abandon, ability, able, about, above, absence, absolute, absolutely, abstract, abundance, academy, accent, accept, access, accident, accompany, accomplish, according, account, accurate, achieve, achievement, acid, acknowledge, acquire, across, action, active, activity, actor, actual, actually, adapt, addition, additional, address, adequate, adjust, administration, admire, admission, admit, adolescent, adopt, adult, advance, advantage, adventure, advertise, advice, advise, adviser, advocate, affair, affect, afford, afraid, after, afternoon, again, against, age, agency, agenda, agent, aggressive, ago, agree, agreement, agriculture, ahead, aid, aim, air, aircraft, airline, airport, alarm, album, alcohol, alive, all, alliance, allow, ally, almost, alone, along, already, also, alter, alternative, although, always, amateur, amazing, ambition, ambulance, among, amount, analysis, analyst, analyze, ancient, and, anger, angle, angry, animal, anniversary, announce, annual, another, answer, anticipate, anxiety, any, anybody, anymore, anyone, anything, anyway, anywhere, apart, apartment, apologize, apparent, apparently, appeal, appear, appearance, apple, application, apply, appoint, appointment, appreciate, approach, appropriate, approval, approve, approximately, architect, area, argue, argument, arise, arm, armed, army, around, arrange, arrangement, arrest, arrival, arrive, art, article, artist, artistic, as, ashamed, aside, ask, asleep, aspect, assault, assert, assess, assessment, asset, assign, assignment, assist, assistance, assistant, associate, association, assume, assumption, assure, at, athlete, athletic, atmosphere, attach, attack, attempt, attend, attention, attitude, attorney, attract, attraction, attractive, attribute, audience, author, authority, auto, available, average, avoid, award, aware, awareness, away, awful, baby, back, background, bad, badly, bag, balance, ball, ban, band, bank, bar, barely, barrel, barrier, base, baseball, basic, basically, basis, basket, basketball, bath, bathroom, battery, battle, be, beach, bear, beat, beautiful, beauty, because, become, bed, bedroom, bee, beef, beer, before, begin, beginning, behavior, behind, being, belief, believe, bell, belong, below, belt, bench, bend, beneath, benefit, beside, besides, best, bet, better, between, beyond, bicycle, big, bike, bill, billion, bind, biological, bird, birth, birthday, bit, bite, black, blade, blame, blanket, blind, block, blood, blow, blue, board, boat, body, bomb, bombing, bond, bone, book, boom, boot, border, boring, born, borrow, boss, both, bother, bottle, bottom, boundary, bowl, box, boy, boyfriend, brain, branch, brand, brave, bread, break, breakfast, breast, breath, breathe, brick, bridge, brief, briefly, bright, brilliant, bring, broad, broken, brother, brown, brush, buck, budget, build, building, bullet, bunch, burden, burn, bury, bus, business, busy, but, butter, button, buy, buyer, by, cabin, cabinet, cable, cake, calculate, call, camera, camp, campaign, campus, can, Canadian, cancer, candidate, cap, capability, capable, capacity, capital, captain, capture, car, carbon, card, care, career, careful, carefully, carrier, carry, case, cash, cast, cat, catch, category, Catholic, cause, ceiling, celebrate, celebration, celebrity, cell, center, central, century, CEO, ceremony, certain, certainly, chain, chair, chairman, challenge, chamber, champion, championship, chance, change, changing, channel, chapter, character, characteristic, characterize, charge, charity, chart, chase, cheap, check, cheek, cheese, chef, chemical, chest, chicken, chief, child, childhood, Chinese, chip, chocolate, choice, cholesterol, choose, Christian, Christmas, church, cigarette, circle, circumstance, cite, citizen, city, civil, civilian, claim, class, classic, classroom, clean, clear, clearly, client, climate, climb, clinic, clinical, clock, close, closely, closer, clothes, clothing, cloud, club, clue, cluster, coach, coal, coalition, coast, coat, code, coffee, cognitive, cold, collapse, colleague, collect, collection, collective, college, colonial, color, column, combination, combine, come, comedy, comfort, comfortable, command, commander, comment, commercial, commission, commit, commitment, committee, common, communicate, communication, community, company, compare, comparison, compete, competition, competitive, competitor, complain, complaint, complete, completely, complex, complexity, compliance, complicate, complicated, component, compose, composition, comprehensive, computer, concentrate, concentration, concept, concern, concerned, concert, conclude, conclusion, concrete, condition, conduct, conference, confidence, confident, confirm, conflict, confront, confusion, Congress, congressional, connect, connection, consciousness, consensus, consequence, conservative, consider, considerable, consideration, consist, consistent, constant, constantly, constitute, constitutional, construct, construction, consultant, consume, consumer, consumption, contact, contain, container, contemporary, content, contest, context, continue, continued, contract, contrast, contribute, contribution, control, controversial, controversy, convention, conventional, conversation, convert, conviction, convince, cook, cookie, cooking, cool, cooperation, cop, cope, copy, core, corn, corner, corporate, corporation, correct, correspondent, cost, cotton, couch, could, council, count, counter, country, county, couple, courage, course, court, cousin, cover, coverage, cow, crack, craft, crash, crazy, cream, create, creation, creative, creature, credit, crew, crime, criminal, crisis, criteria, critic, critical, criticism, criticize, crop, cross, crowd, crucial, cry, cultural, culture, cup, curious, current, currently, curriculum, custom, customer, cut, cycle, dad, daily, damage, dance, danger, dangerous, dare, dark, darkness, data, database, date, daughter, day, dead, deal, dealer, dear, death, debate, debt, decade, decide, decision, deck, declare, decline, decrease, deep, deeply, deer, defeat, defend, defendant, defense, defensive, deficit, define, definitely, definition, degree, delay, deliver, delivery, demand, democracy, Democratic, Democrat, demonstrate, demonstration, deny, department, depend, dependent, depending, depict, depression, depth, deputy, derive, describe, description, desert, deserve, design, designer, desire, desk, desperate, despite, destroy, destruction, detail, detailed, detect, detection, detective, determine, develop, developing, development, device, devil, dialogue, diet, differ, difference, different, differently, difficult, difficulty, dig, digital, dimension, dining, dinner, direct, direction, directly, director, dirt, disability, disagree, disappear, disaster, discipline, disclose, discover, discovery, discrimination, discuss, discussion, disease, dish, dismiss, disorder, display, dispute, distance, distinct, distinction, distinguish, distribute, distribution, district, diverse, diversity, divide, division, divorce, DNA, do, doctor, document, dog, domestic, dominant, dominate, door, double, doubt, down, downtown, dozen, draft, drag, drama, dramatic, dramatically, draw, drawer, drawing, dream, dress, drink, drive, driver, drop, drug, dry, due, during, dust, duty, dwell, dying, dynamic, each, eager, ear, earlier, early, earn, earnings, earth, earthquake, ease, easily, east, eastern, easy, eat, economic, economy, edge, edit, edition, editor, educate, education, educational, educator, effect, effective, effectively, efficiency, efficient, effort, egg, eight, either, elderly, elect, election, electric, electrical, electricity, electronic, element, elementary, eliminate, elite, else, elsewhere, e-mail, embrace, emerge, emergency, emission, emotion, emotional, emphasis, emphasize, employ, employee, employer, employment, empty, enable, encounter, encourage, end, enemy, energy, enforcement, engage, engine, engineer, engineering, English, enhance, enjoy, enormous, enough, ensure, enter, enterprise, entertain, entertainment, entire, entirely, entrance, entry, environment, environmental, episode, equal, equally, equipment, equivalent, era, error, escape, especially, essay, essential, essentially, establish, establishment, estate, estimate, etc, ethics, ethnic, European, evaluate, evaluation, evening, event, eventually, ever, every, everybody, everyday, everyone, everything, everywhere, evidence, evolution, evolve, exact, exactly, exam, examination, examine, example, exceed, excellent, except, exception, exchange, exciting, executive, exercise, exhibit, exhibition, exist, existence, existing, expand, expansion, expect, expectation, expense, expensive, experience, experiment, expert, explain, explanation, explode, explore, explosion, expose, exposure, express, expression, extend, extension, extensive, extent, external, extra, extraordinary, extreme, extremely, eye, fabric, face, facility, fact, factor, factory, faculty, fade, fail, failure, fair, fairly, faith, fall, false, familiar, family, famous, fan, fantasy, far, farm, farmer, fashion, fast, fat, fate, father, fault, favor, favorite, fear, feature, federal, fee, feed, feel, feeling, fellow, female, fence, festival, few, fewer, fiber, fiction, field, fifteen, fifth, fifty, fight, fighter, fighting, figure, file, fill, film, final, finally, finance, financial, find, finding, fine, finger, finish, fire, firm, first, fish, fishing, fit, fitness, five, fix, flag, flame, flat, flavor, flee, flesh, flight, float, floor, flow, flower, fly, focus, folk, follow, following, food, foot, football, for, force, foreign, forest, forever, forget, form, formal, formation, former, formula, forth, fortune, forward, found, foundation, founder, four, fourth, frame, framework, free, freedom, freeze, French, frequency, frequent, frequently, fresh, friend, friendly, friendship, from, front, fruit, frustration, fuel, fulfill, full, fully, fun, function, fund, fundamental, funding, funeral, funny, furniture, furthermore, future, gain, galaxy, gallery, game, gang, gap, garage, garden, garlic, gas, gate, gather, gay, gaze, gear, gender, gene, general, generally, generate, generation, genetic, gentleman, gently, German, gesture, get, ghost, giant, gift, gifted, girl, girlfriend, give, given, glad, glance, glass, global, glove, go, goal, God, gold, golden, golf, good, govern, government, governor, grab, grace, grade, gradually, graduate, grain, grand, grandmother, grant, grass, grave, gray, great, green, grocery, ground, group, grow, growing, growth, guarantee, guard, guess, guest, guide, guideline, guilty, gun, guy, habit, habitat, hair, half, hall, hand, handful, handle, hang, happen, happy, harbor, hard, hardly, hat, hate, have, he, head, headline, headquarters, health, healthy, hear, hearing, heart, heat, heaven, heavily, heavy, heel, height, helicopter, hell, hello, help, helpful, hence, her, herb, here, heritage, hero, herself, hey, hi, hide, high, highlight, highly, highway, hill, him, himself, hip, hire, his, historic, historical, history, hit, hold, hole, holiday, holy, home, homeless, honest, honey, honor, hope, horizon, horror, horse, hospital, host, hot, hotel, hour, house, household, housing, how, however, huge, human, humor, hundred, hungry, hunter, hunting, hurt, husband, hypothesis, ice, idea, ideal, identification, identify, identity, ignore, ill, illegal, illness, illustrate, image, imagination, imagine, immediate, immediately, immigrant, immigration, impact, implement, implication, imply, importance, important, impose, impossible, impress, impression, impressive, improve, improvement, incentive, incident, include, including, income, incorporate, increase, increased, increasingly, incredible, indeed, independence, independent, index, indicate, indication, individual, industrial, industry, infant, infection, inflation, influence, inform, information, ingredient, initial, initially, initiative, injury, inner, innocent, inquiry, inside, insight, insist, inspire, install, instance, instead, institute, institution, institutional, instruction, instructor, instrument, insurance, intellectual, intelligence, intend, intense, intensity, intention, interaction, interest, interested, interesting, internal, international, Internet, interpret, interpretation, intervention, interview, introduce, introduction, invasion, invest, investigation, investigator, investment, investor, invite, involve, involved, involvement, Iraqi, Irish, iron, Islamic, island, Israeli, issue, it, Italian, item, its, itself, jacket, jail, Japanese, jet, Jew, Jewish, job, join, joint, joke, journal, journalist, journey, joy, judge, judgment, juice, jump, junior, jury, just, justice, justify, keep, key, kick, kid, kill, killer, killing, kind, king, kiss, kitchen, knee, knife, knock, know, knowledge, lab, label, labor, laboratory, lack, lady, lake, land, landscape, language, lap, large, largely, last, late, later, Latin, latter, laugh, launch, law, lawsuit, lawyer, lay, layer, lead, leader, leadership, leading, leaf, league, lean, learn, learning, least, leather, leave, left, leg, legacy, legal, legend, legislation, legislative, legislator, legitimate, lemon, length, less, lesson, let, letter, level, liberal, library, license, lie, life, lifestyle, lifetime, lift, light, like, likely, limit, limitation, limited, line, link, lip, list, listen, literary, literature, little, live, living, load, loan, local, locate, location, lock, long, long-term, look, loose, lose, loss, lost, lot, lots, loud, love, lovely, lover, low, lower, luck, lucky, lunch, luxury, machine, mad, magazine, mail, main, mainly, maintain, maintenance, major, majority, make, maker, makeup, male, mall, man, manage, management, manager, manner, manufacturer, manufacturing, many, map, margin, mark, market, marketing, marriage, married, marry, mask, mass, massive, master, match, material, math, matter, may, maybe, mayor, me, meal, mean, meaning, meanwhile, measure, measurement, meat, mechanism, media, medical, medication, medicine, medium, meet, meeting, member, membership, memory, mental, mention, menu, mere, merely, mess, message, metal, meter, method, Mexican, middle, might, military, milk, million, mind, mine, minister, minor, minority, minute, miracle, mirror, miss, missile, mission, mistake, mix, mixture, mm-hmm, mode, model, moderate, modern, modest, mom, moment, money, monitor, month, mood, moon, moral, more, moreover, morning, mortgage, most, mostly, mother, motion, motivation, motor, mountain, mouse, mouth, move, movement, movie, Mr, Mrs, Ms, much, multiple, murder, muscle, museum, music, musical, musician, Muslim, must, mutual, my, myself, mystery, myth, naked, name, narrative, narrow, nation, national, native, natural, naturally, nature, near, nearby, nearly, necessarily, necessary, neck, need, negative, negotiate, negotiation, neighbor, neighborhood, neither, nerve, nervous, net, network, never, nevertheless, new, newly, news, newspaper, next, nice, night, nine, no, nobody, nod, noise, nomination, nominee, none, nonetheless, nor, normal, normally, north, northern, nose, not, note, nothing, notice, notion, novel, now, nowhere, nuclear, number, numerous, nurse, nut, object, objective, obligation, observation, observe, observer, obtain, obvious, obviously, occasion, occasionally, occupation, occupy, occur, ocean, odd, odds, of, off, offense, offensive, offer, office, officer, official, often, oh, oil, okay, old, Olympic, on, once, one, ongoing, onion, online, only, onto, open, opening, operate, operating, operation, operator, opinion, opponent, opportunity, oppose, opposed, opposite, opposition, option, or, orange, order, ordinary, organic, organization, organize, orientation, origin, original, originally, other, others, otherwise, ought, our, ours, ourselves, out, outcome, outside, oven, over, overall, overcome, overlook, owe, own, owner, pace, pack, package, page, pain, painful, paint, painter, painting, pair, pale, Palestinian, palm, pan, panel, panic, pant, paper, paragraph, parent, park, parking, part, participant, participate, participation, particle, particular, particularly, partly, partner, partnership, party, pass, passage, passenger, passion, past, patch, path, patient, pattern, pause, pay, payment, PC, peace, peak, peer, pen, penalty, people, pepper, per, perceive, percentage, perception, perfect, perfectly, perform, performance, perhaps, period, permanent, permission, permit, person, personal, personality, personally, personnel, perspective, persuade, pet, phase, phenomenon, philosophy, phone, photo, photographer, phrase, physical, physically, physician, piano, pick, picture, pie, piece, pile, pilot, pine, pink, pipe, pitch, place, plan, plane, planet, planning, plant, plastic, plate, platform, play, player, please, pleasure, plenty, plot, plus, PM, pocket, poem, poet, poetry, point, police, policy, political, politically, politician, politics, poll, pollution, pool, poor, pop, popular, population, porch, port, portion, portrait, portray, pose, position, positive, possess, possession, possibility, possible, possibly, post, pot, potato, potential, potentially, pound, pour, poverty, powder, power, powerful, practical, practice, prayer, preach, precisely, predict, prediction, prefer, preference, pregnancy, pregnant, preparation, prepare, prescription, presence, present, presentation, preserve, president, presidential, press, pressure, pretend, pretty, prevent, previous, previously, price, pride, priest, primarily, primary, prime, principal, principle, print, prior, priority, prison, prisoner, privacy, private, probably, problem, procedure, proceed, process, processing, processor, proclaim, produce, producer, product, production, profession, professional, professor, profile, profit, program, progress, progressive, project, prominent, promise, promote, prompt, proof, proper, properly, property, proportion, proposal, propose, prosecutor, prospect, protect, protection, protein, protest, proud, prove, provide, provider, province, provision, psychological, psychology, public, publication, publicity, publish, publisher, pull, punishment, purchase, pure, purpose, pursue, push, put, qualify, quality, quarter, quarterback, quarterly, queen, quest, question, quick, quickly, quiet, quietly, quit, quite, quote, race, racial, radiation, radical, radio, rail, rain, raise, range, rank, rapid, rapidly, rare, rarely, rate, rather, rating, ratio, raw, reach, react, reaction, reader, reading, ready, real, reality, realize, really, reason, reasonable, recall, receive, recent, recently, reception, recipe, recipient, recognition, recognize, recommend, recommendation, record, recording, recover, recovery, recruit, red, reduce, reduction, refer, reference, reflect, reflection, reform, refugee, refuse, regard, regarding, regardless, regime, region, regional, register, regular, regularly, regulate, regulation, regulator, reinforce, reject, relate, relation, relationship, relative, relatively, relax, release, relevant, relief, religion, religious, rely, remain, remaining, remarkable, remember, remind, remote, remove, repeat, repeatedly, replace, replacement, reply, report, reporter, represent, representation, representative, Republican, reputation, request, require, requirement, research, researcher, resemble, reservation, resident, residential, resign, resist, resistance, resolution, resolve, resort, resource, respect, respond, response, responsibility, responsible, rest, restaurant, restore, restriction, result, retain, retire, retirement, return, reveal, revenue, review, revolution, rhythm, rice, rich, rid, ride, rifle, right, ring, rise, risk, river, road, rock, role, roll, romantic, roof, room, root, rope, rose, rough, roughly, round, route, routine, row, rub, rubber, rude, ruin, rule, run, running, rural, rush, Russian, sacred, sad, safe, safety, sake, salad, salary, sale, sales, salt, same, sample, sanction, sand, satellite, satisfaction, satisfied, satisfy, sauce, save, saving, say, scale, scandal, scare, scatter, scenario, scene, schedule, scheme, scholar, scholarship, school, science, scientific, scientist, scope, score, scream, screen, script, sea, search, season, seat, second, secondary, secret, secretary, section, sector, secure, security, see, seed, seek, seem, segment, seize, select, selection, self, sell, Senate, senator, send, senior, sense, sensitive, sentence, separate, sequence, series, serious, seriously, servant, serve, service, session, set, setting, settle, settlement, seven, several, severe, sex, sexual, shade, shadow, shake, shall, shallow, shape, share, sharp, she, sheet, shelf, shell, shelter, shift, shine, ship, shirt, shock, shoe, shoot, shooting, shop, shopping, short, shortly, shot, should, shoulder, shout, show, shower, shrug, shut, shy, sibling, sick, side, sigh, sight, sign, signal, significant, significantly, silence, silent, silver, similar, similarly, simple, simply, sin, since, sing, singer, single, sink, sir, sister, sit, site, situation, six, size, ski, skill, skin, skirt, sky, slave, sleep, slice, slide, slight, slightly, slip, slow, slowly, small, smart, smell, smile, smoke, smooth, snap, snow, so, so-called, soccer, social, society, soft, software, soil, solar, soldier, sole, solid, solution, solve, some, somebody, somehow, someone, something, sometimes, somewhat, somewhere, son, song, soon, sophisticated, sorry, sort, soul, sound, soup, source, south, southern, Soviet, space, Spanish, speak, speaker, special, specialist, species, specific, specifically, specify, speech, speed, spend, spending, spin, spirit, spiritual, split, spoil, sponsor, sport, spot, spray, spread, spring, square, squeeze, stability, stable, staff, stage, stain, stair, stake, stand, standard, standing, star, stare, start, state, statement, station, statistical, status, stay, steady, steal, steel, steep, stem, step, stick, still, stimulate, stimulus, stir, stock, stomach, stone, stop, storage, store, storm, story, straight, strange, stranger, strategic, strategy, stream, street, strength, strengthen, stress, stretch, strike, string, strip, stroke, strong, strongly, structural, structure, struggle, student, studio, study, stuff, stupid, style, subject, submit, subsequent, substance, substantial, substitute, succeed, success, successful, successfully, such, sudden, suddenly, sue, suffer, sufficient, sugar, suggest, suggestion, suicide, suit, summer, summit, sun, super, supply, support, supporter, suppose, supposed, Supreme, sure, surely, surface, surgery, surprise, surprised, surprising, surprisingly, surround, survey, survival, survive, survivor, suspect, sustain, swear, sweep, sweet, swim, swing, switch, symbol, symptom, system, table, tactic, tail, take, tale, talent, talk, tall, tank, tap, tape, target, task, taste, tax, taxi, tea, teach, teacher, teaching, team, tear, technical, technique, technology, teen, teenager, telephone, telescope, television, tell, temperature, temporary, ten, tend, tendency, tennis, tension, tent, term, terms, terrible, territory, terror, terrorist, test, testimony, testing, text, than, thank, thanks, that, the, theater, their, them, theme, themselves, then, theory, therapy, there, therefore, these, they, thick, thin, thing, think, thinking, third, thirty, this, those, though, thought, thousand, threat, threaten, three, throat, through, throughout, throw, thus, ticket, tie, tight, time, tiny, tip, tire, tissue, title, to, tobacco, today, toe, together, toilet, token, tolerate, tomato, tomorrow, tone, tongue, tonight, too, tool, tooth, top, topic, toss, total, totally, touch, tough, tour, tourist, tournament, toward, towards, tower, town, toy, trace, track, trade, tradition, traditional, traffic, tragedy, trail, train, training, transfer, transform, transformation, transition, translate, translation, transmission, transmit, transport, transportation, travel, treat, treatment, treaty, tree, tremendous, trend, trial, tribe, trick, trip, troop, trouble, truck, true, truly, trust, truth, try, tube, tunnel, turn, TV, twelve, twenty, twice, twin, two, type, typical, typically, ugly, ultimate, ultimately, unable, uncle, undergo, understand, understanding, unfortunately, uniform, union, unique, unit, United, universal, universe, university, unknown, unless, unlike, until, unusual, up, upon, upper, urban, urge, us, use, used, useful, user, usual, usually, utility, utilize, vacation, valley, valuable, value, variable, variation, variety, various, vary, vast, vegetable, vehicle, venture, version, versus, very, vessel, veteran, via, victim, victory, video, view, viewer, village, violate, violation, violence, violent, virtually, virtue, virus, visibility, visible, vision, visit, visitor, visual, vital, voice, volume, voluntary, volunteer, vote, voter, voting, wage, wait, wake, walk, wall, wander, want, war, warm, warn, warning, wash, waste, watch, water, wave, way, we, weak, weakness, wealth, wealthy, weapon, wear, weather, web, website, wedding, week, weekend, weekly, weigh, weight, welcome, welfare, well, west, western, wet, what, whatever, wheel, when, whenever, where, whereas, whether, which, while, whisper, white, who, whole, whom, whose, why, wide, widely, widespread, wife, wild, wildlife, will, willing, win, wind, window, wine, wing, winner, winter, wipe, wire, wisdom, wise, wish, with, withdraw, within, without, witness, woman, wonder, wonderful, wood, wooden, word, work, worker, working, workout, workplace, works, workshop, world, worried, worry, worth, would, wound, wrap, write, writer, writing, wrong, yard, yeah, year, yell, yellow, yes, yesterday, yet, yield, you, young, your, yours, yourself, youth, zone.

