advice

August 17, 2025

Painful Words and Relationship Repair

Getting the last word can end relationships. Not always, but often. The rage builds in response to perceived offensiveness. Increasing resentment triggers one who has had enough. The chance of pushback grows.

High volume, blistering, venomous comments come at once. You can’t retrieve or erase them. They can be unforgettable.

Sometimes, a more measured retort makes the point without the blast. Let’s consider the offense and how to fix the breach in the relationship.

What Causes the Offense?

Many possibilities:

  • Words that attack or diminish.
  • A sense of being ignored.
  • Unfairness and the belief that you have been taken advantage of.
  • The experience of the offender pushing you around, literally in the case of bullies.
  • Telling your secrets.
  • Making fun of you in public.
  • Infidelity in friendship or love.
  • Too much truth, or at least what the truth-teller thinks is essential to deliver.

Relationships of long standing carry value because of irreplaceable shared experience. Worth might diminish over time, however, for one or both of those who were close.

Some of the reasons:

  • Lives change, and distance increases.
  • Getting married.
  • Having children.
  • Moving away.
  • Taking a different job.
  • Becoming more successful.
  • The feeling of being forgotten.
  • Politics.

One hesitates to mention it or ask the friend to remedy the situation. The injured party concludes that things won’t change, or he is too sensitive.

The discontent enlarges as the pain becomes a daily preoccupation.

Delaying the Response:

The importance of connection contributes to our hesitation to voice concerns. We struggle with the right words, the best moment, and worry our complaints will be dismissed.

Worse, they might cause more damage.

Waiting is common. The possibility of losing the buddy creates hesitation. You fear pushback from the person who injured you.

Some never raise the issue, others explain the difficulties in small pieces. Hoping the friend will enlighten himself fuels the postponement.

Detailing the troubles face-to-face is better than an email or text. The latter are often misunderstood but thought to be safer.

One-Time Conflicts:

If the unhappiness is rare between people who tend to get along well, salving the wound may not be required.

Time can heal the injury. Moreover, if you are a confident person, it is easier to set aside any accusations about your character.

When You Can’t Put the Issue Aside:

If you believe a vital matter will not resolve itself, the question becomes how to approach it:

  • The time lapse since the event or events must be long enough to reduce agitation, but not so long that the opposite party will have forgotten the incident or incidents..
  • Ask yourself if this confidante is worth the trouble.
  • Consider whether the other can understand why you might be upset. If he is obtuse or defensive about such things, never taking responsibility or offering an apology, you are unlikely to repair the bond.
  • Talk to a wise and empathic acquaintance to obtain his perspective.
  • Look in the mirror and evaluate whether you have misunderstood your friend or contributed to the rupture. You might want to lead with this.
  • Be sure the peace talk allows sufficient time.
  • Converse face-to-face or, at worst, on Zoom.
  • Agree to avoid interruptions such as texts and phone calls.
  • Begin by telling the other what he means to you.
  • Organize your thoughts, read them if you prefer, and recognize how your counterpart is responding as you proceed.
  • One thing at a time, if possible.
  • The parties benefit from setting ground rules. These should include the ability to speak without interruption.
  • Consider a mediator or couples counselor.
  • Use “I” statements. That is, “I felt hurt” rather than “you hurt me.”
  • Keep as much eye contact as possible.
  • Realize others might be surprised or have their own list of accusations.
  • Agree to meet a second time or more often. That, by itself, can reveal the friend’s desire to solve the problems and maintain the connection.
  • You may have to renegotiate your relationship to save it.

The Matter of Apology:

Sometimes you need a break. Weeks, months, or years, by design or accident, meet the definition of a time-out or ceasefire of sorts.

Upon reflection, one or the other of you might have cause to apologize, call a truce, or obtain closure by ending things.

Avoid “I did this, but YOU did X… It is a poor expression of regret.

People grow apart and grow back together. Some of us restart a friendship after decades or when the end of life moves closer.

An old baseball expression, if you modify it, applies:

The game isn’t over until the last man is out.

My view is that so long as there is time and the will of both individuals, there is a chance.

==========

The first painting is Argument Over a Card Game by Jan Steen. Next comes Jealousy by Tomisu. Finally, a painting called Politics, by Robert Robinson.

August 10, 2025

What Therapists Don’t Know

512px-gertrude_kasebier-blessed

Many therapeutic interventions begin by looking backwards. The deep dive into the ocean of previous traumas focuses only on the patient and a few others. Is a broader scope needed?

