The European Parliament on Wednesday approved a new EU law allowing the infamous, almost unspeakable word: remigration. The first time I heard it, I had just returned from living in a Muslim country where I was working as a journalist, wide awake at the reality of what my civilization was soon going to face. Many were confused as to why, despite these anti-immigration sentiments, I was not a vitriolic hater of Muslim immigrants or why I wasn’t a Zionist.

The reason was simple: Because I learned something from this culture, and while I was working for the media companies in the Arab region, I had the opportunity to understand who was funding which cause and why, and the power dynamics forging the Middle East, and by extension, the Western world. I was reading the anti-Islamic Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci while I was there, and I could resonate with what she was arguing, but (as a rather stereotypical precursor to the Boomers), I thought her views on the West were fundamentally limited.

Fallaci believed our civilization was worth defending because of individual rights, sexual liberation, and secularism - that didn’t sit right at all. I was born and bred in the most toxic, hedonistic high-class elements of that world. It was why the West was decaying so rapidly; there wasn’t a ruling class that believed in anything, only a vulgar and self-serving bourgeoisie, a dead aristocracy, and an urban sub-class of a proletariat that lived in the most dehumanizing, brutalist post-industrial conditions. In the Muslim world, I came to know simple people who spoke about God daily, who believed in their tribes when no one else did, whose society held youthful energy, a strong sense of generosity and hospitality by their elderly who still prepared meals for their families; all of them were taken care of in their large homes. There was something profoundly genuine about it, even if they performed summary executions among rival militias the next day. They welcomed me into their homes, often leaving me their spare bed, while it would be hard to find an estate agent to lease you a one-bedroom neon apartment in a Western city. Don’t get me wrong, when I worked with my Arab bosses, I argued with them routinely because they couldn’t stand an opinionated woman; I quit, or they fired me. However, on a human level, I noticed a healthier civilization.

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Perhaps it’s hard to articulate such feelings into words, but you can still respect and admire your enemies. The Muslim world, paradoxically, cured me because it was still immune to post-capitalist sterility and decay. However, given that I don’t feel prone to developing Stockholm syndrome, I couldn’t consider converting. Instead, I wanted to convert my own people to curing themselves. I didn’t become a Zionist because I understood that hating one another was just a self-serving agenda by Israel, and because I genuinely felt for these people and observed their pain in front of their powerlessness as their hometowns became ravaged by wars, and captive to interests that sought to make them become another version of us.

I remember starting to write edgy political essays for obscure magazines about the rise of neofascism in Italy, like this one. I was embedded with these militant far-right groups who took care of me, but I didn’t join them despite their insistence. Their priority was, of course, remigration, which I agreed with, but not because I hated all immigrants; I hated our elites more. I understood, by visiting migrant camps, how many of these immigrants were victims of the same system and were benefiting from it because it was handed to them by us. They fell prey to human trafficking rings that sold them a false dream of Europe, of obscure NGOs that pretended to have their best interest at heart when their primary mission (funded by Soros) was simply to disintegrate Europe, and were propelled to enter by our own open-border policies. They were expected to integrate into a culture that didn’t even know what it stood for. Many second-generation Muslim immigrants, for these reasons, were radicalized because of the spiritual vacuum they experienced in the West. I could see why. I thought remigration was only curing a symptom of a much deeper, festering wound in our society.

The European Parliament approved the law aimed at speeding up the return of migrants with no legal right to remain in the EU, thanks to backing from centre-right and “far-right” political groups. A once entirely taboo topic, when closing down the borders was barely on the table, now remigrating migrants who are illegally here (though we need to address many of the legal ones too) is accepted as the new normal in one of the most ideologically hostile institutions in Europe. That’s a big step forward.

Will this solve all our issues? Imagine Europe not having to worry about being demographically replaced, no more illegal immigrants, and even legal ones require more rigorous background checks, and those who remain are a minority who appreciate and love us. I know this seems like a final solution to many right-wingers, but is it? Would this address the sense of alienation and emptiness that so many young people feel? Is the cost of living crisis that is leading us to have no more families going to be solved? The vacuum in spirituality - how will that be filled? In short, what are our values, and what is the life mission of our civilization? Where’s our North Star?

