#we treat them less like immutable facts and more just jobs we can do

[nexus-nebulae]

I've noticed that since we've more abandoned the Protector role since it's usually too stressful, way more of us (like. a surprising amount. we have so many?) have actually taken the role of Caretaker instead

[ladyloveandjustice]

so idk something that kind of bothers the "we must save men from the alt right pipeline" because "we're hating for their immutable traits"

why

why specifically are men the ones who we need to always do this for.

I think it would sound ridic to say this about terfs. Terfs are turning to terfism because they don't feel welcome, we need to be gentler and more loving and more of a community and they'll see the light. Terfs as a class are so oppressed by an unloving society :(

Or hey imagine saying this about white women. You don't have to imagine it it's been done and its bad. I think we've all agreed that posting a manifesto on how white women should be treated nicer by POC and its leftism's job to save white women from going conservative always sucks.

So why is it up to women now. Why is it up to us.

I agree leftism needs to be a more welcoming place that doesn't crucify people for mistakes, or react with hostility to questions. I personally want that. But it's weird to frame this as something we need to do for (mostly white) men specifically, but like, not like conservative white women, conservative woc, conservative trans women??? There's a lot out there.

I dunno. it rubs me to frame the message of this. I don't want to actively go around saving white men and boys from themselves/other white men, I've been asked to do that all my life.

I don't think we should be hostile, I'm not a person that would ever say kill all men (tbh even ignoring the fact there are marginalized men...language like that in general...kill all (enemy) has always been uncomfortable for me. Some people can change) I don't react to them with hostility, you know, men are just fine as long as they're fine with me. I'm happy to have them as allies, happy to get behind trans men, gay men, men of color when they need help.

But I do know some women just give a dni because they're traumatized. And idk, maybe they deserve to be treated gently. Maybe everyone does.

I think leftists need to be kinder and more welcoming sure. I think we need to focus on change and banding together But framing the convo around saving men. That men are special and alienated and we're specifically failing them somehow. It doesn't sit well.

I do thing putting stuff into a binary of good or evil and just kind of reinventing conservatism in that way is a huge probem,...I don't know...Can't we just be nicer and in-fight less for the sake of being welcoming in general? For everyone? Can't we come together and be more accepting of people because a community is stronger together? Can't we have unity and nuance because of that?

I don't want to do it to save men from their own decisions, I don't feel inclined to engage with hostile guys, I just want to be nice and open and we all have less of a feeling people might turn against you over any little thing.

[larktb-archive]

Hi! I'm too shy to come off anon, but I need your help understanding something. I hope I'm not bothering you!!

I don't want to interact with anyone who is a fascist, but I'm not entirely sure what makes someone fascist. Can you please explain it to me?

I know I could look it up myself, but I know that not all definitions online can be correct and I just want your perspective;;

Thanks!

Hi anon! Well, fascism comes in many forms so “sussing out who’s a fascist” is technically a little harder to do than having a simple checklist. After all, doesn’t a White Supremacist have different beliefs to a Japanese fascist? And doesn’t a Japanese fascist have different beliefs to a Wahabist? These beliefs clash don’t they? Well, yes and no. Sure the surface level beliefs are different but the underlying core beliefs of these groups are actually quite similar; it’s the specifics which are different. Even though it isn’t a “bible” on what is fascism and shouldn’t be taken as gospel, Umberto Eco has an essay called “Ur-Fascism” which contains 14 points, which can help us identify whether certain beliefs are fascist no matter the specifics of their belief system. I’ll explain the points in short and give some examples. Quick disclaimer, I am not an expert on fascism or any of the ideologies I’ll discuss by any means so if you aren’t taking Umberto Eco’s writing as the 100% correct truth, definitely don’t take mine as that either (this is how you should treat most sources tho):

1. Cult of Tradition and 2. Rejection of modernity

I put these two together because they’re kind of inseparable. This is basically the idea that there was a “glorious past” that people need to return to and modernity is a corruption of that “glorious past”. In British fascist thought, this past is generally the 19th century at the zenith of the British Empire or mid-20th century Britain. The latter is more common for people who wish to be a little more PC with their writings; instead of trying to use a by-gone era that pretty much no one alive can remember, they use a much more recent time with nostalgic ideas of “the good old days” which doesn’t seem threatening on it’s surface but is dogwhistling for a time when there weren’t as many immigrants in the country.

You may have seen the “reject modernity, embrace tradition” meme and it’s pretty much the most obvious incarnation of this idea. Similarly you may seen people online use “degenerate” as an insult. If you look at the meaning of the degenerate it means “having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline”; it’s microcosm of these ideas put into a single insult. This is why you tend to see conservatives use it more than progressives.

I’d also argue that terfs obsession with 2nd wave feminism and their utter rejection of intersectionality and modern feminism is another manifestation of this idea. 

3. Action for actions sake

This is less detectable in terms of individuals but still important to note that these people tend to support action without a cause. Sure the insurrection at the white house earlier this year was action, but it had no substance behind it. It was action for actions sake, which is why any principled leftist didn’t support it. Fascists will tend to openly just call for action but won’t be very specific about the purposes of the action; as long as they agree with the ideology behind it they’ll support it. It’s why fascists love harassment campaigns and mindless acts of terror. Take Wahabist terrorist orgs like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, it doesn’t matter if bombing an Ariana Grande concert has no point, the only point is the action itself.

4. Disagreement is treason  

This one’s pretty self explanatory, they will ostracize you if you disagree with them. Again, terfs tend to do this, and I had a long conversation with an ex-terf I called a dumbass, who basically said that she was ostracized by them and mocked for having different beliefs (hope she’s doing well actually). There’s numerous stories from ex-terfs like this.

5. Fear of difference

There’s a tendency for fascists to group people into “us” and “them”. “They” are considered to be intruders who need to be removed whereas “we” are the people who deserve to be here because it is “our” right to be here. In Zulu Nationalism, this tends to be any non-Zulu speakers who they deem to be “Shangaan” even if they aren’t actually Tsonga, it’s just a pejorative at this point. If you see vague references to the “elite” without any reference to who they are and what makes them “elite”, this is tends to be a dogwhistle for Jewish people. Western Fascists have very little issue with the workings of capitalism itself or the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, they just don’t like “them”, taking “our” stuff. Any references to “us” and “them” is pretty much a red flag.

6. Appeal to Social Frustration

Fascists will tend to brush upon actual issues faced by the poor today but will instead blame it on an outside force. You’ll see job loss being blamed on immigrants or vague “elites”. Terfs do this too. They’ll see young girls who are genuinely struggling with patriarchal issues and divert all that pent up rage towards trans people and the “q*eers” (which they do tend to use as a slur unlike what most people would have you think). 

7. Obsession with a Plot

Everything is a conspiracy! The election was rigged! 9/11 was fake! that fucking pizza place/this furniture company is a sex ring! All of these are supposedly plots by the deep state who are trying to do... something or other. You’ll notice these “Plots” don’t actually have a purpose, but the fact that there is a plot itself is the issue. This is a way of engendering paranoia in the group while also feeling that there is a constant war against you even if there isn’t. This is also why, despite news sources being pro-capitalist the right will swear up and down it’s leftist media which is controlled by “them” (usually just meaning Jewish people).

8. The enemy is both strong and weak

“Trans people have infiltrated academia and the only reason people refuse to see gender as an immutable biological concept, is because they’re too afraid of the trans cabal to say anything. But also everyone can tell trans people are crazy and haha you have a high suicide rate.” It’s contradictory that’s the point. They need to feel that they’re both counterculture but also they need to be winning at all times so that contradiction is necessary. Also the use of the word “cabal” is a pretty big red flag for all forms of fascism.

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy, 10. Contempt for the weak, 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero and 12. Machismo and weaponry

All of these are kind of interrelated so I’m grouping them together (also this is already fucking long as hell so I don’t wanna bore you any further). You’ll tend to see a love for the military or at least military aesthetics when looking through fascist blogs. Guns aren’t just a tool for fascists, they’re representative of masculinity and the necessity of violence. Pacifists and anyone who refuses to fight are weak and therefore are “degenerate”. If you do not fight, if you are not willing to fight, you cannot be a “hero” (an ubermensch or a matyr). This comes with the fetishization of violence instead of the recognition of violence being an means to an end, and the worship of individuals rather than of communities and organizations. Take Japanese fascists and their lionisation of the imperial military and their desire to once again have an actual army.

Terfs don’t necessarily fit these roles except for arguably 10 considering how much they seem to look down upon the mentally ill and those who commit suicide and surprisingly 11 since that involves the hatred of non-standard sexual activities and terfs hate non-standard sex (this is from the most vanilla bitch who is very uncomfortable with kink but understands its not inherently good or bad). I have a feeling this is more so because terfs are mainly women (there are male terfs ofc) whereas this was written for male led organizations. 

13. Selective populism

When fascists talk about “the people” they tend to mean “the people we like”. “The working class” can be translated to “this cishet white christian man from Minnesota who owns land but hey he lives in a rural area so he’s working class right?”. They’ll also tend to have “tokens” who will suddenly become the mouth piece of the entire community they’re supposedly representing even if no one in the community asked them to (i.e. Milo Yiannopoulos). 

14. Ur fascism speaks Newspeak

They speak in terms which are both inaccessible to anyone outside of their circles whilst being so simple that once you learn them it becomes easy to understand. They abhor any form of “academic” speech so you’ll rarely see them source things (unless those things happen to agree with their views, which is rare but Jordan Peterson is popular for a reason) and if they do source things they probably wouldn’t have read them fully and will rely on you also not reading them. This is to limit any critical thinking so that your brain is basically jellified into an unquestioning organ which only responds “yes” or “no” and only appeals to a higher authority without any form of reasoning involved. This is why they complain about “the lefts memes being too wordy”... because they’re used to not having to read (this is somewhat tongue in cheek but heyho if the boot fits).

And that’s the 14 main features of fascism, if anyone is displaying multiple of these ideas then they are most likely fascist, and if an organization or group continuously replicates these ideas, then they are definitely fascist. I hope this wasn’t too long but like I said... very complex topic. (Also hopefully this is written well, it’s 10 PM and I am surviving off Irn Bru energy drink). Hope this helped!

