*
PROUST TO HIS MOTHER
Dearest Maman: A disastrous dawn.
I woke to go to the lavatory, lost
the safety pin I use to close my drawers.
Went wandering through a dozen creaky rooms,
rummaging in your dressers for another pin;
only managed to get slightly chilled.
(Slightly! Hah, hah, what a joke!)
That was the end of sleep, so I picked up
my mother-of-pearl fountain pen
and the blue stationery
you gave me for my birthday
(I had asked for lilac).
People might find it odd
that we write letters to each other
though we live under the same roof.
But you and I understand.
You have a writer’s soul:
that’s why you made me a writer.
I have to dream for us both.
Thank you for the flowers and the thorns.
Why do you torture me? A month ago
you put me in such fury that I seized
a visitor’s new hat and stomped on it,
then mailed you the torn lining
as proof of what you do to me.
You know I can’t get up before seven
in the evening, and expose myself to drafts.
So what if I dine alone at the Ritz
at four a.m., or sit in two pair
of long underwear and a fur coat
in front of a blazing fireplace —
go to bed fully dressed, in gloves and slippers,
or use fifteen towels when I wash —
even that is my art.
Do you have talent? means
Are you abnormal enough?
You say many men could boast
more misfortunes than I,
yet they get out of bed,
kiss their wife and go to work.
But can they suffer as much?
— the first requirement for a writer.
And so I gasp for breath
in the echoes of your widow’s flat.
Another tram shudders by
and your cabinets ring
that high-pitched note that dissects my nerves.
I long for spring — tulips and narcissi —
but I feel so helpless around flowers . . .
As for the time when I broke
a crystal vase because you wanted me
to wear the yellow gloves
while I preferred the gray —
I treasure the letter you wrote:
May this shattered glass, as in the Temple,
be a symbol of indissoluble union.
Even my asthma
is a language between us.
But I must ration myself.
Tomorrow I’ll write in more detail.
A thousand kisses, Marcel.
~ Oriana
*
WHY READ PROUST
~ In Search of Lost Time, like many great literary works, is a quest whose structure resembles that of a symphony. The novel’s major themes—love, art, time, and memory—are carefully and brilliantly orchestrated throughout the book. The opening pages, which Proust called the overture, state in a musical, intimate, and subtle manner the goal of the quest, which is to find the answer to life’s essential questions: Who am I? What am I to make of this life? As Proust’s title indicates, the main character, known as the Narrator or Marcel, is searching for his own identity and the meaning of life. As he tells his story, he speaks to us in a voice that is one of the most engaging and enchanting in all of literature.
I always tell anyone who might be intimidated by the many pages to be read that, although In Search of Lost Time is rich and complex and demands an attentive reader, the novel is never difficult. In spite of its length and complexity, most readers find it readily accessible. Vladimir Nabokov, who considered it the best novel of its era, described its major themes and effervescent, Mozartean style: “The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucent work.”
In spite of its “enormity” and complexity, Proust’s book has never been out of print and has been translated into well over 40 languages. In Search of Lost Time has not been kept alive by the academy. The work is seldom taught in its entirety in university courses, but maintains its presence among us thanks to readers all over the world who return to it again and again.
Over the years, I have received unsolicited testimony from many such readers who say that Proust changed their lives by giving them a new and richer way of looking at the world. In fact, rendre visible (to make visible) is Proust’s succinct definition of what an original artist does. In Proust’s case, I think he helps us to see the world as it really is, not only its extraordinary beauty and diversity, but his observations make us aware of how we perceive and how we interact with others, showing us how often we are mistaken in our own assumptions and how easy it is to have a biased view of another person.
And I think the psychology and motivation of Proust’s characters are as rewardingly complex as are those of Shakespeare’s characters. Just as the Bard describes Cleopatra, many of Proust’s characters are creatures of “infinite variety.” Speaking of Shakespeare, Shelby Foote, in an interview, placed Proust in the top tier of writers he most admired: “Proust has been the man that hung the moon for me. He’s with Shakespeare in my mind, in the sense of having such a various talent. Whenever you read Proust, for the rest of your life, he’s part of you, the way Shakespeare is part of you. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I truly feel that he is the great writer of the 20th century.”
Great texts are those that involve the reader to an extraordinary degree. We find ourselves placed at the center of the action. In Proust’s case, because of the intimate, engaging first-person narrative, we become the hero’s companion as he seeks to discover the truth about the human condition. In order to discover the truth about our experience and depict it in a novel, Proust brought to bear his extraordinary powers of observation and analysis. Joseph Conrad saw this endless probing as the key to his genius: “Proust’s work . . . is great art based on analysis. I don’t think there is in all creative literature an example of the power of analysis such as this.”
And how does In Search of Lost Time continue to speak to generation after generation in a voice that seems fresh and vigorous? Far from being the culminating opus of decadent literature, as some early critics believed, this novel constitutes one of the most dynamic texts ever written. Its tremendous energy acts as a rejuvenating force. All its narrative elements—plot, characters, style—create, as Iris Murdoch said of its effect, “the most intense pleasure which one does take in great art.”
Here are a few of the outstanding features of this novel: It is arguably the best book ever written about perception. (Proust’s legendary hypersensitivity is obviously linked to his skills as a writer.) He was the first novelist to analyze and depict the full spectrum of human sexuality. There are even passages that might allow him to claim to be the founder of gender studies and a proponent of gay marriage. And his sense of humor allows him to create comic scenes that satirize the foibles and vanity of his characters, especially those of high society. Proust fits perfectly Gilles Deleuze’s definition of a great author: “A great author is one who laughs a lot.”
My favorite quote by one famous writer about another is Virginia Woolf’s description of her reaction to Proust’s prose:
'Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.'
Proust’s words have enchanted Virginia Woolf and many other writers, dramatists, filmmakers, and choreographers so that often his book becomes a central or significant element in their works. Here is one example: In Search of Lost Time and Albertine, one of its major characters, play a role in Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice. Near the end of her novel, we find Edward, one of the main characters, resuming his reading of Proust:
“Oh—Proust—” Edward had been looking for the passage which had so amazed him . . . about Albertine going out in the rain on her bicycle, but he couldn’t find it. He had turned to the beginning. [Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.] What a lot of pain there was in those first pages. What a lot of pain there was all the way through. So how was it that the whole thing could vibrate with such a pure joy? This was something which Edward was determined to find out.
Although we do not know whether Edward found the answer, Murdoch’s tease at the end of her book is intended as an invitation for us to make our own investigation. This joy stems in part, I believe, from the compassion Proust shows for his characters, even those with whom he finds the most fault. He loves and wants to redeem them all, a sentiment that constitutes a powerful moral force, endowing his characters with life and making them seem real.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, another British writer, sees this as his novel’s great lesson: “There is no novel in the world that changes its readers more profoundly . . . above all it teaches compassion, that relaxing of the mind into gentleness which makes life at once infinitely more complex and infinitely more tolerable.” And: “Proust makes the reader love [the Narrator] so that Proust himself, perhaps more than any writer except Shakespeare, becomes an intimate.”
In the closing pages, Proust urges each of us to comprehend, develop, and deploy our remarkable faculties. He intends his entire enterprise to persuade us that we are incredibly rich instruments, but that most often we let our gifts lie dormant or we squander them. The joy that so many readers feel at the conclusion of the book derives from the long-delayed triumph of the hero and the realization that we too can, by following his example, attempt to lead the true life. When the Narrator completes his quest, after many ups and downs and misunderstandings, the myriad themes—major and minor—beautifully orchestrated throughout, are gloriously resolved in the grand finale. This happy ending makes In Search of Lost Time a comedy of the highest order, one that amuses, delights, and frequently dazzles, as it instructs.
Shelby Foote, as a writer, had a unique relationship with Proust’s novel in that each time he finished one of his own novels or his vast history of the Civil War, he gave himself a special reward: “I’ve always given myself a reward when I finish something and the reward I give myself is always the same thing. I read A la recherche du temps perdu. That’s my big prize. C’est mon grand prix. I think I’ve read it nine times, now. It’s like a two-month vacation because it takes that long to read Proust. I like it better than going to Palm Beach.” ~
https://lithub.com/really-heres-why-you-should-read-proust/
*
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. ~ Marcel Proust
*
NOT EVERYONE LOVES PROUST
Kazuo Ishiguro, in an interview with HuffPo:
To be absolutely honest, apart from the opening volume of Proust, I find him crushingly dull. The trouble with Proust is that sometimes you go through an absolutely wonderful passage, but then you have to go about 200 pages of intense French snobbery, high-society maneuverings and pure self-indulgence. It goes on and on and on and on. But every now and again, I suppose around memory, he can be beautiful.
Evelyn Waugh, in a 1948 letter to Nancy Mitford:
I am reading Proust for the first time—in English of course—and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel. And as for the jokes—the boredom of Bloch and Cottard.
D. H. Lawrence, in his essay “The Future of the Novel”:
Let us just for the moment feel the pulses of Ulysses and of Miss Dorothy Richardson and M. Marcel Proust . . . Is Ulysses in his cradle? Oh, dear! What a grey face! . . . And M. Proust? Alas! You can hear the death-rattle in their throats. They can hear it themselves. They are listening to it with acute interest, trying to discover whether the intervals are minor thirds of major fourths. Which is rather infantile, really.
So there you have the “serious” novel, dying in a very long-drawn-out fourteen-volume death-agony, and absorbedly, childishly interested in the phenomenon “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character of Mr. Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. Is my aura a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed? The audience round the death-bed gapes for the answer. And when, in a sepulchral tone, the answer comes and length, after hundreds of pages: “It is none of these, it is abysmal chloro-coryambasis,” the audience quivers all over, and murmurs: “That’s just how I feel myself.”
Which is the dismal, long-drawn-out comedy of the death-bed of the serious novel. It is self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell.
Germaine Greer, writing in The Guardian:
If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.
Susan Hill, writing in The Spectator:
Since I was 18 I have been told I should read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu by people who knew all seven volumes by heart and loved every line. You cannot, it seems, be lukewarm about Proust. Knowing that love of it is a badge of honor, and mark of a finely attuned and appreciative literary mind, I have tried eversomany times to get beyond Book One.
Indeed, I have probably read Book One more often than I have read Great Expectations, which is saying something. I have even plucked Volume Three or Seven off the shelf and tried to start there, so please don’t judge me, or tell me I haven’t given it a chance. It’s no good. I find the endless sentences distancing, the people without interest. I cannot care about upper-class French people of the 19th century. Mea culpa, of course. My loss too. But if I have not managed to find the key by the age of 70, I guess I never will. I am denied any enjoyment of Proust’s great novel and there it is. I tried to find one word to sum up how it seems to me. The word is “anaemic.”
Candace Bushnell, in her “By the Book” interview with The New York Times:
I’m too old to be embarrassed by books I haven’t read, people I haven’t slept with and parties I haven’t gone to. However, the one writer I’ve never been able to tolerate is Proust.
James Joyce, in a 1920 letter to Frank Budgen:
I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.
Anatole France, famously (but probably apocryphally):
Life is too short, and Proust is too long.
The difficulty of the novel is that half is tedious and half is sublime. However, it is not possible to sort out these two streams. Listening to the audio version will ease the pain for most. It is simultaneously humorous and touchingly poignant. I would rank rank Ulysses above ROTP because it is a far more radical experiment and filled with a more profound compassion.
Jon Rutherford:
French snobs — or snobs of any nationality — simply do not interest me enough; I've tried many times to get through volume one and failed. I can read Proust in French with little trouble; but it's just not worth it for me, especially at age 82. At age 20 or 30 I probably would have persevered and got through a couple of the volumes. By age 40 or 50 I was starting to wise up a little. Now my interest focuses on highly intelligent, non-snobbish, hopefully compassionate people, and such do not populate volume one, or apparently the rest.
Donald M Wright:
I was told by a French teacher when I was 18 that I absolutely must read Proust because he wrote so beautifully about music (I was a piano major at the time). Mr. Conlon was right. I think it took me about 10 years to read all 7 volumes because I would finish one and then turn to other books before resuming with the next volume. I agree that Du côté de chez Swann was the most interesting volume. Sometimes it's true that beautiful passages and profound and fine-grained observations about human nature were buried in the midst of pages of fatuous French fluff, but I don't agree that the other volumes were dull. It was a bit amusing when a character Proust had killed off in an earlier volume suddenly reemerged in a later one, but then, the invalid Proust did not have a computer at the ready in his cork-paneled bedroom as he wrote!
https://lithub.com/not-everyone-loves-proust/
Like several respondents here, I found the introductory portion and the first volume (about Swann and Odette) quite captivating. Then I reached for Volume Two. A few pages into it, I felt bored. I had zero interest in these characters and their lives, and especially the details of their clothes. This is where good abridgments would be a godsend.
I saw a movie based on Proust’s opus. At long last, this was the abridgment I had hoped for. It was well-crafted, beautifully photographed, but ultimately, what did it have to say?
Still, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Proust has nothing or very little to give us. He was a keen observer of human psychology. If he were writing now, he might become a best-selling author of self-help books.
*
THE PHILOSOPHY OF GRATITUDE
Marcel Proust was a writer, author, and spiritual thinker in the early 20th century. His most famous work, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is known for being the longest novel ever written — and for its radical views on life.
Proust is really interesting to me because he started out in life just like anyone else of his day. He was brought up in rather violent surroundings, during the consolidation of the French Third Republic, but despite this, his parents being well-educated people provided him with the best opportunities to learn.
His father was a leading pathologist who studied cholera and helped many people learn about hygiene in order to keep the disease at bay. Inspired by this, Proust sought to help humanity with his novels.
The main concept he shared? Gratitude. Although his most famous connotation is the recovery of memory through stimulation of the unconscious — referred to as a Proustian moment, his contribution to a somewhat Eastern outlook on life goes mostly unnoticed. Proust gave us more than just a madeleine moment — he showed us what life could be if only we were grateful.
PROUST WANTS US TO BE GRATEFUL FOR OUR CIRCUMSTANCES
“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.”
Proust first and foremost wanted us to be grateful for our initial circumstances in life. He wanted us not to despair at how our life is but rather, feel appreciative for what we have.
Proust grew up in an upper-middle-class household and found as he got older, that being high up in society was shallow if one was looking for complete fulfillment. As he writes into his character in La Recherche du Temps, socializing and keeping up appearances will not bring everlasting happiness.
What he did find brings happiness is not seeking to always escape our current circumstances in order to be somewhere else that is more perfect in the illusion that it would make us happier. Proust asks us to plant our feet on the ground where we are right now and find happiness anyway.
Proust knew that happiness was not found somewhere else; it is found within ourselves, through gratitude for our initial circumstances.
