Hazy

But burnout is one of the body’s final defenses against unrelenting, unsustainable demand, and it is only by reevaluating those demands and abandoning a huge number of them that we can actually begin to heal — and heal as the people we are, not the hyper-reliable workhorses we long to be.

These are fair questions, and ones that I hear a lot, from survivors of Autistic burnout and “regular” clinical burnout alike. No matter how profoundly drained and depressed a burned-out person might be (and no matter how much mistreatment got them to that point) they are usually desperate to return to their old, pre-burnout baseline as swiftly as... See more

But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions... See more

That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world,” as Han puts it. “They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space.”

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has understood more than most how modern consumer societies are emptying their souls — tossing out tradition and ritual in the name of the next new thing. “Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people,

The American nostalgia for home and family is closely tied to the American domestic cycle and labor pattern whereby a family unit is created for a limited number of years only to unravel as the kids go away to school or for work, or to create their own family units. The idea of losing and then returning home is a powerful and often unrecognized... See more

The sense of private property ruled the American middle-class household.