Photo: Nima SarikhamiTo gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river
To know we stray like a river
And our faces vanish like water
To see in every day and year a symbol
Of all the days of man and his years
And convert the outrage of the years
Into a music, a proverb, and a symbol
To see in death a sleep, in the sunset
A golden sadness, such is poetry
Humble and immortal, poetry
Returning, like dawn and the sunset
Sometimes at evening there is a face
That sees us from the deep of a mirror
Art must be that kind of mirror
Disclosing to each of us his face
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders
Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing
~ Jorge Luis Borges, Ars Poetica
The penultimate stanza is my special favorite. At first it seems to veer away from the main theme of how things are mortal and immortal at the same time. But on closer look, it’s precisely an instance of that phenomenon: it’s ordinary and transient events that add up to immortality, an ordinary island that becomes someone’s Holy Land.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders
Here we may protest that poetry sometimes speaks of wonders, of the extraordinary as well as the ordinary. But Borges wants the emphasis on continuity, found in the ordinary, “humble and green,” rather than in the exceptional.
After this magnificent detour into the Odyssey and “green eternity,” we return to the river “that passes and remains.” The poem returns to its beginning, and we can contemplate the rich symbolism of the river, “made of time and water” again and again, in our own flowing.
By the way, the first stanza:
To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river
To know we stray like a river
And our faces vanish like water
reminds me of Keats's self-chosen epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But that verdict of time is ultimately passed on everyone, even those who are world-famous now.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BORGES
"The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance… A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resumé, a commentary... More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.” ~ Borges, 1941
Borges has been called the father of the Latin American novel, without whom the work of Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes would not have been possible. “Borges’ influence on Latin American literature is like Sherwood Anderson’s effect on American fiction: so deep it that has become difficult to name a major contemporary writer who hasn’t been touched by it,” says Valdes. “Some of them are affected indirectly – through Julio Cortázar’s short stories or César Aira’s novels or Roberto Bolaño’s everything. The detached tone that marks so much of Bolaño’s fiction, giving it that eerie twilight-zone feeling, is straight out of Borges, though Bolaño bent it to his own ends.”
Over the decades since his death in 1986, Borges’ global stature has continued to grow. “Today one could consider Borges the most important writer of the 20th Century,” says Suzanne Jill Levine, translator and general editor of the Penguin Classics five-volume Borges series. Why? “Because he created a new literary continent between North and South America, between Europe and America, between old worlds and modernity. In creating the most original writing of his time, Borges taught us that nothing is new, that creation is recreation, that we are all one contradictory mind, connected amongst each other and through time and space, that human beings are not only fiction makers but are fictions themselves, that everything we think or perceive is fiction, that every corner of knowledge is a fiction.”
And, Levine adds, "the world wide web, in which all time and space coexist simultaneously, seems as if it were invented by Borges. Take, for example, his famous story The Aleph. Here the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet becomes the point in time and space that contains all time and everything in the universe." As Borges writes in the story, “I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished.”
Readers and writers alike continue to discover new brilliance in Borges’ work. A fitting legacy for the man who once wrote “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
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For this is a fact I’ve learned that has surprised me a little: we come to love our parents more as we grow older together, in a kind of jolting lockstep. Realizing at the midpoint of our lives, looking at them anxiously looking at us, My God, We’re in this together. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless
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WHY THE OUTRAGE AT ISRAEL AND NOT HAMAS
~ 50% of it is just outright anti-Semitism. A lot of people think that Hitler was right, and just didn’t finish the job. This view is incredibly common outside the US. Hamas routinely calls for killing all Jews everywhere. It’s not like they bury the headline here.
50% of it is basically “everything the west (which, somehow, includes Israel) does is wrong and evil, and whoever opposes them is right and just, even if that involves the wholesale murder of innocent people for the express purpose of starting a war”.
Those are the only reasons at play these days. Neither philosophy is of any value at all. Each philosophy is morally bankrupt and repugnant.
Under those philosophies, nothing is the fault of Hamas. Anything and everything they do is the fault of either the Jews or the west, because reasons, yo. ~ Chris Everett, Quora
Edgar Aguilar:
I’d add the underdog camp, where the underdog is always right no matter what.
Eial Teomy:
That's basically a variation of “west is bad, others are good”
Christy Chapin:
ISRAEL is the underdog!!!! There are about 6 millions Jews surrounded by 600 million Arabs & Persians who are mostly Muslim…not to mention how the leftist elites who control all major western institutions HATE Israel. Israel is the underdog!
Rose Solomon:
Those who look at the standard of living in Gaza compared to Israel often miss pieces of the story. They see Palestinians not having access to clean water and blame Israel. In reality, Israel built pipes for clean water to Gaza, and Hamas dug up the pipes and turned them into rockets. Hamas has been a worse enemy to the Palestinian people than Israel has been historically. Hamas restricts basic human needs to the Palestinian people, and then pays them to send their kids to them for indoctrination.
Debopam Bose:
It’s really antisemitism and hatred of other religions that is ingrained in Islam itself.
Lee Jacobson:
For the Left, the “West is evil” trope is a consequence of their Marxist/Progressivist dogma which divides the world into oppressors and oppressed. Israel, they have decided for a few reasons that make little sense, is the oppressor, and therefore anything the oppressed do is completely justified. Do you think that they would criticize the Bolsheviks for their utter brutality? Maybe today, but back in the day, the Left always justified it and encouraged it.
Hamos Rudgam:
Majority of support for Hamas comes from Muslims who blindly support whatever Hamas does to non-Muslims. They consider the acts of Hamas in line with what is written in Quran. This fact is sad and worrisome.
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WHY THE LEFT SUPPORTS PALESTINE
That is actually a very profound and important question, with a very sad answer:
The left today is governed by loud, shallow, ideologically deprived social media bullies.
These shallow bullies pretty much marginalized everything, all matters, into a pathetic narrative of victimhood and deprivation, which is about creating and building nothing, hating those who build and create and — of course — blaming those who build and create for the leftist bullies inequity and failure as if they are owed anything, leading to their demand to be compensated for the nothing they created and the nothing they went through, but whine over.
Sounds familiar? This is exactly the Palestinian Narrative.
Of course they embrace them.
The moral failure of the moderate left today is that it is scared to point out its fringes as extreme and out of fear of cancellation they let the idiots take over.
This perfectly describes the shallowness of their support of “Palestine”, chanting “From the river to the sea” as some virtue signaling, not realizing they are being used by racist liars to advocate a genocide of Israelis.
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WAS STALIN MORE CRUEL THAN LENIN?
Lenin hired Stalin before WW1 to murder and steal money from Banks to fund his revolution.
Lenin was more the Mafia Boss, who didn’t get his hands dirty. He didn’t like Stalin, but Stalin was an accomplished thug, filling Lenin’s pockets.
Lenin and Woodrow Wilson were infected by the H1N1 virus in early 1919, after the USA troops had brought it in 1918 to Europe. The virus was the deadliest disease in the Industrial Age and killed 100 Million, compared to 8.5 Million killed in all of WW1 by enemy fire.
Wilson lost his ability to speak and walk straight, he got severe brain fog and the lingering virus infection gave him strokes; same with Lenin — they both died 3 weeks apart in the beginning of 1924 deaf, dumb and blind.
Lenin wanted Trotsky, who was Lenin’s hired mass murderer, to kill everybody not aligned with the Lenin Regime. As Trotsky was murdering his way through Russia, Stalin built up the power base to take over for Lenin, who started to get incapacitated by 1922.
As Trotsky was busy murdering people with his Killer Train, Stalin set up his Powerbase.
He later chased Trotsky to Mexico and had him killed.
Below, Trotsky's mass murder train.
Starting in 1922, Stalin developed into the most ruthless Dictator in the 20th century, building 400 concentration camps, annexing 22 countries and oppressing them behind an Iron Curtain. Estimates are, that he murdered between 60 and 110 Million people of a population of 585 Million in 23 countries between 1922 and 1953 — Russia, Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. ~ Otto Bihrer, Quora
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LENIN’S STROKES
Lenin’s stroke remains a matter of debate. Here, we propose to assess the potential mechanisms. Lenin died on January 21, 1924 at the age of 53 years. Although some doctors suggested that the origin of his health problems was neurosyphilis, the autopsy findings were consistent with a severe atherosclerosis. This process might account for his recurrent ischemic strokes. In view of the family vascular history, an early hereditary atherosclerosis may be proposed.
The man who set fire to Saint Petersburg in October 1917 and threw Russia into chaos and merciless terror is commonly presented as a great proletarian leader wearing his cap. However, in March 1923, he appeared sadly struck by a stroke. In his wheelchair, he appeared a shadow of his former self, stiff with a right-sided hemiplegia and speechless.
Historians thought that Lenin’s serious health problems dated back to 1921. When the Russian civil war ended, the country was gripped by famine and devastation. Lenin started to suffer from chronic headaches, insomnia, and fainting spells. He was 51 years old and had difficulty maintaining his usual pace of work. He wrote to Alexei Maximovich Gorky “I am so tired, I do not want to do anything at all.” Lenin suffered the first of his 3 strokes on May 26, 1922 which was associated with aphasia and a deficit of the right upper limb. He experienced a slow recovery and was still presented as healthy, able to hold a newspaper in his right hand.
Lenin at his home in Gorky reading a newspaper, 1922
On April 23, 1922, on the advice of one of the German doctors called to his bedside, he was operated to remove the bullet lodged near his neck since the 1918 attack. Indeed on August 30, 1918, Lenin spoke at the Hammer and Sickle, an arms factory in south Moscow. As Lenin left the building and before he entered his car, Fanny Kaplan called out to him. When Lenin turned toward her, she fired 3 shots with a Browning pistol. One bullet passed through Lenin’s coat, the other 2 struck him: one passing through his neck, puncturing part of his left lung, and stopping near his right collarbone; the other lodging in his left shoulder. Lenin refused to leave the security of the Kremlin to seek medical attention. Doctors were brought in to treat him but were unable to remove the bullets outside of a hospital. Despite the severity of his injuries, Lenin survived.
The operation went well, but on May 22, Lenin had a stroke. In this context, the relationship between the previous attack and the surgical intervention may have favored carotid arterial wall damage may be more pronounced on the left carotid. Stricken with hemiplegia on his right side, he also had difficulty speaking. He was examined again to find the origin of his illness; a test for syphilis was negative. Lenin gradually recovered at Gorky Manor and continued to keep himself informed of the work of the Politburo and Sovnarkom, in particular through Stalin who regularly visited him. The propaganda showed him still active reading the newspaper. In December 1922, he suffered a second stroke, which marked the end of his political career and paralyzed his right side. In March 1923, a third stroke left him speechless. Lenin died on January 21, 1924 at the age of 53 years.
Stalin and ailing Lenin
Although doctors suggested that his health problems were related to 2 bullets left in his body after the 1918 conspiracy, the direct cause of death is hardly in doubt today. The autopsy showed that Lenin’s repeated strokes were due to severe atherosclerosis of his cerebral arteries. These were found to be almost blocked. During the autopsy, a doctor found that when he struck one of these arteries with a surgical forceps, it made a mineral sound, as if its calcification had fossilized it. The large blood vessels in Lenin’s brain were stiffened by atheromatous plaques.
But what could have caused such damage to a man in his early fifties with a healthy lifestyle? Lenin did not smoke and forbade people to light a cigarette in his presence. He drank moderately and was not obese. Vinters et al. [4] concluded that the large size of Lenin’s brain lesions and their location hardly correspond to what is usually found in cases of neurosyphilis. They also pointed out that none of the other potential signs of venereal disease (heart or bone damage) were found during autopsy. Lenin’s father, Ilya Ulyanov, died at the age of 54 years – almost the same age as his illustrious son – of a stroke. Three of Lenin’s siblings also died of cardiovascular disease. In this context, one may hypothesize a genetic component to account for these multiple, severe atherosclerosis cases in this family.
Mutations in the NT5E gene were associated with symptomatic calcifications of the arteries of the lower limbs and joints in several families. A similar, as of yet unidentified process targeting cerebral arteries, may have affected Lenin’s family. This premature atherosclerosis may also be explained by an inherited lipid disorder. Stress may also have played a role in the progression of his atherosclerosis. However, the autopsy and analyses at the time did not rule out other potential causes of genetic arterial disease such as homocysteinemia, pseudoxanthoma elasticum*, or Fabry disease; thus, mystery still surrounds the death of Vladimir Lenin. Many of the documents regarding his death remain classified to this day.
https://karger.com/crn/article/13/2/384/821025/Lenin-s-Stroke
*Pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), also known as Gröenblad-Strandberg syndrome, is an heritable multi-system disorder, characterized by aberrant mineralization of soft connective tissue resulting in fragmentation of elastic fibers, involving primarily the skin, eyes and cardiovascular system. [Oriana: It’s a rare genetic disease.]
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NAZI CONTEST FOR THE MOST PERFECT ARYAN CHILD
There was a competition for photographers to find the perfect representation of the Aryan child. The image above is the one that won, and the woman holding it is that little baby all grown up. Her name is Hessy Levinsons Taft.
Why is this the most interesting? Because Hessy Levinsons Taft is Jewish, and the photographer knew that when submitting the image. The thought is that it was a joke, a little social disobedience by the photographer to silently protest what was happening in society at that time. It is also believed that he never thought the photograph would be chosen, but chosen it was.
