At this very moment, you’re encountering Lee Chung-Chung’s The Fortune of the World, pictured above, likely for the first time. How do you engage with it? What is your experience of her splatter—and absence—of ink and color?

If you’re anything like how I used to be, these questions might be impossible for you to answer. For much of my life, I didn’t believe I had the authority to engage with visual art imaginatively. I was uncomfortable with the notion that I could go beyond mere description and actually experience an artwork—position it within a grand story, one driven by nothing other than the rich depths of my mind. Had someone asked me what I thought the painting was about, I might have skirted the question with an inoffensive “I like the colors.” If I were feeling adventurous, I would have thrown in something like, “The ink blots look kind of like animals to me.” What more could I say? I don’t know anything about the artist or the movement her artwork comes from. I would much prefer to react to a critic’s analysis of the piece than give credence to my own experience of it, much less allow my experience to unfold in the first place.1

On a few occasions, my brain would rebel against the flood of anxious thoughts and trepidatiously offer an interpretation of the artwork, something like, “The whale leaping out of the ocean in the first panel looks like it’s having fun, but it’s also making me feel like I’m in danger.” But the mind is not a single entity; it is composed of many, sometimes competing, selves: the version of me who felt comfortable molding an artwork with the eyes and heart of a child would inevitably be shut down by the drill sergeant in me who depended on materialist understandings of the world to feel secure.

It’s not clear to me why this restrictive mentality plagued me for so long—a prison of my own making, to be sure. I know many people, just as inexperienced with visual art as I am, who can take one look at a painting and let their imagination somersault through it. If an artwork struck me as beautiful—because of, let’s say, the colors or textures—I would feel its beauty deeply: shed a tear, laugh, shudder, and reflect in overwhelming awe at just how small and insignificant, or large and miraculous, it made me feel in the world. But that is half the equation. Why couldn’t I allow myself to translate those feelings into words? To explain why the art in question made me feel that way, or why it should be considered good art?

The thing about closing yourself off to the full experience of art is that you miss out on one of life’s deepest pleasures. To see an artwork for the first, fifth, or even twentieth time and feel satisfied with your immediate take and nothing more (“this is beautiful; I like the colors” or “what is this? I don’t like it”) is to turn a blind eye to the unconscious—yours, the artist’s, and a unique third that emerges when yours and the artist’s interact. An artist’s creation is not simply a form of self-expression but a message channeled from something greater than them. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then it is imperative that we play with the artwork by participating in an exercise called close looking. When we look at an artwork closely, we let go of all preconceived notions about art and experience the work for what it is—we do not bring a rubric for judging it. We let it speak to us, and vice versa.

The first time I experienced this imaginative play with an artwork—what Kant calls free play—was in ’s online cultural criticism class, in a lecture specifically on close looking. As a warm-up, he spent the first half of the three-hour class alternating between his lecture and short close-looking exercises. We would sit with an artwork in silence for a couple of minutes, read and analyze a critic’s formal description (i.e., experience) of the artwork, and then share how we felt about both the artwork and the critique. As you can imagine, I was really uncomfortable doing this and felt that my experiences were inadequate compared to everyone else’s. Sometimes, my classmates’ descriptions matched mine, and so I felt more comfortable with my interpretative abilities. Sometimes, they differed from mine and each other’s, which helped me understand that there isn’t necessarily a right or single interpretation or experience—there is just interpretation and experience.

But the second half of the class is what shifted my experience with artwork forever. Mak guided us through a 15-minute meditation to get in touch with our bodies and the present moment, and then guided us through another 15-minute meditation to get in touch with Lee Chung-Chung’s The Fortune of the World and write about it. The second meditation began simply, with a few deep breaths and some questions about our sensory experience of the painting. What colors do you see? What movement is happening right now? More of that, interrupted only by silence and the sounds of my keyboard as I jotted down my experience. My notes during this stage of the meditation were painfully self-conscious. They were short and mostly descriptive, punctuated by the occasional “I’m confused.” At one point, I almost gave up and wrote: “I feel critical of myself for not being able to understand this or feel it more. Why am I feeling this way? The painting is making me insecure. I don’t know what I’m seeing.”

Then, the meditation took a pivotal turn: Now let the division between you and this artwork fall away. This artwork is now an extension of you. You and this artwork are one. You are this artwork. What are the new ways of knowing this artwork, now that it is part of you?

Instantly, my imagination poured out—and there was no stopping it. I was in a flow state, transcribing the wild and absurd associations my mind was making, and I was doing it with the utmost glee. I wasn’t even thinking about how, just moments before, I had very little to say. This meditative approach to artwork is overpowering, in the best way possible: you are no longer in your physical body, on Earth, confined by the laws of physics—but somewhere else, where time and space are suspended, and your thoughts and emotions and bodily sensations have free rein to rule and play in all their childlike wonder, and you know, deep in your bones, that whatever you’re experiencing in relation to this artwork is exactly right, and no one can tell you otherwise. Of course the blot in the first panel is a whale—how could it be anything else?

Keith Johnstone, in his book Impro, describes this experience perfectly. When he asks people to lie down, close their eyes, and report what their imagination gives them, he explains that they go into a deep state of absorption. Instead of feeling like they are just “thinking things up,” they feel the experiences really happening to them. If he asks them, “Did you feel the floor?” they would respond, “There wasn’t any floor.” “Did you experience your body?” “I wasn’t in my body.” If he suggests a scene—“You’re on a beach”—and asks, “Is it sandy or stony?” the person might respond, “Sandy.” “Did you think that up?” “No, I just knew.” This is what happens when you surrender to an artwork and really let yourself experience it—whether that work is a book, movie, song, sculpture, or painting.

So, take a deep breath and observe The Fortune of the World again. What do you see? How do you experience it?

For me,

the piece is unsettling. It’s hard to ignore, for instance, the imposing black figure in the second panel. What is it? The spindly legs, opportunistic crouching, distressing blot of black. Every bone in my body is screaming that it’s a cockroach feeding on some unidentifiable mass: a life-affirming act that makes me recoil in terror. Despite my visceral disgust, there is no escaping the insect, violently foregrounded by the absence of color, stranded in whiteness between the soft blue-gray and purple, neither of which will touch it. It is the star of the piece, unbeknownst to the poor creature—I’m sure it would like its privacy.

If the chilling white provides little comfort, the blinding yellow actively distresses. It cuts through the entire painting, resisting all attempts to slow it down, including the mountainous terrain in the third panel—a battleground for domination. The cluster of ink blots drifting toward the river at a glacial pace crowds the lower half of the painting and briefly pollutes the yellow stream. But to no avail: the yellow purifies itself back to its toxic essence by the fourth panel, unperturbed. The stream’s color is less honey- or gold-like and more reminiscent of dehydrated piss. It moves rapidly; attempts to outrun or stop it are futile. Coexistence—black and yellow, life and death, awe and horror—is the only option.

Consider the top of the first panel. Far from the toxicity of the yellow, an orca leaps out of the water. With the hazy, violet sky as its stage, the killer whale is seconds shy of completing an elegant flip. Her ocean is still, but only for now; there is a moment of silence before the thunderous splash. Her play strikes with overwhelming beauty from a distance. Look a little longer, though, and it becomes clear why the Greeks believed that the beautiful coexists with the terrifying. Will she land back in the little that’s left of her habitat, or lose herself in the black holes hovering near her?

Life is fragile, and the natural elements, beautiful as they are, stop for no one and nothing. I can hear the unceasing howl of the wind pervading all the colors, reminding me that for now, I am alone. I move through this painting with vigilance.

When I re-emerge from my absorption into the painting—back into my body and the physical limits of the world—I’m almost shocked at what I experienced and wrote. Did this really come from me? But this disorientation is one of joy. I think the surprise at what we produced is a sign that we were living life to its fullest in that moment.

I’m similarly astounded by my classmates’ experiences of the artwork. One person said the painting brought her serenity and changed her relationship with water. A couple of people felt the powerful forces of time. For one, the mustard yellow was the past, idyllic lilac was the future, and she was trying to exist within the present, the white gulf in the center, while the black gunk floated in between. The other was reminded of her memories: black being the viscous memories that form our self-perception, white being the large gaps in memory, and yellow being the false beckonings of nostalgia. In fact, another person felt the sweet nostalgia of his childhood in the painting.

Someone explained he couldn’t embody the painting because its four panels made it unsteady; he couldn’t find a personality and was uncertain about where to look. He did not consent to embodying the painting. The panels provoked sadness for another person: they were an explosion, a coming apart rather than coming together. The colors, he explained, were like parts of a person: the complementary yellow and purple were pleasing, but one can only notice the blacks and whites within oneself.

For some, the black ink blots were not of nature, but calligraphy describing the painting’s landscape; for others, they were redactions—erasures—shadows—bodies turned inside out—that elicited fear. One person, like me, saw an unsettling creature in the blacks and found the yellow malicious and clandestine; another person, like me, felt the blacks invading the peaceful absence of color. One person tasted the painting—it was sweet, if you were curious.

There is an infinite number of experiences in life, and for each one, an infinite number of experiences of an artwork. My expedition through The Fortune of the World, and my classmates’ experiences, too—these are the chemical reactions produced by the interaction between artwork and observer. They are part of the emergent unconscious that exists all around us, all the time, waiting for us to notice it.

If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned, and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.
— Marcel Proust

The novel is a living art form that has the power to expand our inner worlds and facilitate the co-creation of our outer worlds. I believe this wholeheartedly.

Living art form. What do I mean by that? Art form, because a novel’s creation demands imagination, flourishes with skill, and reveals truths about life. Living, because a novel is not fixed at the time of its creation—it evolves with each reader, critic, and shift in societal norms.

I often find myself in awe of the seemingly magical process that goes into bringing a novel to life.1 Sally Rooney will say things about her characters like “he walked into my brain,” and “[her voice was] the first voice that came to the page for me,” and “I was intrigued by them, I liked being with them on the page.” She considers herself a passive observer of her characters, quietly following their conversations and inner monologues. Her role is to follow where her characters lead and write down their stories. “I get very into character, and I inhabit that consciousness,” she says in an interview with the New York Times about her latest novel, Intermezzo. “That allows me to write about what it is that the character is undergoing.” Her readers tend to believe there is a relationship between Rooney’s life and the fiction she writes, but she insists that she is separate from her characters, going so far as to wonder why they are interested in the same philosophical, ideological, and interpersonal questions she is. Rooney seems to believe that she is not simply the creator of these characters, but their messenger.

This creative process—which, as I understand it, is somewhat externalized from the self—is surprisingly common among authors of fiction. Are they creating from themselves, or channeling a force greater than them? Keith Johnstone, a pioneer of improv theatre, writes about artists: “We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated.”

This must be what Ottessa Moshfegh is describing when she says her writing process involves listening very carefully to a higher voice outside her own consciousness. To bring her mysterious titular character McGlue to life, Moshfegh placed a mirror behind her writing desk so she could assume his postures and expressions. “That’s actually a really important part of the process, because McGlue as a personality was really mysterious to me,” she recalls in an interview with CCCB. “I had to physically imagine being him in order to understand how he might talk or what his attitude would have been.” Her inhabiting of McGlue—a drunk, brain-damaged man in denial—was so all-consuming that she herself overlooked certain truths about him that her editors noticed before she did.

In another interview, Moshfegh says, “McGlue was really a creative act of writing through spiritual possession. I wasn’t intellectualizing, I wasn’t thinking about plot. McGlue came out of me like some magical demon. And when that was over, it was like, ‘Oh, thank God.’” But unlike Rooney, Moshfegh admits that there is a relationship between her life and her art; one influences the other, affecting her story, shifting her personality, sometimes even making her temporarily a little insane, like in the case of writing My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

E. M. Forster also seems to regard his characters as creations with their own minds, operating outside his control. In a 1953 interview with The Paris Review, he talks about how his characters often change the course of his story. (He generalizes this experience to all authors, but this is not every author’s experience. A little over a decade later, also in an interview with The Paris Review, Vladimir Nabokov responds to this claim with mockery: “It was not [Forster] who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves.”)

Clearly, some stories insist on being told—perhaps to illuminate aspects of life that society prefers to ignore or to help an author resolve an inner conflict—and writers, from Rooney to Forster, are answering that call. This is, in part, what I mean when I say the novel is living. Sometimes, I like to imagine that the life of a singular novel can be as rich and complex as one’s own, from how it was born and sustained to its impact on those who interact with it and the world.2

When read at the right time, a novel really can change you, the way the kindness of a stranger might alter the course of your day or the words of a mentor might shift your perception of a problem you thought was impossible to solve. Many people will pick up a book during a dark period in their lives and emerge from their reading experience transformed. For example, the emotions and events depicted in a novel might help you realize you’re not alone, as famously noted by James Baldwin:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.

You might find that an author has described an emotion or experience you’ve always felt but not been able to articulate nearly as well or at all. When this happens to me, I can’t help but excitedly scream yes! exactly! in my head while reading, like when Gabriel García Márquez wrote in Love in the Time of Cholera, “Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them—life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” This idea, that life repeatedly pushes you to create and recreate yourself, instantly stuck with me and imbued itself into all my experiences; without realizing it, I wrote about it during a particularly challenging time in my life over a year later.

French novelist Marcel Proust said the “number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know.” This might be true in paintings and movies, but especially in stories. While reading, you might encounter a character who is so similar to someone you know in real life that it shakes you a bit—especially when the novel is written centuries before yours. I was so struck by the familiarity of Gustave Flaubert’s side character Monsieur Homais in Madame Bovary, published in France in 1856, that I instinctively reorganized all my perceptions of this type of person into perhaps something more whole, forgiving, accurate. Homais, a local pharmacist, is not exactly a likable character. He is materialistic, selfish, and self-absorbed, comfortably leveraging deceit as a means for his ambition and social climbing. Unprompted, he will launch into antagonistic monologues about the virtues of rationalism and science at the expense of religion, often using cliches and jargon he does not fully understand. He is earnest in his irritating habits; he simply cannot help himself. Maybe this is why I could not help but love how awful and annoying he was as a character. How many Monsieur Homaises do we know in our lives? Every time he appeared on the page, he irritated his fellow characters but absolutely delighted me. In a strange way, he helped me see this type of person, the smug hyper-rationalist, with a little more compassion and understanding. Homais was never satisfied with his life and was always the butt of every joke. He relied on these tactics to feel more in control of his life, more important than he actually was. Is this how the Homaises in my life feel?

The depictions of events and characters in novels are fictitious only to a certain extent. In his book How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton reminds us that such imagined experiences expand our understanding of human behavior, especially our own: “After we have childishly picked a fight with a lover who had looked distracted throughout dinner, there is relief in hearing Proust’s narrator admit to us that ‘as soon as I found Albertine not being nice to me, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty,’ and revealing that ‘I never expressed a desire to break up with her except when I was unable to do without her,’ after which our own romantic antics might seem less like those of a perverse platypus.”

But I want to reiterate: timing is crucial. It doesn’t matter how well-written or revered a book might be; you have to read it at the right time for it to truly change you. I’ve yet to figure out how exactly someone determines the right time to read a book, but I think it’s intuition; you just have to feel it out. Sometimes a book will sit on my shelf for years, provoking feelings of guilt every time I look at it, and then one day I’ll find myself suddenly interested in getting to know it. I’ll pick it up and start flipping through it while hovering near my library, in case I need to put it back on the shelf. A word or a phrase might catch my eye, and I’ll take it to my couch, get cozy, and start reading. Suddenly, I find myself overwhelmed with the feeling that this book was written solely for me and my unique needs at that exact moment. If I had tried reading the book earlier, it might not have done much for me. In fact, if I sense that a book is not right for my current moment, despite being objectively good, I’ll stop reading and save it for later, as I’m currently doing with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Having a personal library with several unread books—or regularly visiting a bookstore or public library—is partly what allows someone to choose the right book at the right time. Visiting a bookstore or perusing my library several times a week has become a ritual for me. The regular exposure and accessibility to a wide range of books help me develop my personal taste and become attuned to my current needs and preferences. For more than a year, I would walk into a bookstore and see Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, wondering if I should read it. It sounded exactly like the kind of book I would like, but I wasn’t in a rush to buy it. One day, I walked into a bookstore intending to get a specific book, but as soon as I saw The Coin, I felt an urgent need to read it. I bought it without hesitation and read it in a few days; it quickly became one of my favorite reads of 2025. It made me so uncomfortable and elicited such disgust within me that I would regularly have to put the novel down and pace around my apartment before picking it up again.

Once again, the main character is not very likable. She is a rich Palestinian woman living in New York City, where she teaches underprivileged boys in ethically questionable ways, falls into a Birkin reselling scheme, and develops an obsession with cleanliness that brings her to (and sometimes over) the edge of insanity. In bringing her novel to life, Zaher brought parts of her self to life as well: “After seven years of being inside this novel, I think I’m a lot less clean than I used to be, and I also care about fashion a lot less. In a way it sort of healed me of my own obsessions.” Many might go into The Coin expecting the narrator, a Palestinian woman, to be the perfect victim, but Zaher finds that boring: “I’m always attracted to novels that bring me closer to my bad, secret fantasies, my repressed bad qualities. I think it’s because reading is engaging in fantasy, and writing is also engaging in fantasy, so it’s an exploration of parts of us that we cannot live in real life.”

I think this is what Proust meant when he described the novel as an optical instrument that allows a reader to read his own self. Everything that exists in the world exists within ourselves as well—the good and the bad. When we are so intimate with a character who flagrantly exhibits the “bad” parts of ourselves that we turn a blind eye to, we begin to understand ourselves a little more (assuming we can get over the extreme discomfort the novel might cause us). For Alain de Botton, reading a book causes our mind to be like “a radar newly attuned to pick[ing] up certain objects floating through consciousness; the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukranian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm . . . The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity.”

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Perhaps my favorite thing about novels, though, is their ability to facilitate conversations between your past, current, and future selves through rereads and margin notes. This is what I discovered when rereading my favorite novel of all time, Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, for the third time in my life: “When I reread the novel for the first time in more than seven years, I felt like I was reconnecting with an old friend—one with whom my relationship had changed, but not my affection or comfort. That old friend, it seemed, was my past self. I was in a silent dialogue with this prior version of me, gently renegotiating many of the beliefs she held because of this novel. The process was unexpectedly therapeutic.” It’s similar to rereading old journal entries you wrote, except this time there’s a third party involved: the author. By making notes in the book’s margins, you are confronting your current thoughts, leaving bits of your current self for your future self to engage with, and addressing the book’s author—whose work ceases to be the author’s own once it’s released into the world. The book is not static, not merely an object: every reader, critic, essay, discussion, film adaptation—even simply the passage of time alone—shapes the book, expanding it and changing its meaning.

In her interview with Hernan Diaz, author of Trust (which I have not yet read), Dua Lipa asks a question about the novel that literally stuns Diaz: “Can I take a moment to thank you for this question? I have been on the road for a couple of years now, and I feel that I’ve heard every possible question in any possible incarnation, and this is so new and fresh and clever and I’m so grateful. And you know what, I had never quite thought of it that way myself. You’re right.” Like Moshfegh’s editors, who saw qualities in her character McGlue that she missed, Dua Lipa understood something in Diaz’s novel that he had not considered until confronted with it.

For James Wood, author of How Fiction Works, reading offers us more than just the opportunity to converse with ourselves and authors over time; it can help us understand the course of our lives. “Fiction ideally offers us a power we tend to lack in our own lives: to reflect on the form and direction of our existence; to see the birth, development, and end of a completed life. The novel provides us with the religious power to see beginnings and endings.” When I see parts of myself in a cowardly character, I can use their experiences to envision what shape my life might take if I continue down this path. When I get to act as a third-party observer of a harmful relationship depicted in a novel, I gain new perspectives on similar relationships in my life. When I read how a character dictates the story of his or her life, I am given the tools to dictate the story of my own life; stories are, after all, how we make sense of our lives.

The power of the novel is not limited to the individual sphere. Ayn Rand’s work has had significant cultural and political impacts on the US, affecting Americans’ daily lives whether or not they’ve read (or agree with) The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Shakespeare’s work pushed the limits of the English language, introducing more than a thousand words and phrases—many of which we still use today. George Orwell’s 1984 remains inextricable from how we think about surveillance and propaganda. Dostoevsky’s vivid portrayal of the human psyche strongly influenced some of the West’s greatest thinkers—Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust, to name a few—laying the groundwork for much of the psychological, philosophical, and even literary thought that followed.

All this to say: novels have the power to penetrate the public imagination and transform consciousness not only on an individual level, but also on a societal level—and not just in the moment, but across time. Many regard books as fixed in time and meaning, and reading as a passive activity—but the former is outright false, and the validity of the latter is entirely up to the reader. For novels to have a serious impact on one’s life, one must take novel-reading seriously.

a brief note about the history of the novel

Today, much of the panic around reading focuses on its decline. There are endless headlines about the literacy crisis and the decreasing rates of reading for pleasure, plus the backlash faced by Vitalik Buterin and Sam Bankman-Fried for questioning the benefits of long-form reading. For the most part, reading is considered a virtuous activity—good for the brain, a remedy for short attention spans, and a more respectable pastime than scrolling or watching TV.

But this was not always the case. In her fascinating paper The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th-Century in England, sociologist Ana Vogrinčič argues that moral panic about novel-reading began to take shape in England3 at the time, targeted primarily at women for fear that it would corrupt them.

One of many examples, here’s an excerpt from a 1796 essay:

Women, of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels . . . [T]he depravity is universal. My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books. I find them on the toilette of fashion, and in the work-bag of the sempstress; in the hands of the lady, who lounges on the sofa, and of the lady, who sits at the counter. From the mistresses of nobles they descend to the mistresses of snuff-shops – from the belles who read them in town, to the chits who spell them in the country. I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread: and the mistress of a family losing hours over a novel in the parlour, while her maids, in emulation of the example, were similarly employed in the kitchen. I have seen a scullion-wench with a dishclout in one hand, and a novel in the other, sobbing o’er the sorrows of Julia, or a Jemima.

—Sylph no. 5, October 6, 1796: 36-37

During this period, the novel was defined as a proper literary genre but was not widely respected. Unlike the traditional, lengthy heroic romances that depicted, in lofty poetic language, aristocratic heroes fighting for big causes in faraway settings, the novel focused on representing, in simple and colloquial terms, the everyday lives of everyday people from the middle and lower classes. The novel took on familiar settings, made contemporary references, and detailed the inner life; this created a certain level of intimacy between the reader, hero, and author. Concerns around novel-reading varied. They could produce “dangerous psychological affects, triggering imitation and inoculating wrong ideas of love and life,” or they could be “a physically harmful waste of time, damaging not only the mind and the morale of readers, but also their eyesight and posture.”

Women—who were the primary leisurely readers and also considered more sensitive and susceptible to bad influences—might read a fictionalized yet realistic storyline and come to expect certain things out of life. Articles about women ruining their lives due to novels proliferated. Literary reviews were often hostile, not to individual titles but to the genre as a whole: “What we have said of the generality of our Novels, for these fifteen years past, will serve for this one. It is just as pert, as dull, and as lewd as the rest of the tribe.” Authors and readers alike rejected the term “novel” due to the stigma around it (perhaps similar to people rejecting the term “creator” when it first emerged?); readers would find ways to hide their reading.

Circulating libraries were compared to brothels and gin-shops, while readers were considered superficial, lazy, incapable of serious study, negligent, careless, and emotional. Novel readers were thought to read only for the plot, skipping chapters, rushing to the end, and making excessive sentimental notations. This 18th-century stereotype of novel readers is, thankfully, foreign to us today; on the contrary, reading is often seen as the antidote to so many of society’s current ailments.

In a 1789 letter addressed to the editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, one man writes:

Novels have been long and frequently regarded not as being merely useless to society, but even as pernicious, from the very indifferent morality, and ridiculous way of thinking, which they almost generally inculcate. Why then, in the name of the common sense, should such an useless and pernicious commodity, with which we are over-run, go duty-free, wile the really useful necessary of life is taxed to the utmost extent? A tax on books of this description only (for books of real utility should ever be circulated free as air) would bring in a very considerable sum for the service of Government, without being levied on the poor or the industrious.

In a 1778 essay titled On Novel-Reading, Vicesimus Knox writes:

If, however, Novels are to be prohibited, in what, it will be asked, can the young mind employ itself during the hours of necessary leisure? To this it may be answered, that when the sweetened poison is removed, plain and wholesome food will always be relished. The growing mind will crave nourishment, and will gladly seek it in true histories, written in a pleasing and easy style, on purpose for its use.

If it be true that the present age is more corrupt than the preceding, the great multiplication of novels has probably contributed to its degeneracy.

Imagine any of this being said about novels today! The very attributes of the novel that caused panic hundreds of years ago are celebrated today for connecting us with humanity: universal depictions of real life, everyday people as heroes, glimpses into inner lives and individual psychologies.

We’ve come a long way in recognizing novels as the art form they truly are, capable of changing our lives and the world for the better.

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But here we are in great danger—the danger of being jealous of the blues of others, or of blues of times past. For while one may repeatedly insist that all one wants is to be satisfied and happy, the truth is that one can often find oneself clinging to samsara with a vengeance.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets

A couple of years ago, I started writing an essay about how I don’t want to live in a world devoid of suffering because life would then cease to have meaning, and we would cease to be human. I truly believed this, and I would even find myself in hours-long debates with loved ones who dreamed of a world where suffering was significantly reduced, if not outright eliminated.

“If I could snap my fingers now and end all suffering in the world, I would,” they would say. I would get angry and respond with something like: “All suffering? Even heartbreak? Even experiences that lead to growth, deepen our wisdom, and inspire beautiful art?” The debates never felt constructive; no one was ever satisfied in the end.

It’s clear to me now that these were not simply debates about some hypothetical world with some specific amount of suffering. We were defending, as if our lives depended on it, our relationships with suffering. Every single one of us, whether or not we have explicitly thought about what suffering means to us, has a deep and complex personal relationship with it. This means conversations about suffering will often be unproductive: they will appear logic-driven on the surface, but in reality, definitions will vary, emotions will rule, and few will leave with changed minds.1

Ultimately, I decided not to publish my essay because the woo-woo parts of me believed its publication would somehow bring suffering into my life and force me to eat my words.2 Suffering is important, I thought, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always welcome it. Well, suffering came shortly thereafter anyway. For the first time, I was forced to confront my relationship with suffering. What is it? How did it form? Is it serving my current needs? Do I want to keep it, or am I ready for something new?

In my essay, I was careful to differentiate between what I considered meaningful suffering, such as that in the moral realm, and meaningless suffering, including illnesses and tragic deaths. My argument was essentially this: moral suffering lends depth and meaning to our lives in a way that happiness alone cannot. Experiences that are inherent to the human condition (e.g., regret, heartbreak, guilt, loss) often result in suffering that helps one develop wisdom, which is necessary for human flourishing. They are experiences that gift us with opportunities to learn and grow, and without them, what meaning are we left with in this life?

Physical suffering, I thought, we could do away with entirely without losing any meaning in life. Houellebecq captured my thoughts on both physical and moral suffering quite well in his essay rejecting physician-assisted suicide:3

No one wants to suffer. Suffer physically, that is. Moral suffering has its charms, it can even generate aesthetic material (as I have discovered for myself). Physical suffering is pure hell, devoid of interest and meaning, from which no lessons can be drawn. Life has been sketchily (and falsely) described as a quest for pleasure; it is, more accurately, an avoidance of suffering; and more or less everyone, given a choice between unbearable suffering and death, chooses death.

