Articles 16.
16.1 *
A World In Upheavel - Freya India & N.S. Lyons
Freya India : “I’ve also been trying to articulate this feeling of being unmoored and uprooted in modern life. Against this backdrop, it’s no wonder girls and young women are falling apart. How can we hold it together in a world of constant upheaval?
That’s why we decided to come together for the conversation below. We talk about the chaos and instability of the modern world, from the loss of shared moral values to a growing crisis of authority. We also discuss where atomised individuals are seeking support and direction, whether through an obsession with self-optimisation or an over-reliance on therapy culture.”
…
Freya India : “In terms of what it’s doing to us, I think, ironically, it’s making us mentally ill. People say therapy culture is stereotypically feminine and it harms men by expecting them to behave more like women, which I agree with—but I actually think it’s worse for women. Girls ruminate more than boys. Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate! Their heads are spinning. Maybe I’m anxious all the time because I have ADHD? Maybe my ADHD is a trauma response? Wait—is it PTSD or a personality disorder?
I also think we get it backwards sometimes. People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. Young people hang out with each other far less than previous generations did at the same age. Friendships are much more shallow and superficial. I don’t get the sense that young people are honestly opening up to each other. We talk to therapists. We join online forums. We open up on TikTok, or chat with mental health chatbots. When we do talk about our problems, we disguise it in DSM diagnoses and obscure therapy-speak.
…
I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! Modern culture asks young people to accept and excuse more and more behaviour, to adjust to more and more change, and then diagnoses them when they can’t cope. So lately in my writing I’ve been trying to emphasise that it’s okay to be emotional. It’s understandable to feel anxious and insecure right now. That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things.
Because yes, humans have emotions. Women are emotional! That seems almost offensive to say now, but I don’t see why. I actually think not properly expressing our emotions is what makes us neurotic. The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. And an absolute joke to call it empowering.
…
N.S. Lyons: “Maybe it’s just me, but today there definitely does seem to be a deeply creepy top-down push to sever us from human connection, or even the human in general, and replace it with the digital and the unhuman. It’s as if there’s a growing suspicion of human interaction as something inherently messy and dangerous, while the virtual world is seen as cleaner and safer. We can envision this will, if taken to its maximum extent, deposit us in a “no contact society” like that which, for some reason, has been planned as a future for South Korea (with predictable results so far). Is it possible for us to disentangle the growing role of therapy culture from that of the internet and social media, or do you think these two forces have become inextricably linked in some way?”
…
All this makes me think about how, from the outside, it looks as if young people are inundated with mental health advice. We have so much guidance! But the truth is, our culture has very little to say to anxious young people. So little to offer. We are too afraid to give actual guidance. There are no clear milestones or markers to follow to adulthood anymore. We stopped appealing to moral character. We got rid of anything more substantial—that was judgemental!—or anything to assure young people that they belong to something bigger—that was superstitious! All that’s left are endless empty platitudes. We tell young people whatever you want to do, do it! As long as it makes you happy! And if they say they feel crippling anxiety or insecurity, we don’t wonder if it’s this morally ambiguous world, the collapse of any real community, this feeling that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves. We don’t investigate further. We diagnose them and are done with it. We call this a culture of compassion, but I’d say that’s far from the truth.
…
N.S. Lyons: “Therapy culture definitely affects men, though I think in different ways. There are of course some men who adopt the feminine model of the therapeutic, becoming the soyboys of internet infamy. But increasingly the equivalent “rabbit hole” for men seems to be one of what we could call “self-optimization.” Instead of obsessing over trauma, we have young men obsessing over whether they’re doing enough. Whether they’re waking up early enough to get in their daily stoic journaling practice, internet-sourced ideal workout routine, ice bath, macro-calculated meal prep, and nootropic supplement regimen—all before heading out to grind their underpaid day job while listening to Andrew Huberman podcasts and thinking about how they need to side-hustle more on their passive income scheme. Others obsess over trying to discover and capitalize on whatever laws of science apply to relationships and the female mind, so that they can potentially find a leg up in a ruthless dating market.
Frankly this is all probably still healthier than women’s tendency toward internal rumination and self-diagnosis, since it at least emphasizes personal agency and encourages taking action in the world (and so is also a healthier choice than that of the large subset of men who check out entirely and retire to a quiet life of video games and depression). But the self-optimizers’ is still an anxious response to exactly the same societal situation, in which as you say there’s been a “collapse of any real community” and the dominant feeling is “that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves.” It’s the frenzied behavior of atomized individuals adrift in a world without anything solid, reliable, or permanent to support them, in which they can’t be sure of anything except relentless competition with each other.
I also see the predicament facing both men and women as in large part rooted in our modern crisis of authority. By authority I mean that power which can tell you what to do and you will accept this decision as legitimate and trustworthy. Our egalitarian culture is basically allergic to the idea of legitimate authority, or at least moral authority and all its traditional sources. Today it tends to be associated with authoritarianism and oppression of the individual.
Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.
But without any legitimate external authority to shape the self, whether cultural or familial, there can’t be any real stability for the individual. There can be no real constraints on the desires of the self, since that would have to come from an authority beyond it; nor can there even be any awareness—let alone shame—that what the self desires might be wrong in some way. Because without an authority providing a moral framework there can be no right or wrong, indeed no moral absolutes at all—without some authority to judge, who’s to say? And today we abhor judgement. But it is external authority that helps keep the self anchored, imposing some structured identity, and directing it toward higher-order ends, including proper relationships with others. Without any authority, there is no universally recognized framework for establishing when someone is behaving wrongly toward another. Nor can we truly connect with others if we cannot move past self-regard. So relationships of all kinds become tainted by solipsism and laced with suspicions of exploitation and repression. This status quo seems to be causing all kinds of social chaos today.
