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Analects

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Analects

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On (Un)happiness

stuff On the things that decorate the heart

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BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.

BDSM as a lazy ideology

Article

I write a lot about ideologies here. Rituals of thought and behaviour that come out of our need to automatically solve predictable problems of a complex world. I also point out that ideologies ‘stack’. They all sort of ‘stick together’, making these bundles of beliefs and behaviours. Most of these are lazy: stacks of ideologies we adopt just because they’re there. I reckon BDSM might be just one of these. It might be an ideology stack that people gravatate to, not because it’s the most efficient way of expressing some core human need, but because it’s just the most common. Let me explain what I mean.
BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.
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connection gratification on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture thought-architecture

article

Stress is a good thing before it’s a bad thing. It motivates us to act. We are scared of the f’s, but we don’t need to be. We should fight for things worth fighting for and fly from things that aren’t. Use the f’s as guides to action, not just things to avoid.

Giving in to Fight or Flight

Article

One particularly sticky idea is the idea of ‘fight or flight’ or whatever variation of “fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and sometimes f***”. As you might be able to tell from the slow accumulation of f’s, fight or flight is suffering from the chinese whispers effect that has us drawing wildly innappropriate conclusions from academic literature and the superficial silliness of many pop-psych ideas—where will the f’s end! So, let’s dust of the f’s and make them useful again.
Stress is a good thing before it’s a bad thing. It motivates us to act. We are scared of the f’s, but we don’t need to be. We should fight for things worth fighting for and fly from things that aren’t. Use the f’s as guides to action, not just things to avoid.
Read this article

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betterment on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful somatic-architecture

article

Neurotransmitters are psychological snake oil. A confidence game pop-psychologists play with their audience. There is frankly no convincing story of human behaviour made more comprehensible by talking about dopamine.

Neurotransmitters are a confidence game

Article

You might have heard people often talk about the ‘reward neurotransmitter’ or the ‘love hormone’ or the ‘happiness molecule’ and so on. Fact is, although we know about some actions of these neurotransmitters, we actually have very little idea about how those actions play out in actual behaviour.
Neurotransmitters are psychological snake oil. A confidence game pop-psychologists play with their audience. There is frankly no convincing story of human behaviour made more comprehensible by talking about dopamine.
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betterment on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

This book is basically, “men are terribly emotionally fragile, and they can make small steps to be better, but women need to just <em>stop bothering them with all their pedantry</em> and just let them be who they are.”

Men and women are from earth, fool pt. III

Article

I’m going to shit all over this ridiculous 30-year old pseudo-psychology book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus that people keep trying to talk to me about now that gender essentialism is getting trendy again. Here I cover Gray’s astonishment that ‘women’ might have ordinary needs. It is the most amusing, and infuriating, aspect of the book.
This book is basically, “men are terribly emotionally fragile, and they can make small steps to be better, but women need to just stop bothering them with all their pedantry and just let them be who they are.”
Read this article

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betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture

article

I guarantee, no matter how sexy traditional gender roles are to you, that you do <em>not</em> want to be like Gray’s ‘men’.

Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II

Article

I’m going to shit all over this ridiculous 30-year old pseudo-psychology book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus that people keep trying to talk to me about now that gender essentialism is getting trendy again. Here I cover, in depth, the emotional fragility of whatever it is Gray considers to be ‘men’.
I guarantee, no matter how sexy traditional gender roles are to you, that you do not want to be like Gray’s ‘men’.
Read this article

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betterment collective-architecture connection on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture
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