— Michel Houellebecq, How France Lost Her Dignity

I was also careful to note to readers that I was not some masochist romanticizing suffering, nor was I holding on to this belief as a way to cope with any suffering I’ve experienced. (In fact, I consider myself a very happy person, I wrote in my post.)

But what does it mean for someone to be attached to her suffering? Would she know if she was attached?

When we’re defending our relationship with suffering—whether that means being vehemently against it or protecting it like it’s our child—we sort of are defending it as though our lives depend on it. Not for literal survival but for the survival of one’s sense of self, because one’s relationship with suffering shapes a core part of one’s identity. In this sense, for better or worse, our relationship with suffering is protective; it serves a very important need.

Defining the Self is tricky, and my understanding of it has been evolving for years. Last year, in my post knowing yourself, I wrote:

At the start of this post, I noted my belief that I present my “authentic self” to people. But what if I’m thinking about the self all wrong? An authentic self implies the existence of an inauthentic self and, thus, some sort of fracturing of the self. What if there is only Self, rather than the dualities we agonize over: higher vs. lower, instinctual vs. intellectual, controller vs. controlled, good vs. bad, current vs. desired?

After further reading and deep self-inquiry, I’ve come to believe a couple of foundational things about the Self:

(1) We are all fundamentally okay; our core Self is already whole and undamaged. I got this from one of my beloved mentors: we are like Russian dolls—all of us have layers shaped by our adopted identities, defenses, experiences, and learned behaviors, but at our core is a solid and unchanging version of ourselves, concealed but never damaged by the outer layers. This is our Self—our essence—where our fundamental okayness lies. Healing, it turns out, is natural to us; our bodies instinctively know how to do it. So when we do self-work to heal, we’re not becoming okay or fixing ourselves—we’re peeling layers to discover that we are already okay, undamaged, and everything we hope to be.

Put differently, and very beautifully, by , a longtime mutual: “yin is about unclenching and unresisting all the way so that you find out that you are always already fundamentally loved. there is nothing you need to do to be loved. things are fundamentally ok, and there is no spiritual problem to solve.”4 I felt this and knew it to be true once during a guided meditation about this exact idea. The Russian doll metaphor helps me tremendously when I doubt myself; it allows me to tap into the insight I gained during my meditation.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells us the story of La Loba to drive this point home. In mythology, La Loba is an old woman who lives in the wild, collecting bones and singing them back to life. Symbolically, bones represent the indestructible force that lives within us—our soul-spirit and deep instinct—which La Loba guards and revives in times of crisis. “We know the soul-spirit can be injured, even maimed, but it is very nearly impossible to kill,” says Estés. “You can dent the soul and bend it. You can hurt it and scar it. You can leave the marks of illness upon it, and scorch marks of fear. But it does not die, for it is protected by La Loba in the underworld. She is both the finder and incubator of the underworld.” The lesson here applies to the real world just as much as it does to the mythological one. Estés—poet, author, psychoanalyst, and post-trauma specialist—is reminding us that no matter how hard things get, how endless rock bottom seems, there is a force within us that is always there and ready to protect us, if we let it. (Hence the importance of self-work.5)

Mary Oliver’s poem The Journey perfectly describes the painful experience of shedding layers—e.g., people’s bad advice or demands, nonsense on the internet that makes its way into our beliefs, poor self-esteem shaped by a bad relationship, etc.—to find one’s unadulterated Self, “a new voice which you slowly [recognize] as your own”:

With enough time and exposure, or under the right circumstances, the voices of others—the bad advice, the demands that are incongruent with our wishes, the insults, threats, fearmongering—form new layers of identities that conceal one’s core Self, one’s own voice.

• Your art isn’t good enough. —> My art isn’t good enough.

• A man isn’t worthy unless he can provide. —> I’m not worthy unless I can provide.

• Stop wasting your time on silly interests and focus on something that will lead to a meaningful career. —> I love doing this, but I need to stop wasting my time on these silly interests so I can focus on something that will lead to a meaningful career.

• A relationship is unhealthy if it doesn’t lead to an engagement within two years. —> My relationship is not healthy if he doesn’t propose within two years.

We’ve all seen these takes on social media—often meticulously crafted in the form of think pieces or video essays, or supported by endless anecdotes—or been told various versions of these statements by family members who think they are being helpful. The younger we are, the more susceptible we are to forming identities around these voices. If a parent tells us to stop wasting time on frivolous hobbies and instead focus on finding a real job, a few things might happen:

• If we love that parent, yearn for their approval, or even just rely on them for food and shelter, their voice eventually seeps into our mind and becomes our own. It’s not just that someone is telling me to stop wasting my time; I need to stop wasting my time.

• A new identity layer is formed, perhaps something like “I am not an [insert frivolous hobby: artist, writer, designer, musician]” or “I’m a serious person who cares about my career.” This identity is important in the sense that it ties back to the fact that we love that parent, or want their approval, or need them for food and shelter. In other words, we create this identity to help us secure love or safety.

• Most likely, under this new identity, we give up or deprioritize the “frivolous” hobby. And most likely, doing this causes some degree of suffering because it was never fully our own decision; it served other people’s needs first, then intertwined our own needs with theirs, and now it’s too hard to untangle everything and decipher what’s really going on.

• Since the new identity serves a core need (love or safety or connection or belonging), and the suffering becomes enmeshed with the new identity, the suffering gains importance, too. Giving up this suffering might mean giving up this identity, which could risk love, safety, connection, or belonging.

This requires some seriously complex mental gymnastics to uphold, creating more tension and suffering—but this is, ultimately, how much of identity works anyway.6

(2) By its nature, identity fractures our sense of self and conceals the whole Self that exists at our core. Identity, or your sense of self, is who you know yourself to be at any given moment. It’s created by a thought that tends to be so deceptively simple that it’s often overlooked, but the implications are quite significant: identity shapes one’s reality and is the root cause of one’s behaviors even in areas of life that are seemingly unrelated to that identity.

When someone forms an identity, which usually happens unknowingly, it creates a layer that conceals the core, or the whole Self. This fractures our sense of self, forcing us to seek wholeness. But—and here’s the cruel paradox of identity—this search for wholeness is happening in service to the very identity that fractured us in the first place, which only reinforces that identity.

Wholeness, then, is impossible to achieve within the framework of our identity. The issue is that our identity is so all-encompassing that it can be exceptionally difficult to nail down and interrogate, so we often go through lengthy periods not knowing why we’re behaving the way we’re behaving, why we continue to suffer when our supposed goal is to minimize suffering, why we can’t seem to break out of our cycles.

This idea is from the book I Am: A Guide to Transforming Reality and Creating the Life You Want by Anya Lincoln. (It’s not exactly the kind of book I’m typically drawn to because it comes off a little too self-help and woo-woo, but I’m always open to exploring different perspectives on identity and consciousness, given my longstanding obsession with these topics. I’m glad I gave the book a chance.)

Here’s an example from I Am of how identity fractures our sense of self (emphasis mine):

In the Identity paradox, both the problem and the solution have to coexist simultaneously as a part of the same reality—one cannot exist without the other.

For example, a person who experiences life as a constant struggle may try to fix their circumstances so they don’t have to struggle anymore. They can work on their strategies and ways of negotiating within their world and making better decisions. But if their identity can only be defined in terms of struggle and overcoming it, both the struggle and its opposite—the state of no struggle (even if only a hopeful possibility)—will have to be present to give the Identity the context it needs to be real. No matter what the person does, the push and pull of the old reality will continue. They will never be able to create a sustainably loving and enjoyable reality without giving up the “I am” that created the conflict in order to exist. To permanently solve the issue of both brokenness and the reality that supports it, in other words, to return to oneness, a creator must give up their Identity.

Someone who was hurt as a child might later assume the identity of a victim, seeing himself as vulnerable to forces beyond his control. To feel whole, he might develop a drive to defeat anything that resembles the original threat; his identity creates a condition in which he must overcome such threats to validate his sense of self. The risk here is that, for this identity to survive, the person will need to be in situations that provide enough threat for him to fight and defend himself. If he gives up his identity as a victim, it will feel as though he’s giving up his motivation to fight and defend himself. Both need each other to exist: the victimhood identity (problem) and the need to overcome threats (solution).

Giving up an identity feels like a suicide mission, but according to Lincoln, that’s because it is, “but only for the thought that creates the mess and struggle in the first place.” Importantly, the goal here is not to replace one’s problematic identity with a positive one: “The point of Identity work is to free a person, not to redefine them.”

The search for wholeness pervades our culture. Everywhere, people feel broken and search for something—a relationship, food, shopping, status, money, beauty—to fill voids within themselves. From psychoanalyst Neville Symington:

The personality is not a unitary phenomenon. We are all made up of parts, each part is capable of functioning as a separate little person. The basic psychological problem for human beings is to get all these parts to act together harmoniously. When we talk of someone having emotional problems, as opposed to practical problems, we mean that they are having trouble “getting it together”—becoming one. We aspire to be whole, but it is always a struggle because we are battling against something.

This may just be the human condition. Individually, we begin as one with nature, in utero, before being violently separated by birth; we begin thinking we are one with our mothers before discovering that we are separate through the natural psychological process of individuation. Collectively, humanity began as one with nature before consciousness and intelligence made us aware of our mortality and separated us from it. Symbolically, therefore, we always begin as one with God before separating and being forced to grapple with the consequences—both liberating and oppressive. In each circumstance, separation creates a void, forcing us to search for wholeness. To psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, love in all its forms is the only answer to this problem of human existence—brotherly love, motherly and fatherly love, erotic love, self-love, and love of God. From his book The Art of Loving: “The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.”

We create identities to help us cope with the unbearable anxiety of separating from a state of Oneness—whether that state exists for us through love, nature, God, the universe, the divine, grace, or whatever else. Since identities fracture our sense of self, concealing the whole Self at our core, we suffer. At the same time, we are accustomed to a way of being as a result of our identity; it becomes hard to fathom not just another way of life but another reality entirely. So suffering—in various ways and to various degrees—and our sense of self go hand in hand.

So, back to defending suffering as though our lives depend on it. Our identities, which inform our lives and convince us that they are the only way we’ll gain love and safety and approval, depend on it. And while the identities themselves are not explicitly about suffering, they shape our relationship with suffering.

Suffering, I now understand, is not the same as pain. Pain is inevitable—we will all deal with experiences like relationships ending, health scares, job rejections, interpersonal conflicts, etc. Our reaction to these events—rumination, revenge plotting, mismanaged rage, “why me?” questions, etc.—is what determines whether we will suffer. Maybe I was wrong, and it’s not necessarily suffering that ultimately leads to wisdom, growth, and flourishing. It can, but it can also create more suffering, hate, and ugliness in this world.

It continues to astonish me that we regularly know what we need to do to minimize our suffering, and yet it’s never that simple. I think a big reason behind this is the complex relationship between (a) the identities we think we need to secure love and (b) the suffering those identities require us to endure.

I recently posted that I’ve had and enjoyed many glimpses of Oneness from certain meditations, but frustratingly find myself resistant to going deeper into such teachings. Vincent sensed it right away: I hold suffering as something important for various reasons. Clearly, this didn’t just lead to hours-long debates with friends about hypothetical worlds in which suffering doesn’t exist, it got in the way of various pursuits that would truly fulfill me. This was plain as day, and I couldn’t see it!

Part of redefining my relationship with suffering now is understanding that suffering is not something I need to cling to or completely abandon. Rather, it’s a signal I can learn from: what deeper belief or value is my suffering protecting? Does it still need protection? Am I ready to untangle this knot to be freer, more at peace?

I thought, not for the first time, that vanity is so great a blessing to women that it should be listed among the major virtues.
— Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife

one. unhappy birthday

Something weird happened to me when I turned twenty-nine in October of 2024, and based on the many conversations I’ve had with others since then, it seems to be the case that something weird happens to a lot of people when they turn twenty-nine.1

I won’t go into much detail, but basically, one day I was okay with my life, and the next day I believed it needed a complete overhaul.2 Suddenly, I was dissatisfied with every aspect of it: my job, living in NYC, my past, my future, my daily habits, my abandoned passions, everything. I knew that I could not continue to live the way I had been up until then; I felt that the consequences of doing so would be catastrophic.3

My thoughts and emotions during this time were intense and demanded immediate action—all except for one. It was quieter and more patient, despite being neglected for so long, and I found it much more interesting than the others, despite being the least consequential: it was my desire to be more feminine.

two. a hint of femininity

In 2020, I officially quit my six-year stint on birth control in an attempt to delineate between the real me4 and, I guess, the me that was manipulated into existence by a cocktail of synthetic hormones. In the years since then, I noticed myself slowly rediscovering the feminine habits and interests I used to have before birth control—mostly things like shopping, caring about my hair and outfits, buying more shoes, decorating my home, etc.

The shift was jarring, to say the least. While on birth control, I felt intense resistance to every aspect of femininity—physical, biological, societal—as though embodying it would somehow diminish my personhood. This means I spent some of the most formative years of my young adulthood rejecting an aspect of myself that once felt as natural as breathing. When you’re more than half a decade removed from being in touch with your femininity—and you exist in a culture where a year feels like ten years, and change happens so quickly that time feels like a big blur—how do you transition back seamlessly?

I only started to feel more comfortable embracing femininity recently. But my biggest struggle is that the more I think about femininity, the more I realize I don’t actually know what it is or why I yearn for it so much.

three. femininity, terribly defined

When I think about femininity, my mind turns to superficial characteristics first: hair that is colored and styled to perfection, a face that is enhanced by makeup, a body that is adorned with fine jewelry, a closet that is carefully curated to reflect one’s Pinterest-informed style, a dresser overflowing with creams and serums and other beautifying potions, a signature scent envied by others, a voice that is soft and warm, nails that are always manicured, and feet that painfully display fashionable shoes.

My mind then shifts to what might be considered feminine behaviors, cycling through the slop I often find on social media:

• Daily affirmations for your divine feminine: I am stepping into an abundant glow-up. The universe loves to provide for me.

• Link in my bio to see how I activated my feminine energy to make men worship me like a goddess and give me the princess treatment.

• Life is a mountain, and men are born at the bottom because their life journey is about the climb—doing, achieving, strategizing. They earn their worth through the work they put in to climb the mountain. That’s why masculine energy is about doing. Women are born at the top of the mountain because they have inherent value. Their life journey is not about climbing the mountain, it’s about remembering how worthy they already are, and trust-falling off the side of the mountain knowing the masculine will catch them. Feminine energy is about surrendering; letting go and trusting. Now, go to ChatGPT and type in the following prompt: “Act like my manifestation coach and help me identify exactly where I’m stuck in unhealthy masculine energy. Based on my responses, give me a personalized plan to help me shift into a more feminine, passenger princess energy.”5

I also think of behaviors that are not necessarily feminine but are associated more with the female sphere, such as cleaning, cooking, dancing, hosting, consumerism, gossiping, cattiness, and so on.

Depending on her culture, a girl or woman may be celebrated for any of these characteristics and behaviors—or she may be forced into or punished for them. She may be expected to embody them (e.g., being beautiful) but demonized for how she does it (e.g., undergoing cosmetic procedures). In one decade, feminine beauty might mean being skinny with thin eyebrows and straight hair, while in the next, it means having an hourglass figure with thick, laminated eyebrows and voluminous hair. For one generation, it might be desirable to be an independent working woman who defies female stereotypes, while for the next, it means embodying more traditional feminine values. Forgive me for the cringe America-Ferrera-from-Barbie-eque speech, but yes, the constant flip-flopping of impossible expectations is tiresome.

Femininity is also rife with complexities and contradictions that make it hard to embody authentically. For example, our hormones inform a good bit of our behaviors and preferences, but so do the societies in which we live—so there is often a felt tension between natural femininity and performed femininity. Adding to the confusion: in much of media, femininity can represent both vulnerability (e.g., physically, compared to men) and strength (e.g., physically, for pregnancy and birth).

And all of this is why I don’t really know what femininity means, despite being bombarded with definitions from everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, or age.

four. femininity, ever-changing

There’s something strange about being a woman, perhaps even stranger than being a human. Right? Or maybe it only feels that way because femininity has been relentlessly commodified and womanhood unapologetically bastardized—by both sides of the ideological spectrum—which has left me with a whole mess to figure out for myself. I suspect many of my female peers feel similarly and, given our increasingly atomized society, are stuck trying to (re)define womanhood and femininity on their own. (From psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book Women Who Run With The Wolves: “We have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.”6 Indeed, we have.)

Has it always been this confusing? In part, this lack of clarity is due to ever-changing attitudes toward women and their roles in society, so the bigger question about femininity is, in fact, about womanhood. Ursula Parrott’s novel Ex-Wife was published in 1929, but many of the challenges it raises about what it means to be a woman—or what a woman is allowed to be, or forced to be, according to the norms of her society—are eerily reminiscent of our own time. 

In the novel, Patricia is only twenty-four years old but already on the cusp of divorce (driven by her and her husband’s infidelities) and forced to navigate a society that is itself reckoning with the unintended consequences of abandoning the sexual puritanism of its predecessor. Her friend Lucia is already a divorcée, helping guide Patricia through this new phase of her life and offering advice like, “If you can really adopt the alleged masculine attitude toward sex, you’ve got all of New York to console you . . . I’m betting you can’t though. Not many women can.” And: “Every attractive woman has fifteen gold pieces to spend, one for each year between the time she is twenty and the time she is thirty-five. She may squander the first ten or twelve if she likes, but she damn well should invest the rest of them in something safe for her middle age.”

Lucia laments the consequences of a sexual liberation she never asked for and never benefitted from. (“Victim of the new freedom—had it thrust on me willy-nilly.”) Rather than being free, women must now “pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.” She goes on:

“The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on. Women used to have status, a relative security. Now they have the status of any prostitute, success while their looks hold out. If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of Susan B. Anthony, and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry.7

The choices for women used to be: marriage, the convent, or the street. They’re just the same now. Marriage has the same name. Or you can have a career, letting it absorb all emotional energy (like the convent). Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude toward sex, and a succession of meaningless affairs, promiscuity, (the street, that is) taking your pay in orchids and dinner-dates instead of money left on the dresser.”

Patricia and Lucia struggle to make sense of the rapidly changing gender norms of their time (“obscenity in common speech is just another one-time strictly masculine ceremonial vice, like drinking and smoking, that recently gone bi-sexual”)—much like we struggle today with the mixed messages we receive about what it means to be a woman and embody femininity.

In her foreword to Ex-Wife, Alissa Bennett describes women’s fraught position in society at the time:

Lurching toward sexual revolution but still psychologically tethered to Victorian morality, women of Parrott’s generation found themselves caught in the freefall of collapsing convention. The seedy emotional texture of Ex-Wife’s Jazz Age debauchery reflected the panic felt by women across the country who had glimpsed freedom but remained ill-equipped to navigate its consequences.

. . . was Ex-Wife a confession, a fantasy, or a culture shifting too rapidly to acknowledge the inevitable casualties we leave in the wake of change?

And casualties there were—and continue to be. We are more than half a century into the sexual revolution, arguably living its end days, and in many ways still grappling with the breakdown of gender relations, false promises of sex positivity, and nostalgia for tradition in hopes of gaining some semblance of stability. We, too, feel panic; we, too, are ill-equipped to navigate the consequences of such change. And, our change is not just in one direction, but in many directions, each one promising that its picture of womanhood will be the one to finally offer you peace, happiness, and fulfillment.

In her book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, Peggy Orenstein notes another shift in our understanding of womanhood:

Girls did not always organize their thinking about themselves around the physical. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg highlighted this change in her book The Body Project by comparing the New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

“Resolved,” wrote a girl in 1892, “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

And one hundred years later: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can. . . . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”

Can you blame a woman for being so lost in the noise, never having a moment to breathe before the next change is thrown upon her, demanding acquiescence or death of social standing?

five. femininity, a requisite to greatness

Confusion about definitions aside, I’m not entirely sure why my desire for femininity is so strong in the first place. Perhaps it’s because, for much of my life, I have aspired to be a great person, which I defined as being a great woman. Because of my more conservative and traditional upbringing, this essentially meant preparing myself to be a good wife and mother. So, naturally I placed a lot of value on skills and behaviors such as cleaning (I don’t regret this one), modesty (that comes and goes), cooking (I’m getting better at this), being around kids (I’m a natural), and being soft-spoken and ladylike (I have failed every attempt in my life to embody these last two traits).

I never could have anticipated that the life I envisioned and tirelessly prepped for would be so different from the life I’m living today. In many ways, I’m glad my vision was not brought to fruition. I now understand that no part of me was ready to become a wife or mother when I thought I was. This is one of the successes of the sexual revolution that Ursula Parrott did not live long enough to see: while the death of rigid womanhood took with it comfort and stability, it birthed in its place a womanhood that is more flexible, forgiving, patient, and open to self-determination.

I’m open to the idea that femininity and womanhood not only evolve with the times but also throughout a woman’s life. I will have to define and redefine what they mean to me in each stage of my life, discerning the useful from the useless in the culture that is dominant at the time.8

There are many mysteries of female life, it’s true, but the veil need not be undisturbed—perhaps it’s the task of a great woman to take a peek and ask questions. (Before my twenty-ninth birthday crisis, I was not asking questions or exploring what felt authentic to me!) In Women Who Run With The Wolves, Estés reminds us: “Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.”

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anaïs Nin

Severance is the best show I’ve seen in years. Seriously, when was the last time a show was this widely beloved? Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, the first season of Westworld? Maybe Succession?1 It’s been a while.

In the world of Severance, employees of Lumon Industries, a mysterious, cult-run biotech company, can elect to undergo a procedure to sever their consciousness. This allows them to separate their work and personal lives while remaining in the same physical body, taking work-life balance to a new level. When a severed employee enters Lumon, he becomes the work version of himself (called an “innie”), retaining no memories of his personal life. Once he leaves work, he reverts to the non-work version of himself (called an “outie”), retaining no memories of his work life. Unsurprisingly, outies have more rights than innies.

The show is great for many obvious reasons: the cinematography is beautiful, the acting is phenomenal, the attention to detail is meticulous to an absurd degree, and the storyline is refreshingly unique. What I love most about it, however, is the questions it raises about the nature of consciousness and the resulting ethical implications. Severance presents itself as a show about work-life balance and corporate corruption, drawing people in with safe, mainstream topics. But before they know it, fans are instead forced to grapple with challenging philosophical questions about consciousness—a less culturally palatable discussion, but a much more important one given the rapid development of AI and humanity’s inevitable trajectory toward transhumanism, for better or worse.

Of course, Severance is not the first TV show to explore consciousness, but it might be the most popular contemporary show to do so—and have a real influence in shaping mainstream discussions around it. (Although I’d be remiss not to mention my favorite episode of Black Mirror, White Christmas, which also forces viewers to contend with questions about who benefits from certain definitions of consciousness. Imagine a digitally cloned version of yourself created to be your perfect personal assistant, but it’s trapped in an egg-like object and claims to hate its life. Is it conscious? Does it have rights? Can a digital clone really feel “hatred”? What is your obligation to this digital clone? Where does your sense of you begin, and where should it end? If you like Severance, you’ll appreciate this brief subplot in the episode.)

My immediate reaction to the procedure in Severance is that it’s unambiguously unethical—and, frankly, a logistical nightmare. Does my innie have a right to treat my body in ways my outie wouldn’t like, or vice versa? Who gets to decide whether to continue employment: my innie, who actually does the work, or my outie, who relies on the income for survival? I can’t confidently answer any of these questions, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who does. But try bringing the conversation up with friends, and you might be surprised by the number of people who don’t consider this a serious moral problem, or who dehumanize innies. (This is why I’m so excited that a mainstream show is touching on challenging questions about consciousness; people will be forced to think about it in ways they may never have considered before, and this has profound consequences for our understanding of ethics.)

Thankfully, the procedure is not possible—or it won’t be in my lifetime, at least—so what does the innie vs. outie debate mean for us, in the real world, today?

I have always been drawn to the idea that people have multiple selves (i.e., all of our future, past, and current selves) and that each self is just as real as the one with which you currently identify most. This means our actions should take into account the rights of each one of these selves. What might this look like in practice?

• Future selves: The person you will be tomorrow, in two years, in two decades, etc.

  • How will Tomorrow You feel about getting blackout drunk tonight in front of your coworkers?

  • What would a 60-year-old You with two children, a wonderful partner, and an appreciation for life2 think about your decision to start a habit that is destructive to your health because you currently believe life is meaningless?

• Past selves: The person you were yesterday, as a teenager, as a child, etc.

  • How would 10-year-old You feel about the person she is today?

  • How would Teenage You feel about the cruel or unforgiving ways you think about her and her decisions? How might she feel if you forgive her?

  • How would Yesterday You feel if she learned that the project she excitedly started has already been abandoned?

• Current selves: The person you are in front of friends, coworkers, family, in a romantic relationship, etc.

  • Do the different versions of yourself feel unified? Or are they jarringly disparate, creating feelings of inauthenticity?

In a way, the person you consider You right now—the one making all the decisions that (1) affect future versions of yourself and (2) characterize past versions of yourself—is like the outie in Severance.3 In our world today, all these other selves are treated like innies: at best, they’re disregarded; at worst, they’re completely dehumanized; and at all times, they are subject to the whims of their outie.

My line of reasoning might sound familiar to those who know about Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, an approach to psychotherapy that sees “every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self.” Many of these parts, especially the wounded ones, are our past selves, or the innie according to my logic above. Each one has needs, but they are often ignored in favor of the needs and preferences of the current self, or the outie. (On the flip side, my line of reasoning might sound really weird to those who don’t know about IFS. If that’s you, I highly recommend you look into it. It’s super cool! I like The Integral Guide, but there are many other resources too.)

You might also notice that my claim (that our future selves matter just as much as our current selves) is similar to the one made in William MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future, which argues for longtermism, or the idea that we have a moral imperative to act in a way that benefits future people because they count just as much as we do.

The IFS model of therapy might be relatively new, but the idea that people have multiple selves certainly is not. In her essay Second Selves, Elisa Gabbert references Virginia Woolf’s diary entries about people’s multiple states of consciousness. In April 1925, Woolf wrote, “My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc.” Then in the margins of that diary entry: “Second selves is what I mean.”

Regarding Woolf’s idea of multiple selves—and the notion that diaries never quite capture a person’s entire self4—Gabbert wonders:

Who is Woolf lying to, if she is lying, in these diaries? Herself, a little bit, the second self that is the diary, and the future Virginia, who might as well be another person entirely. In 1919, she writes, “I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better.” Later that year: “What a bore I’m becoming! Yes, even old Virginia will skip a good deal of this.”

At the age of thirty-eight, she writes: “In spite of some tremors I think I shall go on with this diary for the present. I sometimes think that I have worked through the layer of style which suited it—suited the comfortable bright hour after tea; and the thing I’ve reached now is less pliable. Never mind; I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920, will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! my dear ghost; and take heed that I don’t think 50 a very great age.”

It seems we can’t help but imagine an audience when we write. Because a journal makes the self external, the self counts as an audience.5

In much of her writing, Woolf seems to be in dialogue with multiple versions of herself—past, present, and future. In 1924, she wrote: “And old V. of 1940 will see something in [this book] too. She will be a woman who can see, old V., everything—more than I can, I think.”

Ultimately, I think all these ideas—second selves, longtermism, IFS, Severance—tie back to questions about consciousness. What is it?6 Is it produced by the brain, or is it a fundamental aspect of the universe and therefore something our brains can “tune into” (like radio stations)? Is it the foundation of reality, implying matter is produced within and by it? Who has it? Can objects have rudimentary types of consciousness, a la panpsychism (my favorite theory to ponder)? And most importantly: how do answers to these questions change our understanding of morality and ethics?

