#flourishing — Public Fediverse posts

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable”*…

Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…

In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.

We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.

This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…

[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}

… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.

He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.

This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.

They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.

That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.

This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.

That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.

Fascinating, provocative, and eminently worth reading in full: “Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era,” from @nickhanauer.bsky.social and @ericbeinhocker.bsky.social.

* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776

###

As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.

Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).

https://youtu.be/dlEqWvFH9Jg?si=i17ySxC5uqtm8IBs

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable”*…

Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…

In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.

We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.

This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…

[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}

… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.

He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.

This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.

They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.

That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.

This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.

That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.

Fascinating, provocative, and eminently worth reading in full: “Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era,” from @nickhanauer.bsky.social and @ericbeinhocker.bsky.social.

* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776

###

As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.

Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).

https://youtu.be/dlEqWvFH9Jg?si=i17ySxC5uqtm8IBs

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable”*…

Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…

In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.

We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.

This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…

[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}

… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.

He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.

This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.

They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.

That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.

This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.

That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.

Fascinating, provocative, and eminently worth reading in full: “Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era,” from @nickhanauer.bsky.social and @ericbeinhocker.bsky.social.

* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776

###

As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.

Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).

https://youtu.be/dlEqWvFH9Jg?si=i17ySxC5uqtm8IBs

"The highest-leverage thing a #school can do for student #wellbeing is not another program. It is to make room for #play."
#playfulness #flourishing #laughter #education #classroom #Harvard #study #Spiel #Bildung #joy #Schule #Lebensqualität #blueLZ

nifplay.substack.com/p/the-larges...

"The highest-leverage thing a #school can do for student #wellbeing is not another program. It is to make room for #play."
#playfulness #flourishing #laughter #education #classroom #Harvard #study #Spiel #Bildung #joy #Schule #Lebensqualität #blueLZ

nifplay.substack.com/p/the-larges...

"The highest-leverage thing a #school can do for student #wellbeing is not another program. It is to make room for #play."
#playfulness #flourishing #laughter #education #classroom #Harvard #study #Spiel #Bildung #joy #Schule #Lebensqualität #blueLZ

nifplay.substack.com/p/the-larges...

Counterfactuals grounded by causality, include those that can be imagined. Let imagined realities be a fact, then prove the reasons for their actual existence are empirically significant?

Consider the case for a counterfactual:
1) an event that didn’t occur was an event that could’ve occurred
2) an event that didn’t occur, occurred somewhere else

Raining would be an obvious example, but the copy of worlds like ours that are closer or further to its likeness? Without reasons, dimensions, properties and dispositions there would be no exceptions to Amazing and Fantastic worlds. Freedom to imagine them, is not the freedom to create them if their credence has no value. Our mechanistic, artificial and experimental world of Empire’s atoms cannot cancel that freedom. Foundation constitutes the manifold of that freedom. It transcends the totalitarian control of any world order by an absolute being. #Rumination #MosaicNets #Delimitation #Philosophy #Wellbeing #flourishing #OtherWorlds #Foundations #CausalCategories #AmazingWorlds #FantasticWorlds #AbsoluteIdea #Freedom #FreeWorlds #UnconsciousCollective #CaptiveWorlds #ConnectedConsciousness #Limits #TranscendingSpirit #TheHistoryOfMind #TheFederation

Counterfactuals grounded by causality, include those that can be imagined. Let imagined realities be a fact, then prove the reasons for their actual existence are empirically significant?

Consider the case for a counterfactual:
1) an event that didn’t occur was an event that could’ve occurred
2) an event that didn’t occur, occurred somewhere else

Raining would be an obvious example, but the copy of worlds like ours that are closer or further to its likeness? Without reasons, dimensions, properties and dispositions there would be no exceptions to Amazing and Fantastic worlds. Freedom to imagine them, is not the freedom to create them if their credence has no value. Our mechanistic, artificial and experimental world of Empire’s atoms cannot cancel that freedom. Foundation constitutes the manifold of that freedom. It transcends the totalitarian control of any world order by an absolute being. #Rumination #MosaicNets #Delimitation #Philosophy #Wellbeing #flourishing #OtherWorlds #Foundations #CausalCategories #AmazingWorlds #FantasticWorlds #AbsoluteIdea #Freedom #FreeWorlds #UnconsciousCollective #CaptiveWorlds #ConnectedConsciousness #Limits #TranscendingSpirit #TheHistoryOfMind #TheFederation

Counterfactuals grounded by causality, include those that can be imagined. Let imagined realities be a fact, then prove the reasons for their actual existence are empirically significant?

Consider the case for a counterfactual:
1) an event that didn’t occur was an event that could’ve occurred
2) an event that didn’t occur, occurred somewhere else

Raining would be an obvious example, but the copy of worlds like ours that are closer or further to its likeness? Without reasons, dimensions, properties and dispositions there would be no exceptions to Amazing and Fantastic worlds. Freedom to imagine them, is not the freedom to create them if their credence has no value. Our mechanistic, artificial and experimental world of Empire’s atoms cannot cancel that freedom. Foundation constitutes the manifold of that freedom. It transcends the totalitarian control of any world order by an absolute being. #Rumination #MosaicNets #Delimitation #Philosophy #Wellbeing #flourishing #OtherWorlds #Foundations #CausalCategories #AmazingWorlds #FantasticWorlds #AbsoluteIdea #Freedom #FreeWorlds #UnconsciousCollective #CaptiveWorlds #ConnectedConsciousness #Limits #TranscendingSpirit #TheHistoryOfMind #TheFederation

Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg

And I'm never real, 
it's just a sketch of me 
And everything I've made 
is trite and cheap 
And a waste 
Of paint, of tape, of time

I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary

Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.

Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.

Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.

This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:

“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”

This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.

What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:

“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”

Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I

Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.

Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.

I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:

“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”

It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:

“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”

In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:

“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”

What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.

Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg

And I'm never real, 
it's just a sketch of me 
And everything I've made 
is trite and cheap 
And a waste 
Of paint, of tape, of time

I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary

Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.

Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.

Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.

This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:

“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”

This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.

What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:

“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”

Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I

Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.

Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.

I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:

“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”

It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:

“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”

In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:

“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”

What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.

Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVO-kl0rOlg

And I'm never real, 
it's just a sketch of me 
And everything I've made 
is trite and cheap 
And a waste 
Of paint, of tape, of time

I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility matches my own, I would have finally started reading her books far earlier in this intellectual journey. There are three senses in which I feel a great affinity with her approach which means I’m now committed to reading her entire body of work in a manner which feels largely involuntary

Ruti foregrounds the existential dimension when engaging with psychoanalysis. As she puts it on pg 5 of The Call of Character: “we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails”. In other words “how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contour of our existence”.

Ruti reads psychoanalytical theory through clinical practice in a manner which I’d only otherwise found in Bruce Fink. This is important to me because clinical work starts from the assumption that the analysand in some way wants to reduce their suffering and has proactively taken action to initiate a process which they hope will bring this about. There is after all a lot of work involved in making and sustaining analysis, not least of all accumulating the resources to pay for it and ensuring you turn up multiple times a week over the course of years. There’s a lot of agency here which a surprising number of theorists are bewilderingly oblivious to or disinterested in.

Ruti is deeply influenced by post-structuralist theory while remaining intensely frustrated with it. The problem for her is not the theoretical insights themselves but rather the cultural politics surrounding them, particularly once these theoretical approaches became hegemonic in the academy. The tendency to valorise novelty, movement and fragmentation leave her palpably annoyed at points in her books. Likewise the tendency to negate agency and to treat this as a progressive stance. The point is not that these theorists are wrong but rather that specific insights are wrapped up in a performance which is self-indulgent and politically short-sighted. That at least is how I read her frustration, even if she seems too nice to quite say this about her friends.

This can feel like a strange combination if readers are operating with a rigid distinction between psychoanalytical and philosophical questions. The choice of Lacan in particular as the primary interlocutor cuts through the entire corpus of Ruti’s work. There are many other significant influences who Ruti has a mainly affirmative relationship to (Kristeva, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas) and others (such as Butler and Žižek) whose work mainly serves as an object of critical elaboration. There’s also the vast supporting cast accumulated by someone who reads with exceptional breadth. But it ultimately comes back to Lacan for Ruti as the main lens through which to ask these existential questions. The manner in which she insists on reading Lacan through a clinical lens is crucial for how she connects these two registers. This involves what she calls a paradigm shift in her first book Reinventing the Soul. From loc 2572:

“I believe that if contemporary criticism has tended to neglect the more imaginative dimensions of Lacanian theory, it is in part because Lacanian analysis in the United States has for the most part been filtered through academic discourses that entirely neglect its clinical aspirations. Academic Lacanians—of whom I am one—often talk about Lacanian theory as if it had nothing to do with clinical concerns, with the result that everything ‘therapeutic’ becomes associated with relational or other Anglo-American schools of analytic practice. This in turn leads to an unnecessarily reductive notion not only of what it means to read Lacan, but also what it means to be a clinician. I would like to suggest that it may in fact be quite useful to read Lacan as a clinician, as someone who takes seriously the fact that psychoanalysis at its Freudian inception was centered around the impetus to alleviate the analysand’s psychic pain. Indeed, although Lacanian theory is often presented in ways that might lead one to believe that it is wholly divorced from ideals of psychic well-being, I like to remind myself that whatever else Lacan was, he was always a faithful interpreter of Freud and, as such, could not possibly be wholly unconcerned with the recuperative goals of analysis. The fact that Lacanian approaches are not compatible with the ideal of a coherent self does not mean that they cannot help the subject live its life in rewarding ways.”

This captures the terrain in which Ruti is operating. There is no coherent self but we still seek to live in rewarding ways. The recognition of the split subject is not a denial of flourishing per se but rather a statement about the challenge which we face in our aspiration towards flourishing. It’s in recognition of those psychic conditions, the reality of our fragmented and fractured existence, that we can begin to loosen our grip on preconceived notions of what it means to live well. As she puts it in A World of Fragile Things (loc 607) “it is when we give up the promise of a cure—when we agree to work with our lack rather than seek to heal it—that we become capable of fully entering into the turbulent current of our lives”. The problem is a notion of flourishing, which I’m using here to refer to how ‘living well’ has tended to be conceived within the philosophical literature, which treats this splitness as a contingent condition to which we need to find a cure. Instead, suggests Ruti, once we acknowledge “what we so commonly dread—namely that our selves will become broken, shattered, or decentered—has already happened, we no longer waste our time in trying to fend off the disaster”.

What might otherwise sound like a bleak denial of the possibility of happiness instead becomes a liberation. Rather than lurching from object to object, desperately trying to find the things within us that will repair the gaping wound we dimly sense within us, Ruti suggests we ought to ask “is it really that bad?”. Instead of a fantasy of completion where we imagine we can find a sense of wholeness, a permanent resting place from which we can approach life confident that everything will be fine, we instead begin to see the countless partial enjoyments which life can offer us. There’s not a single thing which, if we get it, will ensure that we are fine. We will never be fine, at least not in the abiding sense the fantasy proposes. To be fine is instead a precarious achievement which can only be realised by looking the void in its face. We will die. Everyone we care about will die. The people and things we love most in the world will inevitably disappoint us. The things we imagine will complete us will inevitably feel hollow. But rather than be defeated by that recognition we can instead see it as a challenge. The problem with the idea of happiness is that it pulls us away from the real business of living, as she writes on loc 520 in A World of Fragile Things:

“To put the matter in slightly different terms, one could say that the more relentlessly we chase happiness as a transcendent ideal, the more difficult it becomes for us to fully invest or immerse ourselves in the affairs of the world—the more difficult it becomes for us to enter what Eric Santner eloquently describes as ‘the midst of life.’ This is to say that the pursuit of happiness can induce us to step outside the flow of ordinary life, to sacrifice the vibrancy and resonance of the present for a futile fantasy of future deliverance. In this manner, the ideal of happiness becomes an exercise in trying to escape life.”