PROUST CALLS US TO LOVE OURSELVES FIRST
“Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we possess them.”
The second important observation Proust makes is that gratitude for the self (or self love) is vitally important to one's sense of security. In the novel, the protagonist spends a lot of time chasing after a woman. The fluttering of the heart in love is all the protagonist wants to live for.
Proust illustrates that when we are looking for love, we are really looking for someone else to love us completely as we are. We are aiming to substitute loving ourselves, with the distraction of someone else's love. In the end, Proust helps us to see that no one else will 'complete' us.
We must complete ourselves through our own self-love — which in its essence is being grateful for ourselves. We must accept ourselves completely as we are. This way, when we do share our lives with someone else, we are able to enjoy the other's company and companionship. As Proust puts it they won’t “turn to ash” because we won’t try to possess them to mend our own inadequacies.
PROUST INVITES US TO BE GRATEFUL FOR THE PRESENT MOMENT
A real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes. ~ Marcel Proust
The final important observation about life Proust makes is that life can be enjoyed to the fullest if we are grateful for each moment as it is. Proust saw those around him in high society becoming depressed and consumed by their melancholy, simply because they were always searching for more. The aristocrats would never be satisfied with what they had, or the circumstances in which they were in, because of their detachment from the present moment.
Proust playing air guitar with a tennis rocket
Proust saw that children, who are innately grateful for everything, were always happy with whatever they had, whether it was deemed significant or not. Children also see the world with a different perspective than adults. Proust coined the term “seeing with new eyes” to describe how an innocent child sees the world.
He deduced that if more people saw the world with new eyes, they would not feel the need to travel to every part of the Earth, seek new romantic partnerships, or strive after more money. In a very Eastern way, Proust encourages us to change our perception.
By being present in the moment, as a child, we too can find joy and happiness. Gratitude for our present moment can revolutionize how we perceive the world, and make us happier because of it.
https://www.claudiamerrill.com/blog/philosophy-of-marcel-proust
Mary:
In Proust's quoted address to his mother he reveals himself as neurasthenic and peculiar, sensitive to an extreme almost comical and grotesque...his extraordinary susceptibility to drafts, for instance, and his measures to avoid them. Sleeping fully dressed and in slippers, sitting in double long underwear wrapped up in a fur coat, next to a roaring fire, using 15 towels to dry himself — habits, or requirements, eminently peculiar and comical.
I must confess I read all seven volumes without much enjoyment, and wrote a paper about it framed entirely in the passive voice...an unconscious stylistic choice that echoed my feeling of distance and alienation from the work. I just could not either identify with or care about all these upper class characters and their mannered, intricate, highly ornamental world.
Proust was not at all in Shakespeare's class for me. The books I read over and over were by Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Bronte...whose characters, despite difference in the era and culture, moved in a world I recognized as real, with lives full of struggles and concerns I felt as vital, authentic, familiar and interesting. Intimacy with Proust's narrator Marcel did not happen for me, and after so many hundreds of pages, yes, endless boredom, the feeling of enclosure in a stuffy room with too many pieces of small furniture, and fussy, breakable, silly ornaments on every surface.
I guess that's my own kind of snobbery.
Oriana:
Dickens would have had fun describing a Proust-like character. He was incredibly eccentric. But his asthma was real.
This was before any effective treatments. One could argue that his prolific output in spite of the exhausting disease also makes him heroic.
I enjoyed the introductory chapter and the volume devoted to Swann and Odette, but never got more than several pages into the second volume. As in your case, I simply couldn’t get interested in Proust’s characters. Those people never did anything interesting. Even the summaries bored me. I admire your endurance in having read all seven volumes. Wow!
*
*
WHY DON’T MORE WOMEN PROPOSE?
Rebekah Kendall, a New York City public school teacher, used her February 2021 break to do something few women ever get to do: she proposed to her boyfriend, Bilig Bayar, an assistant principal at a different New York City school, on a beach at a resort in Jamaica. "I got down on one knee, did the whole thing," says Kendall.
She had scoped the perfect spot while Bayar was at the gym, set up her phone to take pictures under the pretense she wanted vacation snaps, and bought a fancy watch to give him instead of a ring. "I really had the element of surprise on my side," she says. "He had no expectation of it and he was just shocked and so elated and it was really special and really fun." (He said yes.)
She shared her plans with her friends beforehand, and their reaction was muted. "They didn't try to talk me out of it, but they definitely didn't have the reaction that I would have liked," says Kendall. "They were like, 'That's ... that's so you!' Like, 'Good for you!'" She told her mother in advance but not her father: "I didn't really know the protocol on how to ask you for my own hand in marriage to give to someone else," she told him.
The process by which men and women meet, mate, and manufacture more humans is undergoing a radical realignment. Half a century ago two-thirds of Americans ages 25 to 50 were living with a spouse and a smattering of offspring. Today, that fraction is closer to one-third. Whereas marriage used to be an institution widely adopted across all socioeconomic levels, today marriage is much more prevalent among people who are wealthy and educated.
About one in a hundred marriages in the U.S. are between people of the same sex. An unknown but growing fraction of them, including the former Mayor of New York City's, are openly non-monogamous.
But plenty of things about the process of getting married have remained stubbornly unchanged. Men still buy women expensive engagement rings, even when a couple already shares expenses.
American women married to men continue to take their husband's last names, at a rate of 80:20. After a lull during the pandemic, the wedding industry is back in the black or, um, white. And the overwhelming number of proposals are still made by men.
Data on how many women propose is not robust. But Michele Velazquez, who helps plan proposals with her company The Heart Bandits, says she has seen no increase in the number of women proposing in the 13 years she has been in business. She estimates that only three women from heterosexual couples contact her per year.
The latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau say that there are only 90 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women. More women than ever are earning money of their own and thus less reliant on men for financial stability. And most women are already living with the men they are going to marry before any proposal is plotted. These market conditions—an undersupply of men, an ability to provide, and the willing presence of a local candidate—would seem to clear the way for women to do the asking. Yet they don’t.
What prevents a woman who wishes to marry her partner from proposing to him? Is it mortification, the suggestion that a woman had to force the issue because she was not desirable enough to be chosen? Is it the unspoken prohibition on any act that whiffs of female aggression or ambition? Does it seem forward and loose, as if these women were throwing themselves at men? "Sometimes women are embarrassed to admit they proposed," says Julie Gottman, co-founder of The Gottman Institute and co-author of the marriage-advice staple, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. "It makes them seem pushy and controlling, and perhaps not loved enough to receive a proposal.”
She points to the mesmerizing effect of years of saturation in romantic fairy tales. "As much as we’ve tried to establish new, more egalitarian standards for ourselves, those images and their influence have seeped into our bones," says Gottman. "It’s nice to be begged to marry. That’s really being wanted.”
For Aaron Renn, a conservative thinker and writer at the American Reformer, the converse is also true. To ask someone to marry you is to risk being spurned. "I think men have traditionally always just had this understanding that they have to bear the risk of rejection," he says. Women hold the high ground in that encounter, and they may not wish to cede it. "Do you want to be the party that is in the position to decide: 'I accept or reject,'" asks Renn, "or do you want to be the party who is at risk of being accepted or rejected?”
When New Yorkers Amy Shack Egan and John Egan decided to get married in 2017, they opted for a third alternative. They both love sunsets, so they researched the best places to see the sun set and planned a covert trip to the Grand Canyon. They flew to Los Angeles, splurged on a convertible, and drove to their chosen spot where, as the sun went down, they each read something they'd written about why they wanted to spend their lives together.
"We drove up and I remember thinking: 'It's that very rare moment in your life when you know everything is different when you come back to this car,'" says Shack Egan. They each bought their own engagement rings (Shack Egan's was a chunky turquoise) and surprised each other with gifts. She bought him an outdoor couples' massage. He bought her a couples' skydive, because of the metaphorical leap they were taking and "because I've always wanted to go and he's terrified of heights." They had a week alone together before announcing the news to family and friends, who Shack Egan said were pleased, if a bit puzzled by the methodology.
Did she not want the surprise proposal? "I hear proposal stories every day, and the thing I hear the most is that it's never a total surprise," says Shack Egan, who runs the wedding-planning company Modern Rebel. "The conversation around marriage should never be a surprise. If it's a surprise, that's not a great sign." Couples who come to Modern Rebel, which calls its events "love parties," usually want to think outside the box when planning their nuptials, but she has noticed that a proposal from a guy has proved to be a hardy perennial.
Both Shack Egan and Kendall would call themselves feminists but say their motivation was to do something romantic and meaningful and fun rather than strike a blow for equality. Shack Egan told her partner that if he had always dreamed of proposing, she was happy to fulfill that dream. Bayar also surprised Kendall with a proposal of his own a few weeks later, by a waterfall. She says that Bayar had already told her in a hundred different ways that he'd like to spend his life with her, but having had divorce in her family of origin, she was the reluctant one. "I sort of came to the realization that it just is a weird thing that we expect that, like, because he, I don't know, has a penis, that he's meant to be the one to prostrate himself on one knee.”
Rosemary Hopcroft, professor emeritus of sociology at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, thinks the male proposal has been deeply carved into society over millennia. Women want men to propose, with a ring, she says, because historically they needed a mate who could provide for them and their offspring. She points to studies that suggest that across different cultures, women value partners who are providers more than men do. "There's a psychological and emotional reason why women still want their husbands to provide and that doesn't seem to have changed," even as women have become financially independent, she says. "It's obviously not rational. There is no need for it. But we're not just rational actors. We're emotional.”
Shack Egan sees couples every day who are rewriting the rules of weddings and she thinks that's healthy. "We still kind of hold fast to some bridal traditions," she says. "I think if most people stop to think about it, they might realize, 'Yeah, I want parts of this. I don't want parts of this.'"
https://time.com/6314262/why-women-should-propose/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
MORE SINGLE MEN THAN WOMEN
Almost a third of adult single men live with a parent. Single men are much more likely to be unemployed, financially fragile and to lack a college degree than those with a partner. They’re also likely to have lower median earnings; single men earned less in 2019 than in 1990, even adjusting for inflation. Single women, meanwhile, earn the same as they did 30 years ago, but those with partners have increased their earnings by 50%.
These are the some of the findings of a new Pew Research analysis of 2019 data on the growing gap between American adults who live with a partner and those who do not. While the study is less about the effect of marriage and more about the effect that changing economic circumstances have had on marriage, it sheds light on some unexpected outcomes of shifts in the labor market.
Over the same time period that the fortunes of single people have fallen, the study shows, the proportion of American adults who live with a significant other, be it spouse or unmarried partner, also declined substantially. In 1990, about 71% of folks from the age of 25 to 54, which are considered the prime working years, had a partner they were married to or lived with. In 2019, only 62% did.
Partly, this is because people are taking longer to establish that relationship. The median age of marriage is creeping up, and while now more people live together than before, that has not matched the numbers of people who are staying single. But it’s not just an age shift: the number of older single people is also much higher than it was in 1990; from a quarter of 40 to 54-year-olds to almost a third by 2019. And among those 40 to 54-year-olds, one in five men live with a parent.
The trend has not had an equal impact across all sectors of society. The Pew study, which uses information from the 2019 American Community Survey, notes that men are now more likely to be single than women, which was not the case 30 years ago. Black people are much more likely to be single (59%) than any other race, and Black women (62%) are the most likely to be single of any sector. Asian people (29%) are the least likely to be single, followed by whites (33%) and Hispanics (38%).
Most researchers agree that the trend lines showing that fewer people are getting married and that those who do are increasingly better off financially have a lot more to do with the effect of wealth and education on marriage than vice versa. People who are financially stable are just much more likely to find and attract a partner.
“It’s not that marriage is making people be richer than it used to, it’s that marriage is becoming an increasingly elite institution, so that people are are increasingly only getting married if they already have economic advantages,” says Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Marriage does not make people change their social class, it doesn’t make people change their race, and those things are very big predictors of economic outcomes.”
This reframing of the issue may explain why fewer men than women find partners, even though men are more likely to be looking for one. The economic pressures on men are stronger.
Research has shown that an ability to provide financially is still a more prized asset in men than in women, although the trend is shifting. Some studies go so far as to suggest that the 30-year decrease in the rate of coupling can be attributed largely to global trade and the 30-year decrease in the number of stable and well-paying jobs for American men that it brought with it.
When manufacturing moved overseas, non-college educated men found it more difficult to make a living and thus more difficult to attract a partner and raise a family.
But there is also evidence that coupling up improves the economic fortunes of couples, both men and women. It’s not that they only have to pay one rent or buy one fridge, say some sociologists who study marriage, it’s that having a partner suggests having a future.
“There’s a way in which marriage makes men more responsible, and that makes them better workers,” says University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox, pointing to a Harvard study that suggests single men are more likely than married men to leave a job before finding another. The Pew report points to a Duke University study that suggests that after marriage men work longer hours and earn more.
There’s also evidence that the decline in marriage is not just all about being wealthy enough to afford it. Since 1990, women have graduated college in far higher numbers than men.
“The B.A. vs. non B.A. gap has grown tremendously on lots of things — in terms of income, in terms of marital status, in terms of cultural markers and tastes,” says Cohen. “It’s become a sharper demarcation over time and I think that’s part of what we see with regard to marriage. If you want to lock yourself in a room with somebody for 50 years, you might want to have the same level of education, and just have more in common with them.”
Wilcox agrees: “You get women who are relatively liberal, having gone to college, and men who are relatively conservative, still living in a working class world, and that can create a kind of political and cultural divide that makes it harder for people to connect romantically as well.”
What seems to be clear is that the path to marriage increasingly runs through college. While the figures on single men’s declining economic fortunes are the most sobering, they are not what surprised the report’s authors the most.
“It’s quite startling how much the partnered women have now outpaced single women,” says Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. “About 43% of partnered women have completed at least a bachelor’s degree compared to a third of single women.” He speculates that women may be going to college in greater numbers because it helps them attract a partner in the same way it helps men. “Not only are they rewarded in the labor market with higher earnings, but increasingly, partnership also depends on educational attainment.” ~
https://time.com/6104105/more-single-men-than-women
Joe:
Does the Christian Nationalist movement contribute to single men living at home?
Historically, men were taught to be breadwinners by joining a trade union or obtaining a college education. After Ronald Reagan became president, boys learned that a free man owns a rifle, shuns unions, and rejects higher education.
George Bush, a Yale Graduate, is an example of an educated man who acts like a working bloke. He bought a ranch and arranged for photos of himself cutting wood with a chainsaw or hunting with his dogs. His speeches used few polysyllabic words. When he retired, he sold his ranch and moved into a penthouse to paint landscapes.