The circumstances surrounding any life are worthy of attention. The historical conditions in which one lives are essential to a backward glance at life, yet therapists are not experts in history. Nor are we routinely specialized in philosophy, sociology, and religion, the better to understand those who visit us.

When I encountered someone from an unfamiliar religious background, I attempted to learn more: not only from my patient, but from their sacred texts. If clients came to me with existential questions, a sense of emptiness, or a lack of meaning in their lives, we sometimes talked philosophy.

In the course of my career, I needed to learn about poverty and anti-Semitism in the old Soviet Union, the arrangement of marriages among Pakistani-Americans, and the importance of loyalty and family responsibility to the Mexican-American community.

This necessity not only helped me better perform my therapeutic work but also enhanced my understanding of people and the world in general.

—

One can also fool oneself by ignoring the ideas and trials of our distant ancestors.

We face the same core issues that people of all cultures and times faced, although sometimes in different ways. The human experience changes in terms of technique — technical knowledge, astonishing new devices, and skills—but not the basic concerns of living: love, friendship, competition, survival, loss, morality, work, and play.

The same conundrums are forever present: happiness, honor, success, failure, self-awareness, self-interest, integrity, rationalization, sadness, greed, and one’s responsibilities to others.

Yes, we now face possible global catastrophe from weapons or climate change, but robbers, kleptocrats, and rape were always present.

Discrimination today usually takes a different form from widespread slavery, but human rights are still an issue. War and natural disasters, famine, and disease have constantly threatened the human race.

Life was never stress-free, but the sun continues to rise on a new day. The future can be altered with trust, teamwork, and time.

We benefit by recognizing the common humanity we share with individuals who are “different,” whether they are our contemporaries or people who shared our cultural past. We risk laughter at those from non-Western backgrounds, their hairstyles and clothing. They behold us as well, however, and might share the same tendencies to mock or disapprove.

Old photos can be treated similarly. As we turn the pages of antique family photo albums, it is difficult to relate to those who seem ancient, even if they lived only 50 years ago. We, too, will become dated creatures to newer generations.

If you assume historical figures offer nothing worth learning, then you have closed your mind, blinded yourself, and reduced the possibility of self-knowledge and better human relations. Moreover, you render your personal history impotent in its ability to have any substantial impact on those who follow you.

Old words remain relevant. Even if Aristotle lacked an iPhone and wore a toga, he had a good brain, as did many others before and after. We are silly not to attend to his thoughts. Our ancestors didn’t know everything and many justified slavery and maltreatment of women, but they recognized much that is essential to the human condition.

aristotelesbunt

Closer to our own time, the men and women of the last century had more than a taste of modernity. They owned cars and worked in factories, encountered oppression and misuse, used the telephone, and (from 1922) received regular radio broadcasts.

They realized what money could buy and what it did not.

Below are nine quotes from those who lived in the 20th century and before. They walked in our shoes, even if they wore sandals, wooden shoes, or no footwear at all.

Remember this. We read history and philosophy not to understand old and dead civilizations, but ourselves. Perhaps you will dismiss the nine ideas of the eight people you find below. On the other hand, I expect some will speak to you, especially (I hope) the fourth one and the final one:

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

— Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet.

———-

You will be broken. You try to flee it, but ultimately you can’t, you can only fritter away your time on the planet. Yes, be prudent, but don’t think you will escape.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929.

———-

It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forward. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops … .

— Soren Kierkegaard, 1843.

———

We can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we call do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthral ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

— Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

———-

The following words are those of H.L. Mencken, published on July 26, 1920, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, from an essay entitled “Bayard vs. Lionheart,” concerning the difficulty of electing good people to national office:

henry-louis-mencken

In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through … . But when the field is nationwide … and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily and adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. … On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

———-

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

— Theodore Roosevelt, April 23, 1910: Paris.

———

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

— Hannah Arendt in a 1974 interview with Roger Errera.

256px-hannah_arendt_-_retrato-1

———-

Dorothea Brooke is an admirable fictional character in Middlemarch (1871-72) by Mary Anne Evans (better known by her pen name, George Elliot). Ms. Brooke is here speaking to the young man who loves her. He has just said that without her, he would have nothing to live for:

That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for.

At the end of the book, Dorothea’s life is described in terms of her quiet impact on others:

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature … spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number (of people) who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

==========

The photograph at the top is called Blessed Art Thou Among Women by Gertrude Käsebier, from 1900. Next comes the late Congressman John Lewis, hugging a Woman at a Foster Youth Voices Event, from the office of Congresswoman Karen Bass in 2017. The computerized image of Aristotle is the 2005 work of Kolja Mendler. A photo of H.L. Mencken follows. The final image is a sketch of Hannah Arendt by Albarluque. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

The above blog was published here in February 2017. The title has been changed, and the text has been modified.