Or as the inimitable Lester Freamon once said to Jimmy McNulty: “A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR1g30pQi4I

Ruti is warning us that until we can dispense with the “moments that never come” we can never fully enter into the reality of our existence. It’s important to be clear about what she means here. Ruti isn’t postulating a fullness of experience which is accessible once we forego the fantasy of fullness. It isn’t simply that we have misidentified fullness, located it in the wrong place, such that we reclaim it just by living each day as it comes. What she means about ‘escaping life’ carries a different sense of living well which is less to do with integration and more to do with the enjoyments which are available to us if only we make ourselves available to them.

Instead of an existential fullness which can be achieved as an outcome she presents us with an image of more or less skillfully swimming through the tides of life. There is no stable equilibrium we can achieve. There is no resting place. The fantasy we might find one is a denial of life. It is a desire for life to be over. This means there will always be events which knock us off course. There will be crushing defeats. There will be mundane frustrations. The problem with fantasies of fullness is that it leaves us tyrannized by these inevitable experiences as fleshy, fragile, broken beings cast into a world which we can’t control. The events themselves might cause us suffering but the expectation we ought to have avoided them greatly compounds this suffering. Either the guilt at failing as an agent (“how did I let this happen to me?”) or the fury that we were not spared by the Other (“how could they do this to me?” or “how did they let this happen to me?”). Her point is not that we should cultivate passivity and equanimity because “shit happens”. It’s rather that the particular shit that has happened to me cannot now be changed. Her work is interested in how we reconcile ourselves with these past events (more on this later) in a manner which enables us to live more expansively and creatively in the present. In this sense recognising the limits of what we cannot control works paradoxically to expand the scope of our agency by facilitating a more direct encounter with the reality of our existential predicament.

I really like how Ruti reads Nietzsche. She shares my love for the Nietzsche of The Gay Science and Ecce Homo. The Nietzsche who preaches amor fati as an existential imperative. By this he meant not only that we tolerate our fate but that we learn to love it. As she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 4672, “amor fati implies the subject’s readiness to love not only the variable ingredients of its fate but, more importantly, the process of encountering this fate”. I think encounter is a crucial word here which names something running throughout Ruti’s approach. What matters is our encounter with the reality of our existence. There are all manner of defences which we form in reaction to the reality of that encounter, allowing us to step back and evade it, to blunt the difficult feelings which arise from our existential predicament. Ruti is not positing a reality to that encounter beyond these defences, an unmediated fullness which lurks on the other side of psychic renewal, but rather suggesting that we can learn to meet this encounter in more or less skillful ways. Amor fati implies “creatively wrestling with whatever opportunities or obstacles that this fate may bring” which “shares with Freudian psychoanalysis the willingness to sort through whatever wreckage life (wave after wave) washes ashore” (loc 4672). The fantasy that there won’t be wreckage is exactly what we need to do away with. The imperative is about how we respond to what washes up and how we orientate ourselves to the future on the basis of this reckoning with the past. She suggests on loc 4633 that this involves a loosening of control:

“amor fati mellows out the sharp edges of want and desire, enabling us to recognize the times when the best we can do is to allow the events and episodes of our life to develop without any urgency, struggle, or resistance. Amor fati thus asks us to slow down, to trust the rhythm of life, and to create space for experiences to emerge without attempting to rush or force their course.”

It’s not a rejection of agency as much as learning to exercise that agency with greater balance and poise. It’s a shift away from the imaginary register of being occupied by visions of what could and should happen in order to attune ourselves to what is happening and clarify what that means for us. This is where the art of living, in the sense of the classical conception of self-cultivation and flourishing, finds its place within Ruti’s psychoanalytical framework. It is the skill of meeting this encounter in ways which are more or less enriching of our experience of life, more or less conducive not just to enjoyment but to (borrowing a phrase from Bruce Fink) enjoying our enjoyments. Understanding this skill can be easier if we start from what its absence looks like in Ruti’s conception. I’ve already touched upon the problem of control and how this makes it harder for the subject to respond skillfully to the difficulties they inevitably encounter in life. This is how Ruti describes it in A World of Fragile Things loc 685:

“The pursuit of control, insofar as it is directed at keeping at bay the imaginary monsters of our lives, introduces a certain ‘dead-ness’—call it an excessive stiffness or tentativeness, if you will—to our psyches, thereby draining our capacity for happiness.”

In its extreme manifestations this is the mortification of desire itself: someone so wrapped up in their obsessive neurosis that there is little lived contact with life itself. Ruti highlights how this can take more adaptive forms which might seem less obviously pathological. She observes in The Call of Character loc 2548 that “those who have ordered their lives too tightly—who have constructed a bastion of regularizing routines against the specter of anxiety—often have trouble deciphering the truth of their desire, with the consequence that although their lives may be well managed, they are also a little anemic”. These people can be high functioning but there’s something missing, a distance from their own energy which drains their existence of colour and vibrancy. These negative conditions help us see the countervailing sense in which living skillfully means infusing life with exactly the energy that is missing or depleted in these subjects. She uses the memorable phrase “keeping our desire limber” earlier in The Call of Character to describe a lighter and looser relationship to what we want which makes space for the objects of our desire to breathe. From loc 1624:

“This is one reason that it is important, as I have emphasized, to work on keeping our desire limber. Those whose desire has congealed into unyielding configurations will find it virtually impossible to let their alliances breathe. They hold on too tightly, with the result that they squeeze the life out of their relationships.”

