You Can Trust That I Know How Insane We All Are

I consider myself anti-patriarchal, yet I have to confess that when it comes to Halloween candy I think having nuts is superior to not.

A bit of seasonal humor, that. It occurred to me as I watched our kids organize and inventory their "take" after getting home from trick-or-treating. Which was a few days ago, so no longer quite so seasonal.

More relevant today is that it's the first Tuesday in November--election day. It hasn't been long since my last post and I haven't accumulated my normal amount of content, but I have some election-related thoughts to capture while they're still in season.

After, of course, a few digressions.

I appreciate this Facebook post from The School of Life. It has this lead:

There's a simple way to test how good a listener you actually are. In your next conversation, count how many times you say something like 'that reminds me of' or 'oh, same thing happened to me'. Every one of those is a small handover of the conversation from them to you. 

Try going a whole exchange without doing it once, asking instead 'What was that like?' or 'What do you think it was really about?' It feels strange at first, almost too plain to be useful. Most of us could use a little more of that discipline at dinner.

The main content is followed by a string of thoughts-as-images:

• Being a good listener might be the single most attractive skill anyone can have, yet almost nobody has been taught how to do it.

• We arrive at most conversations hungry to speak and only reluctantly willing to listen. Friendship can end up as two people simply taking turns to be heard.

• A good listener knows that most of what we say at first is vague. "I'm fed up with my job" doesn't say what about the job is actually wrong.

• The ask for more rather than moving on. "Tell me more about that." "Why did that bother you so much?" Two magic words do most of the work: "go on."

• Paradoxically, the good listener is a skilled interrupter. They interrupt to bring someone back to the real point, not to introduce their own.

• They don't moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be shocked by anyone else's, so nobody has to perform being find around them.

• They sometimes admit their own failures and confusions first, not to make the moment about themselves, but to prove that being a mess is a normal condition, not a verdict.

• Listening this well is rare enough that most of us can remember every person who's every properly done it for us.

Followed by a link to the full article: How to Be a Good Listener. A few selections from it:

We come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others, but reluctant to hear them. . . . 

The good listener takes it for granted that they will encounter vagueness in the conversation of others. But they don’t condemn, rush or get impatient, because they see vagueness as a universal and highly significant trouble of the mind that it is the task of a true friend to help with. The good listener never forgets how hard – and how important – it is to know our own minds. Often, we’re in the vicinity of something, but we can’t quite close in on what’s really bothering or exciting us. The good listener knows we hugely benefit from encouragement to elaborate, to go into greater detail, to push a little further. We need someone who, rather than launch forth, will simply say two magic rare words: Go on . . . 

The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why others can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they don’t flinch when we mention a particular desire. They reassure us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped. The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by. It is only too easy to end up experiencing ourselves as strangely cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is very muddled and radically imperfect) human being. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover, a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

I'm particularly in love with that last paragraph. It articulates my own thoughts wonderfully.

Know how insane we all are so others can feel comfortable being heard by you.

Important word: Aporophobia - the fear, aversion, disgust, or hatred directed toward people experiencing poverty or a lack of economic resources.

An excerpt from a Facebook post from Homeless Training by Ryan Dowd:

 . . . Some people “dehumanize” homeless individuals.

However bad that sounds, I promise you it is actually much worse.

Neuroscientists found something deeply disturbing.*

If researchers hook test subjects up to a brain scanner and show them a picture of a person, their prefrontal cortex lights up on the scanner. (That is the part of the human brain that recognizes another human as human.)

It doesn’t matter if the person in the picture is white, black, male, female, young, old or just about anything else. The test subjects’ prefrontal cortex lights up.

Show the test subjects a picture of someone who “looks homeless,” though, and you get a different result.

For many people, their prefrontal cortex does NOT light up on the brain scanner.

Their brains LITERALLY do not recognize a “homeless person” as a “person.” . . . 

*Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17(10), 847–853

Aporophobia - the fear, aversion, disgust, or hatred directed toward people experiencing poverty or a lack of economic resources.

Anyway, today is an election day, as I said--and it's always anxiety-inducing waiting to see which direction the population will sway.

I'm pretty sure I've shared this quote from Sofia and Del Samatar's book Monster Portraits on previous election days:

According to a recent poll about the Age of Monsters, half the world's testable population believes it has definitely ended, while the other half believes it has just begun.