You’ve similarly written before that: “My guess is that what we need most in this chaotic world is moral direction. What we need most in a rapidly changing world is rootedness.” That, “when I listen to the misery and confusion of my generation beneath it I hear a heartbreaking need—a need to be bound to others, to a community, to a moral code, to something more. This is not enough.” I think that’s exactly right. Without a strong preexisting moral and social framework to bind us and guide us—a “cultural jig” as the philosopher Matt Crawford would call it—we may be “free” to stretch in any direction we please but are left exposed without shelter, and without firm contact with ground in which we can grow the roots of an unshakeable character of our own.
…
Freya India: “But it’s not true. Human connection is messy, it’s unpredictable, we fall in love in weird and incommunicable ways. And sometimes it’s not a perfect, rigid routine that makes you productive—it’s the messy, unplanned morning waking up next to someone you love. Sometimes it’s the chaos of your kids clambering into bed with you that inspires you to be better, not the morning breathwork or perfectly timed caffeine shot to activate your adenosine system.
I saw a tweet recently that was the perfect example of this. This young guy shared his Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine: journaling, red light therapy, breathwork, meditation, gym, ice bath, sauna, reading, all in perfect silence. No interruptions; no spontaneity. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but it’s just not the kind of lifestyle you can have with other people around. Watching it, my first thought was, wow, if this is the ideal, no wonder young people are delaying marriage and having children. We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient…and alone.
And eventually, you end up seeing other human beings as distractions, as annoyances. Other people become obstacles. For women, men become obstacles to our healing and mental health. For men, women seem like obstacles to their ambition and self-development. Or vice versa. It all seems like an avoidance strategy to me, everyone trying very hard not to be vulnerable and get hurt.
Maybe it’s the hopeless romantic in me but, in my mind, you do all those things for love. For family. We try to heal, we work harder, for our relationships, to build a more stable and reliable foundation for the people we care about. Isn’t that the point? What’s all this for, otherwise? But now it seems like we’re optimising ourselves away from each other, hiding away to heal ourselves, protecting our peace so fiercely we end up alone.
16.2 *****
Tech Dollar 2: The War of the Worlds and Fate of the Dollar - @dantalks1
“In this article we will recap the predictions made in TechDollar, both micro and macro, and will also go over what I think is just as important, which is the anti-predictions that we made as well.
We will then go over the competing systems emerging to the TechDollar, the geo-politics involved, and how long can the current western system go on for in light of the principles we talked about in the original article.
…
In 2020, we made a series of predictions for both personal and global macro. These predictions at the time were both counter-intuitive to financial, economic and geopolitical commentators. However, they are the conclusions of following first principles. Those who listened made out like absolute bandits, securing without a doubt the best returns that exist in the market, especially on a risk adjusted basis.
In the Twitter spaces, and private consultations we went over more in-depth due to people asking what specifically they should do. However these were all present in the article as well.
…
The primary positive predictions were:
Big Tech were significantly undervalued, even though their market caps at the time were at all time highs both individually and historically. They are the prime drivers of the American, and by extension the world economic engine. We separated the companies into 3 categories.
Primary infrastructure - which is Apple, Microsoft and Google. I suggested that this should be at least 50% of a portfolio, with Apple being minimum 25%. While at the time I thought this was highly aggressive, I have to amend this take. I now see Apple equity as the new current risk-free rate, and debt should not be touched. And that all investments now should be compared vs Apple as the minimum benchmark. And that Apple and Microsoft are fast becoming the infrastructure of the world. With Google close behind, they are struggling currently with their core business function. So I am downgrading them slightly, but not completely.
Hardware infrastructure - this being Nvidia, Intel and AMD, becoming the backbone of American industrial tech hard power.
Support, network, corporate and advertising infrastructure - This being Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Salesforce etc.. This by far was the worst performing from an investment perspective, but more because of specific company issues more than anything predictive from a logic perspective.
The real value was going to come in the form of strategic hard assets - Which is oil, food and commodities (you can print money, you can’t print goods).
Due to money printing, this was going to exacerbate the gap between the rich and poor even further as that is the mechanism behind the phenomena. As government deficits are the cause for the money printing, the printing will not stop. This exacerbation has only gotten worse.
I also made a series of economic predictions that were completely unparalleled at the time. I both correctly called that we would see much, much higher inflation and that we would also see much higher interest rates.. I also specifically predicted the inflation numbers of 7% official with 15% unofficial. While its self evident now, back then I was the only one saying this. I suggested people borrow money at back then 2-3% for long term fixed periods. If you followed this, you also made out like a bandit. Particularly those who used this method in property, as suggested.
Food and primary commodities were going to be the most important, and that flexible capital were going to be your best friend. - Current food inflation is at least between 30-50% for all items since publishing Tech Dollar.
Macro predictions that because people still believed in theories other than TechDollar for the US Dollars power, that nations and major institutions would make significant errors in their calculations of how to proceed. Particularly China, Western governments the gulf states and a multitude of investment houses.
