This article makes a lot of assumptions or claims with nothing to back them up, mostly the parts about a system built to traumatize, Charlottesville as an example, etc. It seems to be entirely lacking any context of what life was like in preindustrial times vs modern times. Death was way more common back then, including losing your children. Let's not forget the impacts of religions and superstitions as societal frameworks and how those tended to handle anything different. Even punishments like stoning, flogging, or crucifixion were much more brutal.
One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect. They took what could have been a good article simply exploring modern drug use and ruined it with all these tangential and unfounded claims.
There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions.
I don't know why people are doing this, but it's almost always closely bound to politics. For example, the commenter below mentioning the political commentators Will Self and Dan Carlin as evidence for the theory.
I've noticed generally that people who talk about trauma being broad in this sense also tend to have a confused understanding of psychology in general.
> One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect.
They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
> They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
You're probably right that in the past there were more messed up events, which had high chance of being traumatic.
But you're forgetting the role that Perception has in that equation - from the perspective of a human, a traumatic event isn't a comparison exercise to all possible events, or to past events on previous generations.
Your subjective experience is bound to your context.
In that sense, I wouldn't be shocked if there was more trauma now from the amount of stimulus were getting throughout our life, and the volume of dramatic changes we go through, and the amount of people and chaos that comes with it.
For example, we have way more accidents, and we also have higher survival rates from accidents due to safety measures, and a advanced medical care. So, many deadly events in the past became accidents now, and by consequence, a high chance of it being a traumatic event, sometimes for the victim and the family (directly or indirectly).
Not to mention that our life styles don't even allow us to process traumatic events properly.
Do you think another term is more appropriate to describe the experiences underlying CPTSD? It's now quite broadly recognized that its effect on the psyche is severe and if anything broader in impact and more difficult to heal than acute trauma.
> One of the strangest fixations of AWFL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'
Language constantly evolves. So it’s a little unfair to say anybody is trying to change a definition. In specific professional contexts, definitions are necessarily much more precise. Because in these contexts definitions have consequences. But in general dialogue being pedantic and sticking to a strict definition generally just makes you an ass.
In psychiatry trauma has long been defined much more narrowly than just acute stress. Specifically exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. So not just any acute stress but stress associated with real life violence. That’s the DSM definition of trauma for PTSD and you’ll sometimes find nitpicky professionals sticking to this narrow definition. But it’s not how most people use the word.
> There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions.
>
Do you have any references for trauma being tide to short acute stress? Looking at Wikipedia does not include acute stress and even talks about the difference between short trauma and long term trauma.
Also I definitely recall that even when I was young (>30 years ago) we would talk about e.g. the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
A completely underrated author on trauma is C. Fred Alford. PTSD morphed from a diagnosis for soldiers returning from Vietnam to encompass everything. Life is traumatic. Everyone you know and love will die, and you will die. We also individually react differently to traumatic experiences, and a life changing positive moment for one person could destroy another.
in that it describes the interaction of poverty and mental illness which can well be interpreted in a left-wing frame (these people are victims of the system, they need to get some more resources to get their footing) or a right-wing frame (these people don't take responsibility, they drive away, squander or destroy resources)
At times theories of broad trauma were respectable such as Freud's Oedipus theory and even today I think certain kinds of organizations such as the U.S. Marines and the medical profession can be seen as transmitting their culture through traumatic experiences.
The article is tailing off a well-established historiographic narrative that it cites at the beginning (Will Self) but doesn’t dwell on much.
Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.
Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.
it's not only that. trauma also hits differently if you are the only one experiencing it vs everyone around you. the group experience itself makes trauma easier to handle.
i believe (i don't know enough about this) a big factor is also how your peers treat you after you experience trauma. think about veterans coming home, friends and family don't understands what they went through. they can't talk to anyone because nobody takes them seriously, even to the point of disbelief, or they blow things out of proportion, make them into bigger thing than what the person actually experienced. maybe the veteran doesn't feel any pain, but they tell him that he should. either way, the veteran is completely misunderstood. (again, this is not backed by any knowledge of psychology, just a guess based on some personal experience)
so because in the past everyone experienced the same brutal life (except the land lords or otherwise well off), it wasn't as traumatic as it would be today.
Well, I remember reading an article some time after 9/11 where they studied the incidence of PTSD in New York following that event.