The reason mass immigration was allowed in the first place was because of these compounding factors: dreaded nihilistic indifference over our past, a sense in our youth that being a criminal is “cooler” than being studious or ambitious, an ageing population we can’t afford to sustain with a suffocating pension system, the afterlife being stripped away from daily conversations, and an unwillingness to define our collective mission as a people. This is why I don’t join these National Conservative TM conferences anymore, where speakers go on stage to shout, “Europe should be White!” Applause. Groundbreaking, thank you for your contribution.

If this deeper crisis of meaning were addressed, keeping our borders open to the rest of the world wouldn’t even be a question because we would want to protect each other, motivated by a sense of self-worth. The backlash in Northern Ireland is one of healthy rebellion. The fight is now inevitable, but to win, we are required to do something more profound than simply remigrating. Winning a war entails understanding the fibre of who we are and what our purpose is. That requires positive, forward thinking that is far more challenging than animosity and scapegoating.

There was a video of a Rabbi online talking about how the “goyim” are only thinking about the next football match, holiday, drinking with their friends, and that for this reason, they were fundamentally not on par with the Jewish people. I can’t disagree with this statement because it’s too painfully true, and it’s why our society is characterized by passive indifference rather than meaningful action. The true test of the strength of a person is whether they react to defend themselves. To do so, they need a why to live. Viktor Frankl paraphrased Nietzsche when he said, “When you have a why to live for, you can tolerate almost any how.” Letting things slide is corrosive and allows more of the same troubling behavior to continue. Appeasement only takes place when a soul has been fundamentally stripped of its sense of dignity and duty towards oneself and those it loves.

Suppose we become demographically like Japan - what then? How do we understand what our collective purpose is? That is where the true mission lies.

Alessandra Bocchi is editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.

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Contemporary Britain is an exercise in cacophony and chaos: a place now so unmoored from reality that it is entirely possible to imagine that we are being governed and controlled by forces that seek the demoralisation and destruction of the people in whose name it treasonously pretends to govern.

The recent murder of eighteen-year-old University student Henry Nowak, repeatedly stabbed in Southampton last December by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man of Indian origin, who has recently been sentenced to a minimum term of 21 years in prison, so perfectly and horribly exemplifies the inverted quality of things that it is hard to countenance. We must not forget his death and what it stands for.

Murdered for nothing by a man permitted to carry a dagger for reasons of religious exemption, Nowak died, though he may have survived had he received timely medical attention, as the police arrested him on the basis of a false accusation of “racism” from his killer. As Nowak bled out, his wounds exacerbated and opened by being handcuffed, the police ignored his desperate cries that he had been stabbed by responding, “I don’t think you have, mate”. How much horror is contained in this single, sardonic line. A still image of Nowak’s hand, pale and exsanguinated, cuffed, on the floor, has circulated widely: an image of absolute and total betrayal of a people, and of Henry and his family.

Digwa’s family colluded with the murderer to hide the murder weapon, pretend that Nowak was the aggressor, and even shouted “racism” at Nowak’s family in court, in a perfect and grotesque projection of the very accusation that had led to Henry’s deadly injuries being ignored on the basis of a lie. Nowak’s father even had to fight the police to prevent them from releasing a statement claiming that the incident had been “racially aggravated”, even though there was no evidence that it was, as the judge in the trial made clear. The whole timeline of the event has been carefully pieced together by Millennial Woes, which in itself is indicative of the fact that citizens are compelled to seek out the truth, because the very people who are supposed to uphold the law will only lie repeatedly. Trust in institutions is over: a sense of deep decay hangs over the whole edifice.

The British government’s extremely belated response to the justified rage that followed news of the case has, predictably, largely involved a call for people to avoid “stoking division”. The authorities cannot, of course, directly address the multiple elephants in the room, so they punish people for noticing them instead. This is a by-now familiar pattern in a country which sees 12,000 people a year arrested for social media posts, where “offensive” words count for more than violent behaviour, and whose government truly and actively hates and fears the people.