I feel like I should qualify this by saying I’m not certain I qualify as gifted, but this sub has certainly helped me understand my own mind better. This introspection has got me thinking about the relationship between cognitive diversity and society and I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter, especially since most of you are intimately familiar with the effects of this interaction in your own lives. You can stop reading here if you want, because this is where I start rambling.
I’m not sure “conformist” is the appropriate word. I live in America and I think many would find it unwarranted to call it “conformist”, especially relative to most other countries. Generally, the country is pretty individualistic and a lot of work here is being done toward accommodation/inclusivity of diversity in various dimensions. However, I do think certain aspects are (mostly implicitly) conformist in that they don’t take into account other dimensions like cognitive diversity. In fact, I think cognitive diversity is grossly overlooked and misunderstood.
Throughout my life and especially my time lurking this sub, I’ve come to realize just how multidimensional it is in itself! Some people have internal monologues/dialogues, some don’t. Some can vividly visualize with their mind’s eye, some see nothing at all. Some think in abstract concepts, and some in more concrete terms. Some people can hear music on their heads, some can’t. Some feel empathy more than others. Some feel pain more than others, and so on… Our minds are stimulated by different things as well.
TANGENT: I’m nowhere near an expert, but I’m thinking the crux of giftedness may actually be how the mind is stimulated (Dabrowski’s idea of overexcitabilities that I was recently introduced to by a member of the sub). If a person’s brain is highly stimulated by and sensitive to the euphoria of problem solving, recognizing a pattern, deep and specific thought, etc. then the developing brain may just structure itself to be more proficient at it. Emotional excitability may lead to the brain prioritizing memory capture because of the role emotions play in that system. Maybe it’s all as simple as that: the sensitivities driving the brain’s development. I know it’s largely genetic and likely way more complex than I know, but I wonder if there’s a way to unlock these excitabilities during childhood with individualized and targeted reward systems to facilitate a similar kind of development to that of a gifted brain in a non-genetically gifted individual.
I wonder how much of all this is factored into how society is structured. For example, I think our schooling system, which I think is incredibly outdated and in desperate need of reform, is terrible in regard to accommodating cognitive diversity. I largely think of the academic failures of individuals more like failures of the institution. I largely see the failures of individuals in most areas, academically, financially, morally or otherwise more like inadequacies of the societies we’ve built. It’s wasted potential and needless suffering.
Sure, this can only be controlled to a certain degree. Governing this amount of people necessitates some level of generalizability in our institutions, but I can’t help but feel we can be doing more than we are now. If only cognitive diversity was getting the same kind of attention that more surface level forms of diversity are. At least now with AI we can afford people some level of personalized education or assistance, but I’m not sure this issue has so much appeal to actually make any timely or meaningful effort.
How much do our politicians think about this stuff? I’m sure psychologists and educators are all over it, but how much do their benefactors think about it?
Anyway, ramble over. This is a relatively new interest of mine so if you have any knowledge or reading recommendations, please do share.

There have been an increasing number of juniors visiting this sub asking for advice about writing essays. Below are some tips and advice for making your essay stand out as excellent. Feel free to ask questions because I will answer every single question in the comments.
I know from experience that many of you are struggling to identify a good topic for your essay. Conventional wisdom says to start by brainstorming a list of potential topics, and chances are, you have already started a mental list of ideas. You might think you only have a few choices for topics, based on your activities or experiences, or essay examples you read, or the rough draft you already started (or worse, that GPT started...). I advise, however, that you put down your list of topics and back away from it. Forget that exists for a moment. Seriously - thinking about this initial list tethers you to certain ideas that might not actually be your best options.
Now you can begin brainstorming with a clean slate.
Start with thinking about what you want to show in your entire application, not just one essay. Every single component in your app has one purpose – to tell more about YOU. Filling out the rest of the application by rote and focusing solely on the essay is short-sighted and will leave so much potential untapped in your application.

It's About You. Tell Your Story - And Be The Protagonist

An admissions officer’s goal is to understand you fully, in the context of your background and the rest of the applicant pool. They will begin this with assessing your academic abilities and potential. Then they will evaluate how you will fit into the student body they’re trying to curate. All of this can be somewhat broad and diverse and touch on several institutional goals. But they will dig deep to find out what each applicant is like, what your core values and motivations are, what kind of student you will be, how you will contribute to the vibrant and intellectual campus community they’re building, etc.
Your goal with essay brainstorming is to ascertain how to powerfully tell your story in a manner that will fit these criteria. The entirety of your application (again, not just one essay) aims to showcase your abilities, qualifications, and uncommon attributes as a person in a positive way. Before you begin outlining or writing your application, you must determine what is unique about you that will stand out to an admissions panel. All students are truly unique. Not one other student has the same combination of life experiences, personality, passions, or goals as you do. Your job in your application is to frame your unique personal attributes in a positive and compelling way. How will you fit on campus? What personal qualities, strengths, core values, talents, or different perspectives do you bring to the table? What stories, deeper motivations/beliefs, or formative experiences can you use to illustrate all of this?
It is always helpful to start with some soul-searching or self-examination. You might not immediately know what you want to share about yourself. It’s not a simple task to decide how to summarize your whole life and being in a powerful and eloquent way on your application. Introspection prior to starting your application takes additional time and effort rather than jumping straight into your first draft. But it is also a valuable method to start writing a winning application that stands out from the stack.
You'll see the advice everywhere that all essay prompts are really about the same thing - you. The goal of each essay then is to showcase who you are, what matters to you, and how you think. I guarantee if you're on this sub enough, you'll hear the advice to "show, don't tell" when writing about yourself. But what does this mean really, and how do you do it well? How do you even get started on an essay that does this?

Introspection Questions

It’s often easiest to start thinking in terms of superlatives, especially those related to personal insights -- what are the most meaningful things about you, and what do you value the most? Here is a list of questions to help you brainstorm broadly before you narrow down your focus for writing:

• What are your interests?
  
• What sparks your curiosity?
  
• About what topics do you enjoy reading?
  
• With whom do you enjoy spending time? Who has impacted your life the most?
  
• Reflect upon “superlatives” in your life. What moments were most memorable, formative, enlightening, enjoyable, or valuable? What physical possessions, experiences, dreams, or lessons could make your superlatives list?
  
• Stop and think about what things, people, or circumstances in your life are really unique, fascinating, or outlandish. Are there any that really have a lot of "cultural flavor" (whatever your culture is)?
  

I have a free introspection worksheet with over 100 questions like this designed to help you find ideas worth exploring in your essays. You can find it on the A2C Discord or download it directly here.

Find Your Story And Arc

Think of a small anecdote or story from your life that you could share that serves as a microcosm of who you are and what is important to you. It will massively help you narrow this down and find a gem of a story if you first start by thinking about your application arc or theme. This is the one-phrase summary of your entire application. It could be "brilliant entrepreneur who started her own successful business" or "talented athlete who wants to study economics and finance as they pertain to sports", or even "avid baker whose hobby sparked an interest in chemistry". It doesn't have to be related to your intended major, but it can help your arc be stronger and clearer if it is.
Once you have an arc determined and a story to share, think about what you want that story to say about you. This is where it can help to think of this as something you would share on a date - what impression does it make about you to the reader? Once you know this, start showing, not telling this attribute of yourself through your story. For example, instead of saying that you're compassionate toward others, you show an example of a time you were compassionate, then elaborate on why, and what it means to you.

Essay Brainstorming Techniques

If you are having trouble finding a story, or simply have writer’s block once you have picked your topic, here are some ideas to get your juices flowing:

• Stream of consciousness writing -- Start writing whatever is in your head, and don’t stop for 30 minutes. You probably won’t use what you just wrote for your essay, but it will help you find a starting point.
  
• Journaling -- Answer the prompt as if you were writing in a journal. This will get you in the habit of writing about yourself and establish comfort with the concept. It will also take you to a new level of introspection and self-awareness.
  
• Twitter X style -- Write several rapid-fire responses to the prompt in 280 characters or less. Choose an idea from these responses to expound upon in your essay.
  
• Read each essay prompt, then go through your introspection worksheet responses and connect the stories and insights to one or more of the prompts. Some students like using color coding to visually see how their different ideas might work together.
  

Why Essays Matter

Here's the thing a lot of people don't realize about college admission: it's not an award for being the smartest, most accomplished, or most impressive. It's an invitation to join a community. Far too many students think that if they can just show that they're smart enough, they'll get in. Yale even says right on their admissions website that 75% of their applicants are academically qualified to succeed at Yale. But only ~4% are getting in. That should tell you that they're looking for more than just top tier test scores and grades. To be perfectly clear, you will need top tier grades and (optionally) test scores to show that you're qualified, and the vast majority of my students come to me with this part already in the bank. But what sets the admits apart? It's personal insight - sharing who you are, how you think, what matters to you, and how you engage community. You can't just say "/IAmVerySmart, please admit me," or even "I did a cool thing guys! Isn't that neat!" You need to go deeper and show them your core values, personal strengths, motivations, aspirations, character traits, foundational beliefs, personality, etc. And you need to do it in a charming, winsome way that makes them like you and want to invite you to join their community.
So how do I get students to do this? All of my students complete that introspection worksheet. We go through it and find the stories, examples, anecdotes, conversations, memories, relationships, and other things from their life that will help us craft a strong and personally insightful narrative. We also make lists of the values, strengths, and key personal qualities we want to showcase. Once we have some topics, outlines, abstracts, or rough drafts, we talk about which stories to tell where, how to tell them well, and what details to include to present the best they have to offer. Then we refine, edit, polish, and enhance over and over until the story sings, but more importantly shows their heart and soul. We also go through all the other application components to ensure consistency, quality, and distinctiveness.
Here's why this works so well: at most highly selective colleges there is a primary reader (or 2-3) who will review everything first and then present it to the admissions committee, who then votes on whether to admit you. That presentation typically goes one of three ways:

1. Total enthusiasm, energy, and excitement. They strongly advocate for admission and paint a clear picture of how you will contribute to their goals and community. Everyone in the room picks up on that energy and is leaning forward in their chairs, looking for reasons to admit you. This is quite rare, generally less than 5 out of every 100 applications, even among those which are "fully qualified." When you do this right, you show depth, meaning, and valuable personal insights so the reviewer is learning about who you are and how you might engage the community they're curating. You come alive off the page as a person, not just another file.
   