Trump is another example of a president who hides his college education and embraces the poor man’s language. The white working man believes Trump understands him, and he mocks Biden, the son of a union man and a supporter of unions and education. Those single males are economically fragile, but they are not stupid.
Many spend their time on their computers, playing games using AI. To an extent, they are self-taught computer programmers with a limited scope, which shrinks their employment opportunities. It is not their intelligence or ability that holds them back. It is their family and church affiliation.
Most of these men come from conservative Christian families who promote ignorance and blame minorities for their children’s lack of opportunity. They believe in the Replacement Theory, derived from Nazi propaganda. After World War I, Germans blamed their loss on the Jewish businesses and banks for failing to support the German State.
Today, in America, the Neo-Nazis say that the Jewish community works to defeat White America by replacing white workers with Latin Americans and African Americans. The focus of Christian Nationalist propaganda is Hollywood, and it originated in the 1920s. Jewish men owned the principal studios.
Movies by the Marx brothers, Benny Goodman, and other Jewish actors treated black men as equals. In the film The Jazz Singer, a young man severs his Jewish family ties and finds success by singing with his face blackened. Although blackface existed for many years, by the 1920s, it gave Jewish performers a path into theaters, previously out of reach.
The Jazz Singer uses the same plot as a Polish movie where a young man becomes successful after he abandons his Jewish family. Later, he rejoins his family, and The Jazz Singer is an example of how Neo-Nazis use antisemitism to reinvigorate racism and allow parents to excuse their support for fascism. However, it limits their children’s prospects. ~
Oriana:
“As of 2022, Pew Research Center found, 30 percent of U.S. adults are neither married, living with a partner nor engaged in a committed relationship. Nearly half of all young adults are single: 34 percent of women, and a whopping 63 percent of men.”
Remember the big concern that young people, especially men, are having lots of sex? It turns out that partnered sex is also at an all-time low: “Recent Pew research indicates that over 60% of young men are currently single. Sexual intimacy is at a 30-year low across genders.”
It’s been interesting to watch the reversal of various trends. “Population bomb” turned into a “de-population bomb”; the perception of youth as the happiest years of one’s life turned into the acknowledgment that “older is happier.” The ideal of a woman shifted from a dependent housewife and dedicated mother to an independent woman who pursues her ambition. As for diets, the fanatic avoidance of fat yielded to fat-rich keto diet. Change is of course inevitable, but this shift from one extreme to the other has been a strange phenomenon to watch. We certainly live in interesting times.
*
BARBIE IS A HIT IN RUSSIA
Officially, the Barbie movie isn't showing in Russia.
But unofficially…
I'm in a Moscow shopping center. A giant pink house has been erected next to the food court. Inside: pink furniture, pink popcorn and life-size cardboard cut-outs of Barbie and Ken who are beaming from ear to ear.
No wonder they're smiling: the Barbie film is pulling in the crowds at the multiplex opposite, despite Western sanctions. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a string of Hollywood studios stopped releasing their movies in Russia. But unauthorized copies are getting through and being dubbed into Russian.
Over at the cinema it's a bit cloak and dagger. When I ask one visitor which movie he's come to watch he names an obscure 15-minute Russian film and smiles.
To avoid licensing issues, some cinemas in Russia have been selling tickets to Russian-made shorts and showing the Barbie feature film as the preview.
Russia's culture ministry is not amused. Last month it concluded that the Barbie movie was "not in line with the aims and goals laid out by our president for preserving and strengthening traditional Russian moral and spiritual values.”
Mind you, the cinema goers I speak to are tickled pink that Barbie's hit the big screen here.
"People should have the right to choose what they want to watch," Karina says. "I think it's good that Russian cinemas are able to show these films for us.”
"It's about being open-minded about other people's cultures," says Alyona. "Even if you don't agree with other people's standards, it's still great if you can watch it.”
But Russian MP Maria Butina believes there's nothing great about Barbie: the doll or the film.
"I have issues with Barbie as a female form," she tells me. "Some girls — especially in their teens — try to be like a Barbie girl, and they exhaust their bodies."
Ms Butina adds that the film has not been licensed to appear in Russian cinemas.
"Do not break the law. Is this a question for our movie theaters? Absolutely. I filed several requests to cinemas asking on what basis they are showing the film," she says.
"You talk about the importance of following the law," I say, "but Russia invaded Ukraine. The United Nations says that was a complete violation of international law.”
"Russia is saving Ukraine," she replies, "and saving the Donbas.”
You hear this often from those in power in Russia. They paint Moscow as peacemaker, not warmonger. They argue that it is America, Nato, the West, that are using Ukraine to wage war on Russia. It is an alternative reality designed to rally Russians around the flag.
Amid growing confrontation with Europe and America, the Russian authorities seem determined to turn Russians against the West.
From morning till night state TV here tells viewers that Western leaders are out to destroy Russia. The brand-new modern history textbook for Russian high-school students (obligatory for use) claims that the aim of the West is "to dismember Russia and take control of her natural resources.”
It asserts that "in the 1990s, in place of our traditional cultural values such as good, justice, collectivism, charity and self-sacrifice, under the influence of Western propaganda a sense of individualism was forced on Russia, along with the idea that people bear no responsibility for society.”
The text book encourages Russian 11th graders to "multiply the glory and strength of the Motherland.”
In other words, Your Motherland (not Barbie Land) needs you!
At the Moscow multiplex I'd found many people still open to experiencing Western culture and ideas. But what's the situation away from the Russian capital?
I drive to the town of Shchekino, 140 miles from Moscow. There's a concert on at the local culture centre. Up on stage four Russian soldiers in military fatigues are playing electric guitars and singing their hearts out about patriotism and Russian invincibility.
One of the songs is about Russia's war in Ukraine.
"We will serve the Motherland and crush the enemy!" they croon.
The audience (it's almost a full house) is a mixture of young and old, including school children, military cadets, and senior citizens. For the up-tempo numbers they're waving Russian tricolors that have been handed to them.
As the paratrooper pop stars sing their patriotic repertoire, film is being projected onto the screen behind them. No Barbie or Ken here. There are images of Russian tanks, soldiers marching and shooting and, at one point, of President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.
Patriotic messaging is effective. Barbie mania isn't a thing on the streets of Shchekino.
“Right now it's important to make patriotic Russian films to raise morale," Andrei tells me. "And we need to cut out Western habits from our lives. How can we do that? Through film. Cinema can influence the masses.”
"In Western films they talk a lot about sexual orientation. We don't support that," Ekaterina tells me. "Russian cinema is about family values, love and friendship.”
But Diana is reluctant to divide cinema into Russian films and foreign movies.
"Art is for everyone. It doesn't matter where you're from," Diana tells me. "And we shouldn't restrict ourselves to art from one nation. To become a more cultured, sociable and a more interesting person, you need to watch films and read books from other countries, too.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66934838
*
THE ALCOHOL RATION FOR SOVIET SOLDIERS
100-gram vodka ration for the advancing (not retreating or defending) troops fighting on the frontline was a thing, but a lot of soldiers were not drinking. They were smart enough to understand that even a small loss of concentration could be deadly in battle. And nobody was forcing soldiers to drink. It was just an option. Vodka was offered right before the attack, usually by the petty officer.
Otherwise, the Red Army was technically dry. Soldiers were provided with 100-gram vodka ration only on key Soviet holidays (New Year, Revolution Day, etc).
The real problem was not officially provided vodka. It was the alcohol “found in the field”. German Army alcohol taken as trophies, gifts from the rescued civilians, bottles stolen in Europe… In 1945, the situation became especially dire. Marshal Zhukov, for example, at some point ordered to immediately destroy German tank cars with spirits, “freed” by his troops. It helped, but only a little. There was a lot of civilian alcohol in West and Central Europe.
It wasn’t just about the loss of discipline. Not every seemingly alcoholic substance was safe to drink. On May 9th, 1945, 22 Red Army soldiers died from drinking methanol in Linz, Austria. They were celebrating the German surrender. That wasn’t an isolated incident.
The actual disaster, though, was yet to come. Soon after the war, alcoholism became a national scourge. Soviet people, both men and women, tried to soften the psychological impact of the war by drinking. And it was really easy because alcohol was readily available. Unlike a lot of other things in the Soviet Union.
As for the supplying soldiers with relatively small amounts of vodka, it wasn’t that hard. It was just a minor part of the army supply chain. Constantly supplying troops with reinforcements, food, war machines, ammo, and artillery shells was a lot harder. Vodka doesn’t spoil, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and it’s easy to divide it into small portions that even a weakened or overburdened person can carry. ~ Boris Ivanov, Quora
Boris Ivanov:
It certainly was like that for my grandfather. He was a very nice, soft-hearted man showered with family love in his childhood. War was the complete opposite of that. It didn’t break him exactly, but there was a fracture in his mind that had never healed. He screamed in his sleep for decades. And he became an alcoholic over the years, little by little. By the end, it was a sorry sight.
Alexander Shakhnovsky:
My grandma was a girl back than. She worked in hospital helping wounded. Then she worked as collecting food from locals in Siberia. In summer she would go up the river Yenisey, during winter use the ice road. While at the same time she was a daughter of enemy of the state and almost never she drank vodka, or other hard spirits.
But my grandfather on mother's side became an alcoholic. His wife died from cancer very fast and he couldn't cope with loss. That's why my mom was raised in Leningrad.
It became a problem rather at the end of the Soviet Union in the mid 80s.
Andrei Tupkalo:
Actually, the standard of living improved tremendously. Soviet Union before the war was not just poor, it was pauper-level poor. But there was a sort of an economic boom after the war. Even the much-maligned housing campaign of Khruschev was unimaginable before. Millions moved from barracks and dugouts into tiny, but fully functional family apartments with such amenities as hot and cold water, heating, sewers (meaning, no crapping into a pit in a plywood shack at -20°C), etc. Which didn’t need to be shared with the other families!
Politically, though, not so much.
Kristoff Etranos:
I think the Soviet officer Corps already had a drinking problem even before Barbarossa.
Boris Ivanov:
Yep, that was always a problem. Even in the Tsarist Army. According to the official statistics of the Tsarist Army hospitals, at one point, there were 36 alcoholic officers for each alcoholic soldier. Of course, it was officially discouraged, but it was hard to make officers quit drinking. Having good times with other officers was an important part of their life.
Aldo Rovinazzi:
Most foreigners have no idea that a large part of the Russian population are teetotalers and that many religious and cultural currents are forcefully anti-alcohol.
Luke Hatherton:
“Spirits freed by his troops.” The Red Army, liberating alcohol across Europe
*
CAN RUSSIA REGAIN THE POWER IT ONCE HAD?
On October 3, the whole of Russia will conduct civil defense training.
All regions will be doing the exercises in one day, for the 1st time in the history of Russia.
Training legend:
martial law in parts of the country;
full mobilization has been completed;
70% of housing is destroyed;
severe radiation contamination;
danger of chemical contamination;
complete destruction of life support facilities.
Meanwhile, Putin’s buddy Mikhail Kovalchuk, who was given the title of President of Kurchatov Institute of Physics, demanded to blow a nuke in Arctics “at least once”, to scare the West.
Kovalchuk is confident that if Russia blows a nuke on its remote Arctic island, Americans will immediately beg Russia to negotiate.
Novaya Zemla as a proposed site for dropping a nuclear bomb.
During the Cold War, the USSR propagandists were talking about throwing nukes in the ocean and threatening Americans with giant tsunamis.
Everyone remembers what happened to the USSR.
Now, Russia — the country that’s never even ready for the winter season, snowfalls are a big surprise for authorities every year — is trying to prep for an all-in nuclear war.
The truth is, Russia simply cannot “get ready” for a nuclear war — it’s impossible in principle.
*
WHAT PUTIN HAS ACCOMPLISHED IN THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR
• Doubled borders with NATO
• Lost profitable markets for oil and gas
• Made Russia a vassal of China
• Arranged the largest hole in the budget since the late nineties
• Provoked a record drain of brains and capital from the country
• Achieved the highest number of sanctions in history
Received the status of a wanted war criminal by The Hague
~ Crystal Rose, Quora
*
PERCEPTION OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIETAL IMPROVEMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE
Despite no universal agreement on whether the economic situation is better today than it was under communism, the belief that it is better has become more common in every country since 2009, except Russia. In Poland, 47% held this view in 2009, but today that figure has jumped to 74%. However, in Russia fewer people now say the economic situation is better than under communism.
In Poland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, majorities say the economic situation for most people is better today than it was under communism. In Hungary and Slovakia, more people say it is better, but substantial minorities still say it is worse. And in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia, more than half believe the economic situation is worse today than it was under communism. (This question was not asked in Germany.)
Most Russians characterize the end of USSR as great misfortune.
More than six-in-ten Russians agree with the statement “It is a great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists.” This represents an increase of 13 percentage points since 2011. Only three-in-ten disagree with the statement.
Russians who lived most of their lives under the Soviet Union are more likely to say its dissolution was a great misfortune than are those who grew up under the new system. Among Russians ages 60 and older, roughly seven-in-ten (71%) agree it is unfortunate that the USSR no longer exists, compared with half of Russians ages 18 to 34.
*
Germans view unification positively but feel the East has been left behind economically
Germans are in strong agreement that the 1990 unification of East and West was a good thing for Germany. Roughly nine-in-ten Germans, living in both the regions that correspond with the former West Germany and East Germany, agree with this statement.
However, when asked whether East and West Germany have achieved the same standard of living since unification, only three-in-ten Germans say this is the case.
Since 2009 there has not been much overall movement on this question in Germany as a whole. In former East Germany, however, people are about twice as likely now to say the standard of living is equal to that of the West than they were the last time this question was asked. Still, majorities of Germans from both regions say the East has not yet achieved equal economic footing with the West.
Politicians and business people are seen as gaining from changes since the end of communism, more so than ordinary people.
People are especially inclined to believe politicians have benefited. Roughly nine-in-ten or more express this view in every nation where the question was asked, with the exception of Russia (still, 72% of Russians agree). Roughly three-quarters or more in every country also say business people have profited from the changes at least a fair amount, including 89% of those in the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine.
Publics are less inclined to believe ordinary people have been the beneficiaries of such changes. In Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia, about one-in-five say this. On the other hand, nearly seven-in-ten Poles think ordinary people have prospered under the new system, as well as 54% of Czechs.
Within countries, there are divides on how people see average citizens making out in the change from communism to a free market. In every country where the question was asked, those with higher incomes are more likely than those with lower incomes to say the changes have benefited ordinary people. For example, in Hungary, those with an income at or above the national median are 20 percentage points more likely than those with lesser means to hold this view.
Education is also a dividing line on this question. In every country but Russia, those with more education are generally more likely to say regular people have prospered in the post-Soviet era than are those with less education.
