The Privatization of Being Human

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 Helping people is fine.

What’s strange is when we start needing a ™ to feel fully alive.

Over the last few decades, an entire economy has emerged around personal growth, healing, awareness, and self-understanding. 

Much of it is sincere. Some of it is useful. 

But woven through it is a quieter shift that rarely gets named.

What once belonged to everyone has increasingly been trademarked, branded, and sold back to us.

Not invented. Enclosed.

This isn’t about rejecting self-help. 

It’s about noticing when support turns into ownership, and when care quietly becomes extraction.

Historically, enclosure didn’t begin with ideas. 

It began with land.

Shared fields were fenced off. 

Communal access became private property. 

What had once been a birth right became a toll road.

That same pattern has repeated across domains such as education, medicine, and labour, and now, increasingly, the inner life.

Emotional regulation was once learned through family storytelling, shared hardship, and social repair. 

Resilience was built through adversity, relationship, and time. 

Purpose was explored through philosophy, craft, or service. 

Presence emerged as a by product of safety and attention, not technique. 

Nervous system safety developed through co regulation with trusted others.

None of these are inventions. 

They are capacities humans have exercised for as long as humans have existed, through community, story, ritual, play, and relationship.

Yet many are now packaged as proprietary methods, complete with certifications, trademarks, and branded language that imply legitimacy flows through ownership.

The message is subtle but powerful. You can experience this, but not fully, not correctly, not officially, without the framework.

Social critic Ivan Illich warned decades ago that when institutions monopolize basic human skills, they don’t empower people. They replace competence with dependency.

In Medical Nemesis and Disabling Professions, Illich argued that professionalization often displaces self-trust. 

The more systems promise improvement, the more individuals feel incapable without them.

This is not because people are weak. 

It is because authority has been relocated.

What was once lived becomes something you must be taught. 

What was once felt becomes something you must learn to recognize properly.

Self-help doesn’t cause this. Trademarking accelerates it.

Philosopher Michel Foucault described how power operates most effectively not through force, but through defining what counts as valid knowledge.

When language is owned, legitimacy follows ownership.

Trademarking a self-help framework doesn’t just protect branding. 

It quietly establishes what counts as the real version, who is authorized to teach it, and how it must be named to be recognized.

This doesn’t stop people from breathing, feeling, or reflecting. 

It simply marks those activities as unofficial unless properly framed.

It is a form of epistemic gatekeeping. Not overt, but persuasive.

This is why it feels dirty, even when it’s legal.

Dirty doesn’t mean illegal. It means extractive.

Like bottling water from a public aquifer, the move isn’t to create something new. 

It is to capture access and charge rent on recognition.

Much of the modern self-help economy operates this way. 

Ancient practices are rebranded. 

Ordinary human capacities are renamed. 

Intuition is reframed as a skillset you must acquire.

Once named and owned, they become products. 

Once products, they imply lack in the buyer.

The result is a rentier economy of selfhood.

You lease confidence. You rent clarity. You subscribe to wholeness.

There’s a more personal reason this has begun to grate.

Open an inbox for more than five minutes and it’s impossible to miss. 

Every feeling, every fluctuation of mood or energy, every moment of vulnerability now arrives with a trademark symbol attached.

Trademark signs. Registered marks. Proven methods. Certified frameworks.

As if my health, my nervous system, my grief, my clarity, my being, only counts once it’s been packaged.

There’s something quietly demeaning about that.

My body does not experience exhaustion in a trademark. 

My sense of safety does not return because a funnel says it should. 

Relief doesn’t arrive because someone owns the language for it.

And yet the implication lingers. Without the method, you’re doing it wrong.

That’s the line my system pushes back against. Not angrily, but instinctively.

Being human is not a licensing agreement.

The harm here isn’t dramatic collapse. It’s erosion.

Psychological research consistently shows that when external authority replaces internal sense making, self efficacy declines. 

People become skilled at following systems, but less skilled at trusting themselves.

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers emphasized that growth depends on an internal locus of evaluation, the felt sense that one’s experience is a valid source of truth.

Trademarked self-help often inverts this.

People learn to ask whether they are doing it right, whether this is the correct framework, which method they should trust.

Instead of asking what they are noticing, what feels true here, and what is already working.

The dependency is rarely intentional. It is profitable.

Self-help promises freedom.

Trademarking often delivers branded cages.

Not because frameworks are evil, but because ownership changes the relationship. 

What should dissolve over time becomes something you must continually return to. 

Completion is postponed. Mastery is always one level away.

And perhaps most ironically, the more systems claim to unlock authenticity, the more people feel they need permission to be themselves.

This isn’t a call to burn books or reject guidance.

It’s an invitation to notice when support strengthens agency, when language clarifies rather than replaces experience, and when help points back to you instead of back to itself.

Not everything meaningful needs a trademark. 

Not everything helpful needs a funnel. 

Not everything human needs a method.

Some things work precisely because they are shared, lived, and unowned.

Nothing essential was ever missing. 

It was only renamed.

What if, next time a branded method feels essential, you simply asked what part of this was already mine?