2. Business as usual. You're another great applicant in a pile of great applicants. They share a basic review of the facts, your profile, stats, strengths, weaknesses, etc. Maybe someone on the committee finds something they love, and they really push for admission. More likely, not and you get deferred/waitlisted even though there wasn't anything "wrong" with your application. They just didn't love you enough to commit.
   
3. "Here's a stack of 20 applications that I didn't find all that compelling, so we won't present them individually, but you guys are the committee and you make the decisions. So let me know if there are any you want to talk about." In this case, unless there's a letter of endorsement from an athletics coach or your last name matches several buildings on campus, you're probably not getting additional consideration, much less admission. They will regret to inform you.
   

Everything we're doing is designed to help them get to know themselves, present the best they have to offer, and land in that first group. Having top tier essays is the single best way to get there. Get started on brainstorming in the next few weeks so you'll have time to get a few essays completed over the summer.

I felt myself getting a little heated in today's CASA group discussions about "trauma." For every 10 times you'll hear that word, "resilience" will come up maybe once. I think most of us are aware of how arm-chairy and buzzworthy trauma and therapy have become. It's one of the latest cultural trends that facilitate a fluidity to presumed-more-informed conversation, without the practice of developing finer lines of understanding and distinction.
On the basis of your invocation of "trauma" you can rush to provide "help" and "services" and begin blaming an incredible amount of "mental health issues" or "unresolved childhoods." It's literally the cliche of a freshman's behavior after enrolling in their first college psychology course on blast. They've already invoked unsubstantiated pseudo-science and pop-culture explicitly not psychology as tools to provide frameworks for understanding your families. When someone infers substance abuse from a story just because the accusation was levied or any kind of drug was referenced at any level, their conclusions or assumptions go unchecked. It's predictably baking a recipe for an unnecessary mess on top of whatever the family is going through.
You can feel the tension every time you speak in "checking" ways. This happens to me routinely. One of the presenters spoke to the biased and incomplete ways that foster parents or aggravated family members might speak to the nature of the case or anyone's character. I pointed out that case managers can leave out details and massage stories to fit their ends as well. That got ignored and we moved right along. It's a real concern, and you need to know how to protect your relationship with someone who might be specifically directed to undermine your effort to advocate with the evidence.
But it doesn't feel "pleasant" or "decent" when you "want to believe the best" about your colleagues. Is it less true? Absolutely not. I was literally forced into that position from predatory supervisors and watched dipshit coworkers skip along those disingenuous lines without hesitation. Anecdotes fawning over better-inclined and capable FCMs do nothing to erase that.
So I started thinking about "discomfort" broadly. Another concept that's been wholesale abused. We needed to be way too on guard for what or whether we said might be a "micro aggression" or would cause someone to feel "unsafe" or "uncomfortable." Again, our pop psychology and propensity to overstate the noisiest out-ragers, made it so critical thinking and doubt became sinful in and of themselves. Facts don't matter in that space. "Being heard" is afforded only if you're claiming victimhood, but then, only victimhood of a certain type. The own-goal that is reactionary politics when you forgo any genuine attempt at taking someone's, almost certainly mostly irrational but nonetheless real, concern seriously is the ongoing consequence we get to suffer.
I think the more you practice observing conversational patterns, word choices, and trends, you can start to see previously "abstract" things considerably more acutely. One thing I notice is a propensity for "moving right along." I don't care what the topic is, there's a "normal" pace and pater that is preferred. Violate that, and it's time to move on. Point out the failings of the people you're supposed to trust most or even ingratiate yourself to? Let's move right along into the next module, as we all know there's nothing much more to say about that.
Another pattern I notice is the "taken aback pause." It's not precisely a reaction to being "offended," but it's a stark enough detail or way of relaying information that who you're speaking with was not prepared to engage that intensely. If they're quick, it'll be a brink-of-condescending acknowledgement before moving-right-along, or if they're not quick, it'll be a placating obfuscating of what you said to "even things out."Again, these are imprecise norms of conversational behavior around the particulars of one culture at one point in time, but they're real and of consequence whether or not you can see them.
When we use the word "bias," we let ourselves off the hook on the myriad ways it manifests. We let "bias" obscure in the opposite way that we let "trauma" obscure. Trauma is abused to over-explain what should be considered a necessary series of responses or consequences. Bias is abused to overlook how deeply it colors your propensity to engage that over-explaining behavior. You are biased, first and foremost, to your subjective experience of reality. In my experience, almost no one is that clued into their own flow of experience. Even the ones that are, or are showing the most growth and evidence, struggle, and will struggle indefinitely. This includes myself.
That's the point, though. You need the struggle to keep your wits about you. You need appropriate stressors against the things that will help you grow and incorporate. By definition, norms put that insistence to the side so we can all find a baseline mutual understanding to move right along down. The more cliched you sound, if you don't have a reflex to pause and pull back, the more you're training yourself to believe and act on "just whatever it is you say." You're a circular and totalitarian monster by default.
Add to that, you may not have any real ability or willingness to recognize how many cliches you truly are under the spell of. This is what the unironic attempts around discussions of "privilege" do a generally miserable job of explaining. We all have privileges up and down hierarchies and competencies and dozens of other metrics we fluidly transition through all day. None are necessarily going to jar you awake or indicate there's anything worth examining on their own. Your cohort speaks your language. Your education taught you the "right" things. Your hobbies and interests conform to a person of your state and stature. "It's just how things are done."
This provokes people's insecurity as a standing state of a lack of readiness. When you poke people, you'll find they don't have "real" reasons for their behavior, beliefs, or words. It's all been handed to them. They're a series of unconscious forces they're more or less molding to because that's how our brains work. Your brain doesn't care what it forms a pattern around, just that it can do so. There's survival reasons for this, as well as a story of basic capacities to function regardless of the nature of the environment that's all-but certain to otherwise kill you if you can't figure it out.
I, routinely, provoke that insecurity. I've learned to show considerably less ambivalence about the person after they've been provoked, but it happens just as an ongoing and predictable course of my practice. This is my practice. I analyze. I pull back. I try to identify and speak to patterns, even if they're abstract, but certainly concrete enough for me to anticipate them and work with or around them. I know what kind of response I need built into what I can reliably anticipate is going to be yours. I know how to piss off and get ignored by "the internet," and I know how to illicit a thousand likes. What's important to me is that I'm speaking as closely to my real perspective or agenda as possible, and not being driven by an elusive brain chemical game subject to the mercy of algorithms or inarticulate desires to unhealthily fit in.
I want to fit in, but with an ever-winnowing type of person. I want to be less-wrong in the information I share, but not at the expense of someone's capacity to hear it or learn from it if I can't be bothered to temper how I say it. I want to grow in my capacity to accept people, but not at the expense of their obligation to better account for and relay their own experience. I've been told my whole life that I'm not allowed to expect the same things from other people as I might of myself. I think this is fundamentally wrong and condescending. I think I should maintain the expectation while doing everything in my power to reduce the barriers to any one person getting to whatever heights you think I've managed or been born with.
Here again, we stay lost. How do you remove barriers you can't see or might even be dispositionally against even acknowledging can exist altogether? How many "boot straps" types can even be bothered to acknowledge the impact of the villages they're living in? How many "deeply empathic" people would entertain pairing their sensibilities to the word "toxic" under any circumstance? It's pretty easy, now, for me to see when my forthright manner acts as too blunt an instrument. Can you see where your baseline disposition and sympathies cloud your judgment and capacity to act more accountably?
I feel like "accountable" itself is poorly understood. Just count! Count the disquieting contradictory thought. Count the intensity, frequency, and severity of the feelings. Count the attempts to mitigate or times you recognized forgoing to do so. Accountability doesn't mean wildly wielding an axe to bring down dramatic consequences upon everything and everyone that wasn't noticed until now. It's just asking yourself, over and over again, what can I control about this situation? What can I act on that speaks to my values and perception?
Let's take the real world example of me and Byron. I can't control his perception of what he thought he was doing in service to the kid. I can't control his awareness of any creeping mental health issues that might have arisen. I can't control whether or not he responds affirmatively to my new boundaries. I could control telling him what those boundaries were altogether, so I did. I can affirm that I'm only going to communicate along the lines that hopefully help the boundary conditions get met before I'm willing to get more colloquial or back to friendly. I can respect that he told me our friendship is "invaluable." I can't truthfully say I think we'd be using that word in a mutually understood way until I see practical, tangible effects upon my life that counteract where I feel I am as a direct result of my expression of friendship getting grossly taken advantage of.
Until then, I'll treat him like I would any client. Show me. I'll patiently-enough nod along, provide whatever perspective or reframe that I can, and remain open to demonstrated behavior changes. I don't have to throw myself back into his fire. If I'm going to claim a desire to protect and maintain genuine friendships or care for those in my life, I'm not going to treat myself with the ambivalence I see others suffer from themselves every day.
I choose that level of discomfort. I only mildly complain today, as it's gotten dramatically better, about doing things alone and never having anyone to hang out with. Byron was my go-to spot for killing time or hanging out. Not once in my free time have I said, "You know, fuck my boundary, let's hang out there!" How could I look myself in the mirror? How could I advocate for you establishing better boundaries with people in your life? How could I ignore what I would characterize as gleeful and willful defiance of doing "better" than playing out battered-wife excuse making? I will not play-act friendship with someone who can't be bothered to work as hard on themselves or in service to me as I've been for them. That's not the kind of friend I am, so it's not the one I'll let back in lightly.
What's normal, though? No matter how bad someone fucks you, forgive and pretend to forget, right? They're "family." Life's too short. It is what it is. They didn't mean to or weren't aware. That's not who they were in the past. Holding grudges is unhealthy. Your insecurities around being isolated or alone betray you. Your obligation to play along and appease your mutual network takes over. Whether any real healing or mutual understanding comes into the equation is perfectly mute because we need to just move right along and "love each other."
I watch that dance justify literally every conceivable level of atrocity. It is the exact same self-servicing motivatedly ignorant pattern. From your god's behavior right on down through your secret satisfaction and smirk at punishing your pet a little too aggressively just that one time. What you don't account for counts on you to carry out its consequences. And you are, every day, in big and small ways, and it's predictable and fixable, but only with stuff like this. You have to own it. You have to "yes, and" like it's an improv class. You have to perpetually entertain the thought that you are a misguided monster, but that fact doesn't have to dictate your behavior going forward nor need to illicit some special amount of stress or talking in circles.
Then you might have a prayer of genuinely helping anything, because you see how you're otherwise fucking it up within yourself. You can resist the insistence to move past meaningful details. You can point to specific repeatable demonstrations of your values. You can see other people responding to your confidence of relatable recognizable capacity, and not the shadow game of peacocking virtue signaling and mantra echoing.
I will spend thousands of dollars, use all my tools, and spend every waking hour I have trying to help. I think most people I've met would say the same thing. Who is actually doing so? And in service to whom? Do you trust what drives them? Do you see equitable put in get out dynamics? Or is it codepedence? Or insecurity? Or some noble story of infinite sacrifice and unconditional love?
I'm willing to set the conditions because I expect better than what's normal of and for myself. Were circumstances reversed, I wouldn't treat you as I've been treated, and most importantly, have the demonstrated behavior from myself to trust. I've spent the time and money. I've opened the conversations. I've challenged the mismanaged powers and privileges. I've risen to the challenge of creating circumstances that inch me closer to what I actually want or think is better versus what's expected of me. It never ends. Every second you pretend otherwise, you disappear, and I have to fit your abstract abdication into my specific constructs.

I'll propose why story telling through an anki deck could be more effective than word frequency.
TL;DR: Relevance of word frequency degrades quickly, stories aid learning and stories need words for things characters can touch and interact with. The low frequency of a word like "sword" is less important than its role for story telling.
Intro
I'm using Kaishi 1.5k deck to learn Japanese and it's impressive how they managed to put all the words in the deck together in coherent phrases.
A great effort was made to trim out the noise and stick just to the words on the deck. Well rounded deck, some solid work went into it. After a few sessions I could parse out example phrases that seemed impenetrable just days before.
However I've noticed a lot of the words are outside the realm of concrete. Words like "already" or "not at all", they aren't things like "apple" or "table". You can just close your eyes and imagine the shape and color of an apple, you can't do that with "already".
I suppose that's due to the deck sticking to the 1500 most common words. I think "most common" words are overrated.
The shortcomings of sticking to building a deck from most common words in a language:

• Reason 1 is because a lot of the most common words are also multi-purpose words and so are context dependent or serve functions to add context. A "concrete" word like apple is the grounding to which more abstract words like "already" are anchored to. These "abstract" words need something solid to stick to, which IMO helps committing them to memory.
  
• Reason 2 is because we can't really start creating our own phrases phrases about our lives when all the words we know don't really describe anything in the real world. I think having the tools to start talking and thinking about ourselves is great for self esteem learning a language as well as to help the learner eventually approach graded readers.
  

Graded readers will often start with the most familiar everyday situations common across different countries.

• Lastly, reason 3 is that the way word frequency happens in a language makes it so the 100th most common word isn't much less common than the 50th most common word.

Word frequency in a language happens like this:
Let's say the most common frequent word in a text appears 370 times. The 50th most frequent word is likely to appear 370/50 times (7.4 instances), the 100th will appear 370/100 times (3.7 instances). Since there's no such thing as .4 of a word, let's round it to one word appearing 7 times and another 4 times. Numerically one is nearly double the other, realistically the difference isn't noticeable when you consider the restraints of our memory.
It's even worse when you realize even the most common word is going to be something like less than 7% of the whole text. In English that's "the". So if "the" appears 370 times, the text likely has 5692 words, that's like 5 issues of a comic book. Across five issues you see the 50th most common word appearing 7 times.
In text with tens of thousands of words this difference is meaningless.
The difference degrades even further when we compare 500th to 1000th most frequent word. The 500th most frequent word is likely to be 0.002% of a body a text, the 1000th most frequent will be 0.001%. Sure, one is TWICE as much as the other, but they're both so rare we can't really tell the difference anymore.
This is a weird surprising (but consistent) observation called Zipf's law
An alternative to most common words
Common words are useful, but I guess they aren't as important as their rank in a language. So what to pick then?
Choosing the most common words is definitely the most neutral and objective way to compile words. But the real world is not about neutral and objective situations. The news, entertainment, conversations online, none of that is neutral and objective.
Stories aren't neutral and objective.
One aspect of learning that I've never seen in an Anki deck is story telling.
Stories are a natural mnemonic and help build context which helps learning. Stories can also have emotional aspects to them. Story and emotion are two great enhancers to learning. I say this as someone who's been teaching English as a second language for a decade now.
You can't tell a story without a setting, and a setting demands that we use words for concrete things. Things we touch and interact with, people, professions, places, etc.
A trade-off is in order: abandon some of the most common words, replace them with words to help build a story. The benefit of the trade-off is creating context and emotional impact, which I believe far outweighs learning the most common words.
I think a nice Anki deck could build a story into it, using some of the most common words yes, but also using words that describe a place and real things. The story doesn't need to be told linearly. Bits and pieces here and there that eventually are pieced together by the user and build a cohesive story.
Why not just set the Anki story into some fantasy word, be not afraid to use words that are borderline useless in real life like "sword" or "tiger" as the grounding, and mix up the most common words along the way.
Why not take the story of an already existing movie or TV show and make a deck out of it. Not like a deck with words that appear on Breaking Bad, but a beginners deck that just happens to use Breaking Bad as scaffolding for story telling.
If I were to make an English Anki deck I'd probably use words that are often part of song lyrics or TV dramas. Maybe I'd write in a shoddy crime show of my own into the deck. Maybe I'd use just use The Sopranos.
"This is Tony Soprano", says on card. "Tony has two children", says another.
Either that or go with the setting I suggested earlier, for familiar real life situations common in graded readers.

