#limits — Public Fediverse posts

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life in a box

#Sculptural #Circular #Wood #Box #Tree #Sunset #Decorative #Limits
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #AiArtCommunity #StableDiffusion

in a different kind of box: https://aieris.art/featured/life-in-a-box-eris-and-ai.html

Is the Iran War the Greatest Strategic Defeat in American History?

There’s a new poll out today showing that “Trump’s war in Iran” — and it is his war, let’s make no mistake about that — “is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.”

I am not much of a poll tracker. But the Washington Post story about this new polling caught my eye, not only because I’ve been watching Emile de Antonio’s excellent 1968 Vietnam War film In the Year of the Pig on the Criterion Channel, but also because I keep running into statements like this one, from Paul Krugman’s Substack (30 April 2026):

Trump’s ego is so fragile that he can never admit losing. He cannot bear to face up to the reality that he, more or less single-handedly, led America to the greatest strategic defeat in its history. So he desperately wants to extract concessions from Iran that would lend him a fig leaf and allow him to claim victory.

Krugman is right about Trump’s “fragile ego,” but surely he needs to be more measured when it comes to what counts as the greatest strategic defeat in American history. He’s not alone. Mitchell Plitnick dedicated a whole podcast to the idea in early April. And this isn’t just a slip of Krugman’s pen. A few paragraphs later, he doubles down: “America,” he writes, “will have suffered its worst strategic defeat in history as a result of a completely gratuitous misadventure to please Trump’s ego.”

The American war in Iran might count as the quickest strategic defeat in our history, and I’m not going to deny that it’s already having and will continue to have serious geopolitical consequences. (I found the HC Commodities podcast interview with Doomberg clarifying on this point). But I have a hard time seeing how this war should count as a greater or worse and more humiliating strategic defeat or a more costly blunder (strictly in terms of blood and treasure) than Vietnam.

At the end of his podcast, Plitnick hedges on this point:

It is about as great a strategic disaster as you can imagine. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, I mean they all pale before how stupid this was, despite the fact that they went on for years and years and year, and cost more in terms of lives and more in terms of money, because they went on so long. And that should not be minimized and in no way am I trying to minimize that. But when we talk about a strategic loss, about a strategic disaster, this is the biggest one in US history, and it was all for nothing, all for nothing.

What I take from this is that the war in Iran should count as the biggest or the greatest strategic defeat in American history because it may turn out to be the stupidest strategic defeat in American history.

There is no getting around the stupidity and recklessness and pointlessness of it all.

But I still balk at this application of the superlative to Trump’s Iran disaster. Is Krugman really asking us to start from the founding and work our way forward, ranking strategic defeats*? No, he appears just to be riffing. He never bothers to argue the historical point, never even mentions Vietnam or other examples.

Superlatives may make good clickbait, but they can also be very slippery: in just the two examples I’ve cited here, greatest can mean quickest or it can mean stupidest or maybe it can even mean most consequential. That’s unclear. Superlatives tend to muddle thinking about history, where clarity counts.

Talking about Iran as the greatest or the biggest strategic defeat in American history may score some political points, or drive some online traffic. But in this case hyperbole carries a cost. It distorts both past and present, and it can dampen political will (signaling that there is no recovering from this greatest of all defeats) or exacerbate the historical amnesia from which too many Americans already seem to suffer.

And it’s still early days, too early to judge. Trump’s war in Iran is only two months old, and the American public already appears to be decisively against it. It wasn’t until after the Tet Offensive in 1968, a full four years after the Gulf of Tonkin debacle, that public disapproval of the Vietnam War began to reach these levels, as this chart (made from the same Gallup data used by the Washington Post) shows:

That comparison all by itself is a pretty damning indictment of Trump’s war. And maybe that means a good number of Americans — not all of us, but some of us — have learned a little something from history after all.

N.B. 2 May 2026: In a conversation with Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast (and published on Krugman’s Substack blog today), Krugman backs away from the superlative:

The celebration of a guy who is an absolute disaster at presidenting—he has led, more or less single-handedly, on his own decisions, his own faith, his own judgment, he has led America into one of our worst strategic defeats in our history. He took on this relatively small military power in Iran, figuring that he could destroy the regime and install his people in a few days, and he lost the war.

*PS 10 May 2026: Robert Kagan comes close to doing just that in the opening paragraphs of his new piece in The Atlantic. Though he never reaches for the hyperbole, he argues that the defeat in Iran is in a class all by itself and of tremendous historical import, a signal event in the unraveling of the American-led postwar order.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character [than in every other American war Kagan lists]. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done….the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Alright, future engineers!
A **Limit** describes the value a function approaches as its input gets closer to a specific point.
Ex: `lim (x->0) sin(x)/x = 1`.
Pro-Tip: Limits are the bedrock of derivatives & continuity! Understand them well.
#Calculus #Limits #STEM #StudyNotes

Nah, ezért nem tudok, noha minden ízemben szeretnék váltani Claude AI-ra.

Kurva gyorsan elfogy a sima limit. És most nézem, hogy... mi az, hogy heti limit??? WTF???

#Claude #ClaudeAI #AI #limit #limits #weekly #weeklylimit #magyar #hungarian

Alright, future engineers!

A **Limit** is the value a function approaches as its input gets arbitrarily close to a specific point.
Ex: `lim(x->2) (x^2 - 4)/(x - 2) = 4`.
Pro-Tip: Always simplify first if you hit 0/0!

#Calculus #Limits #STEM #StudyNotes

Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8l2q5yq51o

#HackerNews #Claude #Code #usage #limits #usage_limits #technology #news #AI

Anthropic: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/31/anthropic_claude_code_limits/

#HackerNews #Anthropic #Claude #Code #usage #limits #AI #technology #usage #trends

“We’re entering the age of finitude capitalism”

* "There are many states, or “company-states”, which are currently setting up new types of semi-formal colonisation, in various places." Interview with economist Arnaud Orain >>
https://www.philonomist.com/en/interview/were-entering-age-finitude-capitalism

* What kind of capitalism is possible in a world of limited resources? Arnaud Orain
"Adapted to a world of limited resources, this "capitalism of finitude" seeks to privatize and militarize the seas and territories, impose high prices, consolidate resource "silos," and reserve exclusive markets. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is one alternative to this authoritarian capitalism, but the means to protect it remain unclear.' >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TD7wjURLJM

#FinitePlanet #LandGrabbing #FinitudeCapitalism #resources #energy #NaturalResources #oil #StraitOfHormuz #SeizeTerritories #militarisation #monopoly #predatory #colonisation #conquer #empire #TheLawOfSpoils #MaritimeRoutes #deindustrialisation #CompanyStates #ecology #EnvironmentalLimits #climate #limits #finitude #ConfiscatedWorld

Image: 'Ships of the East India Company at Sea', "A fleet of East Indiamen at sea", Nicholas Pocock, 1803 >>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_fleet_of_East_Indiamen_at_sea.jpg

“We’re entering the age of finitude capitalism”

* "There are many states, or “company-states”, which are currently setting up new types of semi-formal colonisation, in various places." Interview with economist Arnaud Orain >>
https://www.philonomist.com/en/interview/were-entering-age-finitude-capitalism