It seems just as accurate each time.

I decided to capture a few other thoughts related to the values up for election since they're never far from my mind.

As a librarian, I spend a portion of my time talking about the concept of libraries as shared resources collectively owned by the public. In fact, I just copy-pasted some of that sentence from training content for new library employees that I drafted yesterday:

Topic 1: We Are Public Servants

The library is a shared resource -- collection, spaces, staff, services, experiences -- collectively owned by the public.

And below, I share some slides, including presenter notes, from a presentation I created a couple of weeks ago that expand on that premise and some of its ramifications.

Shared public resources are a fundamental quality of communities, including the governmental entities that oversee and maintain their functions.

So I find it strange how so many people advocate for a privatized system of individual ownership. To me, it seems counter to the very foundations of community bonds--and it's generally a more expensive way to get things accomplished, costing each person more for the same amount of benefit. I get that large bureaucracies can breed red tape and inefficiencies, but that doesn't mean the concept of shared resources is fundamentally flawed.

Yet there is an ever-growing clamor of voices advocating for maximum privatization. "People should only pay for what they do/use/consume, and shouldn't have to pay for anything for anyone else," goes the mantra. "I will take care of my needs and you can take care of your needs." Privatized schools, fee-based firefighters and security (police), and on and on. But if every individual is an isolated, independent unit, we end up with none of the "connective tissue" of public spaces. Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone must figure out their own clean water supply, energy and utility supply, wastewater and garbage disposal, etc. Many will be able to afford to "buy into" services, but those who can't increase our overall societal squalor.

And that says nothing about public roads. Imagine we abolish public ownership of roadways. That would make all roads toll roads so people would only have to pay for what they use. If you do more driving, you pay more. If you do less driving you save money. Which means: it would cost you money just to leave your property. Those without enough financial resources would be literally trapped in isolated, individual islands of land. That is not how a functioning society works.

It blows my mind this is something we have to advocate against. Yet here we are.

Libraries are a reciprocal arrangement that naturally builds community and a civic mindset.

I haven't quite finished listening to Traitor's Nest, the latest from Frances Hardinge--one of my favorite authors--but I encountered this passage in my audio reading today and it seems too perfect not to share:

"The House of Treasures is a library. These people are librarians! This is what they have been fighting to defend."

"So the 'treasures' are books?" Burr knew that books were very expensive, so this library had to be worth a king's fortune. "Who owns them?"

"It is a library that anyone in their citadel can visit," Berenice said. "The librarians guard it so that nobody can take the books as their own and hoard knowledge like a miser. This is also a place where great leaders can meet each other in safety to debate great matters of right, wrong, borders and truth without sending armies against each other. The librarians then decide who has won, and everybody respects their judgement. The House of Treasures has the best archers on the coast, to ensure that these great men approach honestly, without trying to ambush or assassinate each other. She says they are a force for peace!"

Librarians are a force for peace.

I just came across this today, and it seems relevant.

Power, Ideology and Culture: The Sediment Beneath Politics

Accumulation applied to politics. Power moves in a season, ideology in a generation, and culture is what both leave behind once they settle.

Political order is not one thing but three, moving at three different speeds. There is power — the hard architecture of institutions, coercion, money and command, the layer that can change in a season. There is ideology — the story a society tells about why those with power deserve it and why the rest should comply. And there is culture — the slow accumulation of everything a people has lived through, settled so deep that it is no longer argued but simply assumed. Most of our political commentary treats these as rival explanations: the institutionalist sees only power, the theorist only ideology, the culture critic only identity. Each is holding one limb of the animal.

The reframe I would urge is this. Culture is not a third thing standing beside the other two. It is mostly the other two — power and ideology accumulated over generations and set hard, the way sediment is only the silt from yesteryear's flood waters deposited over time, slowly compressing to a firmer sedimentary structure. What a people will accept, resist or demand today is the settled residue of the power arrangements and the justifying stories it absorbed long before anyone now living was old enough to question them. This is why culture is the slowest layer to move, and why, when it finally does move, power and ideology have no choice but to follow.

None of this is a model — no equations, no machinery, nothing that claims to predict an election. It is a way of seeing: a lens that treats a political system as a living thing with a fast surface and a deep memory. . . . 

