Do you picture the desk jobs of others like this?

I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce:

"You would have to hike for days to catch the same views they saw travelling through.... She likens a moving train to 'the ultimate dolly'..."

"... the wheeled cart that allows a film camera to capture travelling, panoramic shots. It was 'bonkers' to discover how close the tracks ran to the rivers; on the west coast they were so close to the sea they were practically in it. There’s a snobbery, too, about certain states, which is both political and aesthetic. The central states are often dismissed as the 'flyover states' — miles and miles of cornfields worth seeing only from 35,000ft. But, Edwards says, the 'middle of nowhere' often gave her the most exciting shots. 'You could just see such a long way.... And when you did see something significant, it made it almost more unbelievable that it might be able to exist so far from all other activities.' The emptiness sometimes made her feel anxious.... 'Have I got enough shots? Is this interesting enough? Where is everybody? Where are all the animals?'"

From "Why I spent 180 hours on a train across America (with my dad)/Katie Edwards travelled 10,000 miles on Amtrak, taking 20,000 photographs on the way. She tells Laura Freeman what she saw out of the window" (London Times).

Edwards grew up in the Lake District in England, which makes me think of William Wordsworth and his dedication to walking. Walking, you can always stop and look at whatever you want. It's easy to take photographs (or, if you must, write a poem in your head, stomping out the meter). But I like Edwards's train photography project. It was easy to catch sight of many more things, but difficult to get the shots at the right time (and to deal with reflections in the window glass). 

I like seeing the outsider's view of America:

"On set, Scorsese made one big stipulation. He ordered Dunne not to have sex for the duration of the shoot."

"I am gobsmacked by this, but the actor was unfazed. 'It made perfect sense to me,' he says. 'I knew what he meant. The character had to be boiling over with this unfulfilled anxiety. You had to see …' He pauses. 'Not to be crude, but you had to see the semen build up to where it’s practically coming out of his eyes.' One Saturday night, though, Dunne cracked and broke the rule. The next day of filming, Scorsese spotted the change and went berserk. 'You’ve fucked up the whole picture,' he shouted. 'I don’t think I can finish it now.' Dunne says that he was probably being directed here, too. 'Because now I’m afraid. I’m terrified. And it turns out that a certain level of fear is the same as not having sex. So [Scorsese’s] second piece of direction is telling me that I’ve ruined his movie. That’s excellent direction. It brought all the old anxiety back.'"

From "I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing/Griffin Dunne’s memoir is full of wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese, Carrie Fisher and Madonna. But the killing in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister – and the subsequent trial – overshadows everything" (The Guardian).

If a male director did that to a female....

Anyway... the Scorsese movie in question is "After Hours":

"I never used to talk to myself. Now I do it constantly."

"When I asked my middle-aged friends if they did it, too, the confessions flooded in. One said that when she texts people, she says the message out loud when she’s typing, even in public. 'I just looked in my cabinet and said aloud, "Please, god, let there be vanilla extract,"' said another. Do middle-aged people talk to themselves all day, every day? And is this a problem? I consulted some experts."

Writes Jancee Dunn, in "I’m Middle-Aged, and I Talk to Myself All Day/There, I said it" (NYT).

Unfortunately, the experts — there are experts on what's "called private speech or external self-talk" — hadn't studied the phenomenon of talking to yourself more as you age. So the author didn't get the reassurance she seems to have sought: It's a very common development in middle age.

I see that more than one commenter over there says I talk to myself, but I'm not really talking to myself, I'm talking to my cat/dog. Now, this is one reason I don't want a dog. I'm pretty sure it would cause me to talk to it all the time, and I think that would change my pattern of thoughts into things one says to a dog. 

Actually, I think the practice of speaking aloud would change what I'm thinking. Even if there is no listener to make me ask is this intelligible? is this boring?, putting things into speakable words absorbs my attention. I would imagine a listener. 

But the external self-talk discussed in the article sounds like speaking you would limit to yourself because it would annoy another person: expressing anxiety, encouraging yourself, asking where you put various items, narrating squirrel antics. And it's no wonder such spoken-aloud thoughts make you worry you're slipping into an unwholesome version of old age. You're fussing endlessly over trifles. That's something you can do silently, but when you do it out loud, you get a bit of distance on yourself: you hear that person and you think she's turning into that stereotype of an old person I've always worried I'd become.

"Too much choice is not a good thing. The anxious person is the one who doesn’t know what to do because..."

"... she can do so many things. The neurotic individual is paralysed by the sense that he can’t make the right decision because another one is always available to him. The apparently limitless options afforded to us by dating apps and social media has not made us more content; it has merely intensified our longing."