* What kind of capitalism is possible in a world of limited resources? Arnaud Orain
"Adapted to a world of limited resources, this "capitalism of finitude" seeks to privatize and militarize the seas and territories, impose high prices, consolidate resource "silos," and reserve exclusive markets. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is one alternative to this authoritarian capitalism, but the means to protect it remain unclear.' >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TD7wjURLJM

#FinitePlanet #LandGrabbing #FinitudeCapitalism #resources #energy #NaturalResources #oil #StraitOfHormuz #SeizeTerritories #militarisation #monopoly #predatory #colonisation #conquer #empire #TheLawOfSpoils #MaritimeRoutes #deindustrialisation #CompanyStates #ecology #EnvironmentalLimits #climate #limits #finitude #ConfiscatedWorld

Image: 'Ships of the East India Company at Sea', "A fleet of East Indiamen at sea", Nicholas Pocock, 1803 >>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_fleet_of_East_Indiamen_at_sea.jpg

“We’re entering the age of finitude capitalism”

* "There are many states, or “company-states”, which are currently setting up new types of semi-formal colonisation, in various places." Interview with economist Arnaud Orain >>
https://www.philonomist.com/en/interview/were-entering-age-finitude-capitalism

* What kind of capitalism is possible in a world of limited resources? Arnaud Orain
"Adapted to a world of limited resources, this "capitalism of finitude" seeks to privatize and militarize the seas and territories, impose high prices, consolidate resource "silos," and reserve exclusive markets. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is one alternative to this authoritarian capitalism, but the means to protect it remain unclear.' >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TD7wjURLJM

#FinitePlanet #LandGrabbing #FinitudeCapitalism #resources #energy #NaturalResources #oil #StraitOfHormuz #SeizeTerritories #militarisation #monopoly #predatory #colonisation #conquer #empire #TheLawOfSpoils #MaritimeRoutes #deindustrialisation #CompanyStates #ecology #EnvironmentalLimits #climate #limits #finitude #ConfiscatedWorld

Image: 'Ships of the East India Company at Sea', "A fleet of East Indiamen at sea", Nicholas Pocock, 1803 >>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_fleet_of_East_Indiamen_at_sea.jpg

“We’re entering the age of finitude capitalism”

* "There are many states, or “company-states”, which are currently setting up new types of semi-formal colonisation, in various places." Interview with economist Arnaud Orain >>
https://www.philonomist.com/en/interview/were-entering-age-finitude-capitalism

* What kind of capitalism is possible in a world of limited resources? Arnaud Orain
"Adapted to a world of limited resources, this "capitalism of finitude" seeks to privatize and militarize the seas and territories, impose high prices, consolidate resource "silos," and reserve exclusive markets. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is one alternative to this authoritarian capitalism, but the means to protect it remain unclear.' >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TD7wjURLJM

#FinitePlanet #LandGrabbing #FinitudeCapitalism #resources #energy #NaturalResources #oil #StraitOfHormuz #SeizeTerritories #militarisation #monopoly #predatory #colonisation #conquer #empire #TheLawOfSpoils #MaritimeRoutes #deindustrialisation #CompanyStates #ecology #EnvironmentalLimits #climate #limits #finitude #ConfiscatedWorld

Image: 'Ships of the East India Company at Sea', "A fleet of East Indiamen at sea", Nicholas Pocock, 1803 >>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_fleet_of_East_Indiamen_at_sea.jpg

“We’re entering the age of finitude capitalism”

* "There are many states, or “company-states”, which are currently setting up new types of semi-formal colonisation, in various places." Interview with economist Arnaud Orain >>
https://www.philonomist.com/en/interview/were-entering-age-finitude-capitalism

* What kind of capitalism is possible in a world of limited resources? Arnaud Orain
"Adapted to a world of limited resources, this "capitalism of finitude" seeks to privatize and militarize the seas and territories, impose high prices, consolidate resource "silos," and reserve exclusive markets. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is one alternative to this authoritarian capitalism, but the means to protect it remain unclear.' >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TD7wjURLJM

#FinitePlanet #LandGrabbing #FinitudeCapitalism #resources #energy #NaturalResources #oil #StraitOfHormuz #SeizeTerritories #militarisation #monopoly #predatory #colonisation #conquer #empire #TheLawOfSpoils #MaritimeRoutes #deindustrialisation #CompanyStates #ecology #EnvironmentalLimits #climate #limits #finitude #ConfiscatedWorld

Image: 'Ships of the East India Company at Sea', "A fleet of East Indiamen at sea", Nicholas Pocock, 1803 >>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_fleet_of_East_Indiamen_at_sea.jpg

Despite rising fuel prices, Transport Minister Patrick Schnieder (CDU) rejected pressure to bring the nine‑euro ticket back. He told newspapers from the Funke M... https://news.osna.fm/?p=39922 | #news #caps #fuel #limits #minister

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

These are grief suppressors. They are issued so routinely and across so many contexts that they have acquired the appearance of common sense. They are not common sense. They are commands to override a biological response that the body is producing for a reason. When a child is told not to cry at a funeral, the child is being told to suppress a neurochemical cascade that is already in progress. The cortisol is elevated, the amygdala has fired, and the body is doing what millions of years of evolution designed it to do when it registers the absence of an attachment figure. The command does not eliminate the response. It drives it underground, where it persists in forms the child cannot name and the adults will not recognize as grief when it resurfaces months or years later as insomnia, stomach pain, an inability to concentrate, a persistent anxiety with no identifiable source.

I have written a book about this. It is called “Go to Every Funeral: How Grief Defines the Living,” and it is published by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing, and the title comes from something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago. A mother told her college-age daughter to go to every funeral, even if she did not want to, even if she did not know the dead person, because funerals are for the living and absence is remembered. I carried those six words for a quarter of a century, through the deaths of my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my mentor, two friends, and a cat who sat on my desk for fifteen years, and the book is the result of trying to understand why those words were true and why nobody else had ever said them to me.

The book covers a lot of ground: the neuroscience of grief, the mourning practices of elephants and crows, the history of funerals from the domestic parlor to the corporate funeral home, the economics of death as a market, the global range of mourning from the Torajan highlands to the jazz funerals of New Orleans. But the section I want to talk about here is Part Five, which is about permission. Specifically, about who gets to grieve and who gets told to stop.

The suppression commands are not distributed equally. They fall with particular weight on men, on children, on employees, and on anyone whose grief is judged to be inconvenient by the people around them. Boys are told not to cry with a frequency and an intensity that girls are not, and the instruction begins early enough that by adolescence many boys have internalized it so completely that they experience the suppression as personality rather than training. They do not cry because they are “not the kind of person who cries.” The self-description obscures the years of conditioning that produced it.