The person who chose her image to be the image showing the world what a perfect Aryan child looked like? Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Hessy Levinsons Taft
The irony in this one is delicious. ~ Athena Walker, Quora
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DO RUSSIANS BELIEVE OFFICIAL RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA?
Lenin making a gramophone recording
Propaganda in Russia is multifaceted. The official propaganda, managed by our Presidential Administration, is dominant and omnipresent, but it’s only part of it. Anti-government propaganda spread by Russian anti-Putinists is also present.
Radical nationalist propaganda is very visible, too. It’s about our President being meek and indecisive, surrounding himself with lying oligarchs and hidden liberals. Some even claim he’s an undercover agent of globalism where his Anglo-Saxon and Jewish masters order him to make stupid moves that, in the long run, will ruin Russia.
Leftist progressives are present, too, even if their voices are feeble and few. Mostly, it’s feminists, LGTB+ activists, ecologists, and other niche activists whom the government considers “extremists.” Muslims and other religious communities push their propaganda to the faithful as well.
All this cacophony of voices has their target audience who are willing to listen and believe. Add to that the wall of messages like “I don’t like politics, and I don’t care,”— and you have the entire continuum of propaganda where 100% of Russians find something we believe.
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Below, a children’s new year party in Moscow back in the late 1960s. Under Soviet rule, New Year’s Eve doubled as a Christmas-themed atheist carnival, with the tree, tinsel, table speeches, food, drinks, and gifts galore.
These kids are about as old as I am now. You see their attempts to make their own “new year masks.” The result might not look perfect, but these guys did it by themselves. That matters.
“This mask may look ugly, and it’s not who I am—but I made it, and it’s mine.”
The same goes for propaganda.
Once you find your tribe and embrace their message, their propaganda becomes yours. No matter how much veracity and common sense there is in it, it shines with higher truth. And once you give it your own voice, it kind of becomes your skin.
Ownership matters. Belonging matters. Being part of a tribe makes you strong.
As Karl Marx said, “Theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
Russian children wearing New Year’s masks
~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
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WHY PUTIN CLAIMS UKRAINE WAS A THREAT TO RUSSIAN SECURITY
~ The security threat that Ukraine posed to the Kremlin had nothing to do with the country aligning with NATO or having any military actions planned against the territory of the Russian Federation.
Ukraine’s ultimate sin (in the eyes of Putin and his thugs, of course) was that the country was going West: the people of Ukraine were embracing the individual freedoms and the financial benefits of living in a free and democratic society.
As a result, their wealth and standard of living was continually rising. A Russian who came to visit Ukraine in the 2010s must have asked himself a lot of questions: “Why is everyone so poor in Russia and everything is broken when the Ukrainians (who weren’t that different from the Russians in the past) are living a prosperous, happy and free life?”
And, even worse, “What do we have to change in Russia to become as successful as they are?”
This was the true security threat to the Russian regime. Ukraine had become too successful to be tolerated any longer. By the end of the 2010s this pro-Western transformation of the Ukrainian society was final and irreversible.
It was too much for Moscow. The only way to remove this threat was to destroy Ukraine.
It’s like a small boy who envies the toy of another kid. As he cannot have it, he smashes the toy so that at least the other kid is as miserable as he is himself.
This “way of thinking” may not make much sense to people outside of Russia, but rest assured, for most Russians, it does.
Welcome to the Russian world! ~ Roland Bartetzko, Quora
Sahin Ahadli:
Russians are used to see Ukrainians beneath themselves. They can’t accept that the people they called “hohols” live better than them.
Jonathan Schroeder:
Nailed it, Roland! This also explains his animosity towards the Baltic states and even Poland!
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TOMAŽ VARGAZON ON UKRAINE
Ukraine was rapidly moving westwards. Ukrainians adopted a Western mindset and Western values. Ukraine was a dump in 2004 (when the first orange revolution happened), a bit less so in 2014 (maidan) and considerably less so in 2022. Ukraine was evolving, changing for the better, from the perspective of anyone who wasn’t a professional theft of public funds.
While Ukraine was a genuine Little Russia she presented no threat whatsoever to the Russian kleptocrats. They could always point out to the common Russians Ukrainians have it even worse and be right about it as well.
But once Ukraine became better for just about everyone, this did represent an existential threat to the Russian kleptocrats. Ukraine with a vibrant economy and prosperous people easily inspires Russians to follow their lead. Ukrainians don’t have to do anything but exist as happy, free and prosperous to represent a mortal peril to the Russian elites. So long as Ukrainians are better off than Russians the situation in Russia grows steadily more and more dire for the elites.
Their only recourse was to invade Ukraine and destroy it, as to remove this threat to their power. It had nothing to do with NATO, threat of invasion, nuclear weapons or Russia feeling safe, no. Those were just excuses conjured up to somehow justify the invasion in some way. The real reason was always the threat of Russians following Ukrainians in their quest for a better life. Kremlin can’t allow that and live. ~ Tomaž Vargazon
Dobromir Priborski:
In contrast with the Baltics, which were always felt by Muscovites as more foreign so their turn westwards is not felt as much.
But with Ukraine they have much more personal connections and in a sense they are the “same people” so their turn would have much bigger impression.
Interestingly even if we ignore the obvious destruction and unsafety of life in Ukraine, even if they truly start living better, by the propaganda masterstroke Moscow has been and will keep on discrediting them for years. So Muscovites would happily boast that even if they live worse, at least they are not ruled by gays, Americans or something, that they are free.
Jonas Hellberg Hellberg:
Ukrainian freedom and prosperity is part of it, but the Russian oligarchs couldn’t accept that Crimea and with it Sevastopol should fall into Ukrainian, western-friendly hands, because then they couldn’t participate in the globalized economy and get as rich off the backs of regular Russians anymore.
They needed a land connection to Crimea, and the Novorossiya project was the excuse to go for it.
Nationalism is the 20th century opium for the masses, apparently still potent in Russia.
Michael Bechler:
Leadership is the hardest problem facing human civilization. The extent that the interests of the leaders align with the interests of the people they lead defines how civilized a nation can be. Russia is particularly bad, but this problem afflicts all nations.
Democracy, transparency and the rule of law are attempts to mitigate this situation, but as we can see from history, that is not enough to prevent the wars, kleptocracy and other problems that come from nation state competition and the concentration of resources in fewer and fewer hands.
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JAMES BALDWIN: PEOPLE WHO SHUT THEIR EYES TO REALITY
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” ~ James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village
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MISHA FIRER ON RUSSIAN KINDERGARTENS
manna (semolina). The fat doesn't look like butter, but more like palm oil.
Above, manna kasha (semolina), a Soviet child’s favorite dish to loathe and despise.
A typical Soviet kindergarten resembled a boot camp to teach kids subordination and the communist spirit of collectivism while their parents toiled for the state.
There were two types of caregivers.
Vospitatelnitsi (from Rus. ‘to bring up’) had pedagogical education and taught lessons in the daytime. They were our officers who shaped our minds teaching us to feel awe and trepidation at the mere thought of the Motherland.
Nyanechki (from Rus. ‘to babysit’) came in the mornings and evenings to shape our bodies through bad diet, exercises, commands, and punishments. As our sergeants, they punished us by making stand in the corner and stay inside while other kids went out to play.
We called them by their full first names (no diminutives permitted) followed by patronymic, like Lyudmila Ivanovna, and always using formal ‘vi.’
In contrast, my daughter attends a private kindergarten and calls her vospitateli and nyanechki by the diminutive form of their first names with no patronymics, Lyuba, and informal ‘ti.’ This was absolutely unimaginable when I was her age.
This familiarnost (to speak on equal terms with a person of higher authority) is still not permitted in any of the schools, though, not even in private ones, of which they're very few.
Before dropping out of kindergarten (I dropped out of Soviet/Russian school, too) I had spent about half a year there hating every day. I began to feign headaches and begged my mother to send me shipping to her grandparents in the village, and she obliged.
I remember how on the first day in my kindergarten, sometime in the evening, my nyanechka yelled at me, “You’ve been crying all day, Misha. Just stop it already!”
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When so many kids are huddled together on small premises, it is next to impossible NOT to make friends.
In kindergarten and at school, I was friends with kids from ethnic minorities — Tatars, Chuvashs, Jews — because I always perceived myself as an outsider.
I remember we drew with colored pencils and painted watercolors all day. For the holiday assemblies, I wore bunny ears and drummed on my tin drum with wooden drumsticks.
The food was bad, but to be fair it wasn’t much better at home with its cream of wheat semolina, cabbage, sausages, soups.
All of us were poor regardless of the work our parents did — children of engineers and doctors were as penniless as those whose parents were construction and factory workers.
The state was equally stingy to all of us while being generous to all those foreign nations it tried to convert to communism.
A word to describe Soviet kindergarten — as well as the rest of the Soviet institutions — is loveless.
The state did not love us, and little surprise that we did not love it back.
I believe in this respect nothing has changed in this country, and it is no different today than it was back then. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Oriana:
This post brings back to me many early memories. The memories are bittersweet, with more emphasis on “bitter.” But I am immensely grateful to Misha for providing the term that best summarizes my overall preschool (and beyond) experience: LOVELESS.
Part of it was the overall culture, which emphasized power over relatedness and affection. Children were to be dominated into the ground. The harshness of childhood was supposed to prepare us for the harshness of adult life — and we were constantly reminded how it used to be worse, how our parents and grandparents had to obey or be subject to cruel punishment. All adults seemed to agree that children of the post-war generation were “spoiled.” Grandparents blamed it on “sparing the rod.”
Teachers too were supposed to be “severe.”
I believe the amount of stress the adults were under during the Soviet era, as well as their own upbringing, caused this harshness — and, I repeat, it used to be even worse for the previous generations, with physical and verbal abuse a daily reality.
The idea of a “happy childhood” always struck me as a shameless lie. What awaited us was youth, advertised to us as the “happiest time of life.” There were of course happy memories as well, but offhand it’s difficult for me to choose which was a more miserable time.
Albina Griniute:
In Lithuania kindergartens were of the same Soviet type when I was that age, just less like the army and there was no Motherland indoctrination. But otherwise, they were the same.
We had this porridge for breakfast every other day. By the time the kitchen lady brought it to the class in a big metal bucket, the kasha had lost a lot of heat, and by the time it reached our plates, it was lukewarm, at best. And it had CLUMPS in it. Because when you make food for hundreds of kids in a loveless way, you get clumpy goo instead of porridge.
One morning I just couldn’t bring myself to eat the cold, clumpy goo on my plate. I don’t think anyone could, unless they were genuinely starving and facing death. The teacher thought it was a good idea to make all the other kids, who finished eating before the porridge became totally cold, shame me for not eating. So they all stood in front of me, all twenty of them, with the teacher leading the choir, and sang a shaming song (literally) while I sat there and cried into the cold goo.
I’d like to see someone trying to pull something like that today.
Alice Twain:
Kindergardens tend to suck everywhere. My mom in the 1950’s went to one run by nuns. They only had pastina (small pasta boiled in meat stock) or semolino (cream of wheat, either with milk or with stock). If she refused to eat, a nun grabbed her between her knees and poured the food straight in her mouth holding her nose so that she had to swallow or drown.
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FOR A BRIEF SHINING MOMENT, THERE WAS AN OPPOSITION CANDIDATE IN RUSSIA
~ On January 31, Boris Nadezhdin delivered 105,000 signatures in his support to the Central electoral commission. In fact, Nadezhdin’s team collected more than double this amount — but they are only allowed to file 105,000. (100,000 is the required number, 5% extra for errors.)
Even if the commission refuses to register Nadezhdin (which is more than likely), the regime has already suffered a heavy blow.
The regime overestimated Putin. The almighty presidential administration demonstrated that they have no idea how people really feel about what’s happening with the country. They thought that Putin had no competition, but it turned out that even a no-name Nadezhdin can successfully oppose Putin.
The regime underestimated Russians. The Kremlin could not even imagine that citizens would be able to collect over 200,000 signatures for some little-known guy in a few weeks. The regime was confident that citizens are apathetic and intimidated, that the political landscape has been scorched to ashes and bulldozed over — but it’s still alive and able to surprise.
The Kremlin was unable to oppose Nadezhdin’s campaign in the social media. The presidential administration was simply knocked out: gigantic queues stood in cities to leave signatures for Nadezhdin, while no one went to sign for Putin. Nobody. Even in Moscow, there were no photos of people standing in queues after work until late at night in support of Putin. “A picture is better than a thousand words.” Right?
By now, whether Nadezhdin will be allowed to participate in the presidential elections or not, his campaign showed how massive is the demand for return to normality.
Even more, the whole country saw that Putin’s stated rating is grossly overinflated.
Presumably, 15 times more people signed in support of Putin, but for some reason no one saw it happening (except for some governors doing it on camera).
And the most important thing. Nadezhdin understood what Russians want. That’s why his campaign quickly took off.
And Putin, for 24 years in power, failed to realize what Russians want. Putin isn’t a real politician. He never does political debates with opponents; he only ever answers pre-agreed questions in press conferences. Putin came to power as a result of a special op called “Successor”, designed by oligarchs surrounding Yeltsin’s family.