Machiavelli, writing in Florence in the 1510s after watching the Medici expelled and restored and a republic rise and fall inside a decade, was the first to study power stripped of the stories we drape over it — how it is taken, how it is held, how it is lost. . . . 

Ideology is the layer that converts raw power into authority. Its function is to make command feel legitimate, so that compliance becomes internal rather than enforced. . . . 

The cultural layer beneath both — the stories a society tells about itself, the options that feel thinkable. . . . The mechanism is accumulation: culture is what a people has integrated so early and so deeply that it now runs below the threshold of belief. . . . 

Americans analyse themselves in the vocabulary of ideology — liberal against conservative, progressive against populist — but the deeper condition is cultural fragmentation. The American substrate has split into incompatible layers: an individualist inheritance, a religious pluralism, an unresolved racial history, and now a digital ecosystem engineered to reward outrage and punish complexity. Power is dispersed and competitive, which in a coherent culture is a stabiliser and in a fractured one is an accelerant, because every institution becomes a prize to be captured rather than a boundary to be respected. Ideology has become a proxy for cultural identity, and once a political disagreement has crossed into a fight about who you are, it is no longer amenable to the ordinary settlements of politics — the split difference, the deferred question, the loss survived. . . . 

The sharpest danger: a fractured culture destabilises whatever institutions sit on top of it, democratic or otherwise, and no redesign of the institutions alone repairs it. . . . 

Culture is the sediment beneath politics, and most of what looks like a crisis of institutions or ideas is really the slow ground shifting underneath. The wisest thing a country can do is to know its own sediment — how thick, how coherent, where the fault lines run — and to govern as if the ground, not the noise on its surface, were the thing that finally decides.

If not practically relevant, at least interesting.

At its base, politics is a negotiation of culture.

The stories we tell matter.

The divination card I drew today from An Almanac of Birds:

our range of being

is only limited

by the ending

we expect of situations

for life is animated

by the unexpected

that chooses

the extremities

we have to live

rejecting which

is rejecting life

and respecting which

is respecting

the unexpected

strength in us

Hoopoe

Reject that which is rejecting life and respect that which is respecting the unexpected strength in us.

"The good listener doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why others can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression they recognise and accept our follies; they don’t flinch when we mention a particular desire. They reassure us they’re not going to shred our dignity. A big worry in a competitive world is that we feel we can’t afford to be honest about how distressed or obsessed we are. Saying one feels like a failure or a pervert could mean being dropped. The good listener signals early and clearly that they don’t see us in these terms. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled by. It is only too easy to end up experiencing ourselves as strangely cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is: very muddled and radically imperfect) human being. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover, a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles."

We are all so very muddled and radically imperfect.

Our best course is to rely on each other as much as possible. Mutuality and reciprocity should be our foundations.

Life Isn't Organized; Why Should My Thoughts Be Any Different?

I'm going to start today with a string of fragmentary thoughts I've shared on Facebook recently. A kaleidoscopic collection of life moments.

"You're getting to be a normal person."

Someone told me that this morning, and now I'm having an existential crisis. What does it mean to be a normal person? Do I want to be a normal person? Who have I been and who am I becoming?

Of course, the full context: It was my chiropractor who told me that after my weekly adjustment, and a fuller version of the quote is, "Your spine's doing great today. You're getting to be a normal person." It was a comment on the improvement I've made increasing my flexibility and range of motion.

But, still . . .

Some mornings you wake with energy, feeling ready to spring into action and enjoy the day. Most mornings are nondescript, a gradual easing into the day as you transition out of sleep. And then there are the mornings like today, where--for no particular reason--you wake with a sense of dread, convinced that all your best efforts are futile, engaging with the world can only end in despair, and it takes everything you have to talk yourself into moving forward.

I'm not sure what Facebook is trying to tell me about today, but when I opened the app these were the first two things on my feed. Happy Friday!

I should choose violence to help me express my impotence?

When you pause the TV unseen from the other room then arrive to find a piece of abstract art.

Well, the world is minus one clown.

Life isn't organized. Why should my library be any different?

From Kaleidoscope by Brian Selznick.

I have a confession to make. The second snippet above about mornings and waking with dread claims it was "for no particular reason." That's not entirely accurate. I wrote it today, and I suspect it has something to do with the fact that yesterday I felt disappointed with myself at work in a couple of different situations, where I felt my soft skills were far less competent than they should be. It left me feeling discouraged and doubting my abilities to connect with others.

