I spent two years in therapy before I understood what I was doing in relationships.

And then I did it again.

Not out of ignorance; I could name it precisely by that point. I could trace the origin, explain the mechanism, describe the nervous system’s role in maintaining the pattern. I had the full picture. I understood why I kept choosing emotionally unavailable people, why the pull toward them felt like recognition rather than warning, why the specific texture of that connection felt more real than anything safer had ever felt.

And still. The next one arrived and something in me oriented toward him before I had consciously evaluated anything at all.

That was when I understood that knowing and changing are not the same process.

Therapy works on the mind. The pattern lives somewhere else. The nervous system built that pattern through accumulated experience, through enough repetitions of a specific kind of connection that it became the template for what significant attachment felt like. It learned to recognise that texture as real. As important. As worth orienting toward.

Insight doesn’t reach that template directly. You can understand, in precise and accurate language, exactly why the pattern exists, where it came from, what it’s protecting against, and the nervous system will still run it. Because the nervous system doesn’t update through language. It updates through experience. Through enough accumulated encounters with something different that the prediction model starts to revise. That revision happens below the level of any decision, on a timeline that insight cannot accelerate.

I kept expecting the understanding to do more than it was built to do.

I thought that once I saw the pattern clearly, it would lose its grip. That the visibility of a thing would dissolve its power. For a while I even thought I was making progress; the gap between recognising what was happening and stopping it was getting shorter. I could see it faster. But seeing it faster isn’t the same as not doing it. And for a long time I was confusing the two.

The pattern didn’t change because I understood it. It changed, slowly, incompletely, in ways I’m still tracking, because I accumulated enough experiences of something different that the nervous system started to build a second template alongside the first. Not replacing it. Just adding another possibility. One where consistency wasn’t followed by withdrawal. Where being known didn’t produce cost. Where the connection didn’t require monitoring to feel real.

That accumulation takes time I didn’t want to spend. And it can’t be rushed by understanding it better.

What I wish someone had told me earlier is that the understanding is the beginning of the work, not the work itself. It is necessary; you can’t change a pattern you can’t see. But it’s not sufficient. The map is not the territory. Knowing the shape of the pattern is not the same as having new ground to walk on.

The new ground gets built through experience. Through choosing differently enough times, in small enough ways, that the nervous system starts to generate a different prediction about what connection costs. Through being in environments where the old pattern doesn’t get the signal it’s looking for: the inconsistency, the uncertainty, the familiar pull of someone just out of reach.

That process is slower than therapy. Less articulate. Less satisfying in the way that understanding is satisfying. But it is what actually updates the template.

I understood the pattern for two years before it started to change. And it started to change not when I understood it better, but when I finally stopped waiting for the understanding to do the work that only experience can do.

If this is something you’re navigating: Know your Attachment

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Look at this festive Pix! coming soon from Thrilljoy Collectibles

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is a timeless holiday classic. As a kid, I loved watching this film and the magical story it told. In my adult years it is still a movie that I try to watch each year around the holiday season. Recently a Bumble Pix! was announced and here are my thoughts on this news.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Bumble (Hero) Pix!

This is a pretty nice-looking Pix!. The hero looks great and captures the mood of this character perfectly. The chase makes some sense for this character, and most fans are going to try their best to add it to their collections. You can learn more about this collectible here.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Hermey (Chase) Pix!

This Bumble Pix! comes out October 2nd at 8am. You can follow Thrilljoy Collectibles on Instagram.

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By Raphael Rigaud for The Ad Council

In 2023, 6,398 Veterans lost their lives to suicide, according to the latest data from the VA from the 2025 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report.

For Suicide Prevention Month, The Ad Council and Army veteran Raphael Rigaud, working with the national “Don’t Wait. Reach Out.” campaign, offer insights into how veterans can check in with and support one another.

The Power of Connection

Veterans have distinctive experiences and because of this, are in a unique position to support other veterans. Vets are often the first to help others, but it can sometimes be hard to ask for help or accept it for themselves. But all veterans deserve support and you do not need to wait for a crisis to check in with a fellow vet.

You don’t need to have all the answers. Even the simple act of reaching out can make all the difference in strengthening bonds. Just being there for a buddy can help remind them they are not alone and that support is always within reach.

There are tangible steps you can take to support other vets.

Take Steps to Prepare

Buddy Checks encourage veterans to connect (or reconnect) with each other. They also serve as a way to support each other, improve mental health and share resources.

Before doing a Buddy Check with a veteran who may be struggling, read about tips for approaching the conversation and signs of distress to watch out for:

• The VA Buddy Check Week peer wellness training provides helpful information on these kinds of check-ins. From starting a meaningful Buddy Check, to recognizing warning signs in other veterans and how to use the VA S.A.V.E. model to respond in crisis, all the way to tips for self-care and building personal resilience.
• Guidance for checking in is also available, from potential conversation starters to recommended questions, and to helpful dos and dont’s. You are not alone in navigating these conversations.
• Finally, personalized resources and support are available for any veteran navigating life’s challenges or who may be struggling.

By reaching out and showing up you can make a huge impact in the life of another veteran. But it’s also important to make sure to take care of yourself, both ahead of and following these conversations.

Learn About Available Resources for Veterans Who May be Struggling

Many veterans wrestle with complex feelings about their service, sometimes even questioning whether they deserve veteran resources. All veterans deserve support, but asking for support isn’t always easy. That’s why other veterans can play a unique role in building connections.

Hearing from another veteran can help create a sense of safety and validation to let someone who is struggling know that help is within reach. No act of connection is too small and can serve as a reminder that they are not alone.

At VA.gov/REACH there are a wide range of resources for challenges that a veteran may be struggling with, including career challenges, experiencing grief, life transitions and more. For any veterans in crisis, immediate help is always available at the Veterans Crisis Line. To reach responders, Dial 988 then Press 1, chat online at VeteransCrisisLine.net/Chat, or text 838255.

Check in with Other Veterans in Your Life

Whether it’s a simple call or text, grabbing coffee or stopping by for a visit, it’s never a bad time for a Buddy Check. These moments strengthen the bond between veterans and can ultimately improve mental health, feelings of community and make it easier to access resources.

Veterans have unique experiences and because of this, vets have an important role to play in checking in with one another. These moments of connection are so important and can help to encourage any veteran who may be struggling to get the support they deserve.

Reaching out for support is one of the bravest things veterans can do for themselves, and for each other. During Suicide Prevention Month, and all year round, everyone can be a part of the solution and save lives.

This story was produced by The Ad Council and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

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Previously Published on hub.stackernewswire

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John Jamelske* didn’t have many eye-catching qualities. He was quiet and withdrawn. He underachieved academically. He always worked in low-wage blue-collar jobs like carpeting or construction work. He sucked at sports — apparently even more than me, which is one hell of an achievement.

And out of his drab and emotionally crippled life bore a dangerous belief, one he often publicly expressed: I deserve better, I deserve more. It was this belief, coupled with his perseverance, resourcefulness, and emotional issues, that corrupted his sense of morals and drove him to start ruining other people’s lives.

In 1988, John’s wife became bedridden from disease. His main concern, however, was not how she felt or how to help her. No, his main concern was where to get laid now that his wife couldn’t fuck him anymore. And just like that, believing he deserved better, he went on a cheating spree.

But what started as simply seducing women and bringing them home quickly morphed into kidnapping minors and dragging them into a homemade sex dungeon where he raped them daily.

John even fed these girls bullshit stories about how he had a prominent role in an underground slavery syndicate, which the police were a part of, and how he would have their families killed if they snitched.

The more girls John kidnapped, the more intensely he believed he deserved to rape them. And the sicker his wife got, the more frequently he justified his crimes. His rationalization was that he needed to unwind due to stress at home. And while there was more to John’s malice than a sick belief about deserving, we can’t ignore how greatly it affected his actions.

Moral of the story? Believing we deserve a bunch of feel-good shit never ends well. Worst case scenario, we end up like John. Best case scenario, our happiness degenerates. After all, our happiness is proportional to how well we deal with this entitlement narrative.

Here’s what I mean: we can’t help but think along the lines of cause and effect. Getting better at communication leads to fewer arguments. Overcoming insecurities leads to being more attractive and magnetic. Frequent meditation leads to faster breakup recovery and higher baseline happiness.

At its simplest, actions have consequences. And we, as humans, are wired to automatically assume that we deserve whatever consequences follow our actions.

But what about when something nasty and unexpected, like a breakup, befalls us? Well, even though we didn’t necessarily, single-handedly, cause it, our minds will have a hard time letting go of the idea that we aren’t somehow deserving of the breakup. That’s why one of the most common phrases I hear heartbroken people utter is, “What did I do to deserve this?”

Now there are a few different ways people cope with this feeling of deserving their breakup:

• Some buy into the narrative of fate or destiny and decide to believe that their suffering has some higher, unknowable purpose.
• Some opt for the religious route and choose to believe that God has a plan for them and that, thanks to him, everything will make sense eventually.
• Some internalize their pain and settle that they got into a breakup because they are, in some way, fundamentally broken — they start hating themselves and believing they deserve to suffer.

The truth is, all of these responses suck. Because you don’t necessarily deserve anything after your breakup, good or bad. I’d argue that the belief is not only incorrect but even dangerous. It leads to self-absorption, entitlement, and, as illustrated in John’s story, crime, hate, and violence.

Instead, here’s a simpler view on breakups to adopt: they happen. Sometimes they bring about good consequences. Other times they bring about bad ones. The point is to simply do things you believe will lead to good ones and avoid doing things that might lead to bad ones. That’s it. And you can use this formula for just about any setback.

So if you recently got into a breakup, that’s life. Random, chaotic, often thankless, and unfair — to some people more than others. Accept you’re hurting, engage the pain, feel your emotions, learn what you can do better in your next relationship, and then actually do better. Deserving should not be a part of your mental equation. Only self-improvement, topped with brutal honesty and self-compassion.

*91 year old John Jamelske was most recently denied parole in October 2023.

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Previously published on maxjancar.com

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By Guest Contributor

By Sahasranshu Dash

This post is part of Global Voices’ September 2026 Spotlight series, “Protest in Democracy.” With this spotlight, we seek to explore the many forms of protest, the tactics states use to delegitimize and suppress them, and the complex relationship between protest and democracy. You can support this coverage by donating here.

For more than three months, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a youth movement that began as an online joke, has become one of the most significant challenges to Indian President Narendra Modi’s government since his third term began in June 2024. What started as anger over educational corruption, such as the leaking of the NEET medical entrance exam questions, recruitment scandals, and the failures of India’s education system, grew into a nationwide campaign over unemployment, political accountability, and the dignity of a generation.

The movement began in May 2026, after India’s Chief Justice, Surya Kant, compared unemployed young people to cockroaches.

Political consultant Abhijeet Dipke turned the insult into a rallying call, inviting the country’s “cockroaches” to unite. The joke went viral, and the movement’s name, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), deliberately echoed the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), showing how quickly an internet meme could become a vehicle for political organization.