I have a masters degree, but for reasons too long to get into, my plan of pursuing a PhD fell apart and a large opportunity was squandered. I graduated with $50k in loan debt and limited skill and experience. I don't regret it, as it's gotten me places. However, I still don't know what I want to do.
I am 29 and turn 30 this year. I feel like I'm at an age where employers aren't as inclined to take a chance on you. Moreover, almost all of my resume is scientific research, academia, and such. I am just now learning how to pitch what transferable skills I have. Though my work history is spotty, with my longest recent stint being 4 months (again, too long a story to tell).
I am slowly getting an idea of what i want to do, but I still lack a concrete plan. I just haven't had enough exposure to know what I want to do aside from a desk job and something centered around writing. I want to get out of my current animal research job and into grant writing or human factors research, but it has been stiff competition.
I spent too much time getting stoned or sitting in my head to really think all this through. Most of my classmates had plans for what they wanted. Mine was abstract rather than concrete. I just don't know what to do
I have something to offer, but I lack discipline and experience. I can teach myself skill, but I can fully bridge the experience gap on my own. I don't have 5-10 years of experience. I don't wallow like I used to, but it does feel paralyzing

Me and Lila always carved dozens of jack o’ lanterns every October, so they’d absolutely saturate our lawn on Halloween night. It was our thing. But looking back on it, now that I’ve lost her, I just feel bad for the pumpkins. I almost relate to them, somehow. The way they were carved up, had everything of substance inside of them torn out, and left as hollow, rotting shells with forced smiles.
Needless to say, I didn’t cope with her death well. I didn’t want to cope with it. I wanted the world to drown in the black sludge of my grief. I loathed the people I saw going about their lives, unaware that the world had already ended the moment Lila died. The Earth shouldn’t keep spinning. Life shouldn’t go on. Not without her.
Even my relatives bringing me along on a trip to Kauai only made it worse. The most gorgeous place on Earth, and it made me sick with hatred. Nothing that beautiful deserved to exist if Lila wasn’t ever going to get to see it. It wasn’t fair.
I thought I’d never enjoy or care about anything again. Then I discovered media preservation.
It started with taking some of Lila’s old VHS tapes to a video repair place to fix some issues with the footage before it’s digitized. The job fascinated me. In a universe based on entropy, where everything inevitably fades away and is forgotten… restoring something lost is like snatching it from the jaws of death, right? Like flipping the bird to the universe and its so-called ‘natural order’. People die, but information doesn’t have to.
Now, it doesn’t matter how small — be it some god-awful plug-and-play licensed game, or a cereal commercial from 80’s — it’s my mission to recover it in as high a quality as I’m able, and make sure it’s freely available online for as long as possible.
A couple weeks ago, I came across a big haul. Four boxes of old VHS tapes offered up on E-Bay for dirt cheap. Most of the tapes were just recordings of Cheers episodes already preserved in higher qualities, but one Maxell E-240 caught my interest.
First of all, I’d never seen one so melted. Sure, sometimes they were left in an attic too long, and the colors and audio start to degrade. But this one looked like it had survived a house fire. It was covered in soot and the smell of smoke, and had the overall shape of a chocolate bar left out in the sun a little too long.
Second was the label, which read in neat sharpie: ᴇᴘɪꜱᴏᴅᴇ 4,679,329 ᴍᴀʀ 8 2035.
The casing was so disfigured, I had to bust it apart just pull out the tapes and respool them in a fresh cassette. I tried to iron out the creases in the tape as best I could, but I had no illusions about it accomplishing much — the mylar surface had been irreparably warped in places by whatever fire had half-melted the thing.
Imagine my despair at the sight of that dreaded ‘ɴᴏ ꜱɪɢɴᴀʟ’. I could clearly see the tape wasn’t blank, yet no amount of adjusting the tracking or trying different TVs or VCRs accomplished anything. Just as I was about to give up, though, the thing just suddenly started playing properly at the exact instant the clock struck 3 AM, as if it had only now decided to work. My all-nighter had paid off.
I didn’t dwell on the fact that this ‘miracle fix’ had been impossible. If I’d had any sense, I’d have torn the horrid thing out of my VCR and buried it beneath holy ground. Instead, fool I was, I sat down and watched.
At first, the thing seemed unwatchable. The audio was so distorted that the show’s theme song emerged as a low, crackling, staticky wail that made my head throb, and the logo was completely indistinguishable through the flickering and interference. I thought it was a lost cause for a moment. But then a figure appeared and cleared away the static, like Moses parting the Red Sea.
It was the sight of the show’s host that hooked me. He was just… perfect. Perfect in every way. I knew it just looking at him. Infinitely handsome and likable and charismatic, and he always said the exact perfect thing. The only issue is, I don’t remember a single thing about him now, in the same way you can’t remember a dream that seemed so clear to you while you were experiencing it. He just appears in my memory as this abstract blur in a sharp suit. Yet at the time, I was awestruck, even before he said a single word.
I can’t even remember a word he said. It was like he was speaking another language, one I felt as opposed to heard. I’ll try and transcribe it as best I can into words, but know that it’s only a pathetic imitation.
“... for another night of laughs, prizes, and fun for the whole family, with your host, #####!” I noticed that the audio and visual distortion seemed to suddenly intensify the instant he said his name, rendering it completely illegible. Idiot I was, I figured that was a coincidence. “Tonight is a night of celebration, folks, because thanks to the support of loyal viewers like you, we have just been approved for, get this: two hundred thousand more seasons!”
The “live studio audience” went wild with applause. I put that in scare quotes because, as far as I could tell, besides the host, the studio seemed completely empty. As if he was standing on a plain white stage that extended outwards into infinite darkness on all sides.
“For those just joining us, the game here is simple…” He explained that this was some sort of a trivia show. Every time a guest got an answer wrong, it brought them a little closer to some sort of unspecified ‘punishment’. And if they got it right? He smirked. “Well, they get to delay the inevitable.”
I wondered what he meant by ‘inevitable’. I didn’t have to wonder long.
The host gestured to a curtain that hadn’t been there moments ago, which raised to reveal a middle-aged man. You know the type — bushy mustache, gray hair, round-rimmed glasses. Kind of guy you’d have doing your plumbing. He couldn’t look any more out of place stood up and restrained in that — what the hell is that?
I recognized that metal coffin-looking thing from a medieval torture museum I went to once. The iron maiden. The lid hung open, countless long, needle-like blades poking inwards, threaten to poke a million new holes in him if it was shut.
His situation was not lost on him. “Where… where am I? What the hell is this!?”
“Oh, lucky guess!” The host ‘joked’. More canned laughter. “I know you always loved watching those trivia shows, Malcolm? Weren’t you always sitting there, grinding your teeth, seething that it wasn’t fair? That you should be the one up on stage, winning big?”
The man paused. Even he seemed mesmerized by the unreal perfection of the host before him. “I… this is a… game show?”
“All you have to do is answer a few questions! Think you can handle that, Malcolm?” He pulled out a cue card without waiting for an answer. “And our first question! What were you doing the night of February 18th, 1998?”
The man seemed baffled. “Just… sat on my couch watching the NFL, I think? I’m not sure how I’m supposed to remember —“
He let out a startled squeal as a horrid buzzer sounded. On cue, the lid slid a third of the way closed, making him flinch. “Oooh, I’m afraid that’s the wrong answer, Frank! But you know what? I’ll give you one more chance. What were you —“
“Following a girl home!” The man cried out. “F-from the bar. There, are you happy?”
“Cor-rect!” The canned audience began cheering! “Such honesty! Now, our second question: just what were you carrying while you followed her?”
He hesitated for a little too long. And then the buzzer sounded again, and the lid slid so near to closing that its blades began poking uncomfortably against his skin. He tried to press himself against the back of the maiden as well as his restraints would allow. “Jesus! Okay! A knife, a knife!”
“Awww, if only you’d said that just a second earlier!” Another big question. “Our third question: why, Malcolm? Why did you do it?”
That set Malcolm off. He started thrashing, clawing, screaming. “Let me out of this thing, you maniac! You can’t do this to me! Do you know who I am? Is this some sort of sick joke? My lawyers will have your head for this, you—“
And then the buzzer. All of a sudden, the lid slammed shut full-force, and the man was utterly silenced save for an unnatural, drawn-out wheeze. “Another wrong answer, Malcolm! I’m afraid I was looking for: ‘because if I can’t have her, no one can’!”
I admit it. I laughed. Out of shock more than anything. How was this allowed on TV? I took it as some sort of dark comedy show, and it was kind of satisfying to see that freaky character get his comeuppance. Still, there was something unnerving to me, seeing the man’s eyes through the openings in the maiden. Wide and red and terrified. They just looked a little… too real.
But the maiden disappeared as quickly as it came, before I could dwell on it too much. “Oh, envy! Definitely one of my favorite sins.” More laughter. “Stay tuned, folks! We’ve still got a night of fun and games in store for you! But first… how’s about a word from our sponsors?”
Cut to a corporate logo which I again couldn't recognize.
“This segment was made possible by Buer Health, which has recently announced a brilliant new initiative to protect our citizens from skin cancer by removing their skin completely.”
The camera cut to a massive industrial building, resembling a solid concrete cube around 50 meters in width and height. Its surface bore arcane symbols etched using carvings of wailing, tormented faces. The host would occasionally be rendered inaudible by a deafening metallic scraping from within, though he didn’t seem to notice. The only protrusion from the building’s cubic shape was a single smokestack, belching a scarlet red smoke into the atmosphere. A queue of gaunt figures waited at the entrance, herded and coerced by their grim overseers, and there were no words to describe the procession of scarlet ghouls limping out the building’s other end.
“Owing to the nonlinearity of time, the brand new Grand Skinpeeling Machine has spontaneously appeared several years before construction deadlines, and indeed, before it was even conceived of by anyone in our timeline. People have rushed all the way from Malebolge just to try this miracle of technology out on opening day, and so far, the reviews have been stellar!”
He shoved his microphone in the face of a shambling thing that could only scarcely be called a human. Tatters of flesh clung to its exposed musculature, blowing in the wind. Its eyes were the only hint of color in that sea of bloody red, and they were wide, white and terrified. The thing screamed and wailed for as long as it could before the last tendons connecting its jaw to its face snapped, and it was left to choke and gurgle.
“An amazing wail! The results speak for themselves, folks. The Grand Skinpeeling Machine is a hit!”
So far, I was still laughing along and having a good time. The sight of the next ‘guest’, however, started making me nervous.
It was an old lady.
She couldn’t be a day younger than sixty, the sort of sweet elderly woman who in a just world would be cooking chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren in a comfy cottage somewhere. But here she was, tied to a metal chair, eyes wide, shaking like a leaf. Unlike the last contestant, she seemed to know exactly what was happening.
“In exchange for our loving endorsement, they’ve agreed to loan us one of their star employees. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for: the Liqisma!”
Something slunk from the darkness far behind her — or perhaps it’d be more apt to say that the darkness birthed it whole-cloth. It was like a living shadow, and it took my eyes a moment to register what I was even seeing.
How do I even begin describing this creature? I could say it looked almost human, or at least like something that may have been human long ago. Or I could start with its skin, which was all black and shiny as latex and seemingly smooth on first glance, but if you looked closer you’d realize it was covered in a million tiny reptilian scales, almost like a shark. Its head was a bald man’s, utterly devoid of any distinguishing features, like the basic stock template for a human being. It was notable only for a complete lack of pupils and irises, its eyes a pure white.
Its body defied basic biology in so many key ways, I had to stare it at for what felt like an eternity just to wrap my mind around its physiology. It was at least five or six meters long, by my estimate, composed of multiple human torsos stacked one on top of the other like segments of a centipede, each melding with the ones around it at the waist and shoulders. Each torso sported a pair of short, stubby arms that propelled it with terrifying grace. It ended with a pair of human legs, perpetually bent on their knees, beneath a ‘tail’ that looked more like its coccyx was poking free from its body.
The old last could clearly hear it, and kept futilely trying to turn her head around enough to get a peek at what stood behind her. I mouthed uselessly, don’t. You don’t want to know.
“Glad you could join us again, Miss Wethersby! Judging by our ratings last week, you seemed to have been a fan favorite!”
Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear it below the static. “Oh, God. Please, why won’t you people let me go? I’ve told you, I’ve never done anything, never hurt anybody. There must be some sort of—”
He waved a hand over her, and it seemed to forcefully snap her mouth shut. “Please, Miss Wethersby, save your breath for our questions!” Another cue card. “Your first question, my friend: where did you and your husband buy your first home?”
She had to think about it for a long time. Eventually, she cried out, “Alabama! Tuscaloosa, Alabama!”
“Ding ding ding! Why, you’re already doing better than our first contestant! Next question: what breed of dog was your childhood pet?”
She had a pained look on her face as she thought. Eventually, a timer started ticking down. It wasn’t visible, so it wasn’t clear how much time she had left exactly, but the sound it made got more shrill and high-pitched with every second. “Miss Wethersby, need I remind you that we have a time limit on this show?”
A tear ran down her cheek. “I… I keep telling you people, I don’t know. I have dementia, I can’t remember, please—”
That buzzer again. “I’m afraid that was the wrong answer! Liqisma?” The old lady shuddered at the sounds of hundreds of feet drawing a little closer to her. “Now, your first grandchild. What did he look like? What color were his eyes? His hair?”
She was crying harder now, like it hurt her that she couldn’t remember something so dear to her. “I told you I can’t remember! Why are you doing this to me!?”
“If you don’t remember them, why would they remember you?” The host mocked as the buzzer sounded, and the beast drew a little closer. “Really, do you believe they still even think about you? Or do you think they’re glad that the old bag of bones isn’t there sucking up their inheritance?”
This went on for… God, it could have been an hour. I was glued to the screen all the while, frozen with terror, praying for this nightmare to just end, for her to make it out okay somehow. He poured over every little detail of the life she lived and the people she loved, delighting in how little of it she could still recall.
And the thing grew closer, and closer… until she finally felt multiple pairs of hands resting upon her shoulders. The thing was looming over her now, and a long, black tongue a few feet in length emerged from its mouth and ran trails of dark saliva over the back of her head. She looked broken down, eyes raw from crying, and I could tell by the dampness of her dress that she’d wet herself.
“Now, Miss Wethersby, our time here has been fun, but I do believe it is time for our final question. Tell me, what is the name… of your only son?”
She couldn’t even answer anymore. She just stared ahead, like her mind was a million miles away. He cackled as the buzzer sounded one final time, and threw his cue cards aside. “Thank you for playing, Miss Wethersby. Better luck next time.”
I would say the thing unhinged its jaw like a snake, but that’d be an understatement. The way the thing’s face malformed and wrinkled and stretched as it opened its maw, it no longer looked even remotely human. Its jaws must have parted at least thirty centimeters apart, revealing a second, pharyngeal pair of jaws that lashed out and gripped the woman’s skull, pulling her headlong into that darkness.
I could hear bones crunching and snapping as its throat constricted down around her body, peristaltic muscles compacting her into a meat slurry, bit by bit. Yet she just wouldn’t die. Even as her skull and upper body were already crushed and compacted, organs and muscles pressed into mulch, she still kicked her legs, twitched her fingers, let out a gurgling that must have been some attempt at screaming. She was squirming even as the beast snapped its jaw shut around the last of her, condemning her to whatever torments awaited her inside the creature.
And all the while, that horrible laughter. “Don’t worry, folks! She’ll be back next week! And the next. And the next…”
Needless to say, I wasn’t having fun anymore. In fact, I had to turn away and fight the urge to throw up. I stood, about to turn the TV off and —
“Ah, ah, ah! Don’t touch that dial, now!” I froze. There was something chilling about the way he said that, staring right into the screen as if reacting to what I was doing. I hated that grin on his face. “The real show is just beginning.”
And with the barely restrained excitement of a child on Christmas morning, he yanked back another curtain, and I recognized everything.
I recognized that crappy bootleg knockoff Always Sunny in Philadelphia jacket that was so gaudy and terrible it instantly became her favorite thing in her wardrobe. I recognized those subtle hints of slight acne she disguised as fake freckles. I recognized the way her gray eyes would remind me of those overcast mornings at the beach at Hilton Head and pointing out all the cannonball jellyfish washed up on the sands. I recognized that tattoo of the name ʀᴏᴄᴋʏ, how I’d held her all night long as she cried into my shirt after her childhood cat had died.
It was Lila.
I shuddered, gasped, fell from my seat as if I’d been punched in the stomach and the air had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be real. I was dreaming right now. I must be. I just had to wake up.
But I couldn’t wake up. Nothing I could do dispelled the sight of her curled up in that… that thing. That bronze statue of a bull, horns jutting on either side of a head that roaring silently up at the heavens, all while the love of my life was locked in its hollowed out belly, visible only through a pane of glass. I could hear her cry out in shock at where she’d found herself, and every whimper felt like it drove a knife through my chest.
The host soaked in the moment. It was ecstasy for him, the suffering of it all. He stared dead into the camera like he was looking right at me as she called, “What is this? Where am I?”
“Why, I have good news, my dear Lila! You’re exactly where every American dreams of being: you’re on TV.” He pointed to the camera. “And we have a very special guest in the audience tonight. Your very own beloved Jackson!”
I shuddered, hearing my own name ooze from his fetid lips. His façade of perfection was slipping, and there was something so profoundly ugly beneath it. Her eyes snapped to the camera, confused, despairing. “Jackson? Baby? What — what’s happening? What is this?”
I don’t know, I thought, gripping the sides of the TV so hard my knuckles turned white, but I’m going to get you out of there, baby. I’m going to find whoever did this and I’m going to bury them all so far beneath that studio that they’ll never-
“I’m afraid Jackson hasn’t joined us quite yet, my dear. But if you truly love him, surely you’ll give him a show to remember, won’t you?” He taunted her. “All I want, after all, is to ask you a few questions! In fact, I’ll offer you a special deal: get even a single answer right, and I’ll let you go free! But get one wrong and, well…”
On cue, a fire was lit beneath her. Small, smoldering for now, but she whimpered as she noticed the heat. We both realized in that instant what this was. By now, I was screaming things I can’t repeat here, and slamming my hands against the TV screen as if I could reach through and save her.
She bit her lip and acquiesced. Not like she had any room to argue. The host grinned and readied a cue card. “Your first question: where are you, Lila?”
“I… I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”
“You do know, Lila. You know exactly where you are.” He smirked at her. “Here’s a free hint: what’s the last thing you remember, before you woke up here?
She thought about it… and choked back a sob, visibly shaking as the realization slowly settled in. “But… but why? I… I…”
The horrible wail of the buzzer cut her off. “Oooh, too bad! I’m afraid you’ve run out of time!”
Seemingly as if on its own, the fire doubled in size. Sparks licked the belly of the bronze bull, and began to ever-so-slowly heat the surface. She pawed around in the tight confines, searching for any reprieve from the scalding heat all around her as the metal grew hot like it’d been left out in the sun on a summer’s day. “Please! Oh, God, let me out of this thing! It hurts! It hurts!”
The host seemed to breathe in her pain as if stealing a moment’s indulgence. “Now that there is no doubt about where you are, my dear, let us proceed to the second question.” He switched to his next card. “Did you believe in God, in the end?”
“O-of course!” She pled her case as if she was being tried in court. “My entire life… every day I gave to the poor, helped the sick, did whatever I could to honor Hi-“
“I’m afraid you misunderstood my question. I asked, did you believe in him at the end? The very moment your pitiful little life was snuffed out?”
“I always believed! I’d never forsake Him!”
“Yes, yes, I know. You lived a good and holy life, didn’t you?” He cackled. “But what of the very end? You and your little husband were so excited to deliver your first little baby boy. But o, tragedy! It all went wrong, didn’t it? Your precious little boy didn’t make it through childbirth… and you followed closely behind.”
“That whole business with the botched pregnancy, it was… what do you call it? Ah, yes. A ‘test of faith’. And I’m afraid you failed. In your final moments, you watched the light fade from your child’s eyes, and you assumed — wisely, in my humble opinion — that no ‘kind’ and ‘loving’ God would allow something like that to happen.” He laughed. “Funny how after a lifetime of dutiful service, all it takes is one little mistake at the end… to bring you here. To us.”
I’d never seen such depths of despair in a person’s eyes. Such emptiness. Like with every word, he’d been scooping out another piece of her until she was hollow. And then that buzzer roared again, more shrill than ever, and I could barely see her little window through the smoke and flames. The belly of the bull was turning orange in places, and I could hear her flesh start to sizzle like meat on a grill. There are no words for the noises she made. No words at all.
“And our last, final question,” he continued. “What were your last words to your poor, beloved Jackson?”
“I love you!” I called out the answer. Bloody fingerprints stained the TV screen from my slamming my hands against it, as I screamed the answer over and over. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” At some point, I forgot that there was ever a question. I was just screaming it at her as if hoping that she could hear it, that it could bring her a modicum of comfort in that place.
The buzzer sounded again. I couldn't bring myself to look. All I could hear was the roaring of the bull, and the steam rising from its bronze nostrils.
The curtain fell. Silence drowned the sound. The host dropped all pretense that he hadn’t been speaking directly to me. “Now, Jackson. You just might be one of my new favorite audience members this show had ever had. I know this must have been hard for you. But if you’ll just stay tuned, I have one more show I know you’re certain to love!”
I didn’t bother to touch the remote. After all, nothing could be worse than what I’d just seen, right?
Wrong. Horror wracked me as the curtain rose, and I saw the man chained to a chair. I pulled away like a caveman witnessing fire, cringing and stuttering, face wet with sweat. It was the sort of fear that worked its way into your bones like a bad chill, that left you shaking, teeth chattering.
It was me.
An older me, sure. But not by much. Ten years, maybe. A gaunt and hollow version of me, one twisted by ten years of depression and hard drugs. But it was unmistakable.
His eyes widened as he recognized the host. “Oh — oh God, God please no! It can’t be — oh Christ, let me out of this chair, you —“
“Come, now! We wouldn’t want to use the lord’s name in vain, would we? I mean, that would be a sin!” The host laid a hand on the other me’s shoulder. “It may have been a few years since you watched our program, but I’m sure you remember the rules, don’t you, old friend?”
The other me was wordless, on the verge of hyperventilating, just as I was. The host was giddy with delight. “Now! Our first and only question is one I’m sure our viewer will be very interested in: what sins, exactly, do you think landed you here?”
The other me tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat. I could see it in his eyes. The years of self-destruction, the bitter hopelessness, the whirlpool of nihilism and vice and decay. The suffocating depths of a man. The darkness. How could he put it into words?
The sound of the buzzer was like a pig’s squeal. “Mmm, I’m afraid that our viewer is going to have to figure that out for himself! In the meantime, your punishment? Well, we wouldn’t want to spoil anything…”
The curtains slowly began to fall just as a couple other of those black, grotesque monstrosities emerged from the darkness. The curtain covered them all before I could get a good look at their obscene, twisted, asymmetrical figures. All I could hear was the crunching, the sound of skin tearing like paper, the screaming that went on for longer and louder than a human throat or vocal chords could endure.
The image and audio were beginning to distort, glitch, burn away. The tapes were physically melting as they played. My VCR was starting to overheat, sparks pouring from its front panel. The host voice jumped around in tone, his voice fading into the static blur as the tapes bubbled and boiled and distorted. “But, my friends, I’m afraid that concludes tonight’s episode of our show! So, with a final farewell to our dear, beloved viewer, Jackson…”
Just before the image melted away, the camera seemed to jump forward until his face filled the screen, his eyes piercing into mine as he cackled in that singsong voice.
“See you sooooon~”