What does it mean to keep our desire limber? In the case of relationships, particularly romantic ones, it means moving with our desire rather than being tyrannized by it. This means, as she puts it in Reinventing the Soul loc 3271, “learning how to place restrictions on oneself without becoming masochistic” because “psychic well-being is in many ways a function of the subject’s capacity to place limits on its pleasure principle (and the repetition compulsion that feeds this pleasure principle)”. It’s not a matter of renouncing desire but rather “following the thread of one’s desire in a more discerning and discriminate manner”. This is “channeling it in directions that are less likely to cause us pain than the gluttonous pursuit of narcissistic and/or primordial pleasure”.

"[...] recently, they're also interested in #qualitative questions of #purpose, of human #flourishing, and of being a thriving family. And I think these are more important questions."
https://www.businessinsider.com/5-kinds-of-capital-that-can-save-generational-wealth-advisor-2025-11

Solidarity seems like a noble goal, but it's specious at best. When rallying for a cause, we want solidarity – for others to join – but what if we are among the others? #Solidarity comes at the expense of self – fine if you are already committed. Otherwise, not so much.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/12/03/on-the-strange-politics-of-solidarity/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
#solidarity #ethics #virtue #commongood #teaching #indotrination #normativity #institution #philosophy #psychology #virtue #dogma #flourishing #boundaries #goodandevil #totalitarianism #morals #principles

Solidarity seems like a noble goal, but it's specious at best. When rallying for a cause, we want solidarity – for others to join – but what if we are among the others? #Solidarity comes at the expense of self – fine if you are already committed. Otherwise, not so much.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/12/03/on-the-strange-politics-of-solidarity/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
#solidarity #ethics #virtue #commongood #teaching #indotrination #normativity #institution #philosophy #psychology #virtue #dogma #flourishing #boundaries #goodandevil #totalitarianism #morals #principles

Solidarity seems like a noble goal, but it's specious at best. When rallying for a cause, we want solidarity – for others to join – but what if we are among the others? #Solidarity comes at the expense of self – fine if you are already committed. Otherwise, not so much.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/12/03/on-the-strange-politics-of-solidarity/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
#solidarity #ethics #virtue #commongood #teaching #indotrination #normativity #institution #philosophy #psychology #virtue #dogma #flourishing #boundaries #goodandevil #totalitarianism #morals #principles

“It is most often to others that we owe our #survival, let alone our #flourishing” - #AlisdairMacIntyre

Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing

This is the clearest account I’ve ever heard of what gets talked about as the eudaimonic society. A good life involves the creative realisation of our latent talents. A good society is one which systematically enables the realisation of those latent talents. In this sense individual flourishing and the flourishing of society go hand-in-hand.

https://youtu.be/UBvNJ9mX8_c?si=CAIN9P6WUWPy95Yc&t=6398

#eudaimonia #flourishing #YanisVaroufakis

Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing

This is the clearest account I’ve ever heard of what gets talked about as the eudaimonic society. A good life involves the creative realisation of our latent talents. A good society is one which systematically enables the realisation of those latent talents. In this sense individual flourishing and the flourishing of society go hand-in-hand.

https://youtu.be/UBvNJ9mX8_c?si=CAIN9P6WUWPy95Yc&t=6398

#eudaimonia #flourishing #YanisVaroufakis

Yanis Varoufakis on a socialist interpretation of human flourishing

This is the clearest account I’ve ever heard of what gets talked about as the eudaimonic society. A good life involves the creative realisation of our latent talents. A good society is one which systematically enables the realisation of those latent talents. In this sense individual flourishing and the flourishing of society go hand-in-hand.

https://youtu.be/UBvNJ9mX8_c?si=CAIN9P6WUWPy95Yc&t=6398

#eudaimonia #flourishing #YanisVaroufakis

Nach dem Erstrunden-Ausscheiden von Alexander Zverev in Wimbledon gibt es für den deutschen Tennisstar offenbar wichtigere Themen.

Dr. Hanspeter Gubelmann: Wenn es Alexander Zverev nicht genügt, «sein Herz in die Hand nehmen» Diesen und um die 1000 weitere Texte findest du bei www.die-sportpsychologen.de

#Einsamkeit #Floundering #Flourishing #Tennis #Wimb

https://www.die-sportpsychologen.de/2025/07/dr-hanspeter-gubelmann-wenn-es-alexander-zverev-nicht-genuegt-sein-herz-in-die-hand-nehmen/

Nach dem Erstrunden-Ausscheiden von Alexander Zverev in Wimbledon gibt es für den deutschen Tennisstar offenbar wichtigere Themen.

Dr. Hanspeter Gubelmann: Wenn es Alexander Zverev nicht genügt, «sein Herz in die Hand nehmen» Diesen und um die 1000 weitere Texte findest du bei www.die-sportpsychologen.de

#Einsamkeit #Floundering #Flourishing #Tennis #Wimb

https://www.die-sportpsychologen.de/2025/07/dr-hanspeter-gubelmann-wenn-es-alexander-zverev-nicht-genuegt-sein-herz-in-die-hand-nehmen/

Today's poem:

Benediction
- by Stanley Kunitz

https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/787972000009355264/benediction?source=share

#poetry #benediction #blessings #peace #nurture #health #flourishing #StanleyKunitz #pain #loss #resilience #agency

Today's poem:

Benediction
- by Stanley Kunitz

https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/787972000009355264/benediction?source=share

#poetry #benediction #blessings #peace #nurture #health #flourishing #StanleyKunitz #pain #loss #resilience #agency

🌟 New Article: The Complete Guide to Human Flourishing

I've just published a comprehensive exploration of what it means to flourish. This guide covers:

🔬 Scientific frameworks (PERMA, Ryff's 6 dimensions)
🛠️ Practical interventions & therapeutic approaches
🚧 Common barriers & how to overcome them
📋 Implementation guide with daily practices

