Brandon Marcus

Freud did not treat anxiety as a mistake. He understood it, rather, as perhaps our most important, vital, informative feeling—the psyche’s most urgent messenger.

“The problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental

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If we’re serious about creating space for genuine human connection we need to attack the conditions that make performance necessary in the first place. It should not be hard to see that policies around economic security, affordable housing and universal health- or childcare are what’s really necessary, so we aren’t stuck in a society that doesn’t... See more

As Jia Tolentino wrote: “As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.”

Instead, eros calls us to not know. To meet each new day, thing, interaction, object as some new, striking phenomena (which no matter the method, interpretation or approach is the essence of phenomenology). To be drunk on unknowing—and be willing to be enraptured by the unknowability of everything. Even ourselves. No, especially ourselves.

Murdoch suggests that the ego makes it difficult to properly attend to one another. We often fail to see others adequately because the ego gets in the way and obstructs or distorts such vision. On Murdoch’s very loosely Freudian picture of the human psyche, the ego is anxious and utterly self-centred, utterly absorbed in itself and focused on... See more

John Keats, whose portrait by Severn captures exactly this quality of absorbed attention, gave us another language for it. His “negative capability”, the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” is, in essence, Weil’s attention under a different name. Both describe a mode of... See more