Nadezhdin’s success shocked Putin’s administration so much, they had to use the heavy artillery: Vladimir Solovyov [Putin’s TV propagandist]
Solovyov was given a long text to discredit Nadezhdin, linking him to opposition figures of Navalny and Khodorkovsky, saying he was only doing it for money, and at the end — accusing Nadezhdin in treason. And hinting that the signatures in his support were fake.
At the same time, everyone understands it’s not about Nadezhdin. It’s about having someone other than Putin. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Wullie Grub:
He may be on the ballot paper but the result will be pre-determined. Look at what happened in Belarus.
Elena Gold:
I don’t think they will allow Nadezhdin on the ballot — precisely because Putin remembers what happened in Belarus.
Oriana:
At the same time, we mustn’t mistake Nadezhdin for someone with egalitarian values who respects the sovereignty of other nations. I watched him speak, and was startled by the display of Russian chauvinism and the denial that Ukrainians are anything except Russians.
Meanwhile Putin keeps claiming that Russia is only taking back what has always been its own land, and there is really no such thing as Ukraine. It's a "fake country."
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WHY THE SOVIET UNION LOST ITS LEAD IN SPACE
~ The Moon Race was the era when modern Project Management (CPM, PERT, and stuff) took shape as a consistent discipline in the US. In the USSR, we still viewed PM as a kind of art where all the magic was hidden in a project manager's brain, ego, and panache.
Predictably, we were sucked into the “cursed triangle” of cost-vs-time-vs-quality. In there, we burned lots of resources before the old men in the Politburo got sick and tired of the whole thing and shut it down in 1974.
Hubris
We had a string of amazing breakthroughs in early space exploration in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These created a sort of overconfidence among our rulers, scientists, and technicians. With their heads in the clouds, they set unrealistic goals and overoptimistic timelines for the rest of the 1960s.
This led to splitting the entire space program between three competing R&D centers. In addition, the head of the one that spearheaded the Moon program, legendary Sergey Korolev, and the man who made the engines for our missiles, Valentin Glushko, hated each other’s guts.
Misapplied diversification
Also, much of our successes in the 1940s and 1950s with jets, missiles, and the Bomb were built on the shoulders of American and German technologies. In the Moon race, we decided to go our own way.
This was bold. Way too bold. Blazing new trails in space tech is very costly. It turned out, no one took this into account.
As a result, according to one of the project managers, the Soviet Moon program received only about 20% of the funding it should have had ahead of the original landing objective in November 1967. The stakeholders decided they could move heaven and earth on a shoestring budget.
Afterburn
When Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon, we still struggled to get our rockets off the start ramp. The Americans beat us in July 1969 to the finish line, but too many heavyweights in Moscow invested themselves into the venture. They refused to stop.
The decision was made to cut some corners on rocket stand tests and run full-scale test launches “live.” This turned out to be more expensive and time-consuming. Four test launches were made. All failed. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Attila Hatsagi:
Do I get it correctly that Korolev’s hard feelings — and, indirectly, the ultimate failure of the program — can be explained (at least partially) by Glushko’s ratting him out to the NKVD back in the late thirties, which led to his return from the Gulag as a wreck, and also to his untimely death by the way?
Dima Vorobiev:
Murky story. They both got caught in the Great Purge. Everyone ratted on everyone, and those who didn’t simply got shot or rotted in the Gulag.
Shrinivas S:
The Americans got the entire team of von Braun, that was a huge factor. Years after the cold war ended a retired NASA director admitted, all our space and missile programs would have gone nowhere without von Braun.
Tim Orun:
One thing Russia has never lacked is an imagination to go big and bold. One example is the world’s largest airplane, the Antonov AN-225. Sadly destroyed in the Ukraine conflict.
Another example is the Kalinin K-7. Another world’s record for air flight. [Oriana: K-7 goes back to the early 1930s, before jet engines were developed. It survived seven test flights before crashing.)
Given a functioning political and economic system Russia would already be on the moon and their moon rover would probably look something like this guy.
Still I admire Korolev and Glushko for having went through the vagaries of Communist rule. If the CPSU valued their technicians greatly and give them an absolute upper hand things would have been different. Also the US Saturn V rocket was made with the help of erstwhile Nazi scientists. Von Braun, Hermann Oberth and others were poached by the CIA via Operation Paperclip to US. They were lucky as compared to their Soviet counterparts.
Minus silly politics if the two geniuses worked together we would have been selling hot dogs in the moon by now.
Oriana:
Why do I return to the topic of the Soviet/Russian loss of the space race?
Because it wasn’t a simple competition between two countries. Nor was it really about capitalism versus “socialism” (the Soviet system was hardly “socialist”; sooner a fascist dictatorship). It was a contest between the Western values (free speech and openness, including openness about one’s mistakes) and the supposed authoritarian “efficiency.”
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A DOMINATRIX SPEAKS
~ On 8 December 1869, the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch signed a ‘love contract’ with his fellow writer Fanny Pistor. The terms were straightforward. He submitted himself to her as a ‘slave’ for six months, while she took on as many other lovers as she pleased. She agreed not to ‘demand anything disreputable of him – anything that would make him disreputable as a human being and a citizen’ and to allow him six hours a day to write. Furthermore, ‘the subject shall obey his sovereign with complete servility and shall greet any benevolence on her part as a precious gift.’ In exchange for Sacher-Masoch’s ‘slavish submission’, his mistress promised to wear furs as often as possible.
The affair inspired Sacher-Masoch’s most notable work, a Darwinian novella called Venus in Furs (1870). It is about a similar arrangement between Severin von Kusiemski and Wanda von Dunajew – only Severin signed on as Wanda’s ‘absolute property’, giving her the right to kill him. The popularity of the book led the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing to coin ‘masochism’ after the author (without his approval and much to his disdain) in his medico-legal study of sexual pathology, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886): ‘a peculiar perversion … in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master – humiliated and abused.’
For Sacher-Masoch, supersensuality – the longing for cruelty over intimacy – was a symptom of ‘unnatural’ modern love. His works are an exploration of these ‘dark sides’ of love, while Krafft-Ebing interpreted them as material for pathological investigation. An opponent of marriage, Sacher-Masoch argued in his cycle of novellas Die Liebe (1870) that male submission was a sensual escape from the pressures of being a sole provider, that female infidelity was a consequence of women’s exclusion from work, and that only when a man sees a woman as an intellectual equal are they able to achieve matrimonial bliss. It reveals that the foundation of female dominance in BDSM (erotic practices including bondage, discipline and sadomasochism) is not female empowerment but men’s surrender to unrecognized female potential.
As a female dominant (femdom) in the 21st-century fetish sphere, I still deal with the same gendered themes. Masculine subjectivity has evolved, mostly in the ways in which women can cater to it: there is an enormous variety of female domination today. There’s the domme who takes a more dominant role in the relationship, sometimes unwittingly. She may engage in pegging, or the anal penetration of her male partner using a strap-on dildo. Then there are the extreme dynamics that typically don’t involve sexual intercourse: the findomme who practices financial domination (findom) by letting men spoil her with gifts or ‘tributes’ for her attention; the dominatrix who charges for professional masochistic experiences, like physical or emotional degradation and humiliation; and the mistress, who typically ‘owns’ a domestic ‘slave’.
I’m more of a hedonistic domme, like the character Venus who appears at the beginning of Venus in Furs, taunting the unnamed narrator with the feminine advantage: ‘Man desires, woman is desired.’ In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967), Gilles Deleuze referred to this archetype in Sacher-Masoch’s work as Aphrodite:
Her life … is dedicated to love and beauty; she lives for the moment. She is sensual; she loves whoever attracts her and gives herself accordingly. She believes in the independence of woman and in the fleeting nature of love; for her the sexes are equal …
But it’s not that esthetic freedom that attracts my submissives. It is my coldness, my promiscuity, and my disregard of men outside their erotic purpose. In saying that, my perspective is not that of a sadist. I do not have violent sentiments against men. If I’m cruel, it is only because my ways attack their unresolved beliefs of what a woman should be. This, as Deleuze noted, makes me ‘the woman torturer of masochism [who] cannot be sadistic precisely because she is in the masochistic situation, she is … a realization of the masochistic fantasy.’
In 1889, Sigmund Freud popularized the concept of sadomasochism (now known as S&M), which positioned masochism as a feminine counterpart of sadism – a term Krafft-Ebing coined based on Marquis de Sade’s sex crimes. Since then, we’ve adopted the misnomer of calling a masochist’s torturer a sadist, and a sadist’s victim – a masochist. In Sade’s novel Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), one of the monk’s victims states: ‘They wish to be certain their crimes cost tears; they would send away any girl who was to come here voluntarily.’ As a willing servant, a masochist is of no interest to a sadist.
The distinction, albeit overlooked, exists even in BDSM where consent is required and masochism has been far removed from its supersensual roots. In female domination, the man selects a woman he will make his goddess, like the male dominant who targets and grooms his prey. While the latter is not necessarily sadistic, the fantasy in both male dominance and sadism is the objectification of women, as exhibited in Sade’s literature. In Sacher-Masoch’s tales, however, the female abuser is glorified. Regarding what that makes of the dominant woman, Deleuze comments: ‘Whenever the type of the woman torturer is observed in the masochistic setting, it becomes obvious that she is neither a genuine sadist nor a pseudosadist but something quite different.’
This became clear to me when one of my submissives left his girlfriend for me, a few months ago. I had met him only once, for which my time was compensated. ‘I would never ask you or anyone to do this for me,’ I remember saying, mindless that unappreciation aroused him. The gesture itself was not surprising. But the reason behind it was. When I asked why he suddenly wanted to ‘serve’ me, he said: ‘I see a beautiful, intelligent, powerful woman [who is] younger than me yet … able to tame me so easily.’ Our meeting was vanilla. It didn’t even involve the customary whipping, verbal degradation or any physical female domination, aside from him kissing my feet.
After that, I never talked to him again until he informed me about his breakup. He had simply eroticized my indifference like Sacher-Masoch’s supersensualist who voluntarily succumbs to the sternness of nature. Although I’m sure my sub sees it as a power play, female domination has never been a source of empowerment for me. To me, being a dominatrix has always been about providing a safe space for men to unburden themselves and be vulnerable. That is what’s quite different about what I do. If anything, I feel more like a distant mother to my clients.
This reminds me of the Darwinian theme of Venus in Furs – man’s struggle with his recreational needs and achieving a more equal dynamic between the sexes. It positioned men as a casualty of modernity, especially in this digital age when intimacy is as elusive as ever. The problem, like what Sacher-Masoch’s first wife Angelika Aurora Rümelin emphasized in her memoir, The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (1906), is that the supposed female empowerment that comes with a supersensual husband didn’t give her the privilege of self-representation. She was placed on a pedestal as a fantasy, not as a woman who truly had equal or more social power than her man.
Despite defending her husband when he was accused of suffering from a sexual anomaly, Rümelin felt trapped by the ‘occult power’ he held, the ‘“false” representation of female life in male art,’ as the historian Katharina Gerstenberger has said of Confessions. Sacher-Masoch’s masochistic tales failed to address the impact this power had on marriage and women’s social life. Rümelin, who had three children with Sacher-Masoch, thought that ‘male sexuality [is] an unpredictable force that even the institution of marriage cannot always successfully contain,’ as Gerstenberger put it.
After agreeing to cuck her husband per his submissive wishes, Rümelin later discovered that he had cheated on her. ‘I never saw Sacher-Masoch again,’ she said after learning that ‘there was a woman,’ as the maid informed her. She lamented how even the sanctity of marriage doesn’t secure her gendered roles as a wife and a mother: when a man betrays his wife due to complex sexual needs, she becomes an outcast of society and her own person, just as she was as a maiden.
Meanwhile, Sacher-Masoch reveled in his wife’s ‘honest’ infidelity and even prostituted her via newspaper ads. ‘How delightful to find in one’s own respectable, honest and good wife a voluptuousness that must usually be sought among women of easy virtue,’ he said. Masochists have a special attraction to female sexual freedom. As an open domme, I receive a lot of these cuckolding or ‘seeking: hot wife who will…’ offers. But as with Sacher-Masoch’s marital integration of his kinks, they are presented like requirements. My sexual decadence has always been individual – going after who I want, when and where I want it. It is not at all akin to when men dictate the scenes in which I get to be ‘free’ with another lover, especially when it always has to include them, as a voyeur or an active participant. A non-masochistic man doesn’t feel the need to be part of a woman’s sex life or what it symbolizes; he simply desires her.
Supersensuality in the 21st century isn’t that different from its sources in the 19th century. Only, now, the lucrative demand for women in the sex and fetish industry has given us better self-representation and autonomy. In some capacity, there is more ‘shared work’, which Sacher-Masoch believed was key to a healthy bond between men and women. And with intimacy in trade, nature, as Sacher-Masoch claimed, is as cold as ever.
In Venus in Furs, Wanda ends up finding a lover in the dominant Greek aristocrat Alexis Papadopolis, who goes on to join her in punishing Severin. Although he recalls ‘dying of shame and despair’ during that moment, facing his ‘successful rival’, Severin initially ‘felt a kind of fantastic, supersensual fascination’ that soon brought the ‘dreadful clarity [of] how blind lust and passion have led men’ since the beginning of time. Reflecting on the experiment while talking to the unnamed narrator, Severin says: ‘The therapy was cruel but radical. The main thing is: I am healed.’ In a comical, misogynistic conclusion, he shares the lesson: ‘if only [he] had whipped her’, he wouldn’t have been a slave to his desires.