Si: earth, physical world, phenomenal world, form, matter, material, actuality, concrete, quantity
Ni: heaven, spiritual world, foundation, concept, ether, potentiality, abstract, quality, spirit
Ether (Ni) condensed, is Earth (Si). Quality expressing in the Quantity. The spiritual in the physical.
Ne—Se (the spectrum of difference in quality of form) show the Ni (potential, quality, ethereal) expressing in the Si (world of forms).
Ne is qualitative form. Se is quantitative form.
Ni, the Potential (the spiritual) —Si, the Actualized Potential (the physical).
Si, the physical world is in a spectrum; Ne—to—Se (Ne- the more qualitative physicality and Se-the more quantitative physicality).
Ne is Se, Se is Ne, difference is the quality of Si, either it displays more Ni or it is lacking in Ni.
Ni doesn’t exist in the physical world. It expresses itself in the Si. Ni users are in this sense Si users but lacking quantity, earth, and boundary, thus showcasing more quality, ether and expansiveness.
Si is Physicality (The Whole Universe); from the most visible (Se) till the least visible (Ne). Physicality is in a spectrum of perceptibility according to consciousness of the observer.
Densest physicality (Se), reduced in quantitativeness (Si), is Te, world of astral phenomena (super-physical). Emotion, desires, feelings are here.
Te reduced in quantitativeness (Si), is Ti, super-physical world of mental phenomena.
Reduction in quantitativeness is an increase in vibration or quality. Quantity is redundant with increased vibration, quality makes up for it. The super-physical is just as real as the physical, but according to the consciousness of the observer is his capacity for belief.
Fe is the qualitative aspect of Te. Te is quantitative even though less material than Se.
Te inclines towards external organisation to achieve— Fe, internal harmony (qualitative). This is an example of: the physical completing the spiritual or the quantitative existing for the sake of the qualitative. [The Quantitative does not exist for itself, it displays and grounds the attributes, the descriptions, the qualities, ie. The Qualitative. The physical completes the spiritual, it exists not for its own sake.]
Fe inclines towards spiritual (emotional) organisation and harmony, even if it has to upset systems, methods and guidelines (quantitative Te).
Fi is the qualitative aspect of Ti. Direct knowledge, innate understanding makes rationalisation and argumentation (quantitative) redundant. Knowledge (data, information) is required only to sustain and carry the underlying meaning and understanding (the qualitative), the letters are of no special worth. Fi is intuitive grasp, value-based, assessing the quality of something. Ti is logical deduction, systematic, and a means to (Fi) assessing the worth of something. Ti is quantitative, it must reach the qualitative (Fi) end and not get caught in endless philosophizing.
Everything we see is physicality, form-world, quantitative, the creation (Si). All quantitative things express qualities. Quantity is the dis-charge of the Quality. Physical is the display, the working out, the discharging aspect of the Spiritual, the charging aspect.
Ni (the spiritual or the Command), is the basis of all Creation (Si, all existence). The Command is the spiritual aspect to the Creation; Si (the physical aspect). The spiritual is the blueprint. Ni is the quality in quantity (Si). Si (form) expresses the Ni (soul). The physical expresses and completes the spiritual. The Creation exists because it is the Command (of God).
The spiritual is the cause, the physical is the effect. The spiritual is the expressive but it requires a grounding for its unfolding. The physical is the inert, and the ground for spirituality to work itself. The physical only exists as the materialisation of the spiritual. The actual exists as a realisation of a potential, not as a realisation of nothingness. Quantity (physical) needs something behind it to display what it is. These are the properties, attributes, descriptions; it is the Quality (spiritual) that is behind all manifestation. Existence (Si) is not an accident, it is a meaningful depiction. Physical world is the externalization of the spiritual. Physicality is materialisation. Of what; — of the Spiritual.
It may be difficult to grasp these things initially, because the reader must supply from his own understanding the meaning of the things he is reading. It is more like a belief system. The nature of truth (the spiritual) is that is requires no proof, it validates and does not require validation. The spiritual is manifest, the obvious and self-evident.

When nonsense makes perfect sense. (5 stars)
Is life ordinary, unexciting and boring? That’s what 10 year-old Milo, main character of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth thought, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Until a mysterious package arrived in the mail, containing “one genuine turnpike tollbooth", which Milo assembles. He finds himself driving through it into a fantastic land of words and numbers. This land features two main cities: Dictionopolis (marked by a love of words) and Digitopolis (marked by a love of numbers). That’s the basic premise of this beloved classic book from 1961, which has stood the test of time, and will thrill readers today just as it did when it was first published.
In Dictionopolis, Milo is faced with the peculiarities of the English language, as abstract words turn into concrete individuals. He meets the Spelling Bee (who is always spelling words), a Which called Faintly Macabre (who is not so wicked), and the Whether man (who says its more important to know whether there will be weather, rather than what the weather will be.) At the word market place, he has the opportunity to buy a bag of pronouns, and letters of the alphabet.
After an encounter with the police Officer Short Shrift, Milo ends up in the palace of king Azaz. Here he meets the cabinet, composed of a duke who makes mountains out of molehills, a minister who splits hairs, a count who makes hay while the sun shines, an earl who leaves no stone unturned, and an undersecretary who hangs by a thread. Dictionopolis is inhabited by strange fellows such as these and the unforgettable Kakofonous A. Dischord (Doctor of Dissonance), as well as a strange places such as the “Island of Conclusions” (which you get to, of course, by jumping).
Juster’s word play is so skilful and delightful, that at first you suspect that this wordy excellence will be impossible to match when Milo visits Digitopolis, the city of numbers. But not so - the fun keeps right on going. Whereas Dictionopolis had offered food like synonym buns and required banqueters to eat their words, Digitopolis offers a diet with things like subtraction stew (the more you eat, the hungrier you get).
Numbers are so essential, Milo discovers, to measure the height of high hopes, and also because narrow escapes come in all different widths. And as for the smallest number, it is infinitely small that it is kept in a box so small you can’t see it, in a dresser so small you can’t see it, in a house so small you can’t see it. Milo tries to travel along a long line to the Land of Infinity, but is told that he probably won’t like the land, and that “infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.”
With his two faithful companions - the watchdog Tock (who “ticks” instead of “tocks”, and whose body is the face of a watch”), and the Humbug – Milo goes on a perilous journey to rescue the two lost princesses, Rhyme and Reason. As you would expect, without Rhyme and Reason the lands of words and numbers have become rather chaotic. There are a variety of obstacles and enemies on the way, however, including the Everpresent Wordsnatcher (who literally takes the words right out of their mouths).
To rescue the princesses, Milo and his company need to travel to the Mountain of Ignorance. Logically, the creatures who live in Ignorance are rather dangerous. But Milo manages to outwit them, rescue Rhyme and Reason, and returns through the tollbooth back into his real land.
Comparisons with Lewis Carroll’s legendary Alice in Wonderland are inevitable and perfectly appropriate. The Phantom Tollbooth is an award winning classic that will please adults as well as children for generations to come. Juster demonstrates a superb ability to make the abstract concrete, and to produce an unending stream of puns and plays on words and concepts.
Yet unlike Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Juster’s world is not nonsensical, but makes a great deal of sense. Words and numbers are dealt with strictly, literally, and logically. Because he has created a world that is new and apparently nonsensical, and yet one that plainly makes perfect logical sense, Juster’s world is exceedingly understandable and enjoyable. For instance the fact that a Spelling Bee is a buzzing bee that actually spells is a fantastic notion, and yet one that makes more sense than what we’ve always thought a spelling bee was. This is a nonsense world that makes perfect sense.
Yet Milo returns from this world as a changed individual. He has gained a new insight and appetite for the joys of words and numbers. Here's a few tantalizing quotes to whet your own appetite. About expectations: "Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations..." About a box filled with words: "Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places."
Juster also shares insights about real life. From the Terrible Trivium (“demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort and monster of habit”) Milo learns that by doing enough unimportant things you’ll never get to where you’re going.
So it is that when Milo exits the tollbooth, he has a renewed perspective on life, and is no longer the boy who didn’t know what to do with himself. The tollbooth has changed him. When he says goodbye to the tollbooth, he says hello to the real world, a world awaiting discovery and exploration.
But the phantom tollbooth has a very real capacity to have the same effect on you the reader. If you are a bored little boy like Milo, this book might just change your outlook on life! And if you already love puns, and plays on words and numbers, you’ll love this book anyway. Be sure of one thing: a journey through the phantom tollbooth is thoroughly enjoyable!