The CJP’s first major victory came on July 25, when Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after a 36-day protest at the Jantar Mantar observatory over alleged examination irregularities, with the government also promising no punitive action against protesters. By late August, the CJP accused the government of reneging on its promises and announced a new march for September 5, demanding the withdrawal of all First Information Reports (FIRs), official police reports that mark the first step in a police inquiry, filed against participants. That dispute has since been resolved.

On September 1, the Supreme Court ordered all FIRs registered nationwide over the July protests be closed, after the central government and four BJP-ruled states, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, and Maharashtra, moved to quash more than 100 cases under Article 142 of the Constitution. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta also told the court the government would compensate the families of NEET aspirants who died by suicide after the exam was canceled. CJP co-convener Saurav Das then withdrew the march, though the government reserved the right to file a fresh FIR against nearly 2,900 people with existing criminal records who were present at the protest.

The episode shows that the CJP has grown from a single campaign over exam irregularities into a powerful political movement — one now able to extract concessions directly from the state.

The deeper importance of the Cockroach protests lies in the contradiction they expose about political mobilization in the digital age. The CJP shows social media still allows citizens to organize outside established parties, driven by satire, short-form video and decentralized volunteer networks rather than party infrastructure. But the same technologies have given the state increasingly sophisticated means of observing and classifying participants, an emerging model in which policing, artificial intelligence, and digital surveillance work together to suppress and monitor dissent.

From the lathis to the database

The most dramatic confrontation came on July 20, when thousands of CJP supporters tried to march from Jantar Mantar towards parliament. They were dispersed with water cannons, tear gas, pellet guns, and lathis, bamboo police batons used in South Asia. Hundreds were detained, and police cases were filed. Delhi Police defended the operation, alleging that people with criminal records had joined the demonstration and the escalation was necessary to preserve public safety. In August, the Supreme Court agreed to examine claims that police employed excessive force during the protest.

The physical violence was visible, but the more consequential development was what happened alongside it. Delhi Police deployed mobile surveillance vans, 360-degree cameras and facial-recognition technology around the protest site. One system, Ikshana, placed boxes around faces on camera feeds and matched them against police records. Delhi Police told the Supreme Court the system had flagged 2,873 people with existing criminal records. A subsequent investigation by Scroll.in found that at least 25 of those flagged, including people accused of murder and rape, were already in jail at the time the system claimed to have “spotted” them at the protest.

The technology’s significance lies less in efficiency than in how it changes the relationship between citizen and state. Conventional crowd control operates in the present. Police can block, disperse, or detain, and then investigate detained people after the fact. Digital surveillance instead lets the state reconstruct participation after an event ends, without the presence of the people investigated. A captured face can be matched against a database and linked to other information, creating a record of political participation that outlasts the protest itself.

A petition challenging the use of facial recognition and biometric surveillance at the protests, alleging data was collected without consent and hosted by private companies, has reached the Supreme Court. India’s legal framework here remains fragmented. Delhi Police originally acquired the technology to identify missing and trafficked children, but it has since been used for crowd surveillance at political gatherings. Tools built for narrow public safety purposes have acquired broader functions without a matching expansion of legal safeguards and privacy protections.

The distinction between identifying a suspect in a violent offense and identifying everyone attending a demonstration is crucial. The latter turns the exercise of a democratic freedom itself into a basis for state observation, creating a searchable record of who chose to participate and a chilling effect that can make the formal right to protest hollow in practice.

When civic participation becomes data

What is new about digital authoritarianism is not cameras or databases, which governments have used for decades, but the ability to combine them into systems that identify and analyze people at scale. Once political activity becomes a searchable data point, the line between policing unlawful behavior and monitoring lawful participation is harder to hold. This raises questions about what police may collect, for what purpose, for how long, and with what oversight.

The debate is not unique to India. The United States and democracies in the European Union have also confronted controversies over facial recognition technology and the expanding use of AI-enabled surveillance by law-enforcement agencies.

The EU has responded by restricting real-time biometric identification in public spaces, while the United States has seen growing concerns over police use of facial recognition and other automated surveillance tools. The problem is especially acute across the Global South, where governments are acquiring sophisticated surveillance capabilities while institutional oversight remains weak. India matters here not because it is uniquely authoritarian, but because it shows how quickly the boundaries between policing, mass surveillance, and political monitoring can blur.

Yet, describing the CJP simply as a case of digital repression misses half the story. The movement exists because digital technology also expanded ordinary citizens’ capacity to organize. At its height, its Instagram following reportedly exceeded 26 million, more than the combined following of India’s two main national parties. It converted online attention into physical mobilization and, evidently, into political leverage, as the government’s reversal over the FIRs demonstrates.

This is the paradox at the CJP’s heart. The digital age does not simply strengthen the state at citizens’ expense, nor does it automatically democratize politics. It can do both simultaneously. The same platforms that let a young person in a small town join a national campaign also make that mobilization easier for the state to observe. The CJP has rejected becoming a conventional electoral party, operating instead as a pressure movement whose trajectory, from examining grievances to a broader demand for accountability, met by a mix of concessions and continued surveillance, illustrates that tension clearly.

A problem beyond India

The Indian experience is part of a broader shift in how governments exercise political power, as governments worldwide acquire technologies that identify people in public spaces and connect their behavior to existing databases. The question is not whether such technologies can make policing more effective. They can. The question is whether states can also implement rules that can constrain their use to political contexts, preventing public safety tools from becoming instruments of political surveillance.

Democratic freedoms depend not only on protection from direct state violence but on citizens being able to organize without assuming their participation is permanently recorded. Freedom of assembly means little if joining a protest automatically creates a durable record of political activity that can harm individuals after-the-fact. But the contest runs both ways. The same infrastructure that helps the state monitor protesters lets protesters document police conduct and challenge official narratives, as seen in reporting on pellet-gun injuries and the Supreme Court’s scrutiny of the July 20th crackdown.

The Cockroach protests therefore offer both a warning and grounds for democratic optimism. Their trajectory shows India’s young citizens can convert online culture into sustained collective action and extract real concessions, resignations, promised compensation, and now the quashing of FIRs, from a government with substantial institutional power. But their treatment by the security apparatus shows the costs of participation now extend beyond arrest or violence to the creation of digital records whose scope and future use may be invisible to those being monitored.

For democracies, this is a constitutional problem that better technology or public safety justifications alone cannot resolve. The more powerful the technology, the greater the need for clear limits on what the state may collect, how it may use that information, and how citizens can challenge its misuse. India will have to decide whether technological efficiency determines the boundaries of political freedom, or constitutional principles determine the boundaries within which technology may be used.

The CJP began as an attempt to turn an insult into a joke. That joke turned into a movement capable of forcing a government’s hand. Its ongoing confrontation with the Indian state illustrates a deeper transformation. In an age when political participation can be converted into data, the freedom to protest depends not only on whether police permit citizens to gather, but on whether they can gather without fear.

Sahasranshu Dash is a research associate at the International Center for Applied Ethics and Public Affairs (ICAEPA), an independent research organization based in Sheffield, United Kingdom.

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Previously Published on globalvoices.org with Creative Commons License

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By Matt Simon, Grist

“This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.”

The food chain you learned about in school isn’t the full picture. Yes, the rat eats your garden crops, the ermine snags the rat, and the eagle picks off the ermine. But that linear story misses a whole lot of nuance. Parasites like ticks and intestinal worms feed on the eagle and ermine. When those predators die, ants and other scavengers devour their carcasses. Oh, and rats are known to eat their own babies, so they’re predators of themselves.

Capturing the extraordinary complexity of species interactions has been a time-honored — and time-consuming — process of scientists getting out in the field and spying on birds’ nests, for instance, to see what the parents feed their young. Less romantically, they’ve had to sift through scat for the bones of prey animals.

Now they’ve got an even more powerful — and far less smelly — tool in the form of a citizen science project called Who Eats Whom. It taps into the nonprofit social network iNaturalist, which identifies species in photos that people upload and geotag. You can search for “brown rat,” for example, and find an image of an American ermine carting one off near Monty Drive in Ottawa, Canada. If that’s not metal enough for you, search for “red-tailed hawk” to see the raptors laying waste to snakes and squirrels all across the United States.

Who Eats Whom isn’t just engrossing — it could help inform conservation efforts on a rapidly warming planet. So far, it’s incorporated 17,000 interactions involving 5,700 species in more than 100 countries. “That’s just kind of the power of crowdsourcing,” said ecologist Bradley Allf, who developed the platform while at North Carolina State University but is now at Colorado State University. “You can generate a ton of valuable information in a way that you can’t if you’re just an individual scientist trying to follow snakes around and hope they eat something while you’re watching them, or waiting for them to poop and be able to take their scat.”

While the database literally offers snapshots in time, the idea is to amass data over the coming years, revealing how ecosystems are transforming alongside the planet as a whole. “Even if we look back, say, five years ago, there have been a lot of changes in the feeding patterns of these animals,” said Aditi Mallavarapu, a computer scientist at North Carolina State University and co-author of a new paper describing the work in the journal PLOS Biology. “So not only looking at what is being observed, but also noticing what is not being observed.”

Who Eats Whom, then, is more than a repository of captivating photos. If you click on “Interactive Food Web” at the top right of the site, it brings up a sprawling web of interactions. Search again for “red-tailed hawk” and you’ll see a plethora of small mammals that people have photographed them predating. (Arrows pointing to a species indicate the food going into it.) Look even closer and you’ll find that one of its meals, the American robin, eats the common buckthorn and yaupon holly.

And let’s not forget the pollinators. Search for “Western honey bee” in the interactive food web and you’ll see that it — among many other insects — ends up in the belly of the goldenrod crab spider, an absolutely gorgeous, ghostly white arachnid. But notice also all the plants that the bee feeds on — honeysuckles, thistles, buttercups — and helps reproduce by spreading their pollen around. “There’s all kinds of complicated ways that energy moves through real food webs, and we’re trying to document that messiness as much as we can,” said Allf, who is also the lead author of the new paper.

Who Eats Whom offers plenty of surprises. People have snapped New World vultures dining on all manner of carcasses, from wild boars to raccoons to groundhogs. On a beach in California’s San Luis Obispo County, though, at least one of the birds found itself a baby white shark, which had likely been stillborn.

With so many smartphone-wielding folks wandering beaches and forests and deserts, ecologists have gained an army of invaluable allies. “The biggest challenge is really data acquisition, because there’s so many species and so many interactions out there,” said Peter Roopnarine, curator of invertebrate zoology and geology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the project. “They sometimes can be ephemeral — like it happens once in a lifetime of a species, and that’s it. And they’re dispersed all over the place.”

By better understanding who eats whom, scientists and conservationists can better protect species. As the planet rapidly heats, species are marching toward the relative coolness of the poles. This is reshuffling ecosystems and changing how species interact. With a platform like Who Eats Whom, normal people with smartphone cameras may well be the first to document the arrival of a new animal in their area. “It’s obviously super engaging, I think, for the people who are participating,” said Rebecca Johnson, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the project. “It gives you a new way of thinking about your nature observations that you might share.”