[barryjeanblues]

taako meets death (again)

(also posted to my ao3)

taako has met two raven queens in his life before now.

well, close enough, at least. most - though not all - of the worlds the starblaster had traveled to had gods, and surprisingly enough, those gods were usually - though not always - strikingly similar to their homeworlds gods. (this was useful, because one of the crews number relied very heavily on a certain nature god for his magic. luckily, the nature or life god of each world always seemed to have a soft spot for little old merle, even if they werent merles traditional cloven-hoofed pan.)

twice, taako had met the death god - someone equivalent to faeruns raven queen. 

this had led to taakos understandable trepidation upon kravitz finally putting his foot down and insisting taako meet his mother boss. 

the first time taako had met a raven queen, she had been… overwhelming. the light of creation had fallen into a forest dedicated to her and her followers, and the head acolyte refused to give the wandering crew the light unless they first received permission from the queen.

the crew had agreed, with no other option, bracing themselves to firmly explain the direness of the situation. surely a goddess would be intelligent enough to understand. 

that raven queen had burst into a forest cleaning in an explosion of black feathers, half illusion, half steel, so that when lup brushed the smoky feathers from her eyes they blurred and dissipated, but when magnus tried the same thing he yelped and brought his hand back bleeding. 

that raven queens laughter had been eerie and echoing, almost but not quite mocking, almost but not quite infectious, almost but not quite joyous. the crew had stood firm and offered their argument, and the queen had given them tests and tokens and bargains and tricky promises with too many clauses and loopholes and at the end of it all the ipres numbers had been halved and the rest were weary and worn as they caught the light of creation and fled with only minutes to spare, the faelike laughter of death following them terribly even through the overwhelming cacophony of the hungers assault. 

that laughter had trailed after them longer, if only in their heads. taako would be making stir fry, planning outfits, swapping merles shampoo for hair-loss potions, when hed have to sit down suddenly and breathe through the musical trills of the raven queens cruel pleasure. it had seemed to bounce in his head the way a rubber ball might, ricocheting off thoughts and feelings until it rolled under a couch to be forgotten about, till some slight movement sent it rolling and bouncing about once more. 

davenport had died in an illusion, thinking he was saving his crew. poor merle had been choked by his own plants, betrayal writ across hos face. barrys skin had grown sickly purple with poison - ten to one odds arent very good odds. taako doesnt forget easily. he decides the goddess of death can go fuck herself. 

the second raven queen taako had met much later in their journey, and taako had met her alone. 

lup and barry had become liches a few cycles back. it was something taako had still been coming to terms with. 

taako loves lup. this is an immutable fact of any and every universe. taako loves lup and lup loves taako and not death or memory or space can separate them, not for long. but seeing your sister die, and then… go beyond death, to twist herself and latch on to a chance that she may never return except in madness and spite - thats a hard thing to grasp, even when she succeeds. taako had still found himself shivering when his sister forgot she had a body again and grabbed a hot pan off the stove, crying out in pain. taako still woke sweating from nightmares in which his sister and his friend flew apart and reformed as cackling red robed horrors of insanity and cruelty, too far for him to reach. 

until that cycle, though, barry and lups choice had only been an asset. 

but some raven queens do not take kindly to anything they see as a perversion of their domain. 

barely a week into that cycle, taako had awoken from the guilty non-elven pleasure of a nap only to find himself in some cold, hard court, fashioned seemingly of steel and silver and concrete, onyx lining the floor and the only color coming from sparse sapphires sparkled throughout the long echoing hall. 

at the end of it - and taako had known his eyes must have played tricks on him, because at first the being at the end of the hall seemed, while large, not much larger than a giant, but when hed called a nervous greeting his voice had echoed so awfully he knew the hall stretched much farther than hed thought and the goddess at the end of it must have been unimaginably huge. 

her eyes had glinted a flinty sapphire in her carven steel face when she ordered him to defend the existence of his sister and his sisters lover. 

taako had tried. he truly, truly had. but while taako is a being of preservation and caution, full of intelligence and cleverness, he is not one of cold hard logic. perhaps lucretia could have convinced this raven queen, the only of their number who had ever been able to grasp true hard reason… but taako doubts it. he had doubted it then and he doubts it even more these days. 

the point is, taako, for all his love for his family and his brilliant wit and devotion (probably, in fact, because of it) taakos arguments couldnt convince that raven queen. she saw past his genuine belief that lup and barry had made a good decision, and into his fears for her, and the goddess of death had based her own argument on those. she won. taako never had a chance. 

he, lup, and barry had woken up in the next cycle, newly resurrected. taako never stops feeling guilty about it. 

so. yes. 

taako is more than a little nervous about meeting the goddess his boyfriend serves so devotedly. but, and youd be hard pressed to convince him to admit it, taako would do anything for kravitz. and despite it all he does actually want to see what the deal is with his sister and his best friends boss, and his patron gods… friend? lover? girlfriend? taako isnt quite sure what fate and death are to each other, but its definitely something.

kravitz lays a warm hand on taakos shoulder, but taako squares them up. he can do this, for fucks sake - hes died a shitton of times, he can meet death. 

the doors open and taakos breath - the only breath in this realm of the dead - catches in his throat.

taako is a die hard istus fan, and shell always be his goddess. but if taako wasnt a taken elf, hed follow the raven queen, he realizes with a startle.

shes beautiful, yes. shes gorgeous, and taakos always been weak for beauty, but hers isnt the cold hard beauty of gemstones and gold, thinks his nimble fingers snatch up and hoard in his endless pockets. the raven queen is beautiful in a way that taako cant describe as anything other than simple.

he cant pin down any features. she has a kind face, gentle hands, bright eyes, but taako can tell she is a goddess because despite staying still the image of her flicks and shifts in his head. at once she seems to have every kind face hes ever seen, even if he doesnt recognize anyone. her hands reach out to comfort him - no more than comfort - but she stands without moving in front of taako and kravitz. her eyes glitter and sparkle and crinkle up with cheerful laughter, except taako isnt entirely sure she has eyes at all, or maybe she has too many. 

he thinks… he thinks maybe she has wings, or maybe theyre arms, or maybe theyre black fabric, draped around and behind and below and above her, shifting with the last breaths of every mortal in the universe. its darkness but its not scary, taako realizes, its solacing, healing, the way that he feels when dusk passes to night and the sky is huge and warm and the brush of lups hand against his as she says goodbye for the night is a relief and a love. 

hello, taako, death says. its lovely to meet you. 

she means it, taako knows. he can tell, somehow. shes just happy to meet him. nothing more, nothing less. 

'oh,' taako says aloud, and kravitz laughs his quiet sweet dorky laugh, and the raven queen laughs too, and its just that. its just a laugh, and its a nice one.

'oh indeed,' kravitz says. 'taako, did you really think id serve a monster or a cruel master?'

'well,' taako replies hesitantly, 'honestly, homie, i kind of thought you were, and id, like, have to start some quest to slay death itself and rescue you.'

the anthropomorphic personification of death laughs again, a note of delight in her tender voice. i like him, my kravitz, she says, good job.

kravitz does the dead-reaper equivalent of blushing. taako grins a little because its very cute. 

'death is different here,' taako hums. 'its… it wasnt like this anywhere else i went. it was cold, or cruel, or empty. i dunno why its different in your world.'

'then i guess we're the lucky ones, huh?' kravitz asks. taako leans up against him and murmurs an agreement. 'its why i love my job so much, why it means so much to me. its not that im some hardass, i just…'

'yea, cha'boy gets it now,' assures taako. 'still.' he looks at the ever-shifting, ever-stable face of death again. 'you better treat my boy kravitz and my lady istus well, capiche? or we will have issues.'

its a deal, taako, the raven queen says, smiling. 

when taako opens his eyes, hes in his home in the material plane, and kravitz is next to him, and theyre both smiling. 

[bbq-hawks-wings]

So I took a personality test to day and got the result of an Architect (INTJ) and for some reason Hawks just came to mind so I wondered, based on the Myers-Briggs classification what personality would he have? Also just out of curiosity, and you don't have to answer, but what would yours be? (I took the quiz on the website 16personalities)

Fantastic question, anon! Last I took the test a few years ago I was an INFP (The Mediator) myself which I think still largely applies. It can be easy to mistype yourself, let alone someone else, so I’m going to use evidence from the manga as much as possible and go through the individual traits one by one to see what I can find. I considered taking the test myself in character, but realized especially with how long the test is it could be easy to either overthink it or hyper-fixate on consciously or unconsciously preconceived traits, so I decided an evidence-based approach would be more accurate.

An important thing to know about Meyers-Briggs personality types is that they’re not all-encompassing, exclusive, or immutable. Some people have a tendency to make ill-informed preconceptions about people or treat it like a horoscope. This is the wrong way to apply a Meyers-Briggs personality type. They are insights to the instinctual way people are likely to act and perform and are only a tool to aid in things like working in a team, putting them on a path to personal success, and exercising emotional intelligence when interacting with them. Many people may still display a different “type” in different settings so I’ll be as cognizant of that as possible as I go through.

So with that, let’s get started!

Extroverted [E] or Introverted [I]?

This is a fantastic example of how preconceived notions  can completely mess up a characterization of someone as well as someone displaying a different type from what they might naturally display. Hawks is great with people, can work a crowd, and is a people-pleaser through and through. To many others, he would be a dead ringer for an extroverted. However:

In his own ideal world, Hawks has time to himself, to spend alone at home, doing whatever he wants freely. If he was an extrovert this dream might be a little more geared towards still being a top hero, but he’s said in so many words he wishes he was a little further down the ladder.

At this point I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up that a false dichotomy of introvert/extrovert has developed over the years. Humans require interaction with other humans to stay healthy and they also require alone time. Too much or too little of either will give them problems over time. It’s a tad frustrating to me that this personality test requires an either/or answer since I thoroughly believe that Hawks enjoys human company and would naturally seek it out in his ideal scenario, just in greater moderation than he does now (which would make him more of an ambivert); but given the fact that at this point in time he seeks more opportunities for solitude, I’m going to answer that he lands, somewhat surprisingly in the Introverted category.

Observant [S] or Intuitive [N]?

This one is also tricky at first, but a deeper dive into their definitions gives us a pretty solid answer, I think. According to the website: 

“These traits describe what people are more likely to do with the information gathered from the world around them. Intuitive personality types rely on imagining the past and future potential of what they see. Those with the Observant style are more interested in observable facts and more straightforward outcomes. They prefer to avoid layering too much interpretation on what they see.“

So does Hawks take a complicated, theoretical approach to information he’s exposed to, or does he call it like he sees it? Does he act in the here and now, or is he more bigger picture?

While he’s actively working toward a definitive goal, he has a tendency to only focus on the information in front of him as it happens. Dabi’s going to release a super powered Nomu? Better get the best hero around to fight it. Need to infiltrate the League of Villains? Just hammer away at getting Dabi to trust him and open the door for him.

He tends to look at the road in front of him to figure out if he should go left or right, but doesn’t always seem to realize he could be being taken for a ride. In his section of the new character book, his relationship with Dabi is described as “they are using each other” (note the present continuous tense) meaning that Dabi is stringing along the number two hero for his own purposes, but Hawks seems to have no idea of it. Just his altercation with Dabi at the warehouse after High End is proof he’s too trusting of the information he’s given at face value.

He may have contingencies (such as holding onto the one feather), but they do not span very far and wide into the future depending on any way things go. It’s always, “If plan A doesn’t work, go to plan B” and never a step or two ahead of that or a consideration of other possible outcomes. Did he have a plan in case High End actually killed Endeavor? Based on his reaction, I don’t think he really thought that was a possibility even though in the end it almost happened and left him with a permanent scar.

This, to me, puts him safely in the Observant category.

Thinking [T] or Feeling [F]?