August 3, 2025

Some Random Observations That Don’t Tell You What To Do

Here we go:

  • There is strength in numbers. We feel better with the support of other like-minded people who also benefit from our presence.
  • My old friend Mel was a child during the Great Depression. He made no big deal of it because his father supported the family, and Mel never thought he was in any peril. He was a kid, after all. Surviving a calamitous time under favorable circumstances is not the same as experiencing the trouble of others.
  • Those under pressure benefit from our kindness and assistance. The Greeks have a long tradition of hospitality toward the stranger. It goes back to the time of Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey. This sacred duty is called Philoxenia, the opposite of Xenophobia, the fear of strangers.
  • You will be loved, but also betrayed, sometimes by the same person or people you thought to be friends.
  • The world of AI is a bit of a mystery, but it’s worth understanding what is known. This nonhuman, nonliving agent is a growing presence in our lives. Youval Harari, a brilliant public intellectual, is among those who speak intelligently on the subject. He is all over YouTube.
  • I was born in the luckiest historical moment and place in history for white people, just after World War II. Those born later, including my children, have encountered a less favorable set of conditions.
  • My mother used to say, “God helps those who help themselves.” She was not religious, though she prayed to my dad and her mother. Mom wanted to die and asked for their help in the several months she lived after my father passed away. Make what you will of that.

  • When my friend Joe, also a psychologist, was recovering from a heart attack, I stepped in for him with one of his challenging patients. She believed herself the most unfortunate person in world history. This woman expected special consideration from others as a result. Her sense of entitlement was part of her problem.
  • Most of the young and middle-aged do not understand the physical pain brought by old age. I sure didn’t. Better that you don’t.
  • Love and let yourself be loved. OK, I said I wouldn’t tell you to do something, but I couldn’t resist.
  • One of the problems created by the pandemic was skin hunger. We need human or animal physical contact, but not of the cannibal variety.
  • About 13 years ago, I learned how to read in a new way. Instead of judging the author after reading a bit, I tried to understand what the author intended without judgment. I was also instructed not to read background material or expert opinions and explanations of the book’s contents. I came to ponder how the human strengths and flaws portrayed in words might apply to my life, my decisions, and the human condition.
  • Are we free? That depends on how you define freedom, free will in particular. To some degree, we have become the prisoners of algorithms. These early AI interventions into our online lives keep track of what we choose to see and read, and provide us more of it. Included are media that enrages us and contribute to the virality of untruth and conspiracy theories. The only way to achieve freedom from this algorithmic effect is to dispose of our phones and computers. I haven’t heard of anyone who has made this choice.

  • Among my favorite old songs is “If I Had a Hammer,” as sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary. Appropriate for our time. I like “My Boyfriend’s Back,” which has nothing to do with a body part, and “Rock Around the Clock,” as performed by Bill Haley and the Comets. “In the Mood” is a big band favorite from before my time. It still puts me in the mood, meaning thoughts of romance with the woman I love. Then, of course, the instrumental masterpieces of Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven, etc.
  • The 1950s and ’60s offered a proliferation of cowboy TV shows and reruns of World War II movies, not to mention the TV version of Superman. Thereby, kids my age absorbed a simplified version of right and wrong. Native Americans were among the bad guys, a more than unfortunate and dishonest depiction. Nonetheless, the abstract moral principles led me to buy in. I later understood how the white men mistreated the natives, something I never learned in school. More recently, I discovered we no longer agree on right and wrong.
  • Among the most thoughtful action movies of the time was Abandon Ship. An ocean liner on a pleasure cruise strikes a naval mine, which explodes and sinks the ship. The lifeboat has inadequate supplies, and those clinging to it in the ocean lack enough shark repellent. The commanding officer faces a moral dilemma. He considers how to save everyone, an impossible task. The single alternative is to select the hardiest among them for a challenging journey. The rest are forcefully put in the water, resulting in certain death as they float away.
  • We live in a world of ideas. There are more movies, classic books, and transformative, exciting, and uplifting music than one can enjoy in a lifetime of learning, watching, and listening. A friend rereads many of the books he considers the most thoughtful and provocative. If we read such works, the greatest minds of human history still speak to us. They wait patiently for us to listen to their words.

Enough for today. Be well.

==========

The three images are sourced from Wikiart.org.

They are Thinking Thought Bubble by FreyaSyangila, Orangutan Thinking by Dmitry Rozhkov, and The Thinker by Auguste Rodin.