Read the full guide: https://www.drdevroy.com/flourishing/

#Flourishing #MentalHealth #PositivePsychology #Wellbeing #PersonalDevelopment

🌟 New Article: The Complete Guide to Human Flourishing

I've just published a comprehensive exploration of what it means to flourish. This guide covers:

🔬 Scientific frameworks (PERMA, Ryff's 6 dimensions)
🛠️ Practical interventions & therapeutic approaches
🚧 Common barriers & how to overcome them
📋 Implementation guide with daily practices

Read the full guide: https://www.drdevroy.com/flourishing/

#Flourishing #MentalHealth #PositivePsychology #Wellbeing #PersonalDevelopment

Sind Skandinavier wirklich die glücklichsten Menschen? 🤔

Der World Happiness Report sagt: ja. Aber was misst er eigentlich – und was nicht?

Lara Malberger (@Lara) zeigt, warum Glück mehr ist als ein Platz auf der Rangliste – und was wir von Indonesien lernen können.

👉 https://perspective-daily.de/article/3726-skandinavier-sind-am-gluecklichsten-warum-das-quatsch-ist-und-worauf-es-wirklich-ankommt/FpxSVJKQ

#Glück #Wohlbefinden #HappinessReport #Flourishing #Lebensqualität

Sind Skandinavier wirklich die glücklichsten Menschen? 🤔

Der World Happiness Report sagt: ja. Aber was misst er eigentlich – und was nicht?

Lara Malberger (@Lara) zeigt, warum Glück mehr ist als ein Platz auf der Rangliste – und was wir von Indonesien lernen können.

👉 https://perspective-daily.de/article/3726-skandinavier-sind-am-gluecklichsten-warum-das-quatsch-ist-und-worauf-es-wirklich-ankommt/FpxSVJKQ

#Glück #Wohlbefinden #HappinessReport #Flourishing #Lebensqualität

Sind Skandinavier wirklich die glücklichsten Menschen? 🤔

Der World Happiness Report sagt: ja. Aber was misst er eigentlich – und was nicht?

Lara Malberger (@Lara) zeigt, warum Glück mehr ist als ein Platz auf der Rangliste – und was wir von Indonesien lernen können.

👉 https://perspective-daily.de/article/3726-skandinavier-sind-am-gluecklichsten-warum-das-quatsch-ist-und-worauf-es-wirklich-ankommt/FpxSVJKQ

#Glück #Wohlbefinden #HappinessReport #Flourishing #Lebensqualität

https://open.substack.com/pub/steady/p/welcome-to-america-now-leave?r=29jpsy&utm_medium=ios Doesn’t the case against the abusive rhetoric and extreme violence against immigrants and indigenous people rest on ending the oligarchs finance and bribery of opportunists (their fascist cults) and fake opposition parties? #WarOnThePeople #OligarchsHell #EcocideEmpire #Recession #Terror #Wars #Purges #HegemonyOfHydra #PeaceAndSecurity #Wellbeing #Flourishing #Constitution #FederationOfRepublics #RightsFreedom #FederationOfDemocraticRepublics

https://open.substack.com/pub/steady/p/welcome-to-america-now-leave?r=29jpsy&utm_medium=ios Doesn’t the case against the abusive rhetoric and extreme violence against immigrants and indigenous people rest on ending the oligarchs finance and bribery of opportunists (their fascist cults) and fake opposition parties? #WarOnThePeople #OligarchsHell #EcocideEmpire #Recession #Terror #Wars #Purges #HegemonyOfHydra #PeaceAndSecurity #Wellbeing #Flourishing #Constitution #FederationOfRepublics #RightsFreedom #FederationOfDemocraticRepublics

https://open.substack.com/pub/steady/p/welcome-to-america-now-leave?r=29jpsy&utm_medium=ios Doesn’t the case against the abusive rhetoric and extreme violence against immigrants and indigenous people rest on ending the oligarchs finance and bribery of opportunists (their fascist cults) and fake opposition parties? #WarOnThePeople #OligarchsHell #EcocideEmpire #Recession #Terror #Wars #Purges #HegemonyOfHydra #PeaceAndSecurity #Wellbeing #Flourishing #Constitution #FederationOfRepublics #RightsFreedom #FederationOfDemocraticRepublics

Flattened is accurate this week, but the flourishing part is coming along nicely too.

#flourishing #seacreature #wildgreenmemes #meme #flatfuckfriday #wgmfef #unbothered #ThrivingInTheChaos

Flattened is accurate this week, but the flourishing part is coming along nicely too.

#flourishing #seacreature #wildgreenmemes #meme #flatfuckfriday #wgmfef #unbothered #ThrivingInTheChaos

Flattened is accurate this week, but the flourishing part is coming along nicely too. #flourishing #seacreature #wildgreenmemes #meme #flatfuckfriday #wgmfef #unbothered #ThrivingInTheChaos

When they ask me where do I see myself in 5 years.

#solarpunk #pondsage #relax #calm #moisturized #happy #focused #flourishing #bloomscrolling #meme

When they ask me where do I see myself in 5 years.

#solarpunk #pondsage #relax #calm #moisturized #happy #focused #flourishing #bloomscrolling #meme

When they ask me where do I see myself in 5 years.