Even in areas that were some distance from the towers there was a relatively high incidence. They put it down to a background level of stress including sources like violence on TV.
This was in comparison to other parts of the world that were less modern and less busy than experienced more traumatic events but had less PTSD. The conclusion was that if you generally have a more boring/ quiet life you will be better able to absorb trauma if it occurs.
Yes, and the article explores none of that. Complaining about stress from rent being high would be much more palatable if they explored those types of things, or simply didn't mention it at all. Instead they focus on the stress being from high rent vs from the reasons you point out. The way they use that quote makes it seem like they didn't read or understand the larger text, but just cherrypicked what fit with their narrative.
It can be read charitably as claiming that society is traumatic in different ways, maybe, and in a wider variety of ways. Which is much more defensible. A rapid change in everyday psychological or physiological reality is traumatic, by definition, as one must adapt to it or bear the consequences. There may be less instances of stoning and flogging but many more of subtle conditioning, for instance.
Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind
I think it would have been more interesting if they spent any amount of time exploring the causes. Such as basic life sustaining tasks being easier so there are fewer distractions from trauma. Or feedback mechanisms around effort, success, struggles, and triumph are reduced compared to a hunter gatherer. Etc
The social media definition of trauma has diverged from the clinician definition. The social media version of “trauma” is used to define anything stressful.
When we start redefining trauma to cover everything down to the basic realities of life like having to pay for rent to live somewhere, the term loses meaning. With a definition this broad, where do we draw the line between stress and trauma? Is there a line between basic inconvenience and trauma, if the person suffering the inconvenience doesn’t handle it well?
The less discussed problem is that some people have a problem of exaggerating everything into catastrophic stressors, thereby turning common experiences into traumas. This itself is a problem that is addressed through therapy, but it’s not as amenable to garnering sympathy on social media. It’s not appealing to read someone whine about having to work a job to eat food in a first world country, because that’s life and it’s a hundred times easier than it was for our ancestors. However, reframe that as a high-brow article about the perils of capitalism and how it inflicts trauma on us and causes PTSD and now it feels like we are the victims who deserve sympathy.
I read the article and said “so, what was that about?”
Felt more like a journal entry.
Anecdote: try everything but the drugs if you can. What helps me: regular exercise, cut alcohol, do my best to sleep/wake up with a schedule. Make a list of what I need to do every day that isn’t insane.
Not going to solve everyone’s problems. But I’ve consumed clonapen here and there for very specific reasons and otherwise don’t need it when I keep all of the above as top life priorities.
Counterpoint: The instance at the cheerleading convention here in Dallas where a knocked over piece of equipment prompted a panic and viral news spread with incorrect assumptions.
The "ripple effect" of trauma is magnified more than ever. You don't even have to go out of your way to get the news, as with the past, oh, before 30 years ago...now it's in our pockets. I think the assumption passes the intuition prima face test in my world, too bad not yours. Equipment may need better calibration.
I like the fact that it attempts to provide an alternative narrative to the artificial medicalisation of 'mental illness'.
Maybe it isn't totally factually accurate but it has enough truth to me that it represents a small flicker of hope in what is too often a chronically invalidating world.
Re ending - while it probably alludes to the fact that we need community to feel better - expecting another person to be able to help you with your emotional state (or expecting from yourself that you might be able to fix someone's emotional state) is a slippery slope.
One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc). Some argue that such unhealthy dependencies on soothing agents (drugs or people) stems from lack of self soothing skills. Apparently, most "happy healthy people" (there are ofc caveats with this definition but for arguments sake let's assume that we share some understanding of what that means) have an intuitive understanding of how to take care of themselves both physically and emotionally in ways that return them to a baseline state of sorts. If you lack such skills, you often resort to less healthy coping strategies to draw yourself towards this baseline state.
Funny quote from sir Terry Pratchett:
Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them."
> One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc).
I think this is a very consumer-centric reductionist way to look at human interaction.
We are a social species and have been so for millions of years. Social connection and interaction is deeply encoded into our genes. We have dedicated cranial hardware for recognizing faces and emotions in others. We have a complex larynx and tongue entirely so that we can make sounds that convey meaning to other humans.
Given that, it's entirely reasonable to state that we need human connection not as a drug-like balm to cover a failure to be a sufficiently hardcore individualist, but because that as what it means to be human. You wouldn't say a worker ant dying on its own is a failed ant. Ants need their colonies to be ants. We need our tribes to be people.