And that due to the logic imbalance between modern western religious beliefs and reality, institutional reputations would be sacrificed to maintain liberal religious power. Leading to a collapse in confidence internally of institutions both domestic and international.
…
The split between the physical economy and the digital economy in the west has widened, and will continue to do so. The technology infrastructure is the main driving force behind western economic power and this has only accelerated. This while causing political instability domestically in the US, has maintained political (financial) stability internationally.
…
The value difference between customer and product is, I still think this is the primary reason for the USD dominance, and the true underlying power behind the continued usage of the USD globally, despite the US government abusing this for domestic and ideological reasons with inflation, sanctions and deficits. Meaning, while the valuations are expensive, they are still the best assets in the world, by a significant margin.
Companies, institutions and especially governments will always act in their best interests. The delta between the value of the modern tech infrastructure, and the price they are selling their products at, the USD will remain supreme until this ends. To think of it another way, ask someone how much you would need to pay them to not use a modern smartphone/iPhone. Or ask a business how much they would have to be paid to not use modern western tech in their business. The difference between that price they say, and what is currently being charged by these companies, is the value that the US government will be able to continue to extract via money printing and deficits.
While physical goods and manufacturing, and even high end manufacturing is important. The tech infrastructure in terms of value and the difficulty of replicability of it means that the Dollar will remain supreme and dominant to the majority of countries worldwide. This also encompasses the underwater and physical network infrastructure of the world, but this is a lot less US centric even though it’s primarily now controlled by western entities. The tech infrastructure is simply far too valuable and the advantages it gives far outweigh any current existing system.
This is the real reality of the situation. As long as this exists, and the tech infrastructure is priced and sold in USD, the USD remains supreme worldwide. This is what is actually still underpinning western global dominance and enabling American power. Not any other reason most people espouse.
…
Reserve currencies since we have understood them have been intertwined with the geopolitics as much as the economics of the system that sustains it. Which is why the incumbent generally converts that economic power to military dominance. When faced with a challenger, the up and coming competitor must unseat and surpass both the economic and military power of the incumbent. Reserve currency holders have generally been the dominant naval power of the world, atleast since the 14th century. This is primarily due to the protection of international trade, which is the unspoken agreement that the world makes with the incumbent. While unsavoury to many, this is the burden of the position within the international system.
…
End of unipolarity and international system
For the last 2 generations, we have been in a unipolar system. What this means is that the incumbent western power (US/NATO) has been supreme and unchallenged, without any great rival or competitor since 1990. This is a very rare occurrence in history, and while in my opinion still intact, it now faces a real threat to it, the largest since 1990. This for the foreseeable future is coming to an end and we will be in a multi-polar system. With the western system on one side, and the Chinese/BRICS on the other. This means the return of great power conflict and the return of realpolitik structure. This has been obvious to anyone who comes from the realist school of thought, but this is very difficult for someone trained within a modern liberal understanding of the world.
One thing that is misunderstood within the west, is that the west is a ruthless great power. Unlike anything ever seen in history, those who are insulated from it aren’t exposed to this, but we are the most ruthless great power in history. It’s important to understand that the system developed by the west, during the unipolar moment, was specifically designed to attempt to religiously guarantee western power. Because the ideological system driving the western system at the time was liberalism. The last 40 years have been us trying to convert the world to liberalism(our new incumbent system), to attempt to ensure global peace. The reverse of this will now begin to occur, and many will be very surprised, (especially China and Mid-east) at just how ruthless the west will be in regards to the countries aligned against the America/western system.
…
This is going to be a war in every sense, between these two systems. They are competing for ultimate power within the international system. Only one can win. In these kinds of conflicts, you cannot play both sides, to play both sides is to be an enemy of one supporting the other. This is going to be a very different political and business environment unlike anything most have experienced in the past 40 years. Where it was a positive sum game of globalization and internationalism. We are now moving into a situation of protectionist structures between two competing blocks.
…
My opinion is that should the US dollar fail, or lose in a global conflict, there is a possible competitor to the dollar, but that this isn’t enough to supplant the dollar as the global reserve currency. At least not within the next decade, which is what matters to most reading this. The BRICS system doesn’t have the unique economic requirement, nor the global trust, nor the infrastructure to support it. From this perspective, the threat to the dollar externally while it exists, is nowhere near what many portray it as. The greatest threat externally is a diminishment of western power, rather than a supplanting of it in the medium term (5 years).
…
I want to debunk one theory that i’ve heard from Austrian theorists that the US is in a worse position than Japan, because Japan had high savings and savings culture while US doesn’t. The US is able to absorb value through printing of the rest of the world, until the tech infrastructure is replicated, people will use the USD until others can offer a comparative tech product. Which means the US govt has access effectively to the savings of the rest of the world. Which is where I get my statement that money printing is how they extract value of those subservient to them. Those who wish to use US tech infrastructure, will be subject to this value extraction.
…
While deficits of $1T+ per year, with debt repayments of nearly $1T themselves, people think this is unsustainable short term and will combust. I disagree, there is atleast a 5-10 year runway without the existential crisis, however as I said in TechDollar 1, it will get worse every year, the money printing will exacerbate all the issues internally that will make the ideological crisis and internal civil war going on in America and the west much more explosive and unpredictable. However the existential crisis will eventually come, but most severely underestimate what money printing is going to be able to enable and paper over until that time. And that means a devaluation of another 50% over the next 10 years, effectively halves the debt in real terms. Yes it will exacerbate the split between the rich and the poor, and a massive transfer of wealth etc, but in terms of the functional structure of society, it will remain intact if this is the only variable.
