One of the central myths of American romance right now is this notion that you and your partner should be able to tell each other anything and everything

I am begging you not to do this There are so many things about you that are just for you, for your soul, as well as a whole other category of things that are only for your therapist or priest to know. Both are largely things that your partner can not know and remain in a stable relationship with you

The narrative around shame in popular spirituality is too simple. Most people don't feel shame about the past, they're afraid that it's going to happen again in situations that don't make sense, because they were inappropriately shamed. It's a miscalibrated feedback signal. The mere presence of shame is not a pathology and doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means your community or loved ones disapprove of you. Or yourself!

When that is just, when your behavior is genuinely shameful, it will feel terrible, sometimes for a long time

Some of the worst cases of PTSD you will ever see are not from external trauma, but from self-inflicted moral injury.

That is, people who have behaved so shamefully that they can't face the person they've become, but also can't accept the loss of their innocent self-image. This is true of horrific crimes like murder and rape, but also more mundane relationship aggressions like betrayal and infidelity.

We carry an imprint of everyone we've ever hurt, in our bodies and psyches, which returns, expresses and repeats in cycles in our new relationships.

In both blue and red cultures, men clearly feel a gendered responsibility to women, in different ways. Red tribe women also express this, the other way.

But liberal women, apparently, now consider responsibility to men to be taboo, and judge each other very harshly for it. My blue tribe friends say they value interdependence and mutuality, but in practice, they are the most confused & ruthless people I know

They demand a near-religious male devotion to women & collectivism, and an amoral, mercenary femininity that thinly rationalizes its egomania

I can't believe I have to say this, but if you let ChatGPT write a personal communication for you, you are being fake.

It doesn't matter how mundane the conversation is - if you're not present with your emotions and speaking/writing from the heart, it's inauthentic. Yes, the system sucks, no one wants to have to make small talk or write useless emails or busywork reports.

But those feelings of frustration and disdain are telling you to *get out of that position*, not *compromise your integrity even further*.

One of my biggest flaws right now is that I am far too willing to walk on eggshells, let people get away with irresponsibility and tolerate double standards.

Much of this I absorbed from recent shifts in social norms - that as a man, I somehow owed this to the women around me. Or as a white person, I owed it to people of color, or as a etc etc, you know what I'm talking about.

I knew there was no personal debt or obligation to proffer this extra deference to anyone, but I expected this was a social project that would benefit us all.

Caring for an elderly parent with memory loss casts a harsh, glaring light on the extreme corruption we have allowed to proliferate in our system.

There's an entire industry devoted to ripping seniors off, and legal enforcement does nothing to stop them. @TMobile has charged my fixed-income, disabled mother $125/mo, every month, since my Dad died. I have tried to cancel online, on the phone and in person. Each time they've agreed to cancel it, and each time they've continued to charge her. There is no accountability and no shame.

Getting my shit rocked by a barely literate French peasant monk from the 1600s. SW

(Reading the Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.)

This man attained a form of enlightenment via one practice that I think almost any mystical tradition would recognize. BL naively invented a form of metta-mindfulness combined with Christian worship and what appears to be some personal idiosyncratic tendencies (for instance, gently chiding God for letting him get distracted 🥹)

He obsessed over this practice until he attained enlightenment.

A Poem for Friday
"Prayer" by James Joyce

Again!
Come, give, yield all your strength to me!
From far a low word breathes on the breaking brain
Its cruel calm, submission's misery,
Gentling her awe as to a soul predestined.
Cease, silent love! My doom! Blind me with your dark nearness, O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!
I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.
Draw from me still
My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,
Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying
Him who is, him who was!

You have done well

In the contest of madness.

You were brave in that holy war.

You have all the honorable wounds

Of one who has tried to find love

Where the Beautiful Bird

Does not drink.

May I speak to you

Like we are close

And locked away together? Once I found a stray kitten

And I used to soak my fingers

In warm milk;

It came to think I was five mothers

On one hand.

Wayfarer,

Why not rest your tired body?

Lean back and close your eyes.

Come morning

I will kneel by your side and feed you.

I will so gently

The best Christmas gift I got this year was getting fact-checked by @slatestarcodex, one of my favorite writers of all time.

(I don’t know Scott personally, so his attention is really thrilling.)

In a short piece, he laid out the case for why one of my recent tweets is Wrong. You can read the entire thing here: rb.gy/p7omgn.