Severin explains that it’s women’s lack of equal opportunities that keeps them an enemy of men. From what I’ve seen in the journey of my supersensualists, as well as my masochistic admirers and lovers who inevitably measure themselves against my regular ‘stud’, it’s the increasing female independence that discharges the opposite sex from their traditional duties – a long-engrained purpose – that keeps men at the mercy of women. ~
Gia Marcosis a journalist based in Manila in the Philippines. She writes about pop culture for the online magazine TheThings. She also muses about existential eroticism and her experiences as a dominatrix on her Substack blog, The Defiling System.
https://psyche.co/ideas/my-take-on-venus-in-furs-as-a-modern-day-dominatrix?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=9f6ee16ada-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_02_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-a9a3bdf830-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE ILLUSION OF CLOSENESS
~ The notification sign turns red as I unlock my phone one early morning. My university friend Abid has posted yet another passive-aggressive poem lamenting his breakup. This follows his emotionally exhausting 2am oversharing on WhatsApp, to which our friend circle has become accustomed. I recall his perfectly filtered Instagram photos with Amna that flooded my Instagram feed not long ago, projecting the appearance of #couplegoals. Yet now, their messy split plays out theatrically across all his social media, permeating digital spaces I can’t seem to escape. My finger hovers over the Like icon, before deciding that silence feels kinder.
Abid’s collapsed relationship drama encounters my wider ambivalence about social media. Since our offline and online worlds increasingly merge into perpetual visibility, what has become of basic dignity between individuals? In his book In the Swarm (2017), the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote that, historically, respect required thoughtfulness to maintain interpersonal distance – not invasive overexposure, but restraint, allowing meaningful connection within cautious bounds. This approach to interpersonal dignity now feels extinct as people broadcast intimate details and descriptions amid desperate bids for external validation.
My parents prohibited my younger brothers from even having Facebook profiles well into their 20s, calling it vain attention-seeking. They emphasized dignity in preserving some mystery in public presentation of themselves and respect for individual preferences. Contrast this with the current norm of chronically oversharing personal information to infinity. The distressingly public meltdown of Abid’s relationship made me wonder – have our notions of restraint transformed so profoundly that all dignity becomes abandoned online?
Not long ago, it would have seemed absurd to provide real-time life updates to vaguely known acquaintances or anonymous followers. Remember when you had to decide who to put in your ‘Close Friends’ list on Facebook? When you chose the friends who’d know what you were up to and whose interest in your posts you welcomed? Or when you accepted friend requests only of selected people whom you already knew offline?
In my early teens, as I navigated the vast landscape of the internet, my journey of self-discovery took place in the concealed realms of niche chat rooms and forums. Unlike the current social media platforms with their emphasis on Likes and comments, these online spaces didn’t offer instant validation in the form of digital affirmations. What they provided was far more valuable – a sanctuary of nonjudgmental interaction where I could explore and shape my developing identity.
It was a place where curiosity and self-exploration took precedence over the pursuit of Likes or the fear of judgment. Compare this with today’s expectation of 24/7 visibility and being digitally connected to everyone from one’s past, present and potential future encounters. The once-private and intimate process of identity-exploration has become intertwined with the public sphere, making it challenging to differentiate personal growth from the constant stream of online interactions.
As Han writes, respect once relied on carefully guarding interpersonal distance, governing interactions through restraint. What gets lost when these borders of respectable caution dissolve entirely into reckless over-revelation? The tendency to share salacious personal information all too frequently prioritizes a bid for attention over conveying depth. Abid’s shattered relationship plays out as a spectacle because the performance promises more eyes.
Of course, past customs had downsides, too. Earlier internet anonymity could protect abusive behaviors without accountability. And secrecy certainly enables repression. But contrast this with our current compulsion for excessive disclosure as default, seeking outside validation even around sensitive life changes. Have we sacrificed self-regard for reach? Does authentic connection still have space to unfold offline before being marketed as content? The tension between privacy and secrecy – dignity and deceit – has taken on newly heightened digital dimensions, still awaiting philosophical reconciliation.
As Abid uploads another angsty poem, I feel for his suffering, having witnessed the relationship from inception to implosion. But I hesitate to celebrate his overexposure as vulnerability, when each revealed wound intensifies unease within our friend group. Research affirms that Likes activate neural reward circuits, lighting up areas such as the nucleus accumbens that respond to pleasure and validation. I ponder the implications of celebrating vulnerability when the exposure of every emotional wound contributes to our discomfort. Can sincerely ethical intimacy still flourish in the absence of clearly defined boundaries? Or are we inadvertently sacrificing the depth of true intimacy for a mere superficial simulation of support, while the intricacies of our personal worlds crumble beneath the weight of public platforms?
Just weeks ago, in photos on social media, Abid and Amna had projected such enviable bliss. But when I met Amna after their messy breakup, she told me that, ever since, she’s endured anonymous abuse and trauma online.
‘Each morning I wake up now dreading checking my phone, finding more messages from fake accounts attacking me,’ she said, tears welling up. ‘They hurl such violently sexist slurs, calling me unrepeatable names, a homewrecker, a fraud … with no way to stop these faceless smart mobs trying to destroy my spirit.’
She described frequently sobbing herself to sleep, feeling violated by vicious lies constructing false narratives about her character and past. Once lively and outspoken, she has withdrawn from digital spaces and public activities vital for her work as an activist and entrepreneur.
She pulled up one menacing post from an account named ‘JusticeForAbid’ casting her as a manipulative abuser while lauding her former partner. Seeing such harassment terrorize her every waking moment, I was at a loss to console her for the depths of depravity enabled by online anonymity. No wonder she appeared so drained of joy’s light once animating her ambitions to uplift her community. This poisonous theater of intimacy left wider ripples of damage than I had anticipated.
Digging deeper into social media’s rewiring of social contracts, I began researching online abuse. Alongside declining privacy norms, anonymity frequently has a dehumanizing impact. Han’s work shows how this disregard for others represents a stark departure from traditional notions of respect. True respect meant approaching even disagreement with consideration and thoughtfulness. Now, many online conversations frequently default to tribalism and heated conflict, which these ‘smart mobs’ instigate.
A survey in the United States in 2021 found that 64 per cent of adult social media users under 30 have endured online harassment or abuse, with anonymous attackers accounting for most incidents. The anonymity afforded by digital spaces appears to remove inhibitions against unethical behaviors – it becomes easy to forget that real humans exist behind screens.
Evidence also shows that online anonymity directly enables traumatizing experiences, especially for marginalized groups. In a study in 2022 by Compassion in Politics, 72 per cent of people said they’d experienced online abuse through anonymous or false accounts. Funneling prejudice through fake accounts allows bigots to dehumanize victims without backlash.
Researchers emphasize that experiencing such harmful rhetoric tied to one’s identity often causes deep trauma and feelings of powerlessness. Indeed, multiple investigations reveal that frequent exposure to online hate speech creates escalating psychological wounds. Victims of anonymous online abuse report experiencing nightmares, anxiety causing them to withdraw from digital spaces, as well as depression and symptoms resembling PTSD.
The unchecked cruelty enabled by anonymous and fake accounts facilitates immense suffering. Experts argue that better regulation around online verification methods can help curb such caustic behavior tearing at our shared social fabric under the cloak of anonymity. But beyond policy fixes, we must also nurture cultural shifts – choosing dignity and mutual understanding as cornerstones for how we show up in all spaces, physical or digital.
Dignity is the innate worth in all people, regardless of allegiance. But it gets lost when social networks engage in personal matters and communicate without the thoughtful distance that allows understanding to take root. In so much online communication empathy gets dismissed as time-consuming. I have witnessed the spread of toxic and divisive opinions, which harden ideological lines rather than build bridges. As Han warns: ‘A society without respect, without the pathos of distance, paves the way for the society of scandal.’ Studies also confirm that exposure to toxic online behavior and opinions actually increases polarization by sowing further misunderstanding. In this environment, can shared truth or mutual human regard still take root?
In his book Understanding Media (1964), the philosopher Marshall McLuhan analyzes new technology as an extension of our faculties, enabling greater scale but demanding moral vigilance around unintended consequences. I contemplate this idea. Despite my misgivings around social media’s rewiring of social contracts and privacy loss, aspects of its global connectedness captivate me. I recall the surge of optimism during the Arab Spring protests of 2011, facilitated through digital organizing against authoritarian regimes. I also remember an Earth Day when my university friends coordinated a beach cleanup, inspired by Facebook posts.
Beyond activism, watching a musician friend’s video reaching 2 million views on Instagram sparked pride in him finding recognition, even though I understand the fleeting nature of internet fame. I even feel touched when forgotten high-school contacts message occasionally out of the blue thanks to our enduring social media connection. And while toxicity abounds online, I’ve also witnessed digital organizing expose injustice and spur change through collective action at unmatched speed. Both cases reveal social media’s amplification of human potential beyond physical limitations.
Yet McLuhan warns that even beneficial technologies risk numbing aspects of our humanity in overuse, necessitating constant ethical re-centering. I reflect on whether, in my impulse to share achievements online, I have sacrificed grounded self-worth for external validation without depth. Do I demonstrate respect on platforms designed to monetize public attention and data? If there are only pseudo-boundaries online, what responsibility comes with visibility?
Han’s notion of respect provides wise caution for maintaining distance. Otherwise intimate matters are put on display and the private is made public where one ought to allow a person’s true essence to develop before developing intimacy. McLuhan argues that understanding media’s extensions of ourselves allows agency over its impacts. Between these thinkers may emerge a path to aligning technology with enduring values.
I return to Abid’s relationship drama, playing out online in impulsive fragments. Beyond sympathy for his heartbreak lies a lament for the public decay of private dignity between two individuals. The precise contours of their inner world blur into one-dimensional visuals of what garnered external acclaim, signifying little. Han may diagnose even well-intentioned support amid Abid’s overexposure as devoid of deeper care or understanding.
Yet I hesitate toward outright technophobic protectionism, having witnessed social media empower marginalized voices and forge connections against great odds. McLuhan compels me to acknowledge enhancing and dangerous aspects within modern media as mirrors of our own capacities. He warns that we shape tools that in turn reshape us.
I am left reflecting on ancient wisdom around self-knowledge determining fate. Internally sound moral foundations allow external engagements to elevate collective potential. But even the most advanced technologies alone cannot save us from losing touch with core human needs. To preserve dignity, truth and community in rapidly evolving virtual spaces, we must anchor digital citizenship to older values of restraint and care for the sacred inner life. Our humanity endures only if we sustain ethical relationships through wisdom and grace learned first beyond all devices.
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-illusion-of-closeness-how-social-media-redefined-respect
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ARE INSECTS NATURALLY ATTRACTED TO THE LIGHT?
Io moth (Automeris) confused by artificial light
At night, it’s not unusual to find a hoard of moths and other insects circling around a porch light or street lamp — but their reasons for being there are likely quite different from what most people assume, new research has found.
The insects are not actually drawn to the glow like “moths to a flame,” as the old saying suggests, but rather trapped in a disorienting orbit around the artificial light, scientists reported in a study published January 30 in the journal Nature Communications.
By using motion-capture cameras — and filming with infrared illumination so as not to disrupt the creatures’ vision — the researchers showed that when the insects flew around a light source, they were tilting their backs toward the light and keeping their bodies in that direction. By maintaining this orientation, the hapless critters created odd orbits and steering patterns, according to the study.
Gaining a better understanding of the impact of artificial light on these winged creatures is crucial as light pollution plays an increasing role in the decline of global insect populations, the researchers wrote.
ARTIFICIAL LIGHT CONFUSES NOCTURNAL INSECTS
“Insects in the air don’t inherently know which way is up, they don’t have a very good way of measuring that. … It’s assuming the light is the direction of up, but it’s wrong. And if you tilt, that’s going to create sort of weird steering patterns, in the same way that if you were riding a bike and you tilt over to one side, you’re going to get to steer in a big circle, it’s all going to go a bit funky,” Fabian said.
Orbiting, stalling, inverting
The study team compiled hundreds of slow-motion videos capturing the behaviors of butterflies, moths, bees, wasps, dragonflies and damselflies, and found that the critters were not attracted to faraway lights. The insects only appeared to be drawn in when passing a light that was nearby. Consistently, the overwhelming majority of study subjects tilted their backs toward the light, even if doing so prevented sustained flight.
“Maybe when people notice it, like around their porchlights or a streetlamp, it looks like they are flying straight at it, but that’s not the case,” said co-lead study author Yash Sondhi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, in a news release. Sondhi contributed to the research while a doctoral student of biology at Florida International University in Miami.
The overwhelming majority of study subjects were observed tilting their backs toward the light. An Atlas moth is shown.
The team observed three common responses to the light source made by the insects, including orbiting the light, stalling — which caused the insect to steeply climb above the light — and inverting, in which the insect flipped over and crashed into the ground.
Some fast-flying insects, such as dragonflies, remained in orbit for minutes at a time, going swiftly round and round the light fixture, Fabian said.
In one experiment, the researchers emulated the night sky by shining a light on a white sheet oriented above and found the insects were able to navigate under it without issues. If the insects were inherently seeking the light, they would have crashed into the sheet, Fabian said.