From "Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness/Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days is on to something with its depiction of main character Hirayama’s calm, habitual life" (The Guardian).

From The Guardian review of the movie:

"'Following my therapist’s advice, I’m taking a day off tomorrow to recharge my energies to continue giving the best in my sessions. Can we reschedule?'"

"So messaged my 26-year-old spin instructor. When I expressed mild frustration to a twentysomething colleague that our class had been cancelled, she seemed surprised. 'Have you been therapised?' she asked. No, I haven’t, but Gen Z increasingly have. They know how to gatekeep their time, creating boundaries and promoting self-care and are triggered when their feelings have been invalidated or they aren’t given time to heal from toxic relationships...."

Writes Alice Thompson, in "Gen Z need life lessons more than therapy/A sense of purpose and decent careers advice would help youngsters stressed out by global uncertainty and war" (London Times).

She's reading "Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up," a new book by Abigail Shrier (commission earned).

Yesterday, I blogged an excerpt from that book, and I also listened to the Bari Weiss podcast interview with Shrier and am in the middle of Joe Rogan's new episode with Shrier. Here's a excerpt of that:

Shrier is on the move this week, not exactly trashing therapy, but trying awfully hard to cut it down to size. What is the right size though? How much of a role is appropriate? It's not just a matter of the quality of the therapists, for Shrier. She favors working out your own problems, the old-fashioned way, and only resorting to therapy for substantial mental illness.

"Limerence is a state of overwhelming and unexpected longing for emotional reciprocation from another human, known as a limerent object..."

"... who is often perceived as perfect but unavailable.... The LO is most often a friend, colleague, or stranger met in passing... 'It’s often not romantic or sexual in nature. It is very much about wanting to feel loved and cared for.'... We begin to mistake anxiety for excitement and excitement for joy.... One strategy... to de-idolize their LO is listing reasons the LO is not perfect... [or the] ways in which the LO and the patient are not compatible. Name it to tame it: You can deliberately interrupt the habit by calling it out — 'Hello, limerence' — and paying attention (for example, through journaling) to what it feels like when you’re in that state of longing.... You should also believe you deserve more...."

From "Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence? How an intense longing for a romantic connection can lead to a serious addiction" (NYT).

The article says the word "limerance" was coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, and the OED finds her first use of it in print in 1977. 

That first quote denies any etymology: "I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’... It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever."

So if you were seeing a connection to "sublime" or "limn," just forget about it. If you can't forget it, make a list of things that are rootless, nice looking, and well functioning in French.

"After six months or so in the womb of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. She stopped trying to track time..."

"... because doing so had only added to her anxiety. She became neither hopeful nor despairing. 'In the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you,' she told me.  'A while ago I was born. A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.' One temporal marker remained. After five defecations, she would carry her waste, in plastic pouches, up to the exchange point, and then hurry back down.... There came a moment, she told me, when she thought that she was dying. It felt like an act not of suicide but of release: 'There was no difference between what I was feeling then and what I understand as death.'"

From "The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave/Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was gruelling and surreal" (The New Yorker).

"On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness."

A NYT article.

I'm linking if only to marvel at the photograph at the top of the page. The faces! Caption: "Vivek Ramaswamy spoke to voters at a town-hall meeting at Wellman’s Pub and Rooftop in Des Moines. Credit... Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times." 

The  article, by Lisa Lerer, is subtitled, "As Monday’s caucuses approach, voters casually throw around the prospect of World War III and civil unrest, anxious of divisions they fear are tearing the country apart."

Key concept: Anxiety.

Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment....

But isn't it this fearful fragility the real threat to democracy? Why do mainstream media stoke despair and anxiety? Why don't they — why don't we — build our resiliency and optimism?

"Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era..."

"... I resolved a while back not to get overly excited about Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances.... But I can’t shake a grandiose prophecy that he made repeatedly last year as he looked toward the 2024 presidential race. He took to calling it the 'final battle.'... [A]s he continued to rave biblically... my reaction changed, and it surprised me: He just may be right. Not in his cartoonish description of that conflict... but in terms of how profoundly meaningful the 2024 election could be...."

Writes Frank Bruni, in the NYT.

What I hear him saying in those opening lines to his column is: I'm not going to let Trump play me... and yet I just can't resist.

Bruni resolved not to get overly excited, so he's got his loophole. He's sticking with his resolve, but he still can get excited... whenever excitement is appropriate. He's not overly excited. Just the right amount of excited. 

Me, I am far more deeply resolved not to let Trump rhetoric excite me. I am a cool and distant observer. To me, the things he says are merely bloggable or not bloggable. I listen to Trump and to the people he plays — one way or another. I'm not one of the many Americans "struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era." How can you struggle to find calm? To struggle is to be uncalm. How can calmness come in scraps?

