The cope is so harsh, I actually feel bad for both these dudes:
The evidence that Trump knows what he’s doing and has been very proactive in this situation is overwhelming but yes, let’s totally hide from reality. It’s worked so well so far.
You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.
Carl Jung.
The very special cookies who prattle incessantly about how they can never be influenced, persuaded or tricked are imaginatively excluding themselves from the normal fabric of human relationships. They are fragile. Everything around them crumbles on contact.
Turns out, my colleague was right, there was a parade.
People routinely get upset when I say that the US army is pathetic but look at this. These soldiers are sluggish, slouched, low-energy. Many of them are overweight. They look like prisoners of war marching towards captivity.
If you watch this and feel that the soldiers project strength and confidence, then you probably need eyeglasses.
You cannot get rid of emotional pain if you understand it as originating outside or your self.
I suggest going at it from a different direction. Decide which people will be in your life forever. And build relationships based on that. Is the husband in question a forever husband or a temporary companion? It’s your decision. The power lies with you. I promise that the moment you decide that you found your forever husband, you’ll have an entirely different relationship with him than with any temporary companion.
Once you got your forever husband (wife, relative, friend, etc), you will relate to them in a way that’s on a different planet from how you relate to the disposable and interchangeable people in your life.
The approach I propose is better because it’s not reactive. You don’t sit there, waiting for something to happen that will prompt you to end the relationship. There’s nothing that can end the relationship like there’s nothing that dan end your relationship with your forever head or your forever left shoulder. The forever head can have a massive headache and the forever shoulder can get annoyingly arthritic. But they are there for good. You can similarly have people in your life who are there for good. These will be very, very few. Isn’t it great, though, to have people like that?
As an exercise, I suggest sitting down right now and making a list of your forever people, the people who will witness your life from today and until one of you dies. The feeling of freedom and peace once you know for sure who’s there till the final point is like nothing else.
None of this, of course, works in the one exceptional case of parents. You will be in a relationship with your parents—whether they are living or dead—irrespective of whether you want it or not. You can decide never to see your mom again, yet you’ll continue suffering from the anxiety she seeded in you when you were an infant. So that’s one thing that was decided for us. All the rest of the forever people are up to us.
There was no serious interest in communism in the USSR after 1943-4. In those years, all of the sincerity people had put into the communist cause evaporated. Cynicism set in. It never went away after that.
So how did the Soviet people become disillusioned with communism?
The war was brutal. Horrific losses. Stalin’s army had prepared for an offensive, and defensive warfare was something it couldn’t do on any level. The civilian population sustained terrible damage. Hunger, terror, bombings.
And at that exact time, a very visible and in-your-face class divide appeared. People would evacuate their young, send them to school in the safe depths of Siberia. And in the same school or the hallways of the same university, some kids would faint with hunger while others would throw uneaten salami sandwiches into the trash because they were too sated. If you want a literary depiction of this sudden class divide, I recommend Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle or his Cancer Ward.
In the 1920s, a party apparatchik would show off his worn coat and his shoes with holes in them. After 1943, he’d show off his expensive suits and his wife’s furs.
I keep saying 1943 because that when it became clear the war was won.
The war made it OK openly to want to be rich. It made it OK to despise people who didn’t have chic new things. It made the pursuit of material goods an obsessive and all-consuming game for the Soviet people.
By the time my generation came around, nothing but the most hardcore cynicism was possible for people who were neither very elderly nor mentally impaired. I can’t imagine anybody seriously bringing up Communist ideas after 1950 in my grandparents’ or my parents’ generation.
I still don’t use the words “sincere” and “earnest” as compliments. This is how many generations it took for people to recover from the early Soviet fervor.
People live in completely different news streams.
I met a colleague at the farmer’s market. A lovely gentleman, very left-wing, of course. He started talking about some parade in Washington (or NYC?) that either recently happened or was about to happen. The parade clearly meant a lot to him. He spoke as if I were supposed to be aware of all the details, numbers, amounts.