Hey, this one is actually easy! Hawks is incredibly intelligent, but he is far from rational. A good litmus test for this is to see how someone reacts to failure. A thinking individual will view an undesirable outcome as useful data for the future and possibly just a result of things beyond their control, but a feeling person will view the same as proof of inadequacy that needs to be remedied through personal improvement.

He consistently reacts to situations emotionally first. Even when Tokoyami really proved himself during his internship, it was an emotional response that changed his attitude towards training him and the next generation.

Even Endeavor describes him as,

Hawks has always been emotionally expressive, responsive, and driven. In his interactions with others, he displays a huge amount of emotional intelligence - you can see it in the way he ever so slightly adjusts his interactions with others based on the response to him and the outcome he’s looking for. He pauses for just a second to get a cool selfie perfect for a girl’s social media timeline, he’s polite and considerate carrying a little old lady’s bags up the stairs for her, and he appeals to a little boy’s sense of style and flair when asked to sign his bag. The way he and others feel at any given moment is almost paramount to him.

This is a trait I don’t see changing in his character over time unlike some of the others. He’s clearly a Feeling type.

Judging [J] or Prospective [P]?

This one I also think is easy to figure out. Basically, does he prefer a set, methodical schedule or is he a more spontaneous, spur of the moment person?

Yeah, this is Hawks we’re talking about. He’s shockingly adaptable and almost seems to fall into routine for the sake of others instead of his own sanity. Most of his decisions are made on the fly, and he’s known to improvise.

He’s more than capable of planning ahead, but prefers to operate as the wind blows which makes him a solid Prospective type.

Assertive [-A] or Turbulent [-T]?

For funsies, I just want to pop in and check in on this last trait since it’s here. Basically, all it asks is his confidence level and response to stress. I’ve more or less answered this earlier, but when encountering a situation potentially way over his head, he may outwardly display confidence and roll with the punches (his _S_P traits at work) but when it comes to results, especially failure, perfection and personal excellence are all that matter. I feel very confident classifying him as a Turbulent personality.

Final Results

So with that we get a final Meyers-Briggs personality type of ISFP-T which according to 16 Personalities is the Adventurer type personality.

“Adventurer personalities are true artists, but not necessarily in the typical sense where they’re out painting happy little trees. Often enough though, they are perfectly capable of this. Rather, it’s that they use aesthetics, design and even their choices and actions to push the limits of social convention. Adventurers enjoy upsetting traditional expectations with experiments in beauty and behavior – chances are, they’ve expressed more than once the phrase “Don’t box me in!” Adventurers live in a colorful, sensual world, inspired by connections with people and ideas. These personalities take joy in reinterpreting these connections, reinventing and experimenting with both themselves and new perspectives. No other type explores and experiments in this way more. This creates a sense of spontaneity, making Adventurers seem unpredictable, even to their close friends and loved ones. Despite all this, Adventurers are definitely Introverts, surprising their friends further when they step out of the spotlight to be by themselves to recharge. Just because they are alone though, doesn’t mean people with the Adventurer personality type sit idle – they take this time for introspection, assessing their principles. Rather than dwelling on the past or the future, Adventurers think about who they are. They return from their cloister, transformed.Adventurers live to find ways to push their passions. Riskier behaviors like gambling and extreme sports are more common with this personality type than with others. Fortunately their attunement to the moment and their environment allows them to do better than most. Adventurers also enjoy connecting with others, and have a certain irresistible charm.”

It feels like a pretty accurate assessment of his personality, so I think I did a good job. This was a lot of fun, and I feel like I’ve even gotten to know him a little better! Thanks for sending in the question, anon, I really enjoyed it!

And if you’re curious about Meyers-Briggs personality types or want to take the assessment yourself, go check out 16personalities[.]com!

[ruminativerabbi]

Awakenings

For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to Rip Van Winkle-style stories about people who fall asleep for one or many years and then wake up to find themselves in whole new worlds. First of all, there’s Rip himself—a fictional character who first made his appearance in Washington Irving’s collection of stories and essays, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which came out exactly 200 years ago in 1819. The book has long since been forgotten by most, as unfortunately also has been its author: one of the true giants of American literature in his day, Irving has for some reason not joined the authors he himself encouraged in their careers—writers like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in the pantheon of American authors still read other than by people to whom their books have been assigned in American Literature classes. And he really was one of the greats! I believe that I’ve read all his stories, certainly most of them, and “Rip Van Winkle” is one of my favorites. His other still-famous story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” turned into a whole series of Hollywood movies—most memorably Tim Burton’s 1999 film, Sleepy Hollow—and television shows, is also a terrific piece of writing that deserves to be more widely read in its original format. But I digress: I wanted to write here about Rip van Winkle himself and not the author who dreamed him up.

The story is well known and easily retold. One day while wandering deep in the woods near Sleepy Hollow to escape his wife’s endless nagging, Rip runs into the ghosts of the sailors who in their day manned Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, and promptly joins them in a game of nine pins and in drinking a lot of liquor, whereupon he falls into a deep sleep. Then, when he awakens twenty years later, he discovers that his son is now a grown man, his wife has died, and that he missed the entire American Revolution while he slumbered away. He makes his peace with being a widower easily enough (the Van Winkles don’t seem to have had too happy a marriage), finds it more challenging to abandon his native allegiance to King George, and finally ends up settling in with his grown daughter as he tries to figure out the new world and his place in it.

There are lots of parallel stories to Irving’s tale. Third-century (C.E.) Greek philosopher Diogenes Laëterius, for example, wrote about a man named Epimenides who fell asleep for fifty-seven years and then had to negotiate an entirely new world when he awakened.  Jewish literature has its own version of both Rip van Winkle and Epimenides in Honi the Circle-Drawer, a wonder-working rabbi of the first century (or thereabouts) who fell asleep for seventy years and awakened to find a man tending to carob trees that Honi himself had witnessed the man’s grandfather planting just (it must have felt like) a day earlier. Other cultures have their own versions, but what makes them appealing—and also slightly terrifying— is the fantasy that this could possibly happen to us readers, that we too could possibly get into bed tonight, turn off the light, drift off into sleep…and then awaken not tomorrow morning but a century from now. Nor is it hard to explain why this is such an arresting theme to so many. We all like to think that the world is so sturdy, so substantial, so there, after all…and then an idea like this takes root and suggests that it’s all a chimera, all a fantasy, all an elaborate illusion played out against an equally illusory dreamscape, that what feels so real is only an elaborate set that the stage crew will take down the moment we breathe our last. And why shouldn’t the theater of life mimic the way things work in real theaters? The show closes, the crew strikes the set, the actors return their costumes, and everybody goes home. And, on Broadway, that is that!  

And now it turns out that it really is so that people fall asleep and awaken decades later. Some readers may have noticed a story in the paper a while back about one Munira Abdulla, a woman from a small town in the United Arab Emirates, who was in a terrible automobile accident in 1991 when she was only thirty-two years old. She fell into a coma, but was kept alive by her family in the hope that she might one day awaken. And she did just that, awakening, apparently on her own, after twenty-seven years. Technically speaking, Ms. Abdulla was in the state technically called “minimal consciousness,” which is less bad than being in a full coma (i.e., in which the patient shows no sign of being awake) or in what’s called a persistent vegetative state (in which the patient appears to be awake but shows no signs of awareness). It is, however, still extraordinarily rare for patients possessed of minimal consciousness simply to awaken.

It’s happened closer to home as well. Terry Wallis, for example, was nineteen when his pickup skidded off a bridge near his hometown in Arkansas, which accident left him in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors told his family that he had no chance of recovery. But then he somehow managed to move up a notch into the same state of minimal consciousness that Munira Abdulla was in. And there he remained for nineteen years, domiciled at a nursing home near his parents’ home. And then one day in 2006 his mother walked into his room, whereupon he looked up and said “Mom” out loud, the first word he had uttered in almost two decades.

Donald Herbert’s is a similar story. A Buffalo fire-fighter, Herbert was injured on the job in 1995 when debris in a burning building fell on him and left him in what doctors called a state of “faint consciousness” for a full decade. And then, in 2005, after a full decade of silence, he opened his eyes one day and asked for his wife.  

These are rare stories, obviously. Most comatose people—including people possessed of faint or minimal consciousness—do not suddenly wake up and start talking. Indeed, in every real sense, these people I’ve been writing about are the rare exceptions to an otherwise sad rule. But the fact that such people exist at all is very meaningful: even if the overwhelming majority of comatose patients do not spontaneously wake up, some apparently do. And in that thought inheres the huge problem for society of how to relate to the somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans who exist in states of partial, faint, or minimal consciousness. Most will never recover. But some few may.

Many readers will remember Penny Marshall’s terrific 1990 movie, Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, and based on Oliver Sacks’ 1973 book of the same title. (Less well known is that Harold Pinter wrote a short play, A Kind of Alaska, based on Sacks’ book as well, which is often performed as part of a trilogy of the playwright’s one-act plays.) The story of the book and the movie (and presumably the play as well, which I’d like to see one day) is simple enough: a doctor working in 1969 at a public hospital in the Bronx is charged with caring for a ward of catatonic patients who survived the world-wide epidemic of encephalitis (specifically the version called encephalitis lethargica) in the 1920’s. The doctor, very movingly and effectively portrayed by the late Robin Williams, somehow has the idea to try using L-Dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, on these patients and gets astounding results; the movie is basically about one of those patients, portrayed by Robert De Niro, whose “awakening” is depicted in detail. It doesn’t work in the long run, though; each “awakened” patient, including the one played by De Niro, eventually returns to catatonia no matter how high a dose of L-Dopa any is given. The movie thus ends both hopefully and tragically: the former because these people on whom the world had long-since given up were given a final act in the course of which they sampled, Rip Van Winkle-style, the world a half-century after they fell asleep; and the latter because, in the end, the experiment failed and no one was cured in anything like a long-term or fully meaningful way.

Why do these stories exert such a strong effect on me? It’s not that easy for me to say, but if I had to hazard a guess, I think I’d say that the concept of dying to the world briefly and then coming back to life to see what happened while you were gone is what draws me in. (Fans of Mark Twain will recall Tom Sawyer’s wish to be “dead temporarily.” But even Tom and Huck only manage to be gone from the world long enough to attend their own funeral and enjoy the eulogies they hear praising them, not to vanish for decades and then come back to life.) I’m sure there would be surprises if I were to go to bed tonight and wake up in 2089. Some would be amusing—seeing what model iPhone they’ve gotten up to or what version of Windows, or if anyone even remembers either—and some would be amazing: if the President of the United States in 2089 is sixty years old, then he or she won’t have been born yet.  But mostly it would be chastening, and in the extreme, to see how all the various things that seem so immutable, so permanent, so rooted in reality in our world, have all vanished from the world, as will probably also have all of the houses in which we live today, the banks in which we store our cash, and even the shore lines that mark the boundary between the wine-dark sea and the dry land upon which we live in safety or think we do. Depending on a wide variety of factors, that thought is either depressing or exhilarating. But in either event, it makes it easier not to sweat the small stuff or allow our own anxieties to impact negatively on the pleasures life can offer to the living.

