April 5, 2026

Beware, Especially of Bad Advice

The best advice about advice is to consider the source. One might do better to read from a blank sheet of paper than listen to an advisor with a track record of endless mistakes.

People do well to ignore the guidance of anyone who has not lived the kind of life they are shooting for, troubles and all.

Rather than giving you a list of what to do, here are a few mistakes therapists observe or discourage.

  • Avoid, avoid. Dodge everything. Take no new chances. Hide. Tell yourself you are too young, too old, too worried, too traumatized, or too insecure to take action.
  • If you are afraid of rejection, say no first. You will be alone for eternity, but you will never sustain the wound of spurning or abandonment. Your only possible buddies will be those who hide behind larger rocks than the ones you use.
  • Rationalize. Never admit fault. Regret nothing. Give reasons to yourself for what you did or are going to do. Take no responsibility. Blame others. Harm them because, in your mind, they deserve it.
  • Never be a Mensch. According to Wikipedia, Mensch is a Yiddish word that figuratively means “a person of integrity and honor.” Leo Rosten characterized a Mensch as “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being ‘a real Mensch‘ is nothing less than … rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, and decorous.”
  • Make promises at the same time you formulate multiple excuses for not keeping them. Seek the absurd high ground of unreliability. Your friends will depart soon enough.
  • Cheat. Steal marbles as a kid for some early life practice. Tell yourself you will never get caught, because you are charming and more intelligent than all the suckers in the world. Consider it a calling.
  • When someone provides you with a service in a store or elsewhere, never say thanks. They are getting paid by their employer, aren’t they?
  • Never think about the condition of the democracy. Someone else will do the worrying for you. Persuade yourself of an excuse for inaction. Ignore the famous saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
  • You owe the world no help, even though the world needs repair. Carpentry might hurt your hands.
  • Become the thing you hate. Consider your parents, siblings, spouses, and your boss. They are among the most suitable candidates for the list of the undesirables who ruined your life. Then become as much like them as possible, the better to ruin someone else.
  • Lie. Keep track of your lies for a possible introduction to your autobiography, and enjoy escaping the limitations honesty imposes. Yes, your kids and spouse will learn from you and be better at it. They might even teach you new tricks.
  • Don’t read books. They will destroy your innocence.
  • I had an aunt who was a grifter. She found used objects by dumpster-diving and resold them. Florence placed free ads in the Chicago Reader, mischaracterizing the loot. A man paid her top dollar for what appeared to be excellent audio equipment. When the stuff didn’t work, the buyer called to request a refund. Ever ready, Florence stated, “Who do you think you are dealing with, the CEO of Macy’s?”
  • Live like the world owes you fairness and complain when it doesn’t. Think of yourself as the most unfortunate soul on the planet.
  • Rank order all the injustices you endured during your lifetime. Wear a favorite t-shirt with the word MARTYR on the front. At day’s end, you will discover someone stole it, perhaps your spouse.
  • Think of all the ways you can go wrong. Bedtime is perfect for this, since it will destroy your sleep. Read articles about unexpected and unavoidable catastrophes. Give in to fear.
  • Let the days pass you by without realizing you are mortal. The horror of your discovery of a wasted life will descend upon you too late. Time is unrecoverable.
  • Make a bucket list and imagine the distant days ahead when you will do the things you have always hoped to do. Better than knowing you might be a different person by then, or deceased.

