"Not everyone at the Anti-Capitalist Co-Working Club is an actual anti-capitalist...."

"The club isn’t for debating Marxist theory or organizing labor unions. For many, the name simply signified a set of values they believe are missing from modern work culture: rest, community and self-actualization.The club, which operates on Fridays out of a recently opened arts space called Living Room in Mount Pleasant and costs $20 per day, was founded last month as an alternative to the sort of co-working spaces that gained popularity after the pandemic — such as WeWork and Industrious that allowed remote workers a quiet place to log in outside of their homes. Unlike these spots, the Anti-Capitalist Co-Working Club explicitly rejects the 'grindset.'"

From "Even anti-capitalists need to work. Enter a different kind of co-working space. In a response to D.C. work culture, the Anti-Capitalist Co-Working Club invites people to spend their 9 to 5 in ways that reject the grind" (WaPo)(gift link).

$20 per day! Somebody's trying to make money. But who would join? You pay someone else to brand your doing your own work as anti-capitalist. But you're working! Maybe it's a way to get a sense of community with other women who are on the left. But you're working!

“Let’s all take a big breath together,” club organizer Sarah Stern said in a firm, gentle voice. The 20 or so people in the airy room inhaled slowly in unison, after a long stretch of silent work time....

In case you wondered why I said "women."

A typical session involves 90 minutes of independent work time followed by a lunch break, where Stern invites attendees to chat with neighbors by using prompt cards with questions like “What’s something you’ve unlearned about ‘hustle’ culture?” and “What’s your go-to ritual when you need to recharge?” Ninety more minutes include reminders to stretch and an art break....  An “art library” has supplies to paint, embroider or sew, including a jar filled with real cicada wings. The soft instrumental songs are akin to what one might hear in a yoga class....

How embarrassing! Credit to Stern for getting the Washington Post to write an article about her little capitalistic anti-capitalistic scheme for extracting $20 bills from ladies who long for a chance to make friends. 

Unsaid things.

That's a favorite tag of mine and I've even blogged about the tag.

In 2014, I said: "I feel that I've found the psychic key to my favorite tag: 'unsaid things.'... Did you know that before I started blogging I believed myself to be a person without political opinions? I used to read the New York Times every day and feel that I had no opinion. It was such a distinctive feeling — no opinion was my opinion — that for a while, to counteract it, I challenged myself, upon reading at least one article a day, to arrive at an opinion. What do I think of that? In blogging, early on, I had to tell myself to stop before moving to the next item and write one more sentence. You have to say something about that. I had to make it a discipline: To write one more thing...."

And in another 2014 post, I wrote: "Unsaid things is one of my favorite topics, and things that fall into this category are things that, aptly enough, most people would leave unsaid. There's a convention in human society not to outline the secret motives of others. As long as someone hasn't actually said something, you ought not to act as though you know what that thing is. But I'm here to transgress on that convention. I think I can and should do it...." (7 reasons why are said at the link but I will leave them unrepeated here.)

So naturally, I'm powerfully drawn to this article by Ariana Eunjung Cha in The Washington Post: "The 'Gen Z stare' — and the decline of saying things out loud/We’re speaking fewer words every year. Scientists worry what that’s doing to our brains" (gift link).

First, I don't like the focus on the number of words.

"The present looks more like Wolfe’s 1976 than we care to admit. The engine of the ’70s was the failure of the ’60s."

"Fast-forward: The years from roughly 2016 through the early 2020s were America’s most feverishly political stretch in generations. On one flank stood a populist insurgency; on the other, the Great Awokening. Both failed to build the transformed society their rhetoric advertised. What does thwarted revolutionary energy do when it has nowhere durable to go? As it did after 1968, it goes toward the one realm that still seems transformable: the self. It splinters into private quests for meaning.... On the left in the late ’70s, disillusion flowed into the New Age. Today, it flows into 'self-care'.... It flows into astrology... and into the witch with the imagined power to 'hex' President Donald Trump.... The right in the ’70s had the cult of fitness. MAHA, the manosphere and Silicon Valley have looksmaxxing and testosterone infusions, ice baths and the carnivore diet, along with the tech billionaire Bryan Johnson spending millions to reverse his own aging and streaming his bloodwork to the world. It is the body as a project to be perfected, but with the promise cranked up from fitness to immortality...."

