Another Week Ends

1. Earlier this month, Mbird favorite Heather Havrilesky shared some wonderful insights on “the right way to fall apart” (or, specifically, that such a way does not exist). She opens with the insight that “people lash out when they’re sad,” describing the difference between a person’s inner experience (“fearful animal”) and outward behavior (verbose evil-seeming outbursts); that under duress the people we know and love can seemingly become different people entirely.

Lately I’m starting to see that I’ve spent a whole lifetime approaching other people’s panic attacks and breakdowns from a clinical remove, guided by a moralistic notion of THE RIGHT WAY TO FALL APART. This reaction isn’t uncommon, and it makes perfect sense, really, since I’ve historically approached my own despair and agony with similar mercilessness, with similar shame, with similar inflated moralistic expectations. When I had cancer, I barely paused to feel sad. I rose above the problem. I started to say, “It’ll all be fine, this is easy for me because I’m tough” before I had my first operation.

I’m only able to share that because I no longer see it as some kind of moral failing to be a very specific sort of weirdo who reacts to the world in extremely eccentric and odd ways that don’t seem normal or appropriate to others but also don’t hurt anyone else directly… I recognize that I couldn’t go back and do it differently through sheer force of will. If you put me in an absolutely devastating situation, I will panic and cry for a few days and then I’ll start mapping out the optimal route above, over, through. I will optimize hell. I don’t even fucking mind it. I ENJOY being a serene tour guide through trauma. Trauma made me this way. Trauma taught me to calm the fuck down and look on the bright side OF HELL.

What a fun and perceptive read — I suggest checking out the full thing! For now, her conclusion:

Find a way to show up and be gentle. And when that doesn’t work, when you’re too tired and too MEH and too ill and too indifferent, and you’re surrounded by people who just don’t seem to care about you or your needs at all? Remind yourself that most people grew up on pirate ships, on desert islands, in the trenches of a brutal war. Most people learned to swing a long sword and sail away with the wind and spear fish and fire a rifle before they learned to sit and cry and breathe and tell the truth.

Most people never learned to sit and cry and tell the truth.

Have mercy on them. Notice their pain. Honor their big hearts. Relish your body’s endless capacity for love.

Holy moly! Thank you, Heather.

2. The longer the internet lives, the more of our lives we give to it, the more inescapable a certain trend becomes: the performance of grief. When someone on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or elsewhere exhibits a hardship for audience consumption. At the Atlantic, Maytal Eyal has an interesting (if flawed IMHO) appraisal:

People post videos of themselves crying (or trying not to). Some of these videos are slickly produced; some feature moody music; many rack up hundreds of thousands of views. … Influencers and celebrities strip down to what can seem like the rawest version of themselves, selling the promise of “real” emotional connection—and, not infrequently, products or their personal brand. In a post titled “Reacting to My Sad and Lonely Videos,” the YouTube star Trisha Paytas watches old footage of herself sobbing and is moved to tears all over again; this sort of post shares space in her channel with clips in which she pitches her own merch. On Instagram, influencers toggle between montages of sadness and sponsored videos that show them cozily sipping fancy tea.

The weepy confessions are, ostensibly, gestures toward intimacy. They’re meant to inspire empathy, to reassure viewers that influencers are just like them. But in fact, they’re exercises in what I’ve come to call “McVulnerability,” a synthetic version of vulnerability akin to fast food: mass-produced, easily accessible, sometimes tasty, but lacking in sustenance. True vulnerability can foster emotional closeness. McVulnerability offers only an illusion of it.

I feel pretty comfortable decrying this as “law.” As with all distinctions between “true” versus “false” self-expressions, the authentic versus the inauthentic, one senses here a desire to encounter grief in purity. But when it comes to something as emotional and out of control as this, a strange modern way of letting it out doesn’t necessarily invalidate it. It’s sort of the opposite of exactly what Havrilesky is saying above — there is no right way to fall apart.

Still, this part seems true, so hats off to Eyal:

This is, perhaps, one of the more insidious effects of McVulnerability: It helps encourage a self-perpetuating cycle of materialism and loneliness, in which one inevitably spawns the other. […]

In my years as a therapist, I’ve seen a trend among some of my younger clients: They prefer the controlled environment of the internet — the polish of YouTube, the ephemeral nature of TikTok — to the tender awkwardness of making new friends. Instead of reaching out to a peer, they’ll turn to the comfort of their phone and spend time with their preferred influencers. At a talk in 2023, the psychotherapist Esther Perel touched on this impulse while discussing what she calls “artificial intimacy” — pseudo-experiences of emotional closeness that mimic connection but lack depth. These “digitally facilitated connections,” she said, risk “lowering our expectations of intimacy between humans” and leave us “unprepared and unable to tolerate the inevitable unpredictabilities of human nature, love, and life.” I understand where my young clients are coming from: Putting yourself out there is uncomfortable. But for the reasons Perel articulated, I also worry that by relying mostly on social media to encounter other humans, they’re forfeiting opportunities to develop the skills that could help them thrive in the flesh-and-blood world.