The government and its various arms can only traduce and smear, because everything about this rotten regime is wrong, and the only thing they can do, rather than admit it, is to double down. A world in which a false accusation of racism will see you arrested and your death inevitable because it carries more weight than severe violence against you. A police force so brainwashed by DEI training that they are programmed to punish bad words, real or imagined, more severely than physical crime. That a cry of “racism,” subjectively felt, or made up, can result in arrest, let alone prejudicial treatment, must cease: discrimination and hate speech legislation has become nothing but a cudgel to punish legitimate dissent, or to wage petty war against fellow citizens.

Henry Nowak was violently attacked, and the police hoped they could cover up and lie about it so that the truth would not emerge. The police were primed to believe Digwa’s claim of offence over Nowak’s protestations that he was dying; Digwa and his family calculated that an accusation of racism would see the state take their side; the government hoped that by attacking the upset, they could redistribute and invert blame. All of those would only be possible in a world in which the accusation of racism carries more weight than the truth, a world in which pretending that things are other than they are is now the dominant mode of imposing power.

How did this happen?

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I’m writing as an Italian whose heart is bleeding for her nation. I have known of Giorgia Meloni before her rise to fame. I was trying to convince American newspapers to let me interview her, and they turned me down because she wasn’t of enough interest. Barely anyone outside of Italy knew who she was, nor cared to know. I knew she had talent and would succeed. I met her once; she was particularly polite (not something to take for granted nowadays). I didn’t vote for her because I wasn’t fully aligned. But her personality stood out to anyone who knew of her, irrespective of her politics.

Not many are aware that Meloni was bred in the post-fascist movement of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano). She was a militant and at least sympathetic to fascism in her youth. There are videos of her giving out far-right leaflets and talking about that time in history with approval. In Italy, fascism is not stigmatized the way nazism is in Germany, even if our constitution forbids it. It’s mainly seen as a nuisance of nostalgic fanatics who hold no real leverage.

Meloni was born in the outskirts of Rome, anything but a privileged background. She grew up in a broken home without a father figure and talks openly about how her father’s rejection led her to become an overachiever. She worked in nightclubs in her spare time to make ends meet while she focused on her political career. Through perseverance, she became the youngest minister and worked for various right-wing governments before deciding to create her own party, “Brothers of Italy”. The name was inspired by Italy’s national anthem. One can’t help but notice the irony in the first female leader of a party using this slogan. However, Meloni didn’t care that she was a woman. It didn’t factor into her political affiliations or even perceptions of herself or what she stood for. She was vehemently pro-Italy; anything else was mere noise. She was criticized for defending traditional families while not being married and having a child with a rather unsophisticated toyboy. She chose not to respond to the provocations and kept her personal and political lives strictly separate.

She was marginalized and even mocked for a long time in our country. First, because she has a heavy Roman working-class accent that is considered “unbecoming” for women, and she didn’t possess a formal education, which made her somewhat ostracized from elite Italian politics. Second, she was notoriously aggressive, more than any of the men she was dealing with. She was loud, pointing her finger at her opponents while shouting at them in Parliament. This made her disliked by many politicians who felt profoundly challenged by her. That said, she was liked by the people because of her tenacity and how she delivered speeches with passion and conviction, unafraid to touch taboo topics.

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Meloni was politically uncompromising in terms of integrity. She was offered various opportunities to form coalitions with opposing liberal parties so she could be part of a government. Unlike other leaders, she refused - to her own detriment at first. She was playing the long game; she saw herself as exclusively right-wing, and that was the only coalition she was willing to accept. Eventually, that intransigent approach bore its fruits. She managed to win a majority vote to form the right-wing coalition, which meant she would be at the helm as Prime Minister in 2022. She enjoyed a large momentum behind her. Meloni stood out as a woman because Italy has a long history of attractive female politicians being afforded opportunities based on their looks, and the prevailing culture is not particularly favorable to female leadership. She was elected based on merit. On the global scale, she became a formidable and charming woman leading a major European country. She started taking care of her appearance and hiring new stylists to look more formal and presidential. Her front-line rallying days were over.

That’s where it started to fall apart. In my view, Meloni made a fatal mistake: She believed the battle was over, and she would sustain a reign of at least a decade. She felt no pressure from beneath, no opposing force either from within her coalition or the defunct left-wing opposition. The only pressures she felt were from above, and she caved quickly to them by thinking that by being accommodating, she could convince them to convert to her cause. This is hardly the case. The positions of EU bureaucrats and American neoconservative warmongers only hardened without significant pushback. Perhaps more tragic is that the Italian electorate did not forgive her for becoming a seemingly out-of-touch, ambiguous centrist whose ideology became increasingly elusive. That’s why she lost the recent referendum on constitutional changes. She started back-peddling and contradicting her major positions, trying to appease all sides so her credibility would remain intact with the same forces she promised she would face fearlessly.

