In the first part of this exploration, I looked how how structural change complicates the experience of “enough” at an individual level. This second part turns outward: toward the economic, technological, and cultural conditions that seem to re-calibrate adequacy itself. If there is no settled sense of identity, it might be because the external environment is rarely stable.
Economies That Expand – and the Selves Within Them
Growth-oriented economies function through continuous expansion. Adaptability, productivity, and scalability tend to be rewarded. These statements are descriptive rather than evaluative.
Over time, people adapt to the logic surrounding them and attune to these conditions.
Research on contingent self-worth indicates that when achievement becomes a primary basis for evaluation, self-regard becomes increasingly conditional. One is acceptable – as long as one continues to perform.
The internal atmosphere shifts subtly:
There is always another course/program/credential to consider.
Another ‘optimization’ to attempt.
Another version of oneself that might function better. And then maybe – be happier.
So additional training appears prudent. Further refinement seems responsible. Optimization presents itself less as ambition and more as a prerequisite or maintenance.
Over time, the reference point for adequacy can become almost unattainable.
Globalized comparison
Digital environments have significantly broadened the range against which individuals evaluate their lives. Social media is providing endless personalized content to explore, and endless points of reference to compare yourself to.
Meta-analytic research continues to show associations between problematic social media use and symptoms of depression and anxiety. The impact of scrolling on mental health is typically gradual rather than dramatic. It accumulates through repeated exposure. The mechanisms are multiple, but altered comparison appears to play a significant role.
To put it into perspective, historically, most comparison occurred within relatively bounded communities. For example: there is a great master in the city, and an alright craftsman in the next village. Today it often unfolds across far larger and less comparable populations. Comparison becomes global and constant.
When reference groups expand without proportion, normal differences can begin to resemble personal deficiency.
Acceleration Without Psychological Integration
Artificial intelligence introduces another environmental shift: temporal. Work that used to take hours of research and analysis, takes mere seconds.
Early field research indicates that generative AI often increases productivity while simultaneously raising performance expectations. When output becomes easier to produce, assumptions about what constitutes adequate output often adjust accordingly.
Human psychological processes, however, do not reorganize at even remotely comparable speed. Meaning-making, identity formation, and emotional integration – all of these take time and energy.
While these tools can create a sense of increased efficiency and capability, the inner psychological system does not automatically adjust to that speed. The unease that follows may not signal personal inadequacy, but rather a gap between rapidly escalating external expectations and the slower pace at which identity, meaning, and emotional integration naturally evolve and unfold.
The Nervous System Tracks the Future
As human beings we like to have some sort of predictability in our lives: some more so, some less so. We cannot feel truly secure without knowing that ‘tomorrow’ is guaranteed. These days, the uncertainty and instability seem to engulf our lives. Threats of global wars and disasters seem to be all over the information feed. When future seems uninhabitable, people change the way they operate.
Human regulatory systems include predictive processes: expectations about the future can shape present levels of vigilance. In other words, if there seems to be a threat (however hypothetical or far into the future it might be) – the body takes it seriously.
Sustained uncertainty does not automatically create panic. More often, it keeps the system in a low-grade state of alert. When the future feels difficult to estimate, the mind compensates by preparing more—thinking ahead, scanning for risk, trying to stay ready.
Over time, this continuous preparation requires energy. Fatigue, in such cases, is not only the result of doing too much. It can reflect the quiet, ongoing effort of staying braced for what might happen.
Identity Without Edges
Taken together – ever shifting expectations, vague limits, expanded comparison, and accelerated demands – these conditions can complicate identity consolidation.
When roles remain open-ended and the mind has a million of tabs open in the background, people may find it harder to experience their lives as settled in any meaningful sense.
People begin to feel less like participants in a life and more like ongoing drafts.
When the path is unpredictable, continuity becomes something a person must actively reconstruct rather than inherit.
This is not necessarily fragmentation or pathology. More often it presents as prolonged provisionality – a sense that one is still preparing for the “real” version of life.
Attention plays a role here as well. A constant stream of information interrupts the sustained attention required to process and integrate experience. When attention is repeatedly divided, the narrative continuity that supports identity can weaken.