Back to Bruni and skipping into the middle of things:

If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one....

Ha ha, I skimmed over the context and, for an instant, I couldn't tell which side was which. Either side, losing, will go nuts looking for some way out, won't they? I lived through the Wisconsin uprising of 2011. 

But, of course, I know what I'm reading, what side Bruni is on, and that the general rule in politics is — as we say in Wisconsin — "All the assholes are over on the other side."

"Psychedelic medicine-assisted therapy also can support a patient in exploring the enormous and complex feelings associated with eco-anxiety and climate grief...."

"In my clinical practice, patients using oral ketamine plus psychotherapy have experienced breakthroughs and new insights when working with the intention of navigating eco-anxiety. Many patients said they felt connected to a sense of oceanic oneness, reminding them of the meaningful interconnectedness of their lives with others and offering context for their personal narrative.... Psychedelics can also teach us how to experience and hold intense emotions that feel too much to bear, allowing for the ability to observe our suffering in a new way...."

Writes Emily Willow, "a board certified psychiatrist, researcher, educator and advocate for psychedelic medicine," in "How psychedelic therapy may help with climate change anxiety/Eco-anxiety and climate grief are unlike other issues in psychiatry because the feelings extend to something greater than ourselves and our personal narrative" (WaPo).

So we've worried our young people into a state of high anxiety and the next stage is to offer them psychedelic drugs.

I'm having a flashback.

"[Ryan] Carson was also a published poet – who once penned a poem called 'Anxiety' about fears over his own death – namely about the 'inconvenience' his passing would cause others."

"'That it could come while someone waits for me, that I couldn’t call to let them know I was held up,' he wrote in the poem."

From "NYC man, 32, fatally stabbed by unhinged suspect was do-gooder activist and poet" (NY Post)("'He’s really… like the epicenter of an entire community that he created, that he brought together'... the roommate said. 'He was the guy that bent over backward time and time again to be there with his friends'").

See also, "Disturbing video shows moment beloved activist, poet is randomly stabbed to death in front of girlfriend on NYC street" (NY Post)("Suddenly, the unhinged man turns to Carson and seethes: 'What the f–k are you looking at?' The beloved community activist – who replied that he wasn’t looking at anything – then stepped between his girlfriend and the irate stranger....'").

From the comments at the second link, the kind of victim-blaming that is, at its core, self-soothing: "Who sits on a bench on a street in Bed Stuy at 4:00 am."

"This being a classical virtual-reality school, Optima’s environments include settings in ancient Greece and Rome...."

"We teleported past a Roman official’s house, decked out with red-clay roof tiling, up some stairs to an open patio of black-and-white-checkered marble floors, surrounded by Ionic columns and an ivy-covered railing. Here, a teacher might spawn a set of bleachers for students to sit during a lecture on a subject such as history or Latin.... Toward the end of the school year, I joined a sixth-grade science class on a field trip to an Everest base camp. The scene was elaborately staged: our group was surrounded by gray tents held up by bright orange poles.... A whiteboard stood to our left in the snow, covered with colorful Post-its bearing scientific terms. The teacher had taken a selfie of his avatar wearing an orange mountain-explorer jumpsuit and put it on the board. Wind whistled quietly somewhere in the background of my headset....

I'm reading "Virtual-Reality School Is the Next Frontier of the School-Choice Movement/The conservative education activist Erika Donalds envisions a world where parents can opt out of traditional public school by putting their kids in a headset" (The New Yorker).

"Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily."

"She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends. Today I’m 16, and my peers are suffering from an addiction to what many call 'the new drug.' Porn is the disastrous replacement for intimacy among my sexless, anxiety-ridden generation."

From "I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. Porn is not content. It’s a substance. And it must be controlled like one, argues 16-year-old Isabel Hogben" (Free Press). 

This is one of 2 winners in what was an essay contest for high schoolers. The other winner is "Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax/At 15, Caleb Silverberg made the most important decision of his life. He ditched technology and headed to the forest."

You see the common theme: Kids challenged to break away from the screens that captured them at an early age. I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself. 

By the way, the observations Hogben makes about on-line porn have been around as long as on-line porn. There's nothing "new" about them. And the idea that porn isn't speech was very well developed by Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s. I'm not surprised that a 16-year-old doesn't know much about that, but why would she know about what "intimacy" has consisted of in all the various generations? Of course, it's pretty standard to think your generation is different from those that came before and sound, to older ears, like the same thing all over again. 

"I have this fear of being buried alive in a box."