#solarpunk #pondsage #relax #calm #moisturized #happy #focused #flourishing #bloomscrolling #meme

« Bread » by Anastasia Trusova

🔗 · https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/741806027241111552/bread-by-anastasia-trusova-artists-instagram

#arts #artshare #paintings 🎨 #AnastasiaTrusova @atrusovaartist @amtrusova #flourishing #sunsets #sufficiency

« Bread » by Anastasia Trusova

🔗 · https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/741806027241111552/bread-by-anastasia-trusova-artists-instagram

#arts #artshare #paintings 🎨 #AnastasiaTrusova @atrusovaartist @amtrusova #flourishing #sunsets #sufficiency

« Bread » by Anastasia Trusova

🔗 · https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/741806027241111552/bread-by-anastasia-trusova-artists-instagram

#arts #artshare #paintings 🎨 #AnastasiaTrusova @atrusovaartist @amtrusova #flourishing #sunsets #sufficiency

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-2lJtpgWTN/?igsh=cTRjcW8zMm13YjIy “.. It's notable that our greatest role models are those who have overcome and endured some kind of ordeal, not those who have experienced a life of gilded pleasure. Dogged resilience is what makes us great. It's easy to see suffering as a kind of barrier to a #flourishing life. But as Frankl wrote, 'Without suffering and death, a human life cannot be called complete!”
#philosophy #stoicism #wisdom #life #hardship #psychology #tragedy #sociology #education #health

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-2lJtpgWTN/?igsh=cTRjcW8zMm13YjIy “.. It's notable that our greatest role models are those who have overcome and endured some kind of ordeal, not those who have experienced a life of gilded pleasure. Dogged resilience is what makes us great. It's easy to see suffering as a kind of barrier to a #flourishing life. But as Frankl wrote, 'Without suffering and death, a human life cannot be called complete!”
#philosophy #stoicism #wisdom #life #hardship #psychology #tragedy #sociology #education #health

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-2lJtpgWTN/?igsh=cTRjcW8zMm13YjIy “.. It's notable that our greatest role models are those who have overcome and endured some kind of ordeal, not those who have experienced a life of gilded pleasure. Dogged resilience is what makes us great. It's easy to see suffering as a kind of barrier to a #flourishing life. But as Frankl wrote, 'Without suffering and death, a human life cannot be called complete!”
#philosophy #stoicism #wisdom #life #hardship #psychology #tragedy #sociology #education #health

unbothered. moisturized. happy. in my lane. focused. flourishing.

#f16 #moisturized #flourishing

unbothered. moisturized. happy. in my lane. focused. flourishing.

#f16 #moisturized #flourishing

unbothered. moisturized. happy. in my lane. focused. flourishing.

#f16 #moisturized #flourishing

Ingurgitating Oblivion – Ontology of Nought Review

By Dear Hollow

I’ve spent over twenty hours with Ontology of Nought, trying to learn the German Ingurgitating Oblivion’s method in the madness. I’m still lost. I’m still stumbling blindly through the dead ends, the hairpin turns, the ominous spires, and the high walls that enclose its labyrinth, attempting to discover its light but knowing that it will only be by chance if I do. I cannot find a pattern, a clue, or an architectural basis anywhere. It’s blind memorization and utter void of context, and I have never been so baffled and intrigued by something calling itself death metal.

The lack of reference makes Ontology of Nought such a difficult album to score. Laced dissonance, choppy rhythms, blackened death intensity, and technical arpeggios, tied together with spoken word, a haunting atmosphere, and vicious noise, avant-garde veterans Ingurgitating Oblivion1 somehow avoids sounding like the trademarks of any of the bands who use them. Their first album in seven years consists of five tracks spanning nearly an hour and fifteen minutes, the eighteen-minute closer divided into three movements. It shifts patiently, organically, but with the intention and direction of the blind leading the blind. Ingurgitating Oblivion constructs Ontology of Nought not as a collection of highlights and riffs, but as a sonic labyrinth composed of mile-high walls, experimental twists, jagged spires, and brutal nihilism.

Disjointedly, Ingurgitating Oblivion recalls acts like Serocs, Coma Cluster Void, and Flourishing, a fusion of dissonant, blackened, and avant-garde death metal, sprawled together with ambiance and murky songwriting – however, Ontology of Nought is a free jazz expedition a la Sun Ra or Peter Brötzmann at heart. Opener “Uncreation’s Whirring Loom You Ply with Crippled Fingers” sets the tone with a haunting ambiance, interspersed by nearly mathcore-inspired marbled rhythms and manic drumming and featuring wild jazzy solos. The suffocating sprawl of noise and dissonance gives “To Weave the Tapestry of Nought” a dangerous grin atop its cantankerous rhythms, and the crescendos of lush ambiance, cumbersome keys, and clean vocals are downright haunting and strangely infectious. The women’s choir of “Lest I Should Perish with Travel, Effete and Weary, as My Knees Refuse to Bear Me Thither” shines through this tapestry of noise, interspersed by blackened death bomb explosions. Closer “The Barren Earth Oozes Blood, and Shakes and Moans, To Drink Her Children’s Gore” is a tour-de-force of spidery keys, unhinged drumming and sick riffs, epic solos, crawling leads, scathing noise, and crystalline ambiance, an eighteen-minute behemoth with which Ingurgitating Oblivion will test your patience and your sanity in some of the best ways, the patience of prior tracks stricken to the bone.

It’s easy to draw comparisons to Midnight Odyssey or Swallow the Sun in Ontology of Nought’s challenging runtime, but at least those atmoblack and melodeath/doom legends have shreds of consistency. Ingurgitating Oblivion shifts dramatically across each song’s ten-to-nineteen-minute track-lengths in ways that rob distinctiveness in favor of an ever-changing amorphousness, leaving memorability by the wayside. Most damning is centerpiece “The Blossoms of Your Tomorrow Shall Unfold in My Heart,” which lacks the oomph or highlight to stand out amid the crushing sea of experimentalisms and jarring shifts, compared to the haunting “To Weave…” and the actualized clarity of “Lest I Should Perish…” It’s ultimately small potatoes, however, because despite the myriad spins, I still cannot seem to wrap my head around Ontology’s shifting sands of jarring tonal and musical changes. This makes Ingurgitating Oblivion almost entirely inaccessible, requiring an obscene amount of concentration – in an inherently difficult style – for an asinine amount of time. In the spirit of free jazz, Ontology of Nought feels nearly entirely improvised, so it’s difficult to tell if its insanity is a puzzle worth solving or an empty pretentious pursuit.

