Hieronymous Bosch: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights BACKSTITCH
In this pine village time’s so slow
that I permit myself to sew —
a patient stitch that imitates
the over-and-over
of a sewing machine.
What luxury, my hand my own
sewing machine, dipping back
before moving forward —
stitching the moment that has passed
to the moment that is passing now.
It’s backstitch, a friend explains.
Thirty years I’ve worked that stitch
without knowing its name.
I learned to sew long ago,
in a faraway language —
I and silence in a slow race
to see who’ll say it first:
in sun-flood of a California summer
stitching to where the past and now
fall together in seamless snow.
~ Oriana
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“THE PALESTINIAN PROBLEM IS A RELIGIOUS PROBLEM”
~ Hamas’s massacre of Jews on October 7 stands out not only in its scale — the deadliest and most comprehensive act of mass violence against Jews since the Holocaust — but also its depravity. Words such as “barbaric,” “perverse,” “gruesome,” and “savage” only hint at the nature of the atrocities inflicted on the kibbutzim, towns, and villages near the Gaza Strip. Those who stormed into southern Israel murdered some 1,400 Jews and raped, tortured, slashed, burned, beheaded, and mutilated their victims. They shot parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They live-streamed many of their acts, so all the world could witness the spectacle of Jews hunted down and slaughtered or abducted.
“Terrorism,” although accurate in its application to what took place, doesn’t fully capture the nature of the cruelty inflicted on Jewish babies burned alive and elderly grandparents wrenched from their homes and hauled off to Gaza. President Biden came closer to the truth when he called such acts “pure evil.” But this evil has a particular source — a religious one. I suggested this to a knowledgeable Muslim friend. I also asked him what could be done. This is what I got back:
What motivates Hamas is the Koran, primarily. But the Koran is not everything. There is the Sunnah (the prophet’s life, what he said and did). One of the major battles the prophet of Islam fought was Khaybar, which was against the Jews. So the Koran said it and the Prophet did it. In other words, there is no way to “twist” history or “reinterpret” it. You just cannot say that the Jews of Khaybar were not the Jews of today.
Islamists believe that the Koran and Sunnah are suitable for every place and time. And that history (loaded with ideology) continues to play over and over — but not only Islamic history: For example, Iraqis are still proud of what Nebuchadnezzar did when he exiled the Jews to Babylon. Ismail Haniyeh gave a speech on October 7. He did not talk about the two-state solution, the border line of 4 June 1967, or East Jerusalem. He was clear in saying that the Jews “must leave Palestine.” This is war until death. If the IDF collapses (God forbid), the Holocaust will be like a picnic. Islamists will kill every man, rape every woman, enslave every child, and destroy every building.
The orgiastic Jew-killing was accompanied by shouts of “Allahu Akbar” — “Allah is the greatest” — a victory cry of defiance and determination. Hamas is and always has been a jihadist organization that sees the existence of the State of Israel as an intolerable intrusion into the Domain of Islam (“Dar al-Islam”) and is committed to removing it by whatever means it takes. As the Hamas Charter records, “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”
Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, does not represent all Palestinians, let alone all of Islam. But its success on October 7 has incited the passions of many in the broader Arab and Muslim world and has greatly strengthened the Islamist reading of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a Muslim–Jewish one.
This reading, far from new, differs from most mainstream attempts to understand and resolve the conflict. The West sees the problem as political and territorial in nature. It is that. But for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and their sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is primarily religious, and at its heart is the annihilationist fantasy of ending the Jewish state by killing as many Jews as possible. The goal is not a two-state solution but the Final Solution. October 7 was an extravagant rehearsal of a larger, genocidal drama.
All this is spelled out in Hamas’s 1988 Charter. Its preamble and 36 articles are all formulated in religious terms, and it frequently validates its points by reference to the Koran and other sacred Islamic texts. Israel, we read, “exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
The “Palestinian problem,” it affirms, “is a religious problem” and is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement. The only way to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” is through “jihad,” a holy war that is a “duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.”
The Charter is openly antisemitic — “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious” — and extends beyond the borders of the Holy Land. The Jews must be vanquished “until Allah’s victory is realized.” The charter cites the fraudulent, antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion as proof of malign Jewish influence everywhere in the world: “There is no war going on anywhere without their having a finger in it.” Further conspiratorial thinking follows:
“With their money, [the Jews] took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein.” For these and other reasons, the faithful are called upon to join “the struggle against the Jews,” liquidate the Jewish state, and “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”
To achieve this goal, Hamas named its operation against Israel “Al-Aqsa Flood,” justifying its murderous assault of October 7 as a response to the alleged Jewish desecration of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.
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One of the most influential portrayals of the conflict is the explicitly religious “Our Struggle with the Jews,” by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer sometimes referred to as the godfather of Islamic fundamentalism. First published in the early 1950s, Qutb’s essay was reprinted in Saudi Arabia in 1970 and widely disseminated throughout the Muslim world. It has had an enormous influence on the development of an Islamist view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as a centuries-old Muslim–Jewish conflict.
For Qutb, the Jews are a decadent, dangerously influential, and eternal enemy of Islam. “The Jews have confronted Islam with enmity from the moment that the Islamic state was established in Medina….[They] will be satisfied only with the destruction of this religion [Islam].” This war of the Jews against the faithful has “not been extinguished even for one moment, for close on fourteen centuries.” Whenever the Jews return to their “evil-doing” by trying to take possession of the land, writes Qutb, “Allah sends against them others of his servants,” including, in more recent times, “Hitler to rule over them.” So it is to this very day: “If you return, then We return,” and what awaits you will be “the worst kind of punishment.”
The war in Gaza continues and is becoming more intense, but politicians, diplomats, and commentators are already looking beyond the fighting for solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict.
But there can be no easy solution to an eliminationist ideology inspired by religion.
On multiple occasions in the past, a two-state solution has been proposed by diplomats, endorsed by Israel, and rejected by its Arab adversaries. Especially in the aftermath of October 7, however, it is unlikely that Israel would agree to one. The same is true for the fantasy of a one-state solution; in this scenario, the fate of the Jews may be easily gauged by the tragic fate of Arab Christians in the lands of Islam.
Progressives in the West are the inheritors of a secular conviction that all humanity’s problems are solvable. They typically look at the Arab–Israeli dispute only as a clash of national, political, and territorial claims. Problems of that kind can be solved. But the absolutist tenets of fundamentalist Islam cannot be compromised with. And nothing is gained by pretending these founding principles don’t exist.
October 7 put the lie to all this all over again. Whatever its other aims on that day, Hamas was looking to win a “Victory for Allah.” Fueled by religiously inspired hatred of Jews, they will keep at it unless and until they are decisively defeated. That must include defeating their ideology, which is shared by others in the region and well beyond. It will be a task for the generations. ~
https://sapirjournal.org/war-in-israel/2023/11/the-palestinian-problem-is-a-religious-problem/
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NICHOLAS KRISTOF: WHAT WE GET WRONG ABOUT ISRAEL AND GAZA
~ The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled.
Israelis deserve their country, forged by refugees in the shadow of the Holocaust, and they have built a high-tech economy that largely empowers women and respects gay people, while giving its Palestinian citizens more rights than most Arab nations give their citizens. Israel’s courts, media freedom and civil society are models for the region, and there is something of a double standard: Critics pounce on Israeli abuses while often ignoring prolonged brutality against Muslims from Yemen to Syria, Western Sahara to Xinjiang.
“We are normal people, trying to live,” an engineer in Gaza told me by phone. He despises Hamas and would like to see it removed from power, but he says that Hamas fighters are safe in tunnels while he and his children are the ones most at risk: “We’re the civilians paying the price.”
Whichever side you are more inclined toward, remember that the other includes desperate human beings merely hoping that their children can live freely and thrive in their own nation.
The second myth is that Palestinians can be put off indefinitely, strung along by Israel, the United States and other countries. That was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, his way of avoiding a Palestinian state, and it worked for a time — the way a pressure cooker works, until it explodes.
It’s difficult to know the counterfactual, whether a Palestinian state would have been better for Israeli security. But Palestinian statelessness in retrospect has not made Israel safe, and risks may increase if the Palestinian Authority collapses from corruption, ineffectiveness and lack of legitimacy.
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said that one of the Hamas attackers on October 7 was carrying instructions for releasing chemical weapons, and that’s a reminder of the risk that terrorism experts have worried about for years of extremist groups turning to biological and chemical agents.
Israel has a right to feel anxious in any case, but I suspect that the best way to ensure its security may be not to defer Palestinian aspirations but to honor them with a two-state solution. This is not just a concession to Arabs but a pragmatic acknowledgment of Israel’s own interests — and the world’s.
The third myth is found on both sides of the conflict and is approximately: It’s too bad we have to engage in this bloodshed, but the people on the other side understand only violence.
I hear that from friends who support the war in Gaza and regard me as well-meaning but misguided, as a naif who fails to comprehend the sad reality that the only way to keep Israel safe is to pulverize Gaza and uproot Hamas at whatever human cost.