I will bring all these thoughts with me as I prepare for Israel in a few weeks’ time because the Rip Van Winkle and Terry Wallis stories are Jerusalem’s own as well. The vibrant center of Jewish life for more than a millennium when the Temple was destroyed in the first century, the city was suddenly emptied of its Jews by its Roman overlords who renamed it and forbade Jews from living there. And yet…some small remnant always remained in place while the city slept. And then, just when the Jewish Jerusalem’s faint consciousness seemed poised to flicker and die out entirely…just the opposite happened as Jews from all over the world built a new city on the outskirts of the old one and breathed consciousness and life itself into its ancient alleys and byways. As the patient came back to life, she didn’t only re-enter history either—she began to be a player in her own story, stepping off the stage to become her own play’s playwright and director. It felt like a miracle then and it feels like one to me today too.

When I’m in Jerusalem, I myself feel my consciousness expanding and becoming in equal parts rejuvenated, reconstituted, and revivified. I never run out of things to do, to write, to read, to experience. I can’t imagine being bored in Jerusalem, even on a hot day in mid-summer when I could just as easily be on the beach in Tel Aviv. I love the beach! But there is something about the air in Jerusalem, and the light, that is the spiritual version of L-Dopa that Robin Williams gives his patients in Penny Marshall’s movie. Except that it doesn’t wear off with time and, if anything, only gets stronger and more powerful as the weeks I spend in Jerusalem pass one by one until the time comes to come home and begin a new year in this place we have all settled.

[belonglab]

Growing Up Brown in America: When Every Day is Halloween

By Neha Sampat, Esq.

October 16, 2018

(Previously published in News India Times, The Teal Mango, and Thrive GlobaI)

Sometimes, taking off the mask is what is really scary.

I’ve been working on that the past few years. I found myself struggling to process a personal loss, mainly because I was more worried about how others perceived my loss and my reaction to it than allowing myself to just feel what I felt and honor those feelings. I realized I had become so swift to gauge others’ needs and so preoccupied with telling them what they wanted to hear, that I had forgotten in some ways who I was. I had covered myself in a cloak of expectation, carefully crafted over four decades of my life, and it was suffocating me.

“How did I get here?” I wondered. I thought back to kindergarten, when I proudly raised my hand when the teacher asked who knew the alphabet. Upon her request, I began to recite it, but was brutally stopped at “H” by my classmates’ uproarious laughter. I couldn’t comprehend why they were laughing at me, which only added to my distress. Finally, someone explained to me that it was pronounced “aych,” not “etch,” as my mom had taught me through her Indian accent. From there sprouted a seed of self-consciousness, a ceaseless suspicion that there was the equivalent of a “Kick me” sign taped to my back, and the silencing shame of being different.

I started to adapt by downplaying my differences. I figured I had to try to be like them in order to be with them, and I had to say what they wanted to hear so they would listen to me. And thus, I gathered the fabric of fitting-in and the string of assimilation, and I began to assemble my costume.

Once I had a passable prototype, I began to perfect it with the right props. For me, one such prop was the simple fork. In my Indian-American family, I remember from early childhood eating with our hands. My mom and grandmother would use their hands to carefully and evenly work warm jaggery into crumbled wheat rotis to create glistening spheres of goodness, which they would lovingly pop into my mouth. Even in the moments we resorted to silverware, we went straight for the spoons, effectively cutting food by forcefully and frantically sawing with the spoon’s side. When invited to a white friend’s home for a meal, I initially feared the fork. I would meticulously study how my friend’s family ate, marveling at their mastery of interchangeably using three utensils in one meal, and I would bring home with me those lessons in “civility, normalcy, and good manners.”

In middle school, I was thrilled to discover another useful prop: Lip gloss in the perfect shimmery shade of frosty pink. It made all the white girls look so shiny-sparkly-good, and that’s what I needed to be! But with my darker lips asserting themselves from beneath the cotton candy sheen, I couldn’t quite achieve the desired effect. Yet, there was no room in my world for the question my mom gently proffered as to what was the right shade of lip gloss for me, so I persisted with the pink.

Thankfully, we all grew out of the Bonne Bell stage. But for many of us brown folks, that just meant our costumes needed to be updated. I observed with an eagle-eye every expression, every choice, every quiet movement made by my white counterparts, and I plotted how I could improve my costume to make it more real and more believable. I started to become more accustomed to wearing the costume and, soon enough, was rarely taking it off. In the safe space at home with my Indian-American friends, I thought I was taking the costume off, but I realize now that remnants of the deception remained: an expression, a choice, a quiet movement.

All of this seemed to work well enough for me as I graduated from my educational endeavors and entered the professional world. I knew how to dress like a white girl, talk like a white girl, and for the most part, act enough like a white girl to get by. And trust me when I tell you that this is what it takes to get by in many professions. Even worse is that in most professions, mimicking a white girl isn’t even enough to excel, due to a cultural bias against women leaders.

In spite of this set-up, I took some risks. Once, when I was a summer intern at a law firm, I asked my assigned mentor attorney if I could wear an Indian outfit to an off-the-clock gathering at a law firm partner’s house. My mentor shook her head incredulously and issued a resounding “Noooooo!” Curiously and quite distressingly, despite my consistently well-received work product, I later was denied a position with the firm for reason of “not being a good fit.” It doesn’t take more than one or two outcomes like that to shake your confidence and chase you right back into your costume, which then is what begins to feel like the safe space.

Without even consciously realizing it, my M.O. became more and more about flying under the radar. If they didn’t notice me, it meant that I was fitting in. That my disguise was working.

Eventually, my costume started to fray from overuse, and the seams started to split to reveal more of my true personality, which, as it turns out, does not want to fly under the radar. I want to do something big and important! I’m tired of the same ineffective solutions to the same problems in business and society, particularly when it comes to diversity. And I’m tired of listening to people tell me their stories and then walk away before hearing mine.

I’ve tried to share with some people how much I was bullied as a child because I was different, but I often find they start to get visibly uncomfortable or try to tell me that my race may not have been a reason, for they, too, were bullied for being nerdy or not wearing the right clothes. I’ve learned through my now well-honed observational skills that people don’t really want to hear me talk about how I was called a “sand n_____” by my elementary school classmates. Or how, even after being the last one picked in 6th grade gym class, my square dance partner considered my brown skin too dirty to even touch, and we both miserably do-si-doed with a deep, dark chasm between our outstretched hands. Or how my high school English teacher told my mom that my potential was less than that of my white classmates since I was “English as a second language.” All of those stories make people break eye contact with me, wriggle in their seats, and try to change the subject.

I have this friend who is Jewish. She and I often have connected over some of the similar traits of our cultures. She is a gifted storyteller who doesn’t shy away from questions that help her understand others’ experiences, and I accordingly have found her to be compassionately and sincerely open to my stories. I recently relayed to her a detailed version of the story about my request to wear Indian clothes to the law firm gathering. Her eyes welled up as I related the events that led to me being dinged from the firm. I could see that it was hard for her to hear. As it should be, because it was hard for me to tell and even harder to experience. In fact, there was a new pain I felt in relating that experience. It was the pain of knowing better. It was the ache of wisdom telling me that I shouldn’t have put up with that and regretting that, as a young, female law student of color eager to make a good impression, I felt disempowered and showed up to that event costumed up, asking them to drop a treat in my bag.

Unfortunately, yet understandably, this form of disempowerment is common among minorities and women. In the 1960’s, sociologist Erving Goffman coined as “covering” this behavior of a known stigmatized individual attempting to mitigate the obtrusiveness of the stigma. It is difficult to metrically ascertain the impact of covering, when it includes lost professional opportunities, decreased confidence, identity and self-worth, and a whole lot of cognitive dissonance. But as law professor Kenji Yoshino recognized, “covering” amounts to a civil rights issue: African-Americans have lost their jobs over wearing their hair in cornrows; Women have been demoted for choosing to become mothers; and Jews have been terminated from the military for wearing yarmulkes. Professor Yoshino explains that courts are willing to protect immutable traits such as the color of one’s skin and one’s sex, but “will not protect mutable traits, because individuals can alter them to fade into the mainstream…If individuals choose not to engage in that form of self-help, they must suffer the consequences.” Such consequences are too often dire in these days of rampant racial profiling, especially for our African-American brothers and sisters who might wear a dark hoody on a candy run. And so, as incentivized by some of our classmates, teachers, neighbors, mentors, and bosses, and also by the law of the land, we cover, hiding our true selves behind masks of the majority and resigning our society to a persistent and oppressive homogeneity.

Abby Norman, in her article about liberal progressives not enrolling their children in her predominantly black neighborhood school, asks, “Really, if we are experiencing diversity on white terms, what good is that diversity anyway?” I’d guess that Ms. Norman and I would agree that the answer is, “not very good at all,” but you don’t have to take our word for it; the data speaks loudly and clearly. In spite of ongoing claims of diversity as a top value and mission of many organizations, African-Americans and Latina/o-Americans remain significantly underrepresented in many industries, even more so in senior leadership roles. Even in a legal profession charged with upholding justice, barely modest strides have been made in diversity metrics.

Clearly, “success” needs to be redefined when it comes to diversity, and innovative and diverse approaches must be welcomed, supported, and earnestly attempted to reap the many benefits of diversity and inclusion. To genuinely engage our underrepresented brothers and sisters, we all must battle our own implicit biases, in part by expanding our own social networks to be genuinely inclusive of others who have different backgrounds and experiences from us. If organizations truly seek diversity and inclusion (and that is a question meriting candid organizational introspection), they must make space for everyone, especially minorities and women, to bring their true selves to the table. Most, like me, have learned the art of “covering” to survive in organizations because that is what our society has required of us. It is now on our society and our organizational leaders to undo that to allow minorities and women to thrive and offer their unique perspectives and ideas for assured organizational and societal improvements. Seats at the table aren’t enough; organizational leaders must warmly and earnestly ask minorities and women to share their stories and then must listen, especially when it is painful and uncomfortable.

At the same time, we minorities and women must be more aware of and intentional about when we put on our costumes. There always will be some amount of care and strategy we employ in determining with whom, in what scenarios, and to what extent we show our true colors. However, it is important that we not be scared by past risks that didn’t pay off and continue to share our stories with the people in our lives who will be moved and impacted, and who will remind us of the power of our true narratives.

For me, that means remembering the way food always tasted better to me as a child when it was fed to me by my mom’s or grandmother’s hand instead of a cold-clawed fork. And it means acknowledging that the pretty pink lip gloss made me look like the living dead.

I’ll save that costume for Halloween.

Neha Sampat is founder, consultant, trainer, and coach at GenLead|BelongLab, where she collaborates with clients through consulting, training, and individual coaching to innovate approaches to leadership, inclusion, and professional development that are both data-driven and grounded in the subjective experience. Her best Halloween costume to date was Buffila Slayerjee (the South Asian vampire slayer), and when she wears lip gloss, it is in the shade of coco plum. Find her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram (@belonglab) and Twitter (@nehamsampat and @BelongLab).