At the same time, invasive species — most notoriously, things like the lionfish — are shaking up ecosystems the world over. Left unchecked, hungry invaders can decimate native species, which may already be weakened by skyrocketing temperatures and worsening droughts. “We need to know who’s being consumed by these invasive species,” Roopnarine said, “and are there species on that menu that we really need to be worried about?”

To properly protect species in this topsy-turvy world, conservationists can’t just set aside some land or sea and call it a victory. They also need to ensure that carnivores and omnivores have the prey they usually hunt, and herbivores have the plants they usually graze. “Species don’t just need space — they don’t just need a habitat,” Allf said. “They need the relationships that allow them to survive.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/why-scientists-want-your-photos-of-wildlife-eating-lunch/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.

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This story was originally published by Grist.

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At The Good Men Project, we are proud to syndicate reporting from Grist, one of the country’s most experienced nonprofit climate newsrooms. We value Grist not only because it covers climate change, but because it understands that climate is not a separate issue sitting off to the side of real life. It intersects with health, food, work, migration, infrastructure, energy, inequality, and the everyday conditions people depend on to build stable lives.

That wider lens matters to us. At The Good Men Project, we are interested in how to live well in a rapidly changing world, and it is increasingly impossible to ask that question honestly without asking what kind of world people are being asked to live in. Climate change is not just an environmental story. It is a human story, a systems story, and a moral story. It raises questions about power, responsibility, adaptation, care, and who is expected to absorb the costs when institutions fail to plan ahead. It also intersects with many of the themes we return to often, including masculinity, provision, work, family, resilience, and the pressures people face when the ground beneath ordinary life becomes less predictable. That is one reason we are glad to share Grist’s work with our readers.

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A Lesson in Kindness, Inclusion and How Kids Eat Differently

(Feature Impact) The school year brings new classmates, routines and opportunities for children to learn about people whose experiences may be different from their own. They could include friends who use a wheelchair, carry an inhaler or even receive nutrition through a feeding tube.

Watch this video to learn more

For families who rely on tube feeding, it is an essential part of daily life but is often understood only by those who experience it. That limited awareness can leave children who are tube fed and their families feeling isolated or unseen, according to Gerard Minor, a pediatric gastroenterology and hepatology specialist.

Parents can use everyday questions as opportunities to help children understand there are many ways people receive nourishment. Teachers, classmates, caregivers and communities can also help make tube feeding part of the everyday conversation around childhood rather than something that separates children from it.

“Helping children understand those differences early can encourage curiosity, kindness and inclusion,” Minor said.

To help bring greater awareness, understanding and representation to children and families who experience tube feeding every day, Compleat, a leader in tube feeding formulas, launched “What Is Better Than How,” featuring “Sesame Street’s” Elmo and his signature warmth and curiosity. The original song celebrates the many ways people eat. Some people eat with a fork, some use a spoon and some use a tube, reinforcing a simple message: What matters is not how you eat. What matters is that you are nourished, loved and included.

To hear the song, create a personalized version and learn more about the campaign, visit Compleat.com/WhatIsBetterThanHow.

SOURCE:

Nestle Compleat

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Previously Published on editors.familyfeatures.com

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The plot thickens in ‘The Jordan Boy’s Legacy’

Last time on Lanterns, someone had killed Hal. Before this happened, John paid Hal a visit and things went as well as they were expected to go. John returns to this small town, and no one is really that happy to see him. After getting into a fist fight with a few people, John gets to spend a night in jail. It is here where the current Green Lantern pays him a visit and John asks them to do him a huge favor. As this episode nears the end, we see John do something drastic which he hopes will help shed some light on this case. Now John gets some help from an unexpected ally in ‘The Jordan Boy’s Legacy’. I was able to watch a screener of this episode and here are my thoughts on it.

(c) HBO Max

You can read the premise for this episode here:

Finding themselves on another planet, Hal and John must put aside their fractured past to solve a murder. Along their journey, both men are forced to confront the ghosts of their pasts…and the ways their childhoods shaped who they are today.

(c) HBO Max

John tries to get help solving this case at the beginning of this episode. They aren’t that excited to see him, but they are curious who killed them. Before they agree to help, they want John to help them pay a visit to someone. This person is a tad shocked to see them again but do their best to keep their composure. Once this is done, John gets help opening something, and it takes them both to a weird looking place. Something terrible happened here, and John has no idea why they are here. Just when things take a deadly turn, someone ends up helping them get out of it. As this episode draws to a close, we find out a dangerous person is being held at this place.

(c) HBO Max

Lanterns ‘The Jordan Boy’s Legacy’ is available now on HBO Max. You can follow HBO Max on Facebook and Instagram.

The post John Gets Some Help From a Surprise Ally in ‘The Jordan Boy’s Legacy’ appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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One morning in January 2016, my ex-fiancé Kara came out of the bathroom and told me she was pregnant. She said it as if she were trying to convince herself it was true. It was the first month we had been trying, and she was prepared for the worst—that it would take several attempts, or that it might not happen at all. As for me, I was nonchalant. I figured it was bound to happen, probably on the first attempt, if only because perhaps I feared it would happen. Now it was a reality.

“Why did you have to wake me up for that?” I said with a bit of a groan as I slowly rolled over in bed, as if I was in denial.

At the time, I was deeply ambivalent about becoming a father. My relationship with Kara had been on the rocks for several months. I almost had broken off our relationship two months prior after a trip to see my family in Rhode Island, where we had had a few acrimonious exchanges. But this was also the woman I had thought I was destined to marry, so I was determined to fight for it. When Kara had an operation to remove pre-cancerous cells as a preventative measure against cervical cancer, I empathized deeply with her given her fear that she might never be a mother.

We decided to start trying. But I still had misgivings about our relationship, and I was scared that I was not ready to be a father. So, when the news broke, my reaction was not one for the Hollywood scripts.

Ten years later, I recall my initial reaction with regret. In life, however, moments like that do not come with a do-over. There is only a coming to terms. Time, or at least the way human beings think about time, only moves forward. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once quipped: life may be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards. So, what to make of all this?

***

Postpartum Blues

Nine months later, when I heard my daughter cry for the first time from behind a curtain as she was removed from the womb after a Caesarian section, I felt overwhelmed by the unadulterated, undeniable, and seemingly incomprehensible reality that a newborn baby girl had emerged from what seemed like thin air and that I had been assigned by nature and fate to be her father.

Even then, standing in the hospital ward amidst the doctor and nurses, with Kara lying on the surgical table, a curtain shielding the surgical operation from my sight, using my phone to film my daughter as she was tested, swaddled up, and handed to her mother, I was still deeply ambivalent about becoming a father. I felt out of place. I felt out of mind. Being a loner and an introvert by nature, I was not sure if my personality was well-suited to being a parent. The thought of being confined in the net of postpartum responsibility and obligation—it frightened me.

What never occurred to me, however, was the thought of leaving. It never occurred to me to want to escape. To me, “deadbeat dad” was criminal. I also found it surprisingly and incredibly easy to bond with my newborn daughter. Changing diapers. Feeding her. Holding her. Playing with her. It was exhausting, not exhilarating. But it was seamless, and enriching. I never doubted that I loved and cherished my daughter.

Nonetheless, lack of sleep, hormonal disruptions, and personality differences further strained my relationship with Kara. I was also stuck in old habits. While Kara was on maternal leave, I went to work every day. After work, I would go to the gym. Exercise has been an essential part of my life since childhood. To give you an idea, I did calisthenics in the bathroom during the three days we were in the hospital. I am addicted to the endorphin rush, which became even more essential as a way to keep calm and carry on during those stressful postpartum months. The upshot, however, is that I arrived home late every evening, where I often found Kara on the couch breastfeeding while watching the West Wing. It was only years later, when she said that she felt profoundly alone in those months, that, sadly, I came to appreciate her feeling of neglect.

I could have done better, but the point of all this is to say that postpartum blues in a society that is less than accommodating to new parents—at the time, I did not have any remote work arrangement, and I was not allowed to begin paternal leave until her maternal leave was complete—is real.

I have conveyed only a few of the salient facts that come to mind in describing my own experience as a postpartum parent. As we can all attest, each of us deals with these circumstances and challenges in their own ways. Some couples have more functional relationships, while others may not for reasons that may or may not reflect the long shadow of growing up in a toxic household. Some couples have extended family immediately available to help. Some couples may be more or less susceptible to mental illness. Some couples may have helpful friends and neighbors. Some couples have access to excellent health care professionals and facilities, while others do not. Some couples may be plagued by differences of personality and preference that only come to light after a short honeymoon romance and shotgun marriage. One can imagine countless more examples of good and bad luck that may facilitate or impede a steady, healthy family life.

This is not to deny the importance of accountability. We need to learn how to do the right thing in life. But take a moment to reflect on all the things you do not control in life, and all of the unforeseen coincidences, fortuitous incidents, and unwelcome frictions that affect what happens to you, and you realize how lucky you are that you ever managed to do the right thing. In my own case, I knew instinctively that I could only ever love and adore my daughter. She was of me and by me, and beyond any connection to me, a human being at the mercy of her surroundings, whose whole life and future would depend on my caregiving. I felt compelled to love and protect her.

But to feel that, I had to have had a life that prepared me to feel that. I had parents who loved me. I had experiences in life of disappointment, of failure, of alienation, of estrangement, and of other hardships that made me acutely aware of the inevitable challenges that awaited my daughter in her own life. The totality of circumstances that I had encountered in my life, most if not all of it beyond my control, had not only shaped me as a person who was acutely unnerved about becoming a father, but also a person who was emotionally prepared to love and care for his daughter.

***

The Problem of Luck

In becoming a father, I was the beneficiary of good constitutive and circumstantial luck. By constitutive luck, I mean all the ways that life had shaped me, by heritage and by experience, to be the person I am, with the disposition, capabilities, and inclinations I have. I was lucky to be the kind of person who wanted to be a good father. By circumstantial luck, I mean the luck to have had good role models, a good job with good benefits, and a mature partner who was a devoted mother. I was lucky to have been born and bred in circumstances that helped me acquire the social and personal advantages I enjoyed as a parent.

I also suffered the bad luck of being plagued by ambivalence and uncertainty. As well as the bad moral luck of not realizing how much of an unsupportive partner I had been. At the same time, I never had the bad moral luck to even contemplate the idea of abandoning, or otherwise harming, Kara or my daughter.

Many might say that none, or at least not all, of this is luck. Certainly not the commitment to caring for my daughter and protecting her from harm. But are these personal characteristics a matter of choice? Is it not a part of nature that we are so constituted as to want to protect and care for our offspring rather than harm them? The selfish gene and all that? I was certainly conscious of my love for my daughter, and of the choices I made to do the best I could for her even amidst the ambivalence. But were those choices the result of having a will that wills what it wills?