Hamas indeed understands only violence, and it has been brutal to Israelis and Palestinians alike — but Hamas and Palestinians are not the same, just as violent settlers in the West Bank do not represent all Israelis. I’m all for surgical strikes against Hamas and I would be delighted if Israel managed to end extremism in Gaza. But so far, I’m afraid that the ferocity and lack of precision in Israel’s attack has fulfilled Hamas’s goal of escalating the Palestinian issue and changing the Middle East dynamic (and Hamas is indifferent to Palestinian casualties).
In that sense, Hamas may be winning.
Five weeks into this war, I don’t see evidence that Israel’s military has degraded Hamas in a significant way, but it has killed vast numbers of civilians, put the Palestinian struggle on top of the global agenda, dissipated the initial torrent of sympathy for Israel, prompted people around the globe to march for Palestine, distracted attention from kidnapped Israelis and ruptured any possibility soon of Israel’s normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.
My friend Roy Grow, an international relations specialist at Carleton College who died in 2013, used to say that a crucial goal of terror organizations was getting the adversary to overreact. He compared this to jujitsu, with terrorist organizations using their opponents’ weight against them — and that is what Hamas has done.
Each side has dehumanized the other, but people are complex and neither side is monolithic — and remember that wars are not about populations but about people. These are people like Mohammed Alshannat, a doctoral student in Gaza, who has been sending desperate messages to friends who shared them with me; he agreed to allow me to publish them as a glimpse into Gazan life.
“There was heavy bombing in our area,” he wrote in English in one message. “We run for our lives and I lost two of my children in the dark. Me and my wife stayed all night searching for them amidst hundreds of airstrikes. We miraculously survived an airstrike and found them fainted in the morning. Please pray for us. The situation is beyond description.”
“I see death a hundred times a day,” he wrote another time. “We defecate in the open and my children defecate on themselves and there is no water to clean them.”
If he survives the war, what will we Americans say to him and his children? How will we explain that we supplied bombs for this war, that we were complicit in his family’s terror and degradation?
If there is a path forward toward peace — whether in two states or one state — it will begin with all of us moving beyond stereotypes. Israelis are not the same as Netanyahu, and Palestinians are not the same as Hamas.
Seeking humanity in each side means demanding the release of Israeli hostages and calling out the dehumanization that leads people to pull down posters for kidnapped Israelis. It also means renouncing what Netanyahu called “mighty vengeance” that transforms entire neighborhoods of Gaza into rubble, with bodies buried underneath.
I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews AND for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.
Fixing this crisis starts with acknowledging a principle so basic that it shouldn’t need mentioning: All children’s lives have equal value, and good people come in all nationalities. ~
Below: Aftermath of a Hamas raid
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THE HAMAS FIGHTERS SEEMED ELATED WHEN COMMITTING ATROCITIES
Recently I’ve read something related: that the German soldiers did not look thrilled when shooting women and children. They had dreamed of being heroes, and instead their task turned out to be the opposite of heroic. They’d return to their base and start drinking to forget. Their commanders wrote desperate letters to Berlin, warning of growing alcoholism among the troops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmivUM0tlwc
Oriana:
It occurred to me that if the goal of Hamas were the highest possible body count, they wouldn’t have engaged in more time-intensive activities like decapitating, burning, mutilating, and other atrocities. Then I realized that the point of terrorism isn’t a quick death, but a horrible death.
Cruelty and degradation— that was more important than mere body count.
Charles:
Another element of terrorism is that the terrorists want terror to go on forever. Timelessness of terror.
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RUSSIAN WOMEN URGED TO FOREGO EDUCATION IN FAVOR OF REPRODUCTION
Member of the Federation Council Margarita Pavlova announced the direction in which Putin’s regime intends to take Russia: it’s time to stop focusing girls on going to college — girls should give birth.
“The system of values should be reconsidered,” stated the 44-year-old senator from Chelyabinsk region.
“It should be reconsidered from the point of view of, we should stop orienting girls to obtain higher education!” explained Pavlova.
Because, according to her, young people spend time on getting education and “trying to find themselves” — which gives them nothing and a total waste of time, while what the young women should be doing is reproducing.
(Pavlova herself, however, first went to university and got a degree, before giving birth at 27. Then she got a second degree.)
Margarita Pavlova, advocate of early reproduction to combat Russian "underpopulation"
The ban on abortions seems to be next on the list, as private medical clinics in Russia are hard-pressed to “voluntarily” stop offering abortions. (I suppose, if the clinic didn’t “stop voluntarily”, it wouldn’t be operating for long.)
One private clinic after the other had been announcing they will no longer offer the service. In the occupied Crimea, Chelyabinsk and Kursk regions and Tatarstan, private clinics are stopping to offer abortions.
The head physician of ‘Atlant’ medical center in Kursk, Vladimir Pavlovsky, announced that “every saved child is the asset of the state.”
Patriarch Kirill proclaimed that the birth rate in Russia “could be increased by a wave of a magic wand”, if “we learn how to talk women out of having abortions”.
”Giant country and the population is totally insufficient,” angrily stated Kirill. “We need more people! It’s an obvious fact, everybody admits it — politicians, sociologists.”
The Chairman of the Patriarchal Commission on Family Issues, Priest Fyodor Lukyanov, called for a complete ban on abortions in Russia.
“Abortions are national suicide. We need to follow the example of African countries where abortions are prohibited!”, proclaimed Lukyanov.
18-year-old boys — drafted by the military, trained to kill, sent to Ukraine to kill Ukrainians.
18-year-old girls — no need to study in a college, must be reproducing without delay.
The future of young people in Russia is bright and clear!
It’s clear that Putin’s state doesn’t intend to stop “protecting Russians from the evil West” in another two decades.
Right now, the Russian army is protecting Mother Russia — and Russian mothers — in Ukraine.
There is still a lot of protection that needs to be done — propaganda TV names the targets all the time: Baltics, Poland, Germany, UK and America, and all the “Russophobic” countries where Russia isn’t loved.
Putin’s state is already preparing.
Protect me today, and I’ll be there to protect you tomorrow
Billboards
saying “protect me now — I will protect you later” (with a photo of a
pregnant woman and then a child soldier) are popping up next to
billboards advertising army contract service, in the streets of Russian
cities.
Does the West take notice? ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Farmall Empta:
That “oh, here’s the problem. It’s THIS one thing right here!” type of analysis is always a fool’s garden. Abortion is not THE problem. It’s everything about Russia that leads to the abortion decisions. Meaning it’s incredibly multifaceted and starts right at the top and the completely f*cked up mess that Russia and Russian culture and Russian society have been since the days of the Mongol Horde.
Russell Wim:
A totalitarian dystopia.
Karl Hui:
Oookay, I'm totally expecting Putin to just go all in on the 1984 vibe at this point, and just straight out decree that women will only be breeding stock from now on to give Mother Russia another wave of meat to throw into the grinder.
Mogens Møllen:
There are two problems with the concept. First, when all the young men are being send off to be slaughtered in senseless wars, who shall support women and children, when they have no education, and second, what kind of women will give birth to sons just to see them being slaughtered in senseless meat attacks in Ukraine — or wherever Russias next war will be.
As the nazis said about women: Kinder, Küche, Kirche.
Joseph L DiSano:
Right out of the Nazi playbook.
Dan Waage:
They need more killers.
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CAN THE RUSSIAN COMMUNIST PARTY WIN AN ELECTION IN RUSSIA?
Yes, it’s possible—in post-Putin Russia.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is a populist nationalist party that uses Stalinist vocabulary to promote ideas of Russia’s imperial greatness.
It homesteads our political scene under the terms dictated by President Putin. This means never challenging him or his policies. It also includes voicing an anti-oligarchical clamor without doing anything real against our Stoligarchy (“state” + “oligarchy”). They have a loyal power base among nostalgic seniors. What’s more important, they have a good presence in the provinces.
Post-Putin, the most likely direction Russia’s politics are going to take is radical nationalism and the re-distribution of oligarchical assets. The Communist Party seems to be the best positioned to give it all an ideological shine.
Without Putin, our ruling party, United Russia, will most probably get shattered by infighting between powerful players in Putin’s circle. The Communists’ appeal to the older generation—the group that most dutifully participates in every vote—will also give them a big electoral advantage. Also, they enjoy the support of some oligarchical clans on the national and local levels, which secures funding for their political campaigns.
Below, Communist teenagers hold the banner “I want to live in the USSR.”
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WHY THE US STILL HAS DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME
The current March to November system that the US follows began in 2007, but the concept of “saving daylight” is much older. Daylight Saving Time has its roots in train schedules, but it was put into practice in Europe and the United States to save fuel and power during World War I, according to the US Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
The US kept Daylight Saving Time permanent during most of World War II. The idea was put in place to conserve fuel and keep things standard. As the war came to a close in 1945, Gallup asked respondents how we should tell time. Only 17% wanted to keep what was then called “war time” all year.
During the energy crisis of the 1970s, we tried permanent Daylight Saving Time again in the winter of 1973-1974. The idea again was to conserve fuel. It was a popular move at the time when President Richard Nixon signed the law in January 1974. But by the end of the month, Florida’s governor had called for the law’s repeal after eight schoolchildren were hit by cars in the dark. Schools across the country delayed start times until the sun came up.
By summer, public approval had plummeted, and in early October Congress voted to switch back to standard time.
