Modern distress and lifestyle migration: The false promise of a pure relationship with one's self

Abstract This study presents a qualitative ethnographic exploration of professionally successful lifestyle migrants' self‐perceptions of premigration etiologies of “modern distress,” and postmigration pathways of healing and outcomes in Guatemala. Reflexive accounts of perceived etiologies of distress include self‐commodification, atomization, and disengagement from “true‐selves” as stressors motivating relocation. Migrants depict postmigration healing practices as embedding popularized therapeutic narratives that amplify introspective self‐dialog reproducing hypercapitalist and emotional capitalist “liquid‐modern” unstable and disengaged selfhood. Constituting what we term a “pure relationship with the self,” lifestyle migrants describe a “modern trap” of “addictive” chronic healing, self‐seeking, and unfulfillment while resultant self‐deliberations continue to exhibit no less liquid and potentially adaptive life paths. Implications will be considered pertaining to self‐dialogic therapeutic processes that reproduce distressed liquid selfhood and the potential of sites of self‐relocation to amplify socially disengaged introspection. Yet reflexive self‐dialog problematizes reductionist readings of structural subjectification, calling for further examination of the way distressed selfhood is a product of shifting social structures and zeitgeists but no less a self‐crafted outcome of self‐deliberation that critically evaluates emergent selves and alternative contexts of self‐constitution.