July 27, 2025

I Saw a Man This Morning

I saw a man this morning, or was it midweek? I keep thinking about him.

He wasn’t older than forever, but old enough for today and tomorrow. Mature enough to worry about costumes and conscience.

I was driving to a suburban farmer’s market to pick up a knife I’d left for sharpening.

As I entered the parking lot, the gentleman walked past my car as he was leaving the market.

His face had a familiar quality. Years earlier, at my youngest’s birthday party, he came to the door to pick up his child. At least I think so.

The fellow wrote for a living, which is perhaps why he caught my attention back then.

This time, I recognized him for a much different reason than a birthday celebration.

You’d have, too.

Of course, you might not have realized what caught my attention. Instead, you could have mistaken him for Beetlejuice, as played by Michael Keaton in the 1988 movie (and its 2024 sequel).

What he did was more than I would do, as a man not inclined to portray a historic role on stage or off.

The gent’s unusual form of dress made a statement. If old enough, you’d have recognized his message had nothing to do with popular movies or comedy.

The gentleman was protesting, a principled action based on his own version of right and wrong.

His garb was an alternating white and black striped concentration camp uniform, something that caught your attention and provoked thoughtful consideration. Or did it? If correctly identified, the clothing was a possible trigger for Holocaust survivors, their children, and other relatives.

Still, let’s call him Mr. Good. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, this citizen opposed ICE arrests in Chicago and elsewhere.

Given the publicized abductions of immigrants, such actions are risky, though the protester is not an immigrant or a person of color.

Why did he do something so public, both stirring and personally vulnerable? He gave the reason in the newspaper: “If I didn’t do anything, it would eat me up.”

Acting on our conscience comes with a price. So does rationalization. Each of us employs our defense mechanisms, and we all use several unconsciously.

For most worthy causes, there is a need for witnesses, many to provide support, and for all of us to think about and discuss.

We could analyze this, but I’d rather consider this singular individual as a brave soul in a noble cause.

Self-reflection is a tough job, and not everyone undertakes it. Yet Mr. Good’s unspoken portrayal asks us who we are and what our responsibility is to strangers.

More needs to be done, he implies.

The moment is ripe with urgency. Given that we don’t live forever, I suppose it always is.

Mr. Good must hear the clock.

July 20, 2025

The Things We Fear, the Things We Overcome

If I Knew the World Ended Tomorrow, I Would Plant an Apple Tree Today by Herakut in Berlin.

—

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.” John Lewis 2/21/40 — 7/17/20

The fears listed below can be overcome. Not always, but with time, patience, effort, and a helping hand. Not always, but with hope, courage, resilience, and an awareness of your previous triumphs over adversity.

Here are some of the usual suspects:

A broken heart.

Failure.

Revealing ourselves to ourselves.

Opening up.

Breaking down.

Watching our parents age.

Incapacity.

Fear of abandonment.

Nakedness.

Speaking in public.

Confronting change.

Change in those to whom we are close.

Mortality.

The death of those we love.

Friends who move away.

Fear of being thought of as too sensitive.

Others who take us for granted.

Ingratitude.

The unknown.

The Great Challenge by Nicholas Lavarenne at Antibes on the French Riviera, sourced from James Lucas on Substack

What others say about us.

Not having enough money.

The weight of responsibility.

Those who expect too much.

Being forgotten.

Fear of fascism.

Being remembered for our moments of humiliation.

Those who see through the masks we wear.

Being thought of as fake.

Being alone.

Being with others.

Groups.

As children, the slowness of time.

As adults, the speed of time.

Holding the gaze of another.

Being unseen.

Silence in conversation.

Speechlessness.

Signs (like the other yawning) that you interpret as your fault.

Having others visit your home.

Believing you are a coward.

Making phone calls.

Regret, especially in old age, or when the regretful action can no longer be remedied.

Fear of losing your job.

Triple Play by Fan Ho.

Fear of staying in your job.

Fear of looking for a job.

The criticism of a parent or a boss.

Taking a public position, in speech or writing, in a politically challenging moment.

Fear for the well-being of your children and grandchildren.

Being shamed.

Commitment.

Fear of doing nothing.

Loneliness.

Fear of going to a therapist for the first time.

Fear that we don’t know what or who to believe.

You fear you are not

strong enough to do

the hardest thing

only because you don’t

yet know that doing

the hardest thing

is exactly what will help

you know your strength.

Andrea Gibson 8/13/75 — 7/14/25

If you appreciated Gibson’s poem, try watching them perform “Ode to the Public Panic Attack.”