Writes Ryan Zickgraf, in "Tom Wolfe’s ‘Me Decade’: Still going strong 50 years later/The peerless social critic skewered a culture of self-absorption much like today's" (WaPo gift link).

And here's the August 1976 New York Magazine essay by Tom Wolfe, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening."

"Look, I’d also be annoyed if touch of the ’tism TikTok were a regular feature of my offline conversations..."

"... but you’re right to laugh off your friends’ commentary if you can. It’s not worth wading into the quagmires awaiting you otherwise: conversations that assume and/or stigmatize a given condition’s symptoms and signs; declamations about the societal perils of self-diagnosing online, especially when it’s possible someone in your cohort has done exactly that; and any number of other headaches."

Writes the NY Magazine advice columnist, answering a letter in "My Friends Are Always Trying to Diagnose Me With Something!"

"After the 1997 Asian financial crisis South Korea realised that it was overly dependent on heavy industry, notably shipbuilding and carmaking."

"Ministers decided that the creative industries might successfully diversify the economy, after a team of economists pointed out that the film Jurassic Park alone had generated the same profit as selling 1.5 million Hyundai cars. They got behind everything from media and the arts to food and drink. A campaign for traditional Korean food supported restaurants, chef training and marketing. It has helped Korean food to travel alongside the 'K-wave' of pop culture. Kimchi is spreading like sushi and ramen did a generation ago...."

From "All points east — how the West got hooked on Korean and Japanese culture/K-pop titans BTS are taking on the Grammys, manga is on the London stage and Japanese literature is breaking records. What’s driving the boom?" (London Times).

We're told that BTS is very popular because of their "mix of pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, with lyrics about mental health and social pressure," and it made me wonder what the group is saying about mental health and social pressure. So, the world being what it is, I said to Grok, "All I want from you is about 10 quotes from BTS songs that are 'lyrics about mental health and social pressure.'"

Click through if you want to know.

"Hobbies have helped Kimura feel more secure and find her voice, partly because many of her hobbies end with a finished product..."

"... giving her a feeling of accomplishment. Unlike the women in previous generations in her family, whose lives were centered on marriage and raising children, she feels empowered to pursue the activities that bring her happiness. 'I feel like I can design my future,' she said. As for romantic relationships, Kimura said she’s not closed off to dating indefinitely. 'I just don’t feel like I’m in such a rush anymore.'"

From "For Some Singles, ‘Hobbyamory’ Has Replaced Hookups/Is a packed social calendar the new relationship goals?" (NYT gift link).

"When I was younger, I definitely felt smug about how much money I was saving. I felt like I was doing something secretly smart..."

"... living this ultrafrugal lifestyle in preparation for a day when I wouldn’t have to answer to anyone but myself. But I don’t feel that way anymore. If I drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, most of my friends will have had more fun in their lives than I had in mine. Right now, I’m playing catch-up on fun. But I’m still pretty far behind...."

From "She Retired at 35. The Only Problem? It’s Lonely" (NY Magazine).

"And only since I retired have I started looking hard at what achieving all this shit was actually going to do for me. What emotional need was I trying to meet? My ambition level, the way I used to think of it, is now gone. But what did it serve?... I have a lifetime goal to foster and adopt out 100 animals, and I’m three-quarters there already.... I am not bored or underchallenged at all. I feel like I am busier than I’ve ever been, just with different things. I have the flexibility to help my friends with their kids, which — as I don’t plan to have kids — is pure joy...."

"Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. It is demonic, 'the complete anti-God state of mind'..."

"... as C.S. Lewis wrote in 'Mere Christianity.' Pride is a turning away from God, and an exultation of oneself.* The mirror is a symbol of pride and vanity, but it also symbolizes our incomplete, earthly knowledge. As the Apostle Paul wrote about God in his first letter to the Corinthians: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.'... In Islamic mysticism... a smudged mirror is a metaphor for the human soul. It is only when the ego is annihilated, and the surface is polished clean, that the divine becomes visible.... In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a 'heterotopia.' The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. 'I see myself there where I am not,' he wrote, 'in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.'"

A small sample from "All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads" (NYT gift link), by Catherine Shannon.

___________________

* Shouldn't that be "an exaltation of oneself"? Are we not talking about raising ourselves above God (as opposed to jubilating over how wonderful we are)? Think about it. We say "an exaltation of larks," not "an exultation of larks." 

"Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher and father of existentialism, saw in the fear of heights a metaphor for all human anxiety."

"Standing at a precipice, Kierkegaard imagined, a person becomes instantly and acutely aware of their power to jump — and with it, the dizzying breadth of human freedom...."

Writes Chris Hippensteel, in "To Confront My Fear of Heights, I Crossed a Chasm on a Cable/A jittery hiker signed up for a via ferrata tour on the cliffs of an Adirondacks gorge. Here’s what he learned on the ledges, rungs and exposed bridges" (NYT gift link).

"Despite their dramatic vertical settings, via ferratas are, in terms of technical difficulty, not that far removed from a playground jungle gym. Climbers are harnessed in along the entire route, keeping at least one carabiner clipped to the safety cable at all times. Though the danger is limited, the exposure is not — exactly the type of challenge I was seeking...."

So it's like a roller coaster or a horror movie — packaged, safe fear. You're not really experiencing what  Kierkegaard was talking about because you've got a harness and are always clipped to the cable. You don't have the freedom to jump.

If he had the chance — did he? — would Kierkegaard ride a roller coaster?

"Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s."

"Back then, it was called psychobabble.... The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose.... Isn’t it odd... that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, 'I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.' The girlfriend was a professional surfer...."

From "You're Not a Therapist. Stop Talking Like One/Please respect everyone else's boundaries by keeping your psychobabble to yourself" (Vanity Fair).

This is an important general issue, but if you're interested in the A-list actor part of it, here's a Newsweek article from 2023: "Jonah Hill, Sarah Brady Text Messages—Full Transcript." It's really long and a massive invasion of privacy. Why did Newsweek publish all that? Or maybe the better question is why do people have their arguments via text? Why would anyone want to leave a cold record for the whole world to read? And this was a man concerned with "boundaries."

"He was relieved that everyone was home safe from the hospital, and yet he found he couldn’t connect with his [newborn] children, Olympia and Elisabetta."

"He became full of nervous, negative energy. He had physical symptoms of anxiety: a racing heartbeat, chest pains, burning and electric sensations in his torso and muscles. When the babies smiled and laughed for the first time, he found himself saying out loud: 'What do they have to be happy about?' He didn’t feel he could actively give his family emotional support, so instead he came up with practical solutions, such as creating organised systems and spreadsheets to track his daughters’ feedings and sleep schedules. 'Control was how I approached many things in my life,' he says. 'I had to control their sleep because only when I knew for certain that they were asleep could I settle and relax.'"

From "'Holding my IVF twins as a new dad, I felt only sadness'/As a doctor, Christopher Choukalas thought he could diagnose an illness when he saw it. But his paternal postpartum depression crept up on him completely unnoticed" (London Times).

"I left Google to study neuroscience, and what I found in the research literature helps explain why the A.I. summary poses a danger to learning."

"Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories.... Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.... Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints...."

Writes Anne-Laure Le Cunff, "a neuroscientist who studies curiosity," in "We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask" (NYT).

Intriguing questions that popped up for me: 1. What kind of name is "Le Cunff"? 2. "The danger is not.../It is..." seems to be one of those things — like em dashes and the word "delve" — that A.I. tends to write, so did Le Cunff use A.I. to write this essay?

Answers: 1. It means "the gentle," "the affable," or "the debonnaire." 2. It's a rhetorical device that A.I. has learned from real human writers, and real human writers don't need to avoid it, they just, as always, need to use it well, which, in this case, Le Cunff did. 

"The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal."

"In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.... [I]ndividual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs.... But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work.... Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence.... Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets.... Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack...."

From "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week" (NYT).

Doesn't seem like much of a "secret"!

I see some potential for turning all these criticisms around into attacks on the employees. They are worse when they are working at home. They are beset with boredom, fatigue and interruptions. It's not that the boss wants them in the office to fawn over him but that he wants them on task and working hard. It's not narcissistic of him to want what they're paid to do.

"Therapy didn’t work for you. But church does," said Usha to JD Vance.

Quoted in JD's new memoir, "Communion" (commission earned).

Did he need therapy and what's the story of its not working on him?