Don't tell me to go in the function they aren't clear to me

Hi, guys. I'm really sorry if this comes across as annoying, or whingey, or anything else, but I'd appreciate some help here. I don't really know what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it, but I am. Alright. By the way, if the formatting's funky, it's because I don't typically post on Reddit (or anywhere), so I'm sorry for that as well.
I'll list some basic info; I'm thirteen, I'm a male, I have no diagnosed mental disorders and my upbringing is still ongoing. Early childhood was somewhat rocky. Lax, though. Maybe too lax. I felt neglected at times. I learned to deal with it. :)
I used to think I was an INFP. I still do, to some extent, but I don't know.
More than anything else, I don't want to be selfish. Selfish, or self-absorbed, or self-centred, or anything related to that family. I want to be anything but selfish. Selfless, altruistic, benevolent, giving and never taking. Never desiring. I don't deserve to take, nor want. It's my place to never impede and never impose. Otherwise, I'm sickeningly hedonistic, an ugly, beastly glutton who takes and takes and leaves no room for others to interject. All I want is to be invisible until needed, then I'll perform my little song and dance for people and they'll be (I hope, at least) content and my feelings don't matter. They never have, and I stifle them until I'm alone, then it seems like all I really do is brew in them until I've rendered myself miserable.
I've always been the tearful type, y'know. Someone squishes a spider, I cry. Someone raises their voice a few decibels too many for me to handle, I cry. I think about the world and I weep, because I'm one meagre unimportant person on a planet of 8 billion and there's nothing I can do to save everyone from pain. Therefore, I cry. I am often upset. I loathe the feeling. All I do is cry, then attempt to be of service—attempt to be *needed*, then cry some more when I inevitably mess up and it feels like the world hates me. I want to change. It's all just too much, I muse, but then I'm aware that I'm thinking about myself again. I can't stop thinking about myself and I hate it. I hate that 'I' is a pronoun I use so often. I just want to help. I wish there was some place I could go where I wouldn't be able to disturb anyone or push my problems onto them.
But, it's 'oh well'. I'll continue to do the best I can till I can be worthy, however long that may take.
Enough of that, sorry. I daydream a lot. Like, most of the time I'm awake is still spent dreaming. Usually about the future, or stories I plan to write, things I'd like to do in the following whenever. Either that or I'm stewing in my own thoughts, thinking over the world. It pains me to know people ail. I wish I could take everything away, even if it meant bearing their struggles on my own shoulders. What I'm trying to say is that my mind is nearly never in the present. I do dwell on the past a bit. Situations involving me that may have appeared minimally embarrassing when first experienced are magnified tenfold in my head weeks later. I manage to let them go after a while, sometimes.
The future scares me, actually, though I think it's beautiful how many endless ways it can go right or wrong or painfully neutral. I'm just afraid of changing my mind. I'm attached to my ideals as they are now, and the prospect of them morphing over time terrifies me. I'm trying to learn how to deal with it, though.
I put things off a lot, giving myself some half-hearted excuse as to why I can't do it so I don't feel as guilty about being a lazy ass. I know I should deal with the mould in my room. I know it's gross, and probably unhealthy for me and for the building. I just can't bring myself to start. Or... I'm too tired. Or I've had a hard day. Or I have more immediate stuff to tend to. Or I have a migraine. Or I'll simply do it later. Or... you get the gist. However, when it has to do with people besides myself, I'll get it done as soon as possible. I don't want them to be disappointed or hurt by my inaction.
My biggest hobby is writing, and I love it in all its forms; poetry, novelettes, you name it... well, maybe not *all* its forms, specifically the creative ones. Monotonously writing a report in school on whatever dull book I couldn't be arsed to pay true attention to bores me to tears. I feel bad saying that. I'm sure the aforementioned book is a lovely read to some people, just not to me. I can't really stay focused for long enough to write anything super lengthy on any subject either. I have too many ideas I want to pursue and the old ones are abandoned. Left in the dust. It's a bit of a waste. I love creative writing because the idea of something so abstract yet so concrete draws me in. Letters, then words, on paper or on a screen string together in sentences to hopefully conjure up an image in your mind.
I know it's a wee bit silly, but it all bloomed from me roleplaying Warrior Cats online when I was about 6-7 years old. Not to insinuate that I'm some literary genius far beyond my years (I am nowhere near an expert by any means), but I think I might be somewhat decent at writing— from what I've been told, at least. I know I still have lots of room to improve, though, and I'm sure I will in due time. I think I use adverbs too often.
Sorry for this long, somewhat vent-y, half-coherent rambling of words. I shouldn't be as stressed about not knowing my type as I am, I'm not entirely sure why it bugs me so much. I vehemently despise labels and the constrictions they place onto people, but I'm not satisfied unless I have one that I feel fits right. As I said earlier, I'm a young teenager. I'm aware that typing myself at such an immature age isn't that feasible, but maybe the one thing I despise more than labels is not knowing the truth. Not knowing bothers me. Sorry again, and thank you for hearing (reading?) me out on this, I really appreciate it and I appreciate you. Just in case you happen to take any interest in this, I don't mind answering stuff or anything, if I didn't provide adequate info. Sorry if that sounds arrogant. Thanks, I mean it.
My bad if this went through twice. Reddit is being an absolute prick.

The fulcrum cross method applied to time spans between key dips and abstract geometric numbers inside Sacco's orbit yields crystalline reproductions of the template's 1508 in combination with Kiefer's 928 days, the standard template (1574) and the completed template (1574.4 : Sacco's full orbit) and other key structural numbers. When it comes to the stretch between D1520 and Elsie, the fulcrum cross method does have something interesting to say (a minor consistency), but nothing striking.
However, applying a variant of the fulcrum cross method yields dramatic findings. Within a signalling proposition, the distance between D1520 and Elsie appears to serve as a pointer to use the fulcrum cross and the logic of the π routes threaded in the data. This comes into sharp relief when looking at the stretch between D1520 and Elsie as span (so 1542 days), counting the number of days including both dips. First, revisiting the variant of the fulcrum cross, which uses half the 66 days of the two extended sectors of the standard template 1574 (52 * regular 29-day sectors = 1508, 2 * 33-day extended sectors = 66):
1541 (days separating one dip from the other) + 33 = 1574
1541 - 33 = 1508
This is because without even processing 1541 days, it fragments into half the standard template and half the 52 regular sectors:
1541 = 787 + 754
Before looking at the distance between D1520 and Elsie as span, another look at the π pointers:
1541 - 66.4 (fulcrum cross) = 1474.6
4 * 1474.6 = 5898.4
5898.4 - 92.8 (1/10th Kiefer) = 5805.6
5805.6 = 59 * 98.4
A minor route, but a pointer for π because '59' is a composite of Elsie's sector ratio (30) and the Elsie Key (29). Applying the (non-extended) ratio signature method to π, let 'n' = non-integers:
100 * π, - n = 314
314 - 156.6 (1/10th the standard dip signifier for Elsie) = 157.4 (1/10th the standard template)
157.4 - 59 = 98.4
Yields 1/16th of the completed template (Sacco's full orbit periodicity 1574.4). Now to understand the consistency being proposed here, the Elsie standard dip signifier relies on the sector boundary datelines of the standard template for its construction - also the Elsie dip manifests 98 days (as span) from the fulcrum. So looking at the distance between D1520 and Elsie as span:
1542 - 66.4 = 1475.6
1475.6 - 314 = 1161.6
= 24 * 48.4
Taking ten multiples of the '52 platform 3132' in the Skara-Angkor Signifier:
31320 - 1161.6 = 30158.4
= 0.96 * 31415
31415 = 10,000 * π - n
Finally:
1542 - 66.4 = 1475.6
1475.6 + 98.4 = 1574
Summary: unlike the stretches between other dips, the distance as difference and as span between D1520 and Elsie serves to flag the connection between the abstract (the standard 1574 template and the 52 regular sectors) and the concrete (the completed template: 1508 + 66.4), and underpinned by the ratio signature rendering of π into discrete 100th segments at the opening stages (where the numbers are most important for astrophysical modelling and science in general).

II. The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time
Narcissism as a Metaphor of the Human Condition
…
Theoretical precision about narcissism is important not only because the idea is so readily susceptible to moralistic inflation but because the practice of equating narcissism with everything selfish and disagreeable militates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been ethnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label. The emergence of character disorders as the most prominent form of psychiatric pathology, however, together with the change in personality structure this development reflects, derives from quite specific changes in our society and culture - from bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and from changing patterns of socialization. All this disappears from sight if narcissism becomes simply “the metaphor of the human condition,” as in another existential, humanistic interpretation, Shirley Sugerman’s Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism.
The refusal of recent critics of narcissism to discuss the etiology of narcissism or to pay much attention to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject probably represents a deliberate decision, stemming from the fear that emphasis on the clinical aspects of the narcissistic syndrome would detract from the concept’s usefulness in social analysis. This decision, however, has proved to be a mistake. In ignoring the psychological dimension, these authors also miss the social. They fail to explore any of the character traits associated with pathological narcissism, which in less extreme form appear in such profusion in the everyday life of our age: dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral cravings. Nor do they discuss what might be called the secondary characteristics of narcissism: pseudo-self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor. Thus they deprive themselves of any basis on which to make connections between the narcissistic personality type and certain characteristic patterns of contemporary culture, such as the intense fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of the play spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women. For these critics, narcissism remains at its loosest a synonym for selfishness and at its most precise a metaphor, and nothing more, that describes the state of mind in which the world appears as a mirror of the self.
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Scribe Note:
I think the moment Pathological Narcissism is taken as an opening through which contemporary culture and subjectivity can discussed, in concrete relation to socioeconomic or historical particularities, is the moment the Pathological Narcissus is transformed into a metaphor. Here I understand the metaphor as intrinsically concrete. Serving as a connective tissue, medium, and threshold. Alternatively a meeting place. The shape of the Pathological Narcissus orients and organizes. Find Lasch’s approach implicitly architectural. He approaches his work as a craftsmen. Reading Lasch I envision a series of papers detailing seemingly disparate cultural phenomena unfolding and filling in a human-outline, this outline is the Pathological Narcissus. Flipped right-side up, the Pathological Narcissus reveals the real framing device. Contemporary technologies and the move away from the Industrial without properly buffering the agrarian or the small and mid-sized manufacturing that contained/shaped the animating brilliance, innovativeness, and sociality of the American peoples. The Pathological Narcissus cannot be concrete without the abstract as its genesis. Abstract in so far as it is an atomized or segregated sequence of symptoms (an individual reduced to his symptoms) that emerges into view within the transferal space(eros-field) of the analyst’s office. Detailed and expounded upon in the literature. The grounding is perhaps necessarily abstract (to clarify, my usage of the term is distinct from spectral).
Lasch appears at the verge of anticipating and integrating the easy criticism one might levy against him, that this all rests on the presupposition that psychoanalysis has any genuine scientific validity, that Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg’s contributions to psychoanalysis serve as the standard bearer of psychoanalytic theory and practice (concretely if I’m not mistaken this is absolutely the case in the United States) and more to the point that the psychoanalyst is a trustworthy authority - into his own Criticism. In my reading of The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self, Lasch spirals around this particular critique and the implications. As if it’s a thread we mustn't risk pulling on lest the whole thing unravels. Serves almost like a therapeutic fiction or ‘noble lie’. Still I think it’s implicit in Lasch’s broader critique. In the essay From Mirror to Window: Curing Psychoanalysis of its Narcissism, James Hillman (who I believe had a superior approach to the question of the Image or Icon compared to Lasch who expresses a stunningly consistent Anglo-Germanic and Reformationist contempt for imagery, indeed Lasch’s Iconophobia is nigh Islamic) notes as much,
“Eminent culture critics - Karl Krauss, Thomas Szasz, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Paul Zweig, and the notorious Dr. Jeffrey Masson - have each seen that psychoanalysis breeds a narcissistic subjectivism inflicting on the culture an iatrogenic disorder, that is, a disease brought by the methods of the doctors who would cure it.”
The “personality disorder” viewed in this light is a diagnostic category that could only come about thanks to the faddish popularity of psychoanalysis. The mother-tongue and womb-religion of the narcissist is psychoanalysis.
The metaphor serves as the site of agonism. Что делать? What is to be done?
What Lasch does here, in my opinion, is update the Narcissus. Can see why this continues to prove a difficult task. One of the issues with the Metaphor is that it becomes very very difficult to differentiate it from the Phantasmatic Type. Especially once it enters into popular usage. Danger of using psychoanalytic terminology in this manner outside of the institution of psychoanalysis. The Pathological Narcissus is that thing the other person is. The tinge of recognition is painful. Or perhaps the greatest danger comes from over identification with the Spectral Narcissus which is easily syncretized with seductive literary or cinematic types i.e., the Superfluous Man or whatever Woody Allen is- and/or falling into a masochistic hypochondria loop of psychic despair. Important to have the example of what an actual Pathological Narcissist is.
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Psychology and Sociology
Psychoanalysis deals with individuals, not with groups. Efforts to generalize clinical findings to collective behavior always encounter the difficulty that groups have a life of their own. The collective mind, if there is such a thing, reflects the needs of the group as a whole, not the psychic needs of the individual which in fact have to be subordinated to the demands of collective living. Indeed it is precisely the subject of the individuals to the group that psychoanalytic theory, through a study of its psychic repercussions, promises to clarify. By conducting an intensive analysis of individual cases that rests on clinical evidence rather than common-sense impressions, psychoanalysis tells us something about the inner workings of society itself, in the very act of turning its back on society and immersing itself in the individual unconscious.
Every society reproduces its culture - its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience - in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized. The process of socialization, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms. Each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood - the trauma of separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother’s love - in its own way, and the manner in which it deals with these psychic events produces a characteristic form of personality, a characteristic form of psychological deformation, by means of which the individual reconciles himself to instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence. Freud’s insistence on the continuity between psychic health and psychic sickness makes it possible to see neuroses and psychoses as in some sense the characteristic expression of a given culture. “Psychosis,” Jules Henry has written, “is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture.”
Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud’s extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indispensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct.

• Freud should not be reproached [wrote T. W. Adorno] for having neglected the concrete social dimension, but for being all too untroubled by the social origin of… the rigidity of the unconscious, which he registers with the undeviating objectivity of the natural scientist… In making the leap from psychological images to historical reality, he forgets what he himself discovered - that all reality undergoes modification upon entering the unconscious - and is thus misled into positing such factual events as the murder of the father by the primal horde.

