Reading Dr. Mark Rego’s provocative, intense Frontal Fatigue: The Impact of Modern Life and Technology on Mental Illness, I found myself thinking of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water.” In it, the late author observes the need to be aware of “what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us.”
Today, we live in a culture that is often corrosive to our mental and physical health, but it’s water in which we swim. The water of an incessant blare of notifications and breaking news; the water of, as Rego explains, that “something about modernity that acts as fertilizer for mental disorders.”
Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young. BY MARIA POPOVA
There’s already plenty of literature about our contemporary mental health crisis. But Rego, who has practiced psychiatry for three decades, takes the unique approach of examining with specificity the impact of 21st century life on our magnificent, misunderstood prefrontal cortexes. He offers no sweeping generalizations, or finger pointing. Instead he takes the reader deep into the science of how the region of our brains that controls executive function evolved, how it operates — and what the unbelievable demands we put on it every day are doing to it. It’s a fascinating window into what makes us human, and an urgent call to “build our lives as best we can.”…
https://www.salon.com/2021/12/12/the-dangers-of-overtaxing-your-prefrontal-cortex/
Tanya Gold – How materialism makes us sad
David Foster Wallace – This Is Water
Julia Kristava: Interpreting radical evil
Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
STANISLAV MARKELOV – Patriotism as a diagnosis
Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)
Lauren Aratani: Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries
Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death. By George Monbiot
The Bleak Left – On Endnotes. By TIM BARKER
Sam Kriss: ‘Neoliberalism’ isn’t a left-wing insult but a monstrous system of inequality
After the truth-shower 