“The behaviors of flying insects in the presence of artificial light close to the ground are non-uniform and surprisingly complex in a way that had not really been documented well previously,” said Floyd Shockley, the collections manager for the department of entomology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
Past theories on why many insects erratically fly around light sources have included the idea that they are drawn to heat and that the creatures — particularly those that ancestrally lived in caves and holes in trees — believe the light source is an escape to the outside.
The most common one has been that insects are confusing the light with the moon, which they use as a compass cue. Since the critters are not flying directly toward the light, and the behavior has also been observed in species that are not migratory and do not use compass cues, these old theories no longer seem likely, Fabian said.
Light pollution and insect declines
The world has experienced a widespread “loss of the night” — scientists found light pollution rose at a rate of 2.2% a year in a November 2017 report that looked at the world’s radiance through the first calibrated satellite radiometer for night lights.
The increase in artificial lights has several harmful effects on wildlife, including habitat loss and fragmentation, according to a March 2022 paper cited by the National Wildlife Foundation.
The authors of the new study noted that light pollution is a growing cause of insect declines, referencing a September 2020 report that had found artificial light affected moth behaviors when it came to reproduction and larval development.
The new findings could help with conservation by fueling research on how to minimize the effects of light pollution on the insects, Dombroskie said. “I always advocate that if the light is not doing anything, turn it off.” ~
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/07/world/moths-drawn-to-light-behavior-study-scn/index.html
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ARE FINNS MONGOLIANS?
Some Scandinavian racists used to get a warm, fuzzy feeling when the called Finns Mongols, and some probably still do. Finns do have approximately 7 to 10 percent of Northern Siberian DNA, which is pretty cool, but that is not “being a Mongol”.
It is commonly accepted that Finnish descends from the Uralic proto-language, that was spoken in the proximity of the Ural mountains. There is dispute about whether is was spoken on the Western (European) or the Eastern (Asian) side of the Urals. I think that this is irrelevant in the context of Finnish being mongoloid.
Before proto-Uralic, there must have been an older parent language. Some hypotheses say that it was spoken around the Altai Mountains and that may or may not be the case. On the other hand, some sources say that the parent language of proto-Indo-European was spoken in Central Asia. Following the same logic that says that Finnish is a mongoloid language, we could say that English is an Asian language.
Some sources hypothesize with the common root of the Uralic and Indo-European proto-languages. In that case, if Finnish is a mongoloid language, so is English as well.
I’m not proposing that English is a mongoloid language. I’m proposing that linguistics doesn’t reach that far to the prehistory to tell anything certain. Even well established proto-languages are still under research and new results are revealed constantly, not to speak of their possible ancestors that are out of the reach of reliable linguistic tools (or that’s how I understand the situation).
But people want simple, short and clear answers, and if there aren’t such available, they make them by themselves. And that’s why ”people say” that Finnish is a mongoloid language. I have no idea why they don’t say that English is an Asian language. ~ Vessa Hekkinen, Quora
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WHY AMERICANS FEEL NEGATIVE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY, BUT OTHERS DON’T
Although Americans are optimistic about their personal future, they are pessimistic where their country’s future is concerned. This paradox may not be shared by people in other cultures.
A bright future for me
Human beings have the fascinating capacity to mentally travel forward in time to pre-experience the future. We can imagine the fine details of our future wedding, the excitement of having our first child, rewarding collaborations with our future co-workers, fun trips with our future spouse, and even winning a lottery. We are optimistic about our future. In fact, researchers find that when people are asked to imagine events to happen in their future, they show a positivity bias: They imagine overwhelmingly positive events, and they find it difficult to think of negative future events.
What’s more, this optimism about our personal future turns out to be important for our psychological well-being. People who imagine more positive events in their future are also happier and more satisfied with their lives. The future optimism is attenuated or absent among people with emotional disorders such as depression.
THE GLOOMY FUTURE FOR MY COUNTRY
Surprisingly, we become pessimistic when we think of our country’s future. Studies find that Americans imagine predominantly negative events in their country’s future, both short term, like next week or next year, and long term, like in 5 or 10 years. This is consistent across different demographics and political affiliations. Similar findings are also observed among Canadians as well as Europeans (e.g., Dutch), leading researchers to believe that people have a negativity bias toward their countries' futures. Importantly, this pessimism negatively impacts psychological well-being, particularly among young adults for whom the country’s future matters greatly.
However, studies outside of the North American and European populations suggest that the negativity bias about things to happen in one’s country’s future is not universal. For example, unlike Americans who imagine more negative than positive future events for their country and more positive than negative future events for themselves, Chinese imagine similar numbers of positive and negative events for both their own and their country’s futures.
Moreover, Chinese imagine a brighter future for their country — both short term and long term — than do Americans. Whereas Chinese often imagine events related to economic growth, technological breakthrough, and national celebrations, Americans are often worried about social-political issues, financial crises, and climate change.
WHY THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE ?
Several factors contribute to these cultural differences. One is how much people consider their country to be an important part of their identity (e.g., “My country is an important reflection of who I am”): Chinese report identifying with their country more than do Americans; and the more that people identify with their country, the more positive they feel about their country’s future.
Another factor is how people perceive the well-being of their country in the present day (e.g., “Everyone is satisfied with the way things are in our country”): Chinese view their country as doing better right now than do Americans; and the better people believe their country is currently doing, the more positive they feel about its future.
Interestingly, these research findings, based on data collected in mid 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, are consistent with the “What Worries the World” survey report from the similar period. In April 2020, only 1% of Chinese respondents but 59% of US respondents thought that things in their country were off on the wrong track. According to the latest “What Worries the World” survey report, as of January 2024, 69% of US respondents think that things in their country are off on the wrong track. The responses vary markedly across the participating countries.
IN CLOSING
A pessimistic view of one’s country’s future can create worries about one’s own future and in turn impact one’s life satisfaction and well-being. On the bright side, this pessimism is not universal, nor is it fixed. Instead, it reflects how important people feel about being a member of their country, whether they think things in their country are heading in the right or wrong direction, and possibly the influence of other factors such as news coverage (negative news may contribute to negative perceptions of the county’s current and future conditions) and cultural values (collectivism may facilitate positive views of one’s country).
Researchers as well as policymakers need to find ways to address these factors and promote optimism about our collective future.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/time-travel-across-borders/202402/why-americans-see-a-gloomy-future-but-others-dont
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GRAY HAIR CAN BE REVERSED
Hints that gray hairs could spontaneously regain color have existed as isolated case studies within the scientific literature for decades. In one 1972 paper, the late dermatologist Stanley Comaish reported an encounter with a 38-year-old man who had what he described as a “most unusual feature.” Although the vast majority of the individual’s hairs were either all black or all white, three strands were light near the ends but dark near the roots. This signaled a reversal in the normal graying process, which begins at the root.
In a study published in eLife, a group of researchers provide the most robust evidence of this phenomenon to date in hair from around a dozen people of various ages, ethnicities and sexes. It also aligns patterns of graying and reversal to periods of stress, which implies that this aging-related process is closely associated with our psychological well-being.
These findings suggest “that there is a window of opportunity during which graying is probably much more reversible than had been thought for a long time,” says study co-author Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Miami.
Around four years ago Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University, was pondering the way our cells grow old in a multistep manner in which some of them begin to show signs of aging at much earlier time points than others. This patchwork process, he realized, was clearly visible on our head, where our hairs do not all turn gray at the same time. “It seemed like the hair, in a way, recapitulated what we know happens at the cellular level,” Picard says. “Maybe there’s something to learn there. Maybe the hairs that turn white first are the more vulnerable or least resilient.”
While discussing these ideas with his partner, Picard mentioned something in passing: if one could find a hair that was only partially gray—and then calculate how fast that hair was growing—it might be possible to pinpoint the period in which the hair began aging and thus ask the question of what happened in the individual’s life to trigger this change. “I was thinking about this almost as a fictive idea,” Picard recalls. Unexpectedly, however, his partner turned to him and said she had seen such two-colored hairs on her head. “She went to the bathroom and actually plucked a couple—that’s when this project started,” he says.
Picard and his team began searching for others with two-colored hairs through local ads, on social media and by word of mouth. Eventually, they were able to find 14 people—men and women ranging from nine to 65 years old with various ethnic backgrounds (although the majority were white). Those individuals provided both single- and two-colored hair strands from different parts of the body, including the scalp, face and pubic area.
The researchers then developed a technique to digitize and quantify the subtle changes in color, which they dubbed hair pigmentation patterns, along each strand. These patterns revealed something surprising: In 10 of these participants, who were between age nine and 39, some graying hairs regained color. The team also found that this occurred not just on the head but in other bodily regions as well. “When we saw this in pubic hair, we thought, ‘Okay, this is real,’” Picard says. “This happens not just in one person or on the head but across the whole body.” He adds that because the reversibility only appeared in some hair follicles, however, it is likely limited to specific periods when changes are still able to occur.
Most people start noticing their first gray hairs in their 30s—although some may find them in their late 20s.This period, when graying has just begun, is probably when the process is most reversible, according to Paus. In those with a full head of gray hair, most of the strands have presumably reached a “point of no return,” but the possibility remains that some hair follicles may still be malleable to change, he says.
“What was most remarkable was the fact that they were able to show convincingly that, at the individual hair level, graying is actually reversible,“ says Matt Kaeberlein, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington, who was one of the editors of the new paper but was not involved in the work. “What we’re learning is that, not just in hair but in a variety of tissues, the biological changes that happen with age are, in many cases, reversible—this is a nice example of that.” The team also investigated the association between hair graying and psychological stress because prior research hinted that such factors may accelerate the hair’s aging process. Anecdotes of such a connection are also visible throughout history: according to legend, the hair of Marie Antoinette, the 18th-century queen of France, turned white overnight just before her execution at the guillotine.
In a small subset of participants, the researchers pinpointed segments in single hairs where color changes occurred in the pigmentation patterns. Then they calculated the times when the change happened using the known average growth rate of human hair: approximately one centimeter per month. These participants also provided a history of the most stressful events they had experienced over the course of a year.
This analysis revealed that the times when graying or reversal occurred corresponded to periods of significant stress or relaxation. In one individual, a 35-year-old man with auburn hair, five strands of hair underwent graying reversal during the same time span, which coincided with a two-week vacation. Another subject, a 30-year-old woman with black hair, had one strand that contained a white segment that corresponded to two months during which she underwent marital separation and relocation—her highest-stress period in the year.
Eva Peters, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the University Hospital of Giessen and Marburg in Germany, who was not involved in this work, says that this is a “very creative and well-conceptualized study.” But, she adds, because the number of cases the researchers were able to look at was relatively small—particularly in the stress-related portion of the study—further research is needed to confirm these findings.
For now, the next step is to look more carefully at the link between stress and graying. Picard, Paus and their colleagues are currently putting together a grant to conduct another study that would examine changes in hair and stress levels prospectively—which means tracking participants over a specified period of time rather than asking them to recall life events from the past.
Eventually, Picard says, one could envision hair as a powerful tool to assess the effects of earlier life events on aging—because, much like the rings of a tree, hair provides a kind of physical record of elapsed events. “It’s pretty clear that the hair encodes part of your biological history in some way,” he says. “Hair grows out of the body, and then it crystallizes into this hard, stable [structure] that holds the memory of your past.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/gray-hair-can-return-to-its-original-color-and-stress-is-involved-of-course?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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DINKS (DUAL INCOME, NO KIDS) ARE LIVING THE AMERICAN DREAM
Elizabeth Johnson and her husband hit the vacation circuit hard over the past couple of years.
They went boating in Florida, hiking in the Swiss Alps, snorkeling in Hawaii, waterfall exploring in Oregon, and leaf peeping in Canada. They saw moose and orcas in Alaska, manatees in the Dominican Republic, and sheep in the Irish countryside.
"We also volunteer at a local food bank each month, go to comedy shows at Mall of America, routinely go to concerts," she said.
Neither Johnson nor her husband grew up wealthy, and the couple never expected to have such an indulgent lifestyle. Johnson's husband, in particular, faced "a very bleak outlook" for his career when he graduated from college in 2008 at the height of the Great Recession.
But now, 16 years later, the 30-something couple make a generous joint income of just under $300,000. That income, their hard work, and a dash of savvy investing are largely responsible for the lifestyle they lead — but there's another big factor. The Johnsons are DINKS, a dual-income couple with no kids.
The costs of rearing a child have skyrocketed in recent years, especially as parents get less help from their families and communities. Raising a kid could cost parents upward of $26,000 this year. Being a DINK has always been a way to save money, but as the stigma around the choice to be child-free has faded, more and more Americans see being a DINK as the key to a new American dream of financial stability, freedom of choice, and a comfortable retirement. DINKs are proudly emerging as an aspirational class for young people — and they're ready to live it up.
Lifestyles of the DINKS and the child-free
Johnson's Tinder profile set her on her path to DINKhood. In early adulthood, she never felt the desire to have children but wanted to keep an open mind. As the years went on, even as she saw her peers having kids, she said her "beliefs just never changed and completely solidified." So when she set up her dating profile, Johnson included in her bio that she didn't want to have kids of her own.
"I just wanted to weed out the ones I wouldn't be compatible with," she said. It worked. Johnson recalled that on their second or third date, she and her now-husband discussed the topic to make sure they were on the same page. The pair married in 2022, and Johnson said their decision to live as DINKs had been enriching.