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

It’s one of the juiciest debates in science.

There’s an oddly persistent myth that people have always had a good chance of living to a ripe old age if they could just survive childhood. Socrates was old, after all, and what about Ben Franklin? It’s true that infants and children were once more likely to die than people of any other ages. Eliminating many of the deadly diseases of childhood gave the biggest boost to our average life expectancy as it doubled in the past 150 years. But children aren’t the only ones who are less likely to die than they were in the past. At every age, even older than 100, people are more likely to survive the next year than they were at any other time in human history.

Why has life expectancy continued to go up steadily over the past several decades? And what’s in store for us: Will we continue to live for more and more years than ever before?

Public health measures get the credit for most of the increase in life expectancy that happened from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s. Clean water, safe food, comfortable housing, and a healthy respect for germs made the world a completely different place. If you look at the top causes of death in the United States in 1900 and 2010, you might think you’re examining data from two entirely different species. In 1900, we died of tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections, and diphtheria. In 2010, none of those diseases made it into the top 10. Take a tour of this interactive to see how death rates changed over the course of the past century. (The spike in 1918-1919 was caused by the Spanish flu, the worst pandemic in history.) While infectious diseases plummeted over the course of the 20th century, cancer and heart disease shot up.

Heart disease isn’t a new invention. Egyptian mummies show evidence of atherosclerosis. But it and cancer were masked by other diseases that killed people before they got old enough to die of a stroke.

Because heart disease is such a killer, anything that reduces its incidence or treats it can save a lot of lives and boost our overall average life expectancy. The death rate from heart disease (adjusting for age, since there are more and more older people in the population) was cut in half between 1980 and 2000. That’s a screaming success for public health and biomedicine. Who gets the credit? About half of the credit goes to medical treatments (statins, aspirin, heart surgery), and the other half goes to reductions in risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, and eating red meat. More good news is that some risk factors, including high cholesterol, are continuing to drop.

Heart disease is still a horribly common way to die, and it’s hard to appreciate the number of deaths that didn’t happen. But you probably have loved ones who are alive today because careful epidemiological studies identified risk factors for heart disease and medical researchers found effective treatments.

My great-great-grandmother died at age 57, probably of a heart attack. My great-grandmother died at age 67 of a stroke. My grandmother takes medication for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She will celebrate her 90th birthday next week. She is the first person in her family to live long enough to see a great-grandchild. Preventing and treating heart disease is a huge unsung victory of modern times.

Deaths from many kinds of cancer also decreased during the past few decades. Cancer isn’t a single disease, and it won’t be eliminated anytime soon, foolish talk from George W. Bush’s head of the National Cancer Institute aside. But researchers and clinicians are making steady progress at identifying and treating most forms of the disease. Long-term survival rates are up. In 1975, about half of all cancer patients lived for five more years. Now the rate is two-thirds.

Even more important than treatment, though, is prevention. The reduction in smoking rates gets credit for much of the decrease in incidence of heart disease and cancer, especially lung cancer, which is by far the most common cause of cancer deaths. Smoking bans are lifesavers, too—fewer people are dying of heart attacks, stroke, or lung disease due to secondhand smoke now that it’s not stinking up all our restaurants, offices, and airplanes.

Controlling air pollution has been a big lifesaver in the United States. In 1948, a noxious smog choked Donora, Pa., killing 20 people and sickening half of the population of 14,000. In 1952, a great smog in London killed at least 4,000 people. Air pollution provokes heart attacks and asthma attacks and increases the risk of lung cancer, heart disease, bronchitis, and other diseases. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 and has been revised several times with stricter limits on pollutants. The law has led to great improvements in public health: It prevented 160,000 premature deaths in 2010. You can even see the mountains outside Los Angeles now, which you couldn’t do in 1968. Air pollution is still a big killer in the developing world, however, and is blamed for more deaths worldwide than high cholesterol.

We have a completely different relationship to safety today than we did at the beginning of the 20th century. Workplace deaths are down by 90 percent, thanks to efforts by labor unions, researchers, and overreaching government agencies. We’re driving more miles than in the past but are much less likely to die in traffic accidents. People complain about U.S. culture being excessively litigious, but there’s nothing like the threat of a lawsuit to make companies recall dangerous products. Even death by lightning strikes is down; God is smiting 70 percent fewer people than he did in 1960.

Fewer women die in childbirth—although it took a shamefully long time for the maternal mortality rate to decrease. Safe and effective birth control has saved women from dying in unwanted pregnancies. Improved delivery practices cut death rates from infection, hemorrhage, and other complications. And continuing improvements to neonatal care mean that more infants and mothers survive the dangers of childbirth.

Antibiotics are the lifesavers that are most familiar to us. When I asked my acquaintances why they weren’t dead yet, the most common stories involved infections that had been cured by antibiotics. Today we’re publishing some of the best #NotDeadYet stories that people tweeted or emailed to us over the past week. Many of you alive today would have been vanquished by bacteria in previous eras.

The public health interventions that protect children from infectious disease continue to echo throughout their lifespan. People who reach old age today are stronger and healthier than earlier generations, partly because they weren’t weakened in childhood by repeated infections. As more people live to old age, they have more time to develop diseases of aging, the most devastating of which is dementia. But taking age into account, the rate of dementia seems to be falling, probably because of improved overall health.

Life expectancy can make sudden jumps even in older populations in response to social conditions. Before the reunification of Germany, retirees living in the former East Germany had much lower life expectancies than their cousins in the West. After reunification, they started living much longer—even people in their 80s and 90s had years added to their lives.

People with more years of education live longer, and the gap is widening between people who didn’t graduate high school and those who have college degrees. That may not be surprising since the well-educated are also wealthier on average and have safer jobs and better access to health care. But a few studies have found that education in itself prolongs life; it seems to allow people to manage chronic diseases better, handle stress, and make better judgments. The proportion of the population with some college education has been growing, and that may pay off in better long-term health outcomes.

It’s all connected, of course—the reason we live longer today is that we are living in an entirely different world than the one people inhabited at the end of the 19th century. It’s less nasty, less brutish, and less short. One final reason we’re living longer is that we have less exposure to the most heart-breaking risk factor for death: bereavement. In other words, we are living longer because our loved ones are living longer, and thus we are less likely to be sunk in grief than at any time in human history.

* * *

So what’s next? What are the little things that could make our average life expectancy jump again? Some of them sound simple but really aren’t. “The biggest low-hanging fruit is smoking,” says medical historian David Jones of Harvard. “But is it really low-hanging?” About half of the population smoked in the mid-20th century. That rate dropped steadily until the latter part of the century, but it seems to have plateaued (although a recent gruesome ad campaign had promising results). About 20 percent of the population smokes, and it may be very difficult to get the remaining holdouts to quit.

Obesity is the other major risk factor for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and any number of other causes of death. The obesity rate climbed so much in the past few decades that S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois–Chicago, and his colleagues estimate that obesity could swamp the effects of reduced smoking on average life expectancy.

The most disturbing fact about life expectancy in the United States today is that African-Americans live about four years fewer on average than whites. The good news is that the gap has been narrowing. This disparity has been seen as a matter of social justice, but as Jones points out, there’s also a major gap in life expectancy between males and females. “I can expect to live five years less than my wife,” he says. “To me, this feels totally unfair.” We tend to think of this difference as something biological and immutable, but finding ways to help men live as long as women would go a long way toward improving life expectancy and making the world a less sorrowful place.

The United States could learn a lot from other developed countries. Our life expectancy is much shorter than it should be considering how wealthy we are. By some estimates, we’re 40 years behind other countries in terms of advancing life expectancy. The National Academy of Sciences took a hard look at what we’re doing wrong and identified nine things that set the United States apart from other countries, including drug and alcohol use, HIV and AIDS, adolescent pregnancy, and injuries and homicide. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls many of these problems “winnable battles.”

* * *

One of the most fascinating debates in life science these days is between Olshansky and James Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. They disagree fundamentally about whether and how average life expectancy will increase in the future, and they’ve been arguing about it for 20 years. Olshansky, a lovely guy, takes what at first sounds like the pessimistic view. He says the public health measures that raised life expectancy so dramatically from the late 1800s to today have done about as much as they can. We now have a much older population, dying of age-related diseases, and any improvements in treatment will add only incrementally to average life expectancy, and with vanishing returns. He explains his point of view in this charming animated video.

On the other side of the ring is Vaupel, who says that people are living longer and healthier lives all the time and there is no necessary end in sight. His message is cheerier, but he takes the debate very seriously; he won’t attend conferences where Olshansky is present. His charts are heartening; he takes the records of the longest-lived people in the longest-lived countries for each year and shows that maximum lifespan has been zooming up linearly from 1800 to today. One wants to mentally extend the line into all of our foreseeable futures.

Olshansky says the only way to make major improvements in life expectancy is to find new ways to prevent and treat the diseases of aging. And the most efficient way to do that is to delay the process of aging itself. That’s something that some people already do—somehow. Olshansky says, “The study of the genetics of long-lived people, I think, is going to be the breakthrough technology.” Scientists can now easily extend lifespan in flies, worms, and mice, and there’s a lot of exciting research on genetic pathways in humans that might slow down the aging process and presumably protect us from the age-related diseases that kill most people today. “The secret to longer lives is contained in our own genomes,” Olshansky says.

Predictions about medical breakthroughs are notoriously optimistic, of course. When the human genome was sequenced, people predicted personalized medical interventions in a decade. That was 12 years ago. Richard Nixon’s war on cancer has yet to be won. So while you’re waiting, do what you can. Eat right, exercise. Drive safely. Don’t smoke or play with fire. Get that mole looked at. Are you sitting in front of a computer screen now? Stand up and stretch, do some lunges, we won’t laugh. Here’s to your health and long life.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/maximum_adult_lifespan_debate_over_how_long_humans_can_live.html

[noplanwithavan]

WISH YOU WERE HERE

There’s been a touch of holiday season “hiraeth” these last few weeks. Or perhaps that’s disingenuous. It’s not the motherland we miss. We cannot lay claim to that evocative welsh term for longing. Ours is more a background hum - a pang of kinship for the traditions and people of home. Christmas time will do that to you. When the strength of familial bonds tug most keenly. Yet there has been enough to lessen the strain - many friends - old, new and acquired have helped to see us through.