The consequences are visible in the data. Men die by suicide at rates roughly four times higher than women in the United States. They are less likely to seek mental health treatment, more likely to self-medicate with alcohol, more likely to convert emotional distress into physical aggression. These are not biological inevitabilities. They are the downstream effects of a culture that tells half its population to suppress the emotional responses the other half is permitted to express. The man who cannot cry at his father’s funeral because he was told, at age six, that men do not cry is not displaying strength. He is displaying the result of a training program that disconnected him from his own grief response, and the disconnection does not eliminate the grief. It makes the grief dangerous, because grief that cannot be expressed as grief will be expressed as something else.

The workplace runs on the same logic. The standard bereavement leave in the United States is three days for the death of an immediate family member. Three days. The body has not even begun to metabolize the cortisol surge in three days. The cognitive map has not begun to update. The neurological process of revising the brain’s internal model of the world, recognizing at the cellular level that the dead person is absent from every context in which they were expected, has barely started. And the employer expects you back at your desk, functioning, participating in meetings about quarterly targets while the fact that your mother is dead has not yet reached the parts of your brain that govern concentration.

Some companies offer five days. Some offer none. Some distinguish between the death of a spouse and the death of a parent and the death of a sibling, granting fewer days as the relationship moves outward from the nuclear center, as though the grief for a brother can be mathematically demonstrated to require less processing time than the grief for a child. The taxonomy of bereavement leave is a document written by human resources departments, and it tells the employee, in the plainest possible terms, how long their grief is permitted to inconvenience the organization.

Then there is the clinical manual. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM-5-TR, giving clinicians a formal diagnostic category for grief that persists at debilitating intensity beyond twelve months. The addition was controversial among grief researchers, and the controversy is worth understanding, because it reveals how the medical establishment processes the same impulse that drives the workplace policy and the childhood command: the impulse to draw a line, to say that grief is acceptable on this side and pathological on the other, and to give the line the authority of science.

The proponents of the diagnosis argued that a subset of bereaved people, estimated at roughly ten percent, experience grief that does not follow the typical trajectory. The pain does not diminish over time. Functioning does not return. The preoccupation with the dead person remains so intense that it dominates waking life months and years after the death. These people need clinical help, and the diagnosis gives clinicians a framework for providing it, including the possibility of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

The opponents argued that pathologizing grief at twelve months imposes an arbitrary timeline on a process that has no natural expiration date. The twelve-month threshold was chosen because the clinical data showed it as a statistically significant inflection point, the point at which the probability of spontaneous recovery drops sharply. But statistical inflection points are not the same as biological boundaries. The griever at month thirteen is not clinically different from the griever at month eleven. The line exists because the diagnostic system requires lines, and the existence of the line communicates something to the broader culture: that grief beyond a year is officially a mental illness. The employer who was already impatient at three days now has clinical validation for the suspicion that the employee who is still struggling at fourteen months has something wrong with them.

The book argues that this entire apparatus, the childhood commands, the workplace policies, the diagnostic thresholds, is part of a single cultural project: the management of grief for the convenience of everyone except the griever. The child is told to stop because the adults are uncomfortable. The employee is expected back at the desk because the organization needs the labor. The patient receives a diagnosis because the clinical system requires categories. None of these interventions exists primarily to serve the person who is grieving. They exist to contain the grief, to keep it within boundaries that allow the surrounding systems to continue operating without interruption.

Meanwhile, the culture has produced a substitute for communal grief that is worse than the absence of communal grief. Social media has made performative mourning the default public response to death. When a public figure dies, the speed with which users post their condolences has become a measure of social attentiveness. The posts follow a formula: a photograph of the deceased, a statement of shock, a brief personal connection however thin, and a closing declaration of love and loss. The formula is so consistent it has been parodied, and the parodies have not slowed it down, because the function of the post is to perform belonging, to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who feels things, who notices when important people die, who participates in the rituals of the digital public square.

Some of the grief is sincere. The rest is performance, and the performance crowds out the reality. When the feeds are flooded with grief posts after a celebrity death, the person who is actually devastated, the person who had a real connection to the deceased and is not performing but drowning, finds their grief indistinguishable from the display. Their signal disappears into the noise. The communal mourning that is supposed to support the bereaved instead competes with them, reducing a specific and irreplaceable loss to one post among thousands, all using the same photographs, the same phrases, the same hashtags.

This is the inversion of what the mother in the Newark cafe was describing. She said you go to the funeral. You show up. You put your name in the book. You sit in the pew. You bring food to the house afterward. The obligation is physical: you move your body to the place where the grief is, and your presence there is the message. Social media offers the simulation of this presence without the physical fact of it. You post. You perform the gesture. You do not move your body anywhere. You do not sit in an uncomfortable chair in a room that smells like flowers and floor polish. You do not look at the face of the bereaved and allow them to see that you came. You post, and the post is seen or not seen, liked or not liked, and it scrolls away, and the next post is about something else, and the grief has been acknowledged in the same medium and at the same depth as a restaurant recommendation.

Kenneth Doka coined the term “disenfranchised grief” to describe losses the culture refuses to recognize. The death of an ex-spouse. The death of a pet. The death of a patient if you are a nurse. The death of a public figure you never met but whose work was woven into the structure of your daily life. These are real losses producing real grief, and the culture’s refusal to recognize them does not dissolve the grief. It isolates the griever, who cannot bring their loss into the social spaces where grief is processed because the spaces will not admit it. The colleague who lost a dog cannot mention it at work. The fan grieving a musician cannot break down at dinner. A nurse whose patient died that morning cannot ask for a day off. The grief has no approved venue, no sanctioned expression, no communal witness. It persists alone.

What the book asks, across all six of its parts and all seventeen of its chapters, is what happens when you add all of this up. The suppression that begins in childhood and hardens along gendered lines. The workplace that contains it in three days. The diagnostic manual that pathologizes it at twelve months. The industry that monetizes it. The digital platform that simulates it. The disenfranchisement of entire categories of loss. What you get is a culture in which millions of people grieve alone, in private, without the communal infrastructure that every human society in history built to distribute the weight of death across many shoulders. The weight did not get lighter because the infrastructure was removed. The shoulders carrying it just got fewer.

The mother in the cafe knew this. She did not use these words. She did not cite the neuroscience or the sociology or the economics. She tapped the table and told her daughter to go to every funeral, and the instruction contained everything: that grief is communal, that the community is constituted by the people who show up, that presence is the oldest technology of mourning and still the most effective, and that the dead have no needs left, and the living have every need there is.

Go to every funeral. The book is available at BolesBooks.com as a free download, and on Amazon in Kindle ($9.99) and paperback ($15.99) editions.

Bill would remove commercial minimum snapper size under fisheries reforms https://www.byteseu.com/1881922/ #been #bill #commercial #Condemned #fish #FISHERIES #fishers #have #including #legalsize #LIMITS #minimum #move #NewZealand #outrageous #popular #proposed #quietly #range #Recreational #reforms #remove #rules #size #snapper #species #that #thats #trevally #under #would

🚨🤪 Claude's oh-so-generous #spring #break #promo is here! They're #doubling usage #limits... but only when you're asleep 💤 or too busy with actual life. Don't worry, enterprises, you're left out of the fun again! 🎉
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-spring-break-usage-promotion #Claude #Sleepy #Users #Enterprise #Excluded #HackerNews #ngated

All the rare earth minerals countries are so desperately ripping up their environment for to gift to the DT regime for weapons and ai.. Much of that cannot be reused or recycled, once it's processed and used, it's no longer in a form that can be used for much else..

