Two people declined to participate in the denial. Kant pointed out, in the least comforting way imaginable, that your mortality is entirely irrelevant to your moral obligations — you must act well not because you’ll be rewarded for it but because reason demands it, and reason does not care that you’re running out of time. Camus went further and said life is meaningless, the universe is indifferent, and the correct response is to live as fully and defiantly as possible anyway — which sounds like a motivational poster until you realise he actually meant it, and it’s terrifying.

Everyone else was simply lying to you. Kindly, elaborately, with candles and incense and beautifully illustrated manuscripts, but lying nonetheless. Death is the one appointment nobody cancels, the one review that’s always five stars for the universe and zero for the attendee. The only honest positions ever staked out were by a humourless German and a chain-smoking Frenchman who both, in their own way, said the same thing: yes, this is exactly as bad as it looks — now what are you going to do about it?

Your town did lose its factory. Your wages did stagnate. The hospital did become a waiting room with ambitions. Somewhere along the way, the mainstream left replaced “we’ll make your life better” with a TED Talk about resilience.

Then comes the trick.

First, he correctly identifies the wound. Housing is unaffordable. Work is insecure. Everything costs more except your salary.

Then, with the confidence of a man who has never queued for his own passport, he points at the wrong culprit. Not the landlord. Not the hedge fund. Not the tax system. No, apparently the real villain is a refugee, a cyclist, a university lecturer, or a 24-year-old in a city eating hummus.

But in reality, the target is your life.

* in the picture #victororban explaining how much he cares about his voters.

And so people who need stronger unions, better healthcare, and affordable housing end up voting for a man who promises to save the nation by cutting all three. He calls it freedom. His donors call it Thursday.

Nothing improves, of course. The hospital gets worse. The rent gets higher. The job gets less secure. But there is always a new enemy conveniently available, so nobody has to ask why the billionaire shouting about “ordinary people” somehow always leaves office richer.

People do not vote for this because they are stupid. They vote for it because somebody finally looked at them and said: You matter.

Unfortunately, he meant it as a market segment.

ps. If you want to avoid being part of The Betrayal Economy, support initiatives and policies that actually strengthen communities: invest in public services, protect unions, back affordable housing, and fund organizations working for real structural change. Recognition is cheap, but repair is expensive but worth every bit of effort.

And above all, remember to pity the voters. Feel compassion for those whose anger has been sold back to them as a product. Their pain is real, their targets are not.

The self-hatred this produces is, the Institute acknowledges, an impressive achievement. To have internalised an impossible standard so thoroughly that you can administer your own annual performance review, mark yourself inadequate across all categories, and file the report with no outside assistance, this is, if nothing else, a form of self-sufficiency.

The responses are well-documented:

• Avoidance: work more, scroll more, drink more, stay busy enough that the gap between projected and actual self never gets a quiet moment to speak. The most popular option, and the least effective.

• Comparison: check what everyone else is doing, feel worse, repeat. Social media has industrialised this process considerably.

• Productivity as penance: optimise everything, hit the gym at 6am, read the right books, take the right course, treat self-improvement as self-punishment disguised as progress.

• Wellness consumption: yoga, breathwork, cold exposure, journaling, the life coach. Not useless, but operating entirely at the level of symptoms. The underlying belief that you are fundamentally inadequate is not a flexibility problem.

• Numbing: various substances, various screens, various relationships that ask nothing and offer distraction. Effective short-term. Compounding the original problem indefinitely.

  ---

Camus uses the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it fall back down, as a metaphor for the human condition: we seek meaning in a universe that offers none.

This tension between our need for meaning and the world’s silence is what Camus calls the absurd. His conclusion: we must imagine Sisyphus happy, defiance and full engagement with the struggle is the meaning, not a means to it.

Camus, who charged nothing and had no retreats to sell, proposed that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because the boulder stops, but because at some point he looks at the rock and recognises it as his. That recognition does not arrive through a subscription tier. It emerges from the slower and considerably less aesthetically pleasing work of sitting with someone qualified to help you examine where the premise came from, who installed it, and whether it was ever accurate. This is not transformation. It is not a breakthrough. It is a gradual and undramatic reduction in self-criticism.

For most people, this is too slow and too unglamorous to attempt. There is yoga. There is breathwork. There is a coach who will reframe the narrative at a rate of €150 per hour. None of this is wrong. The dishwasher still needs loading.