If Mockingbird is largely a digital engagement, consider taking a chance and come see us in NYC this year! Scholarships tend to be available if the cost is prohibitive. We birds do exist in flesh and blood and like to think of ourselves as “people of substance.”

3. Speaking of … that is the title of a song from Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn’s new album. Will let the concept speak for itself:

This is perhaps Finn’s most narrative record yet. It tells the story of a man who becomes a clergyman despite a lack of faith. The songs detail his rise, fall, and eventual redemption, while also shining a light to sharply reveal the other characters that populate the world he moves through.

4. For humor, there’s this from the British NewsThump: “Man Who Works from Home Still Slightly Late Every Single Day.” In addition to that, there were lots of cutting jokes about dry January (ex. “Woman Doing Totally Fine Without Alcohol Has Posted About Mocktails 23 Times This Week“).

But what actually made me laugh were the “Tiny Cops Hassling Fingerboarding Teens” (from the Hard Times). I also giggled at “I’ve Had My Heart Broken By the Cryptkeeper for the Last Time!”

And from the Beaverton, “China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesman“:

NEW YORK CITY – America’s magic bean market is in turmoil after a Chinese company unveiled a competing bean that’s less than one tenth the price but still just as useless.

“DeepBean’s new beans only require a third of the water that American beans need to not grow into anything of value,” an analyst said. “Any serious investor or cow owner would do well to give DeepBean a look.”

5. Not quite at the level of magic beans, but almost, journalist Rina Raphael continues to debunk wellness myths and suspicious health products. One of our 2023 conference speakers, Raphael has released a funny/incisive list of health buzzwords that she suggests ditching. There are quite a few, but here is my selection of her selection:

Hormone-balancing: This is somewhat inaccurate since we don’t need our hormones “balanced,” nor does any influencer-hawked protocol or product do that. As Dr. Ashley Winter points out: “Balancing is for scales and people on tightropes. Hormone deficiencies should be treated. Hormone excess should be treated.” If someone says they’re balancing their hormones, it’s worth asking them precisely which ones, why, and how.

Nourish: This word is equally applied to recipes as it is to spiritual homework. “Nourish your soul” makes my eyes roll so hard I risk nerve damage.

Gut health: Probiotic sodas engaged in this science-washing until they started getting hit with lawsuits. This is another ambiguous catch-all term claiming something without concretely promising anything. “It’s clever because you don’t have to be specific,” registered dietitian Leah McGrath of Build Up Dietitians Newsletter previously told me. […] A reminder: There is no clear and agreed-upon definition of a healthy gut, as I noted in my Bloomberg feature on sketchy “gut health” tests like Viome.

Evidence-based: I am trying to phase this out of my writing partly because it’s been stolen by wellness marketing. Honestly, it was never a fully helpful term because there’s all kinds of evidence: good, bad, contested. It doesn’t tell you much, save that the writer has determined it suffices their level of evidence.

Immune-boosting: No singular tonic, soup, or product can optimize the immune system (save for maybe a vaccine), as it relies on various factors. That’s not how the immune system works. There are a lot of misconceptions: for example, when people get a cold and suffer all the icky symptoms (runny nose, cough, etc.), they reach for an Emergen-C, believing it’ll “boost” their immune system. But those symptoms are the immune system working: they’re how the system reacts against a virus…

Trauma: This medical term has been co-opted to mean everything from bosses failing to acknowledge hard work to suffering a Taylor Swift online ticketing queue. Do not use unless intending its original, more serious use…

Runner-ups: Science-backed, “holding space,” root cause

6. At Seen & Unseen Graham Tomlin identifies a trend on Love Island (which I have watched, I do watch) where contestants are constantly thanking the universe for the inane things they’re enabled to participate in on the show. In Tomlin’s hands, a funny observation becomes a powerful meditation on gratitude (reminiscent of this “crisis of gratitude” convo from the recent Mockingcast).

‘Thanking the universe’ has become a common trope these days, maybe because people feel they can no longer thank God. Being thankful, of course, is a good thing… Numerous studies have shown the beneficial effects of a grateful approach to life. It helps people live longer, sleep better, reduces toxic emotions like regret or resentment, and builds self-respect. […]

Gratitude is the ability to recognise good things in our lives that we didn’t create. It reminds us that we are not the makers of our own good fortune.  Saying a simple ‘thank you’ turns us outwards, away from a sense that we deserve the good things that come our way.  It contradicts any idea that we are somehow self-sufficient, helping us recognise that we are thoroughly dependent on factors beyond ourselves for most of what makes our lives enjoyable and fruitful.