  • On the question of whether you are metaphorically alive, bury the thought. If the idea recurs, confuse yourself by eating blueberries while upside down. As an added bonus, eat enough junk food to gain weight.
  • Forgive no one. Holding grudges will improve your digestion. As the old saying goes, if you want revenge, dig two graves. Pay in advance.
  • Keep the TV, radio, or movies on all day, every day. Check your phone as much as possible, waiting for the job or mate you’ve always hoped for.
  • Seek the kind of work or play you can do without exerting yourself. The time spent on mindless inactivity crowds out other possibilities. If the environment is noisy, the sound will impair your capacity to think about what is important and how to change yourself.
  • Depend on others. Believe they will always be there to take care of you. Dependency means others can take advantage of you or rage at the helpless burden you have become. Ignore the signs that you are undesirable company.
  • Stay at home, collect things rather than experiences. Empty beer cans count.
  • “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” These are the words of Satchel Paige, the Hall of Fame pitcher.
  • Live with shame and embarrassment, making these feelings a regular part of your day.
  • Hide who you are. Never be real, genuine, or authentic. If someone dislikes you, you will thereby avoid awareness that it is you who is detested rather than the role you play.
  • Appearance is everything. Your clothes are everything. Shopping for the latter is everything. Cosmetic surgery will fix what your wardrobe can’t disguise. Live a life with little human contact, but lots of selfies.
  • Don’t display interest in others. Don’t recognize their discomfort or fragility. Keep thinking of only what you need. Others are irrelevant, whether they are homeless or your relatives.
  • Stay at home and do not travel. Shun the human race. They are not worth your time.
  • Glare down on everyone, as if you are royalty and they are vassals. Take a last, long look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you are the top dog in a dog-eat-dog world.
  • Steal dog food from old people just for fun, and, if necessary, even from your dog.

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The top photo was Laura Hedien’s entry to the Royal Meteorological Society’s “Storm Hour Photo of the Week.” The image is an Old School Bus during an active aurora night in Coldfoot, Alaska. The next photo is a Sunrise in Utah, August, 2024.

Thanks to Laura for her permission to display these marvelous pictures: Laura Hedien Official Website.

March 29, 2026

“In Defeat, Defiance:” Suicide and the Danger of Giving Up Too Soon

Is suicide ever justified? Is it permissible to give in to the despair and hopelessness that life can bring, to “end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks”* of an unlucky life?

Under what conditions?

Before you answer, a cautionary tale.

The little girl was born in approximately 1889. She was five years old when her parents died in a home fire. Two older brothers, themselves only in their late teens, were now heads of a household without a home.

The farming community in which they lived in Lithuania (then a part of Russia) offered few vocational prospects and certainly no way for them to support their two younger siblings.

A neighboring family made them an offer. In return for the promised work services of the five-year-old and the slightly older sister for the next seven years, the head of that family would advance the two boys enough money for passage to the USA. By then, it was hoped, the brothers would have sufficient funds to arrange the overseas transport of their little sisters.

And thus, this poor little five-year-old, already having lost her parents, was separated from the older brothers she loved.

What is seven years to a five-year-old?

Eternity.

But the family with whom these children lived was good to them, and the brothers made good on their promise. They kept in contact by writing letters to their sisters and, after seven years, had enough money to arrange for a reunion in the USA.

—

The now 12-year-old girl was named Johanna. And it was not too terribly long after, when she was 16, that she met the man who was to be her husband.

Her brothers had been supporting her, as well as their own young families. It was time for her to marry, she was told.

She had to choose among the suitors available in their small town of LaSalle, Illinois.

The man she chose was 16 years her senior, 32 years old. A coal miner. Farming and coal mining were the chief vocations at that time and place.

Johanna had the first of her five children when she was 18. Life was relatively peaceful, and she made the best of the marriage that her brothers had required of her.

In her 37th year, things changed. Johanna felt less than her best. At first, she thought little of the fatigue and shortness of breath. Others noticed her pallor. Meanwhile, her appetite diminished, and she suffered from diarrhea.

Eventually, the symptoms could not be ignored. The local physician diagnosed her as having pernicious anemia, a disturbance in the formation of normal red blood cells.

There was no cure. Johanna’s doctor estimated that she might live for one year.

LaSalle, Illinois, was a small community. And in that place, at the same time that Johanna received her death sentence, so did another young woman, a mother and neighbor.

That person became profoundly depressed and hung herself.

Johanna did not. She did not want to leave her children and her husband in such a fashion. There were things yet to do for her children, messages to impart, care to deliver.

And then there was love to bestow upon all of them. The love she missed once her parents died and her brothers left the country.