…
Whats to come?
1970s redux, history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
As the higher interest rates will start to encumber the real economy. Effectively, what will happen is the “real” economy will go into a depression, with much higher inflation simultaneously.
Remove the dollar amounts in your mind for a second, the govt seeks to consume more real resources(oranges) from the economy. This requires a net reduction in the consumption of everyone else in order to facilitate this. The method it uses to do this can vary as I explained in Tech Dollar 1, but the logic remains the same. And they are going to print money to facilitate spending from the govt. Which means they are going to have to do some form of yield curve control, and some form of debt monetization again, which is the fundamental cause of inflation. So as long as the govt is running deficits that it has to monetize in order to pay for, inflation will continue at much higher rates.
…
Lending institutions will have their book value collapse even further (as I said in TD1, to avoid debt and credit institutions like the plague, they're completely screwed) and the ability to lend money will dry up for the majority, and even the very well connected and funded. Cash flow will reign supreme, and cash will begin to become king again. As access to credit will be much harder, as higher interest rates, with higher inflation will cause lenders and lending institutions to completely clam up. Even though they will be devaluing the value of cash via money printing, during this process, it will be worth holding, in order to acquire assets, particularly illiquid ones that produce real goods and real cash flows. Ensure that you buy at extremely attractive multiples as a risk premium for holding cash. These kinds of deals are beginning to occur, but it will become much more extreme going forward.
…
This is the fertile ground of political extremism, as the economic system will begin to fail for the majority, large swaths will seek more extreme solutions to solve the glaring problems that the current ruling ideology has caused. This isn’t an American phenomenon, this will start to happen across many countries in the west, as the driver of this is ideological, however the economy is the fuel to the fire. And as the economy gets worse, the ideological splits will become more and more extreme.
So you will have civil / ideological wars within western countries, while the security apparatus of those countries will also be fighting an external conflict and security competition with China and the BRICS block.
Additionally, manufacturing will slowly be attempted to be forced back into western countries, or adjacent countries due to the security competition. However due to the fact that policy makers do not understand how to do this effectively, my guess is that it will happen somewhat, but it won’t happen at the speed desired. Simply because of the ideological and political issues internally within the west that needs to be washed out.
…
The current Russo-Ukraine war, in my opinion, is one of the largest strategic mistakes of modern western liberal strategy. Not for moral reasons, but because it goes against the basics of power and realpolitik strategy.
From the most basic power strategy, if 1 and 2 go into conflict, it’s the person who teams up with 3 that generally gets an advantage. 1 generally sides with 3 to beat 2. 3 prefers 1 to 2, due to risk aversion. A historical example of this was the US allying with the Soviet Union to beat Nazi Germany.
Basic strategy would say that America and the west should be teaming up with Russia to contain China. However due to the Russo-Ukraine war, this has forced Russia and China together alongside Iran to create a real power block that can wage a possible threat to western dominance. From a strategic point of view this is the most inadvisable logic, but the current western power structure is based on religious liberalism and not rational realist strategic thinking.
…
One thing that is for sure, is global conflicts are going to be much more prevalent going forward. The golden era that we have been accustomed to of relative world peace is coming to an end, as great power competition returns.
…
Censorship absolutely works, and so do sanctions. However they don’t work in the way most think of them. They are able to suppress capacity and capability in the short to medium term. They are able to disrupt supply chains, understandings etc. But they aren’t able to completely shut down an industry, if they have the components and enough technical understanding to create their own. However, if they do not, then it will work as intended. But this is a pressure valve that is able to work, but not forever.
For example, during the cold war, the US blocked the Soviet Unions access to GPS, which is sort of the modern day chips, but this forced the USSR to create GLONASS, which is their own version. Is it inferior? Yes, does it work? Yes. So you can see, while it does work, if the competing entity has enough technical knowhow, you can’t stop thinking and you can’t stop ideas. Reverse engineering what’s known is much easier than creating something that you aren’t sure is possible.
This doesn’t mean that they are not effective, but they are not the panacea that they are thought out to be, and it creates bad incentive structures for people to subvert and skirt them, as it becomes extremely profitable to do so.
Economic sanctions occur when what the good being attempted to be restricted is a tradable and fungible good. This is what they are trying to do with Russia.
They are effectively consuming western historical value for current power, as they are ideologues and they see these threats as existential, so they are using everything they have, including western cultural norms of private property to win at all costs.”
16.3
The Age of Abandonment - Freya India
“I’ve written a lot about my generation and fear. Our fear of love, and fear of life. But I’ve been getting the sense lately that there’s some ultimate fear underlying all this, running through everything. And I’m becoming convinced that it’s fear of abandonment.
…
Of course families have fallen apart in every generation. But even a few decades ago children from broken homes had communities, they had neighbourhoods. Now our families fall apart and there is nothing, nobody, to catch us. We live far from extended family. We are more estranged than ever. And I can’t get across how little familiarity Gen Z has with community. When some of us hear the word community we think of Instagram. We think of Reddit. Or abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities, nothing real or solid. Which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done?
Plus, total abandonment of any sense that we belong to something bigger. Loss of faith—not just in religion, but in all social bonds. No sense that there’s anything binding us, that we even share the same values. Forget loving our neighbour, we can’t even make eye contact with them. Nothing holds us together anymore. We are alone.
