“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Krishnamurti
“The Forces” by Laura Vazquez is a French novel that will be published in English next year. But it’s not really a novel or even a book: it’s a combination of a musical score and script for a five-part opera about existential psychology. Like “Finnegans Wake,” it is meant to be heard. And watching Ms. Vazquez’s readings of “Les Forces” on YouTube is like watching Gustavo Dudamel conduct Mahler: both Dudamel and Vazquez hear, see, and feel the world differently from you and me.
Ms. Vazquez is a fragile soul who sees through the veil of “normal” to reveal the organized madness of mundane existence more vividly than any Western philosopher. There are parts influenced by Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, and yet, they are sung. Imagine Charli XCX singing “The Tractatus.” This book is going to flabbergast a generation of readers the way “Generation X” and “Infinite Jest” rocked my generation. The diction and descriptions made me laugh and cry alternatively throughout.
For example, on page 2, the young narrator says, “I live in an apartment that is in a building that is in a city that is in a country, and I am not looking for trouble. If you saw me, you wouldn't notice me, because I'm not deformed or smelly and I don't raise my fists in the air while screaming in the streets, I haven’t stabbed anyone, I am polite, I stand up straight. My parents are normal people and they brought me up properly.” (my translation)
“Neti neti” in Sanskrit translates to “Not this, not that.” Artificial Intelligence calls it “contrast,” often first describing something in the negative, by what it is not. The narrator spends much of the book bathing the reader’s mind in the incomprehensibility of every convention in florid language that’s akin to a monkey wrench in our cognitive engine.
In my psychotherapy practice, Gen Z patients arrive overwhelmed by the world that Ms. Vazquez animates. They are intelligent, terrified, lonely, curious, furious, and suspicious that they have gotten the short end of humanity's stick. They were told to create a verisimilitude of their true selves that is marketable, collect credentials, demonstrate financial viability, work 24 hours per day in order to remain competitive, and then… maybe with a sprinkling of good luck and having chosen the right parents… the elusive goal of “happiness” will befall them.
Alas, they have done everything right, but who has time to be happy when reality is disintegrating all around them and their days as apex predators are numbered? They feel alienated, physically at risk by man-made (previously named “natural”) disasters, financially endangered, and unable to tell whether their anxiety and depression are a chemical imbalance, personal pathology, massive failure, unaligned chakras, childhood trauma, mood disorder, blistering disease, result of a borderline mother or narcissistic father, or a rational response to the society they were thrown into through no fault of their own.
“The Forces” will let them know that they are not alone.
Gen Z asks questions such as “What is a self when so much of it has been downloaded from family, social media, status anxiety, advertising, and trauma? What is real desire when every platform profits from manufacturing lack? What is a meaningful life when adulthood means joining a belief system that is bankrupt in every way?”
Previous generations relied on philosophers from Hegel to Heidegger to answer these questions, but many of these thinkers now seem both confused and confusing. Ms. Vazquez’s narrator shares the perspective of an alien anthropologist sent to Earth to report on human customs and rituals. Her primary insight is radical yet easily digested: reality is what we have narrated into normality.
“The Forces” proceeds in five “chants”: “Everyone Lies,” “Mystery and Truth,” “The House of the Dead,” “The Various United Sects,” and “The Earth Is Good.” The structure resembles a Bildungsroman, but for me, I see the perfect arc of the construction of a self, then its deconstruction, culminating in a rebirth.
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In the first chant, the narrator perceives the discrepancy between authenticity and facades. She sees adults agreeing with consensus, reciting judgments about taste, and treating social compliance as reality itself. Pierre Bourdieu called this habitus; Jacques Lacan called it the Big Other. Vazquez allows us to experience it through the eyes of a child—a child who decries inauthenticity.
The second chant is set in a bar and introduces Claudie, who compels the narrator to confront the danger faced by every critic of conformity: the fantasy that these forces are escapable. The narrator sees other people as possessed by collective language, but as Jacques Derrida said: when you look up a word in a dictionary, all you find is other words.
The third chant is “The House of the Dead,” where the narrator encounters people addicted to substances, patterns, and—most memorably—sentences. This is a brilliant image for the ways people become addicted to their own rationalizations. As I tell my patients who accuse partners of acting irrationally, “Everything Adolf Hitler did was perfectly rational. To Adolf Hitler.” Addiction offers relief from the unbearable weight of reality, but that relief turns into a prison itself.
The fourth chant is called “The Various United Sects,” and the narrator enters a building filled with sects, each floor representing a more absurd dictum. Vazquez understands that secular people worship the gods of productivity, the therapeutic industrial complex, money, romance, politics, or the promise of technological salvation. We all live inside stories so pervasive that we mistake them for the world—that there is no alternative to capitalism, that adulthood means constant optimization, that desire is fulfilled through constant consumption, that social media is connection, and that self-worth depends on attaining someone else’s definition of “success." The narrator’s journey through the building of sects is a tour through the absurd beliefs that organize ordinary life.
The final chant, “The Earth Is Good,” gives the book its hard-won affirmative power. After the mall, bar, addicts, and sects, and the narrator enters nature. She finds meaning in mud, birds, and the strange grace of an environment before it is processed into words, brands, résumés, slogans, and propaganda. The narrator does not solve the world’s cruelty, abolish capitalism, cure loneliness, or transcend death. She discovers something more modest and perhaps more psychologically credible: creative expression, intimate attention, and reintegration with Gaia.
Gen Z does not find much solace in traditional existential psychology. They need a scintillating, vivacious, and enthralling opera that unveils the “forces” that have caused them to try to be well-adjusted to a sick society. “The Forces” performs that exegesis, exposing normality as insanity, and offering a poetically beautiful and peaceful path out of the Matrix. That is why this extraordinary novel/script/score/performance/poem will be the most important psychology book of 2027.