Johanna informed her children that she was going to die before long. She instructed them on what they needed to know to take over her household duties and become independent.

This woman also told them they would almost certainly have a stepmother eventually, and to welcome her as if she were their own mother.

—

In 1926, the year of her preparation for death, Johanna Grigalunas could not know that there would be a second World War 13 years in the future and that the country of her birth would be consumed by it.

She might have heard of Winston Churchill, the man who became Prime Minister of England for most of that conflict. But she would not have been aware that Churchill battled depression himself.**

Things were particularly dark for England in 1940. All of continental Europe had been conquered by the Nazis, and night after night, the great cities of that island nation were bombed by the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air force.

The British Empire stood alone against the Third Reich and expected an invasion of its land. The United States had not yet entered the War, and there was no certainty that it would.

In October of 1941, Churchill was asked to speak to the students of Harrow School, an independent boarding school that was his alma mater. Most of his words that day are now forgotten. But his job was to rally and inspire a nation, as well as the young men to whom he said:

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in…”

Virtually no one thought England would survive. But Churchill did, and the Nazis were defeated.

—

Just as she could not know of the geopolitical events ahead for the world, Johanna did not know that two separate research teams, one in England and one in the USA, were searching for a cure for the disease that afflicted her.

Thus, in 1926, George Richards Minot and William Perry Murphy fed large amounts of beef liver to their patients with pernicious anemia, building on the pioneering work of George Whipple, who had demonstrated that red blood cell production in dogs could be enhanced by this method.

It was determined that a daily diet rich in liver would prolong the life of those with this disease. All three scientists received the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Eventually, the crucial healing component in the liver, vitamin B12, became available by injection.

—

Johanna Grigalunas lived to be 93, more than a half-century beyond the medical death sentence that she received in the 1920s.

Now, you might ask: how do I know this story?

I met Johanna Grigalunas, almost blind but full of life, when she was over 90.

You see, Johanna was my wife’s grandmother.

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This essay was originally published on September 2, 2010. The present version has been revised.

*The quotation is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The top image is Winston Churchill. The quotation in the title is from Churchill himself: “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity.”

The image beneath Churchill is a 1964 untitled painting of Paul Rego.

**Churchill is reported to have suffered from depression off and on throughout his life. He referred to it as his “black dog.” On the subject of suicide, he said the following:

I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.

March 22, 2026

What Can You Do for the World Today?

Part of growing up, at least in the USA, means answering two questions.

Who do you want to be? What do you want to do?

The first is a matter of meaning: your understanding of what life is about and what constitutes a meaningful life. Most think of a desirable feature of existence as a speaking part, a role that makes a difference in the overall story, not just their story.

No one tries to be a nonentity, a cipher, the mathematical equivalent of zero, without significance, influence, or worth. One hopes to make an impact and change things by gaining recognition for one’s outsized talent, rather than remaining invisible.

Another portion of the kind of visibility you’re looking for requires that someone see you as you see yourself. To achieve a role that distinguishes you from others, which is not the same thing, you must overcome whatever fear holds you back from trying to be noticed and understood, set apart from the crowd.

Few wish to take an ambitionless non-speaking role, one that leaves no mark.

In the dark night of the soul, question #1 demands that who you are matches who you appear to be. The alternative is to live every day wearing a mask.

The second question involves how you will get there: how you will achieve a meaningful time on planet Earth. What vocation, job, or calling?

Most find themselves psychologically incomplete as they approach adulthood. The upside-down world necessitates becoming right-side up.

The downside of making a lasting and recognized difference is how difficult it is to do so. Even in the short term, one must realize that a towering splash doesn’t last long. The water falls back in place, as if you had never entered the pool.

Stillness is our default position in the moving picture. Not everyone can be a mover and a shaker. In the end, your self-worth should depend on yourself and not the crowd. That much is achievable.

Start from a place of silence and quiet contemplation. What is troubling you will arise and tell you what you need to change.

People have to learn things, take risks, speak even when others don’t listen, and on occasion declaim, “Here I am. I have given you the best of myself. If that is insufficient I will leave now and not look back.”