July 13, 2025

The Questions We Don’t Ask

Much as we understand others, there are often things of which we aren’t aware. The painted acquaintance remains unfinished, no matter how long our association.

Secrets separate — the embarrassing imperfections, the naked truth. All the uncomfortable territory the other prefers to shield, and we never inquire about.

Humans, including the most intelligent, also hide shortcomings from themselves. Intelligence counts for little in such matters. Our species defends against recognizing its flaws.

Even those who have taken several looks in the mirror might ignore or miss shadows. Figurative blind spots cover troubling thoughts.

We repress elements of the dark side, an unconscious, self-protective act. The psychological defense of denial recalls an old play on words known to counselors: “Denial is not a river in Egypt,” a phrase referencing the famous Nile River. The Nile, not denial.

Rationalization cannot be escaped in full, an attempt to give reasons that purify and satisfy our conscience and those who stand in judgment of what we have done.

Projection is another part of our defensive toolkit, characterized by assigning our flaws to friends and strangers. One might go on. There are more ways to keep knowledge of ourselves from ourselves.

Since we don’t want to reveal everything or allow the other to ask us about the guarded portion of our life, we hesitate to open the door to mutual shared intimacies.

Here are a few of those questions (below each photo) that often go unasked and might be experienced as an interrogation by the one from whom answers are expected:

  • Are you as happy as you appear to be?
  • What single moment in your life would you repeat?
  • If you conclude that the afterlife you believe in isn’t real, how would you alter the way you live?
  • How often do you think about death?
  • What is the thing you’ve never told anyone?
  • What is the action you are most proud of?
  • The worst? Why?
  • How do you determine what is right and good in a moral sense? To what degree do you depend on sacred texts or clerics?
  • Do you think you are moral? In what way do your actions demonstrate your morality or fall short?
  • Do you attempt to reduce climate change? In what ways?
  • Do you live by the commandment in Leviticus 19:33-34 of the Hebrew Bible? “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
  • What role does anger play in your life?
  • Kindness?
  • Do you aid the poor and homeless?
  • What does money mean to you? Why? Do you display generosity?
  • When did you recognize you were aging? How did you react?
  • How have you changed in the last 10 years?
  • Will you be recalled in 100 years? What would you like to be remembered for? Why does it matter?

  • Do you travel much? Why? Why not?
  • Do you value enjoyable activities more than purchased objects? Which of these is more fulfilling? Why do you think so?
  • Do you envy the life of another? Why?
  • Have you committed adultery? Why? What happened?
  • What is the state of your marriage? Would you marry the same person again? Would you stay single? Why?
  • What have you learned about life that you didn’t grasp in early adulthood?
  • Describe the most courageous act of your life. How about the least admirable?
  • What must you change to improve your life?
  • Are you lovable? What makes you so?
  • Do these questions cause discomfort?
  • Are you answering them truthfully?
  • If a genie gave you three wishes, what would you wish for?
  • Are you happier alone or with others?
  • Can you be yourself with others?
  • Are you more emotional or logical?
  • Are you more like your father or your mother? In what ways?
  • Are you happy with that? Have you tried to modify any of those qualities?
  • Do you worry about what people say about you? Why? What difference does it make?
  • Does anyone see you as you would like to be seen?
  • What are your values and which do you give priority? How high do you place your own happiness? Justify it.
  • Do you expect reciprocity in most relationships?

The list could go on.

Of course, you might want to ask yourself these questions before contemplating the uncomfortable task of questioning anyone.

Another way to approach the subject would be to ask, “What would Jesus do?” As an alternative, fill in the name of the historical or religious figure of your choice.

There are no requirements here, but you might learn something by considering the thoughts and feelings the list has provoked.

So would we all.

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The top image is The Two Faces of Juliet by György Kepes, sourced from Wikart.org. The two photographs are the work of Fan Ho. The first is called Smokey World (1959). The second is entitled Black Lane (1960).

July 6, 2025

Alienation, Music, and Finding a Soulmate

Feeling alienated from the world is not a new phenomenon.

We believe we don’t belong, and our lack of confidence underscores our strangeness. Authenticity becomes dangerous for fear of exposing our dislocation, as if there were a flaw in our manufacture, putting us in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two examples, many years apart.

The first is 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, portrayed in the 1999 movie Girl, Interrupted. The story begins with an overdose, leading to psychiatric hospitalization.

A friend of hers on the same ward, Daisy, kills herself late in the film.