And add to all that, so little sympathy. Ours is a culture choking on its own compassion yet offering next to none for children of divorce. We are the first generation to grow up without stigma around family breakdown, but near total normalisation of it. And when you normalise something, you stigmatise the reaction. So many marriages end; what did you expect? Your friends’ families are the same; what’s wrong with you? It’s just a contract anyway. Kids are resilient. All this tells us that abandonment is trivial. That if you feel deeply affected by it you might be the problem. And anyone who does try to articulate the pain is treated with such suspicion, accused of having some political agenda, rather than just being overcome with this feeling. This feeling of absolute abandonment.
The feeling we’re left with, God. How to describe it? It’s the feeling that nobody has our back. That we can’t trust anyone. That this world is terrifying and we are powerless, but if we attach to anything for support, we will be abandoned. I see it everywhere; it cuts to the core of this generation. Difficulty trusting people, hypersensitivity to criticism, low self-esteem, constant need for external validation—all are abandonment symptoms. And I’m not saying this explains everything, or we all feel this way, but that we underestimate how many young people are carrying this around. This feeling of being abandoned and fear of it happening again. Beneath what looks like the age of entitlement, below the culture of narcissism, this is the age of abandonment.
For one, fear of abandonment explains much of Gen Z’s lack of resilience. We fear life because we feel alone. That’s the thing about attachment—you need to depend to be independent. You need a stable base to venture out. Something to rely on to take risks. Some stability to cope with chaos. Otherwise you can’t explore with confidence. If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic. You will stay stagnant, afraid to move. Maybe this generation is slow to grow up because we have no foundation to fall back on. How can we stand on our own two feet when the ground keeps crumbling beneath us?
Fear of abandonment can also explain much more culturally. I think the lesson many of us took from being left was to aim fire at marriage. Can’t blame our parents, we love them, so blame the institution. Burn it to the ground. Smile as it burns. Laugh at anyone who runs into the flames. It destroyed our family so we’ll destroy it. And I don’t mean those simply choosing not to marry or have children, but who talk about these commitments with utter contempt. I think the root of that is fear. Not feeling safe. When young women rage against marriage and motherhood so viscerally what I’m really hearing is it’s not safe to marry. It’s not safe to have kids. Why would you risk that? I see conservatives mock young women speaking like this, but listen, they’ve clearly got something to say. What if they’re trying to say this doesn’t work, and if it does work then why was I abandoned? This is the thing that broke me, why would I go near it? If it’s so easy how come my parents couldn’t hold it together? That’s what I hear in chemistry is a red flag. In marriage is a trap. And I think this is a major and often missing explanation for falling marriage and birth rates—maybe it’s not selfishness, maybe it’s not narcissism, maybe deep down at the heart of it, we are terrified someone will walk out. That they will decide, one day, to give up. That even if we gave it our all, it would never be good enough. We simply don’t believe anyone will stay.
Explains some of the extreme feminist sentiment, too. The first man I ever relied on walked out, so fuck men. Red Pill as well. Women give up so why bother. We decided the answer is resistance to love, to declare it unreachable. No need for families. Dismantle the ideals. Take down the traditions. Vilify all men. Mock fathers. No heroes allowed. Love isn’t real anyway. Hear about a good, healthy marriage and do all we can to debunk it. Our response is not to try, to take family less seriously, to put less of ourselves into relationships, do it all half-heartedly so it hurts less in the end.
…
But the answer cannot be to retreat from relationships. It has to be to take them more seriously. To kill that urge to run and avoid. Because we’ve got two choices here—crumble under the weight of this thing or go all in, against the odds. Forget pretending that love and family aren’t important, that they are oppressive, that loving ourselves is enough. Forget torching the whole thing. We have to try even harder.
And become an example. Find someone and commit fully. Be a parent who teaches that loyalty isn’t too much to ask for, who shows it’s safe to stay. If I have a daughter someday I don’t want to model for her a strong independent woman who doesn’t need a man; I want to model a strong woman who shows it’s okay to depend on someone, I feel like culturally that’s a much more important message now. It’s okay to take a risk to be with someone! To give up some of yourself to belong to something bigger! And actually, that’s independence—feeling loved, feeling backed, and finding resilience from that, becoming a competent individual who can stand on their own. I’m just so sceptical of this belief that people can become emotionally enlightened or self-sufficient enough that they can handle life by themselves, and anyone barely hanging on these days is too dependent and needy. It’s not a weakness to want to feel at home. We weren’t designed to do this alone.”
16.4 *
Living With Intensity: Giftedness & Self Actualization - Jennifer Harvey Sallin
“The book Living with Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults is a beautiful collection of articles which offer an introduction to Kazimierz Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration, and its application throughout the lifespan of gifted individuals. Dabrowski was a Polish psychiatrist, psychologist and physician whose research and theoretical work centered on what he called Advanced Personal Development. As a basis for this development, he described a sort of "uncommon intensity" as a generator for the inner conflict that leads to advanced personality development. He called these heightened physiological experiences "overexcitabilities".
OVEREXCITABILITIES
Intellectual
Intense curiosity, love of knowledge and learning, love of problem solving, probing questions, search for truth, understanding, knowledge, and discovery, keen observation, reflective thought, introspection, avid reading, sustained intellectual effort, love of theory and analysis, and independent thinking.