First there was the Osman family whom we met on the Costa Brava at the start of our journey. We’d kept in touch as we knew they would be heading south for the winter, and managed a rendezvous at a campsite outside Caños de Meca. Unlike us they hadn’t gone down the route of wild camping. Their smaller van with a large tent in tow ruled out that option. Instead they’d stuck to campsites - a more expensive, yet undeniably less smelly existence. We spotted their flower-powered van on our approach and followed, whopping, hooting and waving with glee. Despite only having spent a few days together 3 months ago, they felt like long lost friends. Bonded by that peculiar camaraderie which comes from shared experience. The girls picked up with their kids Nancy and Dolly where they left off. Trotting, free-wheeling and carousing around the campsite. All chitter chattering as they shared stories. Rain set in for a few days, but we countered it by hunkering down in the Osman tent. Gossiping and catching up. The adults drinking wine, while the young ones put our distraction to good use. Before we realised what game they were playing, it seemed too late to stop it - dress the parents up in the children’s clothing. Unsurprisingly Elsie got very absorbed in her role as stylist. A particularly fetching ruff was selected for Nancy and Dolly’s dad, Jay, which gave him the air of a Spanish reconquistador. She paused to weigh up the effect of her composition, but seemed unsatisfied. Clearly this was not quite the look she had in mind. Disappearing briefly into the deeper recesses of the tent, Elsie emerged moments later with a triumphal look. Rapidly, layers were added - to the face, and hands. She stepped back quizzically to admire her work, and smiled. The masterpiece was complete. With hands now bound in submission, Mr Osman was transformed - no longer a knight of the Spanish Golden Age. More like a detainee from Guantanamo Bay.

As we parted, Marcus joked we’d have to find more friends in time for Christmas. And in fact, this proved remarkably easy. Rolling our way back down the coast, we made for Tarifa. That wind-sock of a kite-surfing mecca, luring you in with its laid-back charm. We’d heard there was a good free camping community at Playa de los Lances. Surely our best shot at making festive friends. After searching for a few days without success, Marcus suggested trying down one of the many beach-side tracks. One clearly declaimed itself a campervan-free zone, with a hard-to-ignore “No Acampar” sign in large lettering. Venturing on through the umbrella-shaped pines, we broke out onto a runway lined with mobile homes. This was van heaven, curving off into the distance. With a collective gasp, it was clear. We were hit with a serious case of vehicle envy.  It’s hard not to marvel at human inventiveness at such moments. The sheer cornucopia of self-sufficiency in all shapes and sizes. Big wheels, graffiti spray-jobs, even patio doors out the back. All these configurations and compromises tailored to individual need.

We celebrated the girl’s 6th birthday here, foregoing presents for an “experience” instead. After some discussion they settled on a rock climbing lesson over horse riding on the beach. It proved an education all round; the parental art of butting right out. Scaling a 40 foot rock face in nearby Bettis, Elsie baulked at the prospect of letting go to abseil down. Contradicting everything she’d ever been taught, the instructor Chris was now explaining how to let go and lean right back. She was not at all keen to put her untested faith in a rope. Sensing panic, Marcus and I tried to help, bellowing up instructions like, “Move your leg over to the right. No, not that right, the other right.” This didn’t help. We were merely fuelling the flames, a volley of overlapping commands fired at cross purposes. That was until Chris turned to us diplomatically, with the words, “I think it would help if you just let me do the talking.” Enough said. He had her down in a jiffy. From a quivering jelly back to full bravado, all in the space of a few feet. And busting to do it all over again.

During our time in Tarifa we acquired a favourite pitch at our camping spot. That curious desire to lay claim even amongst a free-for-all. If we went for the day we’d leave behind a few possessions - chairs, clothes hung out to dry. And there was good reason. Not wanting to lose our place beside the big blue bus. When we first arrived we noticed it had the tell-tale sign we tend to home in on - a child’s bike mounted on the back. Sure enough, 3 year-old Bonnie soon burst forth, wearing baggy pants and a sweet, diffident smile. Within minutes that immutable call to friendship between children had been uttered and answered. The girls disappeared inside her bus. And that was it. We had neighbours. And what’s more neighbours with extended family. A few days later Hilary and Richard, Bonnie’s Grandma and Grandpa, showed up. Swinging by in style with their vintage VW van. This was, it seems, a grand tour en famille. We stayed put, cooking together and sharing food on Christmas Day, happy to be part of this warm solidarity. Hilary and Richard provided an indulgent treat for the girls - spearheading craft sessions on the beach and trips to pick edible mushrooms. After a week Elsie and Lulu were even calling them Grandma and Grandpa, exchanging christmas cards and involving them in parental confidences. Waving hello one morning Hilary chuckled knowingly as she shared, “You can’t tell children anything can you?” I must have looked puzzled, for she added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Just so as you know…we DO have a toilet.” Blushing furiously I could hear my mind whirring…back to that conversation days ago with the girls. The one that went:

Lulu - “I like their orange van. It has nice curtains. It’s pretty cool isn’t it? Me - “Well yes VWs are good to look at, but frankly they’re not very practical. I mean it’s very small. They probably don’t even have a toilet in there.”

Repeated verbatim to the subject in question…thanks a lot kids.

Social indiscretions aside, we would have loved to stay, but Boxing Day brought with it a new chapter. Friends from the old country - the Bulloughs -  were coming out to see us. The girls were crackling with excitement. I’m not sure which was more of a novelty - welcoming the first pals to have made it out to join us along this journey, or ditching the camper van and living it up in a flat for 12 days. Sadly I fear it may not have been the relaxing holiday Tom, Charlie, Edwyn and Alice envisaged. All 8 of us squeezed into a small apartment, with Elsie and Lulu clearly the more noisy and boisterous half of their merry band. But it was fab. And as a city Cádiz is hard to beat. This is Spain at it’s most Spanish. We were in the heart of the old town. Crammed into a spit of land, with the port on one side, and sweeping beaches the other. Looking out from up high there is a maze of flat roof-tops, intersected at points by over 100 watchtowers. Faded relics from a more prosperous past. Then stepping outside you’re thrown headlong into a warren of wide, criss-crossing streets teeming with life. I had the unshakeable sense that whole lifetimes are lived within just a few yards. The same faces seen day after day within invisible boundary lines - hawking their wares or pacing the plaza. It was truly an enchanting, beguiling place. Having been told from Grandma Ros that Rick Stein had done a programme on Cádiz, Marcus assiduously followed all of Rick’s food recommendations. And we weren’t disappointed, gulping down sherry, seafood and churros. Bizarrely the only time when people didn’t appear to be out and about, drinking and eating at all hours, was New Year’s Eve. We’d read that Spanish people celebrate with their families until midnight, and only come out much later. Having managed to stay awake until 12.30, we reasoned things would surely have begun to heat up by now. The odd bar perhaps cracking open to offer a sliver of comfort. Maybe even the faint strains of “auld lang syne” calling us forth. But no, the whole place was a ghost town, shutters drawn over large silent windows. If we’d kept prowling the pavements till 2am perhaps we’d have seen a party, but tired and despondent it was just easier to go to bed.

But if welcoming in 2017 was a little restrained, our epiphany was soon to come. Christmas Day is no big deal in Spain. The real festivities are geared towards the Magi. The 3 Kings visiting baby Jesus on January 6th. It wasn’t always easy to coax 4 kids around the city. To avoid the many glittering temptations in every doorway. Constantly beset by stops to the playpark or the irresistible giant magnolia trees. Their trunks inviting exploration, with bark the texture of an elephant’s hide. But if we’d tried we wouldn’t have been able to drag them home on the night of January 5th. Despite multiple separate breakdowns, all 4 refused to abandon their place behind the barriers lining Plaza de España. This was the mother of all fiestas. The Magi were on their way. A brass band heralding a cavalcade of flotillas snaking its way towards us, releasing a collective frenzy amongst the crowd. Small Spanish bodies surged forwards, elbowing their way past us, screaming “Acquí, acquí!” as thousands of sweets rained down. We tried to get a look at the girls faces, to see their reactions to this bubble-gum exuberance. But we couldn’t see them - shielded by the youthful melee they were scrabbling desperately all around - on the floor, under the barriers - for whatever pickings they could get. “Did you like that?” we asked later. “That.. was the best night of my life - EVER!” beamed Lulu.

Leaving Cádiz it was tough to say goodbye to the Bulloughs. But we were also hankering to be back on the open road and in the camper van once again. The last few days have been peaceful, sun-filled and happy. Hanging out along the Costa de la Luz - the surf spot El Palmar, Conil, and Vejer de la Frontera. And the hand of friendship has once again played its part. Big thanks to Ivan Black back home for putting us in touch with his great mates Sarah and Camden out in Vejer. Former Londoners who’ve been living in Spain for the last 12 years, we hit it off straight away. We ended up parking in their garden and had a fabulous day sharing great food, company and the delights of a washing machine and shower. Sarah even threw in a yoga lesson. New friends, old friends, friends not just for Christmas. It’s all good, and it’s set us in great stead for our next big leap. Across the water to Africa - Morocco here we come!

[jimdroberts]

  We’re at a point in human history when civilisation is changing faster and in ways that will leave it different forever. It only follows that the people must be changing too. During the long soulless hours of isolation I’ve found myself asking:

  Am I changing for the better or worse?

There’s no other way to describe these times other than terrifying. Societally and as individuals we’re being forced into making decisions, and ways of living, that we’ve not been prepared for. The structure and order of our societies had to be rebuilt out of the wastelands of World War II, this structure and order is being threatened. If you’re unable to see the pachyderm at your drinks party hitting on your spouse, let me make this easier for you; we are looking into the  abyss.

Pandemic, collapse of the global economy, unemployment leading to an inevitable global depression; reduced manufacturing, oil scarcity, reduction in the capacity of food production resulting in famines that the Bible would consider hyperbole; civil disorder, racial tensions, the continuation of eternal religious conflicts, environmental collapse, and energy crises. If just some of these happen as a result of COVID-19, we’re in trouble. If most of them happen, as I am compelled to believe the may well, we’re on for a global reset.

  According to the ancient Chinese Book of Change, The I Ching, the symbol of the Tao, dates back to at least 200 BCE. A circle divided in two halves, yin and yang. The symbol intends to represent the oneness of man and the surrounding cosmos. The two halves representing the complimentary pairs of male and female. The I Ching, as it’s name infers, The Book of Change, tells us that mankind has been attuned to fluctuations between moments of chaos and order for thousands of years. Taoism is a religion based on the impermanence of the cosmos and that limitless shifts between hope and despair, life and death are the norm. It proves that such events are an immutable part of the cosmic order. And it’s reasonable to say, that one such event is happening now.

Current circumstances tell us that in our area of the cosmos chaos has taken dominion over structure and order. It is inevitable that under such an existential, and environmental uncertainty, that many of us feel heightened levels of anxiety. (I’m freaking terrified right now, and it’s the reason I’m writing this.)

Even though it might feel as if we have wandered into a metaphorical, valley of darkness, my purpose in writing these two posts, is to help reduce some of your suffering and put some love back into that sad, scared, and lonely heart.

It’s nothing new for suffering to play a part in everyone’s lives, the world’s major religions use this foundational message at the core of their beliefs. But what feels unprecedented is the universality of the suffering in the world. As a person who doesn’t subscribe to any faith, I’m uncertain of this being the actual apocalypse, but I’m keen on it being so. Some Christians might refer to their mythology and believe these times are the apocalypse. Christianity anthropomorphises the apoclypse through the symbolic Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

    Right now, maybe you’re thinking that this is nothing more than another blog promoting fear-mongering. Such a thought is understandable, even inevitable for many of us. Fear porn, along with actual pornography are the most prominent genres of material to appear on the internet. It’s my purpose to help you understand the gravity of the current situation. But it remains you’re choice, whether you ignore the warnings I’m about to set out. You always keep the right to ignore the elephant in the room.

