The Top 5: Therapy-Speak
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The Morning Five, November 7, 2022
The Morning Five, November 8, 2022
The Morning Five, November 9, 2022
The Morning Five, November 10, 2022
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speaks to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week.
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Roof Always Caves In” (Comment Magazine)
Because we’ll always read Kate Bowler. “Even at my most durable, it took so many people to build my life, prop it up, and maintain it. But once I was sick, I came to realize that the most basic aspect of our shared humanity is our fragility. We all need shelter because we are soft and mushy and irritable in the elements—and we will need so much more than a bank loan because, sooner or later, we are left exposed. Time and chance, sayeth Ecclesiastes, happeneth to us all.”
“The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything” (NYT)
Because “But as therapy-speak has left the clinician’s room, its remit has expanded, and its subtleties have been lost. We have become more and more used to thinking of ourselves as the main characters in our own lives and other people as the obstacles in our way. It is easy to be cynical about the proliferation of therapy culture and the attendant self-focus it promotes. But I believe the growing popularity of therapy discourse is less about generational or cultural selfishness than it is about a cultural hunger: the shared need for a framework to talk about the questions foundational to our existence as human beings and a shared sense that the good life relies on more than just our material circumstances.”
“The Age of Social Media is Ending” (The Atlantic)
Because “…if change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments.”
“A Tweet Before Dying” (Wired)
Because here’s another thought-provoking take on the longevity of Twitter and social media. “Of course, truly giant things—at the scale of social media platforms, religions, and nation-states—don’t really die. They deflate like air mattresses, getting soft at the corners and occasionally waking you up to pump them. The entities that dominated my childhood, AT&T and the Soviet Union, seemed at one point to have given up the ghost. There was rejoicing: Now a million new innovative companies can flourish! Now democracy will spread everywhere! Both were stripped for parts—and those parts eventually recombined into new, enormous forms, like beads of mercury finding each other on a plate.”
“Why Do We Only Value Artists Once They’re Dead?” (Catapult Magazine)
Because “why do living artists subsist on part-time gigs while dead ones become immersive money-printing machines for corporate enterprise?”
I loved that Tara Isabella Burton piece.