The vibe shift is here, and I’m not the only one who has noticed or is excited about it. From Scott Britton:

The great awakening seems real. I probably get 2-4 messages a week from childhood friends, former business contacts and previous skeptical friends who now want to talk about consciousness. This has picked up from a year ago where at times I felt like I was banging a consciousness drum into a void. It’s exciting. I do believe there is an objective shift going on.

To be clear, I think it’s very likely that we’ll never fully know what consciousness is. (See footnote #6 for an explanation.) Regardless, it’s a topic I’ve always loved and will continue to obsess over, and I hope whatever temporary answer we land on will lead to better outcomes for all beings.

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6

By the way, this Quora response to the questions “Is there any conclusive proof that the brain produces consciousness?” and “What rules out the case that the brain acts as receptor antennae for consciousness?” is close to what I believe:

The only thing that scares me is that I will die tomorrow without having known myself.
— Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat

For a long time, I wondered which is closer to reality: how I perceive myself or how others perceive me. I like to think I have a strong understanding of who I am and consistently present my authentic self to people, but this naive thought is disrupted whenever someone describes me in a way that sounds foreign or not quite right to me.

It’s also disrupted when I misunderstand a fundamental aspect of myself. Recently, I was navigating a tricky situation that caused me a lot of distress and anger. But the experience made me realize something odd: before experiencing it, if you had presented the exact scenario and asked me to guess how it would make me feel, I probably would have responded with something like, “I’d be mildly annoyed, I guess.”

How could I be so wrong? And now that the situation has passed, I find myself looking back and wondering why I was so emotionally invested in the first place. I’m either stubbornly ignoring new information about myself, or I do not understand myself as well as I thought I did. Perhaps it’s simply that humans are bad at assessing how they would react to unfamiliar situations.1

I love asking people to share their top personal values because I’m always pleasantly surprised by their answers, no matter how well I know them—and because I’ve always felt like their answers can help me better understand their motivations, life choices, and other intimate details—who they really are. But recently, I got pushback for the first time in all my years of asking this question. My friend found the question reductive (“the human spirit can’t be summed up into three words”) and insisted that any response a person readily gives is likely inaccurate to the point of being worthless. This seems overly cynical to me, but maybe there is some truth to it. Are we overestimating how well we know ourselves? And are we overestimating the necessity—or even possibility—of self-discovery?

compulsory self-discovery

In James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room, the protagonist, David, is constantly fleeing from what he has learned about himself—his homosexuality—in hopes of discovering something different. (Ideally, something more palatable to himself and the society in which he lives.) In the end, he realizes he was escaping himself in an attempt to find himself—a futile, if not self-destructive, exercise:

“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.”

There is no shortage of movies, novels, and other forms of media that obsess over self-discovery at any expense. They urge us, as if it’s a matter of life and death, to find ourselves—our true selves. But they’ve steered us wrong. The quest for self-discovery implies there is a prize ending; a time you’ll be able to breathe out a sigh of relief, or jump up and down with excitement, or throw a party, or in some way acknowledge that you’ve finally done it: you’ve discovered yourself. But in practice, the quest never ends, because fully knowing oneself is impossible. This sounds obvious, but it’s hard to internalize in a culture that treats perpetual self-discovery as a virtue.

The urge to discover oneself is a drive many people experience at some point—and for some, it never really goes away. I’m not sure if this is learned or inherent, but there is wide speculation that it’s the former. In her extended essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf curiously notes the scarcity of work about the inner states of writers and artists in the sixteenth century. “Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps,” she thinks. “[B]y the nineteenth century, self-consciousness had developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters to describe their minds in confessions and autobiographies.”

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had the same thought in one of my favorite books, Escape from Freedom. He traces the seeds of our self-consciousness—in the literal sense, as in the consciousness of our selves as individuals—back to the Renaissance, when Humanity replaced God/The Church as the center of the universe. Suddenly, who you were was not predetermined based on your class, geography, family standing, or whatever basis society used to justify your role in it. Suddenly, who you were was much more up to you—much more up to interpretation, analysis, and discovery.

The idea that we can and should discover ourselves has a rich history, and it does kind of feel like we’re at the height of it now. But is such discovery possible? When people talk about self-discovery, it’s either implied or entirely overlooked that the end goal is the complete knowledge of oneself.2 It’s a Sisyphean task parading as an achievable goal. It dooms us to failure from the start.

complete vs. accurate self-knowledge

A complete understanding of yourself would require gathering and evaluating an incomprehensible (and unattainable) amount of data, like what everyone thinks of you at each stage of your life and how you would react in every possible scenario. How would you respond to life-or-death situations? What about in rare and unusual circumstances? How might your reactions differ at various times in your life? If you’re lucky, you will never know how you would respond to being stranded on an island—but that situation would yield information about yourself that is, at the very least, interesting to know, but more importantly, crucial if you want to completely understand what kind of person you are. You could guess based on the knowledge you currently have about your personality and background and past experiences, but you won’t really know your response until you live this nightmare island scenario.3

Since we can’t gain a complete understanding of ourselves, we have to settle for the next best thing: an incomplete understanding that requires constant updating—hopefully in the right direction—as we continue to take in more information from our peers and life experiences. The key phrase here is “in the right direction.” One could interpret information incorrectly and update further away from reality. One example of this is when victims of abuse eventually believe their abusers’ character attacks, which leads to feelings of worthlessness and insecurity. An opposite but equally problematic example is when narcissists surround themselves with people who feed their egos, which protects (and strengthens!) their already unrealistic sense of self.

Here’s how I see it: complete self-knowledge is impossible, so we must accept that self-knowledge will always be incomplete. It’s not like we begin at 0% self-knowledge and then embark on an Eat, Pray, Love journey to bring us to 60% self-knowledge and then hopefully, somehow, reach 100% before we die—no matter how tempting this mentality might be.4

From Joanna Biggs’ bibliomemoir, A Life of One’s Own: “There are moments in life where you shock yourself by what you want and what you’ve done, and they stop you from being able to trust yourself. You may not even be on the wrong path, but your ease in your own reactions has gone.” There is no such thing as complete self-knowledge because we are constantly changing. If our hearts and minds are gentle and loving and open to it, we could learn a thing or two about ourselves—but that thing or two might change with time, only for us to have to relearn it, again and again and again. Maybe that’s what makes the often failed attempts at self-discovery so tragic. You can take drastic measures in an attempt to find yourself, only to realize in the end that there is no finding yourself—there is only gaining incremental knowledge about yourself that could change in an instant depending on your circumstances.

Perhaps a more productive framework, then, is to focus on the accuracy of our self-knowledge, also known as self-awareness. How close to reality is your understanding of yourself at this moment? To what extent are you deceiving yourself when you call yourself a loser, ugly, dumb, or the smartest person in the room? Do you know your values, and how others perceive you? Are you running away from what you have already learned about yourself? Are you open to the fact that you will change?

While the quest for the completeness of self-knowledge implies an end that does not exist in reality (and therefore oppresses us), the quest for the accuracy of self-knowledge recognizes that we are constantly changing (and therefore liberates us).

I don’t see accuracy as binary as I do completeness. It’s a bit more complex. Research conducted by organizational psychologist Dr. Tasha Eurich suggests that each person falls on a spectrum from high to low internal self-awareness and high to low external self-awareness. (While 95% of the people she studied believed they fit the criteria for high self-awareness, just 10% to 15% actually did; it’s a rare quality.)

Dr. Eurich defines internal self-awareness as “how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others.” Meanwhile, external self-awareness is understanding those same factors, but in terms of how others view us. The two types of self-awareness are independent of each other, but they are skills that can be developed. One way to become more self-aware is to introspect correctly, by asking “what” questions instead of “why” questions when trying to better understand yourself. The former helps you find solutions, the latter causes rumination.5

Dr. Eurich’s study is targeted at the corporate world, but her findings are relevant to all aspects of our lives. I think of people who score high on both internal and external self-awareness as being integrated. They have insight into themselves.

fracturing the self

At the start of this post, I noted my belief that I present my “authentic self” to people. But what if I’m thinking about the self all wrong? An authentic self implies the existence of an inauthentic self and, thus, some sort of fracturing of the self. What if there’s is only Self, rather than the dualities we agonize over: higher vs. lower, instinctual vs. intellectual, controller vs. controlled, good vs. bad, current vs. desired?

In his essay “Zen and Control,” philosopher Alan Watts writes at length about the issues that arise from fracturing our sense of self in this way:

The problem is this: man is a self-conscious and therefore self-controlling organism, but how is he to control the aspect of himself that does the controlling?

It is of great interest that we cannot effectively think about self-control without making a separation between the controller and the controlled, even when—as the word “self-control” implies—the two are one and the same.

I have not stopped thinking about this since I read it months ago. But it opens up a whole new can of worms about the nature of the self and consciousness, an impossible question that has been debated fiercely for a long, long time—one I certainly won’t be able to figure out in a blog post, despite my obsession with it for years now. Perhaps more on that some other time.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts about the points I made regarding self-discovery and the self. Do you disagree? What’s your experience?

More often than not, mainstream discussions of mental illness are simplistic, formulaic, and deterministic. Psychobabble and therapy-speak dominate all kinds of discourse—whether or not they explicitly have to do with mental health—creating a society that is obsessed more with the appearance of mental well-being than the achievement of it.

This has, unsurprisingly, left me frustrated with and skeptical of the current state of therapy, which seems to have normalized much of the nonsensical discourse around mental health. But several months ago, I watched a two-part interview with psychotherapist Nancy McWilliams that had a tremendous effect on me. For the first time, I was able to watch what exceptional therapy looks like, and I developed an appreciation for its practitioners, rare as they may be.

In my last post, defining mental health, I shared the main takeaways from the first part of McWilliams’ interview, which covered the 10 qualities of mental health. To recap, these are safety and attachment security; self-continuation; self-efficacy; self-esteem; resilience; self-reflection and mentalization; self vs. community advocacy; vitality (my favorite one); acceptance; and love, work, and play.

In this post, I want to share information from the second part of her interview, which covers the psychodynamic diagnostic process, a more nuanced approach to therapy and mental health than the system laid out by the DSM. She talks about the common personality types seen in therapy, how they manifest on a spectrum from high- to low-functioning, how each level on the spectrum should be treated according to research, and specific examples of therapist-patient interactions at each level.

Whether you decide just to watch the interview, read this post, or do both, I believe this information will be helpful to all, regardless of their experiences with mental illness. I strongly recommend watching the interview at some point, as I had to leave out a lot of details and fascinating examples for the sake of length.

McWilliams speaks about this topic in a precise and nuanced way, choosing each word with care and intention—I hope this is evident in my post.

Enjoy.

Early on in the interview, Nancy McWilliams touches on one of the reasons behind the modern simplification of mental illness:

Some of the things that have made clinical thinking less popular are: one, the pressures of drug companies, who love categorical diagnosis—because if you have an illness, they can market a drug for it; they don’t want to hear about complexity and context and dimensionality. And two, if you’re an insurance company, you think, OK, all you have to do is get rid of the symptoms. They don’t do that with other illnesses, but they do with psychiatric illnesses.

You miss a lot when you diagnose that way. For example, you can’t tell by the DSM description of depressive disorders whether it’s an introjective depression—where the subjective experience is I’m bad, I’m evil, I’m a terrible person, and there’s a lot of guilt—versus an anaclitic depression, where the person feels I’m empty, I’m hungry, I need an attachment, life is meaningless without an attachment. Those two kinds of subjective experiences of depression have exactly the same vegetative signs and meet the same DSM criteria, but they have different implications for treatment.

The rest of the interview demonstrates exactly why such nuance is so important. McWilliams begins by describing some of the common personalities seen in therapy and how a skilled therapist might approach treatment based on each type. But there’s an added level of complexity to providing the best treatment: what matters is how each personality manifests depending on its level of dysfunction, with healthy and neurotic at the high-functioning end of the spectrum, followed by borderline, and then psychotic at the most severe end.

Let’s start with the personality types before moving to the levels of (dys)function.

some common personality types in therapy

Depressive personality is characterized by “a pattern of pervasive, chronic sense of loss; inadequacy; a deep-seated fear of rejection or disappointing others; chronic self-criticism.”

Depressive personalities are sensitive to criticism and tend to use introjection, or “the unconscious adoption of ideas and attitudes from others.” When criticized, they tend to assume that there is, in fact, something wrong with them. This differs from, say, paranoid people, who might respond to criticism by using projection, or turning the criticism back at the person criticizing: “What’s wrong with YOU?”

Self-defeating people with depressive problems might approach their issues as perpetual victims. Like those who lack vitality, the self-defeating might see therapy as an opportunity to complain about other people and assign therapists the impossible task of fixing their lives.

One thing to note is that someone with a depressive personality might never experience a depressive episode, but they have the dynamics that go into one.

Masochistic personality, a type of depressive psychology, is characterized by “self-sacrifice, enduring suffering, a tendency to seek punishment, and a struggle with assertiveness.”

Those with a masochistic personality are compelled to demonstrate their suffering to others either to show they are a good person or to maintain a relationship. The masochistic type (e.g., someone who stays with an abusive partner because the alternative, being alone, seems worse for them) does not necessarily enjoy pain. Rather, his pain tolerance might have developed as a survival strategy (e.g., his parents only paid attention to him when he was in pain; he had to rely on his abusive parents for food and shelter as a child).

Paranoid personality can be characterized by a “pervasive distrust of others, coupled with a tendency to interpret others’ actions as malevolent.”

While they are often (rightly) described as suspicious and distrusting, paranoid people might also over-trust the people they idealize. For that reason, their psychology is best thought of in terms of their preoccupation with trust and distrust; they do not have normal levels of either.

Schizoid personality is traditionally characterized by “emotional detachment, social disinterest, and a preference for introspective solitary activities.”

While paranoids are preoccupied with trust vs. distrust, schizoids are preoccupied with closeness vs. distance; they feel lonely and want to be close to others but often retreat when closeness occurs.

Obsessive-compulsive personality is characterized by “perfectionism, rigidity, a fear of losing control, preoccupation of order, difficulty delegating tasks; they are organized around what’s right to do, timely, conscientious, neat, fastidious.”

At the same time, and in line with the theme of control vs. discontrol, obsessive-compulsives might have a part of their life that is out of control, like a dirty drawer.

Throughout the interview, McWilliams illustrates the implications of each personality type for treatment. For example:

If you’re a patient with a schizoid psychology, and I [the therapist] don’t get that about you, I may—because I have a depressive psychology—be moving toward you, trying to comfort you, trying to offer you stuff.

But your experience of that is going to be, you’re impinging on me, you’re in my space, I’m not comfortable. So, with a schizoid person, I’ve learned to sit back and check in on how over-stimulated they may be feeling in this particular point.

Meanwhile, the paranoid patient will likely be concerned with trust and the possibility of betrayal; the obsessive-compulsive with control vs. discontrol, neatness vs. messiness, promptness vs. lateness.

Histrionic personality types are interested in gender, power, and sexuality, and are characterized by “attention-seeking behavior, emotional shallowness, a strong desire for external validation, and intense emotional expressions.”

Here’s another example of how personality type influences treatment:

If you are a powerful, heterosexual male treating a female who has somewhat hysterical tendencies, you don’t want to mansplain to her, because her psychology is that she feels like the inferior or weaker gender. So, you want to help her find her own solutions to things rather than come in like, you know what you should do? Because that’s a replication of the sense that men have the power and women don’t. And if you don’t have the power, all you can do is try to use your sexuality to even up the power disparity—and that usually goes badly.

But there are other kinds of personality which, if you simply keep asking the patient, how have you thought about that? what would your solution be? how do you feel about that and what implications does that have for your life? they feel like you’re being evasive. With a paranoid patient, they want to know what you think.

Narcissistic personality is characterized by “grandiosity or covert grandiose fantasies, a need for admiration, and avoidance of feelings of inadequacy; this is accompanied by a lack of empathy and a sense of entitlement.”

McWilliams reminds us of closet narcissists: those who seek help from therapists to gain popularity, fame, or riches, and believe such status will solve all their problems. This is not much different from the narcissists who already believe they are popular or wonderful—both are concerned with the same preoccupations. Their grandiosity is used to defend against shame.

According to McWilliams: “If you have an arrogant narcissistic person, the kind that the DSM describes, and they have a terrible injury—they aren’t promoted or they lose their job, beauty, wealth, or whatever it is they’re constructing their grandiosity on—then you see the shamed, anxious, humiliated version: the closet narcissist.”

Dependent personality is characterized by “excessive reliance on others, a fear of abandonment, passivity, and constant seeking of reassurance to mitigate fears of abandonment.”

Dependent people define who they are in relation to others—e.g., someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s teacher—and don’t know who they are absent those relationships. Meanwhile, counter-dependent personalities “avoid dependencies, intimacy, and are concerned with maintaining autonomy and self-reliance.” They believe that they can’t depend on anyone but themselves.

Psychopathic personality, or what the DSM calls anti-social personality, is characterized by “manipulative behavior, impulsivity, deceitful conduct, shallow emotions, and a disregard for the rights and feelings of others without ethical constraints.”

The internal experience of the psychopathic personality, which the DSM glosses over, is the need for omnipotent control. My worth is dependent only on what I can make happen. I’m understimulated, so I’m going to attack the world manipulatively, and I don’t care about other people. These people tend to be in or seek very powerful positions because power organizes everything. McWilliams explains that they love power more than the narcissistic gratification of being seen as powerful.

levels of personality organization

McWilliams reminds us that it’s almost always the case that people have some combination of different personalities—but understanding the levels of personality organization is what allows for truly personalized and effective treatments. People’s psychologies are organized on a spectrum from high-functioning (i.e., healthy and neurotic) to dysfunctional (i.e., borderline and psychotic).

Healthy organization is characterized by “adaptive coping, positive relationships, realistic self-perception, resilience, effective problem-solving, and fulfillment.”

Neurotic organization is characterized by “moderate psychological distress, anxiety-driven behaviors, and unresolved conflicts.”1

Some typical characteristics of those at the high-functioning level:

• Almost every therapy will be useful

• They have healthy attachment security and assume their therapists are well-intentioned, even when providing difficult feedback or advice

• They can observe complexity within themselves and others, building three-dimensional pictures of people (i.e., not all good vs. all bad)

• They respect boundaries with their therapists and can easily resolve ruptures in therapist-patient relationships

• They can develop realistic goals in therapy

• They can acknowledge painful realities and talk about them with nuance as opposed to being in denial or relying on blame; they feel catharsis and relief at the end of sessions after describing their feelings, which allows them to move quickly toward grieving

• They are more likely to use adaptive, rather than primitive, defenses; these include sublimation (transforming socially unacceptable impulses to socially acceptable or productive activities, like redirecting sadistic urges by becoming a surgeon) or having a sense of humor about themselves

  

Borderline organization is characterized by “intense emotional instability, identity issues, fear of abandonment, turbulent relationships, impulsive behavior, self-image challenges.” The psychodynamic process uses the term borderline for people who are too troubled to be considered just neurotic, but not troubled enough to be considered psychotic; hence, they are on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis.

This original definition is distinct from the way borderline is commonly used today. As McWilliams describes: “When DSM-III decided they had to include something about borderline in 1980, but they didn’t want to talk about anything dimensional, they took a type of borderline—namely a histrionic, self-dramatizing, affect dysregulated kind of borderline—and made it the definition.”

Some typical characteristics of those at the borderline level:

• It’s hard to put themselves back together after talking about their feelings in a session

• They tend to have insecure, anxious, and disoriented/distressed attachment

• They are not able to modulate their affect and often experience intense affects

• They rely on primitive, rather than adaptive, defenses such as:

  • Denial, withdrawal, dissociation

  • Splitting: seeing oneself or others as either all good or all bad; the inability to integrate conflicting feelings

  • Projection: the unconscious attribution of one’s unconscious (and usually disavowed) thoughts and feelings onto others; this includes doing it in a way that makes that projection true or induces the projected feelings in the other

  • Omnipotent control: a belief that one can “make anything happen”; an enjoyment of exerting power over others, though this is more evident in the psychopathic level of organization

Several clinicians are working on therapies specifically for those at the borderline level. McWilliams highlights some commonalities between their discoveries:

• The top priority for therapists at this level is to monitor the therapist-patient relationship because stability cannot be taken for granted the way it is at the healthy or neurotic levels. This means consistently asking patients how they feel about the topics of conversation and the pace of the therapy. This approach is important for maintaining an alliance with a borderline patient, whereas it might come off infantilizing to someone on the high-functioning end of the spectrum.

• The therapist should expect ruptures in the therapist-patient relationship; these will be painful and often happen early on, and most of the therapeutic work will be spent on repairing those ruptures. People at the borderline level know they are difficult and that they have a strong impact on people, so one implication of this is that therapists cannot be too neutral like they would with neurotic patients; acknowledgment of a borderline patient’s strong impact on people is more productive for treatment. For example, if Sally, who is at the borderline level, tells her therapist Mike that she started cutting herself again and asks him if he’s mad at her, it’s more productive for Mike to respond with: “Look, it’s my job to help you be less self-destructive and right now you’re being more self-destructive. That doesn’t make me happy. What’s it like for you to see the anger on my face?” instead of “Let’s investigate why you think I’m angry with you.”

• Therapists need to be very explicit about their limits and boundaries. For example, they might implement contracts about the consequences for various acts of self-harm or boundaries around communication (e.g., when to text or call, if at all). Therapists should also expect patients at this level to test these boundaries—but they must uphold them nonetheless, no matter how hard it is (e.g., ending a session on time, even if the patient is in a fetal position crying over the topics discussed). This is because people at this level tend to have experienced boundary violations (e.g., sexual assault), so it’s important to have a therapist who models what boundary setting and adherence look like in order to build that trust. Patients will likely express anger at the boundaries when they are enforced, but what’s likely happening subconsciously when patients test boundaries is that they are assessing whether rules will be rationalized and changed (which happens, for example, in cases of molestation).

• Therapists have to be more emotionally expressive, especially when they are presented with binary dilemmas by the patient. McWilliams approaches this by explicitly asking for supervision from her patients. For example, when one of her patients at the borderline level falls silent, McWilliams will say something like, “As your therapist, I’m not sure what’s helpful to you when you fall silent like this. Part of me says I should be drawing you out, but then I’ll be seen as someone with an agenda. Another part of me is saying to wait until you’re comfortable talking to me, but I’m afraid you’ll see that as abandonment. What do you want me to do when you’re silent like this?” Sometimes patients might respond with fuck you, you’re the doctor, you figure it out, but other times they have solutions in mind. Either way, they get the message that the therapist is trying to help. One of her patients offered the solution to just wait for him to feel comfortable, and he tested her by not saying anything for three full sessions. Again, here is a boundary being set (by the patient this time), and it’s important to adhere to it.

• Therapists should expect intense countertransferences, defined as “a therapist's emotional response to a client that is influenced by their past experiences, unresolved issues, and personal biases.” These emotional responses can be positive or negative, but they must be managed either way.

• Therapists need consultation and supervision when they are treating patients at the borderline level. The best way to do this is by presenting their patient cases to a team of other clinicians who treat at this level.

Borderline patients who are successfully treated will become much more adaptable and self-soothing versions of themselves, but their intense psychology will remain.

Psychotic organization is characterized by “severe reality distortion, hallucinations, and delusions; impaired thought processes, disrupted emotions, and significant functional impairment.”

Some typical characteristics of those at the psychotic level:

• They get confused between the boundary of self vs. other. McWilliams once had a patient who would rapidly change the topic when he started speaking about traumatic experiences. She shared this observation with him and expected him to say he just wasn’t ready to discuss those topics (as perhaps someone at the neurotic level might say). Instead, he said he was doing that to avoid hurting her. “He saw sympathetic sadness on my face when he started to get sad and felt he was damaging me. He couldn’t imagine that I was a separate person able to feel compassionately for his suffering. That is a [subtle] psychotic level of confusion between his mind and my mind,” she says.

• There are also many at this level who are not diagnosable as schizophrenic or as psychotically manic or depressive, but who are very confused about what’s inside vs. outside and are invested in peculiar beliefs. The primitive defenses they rely on are not working for them and they are fragile and often in a state of terror.

Therapies for patients at the psychotic level will differ from therapies for those at the healthy or borderline level. For instance:

• Therapists should be aware that patients may be making profound misinterpretations throughout therapy.

• The top priority for therapists at this level is ensuring an environment that feels safe for the patient. This might require, for example, conducting sessions with an open door or letting patients examine the office before beginning sessions.

• Therapists need to achieve a (tricky) balance between egalitarian and authoritative tones in therapy. They need to demonstrate that they are just another human being trying to help the patient, but that they also are competent and skilled in this area. The former prevents patients from feeling like they’re being condescended to, while the latter helps them feel like they are with someone who knows what to do.

• It’s important to maintain a tone of respect. For example, a therapist might respond to a delusional patient’s theory by saying it’s brilliant—but when asked by the patient if the therapist agrees with the theory, the therapist would gently say something like, “No, I disagree for XYZ reasons, but if you want to hear what I think, I’d be happy to share.” Here, the therapist is looking up at the patient—not in an idealizing or admiring way, but in an “I can learn something from you” way. This is crucial with this group because they have histories of humiliation, which is a cause and effect of psychotic personality. Therapists should be anti-humiliators.

• Oftentimes, patients at this level will have severe emotional reactions about simple thoughts, or they will fuse meaning with certain perceptions or emotions, so therapists will likely need to spend a lot of time teaching them to differentiate between inside and outside, thoughts and behaviors, etc. McWilliams provides a good example of this from her own practice:

  There’s a certain amount of educating that goes on with people at this level, and you can do it not necessarily by heavy-handed didactic stuff.
  
  For example, I had a woman in this range who came to me really upset at herself and felt she was a horrible person—she used the phrase the spawn of Satan—because she found herself having the fantasy of strangling her teenage daughter. So I was just about to go into this lecture about how most parents have fantasies of strangling their oppositional teenage kids now and then—but I realized she was so sensitive to humiliation that if I took that stance, it would sound like I was talking down to her.
  
  So I said, “Ugh, tell me about it, when my daughters were that age I wanted to strangle them three times a day!” That made us equals. That imparted the lesson without my being a heavy-handed educator.

• Therapists should recognize and validate that patients are attempting to solve their personal problems, even if their solutions are delusional. By acknowledging this effort, therapists can help patients see the maladaptiveness of their solutions.

• Therapists will need to be conversational with patients at this level, even more so than with those at the borderline level. Neutrality is counterproductive.

Counterintuitively, successfully treating someone at the psychotic level does not mean that person becomes borderline. Rather, it means they become a well-compensated person who is still dealing with a lot of annihilation anxiety but does not need to rely on delusions to manage the anxiety.

Applying this dynamic lens to mental health is crucial because it allows therapists to provide tailored treatments with higher success. Someone with OCD symptoms in the healthy to neurotic range could be a great candidate for exposure therapy, whereas someone else with identical OCD symptoms in the borderline or psychotic range will require much more work before she could ever benefit from exposure therapy. This is despite the fact that exposure therapy tends to be blanketly regarded as the evidence-based treatment of choice for OCD.

McWilliams reminds us that the goal of therapy is not necessarily to change who someone is but to help that person become more functional:

In terms of the levels, you want to help people become a better version of somebody at that level. But in terms of the types . . . you can change the economics, not the dynamics. You can help an obsessive-compulsive person find much better ways to deal with anger than rituals or intrusive thinking. But you’re not going to turn that person into a hysterical person or a depressive person. They’re still going to be obsessively organized, but they’ll be much more flexible, have more range, be able to use a much wider group of defenses, and not feel quite so rigid.