This comes right on the tail of a solid period of successes, so it shouldn't be discouraging. A few posts ago, in The Best Way to Achieve It Is to Think Better of Others, I shared the book Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki. In it, Zaki writes about our natural "negativity bias," which leads us to notice and feel impacted by the negative much more than the positive. That dynamic is at play in my thoughts and emotions in this instance.

Which is particularly interesting in light of the fact that the period of feeling successful leading up to it has been based on my efforts to help change our organizational culture at work, including sharing a chapter of Zaki's book with the leadership team I'm on. It also included writing the summary of a discussion related to helping new entity Raise Up KC build the foundations for their own organizational culture, in consultation with Niloufar Khonsari, author of The Future Is Collective: Effective Workplace Strategies for Building a Culture of Care--Frameworks and practices for nonprofits and changemakers. We explored the organizational value of "good intentions," and I mention it because I thought it was worth preserving and sharing here. My thoughts related to Zaki's concept of negativity bias are definitely on display.

Good Intentions - A core value is our belief that when others communicate, decide, and act, they have good intentions behind doing so. This means resisting our natural inclination to guard ourselves against potential negative motives and to instead begin every exchange with inherent trust. It teaches us to approach disagreement, the new, and the unknown with curiosity instead of judgment and builds appreciation for difference and diversity.

Being able to assume good intentions is indeed a value I am striving to adopt and strengthen, and sometimes--like today--I need to apply it to my relationship with myself.

For contrast . . . today is a grey fall day. Without the sun shining, the colors are more muted and dreary. The word that comes to mind is "melancholy." And yet, being outside on days like today make me feel energized and happy. It's an odd emotion, that joyful melancholy--or melancholy happiness. It's a good ache.

and the sky is mostly gray

and the air is chilly

That picture's from a couple of weeks ago on a brighter, more colorful day.

And this, from Disappointing Affirmations, which provides its own kind of dreary cheer.

It is extremely important to prioritize your mental health during the colder months. So be sure to get outside as often as possible and watch as everything around you withers and dies, and stop and think to yourself: one day, that will be me.

The divination card I drew today from An Almanac of Birds:

fearless feeling alone

can glimpse through

the dim light of reason

the labyrinth of silence

at the centre of a person

the desolate haunts of pain

untouched by the sun

the solitary evolutions

of the frightened wounded parts

towards a ripened whole

tenacious as life

Wood Ibis

The labyrinth of silence at the centre of a person, untouched by the sun . . . 

A melancholy happiness indeed.

Like life, this post isn't organized. More a mosaic of thoughts and ideas from my past couple of weeks. During that time, I read Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes by Sunita Sah. My thoughts:

You don't have to change who you are to be defiant. You have to become more yourself.

This is a helpful guide for how to become more thoughtful and authentic about one's choices. Sah defines defiance as "acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise." Defiance doesn't mean thoughtless rebellion or contrarianism, it means acting in ways that are true to the person you want to be. She delves into our natural inclination to be automatically obedient and charts a path for how to become more intentional. She does a marvelous job of teaching readers how to more effectively stand up for themselves.

A few quotes to capture the essence of the book:

Despite our ideals and best intentions, we most often choose obedience over disobedience, submission over disruption, compliance over defiance.

This is true regardless of the stakes, regardless of whether the situation is life-threatening or prosaic. . . . 

Defiance is the exception. Obedience is the rule.

-----

Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.

It sounds simple, but as years of research confirm, it is so much easier said than done.

-----

When your "gut" speaks to you, it could be expert intuition--but it could also be your biases. Being able to distinguish between the two is critical.

Expert intuition needs as least three conditions to develop and be accurate: a predictable environment, immediate and unequivocal feedback, and repeated practice.

And I think this internal conflict between our warring desires described in the passage below meshes well with my mixed feelings today.

Psychologists describe two different ways we can view ourselves. One is the ideal independent view, in which we celebrate our uniqueness, our freedom of action, and our agency. The other is our social or interpersonal identity--our ideal interdependent view--that views ourselves in relation to others and is motivated to maintain social norms and harmony over acting on internal wishes.