Dan Ariely, a Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, tells the story of a meeting with friends. One of them raised the question of what gift each would give to everyone in the world, all on the same day, if such an action were possible.

One answer was an empathogen, a psychoactive substance best known as MDMA (ecstasy), thus increasing feelings of empathy in everyone.

Thinking about the meaning of life is worth some time, but I might suggest a more modest answer to the question posed by Ariely’s friend.

My response would be something within my power, not an idealistic, impossible goal.

I do, however, have a couple of friends who have made grand and lasting contributions to medicine. One developed a method of treatment, and another changed a country’s practice of refusing life-saving medicine to a marginalized group. Remarkable, indeed, men named Steven Henikoff and Richard Stern.

For my part, each day, or most of them, I try to make someone smile.

And you?

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The top image is a photo of a Winter Sunrise on Lake Michigan, IL, 2026. It is the masterful creation of Laura Hedien, with her permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

March 15, 2026

The Humiliations of Growing Up: When Boys Swam Nude in Chicago Public Schools

Youth, despite its moments of uninhibited joy, can be punishing. Not just the modes of punishment meted out by parents, but forms of humiliation at school that create an audience for mistakes.

Kids fear that the joke will be on them.

A youngster often lacks knowledge of proper behavior. He knows not left or right.

The opposite sex? Talk about mystery!

A parent who wishes to save money decides to cut their child’s hair. The tactless first-grade teacher’s comment? “Did your mother put a bowl on your head?”

What are you supposed to do? How do you fit in? The embarrassment of asking someone to tell you reveals your weakness.

Even requesting permission to use the washroom is not easy to manage. The one who suffers from an “accident” counts the time before the class sees the evidence.

What follows is a post about one aspect of such humiliation, dating from 2014. Thousands have read it.

You will enjoy the punch line.

When Boys Swam Nude in Chicago Public Schools

March 8, 2026

A Dramatic Moment and a Fitting Word

Kakistocracy.

Not bureaucracy, not religiousity, and, for sure, not meritocracy.

I’d never heard the word. I’d never read it before. But in our interesting times, I have learned a few things.

According to Wikipedia:

Kakistocracy is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.[1]: 54 [2][3]

The word was coined as early as the 17th century[4] and derives from two Greek words, kákistos (κάκιστος, ‘worst’) and krátos (κράτος, ‘rule’), together meaning ‘government by the worst people’.[5]

American poet James Russell Lowell used the term in 1876, in a letter to Joel Benton, writing, “What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of Democracy? Is ours a ‘government of the people by the people for the people,’ or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”[11]

Keep that word in mind as you read further.

This past week, a friend mentioned an extraordinary play I attended at Court Theatre in Chicago in 2013. It was a one-person show adapted from Homer’s Iliad.

The online study guide describes:

The Iliad … is an epic poem traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, a ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events that took place during the weeks of a disagreement between the Greek King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.

A drama can stick with you. You might have witnessed a scene that is hard to get out of your mind. An Iliad, as the one-man theater piece is called, offered such an experience.

I was not alone in this. Friends who attended were all struck not only by the actor’s ability to recall every name on the long list he uttered. They were overwhelmed by what he told us about ourselves, our past, our world, and our future.

One possible future of humanity

I have given you two clips from the play below; the first is a one-minute introduction. The second is the stunning three-minute excerpt I referred to:

I hope you will watch at least the second of these: the actor Timothy Edward Kane’s chilling recitation of a list of wars, from Court Theatre’s production of An Iliad. Kane is a more than competent man who demonstrated his craft and preparation.

You will hear name after name after name. All the titles by which the conflicts are called today.

Several could be added to the list the narrator exclaimed. War has not ceased since 2013.

A play without competence displayed by its director and actors is unthinkable.

War is a different thing.

Incompetence is an inevitable component of wartime, especially among those in the lead, a quality that stands alongside the heroes sharing its history.

Now, a few days into a new conflict, we appear to have a term for the creators of a grand but misguided venture.