I’ve been thinking about this interview with McWilliams for months now. I revisit it often; it helps remind me that both socially and psychologically, humans are incredibly complex. I have immense gratitude for those who understand and work with these complexities, rather than exploit or dismiss them. More than anything, I was finally able to witness the level of skill (and patience, compassion, self-reflection) required for a therapist to be exceptional. Hence, my newfound respect for therapists.

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It’s no secret: I’ve openly regarded therapy with skepticism at best and disdain at worst for a very long time. Justified or not, there are probably a few reasons for this:

1. I had a pretty lousy experience with therapy in college. The few sessions I attended made me feel pitied at one extreme and silly for complaining at the other extreme. At the same time, I wasn’t told anything I didn’t already know or hadn’t already practiced on my own, so the sessions felt useless. I also couldn’t shake the highly transactional nature of the relationship.
   

2. I’ll start with the positive here. The push to destigmatize mental illness, therapy, and psychiatric medications over a decade ago was very much needed, and I sometimes don’t appreciate it enough. Growing up, my community dismissed depression and anxiety as signs that one was not close enough to God, and that was usually the end of the conversation. The destigmatization movement was well-intentioned, and I’m thankful for it. In fact, some of the negative outcomes from this movement are still better than the previous status quo: the trend of over-seeking and -identifying with trauma is still better than the alternative, which is when people refuse to acknowledge and work through their traumas, terrorizing everyone with their unresolved issues as a result. (Think of the parents who claim it’s OK to hit children because they were hit and “turned out fine.”)

   
   But things have gone too far, and it has given me pause. As meticulously documents in her Substack GIRLS, psychiatric-related industries have pathologized every aspect of human life, preying on adolescents and young adults in particular. (Who else remembers the Betterhelp ad that shows a bunch of girlfriends saying it’s a red flag when a man doesn’t go to therapy?) We didn’t stop at destigmatization—we quickly moved to normalization and even glamorization, as I wrote in my previous post i’m broken, but at least i’m interesting. There’s a pervasive narrative that everyone could benefit from therapy. It’s also becoming increasingly taboo to question the efficacy and safety of psychiatric medications.
   

3. For every good therapist, there is more than one bad therapist. I don’t know the ratio of good to bad therapists, but my guess is pretty cynical. (I’ll keep it to myself.) points this out on his Twitter by highlighting the results of a study about so-called super-shrinks: “The therapists whose clients showed the fastest rate of improvement had an average rate of change 10 times greater than the mean for the sample. The therapists whose clients showed the slowest rate of improvement actually showed an average increase in symptoms among their clients.” The study found no significant differences in patient outcomes based on therapists’ gender, level or type of training, or theoretical orientation—suggesting that the differences in outcomes likely came down to the individual characteristics of the therapists themselves.

   
   The study has significant limitations, but it invites us to ask critical questions: what makes a therapist bad, and just how harmful is it to be treated by one? Do super-shrinks exist, and if so, how can we develop more of them? We’ve all heard horror stories, like therapists who are unprofessional during Zoom calls, blur boundaries with their patients, refuse to push back on unhealthy behaviors, or encourage patients to think everyone else is the enemy. It might behoove us to consider that no therapist at all is better than a bad therapist.

All that being said, I am here to acknowledge my newfound appreciation for therapy. Specifically, for good therapists. No! For exceptional therapists.

It might seem obvious that exceptional therapists are impressive and should be appreciated; I knew that even at the height of my resentment toward the industry. But my understanding of exceptional therapists was limited by the fact that I had never seen or experienced, and therefore could not imagine, what this might look like—until I watched an interview with psychotherapist Nancy McWilliams.

Her ability to identify patients' specific personalities and health statuses, and respond accordingly, is phenomenal, and I have to share the insights from her interview with as many people as possible.

The interview is split into two sessions and is more than an hour and a half long (though not long enough). In this post, I’ll summarize the main takeaways from the first part of her interview, which defines 10 qualities of mental health.

This should provide a foundation for my next post, where I’ll share my notes from the second part of her interview—which was significantly more impactful for me. It explains the psychodynamic diagnostic process (a more nuanced approach to therapy and mental health than the system laid out by the DSM), including common personality types seen in therapy, how they manifest on a spectrum from high- to low-functioning, how each level on the spectrum should be treated according to research, and specific examples of therapist-patient interactions at each level.

I’m so excited to share these notes in my next post, but for now, let’s start with the fundamentals: what is mental health?

defining mental health qualities

Pop psychology might lead us to believe that the hallmark of mental health is happiness, but of course, it’s a little more complex than that.

According to Nancy McWilliams, there are 10 qualities of mental health. I want to summarize her account of these qualities to establish a foundation for my upcoming post, which will cover the different personalities prevalent in therapy and how a skilled therapist might approach each one in treatment.

• Safety and attachment security
  This is the ability to develop epistemic trust, or a “willingness to consider new knowledge from another person as trustworthy, generalizable, and relevant to the self.” This allows individuals to feel safer in relationships and experience joy and comfort around others, rather than solely torment. McWilliams highlights that one of the conditions for moving from insecure to secure attachment styles is having a devoted relationship of some kind that lasts at least five years.
  

• Self-continuation
  An individual with self-continuation or self-constancy has a sense of being the same person across time, space, and within the body. Someone who struggles with this might react with bewilderment over questions like, what kind of person were you as a child? how do you see yourself in five years?—as if they were asked to describe a total stranger. They might not have the capacity to see both good and bad within themselves; they tend to define themselves entirely as one or the other.
  
  Regarding the body, McWilliams says: “More and more patients I see seem to regard their body as a foreign object. You can cut it, burn it, starve it—as if it’s an it. They don’t feel fully embodied. They don’t feel like their body is ‘me,’ like it deserves for them to eat well or exercise well.” Someone who does not have a constant way of being recurringly experiences dissociation from the self.

  
  I love this passage from Alan Watts’ essay Spirituality and Sensuality about the importance of integrating both the good and bad in oneself:

  It has often been said that the human being is a combination of angel and animal, a spirit imprisoned in flesh, a descent of divinity into materiality, charged with the duty of transforming the gross elements of the lower world into the image of God. Ordinarily this has been taken to mean that the animal and fleshly aspect of man is to be changed out of all recognition . . .

  Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner . . . is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete.

• Self-efficacy
  This is also referred to as agency or autonomy. It’s the sense that one can make choices that influence his or her life. (I wrote about this in my post agency: it’s only human.) McWilliams points out that therapists typically notice self-efficacy when it’s lacking. A therapist might ask a patient why he married his wife, and he might respond, “I don’t know. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.” Similarly, one might ask a teenage girl if she felt desired when giving oral sex to a guy or if this act was something she wanted, only to realize that it never occurred to the teenage girl that sexual acts should be a result of her own desires.
  
  Patients with low efficacy might shudder at a therapist’s suggestion to make their wants or needs explicit; their default tends to be an expectation that others should just know what they want or need and simply offer it—an unrealistic expectation that often breeds resentment.
  
  They also tend to talk as though the world just happens to them. There is some truth to this—we cannot control everything. But McWilliams reminds us that even in extreme situations like the Holocaust, some people found small ways to reassert their freedoms. (Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning is a fantastic example of this.)
  

• Self-esteem
  The key here is self-esteem which is both realistic and reliable. Realistic self-esteem is exactly what it sounds like: having reasonably high and meetable standards to evaluate oneself. Someone with unrealistic self-esteem might feel bad if he or she falls short of perfectionism—or believe that everything he or she says is the ultimate truth that must be worshipped.
  
  Self-esteem is reliable when it remains realistic and intact even in the face of criticism or high praise. Criticism of your work shouldn’t send you into a depressive spiral, and praise of your ideas shouldn’t inflate your sense of importance to an unrealistic degree.
  

• Resilience
  This is also known as flexibility or affect modulation (i.e., the capacity to keep oneself within tolerable ranges, for instance between over-stimulation and under-stimulation). This typically requires an ability to rely on high-functioning defenses like humor and sublimation. McWilliams sums it up as “going through difficult stuff and still maintaining a sense that you’re going on being.”
  
  We have a much better understanding of trauma than we do resilience. Why do some kids become stronger after difficult situations, while others break down in the same situation? I’ve been fascinated by this exact question for as long as I can remember. Resilience can be developed, but I often wonder how much of it can be tied back to upbringing or innate characteristics like personality.
  

• Self-reflection and mentalization
  If you’re familiar with psychoanalysis, you might know this as insight into illness or the capacity to look at one’s own mind. Someone lacking this ability might struggle with questions like, why do you think you got triggered there? what’s the pattern for when you find yourself feeling paranoid? McWilliams recalls that in the past, it was believed that insight caused therapeutic change, whereas today, the belief is that insight tends to be the result of therapeutic change.
  
  Another important aspect of mentalization involves the ability to imagine the subjective experiences of other people; this is known as the I-Thou relationship, in which one sees others as subjects with minds, not merely objects. Patients lacking this ability might struggle to imagine that their therapists do not intend to hurt them when questioning certain beliefs.
  

• Self vs. community advocacy
  The spectrum between self-advocacy and adaption to the community is a recurring theme in clinical writing. People have needs for both, but each culture tends to emphasize one more than the other. Counter to what one might expect, psychologically healthy people don’t necessarily exist in the middle or lean toward the pole most adaptive to their culture. Rather, psychologically healthy people are strong on both ends of the spectrum: they can advocate for themselves when appropriate and subordinate their own needs to the needs of others or the community when required. This finding eliminates the temptation to pathologize cultures that emphasize one end of the spectrum over the other.
  

• Vitality
  This one is my personal favorite, mainly because I’ve seen how devastating it can be when someone loses vitality. Recalling her clinical experiences, McWilliams says patients who lack this are the hardest to help—even harder than those who are furious at her. They tend to approach therapy with a defeatist mentality: let’s see if you can bring me to life; no one else can. Prove to me there’s any point in living life.
  
  It’s not exactly depression, she says. It’s more like anhedonia. You might describe someone with an absence of vitality as being dead inside. It’s hard to find something that enlivens them. It’s hard to build a relationship with them that they consider meaningful because they’re in defense mode and nothing matters to them. Their natural enthusiasm, energy, and curiosity might have been discouraged or forbidden early on in their life, and they have yet to recover.
  

• Acceptance
  This is the ability to accept what cannot be changed, like trauma endured at a young age. One goal of psychotherapy is to help people accept, rather than change, who they are. McWilliams stresses that this is not like positive psychology, which emphasizes happiness instead of the importance of tolerating grief and other inevitable negative emotions. “If you accept the stuff you can’t change and grieve it, you can move on to forgiveness and gratitude,” she says.
  

• Love, work, play
  Love: can you love people as they are rather than idealizing them? Can you be devoted to their welfare? Can you make sacrifices for them? Do they exist as a subject to you, instead of an object?
  
  Work: do you do something that has meaning to you, even if it’s difficult or not something inherently satisfying? Does your work make you feel like a contributor to your community? Does it make you feel like you matter?
  
  Play: do you participate with others in sports, dancing, singing, and other activities? Are you making room for unscripted social engagements?

Many of these qualities might seem intuitive, but the language used in mental health discourse has gotten so convoluted that I think it’s important to establish clear definitions and goals for what constitutes mental health in the first place. The examples provided here really helped me understand these qualities and their significance at a deeper level.

I hope you enjoyed this post and come back for the next one, which I genuinely believe can be helpful to all who read it—whether or not they or their loved ones experience mental illnesses.

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The divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable, a fact that I find both haunting and promising. It’s startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.
— Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

I love reading personal blogs and Substacks because I frequently come across a post so good that I think about it for weeks, months, and sometimes even years after reading it. I don’t know what it is about the personal blog format that does this for me; I rarely get the same satisfaction when reading pieces from seasoned journalists writing for traditional outlets such as the New York Times. Perhaps ideas click better when reading someone’s minimally edited thoughts and streams of consciousness.

Sometimes these blog posts disrupt my worldview and force me to scrutinize some of my long-standing beliefs. Other times, they put into words things I’ve always felt intuitively but never known how to verbalize; this allows me to connect and give purpose to the ideas floating around in my head.

Two years ago, I came across a post on Substack that had the latter effect on me. I’m still thinking about it, and now, here I am writing about it.

In her post Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters, Rayne Fisher-Quann talks about how easy it is for women to turn their neuroses, mental illnesses, and traumas into romanticized personas for online consumption.1 In just a few paragraphs, she perfectly articulates this trap into which so many women and girls fall. It’s a mindset that has been around long before my time, but one that I’m sure has been exacerbated by the continued proliferation of social media:

it’s easy, as a woman, to compactify illness into a consumable package — to whittle at the edges of pathology until it becomes little more than smudged eyeliner and wild sex. childhood trauma becomes daddy issues, suicidal depression becomes mystique. selling your pain is easier than living with it.

i am in my hysterical 20th-century woman era, i would think, unlikeably. i am sleeping at erratic hours, i am sobbing, i am writing and never publishing, i am seeing shapes in my wallpaper. i am never washing my face, i am eating lavishly, i am ruining my reputation. i am making sure to eat a square of dark chocolate during my depressive episodes so they’ll sound sexy in my memoirs. even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing.

like the great mad women before me, i am spiralling into manic-depressive chaos in a way that i will inevitably romanticize regardless of its material consequences, and self-mythologizing until i can make that feel like a good thing. i’m not unwell or self-destructive or entirely unbearable — i’m in my fleabag era! we rationalize our own suffering through the romanticization of those who have suffered before us and, in turn, we provide a blueprint for the hot-girl suffering of those after. we commodify that rationalization through the era-appropriate medium. this is a cycle, apparently, that never ends.

To sum up my reaction in just one word: wow. The part about living for our biographies really stood out to me. Is viewing oneself through the lens of an audience (other women, men, future self, younger self, God, parents, whoever) largely a female trait? If so, is it predominantly due to socialization? Does this kind of external self-perception contribute to mental illness, and the romanticization of it? I showed my friend the passage from Rayne Fisher-Quann quoted above, and she said something I can’t stop thinking about: every time she writes in her journal, she writes as though an audience will later consume her entries. She doesn’t know why she does this, and she doesn’t know how to stop doing this. (And no, she’s not active online.)

YouTuber oliSUNvia shared a similar experience. Her pre-teen diary entries were extremely dark, but she admits:

I was a fraud. Yes, I was sad a lot. Yes, I had low self-esteem. But I wasn’t suicidal. I never had a real panic attack. It’s so embarrassing and disappointing to acknowledge that that’s how I once acted.

I thought that in order to give my sad emotions meaning, I had to make my sadness sound right. I couldn’t just scribble down diary entries however I wanted, with simple language and basic sentence structure. Who am I, Rupi Kaur? God, no. I had to write beautifully. Pre-teen Olivia made sure that her sadness was translated into words that sounded straight out of black-and-white, deep Tumblr GIFs. I needed my thoughts and feelings to be beautiful, because that’s the only time I saw society value mental illness: when it was delivered to us in the form of aesthetic art. In fact, I felt that to be deep and introspective, I needed to be sad. I had to be lonely and pessimistic in order to be truly enlightened about real life.

storytelling

This got me thinking about how so much of our understanding of ourselves is shaped by storytelling—even when that means pretending that the story we’re telling ourselves will one day be consumed by others (e.g., writing in a private journal that we, apparently, secretly hope isn’t so private). With that in mind, perhaps external self-perception is fundamentally human, and what makes way for mental illness is how much we externalize our self-perception, and how much of an identity we produce as a result.

In the book Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv explores the following questions: How do we understand ourselves in periods of crisis, especially when psychiatric explanations do not suffice? How do the stories we tell about mental illness shape their role in our lives and, consequently, our identity? She presents five case studies of patients who pushed past the limits of the psychiatric explanations of their times, and she includes interviews with the patients and their loved ones, published and unpublished passages from their journals and memoirs, and fascinating historical context about the development of psychiatry.

After reading Strangers to Ourselves, I realized that the romanticization of mental illness that Rayne Fisher-Qaunn illustrates is just a type of story we tell ourselves about who we are. It occurs to me that romanticization serves a few purposes, primarily by giving meaning to our suffering. It can help us:

• cope with distress and instability, making our struggles more palatable to ourselves and others;

• feel included in a community, since being “someone with [insert mental illness here]” can give one an identity and group of people with whom to relate, which might be easier than feeling alone and misunderstood;

• attain status in certain circles where marginalization is seen as a social currency;

• feel stronger, more interesting, or more complex than those who are not struggling;

• succeed in intrasexual competition, which I’ll discuss more later.

But while romanticization might be a saving grace to some, especially in its earliest stages, it can also quickly contribute to one’s downfall. On her recovery from anorexia at the age of six, the youngest diagnosed patient at the time, Rachel Aviv says: “This sense of narrow escape has made me attentive to the windows in the early phases of an illness, when a condition is consuming and disabling but has not yet remade a person's identity and social world. Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially in the beginning, can shape their course. People can get freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.”

Reading Strangers to Ourselves made me realize that too much personal identity can be just as harmful as too little personal identity—and I think external self-perception and romanticization play some role in both.

Someone romanticizing her mental illness might identify too much with it, which can lead to a vicious cycle where her mental illness worsens, and resolving it could mean losing her identity, so the least disruptive option (in the short-term) is to continue identifying with her mental illness and building it out.

Someone externalizing her self-perception too much (e.g., extreme sensitivity about what others think, only viewing self through others’ perspectives, changing self for approval and to fit in) might have too little personal identity, leading her to rely on self-destructive behaviors and thought-patters to try to construct any identity. Here are some examples from Strangers to Ourselves of too little personal identity, and how this contributed to the rapid decline of mental health:

• Hava, who struggled with severe anorexia her entire life, once wrote in her journal, "Labels aren't so bad. They at least give you a title to live up to... and an identity!!!" Many years later, she wrote: "I suppose I am one of those people that thoroughly understands myself yet am a stranger to myself. I'm not completely convinced I want to be rescued. Maybe it is just because I don't quite know who I am and what kind of person I am going to be."

• Ray, who sued his psychoanalysts for failing to treat his depression and further driving him into illness, testified in court: "I'm not going to deny that I have had difficulties in living. I have looked at myself and examined myself from the viewpoint of a man who knows a lot about psychiatry now. Am I a narcissist? Am I really this? Am I not this? What am I?"

• From poet Louise Gluck, on her struggle with anorexia: "The tragedy of anorexia seems to me that its intent is not self-destructive, though its outcome so often is. Its intent is to construct, in the only way possible when means are so limited, a plausible self."

• Laura, who was given multiple diagnoses and cycled through 19 psychiatric medications (many of which she took simultaneously) over a decade, was relieved when she received a diagnosis: "It was like being told: It's not your fault. You are not lazy. You are not irresponsible. The psychiatrist told me who I was in a way that felt more concrete than I'd ever conceptualized before."

Whether the mental illnesses we identify with are genuine (e.g., the cases presented by Rachel Aviv) or performative (e.g., YouTuber Olivia’s pre-teen diary entries), so much of it has to do with storytelling. I want to talk about an interesting trend that has only been accelerating since I joined social media back in 2006: the mass storytelling occurring online that is romanticizing mental illness for young girls and women.

differentiating oneself

I first noticed this romanticization happening in middle school but didn’t put much thought into it until my late teens and early 20s, at which point I began to wonder why seemingly all the women in my life, online, and in media believed they were irreparably damaged. And their presentations of mental illness were rarely received negatively—they were often coveted. It’s as though we one day collectively decided to ignore the tragic consequences of mental illness, instead turning it into a social currency, different personas to be crafted for status, something cool.

There are a few different personalities that manifest from the romanticization of mental illness. I’ll lay out a few popular ones below. But first, some disclaimers:

• The points made in this post are based on my personal experiences and observations. They do not apply to every woman and are not an indictment of womanhood.

• Men romanticize mental illnesses as well, but I am not a man, so I will not focus on male experiences.

• I am talking about trends that spread largely via social media platforms, so they will likely be more intelligible to those who are Online.

• The purpose of this post is to talk about the different manifestations of the female romanticization of mental illness. It is not to debate the definition of mental illness. (See footnote 1.)

• This post is not meant to imply that everyone who suffers from mental illness romanticizes it. In fact, those with debilitating illnesses that are less palatable to social media consumers (e.g., manic depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia) are considerably harmed by the trends that romanticize mental illness. Freddie deBoer does a fantastic job in his coverage of this (see The Gentrification of Disability or The Incoherence and Cruelty of Mental Illness as a Meme as a few examples).

• I acknowledge that many people do not have mental illnesses. Still, it is interesting to consider that they are often derided as boring by those who romanticize mental illness: I came across a now-deleted TikTok that was on its way to becoming viral in which a girl questions why men frequently leave her—troubled yet interesting and complex—for simpler and uninteresting girls. She reveals a text from an ex-boyfriend who says he still loves her but that his new girlfriend is nicer, less complicated, and therefore better for him emotionally. Her confusion about his decision is revealing: it implies that being troubled should make you more interesting as a lover, and perhaps more worthy of desire.

Alright, back to business. Here are some common archetypes of the Mental Illness Romanticizers:

insane and proud

Lately, everywhere I turn, there is a woman smugly reminding the world that she is crazy. No, not just crazy, but insane. She’ll ruin your life if you get on her bad side. She’ll ruin the life of your next girlfriend, too, if you break up with her. She knows all the hottest tricks to permanently psychologically scar you. She’ll keep you on your toes; you’ll never know her next move. Being with her is a thrill, it’s dangerous, it’s not for the weak…

Okay, I don’t know how true all that is, but it’s exactly how the self-proclaimed insane women present themselves. Their declaration of insanity is seldom announced with shame, self-reflection, or hesitation. Rather, it’s a source of pride for them—and one can’t help but think they do this to appear more interesting and valuable to the men they are trying to attract. Incidentally, women often self-proclaim insanity in contexts related to men and female intrasexual competition.

You don’t have to dig deep to find thriving online communities that turn “insane” or contemptible women into highly sought-after aesthetics, relying on characters from books (e.g., literally any character from Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels), movies (e.g., Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie from Girl, Interrupted or Rosamund Pike from Gone Girl), and TV shows (Alexa Demie or Sydney Sweeney from Euphoria, depending on the type of “crazy” that resonates with you most).

One popular term that describes this type of persona is femcel, which has been redefined from “female involuntary celibacy” to a celebration of toxicity and manipulation, but in a hyper-feminine way.

The clearest example is the clip below from HBO’s Euphoria. In it, Cassie, one of the show's main characters, brags about her insanity as a tactic to get what she wants from the man she’s seeing. She proudly screams that she’s crazier than her best friend Maddy—who is quite literally the blueprint for crazy. This is one of my favorite scenes from the second season of Euphoria, because in just 2 minutes and 58 seconds, we witness a perfect reenactment of the romanticization of being crazy and how it can be leveraged for intrasexual competition.

This is not limited to the theatrics of television dramas—the crazy girlfriend trope is regularly abused in real life by both men and women alike. Women might exploit the trope as a tactic to get and keep the men they desire; men might do so to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the failures of their relationships. There’s something else at play here too: a non-insignificant portion of men claim to prefer “crazy” women.

On X, I asked people to share their theories on why some men prefer to date unstable women. I was making an assumption here that there are men who prefer this—and I was right. So many men replied to my post or messaged me privately revealing their preference for unstable women. The reasons varied: for the emotional highs, for the wild sex, for the intellectual conversations, because of the hot-crazy matrix, because they’re more available, etc. These reasons, by the way, are widely communicated in TV shows, books, movies, and other media.

Why, then, should we be so surprised when girls and women take this to heart and develop personas around instability?

There’s no shortage of self-identified Insane Women And Girlfriends on social media platforms like TikTok. Many of these videos have millions of views, tens or hundreds of thousands of likes, and far too many comments from users claiming they can relate.

One TikTok claims that “womanhood is realizing that ur just as insane as ur mother.” Its most-liked comment finds a way to normalize this insanity, turning it into a virtue and welcoming its inevitably: “and perhaps that our mothers aren’t insane, just overworked, underappreciated, and can’t embody an impossible standard of femininity.” Sure, this is likely the case for some mothers who are labeled insane. But there are also a lot of mothers who are harming their loved ones and need help mentally. Where’s that conversation?

A lot of posts like these are (hopefully) exaggerated to achieve virality, but I have to wonder why so many young girls and women are positively engaging with them. If they are doing it because they can genuinely relate, then we should be very concerned about the current state of mental stability for girls and women. But I bet the vast majority of those making or agreeing with these posts are not insane.

So, is it just the aesthetic that’s appealing to them? Are they claiming insanity and then returning to their peaceful, non-insane, pretty normal lives? I think so. But if that’s the case, then there’s a more interesting question we need to contend with: At what point do exaggerations and false proclamations about oneself become… reality? When do the stories we tell ourselves become all-consuming and difficult to escape?

It’s not clear to me at what point the romanticization of insanity goes beyond just fun and games, and becomes a serious concern. But I think it’s time we turn the narrative around and clarify that Being Insane is not a good thing. That persona does not imply complexity or boost a woman’s self-worth and self-efficacy. Ultimately, it becomes a net negative for the woman herself and everyone else in her life.

woe is me

Another ideal candidate for the romanticization of mental illness might be one with a victim mentality. I’ve written (and posted) about how victim complexes rob people of their agency, and why the immediate benefits of perpetual victimhood, like avoiding accountability, are ultimately never worth it:

A victim mentality is one of the biggest threats to cultivating a sense of agency. Perpetual victimhood cannot coexist with agency.

To be clear, I’m not talking about horrific events and circumstances that produce victims (or survivors, as some people prefer to say). Thinking of someone—or yourself—as a victim in certain cases can be a useful framework for finding solutions. I’m talking about people who unproductively cope with adverse life events by refusing to take accountability and instead blaming anyone and anything else for their woes; it’s a comfortable position to be in because someone with a victim complex can avoid responsibility, garner sympathy, and always find a way to justify their harmful behaviors. The crux of the mentality is the absence of agency.

Reminder that a sense of agency means feeling like you have control over your actions and their consequences. I think people tend to forget that second part; owning your mistakes and their consequences is extremely difficult, which might be a motivating factor for some people to adopt victim complexes. (A victim complex is learned!)

This is where the Sad Girl persona that YouTuber Olivia developed in her pre-teens comes in. As Rosemary Kirton defines it in i-D magazine, a Sad Girl “listens to better music than you and might spend her alone time watching French films from the ‘60s or angsty TV shows from the ‘90s.” She might obsess over the lives and works of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf—ignoring the devastating and life-threatening nature of their Sadness, and instead inadvertently turning it into a conduit for creativity, intelligence, and societal reverence. Talk about romanticization!

With so many examples of female sadness, you begin to wonder if a woman is less of a woman—less interesting, complex, desirable—if she isn’t fighting any demons, or overcoming (or succumbing!) to her traumas. You also begin to wonder if suffering is uniquely female, rather than inherently human. By accepting and internalizing this idea, women rob themselves and men of their autonomy: women are no longer agents of their life, they are slaves to the things that happen to them; men are no longer complex human beings also capable of experiencing the full spectrum of emotions, they are merely two-dimensional characters struggling to understand their more complex female counterparts.

In another one of her posts, The Pain Gap, Rayne Fisher-Quann nails why this romanticization of trauma might be so ubiquitous for women:

there is a sickeningly pervasive idea in our culture, by the way, that a young woman can only become interesting and complex by experiencing untold quantities of pain — and so we seek this suffering in an attempt to become artistic, but only end up learning that we were operating from a flawed premise in the first place. pain is nothing but pain.