 

That scene from the old Bob Newhart show [see correction below] was cited by the psychiatrist/neuroscientist Judson Brewer, when he was asked about C.B.T. by Joshua Rothman, who's written this new New Yorker article, "Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Change Our Minds? The theory behind C.B.T. rests on an unlikely idea—that we can be rational after all."

Here are 7 TikToks for your amusement and edification. Let me know what you like best.

1. How she worries people are going to react whenever she arrives anywhere.

2. What Elizabeth Taylor likes about Richard Burton most — his anger.

3. A granddaughter's love.

4. That walking is just too bouncy. It must be punished.

5. The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.

6. "Inspirational quotes from my 11-year-old on today's hike."

7. "Mona Lisa" transformed into a photographically real-looking face.

"[Matthew] Crawford is out to defend what he calls 'homo moto,' the human being who moves purposively through the world rather than being simply carried through it..."

"... who uses a 'car or a motorcycle as a kind of prosthetic that amplifies our embodied capacities,' who gains freedom, familiarity and mastery by navigating swiftly through a complex landscape. Driving, Crawford argues, remains an important 'form of organic civic life' and a 'realm of interaction that demands the skills of cooperation and improvisation.' Whereas its possible replacements, especially the supposed self-driving utopia, transform democratic agents into isolated passengers moving under algorithmic power, no longer 'mentally involved in our own navigation and locomotion,' ruled, scrutinized and passive...." 

Writes Ross Douthat, in  "What Driving Means for America" (NYT).

Matthew Crawford book — which Douthat read as he drove his family across the country in a minivan — is "Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road."

More from Douthat:

"The impulse to pull out my phone and micromanage my persona was constant: post at the right time, tag the right people, pin comments that supported my views..."

"... leave my own smart, witty comments on other influential accounts, re-share mentions of my work with just enough faux humility so as to not appear gross — all of it had become as reflexive as scratching an itch.... What was it specifically about Instagram that was so destructive for me? ... I was chasing a goal that was impossible to reach. When a post did well, or I got a bunch of followers, I felt great for a minute, but just as quickly I felt pressure to do it again. If something was negatively received, or I lost people, I was consumed by anxiety and felt compelled to 'fix' it. Over time, I made hundreds of tiny adjustments to how and what I shared, editing myself to get the best outcome. But there was no 'best' outcome. No matter what I did, there would never be enough followers, enough approval, enough success. The more I posted, the less I felt like my true self.... When I begin to think there might be a way for me to handle social media, I do what I did in my first days of sobriety from alcohol: I play the tape all the way through and force myself to viscerally... feel the buzz of fear in my stomach, the clutch of anxiety around my throat, the endless procession of negative thoughts and the fractured texture of my attention. When I do this, I remember it’s simply not worth it."

From "How I Knew I Needed to Quit Instagram/Just like with alcohol, social media left me feeling anxious and removed from myself" by Laura McKowen (NYT).

"Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping."

"They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.... He has remade the Republican Party in his image.... In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates. Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first... On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.... [I]n Georgia... the former football star Herschel Walker... Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, 'He keeps winning.'... Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy.... [T]o blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party... scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election...."

Writes Sarah Longwell, "the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project and the publisher of The Bulwark," in "J.D. Vance Is More Proof That Trump Is King of the Republican Party" (NYT).

I haven't been reading enough about Herschel Walker to have seen, until now, that he's talked about playing Russian roulette more than 6 times! Is that anything but crazy? 

The oldest use of the term "Russian roulette" — according to the OED — is a 1937 short story by George Surdez. Here's a passage from that story, quoted in the Wikipedia article "Russian roulette":

"A Kentucky man who was fired days after he had a panic attack at his workplace over an unwanted birthday party was awarded $450,000 by a jury last month..."

"... or lost wages and emotional distress. The man, Kevin Berling, had been working at a medical laboratory, Gravity Diagnostics in Covington, Ky., for about 10 months when he asked the office manager not to throw him a birthday party because he had an anxiety disorder, according to a lawsuit filed in Kentucky’s Kenton County Circuit Court.... Mr. Berling had a panic attack after he learned about the planned lunchtime celebration, which was to have included birthday wishes from colleagues and a banner decorating the break room. Mr. Berling chose to spend his lunch break in his car instead. The next day, Mr. Berling had a panic attack in a meeting with two supervisors who confronted him about his 'somber behavior,' Mr. Bucher said. He was fired three days later in an email that suggested that Mr. Berling posed a threat to his co-workers’ safety...."

The NYT reports.

The legal claim was discrimination based on disability. The company's legal position seems to be both that it wasn't informed of Berling's disorder and that the condition was not a disability within the meaning of the law.

What should you do if you have an anxiety disorder and risk getting triggered by workplace interactions?