So this is an "all in" event in the history of not just our civilisation but the limitations of the planet (materially and environmentally).. And when the ai bubble bursts in 2 or 3 years time those complicit governments & greedy ceo's will have consigned our civilisation some very big constraints on what we can do or achieve, technologically, going forward..

#Limits #Environment #Technology #AI #Corruption #Capitulation #Destruction #Activism #HumanRights #Evolution

Live updates: Trump says ‘no time limits’ on Iran war, Israel strikes Tehran and Beirut suburb

https://misryoum.com/us/trending/live-updates-trump-says-no-time-limits-on/

An Israeli military warning to evacuate nearly all of southern Beirut triggered scenes of chaos and panic Thursday evening as tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of residents jammed roads trying to flee the area. “I saw people running...

#Live #updates #Trump #says #time #limits #Iran #war #Israel #strikes #Tehran #and #Beirut #suburb #US_News_Hub #misryoum_com

#Singapore to tighten demerit points system, lower alcohol limits amid surge in #road #traffic #deaths
"Road traffic deaths hit a 10-year high in 2025, w 149 deaths cf w 141 in 2016. # of #elderly folk who died more than doubled fr 11 in 2024 to 27 in 2025. 🤦‍♂️All were #pedestrians.. Te #drinkdriving limit today is 35mcg #alcohol per 100ml of breath, & has remained unchanged since 1985.. more than double tt of Japan & Taiwan, which hv #limits equiv to 15mcg" #longoverdue
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/spore-to-tighten-demerit-points-system-lower-alcohol-limits-amid-worsening-road-traffic-situation

WSJ: US Weighs Seizing Iranian Oil Tankers To Pressure Tehran

Islam Times – The United States is reportedly considering seizing …
#Conflict #Conflicts #War #accepting #as #carrying #citing #considering #efforts #into #Iran #Iranian #IS #Islam #ITS #journal #limits #middleeast #middleeastcrisis #nuclear #of #officials #oil #ON #part #pressure #program #reported #Reportedly #Seizing #States #street #tankers #Tehran #the #Times #TO #United #US #Wall #weighs #wsj
https://www.europesays.com/2773179/

News Flash: Fish Are Not Arboreal by Nature
🦈 https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/06/fish-are-not-arboreal-by-nature/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
Those who know me know I am no fan of psychology as a discipline. A fundamental reason is the categorical misunderstanding of cognitive and precognitive functions.
#philosophy #psychology #ontology #selfhelp #mentalhealth #wellness #beliefs #salience #limits #architecture #society #culture #growth #suppression #repression #expression #regulation #reengineering #cognition #blog #podcast #communication

Hydrological limits - Living Beyond Our Means
Conflicts over water have risen sharply

Era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ is here, UN report says
"Overuse and pollution must end urgently as no one knows when whole system might collapse, says expert."

“This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” said Madani, of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “It’s extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse.”

"Humanity was also slashing the amount of water available by destroying natural stores, such as wetlands, and polluting waterways. Wetlands equal in size to the entire European Union had been erased in the past five decades, the report said."

"Dr Jonathan Paul, at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: “The report lays bare humankind’s mistreatment of water [which] threatens the viability of ‘the water cycle’ as a concept."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/20/era-of-global-water-bankruptcy-is-here-un-report-says

Global Water Bankruptcy. Living Beyond our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, UNU-INWEH Report: Madani, K. (2026). Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. DOI: 10.53328/INR26KAM001
https://unu.edu/inweh/collection/global-water-bankruptcy
#water #overuse #extractivism #MDB #irrigation #pollution #destruction #limits #biodiversity #habitability

🔍🧠 Their experiments show that #LLMs can produce reasonable poem descriptions, but struggle with more abstract interpretion, highlighting where #NLG currently meets its #limits in #LiteraryInterpretation.

#LiteraryComputing #Evaluation #GenerativeModels

Former Alaska representative
❤️#Mary #Peltola announced on Monday she is running for Alaska’s US Senate seat,
handing Democrats a major recruitment victory as the party battles to reclaim the chamber’s majority in this year’s midterm elections.

Peltola, who served as Alaska’s sole House member from 2022 until her narrow defeat in 2024, is considered one of the few Democrats in the Republican-leaning state capable of mounting a 💥serious challenge to Senator Dan Sullivan, who is seeking re-election.

In her campaign announcement video, Peltola positioned herself as a political outsider focused on Alaska-specific concerns,
including the state’s fishing industry and soaring affordability problems.
She resurrected her “fish, family and freedom” slogan from previous campaigns,
pledged to introduce #term #limits for members of Congress
and said she would focus on
“fixing the rigged system in DC”.

“It’s not just that politicians in DC don’t care that we’re paying $17 a gallon for milk in rural Alaska
– they don’t even believe us,” Peltola said in the video.
“They’re more focused on their stock portfolios than our bank accounts."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/12/alaska-democrat-mary-peltola-us-senate-run?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Parking on biodiversity while racing to the beach

"There are concerns extra people and cars are putting pressure on the natural environment...If we're not careful overtourism will actually destroy the character, the amenity, the natural environment, the beauty of the area that we've got to sell."

"We don't want damage to the vegetation.There's also increased risk of fire from starting underneath their vehicles so please park in the designated areas."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-11/busy-beaches-southern-wa/106211286

Image: "The Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions has spotted cars parking on the side of the access road into Greens Pool in Denmark. "(Supplied: DBCA /ABC)
#biodiversity #beach #cars #CarStorage #FossilFuel #tourism #overtourism #coast #schoolholidays #OverCrowded #flora #destruction #limits #NPs

Reading Without Limits or Expectations

https://www.carolinecrampton.com/reading-without-limits-or-expectations/

#HackerNews #Reading #Without #Limits #Reading #Expectations #BookLovers #Literature #HackerNews

Water Extraction

"The Great Artesian Basin covers a fifth of Australia and contains water that has been there for millions of years. Now, decades of extraction are taking their toll and traditional owners are fighting a mining giant for compensation. But there are limits to what he can do, with BHP’s extraction out of his control."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/water-is-under-pressure-in-the-great-artesian-basin/106002448
#water #OverExtraction #mining #irrigation #TakeCulture #limits #Ramsar #GroundwaterDependent #ecosystems #NSW #GAB #extractivism #IndigenousPeoples

Water Extraction

"The Great Artesian Basin covers a fifth of Australia and contains water that has been there for millions of years. Now, decades of extraction are taking their toll and traditional owners are fighting a mining giant for compensation. But there are limits to what he can do, with BHP’s extraction out of his control."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/water-is-under-pressure-in-the-great-artesian-basin/106002448
#water #OverExtraction #mining #irrigation #TakeCulture #limits #Ramsar #GroundwaterDependent #ecosystems #NSW #GAB #extractivism #IndigenousPeoples