All the same, there is something odd about being grateful to an impersonal object – like a tree for standing, a river for flowing, or, for that matter, to the universe itself, especially when we usually think of that universe as blind and indifferent. Bob Emmons, a Professor of Psychology in California points out an important distinction between gratitude and thankfulness. We tend to be grateful for something, but thankful to someone. We often talk about life or a particular talent as a ‘gift’, but for something to be a gift, it really needs to be given by a giver. Something that is not deliberately offered can’t easily be seen as a gift.

I’ll add that, far as I’ve observed, gratitude to the universe tends to be a sheepish profession, or admission, that the universe is not indifferent, that in some ill-defined way it conspires toward meaning and goodness, but still, that fails to put a face to a name (and a name to a gift). It all ends up feeling depressingly impersonal when sat with too long.

The practice of giving thanks in Christian prayer is rooted in the idea of Creation — that the world around us is not here by chance but is a gift from a God who made it. It therefore changes the way we look at that world. The simple discipline of saying grace before a meal transforms the food from a random plate of meat and veg into a sign of love and provision for our needs. Thanksgiving reminds me that the tree outside my window doesn’t just happen to be there, but is a gift from a heavenly Father who made it and gave it to me as the person observing it right now. As G.K. Chesterton once put it: “If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have someone to thank for putting candy in their stockings, have I no-one to thank for putting two feet in mine?”

7. In their latest issue, The New Atlantis published a lengthy opus called “Stop Hacking Humans,” which probably deserves more commentary than I can muster right now (especially with regards to the section on IVF, which is hard for this writer not to see as anything but miraculous) but the general gist is urgent and worth reflecting on: that corporate technology is changing our understanding of human nature for the worse.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as we have come to think of our own humanity in technological terms — as biological hardware running psychological and social software, which can be reprogrammed — we have come to apply the language and concept of hacking to ourselves. What we are beginning to hack is human nature. When we hack, rather than heal, we discern a human desire and identify a technique that could enable us to meet that desire, bypassing ordinary human functions in a way that, while it may be pleasurable, profitable, or relieving in the short term, threatens the long-term health of the individual and of society. […]

Not all hacks, then, are created equal. Some may be harmless in moderation but can still tempt us to mistake them for the real thing. Others, by their ability to satisfy our desires so effortlessly, become addictive, blinding us to the real thing. Still others are so at odds with our natural forms of flourishing that to resort to them can permanently disable our ordinary human functions, rendering us dependent on more and more technological hacks to treat the symptoms of the cure.

For all its vogue, the word “hacking” still retains overtones of violence. It originally meant to cut into something or cut something off. That is what we are increasingly doing to ourselves — figuratively, in some cases literally.

8. Lastly, a powerful one by Steve Cuss at Christianity Today, about learning to disbelieve in the gospel preached by your inner-critic. Such a moving self-disclosure, so concisely put, and instantly (for me) relatable:

I have battled a low-grade feeling of stupidity my whole life and never outgrown it. Even as an adult, it doesn’t take much for me to feel stupid — and consequentially, exposed. Leading through a building project helped me get very familiar with my inner critic. (Are you familiar with yours?) I decided it was time to learn to wrangle it, so I began to pay close attention to its messages.

Here are the statements it would tell me over and over: You should know better by now. You are stupid and everyone knows it. You are not worth being loved. You are not worth people’s time.

It is quite arresting to read the message of my inner critic written plainly like that. If I don’t wrangle him, his words become like a stagnant pond in my soul, breeding and growing all manner of shame toxins. How can we learn to turn down the noise of our inner critic and hear what God has to say about us? […]

My inner critic’s gospel promises protection. He stands like a sentry guarding me from outside threats, and he condemns me out of a weird self-protection. He tells me it is better to criticize myself than to let my guard down, be vulnerable, and receive the criticism of others. … But my goodness, my inner critic makes me pay. As I examined my belief structure, I discovered that I never got the promise of protection; instead, I just got condemnation.

In every gospel except one, the humans do the paying and the “gods” get the benefit. … John reminds us in 1 John 3:19–20,

This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in [God’s] presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Strays:

• How Do You Solve a Problem Like Katie Luther? by Gretchen Ronnevik
• Why children’s books? by Katherine Rundell
• Little Life-Ruiners by Naomi Fisher
• The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic by Anna Wiener