Additionally, those who lived through the communist era are much more likely to say the changes that took place have had not too much or no influence on ordinary people compared with those who were born near or after the changes took place. For example, in Slovakia, 70% of those ages 60 and older say ordinary people did not benefit from the change to capitalism and a multiparty system, compared with 39% who say this among 18- to 34-year-olds. Double-digit differences of this nature appear in every country surveyed, highlighting how those who lived through communism have a more negative view of the post-communist era.
*
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES SINCE THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
~ When asked about changes that have taken place since the end of the communist era, people across the former Eastern Bloc express support for the shift from one-party rule and a state-controlled economy to a multiparty system and a market economy. However, Russians in particular are less supportive of these changes.
The move to a multiparty system garners the strongest approval from Poles (85%), those in former East Germany (85%) and Czechs (82%). But majorities in Slovakia, Hungary and Lithuania also approve. Roughly half or more in Bulgaria and Ukraine also support the change, even though there are more who disapprove in those countries. Only in Russia do fewer than half express support for the change to a multiparty system.
Support for the shift to a market economy is also robust in most of the countries surveyed, with majority support for the economic change found in many countries where majorities also favor the change to the political system. However, only 38% in Russia approve of the economic change, while 51% disapprove.
People in many of the countries surveyed are less supportive of the changes to the political and economic systems now than they were in 1991. However, since 2009, there has been a notable uptick in positive sentiment toward these changes in about half of the countries surveyed. Russia, a notable exception, is the only country where support has decreased since 2009.
For example, in Hungary, 74% in 1991 said they approved of the change to a multiparty system, and 80% liked the movement to a market economy. But when surveyed again in 2009, only 56% approved of the change to the political system since 1989 and 46% were positive on the change to the economic system. Now, however, 72% of Hungarians approve of the multiparty system and 70% like the capitalist system.
Russians, however, are even more pessimistic than they were in in the past about these changes. In 1991, 61% of Russians welcomed the multiparty system, but that figure is 43% today, an 18 percentage point decline. And positive views toward the market economy are also down significantly since 1991.
Young people in general are keener on the movement away from a state-controlled economy in many of the countries surveyed. For example, in Slovakia, 84% of 18- to 34-year-olds are in favor of this change, compared with 49% of those ages 60 and older. Double-digit age gaps also appear in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia and Lithuania.
In most of the countries surveyed, those with more education are more likely to favor the movement to a capitalist economy than are those with less education. In Bulgaria, 78% of those with more than a secondary education favor the change to a capitalist economy, while only 49% of those with less education do. These differences are also significant for the change to a multiparty system.
Similar differences appear when it comes to income, not just for the movement to a free-market economy but also for the change to a multiparty system. In all countries, those with incomes at or higher than the country median are more likely to approve of these changes than are those with incomes below the country medians.
The transition from a state-controlled economy to a capitalist one is much more highly regarded now than in 2009, during the recession. Perhaps because of an improved economic outlook many more now see the economic benefits of the new system compared with communism. However, there are sharp divides across countries on how the change affected most people.
Despite no universal agreement on whether the economic situation is better today than it was under communism, the belief that it is better has become more common in every country since 2009, except Russia. In Poland, 47% held this view in 2009, but today that figure has jumped to 74%. However, in Russia fewer people now say the economic situation is better than under communism.
In Poland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, majorities say the economic situation for most people is better today than it was under communism. In Hungary and Slovakia, more people say it is better, but substantial minorities still say it is worse. And in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia, more than half believe the economic situation is worse today than it was under communism. (This question was not asked in Germany.)
Majorities of Poles, Lithuanians and Germans say the changes have had a good influence across every category asked, including education, standard of living, pride in their country, spiritual values, law and order, health care and family values. On the other end, roughly half or fewer Bulgarians, Ukrainians and Russians say the changes have had a good influence on these various issues, with the exception of the positive influence on pride in their country among Russians (54%) and Ukrainians (52%).
Sentiment is more mixed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary, with people generally seeing the benefits of the changing standard of living and pride in their country. But worries persist about spiritual values in the Czech Republic and health care in Slovakia and Hungary.
The most prominent increase is in the percentage of people who think the changes in 1989 and 1991 have had a good influence on the standard of living within each country. In many of the countries surveyed, there have been multifold increases in this sentiment from 1991 to today. For example, in Lithuania, only 9% of people in 1991 said that the recent changes had a positive influence on the standard of living for people in the country at the time. But in 2019, that figure has shot up to 70%, more than a sevenfold increase.
In Ukraine, those who only speak Ukrainian generally see a more positive influence of the societal changes on each issue than Russian-only speakers or those who speak both languages at home.
In Germany, there are many divides on whether the changes since 1989 have had a good influence on national conditions among those who currently live in the West versus those in the East, though overall sentiment in Germany toward these changes is quite positive.
Since 2009 there has not been much overall movement on this question in Germany as a whole. In former East Germany, however, people are about twice as likely now to say the standard of living is equal to that of the West than they were the last time this question was asked. Still, majorities of Germans from both regions say the East has not yet achieved equal economic footing with the West.
Education is also a dividing line on this question.
In every country but Russia, those with more education are generally more likely to say regular people have prospered in the post-Soviet era than are those with less education.
Additionally, those who lived through the communist era are much more likely to say the changes that took place have had not too much or no influence on ordinary people compared with those who were born near or after the changes took place. For example, in Slovakia, 70% of those ages 60 and older say ordinary people did not benefit from the change to capitalism and a multiparty system, compared with 39% who say this among 18- to 34-year-olds. Double-digit differences of this nature appear in every country surveyed, highlighting how those who lived through communism have a more negative view of the post-communist era.
Many say education, standard of living and national pride have improved in post-communist era, and worry about effects on law and order, health care and family values.
For example, those in the West are 20 percentage points more likely than those in the East to say the changes have had a good effect on the education system. Western Germans are also more likely to see the changes as a good influence on law and order and spiritual and family values compared with the East. However, there are no real differences of opinion between the West and East on how changes have benefited standard of living, health care and pride in their country. ~
In summary:
Those in West and East Germany differ on whether some changes to society and culture were good
Young people see benefits of changes to health care system since 1989/1991
Perceptions about changing standard of living differ by income level
Large increase in people saying the standard of living has improved after 1989/1991 changes
Many say education, standard of living and national pride have improved in post-communist era, worry about effects on law and order, health care and family values
People who lived under communism are more convinced that ordinary people did not benefit from societal changes
Those with higher incomes more likely to say ordinary people benefited from changes since end of communism
Younger groups are more optimistic about children’s financial future
Most are optimistic about relations with other European nations and their own country’s culture
Since 1991, life satisfaction has improved across Europe
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/10/14/political-and-economic-changes-since-the-fall-of-communism/
*
DESERVINGNESS: FRIENDSHIPS AND THE CHANGE TO POST-COMMUNISM
In June 1992, soon after the fall of the Wall, Berliner Zeitung, a formerly state-run newspaper in the communist-ruled German Democratic Republic (GDR), invited its readers to submit letters to the editors on the topic of friendship. What was the meaning of friendship today? One reader recounted that: ‘when my friend got married, it did not impact our friendship at all … our relationship broke off, strangely – but tellingly – with the fall of the GDR. Fundamental differences in our characters revealed themselves, ones we were tacitly aware of, but which had not impacted our friendship before.’
*
What might those differences in character be? During the 1990s, throughout eastern Europe, people witnessed profound economic changes. The transformation period was characterized by contradictions: it gave rise to great political and economic accomplishments, but also to innumerable socioeconomic tragedies. Social upward-mobility expectations, for many, did not materialize. In disadvantaged regions, poverty surged, and many lives were lost due to health-related complications.
DEATHS OF DESPAIR
In an analogy to the deindustrializing rust belt in the United States, social scientists have described the profound health consequences in certain regions and societies of eastern Europe as ‘deaths of despair’. In some areas, especially in the post-Soviet societies further east, economic shock became a persistent reality. In their book Taking Stock of Shock (2021), Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein have calculated that, on average, it took approximately 17 years for the 28 post-communist societies to return to their levels of economic output of 1989.
As the state retreated from the economy, public resources like healthcare were marketized and defunded. Welfare systems weakened. Life chances diverged and social inequalities surged. Individuals who once resided in the same neighborhoods, possessed the means to acquire similar goods, and embarked on comparable if modest vacations found themselves occupying vastly disparate social positions merely a few years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. People developed different ways of coping with these new realities.
This is where ideas about economic deservingness come into play. Disruptive economic change and the inequalities it gives rise to are not merely abstract concepts; they resonate deeply within a person’s heart and mind. Often, it is through the lens of economic deservingness that people make sense of such transformative shifts.
Economic deservingness involves two aspects: first, the distribution of material resources, which raises questions about fairness and redistributive justice. After 1989, who succeeded in moving up the social ladder, what did they gain, and what were the reasons behind their success or failure? Second, deservingness is evaluated at a personal level, entailing judgments about individuals and their moral qualities. What personal qualities are reflected in material gains or losses during the transition to this new society?
This uneasy connection between the economic and the moral – unsettling because it brings together two realms that are often, and for good reasons, thought of as separate – is what deeply impacts social relationships. For better or for worse, it is within their social networks that individuals develop a deep understanding of economic inequalities and express their nuanced beliefs about justice. That’s what we can learn from listening to people’s stories and memories of the post-1989 changes.
*
The 1990s are typically remembered as a period of great economic opportunities. With the fall of communism, there was freedom, there was a new market society. People wanted to be part of the process of societal opening-up. It is often expressed that the early 1990s provided a chance for individuals to seize control of their own destinies, liberated from the constraints of socialist complacency and the uniformity of life prospects. But what about those who were not ready to embrace this new future?
The process of privatizing the formerly socialist economy began in the early 1990s, soon after the political transition. Numerous companies underwent downsizing or disappeared altogether; millions of jobs were lost. In certain regions of East Germany, for example, unemployment affected up to a third of the adult population.
Individuals had to navigate the challenges of economic hardship. Some perceived those who were struggling as burdens, lacking the willingness to embrace the available opportunities. Such views allowed the successful to uphold meritocratic values and assert their own commitment to hard work as an intrinsic conviction.
There are also accounts of breaking social ties from the opposite perspective. With swiftly widening inequalities, it was easy to feel stagnant while others, even in modest ways, experienced upward mobility. Some individuals recount distancing themselves from those whom they perceived as becoming ‘arrogant’, suddenly preoccupied with expensive dinners, travels and self-centered pursuits. These stories often revolve around how a former friend introduced a market logic into the realm of interpersonal trust, thereby violating the sacred boundary that once distinguished the two.
Maria, today in her late 60s, was laid off from a large, formerly state-owned East German company during its dissolution in the early 1990s, and endured the challenges of a harsh labor market for years. She vividly recalls an incident at her birthday party in the early 1990s that led to the break with a once close friend of hers: ‘At one point she came to my birthday, as a surprise, but only to acquire customers for her business! She occupied my guests, my friends, in this way! So we separated … So that was a case when we said, “No, I don’t want you around anymore.”’ To Maria, the former bond of equality – founded on an implicit agreement about what truly matters in life – was shattered.
Accounts like hers typically do not concern friends who became extremely affluent. Instead, they center on much smaller, subtler differences. People use these stories to criticize meritocratic beliefs and the detrimental effects they have on the purity of social connections. It’s the nuance that counts here, and the fact that these differences emerged from a previously more egalitarian relationship.
It is remarkable that these narratives frame economic realities in moral terms. They emphasize the character traits of individuals, highlighting the way people perceive and evaluate these experiences based on notions of personal virtue and values. This is noteworthy when considering that, during the 1990s, individuals’ life prospects were shaped not by their personal commitment or effort, but rather by factors such as their prior qualifications, gender, geographic location, ethnicity, the fate of their firms, or social connections – all of which are structural forces.
Taking initiative and not relying on others to take care of you are seen as indicators of being a ‘good’ person. In a similar way, staying true to oneself and avoiding behaviors that prioritize money over friendships are valued traits indicating ‘good’ character. These moral judgments assess an individual’s character.
The moral significance involved in these situations lies in the essence of the social relationship as a grown connection. The breach of trust is a breach of a mutual understanding of the history of the relationship. The philosopher Avishai Margalit has eloquently articulated this idea. According to Margalit, betrayal is fundamentally characterized by the disregard of the shared values that previously united two individuals. Betrayal is the act of shattering the meaning of a shared past. Only a strong tie, understood as a tie of mutual commitment, attachment and recognition, can ever be betrayed. Such ties are found in families, but more so in friendship relations.
Two friends’ understandings of their past – the past of the self, and the past of the other – is mutually entangled. Because it is constitutive of the relation, the shared past is ‘colored by the betrayal’. And only a tie that never had as its purpose an external goal can be betrayed. That tie must have been treated as an end in itself. It must have had no other goal but the flourishing of each of the two persons, or more precisely, the flourishing of the relationship itself. Betrayal is the blow to the relation of commitment, which comes with a profound shock to the status of recognition of the other as person. As Margalit notes in his book On Betrayal (2017): ‘The shocking discovery in betrayal is the recognition of the betrayer’s lack of concern; the issue is not one’s interests but one’s significance.’
This understanding of the influence of the past, the temporal nature of social relationships, enables us to acknowledge the connection between economic deservingness and betrayal more accurately. We come to realize that the question of who deserves what after 1989 becomes a central concern for individuals. The moral belief that individuals deserve certain economic outcomes, whether through hard work or social support, also extends to their entitlement to specific social relationships. The stories of broken friendships highlight the desire to purify one’s social sphere from relationships that contradict their sense of deservingness. People yearn for recognition of their economic choices and strive for others to perceive them as deserving as well. This moral claim on their environment and the importance placed on it reveal the significance of economic justice in social ties.
These dynamics are, to be sure, not solely a result of marketization after 1989. They have deep historical roots, molded, in particular, by the social conservatism of late-socialist societies. As the historians Thomas Lindenberger and Michal Pullman have shown for the GDR and Czechoslovakia respectively, the notion that someone was supposedly ‘unwilling to work’ was politically propagated and instrumentalized by the communist parties during the 1970s and ’80s. Court files reveal that the state increasingly persecuted individuals on moral grounds, using charges like ‘socially deviant behavior’, ‘asocial behavior’, and labeling them as ‘goldbrickers’ or ‘parasites’ to distance them from the ‘healthy’ and ‘productive’ socialist community.
In reality, this politics of scapegoating – accompanied by a sharp rise in racist resentment and violence – was a clear indication that the communist parties had lost ideological support and lacked a positive vision for the future. Nonetheless, this aggressive language subtly infiltrated interpersonal relationships. It shapes dynamics of trust and eerily echoes elements of the moral language of market society, even serving as a framework to attribute economic setbacks during the 1990s to individual choices.