In the US, states are not required by law to “fall back” or “spring forward.” Hawaii, most of Arizona and some territories in the Pacific and Caribbean do not observe Daylight Saving Time. The twice-yearly switcheroo is irritating enough to lawmakers of all political stripes that the US Senate passed legislation in March 2022 to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. The bill passed by unanimous consent. It would need to pass the House of Representatives and be signed by President Joe Biden to become law.
House lawmakers failed to vote on the bill in 2022. However, on March 2, a dozen senators forming a bipartisan group reintroduced the legislation that would end clock switching in favor of permanent Daylight Saving Time. Companion legislation to the Sunshine Protection Act was introduced by Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Republican from Florida, in the House.
DO WE NEED DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME?
Studies over the last 25 years have shown the one-hour change disrupts body rhythms tuned to Earth’s rotation, adding fuel to the debate over whether having Daylight Saving Time in any form is a good idea.
The issue is that for every argument there is a counterargument. There are studies, for example, that show we have more car accidents when people lose an extra hour of sleep. There are also studies that show robberies decline when there is an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day. We also know that people suffer more heart attacks at the start of Daylight Saving Time. But what about our mental health? People seem to be happier when there is an extra hour of daylight.
Of course, there’s the economy, which pays for all that outdoor fun in the sun. Although saving energy was often put out as a reason to have Daylight Saving Time, the energy saved isn’t much — if anything at all.
Instead, the lobbying effort for Daylight Saving Time came mostly from different sectors of the economy. In the mid-20th century, lobby groups for the recreational sports industry (think driving ranges) wanted more customers to come out after a day at the office. It’s easier to do so when there is more light at the end of the day.
But the movie industry didn’t like Daylight Saving Time. You’re less likely to go to a movie when it’s bright outside. Despite the myth, farmers didn’t like it either because it made it difficult to get their food to the market in the morning.
The bottom line: It’s not clear whether having that extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day versus the beginning is helpful. It just depends on who you are and what you want. And it doesn’t look like Daylight Saving Time in the US is going away anytime soon. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/05/health/daylight-saving-time-explainer-wellness/index.html
Daylily
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WHEN WILL THE US POPULATION WILL START DECLINING?
~ The US population is projected to peak in 2080, then start declining, according to a new analysis by the US Census Bureau.
Projections released Thursday predict the country’s population will reach nearly 370 million in 2080, and by 2100 will have declined to 366 million.
It’s the first time Census projections have indicated the US population will decline, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
But as the US population ages and the birth rate declines, these latest Census projections reveal how the number of newcomers arriving in the US could significantly change this picture going forward.
In the zero-immigration scenario, the US population would peak next year at 333.4 million. In the lower-immigration scenario, it would peak at 345.9 million in 2043. If immigration increases, then the population is projected to continue climbing through th
e end of the century.
“These (projections) emphasize that immigration is an even a bigger contributor long-term to our demographic growth and stability than perhaps it was in the past,” Frey says.
The Census analysis also predicts a slower rate of population growth than previous projections, due to new data reflecting recent trends, Census demographer Sandra Johnson said in a news release.
“The U.S. has experienced notable shifts in the components of population change over the last five years,” Johnson said. “Some of these, like the increases in mortality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, are expected to be short-term while others, including the declines in fertility that have persisted for decades, are likely to continue into the future.”
WHY FOCUS ON IMMIGRATION?
Experts look at three major factors when predicting population growth: births, deaths and immigration.
For years, demographers have pointed out that the US population growth rate is slowing as birth rates decline. When that’s happened in the past, immigration has made up the difference.
But how many people come to the US can change based on policies and politics here and around the world. A document explaining Thursday’s Census projections says immigration is “arguably the most uncertain of the population change components” used in projections.
But despite its uncertainty, immigration is vitally important, Frey says.
“We’re a country that’s getting older. It’s growing more slowly. Immigration is able to put some of the brakes on that so that we’re not in the situation of Japan or Germany or Italy, which have much more difficulty in terms of the already slowing labor force or declining population.”
Overall, the world’s population is rising and could peak at a record 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s, according to the United Nations. And this year, India overtook China to become the world’s most populous country.
Meanwhile, China and many European nations have started to see birth rates dropping. Many demographers and economists see cause for concern. But some environmental activists are less worried, describing potential population declines as a trend that could help the planet.
Still, Frey says, something about the latest Census projections stands out.
The low rate of population growth, and the projections of a decline, are something “we’ve really not seen for most of our lifetimes, until now.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/09/us/us-population-decline-census-projections-cec/index.html
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THE END OF RETIREMENT?
~ Every generation lives longer than the one that came before—nothing new there. But a fifty-year span between the end of work and the end of life is a long way from the original purpose of paid retirement, which was a very short bridge of financial support. Or no bridge at all.
Otto von Bismarck has been trotted out and smacked down many times for his invention of paid retirement: in 1881, Bismarck proposed that all Germans had the right to government support after a life of work, with payments kicking in at age seventy. Except that life expectancy in the 1880s was about forty years. When Canada created its own pension plan, in 1965, to address the growing poverty of retired Canadians sixty-five and older—thank you, Lester B. Pearson, for my monthly CPP cheque—the life expectancy of men, who made up the bulk of the workforce, was sixty-eight.
“There’s not enough gold in my golden years,” I told Klein a few months into my retirement. I could feel him smiling sympathetically across the phone line. “You’re not alone,” he assured me. Rents, mortgages, groceries—Canadians are suffering. I described the little house graphic on my gas bill: the house keeps getting smaller, thanks to my ferocious vigilance. But the bill keeps getting bigger, thanks to the cost of gas. And that’s just standard housekeeping. Throw in the unexpected, like a family wedding or grown kids moving back home, and many retired people land “somewhere on the spectrum of panic,” Klein said.
It’s not only the retired who need to worry about supporting themselves in the long stretch of their future. Working generations coming up behind them will also shoulder this burden. A metric called the dependency ratio calculates the proportion of the people not in the workforce who are “dependent” on those of working age. According to Statistics Canada, dependents are aged zero to nineteen and sixty-five and over. Productives are twenty to sixty-four. The international tool is often cited by government and business and has been a driver of pension-reform debates around the world.
A low dependency ratio—in Mexico, for example—means that there are enough people working to support the dependent population. A high ratio—Japan and South Korea are at the top—indicates more financial stress on workers. Across all OECD countries right now, there are about thirty people sixty-five and over for every 100 people of working age. In 1950, that ratio was fourteen to 100; by 2075, it is predicted to increase to fifty-five non-working adults for every 100 working.
In Canada, we’re at the lower end, with dependency expected to hit about thirty-five by 2025, according to 2015 data from the OECD, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. But by 2075, our dependency ratio is projected to be 49.9—one dependent for every two working-age Canadians. That’s a big burden for Xs, Ms, and Zs. “The shrinking percentage of young people means that in the future, the number of workers may be insufficient to finance the pensions of retirees,” according to StatCan.
The original meaning of the word “retire,” from the French “retirer,” is the act of retreating, falling back, withdrawing into seclusion. Except the retirees I spoke to for this story had go-go schedules that I was worn out just hearing about. Many had taken on dramatically different types of paid employment after leaving their careers; others had unleashed their inner rebels to become tireless advocates for social justice and climate change; still others were full-time caregivers.
Samir Sinha called the dependency ratio outdated and misguided. The director of geriatrics at Sinai Health and University Health Network in Toronto and a passionate defender of the rights of older Canadians argued that such concepts hold us back. “They don’t recognize the new reality that at sixty-five you’re likely to have twenty years” of good and productive life ahead.
The retired are among the country’s biggest contributors to child care and volunteer work, Sinha said. “Think about the amount governments save for the unpaid care that mostly older people are providing. When we’ve priced out the unpaid caregiver, we’re valuing that in the billions and billions of dollars every year.”
Mieko Ise might be called a “silent retiree”: someone who quietly leaves the workforce to look after family members in need. For years, she juggled looking after her own and her husband’s parents while working full time for a Toronto nonprofit. “I started to have issues with being a caregiver and a full-time employee,” said Ise, now in her sixties. “I would take vacation days. I would book time off. My boss was not particularly sympathetic. I get it. I don’t believe employers should carry the load of your life burden.” When it became too overwhelming to have two jobs, Ise quit the one we count as work.
Sinha pointed me to a Japanese movie called Plan 75, directed by Chie Hayakawa and released in 2022. In a dystopian future, Japan—which in real life is the demographically oldest OECD country, with a projected dependency ratio of seventy-seven to 100 by 2075—offers $1,000 to the elderly to terminate their own lives and relieve society of the burden of supporting them.
The movie, which I watched with my seventy-six-year-old sister (a lawyer who retired at seventy-two), opened with a violent murder off camera. We heard the blast of gunshot and saw a wheelchair toppled on its side. “Cheery beginning,” said Laura. (It turned out—spoiler—the real Plan 75 was to sell the older generations’ ashes for profit to a recycling company. The message of the sweetly weird movie was it’s better not to kill our elders.)
The year before Plan 75 came out, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University, suggested mass suicide and disembowelment for Japan’s aged. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said in a 2021 video. Narita later softened his comments in response to questions from the New York Times, saying they were an “abstract metaphor” (disembowelment seems pretty visceral to me). But he did win a big audience: he now has more than 600,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter).