What do you think? Does the K expression apply to the evolving circumstances?

The word has been waiting a long time for a place in a sentence.

What a misfortune that it fits any moment at all.

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The top image is of an Ancient Greek Storage Jar sourced from the Art Institute of Chicago.

March 1, 2026

About the Purpose of Life

You know the people. Indeed, you might be one of them. I am speaking about all of us and the objectives we pursue. The list includes items like money, power, status, beauty, attention, control, and fame.

According to Yuval Harari, the historian, author, and public intellectual, we are missing the point. He doesn’t talk in terms of purpose. Rather, he believes much of humanity views existence as a story.

Their story.

We search for our part in a play, looking for the musical score we perform and the lines we must speak.

It might not be in a book. Anywhere we think the answer can be found is acceptable. This could put us on a ball field, in school, raising a child, formulating a meal recipe, or serving in an orchestra or the military.

It might be something we discover within a religious faith.

The historian suggests reality is not about the drama or the character we play in it. We fail to understand life when we close our eyes to much of the anguish embedded in our world, and produce the very pain we wish to bypass.

Thus, ignorance is the cause of many predicaments, according to Harari.

Ignorance of reality.

We brush aside cautionary information we should ponder. Think of the times we cannot bear to face the events and choices generating discomfort.

Paradoxically, by wearing a blindfold while pursuing our goals, we increase our chances of hurting ourselves, our acquaintances, our family, and those who are different from us.

Looking is inconvenient. We decide to cross out the difficult parts in the play’s manuscript. Alcohol and drugs are available to serve as masks. TV is one of the endless distractions.

By avoiding what the mirror shows and turning away from careful, honest consideration of how we cause injury, we do not recognize or acknowledge our contribution to pain. This leaves us unable to remedy either our own misfortune or that of others.

As Harari notes, “We can’t fix something we are busy ignoring.”

To eliminate this tendency, the alternative is to engage in human life rather than hiding from significant parts of it. The unpleasant wisdom it offers begs for attention.

We hope to avoid pain, but discover that anguish does not obey our attempt to flee from it. As Henry Fielding said, “When you close the door to nature, she comes in at the window.”

Satisfaction in a life well-lived is the result of triumphing over its difficulties.

What is needed is the realization that not all unhappiness is inevitable. Our complex and potential difficulties can often be relieved by acknowledging our condition honestly, so we can take them on and improve ourselves.

Here is another hard truth. We can control, to some degree, the present moment and our own minds, but little more. The past is unchangeable, and the distant horizon offers no guarantees, no matter our plans, efforts, and ingenuity.

Not even the greatest and most powerful leaders do better. We grasp all too well the history of their mistakes and the limitations and unexpected consequences of their decisions.

The fix, Harari might tell us, is to work within the terms life allows, not denying them, not ignoring them, and not running from them.

This includes the most inescapable fact of living.

We age, we die, and everyone precious to us passes away.

Our end arrives at an uncertain time, while attempts to live forever have their shortcomings. Some of the wealthiest men want to reach eternity, an expensive way of denying death.

Downloading their consciousness to a computer becomes a goal. Moving to another planet is planned should the world become more unfriendly.

No wonder some of them build rockets.

No wonder we try to hide or alter the evidence of aging.

A number among us consider bringing forth children as our posterity, perhaps winning a Nobel Prize, or having our name in a record book, or on a building. Thus, we hope to be remembered, reaching a form of immortality.

Are the names of the following men familiar?

Each won a Nobel Prize in 1920.

Harari is not alone in pointing out our tendency to evade the reality of death, accepting it only as an abstraction somewhere in the distance, and trying to dodge thinking about it. Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, deals with the subject.

Becker wrote it over 50 years ago.

Bottom line: Yuval Harari believes increased contentment comes from accepting the realistic conditions of life, thereby increasing our chances of reducing our pain and the suffering we cause.

Game on.

