We constantly feel stressed, overwhelmed and guilty.It's our own fault if we're unhappy. It means we made a bad decision.

I do have the power. I can decide for myself what I want, even if the thought stresses me out.

Sigmund Freud already discovered that suffering gives us pleasure - in a strange masochistic way. The tyranny of choice exploits that weakness. Consumer culture exhausts us. We suffer. We destroy ourselves. And we just can't stop.

One of the greatest gains of capitalism is that even the proletarian slave feels like a master. He believes he has the power to change his life. We are propelled by the ideology of the self-made man: we work more, we consume more and in the end we consume ourselves. The consequences are burnout, bulimia and other lifestyle diseases.

When I speak about the "tyranny of choice," I mean an ideology that originates in the era of post-industrial capitalism. It began with the American Dream - the idea of the self-made man, who works his way up from rags to riches. By and by, this career concept developed into a universal life philosophy. Today we believe we should be able to choose everything: the way we live, the way we look, even when it comes to the coffee we buy, we constantly need to weigh our decision. That is extremely unhealthy.

We aren't really the victims. After all, we created the system ourselves and as long as we keep consuming, it will continue to exist. Ultimately, capitalism only mirrors human nature.

We constantly feel stressed, overwhelmed and guilty.It's our own fault if we're unhappy. It means we made a bad decision.