  COVID-19 and Religions

  The spiritual texts of the Abrahamic religions have achieved an unprecedented level of success in their ability to remain valid. Even after two thousand years, they continue to influence and retain cultural relavence. It is the paragon of ignorance to deny this fact. I’m agnostic, but I’m very comfortable acknowledging  the profound hold these faiths have had, and continue to have on our world. But how have they achieved this?

  They achieved this because of one simple but profound reason, they contain ineluctable elements of wisdom that are fundamental truths of nature of the human condition. That might not sound so simple, basically these books tell us: who we are; why we behave the way we do; how it’s desirable for us to behave; what we desire; virtues (good habits); and sins (bad habits). As well as generally encouraging us not to behave like complete dicks. They’ve provided the rules and laws that enabled humans to start living in ever bigger communities. And ever bigger communities generated greater wealth.

  Earlier I listed the types of upheval and chaos that I expect COVID-19 to have and cause. And I genuinely see the potential for each of them occuring to a variety of degrees. But there is one area of society that upon which all other areas of our societies depend.

  Economic failure will result in the systemmmic failure of our societies as we know them. Should our economies fail, the rule of law, public order, claims to property, food, healthcare, sanitation, medicene, the list is endless, but each of these will to some extent lessen, or cease to exist.

  Economic Collapse Post COVID-19

  Whilst I am certain that the consequences of COVID-19 will be far reaching in both their space and time. At the moment, COVID-19 is affecting almost every industry and community around the world, and it’s likely to continue doing so for many, many, years to come. I’m thinking more in the terms of a generations ‘ball park’. Denying a generation the hope of upward mobility and prosperity, and replacing it with decades of poverty is going to profoundly affect the lives Once the hope of upward mobility, and prosperity is denied to a generation of people.

  Modern society is one that was built around the combustion engine and the burning of fosil fuels. The Baby Boomers grewp following World War II in the most prosperous generation, for the masses, in history. The world needed rebuilding, there was a population explosion there to build it. More people than ever before were in employment, producing more goods, buying more things and paying more tax. Land was affordable, they bought houses, the value of which they saw ascend on a never ending escalator. Baby Boomers worked hard, but the conditions for their economic prosperity were optimal.

  Thre’s nearly always a correlation in the relationship between the potential prosperity of an individual and the actual prosperity of their society. It’s now become obvious that anyone aged betweeen 15 and 30, the younger Millennials and start of of Generation Z, that their prospects are going to be worse than both their parents, and their granparents, Genrations X and the Baby Boommers. Generation Z will become the second consecutive generation to inherit a period generational economic decline. The question that needs to be asked is: how do we expect these people to live lives of diminished hope?

  This is important because it flouts a rule that is embedded in our evolutionary psyche. Nature determines whether species live or die, flourish or struggle. Because humanity’s prospects are so tightly bound to their economy, it’s becomming abundantly obvious to anyone aged betweeen 15 and 30, the younger Millennials and start of of Generation Z, that their prospects are going to be worse than both their parents, and their grandparents, Genrations X and the Baby Boommer generation to . Indeed, Generation Z will become the second consecutive generation to inherit a period generational economic decline. They are two generations for whom it’s realistic that they will endure significant periods of unemployment. Will be employed in a number of jobs that have unrelated skills. Two generations that will in all likelihood see reductions in worker’s rights. When unemployment is high people don’t tend to care how they’re treated, as long as they have a little bit of money to show for their effort. Temporary contracts, limited healthcare, maternity and paternity rights are realistic scenarios when unemployment s high.

  Today’s quality of life is almost a reflection of societal systems underwritten by an economy which is man’s greatest work of fiction.

  Why Economic Collapse Is Inevitable

This is an area I’ll actually cover in more detail at a later date, it deserves a more thorough explanation than I have the room for here. Here I’ll give an overview of the collapse, leaving the finer details in part II.

  Understanding Definitions is paramount if we’re to understand the severity of this current situation. When I refer to economic collapse I am referring to the end of our fiat based economies. Fiat economies are ones in which the government prints currency. It is then believed that this currency has a value that can be used in exchange for goods and services. I believe this to be quixotic fantasy, no less foolish than building castles on the sand. For further, more in depth information, I recommend reading the work of Dmitry Orlov.

  New Yorker, reporter, John Cassidy wrote in a recent article:

In January of 2019, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, appeared before a House of Commons committee to discuss global threats to financial stability. At that time, the U.S. unemployment rate was below four per cent, the gross domestic product was growing steadily, and Donald Trump was busy boasting about “the greatest economy ever.” But, despite these favorable statistics, staffers at the bank had identified a potentially serious problem on the horizon:

Cassidy suggests that, Carney, and the Bank of England became aware of high risk economic practices on Wall Street that haven’t undergone the changes necessary to prevent the exact same thing happening as in 2008. The essence of his article implies that the Bank of England was aware, and concerned about a decline in the lending standards in corporate debt markets, is almost the exact equal of the sub-prime debacle

If you’re still reading this I assume that you’re in agreement that the economic fall out of COVID-19 is going to be signifiicant, but may be reluctant to agree with my prediction of a complete collapse of the fiat system, bringing an end to currency as we know it.

Okay, what does your more optimistic scenario look like? We know that there’s going to be enormous recession/depression fueled by unemployment. In turn, this triggers a reduction in taxes received, resulting in sub optimal funding of public services. The unemployed will have to find money by fair means or foul, so an increase in crime is inevitable. The reduction in public funding means the police needed to deal with the increase in crime, will not exist. Poverty, results in poorer diets leading to obesity, diabetes, or other health complications. It causes stress which is known to heighten the risk of developing cancer. And if you’ve been lucky enough to survive all that, you have a proclivity to fall into drug and alcohol addiction, be at a greater risk of depression and according to a, 2003 study by a team of New Zealand doctors,  proved that people between the ages of 18 and 64, who are unemployed are between two and three times more likely to commit suicide. If history’s taught us one thing, it’s that poverty sucks.

  Ploughing the Fields of Hopelessness

And when one of these people do get a job, they’re so grateful that they’ll work till they drop to make enough to feed themselves. They can’t afford aspirations to improve their lot, for fear of appearing ungrateful. Read, Steinbeck’s, Grapes of Wrath. Mass unemployment and a depressed employment market erodes hope. And hope isn’t just a word you expect to see appearing in the inscriptions of Hallmark cards. Hope can be is also a noun, and a verb. The noun names the feeling, whilst the verb is the feeling. To be robbed of the ability to feel hope is a desperate state of affairs. Hope is an emotion that has survived millions of years of natural selection. Hope and evolution has interested psychologists. What purpose does hope play in maximising our abilities to survive, procreate and pass on our genes?

  Rats, Religion and the Power of Hope

  Let me warn you that psychology experiments conducted soon after World War II are notorious for their ignorance of ethics.

In the 1950’s Professor Curt Richter performed an experiment drowning wild and domesticated rats. At least when this is your line of work the neighbours never ask you to look after their dog.

The purpose of Richter’s morbid interest, to compare how long domesticated rats survived compared to their wild counterparts. Richter discovered that the domesticated rats, despit not needing to swim in their day to day environments, far out performed the wild rats.

  The explanation given is that the domesticated rats were used to being helped by handlers and were writing to be saved. While being far superior swimmers, the wild rats drowned sooner as once they had understood that there was no escape they gave up.

It’s been recorded that individuals who survive disasters are disproportionately made up of those that practice faiths.This was discovered by scientists, they’re not likely to put this down to divine intervention. What they concluded was that people with faith hold onto the belief of survival, of divine intervention. This hope is the edge that differentiates the victims from the survivors. Don’t underestimate the power of hope.

If you’ve read all and been left to feel that has lingered in each and every sentence, you have started to understand what’s about to happen. To have any chance of making good decisions over the next twelve months, it’s imperative to understand the scale of the events that are resulting from COVID-19. Hope is essential in the challenges that lay ahead.

in Part II I promise hope, chicken soup for your soul.

  It’s in Part II. I Promise.

                Chicken Soup for the Soul (Part I) – Surviving COVID-19, Isolation, Race Wars, Rioting, and the Inevitable Economic Collapse We're at a point in human history when civilisation is changing faster and in ways that will leave it different forever.

[bpellerin]

Bearing freedom with a smile

This piece was just rejected from a publication where I've published before because they don't think their Christian readers would appreciate it. I don't mind the rejection - having your stuff thrown back in your face kind of goes with the territory, and I'm fine with that. But I'm puzzled by the reason - choosing to live your life according to a particular religion is a choice, is it not? At any rate, around here it is. It's in the Charter, the Bill of Rights, etc. Religion may help you not feel so much fear and anxiety in your life, since it removes a few choices from your day-to-day life. It's kind of like routines that way. But following a religion is not necessarily a life-long thing, or even a 100%-take-it-or-leave-it thing; some people cherry-pick, others move in and out of religion, for all sorts of reasons. That's still your decision to make, in freedom. But even if you live religiously, are you not still in control of your life? Aren't there still lots of areas in your life that aren't decided by it? Like what subjects you'll study in school, what job you take, or whom you'll agree to marry. Anyhow. The piece is below. You tell me what you think. 

 Bearing the cost of freedom – with a smile

 “Freedom comes with choice and choice comes with responsibility. Why do people willingly give up their freedom to a boss, a method or even a despot? (…) Sometimes, we willingly sacrifice our freedom because it creates an other, someone to blame. It gives us hard boundaries and eliminates potential choices. And mostly, it lets us off the hook, because someone else is driving the bus. Trying to drive from the back of the bus might feel less risky, but it rarely leads to much agency, influence or control as to where the bus actually goes. Careful what you do with the keys.” - the great Seth Godin recently on his website.

 Oh, how. Freedom is one of the scariest things in the world, because it puts you in charge of everything that matters. Making choices is exhausting. That’s why we value daily routines so much.

Freedom is also, paradoxically, one of the most sought after and highly valued things in the world, because everywhere freedom is denied you find human misery. OK, you can find human misery anywhere if you look hard enough. But in unfree societies misery in abundance results from a systematic negation of human dignity.

Freedom matters so much that countless humans are willing to fight and sometimes die to get it. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone willing to cross the sea in a dinghy to go live in a dictatorship.

It’s obvious why. To be the best version of ourselves we can be, we need freedom. But at the same time, freedom is like the Grand Canyon: Big, cavernous, and potentially very dangerous if you fail to treat it with the respect it deserves.

Humans are hardwired to demand freedom. But we are terribly ill-equipped to deal with its potential dangers. That’s why it’s so crucial to teach children how to handle it. They need to know what to do with it so that when they finally begin to spread their wings they don’t get snagged on the first obstacle.

