Top Highlights

• Listening to my patients, I’ve come to wonder if piety, an infinite demand for dutiful conduct and unthinking reverence, is what is being asked of us endlessly in the currently climate. Feelings of guilt and shame hover about like a thick fog.
• These pursuits certainly aren’t what you ought to do — much less post about — and yet I find that it’s when we dwell on our secret enjoyments that we learn the most about ourselves. Sexual and aggressive feelings, veering self-destructive, are finally confronted without the veneer of rationalization.
• The problem is it’s very hard to tell someone that pursuing the abstract question of “right and wrong” ways to live will lead you into a cul-de-sac. It avoids the deeper question of desire, and desire is a compass.
• As if to make up for this vacuum — while not really doing much about it — I think we now seek to impose rules on ourselves and shame on others.
• “Even when I was caught in a rainstorm the other day, I couldn’t just enjoy it, like I was looking at the image of someone caught in a rainstorm but not actually in it.”

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