A nurse, Valerie, attempts to console Susanna:

  • Valerie: “What would you have said to her?”
  • Susanna: “I don’t know. That I was sorry. That I will never know what it was like to be her. But I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in, but you can’t. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”

In the course of her treatment, her psychiatrist Dr. Wick captures Susanna’s estrangement with a quotation in Latin from Seneca’s Hercules Furens:

“What place is this, what region, what shores of the world? “

Seneca (4 BC — 65 AD) understood Susanna’s sense of not belonging 2,000 years ahead of her birth.

Something of a different vintage touches us. It is the 1902 song by Gustav Mahler – “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen“ (Rückert): “I have become lost to the world.”

Once again, we sense ostracism and exclusion from the smiling faces around us. There is an ache in the singer’s voice — a quiet resignation, revealing his self-exile from the possibility of a shared life.

Mahler identifies with the poetry he set to music. As the composer wrote, “It is my very self” expressed in this work.

Modernity has been blamed for such feelings since the Industrial Revolution. Yet, if we listen to songs that move us to tears, we are not so alone as we think.

Mahler is someone else who shares a recognition of our emotional life without knowing us.

A connection to others often comes in the music matched to words, reminding us that some strangers feel as we do, and we are not so odd and dislocated after all.

Defying the singer’s message, we realize we must search for individuals who identify with the music, and thereby with us.

Not only the vocal art of Mahler, but any composition — any song or symphony in which we find the recognition of our vulnerability — enlarges our awareness and demonstrates the possibility of human connectedness.

Soul mates are out there.

No wonder that one of the first questions we ask of a new acquaintance is, “What music do you like?”

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The top image is Lotus and Herons by Huang Yongyu, 1984. It is followed by Vasile Kazar’s untitled painting. Both are sourced from Wikart.org/

June 29, 2025

What If Opportunity Knocks and A.I. Answers?

Opportunity knocks, but doesn’t tell us what we will find behind a different door. We often pursue what we’ve always wanted—something hard to turn away from.

There are many possible vocations. Additionally, hobbies, vacations, romantic pursuits, and friendships compete for time. How about adding education instead of working or choosing to spend time with the kids? Trying to repair the world is another worthy avenue for your energy.

How shall we decide? Consider this:

Opportunity cost is “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” For example, we cannot profit from road B if road A consumed our time. The lost chance might be due to a poor decision, but the world’s speed of change and complexity also play a part.

Should we stay with lover A or pursue other relationships? The guidelines are not clear.

Choose a job, and A.I. might gobble it up in five or 10 years.

Decisions would be easier if we were better at affective forecasting—predicting how we will feel about our choices when we are older. As Kirkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”  

In our high-tech age, how many jobs can you adapt to in a lifetime?

Yuval Noah Harari, a historian who looks ahead, raises this question in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

He indicates that we should not classify A.I. as a tool that mankind employs and empowers our species, similar to previous inventions like the printing press. Instead, he describes it as an agent that can consume and retain unimaginable amounts of information, make decisions independently, learn and change by itself, and create new ideas and things.

He predicts that A.I. will outperform homo sapiens in communicating, analyzing, learning, and understanding how human emotions work. If this is not unsettling enough, he says A.I. is in its infancy.

Harari suggests A.I. will take over some professions currently performed by humans. The process will not stop, but continue to take more unless governments choose to stop it.

Would such a circumstance require us and our children to transform ourselves into experts in several new fields during our working lives?

The repeated stressful changes will tax humanity’s emotional adaptability if Harari’s expectation is fulfilled.

In the meantime, we would be well-served if our vocational plans include a wider range of careers than have been customary in a single lifetime.

The one thing we can be sure of is that the decades ahead will be interesting in ways we could never have imagined.

Read Harari’s books and watch his many interviews on YouTube. He is a remarkable and provocative communicator who makes the complex easy to understand.

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The top photo is a Flamingo in Amboseli, Kenya, taken in November 2024 by Laura Hedien, with thanks for her kind permission to use it: Laura Hedien Official Website.

Beneath it is Composition VI, 1913 by Kandinsky. It is sourced from Wikiart.org/

June 22, 2025

How I Came to Love My Brothers

I am an older brother who was clueless about fulfilling my role when my siblings and I were kids. Big brothers are expected to show the way for the younger ones, as if we received training.

I sure hadn’t.

Little Gerry Stein arrived on Earth four and five years ahead of Ed and Jack, respectively. The mature guidance I lacked left me like a blind man without the power of speech, leading deaf men who could see.

No one was pleased with this, and my brothers’ dilemma was further fueled by their birth one year apart, which heightened their sibling rivalry.

Since my dad worked multiple jobs, our mother took over the family’s traffic cop position. Life was sometimes like a demolition derby with lots of collisions.