Those who wish to understand contemporary narcissism as a social and cultural phenomenon must turn first to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject, which makes no claim to social or cultural significance and deliberately repudiates the proposition that “changes in contemporary culture,” as Otto Kernberg writes, “have effects on patterns of object relations.” In the clinical literature, narcissism serves as more than a meta-phoric term for self-absorption. As a psychic formation in which “love rejected turns back to the self as hatred,” narcissism has come to be recognized as an important element in the so-called character disorders that have absorbed much of the clinical attention once given to hysteria and obsessional neuroses. A new theory of narcissism has developed, grounded in Freud’s well-known essay on the subject (which treats narcissism - libidinal investment of the self - as a necessary precondition of object love) but devoted not to primary narcissism but to secondary or pathological narcissism: the incorporation of grandiose object images as a defense against anxiety and guilt. Both types of narcissism blur the boundaries between the self and the world of objects, but there is an important difference between them. The newborn infant - the primary narcissist - does not yet perceive his mother as having an existence separate from his own, and he therefore mistakes dependence on the mother, who satisfies his needs as soon as they arise, with his own omnipotence. “It takes several weeks of postnatal development…before the infant perceives that the source of his need…is within and the source of gratification is outside the self.”
Secondary narcissism, on the other hand, “attempts to annul the pain of disappointed [object] love” and to nullify the child’s rage against those who do not respond immediately to his needs; against those who are now seen to respond to others besides the child and who therefore appear to have abandoned him. Pathological narcissism, “which cannot be considered simply a fixation at the level of normal primitive narcissism,” arises only when the ego has developed to the point of distinguishing itself from surrounding objects. If the child for some reason experiences this separation trauma with special intensity, he may attempt to reestablish earlier relationships by creating in his fantasies an omnipotent mother or father who merges with images of his own self. “Through internalization the patient seeks to recreate a wished-for love relationship which may once have existed and simultaneously to annul the anxiety and guilt aroused by aggressive drives directed against the frustrating and disappointing object.”
Narcissism in Recent Clinical Literature
The shifting emphasis in clinical studies from primary to secondary narcissism reflects both the shift in psychoanalytic theory from study of the id to study of the ego and a change in the type of patients seeking psychiatric treatment. Indeed the shift from a psychology of instincts to ego psychology itself grew partly out of a recognition that the patients who began to present themselves for treatment in the 1940s and 1950s “very seldom resembled the classical neuroses Freud described so thoroughly.” In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains “of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life” and feels his “amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless.” He describes “subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression,” “violent oscillations of self-esteem,” and “a general inability to get along.” He gains “a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported.” Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happiness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth living.
Psychoanalysis, a therapy that grew out of experience with severely repressed and morally rigid individuals who needed to come to terms with a rigorous inner “censor,” today finds itself confronted more and more often with a “chaotic and impulse-ridden character.” It must deal with patients who “act out” their conflicts instead of repressing or sublimating them. These patients, though often ingratiating, tend to cultivate a protective shallowness in emotional relations. They lack the capacity to mourn, because the intensity of their rage against lost love objects, in particular against their parents, prevents their reliving happy experiences or treasuring them in memory. Sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, they nevertheless find it difficult to “elaborate the sexual impulse” or to approach sex in the spirit of play. They avoid close involvements, which might release intense feelings of rage. Their personalities consist largely of defenses against this rage and against feelings of oral deprivation that originate in the pre-Oedipal stage of psychic development.
Often these patients suffer from hypochondria and complain of a sense of inner emptiness. At the same time they entertain fantasies of omnipotence and a strong belief in their right to exploit others and be gratified. Archaic, punitive, and sadistic elements predominate in the superegos of these patients, and they conform to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from a sense of guilt. They experience their own needs and appetites, suffused with rage, as deeply dangerous, and they throw up defenses that are as primitive as the desires they seek to stifle.
On the principle that pathology represents a heightened version of normality, the “pathological narcissism” found in character disorders of this type should tell us something about narcissism as a social phenomenon. Studies of personality disorders that occupy the border line between neurosis and psychosis, though written for clinicians and making no claims to shed light on social or cultural issues, depict a type of personality that ought to be immediately recognizable, in a more subdued form, to observers of the contemporary cultural scene: facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it; unappeasably hungry for emotional experiences with which to fill an inner void; terrified of again and death.
The most convincing explanations of the psychic origins of this borderline syndrome draw on the theoretical tradition established by Melanie Klein. In her psychoanalytic investigations of children, Klein discovered that early feelings of overpowering rage, directed especially against the mother and secondarily against the internalized image of the mother as a ravenous monster, make it impossible for the child to synthesize “good” and “bad” parental images. In his fear of aggression from the bad parents - projections of his own rage - he idealizes the good parents who will come to the rescue.
Internalized images of others, buried in the unconscious mind at an early age, become self-images as well. If later experience fails to qualify or to introduce elements of reality into the child’s archaic fantasies about his parents, he finds it difficult to distinguish between images of the self and of the objects outside the self. These images fuse to form a defense against the bad representation of the self and of objects, similarly fused in the form of a harsh, punishing superego. Melanie Klein analyzed a ten-year-old boy who unconsciously thought of his mother as a “vampire” or “horrid bird” and internalized this fear as hypochondria. He was afraid that the bad presences inside him would devour the good ones. The rigid separation of good and bad images of the self and of objects, on the one hand, and the fusion of self- and object images on the other, arose from the boy’s inability to tolerate ambivalence or anxiety. Because his anger was so intense, he could not admit that he harbored aggressive feelings toward those he loved. “Fear and guilt relating to his destructive phantasies moulded his whole emotional life.”
A child who feels so gravely threatened by his own aggressive feelings (projected onto others and then internalized again as inner “monsters”) attempts to compensate himself for his experience of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and omnipotence. These fantasies, together with the internalized images of the good parents with which he attempt to defend himself, become the core of a “grandiose conception of the self.” A kind of “blind optimism,” according to Otto Kernberg, protects the narcissistic child from the dangers around and within him - particularly from dependence on others, who are perceived as without exception undependable. “Constant projection of ‘all bad’ self and object images perpetuates a world of dangerous, threatening objects, against which the ‘all good’ self images are used defensively, and megalomanic ideal self images are built up.” The splitting of images determined by aggressive feelings from images that derive from libidinal impulses makes it impossible for the child to acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilt or concern for objects invested simultaneously with aggression and libido, or to mourn for lost objects. Depression in narcissistic patients takes the form not of mourning with its admixture of guilt, described by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” but of impotent rage and “feelings of defeat by external forces.”
Because the intrapsychic world of these patients is so thinly populated - consisting only of the “grandiose self,” in Kernberg’s words, “the devalued, shadowy images of self and others, and potential persecutors” - they experience intense feelings of emptiness and inauthenticity. Although the narcissist can function in the everyday world and often charms other people (not least with his “pseudo-insight into his personality”), his devaluation of others, together with his lack of curiosity about them, impoverishes his personal life and reinforces the “subjective experience of emptiness.” Lacking any real intellectual engagement with the world - notwithstanding a frequency inflated estimate of his own intellectual abilities - he has little capacity for sublimation. He therefore depends on others for constant infusions of approval and admiration. He “must attach [himself] to someone, living an almost parasitic” existence. At the same time, his fear of emotional dependence, together with his manipulative, exploitive approach to personal relations, makes these relations bland, superficial, and deeply unsatisfying. “The ideal relationship to me would be a two month relationship,” said a borderline patient. “That way there’d be no commitment. At the end of the two months I’d just break it off.”
Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous intimacy - of emotional titillation without involvement and dependence - the narcissist is promiscuous and often pansexual as well, since the fusion of pregenital and Oedipal impulses in the service of aggression encourages polymorphous perversity. The bad images he has internalized also make him chronically uneasy about his health, and hypochondria in turn gives him a special affinity for therapy and for therapeutic groups and movements.
As a psychiatric patient, the narcissist is a prime candidate for interminable analysis. He seeks in analysis a religion or way of life and hopes to find in the therapeutic relationship external support for his fantasies of omnipotence and eternal youth. The strength of his defenses, however, makes him resistant to successful analysis. The shallowness of his emotional life often prevents him from developing a close connection to the analyst, even though he “often uses his intellectual insight to agree verbally with the analyst and recapitulates in his own words what has been analysed in previous sessions.” He uses intellect in the service of evation rather than self-discovery, resorting to some of the same strategies of obfuscation that appear in the confessional writing of recent decades. “The patient uses the analytic interpretations but deprives them quickly of life and meaning, so that only meaningless words are left. The words are then felt to be the patient’s own pression, which he idealizes and which give him a sense of superiority.” Although psychiatrists no longer consider narcissistic disorders inherently unanalyzable, few of them take an optimistic view of the prospects for success.

According to Kernberg, the great argument for making the attempt at all, in the face of the many difficulties presented by narcissistic patients, is the devastating effect of narcissism on the second half of their lives - the certainty of the terrible suffering that lies in store. In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserves for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the ravages of age - identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one’s immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past - can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever comfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, “to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing identification with other people’s happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.”

UX is important when it comes to all industries, products or platforms. However, I've been thinking about how there are some specific industries in which the UX of the product holds much more responsibility and is the star of the show.
For example: Ed-tech, Social media and dating apps
There are industries in which the point of the product is the User Experience. The success of an Ed-Tech learning platform is directly linked to the learning experience it provides. The success of a social media or a dating app is directly linked to how well it plays on social norms.
It seems like UX is given a lot more importance and responsibility in these industries and designers are really motivated to put their 100% into making sure that their design is bulletproof. Whereas in many other industries, UX is just seen as a cherry on top, hence we don't see their major products ever having good UX (Banking apps, amazon)
The major distinction between these two types of industries is the user need that they are trying to fulfill.
Banking, E-commerce industries are trying to fulfill concrete needs, like the need to tranfer money online or check your bank statement, or to buy new products. Whereas Learning platforms and social media are trying to fulfill abstract needs, such as learning and connection.
Abstract needs are much more unclear and ambiguous, and need deeper UX expertise to fulfill.
What do you think?

Has the result changed for anyone as well? Do the result change with time, thought this coz I'm focusing more on self growth and healing for a while now, does this have anything to do with this?
I observed that the 'INFP' and 'INSP' have lots of similarities and just a fine line differs them from eachother. Was I mistyped earlier? The last test I took was ~3 yrs ago, and this is the recent one .
Please help me understand this mbti, I'm still confused about it. Maybe your knowledge might enlighten me in someway.
Fellow istps help out your junior please. Thankyou in advance.

I hope this isn't a dumb question - I am the parent of a fourth grade girl who was diagnosed with dyslexia recently and this is all pretty new to me. I hope I'm missing something, actually, because I'm confused and pissed and sad.
This ended up being longer than my single question - I guess I am actually really pissed off and sad about the last nine months in general, and I am completely open to any feedback, advice, or ideas about what to do now and how to help my kid. This is the first time I wrote all of this down and the irony of writing a novel on a dyslexia subreddit is not lost on me.
I'm leaving it lol.
Cora has always been brilliant and weird and loud, but over the last few years, it became apparent that she was having a harder time....stopping. Stopping talking, stopping moving, stopping yelling - it was just endless and exhausting for everyone around her. (Except at school. She is and was perfectly behaved at school - she has literally never gotten so much as a note home about goofing off in class.) Cora hit a wall in third grade - the hyperactivity was finally wearing her out, too, and annoying her friends. She finally asked for some help slowing down.
She was tested for ADHD and the general host of common mental health conditions last fall, and to no one's surprise, was diagnosed with ADHD-combined type, as well as anxiety symptoms that the psychologist described as significant enough to warrant a GAD diagnosis…but that she strongly suspected were a perfectly rational reaction to the very real problems Cora’s impulsiveness caused in her life.
This was exactly my experience as someone diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. It turns out that the consequences of constantly losing my car keys, forgetting appointments, and impulsively spending money I didn’t have were making me anxious and stressed, not the other way around. I had expected similar results for Cora and I was glad this was happening now - she could skip the years of totally ineffective treatment and misdiagnoses that I went through before being diagnosed and successfully treated.
What we were not expecting at all was the additional diagnosis of "specific learning disorder with reading impairment" noted in the report. I had no idea what this meant. The psychologist did not use the word "dyslexia" in her written evaluation, a decision which resulted in another 8 months of confusion and (probably unnecessary) testing detailed below. She explained to us that Cora could have dyslexia, but that her testing wasn't granular enough to be sure - that there was a chance it was "something else" and the SLD diagnosis was an umbrella term that covered both dyslexia and conditions unknown. (I have no idea what she was referring to and the general weirdness about using the word dyslexia was something I noticed with the school, too. I am still confused by this and other interactions where I get the distinct feeling people aren’t telling me something important.)
It was almost September, so the psychologist recommended pursuing testing with the school; this seemed to be a reasonable next step. They would test Cora and determine exactly what was going on, if anything. This whole part of the report was very much characterized as an incidental finding - something to follow up on, but nothing alarming given Cora’s history of good grades.
"Maybe she was just tired after a long day of testing,” the doctor explained. “But it also seemed like she wasn't hearing certain letters correctly." Years of speech therapy had helped Cora correct all but a few minor issues - but combined with this potential reading issue, maybe an audiologist should test her again. Get her hearing tested, start medication for ADHD, and see what the school says about her reading - that was the plan, no big deal.
I wasn't worried, but I figured it couldn't hurt to see what other help was available. I learned that we have a branch of a big tutoring nonprofit in our city that offers Orton-Gillingham instruction at no charge - something I soon realized would cost hundreds of dollars per month at other centers. Free is good! I submitted Cora's application and the report from the psychologist (with the ADHD/GAD/SLD all clearly noted)….and we got a rejection letter a week later in the mail. Cora didn't qualify because the tutoring was specific to dyslexia, and the SLD with reading impairment was not the same as a formal dyslexia diagnosis. Fair enough, I thought - I figured we'd get the testing done through her school and could reapply if the result was a dyslexia diagnosis.
That....was naïve, lol. But the psychologist made it sound like a total non-issue, something schools did all the time. I sent the school psychologist and teachers the report before school even started, since surely they would want to schedule all of this right away! I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks – the start of the school year must be such a busy time, after all – but raised it again, report in hand, at a meeting with Cora’s teacher in late September.
“You….really want to try to avoid putting a label on things too quickly,” she told me, in a tone that implied there was much more that she was not saying. “She seems to be doing quite well in class. Let’s see how she does on the standardized tests we’re finishing this week and go from there.” I was definitely aware that I was missing something, but it seemed reasonable to wait for Cora’s test results if they would help inform next steps. Cora scored well above average, as usual; shortly after receiving these scores, the school psychologist emailed me to let me know that no further testing was warranted.
I still felt like I was missing something – spoiler alert, I was – but there didn’t seem to be anything else left to do. They're the experts and were totally unconcerned – only positive news - and Cora’s new ADHD meds seemed to be really helping. After that, everything did seem to be okay at school for a while. Cora liked her teachers and was doing well.
Everything was copacetic…except for the fact that Cora’s anxiety seemed to be getting worse without any tangible explanation. She complained about fourth grade being a lot harder, but again – her grades were fine, she was perfectly behaved, she liked her teachers….it was difficult to identify any problem that needed solving. Soon, Cora started getting home and isolating herself in her room for over an hour every day. She seemed stressed. Worn out. This went on for months.
And then she had her first panic attack on a Sunday night, seemingly out of nowhere. She wanted a mental health day Monday and was back in school Tuesday, seemingly her normal self.
The next Sunday, she had another panic attack, and this one was much, much worse. She lost control of her bladder. I was close to taking her to the ER. It was scary. That's when it all came out. She was DREADING school - her two hours of ELA in the mornings had become “torture.” She was white-knuckling it through the reading, writing, and spelling work, totally clueless as to why it seemed so much harder for her than for other kids, but so determined to get good grades that she had just burned. the. fuck. OUT.
She was home for days after this. The school tried to dismiss my concerns at first - it couldn't have been that bad, I was told. To be fair, my concerns were vague because I still didn’t understand the real issues or how to help Cora, either. Cora was clearly unwell and adamantly refused to return to school. I started putting everything in formal, written letters emailed to all of her teachers, the school psychologist, and everyone else who seemed potentially relevant. I told them I wasn't sending her back until they did something to try to figure out what was going on in ELA.
That was mid-February. We had a meeting before I would agree to send Cora back, where they talked about putting together the "interdisciplinary team" to conduct "extensive classroom observation.” They insisted that this process would take at least 60 days to complete. Cora reports that there have been three days where someone has essentially come to her ELA class and stared at her while she works.
We weren’t just waiting for the school, though. After the psych eval last summer, we had been slowly working through additional evaluations and appointments related to Cora’s hearing, speech, and language abilities. Basically, we were working our way from Cora's ears into different regions of her brain, trying to catch problems along the path that sound waves traveled - entering Cora's head as vibrations in her ear canals, winding into her brain as phenomes, assembling into a stream of recognizable words, converting into meaning in entirely different areas of her brain, and eventually emerging again via her speech. I had no idea so many tiny things could go wrong in that process, but they can - and we can get pretty damn granular in order to figure that shit out when there’s a potential problem. Cora had some weird results here and there - we now know that overlapping speech is basically her Kryptonite, which explains a lot of meltdowns at family gatherings over the years. But on the whole, her ears and her brain are doing fine, and she doesn't have autism, either.
We had been lucky to get hooked up with the best child development team in the area - they were wonderful, and the process of more testing and visits seemed to reassure Cora (and us, honestly) that there was more help on the horizon, more answers soon. She started low-dose Zoloft for the anxiety and seemed a little happier; her anxiety about school was starting to morph into resignation and frustration, which actually seemed healthier in a way. "It takes time," they tell us. Her breakdown was in February. They wanted to see the report from the most recent evaluations. Fair enough; although it is not lost on me that I am paying an outside team to do the school's job, at least it's getting done.
Two weeks ago, we finally got the team's report - and the written words, "developmental dyslexia." The lead psychologist is going to meet with the 504 team at her school - he is wonderful and immediately understood so many of Cora's concerns and needs. I'm not exactly optimistic, but it's at least possible that this may result in accommodations/extra help in school. Cora thinks he walks on water and is so excited that he's going to "stand up for" her.
The report is detailed and confirmed a lot of what we suspected. She's a really bright kid - IQ around 120 with sky high mathematics and nonverbal problem-solving scores. She apparently discussed "conundrums that are complex and abstract in nature" during her sessions, with a "recognition that there is not necessarily a solution" to these mysterious issues. (LMAO....this is my weird and wonderful kid.) The report describes Cora as "delightful" - funny, self aware, and highly motivated to learn.
Her reading comprehension score was in the 90th percentile, essay composition in the 70th - spelling scores came in at the 25th percentile, which was no surprise. Pseudoword decoding was poor - she's in the 14th percentile - and it got worse from there. Cora has an oral reading fluency in the 9th percentile, a basic reading score in the 7th percentile, and a word reading score in the 4th percentile.
In fact, the essay composition score was the only "average" score among dozens of measures of her reading, writing, and language abilities - comprehension was universally excellent and decoding was universally abysmal. It was hard to read. It felt like a gut punch - looking at the single-digit scores, I finally realized the insane degree of effort it must have taken to finish her work and look happy doing it.
The developmental psychologist leading the team told us that it was unusual to see that stark of a difference - that the severity of her impairments are usually associated with average comprehension scores at best. I have tried to wade through research about these instruments, but decided to take his word for it. Typically, the deficits in her basic reading skills would set off a chain reaction of lower scores down the line - but Cora had brought her grades and tests scores up from an already high start at the beginning of the year.
"It's no wonder her anxiety symptoms are increasing - she's completely exhausted," he said. "Imagine what she could achieve with the right kind of help."
I realized then why Cora's high scores and good grades, so impressive to everyone else, were such a source of consternation for her. That chain reaction was still happening, getting in the way of what she was actually capable of achieving. She knew it, even if the rest of us didn't - she could do better with the right kind of help.
I honestly feel sick thinking about it. She never told anyone she was struggling, never asked for help - not from us, not from anyone at school, heck not from her former-literacy-teacher grandma. No one had any idea. My husband and I had actually encouraged her to slow down a little in the weeks before her panic attacks, just out of a general sense that something was brewing despite her repeated insistence she was doing fine. Turn in the worksheet a day late, three sentences is plenty, relax. Unthinkable, Cora insisted, she was fine.
So she's back at school, nothing has changed other than the glacially slow 504 process of "observation" occurring in the background sometimes, but she seems to be a bit less stressed. I can't tell if getting pissed off about the situation is helping her deal with it, if the Zoloft is taking the edge off, or if she's just masking harder now. Maybe all three. 18 more days of school and Cora is counting. them. down. Her teachers and support staff seem generally bewildered by the idea she is or was ever struggling. They were caught totally off guard when I abruptly pulled her out of school until we at least got them to commit to the 504 process – but we had been blindsided too. They saw a happy kid who was thriving academically until her parents pulled her out of school and started a process that no one seems particularly committed to finishing. Sometimes I think they don't believe us at all. Maybe I would feel the same way in their shoes, I don’t know. I think they’ll listen to the doctor.
The entire point of this post, though, was to ask about Cora’s second rejection from the local tutoring program. With summer approaching and the diagnosis of dyslexia (versus maybe-dyslexia, maybe-whatever-else-could-be-included-under-the-SLD-“umbrella”, which I am still unsure is even a thing), I've been looking into all sorts of options for tutoring. Summer is a good opportunity to try to start getting Cora some meaningful help without adding yet another thing to her plate. She's excited. We can build some tools before next year - if we know what works for her, we can be better advocates from Day 1.
So I resubmitted Cora's application - I still had my original email and I just attached the shiny new report to that, explaining where to find the magic D word that I fully expected would finally open a door where Cora could get the right kind of help. This new report was more granular with reading testing, but the dyslexia diagnosis was the one really substantive change. It included Cora's ADHD and anxiety diagnoses, as did the report I submitted with our initial application, but with new information about medication and treatment for these issues - progress!
(I would like to point out at this point that ADHD and anxiety are firmly established as two of the most common comorbid diagnoses for kids with dyslexia, and that anxiety symptoms in particular can occur because of the challenges caused by dyslexia. My daughter had full-blown panic attacks at 10 years old largely because she struggles to FUCKING READ and no one was helping her. I know I am preaching to what little choir is likely left at this point in my novel. But especially as someone who was medicated/treated for depression and anxiety for 20 years before anyone agreed to test for, diagnose, and treat the ADHD symptoms that were causing me to regularly fuck up my life in really depressing and stressful ways…..this chicken and egg shit really hits a nerve.)
Anyhoo, it had taken 8 months and a lot of work, but I had finally done this one cool thing for her - Cora was going to get the right kind of help. The school year is almost over, but at least we had this one success. The obstacle that I’m still not sure was warranted in the first place – the lack of the word dyslexia in the initial evaluation – had been checked off what was now a giant list of obstacles in Cora's path.
And thanks to the generosity of people who had probably heard and experienced a lot of similar, frustrating stories, our family could focus on paying off the bills accumulated in the process of getting to this point instead of adding more to the pile. Free is always good, but sometimes free is a godsend.
Twelve hours later, Cora was denied again, this time via a brief email simply noting the GAD diagnosis in both reports. "Our tutors are not trained to work with children who are diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorders" and they "cannot meet her needs."
That was it. No further explanation. Just…fuck your anxious baby girl who is trying so hard and fuck you for trying. NEXT!
Oh, and P.S., fuck the really significant percentage of kids with dyslexia with comorbid anxiety diagnoses who are incredibly well researched and described in just…all of the fucking literature. Just all of it, honestly, for decades. Fuck those kids too.
People seem to treat the word "dyslexia" like it's the only thing that matters sometimes but also not something that should be ever said in other contexts, AND I'm pretty fucking sure that "SLD with reading impairment" is essentially equivalent to the word dyslexia because no one can explain what else might be under that "umbrella," and apparently it's nigh impossible to get meaningful help for my daughter through the public school systems anywhere in America, and giant nonprofits care about kids with dyslexia so much, but not the anxious ones, better lock the doors before those crybabies get their needs all over our tutoring center!
We will figure out how to pay for help for Cora, that’s a given.
But honest to fucking god, have you guys just been putting up with this shit the whole time? I'm so sorry.