I don't think these two are exclusive. The Terry Pratchett quote there at the end of that reads like it's a tounge-in-cheek reduction, with a sense of humor. Obviously we're more complex than that, but sometimes we really are that simple and that's ok too.
I do wholeheartedly agree - personal anegdote: regular live improv comedy has done wonders for my well-being. And one could say this format of spending time with other humans has opened new very personal techniques for self-soothing to me. But it's also assumed this rather consumerist form, almost drug-like, repetitive, formatted, scheduled. It's not, like, a real tribe or anything serious like that. And as it turns out a lot of wonderful human interactions really can be reduced.
Having had earlier personal experiences with substance abuse, and seeing good people go down a lethal path, it's been a discovery to me that adults do this whole self-soothing thing and that it is a skill that they pick up from family and society. All these folks I meet doing improv seem to be getting something similar out of it.
> One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug
The efficacy of psychology can vary widely with each party - both the patient and the helper.
While mood-altering drugs are more consistent in general, their effects degrade, depending where one is on the usage timeline (1st use, 10th, 100th).
I use Kratom to somewhat dull the effects of mild anxiety. It is enough to preserve general functionality - and that, in-turn, makes causes (of anxiety) less forbidding to consider.
Doing this means I tend to live in a '10th use' space. To preserve that benefit, I don't try to increase dosage if I venture into distress territory. My current regimen is helpful or it isn't.
I recently read the paper "Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to Its Social and Economic Determinants" which argues that the opioid epidemic isn't as supply driven as we tend to think and that places with weaker social ties and economies recently changed for the worse tend to see more overdoses.
Yeah. Drug use is mostly a result of something horrible about your life. The drugs might legitimately help (such as opiods for pain), or they might just provide a temporary escape. The only real fix is to remove the source of the problem, then dealing with the habituation can actually work.
It remains one of the minor curiosities of digital modernity that every recipe blog insists on beginning with a 5,000 word ethnography of the Hugo Spritz, SEO-optimized invocations of Tuscan terraces, grandmotherly hand-gestures, and the precise terracotta shade of sunset, only to resolve in instructions amounting to little more than "insert beverage into rectum."
Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.
There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.
And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.
You're wondering why you can't find a Miltini recipe online? One trick for finding out historical information is to search archive.org. That quickly turns up a 1956 article [1] with the recipe: a Miltini is a six or seven-to-one Martini [i.e. ratio of spirits to vermouth] with a Miltown substituted for the lemon peel or olive.
The dramatically overwrought article continues: "It is doubtful if any other creation of the mid-20th Century so typifies this frantic, uncertain era in which no man can know what the next hour will bring." and suggests that a hermetically-sealed shaker of Miltinis should be placed in time capsules "so that posterity can know what real cool cats we were and how extraordinary the civilzation we wrought."
Personally, it sounds a bit like an urban legend. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said: "Unlike most drugs, its name was easily pronounceable and, better still, lent itself to punsters and jokesmiths on TV screens in the homes of millions of people. Example: 'Miltown Berle,' or 'The Government is giving out a Miltown with every income tax blank,' or 'Use a Miltown instead of an olive to make a Miltini'".
I advise a lot of caution when reading articles like this. This is more of an opinion piece or stream of consciousness writing style, even though it’s presented as if it was well researched authoritative material.
The article starts with buzzword bingo for topics that appeal to a certain group: Trauma, drugs, capitalism is to blame for our pain, and so on.
The sections describing the drugs will make anyone familiar with basic pharmacology groan. Meprobomate isn’t a drug with unknown action like he claims. It’s a GABA-A agonist with adenosine reuptake inhibition activity. When we say it isn’t fully understood we mean there’s more to it, but that’s the case for literally every drug. This person has misunderstood that as if don’t know how it works at all.
The sections about GABA are also full of similar mistakes. Benzos don’t “flood your brain with GABA”. They bind to part of the receptor that modulates its activity. We switched to them because they are much better in overdose relative to older drugs.
The author’s drug use is also in an unfortunate pattern. Modern prescribing practices only suggest benzos for short term situational use. They are not a primary treatment for chronic anxiety and they do not address psychological issues. SSRIs, buspirone, and therapy techniques are indicated for long term treatment, not benzos. Benzos are also not good for sleep quality even though a high dose can help someone get to sleep. The number of issues with the treatment described in this article is large, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets misled into thinking this is normal psychiatric practice. These days most doctors are hesitant to prescribe benzos at all because many patients want them and can start abandoning the better long-term treatments while they seek more benzos (a strategy that doesn’t work, as this author sadly discovered).