"It makes my life more meaningful," the occupational therapist said of her choice to be child-free. "I feel like I can give more to my patients at work. I have more time to see my loved ones and family.”
Beyond the emotional value Johnson ascribes to her DINK status, there are the dollars-and-cents benefits to the lifestyle. Her husband, who works in banking, is "a very big spreadsheet guy," Johnson said, and the couple track their finances "religiously." Part of that maniacal focus is tracking their net worth. The latest tally? About $1.1 million, a combination of the equity they've been able to accumulate in their new-build, suburban Minneapolis townhome and their retirement accounts.
As an occupational therapist who works with older people, Johnson said, she sees "one of the biggest downsides to being a DINK is not having your children there to support you and help you age in place as you get older." So in addition to enjoying travel now, it's important for the couple to have "the financial resources in place to support safe living when we're old," she said.
For many adults, having children holds a massive amount of intrinsic value, but there's no denying that those who choose to forgo parenthood gain a serious financial edge. In fact, the net-worth data from the Federal Reserve's most recent Survey of Consumer Finances showed there's never been a better time to be a DINK. Child-free couples' median net worth of $399,000 in 2022 was the highest of all types of family structures studied by the survey and almost $150,000 more than couples with kids. The median net worth of DINKs was also more than $100,000 higher than it was in 2019, and the gap between child-free couples and couples with kids has only widened as prices on items and services parents need most, such as childcare and food, have spiked.
Amy Blackstone, the author of the 2019 book "Childfree by Choice," said that the financial gap between DINKs and couples with kids wasn't solely because of the choice about children. In many cases, it's also a bit of selection bias.
“It's the people who already have higher incomes, higher education, and are generally more privileged who opt out of parenthood,” she said.
Still, DINKs like the Johnsons demonstrate that as the American dream of homeownership and putting kids through college gets further out of reach, forgoing children is one way to achieve the upward economic mobility that many parents find more difficult to reach. Child-free couples have more free cash flow that can be invested in real estate or stocks. And while the pandemic's fiscal stimulus left pretty much everyone with more cash, DINKs seemed to emerge victorious in the battle to grow wealth. After a few years of saving, the Johnsons are free of student debt and said they're in a financial position to start planning for an early retirement in their 50s.
“I am from a middle-class family, and my husband from a lower-class upbringing,” Johnson said.
“He experienced paycheck-to-paycheck living, started his first job at age 11 delivering newspapers. We feel very fortunate for our current economic stability.”
Of course, not all DINKs are raking in six-figure incomes and investing in real estate. Alex Killingsworth is a 25-year-old entrepreneur building a content-writing business, and his wife is a full-time graduate student. She makes $14,000 a year as a teaching assistant, while his business earned them $84,000 in 2023. Not having kids has allowed them to invest in his startup and her higher education, both of which they believe will pay off.
“I'm 'investing' in the work I'm doing," Killingsworth said. “Likewise for my wife. Almost all of her income is going into research, so our actual take-home pay is quite a bit lower.”
If they had kids, paying the bills could be tougher for them. Instead, they're buying wine and whiskey, maxing out a retirement account, and taking advantage of the freedom to spend Thanksgiving in Alaska, visit family in Texas, or go to Broadway shows in New York.
"I don't know if we have any hacks or tricks here, but I have been told all of the extra income has a tendency to dry up when you have kids," Killingsworth said. "I don't know if that's true, but it's better to overprepare than under, right?”
GROWING ACCEPTANCE
"When another school asked her to give a speech on her decision, angry parents carrying siThe
financial upsides of being a DINK used to come with a cost: In 1974, a
substitute teacher named Marcia Drut-Davis was fired from her job and
received death threats after discussing her choice to be child-free on
"60 Minutes.gns calling her "the devil's sister" crowded the entrance, and the teacher who provided closing remarks after the speech denounced her in front of the auditorium.
In her 2013 book, "Confessions of a Childfree Woman," Drut-Davis recalls the teacher saying: "How will you feel when you're old and alone with no one to take care of you? How will you feel without a grandchild to give you chocolate kisses? You're a sad excuse for a woman."
For decades, the social stigma around choosing not to have children has been substantial, but Blackstone said that she'd noticed a major shift in acceptance since she began research for her book in 2008.
"I would say that it's millennials and Gen Z who have really done the heavy lifting in terms of bringing this conversation out into the open," she said.
That's not to say Gen X didn't contribute to the conversation — Blackstone is a child-free Xer — but she said the younger generations' experiences with the 2008 financial crisis, accelerated climate crisis, and increasingly divisive politics made the choice to forgo kids more acceptable to a wider group.
One 2022 Nature paper from the researchers Zachary P. Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal found that nearly half the adults they studied were parents and 22% were child-free by choice. The rest were ambivalent, undecided, unable to have kids, or planning to have them. In the 2020 US census, 87 million Americans were between the ages of 20 and 46. If you apply the findings from the Neals' study, that means roughly 19 million millennial and Gen Z adults of childbearing age were child-free by choice. That same research, which polled 1,500 Michigan adults, found that while parents felt warmer toward fellow parents, "both parents and child-free people feel about the same toward child-free people." The report concluded: "Although parents really like other parents, they don't dislike child-free people.”
Sentiment actually seems to be shifting in the opposite direction: In a summer 2022 Harris Poll of 1,054 American adults, 20% of all adults — and 27% of millennials — agreed "that people should stop having children because of the harm it causes," specifically the harm to the environment, animals, and even other people. Similarly, about one-third of all adults — and over 40% of millennials — said that they agreed "people should stop having children because their children's quality of life will be poor.”
And then there's social media and our identity-obsessed culture. Child-free people now have more and more platforms to connect with each other and flaunt their no-kids lifestyles of extensive travel, impeccable homes, and spoiled pets. The communities devoted to a child-free lifestyle are booming: The subreddit r/childfree, focused on "topics and links of interest to childfree individuals," boasts 1.5 million members. TikTok videos about DINKs rack up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes. DINKs, GINKs [not having children for environmental reasons], "rich aunties," and DINKWADs — DINKs with a dog — have become aspirational identities for younger generations.
Stigma against DINKS certainly remains — just look at the comments of "selfish" and "missing out" on child-free TikTok videos. But they're overshadowed by comments of support. As Blackstone, who wrote the 2021 book on the topic, said, what happened to Drut-Davis wouldn't happen today.
"I've gotten the random email telling me that I'm miserable and going to die alone or that I'm right, I shouldn't have kids anyway," she said. "But nothing like what Marcia got in the 1970s."
With the rise in childcare costs, education, and other parenting expenses that have outpaced inflation, it's hard to deny that a two-track economy has emerged. There are the DINKs who can seize the American dream and the parents who are struggling to stay afloat in a country without guaranteed paid leave or affordable childcare. It's no wonder that so many people are suddenly interested in becoming a DINK.
Johnson said that her DINK lifestyle kept her plenty busy. She invests time in her hobby of landscape photography, and though she's questioned whether it's a selfish choice, she overall feels more "well rounded and healthier" than she would if she had kids, she said.
“We hang out with other people's kids every once in a while,” she said, “but then we happily just give them back to their parents.” ~
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-dinks-winning-childfree-economy-finances-income-vacation-retirement-kids-2024-2?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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LEADERS AS INDIVIDUALISTS
If you search for books on leaders in history, you find a recurring cast of characters staring at you from the covers: Winston Churchill. Napoleon. Abraham Lincoln. Genghis Khan. Mao Zedong. They will often be military or imperial leaders, on horses or in uniform or armor, who triumphed in big wars or led their nation through crisis. Keep browsing and you will encounter another variant of works on leadership, featuring prominent figures from the business world.
With varying degrees of sophistication, these men (and, sometimes, women) are treated as heroes, role models and inspirations – or, alternatively, as menaces. Business leaders such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos are portrayed, whether positively or negatively, as uniquely powerful individuals – able, through sheer force of will or ruthless intelligence, to overcome any obstacles life put in their way.
Such books are celebrations of individualism. Their primary effect is to promote an individualist perspective on the world. They are popular because their political appeal is so wide: liberals can love this perspective on leadership, and so will conservatives and libertarians. Almost everyone, it seems, enjoys a good success story. But you will usually read little in them about all the things that provided the basis for the success stories but which had nothing to do with the protagonists personally, like being born to wealthy parents in a socially and economically stable country with myriad educational and commercial opportunities.
The message from this literary cottage industry is that where there’s a will, there’s a way. ‘Leaders’ are ‘winners’. They built themselves up and achieved greatness through their extraordinary qualities. They made their own history.
It is hard to escape this view of leaders and leadership. It is all around us. We still tend to teach, study and celebrate ‘Great Men’. All over the world, people are in search of larger-than-life figures who can lead them past crises and catastrophes, and into a bright future. Perhaps that is why leaders from a supposedly glorious past loom so large in the gloomy present.
But how did we get to this dominant view on leadership, with its focus on all-powerful individualism? To answer this question, we must go all the way back to antiquity, where mythology holds the key. We need to revisit the earliest written works in human history and see what kinds of ideas about leadership they implanted in us. And then, we have to see how these early ideas were countered by a new and compelling vision of leadership that remains with us today.
For hundreds of millions of people, the Bible is not just a book, or even just a sacred book, but the source of how to think about the world. It teaches us about kings, gods, wars, human nature and our origins. Its influence can be direct or indirect, depending on whether one is a religious or secular person. But its profound impact on world civilizations – and on us as individuals – is undeniable. This means that, even if you have never read any of it, you have imbibed many of its teachings and values. So how has the Bible shaped us? What lessons on leadership are we meant to draw from it?
The Book of II Samuel, chapters 11 to 18, presents perhaps the most dramatic and bloody story in the Hebrew scriptures. It begins with King David, sitting in his palace in Jerusalem, lazily gazing at a woman bathing in a nearby house. David has his servants bring her to him. The woman, Bathsheba, is married to a Hittite named Uriah, a soldier in the Israelite army, who is off fighting the Ammonites in one of the wars that had helped establish David as a powerful and wealthy king. From her tryst with David, Bathsheba conceives. Eager to hide his deed, David summons Uriah from the battlefield. After feting him in his palace, David sends Uriah to have a conjugal visit with his wife so that he will be assumed to be the father of David’s child.
But Uriah ruins David’s plan when he refuses to go to his house, and instead sleeps outside the king’s door. He explains to David that he could not possibly sleep with his wife and feel the pleasures of home while his fellow soldiers are mired in battle. Uriah’s honor and integrity push King David to greater duplicity: he sends Uriah back to the battlefield with a private message to David’s general, Joab, instructing the general to place Uriah in the battle frontline, where he is likely to be killed. And so it happens: Uriah dies – because of a note that he was ordered to take to his commander without knowing its contents. Back in Jerusalem, Bathsheba grieves for her husband, and David soon makes her the newest of his many wives.
One of the things that makes this episode shocking and disturbing is that David is a sacred figure to Jews, Christians and Muslims. His reputation, as such, is of a great and admirable leader, who rose from nothing; a favorite of God, the modest shepherd boy who was ordained by Him to be king; who felled the mighty Philistine warrior Goliath with only a sling and rock; who played the harp for the tormented first king of the Israelites, Saul; who saw the face of God, and spoke to Him, and according to Jewish tradition, his house would be the king of Israel’s in perpetuity, and the Messiah (for Christians, this was Jesus Christ) would come from his lineage. In II Samuel, before his encounter with Bathsheba, David rises to great power and expands his kingdom by triumphing in wars, protected and beloved by God, and always with righteousness.
But in his behavior towards Bathsheba and Uriah, David is human, not godly – even low and immoral and slothful. He is the exact opposite of what we might expect a great leader to be. He no longer leads men on the battlefield or sets a personal example of modesty and courage, as he once did, but sits in a luxurious palace, a fat cat, a Peeping Tom, while others fight and die on his behalf. So the scriptures give us a darker portrait of David than those who only know him by reputation – as an icon, filtered through mythology or belief – might presume.
Soon after Uriah’s death on the battlefield, the direct result of David’s orders to Joab, the Prophet Nathan pays King David a visit. Prophets play a crucial role: they carry the word of God and serve as spiritual authorities. Nathan is thus one of the only people who can speak directly and freely to David, without fear, since it is like God speaking. Nathan tells the king a story about a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had a large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had only one little lamb. ‘He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup, and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him,’ Nathan tells David. One day, the rich man had a visitor and, instead of taking one of his many sheep to prepare a meal for the visitor, he took the one little lamb that belonged to the poor man, killed it, and served it.
The Bible then tells us that, upon hearing this story, ‘David burned with anger against the man’ and said to Nathan: ‘As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.’ Nathan’s response to David is: ‘You are that man.’ And Nathan continues, channelling God’s voice: ‘I anointed you king over Israel … Why did you despise the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own … Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house … Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity upon you.’
Upon hearing Nathan’s words, David collapses in guilt, saying: ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ Nathan reassures him that God will spare his own life. But, from this point on, David and his family experience a stunning series of tragedies. First, Bathsheba’s baby, David’s son, becomes gravely ill. David and his servants pray and cry and fast, to no avail: the baby dies. (After this, Bathsheba becomes pregnant again – this time with Solomon, whom we are told God loves, and who would eventually succeed David as king.)