There’s another element here to take note of: Meloni was suddenly thrust into political power, giving life to her wildest dream she had held since she was a teenager. However, she was an outsider; unaccustomed to “elite extravagance” like Donald Trump, who, despite denouncing those circles during his electoral campaign, marinated in them for most of his life. Suddenly, she felt embraced at red carpet events with other male leaders (literally) falling to their knees and calling her beautiful. This was alien to her in her own country and different than anything she had previously experienced.

She started assuming a ceremonial, almost diplomat-like role. Her social media radically changed from being defined by videos of migrant assaulting women and her calling them “worms” in the captions to her being pictured in high-end political events with filtered, meaningless phrases such as, “We have strengthened bilateral relations with Uganda.” Barely anyone cared, certainly not the people who voted for her. Of course, one must concede that becoming a leader requires a degree of decorum that is fundamentally different from a campaigner appealing to the sentiments of the masses. Still, the change in her personality was too extreme and uprooted from her values not to raise some questions.

It’s important to note why this shift is becoming so concerning for her voters. Italy, like most European countries, is in a dire state, more than many foreigners realise. I know Americans think they have it so hard, and many look to Europe as a successful hybrid economic system. However, the European welfare state system is not something they should look up to today, and I don’t say this as someone who is a capitalist free-marketeer. I say this because its bureaucracy is ossified and is causing stagnation and decline. There is little dynamism or opportunity to create. Europe, at large, is not a central power on the world stage anymore because it’s not a forward-looking continent. One can hardly find cutting-edge technologies or avant-garde ideologies. Its appeal largely rests on its civilizational history and beauty. It’s like an open-air museum where life is slower and more enjoyable. To someone vacationing, that is understandably appealing - but it represents a fundamental problem for the survival of its people.

In Italy, a decent salary is considered to be worth around 2,000 net euros a month, yet unemployment is high, and rents in cities like Milan - the only city that offers real work opportunities - have been reported by the FT to be proportionately higher than in London. This is a staggering finding - a small one-bedroom apartment in a relatively peripheral area of Milan costs around 1,000 euros a month in rent (at least). Mortgages for these same apartments are life-long. Considering rising gas and electricity prices and other costs, that leaves a well-earning person with 500 euros at best for themselves. That is barely enough to afford healthy food and other basic costs of living. Many young Italians still live with their parents into their late 30s, not because they love their mothers as the stereotype goes, but because that’s the only chance they have to save and invest something of what they earn. And their parents offer them the rooms they grew up in, certainly not the once-large family apartment blocks or agricultural homes where couples could envision having children, with more space and the support from their extended families. Individuals who are supposed to build their lives spend this time surviving in a rigged economic system with a housing market that is largely owned by their Boomer parents, who stockpile the remaining resources. It’s worth noting that Italians, despite the baseless caricatures, work longer hours than Germans on average, and Italy is a major net contributor to the EU budget while receiving almost no benefits from Brussels in return.

The rise of feminism is inconsequential to the decline in birthrates, and Italy is a perfect example to illustrate why. As the rule in statistics goes, “Correlation is not causation”. This fixation on feminism largely rests on the need for emotional propaganda from a manosphere culture that profits off gender division. Most couples in Italy cannot afford to have children. They remain in relationships for several years without getting married because they would have to spend their bare savings on an engagement and a wedding, which would leave nothing extra for their children or any other emergency situation. They choose to have maybe one child in their late thirties and struggle to keep things afloat because of the rising costs of living. There are no fertility incentives like France, which has the highest birthrate from natives in Europe, where the government offers egg freezing and assisted reproductive technologies for free. The power of the Catholic Church in Italy is too strong, and right-wing reactionaries (including Meloni) are allergic to these new developments.