Since there appears to be much misuse of the term, I think it may be good to put some points about fascism that I think are key in helping us understand it better to combat it.
This is not a definition, but a description of what fascism has historically been and how it came to power, so you can decide for yourself what its "definition" is.

Fascism and Revolution

To put bluntly, fascism is not revolutionary and never has been. It is in fact, counter-revolutionary.
Fascism may credit itself as being such, and fascists may say they are revolutionaries but a cursory glance of how fascists came to power shows otherwise.
First with regards to Italy, Mussolini was appointed PM by King Emmanuel III on 31 October 1922, after the March on Rome. Described as a coup, it was in reality a hand down of power from the Italian ruling elites and aristocrats who feared the rise of left-wing unions and Bolshevism (Marxism-Leninism). Mussolini was put in power because his squadrismos were the most effective (violent) ways for the ruling class to stop this brewing revolutionary movement.
Mussolini's rise was celebrated by the monopolists and business elites in America and the UK, many looked on Italy with admiration. For those seeking more information on this, I recommend this article

US corporations flocked to invest in Mussolini’s Italy. The American historian and analyst Noam Chomsky wrote, “As fascist darkness settled over Italy, financial support from the US government and business climbed rapidly. Italy was offered by far the best postwar debt settlement of any country, and US investment there grew far faster than in any other country, as the fascist regime established itself, eliminating labor unrest and other democratic disorders”. (4)
The irresistible attraction of big business towards fascist rule, like moths to a flame, tells its own story. With Mussolini one year in power, the US Embassy eulogised in late 1923, “The results have been excellent, and during the last 12 months there has not been a single strike in the whole of Italy” (5). The Embassy believed that Mussolini was becoming a success because of his destruction of labour power, and therefore the erosion of a key democratic process.

In regards to our other example, which is Nazi Germany, once again we have the same story of Hitler being appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg, the president of Weimar Germany at the time. Contemporary Weimar constitution gave the president full discretion to choose anyone he thought fit to the role, and Hindenburg himself was persuaded to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, after beating him in the presidential election in 1932, by Von Papen, who thought the far left was becoming a dangerous threat to the republic.
The traditional story presented of course is of a charismatic leader winning an election to rise to power, putting the blame of Nazi leadership on the masses of Germany and the communists who sought the destruction of the republic. This story conveniently ignores that the Nazis actually performed worse in November 1932 than they did in July, and that the ruling establishment in Germany was far more cocnerned with Bolshevism than with Nazism.
To add more examples to the table, Pinochet was backed by the CIA, Suharto was funded by the UK & US. Or Kolomoyskyi, who has funded the Aidar and Azov battalions in Ukraine
In fact wherever we turn to find actual fascism in the real world, its origin of power almost universally comes from the ruling elites, i.e fascism comes from the top-down, not from the bottom up.
It is as Dmitrov describes, the terroristic rule and vengeance of finance capital, the most advanced form of capital in the stage of imperialism. It is not in the depth of the country among rural or uneducated masses.

Fascism and Definitions

Definitions of fascism seem to miss the point of describing actual fascism. Instead of trying to understand what force animates it, and also what concretely unites Squadrismo with Azov and Pinochet with Mussolini, they ponder and wonder on abstractions and ideals that fascist leaders have seemed to espouse.
Eco's 14 points are a good example of the shortcoming of this, as Eco meanders to say that not all 14 can apply, and sometimes they don't and sometimes they do. The failure of these points to identify actual fascism can be illustrated when we take a control, which is actual neonazis today such as Azov battalion. Eco is no better at finding fascism in azov than it is in finding it in Joe Biden.
The form fascism takes in reality does differ based on time and place and circumstance, the specific ideas it adopts are malleable to those. Which is why chasing fascism by ideals it aspouses is beginning from the wrong premise

Fascism and Opportunism in regards to culture.

In the sphere of culture war, the use of fascism is naught but pure opportunism in the strictest sense of what that word actually means.
As we have seen above, fascism does not come from the masses organically, it rather comes from the heights of political and economic institutions as a response to the unrest among the masses. There is no upsurging fascist revolution among the masses who reject social engineering, while fascism may deceive the masses it acquires political power when it is handed it down from the heights of the elite. Not for arbitrary reasons is fascism elitist.
In their opportunism to silence or cancel their opponents, the opportnistic ultras distract from the very real threat of fascism, which is latent within our very own political institutions. Instead, they objectively side with the establishment in blaming the horrors of fascism on the masses and their backwardness and wiping the ruling class' hands free. In so doing, they legitimise and make credible the suspension of even the facade of formal liberal process by the enlightened ruling class as a tool to preseve the same formal liberalism against the deplorables whom they have alienated by their own opportunism.
Fascism is not based on backward stances regarding culture, culture is not the principal contradiction on which basis we define this term. The cultural aspects of fascism are purely superficial to it - Azov and Aidar have specifically targeted ethnic enemies such as Russians and Roma and have not attacked the disabled or homsoexuals because doing so would alienate them from the western aid they really need. The same way Zionists try to monopolise Nazi atrocities, positing that only the Jews were victims of Nazi atrocities, and that the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jews only, Nazi policies towards Germans they considered inferior is likewise attempted to be monopolised by culutral activists to argue that rejecting their views is a slippery slope to nazism.
This is perhaps forgivable to the uneducated, but it must be adressed to counter opportunism. Stop using the threat of fascism to push a social agenda.

Fascism and Communism

As we have seen, despite what ideas fascism aspouses, its power stems from the handing down of power from the established powers, from parliaments, kings, presidents or state department agencies during a time of crisis, to be unleashed against the masses, fascism and communism do not merely differ "in internationalism" or whatever. Fascists are empowered specifically to fulfil the end goals of financial capital and to crush mass movements against the establishment. Communism on the other hand is an incipient mass movement that tries to sublate and overcome the current state of things. This is why the two are fundamnetally at odds, and why what unites fascism across time and space and through history is violent anti-communism.

Fascism and the Current US

Should be clear by now that I think the real threat of fascism in the US today is not the MAGA base or the rednecks, or the deplorables, but the state department itself, the ones in bed with the duopoly but especially in the Democratic party Fascism in the US will come from the state department and may history of fascism attest to this reality - if fascism is to come to the in 2024 it will be when the powers behind Joe Biden decide to just make Kamala Harris, or anyone else for that matter the leader, and suspend the elections or ignore their result completely. This will be in continuity with how actual fascism - the one that actually killed people - has functioned around the world for over a century.

Fascism and Anti-Fascism

Effective anti-fascism is populism. It is building a mass movement that can challenge the political elites, it is bridging the differences and putting aside personal disagreements for the sake of a greater cause, which is a united front against fascism.
It is for example, reaching out and supporting the truckers and the freedom convoy, it is not believing the media when they plant a glowie to bring a nazi flag to the protest to smear its reputation. It is raising a voice when banks closed their bank accounts. It is not conditioning co-operation with the truckers behind a list of demands, or rejecting them if some are crass or unarticulate.

Conclusion

Feel free to tackle these points or point out where you think I'm unclear or wrong. But keep in mind, I am basing my understanding of fascism on how it actually was, not on the ideas or abstractions it claims to be

Hello,
I am a 31-year-old entrepreneur living in France, originally from Russia. I started with absolutely nothing and have built a leisure business from the ground up, achieving €500K in annual turnover. However, this isn't reflective of my personal income, and the business itself is projected to remain viable for only another 2-4 years without major reinvestment. It also holds me attached to the current place; I can barely leave for 4-5 days from time to time.
For over a year, I've been desperately searching for a new direction but haven’t found any realistic or appealing business ideas. This search has left me feeling utterly incompetent, as if I possess no true skills despite holding a Master's in International Management. My supposed lack of marketable skills is plunging me deeper into what I can only describe as a depression, impacting both my mental and physical health.
Currently, I am facing significant challenges both personally and professionally. Despite (relatively) successful business management and growth, I feel increasingly alienated and disconnected in my adopted country, even after 15 years of residence. This sense of isolation is compounding a deeper existential crisis, where I find myself struggling with my identity and purpose. I feel lost in life and genuinely desperate, caught in a loop of stress that consumes me progressively each day.
Financially, I have been prudent and have started investing in stocks, with a portfolio worth around €30K. Over the next year, I expect to accumulate a total capital of €150-200K. I don't have any real estate or major assets, but I am ready to invest €50-70K in a new venture if I believe in its potential.
My immediate priority is to identify a path for a career transition that can secure me a significant income (aiming for progressively reaching €10K net per month). I am open to intensive work, dedication and taking reasonable risks to achieve this. I try to explore any niche markets that aren't saturated and where entry barriers are not (yet) prohibitively high. Additionally, I am considering skills or software that can be monetized and scaled (3D modeling or other digital production techniques, Cinema 4d, Houdini?)
The idea of relocating to Scotland with my girlfriend remains an abstract plan for the future. Scotland appeals to me due to its beautiful architecture, spacious natural surroundings, friendly populace, and strategic location in Europe. However, any move would require establishing a stable and profitable business or freelance career there.
I am reaching out to this community for pragmatic, realistic advice. I need guidance from those who have navigated similar transitions successfully, especially in identifying viable business opportunities or skills that match my background and financial goals.
Motivational speeches and abstract planning have never resonated with me. I am a pragmatist seeking concrete steps and strategies. As my situation becomes more pressing, it's not only my mental health that's suffering—I am beginning to experience physical health issues due to this prolonged stress and uncertainty.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. I am grateful for any advice, insights, or experiences you can share that might help steer me toward a viable new path.

Hello,
I am a 31-year-old entrepreneur living in France, originally from Russia. I started with absolutely nothing and have built a leisure business from the ground up, achieving €500K in annual turnover. However, this isn't reflective of my personal income, and the business itself is projected to remain viable for only another 2-4 years without major reinvestment. It also holds me attached to the current place; I can barely leave for 4-5 days from time to time.
For over a year, I've been desperately searching for a new direction but haven’t found any realistic or appealing business ideas. This search has left me feeling utterly incompetent, as if I possess no true skills despite holding a Master's in International Management. My supposed lack of marketable skills is plunging me deeper into what I can only describe as a depression, impacting both my mental and physical health.
Currently, I am facing significant challenges both personally and professionally. Despite (relatively) successful business management and growth, I feel increasingly alienated and disconnected in my adopted country, even after 15 years of residence. This sense of isolation is compounding a deeper existential crisis, where I find myself struggling with my identity and purpose. I feel lost in life and genuinely desperate, caught in a loop of stress that consumes me progressively each day.
Financially, I have been prudent and have started investing in stocks, with a portfolio worth around €30K. Over the next year, I expect to accumulate a total capital of €150-200K. I don't have any real estate or major assets, but I am ready to invest €50-70K in a new venture if I believe in its potential.
My immediate priority is to identify a path for a career transition that can secure me a significant income (aiming for progressively reaching €10K net per month). I am open to intensive work, dedication and taking reasonable risks to achieve this. I try to explore any niche markets that aren't saturated and where entry barriers are not (yet) prohibitively high. Additionally, I am considering skills or software that can be monetized and scaled (3D modeling or other digital production techniques, Cinema 4d, Houdini?)
The idea of relocating to Scotland with my girlfriend remains an abstract plan for the future. Scotland appeals to me due to its beautiful architecture, spacious natural surroundings, friendly populace, and strategic location in Europe. However, any move would require establishing a stable and profitable business or freelance career there.
I am reaching out to this community for pragmatic, realistic advice. I need guidance from those who have navigated similar transitions successfully, especially in identifying viable business opportunities or skills that match my background and financial goals.
Motivational speeches and abstract planning have never resonated with me. I am a pragmatist seeking concrete steps and strategies. As my situation becomes more pressing, it's not only my mental health that's suffering—I am beginning to experience physical health issues due to this prolonged stress and uncertainty.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. I am grateful for any advice, insights, or experiences you can share that might help steer me toward a viable new path.