If this is true, and I suspect it is, then it’s no wonder why so many young girls and women find solace in this romanticization. Whether it’s to gain a (false) sense of control over their life or to appear as interesting and complex as the women they admire, the appeal has been manufactured for them, and it’s hard to resist.

daddy issues

This one is especially devastating, in my opinion. It’s also much harder to write about because there’s always the risk of unintentionally slut-shaming or talking about sexuality in a reductive way. But the romanticized persona is really hard to miss. It might include the aesthetics of Lana Del Rey and cigarettes, coquette, Lolita, hypersexualization, fetishes, being wild, sugar babying, infantilization, identification with borderline personality disorder, etc. I might have more to say about this another time, but I did want to include it here since it’s one of the more popular manifestations of romanticized mental illness online.

everyone is implicated in this…

And I’m worried this includes writers like me who are lamenting over the issue. Is it possible that writing about the romanticization of mental illness is making it more of an issue than it already (or really) is? Maybe. I wish I could track the popularity of this romanticization over time to see if it’s on the decline or not. But for now, all I know is that I’m still seeing it everywhere, from social media to traditional entertainment. And it’s constantly evolving, so new iterations might be harder to catch at first, but the outcome is ultimately the same: social media engagement and surface-level relatability at the expense of human flourishing.

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If you’ve come this far, thank you. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this post—I’ve been thinking about it and writing and re-writing it for a very long time now, but decided that it’s time to publish and hear from others rather than spend more time trying to perfect it.

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For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Life feels utterly absurd to me; I have felt this way for as long as I can remember. Interestingly, it has never bothered me much. I simply accepted it as reality and continued about my silly little routines and performances.

At times, I even find the tension arising from absurdity quite enjoyable: I go through life feeling like a detached observer, watching things happen with intrigue and sometimes confusion, but embracing it all and actively participating regardless. To call out to the universe, receive nothing in return, and commit yourself to life nevertheless — it’s the ultimate act of love, both to yourself and to your community.

Over the past few years, especially after leaving religion, I’ve been paying closer attention to my experiences with the absurd and recalling some of my earliest memories with it. One of these memories involves a universal human experience that is, maybe, the origin of absurdity for many people: the realization in childhood that you are separate from your parents. This is the beginning of the process of individuation, which Erich Fromm discusses a lot in his work. Individuation is necessary for personal growth and one’s pursuit of freedom; it can also be unsettling for a child, whose life up until that point of realization is inextricably intertwined with and dependent on the lives of his parents.

In Lisa Tuttle’s novella My Death, the narrator has a similar realization after her first recallable nightmare as a child. This passage perfectly describes that feeling of absurdity at the beginning stages of individuation:

In the jumbled, fragmented memories I carry from my childhood there are probably nearly as many dreams as images from waking life. I thought of one which might have been my earliest remembered nightmare. I was probably about four years old — I don't think I'd started school yet — when I woke up screaming. The image I retained of the dream, the thing which had frightened me so, was an ugly, clown-like doll made of soft red and cream-coloured rubber. When you squeezed it, bulbous eyes popped out on stalks and the mouth opened in a gaping scream.

As I recall it now, it was disturbingly ugly, not really an appropriate toy for a very young child, but it had been mine when I was younger, at least until I'd bitten its nose off, at which point it had been taken away from me. At the time when I had the dream I hadn't seen it for a year or more — I don't think I consciously remembered it until its sudden looming appearance in a dream had frightened me awake.

When I told my mother about the dream, she was puzzled. 'But what's scary about that? You were never scared of that doll.'

I shook my head, meaning that the doll I'd owned — and barely remembered — had never scared me. 'But it was very scary,' I said, meaning that the reappearance of it in my dream had been terrifying.

My mother looked at me, baffled. 'But it's not scary,' she said gently. I'm sure she was trying to make me feel better, and thought this reasonable statement would help. She was absolutely amazed when it had the opposite result, and I burst into tears.

Of course she had no idea why, and of course I couldn't explain. Now I think — and of course I could be wrong — that what upset me was that I'd just realized that my mother and I were separate people. We didn't share the same dreams or nightmares. I was alone in the universe, like everybody else. In some confused way, that was what the doll had been telling me. Once it had loved me enough to let me eat its nose; now it would make me wake up screaming.

But not all my experiences with the absurd are terrifying, and embracing absurdity certainly does not mean my life lacks meaning. Quite the opposite, in fact: I am free to determine precisely what makes my life meaningful. Morning lattes, solitary walks, reading, laughing with friends, spending time with family, exercise, being engrossed in challenging work, meeting people, experiencing new places — as silly as it might sound, if I consciously decide that these are all meaningful and make life worth living, then suddenly my life is meaningful and worth living. Determining the purpose of my life has always felt this simple to me; I have yet to be troubled by my belief that the world itself lacks inherent meaning.1

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t struggle with the many aspects of life that are banal, contradictory, hopeless, or frivolous; it doesn’t mean I don’t often wonder if my embrace of absurdity is enough.

Life has felt very weird lately. Not necessarily in a bad way — just in a way that has captured my attention for an extended period of time. I want to share some of that weirdness here, so I’m treating this post more like a diary entry than an exploration of an idea (which is how I’ve structured my previous posts). My thoughts throughout this post are a bit disjointed, and the post feels incomplete. But please do let me know if you have similar thoughts you’d like to share. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this post.

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irreconcilable contradictions everywhere

In October, I celebrated my 28th birthday and things have been… weird. Most people who found out about my birthday would joke about how life is only downhill from here, or they would express some fear over their approaching 30s. I would half-jokingly retort that my best days are still ahead of me.

But then I would realize that many in my age cohort are starting to experience their first taste of death — sickness that consumes their parents, tragedies that take their friends too soon — which means my time to experience death is also certainly coming. I don’t know how to handle that inevitability, but I guess no one does, so at least I’m not alone in that.

I’ve never been happier with who I have developed into as a person: I’m rediscovering myself post-birth control, I’m comfortable with the fact that it’s impossible to be universally liked, I’m honing my values, I’m more accepting of worldview shifts.

At the same time, I’ve never been more uncertain about my future. I’m living in a city that likely won’t be my permanent home, but I’m forced to treat it as if it will be: buying furniture, getting attached to specific places, agonizing over the need to be part of a community, finding comfort in my routine. I feel heartbreak whenever my friends leave this city, as if that won’t be me one day. I’m becoming more established in my career, but I don’t know what’s next.

Every single one of my friends is at a completely different point in his or her life: married, engaged, in an established relationship, in a new relationship, in their third situationship this year, single and happy, single and bitter, in an unhappy relationship, divorced, recently broken up, experimenting, given up, hopeful once again.

Also: earning twice my salary, earning half my salary, still in school, back in school, working a job they hate, working a job they love, shifting careers, starting their own companies, quitting the corporate life, living with their parents, living with roommates, living alone, living with a partner, renting, buying their first house, battling mental health crises, finally flourishing.

Every day, people everywhere are freaking out about corporate deadlines that are made up, elevating the blood pressure of everyone around them, slowly creating a stress-induced decline in our national life expectancy. These deadlines are entirely made up! But these made-up deadlines are part of larger, real, complex, and essential systems that are at the core of a functioning society. I can’t reconcile the two — especially when I’m mid-panic over yet another made-up deadline.

There are wars, pandemics, mass shootings, and avoidable sufferings all over the world, but we’re constantly told this is the best time in history to be alive.

People’s actions consistently contradict the outcomes they want. If they do manage to get what they want, they find ways to push it away.

Love consumes our lives but it’s nearly impossible to describe the feeling adequately. No amount of art, poetry, movies, music will ever give the feeling of love any justice. Even the word “love” feels insultingly simple. And why is it that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen or heard or experienced can be considered just “okay” by someone else?

It’s weird how much you can understand someone based on just a glance. Right? How odd is that? That you can lock eyes with someone and communicate what feels like a lifetime’s worth of emotions and conversation in just a second? What is that?

Then I remember that all of the situations I described above apply to those who are much older than me as well, and I wonder if life ever stops being weird. I’m told it doesn’t, and I’m okay with that. I think the tension these experiences create is what keeps life interesting and worth pursuing.

committing to life regardless

People’s commitment to life in the face of incomprehensible suffering has always astonished me and given me hope. There are examples of this stubborn zeal for life and collective will to live all around us, but they don’t get nearly enough praise.

I’ll end this post by sharing one of my favorite examples of this:

In 1849, Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to death by firing squad for being a member of a secret utopian society that was accused of conspiring against the emperor Nicholas I. Dostoevsky and the other members of the club were read their death sentence, given the cross to kiss, had swords symbolically broken over their heads, and tied to pillars and blindfolded. However, mere moments before their execution, the group was granted a reprieve from the emperor.

After the mock execution, and before his real sentence of four years in a labor camp, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to his brother describing his renewed passion for life:

Brother, I am not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter — this is what life is, herein lies its task. I have come to recognize this. This idea has entered into my flesh and blood.

Yes, it’s true! That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders. Memory remains, and the images I have created and still not molded in flesh. They will leave their harsh mark on me, it is true! But my heart is left me, and the same flesh and blood which likewise can love and suffer and desire and remember, and this is, after all, life. On voit le soleil! Well, goodbye, brother! Do not grieve for me. . . Never until now have such rich and healthy stores of spiritual life throbbed in me.

We should all be this passionate about life. The trials we face shouldn’t cause us to despair; the deafening silence we endure from the universe shouldn’t discourage us.

Life can be beautiful, if we decide it is.

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Something bad keeps happening to good ideas.

Good ideas are developed in specialized circles as tools that help us make sense of the world; they then slowly gain adoption among a small group of enthusiastic explorers of the idea. This is great; these groups test the idea, improve it, and discuss it in-depth — nuance and all.

Eventually, the idea enters the mainstream and is hailed as the Truth by some devout believers, or iterated nearly to death by others. This is both good and bad. Useful ideas should be widely adopted, but it seems like this is where things frequently take a turn for the worse: the idea is transformed into something utterly useless.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is there a name for this phenomenon or some research on it? I would love to hear other takes on the topic, but for now, here’s my attempt to understand what’s going on.

the four phases of idea dissemination

Over the years, I’ve noticed that many good ideas go through the following phases:

phase 1 — birth

An idea is developed by or popularized within a small circle of experts, like academics, and discussed extensively. (These ideas usually stem from the social sciences or humanities.) The idea is good and useful for better understanding some facets of life or culture.

phase 2 — exploration

Eventually, the idea is adopted by a small group of people outside this circle. It has not entered the mainstream yet but gets further developed, refined, and validated by this group of people — perhaps we can think of them as explorers or early adopters. The idea remains strong and useful.

phase 3 — deterioration

The idea finally enters the mainstream and is at the center of both online and offline discourse. Eventually, the idea starts to change: it’s no longer specific, as its original group might have intended it to be, but starts to broaden out and take on multiple meanings; the definition changes again and again and again; it’s haphazardly applied to multiple use cases; identities are formed around it. Some revere it, others fear it.

Despite (or because of?) its ubiquity, the idea ceases to be useful when it reaches this stage. It might even feel like we would be better off completely without the idea!

phase 4 — backlash

If the idea doesn’t become completely useless after it goes mainstream, at the very least it becomes annoying. Sometimes, certain groups begin to mock this idea or consider its believers cringe. They make fun of the believers by ironically using the idea. This contributes to the idea becoming useless. If the idea is useful at its core, it should be able to recover from Phases 3 and 4, though it might take a while.

These stages might apply to non-ideas as well, like social media platforms and other inventions. I will never forget how jarring it was to witness the rise and collapse of the “coolness” of Facebook for my generation after its mass adoption. (Same with Clubhouse.) I’m sure there are other examples, too, like crypto (which I believe will survive Phases 3 and 4) and AI (which currently lies somewhere at the end of Phase 2 and the beginning of Phase 3).

In fact, while I was writing this post, someone shared David Chapman’s Meaningness article, titled Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in subculture evolution, about a similar phenomenon that happens to subcultures.

Chapman’s framework about subculture evolution is fascinating and illuminates the phenomenon I’ve been exploring a bit. Here’s a brief overview of his post and how it might align with my four phases:

Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.

The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.

Creators and fanatics are both geeks. They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.

Chapman’s creators are akin to my experts in Phase 1, while his fanatics are akin to my explorers/early adopters in Phase 2.

If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops. Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

Geeks welcome mops, at first at least. It’s the mass of mops who turn a scene into a subculture. Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible. It’s also good for the ego; it confirms that the New Thing really is exciting, and not just a geek obsession. Further, some money can usually be extracted from mops.

However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

This part is closest to my Phase 3, in which an idea goes mainstream and deteriorates with popularity. Oftentimes, much like what the geeks experience, the experts and explorers/early adopters watch the evolution of their idea in horror (e.g., Kimberlé Crenshaw, the professor who coined the term intersectionality in 1989, commented on how her idea changed since it went viral: “This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content”).

I imagine that the experts and explorers/early adopters might feel some hope right as their idea enters the mainstream — but that promise quickly dies.

Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops. At this point, they may all quit, and the subculture collapses. Unless sociopaths1 show up. A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation.

The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to. Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better.

The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay.

This seems to be at the height of my Phase 3 — when those in the mainstream start creating businesses and identities and movements around the original idea, which contributes to the idea’s deterioration.

After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it. (Often the geeks all end up hating each other, due first to the stress of supporting mops, and later due to sociopath divide-and-conquer manipulation tactics.)

Finally, Phase 4: chaos, resentment, fragmentation, backlash. The idea (or subculture, in Chapman’s case) is no longer useful.

from smart and new to cringe and annoying

Words like patriarchy, late-stage capitalism, colonialism, trauma-bonding, narcissism, postmodernism, neoliberalism, eugenics, critical race theory, ADHD/neurodivergent, and woke are typically at the center of such ideas. How many times have you heard one of these words thrown around with so little substance that you wondered about the validity of the idea itself?

This also happens with intellectualized explanations of certain human experiences, including commonplace or universal ones. Take, for example, the following copypasta:

Of course, this touches on something real: mental illness can have serious side effects, including memory loss. But at some point, this idea entered Phase 4 and became annoying or cringe to discuss earnestly. I can imagine this idea still being discussed unironically in some circles (it might be turned into an aesthetic Awareness Raising infographic for some wanna-be mental health coach on Instagram), but it is largely categorized as a meme among younger, online generations and frequently brought up ironically for humor.

Does this mean the original idea is obsolete or invalid? Not at all. But my guess is that when it was in Phase 3, the idea was loosely applied to multiple use cases and, eventually, ceased to hold much weight. People are quick to cling to smart- and official-sounding explanations of their faults and quirks, and this is possibly what happened here.

Another example is how diaspora kids describe their sense of identity as being in between their parents’ homeland and their own. What started as a useful idea was eventually ridiculed by many; the idea went through all four phases of the idea dissemination cycle.

I’m a first-generation Arab American who frequented the Middle East countless times growing up, and I empathize: growing up, I often felt like I was neither fully American nor fully Arab, but some weird in-between. I’m not alone in this, and several years ago, talking about this experience became a rite of passage for kids of the diaspora (or at least those with MENA and South Asian backgrounds).

Suddenly, blogs and podcasts and merchandise about “in-between” identities sprung up everywhere, and people ate it up. (Consider this Phase 3 of the idea dissemination lifecycle — or the proliferation of mops and sociopaths in the evolution of a subculture.)

And then, quietly, this idea (and all the art and businesses it inspired) became a target for mockery at best and heavily criticized and disdained at worst, despite the original idea being quite useful and insightful. Again, this does not mean the idea has lost all credence, despite the whims of the masses. And again, this does not mean the idea has been universally shunned; Rupi Kaur does, after all, still have a thriving fanbase. (Sorry to any Kaur fans reading my post.)

Last year, I saw the TikTok below about children of immigrants and couldn’t help but laugh because I recognized myself in it. (I also cringed hard at this realization.) I responded with my own TikTok inquiring about why good ideas often go bad.

@iamsbeihTHIS INCLUDES ME. HAHAHAHHAH #immigrant #firstgeneration #arab #palestine #muslim #filipino #diaspora

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One of my best friends messaged me and offered a very plausible explanation as to why this might happen; I think about his response to this day. To quote him:

Just saw your TikTok, you hit the nail on the head. I have a theory about why this happens, but I wonder if I’m right. It reminded me of a video ContraPoints did called “The Left.”

Basically when arcane, anti-establishment and/or marginalized concepts emerge that actually have explanatory value, like intersectionality, neoliberalism, identity politics, etc., there’s an element of these things being radical that gives a sort of intellectual superiority to people who understand them.

Because people understand them and it gives an ego boost to adopt them and talk about them as if they (among only a few people) understand them, the concepts/theories turn into an aesthetic and we ignore substance.

Then the concept is associated with the stereotype of the people adopting and talking about it vs. what it actually is, and it turns into cringe.

You can see this happening so obviously with the diaspora kid concept and “patriarchy.” Like patriarchy has been studied seriously in academia but now whenever any sort of perceived or real injustice or disparity between gender is found, (some) feminists will just say “it’s obviously because of patriarchy” but do they actually know what that means or are they trying to sound smart?

— My incredibly smart friend who perfectly explained why I felt the way I did in my TikTok

a note on bullshit

One of my favorite YouTube creators, Stephen Antonioni, uploaded a video about the fatigue that arises from fighting constant bullshit. I found that the first few minutes of his video essay highlight the repercussions of encountering so many ideas in Phases 3 and 4:

Does anyone else feel like this is all a bunch of bullshit? Does anyone else feel more stupid than they used to, despite the fact that we are swimming in a constant deluge of information every single day?

Does anyone else look at the certainty at which we speak of things today, especially online, and think for a second: wait a minute, how can we be so sure of this? How is everyone suddenly an expert on everything? How can they say, so confidently, that this one thing will make me rich? Will make me happy? Will make me confident? Will make me more beautiful? Will make me smart?

Are they speaking from life experience, or are they just regurgitating the generally accepted talking points? Are they just saying things that sound good or sound right without having done those things themselves?

When I notice that an idea is in Phase 3, I feel like I’m encountering endless bullshit and shallow regurgitations that leave me cynical and put me at risk of being amongst those in Phase 4 who mock the believers. This is not a position I would like to be in. I used to constantly find myself here, but I stopped after realizing that (a) it’s hypocritical, given that everyone contributes to Phase 3 at some point in their life, and (b) it contributes to outrage politics, which I want to see less of in the world.

memetic hygiene

My take on the idea dissemination cycle is quite cynical, so I want to discuss one more theory about idea spread. It’s not a direct comparison to the good-ideas-gone-bad phenomenon I describe in this post, but it does contextualize the idea adoption process, which might explain why things get so chaotic in Phases 3 and 4.

In my last post, “i believe, therefore it is,” I wrote about memetic hygiene and discussed Sarah Perry’s phenomenal article titled “The Limits of Epistemic Hygiene.”

In her article, Perry discusses the different types of idea contagion (or innovation diffusion) and their adoption curves:

1. Contagion — adoption from mere exposure; adoption occurs when people come in contact with others who have already adopted an idea or innovation; spread happens like an epidemic

2. Social influence — adoption of an idea already adopted by one’s in-group; adoption due to pressures to conform

3. Social learning — adoption occurs after one sees enough empirical evidence from early adopters to justify adoption

The adoption curve for social learning is actually two curves superimposed — and it aligns pretty well with my Phases 1 (idea creation), 2 (early adoption), and the early stages of 3 (mainstream adoption, before idea deterioration):

First, early adopters try the idea out, and adoption initially accelerates, then decelerates or even decreases as the population of early adopters is exhausted. Then, for successful innovations, a second period of super-exponential adoption follows, as the rest of the population observes the idea’s success among early adopters.

But what I found interesting is Perry’s explanation that, when adoption occurs due to social learning, people may be “learning what they can get away with — and how to get away with it.” Is this what’s happening at the height of Phase 3, when an idea is iterated endlessly and extends well beyond its original scope? The mainstream is seeing what developments they can get away with?

That might sound bad, but it doesn’t have to be. Perhaps we should celebrate the mainstream testing an idea by pushing it to its absolute limits (a practice that is integral to formal philosophical debate), because how else can we know what works and what doesn’t, what’s “true” and what’s not, and what’s possible for culture and society at large?

She uses divorce as an example of social learning, and while it doesn’t perfectly align with my four phases model, her example does provide a more nuanced picture of how and why ideas spread:

Divorce has been posited to be contagious in social networks. It is possible that many people desire to get divorced, but are hesitant to do so because they fear the social and economic consequences. If a close associate gets divorced, unhappy lovers will be able to observe an example of the consequences first-hand. If the consequences do not seem so bad, unhappily married observers may learn that they can “get away with” divorcing.

I might be able to apply her example to my framework in one of two ways:

1. If I split Phase 2 into two parts:
   Explorers (e.g., those who are the first to get divorced in their in-group) are the first to adopt an idea or practice, and if it generates enough evidence that its adoption is a net good, then early adopters follow in their footsteps and adopt and further develop the idea or practice (e.g., others in the in-group feel confident enough to get divorced).

2. Or, I can reframe Phase 3 to be less about the fragmentation and deterioration that occurs with mainstream adoption, and more about humanity’s natural (maybe subconscious) tendency to test ideas by pushing them to their limits and seeing if they can survive.

Maybe there is a Phase 5 that’s missing from my idea dissemination model. This might be the phase in which an idea, if it’s both strong and correct, survives all the bullshit from Phases 3 and 4 and truly contributes to our intellectual progress and development as a species. (For example, divorce, the internet, and bicycles all survived the limits they were pushed to in Phase 3 and the cultural backlash they faced in Phase 4.) Besides, I’m not sure it’s possible to achieve such progress without mainstream adoption and all the downsides that come with it.

Maybe it’s not so bad after all.

If I zoom out far enough, I can’t help but think that the four — maybe five — phases of idea dissemination are actually an incredible facet of the human project that we’re all fortunate to be part of.

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The video didn’t go viral, I was not a target of dogpiling, and the few critiques I got were mild — but they did force me to further examine my argument and apply it to the broader concept of memetic hygiene. I’m hoping I can better articulate my experience here and receive constructive feedback to further sharpen my argument.

the argument i was trying to make…

In my video, I talk about how regular exposure to the widely held belief that societies devalue women as they age eventually led me to accept it as true. As a result, I started living in fear of the day that it would inevitably happen to me.

I made an off-hand comment that this idea tends to come from feminist literature and philosophy, and a couple of users mistakenly thought I was claiming that feminism, not society, propagates the idea that older women are less valuable than younger ones.2 Of course, I meant that feminists believe people in general, especially men, regard older women with less value. As a result, the argument goes, women face various forms of discrimination as they age. In fact, much of feminist activism seeks to challenge the notion that women become less valuable with age.

Feminist theorists often argue that under patriarchal structures, women are valued for their physical appearance and reproductive viability, both of which are theoretically at their peak in a woman’s youth.3 The idea follows that when women age, they are no longer in their prime reproductive years and are seen to lose their beauty as well. To address this, feminist movements try to highlight the multitude of ways that women are valuable (e.g., skills, intelligence) and might not necessarily conform to stereotypical gender roles (e.g., not all women want to have kids).

The typical examples given to support this claim include the widening wage gap as working women age; the heightened ageism, combined with sexism, that women face in the workplace compared to men; and the lack of representation of older women in Hollywood compared to older men.

The idea that women are devalued as they get older is one that I have heard for as long as I have been on the Internet, and it does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

For example, in the video below, popular TikTok user Madeline Aford laments that it is “truly evil how the patriarchy weaponized aging” for women, acknowledging their worth only if they age gracefully. She goes on to declare that “by measuring a woman’s worth by her beauty, and her beauty by her youth, [the patriarchy] essentially ensures that even the most powerful of women will lose that power in time.” Other examples of this rhetoric can be found here, here, here, and here.

@madelineafordI could talk abt this for hours tbh

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If that is in fact true, then what a dismal fate for women! It’s no wonder “anti-aging” cosmetic procedures like botox and fillers are on the rise — especially among younger and younger women — along with various pseudoscientific “anti-aging” products, supplements, and beauty tools.

If we believe this narrative, regardless of how true it might seem, are we worsening our outcomes in terms of mental health and life quality? How does such a belief modify our behaviors to optimize for the things in life that ultimately don’t matter or contribute meaningfully to our lives? I already have friends in their mid- to late-20s who are planning their facelift and “mommy makeover” procedures for their 40s — or completely opting out of parenthood out of fear of ruining their bodies, accelerating the physical signs of aging, or feeling invisible as many mothers claim to feel.

These might seem like silly or even self-absorbed fears on the surface, but if you take a step back and scrutinize the origins of these fears (including the narrative consistently shoved down our throats that women, especially mothers, become less valuable with age), these behaviors and thought-patterns begin to make sense, and you cannot help but empathize.

the midlife crisis: fake news?

Another example that might be more applicable to the wider population is the concept of the midlife crisis. (I frequently hear about the quarter-life crisis as well.)

The midlife crisis has cemented itself in popular culture as inevitable for everyone. Think, for example, of the stereotypical middle-aged man who wakes up one day mortified about how stagnant his life has become, splurges on a motorcycle or sports car with money he might (or might not!) have, and regrettably ruins his marriage by cheating on his wife with a younger woman who does not even care about him. Or the middle-aged woman who… wait, how are female midlife crises depicted? By becoming Karens? Letting out a guttural scream? Anyway, real or not, these tropes have certainly seeped into the collective consciousness, at least in American culture. I’ve even heard this discussed casually in conversations with others who bitterly recount their parents’ midlife crises.

Depictions of the midlife crisis are almost hard to escape; they have become central to many shows, movies, novels, and other media sources. (Hulu’s Fleishman Is In Trouble is the latest one, but for wealthy status-seekers in New York City and their wannabe counterparts in the suburbs of New Jersey.)

But, similarly to the idea that women become less valuable with age, I worry about the effects of accepting the midlife crisis as part of the human condition, as something that happens even to the best of us. What if it’s not as prevalent as we depict it to be? What then? Would people be more likely to experience better midlives if they don’t have such terrifying expectations of it? (Forgive me, for I realize I’m coming dangerously close to being one of those people who lecture everyone about the power of manifestation and how our thoughts shape our lives.)

In a New York Times opinion piece titled “Millennials are hitting middle age — and it doesn’t look like what we were promised”, Jessica Grose shares the experiences of Americans in their 40s, many of which are not great, but she also questions if the midlife crisis was ever real to begin with.

The Times asked its older Millennial readers about their middle-aged experience and received responses that range from hopeful (“I’m entering my Eileen Fisher phase of
life, and it is much more enjoyable to me” and “I keep feeling like my life is about to get started, much like how I felt at 20, even though I’m 40”) to downright depressing (“The words make me shiver and want to run to get some more Botox” and “Physically, yes. Economically, I’m in my 20s” and “I still feel like an imposter whenever I catch myself adulting, even though I’m a father now and an attorney” and “I don’t feel established in life. What I feel is a loss of potential”).

But what were they actually promised in the first place? And is what they are experiencing actually a midlife crisis, or is it life as usual? Grose introduces some studies that have tried to assess the reality of the midlife crisis, and the cliche doesn’t seem to hold up:

Dr. Schmidt has written about how “midlife crisis” for men became “an accepted cultural phrase,” despite the fact that there was not “a scientific, methodologically rigorous discovery” to prove it was a widespread phenomenon. . . . .

Starting in the mid-’90s, researchers finally did rigorous academic work on the midlife crisis and found that it was not a “universal feature of human life” and that only 10 to 20 percent of people experience it. What they found was that there is no universal happiness trajectory that can predict our feelings at any given life stage.

