Natalie Audelo

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Anxiety, as Rollo May also pointed out, “is not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.”

What are the kinds of experiences that can kindle a life-altering enchantment?

He suggests we need to fundamentally reconsider what we’re measuring. It’s not about simply rejecting productivity gains but capturing them “as genuine improvements to human flourishing instead of feeding them back into an endless cycle of escalation”. This might mean measuring ‘time affluence over output volume’ – free time as a success metric – o... See more

Allowances — for grief, for pain, for childbirth, for illness — have been so hard to come by, I think, because we discount the body. Worse, we hold it in contempt compared to the mind, a proxy for religious spirit, so that the reality and risk of cruelty and brutalization are minimized and ignored.

So philanthropy under this rubric is not about creating sanctuaries from or alternatives to the demands of capitalism. The benevolence, if you can call it that, is in giving people from the underclass a chance to succeed by its rules. With, of course, very patronizing and constraining surveillance from the funder. It’s neoliberal brainworms all the... See more

On a cold Monday in December, 65 people were gathered for Reading Rhythms, an event that bills itself as “not a book club” but “a reading party.” The parties, which began in May, take place on rooftops, in parks and at bars. The premise is simple: Show up with a book, commit to vanquishing a chapter or two and chat with strangers about what you’ve ... See more