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The first photo is a Supercell in Lubbock, Texas, in June 2025. It is the masterful creation of Laura Hedien, with her permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

Next comes an Eharo mask from Papua New Guinea. The eharo masks were worn during ritual dances, before formal sacred rituals. They were intended to be humorous figures, dancing with groups of women to the amusement of all. This particular item is in the Muséum de Toulouse collection and was sourced from Wikipedia Commons.

February 15, 2026

A Few Added Words on the Subject of Living

For some, the Christian Bible is enough, or the Koran, or the Shreemad Bhagavad Gita. Include the Torah, the Talmud, and the Agamas. Perhaps all the guidance and wisdom in the world is to be found amid them and the other holy books.

But I suspect that the legendary philosophers of history might have a useful and additional word or two, men like Seneca, Socrates, and Spinoza. I would add several novelists, including British writers Julian Barnes and Virginia Wolff.

What is more, sometimes your mom or dad, or your third-grade teacher, offers enlightenment.

If truth is present in any of those possibilities, there also should be value in a few words not always or easily found among the sometimes contradictory messages that sacred books, among others, send our way.

Here are a few for you to accept or ignore.

Life is hard, but it offers a balm not found in a tube of calamine lotion at the pharmacy. It is discovering something or someone to love. The conventional wisdom suggests you must find a lover, but there are many others. A friend, a sibling, your parents, or a pet can offer affection and gratitude in receiving it.

More?

I have an old buddy who enjoys and even treasures his work and might win the Nobel Prize someday. I have cheered athletes who are in love with the game they play. I’ve also run into more than a few self-involved folks. On occasion, they are self-sufficient in the practice of their genius.

Think about writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, and composers. Add to the list, if you like, women and men who seek more than entertainment in the arts, entranced in discoveries of intensity, joy, and moments of ecstasy. If you’re lucky, you can find more than a single such passion.

The point is to be attached to, devoted to, involved in, and touched by what you love.

And, if you are thoughtful, you can return the endearment and the attention. You give back to the game, whether it’s a contest, a person, the adoration of Mozart, or the game of life.

Erin, of the Existential Ergonomics blog, wrote a wonderful post the other day that speaks to those who recognize that life and full reign over your existence are in opposition, much as we wish otherwise:

I am learning the difficult grace of release. I once believed I could map every turn of this story, determine when and how love would appear. But life, patient and persistent, keeps prying my fingers open.

Each time I loosen my hold—on plans, on control, on what I thought I needed—something softer finds its way in. I’m beginning to see that undoing isn’t failure; it’s invitation. It’s the space where breath returns, where grace has room to enter and rebuild.

My response to her statement was this:

Well said, wise, and beautifully expressed, Erin. We never have full control, but for seconds or days at a time, and even that is an illusion. These are the terms on a contract we never signed. Acceptance and managing the cracks that form in our painting is the art we must keep creating—to find love in the cracks.

I should have added more than shared adoration to what saves us, including whatever is useful and whatever can compensate for the blows of fate; if they can.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking feature of our lifelong but imperfect bargain is the loss of people. Then we learn to grieve and endure, cherishing their memory, and desiring a reunion in the afterlife. It is an outcome that is part inclination, belief, and hope, as well as a certainty in select minds and hearts.

A written guarantee? Hard to find on any day or on eBay, but hope often takes its place.

We live in a difficult time. Life moves faster and faster; lasting work is uncertain; residences double as offices where a screen and a phone substitute for a meeting place, a handshake, a kiss, and a hug. Meanwhile, skin hunger grows like ivy on the wall.

George Orwell, a visionary author, described our dilemma as he contemplated it more than 75 years ago:

All we have done is to advance to a point at which we could make a real change in human life, but we shall not do it without the recognition that common decency is necessary.

Surely decency is a step toward love. To love one’s neighbor and the stranger. To provide for the starving and homeless. To call the other by their name, with honor. To recognize our shared humanity.

And not to take arms, but to hold the other in our arms and let her know that she matters.

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The first image is Meanna. It is an album cover from Tales of Loneliness, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Below it is An Elephant at Sunset in Amboseli, Kenya, 2024, by the superb photographer, Laura Hedien, presented with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.

