What's up with the Washington Post? The #1 most-read article right now is a piece from January 2019 about somebody's happiness at cutting off all contact with her mother.

This is disturbing:



I mean, I understand. Given the choice, I'd rather find out what happened in "I cut off all contact with my mother. It made my life much better" than wade through the latest rumors about how almost entirely peaceful things are in Portland and how some Republican isn't handling coronavirus optimally. I don't need to know about an isolated shooting somewhere and I make a point of looking away from the Boston Marathon bomber.

I guess WaPo correctly anticipated that the time was right to invite people, once again, to consider cutting off contact with relatives. It's kind of coronavirus-y:

Ten years ago, after decades of bitter fights and lukewarm reconciliations, I finally got the courage to cut off my mother completely. Our relationship brought me nothing but nuclear-level angst.

Your relationship brought you your entire life, but why fuss over technicalities?

After even the smallest interaction — an email or text message — I’d have panic attacks that lasted weeks. I’d stop sleeping, eat too much, fall through a wormhole into utter self-loathing.

Is this what we're identifying with today?

The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved.... I’ve interviewed more than 50 people who have estranged themselves from family members, and I have yet to meet a single one who regrets it. They regret whatever situation made it necessary. They regret not having a parent/sibling/family member they could come to terms with. They regret that their problems were severe enough to make estrangement look good. But they don’t regret doing it.

So every single one correctly judged the situation to be beyond finding a way to come together? Correct enough that they couldn't question their own judgment.

The most recent research suggests that up to 10 percent of mothers are estranged from at least one adult child, and that about 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point. Most people, though, fall somewhere less definitive on the estrangement continuum.... Some families talk by phone but never visit. Some email but never talk. Some see each other once or twice a year but keep their relationships superficial. Many sustain long periods of silence punctuated by brief reconciliations....

What they don’t typically do is talk to other people about being estranged from their families.... In my experience, estrangement makes people deeply uncomfortable. They wonder what’s wrong with you when you can’t get along with your family....

The author Harriet Brown, a professor of magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, is trying to get people to talk about estrangement, to see how common it is, and not to be so judgmental about those who opt for estrangement to deal with their family problems.

It fits with the cancel culture of 2020. That's a reason to revive this article. Why not cancel your own mother?!