Emotional
Intensity of emotional feelings and relational attachments, wide range of complex emotions, strong memory for feelings, high concern for others, heightened sense of right, wrong, injustice and hypocrisy, empathy, responsibility, and self-examination. Tendency toward feelings of guilt, anxiety, loneliness, depression and somatic expression of emotions.
Imaginational
Intensity of visualization, vivid dreams, love of fantasy, creativity, inventions, love of music and art, good sense of humor, preference for the unusual and unique, fear of the unknown.
Sensual
Enhanced sensory experience of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile stimulus. Appreciation of beauty, need for desire or comfort. Sensual expression of emotional tension (i.e. overeating).
Psychomotor
Physical expression of emotions. Surplus of energy, such as intense physical activity, competitiveness, rapid speech, restlessness, nervous habits and tics, and impulsiveness. Preference for fast action.
To put Dabrowski’s theory in very simple terms, he believed that innately heightened – or intense – experience in these areas of overexcitability (particularly those of emotional, imaginational and intellectual) forms the basic groundwork for the complex process of working toward our personality ideal. Given that a gifted people have a heightened intellectual experience compared to the norm, often accompanied by intellectual overexcitability, the reasoning goes that a gifted person may be more likely to go through a "positive disintegration". This is the start of the journey to self-actualization, or in Dabrowski's terms, the journey toward our personality ideal. I want to note here that giftedness and overexcitabilities have often been conflated with giftedness in the giftedness literature.
So why would heightened experience be the groundwork for self-actualization? Dabrowski felt that intense ways of being caused a sort of "inner conflict", and this inner conflict generated a need for introspection. Through introspection, a sort of "vertical tension" – an inner disharmony between what we are and what we believe we “ought to be” according to our own uncommonly intense ideals – arises. This phrase “according to our own ideals” is a capital distinction in Dabrowski’s theory: by "personality ideal", he wasn’t referring to the self as conformed to social or cultural norms, or any external authority, but the self as based on a self-chosen ideal.
…
In Living with Intensity, Daniels and Piechowski liken Dabrowski’s “multilevel journey” of self-actualization to the process of climbing a mountain. Some people never develop a sense of inner, vertical conflict between who they are now (how their lives are now) and who they want to be (how they want their lives to be); so, they don't see a mountain to climb (this was Dabrowski's Level 1). Some people see a mountain, but are too scared or otherwise blocked from starting the climb (Dabrowski's Level 2); Dabrowski called this a "horizontal conflict" because it usually points to a person feeling so conflicted about how others perceive them or what others want (or society wants) from them, that they are unable to allow themselves to develop their own personality ideal based on their own values.
Levels 3 represents the start of the climb. This is when we start letting go of the societal and negatively self-centered "baggage" that is holding us back from moving actively toward our ideal. This level has a "spontaneous" quality to it, as we are not yet fully aware of how the climbing process works. This lack of predictability and control in the process, combined with the fact that we are literally "disintegrating" personality-wise, can be very frightening and frustrating. Periods of self-doubt, anxiety, depression, and extreme disorientation can occur - so much so that at times, it can look very much like pathology. This is especially true if we are surrounded by people who are operating at Levels 1 or 2 and are uninterested in the climb, since they don't understand our need for change. The process can feel like a betrayal of what others around us have upheld as important rules for life.
But Dabrowski considered this disintegration to be very positive: our deconstruction allows us to reconstruct ourselves, based on our own highest personality ideal. This is not to say that Dabrowski believed we could become a "perfect" version of ourselves. Rather, he believed that, with enough willingness to disintegrate and reintegrate, we could learn to act according to our highest principles in a self-directed and relatively consistent manner. Many people in the process of learning this self-directed way of living struggle to always see it as positive, as it can be extremely confrontational to ourselves and to society, and can at times feel lonely, impossible or agonizingly frustrating.
But once we are able to consistently see the positive side of positive disintegration, we move to Level 4, which is no longer spontaneous and out of our control. This is where directed multilevel development begins, because we have enough practice and experiential data to know - experientially, and not just intellectually - that the letting go and disintegrating doesn't destroy us, but rather clears the path for our continued development and gives us access to parts of ourselves that come to feel increasingly essential to our own thriving and relationship with ourselves. Thus, we actively choose to confront challenging situations or let go of outdated beliefs or actions, even when it is painful to do so, because we know that doing so serves our higher ideal. Since we have a stronger sense of how to help ourselves on the climb, we are better able to regulate ourselves when we're feeling scared or overwhelmed, and better able find the right social support that we need to continue walking our path.
Level 5 is “the top of the mountain,” as the metaphor goes. At this level are those who have mastered the art of the climb. They are the self-actualized ones who are able to consistently live out their personality ideal - again, not perfectly, but persistently and with a certain ease and grace in the process. Often, those who reach this level choose to support others in their self-actualization process. I like to think of them as the guides who, having mastered the path, continue to climb up and down the mountain joyfully supporting others who are on their first journey up.
16.5
When Pain Becomes Identity: How 'Woundology' Keeps Us Stuck - Mark Groves
“I have always had a hard time holding space for people who use victim-based language. This is not to be confused with people sharing their pain or suffering or the very real stage of healing where we require our pain and stories to be witnessed and validated… I mean the people who talk about how the world happens “to” them… who are stuck in their pain and suffering. They are perpetual victims of the world and always see the way life and people have let them down… it’s almost as if they’re addicted to it… (more on that below.)
