IJSP Number 6, 2024

93 individuals who are always on the pursuit for validation, will need even more of them, thousands and thousands only to feel more unsatisfied and to reiterate the process again and again, in an endless loop. 4. SELF-ESTEEM OR RUNNING TOWARDS ONESELF Why, after all, wouldn’t we run towards instead of running away , namely running towards ourselves and not away from ourselves? It is the constant need for more (as in more the enemy of enough )– a paradigmatic prescription of our modern society – that looks like being unavoidable and inescapable. One just wants more and more and no one sees the end of it. Why? Very simple: because there is no end to it! But more is not an absolute, more is just a relative term situated on an intermediary state, somewhere in-between. It is a notion that comes, or originates, in the near past – where there was less – and the near now, or, in a running globalized consumerism, the ‘immediate future’. And those two contemporary verbal items – the near past and the immediate future – represent the turmoil that does not allow the presence of the present tense. People are living, or rather surviving, while on the run, in a very bizarre place, namely the ‘peri-present’. In our hectic world, there is no time for the present time. Nobody has the time to live the present because everyone is running away towards the immediate future where all our desires and wishes will come true, as they say in the advertising: “be happy with more”. The present, on the other hand, has no place or time for more – more is always in the future, the next moment, the next step on the ladder or just in front of us. As such, the present cannot be satisfying, it cannot fulfil our wishes and, consequently, one must run away from it (as if possessed by a demon of haste, agitation, and restlessness). But the present is, par excellence , the place for the self , for oneself, and most of all, for the complex process of self-esteem. Self-esteem as such can only be felt and be lived in the present, namely once one has left behind the constant search for more , for something else, for the new and mostly the newest. Self- esteem means to have enough, to be content with oneself, with what one has and, even more so, with what one is as a human being. The search for more implies a chronic maladjustment to life as it is given to us, a maladaptation to ourselves as we are, and not as we are expected to be . And, surely, more and more of our clients in psychotherapy are not very content with themselves and with their life – they are running away, always on the running away from oneself. They are, constantly and unbending, on the search for something as if there has to be, somewhere out there, something or someone to satisfy their innermost wants or desires (NB not needs). Even psychotherapy as