NARRATIVES FORGE SOME TIES, DISSOLVE OTHERS
Ideas about deservingness are also politically consequential. As social policy researchers have long argued – far beyond the context of the breakdown of communism in eastern Europe – people who believe that individual effort and hard work are decisive to get ahead in society are also more likely to tolerate greater inequalities and to reject a more active role of the state in redistributing resources in society. They have faith that the market will sort things out and are inclined to hold others accountable for their personal failures and misfortunes.
Those who believe that outcomes like poverty or joblessness cannot be addressed via individual commitment alone but that social support is necessary, in turn, are more likely to wish for reductions of inequality, and favor stronger welfare states. Beliefs about deservingness, in other words, influence the degree of solidarity individuals feel towards others.
If these normative judgments are deeply embedded in social relationships, then this also shapes what kinds of inequities people perceive in the first place. Whose fortunes or misfortunes are they going to see? What moral choices do they think are involved, and who do they feel sympathetic to on these grounds? The boundaries of their social networks may coincide with the limits of their imagination.
People may, in fact, invent social relationships to justify their privileged position in an unequal society. It has been demonstrated by sociologists that British middle-class individuals employ origin narratives about social relationships to rationalize their own economic status. They tend to portray their upbringing and their family background in a way that links their origins to individuals that are working class, effectively fabricating social ties in the past in order to frame ‘their life as an upward struggle “against the odds”’.
During periods of crisis, this becomes even more pronounced: the way people define who belongs to their social circles, both in the past and in the present, indexes their self-perception and the manner in which they confront these challenging situations. By examining their narratives about imagined social environments, we can discern their notions of deservingness.
Yet – and this is precisely what memories of the 1990s reveal – there will be ambiguity in these narratives. We should resist the temptation to label people as either pro-market or anti-market on these grounds. Deservingness is articulated in stories, and these stories contain multiple, sometimes contradictory views. It is how people make sense of the world, and also how they act on their social world. Narratives forge some ties, and dissolve others. As observers, our point of departure must be to try to grasp individuals’ notions of personal agency, particularly in navigating economic challenges, during times of crisis.
The 1989 revolutions in central and eastern Europe occurred over three decades ago, yet the echoes of these stories, and their enduring moral significance, continue to resonate today. The passing of time does not necessarily heal economic and social wounds. The notion that individual responsibility solely determines economic outcomes is highly divisive and largely misrepresents the fact that we should aspire to a world where there is less moralizing of economic lives workings of society.
However, we cannot and should not give up on the idea of political responsibility. As Marci Shore reminds us, the readiness to assume responsibility emerges as a key political lesson from the convoluted eastern European experience of the 20th century, and now – in light of the Maidan protest movement, and the struggle against reactionary Russia and its far Right-wing allies around the world – also the 21st.
But economic and political responsibility are not one and the same. The central and eastern European historical experience of the recent past teaches us why – and instead, more contestation, including moral contestation, over political futures. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/in-post-communist-europe-economics-is-laden-with-morality?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=45c8d99023-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_09_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b43a9ed933-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
*
Russia doesn’t have capitalism. It has fatalism. ~ Misha Firer
*
THE “HERO OF DONBAS” IN TROUBLE
Igor Girkin-Strelkov, the “hero of the Russian spring” in Donbas, who was arrested and charged after publishing a video where he openly criticized Putin, got bashed in jail during the walk.
Previously, Girkin’s wife complained that he was transferred from the jail to police quarters in the same vehicle with Ukrainian POWs. Girkin’s wife is appalled. Her husband is a bona fide hero of Russia! How dare they put him in the same space with captured Ukrainian defenders, the very people that her husband was killing for years?
Well, Girkin could be comfortably serving time in the Netherlands — a warm cell, TV, healthy food. But instead, he ended up in a jail in Russia.
To those who don’t know, last year Girkin was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hague Court for downing the flight MH17 over East Ukraine in 2014, which killed 298 people on board.
Girkin also confessed it was him who ignited the war in Donbas.
Freedom requires hope, which I define in two ways: the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next.
*
SOME RUSSIAN SOLDIERS REFUSE TO FIGHT
Vyacheslav Reznichenko from the village of Zarubino in the Far East of Russia refused to go to fight in Ukraine.
He did it calmly and openly, did not run away, did not hide. FSB harassed him, but he responded that he was a Baptist and his religion doesn’t allow him to kill.
Vyacheslav was tried by court 5 times.
The final sentence was 2 years in prison.
Vyacheslav has a wife and little daughter at home. But he did not become a murderer.
Reznichenko is just one of thousands of Russian men who refused to go to war in Ukraine.
In 5 months since February 2022, there were 1793 Russian military servicemen from 22 Russian regions who refused to be sent to Ukraine. At that time, only army contractors were sent to the “zone of special operation”.
234 of them were imprisoned near Bryansk in Russia. Many were kept in improvised prisons in the occupied Luhansk region, such as school basements.
In September 2022, Putin announced mobilization (which he promises at the start will never be required), and hundreds of thousands of Russian men were pulled from their jobs and thrown into Donbas meat grinder.
But even more men decided not to wait for the letter from the enlistment office, bought plane tickets and skipped the country.
Among those men who got grabbed by recruiters at home or work, thousands were seeking options to get out.
An informal organization named “Go by the forest” (in Russian, it sounds as “Idite lesom” — an analogue for “get lost”) that helps Russian men to avoid mobilization, was swamped by requests.
Only in January 2023, they helped 448 men to dodge the draft. In October-November 2022, they helped thousands.
By now, they gave consultations and assistance to over 16,000 people.
Some guys just needed verbal guidance what to do, others were helped to cross the border to Europe.
According to Anton Gorbatsevich, who works in “Go by the forest”, they are getting more and more requests from soldiers who are already at war.
“One of them told me that 70 people from his brigade escaped, and only 15 were caught following fresh tracks, the rest are hiding. Most often people escape from hospitals. The hospital does not want to bear responsibility, and they immediately make the wounded sign discharge documents with an open date. If the people run away, according to the documents everything is in order, so the military unit does not look for them for a long time, they are not put on the wanted list, and thus they have time to leave the country,” explained Gorbatsevich.
Meanwhile, the creeping mobilization in Russia is ongoing.
Russians are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives of their citizens just to remain poor and powerless. They call it patriotism. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Oriana:
This readiness to sacrifice men in a war of choice, a war of aggression, is particularly bad in view of Russia’s demographic problem: the population has a shortage of men in relation to women. Before the war with Ukraine, there were already too few men, due to early male mortality caused by alcoholism; now the war, and the emigration of young Russian men to countries such as Turkey and Georgia is making this shortage even more acute. The official birth rate in Russia is 1.42 children per woman, but there is speculation that it’s even lower than that: 1.1, especially when it comes to ethnic Russians. Central Asian republics have a higher birth rate, which inflates the overall average. According to Misha Firer, a typical Russian family consists of a mother, one child, and the maternal grandmother. The mother is usually divorced — the divorce rate in Russia is 74%, compared to 40-50% in the U.S. Divorced women are often unwilling to remarry.
*
WILL ANYTHING CHANGE IN THE RUSSIAN MAFIA STATE? (Misha Firer)
In Krasnodar, an Orthodox priest on mafia payroll blesses with holy water tombstones of the soldiers killed in the special military operation in Ukraine. Young mafia members in training stand guard. Nowadays they gotta prove their belonging to organized crime group by killing enemies in the turf war.
Russian authorities proved again that while other countries have mafias, mafia has a country in Russia.
It is a place where criminals who committed crimes are prosecuting judges, a situation familiar to you from movies about Cosa Nostra and Mexican drug lords.
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs put the leadership of the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Putin for kidnapping children from Ukraine, on the wanted list.
In addition to the chairman of the court, Piotr Hofmanski, the ministry's search list included his deputy Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranzu and judge Bertram Schmitt. Mafia henchmen are looking for them for daring to stand up to mafia boss.
It has not been specified under what article of the Russian Criminal Code they are wanted because they’re actually wanted under Omertà code, a Southern Italian code of silence in the face of prosecution and questioning by authorities or outsiders.
And while European Union lifts sanctions from previously sanctioned Russian oligarchs although no one can get rich in Russia without paying his dues to the mafia — they even lifted sanctions from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mother who controls most of his assets for raising such a law-abiding son — they punish ordinary Russians for being victims of the mafia state.
The head of the Finnish Foreign Ministry admitted that it was important for the West to show Russia and the Russian people that “you have to pay for the situation in Ukraine…Yes, sanctions really harm ordinary people. But I don’t think we had a choice,” the minister tried to justify herself.
If you don’t want punish mafia boss and continue to buy drugs from him through third party and directly you should most definitely punish poor peasants who live on pittance in constant fear for their lives. A truly brave and honorable act of a civilized nation.
While oligarchs are slowly allowed back to the West, does anyone actually take stand for Russian peasants?
Rich and famous Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of St Petersburg mayor former Putin’s boss, demands to punish Kadyrov’s son for beating a young man accused of burning the Koran:
“This is hell. This is the head of the republic. This is disrespect for the laws of our country. The actions of Adam Kadyrov must be investigated, they must be given a legal assessment in accordance with the CRIMINAL CODE OF RUSSIA, and not with the laws of Sharia or Ramzan Kadyrov. This young man shouldn’t get away with this, how much longer can he mock all of Russia and openly spit in the face of the entire law enforcement system?”
Ksenia, Chechnya is a mafia state under the patronage of the big mafia state. Yes, it’s officially part of the Russian Federation, a secular country, but they live under the sharia laws.
The young man will get away with it because he’s the son of the mafia boss. Maybe Finland could persecute the Koran burner for not standing up to Kadyrov’s son and lift sanctions from his father?
That would be fair and constructive. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Jerry Harris:
The awful mix of church (oppressor) and idiot (follower) has been a brake on human progress for centuries.
*
GEORGE ORWELL ON HITLER’S VISION
“What Hitler envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder.” ~ George Orwell
Compare Adolph Hitler’s slogan “One people, one realm, one leader!” with Vladimir Putin’s “One country, one family, one Russia!”
*
POVERTY IN RUSSIA?
40 years ago the poverty was “no food to buy”, now it’s “no money to buy food”.
40 years ago it was 1983 — the peak of “mature socialism” in the USSR. That’s the time that older Russians are nostalgic about.
Social security was at the highest level ever.
Everyone had a job, could study for free at any university (even if you weren’t smart — there were pathways for those who worked at least 1 year at any enterprise).
Everyone had a place to live or could get a room in a dormitory at the place where he or she worked. Payment for utilities (water, electricity) was very low: 2–3% of the monthly wage.
Wages were low but guaranteed and paid on time. Wages were enough to buy basic food: milk, bread, oil, eggs, chicken, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onions.
And when I say “basic”, it means really basic. Things like butter, ham were luxuries, available sporadically.
Soviet dairy store. Full shelves didn’t last all day, but when the store opened at 7 am, that’s what it looked like.
The food was always available, even though you might have to stand in a queue to buy it.
Queue to the dairy store. It could take 30–40 minutes, and you had to arrive by the time the store opens. The fresh produce was sold out quickly.
Until about 1989, there was always basic food in stores.
People had money left after buying food and paying utilities (apartments were supplied for free by the state). There was not much to buy, in terms of consumer goods.
Most things, including furniture or electronics, were only available by lists: you had to sign up for them and wait for months or years until they became available. Many people had savings in the bank the size of 20–50 monthly wages.
In 2023, the problem is not the absence of goods in stores but the money to buy it.
Pensioners spend a great share of their pensions to pay for utilities and rates. They have little left to buy food. You can buy anything, if you have money.
Pensioners, digging in the bins near supermarkets, where expired produce is thrown away, became a regular sight.
People simply have no money to buy food.
That’s a completely different style of poverty.
It’s poverty without dignity or hope. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Chris Judge:
No wonder the oldies are nostalgic. But do they really believe Putin is going to bring that back, once he has destroyed Ukraine? Why would anyone think that?
Stephen Hannaway:
Yes but according to (Vlad the Impaler) Putin it’s all going to plan & everything will be fine in Mother Russia.
Andrei Vamesu:
Please don't compare Vlad the Impaler to Putin!
Our Vlad might have been a bloodthirsty dictator of Wallachia but he defeated the Ottomans with barely any outside help and Wallachia was independent during his reign.
The only things Putin has achieved is to become the biggest failure of the 21st century and that he made very probable a collapse of the Russian Federation in the next few years.
George Esson:
“Until about 1989, there was always basic food in stores.”
I would argue with that point. In Odessa where I, being an early teen, lived in at the end of 1970s, there were problems with basic food even back then. For example there were huge problems with butter. For months and months it was simply absent in stores. My family always had butter in the refrigerator but we were buying it on the black market not in government stores.
Part of my family lived in Yaroslavl, city 300 km north of Moscow. At the end of 1970s — beginning of 1980s they had constant problems with butter, sausages and etc. They had all that at home but only because they were doing their grocery shopping in Moscow.
Elena Gold:
There was no rationing of milk. Butter was rationed in mid-1980s. So was sugar, vodka, soap, but this happened already in 1989.
*
*
ACTING AS IF: Tentative Belief Can Lead to Real Change: What religion, hypnosis, placebo, and synchronicity may have in common.
~ I grew up in a non-religious Jewish family in which scientific thinking was valued, and belief in a God was not considered important. When I arrived at college, I was uncertain and nervous about my role in life, as is common for many older teenagers. I was intrigued when I met some Christian friends who seemed much more at peace with themselves than I was. They explained to me that their belief in God, as an active being in their lives, helped them feel more secure.
At that time, I started exploring religion and asking myself whether a belief in God would be beneficial to me. Despite talking to my Christian friends at length, and exploring Jewish religious belief in depth, I could not accept the idea that God exists for sure. However, I did become more aware that He might exist, especially given all the many inspirational and highly intelligent world leaders throughout history who based their lives on a belief in God.
I recall a conversation with one of my Christian friends in which I told her that I had been incredibly lucky in my life, as many important things fell into place for me. She said, “I don’t believe in luck. If my good fortune is just the result of luck, then it could turn at any given time.” She explained that her belief in God helped her feel more secure that she will continue to be protected. I liked her security, but was able to identify an alternative explanation for how my “luck” could hold out. Perhaps it had to do with my knowing how to make good choices in life, rather than being attributable to God.
The Benefits of an ”As if” Approach
Thus, I characterized myself as an agnostic, i.e., as someone who does not know whether or not God exists. Nonetheless, I desired the peace manifested by my Christian friends. Therefore, I decided to live my life as if God existed. I reasoned that if I was wrong nothing would be lost, as long as my “as if” approach was helpful for me to live life in a way I felt to be good and meaningful. Indeed, I felt much more comfortable with an approach that allowed me to view some of life’s difficult moments in my work as a physician as being meaningful, rather than as meaningless tragedies.