Our mother’s mother, Esther Fabian, raised her four children during the Great Depression, the 1930s. The family lived in a troubled time. 

My sweet grandfather was out of work and alcoholic. His strong-willed wife was the couple’s powerhouse. 

She used her status to tell each child to be more like her other children. This was done one at a time, so all believed they were failing the life she gave them, unlike their siblings.

Call the home a cauldron filled with poverty, starvation, and pressure, stirred with some added bile and desperation.

Esther’s kind of supervision made the kids competitive and unhappy–jealous of the others and desirous of more time with an encouraging and sober adult,

Mom’s only model of mothering was her mom, so she took the tack Esther displayed. When all one understands is how to use a hammer, everything requires hammering.

Her strategy used each of us like a weapon to downgrade the others, not likely to make us friends.

It is not as if no love existed in my home. Laughter was plentiful, too, since my parents had a riotous sense of humor. Still, my mother was broken, and some of the shards of her anger rained on us.

My brothers and I had better times when we played softball in leagues organized by Chicago and suburban park districts. The Stein Boys stuck together and played well.

Our separate lives went their way, but the possibility of conflict among the Stein boys never disappeared until both our parents died in old age.

A basic decency and feeling for fairness survived, perhaps because we’d seen enough evidence of unkindness growing up, sometimes at home, in school, and on the streets with buddies. Our folks’ commitment to justice offered an abstract, imperfect direction.

Dad had his wife on a pedestal, and Mom was a talented rationalizer, caught between undiagnosed depression and anger.

The shadow of our grievances waited to be fixed. It had no expiration date. But in our parents’ passing, no one was left to set us against each other in a match to win approval.

Eddie, who was in charge of Mom’s estate, was conscientious in carrying out our parents’ equitable wishes. There was now room for us to maneuver and change our relationships.

Not long after, our behaviorally challenged Aunt Florence, a lifelong grifter, began to decline. Ed and Jack did their best to assist her despite her outsized suspiciousness. She was a “chaos merchant,” as Joseph Epstein described people who make trouble for others without distressing themselves.

Ed finally became the target of our aunt’s paranoid delusions, and Jack supported him when she took her anger out on Eddie. My brothers’ kindnesses to their aunt had not gone unpunished. 

I chose to steer clear of Florence’s circus and didn’t reach out to her. Nor did I expect any applause by keeping a distance from her, but when she died, she left me $600,000. Compared to this woman’s animus for my brothers, my distancing made me appear acceptable.

Since I had done nothing to win this surprising inheritance from a woman who pretended to be homeless, I decided to share it equally with my siblings and two cousins Florence had shunned.

Another $7,000 went to the Zeolite Scholarship Fund, a philanthropy my high school buddies and I created.

How did we, brothers of the same blood, set things right? Decades had passed, a waste of time to heal a wound we all carried–a laceration we had inflicted and received, like a boomerang.

Eddie, Jack, and Gerry remained brothers and aging orphans. Our parents had suffered bad times, but encouraged us to do better in life than they did, though they had no clear idea of how we should proceed.

The Stein boys needed guidance from our early days. One cannot know how to give it while looking for it oneself. By now, we had figured some things out and made the lives our parents had wished us to have.

I became the big brother I had never been. I needed to take this position in the absence of our folks and, at last, to tell my brothers someone was proud of them. I said it because it was the truth.

My brothers and I benefited from checking on and rooting for each other as we did on the playing field. We needed to embrace and express our affection. We needed to remember the lives, the people, the time, and the place we had shared: the memories no one else had.

The Stein boys–no longer children–were altered by time and experience, and cared less about fading differences.. Each of us became kinder, more thoughtful human beings with less or nothing to prove.

The flourishing of our affection had always been there in disguise. Ours was a late love, a poignant thing only discovered when family was gone and friends were nearing the finish line or past it. 

A few months ago, I told my brothers to make me a promise: to remember to love their sibling if I was not around to remind them.

The Hindu proverb says, “Help your brother’s boat across, and your own will reach the shore.”

June 15, 2025

Three Short Lessons To Help You Understand Yourself and Others

Understanding yourself is a tough job. I’d like to discuss what makes it difficult, along with two other short lessons that might help you a bit on your journey through life.

1. If you want to know someone well, take a long car trip with them. 

Let’s say the destination is 1000 miles away, something you’ve never done with your copilot, who is little more than a stranger. To the good, he might be funny, an excellent driver, and someone open and sensitive to your needs.

What is the possible downside?

