Debbie Foster

Being a high self-monitor allows you to shape-shift when necessary, without rearranging your entire personality.

I found this to be an uplifting take on personality change: that it can be temporary, but still valid. Free traits allow you the flexibility to act out of character while knowing there's something inside you that's constant and steady.

The relevance of the death instinct isn't restricted to behaviour that is manifestly self-destructive. The death instinct is also expressed across a spectrum of mental states characterised by passivity and inertia. These states can be construed as small resistances and oppositions to vitality, and they seem particularly prevalent in the modern

If the United States' Cold War propaganda efforts have receded so far into the past as to be meaningless to us today, then it remains remarkable that we still believe basically everything they said.

Integrity is a virtue, but it can make the self as fragile as porcelain, incapable of absorbing anything that deviates from the expected

When I talk about the linguistic "innovators" and "majority adopters" in diffusion-of-innovations theory, this is it. The innovators are always niche communities with shared interests and shared needs to create words. The reason we have so many words from incels is that they had an imperative to come up with new language for their common

"It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self/ Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads / to a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through," wrote Mark Strand for his friend Joseph Brodsky…

the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering

It’s natural to experience some level of distress when faced with disruption. The best course of action is to process the emotion with curiosity and self-compassion so you can calmly deal with the consequences.

In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.