As I gained more life experience, I recognized that other “as if” approaches can be very helpful and even healing for people. Through the use of clinical hypnosis for more than two decades I learned that prompting people to imagine a fanciful event “as if” it represented resolution of their health problem, can be associated with a dramatic and lasting improvement in their health. For example, a patient’s abdominal pain resolved when she chose to imagine that an elephant decided to stop sitting on her when she gave it a peanut.
The placebo effect also falls into an “as if” category. Classically, many people who participate in studies involving a new drug demonstrate an improvement in mental and/or physical health, even if they are only given a sugar pill. Thus, they react “as if” they received a real drug. Incredibly, with some diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome and chronic back pain, when people are told they are receiving a fake drug, they also improve (Kaptchuk, 2010; Guevarra, 2020). In other words, similar to the response to hypnosis, people can benefit from therapy by responding “as if” it was real.
“As if” belief related to synchronicity can be helpful as well. Psychologist Carl Jung introduced the concept of synchronicity, which he defined as circumstances that appear meaningfully connected but seemed to have occurred independently of each other. For example, when two people who know each other meet in an unexpected location this might be termed a synchronous event.
While many scientists believe that such events occur by coincidence, many people believe that synchronicity occurs as a result of forces that we do not understand, such as guidance by the spiritual universe. Even though there is no proof that such guidance is real, living “as if” it is real allows people to feel more confident and protected, similar to a belief in God. Such confidence can translate into a more successful life.
As I recognized the power of the “as if” approach, I thought again about religion and prayer. I wondered whether much of the power of prayer arises from the human ability to respond “as if” God exists. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that God does exist. From a religious perspective, people can think of the tendency to respond to an “as if” proposition as a result of a God-given ability.
The Drawbacks of an ”As if” Approach
The human ability to respond to “as if” beliefs, can also lead to difficulties. For example, people who deal with anxiety react to their fears “as if” they are real. In this context, helping patients recognize that their beliefs are unrealistic can help them overcome their anxiety, as occurs in cognitive behavioral therapy. Similarly, people dealing with major depression often react “as if” they will never improve. People with hypochondria react “as if” they have a serious illness.
People with a negative outlook can consider their religious doctrine or synchronous events “as if” they portend poor outcomes.
Our propensity to react to “as if” in unhelpful ways also is demonstrated historically and within some of the current vitriolic political discourses in the world, as large groups of people have thought and reacted “as if” something they believed in is absolutely true. This has led to some terrible outcomes.
Thus, we should consider which of our beliefs might be of an as “as if” nature. Once we identify our possible “as if” beliefs, we should ask ourselves if they are leading us to manifest our lives in a good way.
Why Do we Respond to “As if”?
Why do people respond to “as if” beliefs? I think that we are wired to do so because this allows us to rehearse for real life situations. As children, we engage in pretend play to prepare us for adult roles. Since early in human history, we have rehearsed how we would respond in hunting or dangerous situations. Today, we rehearse what we would do in unexpected situations while driving a vehicle. We train pilots and astronauts by rehearsing in flight simulators.
Many adults do not like to play “pretend” games, as they did when they were children, because they feel these are not real. However, they do respond to an “as if” suggestion. A possible reason for this observation is that pretending requires an active decision to suspend disbelief.
In contrast, acting “as if” something is real represents a more passive thought process, which may be more acceptable to adults. Returning to the placebo example, if an adult patient is told to pretend a placebo is real they might respond that this is a ridiculous suggestion. On the other hand, patients are more accepting when told that a placebo can help “as if” it is real.
Sometimes, “as if” beliefs can evolve into firmer beliefs, which is a process that may be related to confirmation bias. In this setting, acting “as if” something is real can cause us to interpret new evidence as confirming our “as if” belief. For example, based on my many experiences with hypnosis and synchronicity I have become more confident in the existence of a guiding force in the universe.
Takeaway
Choosing to live with appropriate “as if” scenarios can prompt beneficial change in people’s lives including help them deal better with life challenges.
An individual patient’s willingness to embrace a particular “as if” approach can help define its utility as a therapeutic tool for that patient. For example, some patients benefit from thinking about life experiences “as if” their mental health issue has been resolved.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-hypnosis/202301/tentative-belief-can-lead-to-real-change
*
THE ORIGIN OF WINE
With just a sniff and a sip, trained sommeliers can often tell what region a wine came from: Douro in Portugal, Barossa in Australia, Napa or Sonoma in California. Experts in a specific locale can name the hillside—even how far up the hill—where a wine's grapes were grown because of the terroir, the combination of soil, topography and microclimate that imparts a characteristic taste. The geographic and genetic journeys that brought those grapes to those places, however, have been poorly understood.
A massive new study gives us the clearest picture yet of the prehistory of wine, overturning several commonly accepted narratives about when and where humans cultivated grapevines to make the world's wines. A large international group of researchers collected and analyzed 2,503 unique vines from domesticated table and wine grapes and 1,022 wild grapevines. By extracting DNA from the vines and determining the patterns of genetic variations among them, they found some surprises.
For centuries grape growers in different communities passed down lore about where their grapes came from. Some governments, particularly in Europe, designated appellations—strictly circumscribed regions with rules on how and where a varietal such as burgundy, rioja or barolo was legally allowed to grow and be produced. But genetic studies to discover where vines originated thousands of years ago began in earnest only 10 or 15 years ago.
One theme that emerged from these studies was that wild grapes grew in central Asia and dispersed westward as early humans migrated in that direction. But the genetic data in the huge study correct this story, says Wei Chen, a senior research scientist at Yunnan Agricultural University in China and one of the study's leaders. Genetic data indicate that 400,000 and 300,000 years ago grapes grew naturally across the western and central Eurasian continent. Roughly 200,000 years ago a cold, dry, ice-age climate slowly killed off vines in the central Mediterranean Sea region, cleaving vine habitat into two isolated areas: one to the west of the sea (today Portugal, Spain and France) and one to the east (roughly Israel, Syria, Turkey and Georgia). Around 56,000 years ago the eastern region separated again into smaller isolated areas: the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) and western Asia (Israel, Jordon and Iraq).
Until recently, researchers also thought humans domesticated grapevines from wild progenitors as long as 8,000 years ago as an early agricultural revolution spread across what is now western Asia and Europe. Some experts thought vines were first cultivated in Iberia (primarily Portugal and Spain) around 3,000 years ago. Other investigators thought domestication first happened in the Caucasus. To make matters murkier (not a good trait in wine), there was disagreement on whether grapes were used first for food (“table grapes”) or for fermentation.
The recent study settles this debate: humans in western Asia domesticated table grapes around 11,000 years ago. Other people, in the Caucasus, domesticated wine grapes around the same time— although they probably didn't master winemaking for another 2,000 or 3,000 years.
Early farmers, the revised story goes, migrated from western Asia toward Iberia and brought table vines with them. Along the way the farmers crossbred the table vines with local wild grapevines. The earliest crossbreeding probably happened in what is now Israel and Turkey, creating muscat grapes, which are high in sugar—good for eating and fermenting. Gradually the table grape was genetically transformed into different wine grapes in the Balkans, Italy, France and Spain.
But if people in the Caucasus already had wine grapes, why didn't they bring them to Europe? “We just don't know yet,” Chen says. People migrating from there—notably Yamnaya nomads 4,000 to 5,000 years ago—might have brought vines, but the genetic analysis shows that Caucasus grapes have had very little influence on the makeup of European wine grapes.
Once farmers did begin cultivating wine grapes in Europe, they developed many of the varietals we enjoy today. Some grapes, such as cabernet sauvignon, have the same name everywhere they are grown.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wines-true-origins-are-finally-revealed/
*
WHY WE’LL NEVER LIVE IN SPACE
~ NASA wants astronaut boots back on the moon a few years from now, and the space agency is investing heavily in its Artemis program to make it happen. It's part of an ambitious and risky plan to establish a more permanent human presence off-world. Companies such as United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin are designing infrastructure for lunar habitation. Elon Musk has claimed SpaceX will colonize Mars. But are any of these plans realistic? Just how profoundly difficult would it be to live beyond Earth—especially considering that outer space seems designed to kill us?
Humans evolved for and adapted to conditions on Earth. Move us off our planet, and we start to fail—physically and psychologically. The cancer risk from cosmic rays and the problems that human bodies experience in microgravity could be deal-breakers on their own. Moreover, there may not be a viable economic case for sustaining a presence on another world. Historically, there hasn't been much public support for spending big money on it. Endeavors toward interplanetary colonization also bring up thorny ethical issues that most space optimists haven't fully grappled with.
At this year's Analog Astronaut Conference, none of these problems seemed unsolvable. Scientists and space enthusiasts were gathered at Biosphere 2, a miniature Earth near Tucson, Ariz., which researchers had built partly to simulate a space outpost. Amid this crowd, the conclusion seemed foregone: living in space is humans' destiny, an inevitable goal that we must reach toward.
The conference attendees know it's a big dream. But their general outlook was summed up by Phil Hawes, chief architect for Biosphere 2, who gave the opening talk at the meeting. He recited a toast made by the first team to camp out here decades ago: “Here's to throwing your heart out in front of you and running to catch up with it.”
The question remains as to whether we can—and will—ever run fast enough.
In 1991 eight people entered Biosphere 2 and lived inside for two years. This strange facility is a 3.14-acre oasis where scientists have re-created different terrestrial environments—not unlike an overgrown botanical garden. There's an ocean, mangrove wetlands, a tropical rainforest, a savanna grassland and a fog desert, all set apart from the rest of the planet they're mimicking. One goal, alongside learning about ecology and Earth itself, was to learn about how humans might someday live in space, where they would have to create a self-contained and self-sustaining place for themselves. Biosphere 2, located on Biosphere 1 (Earth), was practice.
The practice, though, didn't quite work out. The encapsulated environment didn't produce enough oxygen, water or food for the inhabitants—a set of problems that, of course, future moon or Mars dwellers could also encounter. The first mission and a second one a few years later were also disrupted by interpersonal conflicts and psychological problems among the residents.
Today the people who participate in projects like Biosphere 2—simulating some aspect of long-term space travel while remaining firmly on Earth—are called analog astronauts. And although it's a niche pursuit, it's also popular: There are analog astronaut facilities in places such as Utah, Hawaii, Texas and Antarctica. People are building or planning them in Oman, Kenya and Israel. And they all share the goal of learning how to live off Earth while on Earth.
The people who are mingling on Biosphere's patio, where the desert sunset casts a pink light on the habitat's glass exterior, are part of that analog world. Some of them have participated in simulation projects or have built their own analog astronaut facilities; others are just analog-curious. They are astronomers, geologists, former military personnel, mail carriers, medical professionals, FedEx employees, musicians, artists, analysts, lawyers and the owner of the Tetris Company. On this night many have donned Star Wars costumes. As the sun goes down, they watch the rising moon, where many here would like to see humans settle.
Human bodies really can't handle space. Spaceflight damages DNA, changes the microbiome, disrupts circadian rhythms, impairs vision, increases the risk of cancer, causes muscle and bone loss, inhibits the immune system, weakens the heart, and shifts fluids toward the head, which may be pathological for the brain over the long term—among other things.
At the University of California, San Francisco, medical researcher Sonja Schrepfer has dug into two of the conditions that afflict space explorers. Her research, using mice floating within the International Space Station, has revealed that blood vessels leading to the brain get stiffer in microgravity. It's part of why today's astronauts can't simply walk out of their capsules once they return to Earth, and it would play out the same way on Mars—where there's no one to wheel them to their new habitat on arrival. Schrepfer and her colleagues did, however, uncover a molecular pathway that might prevent those cardiovascular changes. “But now the question I try to understand is, Do we want that?” she says. Maybe the vessels' stiffening is a protective mechanism, Schrepfer suggests, and limbering them up might cause other problems.
She also wants to figure out how to help astronauts' faltering immune systems, which look older and have a harder time repairing tissue damage than they should after spending time in space. “The immune system is aging quite fast in microgravity,” Schrepfer says. She sends biological samples from young, healthy people on Earth up to orbit on tissue chips and tracks how they degrade.
Vision and bone problems are also among the more serious side effects. When astronauts spend a month or more in space, their eyeballs flatten, one aspect of a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, which can cause long-lasting damage to eyesight. Bones and muscles are built for life on Earth, which involves the ever present pull of gravity. The work the body does against gravity to stay upright and move around keeps muscles from atrophying and stimulates bone growth.
In space, without a force to push against, astronauts can experience bone loss that outpaces bone growth, and their muscles shrink. That's why they must do hours of exercise every day, using specialized equipment that helps to simulate some of the forces their anatomy would feel on the ground—and even this training doesn't fully alleviate the loss.
Perhaps the most significant concern about bodies in space, though, is radiation, something that is manageable for today's astronauts flying in low-Earth orbit but would be a bigger deal for people traveling farther and for longer. Some of it comes from the sun, which spews naked protons that can damage DNA, particularly during solar storms. “[That] could make you very, very sick and give you acute radiation syndrome,” says Dorit Donoviel, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH).
Future astronauts could use water—perhaps pumped into the walls of a shelter—to shield themselves from these protons. But scientists don't always know when the sun will be spitting out lots of particles. “So if, for example, astronauts are exploring the surface of the moon, and there is a solar particle event coming, we probably have the capability of predicting it within about 20 to 30 minutes max,” Donoviel says. That means we need better prediction and detection—and we'd need astronauts to stay close to their H2O shield.
If you didn't get to safety in time, the nausea would come first. “You would vomit into your spacesuit,” Donoviel says, “which now becomes a life-threatening situation” because the vomit could interfere with life-support systems, or you might breathe it in. Then comes the depletion of cells such as neutrophils and red blood cells, meaning you can't battle germs or give your tissues oxygen effectively. You'll be tired, anemic, unable to fight infection, and throwing up. Maybe you'll die. See why lots of kids want to be astronauts when they grow up?
There's another type of radiation, galactic cosmic rays, that even a lot of water won't block. This radiation is made of fast-moving elements—mostly hydrogen but also every natural substance in the periodic table. The rays burst forth from celestial events such as supernovae and have a lot more energy and mass than a mere proton. “We really cannot fully shield astronauts” from them, Donoviel says. And inadequately shielding explorers makes the problem worse: the rays would split when they hit a barrier, making more, smaller particles.
