Jay Matthews

Writing, art, creation: this is smithwork. You set your fire; you use your bellows, your pen, your paper, to heat it to the right temperature. You set your base metal in the flames, heat it until it is white. Then you begin your transformation.

"In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff."

I believe the best way to describe this shift is as a shift from legible ambition to illegible ambition. The reason so many people cling to default metrics of success is that other people understand them. Legible ambition is a story that your parents can tell their friends. We fear that not having such legible ambition means we will be cast out of... See more

The psychoanalysis of self psychology serves an implicit social function in seamlessly hiding the contradictions in the economic, political and cultural arrangements of our society by not analyzing them, and therefore allowing them to remain as unconscious determinants of suffering.

“To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she came to life; for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by little, I learned something about her.”

"I always insist on my agency as a thinker. I have the right to read what I like to read. I think that is actually more radical: to insist that because I have my own mind, I will be influenced by whom I choose, and I will write what I choose." — Ocean Vuong

Our respondents unanimously agree that it is important to let problems simmer below the threshold of consciousness for a time.

Examples of the Bio-Psycho-Social perspectives on nature of stress. "People who are isolated and stressed are more likely to develop disease". Maté posits medicine as an ideology that emphasises the individual and speaks primarily about the causal factors and experience of early high-stress environments within communities . For example, how low... See more