When I started listening to Ingurgitating Oblivion, I was reading “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges – and the comparisons fit. While the short story about infinite numbers of identically structured hexagons and books clashes with the insane apparent randomness coursing through Ontology of Nought, the lesson remains the same: the choice of purpose in the minute or despair in the infinite. How each listener approaches this album will differ, as the experimentalism is maddening and the runtime is extravagant. The sounds contained herein are unlike any others, with intensity, experimentalism, and organicity playing an infinite sonic game of chess worthy of both shudder and intrigue. Listen to it once – replay mileage will vary.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Willowtip Records
Websites: ingurgitatingoblivion1.bandcamp.com | ingurgitating-oblivion.de | facebook.com/IngurgitatingOblivionOfficial
Releases Worldwide: September 27th, 2024

#2024 #35 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #AvantGardeDeathMetal #AvantGardeMetal #BlackenedDeathMetal #ComaClusterVoid #DeathMetal #DefeatedSanity #DissonantDeathMetal #Flourishing #Fountainhead #FreeJazz #GermanMetal #IngurgitatingOblivion #Jazz #MentallyDefiled #MidnightOdyssey #OntologyOfNought #PeterBrötzmann #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #Serocs #SunRa #SwallowTheSun #TechnicalDeathMetal #WillowtipRecords

Ingurgitating Oblivion – Ontology of Nought Review

By Dear Hollow

I’ve spent over twenty hours with Ontology of Nought, trying to learn the German Ingurgitating Oblivion’s method in the madness. I’m still lost. I’m still stumbling blindly through the dead ends, the hairpin turns, the ominous spires, and the high walls that enclose its labyrinth, attempting to discover its light but knowing that it will only be by chance if I do. I cannot find a pattern, a clue, or an architectural basis anywhere. It’s blind memorization and utter void of context, and I have never been so baffled and intrigued by something calling itself death metal.

The lack of reference makes Ontology of Nought such a difficult album to score. Laced dissonance, choppy rhythms, blackened death intensity, and technical arpeggios, tied together with spoken word, a haunting atmosphere, and vicious noise, avant-garde veterans Ingurgitating Oblivion1 somehow avoids sounding like the trademarks of any of the bands who use them. Their first album in seven years consists of five tracks spanning nearly an hour and fifteen minutes, the eighteen-minute closer divided into three movements. It shifts patiently, organically, but with the intention and direction of the blind leading the blind. Ingurgitating Oblivion constructs Ontology of Nought not as a collection of highlights and riffs, but as a sonic labyrinth composed of mile-high walls, experimental twists, jagged spires, and brutal nihilism.

Disjointedly, Ingurgitating Oblivion recalls acts like Serocs, Coma Cluster Void, and Flourishing, a fusion of dissonant, blackened, and avant-garde death metal, sprawled together with ambiance and murky songwriting – however, Ontology of Nought is a free jazz expedition a la Sun Ra or Peter Brötzmann at heart. Opener “Uncreation’s Whirring Loom You Ply with Crippled Fingers” sets the tone with a haunting ambiance, interspersed by nearly mathcore-inspired marbled rhythms and manic drumming and featuring wild jazzy solos. The suffocating sprawl of noise and dissonance gives “To Weave the Tapestry of Nought” a dangerous grin atop its cantankerous rhythms, and the crescendos of lush ambiance, cumbersome keys, and clean vocals are downright haunting and strangely infectious. The women’s choir of “Lest I Should Perish with Travel, Effete and Weary, as My Knees Refuse to Bear Me Thither” shines through this tapestry of noise, interspersed by blackened death bomb explosions. Closer “The Barren Earth Oozes Blood, and Shakes and Moans, To Drink Her Children’s Gore” is a tour-de-force of spidery keys, unhinged drumming and sick riffs, epic solos, crawling leads, scathing noise, and crystalline ambiance, an eighteen-minute behemoth with which Ingurgitating Oblivion will test your patience and your sanity in some of the best ways, the patience of prior tracks stricken to the bone.

It’s easy to draw comparisons to Midnight Odyssey or Swallow the Sun in Ontology of Nought’s challenging runtime, but at least those atmoblack and melodeath/doom legends have shreds of consistency. Ingurgitating Oblivion shifts dramatically across each song’s ten-to-nineteen-minute track-lengths in ways that rob distinctiveness in favor of an ever-changing amorphousness, leaving memorability by the wayside. Most damning is centerpiece “The Blossoms of Your Tomorrow Shall Unfold in My Heart,” which lacks the oomph or highlight to stand out amid the crushing sea of experimentalisms and jarring shifts, compared to the haunting “To Weave…” and the actualized clarity of “Lest I Should Perish…” It’s ultimately small potatoes, however, because despite the myriad spins, I still cannot seem to wrap my head around Ontology’s shifting sands of jarring tonal and musical changes. This makes Ingurgitating Oblivion almost entirely inaccessible, requiring an obscene amount of concentration – in an inherently difficult style – for an asinine amount of time. In the spirit of free jazz, Ontology of Nought feels nearly entirely improvised, so it’s difficult to tell if its insanity is a puzzle worth solving or an empty pretentious pursuit.