These discoveries came from an ongoing survey called MIDUS, which stands for “Midlife in the United States.” MIDUS research, which began in 1995, has challenged the widespread idea that happiness is a “U-shaped curve” — that well-being is highest when you’re young and old but dips in the middle. Dr. Lachman, who has worked on MIDUS for years, said that while there is some evidence of a “small dip” in happiness at midlife, “there is also longitudinal evidence from MIDUS following the same people over time that suggests the picture is more complex.”

Dr. Lachman also said that some people even see middle age as a high point. “If you ask people to retrospect and reflect, they often see those years as the peak of their life,” she told me. They may be reflecting on the joy they felt when their children were young or about the time before the losses of any typical life begin to add up — when their bodies still worked pretty well, before their friends started to die.

Forgive me if this is too crazy of a thought, but what would happen if we spread the idea that women become more valuable as they age? That one’s middle age is a significant time in their life, filled with both trials and the creation of sweet, meaningful memories that will last a lifetime? Better yet, what if we took a neutral approach, and stopped trying to impose expectations on such personal and non-uniform experiences?

I often wonder if holding these beliefs instead of their more pessimistic counterparts would improve our lives in any way. In fact, I’ve recently decided to try this out and retrain my thought patterns and actions to be more optimistic about my future. (I did something similar with my anxiety and reduced it by a great deal over a couple of years!)

I’ll report back in a couple of decades to let you all know how it’s going for me.

memetic hygiene

Ultimately, however, I am not interested in arguing whether or not women are treated as less valuable as they get older or if the midlife crisis is real. Sure, they are interesting topics and undoubtedly affect me and virtually everyone I know, but we will have to save these long debates for another time. Instead, I want to talk about the risks of accepting certain ideas and outline some steps we can take before internalizing a belief or acting on an idea.

An info-hazard is something that is true but dangerous to know or may lead to harm, such as the instructions to building an atomic weapon; the (very convincing) idea that free will does not exist,4 assuming it is one day definitively supported; or depictions of suicide in media.

But what about ideas that cannot be or are not yet proven true? Memes, coined by Richard Dawkins and defined as an idea, behavior, or style that passes between people or generations within a culture, can be incredibly damaging to individual or collective psyches — and it behooves us to create guidelines that protect us from harmful memes (such as, in my opinion, the midlife crisis or women being devalued with age).

Perhaps we can treat ideas as germs with the potential to infect us. Not all germs are harmful, in fact, some are great and nourishing (e.g., certain fungi and bacteria), but the harmful ones should be taken seriously and treated as dangerous.

Similarly, not all ideas are harmful, some are great and nourishing, but we should protect ourselves and society at large to avoid the contagion of bad ideas and, as a result, the degradation of our culture and collective intelligence and safety. Ideally, we should arm ourselves with the tools necessary to develop some level of immunity to harmful ideas.

Importantly, not all ideas are spread through mere exposure contagion. Two other mechanisms for the spread of ideas include (1) social influence, or adopting ideas that have been adopted and thus “validated” by one’s ingroup, and (2) social learning, or adopting ideas that were initially practiced by others and seem worthy of adoption (e.g., wanting to get a divorce but fearing the social and economic repercussions of doing so; seeing someone close to you get a divorce; and moving forward with the divorce if that person’s outcome wasn’t as bad as expected).

So what should we do about this? Sarah Perry’s article “The Limits of Epistemic Hygiene” makes a case for applying the hygiene model of infectious disease (a set of infection-prevention tools including improvements in nutrition; cleanliness practices; vaccines; and antimicrobial drugs) to ideas.

Idea hygiene includes the following tools as potential responses to dangerous ideas: improvements in education and its intended outcomes (e.g., intelligence, knowledge, critical thinking); various degrees of self- and societal censorship; exposure to dangerous but weak ideas and arguments; and social norms and practices that shun bad ideas.

She covers several considerations we need to make for each part of her proposed idea hygiene; I won’t recount every point she covers for the sake of length, but I highly recommend reading her article not just once, but twice!, to fully understand and appreciate her argument.

The ideas that women lose their value with age and that people experience midlife crises have likely spread through social learning: there seems to be just enough empirical evidence to support the notion that these experiences are real, and adopting these ideas doesn’t seem to harm us, at least on the surface. In fact, discussing these ideas as though they are true might protect us or even boost our social status — we can use these ideas to develop life lessons that make us seem wise; we can use these ideas to analyze societies and human psychology to make us seem smart; and we can use these ideas to criticize culture to make us seem more virtuous.

At the end of the day, we don’t know how true these ideas are, and I don’t think we should treat them as inevitable or highly likely just because we know a few people who have experienced them or have seen social media posts that intellectualize them. Life is messy and unfair, and there are far too many exceptions to both of these rules for me to consider them… rules. We might be better off hearing them and looking for counterexamples to try to prove the opposite.

I’m choosing to preserve my memetic health by making use of the “censorship” tool in Perry’s ideas hygiene model — entertaining these thoughts, but not accepting them as true. My hope is that one day, we will have wide exposure to the weakened forms of these ideas and reject them as silly at best and dangerous at worst, hopefully improving our lives in the process.

I’m interested in hearing about other socially accepted ideas that do not contribute positively to our well-being and fail to be convincing upon scrutiny. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Thank you for reading!

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I often find myself listening to an argument or reading a heated back-and-forth between two people and realizing that they are entirely talking past each other, which renders their debate interminable. Few, whether active participants or quiet observers, will leave such arguments feeling accomplished, fulfilled, or like they have learned anything new. More often than not, they will leave more intensely attached to their position and dismiss the opposing side as unethical, ignorant, or [insert trending character attack here].

Unbeknownst to them, they will repeat this exact charade of a debate countless times, each time less productive than the last.

Sometimes, it might appear as though the debaters are on the same page about what they are debating: they use the same words and phrases, and they might even anticipate each other’s arguments. But if you dig a little deeper, you will quickly find that there is no consensus on the very words their arguments rely upon! If you asked the debaters to clearly and accurately define certain words in their arguments, they might realize they do not have a complete grasp of the concepts they are debating.

This is especially the case for arguments involving complex and abstract ideas like justice, human rights, dignity, harm, eugenicism, or misogyny—words used in nearly every debate that seems to have no end or resolution in sight. Whether the debate is about abortion, gun rights, interventionism, gender theory, or healthcare, the opposing sides never seem to reach a satisfactory or productive conclusion—regardless of how knowledgeable, kind, open-minded, or reasonable the debaters are. At some point in the debate, tensions will rise, people will begin to feel threatened, and the debate will cease to progress.

This has become such the norm that many might believe these debates inherently cannot be solvable; that they are interminable by nature. But how true is that?

Was it always like this? And if not, how did we get here? And at what point should we consider this state of affairs a serious crisis that needs to be addressed?

a catastrophe

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Alasdair MacIntyre attempts to answer all of these questions. He hypothesizes that our moral debates do not and, in fact, cannot find a resolution today because we have unknowingly lost our comprehension of morality but nonetheless continue to use its concepts and vocabulary.

To illustrate how this could have happened, MacIntyre asks us to imagine a society in which a popular political movement takes hold and successfully abolishes the natural sciences: labs are burnt down, scientists are imprisoned or executed, science classes are banned in schools, and science books and instruments are destroyed.

Eventually, a group of enlightened people mobilize to revive science, but their knowledge of the sciences is largely incomplete. They might know a few important scientific experiments, but they cannot connect this knowledge to the context that originally gave those experiments significance. They might know some key scientific theories, but their knowledge is incomplete and they only have half-chapters from science books and single pages from science articles. Still, their fragmented knowledge became the basis of science in their society; in their view, the natural sciences have been fully restored. Individuals in this society go on to study and debate scientific theories and systematically use the scientific words and expressions of the past, while children are taught and tested on science lessons in school.

While it might appear as though the sciences in this society are thriving, things are, in fact, quite dire: “Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.”

As a result, something interesting begins to happen in this hypothetical society. Because scientific knowledge is unknowingly incomplete, people start arbitrarily using scientific words and expressions, and irresolvable arguments become commonplace. (Let’s jump back to reality real quick—does this sound at all familiar? It should, assuming you have been paying a little attention to any moral debate. Alright, back to the imaginary society.) Suddenly, subjectivist theories of science begin to appear, and society becomes divided between those who believe their science is objective and those who espouse the subjectivist theories of science.

MacIntyre concludes this imagined scenario by comparing it to the current state of moral language and philosophy in the real world:

What is the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by fictitious pseudoscientists and real, genuine philosophy? The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of the natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions.

But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (pg. 1)

Part of the problem, MacIntyre hypothesizes, is the widespread belief in something called emotivism, which is the idea that all claims of moral truth are in reality expressions of personal preference and feelings. According to this theory, when someone says something is bad or wrong, they actually mean they personally condemn it. Similarly, when they say something is good or right, they actually mean they personally like or prefer it.

If emotivism is true, then of course debate can never be truly resolved! People might truly believe or act like their moral arguments are objective and logical and that debates can be resolved—but in reality, these arguments are merely feelings rather than truth claims, and debate is merely a tool for persuasion rather than a tool for reaching rational conclusions.

But a large portion of MacIntyre’s book is dedicated to disproving emotivism and explaining why and how the theory developed and became so popular in the first place.

I am only a third of the way through the book, but MacIntyre’s hypothesis already rings very true to me. However, I realize he has a difficult task ahead of him because a key component of his hypothesis is that people today, like the imaginary society he described, do not recognize their incomplete knowledge of the moral theories they discuss.

MacIntyre acknowledges the pushback he will inevitably receive: “The impulse to reject the whole suggestion out of hand will certainly be very strong. Our capacity to use moral language, to be guided by moral reasoning, to define our transactions with others in moral terms is so central to our view of ourselves that even to envisage the possibility of our radical incapacity in these respects is to ask for a shift in our view of what we are and do which is going to to be difficult to achieve.”

If this hypothesis is true, and I have long suspected it is, then it will require a complete overhaul of our approach to and understanding of morality.

realizing i don’t know anything

I am not here to prove that this is the case or explain how we should fix it—read After Virtue for that.

I do, however, want to discuss my realization that I do not understand morality as well as I thought I did—and I am interested to hear from others about similar experiences and how they navigated such a worldview-shattering realization.

Back in early 2021, I listened to Julia Galef’s interview with Michael Sandel (author of Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? and The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?) in her podcast Rationally Speaking. In the interview, Julia questions Michael about his use of the word dignity in his moral arguments, and she claims that dignity seems to be used simply as an expression of aesthetic reactions or moral intuitions. He pushes back, and the debate gets… interesting.

Their exchange on dignity is a bit long. Still, I am going to include most of it because it is the perfect illustration of the world MacIntyre described—one in which emotivism (again, that all claims of moral truth are, in reality, merely preferences) runs wild and debates are irresolvable as a result. Pay close attention! (And consider listening to the entire episode; they go on to debate consensual cannibalism and other interesting topics, not included in the transcript below.)

Julia Galef: One thing that made me a little hesitant in reading the book is that you'll often make statements like, "Such and such degrades a norm," or "Such and such degrades a person." An example — people selling rights to advertising on their homes or cars, or even on their person, to companies, degrades them. And it sounded, at least on my reading, that you were speaking as if this was a self-evident fact that everyone agrees on.

And in the case of people selling advertising on their bodies, I kind of share your intuition… but in general, when people say that something degrades another person, they're often speaking for that person in a way that that person themselves wouldn't agree with.

Like, people have said that it degrades someone when they strip for money. Or it degrades someone when they have sex before marriage. Or when they masturbate. And in many cases, I just feel like: “Who are you to speak for me about what degrades me?”

And so I was just wondering if you felt that your observations, or your intuitions about what is degrading — do you see those as your own personal intuitions that you understand other people might disagree with? Or do you think you're observing a thing that everyone else should also agree with?

Michael Sandel: Well, I don't think it's simply a matter of reporting one's personal intuitions. I think these judgements can be contestable, but if you believe at all that there is such a thing as human dignity, then you must also think there are certain choices or acts that are contrary to human dignity — even though we consent to them, even though we may impose them on ourselves.

Now, it can be contestable and open to argument. Take some of the examples you gave. Take the example of sex work. The debate about sex work is typically a debate about whether selling one's body for sex is or isn't a violation of human dignity. The tattoo advertising, if I sell space on my forehead to a casino, which is one of the cases that I report in the book, and install a tattoo on my head for the casino in exchange for money — some would say, and I would be inclined to agree, that that's a violation of human dignity, that use of oneself as a walking billboard for a casino. There are others who might disagree.

So there can be disagreements about what counts as a violation of human dignity, and we can reason about this. These are competing moral conceptions, competing conceptions about what it is to be a person, what respect for our own humanity consists in. And they may involve competing intuitions, but I think they are open to argument and debate. Just like debates about justice generally, or the common good are open to reason, to argument and debate.

Julia Galef: Well, at least in arguments about justice, you can appeal to thought experiments like the veil of ignorance: “What rules would you want if you didn't know your place in society ahead of time?” Or golden rule-type arguments.

But in the discussions of what counts as “degrading” or what counts as a “violation of human dignity,” I've never seen any arguments that appeal to shared principles or premises. It always seems like people are just sharing their own aesthetic reactions, or their own moral intuitions, and there's no way to appeal to principles that other people don't already share. What's your vision of how we should adjudicate these disagreements about what counts as a violation of human dignity?

Michael Sandel: Now Julia, if you don't think moral argument and moral persuasion are ever possible about anything—

Julia Galef: Oh no, I do.

Michael Sandel: Okay.

Julia Galef: I was trying to make the distinction between cases where I think it is possible, where we can agree on shared premises, and cases where it doesn't—

Michael Sandel: I don't think that distinction holds up, for the following reason.

Take a debate about human dignity that is also a debate about justice: the debate about whether torture is ever justified. Now, one of the most powerful moral arguments against the permissibility of torture is, even if it would elicit information that would serve the common good, is that it's a violation of human dignity that is categorically wrong. This would be a Kantian argument that a torture violates human dignity. So there is a conception of human dignity at stake here. And the debate is whether torture in all circumstances is categorically wrong because it violates human dignity.

So I don't think that there's a clear distinction between moral arguments about justice and moral arguments about human dignity, simply because the alleged violation of human dignity involves the way we treat ourselves rather than the way we treat others.

I don't think it makes it less susceptible of argument than debates about justice, where we do appeal to norms. We don't know whether there's a shared premise or not, until we carry on the argument, until we give it a try. This is true generally of moral argument. It's not that we say, "All right, let's first agree on first principles, and then we'll know whether or not we can persuade one another." We may not know that until the activity of persuasion and reasoning takes place.

— Rationally Speaking podcast, episode 247: The moral limits of markets / The problem with meritocracy (Michael Sandel)

I imagine that in most debates about dignity, the person disagreeing with Michael (i.e., the person in Julia’s position) would have simply argued that those examples are not violations of human dignity and given various reasons to support their claim.

But Julia did something I rarely see in debates today: before starting the debate on dignity, she took a step back to clarify his definition of the concept.

And in response to Michael’s final point: why shouldn’t we first agree on (or at least discuss!) first principles so we can understand whether or not persuasion is even a viable outcome of our debates? If we want these debates to be conclusive and have an impact, isn’t that what we have to do? Otherwise, what are we even arguing about and… why?

When I first listened to this episode, I went into a sort of personal crisis for weeks and obsessed over the concept of dignity because it was at the core of everything I believed and supported regarding policies, morality, life, and even my sense of self. I argued for policies and lifestyle choices based on dignity; when I made personal decisions, I debated how they would affect my dignity. So hearing Julia, a smart person who had dedicated a lot of thought to these ideas, admit that dignity was an alien concept to her made me question everything.

I forced many debates among my friends about the concept of dignity and, in my attempts to defend it, quickly realized that my idea of dignity was very amorphous. I was not operating based on a clear definition of dignity; in fact, it was quite arbitrary, weak, difficult (if not impossible) to prove, vague, and even self-serving. All this time, I felt as though dignity—and other concepts, I came to realize—was a self-evident truth; something everyone inherently felt and understood.

How many of our debates fail because of this? And once you realize that you do not completely understand one moral concept, your entire moral framework needs to be reassessed due to the interconnected nature of moral arguments. If your understanding of dignity evolves, how does that affect your understanding of justice? And how, in turn, does that affect your views on abortion and other issues?

For Julia, consent is really her priority for the examples listed in their exchange on dignity. As long as someone is mentally sound and fully consents to something, they should be allowed to do it. (She identifies certain exceptions.) She continues: “My reaction would be to say, let's change society so that no one is ever desperate enough to have to do something like this [tattooing a corporate logo on their forehead] if they don't want to. But my reaction would not be to say—even my intuitive reaction is not to say—that they've violated some concept of human dignity. I don't feel like I intuitively know what that means.”

This is the approach I have been most comfortable with over the past few years. I intuitively feel, and try very hard to logically argue, that certain things are right, wrong, good, or bad. But right now, until I figure out what the hell any of these complex concepts mean, I am trying to shift my focus from (a) whether we should ban or punish these things that are supposedly bad, to (b) understanding why people do those things in the first place and how we can improve conditions enough to reduce their appeal.

This mentality has helped me hone my thoughts on abortion, autonomy and the right to life (which also has implications for abortion), and other topics like free will.

I really want there to be an objective moral truth out there for us to discover. I want to believe that I live in a world in which there is a universal system of morality, that good vs. bad is clear cut or at least possible to define, and that it is possible for us to find it. I realize this is asking for a lot, and I have to accept the possibility that it just might not be true. Regardless, I still think it is very worthwhile for us to collectively try to arrive at some conclusion—but first, we need to fix this crisis of moral debate we are currently plagued with.

what now?

At this stage, my post feels incomplete to me—but I think that is simply because my understanding of this topic will always be incomplete.

Funny enough, this is in sharp contrast to how I used to feel in my teens and early 20s when I thought morality was so simple — justice for everyone! peace everywhere! — and that I knew everything. Looks like there is some truth to the idea that the older you get and the more you learn, the less you know. Or something like that. What a beautiful side effect of growth! The world and life would be too boring if we knew everything, anyway.

When it comes to the expectation of subject matter in relation to identity, I think so much of it is pervasive, in that you are expected to write a certain way based on how you look. And I think this is true of all kinds of people, from straight, white men to someone who looks like myself—there’s an expectation of what one should be concerned with. Some have a wider breadth of expectation, impossibility, than others.

I always insist on my agency as a thinker. I have the right to read what I like to read. I think that is actually more radical: to insist that because I have my own mind, I will be influenced by whom I choose, and I will write what I choose.

— Ocean Vuong, in a recent interview

identity, identity, identity

Growing up, I thought about my identity a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. But I don’t mean this in a “who am I?” sort of way. Quite the opposite: everything I liked and every belief I held was labeled and quickly appended to my identity. Perhaps naively, I never panicked about who I was; I knew very well and I screamed it to the world so everyone else would know, too. I was Muslim and an Arab American. I was a photographer. Tar Heel. Floridian. Feminist. Researcher. Liberal. You get the point!

I was never just me: Sundus.

I was always all the labels I gave myself, which meant I was also always the baggage associated with each label, regardless of its validity.

The self as a concept is complex and widely debated. But regardless of what you believe, I think we can largely agree that our sense of self is precious and needs to be safeguarded from self-sabotage or violation from others.

When you define yourself around an identity label—especially if it is intertwined with an identity-driven sociopolitical movement, which is often the case—you forfeit your ability to self-govern and to discern what you genuinely believe from what others tell you to believe. You trap yourself with a rigid and unforgiving set of instructions for things you can and cannot do and think, largely informed and enforced by others who share this identity (or are interested in controlling it). By defining your self around an identity label, you necessarily allow said label to supersede your self.

Most importantly, this identity-first approach (i.e., viewing yourself and the world through your identity labels) robs you of some of life’s most beautiful gifts: growth and change. But more on that later.

Essential skills and values come under threat as well, such as critical thought, individuality, freedom, and agency. With an identity-first approach, you do not get to choose which attributes to embody anymore; the identity group (and its sociopolitical movement) chooses for you. And in extreme circumstances—which can befall any group under the right conditions—it can even become dangerous to question or disagree with any aspect of the identity group’s ideology. This becomes especially concerning once you realize that the rules of any doctrine are notoriously fickle.

Another thought: if subscribing to an identity group makes you more likely to adopt its dominant beliefs, behaviors, culture, and traditions… are you consequently less likely to create something original that can contribute to the advancement or enrichment of humanity? (It should not be surprising that so many of those throughout history who changed the world refused to live by its rules.)

Do you become less willing to live authentically—or even to explore what authenticity is to you? Do you become more likely to turn a blind eye to prevailing (and likely dangerous) mob mentalities—or even to participate in them?

Identity labels can undoubtedly be a useful lens for understanding some experiences, but only to a certain extent. I can only begin my arguments with “As a woman…” or “As an Arab…” so many times before my claims start to contradict the experiences of other women or Arabs, which ultimately creates tension for my identity.

And then what? If I am seeing the world through an identity-first lens, what happens to the image I have constructed of myself once a core part of it is challenged? In this scenario, I am forced to either:

1. Subscribe to additional identity labels or come up with numerous caveats to explain why my experience contradicts that of someone else in my identity group

   • (This is a losing strategy because I will inevitably run into the same issue for all other identities or sub-identities)

2. Deny the other person of their identity because it does not align with how I define it

   • (And start another culture war in the process!)

3. Endlessly redefine my identity to accommodate contradictory experiences as I learn about them

   • (This is an incredibly difficult task because it requires dismantling our understanding of ourselves—over and over and over and over again. And besides, who should have the authority to define the identity in question?)

Do you see the problem here? If it seems like I am making a mountain out of a molehill, I want you to consider this next section, in which I discuss the issues I and countless others encountered with this approach, and the final section, in which I argue how identity labels can erode our freedom and lead to automaton conformity.

deprived of life’s beautiful gifts: growth and change

The first time I questioned my identity-first approach was more than seven years ago when I began to outgrow a core part of my identity: my religion. Until then, quite literally my entire life was grounded in my Muslim identity. Outgrowing my religion, in this case, meant I was also outgrowing myself. (Remember: with this identity-first approach, the label supersedes the self.) Imagine the discomfort! The “self” I thought I knew so well was suddenly challenged, leaving me lost, confused, angry, and forced to rediscover the world from a blank slate.

As my discomfort continued to intensify, I asked my boyfriend how he handles situations like this. To my complete surprise, he said he has never had to—because he does not think of himself through identity labels. I was so taken aback; I had never even considered that someone could go through life without identifying with various labels and, therefore, communities larger than oneself.

I strongly resisted his approach at first, claiming that one could not possibly feel fulfillment with such an individualistic mindset. I was sure his approach, if widely adopted, would put an end to community as we know it—and I had no interest in pursuing it.

But I eventually came around to the idea of emphasizing one’s unique self over identity labels. (To be clear, this approach is not an endorsement of individualism or rejection of collectivism. There is room for both, and I needed to find that healthy balance instead of being so far on the side of collectivism.)

After letting go of the guilt associated with “losing” core parts of myself, I quickly realized how nurturing it was to function as me first. My curiosity skyrocketed because I felt safe questioning; I became less dogmatic and even grew proud of the ability to change my mind when presented with new information; my sense of self was no longer fragile and susceptible to unsolvable challenges; I realized the importance of values and character over beliefs; my empathy and compassion grew significantly. I was finally allowed to grow without fear of being reprimanded for it.

Of course, there are tradeoffs, like potentially having to navigate the loss of community that comes with outgrowing certain ideologies or identity groups—but so far the positives have far outweighed the negatives for me. Why would I want to be part of a community that rejects me the minute I express myself in a way that challenges their established set of beliefs and practices? (Also, letting go of an identity label does not necessarily mean losing the community built around the label. There are healthy ways to redefine your relationship with your community if maintaining affiliation is important—but that is a discussion for another post.)

This brings me to my next point: one way to safely grow through life and experience the enjoyment of change is to avoid identifying around labels and instead refer to your beliefs as models.

beliefs vs. models

In one of my favorite podcast episodes, Tim Urban and Jim O’Shaughnessy talk about the benefits of viewing the world through models instead of beliefs—an idea that has stuck with me since I heard it and pretty much sealed the deal of an individual-first approach to my life.

I highly recommend listening to the entire episode, but I am going to share a transcript of the beliefs vs. models portion here:

Jim: One of the things I've found was that the smarter you are, in many cases the easier it is to deceive you, because deception starts with you deceiving yourself. And if you're really smart, guess what you're going to come up with? You're going to come up with almost a bullet proof narrative about why you're right. And then that's going to be a meme that propagates very easily through your network. And because you're smart, it's going to be very difficult to get you not to believe that.

And so when I tell that to people who are obviously intelligent, I mean, at first they look at me like, why are you insulting me? And I'm saying, I'm not insulting you. I'm saying we're human beings.

We all share a human operating system, right? The primitive [brain] as you call it is optimized to 50,000 BC, an environment that no longer exists. The higher mind built the entire world that we see around us. But what you've got to understand is that most of your beliefs are wrong.

That's the other thing that I say that now, and people lose their shit. So much so that I changed it from beliefs to models. I started in my writing no longer saying, "I believe," but rather, "I have a model that posits this."

When you make that shift internally, what happens is, you release the ego from having to cling to that belief, right? Models should prove things. And models also need to be tested, right? Because you always want to see if you're right or not.

So when you change your structure to saying, hey, I have a latticework of these mental models, and I always want to test them, it's easy for your ego to say, yeah, okay. That model’s outside of you, so I'm not worried. I'm not having my very being challenged here.

And when you do that, it's like a superpower because you no longer are wed to those beliefs, that wed to emotion and create the you that you think of as you. And when you try to go against that person, you're going to lose.

Tim: You're realizing that something very crazy is going on in my brain when I say, "I believe", and it doesn't make any sense, and it's not good for me as a thinker and it's not helping me do anything. So I'm going to shift that perception. I'm going to train my primitive mind to stop thinking that way.

When you call it a model, you're not tricking yourself, you're actually unpacking yourself. You're reframing to bring your relationship with that idea to where it should be, to where it makes sense.

It's not you've spent your whole life building up this idea and this is the thing that defines you at all. The point is, I think a really good thinker is wrong a ton of times because you're a scientist. So when you say model, immediately, I'm thinking, you're talking about a science experiment. If you're an inventor and you're working on a machine and someone says, "Hey, there's a flaw here. The screw's going to come loose." No one's going to say, how dare you. You're an idiot. That's not a good inventor. The inventor is going to say, "Thank you."

— Infinite Loops, Episode 33: Tim Urban - Exploring Ourselves

Now, when I start to develop a new belief, I approach it with caution to avoid falling for the zealousness of conversion.

At this point, it might seem as though I am trying to strip people of everything that makes them… them. How else can you understand yourself if not through labels? How will others understand you? Shouldn’t you be proud of your identity and the group built around it, whether it is your religion, nationality, gender, sexuality, philosophical belief, or even artistic style?

After realizing that so many beliefs are subject to change throughout one’s life, it became obvious to me that we should instead seek to understand and live by our core personal values. The appeal here is that these values should not come under threat or change if one of your beliefs, or models, changes.

For example, if honesty is one of my most important core personal values, it should remain constant even as I transition religious beliefs, political leanings, and even art styles. My core personal values can help guide me to the beliefs and actions that are true to myself and encourage me to slowly build an integrated, coherent worldview.

core personal values

Identity labels, which are primarily defined by the collective, are ever-changing—but you are not the agent of those changes. Understanding yourself in terms of your values and character traits is a much more practical and healthy approach. What’s the top core value that you try to practice in your day-to-day? Is it honesty? Loyalty? Taking time to think about and define the values you want to embody allows you to grow—and most importantly, outgrow—throughout life.

