Your Annual Kyle's Files: Drama Kids, Death, Ordinariness As Enlightenment
("One of the last cowboys of the dying old west chilling in Bonham, Texas in 1910" on reddit)
0. Why This Is In Your Inbox And What To Expect
This is in your inbox because you liked something I once wrote enough to want more of it. (Probably in Art of Manliness--taking action, self reliance, wanting/desiring. But maybe somewhere else.)
This is the first letter I've sent out since last November. The letter before that went out last April. But now, because of a secret reason I might talk about later, I have to send you one every week or I'm in trouble.
Topics will shift, and hopefully I can figure out some better design to send you these in, and I'm may play around with the length. The format's been pretty similar since I started sending these in 2017:
1. Tweets'n'Things: a bunch of quick quotes and tweets.
2. Usually my favorite ideas from a really good book.
3. Usually my favorite ideas from another really good book.
4. Usually my favorite ideas from some really good essay.
5. A collection of random tools, videos, songs, websites, or other linkable thing that are worth clicking.
1. Tweets'n'Things™
If I'm going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart.
If I'm going to live, the best is to quiet my mind and open my heart.
Ram Dass
Joy comes from the will resting in the object of its desire. Resting in it.
Luke Burgis
Learning to be happy is altruistic. Nick Cammarata
There’s a real sickness afoot on the internet whereby people engage more with their annoyance at media coverage than with reality. Matthew Yglesias
I made a new rule: Never trust how you feel about your entire life past 9pm. @dremonson7
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. Alain de Botton
The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage. Maria Popova
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Joan Didion
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. D. H. Lawrence
Death comes without warning. Learn who you are before it does. Mirabai Bush
2. The Drama Of The Gifted Child
Alice Miller is probably the source of a lot of parental neuroses. Even so, more parents could benefit from reading The Drama of the Gifted Child. But really anybody who grew up being told they were special may find its 136 pages worthwhile.
The book is full of ways in which parents can mess up kids without doing anything most of us would see as super unhealthy. For instance, a parent-pleasing kid may struggle to define himself beyond what’s expected of him:
Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the “as-if personality" (Winnicott has described it as the "false self"). This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him, and fuses so completely with what he reveals that - until he comes to analysis - one could scarcely have guessed how much more there is to him, behind this "masked view of himself" (Habermas, 1970).
This can lead to the kid not knowing what they want all that well. And not knowing one's desires makes it hard to live a full life (or feel the fulness of one’s life):
He cannot develop and differentiate his "true self," because he is unable to live it. It remains in a "state of noncommunication," as Winnicott has expressed it. Understandably, these patients complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and partial killing of his potential actually took place when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off.
Miller says these overly accommodating children “often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as partly dead.” She then gives examples of a few dreams. This one needs the least faith in dream interpretation to get:
I am lying on my bed. I am dead. My parents are talking and looking at me but they don't realize that I am dead.
You can see where this type of thing could lead to unhealthy parent-blaming (if not, see the book for a hundred other examples), but it can also lead to more empathy for parents. Seeing example after example of everyday patterns that could have helped shape my personality for the worse makes it vivid how impossible it is to be a perfect parent. Still, seeing traditional signs of parenting successes for the possible landmines they are seems helpful. Continuing with the accommodating child who has fully developed his “false self”:
The parents have found in their child's “false self” the confirmation they were looking for, a substitute for their own missing structures; the child, who has been unable to build up his own structures, is first consciously and then unconsciously (through the introject) dependent on his parents. He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs, and is alienated from himself to the highest degree.
This whole thing leads to an unhealthy emotional bond, which would probably look and feel great to the parent (“Just look at how much they love and want to please me! I must be doing it right!”), but is really a roadblock to the actual psychological work of individuation that should be happening:
Under these circumstances he cannot separate from his parents, and even as an adult he is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, from groups, or especially from his own children. The heirs of the parents are the introjects, from whom the "true self" must remain concealed, and so loneliness in the parental home is later followed by isolation within the self.
Miller continues, reminding us that this is the result of a loving parent trying her best:
Narcissistic cathexis of her child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child, as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his “false self." This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.
One of my very favorite books, On Caring, reminds us that properly caring for someone (or something), requires more than emotional attachment. There's a level of internal work and a type of posture toward the other required of us. Perfection is as impossible in parenting as it is anywhere else.
3. Talking To Ram Dass About Death (While He Was Dying)
Walking Each Other Home: Conversations On Love And Dying is the result of Mirabai Bush’s conversations with Ram Dass in his final days. I read it when my grandpa passed and found it nourishing.
Death is hard. Even with the prevalence of memento mori practices, our mortality borders on impossible-to-confront (it’s only slightly less hard to come to terms with the mortality of loved ones before they prove it to us). Every wisdom tradition insists it's vital, though. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wonders if:
the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death.
Ernest Becker, writing in The Denial of Death, agrees:
The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, and his products count. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky scraper, a family that spans three generations.
This unconscious drive seems to have us in quite the pickle, Becker says:
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
Ram Dass seems to agree with the problem, but offers a path to resolve it, the path he took:
We have to stay close to what we fear, so we know it. Know our attachments and let them go. We have to be willing to look at everything. Keeping death at arm's length keeps us from living life fully.