Another point to dispel on the idea that feminism is causing a decline in birthrates is that Italian men are anything but feminist. In many cases, they are (besides being stereotypically known as handsome) notorious for their predatory nature. They are aggressive in their pursuit of women, and for this reason, they are particularly appealing to foreign women who are looking for men unapologetic about their romantic desires. As a result, Italy is becoming the new Thailand for foreign women looking for “virile” men. The accusation that feminism has somehow emasculated men, and this is why birthrates are plummeting, is a fantasy. Italy is a tourist destination for women who are looking for masculine men, but who quickly realize these men are not able to commit because they can barely get by.

The other theory that women entering the workforce is the reason for lower birthrates is not just unsupported, but contradicted by the evidence. Italy has the lowest female participation rate in the workforce among all EU countries (only 51 percent of women work, on average). There aren’t many women CEOs; there are barely any new CEOs at all. This map of birthrates in southern Italy (more traditional and feminism-averse) versus northern Italy (more modern and economically prosperous for women) helps illustrate this point.

Individuals have families when they can; it’s a primordial instinct for most men and especially for most women. Having children is an inherent joy, but one cannot subtract the cost of children from the equation of when and why individuals decide to have them. If women were financially supported by their spouses, perhaps they would choose not to work and take care of their families. However, that is a distinct argument from claiming that women working is the reason for lower birthrates. The opposite is true in an economy where men can no longer be the primary breadwinners; working women contribute to the income necessary to afford a child in the first place. The idea that women entering the workforce has lowered pay for men is also unsubstantiated. How is that possible in Italy, where almost half of the women do not work? Shouldn’t men, as a result, be earning more?

The reason is simpler, and it lies in the economic infrastructure that defines (and plagues) developed nations. The idea that couples were having more children in dire poverty and war is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding. Developing and war-torn countries enjoy higher birth rates precisely because children contribute to the family welfare and security. It is not a coincidence that, without exception, all post-industrial countries around the world suffer from this predicament. The structure of the economy becomes inverted: Children become a cost as opposed to a benefit. The fact that Italy lives with the added element of a lack of economic dynamism and opportunity represents an aggravating factor.

Meloni doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t want to. She said her priority was to fix the birthrate and the lack of growth opportunities, but none of her policies since being elected have been directed at family formation or realizing working potential. Italy was known for its strong family foundations and for creating some of the most exceptional ingenuity in history, but this is no longer a reality. It is perhaps ironic that the liberal-Left is more sensitive to the economic predicament of ordinary citizens and recognizes that the “boot-strap” philosophy is limited when trying to redress an issue that requires collaboration through policy changes.

Meloni’s aim was mainly to travel the world to convince countries to invest in Italy, but this would only corrode the nation’s already fragile sense of autonomy and render the Italian economy more captive to foreign interests. Italy produces the strongest quality brands in the world, from its artisanship, designs, scientific developments, and much else. Unlike Western countries that rely on foreign capital or financial bubbles, Italy offers unique, tangible skills, and its economy is solidly based on authentic production.

In my opinion, her policy objectives should have been threefold. First, halt immigration, which is causing a rise in housing prices and downward pressure on wages for Italian citizens, besides an increase in crime and cultural division. Second, cut down and simplify a bureaucracy that would drive most sane people to a mental breakdown, to motivate creation. Third, invest in the young by enacting policies where the Boomer generation would be required to give up a proportional percentage of their shares to their descendants so that they can afford to build their future and have families. These policies wouldn’t have been a walk in the park to implement; politics hardly is. Nonetheless, countries like Hungary, Poland, and a rise in populism in the West provided Meloni all the support she needed to move forward. She held a majority in government, and many of these economic policies would have been popular among the liberal-Left as well.

There is much more that should be done, but not seizing these basic opportunities ahead of her and choosing a failed realpolitik approach where catering to the EU, the same institution responsible for Europe’s economic and cultural demise, or American neoconservative hawks who are causing instability in neighbouring countries, when Italy cannot afford more influx of migration, is why she lost the referendum. Votes in referendums are rarely about the merits of the choices themselves. They are usually gut reactions on how the electorate feels about the person offering the referendum. She lost, and she is now waking up to the reality that if she fails to redress her shortsightedness, she might lose the privilege the Italian people afforded her. On my part, I hope she welcomes the wake-up call. The majority are still behind her if she chooses to see them. We are waiting for Meloni’s return to her emboldened self.