Water Extraction

"The Great Artesian Basin covers a fifth of Australia and contains water that has been there for millions of years. Now, decades of extraction are taking their toll and traditional owners are fighting a mining giant for compensation. But there are limits to what he can do, with BHP’s extraction out of his control."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/water-is-under-pressure-in-the-great-artesian-basin/106002448
#water #OverExtraction #mining #irrigation #TakeCulture #limits #Ramsar #GroundwaterDependent #ecosystems #NSW #GAB #extractivism #IndigenousPeoples

Water Extraction

"The Great Artesian Basin covers a fifth of Australia and contains water that has been there for millions of years. Now, decades of extraction are taking their toll and traditional owners are fighting a mining giant for compensation. But there are limits to what he can do, with BHP’s extraction out of his control."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/water-is-under-pressure-in-the-great-artesian-basin/106002448
#water #OverExtraction #mining #irrigation #TakeCulture #limits #Ramsar #GroundwaterDependent #ecosystems #NSW #GAB #extractivism #IndigenousPeoples

Water Extraction

"The Great Artesian Basin covers a fifth of Australia and contains water that has been there for millions of years. Now, decades of extraction are taking their toll and traditional owners are fighting a mining giant for compensation. But there are limits to what he can do, with BHP’s extraction out of his control."
>>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-23/water-is-under-pressure-in-the-great-artesian-basin/106002448
#water #OverExtraction #mining #irrigation #TakeCulture #limits #Ramsar #GroundwaterDependent #ecosystems #NSW #GAB #extractivism #IndigenousPeoples

"Labor’s nature laws have ‘gigantic loopholes you could drive a heavy hauler through’."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/nov/03/australia-politics-live-nationals-net-zero-liberals-labor-bulk-billing-optus-sussan-ley-anthony-albanese-question-time
#biosphere #pollution #FossilFuels #climate #ExtremeHeat #Biodiversity #deforestation #harm #EPBCAct #exemptions #PayToDestroy #law #limits

"Labor’s nature laws have ‘gigantic loopholes you could drive a heavy hauler through’."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/nov/03/australia-politics-live-nationals-net-zero-liberals-labor-bulk-billing-optus-sussan-ley-anthony-albanese-question-time
#biosphere #pollution #FossilFuels #climate #ExtremeHeat #Biodiversity #deforestation #harm #EPBCAct #exemptions #PayToDestroy #law #limits

"Labor’s nature laws have ‘gigantic loopholes you could drive a heavy hauler through’."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/nov/03/australia-politics-live-nationals-net-zero-liberals-labor-bulk-billing-optus-sussan-ley-anthony-albanese-question-time
#biosphere #pollution #FossilFuels #climate #ExtremeHeat #Biodiversity #deforestation #harm #EPBCAct #exemptions #PayToDestroy #law #limits

"Labor’s nature laws have ‘gigantic loopholes you could drive a heavy hauler through’."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/nov/03/australia-politics-live-nationals-net-zero-liberals-labor-bulk-billing-optus-sussan-ley-anthony-albanese-question-time
#biosphere #pollution #FossilFuels #climate #ExtremeHeat #Biodiversity #deforestation #harm #EPBCAct #exemptions #PayToDestroy #law #limits

"Labor’s nature laws have ‘gigantic loopholes you could drive a heavy hauler through’."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."

"The laws to overhaul the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act are scheduled for debate on Tuesday, with the government planning to rush them through the lower house this week."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/nov/03/australia-politics-live-nationals-net-zero-liberals-labor-bulk-billing-optus-sussan-ley-anthony-albanese-question-time
#biosphere #pollution #FossilFuels #climate #ExtremeHeat #Biodiversity #deforestation #harm #EPBCAct #exemptions #PayToDestroy #law #limits

A quotation from Terry Pratchett

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Discworld No. 27, The Last Hero [Leonard] (2001)

More info about this quote: wist.info/pratchett-terry/4715…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #terrypratchett #discworld #constraints #imagination #impossibility #limits #possibility #reality #safety #limitations

A quotation from Bernard Levin

   Almost all of us want to be richer than we are, even if we are very rich indeed. To be sure, there are exceptions; saints, ascetics, those who travel light and will not add even the weight of a wallet, a few whose material ambitions are fully satisfied and who therefore truly want nothing further. But the rest of us want more than we have, and the specially thoughtful sometimes wonder whether there could ever come a time when we didn’t.
   The crucial question, though, leaving out of consideration the exempted categories, is: what are we willing to do to increase our wealth?

Bernard Levin (1928-2004) British journalist, critic, broadcaster, satirist
Essay (1989-03-23), “Do You Seriously Want to Be Swindled?” The Times, London

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/levin-bernard/78387/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #bernardlevin #avarice #ethics #greedy #limits #morals #profit #prosperity #richest #selfrestraint #wealth

I have no safe word. My limits have yet to be tested and distinguished... Duet with me!

#openduet #RyanReynolds #HughJackman #safeword #nosafeword #wolverine #Deadpool #deadpoolmovie #ihavenosafeword #limits #dontwanttostop #nostopping #cantstop #wontstop #safe #test #testyourlimit #testyourlimits #nolimit #Nolimits #limitless #word #keepgoing #wannakeepgoing

Started knitting and crocheting something with 2 mm needles and have decided that is the limit for my hands / fingers / eyes.

Anything lower is basically making lace / and or creating with wire and needle tools.

I have great admiration for those creating in more miniature than that - but it's not for me.

Nope.

#knitting #YarnCraft #Hobbies #Miniature #Limits #YarnWitch

C has its limits. If you know where to look

https://subethasoftware.com/2024/12/09/c-has-its-limits-if-you-know-where-to-look/

#HackerNews #C #Programming #Limits #SoftwareDevelopment #CodingInsights #TechTrends

#AbrahamLincoln: "#democracy is #government of the #people - by the #people - for the #people"

but #democracy is not perfect per default, it needs constant #reform to become better and better (not worse and worse how it was made by (#financial #taxavoiding #lobbyists and other #lobbyists = #corruption)

how to reform democracy? a #conversationwithai: #deepseek

<think>
Alright, I'm trying to figure out how to reform #democracy so that decisions are made faster and are more competent, while also reducing incompetence and corruption. This is a big question because democracy as it stands has a lot of #issues, but it's still considered one of the better systems out there <- read this?

First off, I know that one of the main problems with democracies is that #decisionmaking can be #slow, especially in #large #countries.

There are so many #checks and #balances that sometimes it feels like nothing gets done.

So maybe making decisions faster requires #streamlining some processes.

But how? Maybe reducing #bureaucracy or changing how legislation is passed?

Another issue is #incompetence. I've seen elected officials who don't seem to have the right skills or knowledge for their roles. <- this #AI has seen things!

How can we ensure that #leaders are actually #competent?

Perhaps through better #education #requirements, or maybe having #experts in certain fields advise them more #effectively.

#Corruption is another huge #Problem seems like #money plays a big role in #politics, which can lead to decisions that favor #donors over the people.

#Campaign #finance #reform might help here, but I'm not sure how feasible that is given current laws and court rulings, especially in places like the #US with #CitizensUnited.

