Stephen Grosz has been a psychoanalyst for the past 30 years and spent more than 60,000 hours with patients spanning children, adolescents, adults and the elderly. In his book The Examined Life Grosz draws short, vivid stories from his 30-year practice in order to track the collaborative journey of therapist and patient as they uncover the hidden feelings behind ordinary behavior.
I talked to him about the most often emotional pain we are suffering nowadays. We live in a very competitive world, we live in a world where people are ambitious and they want to succeed, they want their children to succeed, they put huge pressure on themselves and huge pressure on others, and they can feel depressed if they do not obtain those things, they can feel anxious and angry and hurt. So there's all sorts of consequences from that. I'm someone who believes that there are not only biological causes and psychological causes but social causes of depression. So if you have a job you don't like, if you don't get praised at your job, whenever you're doing a good job, that's depressing. And we live in a world where there's an enormous amount of pressure so that's a huge thing right now. Even when some people have obtained a lot of things in the world, they still can have a huge sense of entitlement that they should have even more. I think the absence of gratitude, the absence of the capacity to enjoy what we have, and the friends that we have, the meal that we have, is it is a terrible thing. So if we're not valuing that, in English we say: The grass is always greener - that I want this and I want that - that sort of envy is terrible. It spoils the present and I see that as a great problem.

More on why all change involves pain here, on why change is so difficult here, on the "tyranny of should" here, on the digital distraction against feelings here