Our independent self wants us to act on our personal beliefs, no matter the context. Our interdependent self tells us to consider our actions' effects on others, to contemplate social consequences.

These two different ideals we hold--for an independent and interdependent self--are often in tension. We are constantly in pursuit of one ideal or the other, and neither ideal is attainable in its fullest--it is an ideal, after all, not a reality that can be reached.

The truth is that we are always connected to others, while also containing within ourselves our own beliefs, preferences, and values. While many external factors make defiance difficult, this internal conflict between our warring desires--to be true to ourselves, but also to be connected respectfully to our social environment--is one of the most basic and powerful constraints on defiance. It can lead us to take poor advice. It can cause us to appease people who might take advantage of us. And sometimes it can make us confused about what we actually want, and how we actually want to behave. . . . 

There is something deeply human in that tension, that simultaneous desire to both be true to ourselves and in tune with others, and something valuable as well: these feelings can also push us to reexamine how our decisions affect others. A society in which everyone acts only according to their individual interests and desires is not one you'd probably enjoy living in. As the saying--often attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--goes, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Some of the pressures I've described, the uncomfortable feelings, are uncomfortable for a reason: They remind us that our decisions have consequences for other people. Sometimes we may choose to give up something for the good of someone else, or for a larger collective. The point is that you become aware of it as a choice and feel empowered and able to say no.

-----

When you begin to articulate your values, you may realize that your actions and your stated ideals do not sync up. Which is more accurate, your idea of who you are, or who your actions actually reveal you to be? . . . 

We are what we do, regardless of how we see ourselves--and what we do, over time, affects our self-perception. Not to mention the way others perceive us.

I hope the ability to assume good intentions is not merely a stated ideal of mine, but is one my actions reveal as characteristic of me.

To go a different direction, I really enjoy seeing the commonalities between these three different thoughts. They are more connected than they might seem.

This is about relying on AI to solve things for us.

Ness Letters: Outsourcing Discovery

Discovering something ourselves is different from simply being told the answer.

Research shows that “aha moments” are associated with activity in the brain’s reward circuitry. Having the opportunity to wrestle with a problem before being taught how to solve it also helps develop a deeper understanding so we’re better able to apply it to new situations. Lastly, curiosity helps us remember not just the answers we sought, but unrelated information encountered along the way. The journey towards an answer can teach us things we weren’t even looking for.

That journey of discovery isn’t just about developing an understanding, it’s also about finding meaning in our work. People who copy AI-generated writing report less ownership, confidence and meaning than those who write independently. In that same experiment, those who drafted their own work and used AI to improve it didn’t show the same drop. It suggests that the impact of AI feels different when we’re creating with it rather than just receiving its output. . . . 

Feeling that our work matters requires more than generating answers. We also need opportunities to exercise our abilities, follow our curiosity, make progress and contribute something of our own.

We always need opportunities to exercise our abilities, follow our curiosity, make progress and contribute something of our own.

From Facebook, Hidden Brain's Post

What happens to children who never get the chance to play unsupervised?

Psychologist Peter Gray watched two 6-year-old kids playing with a pile of wooden boards. They turned the board into an imaginary bridge over crocodile-infested water. Inventing rules, negotiating turns, completely absorbed.

Then a well-meaning parent stepped in to show them the "right" way to use the boards. Within minutes, Peter says, the children went from creative to bored.

Peter has spent decades studying what happens when adults take over children's play. Unsupervised free play has declined dramatically. Childhood anxiety and depression have climbed. Peter doesn't think that's a coincidence. When children play on their own, they learn to resolve conflicts. When adults structure every moment, kids learn something else instead: that they cannot be trusted to figure things out for themselves.

Peter puts it bluntly: children see adults as potential enforcers and problem solvers. And when those adults are always present, kids stop developing the skills they need to become capable adults themselves.

People stop developing the skills they need to become capable when they aren't allowed to play, experiment, negotiate, and discover.

And, perhaps, not just people.

Left Alone With Nothing to Do, AI Agents Started Playing

AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. 

The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island’s tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island. 

Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique — exploring without a goal — as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots.

“We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress,” the researchers write in their report. “Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows.”

Intelligence requires play, experimentation, negotiation, and discovery to fully develop.

I'm not sure this relates to anything else in the post, I just find it interesting.

