Why Can’t We Want Anything Anymore? Desire, Burnout, Identity, and the Hidden Costs of Modern Life
Presenter: Alison Feit, PhD
Date(s): Oct. 13, 20, 27, 2026
Time: 7:00-8:15 PM
Sessions: 3
Credits: 3.75
All Levels
Price: $154 (with credits), $25 (without credits)
Virtual
Click Here to Register!
Description
We are living through a strange cultural moment. People have never had more freedom, more choices, more opportunities for self-expression, or more language for understanding themselves. Yet everywhere we look, people are reporting some version of the same experience: burnout, numbness, indecision, loneliness, endless scrolling, a loss of direction, a loss of meaning, a loss of desire. What happened?
In this three-part live course, psychoanalyst Dr. Alison Feit explores one of the defining psychological questions of our time: not simply why we stop wanting, but why so many of us seem to have lost the capacity to want at all. Drawing on psychoanalysis, contemporary culture, philosophy, literature, and clinical work, we will examine the hidden ways desire disappears—not only through disappointment and trauma, but through success, adaptation, identity, self-improvement, certainty, and the pressure to become someone.
This is not a course about finding your passion. It is a course about understanding what happened to it.
Week One Why We Can’t Want Anything Anymore:
Desire, Burnout, Identity, and the Hidden Costs of Modern Life
Everyone says they are burned out. But what if exhaustion is not the whole story?
In this opening session, we will explore the possibility that many of the problems we attribute to stress, distraction, or overwork are actually problems of desire. Why do people who appear successful often feel flat inside? Why does achievement sometimes leave us strangely unmoved? Why do endless options seem to produce paralysis rather than freedom?
Together we will examine how modern life teaches us to become efficient managers of ourselves while quietly losing contact with the part of us that knows how to want.
Week Two
What Happened to Desire?
Burnout, Scrolling, Self-Improvement, and the Modern Disappearance of Wanting
If desire has disappeared, where did it go?
This week we turn to some of the defining features of contemporary life: social media, self-optimization, productivity culture, endless self-improvement, and the peculiar experience of consuming possibility without pursuing it.
We will explore a provocative question: What if doomscrolling is not merely a distraction from desire—but a defense against it? What if our constant exposure to possibilities has become a substitute for actually wanting anything ourselves?
By the end of this session, participants will begin to see familiar modern habits in an entirely new way.
Week Three
The Life You Built
How Safety, Success, and Identity Can Cost Us Our Desires
Many people lose desire not because life went badly, but because it went well.
Drawing on the work of Winnicott, Adam Phillips, Bromberg, and contemporary psychoanalysis, we will examine the hidden costs of adaptation. How do we become so organized around being competent, responsible, successful, admired, or needed that we lose touch with the parts of ourselves that are spontaneous, curious, and alive?
We will ask difficult questions:
What possibilities did you quietly abandon in order to become this admirable person?
What have you stopped permitting yourself to want because wanting it would disrupt the life you have built?
What happens when identity becomes more important than aliveness?
This session focuses on the subtle ways desire disappears in the very process of becoming who we thought we were supposed to be.
This Course Is For You If…
You feel successful but strangely unmoved by your own life.
You find yourself scrolling more and wanting less.
You feel stuck, flat, or unable to imagine a future that excites you.
You have spent years becoming the person you were supposed to be and are wondering what happened to the person you might have become.
You are interested in psychoanalysis, culture, relationships, creativity, meaning, and the psychology of modern life.
The central question of this course is simple:
What if the problem is not that you have lost your desires?
What if you have simply become the kind of person who no longer knows how to hear them?
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
- Analyze the contemporary crisis of desire through a psychoanalytic framework, distinguishing burnout, distraction, and indecision from deeper disruptions in the capacity to want.
- Critically evaluate the psychological impact of modern cultural forces—including social media, productivity culture, and self-optimization—understanding how they may function as defenses against desire rather than expressions of it.
- Apply key psychoanalytic concepts on adaptation, identity formation, and the “false self” to examine how success, safety, and competence can paradoxically diminish spontaneity, vitality, and aliveness.
- Formulate a nuanced understanding of the relationship between identity and desire, recognizing how individuals may unconsciously abandon possibilities in order to preserve coherence, admiration, or stability, and articulate pathways toward restoring a meaningful capacity to want.
References
- Vanheule, S., Lievrouw, A., & Verhaeghe, P. (2003). Burnout and intersubjectivity: A psychoanalytical study from a Lacanian perspective. Human Relations, 56(3), 321–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726703056003614
- Ehrlich, R. (2021).Winnicott’s idea of the false self: Theory as autobiography. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 69*(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651211001461
- Id, libidinal economy, and social media: A hypothetical model. (2025). Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-025-00575-4
- Alienation in modern culture: A psychoanalytic analysis of five societal transitions. (2026). Human Arenas.* https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-025-00549-z
- Identity or identification? Why the difference between these concepts matters. (2023).Psychoanalytic Inquiry.https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2023.2270510
About the Presenter
Alison Feit, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychology practicing in Atlanta and New York. She serves on the Communications/Website committee for the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), is on faculty at St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute (STLPI), China American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA) and the William Alanson White Institute (WAWI) where she also serves on the Artist Group and the Sexual Abuse Service. Her upcoming youtube and podcast “Ghost Note” focuses on unconscious processes and relational dynamics that shape individual and collective life.
Credit Information
In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by the American Psychoanalytic Association and the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. The American Psychoanalytic Association is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.
Credits Available
- Physicians: 1.5 Credits
- Psychologists: 1.5 Credits
- Social Workers: 1.5 Credits
- PAs: 1.5 Credits
- Nurses & NPs: 1.5 Nursing Contact Hours
- Pharmacists/Pharmacy Technicians: 3.0 Credits. Pharmacists must claim credits within 30 days and provide their eProfile ID and Birthdate. APsA will not report credits claimed after 30 days or with incomplete information.
- Interprofessional Continuing Education (Counselors, NPs, students): 3.0 Credits
Other Profession Types
Other profession types will receive a certificate of attendance upon completion of the activity and online evaluation confirming their participation. Participants may claim credit for recertification; however, their professional organization/institute holds the final say on which accredited activities they accept.
Disclosure Statement
None of the planners and presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s)* to disclose with ineligible companies* whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients. There is no commercial support for this activity. APsA verifies that all materials generated by AI are accurate, including cited publications and posttests.
COUNSELORS: The St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 5953. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. The St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
*Financial relationships are relevant if the educational content an individual can control is related to the business lines or products of the ineligible company. — Updated December 2022