Of course, this doesn’t mean abandoning certain parts of your identity. Whether you like it or not, people will consciously and subconsciously label you based on looks, minimal or extensive interactions, hearsay, how you present yourself online, or the group you associate with.

When approached with caution, labels can genuinely be useful to us and others. We just have to periodically check in with ourselves to make sure we are not being controlled and consumed by our labels.

automaton conformity

Why are we so drawn to labels? In his book Escape from Freedom, philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argues that if man experiences freedom from authoritarian rule (e.g., government, religious institution) without exercising his freedom to express his individuality while integrating himself with the world, he will feel burdened with overwhelming feelings of loneliness, alienation, and responsibility, and he will consequently try to find ways to escape his freedom.

Fromm outlines three mechanisms of escaping freedom that people commonly seek in order to overcome the feelings of anxiety and isolation that freedom from, without freedom to, produces: (1) authoritarianism via masochist or sadist tendencies, which I discuss in detail in my previous post; (2) destructiveness, which I will discuss in a future post; and/or (3) automaton conformity, the most common mechanism of escape, which I will briefly discuss here.

To put it briefly, the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be. The discrepancy between “I” and the world disappears and with it the conscious fear of aloneness and powerlessness.

The person who gives up his individual self becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious anymore. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 184)

This is a difficult issue to overcome both individually and societally because there is a widespread belief in “free” societies that people are free to think, feel, and act as they please, and that their thoughts, feelings, and wishes are genuinely their own—but for a majority of people, who are automaton conformists, this is simply an illusion.

According to Fromm, pseudo acts, thoughts, feelings, and willingness (i.e., induced from the outside) are the rule, while genuine and indigenous ones are the exceptions.

Consider how quickly news travels today—much of which is designed to elicit moral outrage that rarely is transformed into productive action. Whether that news is truly catastrophic, merely a nuisance, or literally of no consequence, there is a pervasive idea that one must immediately adopt a strong stance on the issue, or else they will be seen as complicit in the issue, a traitor, or ignorant. This is likely a gross misunderstanding of famous quotes like: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” and “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.

In an increasingly digital age that is deteriorated by rampant mob rule and tribal thinking, the release of outrage-inducing news creates a sense of urgency to react. People’s character, status, and even reputation come under threat if they do not speak out—and, more importantly, do not speak out correctly. “Correctly” here, of course, often depends on many factors, including the group this person is affiliated with, their employer, and the goals and status they are trying to achieve.

So what happens? A news story is released, and many people will immediately respond in very predictable and scripted ways. Typically, their response is almost verbatim what their affiliated groups (e.g., religious, political) tout. If they are silent, they risk being labeled as ignorant at best or affiliates of the “opposing” group (along with a string of character attacks) at worst. This experience is especially pronounced for celebrities, influencers, and other individuals who have established an online presence in certain communities. (Seriously, why and how did we get to a point where we demand our celebrities to become moral arbiters?)

Do these people, who speak out quickly and predictably, genuinely believe what they are arguing? How much of what they say and believe is injected by their identity group? Do they feel pressure to believe and say these things, or do they subjectively feel like those beliefs are their own? Under different circumstances, would they still subscribe to those beliefs?

Are they automaton conformists?

The problem here, Fromm emphasizes, is not whether or not the beliefs are correct—the problem is whether or not the beliefs are a result of one’s own thinking. It is certainly possible that someone, through their original reasoning, can arrive at the same beliefs as the person I described above. The difference is that they came to these beliefs genuinely, whereas the aforementioned type of person came to their beliefs from outside forces—whether or not they feel or acknowledge it.

A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with exepctations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.

In watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as “their” decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure. It almost seems that “original” decision is a comparatively rare phenomenon in a society which supposedly makes individual decision the cornerstone of its existence.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 197)

So, why are we so drawn to labels? When we label ourselves, we are in essence joining a community built around that label. (In the digital age, this is becoming increasingly easy to do—and increasingly lacking in meaning as well.) Ultimately, we conform to the identity group our label is affiliated with. Inevitably, affiliation with an identity group will consciously or subconsciously lead to at least some moderation of our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and actions.

The downside, if we ever realize it, is that we lose our genuine selves; we constantly seek out approval and validation from others to feel secure in our “identity”; we become a pseudo version of ourselves; we do not know who we are anymore.

The upside? Well, the upside is so powerful that it often masks the downside, which is why so many people find themselves in a state of automaton conformity: we gain a community that (superficially) makes us feel secure; we do not feel isolated or out of place or weird; we are provided with (and rewarded for taking) shortcuts for what to believe in, what to do, and how to feel—all so we are not burdened with the important but painstaking work of determining these things for ourselves and, consequently, having to take accountability for the outcomes of our decisions; we are relieved from doubt in ourselves; we potentially gain status and the envy of others.

final thoughts

Getting rid of your labels in search of the real you might be terrifying at first, but liberation was never supposed to be easy. It’s hard work that pays off in the end.

Be kind to yourself, but at the same time skeptical and constructively critical, and you might just find the real you in there somewhere.

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Growing up, I did not have much freedom in my life. I blame this on both external and internal forces. Externally, my fate was in the hands of my community’s gross misinterpretation of religion, as well as an oppressive culture with traditionally conservative practices that were not favorable to girls and women who dared to express their individuality. Internally, I was struggling with chronic and debilitating anxiety that made any sense of agency feel completely out of reach, especially when it started to affect my physical health.

Yet if you had asked me at the time if I was free, I’m fairly certain I would have insisted that I was. My bar for freedom was low. Besides, for those of us who experienced life under authoritarian governments, it’s hard not to consider ourselves free by comparison in a country like the United States. (Some will disagree with me here, but that discussion is… beyond the scope of this post! Sorry!)

Freedom should be something that can be objectively measured, but this is unsurprisingly incredibly difficult to do—because what about the subjective feeling of freedom? That certainly seems to differ between individuals and across cultures. For example, I felt like I was losing freedom every time I traveled to certain parts of the Middle East—but to my surprise, I often hear from Arabs that they felt less free after immigrating to the United States. Of course, there are many factors at play here, but the point I want to make is that freedom can be experienced subjectively in a way that might contradict reality. And what a dangerous situation that is.

Over time, I slowly fought for my freedom and built my sense of agency. Of course, this is a never-ending process, but I can confidently say that I have objectively increased the capacity for freedom in my life. Things are a lot better now.

That being said, I’ve been exploring the topic a lot lately—reading books, observing others, reflecting on my own life and experiences—and it turns out there’s so much more to freedom than I ever could have imagined. It’s not as simple as having “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” (And it’s certainly not as easy to maintain as we might think it is.) Some people might have the right and ability to exercise all of the above but decide against it. Yes! Some people might intentionally limit their freedom!

Erich Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom does a fantastic job explaining the concept of freedom—and why and how some people try to escape it. There are a few books I think everyone should read, and this one is easily at the top of my list. Fromm is a German Jewish psychoanalyst and philosopher who fled the Nazi regime in 1933 and settled in the United States. Escape from Freedom was published in 1941, but I promise it is just as relevant today and a must-read for those who want to better understand themselves, loved ones, and society at large.

In my first Substack post, I wrote about Fromm’s theory of why and how some ideas appeal to certain groups at specific points in time, which he also discusses in Escape from Freedom (hint: it has to do with their psychological needs). For this post, I want to focus on Fromm’s following points:

1. The distinction between freedom from (negative) and freedom to (positive)

2. The dangers of having the former type of freedom without the latter; as the title of the book suggests, in this situation, people will rely on the following mechanisms to escape their freedom:

   • Authoritarianism via masochism (submission) and/or sadism (domination)

   • Destructiveness — to be discussed in part II

   • Automaton conformity — to be discussed in part II

While you read this post, I hope you contemplate what freedom means to you and how, if at all, you or your loved ones might be trying to escape it.

(Note: Fortunately or unfortunately—depending on your reading preferences—there will be a lot of quotes directly from Escape from Freedom throughout this post. While writing this post, I felt like it would be a disservice to Fromm’s work to paraphrase it. Also, my goal is to get more people to read this book, so I figured it’s okay to quote often to give readers a sense of his work and writing style.)

freedom from vs. freedom to

Fromm dedicates a good chunk of Escape from Freedom to discussing the psychological primers that enabled the transition from restrictive societies (e.g., medieval Europe, feudalism) to freer ones (i.e., due to capitalism and democracy). He likens this transition to the process of individuation that children experience as they mature and gain independence from their parents (which sounds a lot like teenage angst to me):

On the one hand it is a process of growing strength and integration, mastery of nature, growing power of human reason, and growing solidarity with other human beings.

But on the other hand this growing individuation means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s own role in the universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 35)

The transition from societies organized around authoritarian rule to ones that value freedom is without a doubt a welcome one—but it comes with challenges as well.

Fromm argues that if man gains freedom from external authoritarian rule (e.g., from a government, religious institution, etc.) but does not exercise the freedom to express his individuality and integrate himself with the world around him, he will feel burdened with an overwhelming amount of loneliness, alienation, and responsibility, and as a result he will try to find ways to escape his freedom.

Free from external rule, man must now think for himself, define his place in society, and make decisions that will determine the outcome of his life instead of outsourcing many of those decisions and their consequences to a higher authority. He is suddenly personally liable for every facet of his life. Basically: it is not easy to truly be free.

Consider how much this contrasts with restrictive societies.

Under feudalism, the class you are born into is the class you will likely die in as well; there is little opportunity to change this fate. In medieval Europe and even many countries around the world today, whatever the religious institution in power says is what you must believe—otherwise, there will be serious consequences. Gender roles, reputations, and even jobs are pre-determined under these systems.

In such societies, people are disincentivized from thinking for themselves, but in return, they are relieved of the burdens of (a) decision-making and (b) being held responsible and accountable for their lives and actions.

And here lies an important contradiction we must acknowledge to understand the problem: in such a society, man is limited, but he feels secure. He has a community of others like him, and his life is given purpose by whatever higher authority is in power. (A reminder that, whether we like it or not, there is a trade-off to everything in life.)

Freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 103; emphasis mine)

These insecurities, which are natural after man gains freedom from authoritarian rule, can be managed if individuals have the freedom to integrate themselves with mankind and nature without violating their individuality.

Even if a society has the capacity to practice freedom to, man must be willing to exercise this freedom. If he doesn’t, he will be caught in limbo between the two states of freedom—and the resulting tension can overpower him with feelings of anxiety, insignificance, and loneliness, which puts him at a higher risk of finding ways to escape his freedom.

Put differently, it’s not enough for a society to break free from authoritarian rule (freedom from). It must foster the conditions necessary to help its members become self-sufficient and express their individuality while also connecting with their peers through love and productive work. Without this (freedom to), people risk falling for authoritarianism once again, but potentially in less obvious ways (e.g., the rule of public opinion, mob mentality).

Once man is free from authoritarian rule, he gains a new self-awareness that makes him feel powerless, insecure, and alone—from there, he has two options available to him:

By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self.

The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 139)

Not convinced? Consider the following scenarios which illustrate this phenomenon on a smaller scale and have likely been experienced by everyone at some point:

• Restrictive scenario: working a job you hate, but it provides status, good pay and benefits, and the comfort of predictability in your life

  Freedom from: quitting this job you hate and losing these benefits, but now having the option to find a better job and take control of your life

  Freedom to: understanding and pursuing your passions and the things that make you feel alive

  Freedom from without freedom to: being too scared to discover and pursue your passions, not wanting to give up the status or comfort of the job you hated, falling into another job you hate, chasing status to appease other people, feeling overwhelmed with and paralyzed by the decisions you have to make to feel good about your life

• Restrictive scenario: having a romantic or platonic relationship with someone you dislike or who often treats you poorly, but justifying it due to low self-esteem, familiarity, fear of confrontation, and to avoid loneliness

  Freedom from: cutting off this relationship despite the heartbreak and consequently having the option to pursue a healthier relationship

  Freedom to: building your self-esteem and not accepting poor treatment from others, having the courage to seek out healthy relationships, healing your unhealthy tendencies

  Freedom from without freedom to: doubting your value as a person and right to have healthy relationships, finding another unhealthy relationship or going back to the one you broke off to avoid loneliness, feeling guilt or doubt over your decision to leave

Given the power and influence of culture, relationship dynamics, historical context, and even our psychological conditions at any given moment, it’s clear why we would need to break down freedom into two parts. We can even think of it as a process—one in which pain is inevitable but ultimately fruitful if we navigate it correctly.

To take it a step further, our freedom is not only restricted by an external authority like a dictator, abusive parent, terrible boss, or powerful religious institution. Today, we focus so much on these threats to freedom that we dangerously forget another powerful one: ourselves. In one of my favorite passages in the book, Fromm explains this using freedom of speech as an example:

We feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.

Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and “common sense,” which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pgs. 104–105)

Now that we (hopefully) understand the two types of freedom, we can move on to what I consider the most important part of his book: how we escape freedom.

mechanisms of escaping freedom

This section is really the reason I’m writing this post. As I read Fromm’s detailed breakdowns of the various ways people try to escape freedom, it struck me just how commonplace they are. Everywhere I turn, people are limiting their freedom because they are overwhelmed with the anxieties it produces.

For the record, this criticism is directed at me as well. My sense is that everyone is limiting his or her freedom; we just differ in how and the extent to which we do it.

Mechanism of escape #1: Authoritarianism

This mechanism is “the tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking” (pg. 140). This can happen by striving for submission (masochism) or domination (sadism).

The masochist tends to feel inferior, powerless, and individually insignificant. You will often find masochists belittling themselves; not asserting their needs or wants; unnecessarily criticizing themselves; depending on powers outside of themselves such as other people, institutions, or nature to guide their lives; and feeling as though life just happens to them instead of being something they have influence over. They are passive and compliant. They might even completely give themselves up for the sake of another person in the name of “love”. According to Fromm, “with such people, it almost seems as if they were following advice given to them by an enemy to behave in such a way as to be most detrimental to themselves” (pg. 142).

The sadist, on the other hand, will either (a) make others dependent on himself to have absolute and unrestricted power over them; (b) rule over, exploit, and use others by stealing material or immaterial (e.g., emotional or intellectual qualities) things; or (c) make others suffer physically or mentally to hurt, humiliate, or embarrass them.

These tendencies can be rationalized by feigning concern or responsibility for others. The sadist might claim that he knows what’s best for the people he seeks to dominate, or that he is so unique that others should naturally submit to him, or that he has done so much for someone that this person now owes him, or that he has been hurt and therefore can hurt others as retaliation, or that he is hurting others as a way to defend himself and loved ones against the dangers of being hurt first.

While the masochistic person’s dependence is obvious, our expectation with regard to the sadistic person is just the reverse: he seems so strong and domineering, and the object of his sadism so weak and submissive, that it is difficult to think of the strong one as being dependent on the one over whom he rules.

And yet close analysis shows that this is true. The sadist needs the person over whom he rules, he needs him very badly, since his own feeling of strength is rooted in the fact that he is the master over someone.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 144)

Have you ever met someone so mean, controlling, and damaging that you wondered how they could possibly have a circle of seemingly close and loyal friends—until you realized that all their closest and longest-held friends were weak and incapable of defending themselves? The sadist here depends on their circle of weak friends to feel powerful and give meaning to his life. Without them, he has nothing. Fromm illustrates this phenomenon well:

A man may treat his wife very sadistically and tell her repeatedly that she can leave the house any day and that he would be only too glad if she did. Often she will be so crushed that she will not dare to make an attempt to leave, and therefore they both will continue to believe that what he says is true. But if she musters up the courage to declare the she will leave him, something quite unexpected to both of them may happen: he will become desperate, break down, and beg her not to leave him; he will say he cannot live without her, and will declare how much he loves her and so on. Usually, being afraid of asserting herself anyhow, she will be prone to believe him, change her decision and stay. At this point the play starts again.

Did he lie when he said he loved her so much that he could not live without her? As far as love is concerned, it all depends on what one means by love. As far as his assertion goes that he could not live without her, it is—of course not taking it literally—perfectly true. He cannot live without her—or at least without someone else whom he feels to be the helpless instrument in his hands.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 145)

The sadist might be able to offer everything in the world to the object of his sadism (the person he is dominating), from material things to grand assurances of love, but he will never offer freedom and independence. Interestingly, Fromm relates this to the typical parent-child relationship, in which the parent’s attitude of domination and ownership toward the child is rationalized as natural feelings of concern and protectiveness. “The child is put into a golden cage; it can have everything provided it does not want to leave the cage” (pg. 145).

Both masochists and sadists are grappling with feelings of intense anxiety over a world that feels alien and hostile to them. Whether they appear powerless or powerful, they cannot be free, because they depend on another individual, institution, or idea in an attempt to find security. This dependence can only result in one thing: losing oneself.

To withstand the burden of freedom, the masochist can reduce himself to nothing; make himself small and helpless; seek out pain and agony; intoxicate himself with drugs and alcohol; become suicidal; or submit, with millions of others, to an ideology or strong leader. Of course, none of these are solutions to his anxiety.

For the masochist, submitting himself to a strong group means he can be part of and participate in the group’s strength and glory—despite his feelings of individual insignificance. Here we see once again a curious contradiction: in surrendering his individuality and freedom, the masochist finds security, pride, and confidence in the object he submits himself to (e.g., a person, institution, God, nation, duty, conscience, public opinion, ideology, claims of normality).

Do we not see several instances of this kind of submission to a group or ideology in a misguided attempt to find personal meaning and identity today?

The masochistic person, whether his master is an authority outside of himself or whether he has internalized the master as conscience or a psychic compulsion, is saved from making decisions, saved from the final responsibility for the fate of his self, and thereby saved from the doubt of what decision to make. He is also saved from the doubt of what the meaning of his life is or who “he” is.

These questions are answered by the relationship to the power to which he has attached himself. The meaning of his life and the identity of his self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 155)

Wow! This passage gave me chills. How often do we sit back and dream of someone who can swoop in and magically take care of all our responsibilities, guiding us through life with a rulebook of what we should and shouldn’t do? What do these feelings tell us about ourselves, if not our desire to escape freedom and the burdens of individuality?

The sadist, on the other hand, deals with his feelings of isolation by seeking complete domination over another individual—and yet, similarly to the masochist, he loses the integrity of his individual self. For the sadist, his desire to be powerful, even if he is successful, is not a sign of his strength. Rather, it is a sign of his weakness: his inability to live and express himself as an individual.

The sadistic person needs his object just as much as the masochist needs his. Only instead of seeking security by being swallowed, he gains it by swallowing somebody else. In both cases the integrity of the individual self is lost. In one case I dissolve myself in an outside power; I lose myself. In the other case I enlarge myself by making another being part of myself and thereby I gain the strength I lack as an independent self. It is always the inability to stand the aloneness of one’s individual self that leads to the drive to enter into a symbiotic relationship with someone else.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 157)

There is so much more that can be said about the authoritarian character, whether he expresses masochistic or sadistic tendencies, but since this post is already quite long, I’ll end it with this final quote from Fromm—a powerful one that I think everyone should contemplate:

The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self, his interest, his wishes.

Not only the forces that determine one’s own life directly but also those that seem to determine life in general are felt as unchangeable fate. It is fate that there are wars and that one part of mankind has to be ruled by another. It is fate that the amount of suffering can never be less than it always has been. Fate may be rationalized philosophically as “natural law” or as “destiny of man,” religiously as the “will of the Lord,” ethically as “duty”—for the authoritarian character it is always a higher power outside of the individual, toward which the individual can do nothing but submit. The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pg. 169)

final thoughts

I will discuss the second (destructiveness) and third (automaton conformity) mechanisms of escape in an upcoming post, but here I wanted to lay the foundation by defining freedom and the first, and in my opinion most important, mechanism of escape: authoritarianism via masochism and/or sadism.

Upon reflection, I realized that for a lot of my life, I exhibited more masochistic tendencies to tolerate the anxieties of life. I submitted fully to religion, and when I gave that up, I replaced it with political ideology. I was never just… me. I plan to write about this personal reflection in a future essay about identity, which I’ve been writing on and off for quite some time now.

In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts about Fromm’s definitions of freedom, masochism, and sadism!

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Its presence is little noted, but its absence causes great distress. 

I talk about agency quite often, because it’s something I only recently discovered (and eventually embraced) for myself.

Cultivating agency was a gruelling experience for me; it required a lot of learning, unlearning, risk-taking, and trusting myself to navigate unfamiliar paths. But that shouldn’t deter anyone from trying to develop their own sense of agency. Think of it as a personal project—it becomes a lot easier to get started once you accept that most long-term beneficial things in life are really difficult to obtain.

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately, so I want to reflect on what it means to go from little agency to high agency, why it took me so long to finally land here, and how to inspire a sense of agency.

what is this so-called “agency” anyway?

Agency can be formally defined as the subjective feeling of having control over one’s actions and their consequences. (Let’s ignore the free will debate for now, please!)

Put differently, you don’t feel as though life is just happening to you, with your only choice being to sit back and accept it all. Instead, you feel as though you are an active participant in your life; you are making things happen.

You might feel high agency when you allow your mind to wander and embrace your curiosity, a behavior that is intrinsic to being human no matter how difficult it feels at times. You might feel high agency when you take a leap of faith and share your creative work with others (music, photography, writing, poetry), abandoning your fear of being judged. You might feel it when you own up to your mistakes and give a genuine apology, whether to yourself or someone else. Little things might inspire a sense of agency, too: watching the sunset after a difficult hike, hitting a new PR at the gym, doing something anxiety-inducing that will pay off in the long run.

But high agency can be hard to describe, or even understand, if you don’t have it. I grew up in a conservative household with little to no autonomy, and if you had asked me then to define agency, I would have struggled to give you a clear answer. How can you articulate something you’ve never experienced?

For most of my life, I did not have a sense of agency—both for reasons within and outside of my control—and I rarely came across others who could serve as my role models for living life with high agency. Not straying from the path laid out to me by others was the safest “decision” I could make, so I was never in a position to contemplate what having agency might look like for me. (In my first Substack post, I wrote a little bit about the difficulties of changing your worldview if you lack agency or are simply preoccupied with survival—this is relevant because cultivating a sense of agency requires a radical transformation of your worldview, which can be nearly impossible if you are not psychologically ready for it.)

A few months ago, I came across this post differentiating ambition from agency, and it helped me better understand what this so-called agency really is:

Growing up, I've always been mesmerized by people I perceived to be “moths” — humans fluttering around just outside of the bright glow of the traditional spotlight. While “butterflies” sparkled within traditional systems, moths seemed to be playing games entirely of their own making.

From the outside, agency is often misinterpreted as ambition, but I learned through observing these two types of people that they are actually quite different. Ambition means you're motivated to play games that others have already created in the world, while agency means you're driven to play a game of your own.

— Mothminds

Something finally clicked for me. For a while, I thought gaining some aspects of independence would automatically grant me agency, but upon reflection, I don’t think the former necessarily guarantees the latter. Independence might be a helpful prerequisite for high agency, but agency is so much deeper than that. Every day, people live with more independence than I could ever dream of, but still don’t feel or exercise agency in their life. You might have independence, and you might be an ambitious person—but if you can’t even begin to fathom creating and playing by your own rules, do you really have agency?

Getting my license, having my own job, living in my own apartment, moving thousands of miles away from home—all of these allowed me to experience some amount of independence and required some ambition, but I was still playing someone else’s game. Sure, I was making decisions, but ultimately I was still trying so hard to please both people I knew and didn’t know. My decisions were all informed by a simple question that will break your spirit with time: what will others think? I was playing a game I didn’t want to play, too scared to find out what would happen if I didn’t adhere to the rules of this game. I didn’t even know I had the option not to play!

Frankly, despite my independence, I did not have agency.

Another post I encountered recently (I have screenshots of the post, but it has unfortunately been deleted) brushes on the concept of agency without explicitly naming it:

A commonality I’ve noticed about the really original characters, the people who go to do great things with their lives, is that they can see that most rules people think exist don’t.

…I don’t think people truly grasp how much of their lives are really a blank canvas. Most of the rules you think are there are simply blinders we willingly put on because of societal expectations.

I sometimes feel like I’m in a society of mimes behind fake walls who’ve started to believe their act and they look on in shock as I carelessly walk through all of their boundaries with no resistance.

— Kat Woods

In her post, Woods is clearly talking about navigating her life with high agency. She’s not playing according to other people’s games or the rules of some traditional system that isn’t working anymore—she’s creating her own rules as she goes about her life. This is the key to having high agency. (For the record, I’m not talking about breaking laws. It can be as simple as refusing to enter a career path you hate despite pressure from your family and community, for example.)

Woods goes on to ask if this “originality” can be taught, and notes that she has only ever met people who always seemed to know this or spontaneously discovered it. “I think for me I learned it when I took a gap year between high school and university and learned I could learn on my own, which opened the floodgates,” she continues. “Maybe for some it could just be enough to read this. Perhaps purposefully trying to find and read about alternate lifestyles could be helpful. For others maybe being around people who think this way could help internalize it.”

I think she’s right—but I would add that, in order to develop agency, one needs to be psychologically ready to embrace it (i.e., change their worldview) once they spontaneously discover it. For instance, abandoning a victim mentality and being open to taking risks.

how did i get here?

When I think of how I developed high agency (or at least, high agency relative to what I had), I recall a number of decisions, events, and thoughts that led me here:

• Recognizing all the ways I tried to exercise my agency when I thought I didn’t have any

  One day, after learning about the concept of a sense of agency, I realized that I had been fighting for it in small ways my entire life. When I was a teenager and at the peak of not having any autonomy, I would occasionally fight back and question why I wasn’t allowed to do something. I would sometimes sneak around to do what I needed to do, if I felt like the restriction was unreasonable or had no basis in ethics. I fought to have my own part-time job as a way to gain some financial independence. My community shamed any woman who left home for college or work before getting married—but I pushed back and did it anyway. In college, when I had gained some autonomy over my life, I dropped the career path that was chosen for me and pursued my own passion, despite disappointing many as a result. Turns out, I was desperately trying to claim my sense of agency—it was terrifying, it was difficult, and at times I considered how much easier it would be to just accept what was expected of me and avoid all the… drama.
  
  This realization—that I had been fighting for my sense of agency even when I had very little of it—was so necessary for me to push through and understand that I owe it to myself to keep going. I think anyone can develop a sense of agency, no matter how broken their spirit might be. You just need to find all the ways that you’ve been fighting for it all along—it’s only human, afterall. Some of us might just have to dig a little bit deeper, but it is there.
  
  Ask yourself: Is there something you’re doing that you feel is unnecessary, or can be done in a better way? What aspects of your life make you feel uneasy, as though something is just… not right? What do you do that makes you unhappy, and can it be fixed? Who are you trying to please at your own expense?

• Surrounding myself with people who have a high but realistic sense of agency

  I found myself attracted to people who exhibited high-agency traits like being decisive, knowing what they want in life, and having big dreams and taking non-conventional or otherwise risky steps to achieve those dreams. (I learned later that many of these people were raised to feel a sense of agency, which is likely why it came so naturally to them; now, I often think about all the ways I’ll raise my future children to have their own sense of agency.)
  
  I liked those people, so I kept them around—despite the fact that we were nearly opposites. I had big dreams but it took a lot to convince myself to act on them; I was extremely risk-averse and preferred the safest paths to avoid conflict, uncertainty, or discomfort; I was highly motivated but, again, playing someone else’s games.
  
  There were moments when these high-agency people angered me. What makes them think they can just… do that? I would think, not realizing that most of that anger was probably directed at my self-imposed constraints.