There is also an undertone of “America bad” in the article (not surprising for an article that opens by blaming capitalism for all of our suffering) but many would be surprised to learn that benzos are currently far easier to acquire in many other countries. France has some eye-popping numbers of benzo prescriptions across the population right now, whereas you’re going to have a hard time walking into an American doctor’s office and getting a benzo prescription (there are exceptions, of course).
Take a heavy dose of benzos and you will look superficially like you're asleep, someone might try to rouse you and be unable to do it.
My take on benzos is that by binding to the receptors it does it opens up ion channels that drain the electricity out of your associative networks, suppressing just about everything.
Sleep it turns out is a structured state of unconsciousness and the EEG will show the person "sleeping" under the influence of beznos isn't actually asleep but they're unresponsive and amnesiac so they think they slept and so did onlookers.
As a piece of generic advice, I suggest turning one's search to feel better into a search for feelbetter. Notice that how we feel is not stable, but changes constantly from moment to moment. Notice that moments of feelbetter and moments of feelworse basically even out over the longterm. Notice that feelings are causal, that everything is a consequence of something prior according to consistent and comprehensible rules. Notice this on anjimmediate moment-to-moment here-and-now emperical basis.
Notice that attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
What I take from it is that feelings are elusive, that you can never "reach" them. Your mind is constantly popping into existence feelings, emotions, and thoughts. Rather than trying to force yourself to "feel" a certain way, just notice how your mind reacts to the world or environment. The grasping or aversion of mind states leads you to spirals of thoughts or suffering.
> attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
Pattern recognition, recurrent excitation of particular stimulus chains, formative psychology, neuroplasticity, and extraordinary stimulus leading to categorical responses. There seems to be deep evolutionary roots and reasons for all those behaviours and their collective expression.
I was bitten on the face by a dog as a child. I attribute feelings around curious dogs now to that decades old experience. My nervous system seems to think it’s an obvious connection, not spooky.
Feel better is easier outside of fight/flight conditioning.
physical exercise results in 2000 myokines active throughout the body which have many actions, including anti-anxiety, and better sleep. But the pharma industry can't put it in a pill form. So it's not advertised like the pills are.
Readit News
One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect. They took what could have been a good article simply exploring modern drug use and ruined it with all these tangential and unfounded claims.
I don't know why people are doing this, but it's almost always closely bound to politics. For example, the commenter below mentioning the political commentators Will Self and Dan Carlin as evidence for the theory.
I've noticed generally that people who talk about trauma being broad in this sense also tend to have a confused understanding of psychology in general.
> One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect.
They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
You're probably right that in the past there were more messed up events, which had high chance of being traumatic.
But you're forgetting the role that Perception has in that equation - from the perspective of a human, a traumatic event isn't a comparison exercise to all possible events, or to past events on previous generations.
Your subjective experience is bound to your context.
In that sense, I wouldn't be shocked if there was more trauma now from the amount of stimulus were getting throughout our life, and the volume of dramatic changes we go through, and the amount of people and chaos that comes with it.
For example, we have way more accidents, and we also have higher survival rates from accidents due to safety measures, and a advanced medical care. So, many deadly events in the past became accidents now, and by consequence, a high chance of it being a traumatic event, sometimes for the victim and the family (directly or indirectly).
Not to mention that our life styles don't even allow us to process traumatic events properly.
In psychiatry trauma has long been defined much more narrowly than just acute stress. Specifically exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. So not just any acute stress but stress associated with real life violence. That’s the DSM definition of trauma for PTSD and you’ll sometimes find nitpicky professionals sticking to this narrow definition. But it’s not how most people use the word.
Do you have any references for trauma being tide to short acute stress? Looking at Wikipedia does not include acute stress and even talks about the difference between short trauma and long term trauma.
Also I definitely recall that even when I was young (>30 years ago) we would talk about e.g. the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
https://traumatheory.com/time-to-drop-ptsd/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_life_syndrome
in that it describes the interaction of poverty and mental illness which can well be interpreted in a left-wing frame (these people are victims of the system, they need to get some more resources to get their footing) or a right-wing frame (these people don't take responsibility, they drive away, squander or destroy resources)
At times theories of broad trauma were respectable such as Freud's Oedipus theory and even today I think certain kinds of organizations such as the U.S. Marines and the medical profession can be seen as transmitting their culture through traumatic experiences.
Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.
Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.
i believe (i don't know enough about this) a big factor is also how your peers treat you after you experience trauma. think about veterans coming home, friends and family don't understands what they went through. they can't talk to anyone because nobody takes them seriously, even to the point of disbelief, or they blow things out of proportion, make them into bigger thing than what the person actually experienced. maybe the veteran doesn't feel any pain, but they tell him that he should. either way, the veteran is completely misunderstood. (again, this is not backed by any knowledge of psychology, just a guess based on some personal experience)
so because in the past everyone experienced the same brutal life (except the land lords or otherwise well off), it wasn't as traumatic as it would be today.
Even in areas that were some distance from the towers there was a relatively high incidence. They put it down to a background level of stress including sources like violence on TV.
This was in comparison to other parts of the world that were less modern and less busy than experienced more traumatic events but had less PTSD. The conclusion was that if you generally have a more boring/ quiet life you will be better able to absorb trauma if it occurs.
What makes you think this wasn't common?
Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind
When we start redefining trauma to cover everything down to the basic realities of life like having to pay for rent to live somewhere, the term loses meaning. With a definition this broad, where do we draw the line between stress and trauma? Is there a line between basic inconvenience and trauma, if the person suffering the inconvenience doesn’t handle it well?
The less discussed problem is that some people have a problem of exaggerating everything into catastrophic stressors, thereby turning common experiences into traumas. This itself is a problem that is addressed through therapy, but it’s not as amenable to garnering sympathy on social media. It’s not appealing to read someone whine about having to work a job to eat food in a first world country, because that’s life and it’s a hundred times easier than it was for our ancestors. However, reframe that as a high-brow article about the perils of capitalism and how it inflicts trauma on us and causes PTSD and now it feels like we are the victims who deserve sympathy.
Felt more like a journal entry.
Anecdote: try everything but the drugs if you can. What helps me: regular exercise, cut alcohol, do my best to sleep/wake up with a schedule. Make a list of what I need to do every day that isn’t insane.
Not going to solve everyone’s problems. But I’ve consumed clonapen here and there for very specific reasons and otherwise don’t need it when I keep all of the above as top life priorities.
Deleted Comment
The "ripple effect" of trauma is magnified more than ever. You don't even have to go out of your way to get the news, as with the past, oh, before 30 years ago...now it's in our pockets. I think the assumption passes the intuition prima face test in my world, too bad not yours. Equipment may need better calibration.
Maybe it isn't totally factually accurate but it has enough truth to me that it represents a small flicker of hope in what is too often a chronically invalidating world.
One might argue that if someone is appreciated on the basis of whether that person makes one feel good in the moment - they are being treated no different than a drug (alcohol, etc). Some argue that such unhealthy dependencies on soothing agents (drugs or people) stems from lack of self soothing skills. Apparently, most "happy healthy people" (there are ofc caveats with this definition but for arguments sake let's assume that we share some understanding of what that means) have an intuitive understanding of how to take care of themselves both physically and emotionally in ways that return them to a baseline state of sorts. If you lack such skills, you often resort to less healthy coping strategies to draw yourself towards this baseline state.
Funny quote from sir Terry Pratchett: Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT." Albert: "Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them."
I think this is a very consumer-centric reductionist way to look at human interaction.
We are a social species and have been so for millions of years. Social connection and interaction is deeply encoded into our genes. We have dedicated cranial hardware for recognizing faces and emotions in others. We have a complex larynx and tongue entirely so that we can make sounds that convey meaning to other humans.
Given that, it's entirely reasonable to state that we need human connection not as a drug-like balm to cover a failure to be a sufficiently hardcore individualist, but because that as what it means to be human. You wouldn't say a worker ant dying on its own is a failed ant. Ants need their colonies to be ants. We need our tribes to be people.
I do wholeheartedly agree - personal anegdote: regular live improv comedy has done wonders for my well-being. And one could say this format of spending time with other humans has opened new very personal techniques for self-soothing to me. But it's also assumed this rather consumerist form, almost drug-like, repetitive, formatted, scheduled. It's not, like, a real tribe or anything serious like that. And as it turns out a lot of wonderful human interactions really can be reduced.