There are easy criticisms I could fling back about his data & methodology, but I don’t need to. His readers already took him to pieces, and he conceded in his own comment section.

The nervous system is a canvas.

It's an art medium - one in which you can turn the rituals and endeavors of your life into a masterpiece.

You can train yourself to care about anything. You can train to find beauty and meaning everywhere in your life.

But there's a catch: You have to practice caring about something for a long time before you actually *feel* like you care about it.

You have to put aside your concepts and your boredom, and practice reverence, care, deep love. It has to be ritual, mindful and intentional.

Once again: There's no such thing as an NPC. Talk with any "normie" for 10m. They're perfectly capable of thinking for themselves.

They just don't find independent thought as *meaningful* as well-worn discourse grooves, because social pressures are highly emotional for them. It's entirely a matter of where a person's priorities are. There are all kinds of reasons it's in ppl's best interest to fit in with the crowd.

Almost everyone conforms in some way. The question is whether you *choose* to do it or whether it's become reflexive/unconscious.

Bad therapy - and therapeutic grift culture - are driving people insane about love, loneliness and belonging.

It is not pathological to want a relationship. It's not *bad* to want a family. You're not codependent if you don't like being alone.

You're a human being! It would be pathological if you were *unable* to function or be happy without a relationship - if your self-image was fully contingent on what your partner reflected to you.

To that extent, it's really important to develop a strong sense of yourself and excellent self-respect.

What's the evolutionary psych explanation for why every human group, tribe and civilization, in all ages and climates, develops religion?

A universal delusion is a pretty inefficient and counterintuitive way to maximize reproductive fitness We develop ritual, art and music around stories so multivalent that they encompass the context in which we exist. Our collective ceremonial complexes then transcend the individual, take on agency and command life and death.

Exactly like finches and their different little beaks!

I'm not surprised that an AI made by human beings has an image of a frightening mother in its subconscious.

I'm surprised that AI researchers didn't already understand and expect this.

https://twitter.com/supercomposite/status/1567162288087470081?t=XJlpMnCGara8mdcEvjLmdw&s=19

Some of the smartest people I know are working in AI but don't understand basic concepts about the mind.

This thing draws on a human dataset made by artists, who themselves draw on the "dataset" of the collective unconscious.

It has OUR shadow.

You constantly hear this refrain that the political system is full of psychopaths. But that's not true. These ppl struggle to cooperate and compromise.

Paranoid ppl are much more likely to seek power, in order to battle the terrifying abstractions that haunt their waking life. It's not just the pols, it's us too. When Hofstadter observed the paranoid style in US politics, it was in the minority.

Now, mainstream discourse is full of conspiracies and haunting systemic abstractions. The epistemics of suspicion are now the default.

The one common trait shared by almost all mass shooters, across identities, locales and generations, is that they were abused as children.

Trauma is at the heart of this epidemic. We are not going to put a stop to it until we decide, as a society, to care about young men. Gun control is impossible. It would take 60 Dem senators and two new SC Justices, and even then it would only last as long as liberal control of the govt.

Banning 4chan is impossible. You can't control information in the 21st century. The cat is out of the bag.

The left has been losing for fifty years and will continue to lose until it forces out the radicals, stops needlessly abusing its own people, stops alienating potential allies, and starts working to build a durable political coalition focused on results, not purity. Recognize that you can address the needs of minorities without the needless, deliberate alienation of men, straight, cis and white people.

The allies that push your coalition to 50.1% will have those identities. The vast majority of your current coalition *already do.*

The part of my shadow that's been coming up most often in recent times:

Envy.

Incredible how deeply I bury it, the lengths I'll go to rationalize it or otherwise avoid feeling it. It feels so dark and stupid and small-souled. The opposite of gratitude. And yet here it is. I feel envious of ppl younger and more beautiful than me

I feel envious of ppl wealthier than me, their ease with problems that weigh me down

I feel envious of women, of some of the advantages they enjoy

I even feel envious of some monks 😂 for their spiritual erudition

Rumor has it that Congress is clamping down on Adderall production, and that one of the largest manufacturers of generic amphetamine salts is leaving the US market.

It's about to get really hard for people with ADHD. Buckle up. The irony here is that ADHD drugs are rarely abused by people who need them. Ppl with ADHD are more likely to forget to fill their prescriptions, and forget to take their medications, than they are to abuse them.

This is not the behavior of addicts.