Young kids bristle at the control their parents exert over their lives. They want – nay, need – to control something, anything. When they get very frustrated by their lack of agency, they throw a tantrum. The greater the frustration, the more epic the tantrum. Because once the kid is on the floor kicking and screaming like a space alien from the planet Utterkaos, Mom has to stop what she’s doing and pay attention. (No, running away and abandoning the seemingly possessed offspring to the benevolence of strangers is not a realistic option. Sorry.)

“OK, fine, I’ll get you the lollipop. Just please stop being so hysterical.”

Anything to make it stop.

The child has won. A trivial war, to be sure. But in the child’s mind getting their parent to relent and get them the stupid candy is a huge victory. (That’s why, as a practical aside, smart parenting experts recommend giving children some control over relatively insignificant aspects of their lives from an early age – not “do you want to take a bath?” but “do you want to take a bath with the red duckie, or the blue duckie?” – to get them used to making some decisions and especially avoid cringe-worthy displays of frustration. The duckie example comes from the awesome Super Nanny.)

A little freedom is great. But what would happen if you gave your toddler free reign? Right. They’d be dead in no time flat.

Teenagers don’t throw themselves on the floor. But they embarrass their parents with rebellious outbursts all the same. They think they’re ready to make their own decisions and feel their parents are square in the way of that independence. So they buck – sometimes hard.

Drugs, sex, mischief – sometimes mild, sometimes prison-worthy – ensues as inevitably as night follows day. Some teens get away with it, some get caught… by the law or by the consequences. At that stage in life, when you’re in a family situation that does not foster independence (or responsibility; despite long lectures on that very topic, many controlling parents refuse to grant their kids the space they need to learn true responsibility by making small mistakes), your entire life becomes consumed by the need to exert control… and not get caught.

You learn cunning. You learn to sneak around. You learn to lie, camouflage and hide. You learn the art of being devious behind a pleasant enough façade. You learn to live with yourself despite the profoundly uncomfortable knowledge that you are in fact a fraud. A clever fraud, sure. But nevertheless…

It’s only once you’ve had to face the consequences of your actions, often in the form of a bill, that you stop fighting so hard for your independence. Suddenly the truth hits you smack in the gob: Freedom is hard work.

The grown adult, after a few years of facing the cost of his independence, may start to want a wee bit less of it. Enter the overly controlling boss. Or the benevolent politician who promises a fool-proof safety net. There is much cajoling and seducing going on, with evocative images of carefree happiness, devoid of unpleasant accountability. Rest your heavy head on my broad shoulders, the politician says, and I will look after you. No longer will you have to sweat anxiously, sitting up in bed at night wondering if you made the right decisions. You don’t need to burden yourself with so many tough choices. I will protect your job so no one can fire you. I will protect your salary and benefits. I will stop meanies from taking advantage of you. I will envelop you in a soft cocoon inside which you’ll feel secure, relieved, and relaxed.

It’s seductive, alright. But also very dangerous. For man is not made to live constrained by the dictates of others. There is no way for humans to develop their full potential other than in freedom. We have to be challenged by situations where risks and potential losses can become painfully concrete in a heartbeat. The potential pain is very real. But on the flip side, those same situations offer us our only shot at real success and profound happiness.

No politician, however benevolent, no autocratic boss, can make us happy. For happiness lives inside all of us, and blossoms when we believe we’ve achieved that for which we were put on this planet, especially if we had to defy considerable odds to get there.

The person sitting at the back of the bus in Seth Godin’s example knows this. And he probably hates himself for having relinquished the steering wheel. But that ability to decide where he would drive to was so scary…

People who choose to live according to their own rules have to deal with fear every day. The fear that comes with knowing there are a whole bunch of holes in the safety net, an absence of someone else to blame for our mistakes and shortcomings. When you’re sitting at the back of the bus, you can grumble and blame the driver for not allowing you to live to your full potential. But when you’re in charge…

So how should we deal with that fear? How can we manage the intractable tension between having enough freedom to realize our potential but not so much freedom that we fear a misstep that will plunge us to our doom?

You could read philosophy. I highly recommend the Stoics. But I’m afraid nobody has found an easy solution yet. We’re stuck with more existential angst than we care for. That is one of those immutable laws of nature, at least where human beings are concerned.

What’s needed is a serious toughening of the metaphysical hide, through repeated exposure to the thing we both want and dread the most. Get used to the fear, the anxiety. Make it your friend. In the end, we have no choice but to reconcile ourselves with the intractable anxieties freedom brings if we want to reach our grave satisfied that we lived our life to the fullest, according to our own priorities, no matter what.

We must grin and bear it. Because while driving the bus of our destiny is scary, sitting passively at the back as it barrels down someone else’s road is worse.

[tbhstudying1]

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[asenseofagency]

5/24/17

Always it’s that question of balance...

I’ve continued working in the lab this summer, at a satisfactorily reduced capacity. I've been in this lab for about a year and a half at this point and my adviser and I have a sort of dissonance about my contribution. He assures me that I've been invaluable. I don't see a lot, materially, having come out of my time. I don't regret the collaboration but... it's a strange feeling to have this irreconcilable difference of perception about something you've both experienced.

There are projects half-complete; it’s an obligation in some sense for me to keep plugging away into June and July. The paper that will document many month’s of my work is just beginning to take shape this week. That’s gratifying but I’m cautious. It’s been an instructive experience, all of it. I’m getting better all the time at speaking my mind. That's a positive. My trouble is I so often swing between extremes of mood - compulsively courteous or blunt and rude. Uncomfortably, I realize I'm more or less obligated to trust the judgment and the experience of my adviser here about the value of this research tack versus that. I feel as if we've been on a treadmill for the last several weeks but it's been hard to define the boundary between slow progress and no progress. That sensation has burnt me out to some extent but the reality is that maybe that's the /normal/ state of affairs. It's hard to say. I've lived enough life to realize that most of us are just faking it: we rarely know exactly what we're doing and this holds for the very smart and reasonably experienced, too. Even the experts in many cases are making best guesses. For most people, I think, it's that first really shocking realization of adulthood.

That could be true in this case - the quality of work we're doing could be as flimsy as I worry it is - or we could be taking a perfectly reasonable approach. I just don't have the experience to know whether my dislike of what I perceive to be the frequent directionlessness of this collaboration is justified or whether this is, in fact, the nature of inquiry in most labs and the way most research is done. Maybe I'm right to be irritated. Or maybe I'm being naive. I’m in the position of trusting my adviser's judgment when he expresses total confidence about the value of our random-walk sort of scientific approach. In five years' time, I'll look back on this with the clarity of experience and be able to say "Oh, what an inefficient method! How sloppy we were!" or "Nope, that was perfect preparation for my subsequent career! That unstructured environment really did do wonders for my creativity!" but it's a strange thing - at least at my age - to have so little intuition about a thing as you're experiencing it...

I've also been spending an enormous amount of time alone and I'm beginning to worry that it's too much. The problem is I'm between lives in a sense right now, between jobs, between moves, between locations, between goals. My trajectory is set to put me somewhere very different than where I'm at now. I'm as disinclined to invest in any personal relationships as I've ever been but... maybe that's a mistake. I had a really gratifying couple of conversations in the last two days with a friend I've been reestablishing some closeness to and with my brother. I was shocked to find how parched I’d been for that kind of contact - apparently. I'd have told you I wasn't lacking in it - in small talk about movies we'd just seen and sharing bile about current events - but it was so totally refreshing it spooked me. Still, I don't know how, or quite if, I want to remedy that right now. I swung from one end of the pendulum to the other in the last year, having been basically social to being, now, pretty isolated. I wasn't happy with the before, I'm probably not happy with the after, but I suppose that's what you have to do to get a sense of where the point of equilibrium is. Your relationships with people ground you. Maybe other things could too but there is, it seems to me lately, a vital need to be removed from your own thoughts periodically, you're own self-scrutiny. That's the only trouble with solitude if you're a person like me: you never stop examining anything because you're never pulled away from that compulsion. Your relationships reinforce a sense of worth that you find you yourself can be a threat to in their absence.

Any remediation of that is complicated by what has to be recognized as my general dislike of people, once you get to know them. Hardly anybody improves with acquaintance. This crappy stance of mine may be an unhappy result of geography: I'm a sort of vague political, cultural dissident, hopelessly scrutinizing, in a part of the country that's still awash in nostalgia for the Confederacy, still touts a Christianity it only vanishingly practices. It boggles the mind and it can be extraordinarily difficult to find kinship on matters of what I would consider basic decency. Ick. It prevents a certain amount of trust, closeness, and then, eventually, discourages even a willingness to broach new relationships. Add to that a natural isolation I should have seen coming as almost everyone my age marries, settles down, and has kids. The wagons are circled on anything that might have the appearance of a new idea or a new experience and if you’re someone, like me, absolutely starving for fresh, meaningful experiences, someone desperate even just to bump up against another person whose intellectual passion survived high school and college, you feel you’ve lost all common ground with others at times.

I'm just complaining now but, bottom line, I'm going to have to find some community in the long term. Certainly, if my reaction to positive contact expresses such a hunger. The Summer of Solitude will have to be temporary.

I'm torn generally between being compassionate and making space. I've been thinking a lot, especially in this political climate, about pettiness and exploitation and selfishness. I'd have told you even a month ago that I believed these things to be the natural condition of mankind but, really, to what extent are those things immutable characteristics of human nature? I'd love to live abroad for a while. I think some degree of my low opinion of people - their pettiness, their resistance to self-examination - has to do, in the end, with being an American, with the oppressive weight of myth and ideology in the American life and the general unhappiness and disillusionment we all feel but rarely speak about. If I take myself: I’m extraordinarily bitter, I find it tough to be in a decent mood many days, and the immediate cause of it is sort of obvious. I feel trapped in many ways in a job I hate and don't feel I really have any political agency in the affairs of my country. Isn't that, really, the case for most of us Americans? Think about what that does to people to spend a life working at something potentially valueless, peripherally aware that things around you are not getting better but that's there's hardly a thing you can do to change that. If it induces people to be bitter and walled-off, that's probably no great surprise. The great act of rebellion then, is to resist the temptation to withdraw, shutdown, and acquiesce to the inevitability of all that...

More tangibly, money has been an issue lately. It's paycheck to paycheck to some extent until maybe July for me and when you’re preoccupied with getting by, everything sort of closes in to some extent. Everything you'd like to be doing becomes wishful thinking and the immediate realities are all economic. I think what I need in a mental sense is a vacation, a little break from my surroundings to reset, but the cruel bit is that that will have to wait until later in the summer if at all. Hopefully July. I'm having a lapse of creativity trying to come up with another way of accomplishing the same thing - a break in routine - when I've not got the cash to leave town or shop or treat myself to much. The one thing in my favor is that I do have a mountain of paid time-off, so in all likelihood, I can at least start taking regular time off work - a good thing!!! Free days to sleep in and watch movies. I can avail myself of that if nothing else for now. Anything to alleviate the burnout.