Having had earlier personal experiences with substance abuse, and seeing good people go down a lethal path, it's been a discovery to me that adults do this whole self-soothing thing and that it is a skill that they pick up from family and society. All these folks I meet doing improv seem to be getting something similar out of it.
The efficacy of psychology can vary widely with each party - both the patient and the helper.
While mood-altering drugs are more consistent in general, their effects degrade, depending where one is on the usage timeline (1st use, 10th, 100th).
I use Kratom to somewhat dull the effects of mild anxiety. It is enough to preserve general functionality - and that, in-turn, makes causes (of anxiety) less forbidding to consider.
Doing this means I tend to live in a '10th use' space. To preserve that benefit, I don't try to increase dosage if I venture into distress territory. My current regimen is helpful or it isn't.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5846593/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family#Reputation_laun...
Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.
There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.
And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.
The dramatically overwrought article continues: "It is doubtful if any other creation of the mid-20th Century so typifies this frantic, uncertain era in which no man can know what the next hour will bring." and suggests that a hermetically-sealed shaker of Miltinis should be placed in time capsules "so that posterity can know what real cool cats we were and how extraordinary the civilzation we wrought."
Personally, it sounds a bit like an urban legend. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said: "Unlike most drugs, its name was easily pronounceable and, better still, lent itself to punsters and jokesmiths on TV screens in the homes of millions of people. Example: 'Miltown Berle,' or 'The Government is giving out a Miltown with every income tax blank,' or 'Use a Miltown instead of an olive to make a Miltini'".
[1] https://archive.org/details/palm-springs-desert-sun-1956-11-...
[2] https://archive.org/details/sim_business-review-federal-rese...
The article starts with buzzword bingo for topics that appeal to a certain group: Trauma, drugs, capitalism is to blame for our pain, and so on.
The sections describing the drugs will make anyone familiar with basic pharmacology groan. Meprobomate isn’t a drug with unknown action like he claims. It’s a GABA-A agonist with adenosine reuptake inhibition activity. When we say it isn’t fully understood we mean there’s more to it, but that’s the case for literally every drug. This person has misunderstood that as if don’t know how it works at all.
The sections about GABA are also full of similar mistakes. Benzos don’t “flood your brain with GABA”. They bind to part of the receptor that modulates its activity. We switched to them because they are much better in overdose relative to older drugs.
The author’s drug use is also in an unfortunate pattern. Modern prescribing practices only suggest benzos for short term situational use. They are not a primary treatment for chronic anxiety and they do not address psychological issues. SSRIs, buspirone, and therapy techniques are indicated for long term treatment, not benzos. Benzos are also not good for sleep quality even though a high dose can help someone get to sleep. The number of issues with the treatment described in this article is large, and I feel sorry for anyone who gets misled into thinking this is normal psychiatric practice. These days most doctors are hesitant to prescribe benzos at all because many patients want them and can start abandoning the better long-term treatments while they seek more benzos (a strategy that doesn’t work, as this author sadly discovered).
There is also an undertone of “America bad” in the article (not surprising for an article that opens by blaming capitalism for all of our suffering) but many would be surprised to learn that benzos are currently far easier to acquire in many other countries. France has some eye-popping numbers of benzo prescriptions across the population right now, whereas you’re going to have a hard time walking into an American doctor’s office and getting a benzo prescription (there are exceptions, of course).
My take on benzos is that by binding to the receptors it does it opens up ion channels that drain the electricity out of your associative networks, suppressing just about everything.
Sleep it turns out is a structured state of unconsciousness and the EEG will show the person "sleeping" under the influence of beznos isn't actually asleep but they're unresponsive and amnesiac so they think they slept and so did onlookers.
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Notice that attributing feelings here and now to decade old stories and narratives is spooky action at a distance.
Your second paragraph is parseable imo
Pattern recognition, recurrent excitation of particular stimulus chains, formative psychology, neuroplasticity, and extraordinary stimulus leading to categorical responses. There seems to be deep evolutionary roots and reasons for all those behaviours and their collective expression.
I was bitten on the face by a dog as a child. I attribute feelings around curious dogs now to that decades old experience. My nervous system seems to think it’s an obvious connection, not spooky.
Feel better is easier outside of fight/flight conditioning.
depression, anxiety, sleep issues for sure