The radiation an astronaut en route to Mars might get from galactic cosmic rays at any one time is a small dose. But if you're on a spaceship or a planetary surface for years, the calculus changes. Imagine, Donoviel says, being in a room with a few mosquitoes. Five or 10 minutes? Fine. Days? Months? You're in for a whole lot more itching—or, in this case, cancer risk.
Because shielding astronauts isn't realistic, Donoviel's TRISH is researching how to help the body repair radiation damage and developing chemical compounds astronauts could take to help fix DNA damage in wounds as they occur. “Everybody's worried about waiting for the cancer to happen and then killing the cancer,” Donoviel says. “We're really taking the preventive approach.”
Even if most of the body's issues can be fixed, the brain remains a problem. A 2021 review paper in Clinical Neuropsychiatry laid out the psychological risks that astronauts face on their journey, according to existing research on spacefarers and analog astronauts: poor emotional regulation, reduced resilience, increased anxiety and depression, communication problems within the team, sleep disturbances, and decreased cognitive and motor functioning brought on by stress. To imagine why these issues arise, picture yourself in a tin can with a small crew, a deadly environment outside, a monotonous schedule, an unnatural daytime-nighttime cycle and mission controllers constantly on your case.
Physical and mental health problems—though dire—aren't even necessarily the most immediate hurdles to making a space settlement happen. The larger issue is the cost. And who's going to pay for it? Those who think a billionaire space entrepreneur is likely to fund a space colony out of a sense of adventure or altruism (or bad judgment) should think again. Commercial space companies are businesses, and businesses' goals include making money. “What is the business case?” asks Matthew Weinzierl, a professor at Harvard Business School and head of its Economics of Space research efforts.
For the past couple of years Weinzierl and his colleague Brendan Rousseau have been trying to work out what the demand is for space exploration and pursuits beyond Earth. “There's been a ton of increase in supply and cutting of costs of space activity,” Weinzierl says, “but who's on the other side?” Space companies have historically been insular: specialists creating things for specialists, not marketing wares or services to the broader world. Even commercial undertakings such as SpaceX are supported mostly by government contracts. Company leaders haven't always thought through the capitalism of their ideas; they're just excited the rockets and widgets work. “Technical feasibility does not equal a strong business case,” Rousseau says.
Today private spaceflight companies target tourists for business when they're not targeting federal contracts. But those tourists aren't protected by the same safety regulations that apply to government astronauts, and an accident could stifle the space tourism industry. Stifling, too, is the fact that only so many people with money are likely to want to live on a place like Mars rather than take a short joyride above the atmosphere, so the vacation business case for permanent space outposts breaks down there as well.
People tend to liken space exploration to expansion on Earth—pushing the frontier. But on the edge of terrestrial frontiers, people were seeking, say, gold or more farmable land. In space, explorers can't be sure of the value proposition at their destination. “So we have to be a little bit careful about thinking that it will just somehow pay off,” Weinzierl points out.
Weinzierl and Rousseau find the idea of a sustained human presence in space inspiring, but they're not sure when or how it will work from a financial perspective. After all, inspiration doesn't pay invoices. “We'd love to see that happening,” Rousseau says—he thinks lots of people would. “As long as we're not the ones footing the bill.”
Many taxpayers would probably agree. As hard as it is for space fans to believe, most people don't place much value on astronaut adventures. A 2018 Pew poll asked participants to rate the importance of nine of NASA's key missions as “top priority,” “important but lower priority,” or “not too important/should not be done.” Just 18 and 13 percent of people thought sending humans to Mars and to the moon, respectively, was a top priority. That placed those missions at the bottom of the list in terms of support, behind more popular efforts such as monitoring Earth's climate, watching for dangerous asteroids and doing basic scientific research on space in general.
A 2020 poll from Morning Consult found that just 7 to 8 percent of respondents thought sending humans to the moon or Mars should be a top priority. Although history tends to remember the previous moon exploration era as a time of universal excitement for human spaceflight, polls from the time demonstrate that that wasn't the case: “Consistently throughout the 1960s, a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969,” wrote historian Roger Launius in a paper for Space Policy. “And consistently throughout the decade 45–60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda.”
When space agency officials discuss why people should care about human exploration, they often say it's for the benefit of humanity. Sometimes they cite spin-offs that make their way to citizens as terrestrial technology—such as how telescope-mirror innovations improved laser eye surgery. But that argument doesn't do it for Linda Billings, a consultant who works with NASA. If you were interested in furthering a technology, she suggests, you could invest directly in the private sector instead of obliquely through a space agency, where its development will inevitably take longer, cost more and not be automatically tailored toward earthly use. “I don't see that NASA is producing any evidence that [human settlement of space] will be for the benefit of humanity,” she says.
If people make the attempt, we will also have to acknowledge the risks to celestial bodies—the ones humans want to travel to as well as this one, which they may return to if they haven't purchased a one-way ticket. The moon, Mars or Europa could become contaminated by microscopic Earth life, which NASA has never successfully eradicated from spacecraft, although it tries as part of a “planetary protection” program. And if destination worlds have undetected life, then harmful extraterrestrial microbes could also return with astronauts or equipment—a planetary-protection risk called backward contamination. What obligation do explorers have to keep places as they found them? Setting aside the question of whether we can establish ourselves beyond Earth, we also owe it to ourselves and the universe to consider whether we should.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-well-never-live-in-space/
Mary:
Even though I was a sci-fi fan and loved dreaming about adventures in other worlds I tend to agree actual extraterrestrial colonies won't happen. Although some dreams involved mining planets for rare and precious ores and minerals, the costs of doing so, and above all, of transporting them back to earth was always a game stopper. The danger and damages to the human body of travel in space might be tolerable for short missions, even reversible to a certain degree once back on earth, but actually living in space or on a moon or other planet would be neither tolerable nor wise. The damage would accumulate, the need for protection would grow well beyond our ability to provide it and beyond the value of any imagined gains.
The real frontier here is knowledge...and exploration can certainly increase knowledge. But exploration need not always involve human explorers, or human settlers. Instruments can explore for us, as they already have, with the Mars explorer or the Hubble telescope. There is also thus less chance of damaging contamination — something historical exploration and colonization already effected, as in the almost eradication of indigenous Americans by the new germs explorers brought with them. Bradbury included such a tragic possibility in his "Martian Chronicles," where the astronauts eradicate the entire population and culture of the Martians without a single aggressive act. They simply brought their microfauna into an environment with no experience of them, and no defense against them.
Colonies in space is a romantic fantasy without, I think, much future.
Oriana:
Meanwhile what is really fascinating is happening right in front of us— and we don’t even know if it’s a great boon or a threat to humanity’s very existence.
We should always be mindful of Orwell’s vision in 1984 and Huxley’s in Brave New World. These two classics continue to be relevant — especially Orwell, I think. Russian propaganda and Orwell — wow . . . Of course the Soviet regime was a big inspiration for 1984.
PK Dick was also a visionary. Then there was a Polish sci-fi writer, Stanislaw Lem (here he’s best known as the author of Solaris). We better listento these prophets.
*
*
THE POWER OF THE SCARCITY LOOP
How did you learn about the scarcity loop, to begin with?
I started learning about the scarcity loop because I’m really interested in bad habits. My background is in science journalism, and writing about health and wellness. People always focus on building good new habits, but I’ve noticed that if you haven’t fixed your worst habits, you still have your foot on the brake. Basically, bad habits hurt people more than good habits help people. And there’s no better place to see this than Las Vegas, which happens to be where I live. This town is built on getting people to do excessive behaviors that often hurt them in the long run. Slot machines are the weirdest. They’re everywhere and people play them around the clock. I started digging into what makes slot machines so appealing, and that eventually led me to interview the guy who designed them. He’s the person who introduced me to the scarcity loop.
Describe it to me. How does it work, and how does it relate to things we do beyond gambling?
It’s like the serial killer of moderation — it’s designed to get us to repeat behaviors over and over and over. It consists of three parts: The first is opportunity, the second is unpredictable rewards, and the third is quick repeatability. To break it down more, you start with an opportunity to get something of value, something that improves your life. In the case of a slot machine, it’s money.
Number two is that you have unpredictable rewards. You may get the thing of value at some point, but you don’t know when and you don’t know exactly how valuable it will be. With the slot machine, it could be a dollar, it could be nothing, it could be a million dollars. And then the third part is quick repeatability, meaning you can repeat the behavior immediately. The average slot-machine player plays 16 games in a minute, which is about the same amount of times that we blink. The loop feeds itself.
Gambling is just one example. The same scarcity-loop design has now been applied to lots of different technologies and things we do in our lives. Social media is one; there’s easy opportunity, uncertain rewards — what am I going to see next, how will people respond to my post — and quick repeatability. Robinhood, the investing app, blew up because it increased quick repeatability with stock trading. And it’s also how dating apps work. You swipe, swipe, swipe, match — opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.
I can definitely relate to being my own worst enemy with certain habits — shopping, especially. But why do we do this? It’s so frustrating to keep doing things that we know we’re going to regret.
It’s a natural human impulse that evolved to help us survive in the past when food and other things that we needed to live were scarce. And in that context, repeating the instinct to chase a reward — like food — kept you alive. Of course, now most of us don’t have to do that, because we have an abundance of food and other necessities. But we still fall into that random rewards game that is the scarcity loop, because it’s part of how we’re wired.
How has studying this changed your own behavior?
The awareness has changed me, definitely. When I find myself scrolling for ages, or mindlessly eating, I can say to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s my ancient brain doing this thing that would’ve kept me alive a million years ago, but now the game has changed and this is not helping me anymore.”
But then, how do you break the loop and stop it?
Part of it is to understand why you’re doing it in the first place. People don’t do anything that is irrational; the scarcity loop evolved to help us. The reason we do almost anything is that it rewards us in some way. As an outside observer, when I look at slot machine players in Vegas, I think, “That doesn’t make any sense to me. They’re just losing money.” But to them, it does make sense, on some level. Maybe it’s giving them entertainment. Or it’s providing an escape from whatever they want to escape from.
I also don’t want to shame anyone for this. People do things that give them a benefit, even if it’s a small one. It becomes a problem when the short term benefit comes with a bunch of long-term downfalls. For example, most people who gamble aren’t addicted to it; they’re just having a good time. But I think a lot of people can identify something that they do repeatedly that’s counterproductive, or that they wish they did less of. It’s a sliding scale. Like, I don’t know many people who would say, “I’m spending the perfect amount of time on my phone.” And once you become more aware of why you’re doing this, and the formula that’s at play, you can tweak it or change it.
I, too, fall down the phone hole. What do I do about this?
Once you become more aware of the behavior you want to change, you can take away at least one of the three parts of the scarcity loop. For example, most people look at their phone because they’re bored. It’s a reflexive thing. But it becomes problematic when you spend three hours on TikTok instead of the three minutes you wanted to spend. It’s the lack of conscious choice that’s an issue.
You could start by removing the opportunity — putting your phone in another room, or farther away from you so you can’t reach it. But a lot of us need our phones to work and communicate, so that’s not always possible. You could also slow down the process of opening TikTok. At first, to me, the idea of downloading an app so I could use another app less was ridiculous. But there are apps that make you wait a certain amount of time before you can open another app. Delaying a reward is a very effective way to disrupt a behavior.
If I see something I want online that’s not absolutely essential, I try to give myself a week before I buy it. And most of the time after a week I’m like, “Wait, what was that thing I wanted to buy? Oh, right. I don’t need that.” A lot of the issue is how we deal with boredom. Boredom is neither good nor bad — there can be upsides to boredom. It’s really what you do with your boredom that matters. A lot of us are a little bored when we decide to shop. Shopping is at our fingertips. It’s integrated into social media. And it has all the hallmarks of the scarcity loop. There’s opportunity, uncertain rewards — will this thing be exactly what I want, and make my life better? — and quick repeatability. It taps into our drive to get more status, to get more stimulation, to get more belongings. And over time, that leads to problems. The problems of abundance are great problems to have, but they’re still problems. The more you train your attention towards hyperstimulating stuff, the harder it is to deal with yourself if you don’t have it.
A lot of people today, especially those in their 20s and 30s, do feel a sense of financial scarcity that is very real. Maybe part of that is a mindset issue, but I also think that it can be very hard for people to pay for things they need to pay for, like housing and food and student loan bills. Knowing what you know about scarcity, what are some things that could be helpful for people who are really feeling pinched?
One message that I want people to get is that we all have different needs, but we are all greatly affected by feelings of scarcity. Experiencing the scarcity loop is not a personal failing. There are larger forces at play that push us to repeat habits that can hurt us. Getting out of that pattern is going to look different for everyone, but across the board, it’s almost never easy. Ultimately, figuring out what you need — financially or otherwise — is hard, but it’s much more rewarding than following a set of rules that may not work for you or give you tools to ask the right questions of yourself.
For example, there was some widely shared research that came out a while ago that linked addictive behaviors to lacking social connections — the popular saying was, “the opposite of addiction is connection.” And that was not something that I related to at all. Before I got sober a number of years ago, I still had plenty of friends. I felt totally connected when I was drinking. The reason I drank had nothing to do with feeling isolated. So I think it’s more useful to grapple with a wide range of ideas, and figure out what applies best to you, even though it might be more complicated in the short term. I could probably sell more books if I said, “Do exactly X, Y, Z,” but I don’t think that works.
It sounds like there are some common themes, though, in what you learned about getting out of the scarcity loop.
That’s true. For instance, I think removing yourself from the influence of others can be underrated and incredibly powerful. Obviously we need social connection to be well, but sometimes the people in our life aren’t giving you what you need in a particular moment. Disconnecting and having some time away from them, on your own, to think, process, figure out how you feel about things, that’s essential. Humans have been doing that for as long as we’ve been writing things down. And it’s free. Anyone can do it.
You also recommend thinking more about the utility of things that you buy, as part of the effort to accumulate less stuff. I can understand the appeal of that, but also, most of us buy things simply because we will enjoy them, not because they’re utilitarian. Is there a way to translate “utility” in a way that feels more realistic?
Maybe a better question is, “What will I actually use this for?” With a lot of the purchases that we make, we have a story in our heads about what kind of person it will help us become. In my book, I lay out the three reasons why people buy stuff they may not technically need. One is to accomplish a goal — it helps us achieve something. The second is to gain status. And the third is to belong socially, and put yourself in a certain group. None of these things are inherently wrong.
But I think it’s important to be aware of the reason you’re purchasing something. Ask yourself, “What is this purchase doing for me?” Maybe the answer is, “I’m buying this watch because it looks amazing.” And that’s okay! Amazing watches are one of the many wonders of living in 2023. But I think if you insert that equation into more of your purchases, you will end up purchasing less. And most people would probably say they own too much rather than too little when it comes to random items.
I think one of the hardest aspects of managing money is dealing with friends and family and their expectations for what you’re willing to spend to be with them. It’s not about stuff; it’s about relationships. How does the scarcity loop relate to that?
