In a small town of maybe 25,000 people in suburbia, the shrink has all the customers she can handle. Modern society churns out batches of flawed, stressed out, overly stimulated, socially inept and emotionally ill-equipped life forms that will ultimately end up stretched out on the shrink’s couch, looking for the cheat sheet that will provide the clues that will somehow change their fucked up lives.

They used to call these shrinks marriage counselors, but they don’t save marriages anymore, rather, they render separate advice to the bitter wives and rotten bastard husbands and jacked-up sons and daughters.

The richest dude she sees is the most unhappy. His dad left him a thriving business and a fat bank account but Peter can’t seem to find happiness. His life “has no purpose.” He’s been addicted to most of the fun stuff, cocaine, opioids, porn, gambling, multi-player video games, pizza … he’s tried every form of diversion except a steady job and now he comes twice a week to the shrink asking her to give him the meaning of life. She tells him you only value those things in life that you earn and that maybe the first step toward happiness is to stop thinking of himself and do something charitable for others.

From her perspective, Peter has never really applied anything they’ve ever discussed over the years. He does give money to charity but he does it mostly for the tax write off and so that he can tell gullible women that he’s a philanthropist.

The shrink finds that most people just want to say that they’re in therapy, that it allows them to get sympathy from friends and somehow makes them feel like they’re an intellectual. Most nights you’ll find Peter in the local bar trying to convince the working crowd of his righteousness even though he’s never worked a day in his life.

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Janey has been seeing the shrink off and on for maybe three years. She was married to a controlling prick. She cut him off from sex in 2012 and they divorced a few years later. She got the house and he kept the girlfriends.

Most of her therapy time is spent on the topic of her ex-husband who she couldn’t wait to get rid of but now can’t stop talking about. He’s brainwashing the kids, he’s always late with the spousal support, he treats me like I’m still his slave … basically, he’s having fun and she’s not.

To make herself feel better she’s continually having parts of her body either reduced or enlarged. The shrink told her before the divorce that if you decide to abandon the family unit you need to replace it with a career or aspiration or hobby that can then become the meaningful focal point of your life. The shrink now sees about 100 women a month who, if you asked them to give their life a title, would respond ex-wife. The shrink tries to urge them forward, but they mostly only want to go back.

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Tommy and Dick are brothers. They both graduated college, and ol’ Dick, he has two degrees. Sixty days ago they both moved back home. Jen and Brad spawned Tommy and Dick and, maybe you’ve heard, sixty days ago the two boys moved back home. Now the parents and the kids are talking to the shrink, sometimes alone, sometimes as a group.

Tommy can’t believe mom and dad want to charge him rent, Dick bristles at the concept of a curfew, Brad thought that after the boys went away to school he’d get to have sex with Jen but now that’s all fucked up and Jen feels like a total failure because she raised two pansies who won’t leave the house.

The shrink, like most shrinks, is a liberal socialist. She believes that traditional family structures aren’t relevant today and there shouldn’t be any arbitrary rules about what the modern family dynamic looks like. However, if adults from multiple generations are going to live together, they all need to contribute.

She tries to get all parties to sign a contract, but before that could happen Brad changed the locks on the doors, leaving the boys out in the cold. Now Brad’s seeing the shrink to help resolve his terrible guilt; Jen has a weekly appointment to finally talk about why she doesn’t want to have sex with Brad; Dick saw the light, thinks his dad did the right thing and doesn’t see the shrink at all anymore; and Tommy has moved into a new apartment but still sees the shrink to help him get rid of the visions of Jen and Brad possibly having sex.

The shrink makes $150 an hour and mostly gets paid in cash. That’s good dough for what really amounts to hour after hour of being a passive, sympathetic listener.

There’s a certain amount of guilt that comes with taking cash money for listening to other people’s problems, so the shrink sees a different shrink on Tuesdays and Thursdays to talk about her divorce and the fact that she drinks sometimes with Peter and the complications that surfaced after she moved back in with her eighty-year-old parents.

Photo credit: kevin dooley on Visual hunt / CC BY