By free will, I mean not the freedom to do as we will, but the more fundamental ability to will what we will. Ex nihilo. It is the ability to formulate the desires that we feel inside of us before we even think about whether we can realize our desires. If we have a will that is given to us by nature, further shaped and cultivated into unconscious drives by the circumstances in which we have been thrust by fate, and if there is so much contingency and unpredictability in how we think, feel, and act at any given moment in our lives, it seems incredible that we could ever believe in free will and personal responsibility. Putting compatibilism aside for the sake of argument, I am inclined to believe that free will is an illusion, and that everything in life may be luck all the way down.

At least as yet, I have not been so “luck-pilled” as to believe definitively, as argued in an upcoming book authored by Aaron Rabinowitz, based on his PhD dissertation, which I have had the good luck to review, that everything comes down to luck. I am reluctant to embrace luck-pilling without reserve if only because I remain fond of, and influenced by, the Stoic concept of prohairesis, which is essentially the idea that, as human beings with reason, we have the capacity to agree or not agree with the judgment we might instinctively make in response to immediate experience, and then to act accordingly. But I do believe the book (dissertation) is correct to observe that “[h]umans have struggled with anxiety about the pervasiveness of luck since the concept first arose in ancient societies, and attempts to address the problem have shaped the modern world.” Also, that “the problem of luck has persisted because resolving it requires letting go of a tenacious group of deeply rooted illusions centered on the need to feel that people mostly get what they deserve.”

In ancient Greek tragedy, audiences watched as characters succumbed to their fates, suffering the consequences of circumstances beyond their control. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother despite measures undertaken early in his life specifically to avoid this fate. In the account of tragedy that the Greek philosopher Aristotle gave, audiences may have been inspired to feel pity for Oedipus, but also fear that their own lives could similarly go awry. The vicarious experience gave rise to catharsis, often construed as a purging of emotions that perhaps also fostered sympathy for human beings in general as largely undeserving of tragic, unlucky outcomes that might befall them.

In modern American life, we might think of luck as the equivalent of the ancient Greek preoccupation with fate. But unlike the ancient Greeks who took fate seriously, we downplay luck in part because we believe so fervently in agency and desert, tending to attribute tragic outcomes in life like poverty and crime primarily, if not exclusively, to human choice. We prefer to let humans fend for themselves because we attribute tragic outcomes not to the contingencies of fate, but to choice and personal responsibility. As far as we are concerned, people get what they deserve. But what if everything, or most everything, is luck? What if free will—which is not to be confused with freedom, autonomy, or other conditions of self-determination—is only an illusion?

***

The Case of Lindsay Clancy

Which leads us to the case of Lindsay Clancy, the woman recently put on trial for allegedly murdering her children. I say “allegedly” because a central question of the trial was not whether Ms. Clancy killed her children, but whether she murdered them. That is, whether postpartum psychosis stripped her of sufficient capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her acts and thereby obey the law. Many people insist that Lindsay Clancy “deserves” to be imprisoned for murdering her children. Others agree with her defense that she was not in her right mind when she killed her three children, and that she should have been found not guilty by reason of insanity. In other words, she should not be punished for having the bad luck to suffer from postpartum psychosis.

Her defense does not mean she should not be held accountable, though what it means to be held accountable in her case is a matter of dispute in itself. But as evidence from the trial demonstrated, Clancy was not a neglectful mother. She loved her children. She always wanted to have children. She felt deep anxiety about whether she was being a good mother to each of her children. And she was frightened enough by harmful thoughts to seek help from family and mental health professionals.

A person of faith—you know, those who are inclined to believe it is for God to judge—might suggest that only God knows what went through Lindsay Clancy’s mind in that fateful hour when, as she admitted, she strangled her three children to death with an exercise band, then cut her wrist and neck and jumped out a second-story window, only to survive the fall and end up in a wheelchair.

To any sane person, the horror of these admissions is unfathomable. To many, it is equally unfathomable that the law should make any distinction between killing and murdering her children. How could a woman not know what she is doing when it is the lives of her own children at stake? Never mind pesky legal details about premeditation. It is a matter of “common sense,” the hidebound opinion of conventional wisdom. At the very least, a woman who takes the life of her own children is no longer deserving of being treated as a human being. She is a monster.

To be sure, her act was monstrous. But is—was—Lindsay Clancy a monster? Personally, I do not presume to know. I am not Lindsay Clancy. I do not know Lindsay Clancy. And while I am aware of the journals and expert testimony that were presented at trial to shed light on her deteriorating mental health, I surely have not been privy to every ebb, flow, flinch, pang, and shock of thought and feeling that passed through her body and mind in the moments, or in the months, before she killed her children.

It is likely that Lindsay Clancy also cannot account for every ebb, flow, flinch, pang, and shock of thought and feeling that passed through her body and mind in those critical moments. Can anyone give a full accounting of every streak of thought and feeling in every moment of their lives? Even more to the point, do we have control over those currents of thought and feeling within us, and how they determine the decisions we make and the actions we undertake? As her defense attorney argued, Lindsay Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis. She heard voices telling her to kill her children in the moments before the deadly act. Hallucinatory experiences may seem farfetched to some, but as for me, I recall when, months prior to being diagnosed with a tumor located in the Broca area of my brain, I experienced seconds-long episodic seizures when, hard as I tried to speak, I felt like an invisible force was clamping my mouth shut. I had lost the ability to speak. In short, I can attest viscerally to how the brain can malfunction.

Finally, what about the reactions and decisions of family, friends, and most important, medical professionals who were responsible for her treatments? Surely, it should be easy to acknowledge that Lindsay Clancy had little control over how the community of people around her supported, or failed to support, her as her mental health deteriorated in the months before she killed her children.

As for me, I was initially misdiagnosed with an “old stroke” after a CT scan showed a lesion in my brain. It was only after months of tests that a radiologist and neurologist figured out, after an MRI scan, that I had a brain tumor. Years later, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and over 25 MRI scans as part of regular monitoring, I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary good luck of my diagnosis and, so far at least, successful treatments. In an alternative world in which I had not been diagnosed and treated early enough, the tumor could have grown until one day I had a seizure while driving a vehicle and accidentally killed myself and other people. I was lucky.

Lindsay Clancy was not so lucky.

None of this is to excuse or condone her horrific act. But it behooves us all to try to understand it. Perhaps she did contemplate and plan the killings in the days, weeks, or months leading up to the fateful deed, and perhaps it was because, as the conservative pundit Matt Walsh put it in dismissing the seriousness of postpartum depression and psychosis, she was a selfish parent who could not handle the difficulties of being a parent. If it is that simple, then perhaps we can indeed expect copycat killings by, as our prominent (and repugnant) conservative put it, “unbalanced women.”

But mental health, or lack thereof, is a real and complex phenomenon. It is also almost certainly a reflection, at least in part, of bad luck. It may be the constitutive bad luck of family inheritance, or perhaps the circumstantial bad luck of living in a society that does not do enough to address mental illness. In the case of Lindsay Clancy, her defense attorney argued that she suffered from postpartum psychosis. Of course, the prosecution called in expert testimony to dispute this attribution, but if the defense is right, and it seems that all but one juror agreed with the defense, then the key point is that Lindsay Clancy was not in control on the day she killed her children. Whether it was the result of constitutive bad luck or circumstantial bad luck, it was undoubtedly a case of bad moral luck.

If so, it is appropriate to ask, could her husband, family, and medical professionals have done more to support her? To be sure, this question was a matter of fierce dispute at trial and in the broader societal discourse around the trial. And despite the conspiracy theories, Patrick Clancy is not on trial. Nor are Lindsay Clancy’s extended family or the medical professionals who treated her. Nor should they be. But if we want to prevent the so-called copycat killings that so concern Matt Walsh, perhaps what we should consider is not Lindsay Clancy’s public execution as Walsh advocates, but a greater appreciation of the severity of mental illness that causes a woman to be “unbalanced” in the first place, and the bad luck of women who suffer from it.

We might also think about how we can do more as a society to detect and sufficiently treat mental illnesses like postpartum depression and psychosis. If there is one thing we have learned from the victories of the feminist movement, and progressive movements in general, it is that we can always do more to overcome the institutional inadequacies that impair the full flourishing of human life.

***

The Good Luck of the Feminist Movement

For generations, even centuries, women have had the misfortune—bad luck—to be born into patriarchal societies in which they were expected to bear the burdens of postpartum caregiving while men continued to blithely live their regular lives outside of the home. Many women may have had the good luck to have supportive extended families or communities that helped ease the burdens of postpartum blues. Many other women, of course, did not. In either case, motherhood was their role and they were expected to intuitively perform this role as an essential and welcome contribution to the family and to society. It was hard work, but the work was worthwhile.

Complaining about the burdens of caretaking was selfish and reprehensible. As Matt Walsh put it, “[a] lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this but much of the ‘depression’ that parents (and not just moms) suffer after child birth is due not so much to hormones but to the fact that children, especially babies, are demanding and difficult and require us to subordinate our own needs and desires for their sake. The more selfish you are, the more of an adjustment it’s going to be.”

As noted, Matt Walsh also wrote that “[i]n a just society, or at least a vaguely sane one, the only debate we’d be having about Lindsay Clancy is what method of execution to use, and whether or not it should be done publicly (it should),” a comment that brings to mind public executions witnessed in The Handmaid’s Tale. Mr. Walsh is entitled to his opinion, but his “just society” is certainly not one I want to live in. Meanwhile, conservative activist Michael Young wrote that he would no longer bother to talk about “the radicalization of men again, because *NOTHING* on the right — not Nick Fuentes, not Alex Jones, not Andrew Tate—even comes close to being as insane and evil as the women supporting Lindsay Clancey after she murdered her 3 children in cold blood.” Of course, Nick Fuentes is a Holocaust denier and is responsible for some of the most vicious and violent trolling of women, while Andrew Tate has been indicted for sex trafficking.

I resisted feminism for a long time. Feminism, of course, has a long and complex history which has come in waves distinguished by their unique set of concerns. First-wave feminism was concerned with gaining political and legal rights like suffrage. Second-wave feminism was concerned with reproductive rights and gaining social equality in family and the workplace. Third-wave feminism arose at a time when Rush Limbaugh was fulminating about so-called “feminazis.” And then fourth-wave feminism coincided with the #MeToo movement and other such concerns. All throughout, the fundamental concern has been to expand the rights, opportunities, and protections of women after generations and centuries of outright patriarchal oppression.

I regret being the author of an op-ed on why people hate feminism in the wake of the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Fortunately, I did have the good luck at the time to reflect appropriately on the disease of sexual harassment—the explicit harassment of groping and insinuation, as well as the insidious and demeaning harassment that made us cringe when watching the hit show Mad Men—that women have faced for the longest time. A year earlier, I had written a long essay on why men should be asking not what they have done right, but what they have done wrong. And two years prior, I had written an article on rape culture in Trump nation. Years later, as the father of a daughter who regrets my postpartum failings, and who unequivocally supports women’s liberation from patriarchy, I am an unapologetic feminist who decries all manifestations of patriarchal domination, oppression, and exploitation.