It’s true that the number of people over sixty-five is growing faster in countries across Asia than anywhere else in the world at the same time that the size of their younger generations shrinks. That means as many as half of Japan’s employers report shortages of full-time workers, according to New York Times reporting from earlier this year on ageing in Asia. Workers in their seventies and even eighties are stepping up to fill the gap, taking lower-paying jobs as delivery drivers, office cleaners, and store clerks—jobs that the younger generations don’t want. A quarter of people sixty-five and over in Japan are currently working.
The number is the same in Canada and increasing: 24 percent of Canadians aged sixty-five to seventy still work in jobs that can be measured, up from 11 percent in 2000. But the dependency ratio reinforces the belief that those sixty-five and over are not working. Workers are not counted as workers because they’ve aged out of the way that we count them.
“The Greys” is what the older generation working for Succession’s Waystar RoyCo were called. They were often shot bunched together like an endangered species. They put on compression socks before flying. They plotted for their golden parachutes. Or maybe “one last rodeo,” as Karl, Waystar’s CFO, suggested to Frank, former vice chairman, in the final minutes of the hit series. Cut to Tom, the brand new CEO: “Frank, dead. Karl, dead. I really don’t need those two old cunts on my shoulder.”
I thought it was funny as hell. Or I did before my conversation with Lisa Taylor, president of Challenge Factory and co-author of The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work. Taylor described ageism as “the last socially acceptable form of prejudice.” She and her company have set 2030—the year the last of the boomers reach sixty-five—as the target for solving what she described as the far-reaching and urgent issue of this country’s age-biased workforce.
I was skeptical. Surely, there are more important workplace issues to solve, like equity and fairness for people of every race and gender. But after a couple of hours on the phone with Taylor, I came to believe that treating retirement as a default outcome of aging is a workplace bias that will affect the life expectancy, financial dependency, and long-term care costs for a generation retiring earlier than it needs or wants to. Not to mention the impact on the economy. Taylor said if we want to take advantage of our full workforce—in 2022, Canada had nearly a million job vacancies—we need to get to a point where we “recognize and call out agism with the same level of comfort as we do other prejudices in our workplaces.”
Systemic ageism was meant to have been legislated out of the workplace in 2006, when the Ontario Human Rights Commission won the argument that Canadian workers don’t come with a best-before date stamped on their foreheads. (I was a manager at the Globe and Mail at the time, I was fifty-one, and there was a lot of backroom worry about carrying the Greys on our backs—and a lot of wisecracks about a superannuated newsroom.) But even though sixty-five hasn’t been the legal age for retirement for seventeen years, “we’re constantly looking for ways to push them out the door,” said Sinha—with retirement packages, buyouts, and pension contributions capped at sixty-five.
Taylor’s company did a workplace survey of the financial services industry in 2015, and it showed that as early as age forty-nine, workers were no longer sent for training or high-performance programs and future-focused career conversations had slowed down. By the time someone hit fifty-five, “the conversation about leaving had been going on for years, except no one was actually saying it.”
My own conversations with retired Canadians, particularly men in finance, bore this out. Raymond Betts worked most of his life in the frenetic world of institutional equity in New York, Boston, and Toronto. (Betts asked that his name be changed for this article.) When he turned fifty-three, the company hired a younger employee to do the same job as his, without discussing it with him. “My desk was originally thirty-six inches long; they kept moving me to a smaller desk until I ended up sitting at one that was twenty-four inches long.” Betts left that world at sixty, taking his skills and work ethic to his second career as a real estate agent.
Many people buy into the company storyline that their best years are behind them—the proverbial coasting into retirement. “People start to say, ‘Susan’s checked out. Susan retired a few years ago, she just hasn’t told us,’” said Taylor. “It’s attributed to age instead of the company’s mismanagement of talent.”
It’s not a big step from there to the accepted myths about older workers: they’re slower and less productive. They’re over the hill, so training them is a cost instead of an investment. Ditto spending any time performance-managing them. The stickiest myth is that the long-time employee is too expensive. “Get this senior person off the books and hire two younger people to replace them,” is how Sinha put it. I’ve been part of those conversations myself about retirement-age people; likely my bosses also had them about me. But seeing the older worker as a financial burden is a failure of math.
“Calculations of how much employees cost a company generally include salary and benefits packages,” said Taylor. However, their not having to learn on the job, be trained, or engage the resources of a mentor, let alone the asset of being used as a mentor for younger staff—all of this also saves costs. “I have the experience, the relationships, the contacts. I work incredibly hard,” said Betts. He still does: he’s sold 132 houses in the seven years since he turned sixty.
I mentioned to Taylor that some of the Greys at CBC News seemed to struggle with technology during COVID. She stopped me. “We give a pass to the twenty-three-year-old with cats walking back and forth on camera,” she said. But we snicker when someone over sixty leaves their mike off. I blamed imminent senility, especially when the person on mute was myself.
Working longer because you’re likely to live longer is not everyone’s idea of how best to reform retirement. It’s an anathema in France, to give the most widely reported example. President Emmanuel Macron finally pushed through his pension reforms this past spring, increasing the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four over a seven-year period. In the often-violent street battles that fed headlines everywhere, protesters lost a thumb, an eye, and even, to one officer’s club in Paris, a testicle. One of the many slogans from the protests stood out for me: “Leave us time to live before we die.”
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But here’s a more existential problem with retirement: it could kill you. People who stop working too soon may not have much time to live before they die. “You hear about the doctors whose entire life and identity was at the hospital,” said Sinha. Then they retire and “they’re dead a few months later.” Similar sudden-death stories circulate about a certain type of driven, lifelong journalist, and I always assumed they were apocryphal. Or that the victim had been ignoring long-standing health issues.
Shortened life expectancy can be predicted by a lack of purpose, Sinha said. He referred to a “meta-analysis” project from 2010 that combined research from 148 studies involving 308,849 people to show that social connection and purpose increased survival by 50 percent. A lack of social relationships created the same risk of death as well-established factors such as smoking, drinking, and obesity. It was a gobsmacking discovery thirteen years ago; a lot of subsequent research has since supported the finding that early retirement can mean less time to enjoy it.
The Blue Zones research into the world’s longest-lived people, much publicized by National Geographic and now a Netflix docu-series called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zone, also links longevity with purpose. “In the island community of Okinawa”—in Japan, where very long-lived women thrive on a diet of sweet potatoes, mugwort, and goya—“everybody can tell you what their sense of purpose is,” said Sinha. “They have a word for it: ikigai, which means ‘reason for being.’”
Every society uses markers as shorthand for people to understand each other. “In some societies, it’s your last name or who your parents were,” said Taylor. “Americans use job titles, but they’re equally likely to identify each other by the city they grew up in, or what university they went to, or what sports team they’re a fan of.” In Canada, she said, “we almost exclusively use our job titles to define who we are.” Sometimes we go so far as to use our previous job to describe ourselves after we retire, in what Taylor calls a “backwards-looking identity.” Even when we’re not working, “we reinforce work as a critical piece of our own identity.”
Don O’Connor put the perils of not having purpose more starkly. He was in wealth management and real estate at TD Bank, in Toronto, for thirty-six years, so his financial literacy was better than the average Canadian’s. COVID made him realize how much he hated the three-hour commute, and so he retired last year, at sixty-two. Now he works part time at a funeral home in Burlington and loves everything about it—two-minute drive, flexible hours, every day is different—and puts up with the mild astonishment of his friends about his new job, because, as he told me on our call, “if you don’t do anything, you’re on an express route to death.”
Here’s a bleak prospect for many retiring Canadians: they will leave or be pushed out of the workforce too soon and without enough money. They’re financially prepared for the short and medium haul of life after work, but not the long one. They will go on to live too long, in too poor health (increased life expectancy has also increased the number of years people spend being sick), with a dwindling ability to support themselves or live independently. Ultimately, they’ll become wards of the state, housed in long-term care at great cost to the government and society. Sinha said: “This is where our destitute end up, in these government-run facilities.” According to a 2019 report by the National Institute on Aging at Toronto Metropolitan University, long-term care costs are expected to triple from $22 billion to $71 billion by 2050. “It will be the equivalent of the modern-day Victorian poor house for our old,” Sinha said.
“We know this for a fact: the human brain is not equipped to make long-term decisions,” said Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald, director of financial security research at the National Institute on Aging. “The human brain is very optimistic, which is great, but it can’t process the bad things that will happen in the future.” Decisions made now are not just for yourself in five years but for you in thirty years. “And that’s going to be a much more vulnerable person than you are right now, health wise.”
The National Institute on Aging report says that, by 2050, care in one’s own home will cost up to $25,000 a month; care in a retirement home or residence could be as much as $10,000 a month. Those options will be unaffordable for most Canadians. Meanwhile, the number of people caring for family members at home will decrease sharply. Between now and 2050, Canada is expected to have 30 percent fewer voluntary caregivers, according to Sinha. Paid health care workers will not fill the gap: Canada’s universal health care system “was never designed to cover the provision of long-term care services,” including home and community care nursing, Sinha said.
Long-term care insurance (LTCI) is now mandatory in Germany, South Korea, and Japan. Here in Canada, home-based care doesn’t even cover prescription medications. According to that 2019 Canadian Financial Capability Survey, a third of Canadians also worry they won’t be able to afford health care costs as they age, and rightly so.