My traumatic childhood had made me resentful and left me with awful conflict management skills. I would overreact or withdraw—fight or flight!—over minor transgressions.... Because of Usha, I attended a few therapy sessions at the Yale student health clinic. The therapist I spoke with was a good guy, but I found therapy too uncomfortable. I didn’t like to talk to my own girlfriend about how crazy my homelife was, so why would I talk to a stranger? But there was a deeper problem with therapy as I encountered it. It was divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt. In one session, we explored an incident that I’ve since discussed publicly: Driving with my mother on a relatively rural road, she loses her temper. She accelerates the car, threatening to crash and kill both of us.... Experts tend to describe unresolved trauma as when a person experiences “disruptive physical and emotional reactions in the present as their body and mind continue to defend against” threats they faced in the past. The gist is that my fight-or-flight response, my temper, and my general resentment about my feelings of insecurity were consequences of trauma I had experienced and hadn’t properly “processed.” And of course, part of that processing was understanding how trauma across the generations was linked. The trauma I experienced at the hand of my mother was connected to the time my grandfather got drunk and beat her. And of course, my grandfather didn’t have it easy growing up in the deep poverty of Kentucky coal country. I resisted this for a couple of reasons. The first is that the framing turned me into a victim rather than an actor.... The therapist’s framing... removed the moral dimension from human conduct.... I was searching for a more satisfying accounting of wrongdoing and responsibility. Of temptation and willpower. Of virtue and guilt.... [M]ost of all I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to be worthy of this woman I was madly in love with. And I began to fear that the past was a prologue: that whatever happened to my mother, whatever destroyed marriages and friendships in my family, would eventually destroy what I had with Usha....

"Lately, it seems that many women — perhaps especially white millennial ones — are indulging in the same fantasy."

"According to endless social-media posts and group-chat messages, Adult life sucks lately. I’m opting out. It’s as if a generation raised on the dream of the girl boss has become disillusioned by the promise that hard work will get us anywhere (and to be fair, there’s no guarantee that it will). Struggle is for chumps! 'I’m just a girl,' and I don’t want to learn about balancing my checkbook or filing expense reports or how to parallel park. The 2020s have been a weird time for womanhood. (Then again, when hasn’t it?) Greta Gerwig’s record-smashing Barbie, more phenomenon than movie, and Taylor Swift’s mind-bogglingly profitable Eras Tour had women spending collective billions to proudly and unapologetically relive their sparkly, pink-tulled girlhoods. Fashion has trended toward the young and feminine, too: : ribbons and bows, beads and sparkles, mary janes and ballet flats. By the end of 2023, Isabel Cristo wrote in this magazine, 'The market [had] conspired to sell us one thing, rendered every which way, and that thing was: girl.' Ours is a time in which 'the only way to have fun [it seems, is] by turning away from adult womanhood wholesale and toward a breezy, bright alternative. Instead of politics, can I interest you in some blissful, childlike ignorance?'"

Writes Shannon Keating, in "Confessions of a Recovering Baby Woman On the enduring fantasy of being 'just a girl” — and how I finally decided to get a grip and grow up" (The Cut).

Are you "upset" or just unsettled?

I'm reading "Are You 'Triggered' or Just Upset? This popular term is often misused, experts say, which may cause more harm than good" (NYT).

When people use the term trigger instead to refer to everyday things that incite annoyance or offense, they run the risk of conflating traumatic experiences or mental health struggles with everyday challenges, several experts said.... Using triggered to describe negative everyday experiences may also cause people to misinterpret discomfort as danger. They may start to think that bothersome experiences or everyday challenges are harmful, rather than seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth, Dr. Needle said.... 

Sometimes, the word trigger can also be used sarcastically or dismissively, Dr. Needle said — as in, “Oh, you’re just triggered” — to minimize someone’s legitimate negative reaction to a comment or action. “It is basically a way of saying your response is a ‘you problem,’ a sign of weakness or oversensitivity, rather than acknowledging that something genuinely hurtful was said or done,” she said.

I love the name Dr. Needle. She's a clinical psychologist, Rachel Needle.

The headline suggests that the word "upset" is a good substitute for "triggered" when you're not talking about having a flashback to a trauma. But isn't "upset" also pretty dramatic, if we take the dying metaphor seriously? Have you been knocked over, capsized, overturned? 

I've noticed recently that political writers are turning to the word "unsettling." There was the very conspicuous NYT headline: "Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall 'Unsettling' Behavior." 

"Many in the entertainment industry are creatives, they’re freethinkers, they’re out-of-the-box thinkers..."