#Voter #engagement is also a factor.

If more people participate, maybe there's more #accountability.

But getting people to vote when they feel their votes don't matter is tough.

Maybe changing voting systems, like ranked-choice voting, could make elections feel more representative and increase turnout.

I've heard about #sortition, where #random #citizens are #selected for #decisionmaking bodies.

That might bring in diverse perspectives and reduce corruption since the average person isn't as beholden to special interests.

But would people take it seriously? I'm not sure how effective that would be compared to elected officials.

#Technology could play a role too.

Maybe using #online #platforms for #participatory #budgeting or #policy #discussions.

It could make #government more #transparent and involve citizens more #directly.

However, there's the risk of #misinformation and #manipulation online.

#Term #limits are another idea.

They might prevent politicians from becoming too entrenched and corrupt, but they can also limit institutional knowledge and lead to a #revolvingdoor of #inexperienced #leaders.

#Anticorruption agencies seem necessary, but they need to be #independent and well #funded.

If they're controlled by the government, they won't be effective.

How do you ensure their independence?

#Media #literacy is important because if people are #better #informed, they can make #better #decisions at the #ballotbox.

But with so much #misinformation out there, improving media literacy is a big challenge.

I'm also thinking about proportional representation.

Maybe switching to a system where more parties have seats could lead to more diverse and representative governments, reducing gridlock.

But it might also make forming a government harder if no single party has a majority.

What about making voting mandatory?

It increases turnout but can also lead to people voting without being informed, which doesn't necessarily improve the quality of decisions.

Another thought is focusing on #local #governance.

If more decisions are made at the local level where people can be more involved and informed, it might lead to #better #outcomes #overall.

But not all issues can be handled locally; some require national or international coordination.

I'm also considering how #education plays into this.

Better #civic #education could make voters more informed and engaged.

It starts from a young age teaching about #government #structures, #roles, and the importance of #participation.

#Transparency is key too.

If governments are more open about their processes and decisions, trust might increase. Things like #FOIA requests in the U.S. help, but they can be slow and sometimes
incomplete.

#Incentivizing #good #governance through awards or recognition might motivate leaders to perform better, but it's not a sure fix for deeper systemic issues.

Encouraging #whistleblowers is important because they can expose #corruption before it becomes entrenched.

Protecting them legally would make others more willing to come forward.

Public-private partnerships could bring in expertise from the private sector, but there's a risk of corporate influence if not managed properly.

Inclusive decision-making ensures that all groups have a voice, which leads to more equitable policies.

It requires active efforts to involve marginalized communities.

Independent judiciaries are crucial because they can check the other branches and enforce laws against corruption.

But judicial appointments can be politicized, which undermines their independence.

Finally, cultural shifts towards valuing integrity over power might help reduce corruption. But changing a culture is slow and difficult, especially in large, diverse societies.

Putting all these thoughts together, it seems like reforming democracy requires a multi-faceted approach addressing both structural issues and cultural factors. It's not just about tweaking one part but making comprehensive changes that promote competence, transparency, and accountability while ensuring representation and reducing corruption.

</think>
Reforming democracy to enhance decision-making efficiency, competence, and reduce corruption involves a multifaceted approach that addresses both structural and cultural aspects of
governance. Here is an organized strategy based on the thought process:

### Structural Reforms
1. **Streamline Decision-Making Processes:**
- Reduce bureaucratic layers and adopt more agile legislative processes to accelerate decision-making without compromising thorough consideration.

2. **Campaign Finance Reform:**
- Implement strict regulations on campaign contributions and promote public financing of elections to diminish the influence of money in politics.

3. **Proportional Representation:**
- Introduce proportional representation systems to ensure diverse representation, which can lead to more inclusive and efficient governance.

4. **Term Limits:**
- Enact term limits for elected officials to prevent entrenchment, while ensuring mechanisms for knowledge retention and smooth transitions.

5. **Independent Anti-Corruption Agencies:**
- Establish independent bodies with strong investigative and prosecutorial powers to combat corruption effectively.

### Enhancing Competence
1. **Expert Advisory Bodies:**
- Integrate expert panels in decision-making processes to provide informed guidance on complex issues.

2. **Civic Education:**
- Improve education systems to foster informed voters through civic engagement and critical thinking skills.

3. **Sortition (Citizen Juries):**
- Experiment with sortition to involve diverse citizen perspectives, enhancing
representativeness and reducing corruption risks.

### Reducing Corruption
1. **Transparency Measures:**
- Increase government transparency through open data initiatives, accessible meetings, and robust freedom of information laws.

2. **Whistleblower Protection:**
- Strengthen legal protections for whistleblowers to encourage the exposure of corruption without fear of retribution.

3. **Judicial Independence:**
- Ensure the judiciary is independent and impartial, free from political influence, to uphold rule of law and check executive power.

### Voter Engagement and Participation
1. **Voting System Reforms:**
- Adopt ranked-choice voting and proportional representation to ensure votes count more meaningfully and increase voter satisfaction.

2. **Compulsory Voting:**
- Consider mandatory voting with incentives for informed voting, potentially reducing apathy and increasing political engagement.

3. **Participatory Budgeting:**
- Involve citizens in budget decisions through digital platforms to foster transparency and accountability.

### Technological Integration
1. **Digital Platforms:**
- Utilize technology for participatory governance, enabling real-time public input on policies and fostering informed discussions.

2. **Media Literacy Programs:**
- Launch initiatives to combat misinformation, promoting a better-informed electorate capable of discerning credible sources.

### Cultural Shifts
1. **Incentivizing Good Governance:**
- Recognize and reward ethical leadership through awards or public acknowledgment to promote integrity in governance.

2. **Cultural Values:**
- Foster societal norms that prioritize transparency, accountability, and integrity, encouraging leaders to adhere to high ethical standards.

### Conclusion
Reforming democracy requires a comprehensive approach that combines structural changes with cultural shifts. By streamlining processes, enhancing
competence through education and expertise, reducing corruption through transparency and independent oversight, and engaging citizens more
effectively, democracies can become more responsive, efficient, and just. This multifaceted strategy aims to rebuild trust in governance and ensure
decisions truly reflect the will of the people.

#AbrahamLincoln: "#democracy is #government of the #people - by the #people - for the #people"

but #democracy is not perfect per default, it needs constant #reform to become better and better (not worse and worse how it was made by (#financial #taxavoiding #lobbyists and other #lobbyists = #corruption)

how to reform democracy? a #conversationwithai: #deepseek

<think>
Alright, I'm trying to figure out how to reform #democracy so that decisions are made faster and are more competent, while also reducing incompetence and corruption. This is a big question because democracy as it stands has a lot of #issues, but it's still considered one of the better systems out there <- read this?

First off, I know that one of the main problems with democracies is that #decisionmaking can be #slow, especially in #large #countries.

There are so many #checks and #balances that sometimes it feels like nothing gets done.

So maybe making decisions faster requires #streamlining some processes.

But how? Maybe reducing #bureaucracy or changing how legislation is passed?