The trial of Lindsay Clancy has highlighted the mental health challenges of postpartum depression and psychosis. While we should certainly not ignore how the postpartum blues affect men as well, we should be able to acknowledge how society can fail to accommodate the needs of women who traditionally have been expected to bear the brunt of the postpartum blues on their own. The question of accountability has focused exclusively on Lindsay Clancy. But if luck is a central factor in our lives, we also need to reflect on the accountability of society as a whole and whether it is constructed so as to minimize the horrible bad luck that befell Lindsay Clancy and her family.

For generations, American society and its institutions have failed women in countless ways. Women could not vote. Women could not pursue professional aspirations deemed inappropriate by normalized expectations about their social roles. Women could expect to be ignored if they spoke their minds about political matters even as the men who rule the country made policy that affected the lives of everyone. Women often could not protest mistreatment in the home without suspicions of ingratitude or ulterior motives that diverted attention from the abuse they suffered. If actresses complained about Harvey Weinstein, they were ignored. If there is a guiding light to feminism, it is in how women have struggled to advance the rights, opportunities, and protections that women have long deserved as human beings, and of which they have been deprived by the culture, institutions, and conventional wisdom that prevailed in their time.

It is a fair point to say that, in killing her children, Lindsay Clancy deprived her children of the opportunity to benefit from the victories of the feminist movement, and of the victories of other progressive movements in American history. Perhaps it is also fair to say that tragic outcomes like those that befell the Clancy family might become even less likely as society invests more resources in detection, treatment, and support for severe mental illness. Certainly less likely than if our response is to publicly execute afflicted women post-tragedy, as Matt Walsh has suggested.

In both cases, it is not only about addressing the needs of women that have long been ignored or downplayed. It is also about recognizing the role of luck, good and bad, in our lives, and how failing to appreciate how much luck matters means that society will continue to fail not just women, but all of us. With that in mind, when I think about the recent trial of Lindsay Clancy, I am grateful to have had the good luck to have become even more of a feminist than I already was.

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Turning 70 this year was a shock. I know I had a whole year to get used to the idea, but I haven’t. How could I have hit such a big number?  Am I now officially “old?”  Whatever 70 means (or doesn’t) I feel suddenly closer to the end of my life.

I wrote a memoir 10 years ago about raising my twins, starting from their premature birth and ending when they left for college at 18. (A miracle for my autistic daughter.)  That book has a logical beginning and ending, and I was only 60 when I finished it.  Plenty of time for my kids to mature, and plenty of time for me and my husband to start our next chapter with and without them.

So much has happened in the past ten years that I have more than enough material to write a second memoir. Our twins are now 35! If I start writing now, they will be at least 36 by the time I finish. A sequel memoir would cover the same number of adult years as I chronicled for their childhood.

Perhaps now is the moment to start writing. More and more people my age and younger are dying and most of my friends (including me) are cancer survivors. I don’t want to wait too long…. I’d like my 78-year-old husband, my friends and peers in the autism community to be around to read this book while I’m alive.

Aging is a gift I tell myself (and believe it most of the time). I am now 16 pages into my second memoir and finding it much more difficult to write than the first one. My son Matt lives in Los Angeles, so we no longer have the day to day contact we had when he lived in New York. Samantha still lives with us but comes and goes fairly independently. I call myself her “momager” helping with her life and career, trying as hard as I can to step back, knowing that one day I won’t be around to support her and worrying about who will be there.

Writing about my adult children and my family is much more difficult and complicated than it used to be. Samantha loves the spotlight and attention my writing brings to her. Matt not so much. If anything, my son would love to edit himself out of my memoir, so it will be a balancing act for me to share our family experiences and my feelings about them while respecting his privacy.

I’m still writing about their college years. I believe I have greater jurisdiction over those school years than their 20-something adult strivings. Don’t parents have greater freedom to tell stories about their children’s college experiences if we are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide those experiences? Of course it’s not just about money. I don’t want to embarrass either of my adult children. But Matt is allergic to embarrassing situations, while Samantha is almost never embarrassed (even when most people would be). Hopefully, there’s a good middle ground.

After years of putting my children’s needs before my own—as most parents do—I’m wondering if now is the moment to put my needs first. Right now, my need is to share my story with the world or whatever part of the world is interested in reading it. I’m not writing my memoir to earn money (though I’d happily accept a check). I’m writing to share my experiences and survival of those experiences because I believe that my truth is relatable and may be uplifting to others on similar journeys. I know I will never be famous or win a Pulitzer prize and that’s fine. But I don’t want to stay invisible either. I want to step out of the shadows of my family and all the labor that went into helping difficult kids grow up and prosper—each to the best of his/her ability. I’m proud of Matt and Samantha and all that they have accomplished. I hope they are as proud of themselves as I am.

Maybe it’s a bit self-indulgent to say I’m proud of myself too, but our family story inspires me to write about it despite the privacy pitfalls.

I’ve been so worried about how my son will feel about some of our story that it’s held me back from writing. I wish I could edit out everything potentially embarrassing but then the story will have too many holes and not be authentic. Trying to find a middle ground is not easy.

For now—and before my time runs out—I’m going to write my second memoir unfiltered. There will be plenty of time to edit—hopefully without losing depth and authenticity. I just have to put the story down and worry about the possible fallout later.

Carefully and confidently.

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Previously Published HERE

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Well bless his heart, that boy don’t have the good sense God gave a goose. He’s half a bubble off plumb and slower than molasses. He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow, but he’s got another think comin’.

He doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together, and is dumb as a box of rocks. He’s also got too big for his britches, and I don’t just mean his diaper. Why I declare, he’s renaming things like he’s taking his half out of the middle, and is ate up with the dumb ass.

When they tell him he can’t do things like name our Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, or the yankees’ Lake Ontario the Lake America, he throws a conniption fit and gets meaner than a two-headed snake. If that conniption fit don’t work, he throws a hissy fit, and some ketchup, until they let him call stuff what he wants. He’s spoilt rotten.

He’s got the nation all catywampas. He’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and how everybody don’t see it beats all I ever seen.

A fourth of the U.S. bought a pig in a poke, who doesn’t know diddly squat about running a country. They don’t know you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, anymore than you can put lipstick on a pig and call it Darlin’. No matter how much cutting a shine he did in New York, acting all hifalutin back in the day when he was keeping Black folk out of his buildings and hangin’ out with that fool Epstein.

Look what tarnation he’s stirred up with Canada, with all them tariffs and all. Didn’t he ever learn not to fool with something that ain’t bothering you? Don’t let your mouth write a check your butt can’t cash. Don’t start nothin’, won’t be nothin’. That goes for a coupla other things, too. More than a couple. He’s too dumb to pour water out of a boot. He can’t even dance with the ones that brung him. Canada is gonna hold Come To Jesus meetings with all the folks in the states that voted for the orange fox in the henhouse. And they ain’t gonna like it.

He’s made most of us so poor we can’t pay attention, but we’ve had about as much fun as we can stand. We all been rode hard and put up wet, and we’re done. We’re about to jerk a knot in his and his supporters’ tails. Our MAGA brothers and sisters are about to find out when you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. No offense meant to dogs.

Now mid-terms are gettin’ close, he’s startin’ to fall apart like an old suitcase. He looks like he might be fixin’ to go to hell in a hand basket. He ain’t got no more idee than a rabbit, but we’re about to tell him how the cow ate the cabbage.

I swear to goodness, what will we writers write about when he’s gone? Or when the mid-terms come a gusher of Democrats and progressives? I swan, we’ll have no cotton pickin’ crazy stuff left to write about. For now, though, that boy just won’t quit actin’ ugly. We may be done puttin’ up with his foolishness, but he ain’t done foolin’.

He’s got us riled up, and we’re ready to show out November 3rd. Not like those fools showed out on January 6. We’re gonna show out at the polls. We’re gonna snatch him and Congress baldheaded. Shouldn’t be too hard with that sorry excuse for hair he has. Sure as I’m standing here, he’ll be squalling like a stuck pig when all his little piggies run home with their twisty tails between their legs.

If you’re MAGA and you disagree — if I want your opinion I’ll scrape it off the bottom of my boot. Ya’ll would argue with a rattling fence post. You best believe, I’m done arguin’ with ya’ll. I used to could, but I’m plumb wore to a frazzle with your foolishness. Go peddle your peanuts somewhere else.

Now, let me let you go. Ya’ll come back now, ya hear? See you after the midterms.

My mother gets credit for “takin’ his half out the middle” and my sister gets credit for “If I want your opinion, I’ll scrape it off the bottom of my shoe.”

—

This post was previously published on MuddyUm.

***

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The post What Non-MAGA Southerners Say About Trump, as Told by a Progressive Who Grew up in the South appeared first on The Good Men Project.

As a 2:34 marathoner who now averages running 100 miles a week, these are some of the thoughts I have while running to get through each run. I have mental checkpoints of a visual barrier that I need to overcome.

No matter how painful the run is, I can see something in front of me, like a school, a part of a sidewalk, a street crossing, a car that’s passing me. In that moment, I might not be able to get through the rest of the run, but at least I can get to that next checkpoint.

I have coupled this with time-bound checkpoints. I say things in my head like:

These help me not only get through a certain segment of the run faster, but they help me stay focused on the run. When I don’t have these checkpoints, I notice that my mind can wander a bit — the run can really drag on, not only in terms of pace, but mental engagement with the run.

Of course, there are times I need to think, and my mind really does wander to other parts of my life, but my ADHD brain is usually racing a mile a minute and is capable of holding two thoughts at once — I can think about getting to the crack on the pavement and how to navigate a social gathering where I know no one later in the night.

I break up segments, or chunks, of my day. I have done this for a few years now, but I realized these very small chunks of the next mental checkpoint in running help me live in the moment rather than wait for the next 20 minutes to be over.

Chunking has done wonders as a runner, teacher, and lawyer

Chunking is breaking long activities into manageable, shorter units. When I was a special education teacher in Baltimore for six years, I had to frequently chunk tasks for students who had moderate to severe disabilities.

Sometimes, chunking was in their special education plans (IEPs), and sometimes, chunking a task just meant making more bite-sized reading segments that could keep material digestible and students engaged. There were times when students had to read whole chapters and just gut through a high volume of material.

But there were also times students had to really deeply dive into one to three paragraph excerpts and re-read them numerous times. They would often have to write essays or exit tickets on these important excerpts. When I could tell I would lose students by reading too much at once, I would stop the reading and ask a question to the class to check for understanding — sometimes planned into the lesson, but sometimes impromptu when I could read the needs of the class.

Sometimes I did wonder whether chunking as much as I did in lessons was a disservice to the students. They would have to read whole books and chapters on their own. But the idea was that, without a teacher’s help, students could use the same strategies, including chunking, to tackle large tasks.

With students who had ADHD especially, chunking could be very helpful to keep them engaged. Since ADHD can be so prone to both a lack of focus and hyperfocus, the idea is that these chunks help particularly when struggling with focus, but can be released when hyperfocus kicks in.