“We spend the majority of our life savings paying for care in the last ten years of our life,” said Klein, the financial manager who put my life expectancy at ninety-four, which is sounding less and less like good news.
The way I think about my own retirement has changed significantly since I started working on this article. I’m part of a generation that will live the longest in history and also work the longest, if the big thinkers—and the workers themselves—succeed in moving Canadians from a forty-year career path to a sixty-year one. It’s new terrain, and the best way through is to be alert, adaptable, open to failure, and ready to act fast on success.
I don’t see retiring when I did as a failure—I had my second career as a writer I wanted to focus on and that grandson I’m gaga to spend time with. But I wonder why I didn’t have the conversation about a staged [gradual] departure into a different kind of role, or why no one else had it with me.
For now, I’m following Benjamin Klein’s simple financial advice: more input, less output. “Those are the only two things we can control,” he said. Which could mean getting a job—and not in management or journalism but something completely different. I’ve been an admirer of people who dedicate their retirement to volunteer work but felt pity when I saw someone my own age shelving groceries or working as a greeter. Now I think, “Long life headed your way, my friend!”
I’ve stopped “backwards identifying” myself by the work I used to do, after Lisa Taylor asked me to “please be bold and to introduce yourself as you are now.” In my case, that’s as a writer. Now and then I even try to picture my future self, thirty years from now, but Bonnie-Jeanne MacDonald is right. It’s unfathomable. I accept that older Cathrin will be more fragile. Hopefully not in the poor house but perhaps a modest room or two, with a few things to remind me of the people I love—and also with the people I love. Likely I won’t be working. We can but hope. ~
https://thewalrus.ca/the-end-of-retirement/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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WHAT FAMILIES ARE FOR: THE POLITICS OF THE FAMILY
Two recent books — The Two-Parent Privilege by economist Melissa Kearney and Family Abolition by social theorist M. E. O’Brien—take up these deep inquiries but wind up in opposite places, one lauding the family as a sociolegal structure and the other calling to abolish it. While these authors employ very different methods and have clearly incommensurate politics, they converge in recognizing the structural economic forces that cause families to form and collapse. By situating the family within the tectonic processes of political economy, each offers a necessary corrective to the neoliberal conceit that treats families as little more than bundles of personal obligations and preferences. Where they disagree is on whether the family form—however unrepresentative or inaccessible it has become—ought to remain the horizon of social policy.
At first blush, Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege might seem like a rehash of the work of her late twentieth-century forebears; indeed, the book features laudatory blurbs from some of them. A professor at the University of Maryland, Kearney also holds posts at some of the premier institutions of technocratic centrism, including the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, and the Brookings Institution (the last of which was a key booster of research on family structure in the 1980s and ’90s). Kearney even traces her own interest in the subject back to an undergraduate course at Princeton taught by McLanahan, a sociologist who spent much of her influential career decrying the difficulties and consequences of single motherhood.
There are certainly resemblances between Kearney’s work and her predecessors’. The central claim of The Two-Parent Privilege—that, all else equal, children raised in the United States by single parents fare significantly worse economically than those raised by married parents—has been conventional wisdom in establishment social thought for so long that few have bothered to try to prove it. (There is a difference between “two-parent” and “married” households, of course, but for Kearney they collapse in practice: “In addition to the fairly low rate of unmarried parental cohabitation in the United States, it is also the case that cohabitation in the United States is a rather fragile arrangement relative to cohabitation elsewhere. . . . the practical truth is that, to date, there has been no alternative institution to marriage that is characterized by the same long-term partnership and commitment in the United States.”)
Like earlier work in this vein, the book repeatedly appeals to “upward mobility”—what it clearly sees as the essence of social equality—while ignoring its relationship to downward mobility. And like other post-Moynihan scholars wary of detailing racial disparities in family formation, Kearney intends to steer clear of culturalist explanations or judgments. “I am not blaming single mothers,” she insists. “I am not diminishing the pernicious effects of racism in the United States.”
What sets Kearney’s vision apart from her forebears’ is that she lacks their faith that social policy can reverse the trend to single parenthood. Although Kearney thinks it would be a good thing if more children experienced the “two-parent privilege,” she argues that government has proven unable to guarantee it — especially since the economic restructurings of the 1970s, and especially for poor children. As the book points out, the rate of children living with married parents in the United States has fallen from 77 percent in 1980 to 63 percent in 2019; most of the drop is among working-class Americans.
While it should not entirely give up on promoting dual parenthood, Kearney concludes, the state should focus more on mitigating the economic effects of the parenting gap through a sort of Pigouvian subsidy: expanding welfare benefits and child tax credits for both one- and two-parent poor families, as well as investing in early-childhood public education. (Universal child care is notably absent from Kearney’s vision, perhaps reflecting a belief in the irreplaceable value of parental care.) If these provisions end up allowing more families to form or stay together, Kearney thinks, so much the better.
Kearney defines the “two-parent privilege” in terms of economic outcomes. On the basis of longitudinal studies (conducted by her and others), she argues that children in two-parent homes receive more care, attention, and intellectual stimulation than those raised by single parents — and that this difference affects their later educational performance, job prospects, earnings, and so on.
The reason is not that single parents are bad parents, Kearney argues, but simply that they tend to have less time, emotional bandwidth, and flexibility in organizing caregiving duties than two-parent families. (She thus concedes, “to the extent that the beneficial effects of marriage for children are derived from the resource advantage of that arrangement, the actual marriage is irrelevant.”) Furthermore, she maintains, given that the vast majority of single parents are single mothers, the absence of men in families has a negative impact on the emotional development of boys in particular. A crucial data point for Kearney is the fact that unequal economic and educational outcomes are not reducible to income disparities between single-parent and two-parent homes. The physical, rather than simply financial, presence of an extra parent makes a key difference.
Kearney’s skepticism about the state’s ability to promote dual parenthood arises from her diagnosis of declining marriage rates, which she attributes to the declining economic position of non-college-educated men over the past several decades. Deindustrialization, the pay-productivity gap, union decline, and mass incarceration have all contributed to a general decrease in what Kearney, following sociologist William Julius Wilson, calls the “marriageability” of working-class men. Since 1980, she writes, “among workers without a four-year college degree, the gap between men’s earnings and women’s earnings shrank considerably (on account of both increasing earnings among women and stagnant earnings among men), which lessened the economic incentive (and imperative) for some women to marry.”
Other authors, it should be noted, have long pursued this line of reasoning into deeply antifeminist territory, arguing variously that women’s efforts to gain an equal wage with men and expand their vocational options have upset a natural hierarchy of gender relations and helped normalize low-waged and precarious jobs. Kearney tries to assure readers that her causal models of marriage and child-rearing simply reflect rather than endorse a heteronormative division of labor. But these gestures are somewhat too perfunctory to carry much force.
Indeed, The Two-Parent Privilege views the prospect of restoring marriage rates by reinstalling the male breadwinner less as an ideological or ethical nonstarter than as a practical impossibility. In one of the book’s most revealing sections, Kearney discusses a recent study of hers which finds that “improvements in the economic prospects of less educated men have not been shown . . . to usher in an increase in marriage and married-parent families.”
In a Moynihanian move, Kearney concludes that growing rates of single parenthood over the past few decades have gradually produced a “new social paradigm” that is mysteriously resistant to economic incentives to marry. Socially conservative scholars have interpreted this study as support for their broader claims that “hookup culture,” accessible contraception, and online pornography have encouraged the cultural decline of marriage. Kearney does not follow them into blaming sexual liberalization, but she admits that “reversing recent trends in family structure will likely require both economic and social changes.” However shrewdly, she does not speculate about what social changes would do the trick.
It is to the book’s credit that it has very little patience for the “new paternalist” contrivances embraced by late twentieth-century welfare reformers. There just isn’t any evidence, Kearney notes, to support the idea that cutting single parents’ benefits and hunting down absent ones has meaningfully encouraged the formation and maintenance of two-parent homes — here she is very much right. Nor does the book call for or lend any direct support to recent conservative calls to rescind no-fault divorce laws and promote covenant marriages. Kearney sees some room for growth in local programs encouraging involved fatherhood, but she treats them as more likely to improve outcomes for children than to promote marriage stability. What scholar Gilbert Steiner bemoaned over forty years ago as the “futility of family policy” in solving the problems of American families re-emerges here as a central takeaway of Kearney’s book.
Critics of The Two-Parent Privilege might take one of two broad tacks. One is methodological: asking whether Kearney’s model is really an accurate depiction of socioeconomic reality when it comes to marriage and child-rearing. There are plenty of analytical moves and omissions one might object to. For example, Kearney admits that “it is possible that mothers who raise children on their own are able to compensate for the lack of another adult in the home, perhaps with their own resources or the help of a network of family and friends,” but she doesn’t discuss the possibility further, nor does she devote much attention to the actual lives and decisions of single parents, which might have enriched her causal models.
Others might doubt that the number crunching means what Kearney says it does. Matt Bruenig, for example, notes that comparing married and unmarried couples—even when controlling for race and class—cannot be used to estimate the causal effect of marriage on children’s outcomes for any particular set of parents, because nonmarital status is closely correlated with relationship dysfunction (which isn’t measured in Kearney’s dataset). For this reason, it does not follow that every pair of working-class parents could boost their children’s economic fortunes simply by getting married. Though Kearney acknowledges that there are situations in which marriage would not be beneficial or would even be harmful for parents and their children, she does not address the broader implications of this methodological critique for her findings.
