A friend, who's a psychologist, told me about a patient once: a woman who was well educated, had a good job, a house and a loving husband. "I did everything right in my life," said the woman. "But I'm still not happy." She never did what she herself wanted, but what she believed society expected from her.

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.

Freud also said we choose our own neuroses. Capitalism is the neurosis of humanity.

Every time we decide for something, we lose something else. Buying a car is a great example. A lot of people not only read ratings before they buy their car but they continue afterwards - to make sure they really made the right choice.

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.

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

I don't criticize political or electoral freedom, but capitalism's perversion of the concept: the illusion that I hold the power over my own life.