"... and so, the idea that someone isn’t conventional is kind of part and parcel of how they move through the world."

Said Dr. Erica Anderson, "a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping children with gender identity issues and who is transgender herself," quoted in "Why do so many Hollywood celebs have trans or non-binary kids?" (NY Post).

These entertainment people are "freethinkers," according to Anderson, who also says, contradictorily, that "the prevailing politics are extremely progressive," so "they don’t feel safe to question an asserted identity by one of their children."

So what is it? Do they feel compelled to go along with whatever the child says — politically compelled — or are they — because of their inherent creativity — celebrating and encouraging unusual expression?

I'm seeing a mysterious merger of freedom and compulsion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd: "I think she means outside-the-box thinkers. Out-of-the-box usually means you don't have to do anything yourself, no assembly required." 

That's closely observed and correct. This is the case of a dying metaphor. What is this box we're talking about when we say "outside of the box"? Grok tells me the expression originated with the 9 dots puzzle:

You're an outside-the-box thinker if you realize you can connect the 9 dots with 4 lines if you go beyond what is only an imaginary box. Apply that metaphor to thinking about how to parent a child who doesn't fit the gender stereotypes associated with its physical form. That's what an outside-the-box thinkers would do. Now, compare the out-of-the-box thinker. This would be someone who has pre-determined ideas built in and really doesn't think at all.

"Some psychiatrists said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s deprescribing initiative was the beginning of a wider effort that might, in later stages, discredit psychiatry more broadly and restrict access to care."

"'I think it is actually putting more questions in people’s minds about whether psychiatric treatment is safe or effective,' said Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan, who chairs the [American Psychiatric Association's] caucus on the social determinants of health. 'The data has not changed on S.S.R.I.s. It’s the narrative that has changed.' He said the A.P.A. should be pushing back forcefully against Mr. Kennedy’s claims about psychiatric treatments, and should steer clear of seeming to endorse any part of the initiative. 'It’s a fine line between having a seat at the table and being used as a tool to legitimize their agenda,' he said."

From "Kennedy’s Push to Curb Antidepressants Has Shaken Psychiatry/An annual psychiatric meeting was abuzz over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s call to rein in the use of depression medications. Some fear it will drive patients away from care" (NYT).

"Around 1980, mainstream psychiatry adopted a medical model."

"A new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, U.S. psychiatry’s bible of diagnoses, published that year, enshrined the change. Ever since, troubles of the mind have been viewed mostly as physiological diseases of the brain, with treatments focused largely on pharmaceuticals. The medical model was partly a reaction against psychiatry’s decades-long dominance by psychoanalysis and its offshoots.... The discipline, meanwhile, was under attack in popular culture; the antipsychiatry movie 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest' won five Oscars in 1976. The field wanted to be viewed as a true science. Then Prozac, an S.S.R.I., was released in the United States in 1987.... The idea of Prozac — and, soon, its close S.S.R.I. cousins — as an unmitigated medical advance was spread by a flood of pharmaceutical advertising. The ads presented readily comprehensible brain science: Mental illness boils down to an imbalance of chemicals.... The chemical imbalance theory has never been substantiated and has been supplanted by other hypotheses that are equally elusive to proof...."

From "The Strange Alliance Trying to Remake American Psychiatry" (NYT). By Daniel Bergner, author of "The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains and the Search for Our Psyches."

"I’d never questioned my gender before I came to America; growing up in India, I’d always identified as a girl."

"Of course, India has a gender hegemony of its own — one I arguably benefitted from in many ways and suffered from in others. I am upper-caste, upper-class, Hindu, and also a Tamil woman who didn’t look like the models in the Fair & Lovely commercials. I was the only Tamilian in most rooms I was in, a fact my North Indian classmates consistently reminded me of. Still, the popular conception of what a woman or a man was felt more fluid. I grew up among Sikh women who didn’t tame their body hair, men who would hold hands platonically with their male friends, and children who cross-dressed for play (almost every boy had a photo of himself dressed up as a girl by his mother for fun).... [And there] is our third-gender community, or hijras, as they are commonly known...."

Writes Supriya Ganesh,  "My Strange Dysphoria/Growing up in India, I never questioned my gender. When I moved to the U.S. at 18, I began to feel disconnected from my body" (New York Magazine).