#18 A Better Version of Yourself
Who's afraid of the big bad mental health?
Happy New Year! How does the transition into yet another year make you feel?
On my end, I am very grateful to have you as a reader. Go ahead and share Oblique Forecasting with your smartest friends. It’s good karma.
xoxo Esther
PS: a few people texted me their thoughts re: past newsletters and it occurred to me that you may have missed an issue or two with the holidays. ICYMI:
#17 Who's who: who I’m betting on for 2025.
#16 The group has entered the chat: a collaborative issue, 25 predictions for 2025, feat. 25 guests.
#15 In-N-Out: my predictions for 2025.
Esther’s Buy/Sell List:
💸 What I’m divesting from
🛋️Therapy in its current state. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t love therapy but I truly believe everyone can benefit from it at some point or another in their life.
For context, my personal experience: days before turning 30, I went to see my GP thinking I had dislocated my jaw. Reader, I was grinding my teeth so hard at night the pain was permanent. At my birthday party, a friend recommended a therapist. After a single session, my physical pain subsided completely. No medication, just old-fashioned talking.
I ended up seeing her on and off for over 3 years.
I recognise this doesn’t make me an expert, but I’ve seen how a good therapist can help turn your life around. You’ve probably sensed a shift in the past few years if you're also interested in the topic.
Exhibit A. Therapy everywhere, all the time
Jonah Hill released a movie about his “friend and therapist” Phil Stutz in 2022. As anyone in serious therapy knows, that’s a clear breach of boundaries.
As stated in a 2024 Vulture profile called Therapy Daddy,
“Some therapists were troubled by Hill’s film. The American Psychological Association’s code of ethics instructs therapists to avoid “dual relationships,” meaning they should not engage with their patients outside the therapy room, as such behavior can reasonably lead to conflicts of interest, role confusion, and boundary violations. Wasn’t the documentary itself — a collaboration between the two men — an example of that? At one point in the film, Hill confesses to Stutz that he has been lying to him during their regular therapy sessions because he doesn’t want to admit that the filmmaking process hasn’t been going well.”
Astute readers will have noticed—my own use of breach of boundaries just a paragraph ago is a clear signal that therapy vocab has pervaded every aspect our everyday life. We use it in our personal life with friends, family, lovers, we use it at work.
Speaking of Jonah Hill. A year after the release of Stutz, texts to his ex surfaced, where he was accused of weaponizing therapy talk. A refresher:
Back to everyone who’s not Jonah Hill. As far as I know, that’s 100% of my readership.
The phenomenon seems more generalised with the destigmatisation of embracing therapy. Without going as far as using this newfound knowledge and vocab to talk about our feelings, are we doing a disservice to ourselves – and to people affected by serious mental illness – by throwing around all these medical terms?
“We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles. We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We project [...]; we are triggered, we [...] process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We diagnose and receive diagnoses: O.C.D., A.D.H.D., generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We’re enmeshed, fragile. Our emotional labor is grinding us down. We’re doing the work. We need to do the work.” The Rise of Therapy-Speak, The New Yorker.
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Exhibit B. Low-cost therapy
If you listened to any American podcast between 2020-present time, you have heard of BetterHelp. The remote (via phone or video call) mental health service positively flooded podcasts with ad-reads.
Does it work? The business model does, with $1.1B in yearly revenue and +2M users.
But! They also had to refund customers $93M in 2023.
I had seen controversial statements made by unhappy customers against the company on Reddit and TikTok (that I obviously can’t find anymore, my bad). Something along the lines of “can’t wait for the documentary exposing betterhelp a few years from now.”
I however found on r/therapists that there’s a class action lawsuit against the company that therapists can join.
Who could have predicted such an outcome for a mass-marketed discount therapy service?
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Exhibit C. AI therapy
With the rise of AI-everything in the past year – a quarter of VC capital was invested in AI in 2024 – it was only a matter of time before the technology reached our trauma centres.
Some recent entries: Could A Bot Be Your New Therapist? How AI Has Transformed Mental Healthcare [Forbes], Paging doctor bot: Why AI therapy is providing hope in the midst of a mental health crisis [euronews.], AI startups revolutionizing mental health care [google blogs].
I don’t see how that could backfire.
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I don’t have a solution. Do you?
Esther’s Dealsheet:
📈 Bullish news
AA Investments, the Hong Kong-based multi-family office that purchased Rose Inc for $2.5M out of the Amyris bankruptcy, just acquired French multi-brand e-tailer L’Exception. [yahoo! Finance]
I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone [Simon Willinson]
The egg [Bloomberg]. An investigation into the global WOMEN-HARVESTED egg trade. Just in case you thought this was about chickens.
Very simple Ozempic primer [SNAKE SUPER HEALTH]. With all this O-talk, misinformation is rampant. Read on to learn more.
It never stops! Introducing Gen Beta, the children born starting in 2025 [Fortune]
The Gamification of Pop Music [The Ringer]. With the rise of streaming—and a fantasy football–style approach to chart analytics—fandoms are working the system for their favourite pop stars.
📉 Bearish news
Legal Questions Arise as Walmart’s ‘Birkin’ Goes Viral on TikTok and Sells Out [WWD]
You may have heard that Meta wanted to populate Facebook and Instagram with AI profiles (Meta’s Big Bet on Bots [Intelligencer]). This just in: Meta removes AI character accounts after users criticize them as ‘creepy and unnecessary’ [NBC]
Before you go:
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Thank you for reminding me about the Jonah Hill lore - what a precious popcultural moment truly!!!
I remember the big "therapy speak" reckoning following this article from Bustle a couple years back: http://bustle.com/wellness/is-therapy-speak-making-us-selfish & the conversation on the rise of "therapinflucers" (remember the holistic psychologist lol?). I am in two minds about it, because, YES 100% we've been overusing the term "boundaries" as a society at large but also, it makes me quite concerned that, especially in the current political climate, we might revert to seeing therapy and the tools it gives us as purely self-indulgent. The devil is in the details as always!
I think people are often using “therapy-speak” to avoid important things such as self-analysis and confrontation. Especially when talking about toxic relationships. Anything nowadays is a toxic relationship—he didn’t take out the trash? Toxic. He didn’t do things exactly the way I thought without telling him how I wanted them to be done? Toxic. It’s easier to distance ourselves from others than face them. It’s truly a shame, but I also think it’s part of the current state of society where it’s so polarized that, instead of promoting healthy debates, we—as a collective—would rather cancel the other.