The reason it bothers me is because it’s often used as a way to unconsciously garner empathy. It’s a manipulative way of communicating to “hook” into others. We learn that communicating from our wounds creates a form of power over others. “I’m more wounded than you.” “I’ve been through more than you.” “I’ve suffered more than you.”
Often, we use it as a way to justify our stuckness. We can’t heal the pain because we’re benefiting from living in it. This, of course, sounds like a twisted mind-fuck. “So I live in my wounds and my suffering because I get something from it?”
Yep. And maybe that something is perceived safety… maybe I get to push people away because I overshare and sabotage closeness and vulnerability.
It’s wild because the language presents as powerlessness, yet it is an inverse way of sourcing power. It tries to create a perceived hierarchy where it places others seemingly “above” us, yet we are, through the use of language, actually moving the chess pieces above, acting as if we don’t even have any pieces still left on the board.
…
This isn’t evil. This often isn’t intentionally happening (unless it’s truly a covert/vulnerable narcissist).
But when we live in our wounds and our suffering, we give away our power. We become a syphon for our own life force. We are living in scarcity and fear. And the traumas that send us there are valid… it’s actually an appropriate adaptive response to feeling powerless. It’s a way to keep us stuck because we don’t trust others, and likely the world. In nervous system talk, we are essentially in functional freeze and also flight — away from possibility, hope, and giving ourselves permission to take up space.
Caroline Myss, one of my favourite spiritual teachers, calls this way of being “woundology." She says that “when we define ourselves by our wounds, we burden and lose our physical and spiritual energy and open ourselves to the risk of illness.
…
I was using my wounds to keep me safe by keeping me from moving on, getting bigger and stepping more into my purpose. I recognized this as I listened to a podcast I had done in the last three months where I thought to myself (having never listened to an episode before!)….”OMG. I’m so tired of this story I keep telling about cov1d and the pandemic. I’m tired of it holding me back because I tell the story of how it holds me back.”
At what point would enough loss be enough? At what point would atonement be reached?
…
I made the choice, then and there, as the awareness emerged into my conscious awareness, that I would never allow something or someone to hold me back from healing. NO ONE EVER NEEDS TO GIVE YOU CLOSURE.
It’s something you create. It’s something I create.
Create the love.
The mission. The integrity of how we want to be remembered.
I made a rule when I was thirty-two that I would always live at my highest level of knowledge. Once I learned something, I must change.
What do you know that you don’t live?
If you’re holding on to something or someone, what is holding on to them holding you back from?
Go do those things.
Go become that person.
Go live that life.
Honour your wounds and your traumas, but don’t live in them. “
16.6 *
The Stages of Adult Giftedness Discovery - Jennifer Harvey Sallin
“Learning as an adult that you are gifted has sometimes been likened to having a bomb explode in your life, or as I once heard it described, living through the “Big Bang”. People often assume that everyone wants to be gifted, and that gifted people are all too happy to discover that they are “special”; this couldn’t be further from the truth. Discovering you’re gifted isn’t all roses and doesn’t make your life infinitely easier. Being gifted is neither good nor bad, but it has personal and social implications that are known to create some measure of chaos in your self-understanding and in your understanding of the world, until you learn to integrate your gifted mind fully into your life.
…
Grieving that kind of loss is normal and healthy. We all do it again and again throughout life as we lose friendships, dreams, youth, and the self-identities we have tied up in them. But no matter how big the loss, the intensity of the feelings of loss don’t last forever. All emotion is finite, and although gifted people generally find a lot of emotion stored up inside them related to their gifted mind construction (feelings of being misunderstood, misguided, ignored, judged, or bullied for divergent ways of thinking and being, for example), that emotion can be processed and dealt with in constructive ways.
What I have witnessed in working with my clients is that consciously and diligently making one’s way through the stages of giftedness discovery allows a more positive process – one that transmutes painful emotion into positive energy, and liberates gifted people to create an updated self-identity based on how their unique mind really works best.
…
Here are the stages of giftedness discovery, as I have witnessed them in my work:
DENIAL - "There's no way I could be gifted!"
EXCITEMENT - “This explains so much of my life!”
ANGER - "Why didn't anyone tell me this before?" and “Why don’t others care now?”
BARGAINING / DEPRESSION / PANIC - "Can I give it back?"…"OMG I can't give it back!"
ACCEPTANCE - "Ok, this is how I am. How am I going to use it to my advantage?"
REBUILDING - “I’m doing the work to rebuild myself based on who I am.”
CREATIVITY - “What else can I create from my unique self?”
I can tell you from accompanying clients through these stages, that it’s a fun, scary, challenging, overwhelming, frustrating, and liberating process all at once. I’m often asked for my best advice for navigating it most effectively, and that advice is: study the stages, and resist the temptation to fight against the process of going through them. It might not be easy, because the process often brings up very intense emotions. But the good news is that those emotions are very valuable messengers of outdated beliefs you are likely ready to let go of (beliefs about who you are and “how the world works”). They are also messages about the positive self-awareness you want to carry forward with you into your future sense of self.