But regardless of these concerns, there is a more fundamental objection: it is possible to agree that “two-parent privilege” exists and drives intergenerational inequality under our current economic system without sharing Kearney’s presumption that its institutions and organization must more or less be taken for granted. Looking at her statistical picture, one could easily conclude not that too few adults are getting married, or that too few kids are being raised in two-parent homes, but that people who adopt other models of care and commitment are systematically disadvantaged by our socioeconomic system.
In this sense, the book’s pessimism about putting the family back together again reveals the limits of Kearney’s political imagination. Where she holds the system constant and asks how to make the best of it, others would reverse the moral: if our economic system cannot be made to sustain the very structures of social reproduction it makes essential to human flourishing, then we need new structures, or a new system.
Or both, M. E. O’Brien argues in Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. A sharp and timely synthesis of past and present anticapitalist critiques of the family, the book builds on O’Brien’s earlier speculative fiction by imagining the future of care in a communist society. We need to envision such alternatives, she argues, because the private household is the stalking-horse of class society, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
One of the many admirable qualities of O’Brien’s book is its reconstruction of the long history of family abolitionist thought. Although anti-family theory and practice certainly extend beyond the self-identified political left — within religious communes, for example — O’Brien focuses on those who have seen it as a key element in the overthrow of capitalism. Tracing family abolitionism from early nineteenth-century calls to dismantle the bourgeois family (which Marx and Engels sportively dubbed the “infamous proposal of the Communists”), through the revolutionary moments of the Paris Commune and the early Soviet Union, and then into the “Red Decade” of radical feminism and gay liberation between the mid-1960s and ’70s, the book’s middle section carefully charts how condemnations of the family form and socialist thought evolved alongside each other—even if not always harmoniously, as evident in conflicts between leftist family abolitionists and the industrial workers’ movement over the breadwinner family form.
O’Brien’s overriding focus on dismantling the private household — the legal-economic form of the family as a “unit of privatized care”— sets her book slightly apart from the work of other contemporary family abolitionists. Family violence is totally missing from Kearney’s book, but it is a central concern of O’Brien’s. Much of it, she argues, is enabled and obscured by the fact that its victims feel — often correctly — that leaving families would sacrifice their primary source of care and economic security, or even expose them to further violence.
“The family as a social form joins together care and coercion, dependency and love, abuse and affection,” she writes, and our society’s laws and lack of a meaningful welfare state encourage people not only to accept but to idealize this compromise. Queer youth whose parents don’t accept them know all too well what they stand to lose if they are cut off from the “privilege” Kearney identifies—as do the many people who remain in abusive or unhappy marriages for the sake of the children.
Unlike Kearney, O’Brien views the decline in marriage and rise in single parenthood as a “huge improvement in human freedom,” but she cautions against being too sanguine about these shifts. For many working-class women, she notes, financial domination by a husband has simply been exchanged for the “impersonal domination” of wage labor, liberation from certain forms of violence coming at the cost of new forms of exploitation and risk. Meanwhile, she notes, this decline has not undermined the ideological force and seductiveness of the family for both conservatives and social democrats: it still serves as the basis for assaults on reproductive rights and public education, as well as the spread of the “family policing system” of child protective services and state bans on gender-affirming care for minors.
What should be done? In recent years, legal scholars such as Nancy Polikoff and John Culhane have argued that declining marriage rates, along with the expanding state recognition of non-heterosexual relationships, show it is long past time to decouple state-provided rights, benefits, and obligations from marital status. O’Brien takes such ideas seriously, devoting an entire chapter to “progressive anti-family reforms” such as universal welfare benefits and aligning law with the social reality of familial relationships.
To the extent that state policy can reduce the advantages gained by forming a private household and the burdens incurred by leaving one, she argues, it is worth pursuing. But O’Brien also sees real dangers in pursuing family abolition through the state, pointing to welfare’s “dehumanizing” and invasive past, as well as the risk that an overweening government wields its power to delegitimize nontraditional kinship and “chosen family” relationships among historically marginalized groups.
It is here that O’Brien departs most clearly from prior left-feminist critiques of the family. Earlier thinkers such as Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai and radical feminist Shulamith Firestone thought that women’s oppression would never end without disrupting the mother-child bond. For Kollontai, this meant the socialist state’s near-total assumption of child-rearing duties; for Firestone, the erosion of gendered labor through mass cybernation and reliance on artificial reproduction.
O’Brien’s vision is instead voluntaristic, unfolding through individual choices and collective experiments freed from the primarily economic compulsions of the family. As she puts it, family abolition means “the destruction of private households as systems of accumulating power and property at the cost of others’ well-being” but “not the destruction of kinship ties that currently serve as protection against white supremacy, poverty, and state violence.”
On this point, O’Brien is clearly echoing critiques of family abolitionist thought by feminists of color. As Hazel Carby and others have argued, attacks on the family have tended to ignore — or even pathologize — family and kinship ties among marginalized groups as a source of resistance, solidarity, and pleasure. Toward the outset of her book, O’Brien tries to square this circle by arguing that the social relations called “families” in oppressed groups often “do not quite constitute a private household as a unit of privatized care.” They are therefore not recognized as families by “dominant social institutions,” and for that reason they are not the target of her critique.
But this distinction misses some of the radical edge of other anti-family arguments. Despite her background as a psychoanalyst, O’Brien has relatively little to say about what familial child-rearing does to children’s identities and attitudes (or to parents’ for that matter), beyond a few passages highlighting the family as the primary enforcer of “alienated gender expectations” and heteronormativity. (This family-cultivated alienation might not be limited to gender identity, some midcentury Freudo-Marxists argued, but it could extend to complexes of deference and docility that “operate to maintain the stability of class society,” as Erich Fromm put it.)
Nor does she reflect more than passingly on earlier left-feminists’ charge that the family is inherently “anti-social” because it unjustly privileges kinship over other forms of social connection. This marks a divergence between Family Abolition and another recent communist manifesto, Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family (2022), which takes aim at not just the economic coercion of the capitalist family but the “uncomradely hierarchy” baked into even the most radical manifestations of kinship such as the “chosen family.”
O’Brien’s vision takes firmer shape in her book’s closing chapters, which speculate on communal life in the aftermath of anti-capitalist revolution. Blending the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier with the left-communist—some would say anarcho-communist—ideas associated with Endnotes and The Invisible Committee, O’Brien envisions a stateless landscape populated by self-governing communes of a few hundred people. Within these communes, she suggests that forms of care and parenting would be intentionally heterogeneous, fluid, and voluntary: people could choose to raise their biological children in “family-like arrangements,” or turn them over to the care of crèches, or something in between, with no expectation of permanence. Children would be empowered to leave or join living situations according to their desires.
It is worth dwelling on O’Brien’s reasons for making these associations voluntary:
It does not require a romantic idealization of the mother-child bond to recognize that the experience of conception and gestation can often lead to an emotional tie, and that universally severing this tie could be a form of injustice. . . . a scenario of the socialist state literally and directly replacing the family is rightfully terrifying to many. . . . Within the commune, kinship ties could persist in many forms but would be integrated with a broader, interdependent community. . . . Research into psychological development suggests that children do benefit from the consistent attention of a small number of adults early in life.
The question lurking behind all of this is whether there is something like a “natural” basis for the nuclear family as an arrangement of care—as its defenders have so often claimed—and, if so, whether it justifies sharp limits on coercing people out of families in the name of the social good (or even individual well-being).
Consider a child whose biological parents are members of a religious sect that emphasizes the divine quality of patriarchal domination and practices self-imposed exclusion from society writ large. Should a society with feminist commitments respect this family arrangement, even if being raised by these parents makes it overwhelmingly likely that the child will not “choose” to leave and will opt to become a member of the sect—thereby reproducing patriarchy? In the interests of not “reproducing the imperialist violence of a white liberalism that seeks to ‘save’ anyone against their will,” O’Brien says yes, “conditioned on . . . allowing outside contact for all residents, giving women, queers, or others experiencing oppression a chance to encounter and choose the outside world.”
One challenge for this view—as O’Brien acknowledges—is that oppression is often not subjectively experienced or recognized as such, particularly in the context of the family. As Lauren Berlant put it in Cruel Optimism (2011), for many people “the promise of familial love is the conveyance for the incitement to misrecognize the bad life as a good one.” O’Brien is compelled by the idea that eliminating the family’s economic function will tend to demystify these relations and allow people to choose the kind of care — the kind of life — that is in some sense best for them. Readers more suspicious of the affective hold of the family will want a more direct or even aggressive strategy to dismantle the injustice they see in the present. Regardless of what side one comes down on, Family Abolition offers a compelling provocation to think about the possibilities of human freedom in a post-family world, and how we might achieve them.
Although their political lexicons, goals, and likely audiences could not be more different, both The Two-Parent Privilege and Family Abolition acknowledge that the family is not fulfilling the tasks of social reproduction that have been delegated to it, that protracted shifts in political economy are the culprit, and that nudges or tweaks to incentives can’t help. Together they offer a strong tonic for the fantasy that the two-parent family can be put back together through top-down welfare and tax policy, which is once again a cause célèbre of the more technocratic tendencies within contemporary social conservatism.
