Alfred Adler died in 1937. He never saw a smartphone, a social media feed, or a LinkedIn profile optimized for personal branding. He never witnessed therapy become a lifestyle or burnout become a badge of honor.

And yet his psychology describes the 21st century better than most frameworks built for it.

Adler's core insight was simple: humans are driven by striving for significance. We compensate for perceived inferiority by pursuing fictional goals of superiority, mastery, or wholeness. These goals are rarely conscious. They're inferred from behavior patterns. And when they become rigid, they produce the pathologies we now treat as modern epidemics.

Status Anxiety: The Infinite Comparison Machine

Adler argued that feelings of inferiority are universal. Every child experiences helplessness, dependency, and inadequacy relative to the adults around them. The healthy response is compensation: striving to develop competence, to contribute, to matter.

The unhealthy response is overcompensation: an endless pursuit of superiority that never satisfies because the goal keeps moving.

Social media is an overcompensation engine. It takes the natural human desire for significance and hooks it to an infinite comparison machine. You're no longer measuring yourself against the people in your neighborhood or workplace. You're measuring yourself against curated highlight reels from millions of strangers, each optimized to trigger exactly the inferiority you're trying to escape.

The striving for significance becomes striving for visibility. The fictional goal of superiority becomes the fictional goal of virality. And because the goal is fictional, achieving it doesn't satisfy. You post, you get likes, you feel briefly adequate, and then the feeling fades. So you post again.

Adler called this "neurotic striving": compensation that never reaches its target because the target was never real. A century later, we call it the attention economy.

Therapy Dependence: When Avoidance Becomes Identity

Adler distinguished between useful compensation and neurotic compensation. Useful compensation builds genuine competence. Neurotic compensation builds elaborate strategies for avoiding the tasks of life while maintaining a sense of superiority.

One of those strategies is perpetual preparation. You're not avoiding life; you're getting ready for it. You're working on yourself. You're healing. You're in therapy.

Adler would look at the modern therapy-industrial complex and see something familiar: avoidance dressed as progress.

This isn't an attack on therapy. Therapy can be genuinely transformative. But Adler would distinguish between therapy that builds capacity for the tasks of life (work, love, community) and therapy that becomes a substitute for them.

The pattern looks like this: you feel inferior. You enter therapy to address the inferiority. Therapy becomes a safe space where you're understood, validated, and protected from the demands that triggered the inferiority in the first place. Years pass. You're still in therapy. You're still "working on yourself." But the tasks of life remain unattempted.

Adler would call this a "fictive superiority": the belief that you're doing important inner work, which exempts you from the outer work that actually builds competence and connection.

The fictional goal shifts from "become capable" to "become healed." And because healing is never complete, the goal recedes forever. You're always almost ready. You never have to start.

Burnout: The Receding Fictional Goal

Adler's compensation model explains burnout better than most productivity frameworks.

Here's the pattern: you feel inferior in some domain (career, status, financial security). You compensate by striving. You work harder, longer, more intensely. You achieve. But the achievement doesn't resolve the inferiority because the inferiority was never about the external marker. It was about an internal belief formed early and never examined.

So the goal moves. You got the promotion, but now you need the next one. You hit the revenue target, but now you need to double it. You proved yourself, but the proof expired overnight.

Adler would say: the fictional final goal is doing its job. It's pulling you forward. But because it's fictional, it can never be reached. The horizon keeps receding. You run faster. The horizon recedes faster. Eventually, you collapse.

Burnout isn't a failure of time management. It's a failure of goal examination. The people who burn out are often the ones who never stopped to ask: what am I actually striving for, and will reaching it resolve the inferiority I'm trying to escape?

Usually, the answer is no. The inferiority predates the goal. The goal is just the latest compensation strategy. And when that strategy fails, you don't question the goal. You question yourself. You try harder. You burn out.

Social Fragmentation: The Collapse of Social Interest

Adler's most distinctive concept was "social interest" (Gemeinschaftsgefühl): the capacity for cooperative contribution to the community. He argued that mental health is essentially social health. The well-adjusted person can work, love, and contribute. The neurotic person retreats into self-protection.

Look around. We're in a mass retreat.

Church attendance has collapsed. Union membership is at historic lows. Civic organizations are thinning. The "third places" where people used to gather (cafes, clubs, community centers) are disappearing. Single-person households are at record highs.

Adler would see this as a civilization-scale collapse of social interest. We've retreated from the tasks of community into the tasks of self. We've replaced contribution with consumption, connection with curation, belonging with branding.

The result is exactly what Adler predicted: neurotic self-protection at scale. When social interest is low, people drift toward superiority posturing (personal branding), avoidance of genuine connection (parasocial relationships), and hypersensitivity to status (cancel culture, pile-ons, constant comparison).

We're not more connected than previous generations. We're more isolated, performing connection for an audience that's also isolated, also performing.

The Adlerian Diagnosis

If Adler were practicing today, his diagnosis would be structural, not individual.

The problem isn't that you have status anxiety. The problem is that you live inside a machine designed to produce status anxiety.

The problem isn't that you're in therapy for a decade. The problem is that therapy has been positioned as a substitute for the tasks of life rather than preparation for them.

The problem isn't that you're burned out. The problem is that you're chasing fictional goals that were never examined, in a culture that rewards the chase and punishes the questioning.

The problem isn't that you're lonely. The problem is that every institution that once generated social interest has been hollowed out, and nothing has replaced them.

What Adler Would Prescribe

Adler's therapy was short, directive, and focused on the tasks of life. He wasn't interested in excavating your childhood for years. He wanted to know: what are you avoiding, and what would it take to stop avoiding it?

His prescription for the 21st century would probably look something like this:

Examine your fictional goals. What are you actually striving for? Is it yours, or did you inherit it? Will achieving it resolve the inferiority you feel, or will the goal just move?

Distinguish compensation from overcompensation. Are you building genuine competence, or are you running on a treadmill that goes nowhere? Does your striving make your life larger or smaller?

Rebuild social interest. Join something. Contribute to something. The retreat into self is the retreat into neurosis. Mental health is social health.

Attempt the tasks of life. Work, love, community. Not perfectly. Not after you're healed. Now. Competence comes from action, not preparation.

Stop performing significance. Start building it. The fictional goal of visibility is a trap. The real goal is contribution. One satisfies. The other recedes forever.

A Century Early

Adler saw the 21st century coming. He saw that a culture organized around individual striving, disconnected from community, would produce exactly the pathologies we now treat as normal: anxiety, burnout, loneliness, endless self-optimization that never arrives anywhere.

He also saw the way out. Not more self-focus. Less. Not more striving. Better striving. Not more healing. More doing.

The fictional final goal is a trap. The tasks of life are the exit.

Adler figured this out in 1912. We're still catching up.