Alessandra Bocchi is editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.

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Dissidents are winning elections, and they increasingly dominate the online political-cultural entertainment sphere, but nothing substantial seems to change in the lives of ordinary citizens. Quite the contrary. Not to sound defeatist, but it’s important to honestly describe our reality. European populists gave us a sense of excitement that Europe could revive itself, yet the economy is increasingly stagnant, young people cannot afford to create their own families or fulfil their professional aspirations, and mass migration is accepted as the new, inevitable normal. The Trump election promised to usher in a new “Golden Age”, yet Americans continue to live through more precariousness, cultural and spiritual degradation, and more Middle Eastern wars. The Epstein revelations gave us hope that we would finally see a glimpse of justice for an unaccountable elite, but the story quickly lost its shock appeal, and nothing came of it. All of these events teach us a valuable lesson if we choose to see it. They reveal how little power voting serves in changing the status quo, and how the organic online community that gives rise to these electoral victories is more limited in function than we believed.

Today, dissidents can learn from those in the past, but I propose a new, adapted format. Antonio Gramsci, the former head of the Italian Communist Party, perhaps the most influential political theorist for the Left, provided progressives with a roadmap to rise up the ranks of institutional power and consolidate their influence. In his book Prison Notebooks, written while imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, he coined the term “cultural hegemony”, by which he meant:

In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

Gramsci was a prominent founder of neo-Marxism, a movement that was born to explain the failure of 20th-century communism. Karl Marx’s original theory of history was called dialectical materialism; it was composed of a base, defined as the mode of production (in modern society, that was capitalism), which dictated the superstructure, defined as the cultural institutions that constitute the dominant ideology. Marx’s dialectical materialism follows Friedrich Hegel’s “dialectics”, whereby a thesis is confronted by an opposing antithesis, resulting in a synthesis which unifies the two opposing concepts. In contrast to Hegel, Marx believed the material world held precedence over the ideal world, hence the term “dialectical materialism”. However, Gramsci attempted to break away from Marx’s material determinism. In his understanding, Marx was wrong; the false consciousness of the proletariat would be awakened, not by overthrowing the means of production, but the other way around - by taking over the cultural institutions that shape the dominant consensus. No violent revolution was necessary. Control of the superstructure of these cultural institutions was enough for this to trickle down to economics. It was a continuation, and simultaneously an inversion of Marx’s theory of history.

What lessons can neo-Marxists like Gramsci teach dissidents today about the importance of cultural institutions in creating a new ideological consensus? I will use dissidents as an umbrella term to identify today’s intelligentsia who loosely disagree with the dominant neoconservative, neoliberal, and progressive agenda: they include Christian traditionalists, neo-Pagans, classical liberals, new-right wingers, certain libertarians, and old-school leftists who have rebelled against “wokeism” (though it’s a term that I’m allergic to using because of its abuse). I will amalgamate these various emerging ideologies into a single term, “dissidents”, despite their significant differences, because they share a common element in their beliefs. They seek to find an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy in Western society. They also share a failure, which is their inability to replace it.

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Beneath the loud wars over masculinity, with Democrats recently launching a $20 million “strategic plan” entitled “Speaking with American Men”, are quieter but no less significant battles over femininity. While young men have increasingly reacted with humor and rage against the corralled, tamed world in which their thymotic energy is punished, women have in many ways taken center stage. But what kinds of women, and what stage?

There are two main dominant and insufficient images of femininity today. Firstly there is what we could call “outward femininity,” in which signs and symbols associated with female roles are displayed to the point of parody. This is the pornographic feminine found everywhere from “Trad Wife” videos to the fetishistic behavior of certain men, who find pleasure in imagining themselves being forced to “become” female, and thus degraded. This image of femininity is primarily visual and consumerist and its evident fungibility demonstrates that it has nothing to do with true femininity, which must be predicated on real sex.

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The second image of femininity is negative and inherited from the second-wave feminist critique of femininity. Here, femininity is understood as something imposed by society upon girls and women and upheld by them insofar as women have not yet reached sufficient self-awareness to break their shackles. Femininity is understood in this image as a way of being designed by men for men. Take this quote from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970):

The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all women. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity. If any man who has no right to her be found with her she will not be punished, for she is morally neuter. The matter is solely one of male rivalry. Innocently, she may drive men to madness and war. The more trouble she can cause, the more her stocks go up, for possession of her means more the more demand she excites.

