Genocide in Gaza, Games People Play & Psychological GDP
Here’s your weekly(-ish) roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, January 28–February 3, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
Live Not by Kayfabe by Ben Sexsmith in The Critic:
It is one thing to put on a performance in your public-facing professional life. It is quite another to reduce your life to a performance.
The ICJ's Ruling on Genocide in Gaza by Isaac Saul in Tangle:
I think the court’s conclusion is reasonable even if I think the charge itself is misguided.
Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other by Maria Popova in The Marginalian:
Because real intimacy is such a hard-won glory and demands so much of us—including, often, the overriding of our primal patterns—we habitually lean on games as our default self-soothing and self-regulation mechanisms.
Rest for Restless Hearts: Samuel D. James’s Digital Liturgies Is a Refreshingly Hopeful Christian Response to the Challenges of Our Digital Age by Brad Littlejohn in Plough:
Too often, Christians think of porn as primarily a problem of bad content that is now simply being delivered through a new high-speed, easy-access medium. But James highlights the extent to which the very form of the internet—and the platforms and devices through which we access it—is essentially pornographic in its logic, infusing erotic imagery with an almost irresistible magnetic pull for unwary users.
Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad by Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic:
We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture ‘therapeutic libertarianism’: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth. This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own ‘fulfillment,’ a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.
Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.
I was Hypnotized as a Teen. Was it Dangerous? by Emily Latimer in Longreads:
Simply put, hypnosis is just a state of focused concentration and deep relaxation happening simultaneously.
Researchers in the 1960s found that hypnotizability was correlated with the subjects’ tendency to have hypnosis-like experiences in their everyday lives. Modern-day equivalents, like playing video games or watching TikToks, can all drop you into a quasi-state of hypnosis.
Music
God, take my life
I offer myself to you now
And I shall everyday
Cherish your name
The lyrics are “Take My Life and Let It Be” in Melanesian Pidgin.
By the waters, the waters of Babylon
We lay down and wept, and wept, for thee Zion
We remember thee, remember thee, remember thee Zion