Why Forgive and Forget is Bad Advice

Counterfactuals are imaginations about alternative ways in which past events could have occurred. A typical counterfactual that we engage in when we remember negative events is how things could be better, but that tends to generate a feeling of regret. The strategy that we employ is instead asking people to think about how a bad event could have been actually worse. And that generates a feeling of relief. “Well, at least I didn't die. At least I didn't lose my limbs,” or something like that.

That relief is a positive feeling that can be incorporated into the original memory so that the next time they remember it, it doesn’t hurt as much. That brings us to forgiveness. I started to think about other kinds of cognitive processes that could engage emotional reappraisal strategies. And I thought that forgiveness was one of them.

When you forgive, it’s not that you forget the event, but rather, now that you bring the event back to mind, now that you think about the perpetrator, now that you think about what happened, it doesn't elicit the same kind of negative affective reactions that it once did. The suggestion is, because we have emotionally reappraised the memory, we can bring ourselves to forgive. You don’t need to forget the contents of the memory. You just need to change the effect that is associated with the remembering. . . . 

Not only verbal self-reports, we also measure objective physiological response. We measure facial expressions, heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, all those things that are associated with the expression of emotions. And you actually see it there, too. Another paper that we just published recently also suggests that the reduction in affect occurs regardless of the severity of the offense, and it also occurs regardless of how close the perpetrator was to you. We seem to have identified something that is essential to the experience of forgiveness. . . . 

Forgiveness is an extremely desirable process to go through because it helps you to live with your past without it hurting as much. But willingness to forgive is extremely important, too, and not everyone is willing to forgive.

But what do you think is the most predictive factor determining whether you’re going to forgive or not? It’s an apology. If the perpetrator apologizes, more than if the perpetrator atones, your likelihood of forgiving just increased. There are a number of other factors that can pile on to increase the likelihood of forgiveness: empathizing with the perpetrator, seeing things from their perspective, thinking about the positive consequences that a bad action could have brought to your life. All of these things are a part of this emotional reappraisal strategy that I was telling you about and all of them can be combined. It’s not like a recipe, though, in the sense that if you follow all the steps you’re guaranteed to forgive, but they increase your chances. . . . 

You mentioned that if a person does not want to forgive, there are other ways to blunt the pain of a memory or experience. What are those alternatives? . . . 

I was really surprised to learn that you found forgiveness only works on emotional fading, not episodic fading. In other words, it reduces the emotional weight of the memory, but it doesn’t reduce how detailed or vivid the memory is. . . . 

Forgiveness reduces the emotional weight of the memory, but it doesn’t reduce how detailed or vivid the memory is.

Or . . . maybe it does relate. If I woke today with dread based on my negative emotions associated with yesterday, and I want to overcome my negativity bias to see my good intentions more clearly . . . maybe . . . 

A poem of a conflicted people.

Seth Peterson

In the Words of Future Historians

Records show they were a trivial people, infatuated with the shape of their hair.

 

Records show their flowers were studded with thorns.

 

Records show doors were rarely built without deadbolts, their violence was so ubiquitous.

 

Records show ideas could travel like viruses, & they called this mass hysteria.

 

Records show some mothers had no children, though they desperately wanted them, while others had many, & were desperate because of it.

 

Records show nudity both captivated & repulsed them.

 

Records show they placed mirrors in their bathrooms, hallways, closets, but there was little understanding of the self.

 

Records show they were gullible, prone to believing in stories, which explains, in some ways, their politics.

 

Records show epidemics of smoking, insomnia, pain medication.

 

Records show they never considered them related.

 

One pastime, records show, was the creation of so-called “vision boards.”

 

Records show their ears were like long-buried castles, hung with amulets of silver, & even their infants could dance.

 

Records show they saw the end was coming, yet they continued planting cherry trees & lilacs & jasmine.

 

Records show, on cool nights, they would gaze in perfect wonder at the stars.

 

Records show their bodies were like underwater reservoirs & their backs hurt often.

 

They had cities, records show, that were almost taller than the clouds.

from #93 – Fall 2026

Tribute to the Future

you're getting to be a normal person

the world is minus one clown

one day, that will be me

you have to become more yourself

that simultaneous desire to both be true to ourselves and in tune with others

“aha moments” are associated with activity in the brain’s reward circuitry

intelligence requires play, experimentation, negotiation, and discovery