…
However, no matter what words you use to describe your giftedness to others, the unfortunate truth is that others will at times not be as enthusiastically welcoming to your self-discoveries as you wish them to be. Being that some of your gifted qualities are the ones that your partner, co-workers, family or friends would most like you to change (your intensity, your high idealism, your insatiable drive, etc.), they are not always keen to learn that these qualities aren't "problems to be solved", but rather manifestations of how your brain works best. It is as if, by putting a name to these qualities and recognizing that they are natural result of the way your mind is constructed, it renders them unchangeable, and this is not always welcome news for others. Then there is the social stigma of giftedness, which can feel threatening to partners who, for example, don't know how to integrate your "difference" into your social circles. Finally, if you are sharing your insights with someone who is him- or herself gifted, but has never been identified as such, your discoveries may stir up their own realization and emotions (their own "Big Bang"); as a result, he or she may go into the denial stage and resist your insights.
This very social dynamic has been a main life-long problem for the majority of gifted clients I’ve coached over the years – that others take their thoughts and insights less seriously than they themselves do, or are even threatened and irritated by them. This creates an ongoing social dissonance that can turn into extreme frustration and anger. In this stage on your giftedness discovery journey, you are likely thrilled to finally make sense of so many aspects of your life, but when you see that others around you are less enthusiastic or even hostile toward your discoveries, it can bring up a lot of the old pain of being misunderstood or not taken seriously at the level you need it.
…
In this stage, clients become angry that they were never identified as gifted when they were kids – “it would have saved me so much suffering!”. They are angry that they didn’t know this key information about themselves, and as a consequence have been judging themselves through a distorted lens all these years, believing what others often told them: that they really were “too much” or “not enough”, or “too demanding and perfectionistic”. And they are angry that it is happening again – “I’m even ‘too much’ in my giftedness self-discovery!”.
As I tell my clients, it is important that you give yourself full permission to feel your anger during this stage; you have a right to it, and it is a healthy expression of your need to be taken seriously, no matter how unusual your mind is. But as I also point out, it isn't constructive to use that anger to blame one’s family, friends, society or the world for what you might feel is, as my clients often do, their “incomprehension”, “small-mindedness” or “meanness”. Giftedness is just one way of being in and perceiving the world, no better or worse than another, just different; and the truth is that many people are still very unaware that giftedness even exists. It is unlikely that others are intentionally trying to harm you by their reactions, it’s just that they truly don’t – and often can’t – understand what you are going through and how your mind perceives things, because their mind construction is different from yours in key ways.
…
The issue is, when clients see what is required to positively channel their anger, it can be very daunting. As described in Living with Intensity, clients can see the mountain ahead that they must climb (Dabrowski’s Level 3) in order to fully accept and integrate their gifted mind into their life, but are overwhelmed at the thought of climbing it. They can see that they will have to leave certain relationships, self-concepts, and comforts behind – including their habitual hiding places and masks (physical and metaphorical). They will need to adopt a new or improved communication style and find a way to accept their and others’ differences. They will be exposed to the “elements” and forced to test their inner strength.
By now in the giftedness discovery process, clients feel like life is pushing them irrevocably toward “accepting their gift” (in other words, pushing them to start the climb up Dabrowski’s mountain), and they are tempted to fight against it. It’s a challenging stage because, while a part of them wants to accept their “gift”, another part of them wants to go back to denying it. My clients have reported feeling fragmented, torn, in doubt, and sometimes unable to choose their direction during this stage. Existential depression and panic (both forms of anger at and fear of life turned inward toward the self) can occur here, along with extreme confusion or depersonalization. These are the moments that, as a coach, I must stay very present with my clients. I must assure them that they are safe to “accept the gift” and all that comes with it. I often remind them that it is a one-step-at-a-time journey and that it is okay to be an imperfect climber (two things that are often hard for gifted people to accept!). They don’t have to jump to the end of the journey today or tomorrow or even next year! And in any case, they don’t have to make the climb alone.
…
Once clients feels safe enough to start the climb with me, I know they’ve arrived at the acceptance stage. They’ve learned about what giftedness is and have recognized that it has affected their lives in profound ways, but they realize and accept that there’s still work to be done. Choosing to go up the mountain is like accepting an apprenticeship in the conscious deconstruction of your self, and of your conception of the world. It is a process which involves examining the various parts of what makes you you, and what makes your life what it is.
You become the detective of your own self, becoming more clear about your values, preferences, and most authentic expression. You start to connect the dots between how your unique mind works and what you need most in life. You start to accept both logically and emotionally the ways in which you are gifted, and the undeniable fact that there are a number of particular challenges which come with that and which you cannot “give back”. As you discover what it really means to be uniquely you, you start to let go of the rest – the false beliefs, the self-judgments, and the roles you adopted but which no longer fit you (such as “people pleaser” or “chronic perfectionist”).
…
With enough self-awareness, clients start to be guided toward positive action by their emotions, rather than driven to self-denial or self-destruction by them. It is during this stage that they are ready to start rebuilding their lives again. The essential question during this stage is: given your raw material (your particular brain and its unique way of functioning, as well as your environmental constraints), what can you / do you want to build?
This may translate to building up your self-esteem, a career, your family life, your relationships – all in a way that suits how you work best. This stage helps you to learn how to communicate effectively to get your essential needs met, helps you construct positive relationships which will support who you really are, and helps you connect with your true inner callings, be they personal or professional.
…
The creativity stage is a joyful and long-lasting stage, which taps into play, inspiration and purpose in order to realize inner visions over the long-term. One feels, rather than being pushed or pulled by life, that one is co-creating with life. This final stage can have its own challenges, but those challenges are seen not as something to avoid, deny, fear or “just get through”; rather, they are seen as interesting opportunities to express one’s authentic self in myriad new ways.