The eternal feminine stereotype is sexless (a “eunuch” in Greer’s language). She exists solely for others and not for herself, or for other women. Yet even this sexless blank canvas can be the cause of all kinds of trouble because of the rivalry she generates. There is no balance between the sexes in this image, no harmony, no dance. Just men competing with other men over a desirable absence.

While Greer’s account of femininity may be too extreme, after all, pretty girls have inner lives too, it also has the added negative effect of downplaying the need for virtue as such. If all a good-looking woman needs to do is sit there quietly to exude the appearance of virtue, then what point is there in any genuine moral improvement whatsoever? The other aspect of this is the social response, played out over the past fifty years or so, namely, what it actually looks like for women to break with social expectation. The mass entry of middle-class women into the office workforce (though working class women have always worked) played out against a backdrop of technological development that was, in one of those great ironies of history, extremely fortuitous for the weaker sex: namely, the massive outsourcing and diminution of physical labor, the privileging of verbal and social skills in an increasingly data and knowledge-based economy.

It is often remarked that women’s emancipation meant women becoming more “like men”. While there is undoubtedly truth here, not least because male and female spheres became crushed into a single economic space in which men and women compete for work, thus learning each other’s tricks, we have also seen the “becoming-woman” of man. Because of its indirect, non-physical nature, the internet has also seen the adoption of various negative social strategies usually associated with women: Character assassination, mean-girl-ism, and so on.

Both masculinity and femininity are in a confused mess. A couple of years ago, some young Australian women dancing and singing in business suits as “boss girls” were roundly mocked for an office video in which they recite lines like “Gen Z boss and a mini” and “itty bitty titties and a bob”. While the performance was unquestionably cringe-worthy, there was a howl that spoke of a deep pain and a bitter humour: “This is why none of homies have job,” responded one man; “This is why birth rates are declining,” posted another. “Taliban was right”, wrote another.

The world is in desperate need of the balancing of masculine and feminine forces. The meaning of these forces is neither to be found in directly emulating each other, particularly not in grotesque and parodic fashion, this goes for both men and women, nor by accepting the terms of the world as they are currently presented to us. Representation in either the visual or political sense is not the end game for men or women, as if attention or politics were the highest goal.

The recognition of men and women in their fundamental reality must be part of any healthy restoration of both positive masculinity and femininity. To do this we must understand what virtues are shared by both sexes - patience is a good thing to cultivate, but might look different in each sex - and which are specific to men and to women; or, perhaps more subtly, how the same virtue plays out differently in men and women.

To take femininity specifically. We might understand why second-wave feminists were critical of femininity understood as a restrictive social expectation. After all, are there not multiple ways of “being” a woman? For sure, there are. Yet by implying that women should simply take up male values and roles, we end up with a parodic image of masculinity as performed by women. We also dispense with any discussion of the specificity of virtue if we simply imagine that all virtues exist only cynically, that is to say, we have forgotten their purpose, and we become suspicious of anyone who says: “Well, you should behave like this because I say so!” or “Because you’re a woman!” Thus, we end up in a vicious spiral of recrimination and denunciation in which each party wants something from the other, but can’t articulate why.

True femininity is something like this: paying attention to how goodness is natural to being a woman. It is a moral and spiritual question as much as it is a physical or aesthetic one, though they are all connected. Taking up appearance on its own and reducing femininity to signs is insufficient. The girl or woman who in earlier times might have been called a Tomboy does not wish to be a boy or a man, despite the idiotic literalism of our era with gender theory. Instead, she seeks to refuse the gaudy symbols of a hyperfeminity in exchange for a neutrality, which is itself a rather feminine move. The authenticity of the Tomboy consists of a way of being in the world that may or may not accompany interest in typically male-coded things, but this is less the point than a certain kind of effortless ambivalence regarding femininity itself, a refusal to commit to the excessive demands of visual-sexual domination.