Another issue is #incompetence. I've seen elected officials who don't seem to have the right skills or knowledge for their roles. <- this #AI has seen things!

How can we ensure that #leaders are actually #competent?

Perhaps through better #education #requirements, or maybe having #experts in certain fields advise them more #effectively.

#Corruption is another huge #Problem seems like #money plays a big role in #politics, which can lead to decisions that favor #donors over the people.

#Campaign #finance #reform might help here, but I'm not sure how feasible that is given current laws and court rulings, especially in places like the #US with #CitizensUnited.

#Voter #engagement is also a factor.

If more people participate, maybe there's more #accountability.

But getting people to vote when they feel their votes don't matter is tough.

Maybe changing voting systems, like ranked-choice voting, could make elections feel more representative and increase turnout.

I've heard about #sortition, where #random #citizens are #selected for #decisionmaking bodies.

That might bring in diverse perspectives and reduce corruption since the average person isn't as beholden to special interests.

But would people take it seriously? I'm not sure how effective that would be compared to elected officials.

#Technology could play a role too.

Maybe using #online #platforms for #participatory #budgeting or #policy #discussions.

It could make #government more #transparent and involve citizens more #directly.

However, there's the risk of #misinformation and #manipulation online.

#Term #limits are another idea.

They might prevent politicians from becoming too entrenched and corrupt, but they can also limit institutional knowledge and lead to a #revolvingdoor of #inexperienced #leaders.

#Anticorruption agencies seem necessary, but they need to be #independent and well #funded.

If they're controlled by the government, they won't be effective.

How do you ensure their independence?

#Media #literacy is important because if people are #better #informed, they can make #better #decisions at the #ballotbox.

But with so much #misinformation out there, improving media literacy is a big challenge.

I'm also thinking about proportional representation.

Maybe switching to a system where more parties have seats could lead to more diverse and representative governments, reducing gridlock.

But it might also make forming a government harder if no single party has a majority.

What about making voting mandatory?

It increases turnout but can also lead to people voting without being informed, which doesn't necessarily improve the quality of decisions.

Another thought is focusing on #local #governance.

If more decisions are made at the local level where people can be more involved and informed, it might lead to #better #outcomes #overall.

But not all issues can be handled locally; some require national or international coordination.

I'm also considering how #education plays into this.

Better #civic #education could make voters more informed and engaged.

It starts from a young age teaching about #government #structures, #roles, and the importance of #participation.

#Transparency is key too.

If governments are more open about their processes and decisions, trust might increase. Things like #FOIA requests in the U.S. help, but they can be slow and sometimes
incomplete.

#Incentivizing #good #governance through awards or recognition might motivate leaders to perform better, but it's not a sure fix for deeper systemic issues.

Encouraging #whistleblowers is important because they can expose #corruption before it becomes entrenched.

Protecting them legally would make others more willing to come forward.

Public-private partnerships could bring in expertise from the private sector, but there's a risk of corporate influence if not managed properly.

Inclusive decision-making ensures that all groups have a voice, which leads to more equitable policies.

It requires active efforts to involve marginalized communities.

Independent judiciaries are crucial because they can check the other branches and enforce laws against corruption.

But judicial appointments can be politicized, which undermines their independence.

Finally, cultural shifts towards valuing integrity over power might help reduce corruption. But changing a culture is slow and difficult, especially in large, diverse societies.

Putting all these thoughts together, it seems like reforming democracy requires a multi-faceted approach addressing both structural issues and cultural factors. It's not just about tweaking one part but making comprehensive changes that promote competence, transparency, and accountability while ensuring representation and reducing corruption.

</think>
Reforming democracy to enhance decision-making efficiency, competence, and reduce corruption involves a multifaceted approach that addresses both structural and cultural aspects of
governance. Here is an organized strategy based on the thought process:

### Structural Reforms
1. **Streamline Decision-Making Processes:**
- Reduce bureaucratic layers and adopt more agile legislative processes to accelerate decision-making without compromising thorough consideration.

2. **Campaign Finance Reform:**
- Implement strict regulations on campaign contributions and promote public financing of elections to diminish the influence of money in politics.

3. **Proportional Representation:**
- Introduce proportional representation systems to ensure diverse representation, which can lead to more inclusive and efficient governance.

4. **Term Limits:**
- Enact term limits for elected officials to prevent entrenchment, while ensuring mechanisms for knowledge retention and smooth transitions.

5. **Independent Anti-Corruption Agencies:**
- Establish independent bodies with strong investigative and prosecutorial powers to combat corruption effectively.

### Enhancing Competence
1. **Expert Advisory Bodies:**
- Integrate expert panels in decision-making processes to provide informed guidance on complex issues.

2. **Civic Education:**
- Improve education systems to foster informed voters through civic engagement and critical thinking skills.

3. **Sortition (Citizen Juries):**
- Experiment with sortition to involve diverse citizen perspectives, enhancing
representativeness and reducing corruption risks.

### Reducing Corruption
1. **Transparency Measures:**
- Increase government transparency through open data initiatives, accessible meetings, and robust freedom of information laws.

2. **Whistleblower Protection:**
- Strengthen legal protections for whistleblowers to encourage the exposure of corruption without fear of retribution.

3. **Judicial Independence:**
- Ensure the judiciary is independent and impartial, free from political influence, to uphold rule of law and check executive power.

### Voter Engagement and Participation
1. **Voting System Reforms:**
- Adopt ranked-choice voting and proportional representation to ensure votes count more meaningfully and increase voter satisfaction.

2. **Compulsory Voting:**
- Consider mandatory voting with incentives for informed voting, potentially reducing apathy and increasing political engagement.

3. **Participatory Budgeting:**
- Involve citizens in budget decisions through digital platforms to foster transparency and accountability.

### Technological Integration
1. **Digital Platforms:**
- Utilize technology for participatory governance, enabling real-time public input on policies and fostering informed discussions.

2. **Media Literacy Programs:**
- Launch initiatives to combat misinformation, promoting a better-informed electorate capable of discerning credible sources.

### Cultural Shifts
1. **Incentivizing Good Governance:**
- Recognize and reward ethical leadership through awards or public acknowledgment to promote integrity in governance.

2. **Cultural Values:**
- Foster societal norms that prioritize transparency, accountability, and integrity, encouraging leaders to adhere to high ethical standards.

### Conclusion
Reforming democracy requires a comprehensive approach that combines structural changes with cultural shifts. By streamlining processes, enhancing
competence through education and expertise, reducing corruption through transparency and independent oversight, and engaging citizens more
effectively, democracies can become more responsive, efficient, and just. This multifaceted strategy aims to rebuild trust in governance and ensure
decisions truly reflect the will of the people.

#AbrahamLincoln: "#democracy is #government of the #people - by the #people - for the #people"

but #democracy is not perfect per default, it needs constant #reform to become better and better (not worse and worse how it was made by (#financial #taxavoiding #lobbyists and other #lobbyists = #corruption)

how to reform democracy? a #conversationwithai: #deepseek

<think>
Alright, I'm trying to figure out how to reform #democracy so that decisions are made faster and are more competent, while also reducing incompetence and corruption. This is a big question because democracy as it stands has a lot of #issues, but it's still considered one of the better systems out there <- read this?