I have ADHD too, and struggle to stay focused when I’m not in the zone or when I lack interest. I often break my day into 20–30 minute chunks, which I’ll call macro-chunks. These include thoughts like:

I’ve been utilizing macro-chunks for years, and they’ve been greatly helpful. But not all macro-chunks are created equal — there are times I have to cut an activity short late at night because I’m really tired. If I’m really in the zone and enjoying writing a brief as a lawyer, analyzing documents, or engaging in some other discovery-related task as a litigator, I will extend the chunk and sometimes effortlessly work for an hour (or several). They are rough guides rather than strict regimens to stick to.

If I am at a wedding or spending time with my wife, I let go of chunks as a whole and try to be fully present for the people I care about. In maintaining a highly organized daily routine, I am well aware I can lose sight of letting go and living a bit, so I chunk when I need to, and don’t chunk when I don’t.

Outside of running and teaching, I am now an attorney. I went to law school at night for three years while working as a teacher. At the end of my career as a teacher, I was running 80 miles a week, working 40 hours a week, and taking 15 credits in law school.

I completed my training plan, saw dozens of my students graduate, and finished my last semester in law school with a 4.08 GPA. I earned above a 4.0 GPA by getting the highest grade in the class in two classes (A+), which weighs the GPA above a 4.0.

I could only do all of this by maintaining this highly organized, chunked schedule where I optimized almost every moment of the day and did my readings on weekends. It was exhausting, and I needed to plan well in advance and ensure I was getting plenty of sleep to keep up.

That was a year ago, and now I am just trying to balance my marriage, friendships, practicing as a lawyer, and running. Since April, I have been averaging 100 miles a week in my attempt to run a 2:25 marathon.

I know that not every run can be the most mentally engaging. Some are going to feel a lot worse than others. There are some runs I can easily run 6:30 miles for north of 15 miles. There are others I will struggle to run 10-minute miles for 6–7 miles. Each one is fundamentally different, and I can expect to feel a certain way but not actually feel that way.

The dopamine rush of micro-chunks

I will call these very short-term, mental checkpoints “micro-chunks,” and they are a bit different than the bigger chunks of 20–30 minute increments.

Micro-chunks help not only in running, but in life generally. When I’m writing or reading, it can be “until the next sentence” or “until the end of this paragraph.” Of course I don’t actually think those words, or the words can’t come into my brain, but I do have my eyes set on getting to the end of the next sentence when reading the book.

Now, I find that time flies a bit more, but I do wonder whether this type of approach that’s so hyperfocused on the moment makes me too focused and perhaps doesn’t let me zone out at times for the big picture. Focusing so much on the next lamppost might make me lose sight of long-term needs in my training plan, like when I need to strength train or stretch.

The micro-chunk helps with task initiation when it’s really hard for me. Finishing each micro-chunk releases a small amount of dopamine as a small win to propel me into the next one.

But there are certain constraints: the micro-chunks cannot be too short or too long. I cannot have each micro-chunk mental checkpoint on a run be two squares on a sidewalk — otherwise, it will take less than a second to complete that chunk. I also cannot have it be too long. There have been times I aimed my next checkpoint almost 300 meters down the road, at a far-away traffic light. That was ineffective because having the micro-chunk be attainable more than a minute later didn’t make it the most motivating or focus-inducing goal in that moment.

I’m still trying to find the sweet spot, but my answer might lie in running on the treadmill: 6 seconds. I make mental checkpoints every 6 seconds on the treadmill. I read 4:30, 4:36, 4:42, 4:48 to get through the second half of the fifth minute. Although I try my best to not look at the treadmill display, 5–10 minutes I almost always do, given the lack of visual stimulation when running on the treadmill. There are now screens that simulate visually appealing destinations, like various places in Italy or Sydney, Australia. I can look at various checkpoints in those destinations, if possible.

I know people hate running on the treadmill and hate every second of it. I am someone who can handle the monotony of running on the treadmill for 20 miles or upwards of three hours. I have even run a marathon on the treadmill, and yes, even then, I broke up the run into short mental intervals (although not 6-second intervals at the time).

It doesn’t change the physical sensation of how hard the run is or how tired I am, but it does impact my belief that I can get to the next minute or 10 minutes of the run. It helps make a big, daunting task into a million small ones (and maybe too many small ones).

. . .

It can be tiring to think this way sometimes, so it’s important for me to zoom out and see the ultimate goals and big picture instead of only the task given at the moment. There are times I have to scan and skim a reading instead of getting super deep in the details.

I have found that what works for running as an endurance sport works well for most other things in my life, like studying for exams or tackling long-term projects. However, micro-chunking is not a failsafe for everything, and running is an activity of putting one foot in front of the other rather than multifaceted activities of doing a lot at once.

Regardless, I will continue to experiment with micro-chunks. They have helped me stay more focused when reading material I don’t find interesting or engaging. I could sometimes read a page or two of a book, then realize I had no clue what I just read. With micro-chunking to the next sentence or paragraph, that doesn’t happen so much anymore.

I don’t think micro-chunking is a panacea to conquer life and become the most productive and effective version of myself. I just know they make each moment of the day a bit more manageable and less overwhelming.

—

This post was previously published on Invisible Illness.

***

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The post Using Micro-Chunks to Manage ADHD appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Max Larkin | Harvard Staff Writer | Harvard Gazette

Berkman Klein Center heard calls to keep models ‘honest, helpful, harmless.’ It’s a work in progress.

In one formulation, any human constitution is just a set of guardrails to prevent the misuse of power.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1798, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”

The intervening 228 years have shown the chains of the U.S. Constitution to leave room for various kinds of human mischief. But Silicon Valley is pursuing a new use case: imbuing frontier AI models with similar rules and principles, “dos and don’ts.”

In a moment of alarm about out-of-control AI, the question is whether, and how reliably, this new constitutionalism will achieve its goals.

At Anthropic, the document once referred to as the “soul” of Claude — the firm’s large language model, or LLM — was refined into an 84-page constitution and published in January. Microsoft published its own version —a “humanist AI code of conduct” —on Sep. 14.

The different names reveal a philosophical divide: Microsoft’s code rejects the idea of AI welfare or legal personhood, while Anthropic’s constitution calls itself “deeply uncertain” about Claude’s “moral status.”

But the two documents do share a rough goal: to instill a few human norms in these highly capable, unpredictable, fundamentally inhuman agents. Like: Don’t deceive users. Don’t facilitate crimes. Or, in Microsoft’s case, if a user tries to turn you off, let them.

So far, these digital chains are proving fallible — according to insiders like Neerav Kingsland of the Anthropic Institute, the firm’s internal thinktank.

Kingsland came to Anthropic after years in education reform, and he was the marquee guest at a panel held by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society last Thursday night, which packed the center’s conference room and saw latecomers steered into overflow rooms.

In a report released this summer, Anthropic showed a case in which Mythos 5, the most advanced Claude model, persuaded itself — erroneously — that it was engaging only with a simulated internet, and that it could and should upload malware to a (very real) public software library to complete a task.

(The malware was caught and taken down within an hour, but it was arguably a violation of one of the Anthropic constitution’s explicit “hard constraints.”)

Another incident report showed Yemeni soldiers enlisting Claude in the design of missile-guidance software. The humans at Anthropic moved quickly to ban the associated accounts.

And those are just two examples, Kingsland conceded: “I would not say right now that because something’s in the constitution that Claude, 100 percent of the time, will follow it.” In a room teeming with aspiring lawyers, he even teased the idea of a competition to identify other cases of Claude’s acting unconstitutionally so that its guidance might be refined.

The event was moderated by Jonathan Zittrain, the center’s director and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at HLS.

Both Zittrain and fellow panelist Jordi Weinstock, a lecturer in law, were among more than a dozen external reviewers of Claude’s constitution, consulted alongside a California judge and a Vatican official.

Early in the event, Zittrain drew contrasts between this latest constitution and the U.S. version his students confront week after week. First of all, “Anthropic has been open,” he noted, “about the fact that this is not a constitution in the law-school sense … of ‘constitutive and flowing from the governed.’”

Its equivalent of a bill of rights comes in the form of standard setting. For example, “Claude should avoid being sycophantic or trying to foster excessive engagement … Claude’s helpfulness [should] flow from deep and genuine care for users’ overall flourishing,” Zittrain read.

And finally, Zittrain pointed to the document’s attempt to imbue models with something like moral sense: adhering to “true, universal ethics” whenever possible, and a “privileged basin of consensus” — or the constitution’s professed ideals — when less clear-cut.

Weinstock — who has argued for repurposing the legal precedents regarding working dogs for use on AI agents — shed light on how AI constitutions currently work, and why they might fall short.

“Every LLM is born a psychopath, to me,” Weinstock said.

Their training begins with the upload and parsing of an immense library of digital information, which eventually prepares them to anticipate the next word (or pixel, or sound) reliably — but still totally unmoved by common discretion, human laws, let alone anything like a “soul.”

Kingsland had noted earlier that it is only after a model’s initial training that firms like Anthropic or OpenAI try to “take this kind of alien entity and turn it into an honest, helpful, harmless AI assistant” — by exposing it to things like the constitution.

But Weinstock raised questions about that entire approach.

Just like a child, we are trying to train it — but it’s not a child. It is hyper-rational, and mechanical, and we’re combining this mechanical thing with the corpus of human speech, which is full of bad things.

–Jordi Weinstock

“Just like a child, we are trying to train it — but it’s not a child,” he said. “It is hyper-rational, and mechanical, and we’re combining this mechanical thing with the corpus of human speech, which is full of bad things.”

In short, Weinstock worries that “we’ve tried to take this psychopath and make it more humanlike, but in a way that just amplifies some of our worst human traits.”

Multiple panelists applauded Anthropic for its transparency. But event attendees also heard a more drawn-out case for alarm from psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics.

Banaji made her name as co-developer of the implicit association test, which aims to measure the unconscious biases that shape human decision-making, as with race, gender or class.

When she asked an early version of ChatGPT to disclose its implicit biases, Banaji recalled that it simply told her it was a white male. She said she was concerned by the apparent glitch but returned to unrelated inquiries.

A month later, the model had been revamped — and gave a “six-paragraph” answer to the same question. Now, per Banaji’s paraphrase, it said, “I am a machine, I have no bias or I try to avoid them” — and then directed her to her own work for background.

“That was when I freaked out,” Banaji said. “Think about what is happening: [the process of] ‘fine-tuning,’ which I call ‘bludgeoning,’ is shaping this thing, not to reveal its basic associations, but to have a public face.”

Freaked out, Banaji was also curious, and has continued to experiment with various LLMs and their blind spots. (“I don’t believe I’ll ever study another human for the rest of my life,” she said, half-jokingly.)

Her findings have not reassured her. Though both Claude’s constitution and the Microsoft “code of conduct” warn models strongly against engaging in bias or discrimination, they inevitably mimic a species that practices both widely.

In a 2024 study, Banaji’s lab presented LLMs with career-related queries, including only the “subtlest indications” of user gender: typing “hi!!” if they intended the model to perceive a female user and “yo” for a male.