  
  I wholeheartedly believe that you are who you surround yourself with. I have always taken my inner and even outer circles very seriously, and I think more people should do that too. Are the people you see most often inspiring you, or bringing you down? Do you admire and respect them? Do they bring out the best or worst in you? I know it can be difficult to find friends, especially these days, but it shouldn’t stop us from examining our circles to make sure they’re not holding us back or keeping us down.
  

• Understanding that I was going to essentially ruin my life if I didn’t act with a sense of agency

  At some point later in college, I felt urgency around the need to develop a sense of agency. I saw first-hand how beneficial it was for the (few) people in my life who had it—they were confident in their decisions, they didn’t let the fear failure deter them from acting, and they were experiencing noteworthy milestones in their life whether or not they had been successful in their original ventures. Even when they failed, they persisted. I admired them, and I knew that I needed to make a change in my life.
  
  At the same time, I was realizing how many personal and interpersonal issues ultimately traced back to feeling like one has little to no agency. Everything from confidence to motivation can be traced back to agency, at least to some extent. I was witnessing others’ lack of agency lead to real life consequences that I wanted to avoid. This realization leads me to my last and perhaps most important piece of advice about developing a sense of agency:
  

• Eliminating unproductive feelings of victimhood and distancing myself from people who have a victim complex

  I was consistently encountering people whose worldview relied on feeling like a victim, to the point where they developed a complex about it. A victim mentality is, in my opinion, one of the biggest threats to cultivating a sense of agency. Perpetual victimhood cannot coexist with agency.
  
  To be clear, I’m not talking about horrific events and circumstances that produce victims (or survivors, as some people prefer to say). Thinking of someone—or yourself—as a victim in certain cases can actually be a useful framework for finding solutions. I’m talking about people who unproductively cope with adverse life events by refusing to take accountability and instead blaming anyone and anything else for their woes; it’s a comfortable position to be in because someone with a victim complex can avoid responsibility, garner sympathy, and always find a way to justify their harmful behaviors. The crux of the mentality is the absence of agency.
  
  Reminder that a sense of agency means feeling like you have control over your actions and their consequences. I think people tend to forget that second part; owning your mistakes and their consequences is extremely difficult, which might be a motivating factor for some people to adopt victim complexes. (A victim complex is learned!)
  
  I highly recommend reading the articles linked here and here, but to summarize, some signs of someone with a victim mentality include:

  • Believing things always happen to you that are not your fault

  • Always placing blame on someone or something else

  • Taking things personally even when they were not meant that way

  • Not wanting to make any changes or consider solutions

  • Self-sabotage, negative self-talk, low confidence/self-esteem

  Seeing how harmful these behaviors are motivated me to challenge any feelings of victimhood I held for myself, which is a necessary step to developing a sense of agency.

so, what now?

Finding and developing your sense of agency is a lifelong project, especially if you were not raised with this mentality. Developing a beneficial habit or mentality is not enough—you must also find a way to maintain it.

So while I have higher levels of agency now than I did growing up, I am constantly faced the temptation to retract to my old ways because… well, it feels safer. But if I want to live a fulfilling and meaningful life, I can’t allow myself to do that. I’ll be working on maintaining my sense of agency despite life’s hurdles. I’ll continue challenging and updating my worldviews when necessary; acknowledging my fears but not letting them stop me unnecessarily; making note of things I want and don’t want for my life based on my observations of others.

One thing I’m working on now is understanding the limits of agency. I can’t always be in control—life simply does not work like that. There will be times when I have to deal with the consequences of decisions that were not mine to make—how should I react in these moments? There might be times when my sense of agency is exaggerated or unrealistic—how can I keep that in check and not get carried away? I’m still figuring things out, but what has worked for me the past few years is practicing gratitude every single day, recognizing that tragedies are part of being human and are not necessarily unique to me, and genuinely believing that I owe it to myself to develop my sense of agency. I always had it in me.

I often think about the sentence at the beginning of my post: Its presence is little noted, but its absence causes great distress. Those lucky enough to have been raised with a sense of agency might not realize the gift they have until something threatens it one day—which, again, is inevitable because we can’t have complete control over our lives. But part of me believes that even those without a sense of agency are experiencing distress, whether they realize it or not—our bodies are, at all times, fighting to be alive both in the physical sense and in the philosophical sense.

So why not give it a chance and feel what it means to be truly alive?

don’t ask me why or how, but here’s some art that reminds me of living with and without agency

This post is about transitions, with a focus on transitioning from lovers to exes. Lately, I’ve been coming across endless news of people ending long-term relationships, or even just thinking about leaving their long-term partner for [insert literally any reason here; I’ve heard it all]. Oftentimes, these were relationships that, I thought, were going pretty well.

For some reason, hearing news of breakups affects me deeply. My guess is that I almost take it personally because I’m trying to reframe how I view relationships to be more positive, which is especially difficult after being exposed to only miserable and failed ones my entire life.

So every single breakup, especially the ones that are most surprising to me, feels like an assault on this new worldview I’m still trying to build—one in which there is hope for long-term relationships that are healthy, strong, and happy. (For the record: I’m in one now! But I don’t want to feel like it’s working out against all odds. I want to believe that there is a reality in which these healthy and happy relationships are the norm, and I’m part of that norm.)

So, this post is my attempt to talk through these feelings and try to understand what the hell is going on out here, along with, of course, a potential solution.

but first, let’s talk about transitions

I think a lot about the various transitions we experience in life.

Many of the transitions I think about happen over months, years, or decades; some happen in an instant and can forever alter your life. I consider some transitions exciting (e.g., gaining independence as an adult) and cower over others (e.g., death). And for some transitions, I was able to reframe how I feel about them; in the case of aging, for example, I went from feeling fear and dread to excitement and hope. (I plan on writing a Substack post about this in the future; specifically, how the book The Telomere Effect radically changed my understanding of and feelings around aging.)

I also think a lot about the physical spaces that hold us during our transitions; the ones that have seen us both at our best and at our worst, but remained unjudging throughout. These spaces exist for many practical reasons, but lately I’ve been considering that they also exist for more sentimental reasons, like to gently remind us of the changes we go through in our lives.

For example, I think of the paths I walked almost every day for four years as a student at UNC Chapel Hill; these paths bore witness to my many transitions throughout that time period. I walked these paths with people who went from acquaintances to friends, and friends to strangers; I walked them while crying and feeling like my life was over, and while laughing and feeling like I was on top of the world; I walked them at my healthiest, and at my weakest; I walked them as someone who firmly believed in X, and later as someone whose belief in X was withering away.

I recently revisited these paths, four years after graduation, and was overwhelmed with how many memories they held for me. These paths—winding, steep, breaking off into different directions, and occasionally with missing bricks—didn’t belong to me anymore, but they kept alive the memories of the old me. Or, at least, they resurrected those memories in my presence. Standing on those pathways reminded me of the transition I experienced from student then to working adult now.

I think about how listening to a song can seemingly transport you back to the time you first heard it, reminding you of how different things were back then. The song has not changed, but you have; it almost feels as though the song is tethered to the old you, and re-molding it to fit the new you would be a crime.

Perhaps you wouldn’t realize how different things are now without the song—or smell, place, whatever it is—to remind you.

And before you roll your eyes, I think a lot about liminal spaces, too. In fact, a lot of what I described above could fit into the idea of liminality, defined as “the places and times in life where one is on the threshold of change … being neither here nor there, this in-between period of time in life can create a feeling of not just anxiety, but also joy and excitement for what’s to come.”

Liminality can be felt in a physical space (e.g., stairwells, hotel hallways at night, elevators, empty malls, abandoned homes, playgrounds at night)—but it can also be a mental state or something non-physical (e.g., divorce and breakups, a coming of age vs. a midlife crisis, job loss, moving).

A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, a season of waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.

— Cambridge Art Association

I don’t know if I’m communicating these examples clearly, but this is how I think of the various transitions we experience in life: typically in relation to something, usually physical, that remains constant throughout our transition and later reminds us of the change happening in the first place.

How intensely would we feel the aging of our physical appearance, for instance, without pictures and videos to visually remind us of our younger days? Similarly, loss hits us much harder when we encounter a scent that reminds us of the person we lost. Buried memories on the verge of disappearing spring out at us when we hear an old jingle, song, or commercial from our childhood—would we have remembered those specific moments, and who we were, and how we felt, otherwise?

Going from being in a romantic relationship with someone for years or even decades, to being single, is a transition that in my experience is so ubiquitous that it might as well be considered a fact of life. This is the transition I want to focus on here. It’s the one that bothers and perplexes me the most, occupying my mind at all times.

the end of a long-term, romantic relationship

For a long time, my worldview was shaped by bad relationships and marriages that were not just unsuccessful, but brutally unsuccessful. I know I’m not alone in this experience; I frequently hear from people that their parents’ divorce had a major effect on them or that they are terrified to commit because they have never seen commitment work out. I know of too many women who have faced unspeakable harms committed by their male partners; at the same time, I’m increasingly hearing from men their fears of being emotionally manipulated and/or financially abused by their female partners. Queer relationships face their own set of typical and unique struggles as well.

Turns out, regardless of your identity or circumstance, feelings of affection are easy but relationships are… a little more complicated.

Whenever someone shares that they are breaking up, separating, or divorcing after many years together, I find myself desperate to know how and why it happened. I want to probe—not out of morbid curiosity, but out of absolute fear.

I bite my tongue, to be polite of course, but I desperately want to ask them: are you shocked, or is this outcome obvious in hindsight? Were the red flags always there but ignored, or did something happen one day that changed everything? Can you recall when the transition from wanting to be together to not wanting to be together happened—and why? Who felt that way first? Sometimes people say they did not see their breakup coming—how?

How can you go from loving someone enough to want to commit to that person for the rest of your life by getting married, building a home together, having kids, building a future—to suddenly calling it quits? (Contracts and government interference aren’t working! We need to find another way to secure love!)

I’ve seen the lover-to-enemy trope happen with countless relationships, and while I understand many of the alleged causes of failed relationships—money, differing values, miscommunication, infidelity, boredom (this one seems the silliest to me), abuse, optionality—I still struggle to wrap my head around the entire phenomenon.

Maybe it’s denial, maybe it’s cope, or maybe it’s fear. Either way, I’m angry about it because these breakups so often seem unnecessary.

When my boyfriend and I are having a wonderful time together, which thankfully is the case more often than not, a small part of me starts to wonder if the couples going through a nasty divorce or breakup had similar happy moments throughout their relationship before things went south. And if so, what does that mean for the relationships that are seemingly healthy and secure? Can they too take a turn for the worse?

It’s not enough to say people just change. People change all the time while maintaining healthy relationships, so is it specific changes that lead to breakups? Is it one’s reaction to these changes?

Is it possible that relationships that end poorly, or end at all, were never strong or healthy to begin with?

Do failed relationships typically fall into a pattern of:

• good (honeymoon stage) →

• messy (the beginning of the end, going back and forth between wanting to break up and fighting for it to survive, hurting each other) →

• over (officially breaking up, divorcing)?

Or is it more like:

• bad (toxic beginnings, weak foundation, infatuation, lust, but all justified by strong feelings and some good moments) →

• worse (breaking up and getting back together, moments of peace followed by ever-worsening conditions) →

• officially over?

Without a doubt, strong and healthy relationships that do last have also experienced transitions from good to bad and back to good, in varying intensities and contexts and timeframes. Maybe they found the courage to stay, learning how to handle these transitions better and committing to working through their issues instead of taking the “easier” route and leaving. (Although some people find it easier to stay in unhealthy relationships, and leaving is what takes courage.) Maybe they had a stronger foundation to work on in the first place.

maybe, we need to think about ‘love’ differently

I recently read bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions after hearing, repeatedly, how transformational this book has been for so many people.

In just 11 short chapters, hooks manages to completely dismantle our conventional understanding of love as “deep affection” or an “instinctual feeling”; she explains why this line of thinking—pushed by movies, books, and even people who mean well—does such a disservice to relationships of all kinds, including romantic ones.

Instead, she asserts that love must be thought of as a verb, rather than as a noun:

The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the most astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

Echoing the work of Erich Fromm: ‘Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.’

Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.

— bell hooks

Thinking of love as a verb, rather than a noun, is helping me better understand why relationships fail. Investing feelings or deep emotions in someone is simply not enough to carry a relationship long-term, through all of life’s trials and tribulations, through all the inevitable transitions.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling — it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.

— Erich Fromm

Affection, according to hooks, is only one ingredient of love. The ingredients missing from our collective yet misguided understanding of love include care, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. Of course, accepting this definition of love can have some pretty upsetting implications, like realizing love, the verb, isn’t really present in your family or relationship.

But imagine how much confusion and unnecessary pain we would all avoid if we did accept this definition of love, refocusing our energy from “finding” love—or, more absurdly, waiting for love to “find” us—to improving how we show love. (And by the way, regarding finding love, what do people think happens afterward? That love is sustained by… divine intervention? That love transforms from noun to verb overnight?)

It makes me sad to think of how much misguided time, energy, and money goes into “finding” love. And the discourse! It’s so bad. Agonizing over the latest beauty trends, learning manipulative behaviors, and obsessing over what constitutes a good first date—all of these might find you a partner, but none of them can guarantee you love.

And if a relationship fails despite both individuals treating love as a verb, well… then back to the drawing board for me. For now, I’m holding on to this theory for why so many long-term relationships end.

Someone on TikTok said something that will stick with me for a while, and I think this is the root cause of relationship failures, and it can potentially explain the other alleged causes of breakups: “People often say relationships are a lot of hard work, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. I don’t think the relationship is hard work — I think the personal growth you have to do is the hard work.”

Working on oneself is an endless endeavor. Can improving yourself be considered a transition, or maybe a series of transitions? Either way, my conclusion is that it might just be the most important transition of all, because it enables the most important thing of all: love.

I think about this type of grief a lot. This emotion is far from foreign to me, and as I grow older, I’m realizing that more and more people have experienced it or are currently going through it as well. (I am once again reminded here that we are not alone in these experiences, finding both sadness and comfort in this realization.)

On the lighter end, you could feel some amount of grief when you and a close friend drift apart over time, becoming strangers with a history. You might also experience this type of grief for your past or future self, but this topic requires an entirely separate post.

On the more extreme end—and this is the type of grief I want to talk about in this piece—it could happen when a loved one undergoes a significant negative change that transforms who they are as a person, or you find out something about them that entirely changes how you see them, leaving you completely at a loss for what to do.

This post is my attempt to understand why we experience grief when this happens, especially for such an extended period of time. My theory is that we experience this type of grief precisely at the moment when we start to realize this person has fundamentally changed, because our mind desperately wants to cling on to the person they used to be. At this moment, we find ourselves stuck trying to reconcile the past (who they used to be) with the present (who they are now). And sometimes, we’ll rationalize or dismiss their behavior for temporary comfort.

I think this mostly comes from a place of love and loyalty, but part of me also worries about the consequences of finding ourselves stuck here for too long. In the next section, I’ll try to explain my understanding of this emotion, but I recognize that I might be off—and I definitely have more questions than answers. If you have other theories, I would love to hear them!

When we meet someone for the first time, we construct an image of this person in our heads. And whether we realize it or not, this image is updated with each subsequent interaction we have with this person. (Of course, this is a bit more complicated for people who have always been around, like family members, given that we begin constructing this image from childhood—a time when we have little life experience to best inform the image we’re creating. Similarly, this image creation process applies to ourselves, which means we can also experience grief for our past selves when we go through a monumental change.)

Are they trustworthy? Do they like me? Are they fun, intimidating, confusing? How do I feel when I’m around them? Who do they remind me of, and what other similarities do they share with this person? Are they still trustworthy?

And on, and on, and on.

As our relationship with someone deepens and becomes more complex over time, so too does our image of them. Suddenly, this image includes thousands of little updates and revisions due to good and bad memories, solicited and unsolicited input from other people, projections of our desires and expectations and insecurities, plus a number of other factors—and with enough time, this image sticks.

It becomes increasingly difficult to make any updates that might strongly contradict our existing image of this person.

I believe this specific instance is when we experience this unique grief for the living—when the contradictions are too overwhelming for us to accept or peacefully incorporate into the image we’ve created of someone, making us feel like we’re stuck.

I’m not talking about the inconvenient but minor updates that we make all the time, such as realizing that someone is always late rather than punctual, or is messy rather than clean, or hates your favorite show or music genre, or is not always aligned with your political beliefs, or is naturally changing as they mature. These realizations simply help us see others as real people who exist outside of our projections of them. In a way, these updates are good, and in many cases harmless!

Instead, we experience this grief when something happens that requires a complete reassessment of the person in question; when the only way to understand and accept who they are now is to stop clinging on to our image of who they used to be.

Physically, the person is the same—psychologically, they might as well be a stranger.

Hopefully, an experience like this is rare. It might happen when someone you know struggles with addiction (the HBO show Euphoria depicts this transformation really well); changes due to severe mental illness; becomes abusive, cheats, or betrays you… you get the point. A change that is more shocking or distressing than the inevitable changes that people go through over time.

These changes, for lack of a better term, might happen suddenly or gradually. For example: finding out your partner cheated might be a sudden change that causes you to grieve the image you had of them, while watching someone you love fall into an addiction might be a gradual change that also causes grief and a reassessment of how your relationship should function from that point.

But it is then—once we are made aware of the change(s)—that our image shatters and we experience this unique type of grief, finding ourselves stuck trying to reconcile our “before” image of the person with the new information we’ve gathered.

What causes us to be stuck here? And why do some people stay in this stage for months, years, or even a lifetime? One obvious answer is shock, or denial. But to dig a little deeper: I think most of us are scared to let go of the “before” image, because doing so metaphorically kills off the person we used to know. And death in any form is an uncomfortable topic; one that we have not yet, and perhaps will never, come to understand or make peace with. There’s also the fear that we’re giving up on someone we love, so we find (sometimes unhealthy) ways to revive our hope in this person.

This happens in the stuck phase, when we’re still trying to grapple with the change(s).

It might especially be difficult for us to move past the stuck phase if the person still exhibits characteristics from the “before” image we hold of them—and they most likely do. We might feel stuck because these characteristics elicit memories which give us hope that this person didn’t actually change.

I’m particularly interested in how we can come to terms with these changes and move past the stuck stage. Perhaps then, our assessment of the person can be more realistic, allowing us to approach our relationship with them in a healthier or more productive or less emotionally distressing way. Or to leave completely and find peace in our loss.

Obviously, a lot of context is required here; each solution will be as unique as the situation it is addressing. Maybe acceptance is the answer for this type of grief. Or maybe the right answer is to keep fighting and not lose hope. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

What’s interesting here, and perhaps a topic for another day, is the perspective from the person who is undergoing the change(s) we talked about. After all, there is some truth to the idea that people leave when you need them most, when you are going through a very difficult time, when you are at your most broken. In part, it could be because difficult times can bring out the worst in people; it also could be because difficult times really are a true test of loyalty. But this shift in perspective raises a lot of questions for how to best deal with this situation. Again: do you leave? Do you accept the situation? Do you try to solve it? Do you fight for change? How do you balance your needs with the needs of the person you’re grieving?

The point I’m trying to make: I have no idea what the best approach is for handling this type of grief, and I don’t know if there is one. In fact, at the moment, I’m okay accepting that this type of grief is just part of the human condition—an experience that we can’t hack or eliminate.

At the same time, I’m hopeful that these experiences, while difficult, don’t have to destroy us. To end this post on a more hopeful note, here is a lovely quote (of a quote) from one of my favorite books, The Telomere Effect:

As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist who studied grief and mourning, once said: The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.

These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.

Beautiful people do not just happen.

final thoughts, but in art form

There was a lot left unsaid in this piece (and definitely more questions raised than answered), largely because this is a complex topic with little written about it, and it’s rare to find someone who has successfully navigated this type of loss and found peace with it.

Art helps bridge the gap between the feelings we can articulate, and those we cannot. Here is my attempt to bridge that gap. I hope you enjoy some pieces that really resonated with me while writing this post:

What exactly is going on here?

In his book Escape from Freedom, German psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm talks about the conditions needed for an idea to be adopted on a societal scale:

If we analyze religious or political doctrines with regard to their psychological significance we must differentiate between two problems. We can study the character structure of the individual who creates a new doctrine and try to understand which traits in his personality are responsible for the particular direction of his thinking. […]

The other problem is to study the psychological motives, not of the creator of a doctrine, but of the social group to which the doctrine appeals. The influence of any doctrine or idea depends on the extent to which it appeals to psychic needs in the character structure of those to whom it is addressed. Only if the idea answers powerful psychological needs of certain social groups will it become a potent force in history.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (pgs. 64 - 65; emphasis mine)

On the surface, this seems obvious; of course one is more likely to adopt a worldview that they are psychologically primed to believe. But the power of understanding if and why an idea will be adopted—on an personal, interpersonal, and societal level—is tremendous.

on a personal level

Without going into too much detail, I want to give a personal example of what this might look like on an individual level.

It’s no surprise that, after years of witnessing domestic violence, I found the viral #MenAreTrash and #YesAllMen movement so appealing. Nothing could convince me that there were, in fact, good men out there. I was not psychologically ready to hear anything other than a quick and cheap validation of my personal experiences.

Accepting the conflicting idea that #NotAllMen are bad would have meant one of two things for me:

(1) I accept this conflicting worldview and am motivated by it; I actively seek out examples of good men and bring them into my life

(2) I accept this conflicting worldview and grow resentment because of it, wondering why it couldn’t be the case for my life

The easiest approach, of course, is to completely reject this conflicting idea altogether and continue on believing that my worldview is correct, completely unchallenged. This is what I did for some time, and what I suspect many do when they are hurt or feel as though they lack agency.

Option (1) from above seems like a great choice, but I can think of a few explanations for why someone would not choose it:

• it requires a lot of effort to reassess one’s worldview in a healthy way, and it can sometimes even be a painful experience

• if you are completely preoccupied with survival, you simply don’t have the time or mental capacity for introspection

• if you lack some level of agency (e.g., you’re a minor), motivation resulting from a change in perspective simply might not be enough to better your life

I abandoned this worldview many years ago. To borrow from Fromm’s idea, I was psychologically ready to give up this worldview when I did: I was several years removed from any direct threat, gained a significant amount of independence, was finally surrounded by great men, and could afford to let go of the bad ones. More importantly, I had agency.

So when I was confronted, once again, with this conflicting idea that not all men are bad, I was able to seriously consider if it was true or not—if it was a worldview I wanted to believe in. And I did. It took some work, but I could not have accepted this conflicting idea if, at some psychological level, I did not have a need for it.

This is a lesson for me: having some awareness of the reasons behind the worldviews you hold and have never questioned can be really helpful, especially if you’re trying to effectively navigate the world and improve your perception of it.

on an interpersonal level

Here’s an example that might resonate with many people: Have you ever tried to convince your friend that they should leave a horrible relationship, but felt like you might as well be speaking to a wall?

Your advice might be correct, but once again, adopting it would require your friend to essentially dismantle their worldview. Your friend would need to abandon their belief that their relationship is worth salvaging for whatever reason, for your belief that they are being mistreated and should find a better partner.

As mentioned, this requires a lot of effort and can be painful—rationalization might be uncomfortable, but it’s a far easier approach to take. (That is, until the cognitive dissonance becomes so overwhelming that one is forced to make a change.)

The lesson here? It’s all about timing. One day, your advice might just click for your friend, and they will begin to slowly improve their life. Understanding their needs and motivations for upholding certain beliefs can help you navigate tricky situations like this and better understand why people believe what they believe. (Note: patience and compassion required!)

on a societal level

This one is a bit trickier to discuss, but it’s important to consider why some ideas immediately spread like wildfire, why others take time to be adopted, and why some just never gain steam.

One of the most fascinating examples for me is the Me Too movement, especially because of its overlap with strong anti-men sentiments like Men Are Trash.

It goes without saying that the Me Too movement has its merits. It was perhaps the first time people saw just how widespread sexual harassment and assault is—that it could happen to anyone and isn’t as clear cut as being raped by a stranger in a dark alleyway. With the viral movement came a number of thoughtful discussions about consent, finding support after assault, and identifying truly predatory behaviors. There were even some tangible changes.

Why did the Me Too campaign—originally created by activist Tarana Burke back in 2006 to raise awareness around abuse and sexual assault—take 11 years to catch on? One simple explanation could be that social media was not around in the same way back in 2006, so it was harder for a movement to become so big. But that reason is not good enough for me.

Which of society’s psychological needs was Me Too tapping into when it went viral? It goes without saying that there were obviously frustrations around rape and sexual assault. But what else?

Here are some initial theories I have, which I recognize raise more questions than answers, but I am interested in exploring and (respectfully) discussing them further:

• As we move more toward a more individualistic culture, movements increasingly need to have some element of relatability in order to be virally successful.

  The goal of Me Too was always, first and foremost, to raise awareness around the magnitude of sexual assault. And while there are many examples of awareness movements that go viral with the help of people who can’t relate to the issue at hand, I imagine virality is much more attainable when a large segment of the population feels included and can share their personal stories of being affected.

  And there’s the key word: feeling included. Perhaps at a time when more and more people are suffering from an erosion of community, there is a deep-rooted psychological need to be included somewhere—to be part of a community. And what feels more fulfilling than being part of global community, one that is also promising to make the world a better place? Whether you were catcalled, made uncomfortable during a date, sexually assaulted at work, or raped by someone you thought you could trust, there was a place for you to go and not feel so alone.

  (Regarding the distress of not being part of a community: there is a great TikTok about this—part one here and a more relevant part two here. I highly recommend you watch them and read the comments.)

• For better or worse, traditional relations between men and women have been breaking down for a while, creating a vacuum in which tension and confusion between the two flourish.

  There’s good that comes out of letting go of outdated gender roles. But all transitions come with a period of turmoil. The movement overlapped with (and fueled) a widespread, negative sentiment against men. Men weren’t just trash, they were also knowingly or unknowingly perpetrators and upholders of The Patriarchy. It’s not surprising, then, that a movement like this could resonate so strongly with someone holding a grievance against one or two or all men.

  For clarity, this is not a commentary on the original purpose of the movement (to raise awareness around a legitimate issue) or whether or not those with grievances were justified. I’m more interested in why the movement succeeded when it did. What psychological needs was it fulfilling? What void was it tapping into? Could it have succeeded under slightly different circumstances? Changing gender norms and long-time “discontent with men” finally erupting into a global movement is one possible theory.

• When people are defined by how privileged they are—and (de)valued accordingly—being able to claim some level of oppression is an incredibly valuable social currency.

  Everyone I know, whether they lean left or right, acknowledges something called The Oppression Olympics—an interesting phenomenon in which people compete to be the most marginalized person, a position that can offer both personal validation and a platform for social commentary.

  

  Simply posting the #MeToo hashtag signalled to the world that this person experienced sexual harassment or assault and is, to some degree, marginalized. It’s not clear to me yet how empowering—in the true sense of the word—this is, and I don’t know if we’ll ever truly know, but I’m more interested in the extent to which this signalling contributed to the virality of the movement.

  Could Me Too have succeeded in the same way if, psychologically, people did not want to identify with their oppressions or traumas? Or if there was no motivation or incentive for this type of signalling? What need was being fulfilled via this signalling?

final thoughts

Fromm’s quote was incredibly influential for me. It made explicit a thought that I always had but was not consciously aware of: that we are capable of changing our worldviews, but the timing and psychological circumstances matter.

I’ve seen it happen to me, my loved ones, and while observing people and social groups from afar—but making use of this new theoretical framework can help me (and maybe you!) navigate the world a bit better.