He goes on, generalizing from fear of death to offer guidance when confronting the other, smaller, less easy-to-pretend-they-aren’t-there fears we run into daily, and any meditator will recognize it:
When I am afraid of something, I come up as close to it as possible, and I notice my resistance. I allow myself to just notice the resistance, because the resistance intensifies the fear - there's no doubt about it. Get as close to the fear as you can, noticing the boundaries of it, just being with it, seeing it as it is. Don't grab, don't push it away, just notice.
To highlight the easy-to-miss import part of getting as close a fear as possible:
The main preparation for dying is giving up any sense of separateness. When feeling separate, it's very painful.
It’s not just scary things like death that cause fear. Ram Dass suggests that, “Even love, when it is conditional, can create fear.”
Unconditional love and a mindfulness practice probably aren’t the solutions you were looking for, though. They’re hard. For most of us most of the time, probably impossible (though maybe, temporarily, glimpsed at with the constant consolations of the book). There are other, maybe slightly more immediately practical ideas, Bush suggests:
It's difficult to get over your fear of death if you don't encounter it.
Ram Dass spent a lot of time meditating at deathbeds. He even created the Dying Center, an organization that paired meditators with those dying so that they could benefit from one another. In cultures that deny death (many of us eat meat daily, yet feel uneasy when we allow ourselves to think about the life and death of whatever’s on our plate), we don’t get much practice confronting the thing. Ram Dass suggests we stop seeing death as a kind of failure:
Death has been hidden and medicalized. Doctors often consider death a failure of their job. But death is a natural transition, not a failure.
Bush, reading Pema Chödrön before meeting with Ram Dass one morning, was struck by this passage:
Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.
This felt frustratingly similar to so many other meditation instructions I’ve been given in uncomfortable situations. The frustration gave way to, “dang, that really is the thing to do in pretty much every circumstance.”
Walking Each Other Home includes some letters of consolation Ram Dass wrote, which included incredibly human details that were helpful to frame the common mistake of “trying to emotionally transcend” the difficult. The whole thing is a beautiful meditation on the end of life for those getting there and those walking with them.
4. What We Find In Other People
I’ve been telling friends lately that the three most lucrative things you can be obsessed with are people, technology and money.
That’s how one of the bookbear express Substack letters started, of which I’m probably quoting way too high a percentage of below. She continues, putting her finger on the immensely practical value of reading fiction:
You can be interested in all three, but you can really only be truly obsessed with one. For me, it’s always been people. When I was a kid I could barely talk to anyone else, so I spent all my time reading. But looking back I think my love of books stemmed not from a love of language (though I do love language), but from an interest in other people’s interiority. I wanted to know what other people experienced, and what they felt, and how they thought. And fiction was—still is, in my opinion—the best way to investigate that.
The short piece is mostly about relating to the people around you in a better way, like realizing that what they offer is always immensely more than anything you could try to get from them:
I feel more and more that if you’re trying to get something from another person, you’re already fucking up. What people offer, in and of themselves, is the chance to get out of your own skin. Their existence is both a consolation and a source of hope.
She goes on to offer up an under-appreciated source of joy:
I’m often reassured by the ordinariness of my own experience.
Why is this a joy? Because the whole Christopher McCandelss “happiness only real when shared” thing:
...if you think you’re special, you separate yourself from others. And in so many ways I think that psychological separation is the source of all our suffering. When you believe that you are ordinary, you believe that your problems are shared and therefore surmountable. You believe that your triumphs mean something to someone else. And as a result your life improves immensely.
Her “psychological separation is the source of all suffering line” might bring into mind some Ram Dass quotes earlier in this letter. This one may, too:
The way I used to relate to people was so much about completion, about craving. I didn’t understand that you can never get enough of something you don’t really need. If you’re blind to the wholeness that’s already present, you’ll never find it in other people. When you see it you’ll see it in everyone.
The goal of a lot of spirituality is to “understand that you can never get enough of something you don’t really need.” To fully grok that would put you miles ahead of those teaching the stuff.
4. Miscellany
If you resonated with the section on embracing the ordinary above, I think you will enjoy this ode to the ordinary. (YouTube, 8min)
A kind critique pointing to a couple of reasons The Rings of Power didn't live up to it's potential this season, from the same guy as above. (YouTube, 19min)
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, maybe Middle Earth feels so solid because of the languages. (YouTube, 3min)
One more: Why Tolkien wasn't a big fan of Dune. (reddit)
I've been revisiting Richard Linklater's Waking Life before bed in short bits, and always love this section on existentialism. (Vimeo, 2min)
A Brief History of Kids Today Are Too Soft, starting in 1921. (Twitter)
A firework that looks like a ladder being built into the sky. (reddit)
An exhaustive collection of therapies.
TIL that Brazil was a monarchy until Crown Princess Isabel signed a law emancipating all slaves in Brazil in 1888. This was unpopular among the rich plantation owners and the imperial family was deposed in a military coup (reddit)
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Thank you for reading, it's an honor to be in your inbox. If there's an idea in here you liked, maybe forward this to someone who might appreciate it.
<3 Kyle