My goal is for people to be able to make more conscious choices about why they’re doing the things they do, including spend money. And your environment — which includes your friends and other relationships — determines a lot. When I got sober, there were certain friends who were awesome. And there were other friends who acted like I’d grown a third head. They didn’t know how to deal with me.
My point is, as you make positive changes in your life, whether it’s in regards to your finances or your drinking or something else, you’re not always going to be able to perfectly maintain every single relationship. For me, the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life is get sober. It affected many of my relationships, most of them positively. But there are a few people who I don’t really keep in touch with anymore, because we live differently. And I’m okay with that. Because by giving up drinking, I got something much bigger.
It would be lovely if every problem could be solved without any repercussions, but the reality is, when you make a change, there’s going to be other changes, and they won’t all be great. I can look back and remember how stressful it was to step away from certain relationships at the time. But sometimes you have to choose short-term stress for the sake of long-term growth.
https://www.thecut.com/article/scarcity-brain-spending-interview.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
This topic was always known to me as "the power of intermittent reinforcement." The usual example is gambling. When the reward is sporadic, people and lab animals have been known to work to exhaustion for what is usually a meager award.
"Intermittent reinforcement is the delivery of a reward at irregular intervals,
a method that has been determined to yield the greatest effort from the
subject. The subject does not receive a reward each time they perform a
desired behavior or according to any regular schedule but at seemingly
random intervals."
*
THE TONGUE-HANDS CONNECTION
~ One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I perched precariously on a ladder painting the window frame of my house, there it was again!
What’s going on here? I’m not deliberately protruding my tongue when I do these things, so why does it keep making appearances? After all, it’s not as if that versatile lingual muscle has anything to do with controlling my hands. Right?
Yet as I would learn, our tongue and hand movements are intimately interrelated at an unconscious level. This peculiar interaction’s deep evolutionary roots even help explain how our brain can function without conscious effort.
Cocker executes a precision grip between thumb and fingers as he sings a syllable that thrusts his tongue forward.
~ A common explanation for why we stick out our tongue when we perform precision hand movements is something called motor overflow. In theory, it can take so much cognitive effort to thread a needle (or perform other demanding fine motor skills) that our brain circuits get swamped and impinge on adjacent circuits, activating them inappropriately. It’s certainly true that motor overflow can happen after neural injury or in early childhood when we are learning to control our bodies. But I have too much respect for our brains to buy that “limited brain bandwidth” explanation. How, then, does this peculiar hand-mouth cross-talk really occur?
Tracing the neural anatomy of tongue and hand control to pinpoint where a short circuit might happen, we find first of all that the two are controlled by completely different nerves. This makes sense: A person who suffers a spinal cord injury that paralyzes their hands does not lose their ability to speak. That’s because the tongue is controlled by a cranial nerve, but the hands are controlled by spinal nerves.
These are fundamentally different kinds of nerves. Cranial nerves penetrate the skull through small openings, connecting directly to the brain. Each one carries out a specific sensory or motor function; the first cranial nerve, for example, conveys the sense of smell. The tongue is controlled by the 12th cranial nerve, called the hypoglossal nerve. In contrast, the muscles controlling our hand movements, like most other muscles in our body, receive instructions from nerves that reach out from our spinal cord, threading their way between our vertebrae. Sensory signals make the reverse journey. Clearly, any short-circuiting between tongue and hand-control circuitry must originate upstream of these two nerves, somewhere inside the brain itself.
Looking next at the neural wiring of the brain’s motor cortex, we see that the areas controlling the tongue are not adjacent to the region that controls fingers. The link between tongue and hands must therefore be someplace else in the brain, most likely in an area where complex neural circuits execute highly sophisticated functions. After all, one of the most sophisticated functions that humans can perform is speech — indeed, it seems to be unique to human beings. The next most sophisticated thing we can do is master the use of tools. Notably, in each of the different situations where my tongue was sticking out, I was using a tool: a needle, scissors or a paintbrush.
That connection is borne out by research showing that hand and mouth movements are tightly coordinated. In fact, that interplay often improves performance. Martial artists scream short explosive utterances, called kiai in karate, as they execute thrusting movements; tennis players often shout as they smack the ball. And research shows that coupling hand movements with specific mouth movements, often with vocalization, shortens the reaction time needed to do both. This neural coupling is so innate, we are usually oblivious to it, but we do this continually without awareness because the neural circuitry involved is in a region of the brain that operates automatically — it literally lies beneath brain regions providing conscious awareness.
Hand movements come in two general forms: Power grip movements involve opening and closing a fist, while precision hand movements involve delicate pinching between the thumb and index finger. These two types of hand movements, we’ve learned, are often accompanied by different tongue and mouth movements. Take, for instance, the movements made by the late rock singer Joe Cocker, who was famous for his wild arm and hand gestures during performances. In part, these were air guitar and piano pantomimes, but Cocker did not play either instrument, so they also likely reflected a natural connection between hand and mouth. He often displayed the power grip movement of an open fist when his tongue was retracted as he sang an open vowel like “aw.”
At other times, Cocker’s tongue thrust forward as he sang the vowel sound “yee,” while his right hand (on the neck of his air guitar — he was left-handed) executed a precision movement, pinching his thumb and fingers as if he were picking up a tiny object or fingering a difficult chord.
Researchers have shown in the past decade that tactile sensations from our sensitive fingertips and tongue are often coupled together in our brain in ways that affect performance. Just as in Cocker’s performances, open-mouth sounds are associated with power grip movements and tongue-forward vocalizations with fine-manipulation finger movements. In fact, new research posted as a preprint while the study is under revision for publication in the journal Psychological Research suggests that if Cocker had mixed up his hand and mouth movements, he would likely have flubbed his vocal performance.
In the new study, test subjects read silently or spoke aloud one of two different sounds — “tih” or “ka” — while the researchers measured their reaction times in performing a power grip or a precision grip task. The tip of the tongue thrusts forward against or near the front teeth in making the “tih” sound, which should correspond to making precision movements with the fingers. In contrast, the tongue withdraws toward the back of the mouth to make the “ka” sound, which corresponds to power grip hand movements. When the subjects read or verbalized sounds incompatible with their hand movements, their reaction times were noticeably slower. That shows how deeply ingrained the coordination between tongue and hand is in the unconscious neural circuitry in our brain.
Where did this coordination come from? It likely originated in our ancient ancestors’ hand-to-mouth feeding movements and their development of language, because spoken language is typically accompanied by automatic hand movements. Presumably, hand gestures were the first type of communication to evolve, and they gradually blended with appropriate syllabic utterances — mouth sounds — that allowed for language. Indeed, functional brain imaging studies show that specific tongue and hand movements activate the same region of the brain in the premotor cortex (the F5 region). Furthermore, the same neurons in the premotor area fire when a monkey grasps an object with its mouth or its hand. Electrical stimulation of this same area triggers a monkey’s hand to make a grip motion while its mouth opens, and its hand moves to its mouth.
Tool use also activates these neurons, and tools are often used in food preparation, eating and forms of communication (such as sketching precise shapes with a pencil or typing on a keyboard). An individual’s proficiency in precision tool use predicts their linguistic ability, and that finding is consistent with the partial overlap in our neural networks between language and tool-use motor skills. In humans, the relevant part of the brain corresponds to a part that is critical for speech, and neuroimaging studies in people indicate a close relation between brain regions related to speech production and those controlling hand movements.
With all these connections, it’s no wonder the tongue peeks out during moments of manual concentration. It probably just seems strange to us because we tend to think of the brain as a sophisticated machine, engineered to take in bits of information, compute them and control muscles to interact with our environment. But the brain is an agglomeration of cells, not an engineered system. It evolved to maximize survival in a complex world. To achieve that aim efficiently, the brain mixes functions in ways that can seem like something’s gone wrong, but it does have a good reason. The brain mixes tongue and hand movements with sounds and emotion because it encodes experiences and executes complex movements in a holistic way — not as discrete entities strung together like lines of computer code, but as pieces of a larger conceptual purpose and context.
When I found my tongue thrust out between my teeth, the ancient and deep-seated wiring in my brain controlling my tongue and hands was actually improving my performance. If you find yourself doing the same, don’t be embarrassed — just recognize the amazing efficiency of our brain functions and be grateful for the help.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-brain-connections-between-our-hands-and-tongues-20230828/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
GLIAL BRAIN CELLS REVEAL THEIR SPECIAL POWERS
The glial cells of the nervous system have been eclipsed in importance by neurons for decades. But glia are turning out to be central to many neurological functions, including pain perception.
The sting of a paper cut or the throb of a dog bite is perceived through the skin, where cells react to mechanical forces and send an electrical message to the brain. These signals were believed to originate in the naked endings of neurons that extend into the skin. But a few months ago, scientists came to the surprising realization that some of the cells essential for sensing this type of pain aren’t neurons at all. It’s a previously overlooked type of specialized glial cell that intertwines with nerve endings to form a mesh in the outer layers of the skin. The information the glial cells send to neurons is what initiates the “ouch”: When researchers stimulated only the glial cells, mice pulled back their paws or guarded them while licking or shaking — responses specific to pain.
This discovery is only one of many recent findings showing that glia, the motley collection of cells in the nervous system that aren’t neurons, are far more important than researchers expected. Glia were long presumed to be housekeepers that only nourished, protected and swept up after the neurons, whose more obvious role of channeling electric signals through the brain and body kept them in the spotlight for centuries. But over the last couple of decades, research into glia has increased dramatically.
“In the human brain, glial cells are as abundant as neurons are. Yet we know orders of magnitude less about what they do than we know about the neurons,” said Shai Shaham, a professor of cell biology at the Rockefeller University who focuses on glia. As more scientists turn their attention to glia, findings have been piling up to reveal a family of diverse cells that are unexpectedly crucial to vital processes.
It turns out that glia perform a staggering number of functions. They help process memories. Some serve as immune system agents and ward off infection, while some communicate with neurons. Others are essential to brain development. Far from being mere valets to neurons, glia often take leading roles in protecting the brain’s health and directing its development. “Pick any question in the nervous system, and glial cells will be involved,” Shaham said.
More Than Just ‘Glue’
Glia take many forms to perform their specialized functions: Some are sheathlike, while others are spindly, bushy or star-shaped. Many tangle around neurons and form a network so dense that individual cells are hard to distinguish. To some early observers, they didn’t even look like cells — they were considered a supportive matrix within the skull. This prompted the 19th-century researcher Rudolph Virchow to dub this non-neuronal material “neuroglia,” drawing on the Greek word for glue.
One reason glia were given such short shrift was that when researchers first began staining nervous system tissue, their methods revealed the convoluted shapes of neurons but rendered only select glia visible. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who is credited with the discovery of neurons and widely regarded as the founder of neuroscience, illustrated one subtype of glia but lumped the rest together as “the third element.” His focus on neurons set the stage for the burgeoning field of neuroscience but shoved the glia behind the curtains.
In addition, some glia are challenging to study because their fates are so entwined with those of neurons that it’s hard to learn about them separately. If researchers try to learn about the glia’s functions by knocking them out and observing the effects, the neurons they support will die along with them.
But the revolution in cell biology techniques in recent decades has generated an arsenal of tools offering greater access to glia, Shaham said. Advances in live imaging, fluorescent labeling and genetic manipulation are revealing the breadth of glia’s forms and functions.
Microglia Reveal Their Versatility
Several cell types are contained within the umbrella category of glia, with varied functions that are still coming to light. Oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells wrap around nerve fibers and insulate them in fatty myelin sheaths, which help to confine the electrical signals moving through neurons and speed their passage. Astrocytes, with their complex branching shapes, direct the flow of fluid in the brain, reshape the synaptic connections between neurons, and recycle the released neurotransmitter molecules that enable neurons to communicate, among other jobs.
The highly versatile microglia seem to serve a variety of functions in the brain, such as removing cellular debris and determining which synapses between neurons are unnecessary.
But the cells that have been the subjects of an especially strong spike in interest over the last decade or so are the ones called microglia.
Microglia were originally defined in four papers published in 1919 by Pío del Río-Hortega, but the study of them then stalled for decades, until finally picking up in the 1980s. Microglia research is now growing exponentially, said Amanda Sierra, a group leader at the Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience. The work is exposing how microglia respond to brain trauma and other injuries, how they suppress inflammation, and how they behave in the presence of neurodegenerative diseases. The cells “really are at the edge between immunology and neuroscience,” Sierra said.
Guy Brown, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, was first drawn to microglia by their star shapes and dynamic movements, but it was their behavior that held his attention. In recent years, microglia have been found to mimic the macrophages of the immune system by engulfing threats to the brain such as cellular debris and microbes. Microglia also seem to go after obsolete synapses. “If you live-image them, you can see them eating neurons,” Brown said.
Guy Brown, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, was first drawn to microglia by their star shapes and dynamic movements, but it was their behavior that held his attention. In recent years, microglia have been found to mimic the macrophages of the immune system by engulfing threats to the brain such as cellular debris and microbes. Microglia also seem to go after obsolete synapses. “If you live-image them, you can see them eating neurons,” Brown said.
Some of these active functions are shared with other types of glia as well. Astrocytes and Schwann cells, for example, may also prune synaptic connections. But despite the commonalities among different subsets of glia, researchers are starting to realize that there’s little to unify glial cells as a group. In fact, in a 2017 article, scientists argued for discarding the general term “glia” altogether. “They don’t have an enormous amount in common, different glial cells,” Brown said. “I don’t think there’s much future to glia as a label.”
Ben Barres, a neuroscientist who championed glia research and passed away in 2017, considered deeper investigations of glia essential to the advance of neurobiology as a field. Others have taken up that cause as well. To them, the historical emphasis on neurons made sense at one time: “They are the ones who process the information from the outside world into our memories, our thinking, our processing,” Sierra said. “They are us.” But now the importance of glia is clear.
Neurons and glia cannot function independently: their interactions are vital to the survival of the nervous system and the memories, thoughts and emotions it generates. But the nature of their partnership is still mysterious, notes Staci Bilbo, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Glia are gaining a reputation for the complexity long attributed to neurons, but it’s still unclear whether one cell type primarily directs the other. “The big unknown in the field is: Who is driving the response?” she said.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/glial-brain-cells-long-in-neurons-shadow-reveal-hidden-powers-20200127/
*
ending on beauty:
I’ve spent two years here, and this morning you start home,
sent off with a mere splash of wine. For us, facing ourselves
grown steadily older, that’s plenty. It’s all drifting idleness:
everything gathering and scattering, failing and succeeding.
~ Po Chu-i, “A farewell to Wang who’s returning to the capital”
No comments:
Post a Comment