It is a hot day, and you discover that the two of you have different ideas about air conditioning. He wants it warmer, and he sweats a lot. You find him polluting your air.

The fellow drives differently than you do, often turning toward you as he talks and going faster or slower than you’d like. He doesn’t care for your approach when behind the wheel, either. You can’t agree on how often you need to take bathroom breaks.

Your cellmate (as you now imagine him) keeps asking you questions about yourself that you don’t want to answer. You discover he is trying to convert you to his religion. The conflict becomes distracting as you miss a significant turn. You blame him, and he blames you. By the time you reach your destination, you have to restrain yourself from strangling him.

Now, at last, you know him, and a bit more about yourself.

2. Self-awareness is painful but necessary.

Think of the following self-description: “I am a scoundrel, someone who lies a lot, puts my needs over my spouse and children as a matter of routine, cannot control my emotions, and cuts off slow drivers in traffic to let them know who is in charge.”

If you are lucky, I’m guessing you don’t know anyone who thinks of himself this way. Humans, including those in therapy, prefer to believe they are honest and decent, with sensible explanations for their actions.

Most of us are not as awful as the alienating description above, but are champions at rationalization. We do not want to know the truth about some things and tend to be well-defended against a realistic view of our mirror’s image.

Time and age alter our being, and if we are to adapt to the new version of ourselves and the speed of our world’s accelerating condition, we must increase self-awareness. Without it, our choices will be misguided, though we will blame bad luck or bad people.

As Cassius said in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

We must change throughout our lives, but the type of adjustment to personality, social skills, willpower, courage, and vocational training depends on realizing the truth in Cassius’s words. We control ourselves, at best, not others.

Such knowledge is costly, so we avoid it in part or whole. The reward can be shocking in its horror, but also transformative. It comes down to a kind of therapeutic integrity sometimes observed in their patients by therapists.

Those rare clients tell themselves, “I can’t continue this way; I must remake myself.”

As the saying goes, making a mistake is human, but blaming someone else for it is even more human.

3. Don’t sell yourself short.

The challenges of life must be faced. If one does not, no possibility of success exists. Luck gives us many opportunities, but we shouldn’t wait until we are confident. Self-assurance comes from trying—opening doors, failing, considering what we lack, learning from the event, remolding ourselves, and trying again.

One must talk back to self-criticism. Trauma, previous defeats, and poor parenting can be the source of the punishment of the self by the self. Early in life, time is patient. It waits for us to find a new track and defy the expectations of those who might wish us to fail or suffer.

Too much humility is not a good thing.

An example illustrates why I am a hesitant endorser of humility. My seventh-grade Chicago Public School home room teacher gave us an interesting assignment. In one of the marking periods (four per semester), we were to write down the grades we believed we should receive for the term, the marks we felt we deserved.

Up until that time, I was something of a humility addict. Whether from home or elsewhere, I’d learned not to toot my own horn, draw attention to myself, and certainly not to overstate my accomplishments.

The strategy had worked pretty well up to that point, but I did not see that it created the potential for trouble ahead.

I dutifully delivered the grades, having understated most of them. What difference did it make, I thought? The teacher would assign the bona fide grades based on the work we had completed, our test scores, and so forth.

Some time later, we received our real marks. And, wouldn’t you know it, my instructor gave me the exact evaluation I assigned to myself. Since I was enormously invested in my school performance, I was crushed.

Each kid had a mini-conference with her at her front desk. I don’t remember what she said to me, but the grades stood until the next marking period, when she would not be influenced by any external opinions. Nevertheless, I was mad at myself for understating my worth.

As miserable as she made me feel, this woman did me a favor. In fact, there probably was no better way to deliver the message: don’t diminish yourself, don’t minimize your accomplishments, or be self-effacing.

If you cannot be your best advocate, why should you expect anyone else to advocate for you? While you needn’t trumpet your attainments to the farthest reaches of the earth, neither should you hide them under a rock.

There is a price to excess humility, just as a cost to the extreme of any human characteristic. Too much confidence or too little, too much risk-taking or not enough, or 100% faith in others to do the right thing, and so forth.

My teacher is almost certainly deceased. But, if I could, I would thank her for her instruction in the cost of humility.

One more thing.

Her name was Miss Price.

Really.

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The top image is a Portrait of the Painter Manuel Humbert by Amedeo Modigliani (1916). Next is The Great Challenge by Nicholas Lavarenne at Antibes on the French Riviera, sourced from James Lucas on Substack. Finally, Cherry Trees in Blossom by Victor Borisov-Musatov (1901). The first and last of these are sourced from Wikiart.org/