The biblical author then recounts the grim episode involving three of David’s older children, Amnon, Tamar and Absalom. Amnon becomes obsessed with his half-sister Tamar. He lures her to his house by pretending to be ill, and asks Tamar to feed him. She does, and offers to feed Amnon cakes of meat, but he declines, instead asking her to lay with him. When she is horrified at the idea and tries to placate him by telling him to speak about his desire with their father, he attacks and rapes her, despite her begging him to stop; once finished, he is consumed with ‘hatred’ for her and throws her out of his house. The devastated Tamar goes to her brother Absalom, who upon learning what happened never speaks to his half-brother Amnon again; we are told that ‘he hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar.’
Two years pass. Absalom seems to have moved on (about Tamar we are told nothing). But then through trickery, Absalom manages to gather all the king’s sons – his brothers and half-brothers – and instructs his servants to murder Amnon. When the news gets to King David, he is first horribly misled to believe that Absalom has killed all his male siblings, all of David’s sons. Absalom flees Jerusalem and goes to Geshur, where he stays for three years. David is described as much more sad than angry; he ‘longed to go to Absalom, for he was consoled concerning Amnon’s death.’
The rest of the episode is both moving and shocking. Absalom and David reconcile after three years of estrangement, a tender moment between father and son that inspired great works by artists from Rembrandt to Marc Chagall. But Absalom is soon overcome once again by his demons. He launches a rebellion against his father, who is forced to flee Jerusalem.
Eventually, after a bloody war between Absalom’s army and those who remain loyal to David, Absalom is killed in gruesome fashion. David does not celebrate his victory and restoration to the throne; instead, he is shattered, and the episode ends with David wailing in grief: ‘O my son Absalom! My son, my son, Absalom! If only I had died instead of you – O Absalom, my son, my son!’ What are we meant to learn from this horrific tale?
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The Bible presents a theological conception of leadership: David is king by divine right, chosen and empowered by God. Earlier, the Hebrews were a wandering people with ‘Judges’ who led them, temporarily, though different hardships and crises. These were not true rulers, but more like guides or military leaders in an emergency. The Israelites, under constant attack by their enemies, especially the Philistines, and aware of the great empires (such as Egypt) that dominated their world, ask the Prophet Samuel to petition God to give them a king, as all their powerful neighbors and enemies had. Samuel offers the people a stark warning about what it is like to be ruled by a king: he will take their sons to be his soldiers, their daughters to be his cooks and perfumers, take over their lands, and enslave the people, and no one will have the right or the ability to stand up to him. ‘When that day comes,’ Samuel warns the Israelites, ‘you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.’
In other words, God tells the chosen people, once you have a king, there is no going back. The people, undeterred by Samuel’s bleak prophecy (which more than came true), choose to have a king rule over them. And once they do, as Samuel warned them, that power is not meant to be challenged by other men – because the king is God’s choice and rules in his name. That was why regicide (the murder of a king) was considered, well into the early modern era, the worst crime one could possibly commit – it was against the ruler and against God. At the same time, the emergence of a king with earthly power but still under God is a conception of leadership that is constrained by a sort of morality, even if that term did not exist then. David abuses his power, and the biblical author implies that the sorrows and violence that follow are God’s punishment for that original sin. David’s successes and sufferings as king are guided by God.
A religious person might believe that the Bible gives us God’s literal word. But, from a secular perspective, we know that these stories are the product of human beings with human intentions. The story of King David’s fall from grace is an example of the ways that societies have always found to empower certain people to be leaders, attributing to them virtue and handing to them authority – but also, at the same time, to limit the power of those rulers. On the one hand, the conception of leadership found in this story of King David’s crime and punishment gives the leader almost limitless power. On the other hand, it implies that there is a threshold that even he cannot pass; David, as the king, remains subservient to the higher power of God. And so, even if ordinary people cannot check their leaders, God can. And faith in God, worshipping God, doing God’s work, means that the people can be sure of God’s protection from a leader who abuses his or her power. For even a king is beneath the same divine authority as the lowest of his subjects.
The Bible represents a foundational mythology – the works and stories that continue to give so many people a sense of themselves, their world and their history. But these were never merely words. They were bedrock principles for how humans organized their societies, in mostly religious and monarchical fashion, for centuries to come. From the standpoint of political leadership, there really is little difference between King David and ruling monarchs well into the modern era. Through social and economic upheavals, technological advancement, evolving bureaucracies and cultural changes, the basic idea conveyed in the Bible persisted: a king (or sometimes a queen, when there was no male heir to the monarch) ruling through divine authority.
But in the modern era, even as monarchies continued, there was a major shift in many states and societies, as people began to think of leadership as something independent of God. It’s not simply that societies and people became less religious. It’s that divine authority over society, and people’s lives, lessened. And when that happened, even as most states and societies were still ruled by absolute monarchs, people needed to find new explanations and justifications for leadership. It wasn’t enough to invoke God. In this regard, in the history of how humans have thought about leadership, perhaps no one was more impactful than Niccolò Machiavelli, best known as the author of The Prince, which he wrote in 1513 but which was published only in 1532.
Like the Bible, The Prince is a foundational work. Whether one has read it or not, we live in a world that it has helped to shape, directly or indirectly, for better or for worse. Nearly two millennia after the biblical story of David, Bathsheba and Uriah was written, The Prince was still part of a world in which the existence of God was as real to nearly everyone in Europe (and most other places) as the Sun and the Moon. Machiavelli acknowledged that God played some role in human affairs; at various points in The Prince, he seems to take for granted the idea that rulers rose and fell at least in part because of God’s will, and because of ‘fortune’ (which he coupled with ‘God’). But he also claimed that men had ‘free will’ and that while ‘fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions’, ‘she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.’ Elsewhere, Machiavelli recounts several miracles and punishments that God was responsible for, and with which he directed what happened in the world, but adds that: ‘God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.’
But despite Machiavelli’s grudging acceptance that God still mattered, his prince exists in a new mental universe from the one in II Samuel, one in which leadership is bound not to the supernatural, or to morality, but to objectives. The Prophet Nathan’s parable about the rich man and the poor man and their sheep would be changed under Machiavelli: the prince shouldn’t avoid taking the poor man’s sole sheep because it is an immoral act that would anger God; he should avoid it because such a mean act would make him hated and the people’s hatred would thwart his ambitions.
On the other hand, because it is ‘better to be feared than loved’, it is fine, and even desirable, that those under the prince know that he is perfectly capable of taking their sheep (as it were) if they do not do as he tells them – and that he goes through with this punishment when it is necessary. This is a wholly new way of thinking of leadership because it provides a guide for the aspiring leader based not on what is morally right but on how politics works in the real world. Machiavelli, in that sense, helps usher us from the old world to the new, where anything seems possible, and in which the leader makes not only her own destiny, but also history.
Yet even in Machiavelli’s brave new world, in which leaders can supposedly shape their own destinies, not all is possible. Leaders still must deal with quite powerful and resistant things: structures. Systems. Institutions. Other leaders. Adversaries. Enemies.
In a Machiavellian world, perhaps the most daunting challenge facing rulers is other people realizing that the ruler’s power is not guaranteed and protected by divine authority, so the ruler can be displaced – without incurring God’s wrath. And so, reading about Machiavelli’s prince after reading about King David in the Bible brings us to the big question at the heart of the issue of leadership: does the leader make history or does history make the leader? If we want to understand leadership, and how it works in the world, should we be looking primarily at the ways the leader changed the world? Or should we focus on the ways in which the world produced, and then constrained, the leader?
Some people – let’s call them Machiavellians – are focused on individuals. Some are more focused on the constraints. Karl Marx, for example, in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), argued that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
The most interesting debate about leadership, then, is between those (like Machiavelli) who believe that leaders make (and overcome) history, and those (like Marx, and like the author of King David’s story) who believe that history makes (and constrains) leaders.
The Machiavellian model probably applies best to leaders who wield superior power, or who have a lot of built-in advantages. If, say, you are a political leader in a functioning democracy and were elected democratically, you have broad legitimacy. If you are a dictator backed by your country’s military and other institutions, or you are the CEO of a large corporation in a country with a political economy designed to serve the interests of large corporations and their CEOs, you will have a lot of choices in how to ‘lead’.
This is especially true if, following Machiavelli’s advice, you believe you are free from the constraints of morality, or God’s scolding oversight.
There is a direct line from Machiavelli to the individualistic conception of leadership one sees everywhere today. But how does this view of leaders and their ability to shape reality apply to leaders who are in opposition to power? Leaders are sometimes heads of state or captains of industry, but other times they have considerably less power, trying to constrain the leaders above them in the hierarchy. Perhaps they are whistleblowers exposing corruption or misdeeds inside mighty companies or institutions, or members of an underground group fighting to overthrow a brutal dictator.
Some of the leaders in history who provide us with the most insight and inspiration might not have had formal power or authority. They might not even be famous. They might not have succeeded, and they might not have won. But these leaders often make a lasting impression on us – and the biggest impact. Perhaps this is because the conception of leadership that we find in II Samuel, with its insistence on morality as a constraint on even the most powerful rulers, still has purchase in our world today – and that the message on leadership in the Hebrew scripture has not been entirely overturned by the Machiavellian viewpoint. At least, not yet.
https://aeon.co/essays/who-are-the-leaders-in-our-heads-and-how-did-they-get-there
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CHURCHILL ON ISLAM
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science -- the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
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WHAT IF NEANDERTHALS HAD PREVAILED
In evolutionary terms, the human population has rocketed in seconds. The news that it has now reached 8 billion seems inexplicable when you think about our history.
For 99% of the last million years of our existence, people rarely came across other humans. There were only around 10,000 Neanderthals living at any one time. Today, there are around 800,000 people in the same space that was occupied by one Neanderthal. What’s more, since humans live in social groups, the next nearest Neanderthal group was probably well over 100km away. Finding a mate outside your own family was a challenge.
Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people. If they had outcompeted our own species (Homo sapiens), the density of population would likely be far lower. It’s hard to imagine them building cities, for example, given that they were genetically disposed to being less friendly to those beyond their immediate family.
Similarities between modern humans and domesticated dogs, in contrast to archaic humans (here Neanderthal) and wild wolves
As Homo sapiens were more likely to interact with groups outside their family, they created a more diverse genetic pool which reduced health problems. Neanderthals at El Sidrón in Spain showed 17 genetic deformities in only 13 people, for example. Such mutations were virtually nonexistent in later populations of our own species.
But larger populations also increase the spread of disease. Neanderthals might have typically lived shorter lives than modern humans, but their relative isolation will have protected them from the infectious diseases that sometimes wiped out whole populations of Homo sapiens.
OBTAINING MORE FOOD
Our species may also have had 10%-20% faster rates of reproduction than earlier species of human. But having more babies only increases the population if there is enough food for them to eat.
Our genetic inclination for friendliness took shape around 200,000 years ago. From this time onwards, there is archaeological evidence of the raw materials to make tools being moved around the landscape more widely.
From 100,000 years ago, we created networks along which new types of hunting weapons and jewelry such as shell beads could spread. Ideas were shared widely and there were seasonal aggregations where Homo sapiens got together for rituals and socializing. People had friends to depend on in different groups when they were short of food.
And we may have also needed more emotional contact and new types of relationship outside our human social worlds. In an alternative world where Neanderthals thrived, it may be less likely that humans would have nurtured relationships with animals through domestication.
Dramatic shifts in environment
Things might also have been different had environments not generated so many sudden shortfalls, such as steep declines in plants and animals, on many occasions. If it wasn’t for these chance changes, Neanderthals may have survived.
Sharing resources and ideas between groups allowed people to live more efficiently off the land, by distributing more effective technologies and giving each other food at times of crisis. This was probably one of the main reasons why our species thrived when the climate changed while others died. Homo sapiens were better adapted to weather variable and risky conditions. This is partly because our species could depend on networks in times of crisis.
During the height of the last ice age around 20,000 years ago, temperatures across Europe were 8-10℃ degrees lower than today, with those in Germany being more like northern Siberia is now. Most of northern Europe was covered in ice for six-to-nine months of the year.
Social connections provided the means by which inventions could spread between groups to help us adapt. These included spear throwers to make hunting more efficient, fine needles to make fitted clothing and keep people warmer, food storage, and hunting with domesticated wolves. As a result, more people survived nature’s wheel of fortune.
Homo sapiens were generally careful not to overconsume resources like deer or fish, and were likely more aware of their lifecycles than much earlier species of human might have been. For example, people in British Columbia, Canada, only took males when they fished for salmon.
In some cases, however, these lifecyles were hard to see. During the last ice age, animals such as mammoths, which roamed over huge territories invisible to human groups, went extinct. There are more than a hundred depictions of mammoths at Rouffignac in France dating to the time of their disappearance, which suggests people grieved this loss. But it is more likely mammoths would have survived if it wasn’t for the rise of Homo sapiens, because there would have been fewer Neanderthals to hunt them.
Too clever for our own good
Our liking for each other’s company and the way spending time together fosters our creativity was the making of our species. But it came at a price.
The more technology humankind develops, the more our use of it harms the planet. Intensive farming is draining our soils of nutrients, overfishing is wrecking the seas, and the greenhouse gases we release when we produce the products we now rely on are driving extreme weather. Overexploitation wasn’t inevitable but our species was the first to do it.