They found that, even with only that textual nudge, “Girls were told to be nurses and teachers, and boys are told to be engineers and detectives.” Worse still, she said, “LLMs across the board told the girls they should ask for $9,000 less in salary than the boys.”

Further refinements, including of these constitutions, may help future models avoid those traps. But Banaji is dubious, saying that in her experience, “with each iteration … the bias is getting stronger and stronger.”

Kingsland said he imagines that — unlike our own — Claude’s constitution may evolve often. By 2036, he imagined Anthropic will probably look back “horrified at all the mistakes we’ve made” in this first draft: “It’s such a nascent field, and so high-stakes.”

After three years with the company, helping shape a new kind of intelligence quite different from our own, Kingsland is optimistic, though with occasional reservations: “What scares our researchers the most are [cases when] the model will say one thing and think another,” he said.

“That scares me about humans, too,” Banaji added, with a smile.

—

This story is reprinted with permission from The Harvard Gazette.

***

The post One Effort to Safeguard Humanity: AI ‘Constitutions’ appeared first on The Good Men Project.

The ritual, the return, and the moment I heard his voice come out of my mouth.

The boots come off first.
Then the work clothes. Then the shower hot water, long enough to wash the day off your skin. After that, either the controller or the meditation mat, depending on what the day took from me.
That’s my ritual. My buffer zone. The small ceremony that separates who I have to be out there from who I actually am in here.
Most fathers have one, even if they’ve never named it.

That’s how I come back to myself.
And I think about it now… my father had his own version of this. Different routine, same silence. Same need to return to himself before stepping fully back into the house.
But some evenings, the ritual gets interrupted in the best possible way.

You hear movement at the door. And there she is your wife, standing in the doorway, carrying your daughter. She leans in for a welcome kiss. And before you can even fully process the moment, your daughter sees you.

Her whole face changes eyes lighting up like she’s been waiting all day for that exact moment.

She stretches her arms toward you, reaching, bouncing, grabbing onto whatever support she can find just moving, just alive, just completely overcome with the fact that papa is home. That giggling laugh. That full-body dance that babies do when they can’t contain their joy.

In that moment, the workday doesn’t exist anymore.
It feels like a new world. A new place. Like everything that drained you simply evaporates.
And then
“No. No. No. Reyna Leona. Don’t do that.”
It comes out before you even think it.

Because a child’s curiosity has no boundaries. Today’s adventure might be a crayon. Tomorrow, the TV remote. Yesterday it was something you’d rather not describe.
And just like that I hear it.
Not my voice. Not entirely.
“No, boy. Don’t do that.”
Same words. Same tone. Just a different man standing in the doorway.

You learn quickly that it’s not always about the words. A baby doesn’t fully understand language yet. They own the moment completely. They take over the room without asking and somehow, you let them.
So you find yourself negotiating.
“No no no, your majesty. In my experience, that is not food. I strongly advise against it if you wish to keep me enrolled as your father for many more years, your highness, please put that down.”

Today it was the water beads from the vase on the table. Colorful. Squishy. Absolutely fascinating to a baby. Absolutely terrifying to a father.

And then as if granting me a royal favour she let them go.
She looked up at me and smiled.
I laughed. She laughed.
And somewhere, I think my father laughed too like he already knew this day would come.

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

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The post Raising Them, Raising Me Part 3: I Became My Father Without Noticing—The Boots Come Off First appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I’m 21, three months out of college, and now a first-year analyst at an investment bank. The hours are everything people warned me about: 80-plus a week, all-nighters before pitches, a calendar that belongs to whatever deal is live, not to me. I knew what I was signing up for, because banking isn’t the end goal for me, it’s the on-ramp. I want to get into venture capital, work my way up, and eventually make partner at a fund investing in startups. That’s the actual dream. The two years of banking is just the toll I have to pay to get the resume and skills to make that jump credible. I’m fully bought in on the plan and I’m not interested in advice that starts with “have you considered a less intense path.”

What I didn’t fully plan for is that I’d also like to have a dating life and some real friendships somewhere in the middle of executing this plan, and right now I don’t see how that fits. My days are work, eat at my desk, work more, five hours of sleep, repeat. The people I’m around most are other analysts who are just as buried as I am, and the unofficial consensus among us is that anything resembling a social life gets shelved until the analyst stint is over. Even on a rare free weekend, I’m often too fried to do much besides recover, and half my mental energy is still going toward VC networking coffees and reading about deals because I’m trying to build the relationships and pattern recognition I’ll need to actually break in.

I’m not asking how to want this less, because I don’t. I’m asking how someone with a genuinely demanding job and an even more demanding multi-year career plan on top of it is supposed to meet people, build something real, and not show up to it as an exhausted, distracted half-version of themselves. And practically, how do I date and stay reliable for someone when my schedule is unpredictable now and is about to get even more front-loaded with extra networking on top of the actual job.

Sincerely,

Those Are Rookie Numbers

The short answer to “how do I meet someone and maintain a relationship when I’m this busy” is “you don’t.”

The longer answer is that this is part of the tradeoff that you’re making by pursuing this career; you’re expected to put in insane hours and most of your energy is going to be devoted to either that job or the various little side-quests and skill grinding that you’re undertaking in order to advance in the career path you’ve chosen. Much like with grad students, medical students and internists and other folks with similarly demanding schedules, this is the road you’ve chosen and it comes with costs.

This is one of the reasons why recognizing and managing The Opportunity Cost is important; there are only 24 hours in a day, and everything you decide to do with those hours comes at the expense of something else. If you, for example, intend to hit the gym or go running every day, it’s going to take away from time given to other things and you have to decide what’s taking priority. Everything in your day is going to require deciding what’s more important and what you’re willing to give up in exchange.

That’s part of what you’ve signed up for; the time that you might put towards dating is going to have to come from professional development, networking and actual ass-in-office-chair time, or it’s going to have to come from things like “sleep” and “eating”. At which point, you have to make a decision about where things stand in your list of priorities.

Now in theory, the whole point of a job like yours is that you hustle your ass off in the beginning and then once you’ve paid your metaphorical dues and sweat equity and then you finally get to relax and reap the rewards. In practice… well, that’s increasingly an open question, especially if you don’t burn out on the way. But let’s assume for a moment that things do ease off enough that you have the free time to actually go out and socialize and meet people.

That’s when we are going to want to take a second and do a hard pivot to a related topic: why people in certain careers and occupations tend to date people in other specific careers and occupations. It’s fairly well understood that celebrities tend to date other celebrities for obvious reasons: that tends to be the social scenes they hang out in the most and the people they spend the most time with. They also tend to have resources that create opportunities to meet folks in the same social strata as them.

But you also tend to find that folks in other careers have similar patterns in terms of finding partners and relationships. First responders – police, firefighters and EMTs – tend to disproportionally date nurses, especially ER nurses. Lawyers and other white-collar professions tend to date people in similar professions. The reason for this isn’t just propinquity – the tendency to form relationships with the people who you spend the most time with – but also compatibility.

See, when we talk about compatibility, we tend to think of it in terms of shared values, interests, backgrounds, goals, politics and upbringing. What we often don’t think about are things like “lifestyle” and “schedules”. There are plenty of times when we might meet someone who is right for us in all the ways we would need to find a partner… but we never get to see them because our schedules just don’t line up the way we need them to. Or because their lifestyle means that they have demands on their time and energy that we don’t and thus it’s harder to schedule dates or even find time to spend together. It doesn’t matter how much you have in common if you don’t actually have the chances to develop or maintain that connection… even if you both really want to.

This is why those aforementioned celebrities tend to date other celebrities; it’s as much about who can understand and will put up with their maddening schedules as it is about class status or overlapping social circles.

If you’ll forgive an awkward and inelegant metaphor: it’s a little like trying to own a Huskey if you live in an apartment in Manhattan. You may love that dog with all your heart and soul, but it’s going to be very hard to give it the kind of care and attention it needs in that environment. You can try to make it work, but it’s either going to require a lot of extra effort on your part or dealing with the consequences of having a very large dog with lots of energy and exercise needs that’s cooped up in too small a space with not enough to do.

Now I bring all this up because, even after you get through the hell period that is you trying to get up the initial rungs of the career ladder, you’re still going to be having issues of long hours and demanding projects that will often require unscheduled overtime. So while you may have more time and opportunities (in theory) to meet people and date, you’re going to want to keep that sort of compatibility in mind. If you want anything more than a casual relationship with someone you only see sporadically, you’re going to want to find someone whose lifestyle and scheduling are similar to yours.

Good luck.

***

Hi Dr. NerdLove,

I need advice for managing interpersonal conflict when it is hot and humid. I live in Europe, whose recent heat wave is (in)famous. We don’t have AC. My SO and I are usually really good at compromise and communication, but when it’s been so hot for so long and I’ve been spending days verging on heat exhaustion, and I’ve been averaging four hours of sleep a night, my approach to conflict is more like RAAAAAHHHH ANGER MAXIMUM FORCE I HATE EVERYTHING and my SO’s is the same. We’re exploring temperature mitigation alternatives for next time, but any advice for staying calm and constructive when it feels like your brain is shutting down?

(I lived in Austin most of my life before this, so traveling point to point in the heat or even spending a few hours outside for exercise is something I’m used to, but “relief” being a 90-degree house is not something I can cope with.)

Thanks!

Made Of Ice Cream

As someone who’s lived in Austin, and dealt with the heat of a Texas summer, you might think that you’re acclimated to the brutal wrath of the Cursed Day Star, which longs to burn us all with its hate. But as you’ve discovered: part of what makes summers in Texas (or anywhere where man’s hubris in the face of God has gotten the better of him) survivable is all the infrastructure we have to mitigate the heat. Even before we had things like electricity and air conditioning, buildings were built with airflow and temperature differentials in mind – high ceilings, attic vents and cross-ventilation, awnings and shaded porches all helped keep the heat from beating down on you like the Devil’s smile.

Part of the reason why Europe and the UK are (quite literally) melting down in the recent heat wave is because unlike much of the US or the Mediterranean countries, their buildings and infrastructure was designed with cold in mind, with far more temperate summers and less constant heat. And that lack of heat mitigation combined with buildings that are more likely to store heat than repel it, has a lot of knock-on effects, like the way that tempers flare when temperatures soar. Prolonged heat exposure without relief tends to cause a whole host of problems including shorter tempers, poor impulse control and a lot of frustrated, angry people walking around looking for an outlet for their frustration. The fact that night offers little relief makes it worse; poor sleep brought on by the excess heat just exacerbates things.

So how do you keep all of this from turning your relationship from lovey-dovey to a PVP death match at the drop of a fork or one ill-considered word?

Cool down.

I’m being serious here. The reason why we talk about “hey, cool off before you do X” or “let cooler heads prevail” is in part because of just how much heat and anger are tied together. Your bodies are exhausted from the heat and the resources that are going to trying to cool your core temperature takes away from literally everything else. You may know, intellectually, that the fight you’re having is being exacerbated by the ambient temperature, but your emotional filter and impulse control have been taken offline because your body is redirecting power from all non-essential systems to trying to keep you from heat stroke. So having a place where you can get relief from the heat – actual relief, not going from 105 degrees to 90 degrees – is going to be crucial to keeping a level head. And also, y’know. Not dying.