At the same time, the decline of marriage and the two-parent family does not necessarily mean that society is becoming less familial. The family form has survived and adapted in response to previous crises of capitalism, assuming different shapes while continuing to facilitate the privatized distribution of wealth and care. This does not demand a set number of biological parents in the home; it only requires that people channel their energy, resources, identities, and commitments in the service of economic units bound by kinship.
“Families tend to hide the very existence of common interests by training people to consider that their worries are personal and private, when in fact they are social,” historian Linda Gordon wrote in 1970. A half-century of jeremiads about family breakdown from Moynihan and his successors notwithstanding, they still do. Even if more children are now growing up with fewer parents than Kearney deems ideal—or are living in arrangements that don’t constitute a private household as O’Brien understands it—they still learn to invest in kinship in a way that may deepen the more essentially it serves to protect them against precariousness.
All of this goes to a point made forcefully by Kathi Weeks in an indispensable 2021 essay: “To affirm family abolitionism is to be willing to play the long game.” As a theoretical tradition, anti-family critique can and should point out how the family currently reproduces an unjust economic system and oppresses those who cannot access its idealized form. At the same time, it should not shy away from demystifying and contesting the psychic claims of kinship — that is, from sustaining and refining its own rich history of condemning the family’s more transhistorical harms and repressions.
To be clear, this does not mean shaming or stigmatizing those who love their families. But it does mean showing why familial love comes with burdens that we need not be collectively doomed to bear. ~
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/what-are-families-for/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=8b419c17fd-roundup_Nov_03_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-8b419c17fd-40729829&mc_cid=8b419c17fd
Oriana:
Like almost everything, the institution of the family is both good and bad. And as with so many things, we have to cope with the bad and rejoice in the good.
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THE FALL
~ There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.
To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living room as your roots may ruin the carpet.
He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.
But his parents said look it is fall. ~
~ Russell Edson
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AUTONOMY: KEY TO HAPPINESS
~ It’s important to pursue the things we find interesting and satisfying, rather than things that offer a large external reward. ~
We all want to be happy – but achieving such an abstract goal has its challenges. No matter how much effort you put into thinking positively and ‘focusing on the good bits’, you can’t force happiness, and doing so can actually have a negative impact on your emotions.
However, just because you can’t control how you feel all the time, doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to boost your happiness and overall wellbeing – and that’s where a study published in The Journal Of Positive Psychology in 2022 comes in.
Before we get into it, it’s important to note that psychologists see wellbeing and happiness as having three key components: affect (emotion or mood), engagement and meaning.
According to the new article, there could be an ingredient that boosts all three of these factors (and therefore makes a big difference to overall health and wellbeing): autonomy.
As defined by the psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, autonomy refers to volition, ie “having the experience of choice… [and] endorsing one’s actions at the highest level of reflection”.
It essentially means being able to make decisions that are intrinsically motivated (eg doing something because you enjoy it or find it satisfying) rather than extrinsically motivated (eg motivated by social pressure or reward).
To find out whether autonomy has a significant impact on a person’s happiness and wellbeing, the authors of the new study asked 68 participants to answer questions about what they were doing at various times of the day.
The questions the participants asked covered areas such as the kind of activity being informed, whether or not the person had chosen to or had to do the activity (aka autonomy), and the effect it had on their mood. The questionnaire also assessed their level of engagement in the activity and how meaningful the activity was.
When they’d completed these questions six times a day for a week, participants were asked to answer questions about their life satisfaction, too.
The results were conclusive: the level of autonomy the participants had had a significant impact on engagement, meaningfulness, positive affect and mood.
However, while affect and mood continued to increase with autonomy, the benefits of autonomy on engagement and meaningfulness only occurred up to a moderate level, which suggests that, as long as people find the activity they’re doing interesting and satisfying, a bit of extrinsic motivation (such as making money at work) doesn’t matter too much.
In short, autonomy can have a big impact on our overall happiness and wellbeing – but in cases where we have to do something (like work), having a moderate degree of intrinsic motivation (eg, enjoying what you do) will have the desired effect.
If anything, this study is a reminder of how important it is to pursue the things we find interesting and satisfying, rather than things that offer a large external reward. You don’t need to be in love with your job to be happy, but feeling engaged and interested to learn more can make a real difference to your overall wellbeing. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-be-happy-why-autonomy-is-a-key-ingredient-for-happiness-and-wellbeing?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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TEACH YOURSELF TO BE HAPPIER
In the depths of dark winter nights and dreary days, fascinating new research suggests that it’s psychologically possible to train yourself to be happier.
Human emotions are complex, but we’re often guilty of oversimplifying them. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a well-meaning but misguided “Don’t worry, be happy” or “Try not to worry”, you’ll understand.
Because when we talk and think about happiness as a general outlook, we tend to sort people into two camps: “glass half full” and “glass half empty”. For a long time, even psychologists have considered personalities as one or the other, but as new research has found, this may not be the case.
According to University of California Berkeley researchers, it’s actually possible to actually learn new ways to activate your feelings of engagement in a positive experience.
Put simply: it’s technically possible to teach yourself to be happier.
According to the researchers, people’s ability to get the most out of positive experiences can indeed be strengthened through training. This means learning to savor positive experiences in order to experience them in a heightened way.
As Psychology Today explains, the idea behind the model is that by learning to engage in a positive experience, you develop a greater sense of resilience and self-worth. “These feelings help to create an “upward spiral” in which good times build on themselves, further enhancing your happiness,” it explains.
“Even when ‘external supports and familiar activities are less available’, such as those restrictions in effect during the Covid-19 pandemic, you ‘are left internally with whatever psychological resources’ you’ve managed to acquire.”
Good news indeed for anyone currently self-isolating or dealing with the continued uncertainty of the Omicron variant.
HOW THE ‘HEAL’ MODEL WORKS
There are four distinct steps.
1. Have the enjoyable experience.
This can be done physically, by doing it, or mentally, by conjuring it up, such as thinking about someone who cares about you.
2. Enrich the experience through these sub-steps
Then, the research suggests, the key is to enrich the experience by making it as long-lasting as possible, and keeping it active in your consciousness.
“Focus on multiple aspects of the experience, including its meaning, your perceptions and sensations, the way it feels and taking action. Increase the novelty of the experience so that it sticks out more in your mind and heighten the personal relevance of the experience by delving into your feelings about it.”
Then, the experience can be intensified through “up-regulating” your emotions, or reliving the parts that feel good.
3. Absorb the experience
This involves making a deliberate effort to internalize it so that it feels like a part of you.
“Turn attention inward to your emotional state and highlight the reward value of the experience.” For example, after a night out with friends, spend some time reflecting on how socializing made you feel, what particular parts you enjoyed and what you gained from the experience.
4. Link positive and negative material
Of course, there are plenty of experiences in our lives that we might struggle to attach positive meaning to, from a parking ticket to experiencing grief and loss.
“Focus on something positive even while you’re aware of negative material in the background,” suggest the researchers. “For example, become more involved in the film you’re watching while still noticing that your dread of the coming work day continues to persist. The positive should ultimately drown out the negative in this step.”
It goes without saying that no research, this included, is a magic bullet to improving wellbeing, tackling depression and helping balance our emotions in such difficult times. But it does offer the possibility of being able to learn new ways of experiencing the good times in your life.
“Fulfillment may not come naturally to you, but by letting the enjoyable experiences change you at a deeper level, those good times can become both more frequent and more long-lasting,” Psychology Today explains.
So whether you’re practicing some much-needed self-care or planning some time off from the chaos of the world, maybe one thing we can all resolve to do is to stop and smell the roses from time to time? ~
https://www.stylist.co.uk/health/mental-health/how-to-be-happier-psychology/606726
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The anthropic principle:
To say “the laws of physics are fine tuned for life” is like saying “the snow is white because a white wolf lives in it” ~ Diogo Pinheiro, Aeon
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A classic argument against crude forms of utilitarianism imagines a doctor who could save the lives of five patients by killing one patient and harvesting their organs. Even if the doctor could increase wellbeing in this way, he would not have the right to kill and use the healthy patient, at least not without their consent. Likewise, even if God has some good purpose in mind for allowing natural disasters, it would infringe the rights to health and security of the individuals impacted by such disasters.
What about an evil God? The evil-god hypothesis faces a ‘problem of good’ mirroring the problem of evil facing the traditional good God: if God is evil, why did God create so much good? I think a better option is a limited designer who has made the best universe they are able to make. Perhaps the designer of our universe would have loved to create intelligent life in an instant, avoiding all the misery of natural selection, but their only option was to create a universe from a singularity, with the right physics, so that it will eventually evolve intelligent life.
I think overall the best theory of cosmic purpose is cosmopsychism, the view that the universe is itself a conscious mind with its own goals. ~ Philip Goff, Aeon
Oriana:
Back in my Catholic childhood, I found it natural to believe that god is evil. Since my grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor, I had an early knowledge of enormous evil. True, this was a human-caused evil, but it easily extended to the suffering due to natural disasters. For several years, I believed that god played his sick games, starting with lying to Adam and Eve and their subsequent expulsion for desiring knowledge rather blissful ignorance, all the way to the Holocaust — when with zero effort he (I never doubted the maleness of the evil god) he could kill Hitler by causing him to have a heart attack.