First off, I know that one of the main problems with democracies is that #decisionmaking can be #slow, especially in #large #countries.

There are so many #checks and #balances that sometimes it feels like nothing gets done.

So maybe making decisions faster requires #streamlining some processes.

But how? Maybe reducing #bureaucracy or changing how legislation is passed?

Another issue is #incompetence. I've seen elected officials who don't seem to have the right skills or knowledge for their roles. <- this #AI has seen things!

How can we ensure that #leaders are actually #competent?

Perhaps through better #education #requirements, or maybe having #experts in certain fields advise them more #effectively.

#Corruption is another huge #Problem seems like #money plays a big role in #politics, which can lead to decisions that favor #donors over the people.

#Campaign #finance #reform might help here, but I'm not sure how feasible that is given current laws and court rulings, especially in places like the #US with #CitizensUnited.

#Voter #engagement is also a factor.

If more people participate, maybe there's more #accountability.

But getting people to vote when they feel their votes don't matter is tough.

Maybe changing voting systems, like ranked-choice voting, could make elections feel more representative and increase turnout.

I've heard about #sortition, where #random #citizens are #selected for #decisionmaking bodies.

That might bring in diverse perspectives and reduce corruption since the average person isn't as beholden to special interests.

But would people take it seriously? I'm not sure how effective that would be compared to elected officials.

#Technology could play a role too.

Maybe using #online #platforms for #participatory #budgeting or #policy #discussions.

It could make #government more #transparent and involve citizens more #directly.

However, there's the risk of #misinformation and #manipulation online.

#Term #limits are another idea.

They might prevent politicians from becoming too entrenched and corrupt, but they can also limit institutional knowledge and lead to a #revolvingdoor of #inexperienced #leaders.

#Anticorruption agencies seem necessary, but they need to be #independent and well #funded.

If they're controlled by the government, they won't be effective.

How do you ensure their independence?

#Media #literacy is important because if people are #better #informed, they can make #better #decisions at the #ballotbox.

But with so much #misinformation out there, improving media literacy is a big challenge.

I'm also thinking about proportional representation.

Maybe switching to a system where more parties have seats could lead to more diverse and representative governments, reducing gridlock.

But it might also make forming a government harder if no single party has a majority.

What about making voting mandatory?

It increases turnout but can also lead to people voting without being informed, which doesn't necessarily improve the quality of decisions.

Another thought is focusing on #local #governance.

If more decisions are made at the local level where people can be more involved and informed, it might lead to #better #outcomes #overall.

But not all issues can be handled locally; some require national or international coordination.

I'm also considering how #education plays into this.

Better #civic #education could make voters more informed and engaged.

It starts from a young age teaching about #government #structures, #roles, and the importance of #participation.

#Transparency is key too.

If governments are more open about their processes and decisions, trust might increase. Things like #FOIA requests in the U.S. help, but they can be slow and sometimes
incomplete.

#Incentivizing #good #governance through awards or recognition might motivate leaders to perform better, but it's not a sure fix for deeper systemic issues.

Encouraging #whistleblowers is important because they can expose #corruption before it becomes entrenched.

Protecting them legally would make others more willing to come forward.

Public-private partnerships could bring in expertise from the private sector, but there's a risk of corporate influence if not managed properly.

Inclusive decision-making ensures that all groups have a voice, which leads to more equitable policies.

It requires active efforts to involve marginalized communities.

Independent judiciaries are crucial because they can check the other branches and enforce laws against corruption.

But judicial appointments can be politicized, which undermines their independence.

Finally, cultural shifts towards valuing integrity over power might help reduce corruption. But changing a culture is slow and difficult, especially in large, diverse societies.

Putting all these thoughts together, it seems like reforming democracy requires a multi-faceted approach addressing both structural issues and cultural factors. It's not just about tweaking one part but making comprehensive changes that promote competence, transparency, and accountability while ensuring representation and reducing corruption.

</think>
Reforming democracy to enhance decision-making efficiency, competence, and reduce corruption involves a multifaceted approach that addresses both structural and cultural aspects of
governance. Here is an organized strategy based on the thought process:

### Structural Reforms
1. **Streamline Decision-Making Processes:**
- Reduce bureaucratic layers and adopt more agile legislative processes to accelerate decision-making without compromising thorough consideration.

2. **Campaign Finance Reform:**
- Implement strict regulations on campaign contributions and promote public financing of elections to diminish the influence of money in politics.

3. **Proportional Representation:**
- Introduce proportional representation systems to ensure diverse representation, which can lead to more inclusive and efficient governance.

4. **Term Limits:**
- Enact term limits for elected officials to prevent entrenchment, while ensuring mechanisms for knowledge retention and smooth transitions.

5. **Independent Anti-Corruption Agencies:**
- Establish independent bodies with strong investigative and prosecutorial powers to combat corruption effectively.

### Enhancing Competence
1. **Expert Advisory Bodies:**
- Integrate expert panels in decision-making processes to provide informed guidance on complex issues.

2. **Civic Education:**
- Improve education systems to foster informed voters through civic engagement and critical thinking skills.

3. **Sortition (Citizen Juries):**
- Experiment with sortition to involve diverse citizen perspectives, enhancing
representativeness and reducing corruption risks.

### Reducing Corruption
1. **Transparency Measures:**
- Increase government transparency through open data initiatives, accessible meetings, and robust freedom of information laws.

2. **Whistleblower Protection:**
- Strengthen legal protections for whistleblowers to encourage the exposure of corruption without fear of retribution.

3. **Judicial Independence:**
- Ensure the judiciary is independent and impartial, free from political influence, to uphold rule of law and check executive power.

### Voter Engagement and Participation
1. **Voting System Reforms:**
- Adopt ranked-choice voting and proportional representation to ensure votes count more meaningfully and increase voter satisfaction.

2. **Compulsory Voting:**
- Consider mandatory voting with incentives for informed voting, potentially reducing apathy and increasing political engagement.

3. **Participatory Budgeting:**
- Involve citizens in budget decisions through digital platforms to foster transparency and accountability.

### Technological Integration
1. **Digital Platforms:**
- Utilize technology for participatory governance, enabling real-time public input on policies and fostering informed discussions.

2. **Media Literacy Programs:**
- Launch initiatives to combat misinformation, promoting a better-informed electorate capable of discerning credible sources.

### Cultural Shifts
1. **Incentivizing Good Governance:**
- Recognize and reward ethical leadership through awards or public acknowledgment to promote integrity in governance.

2. **Cultural Values:**
- Foster societal norms that prioritize transparency, accountability, and integrity, encouraging leaders to adhere to high ethical standards.

### Conclusion
Reforming democracy requires a comprehensive approach that combines structural changes with cultural shifts. By streamlining processes, enhancing
competence through education and expertise, reducing corruption through transparency and independent oversight, and engaging citizens more
effectively, democracies can become more responsive, efficient, and just. This multifaceted strategy aims to rebuild trust in governance and ensure
decisions truly reflect the will of the people.