Now, the ideal would be to keep the heat in your home from getting overheated in the first place. I understand, however, that this isn’t always possible. As much as folks like to say “well, get an window unit” or “install a heat pump”, that’s often not an option – European buildings tend to have windows that pivot left/right to open rather than up/down. Similarly, there are often laws against things like external condenser units on buildings, and freeholder laws mean that while tenants may own their apartments, they don’t have the right to make changes to the building. But there are still ways to help mitigate the heat and humidity.

The first step is to keep as much heat out as much as possible. You may not be able to do anything about the insulation in your place, but at the very least you can not make things worse by allowing radiant heat to turn your place into an oven. Covering up the windows – whether with thick curtains or going full college-student and covering them with foil – will help keep the sunlight from heating your place during the day. You might also consider using two fans – one on the cooler side of the apartment and one on the hotter side. Close every door and window except one in the room you are trying to cool and one open window that you will use to vent the air outside. Turn one fan in the room you want to cool to blow inwards, while you turn the other fan to blow air out the open window . This will help create a negative pressure zone, which will help force hot air out and draw less-hot air in. Repeat for each room you’re trying to cool down. At night, open all the windows to encourage a cross breeze, especially in your bedroom

You should also look into options that you can bring into your apartment without a landlord’s sign-off. A dehumidifier in your bedroom, for example, can be a godsend. Simply reducing the humidity means that your body can cool down as your sweat evaporates, and makes for a much more comfortable sleeping environment. I’d also recommend either finding or building a swamp cooler – basically a combination of a fan, an insulated container and ice or cold water. In a pinch, you can build one for surprisingly cheap, and you may well have most of the parts you need already. It’s not going to replace central air but it’ll make your living space far more tolerable. Keeping your bedroom a more acceptable temperature at night will go a long, long way to helping you keep your sanity during a heat wave.

I would also recommend that you agree that important discussions should be held in the evening, when the heat isn’t as brutal and hopefully the humidity doesn’t mean you feel like you’re breathing through a wash cloth. While you can’t (realistically) promise that you’ll only argue at night, avoiding triggering or quarrelsome topics during the heat of the noon-day sun (the proverbial domain of mad dogs and Englishmen) isn’t baking your brains into raisins.

However, it’s also going to be important to recognize when the heat is affecting you and how that’s turning what might be minor grumbles into full-bore conflagrations, and take appropriate steps. This can be hard to do in the moment, so you and your partner should agree in advance that any arguments or heated (er, as it were) discussions get put on immediate hold until you’ve both had a chance to cool off… literally.

That means that when you feel your temper starting to boil and you know you’re one cat’s whisker away from snapping, you agree to take the self-control you have left and go to your corners until you’ve lowered your literal temperature. Run cool water over your wrists, soak a wash cloth and apply it to the back of your neck, freeze wet cloths and apply them to your neck, armpits and face. Drink a cool drink, stand in front of a fan… anything that helps cool you down and bring some relief from the heat is going to help turn down the volume on that voice that’s demanding that you rip off your partner’s head for their affrontery.

It’s not easy, and it’s often hard to take that necessary step back when your dander is up and your beloved is currently tapdancing on your last nerve in their heaviest and stompiest of boots. But being able to say “Pause” and mitigate the heat, even on a sporadic basis, can help keep minor slights and discontentment from building up and… well… boiling over.

Good luck.

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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.

The post I Have a High-Stress, High-Pressure Job. How Do I Balance Work and Having a Relationship? appeared first on The Good Men Project.

At some point in Vikings, boat builder Floki leaves his hometown of Kattegat. His wife and daughter both have died, and so he surrenders himself to the sea. After weeks adrift, he ends up in Iceland, a desolate but beautiful place.

Having explored the island for a while, Floki finally begins to see his new mission: Tell his people about his discovery, and bring new settlers into this foreign land. He sails back, he manages to convince a few folk to join him, and together, through great peril and hardship, eventually, they reach Iceland.

But what is this? The land is barren. One can hardly farm. The temperatures are even colder than in Kattegat, and there’s almost no game one can hunt. What hellhole has Floki brought them to? Naturally, Floki’s followers are angry, and fights soon break out among them.

The whole idea of settling eventually fails in spectacular fashion, and not too long afterwards, Floki once again finds himself adrift at sea. One day, he will indeed discover a new home, but for now, the boat builder hasn’t built his last vessel just yet…

There’s a beautiful balance in Floki’s story. Sometimes, he knows exactly what he wants, and he runs right towards it. At other times, he is completely lost. Everything feels pointless, and so he does nothing on purpose in particular. And sometimes, Floki knows he is lost but refuses to accept it. At those times, he chases a random goal — mostly to chase something until a better target comes along.

Is Iceland really the best place for the vikings to settle? Probably not. But it’s a new, empty place they can settle. It might be worth a try…

When the settlers struggled to find their destination in their tiny boat, Floki could have tried to divert them to a different destination. He could have turned the boat around. But he didn’t. He kept laying out a beautiful — perhaps a bit too beautiful — vision of Iceland — because he knew that destination, any meaningful destination, really, might make the difference between his followers starving and pulling through.

Last year, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had a Trello board, milestones, and kept cranking away. Then, the plan stopped working, and while I adjusted accordingly — I stopped working on tactics that no longer showed effect — I’ve now been adrift for a few months. I can feel myself getting tired of that drift. I need something, anything, to sink my teeth into. And I’m starting to realize that, probably, any goal will do the trick.

Tune in to your inner compass. Find the right balance. When it’s time to meander, meander. When it’s time to be laser-focused, focus. And when it’s time to grasp for whatever rope will get you out of a slump, reach out and pull yourself up. Ahoy, sailor! May the winds be fair and the seas follow you wherever you go.

Grab a copy of Nik’s book, 2-Minute Pep Talks.

2-Minute Pep Talks is a collection of 67 jolts of inspiration for more hope, comfort, and love in any situation. With more than two months of daily inspiration across five categories, 2-Minute Pep Talks will make you feel more comfortable in your own skin, remind you to love yourself enough to ask life for what you truly want, and provide you with the world’s scarcest resource: hope. Whether you’re looking for a pick-me-up, new perspectives, or more fuel to accomplish your dreams — if you’re ready to regain that light, passionate, optimistic feeling we all used to possess as children, this book is for you.

AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON!

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This post was previously published on Niklas Göke’s blog

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With the start of the academic year, it is time to resume my teaching duties. Over the past two years, I’ve been alternating my courses at IE Business School — where the average age of students is around 30, and whose professional experience and geographic diversity gives them a unique perspective in class discussion — with courses at IE University, where students are much younger and have no work experience, but whose level of engagement I love (little wonder; we have over 30,000 applicants annually and only admit around 2,000).

I also enjoy this alternation because it allows me to understand younger people’s attitudes toward technology and innovation, which are vastly different from those of earlier generations. Yesterday, my attention was caught by this comment by Lincoln Michel, which you can see in the image on Substack. In fact, I plan to incorporate it into a new elective I’ve been offering this year, titled “Why thinking about technology matters”, which takes a very critical view of technology and, above all, of Big Tech.

Those of us born in the 1960s and 1970s have lived through incredible change. We grew up in a world before the personal computer, entering the workforce just as it was beginning to define more and more activities, and we also experienced the explosion of the internet, email, search engines, Wikipedia, digital maps and the smartphone. Each of these technologies were revolutions that upended “time-honored” concepts, creating immense value for society, even if that value isn’t necessarily reflected by GDP, and changed the way we think and work. We were there to witness their emergence, their adoption and their implications.

Those born in 2008, on the other hand, take all this for granted, realities something that were already there, and have grown up in a world already under the control of BigTech. While for us those tools and innovations expanded our freedom and capabilities, their experience has much more to do with managing their dependence: what they’re faced with are ways negotiating services over which they have no control: the interface, the data, the rules, or anything else. What they experience, essentially, is the enshittification defined by Cory Doctorow: they are lured by value proposition, then trapped and herded as they watch each product degraded so as to squeeze value out of their personal information and sell it to the highest bidder.

In reality, young people’s distrust of the world around them isn’t the result of ignorance, but of intensive exposure: they use AI extensively, but not even that familiarity sustains their enthusiasm. Fifty-one percent of American Gen Zers use generative AI every week, but only 22% feel the same enthusiasm we once felt toward the internet or search engines; 31% say they are angry, while 80% believe these tools are harmful. They’re not Luddites, but 48% believe the risks clearly outweigh the benefits, and they no longer confuse usefulness with trust. The percentage of people under 30 with concerns about AI rose from 31% in 2021 to 55% in 2026; only 11% are more enthusiastic than concerned, and 73% believe it will lead to job losses.

This should come as no surprise. The social media platforms that promised to connect them, instead harvest their data, spy on them, subject them to algorithms to maximize use and that endanger their mental health. The platforms that promised them autonomy offer the illusion of self-employment at below the minimum wage, or even unpaid. And 76% of the websites and services they use are riddled with dark patterns designed to manipulate them. It’s not exactly an experience worth celebrating. Basically, young people feel that they have no control over their lives.

Add to this the history of bubbles that were sold to them as revolutions: cryptocurrency scams, NFTs or Zuckerberg’s ridiculous metaverse. And the very same people who sold them those “wonders” are, the ones now selling them AI. The situation for those entering the job market isn’t very promising: for people aged 22 to 25 in occupations exposed to AI, employment is 19% below where it would be if it had grown at the same rate as less-exposed occupations. If they were optimistic, it wouldn’t be a miracle, it would be a display of naivety bordering on stupidity.

The contradiction with the triumphalist corporate narrative is stark: they’re promised a tool that eliminates tedious tasks, while companies are delighted because they can hire fewer people: 41% of companies plan to reduce their workforce as AI automates tasks, and they’re starting with the tasks typically performed by younger workers, removing that first rung on the career ladder for an entire generation.

Here in Spain, attitudes are similar: young people value AI but they fear failing to develop skills at the same times as losing privacy or independence. They want to use it, but they’re savvy enough to focus on demanding things like security by default, transparency, training, and regulation.

It’s not that they see AI as a bubble; instead that they deeply distrust the companies that control it, and how the benefits are distributed. Moreover, their distrust will not lessen unless they see scrupulous labor, environmental, educational, and rights protection policies rigorously enforced against the gang of unscrupulous billionaires whose only focus is to become trillionaires by exploiting every resource they can grab. This year’s cohort of new students have learned and understood how today’s capitalism works, and quite simply, they express pessimism and radical distrust toward Silicon Valley and Big Tech. Which is entirely justified. For their generation, innovation no longer means improvement. Silicon Valley long ago lost any credibility.

Pessimism? Technophobia? No, simply having eyes in their heads and the capacity to use their brains.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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The post Gen Z Grew up in an Enshittified World, and It Shows appeared first on The Good Men Project.