February 8, 2026

Therapy in Sixty Seconds

Therapy is a serious business, but like comedy, there is a place for cracking a smile. According to an old adage, “comedy is tragedy plus time.” I can’t say that is a perfect formula, and tact is always a wise and thoughtful prelude to a joke, or holding back from offering one.

The pictured statement above my paragraph might be something a counselor would think, though he probably wouldn’t say it. Below are more pieces of advice and observations on the human condition.

You will get a big payoff at the end if you can tolerate the F word:

 

 

 

 

Now for the payoff. Uncle Noggie is a brilliant man who can tell you the truth and make it funny at the same time. Here, he offers eight valuable insights in “Three Years of Therapy in Sixty Seconds.”  Don’t miss it, but don’t leave counseling. He is kidding, but on target.
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February 1, 2026

Memories of a Grieving Spouse

What happens when things end, especially relationships? This usually refers to breakups that, by definition, shatter a once precious connection. Think of a chasm and a broken heart at its bottom.

Julian Barnes knows what loss feels like. His wife of 30 years, Pat Kavenaugh, died in 2008 from an aggressive form of brain cancer. There were 37 days between her diagnosis and her death.

The author found his wife’s approach to her demise both stoic and graceful, “never angry or cross.”

The writer described the depression that followed in a recent interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.”

It was like being caught in an avelanch. Every day it became worse. It was the most appauling thing that happened in my life and the blackest, the thing that deprived you of hope and balance. It took me years to get over it.

Barnes recalled that he considered killing himself if the grief didn’t stop. A few weeks after his wife’s passing, he found himself thinking of taking his life as he walked on a familiar path home.

I looked across the curb on the other side of the road … and I thought I can kill myself … that’s permissible. It’s not unforgiveble in my morality. I’m extremely unhappy, I’m bereft, though I have many friends. And I think I said, or a friend said to me: give it two years and, ok, I’ll give it two years.

But before that two year period elapsed I discovered why I couldn’t kill myself: I wasn’t allowed to kill myself. And that’s because I was the best rememberer of my wife. I knew her and I had celebrated her in all her forms and all her nature, and I had loved her deeply. And I had realized that if I had killed myself then, in a way, I’d be killing her, too.

I’d be killing the best memories of her, they would disappear from the world, and I wouldn’t allow myself to do that. And at that point (my thought of killing myself) just turned on its head and I knew I would have to live with the grief a long, long time, but I didn’t think an answer to the grief was killing myself.

The writer has never believed in God, nor does he hold the idea of being reunited with his wife in heaven. His view of human existence is that “life is not a short walk across an open field. There is always something waiting for you, coming out of a hedgerow at you.” His writing has long dealt with endings.

Mr. Barnes continues to write and is a much-celebrated, award-winning, prolific author.

Six years ago, however, he was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. It is treatable and, with continued daily medication, he is not likely to die from this condition.

His continuation of life, as he describes it, is a form of responsibility. He did not want the thoughts and stories and fullness of his wife to vanish because of his own suicide. Nor, it seems, to dispense with his meaningful affection for her and remembrance of her.

Were we to follow his example, we would all keep photos and movies, enjoy mentioning the departed with those we know, and share our memories. I have friends who have written their own biographies using StoryWorth to leave an account of their lives for those who care about them.

Indeed, I have completed such a memoir myself, including advice that it will be more than proper for them to laugh about me once I am gone.

We don’t want to be forgotten, do we?

But while we live, we should “live” with all the strength, joy, and kindness we can muster, as demonstrated by Julian Barnes getting married again a few months ago, 17 years after his loss of Pat Kavanaugh.

What a marvelous thing it must have been for him to marry again, at 80.

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The first photo is of Julian Barnes at Headred, 2018, Estonia. It was sourced from Wikimedia Commons and is the work of WanderingTrad. Next comes a picture of Pat Kavanagh, an image from the Evening Standard. Finally, Barnes, with his second wife, Rachel Cugnoni, sourced from the Telegraph.