So the argument from evil never had much effect on me. My awakening came when I learned enough about various mythologies to conclude about the Judeo-Christian tradition, “It’s just another mythology.”
Talk about relief! No longer watched 24/7 by a monster who out-Hitlered Hitler.
Not that I disliked mythologies: on the contrary, I found them fascinating, and in college was naturally drawn to classes such as Comparative Religion and The Bible as Literature. The various creation myths! Jonah and the Whale! The parting of the Red Sea! Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt! It was heady stuff, and I loved humanity for coming up with such great stories.
While I agree with Taslima Nasrin, I am also aware that religion has increased cultural richness, and there are some stories and rituals I wouldn't want to become extinct. At the same time, I hasten to say that at the emotional level I don't understand the idea that religion serves as a solace. For me religion was a source of worry and the burden of endless prohibitions, and the fear the ultimate punishment. Catholicism both ruined my childhood and enriched my vocabulary. Leaving it made me find my own foundation of personal ethics.
In the end, if religion were to disappear — it know it won't, but at least it's declining — I would be jubilant.
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VEGETABLES THAT ARE BETTER FOR YOU COOKED
Some vegetables are actually more nutritious when cooked. Here are nine of them.
1. Asparagus
All living things are made up of cells, and in vegetables, important nutrients are sometimes trapped within these cell walls. When vegetables are cooked, the walls break down, releasing the nutrients that can then be absorbed more easily by the body. Cooking asparagus breaks down its cell walls, making vitamins A, B9, C and E more available to be absorbed.
2. Mushrooms
Mushrooms contain large amounts of the antioxidant ergothioneine, which is released during cooking. Antioxidants help break down “free radicals”, chemicals that can damage our cells, causing illness and aging.
3. Spinach
Spinach is rich in nutrients, including iron, magnesium, calcium and zinc. However, these nutrients are more readily absorbed when the spinach is cooked. This is because spinach is packed with oxalic acid (a compound found in many plants) that blocks the absorption of iron and calcium. Heating spinach releases the bound calcium, making it more available for the body to absorb.
Research suggests that steaming spinach maintains its levels of folate (B9), which may reduce the risk of certain cancers.
4. Tomatoes
Cooking, using any method, greatly increases the antioxidant lycopene in tomatoes. Lycopene has been associated with a lower risk of a range of chronic diseases including heart disease and cancer. This increased lycopene amount comes from the heat that helps to break down the thick cell walls, which contain several important nutrients.
Although cooking tomatoes reduces their vitamin C content by 29%, their lycopene content increased by more than 50% within 30 minutes of cooking.
5. Carrots
Cooked carrots contain more beta-carotene than raw carrots, which is a substance called a carotenoid that the body converts into vitamin A. This fat-soluble vitamin supports bone growth, vision and the immune system.
Cooking carrots with the skins on more than doubles their antioxidant power. You should boil carrots whole before slicing as it stops these nutrients from escaping into the cooking water. Avoid frying carrots as this has been found to reduce the amount of carotenoid.
6. Bell peppers
Bell peppers are a great source of immune-system-boosting antioxidants, especially the carotenoids, beta-carotene, beta-cryptoxanthin and lutein. Heat breaks down the cell walls, making the carotenoids easier for your body to absorb. As with tomatoes, vitamin C is lost when peppers are boiled or steamed because the vitamin can leach out into the water. Try roasting them instead.
7. Brassica
Brassica, which include broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts, are high in glucosinolates (sulfur-containing phytochemicals), which the body can convert into a range of cancer-fighting compounds. For these glucosinolates to be converted into cancer-fighting compounds, an enzyme within these vegetables called myrosinase has to be active.
Research has found that steaming these vegetables preserves both the vitamin C and myrosinase and, therefore, the cancer-fighting compounds you can get from them. Chopping broccoli and letting it sit for a minimum of 40 minutes before cooking also allows this myrosinase to activate.
8. Green Beans
Green beans have higher levels of antioxidants when they are baked, microwaved, or even fried as opposed to boiled or pressure cooked.
9. Kale
Kale is healthiest when lightly steamed as it deactivates enzymes that prevent the body from using the iodine it needs for the thyroid, which helps regulate your metabolism.
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For all vegetables, higher temperatures, longer cooking times and larger quantities of water cause more nutrients to be lost. Water-soluble vitamins (C and many of the B vitamins) are the most unstable nutrients when it comes to cooking because they leach out of vegetables into the cooking water. So avoid soaking them in water, use the least amount of water when cooking and use other cooking methods, such as steaming or roasting. Also, if you have cooking water left over, use it in soups or gravies as it holds all the leached nutrients. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/nine-vegetables-that-are-healthier-for-you-when-cooked?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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WANT TO INCREASE YOUR FITNESS? TRY WALKING BACKWARDS
~ Head into any gym, and you may find someone walking backward on a treadmill or pedaling in reverse on an elliptical machine. While some may be employing reverse motion as part of a physical therapy regimen, others may be doing so to boost their physical fitness and overall health.
“I think it’s amazing to add in some backwards motion to your day,” said Grayson Wickham, a physical therapist at Lux Physical Therapy and Functional Medicine in New York City. “People are sitting way too much today, plus they lack varied movement.”
Quite a few studies have been done on the potential benefits of retro walking, a common term for walking backward. Participants who walked backward on a treadmill for 30 minutes at a time over four weeks increased their balance, walking pace and cardiopulmonary fitness, according to a March 2021 study.
In addition, a group of women decreased their body fat and boosted their cardiorespiratory fitness after a six-week program of backward running and walking, according to a clinical trial, the results of which were published in an April 2005 issue of the International Journal of Sports Medicine.
Other studies indicate backward motion may help those with knee osteoarthritis and chronic back pain, plus improve gait and balance.
Retro walking may even sharpen your mind and help you become more mindful, as your brain needs to be more alert when moving in this novel fashion. For this reason, plus the fact that backward motion helps with balance, older adults may especially benefit from incorporating some backward strolls into their routine, as one 2021 study of patients with chronic stroke indicates.
SWITCH UP THE MUSCLES YOU ARE USING
Why is backward motion so helpful? “When you’re propelling yourself forward, that’s a hamstring-dominant movement,” said Landry Estes, a certified strength and conditioning specialist in College Station, Texas. “If you’re walking backwards, it’s a role reversal, where your quads are firing and you’re doing knee extensions.”
As a result, you’re working different muscles, which is always beneficial, plus gaining strength. “Strength overcomes a lot of deficiencies,” Estes said.
You’re also moving your body in an atypical way. Most people spend their days living and moving in the sagittal plane (forward and backward motion), and almost exclusively in the forward sagittal plane, Wickham said.
“The body adapts to the positions and movements and postures you do most often,” Wickham said. “That can lead to tight muscles and joints, which leads to joint compensation, which leads to joint wear and tear, then pain and injury. The more we can add in varied movement into our day-to-day activities or in the gym, it’s so much more beneficial for the body.”
Retro movement is hardly a new idea. People in China have been walking backward for centuries for physical and mental health. Moving backward is also common in sports — think soccer players and referees.
There are even some backward running and walking races, plus people moving in reverse while competing in famous events such as the Boston Marathon. Loren Zitomersky did so in 2018 to raise money for epilepsy research and try to break a world record. (He achieved the former but not the latter.)
It’s pretty easy to get started. The key, as with any new exercise, is to take it slowly. You could begin by walking backward for five minutes several times a week, Wickham said. Or take a 20-minute stroll, with five of those minutes moving in reverse. As your body gets used to the motion, you can bump up the time and pace or try more challenging moves, such as walking backward in a squat.
“If you’re younger and exercise regularly, you can probably walk backwards for as long as you’d like,” Wickham said. “It’s relatively safe, per se.”
Walking backward while pulling a sled is one of the exercises that Estes favors. But he said it’s also great to walk backward on a self-powered treadmill if you can find one. While motorized treadmills are also an option, it’s more beneficial to be working under your own power, Estes said.
Retro walking outside is another option, and one Wickham recommends. “While the treadmill simulates walking, it’s not as natural. Plus, you have the potential to fall. If you fall outside, it’s less dangerous.”
If you opt for retro walking on a treadmill, especially a motorized one, start off by holding the handrails and setting the speed fairly slow. As you become accustomed to the movement, you can walk faster, increase the incline and let go of the handrails.
l.If
you elect to try it outside, first choose a spot that’s free of
hazards, such as a grassy patch in a park. Then begin your retro
adventure, keeping your head and chest upright while rolling from your
big toe to your heel.
While you may need occasionally to peer over your shoulder, you don’t want to be constantly doing so, as that contorts your body. Another option is to walk with a friend who is moving forward and can serve as your eyes. After a few minutes, switch roles so your friend can reap the benefits, too.
“It’s so great to get in varied movements,” Wickham said. “And one of those is doing things backwards.” ~
Oriana:
I love little bursts of walking backwards. It's surprisingly pleasant. Try it!
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Ending on beauty:
Full moon
the silence between us
becomes a poem
~ Andrzej Kosmowski (translated by Oriana)
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