And I had no idea what he meant. I live on my newsfeed but nobody I listen to, read, or follow has been talking about this event. I’ve been out with a friend who’s very politicized, and nothing like this got mentioned. My information bubble and the information bubble of a colleague who works in the same building are distant like planets in different galaxies.
OK, one more, and I promise to stop:
Real psychotherapy isn’t about giving answers.
It’s about surviving the not-knowing — together.
This is another realm where AI fails.
Therapy is the alchemy of two nervous systems in dialogue. No algorithm, however advanced, can replace the patient–therapist field.
This is so well-put.
It’s terrifying that neurotics will turn to AI for a cure and end up getting their destructive beliefs reinforced.
I have one more quote from @BrightonPsych that resonated with me deeply:
Our culture increasingly celebrates exceptionalism. But the capacity to be ordinary—to embrace the rhythms of everyday life—offers a profound kind of freedom from the exhausting search for external validation.
The ordinary, the routine, the daily rhythms of life – that’s where the best parts of existence are located.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Yeah, race trumps everything else… right up until a minority disagrees with the progressive party line. Gotta keep em on…
I hope he sells the rights to his story at least to defeat some of the costs of all this.…
OT: the holdout juror, now doxxed, is taking defensive PR measures: https://x.com/SarahisCensored/status/2100022900396847407
Getting to know a writer is often deeply disappointing. There are exceptions. I once met a Spanish writer who was…
There was a hitch with the first generation of VK kids: some parents were SO determined that the kids grow…
You should move out west to Arizona. The desert humidity here is so low that you’ll never break out a…
Thank you so much! What a kind thing to say.
Just the one. 😉
Franzen is the epitome of an insufferable intellectual snob, the kind of whom we sooner or later learn that he’s…
That matches with my observations growing up around a lot of different Asian immigrants. I didn’t know a lot of…
Kid, how much of the actual history of Canadian immigration do you actually know? Human tribalism can be very ugly,…
We on your blog are all grateful for that professor, and for your great writings.
Yes. Unless you had 2 speakers who said the exact same thing.
I have a strong suspicion that this is a comment from the kick-ass speaker in question. 😉
Ha!
My husband and I once read a novel written completely out of clichés, but in all earnestness. We wept while…
She could at least thank God for her son before thanking the app 🤔
Guess he wouldn’t get past the 1st page in a Kristen Hanna book.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Assimilation goes against nature and requires specific effort. Dude, even I need to ask questions…
Even the second generation doesn’t marry outside of the group if the pool of in-group prospects is wide enough. Or…
RPMC boot camp, really ;-D
As a said earlier, moving to New Jersey was the best thing to happen to my family. My parents’ families…
This is why I like to say that the best thing my parents ever did was move to the New…
Actually assimilation is not complete until they intermarry, there was considerable resistance amongst many ethnic groups in western Canada until…
True. People who have assimilated will not prefer to hire from their immigrant group. At an office party, they will…
Arg. CCP=PRC
The Viet Kieu I have known all my life assimilated remarkably well. 1st gen are obviously not Americans, but tend…
There’s a common idea even on the more “racist” right that east Asian immigrants assimilate unusually well. They seem to…
Exactly. There’s some sort of weird parental anxiety involved. Like if the child steps out of the hustle for a…
Free, unstructured time when kids loiter around aimlessly is the most developmentally crucial and useful. People want to turn kids…
Bykov is extremely talented as a poet. But in what concerns his prose, he’s nowhere near Veller.
Shoot, not just resume padding. I’ve watched way too many parents regard any lacunae in their little kids’ time as……
“perception is that you can’t be a just a good student who otherwise enjoys his friends, free time” They’re not…
“nobody has to be intentionally diverted every second of the day” I am soooo glad I finished school before the…
only writer of value writing in Russian today” What about Bykov?
There’s this panic among parents (and it causes a lot of stress to the kids) that you have to have…
He is also the only writer of value writing in Russian today. Meaning serious literature. There is good entertainment lit…
And then they wonder why people no longer trust MSM.
“Since then the share of foreign born population has gone up and up, even while crime fell and fell.” I…
No, I guessed because he’s the only Russian speaking “famous writer” who would make such a comment. I mean, I’m…
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