I looked things back over like I sometimes do, and decided that

1) I felt pretty shy about talking openly about my deepest fears like I did,
2) I was gonna leave that soul-baring stand as it is, and
3) That after 9.5 years of doing this, I was ready to experiment not only with password-protected posts (as I have once in a while in the past), but fully private ones.

Thus, there’s a post you can’t see wedged in between this one and the one called Strength and Security.

I will leave it there, continue to work on it, and maybe post a version of it in the clear at some point.

In the meantime, back to our regularly and daily scheduled programming.

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Pod Yourself A Gun: Episode 305

In the first three minutes of this pod (which incidentally is as much as I could stand to listen to), the guest expert makes an interesting point.

“The best thing about the Sopranos is that it’s a television show about a bunch of people from New Jersey who don’t feel appreciated … (and)
feeling not-appreciated is a part of Our Culture”.

Yes. Not just a part, but a defining feature.

I also listened briefly to two rich heavy-hitter liberal pundits talk about Attention as the key resource in this world of ours. One of them wrote a whole book on the subject.

I think the mass chronic feeling of under-appreciation and the constant pressures of the modern attention-deficit economy are deeply intertwined. The first has been around for 20+ years (as evidenced it being a theme in the mob show), and the second was made radically worse by the explosion of iPhone culture and social media in the last decade of the 2010s.

In my own mind this clusterfuck is also related to the last few posts here, about feeling strong or fearful, about (in)security, and about how modernist solutions like the Gospel of Believing In Yourself can be so insidiously counterproductive, and so fundamentally illusory.