The effect is often subtle: not a dramatic crisis, but a gradual difficulty maintaining a steady sense of presence.
What Limits Actually Are
Considering my previous points, without clear endpoints and contained comparison, the question becomes not how to keep up, but how can the psyche be reorganized. Setting limits can help contain the experience and allow time to process what has already happened. When I speak of restoring limits, especially in regards to social media, I do not to advocate complete withdrawal from contemporary life. Instead, I hope it can help consider how psychological organization might be supported and sustained within it.
Limits function less as barriers than as structuring decisions.
Decisional limits involve allowing certain areas of life to count as sufficiently established. Allowing certain domains to be sufficient, even if improvement remains possible, reduces perpetual internal negotiation. Research on the desire to maximize suggests that accepting “good enough” decisions is associated with greater wellbeing than relentless ‘optimizing’.
Temporal limits protect periods not fully organized around output, therefore permitting cognitive and emotional integration. Recovery is not idleness; it is neurological maintenance.
Informational limits recognize that continuous exposure is not synonymous with responsibility. Or rather, continuous exposure is not required for responsible awareness. Deliberate boundaries preserve interpretive capacity – the ability to think rather than merely react.
Evaluative limits reduce abstract comparison restores proportion. A life assessed primarily from within tends to feel more inhabitable than one constantly calibrated against distant metrics.
From this perspective, limits are less about restriction than about enabling consolidation – allowing the experience to accumulate rather than remain perpetually open. In psychotherapy, this kind of work is often less about accelerating change and more about restoring psychological organization – identifying where limits can support coherence rather than constrain possibility.
Adequacy as a Psychological Stance
Adequacy may be less a destination than an interpretive position – a way of recognizing certain chapters as valid while they are being lived, rather than only in retrospect. In therapy work, it often becomes an act of kindness to oneself – it becomes a permission, a validation of lived experience. For those considering this kind of reflective work, practical details about how psychotherapy is structured can be found here.
Research on meaning suggests that coherence – the sense that one’s life forms an comprehensible whole – is strongly associated with psychological wellbeing. Generally speaking, coherence typically requires some experiences to be treated as sufficiently complete. Think of it this way, coherence requires punctuation.
Without punctuation, even the most articulate text becomes difficult to read.
So without this recognition, life risks being experienced primarily as preparation for living, not actual living.
A Gradual Reorientation
Many capable adults assume that persistent unease signals a personal shortcoming of some sort – not being strong enough, capable enough, or wise enough to find and fix whatever is wrong.
I suggest another option:
Forming a stable sense of self may be inherently more complex in environments characterized by ongoing expansion, rapid change, and perpetual need for optimization.
Recognizing this does not eliminate effort. Nor does it restore older structures.
But it does change the problem of (perceived) private inadequacy to the problem of human adaptation.
From there, a different orientation becomes possible – one less concerned with infinite growth, and more attentive to the edges within which a life can take shape.
Psychological stability may depend less on how much more a person can carry, and more on where carrying is permitted to end. For some, this reorientation benefits from a dedicated psychological space in which these questions can be examined with care.
And sometimes, the most subtle protective act is to allow something – a role, a chapter, a version of oneself – to be enough before it is perfected, edited and re-edited, and built upon.
It is not finished forever and sealed in stone.
There comes a point at which continuing to improve prevents a life from gaining the weight that only lived experience can give it.
Selected References
- Anand, N., et al. (2026). The Influence of Doomscrolling on Mental Health: A Scoping Review.
- Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1998). On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. Cambridge University Press.
- Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.
- Curran, T., & Hill, A. P. (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410–429.
- Dell’Acqua, F., McFowland III, E., Mollick, E. R., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Kellogg, K., Rajendran, S., et al. (2023). Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality. Harvard Business School Working Paper.
- Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., et al. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863–e873.
- Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2020). A systematic review: The influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25(1), 79–93.
- Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531–545.
- McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122.
- OECD. (2023). Confronting the cost-of-living and housing crisis in cities. OECD Publishing.
- Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press.
- Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197.