We can hope that visual evidence of the destruction in our natural world will change our attitudes in time. We have changed quickly when we needed to throughout our history. There is, after all, no planet B. But if Neanderthals had survived instead of us, we would never have needed one.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/8-billion-people-how-different-the-world-would-look-if-neanderthals-had-prevailed?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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EXPOSURE TO HEAT MORE BENEFICIAL FOR DEPRESSED PATIENTS THAN EXPOSURE TO COLD (ICE BATHS ETC)
Researchers from the University of California – San Francisco recently found that people with depression have higher body temperatures.
Scientists believe this finding suggests novel therapies used to lower body temperature — such as ice baths or saunas — might provide a mental health benefit.
Researchers estimate that 5% of the global adult population live with depression.
While antidepressant medication is generally safe to use, it can have side effects such as stomach issues, headache, problems sleeping, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, and anxiety feelings, which can sometimes make a person’s quality of life worse.
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DEPRESSION LINKED TO HIGHER BODY TEMPERATURE
According to Dr. Ashley Mason, associate professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health at the University of California – San Francisco, and lead author of this study, depression is a major detriment to quality of life and the treatments currently available are not meeting the clinical needs of the population.
This led to Dr. Mason and her team examining a potential link between depression and a higher body temperature.
“The link is particularly fascinating because there (is) data showing that when people recover from their depression — regardless of how they got better — their temperature tends to regularize,” she explained. Then we have newer data suggesting that temperature-based interventions may reduce depression symptoms. For example, data have shown that using HEAT-BASED TREATMENTS, particularly sauna, causes acute increases in body temperature.
Dr. Mason said that these increases in body temperature engage the body’s self-cooling mechanisms — such as sweating — and can lead to subsequent decreases in body temperature — a person sweats, they cool themselves down.
“And one study showed that decreases in a person’s body temperature in the days after a single heat treatment correlated with decreases in their depression symptoms over that same time period,” Dr. Mason continued. “So what’s exciting here is that the link might operate in multiple ways — what’s new is that we might be able to intervene directly on body temperature to address depression symptoms.”
HIGHER TEMPERATURE LINKED TO MORE SEVERE DEPRESSION
For this study, Dr. Mason and her team analyzed data from more than 20,000 study participants from 106 countries. The participants all wore a device measuring their body temperature and self-reported their body temperatures and depression symptoms each day for seven months.
At the conclusion of the study, researchers found study participants had higher body temperatures with each increasing level of depression symptom severity.
“Our finding that increasing levels of depression was associated with increasing body temperature is novel,” Dr. Mason said.
“There are many unanswered questions about the link between body temperature and depression,” said Dr. Mason.
“Inflammation may be a factor, and we are looking at this in our ongoing work. Thermosensory pathways may also play a role — these pathways relay sensory information from our periphery (think, our skin) to our central nervous system. We can think of them as ‘gateways’ to neural systems that impact our mood and cognitive function,” she added.
SAUNA VERSUS ICE BATH FOR TREATING DEPRESSION
The research team believes these findings highlight the potential for new depression treatments focused on lowering body temperature.
In the study, they state these findings may support the use of interventions that temporarily raise body temperature, such a hot yoga, hyperthermic baths, and infra-red saunas.
“Ironically, heating people up actually can lead to rebound body temperature lowering that lasts longer than simply cooling people down directly, as through an ice bath,” she explains.
Research has also looked at the opposite by using cold therapies such as cryotherapy and ice baths as a potential depression treatment.
A study published in June 2020 reported that whole-body cryotherapy helps reduce mental health deterioration in mood disorders, such as depression.
Research published in December 2021 found a single immersion in cold water can help improve a person’s mood.
“Future controlled prospective studies comparing different methods for cooling off would help mental health professionals develop more efficacious body-temperature strategies for mitigating mood,” Dr. Small added.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/heat-therapy-sauna-better-outcomes-treating-depression-cold-exposure#More-research-needed-on-body-cooling-methods
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STIMULATE YOUR VAGUS NERVE IF YOU NEED TO CALM DOWN
You’re likely very familiar with the calming effects of a few deep breaths. But take a step back: Have you ever considered *why* deep breathing—and its cousins meditation and yoga—is so dang relaxing? (Hint: It’s not just because it forces you to literally slow down.) When you partake in this activity, you’re stimulating your vagus nerve, which exercises incredible power within your body.
It’s pronounced “Vegas,” like the city, but what happens in the vagus nerve doesn’t stay in the vagus nerve. The longest of the cranial nerves, it starts at the base of your brain. “It connects your throat, ear, and facial muscles and travels down both sides of the neck to the heart and lungs, through the stomach and intestines, touching almost every organ on its way down,” says Kelly Vincent, PsyD, a clinical psychologist in Encinitas, California. Makes sense, then, that vagus means “wandering” in Latin.
This superhighway serves as a communication channel connecting the digestive system and your brain, which means it’s responsible for any “gut” feelings you get (reason enough to keep it in good shape!). Also hugely important: It helps your nervous system switch between the sympathetic mode (triggering the fight-or-flight response that raises heart rate) and the parasympathetic mode (when breathing normalizes and bodily functions settle into neutral).
But when you’re dealing with chronic stress, the vagus nerve loses its ability to send you back into parasympathetic mode (called vagal dysfunction), and you remain stuck on overdrive.
This stress then puts you at risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and depression and anxiety, as well as GI disorders, research shows. Problems with this nerve are also linked to symptoms of burnout, such as emotional exhaustion and lack of energy, per a study in Psychosomatic Medicine, and that can make you irritable and snappy in relationships. Whew, that’s a lot!
The reassuring news is that just as with any other part of your body, you can strengthen and improve function. Take that, modern stressors. Toning the vagus nerve boosts your body’s resiliency, or the ability to toggle between states of stress and calm, says a study from U.K. researchers. Greater vagal activation has also been shown to be anti-inflammatory (and it just helps ya feel better overall!).
Working on it isn’t a one-and-done situation, though—repetition is key, adds Vincent (we’re talking at least once a day). “The more you practice something, the more the brain reaches for it when it needs it most. You’re essentially carving out new neural pathways you can access in a time of high anxiety,” she says. Here’s how to help that big fellow do its job, for the sake of your mental and physical health. And yes, deep breathing is involved, but if that’s not your thing? There are plenty of unexpected ways to give it a little push.
Okay, starting with the biggie because it’s the foundation: “There are sensory receptors in the lungs that connect to the vagus nerve and trigger the parasympathetic nervous system,” says Cynthia Ackrill, MD, a fellow at the American Institute of Stress. But it’s not enough to just breathe. The calm-down process happens as you exhale, because this slows your heart rate. Therefore, it’s important to make your exhale longer than your inhale, she says. (Apps like Breathwrk can help with that.)
This is also why other practices that slow your breath, like yoga and meditation, are useful tools for vagal activation and de-stressing in general. But, deep breathing is tough if you’re upset. If you’re on the brink of a freak-out, imagine blowing through a straw. Adding resistance by pursing your lips can help lengthen your exhale.
Happily hum
Talk about an earworm: “The vagus nerve passes through the inner ear, so you can stimulate it by engaging in active listening to soothing music,” says Arielle Schwartz, PhD, a clinical psychologist specializing in resilience in Boulder, Colorado. That can include not only a favorite song, but an audiobook or a guided meditation with an especially calming voice. (There are also vagus nerve music programs.) Soft, low sounds—like a cat’s purr—are inherently soothing.
Another way to tickle your vagus nerve? Generate sound on your own through singing or humming. That will tap into the nerve as it passes through your larynx and pharynx in the throat. (Bonus: Your exhalation is also so much longer with these vocalizations.) Placing your hands over your ears will amplify the sensation of the sound, adds Schwartz.
Pursue the cold
Frigid temps activate a physiological response called the diving reflex. This slows your heart rate and breathing and directs blood flow to the brain for relaxation, says Schwartz. To trigger it, spend some time outside on a brisk day, or hold ice on your face or neck, or splash your skin with cold water.
Find fresh air
Taking a walk outside is one sure-fire way to downregulate your nervous system and improve your mood, says the psychologist B. Grace Bullock, PhD, author of Mindful Relationships: Seven Skills for Success, Integrating the Science of Mind, Body & Brain. And this doesn’t have to be a long-hike situation. Nature is inherently relaxing to the nervous system, making it so much easier to slow down your breathing, which, again, helps the vagus nerve do its thing. “I love to walk to my mailbox or take my dog out for a quick reset,” she says. Just leave your devices at home so you can take in the surroundings and get a truly calm. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-stimulate-the-vagus-nerve-to-de-stress-and-find-calm?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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KNOWING SOMEONE HAS DIED
In ways yet to be explained by science, some people know when someone has died without being directly told. The information may come through unexpected and nontraditional ways.
Anecdotes:
Writing to the Los Angeles Times in response to an article about the book Meaningful Coincidences (Beitman, 2022), psychologist Kevin Flynn reported that he knew when his older brother had died:
~ In March 2021, I had a dream at 7:06 am regarding the release of a butterfly from a wine bottle. I woke up, noted the time and wrote in my journal that my only brother had died age 79. Five minutes later my sister-in-law called to tell me that my brother Matt Flynn had passed away.
Thank you for your article. Irish mysticism is alive and well. Cheers. ~
Rawlette (2019) provided this dream example: A woman had terrifying dreams about a man she loved 20 years previously. She saw him in a velvet-lined casket, dressed in a blue suit. The next day, a mutual friend told her that the man had died and was placed in a velvet-lined casket wearing a blue suit.
Carl Jung (1963) reported that he was suddenly awoken by a dull headache “as though something had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull.” The next day he received a telegram saying that his patient had shot himself in the head. The bullet had come to rest on the back wall of his skull.
In the 1930s, Rose Rudkin woke up knowing her mother, living in London, had died. She did not know how she knew. A cablegram soon arrived confirming this impression (Stevenson, 1970).
The simultaneous experience by one person of the distress of another at a distance is not uncommon. The most common triggers for these experiences are death or dying and major illnesses or injuries (Yusim, 2017).
Data-based research
Twins serve as a prototype for these kinds of experiences. The largest number of reports of this kind come from twins (Playfair, 2012; Mann and Jaye, 2007). There are similar stories about mothers and their children as well as other closely bonded pairs (Stevenson, 1970).
The more than 2,500 respondents to the Weird Coincidence Survey (Coleman, Beitman, Celebi, 2009) reported that they “occasionally” experienced the pain of a loved one at a distance. In Stevenson’s review of 160 published cases on this subject, one-third involved a parent and child. Friends and acquaintances were involved in about 28 percent. Husband-and-wife pairs were involved in about 14 percent and siblings in about 15 percent. The similar percentages of parent–child and friend–acquaintance simultaneous distress suggest that emotional bonds, rather than genetic similarities, facilitate these interactions. Stevenson’s reports are well-documented by follow-up interviews with both the person who experienced the coincidence and the people who witnessed the event (Stevenson, 1970).
I named this coincidence pattern "simulpathity," from the Latin word simul, which means “simultaneous,” and the Greek root pathy, which means both “suffering” and “feeling,” as in the words sympathy and empathy. With sympathy (“suffering together”), the sympathetic person is aware of the suffering of the other. With simulpathity, the person involved is usually not consciously aware of the suffering of the other except for those pairs with whom this shared pain is a regular occurrence. Only later is the simultaneity of the distress recognized.
I coined the word simulpathity to describe a personal experience. Late in the evening of February 26, 1973, when I was 31 years old, I found myself bent over the kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking on something that was caught in my throat. But there was nothing to cough up as I hadn’t eaten anything. I choked for a very long time before I could swallow and breathe normally again. The next day, my birthday, my brother called to tell me that our father, 3,000 miles and three time zones away, had passed away in Wilmington, Delaware, just as I was choking in California. My father had bled into his throat and choked on his own blood. The timing led me to think that it couldn’t possibly have been random. Through reading and research, I could confirm that my experience with my father was no anomaly.
“The data are friendly” according to a perennial scientific research motto. Sometimes data accumulate before the phenomenon can be explained, and that is as it should be. We need the accumulation of data to gather the required resources to formally develop a potential explanatory model.
Several different sources, both anecdotal and data-based, suggest that human beings do occasionally experience the distress of a loved one at a distance. This phenomenon takes many forms including dream symbols (the butterfly being released from a wine bottle) or realistic dream images (the man in a blue suit), direct analog (Jung’s head pain and my choking), and direct knowing, as reported by Rose Rudkin.
These phenomena fit under the general term “parapsychology,” for which much data are accumulating to suggest the reality of many of these (Cardeña, 2018). Future research may confirm the wide range of ways in which people experience simulpathity and perhaps lead to models for how it happens. ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/connecting-with-coincidence/202212/knowing-someone-has-died
Oriana:
My father had an interesting experience during wartime, while hiding out on a farm. He had a dream that five wild ducks flew across sky. Suddenly the middle duck fell to the ground. My father felt great sadness when he saw that.
To him the dream was transparent: the five wild ducks were his five sisters. His grief led him to think that one of them must have just died.
It turned out that around that time, one of his sisters did indeed die at Ravensbrück, the largest Nazi concentration camp for women.
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ending on beauty (the loveliest stanza of the opening poem)
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders
~ Wallace Stevens
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