When I started listening to Ingurgitating Oblivion, I was reading “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges – and the comparisons fit. While the short story about infinite numbers of identically structured hexagons and books clashes with the insane apparent randomness coursing through Ontology of Nought, the lesson remains the same: the choice of purpose in the minute or despair in the infinite. How each listener approaches this album will differ, as the experimentalism is maddening and the runtime is extravagant. The sounds contained herein are unlike any others, with intensity, experimentalism, and organicity playing an infinite sonic game of chess worthy of both shudder and intrigue. Listen to it once – replay mileage will vary.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Willowtip Records
Websites: ingurgitatingoblivion1.bandcamp.com | ingurgitating-oblivion.de | facebook.com/IngurgitatingOblivionOfficial
Releases Worldwide: September 27th, 2024

#2024 #35 #AtmosphericDeathMetal #AvantGardeDeathMetal #AvantGardeMetal #BlackenedDeathMetal #ComaClusterVoid #DeathMetal #DefeatedSanity #DissonantDeathMetal #Flourishing #Fountainhead #FreeJazz #GermanMetal #IngurgitatingOblivion #Jazz #MentallyDefiled #MidnightOdyssey #OntologyOfNought #PeterBrötzmann #Review #Reviews #Sep24 #Serocs #SunRa #SwallowTheSun #TechnicalDeathMetal #WillowtipRecords

Human Flourishing 2
Work and live as a human, not as a resource.

#life #work #flourishing #newapproach #philosophy

Human Flourishing 2
Work and live as a human, not as a resource.

#life #work #flourishing #newapproach #philosophy

A quotation from Jacobs, Jane:

«
Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
»

Full quote, sourcing, notes:
https://wist.info/jacobs-jane/71264/

#quote #quotes #quotation #cities #decay #decline #flourishing #population #prosperity #society #stagnation

A quotation from Jacobs, Jane:

«
Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
»

Full quote, sourcing, notes:
https://wist.info/jacobs-jane/71264/

#quote #quotes #quotation #cities #decay #decline #flourishing #population #prosperity #society #stagnation

I was initially extremely sceptical of Tony Lawson’s concept of eudaimonic bubbles, particularly in so far as that an intellectual community could be conceived of as taking on a quasi-bounded quality in the manner he’s suggesting:

That answer I defend or explore involves the creation of wider-community-specific flourishing-facilitating contingently protected sub-communities that I refer to as eudaimonic bubbles.

As the metaphor suggests I mean relatively advantageous, if often precarious, conditions in which sub-communities can insulate themselves, relatively speaking, from specific sets of dehumanising or oppressive features characteristic of the wider community within which they are located.

Clearly all sub-communities share much of the social structure of wider embedding communities. But in some cases a sub-community or bubble may emerge that is successfully oriented to achieving a specific set of goals that are perceived as essential to, or highly consistent with, human flourishing, that are difficult and usually impossible to achieve consistently in the wider community.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-49469-2_11

I understand the point to be that a bubble emerges where a group can do something valuable together which they can’t (consistently) do in their wider milieu. But I just found the metaphor of the bubble utterly opaque as a way of describing something which is, by definition, a matter of the relational structure of the group. It makes it difficult to answer the questions which Tony raises in the same chapter, because ‘bubbleness’ as an exterior quality which suddenly comes into being implies a binary logic, as opposed to the relational logic involved in approaching this from Archer and Donati’s perspective:

If despite everything eudaimonic bubbles of relatively localised, if usually precarious and often temporary, flourishing keep appearing, my question is what governs their emergence and relative survival. Are there conditions common to successful cases? And given the wider project to which I am contributing, how, if at all, do processes of morphogenesis contribute? My suspicion is that there is no systematic answer, and that much depends on context.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-49469-2_11

But as a normative concept this has grown on me a lot. It captures the idea that what Stafford Beer once described to his daughter as ‘finding and holding onto one’s own cosmic slice’, can be a collective undertaking. Even if the bubbleness invoked by Tony is an imaginary entity, in this case postulated about an intellectual community which is literally formed around him and his work, it’s still a powerful notion normatively. It could be used to convey a collective aspiration, potentially a slightly defensive one (do we need bubbles if the world beyond isn’t so hostile to flourishing?) but valuable nonetheless.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/08/eudaimonic-bubbles-as-a-normative-rather-than-analytical-concept/

#archer #aspiration #bubbles #donati #eudaimonia #flourishing #normativity #relationalRealism #staffordBeer #TonyLawson

Creating a Node of #Emergence

- #Living, #Learning, and #Growing Together for a #Flourishing World -

"We are looking for co-creators of our new #international deliberately developmental #community in #Stockholm "

Does this sound interesting to you?
Read more here - and express your interest!
https://ekskaret.confetti.events/project-lakefront/

Creating a Node of #Emergence

- #Living, #Learning, and #Growing Together for a #Flourishing World -

"We are looking for co-creators of our new #international deliberately developmental #community in #Stockholm "

Does this sound interesting to you?
Read more here - and express your interest!
https://ekskaret.confetti.events/project-lakefront/

Creating a Node of #Emergence

- #Living, #Learning, and #Growing Together for a #Flourishing World -

"We are looking for co-creators of our new #international deliberately developmental #community in #Stockholm "

Does this sound interesting to you?
Read more here - and express your interest!
https://ekskaret.confetti.events/project-lakefront/

Dear friends of the #unprotected, 🦞

As we may know all bad things, in fact all things come to an end. #Yin suddenly to #yang and around to a cycle of #Great Yin. Even more #strangely; One #cycle #informs the #extremities of the #Next. In other words:

- let the heads #roll, like the good times
- be kinder than the #Middle Way #Buddha
- we are the recycling ♻️

How this works out, is up to those over the cutting edge. The #silent #well of good people, doing even #better under #flourishing #infrastructure. Yes we are the #co-operative #federation of like, #likeness. We are not the enema but the other end of the canal. Or as they say in the marine core of apples, Johnny #Appleseed and the #music of the #ageless:

- Thin
- Go froth and #multiply
- Caesar the #dazed

Talking of great Days. Have One an' All, You here? ❤️

Human Flourishing
Humans can truly flourish when they live as humans, not as resources.

#human #flourishing #life #philosophy #mentalhealth #wellness

Aiming at something #noble. #Resolutions for #human #flourishing.

https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/aiming-at-something-noble-resolutions