January 24, 2026

Cheating and the Yearning for Trust

Many of us write about how to find fulfillment. Add our plentiful commentary on acceptance, gratitude, achievement, loss, depression, defeat, and victory.

Somehow, at least one thing is left out.

Cheating.

In childhood, it was unimaginable to me. Yes,  kids cheated on tests, threw snowballs at moving buses, and found miscellaneous ways to raise hell.

Yet the adults I encountered all appeared decent enough, unlike the fraudulent and dangerous types in news reports. TV was the box where bad guys lived and did their worst, not in my neighborhood.

My dad had a small business, which offered a different story. Mercury Lighter Service was a side job he created, fixing cigarette lighters.

Milton Stein and my mother, Jeanette, learned to repair most of those that were broken.

My parents performed their magic on our dining room table after dinner, after my father came home from his supervisory position at the post office and his second job, keeping the books for my Uncle Sam’s business.

His enterprise was not without its share of upset.

Like deadbeats.

He muttered the word, sometimes changing it to “another deadbeat.“

I asked him what he was talking about. “Adults don’t always pay their bills,” he replied. There were many reasons, including the desire to cheat you.

Such men—it was always men—seemed outliers to me, not regular, honest folk. Perhaps I wanted to envision the world as a benign place. Later, I discovered that the people of the planet were more complicated.

Here, however, is something close to the truth. It is part of a footnote to the Enchiridion, itself a discourse recorded by Arrian, from the teaching he received as a student of the philosopher Epictetus:

Those who have the ability sufficient to raise themselves from a low estate, and at the same time do it to the damage of society, are perhaps only few, but certainly there are such persons.

They rise by ability, by the use of fraud, by bad means almost innumerable. They gain wealth, they fill high places, they disturb society, they are plagues and pests, and the world looks on sometimes with stupid admiration until death removes the dazzling and deceitful image, and honest men breathe freely again.

Stupid admiration. An interesting phrase. The crooks would be easier to recognize if each took the same name and a differentiating number—something like Stupid Admiration #1, #32, #47, etc.

The swindlers can be hard to identify and receive high praise from sycophants and those who want to ride the master’s coattails to wealth.

Does it appear to you that criminals have mushroomed? How do some of them do so well at profiting from their corruption?

Consider the word “con men,” short for confidence men, meaning they gain your confidence so they can take what you have.

The rascals flatter you, recognize that you want to be seen, approved of, and admired. Swinders offer a vision of the future in which your life will be better. They will help to make it, too.

One thinks he is lucky to have found such a person, a kind of father figure and wizard put together. I was taken in by such a one once, years ago.

It happens, but why?

Almost everyone, deep down, wants to be cared for. No wonder that wounded men on the battlefield cry out for their mothers, as they have since the beginning of time.

They search for a place in a trusted group, people who resemble them, think as they do, and brace them against the possibility of others, either different or suspicious.

Laughter, love, kindness, and locked arms fulfill an ageless wish. Togetherness means more when it promises the security of survival. The saying goes, “I will be there for you.“

The fraudster plays on all this and more.

Today, many people ask what they should do to thwart dishonesty and bad faith. Many are afraid, confused, depressed, or all of these.

They hope for a leader, a savior, a person to lean on; someone who can win the day, take the group’s prize to the car wash, soap away the darkness, and bring the light.

If you could sell guaranteed trust and a supportive community on a street corner, you would make a fortune.

The world will always need saving. It always has.

That said, most of us have faith in the basic decency of humankind. My dad didn’t give up his small business or hide from others because of a few underhanded debtors.

Milton Stein went to WWII in a uniform he believed in. To him, it represented the rightness of the fight. He returned still faithful to my mother, and she to him.

Remember, it is always darkest before the dawn.

And then there is love.

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The top image is a Poster for the American Drama film The Cheat (1923).

The second item is an Advertisement for the American Comedy-Romance film The Confidence Man (1924), starring Thomas Meighan, from the March 29, 1924, cover of the Exhibitors Trade Review. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.