While being critical of the excesses of the superficial image of femininity is desirable, chucking it all out in favor of playing the masculine role is insufficient, insofar as it has little to do with the deeper moral and philosophical reality of sexual difference. Femininity is a way of being that enacts a deep sympathy and wisdom. It has as its goal, not the attention of men, though it may well attract this and we hope it will, but rather it consists in a specifically female understanding and intuition of the universe as such, in a way different but compatible with the male vision.

Nina Power is a writer, editor, and philosopher. She is the author of “What Do Men Want?” (Penguin: 2022).

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The Jeffrey Epstein saga shows that we are living through a crisis of heroism. We are obsessed with the villains of the story - the Jeffrey Epsteins of our times, but he is missing a nemesis. There’s no hero to our story.

The anti-heroes are, as a result, viewed through a lens of mystery and allure. Even some of my friends, who are painters and couldn't care less who Epstein was, said their feeds were clogged with videos of him. Endless posts online are circulating about Epstein. What is striking is how most of the ironic ones focus not on how bad he was, but on how cool he looked. Many videos describe Epstein as “Dripstein”. His magnetism was, apparently, impossible to ignore.

In an interview, the ex-girlfriend of former “Prince Andrew”, Victoria Harvey, said:

He knew everybody who was very powerful, so if you were on the scene, and you were powerful, to be honest, if you are not on those files, it would be an insult, because it just means you are a bit of a loser … Of course, I [am on the files].

At face value, Epstein - unlike most villains portrayed in our fictional or nonfictional storytelling - is not a monstrous, marginalized figure who becomes evil because he was shunned from society. He was popular, admired, charming, and a leading member of the world's elite circles. He was well-dressed and clean-cut, with an effortless, casual style. At the same time, beneath that curated appearance, he was creating an international sex-trafficking blackmail operation that involved the abuse of children, with much more that we still need to learn.

A recent article by British journalist Jake Hanrahan on “The Sinister Epstein Photos You Haven’t Seen Yet” shows the depth of the depravity in his homes. The fact that no victims were shown leaves space to the imagination, making the viewer feel even more disconcerted. When interviewed by Steve Bannon about whether he was the devil, Epstein circled the question with wit and humor. And most of those watching aren’t sure what to make of it. They don’t respond with the kind of shock revelations that this severity and magnitude would normally elicit because they have grown accustomed to the moral vacuum.

The message here is that there is no hero we can look up to who was willing to stand up to Epstein when it mattered, except his victims, whom one would expect to come forward, and who have still hardly won. They went through a tiresome legal process only to have justice evade them before the trial because Epstein allegedly took his own life. This final act only deepened our sense of distrust about how entrenched his power truly was. His death was too much of a convenient coincidence for those he was going to expose.

For a hero in this story, we would have needed an infiltrator to hold Epstein and those he controlled accountable. But none of the figures who could have become his nemesis, who were operationally as powerful or close to as powerful as he was, did anything to stop him or his web of coconspirators and apologists. In fact, what makes the public particularly cynical now is that they all seem implicated. Even Noam Chomsky, the intellectual lion of the anti-war Left, who wrote Manufacturing Consent and who spent his career moralizing the public on the corruption inherent in modern power systems, was seen on a flight having the time of his life with the sexual offender. As a society, we’re waking up to the reality that there are no heroes to our story; we’re ruled by a hypocritical elite. The majority of those in power, irrespective of their ideology, when offered the devil’s hand, weren’t able to resist. They decided to join the corruption brazenly and without remorse because they felt certain of their untouchability, and because being part of that elite made them feel omnipotent, without realizing that it would turn out to be their biggest liability. As a result, instead of a response of condemnation and outrage, of demanding the un-redacted copies of all the files to understand who was being corrupted and why, there is a form of nihilistic indifference.

A right-wing political influencer called Emily Wilson fatalistically suggested:

Just f*cking log off, who cares? There’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing is going to happen to these people.

But this is the defeatist attitude they want us to internalize. The release of these files, and the way they’re being released, isn’t coincidental. They’re intended as a message: By making us believe that heroes do not exist, we feel we have no hope that creating a better society is possible. This narrative is being normalized to make us feel uninspired and to hide the motives of the true culprits. We’re not asking, “Why was this operation taking place? For whom or what?” Instead, the public is entertained by the sensationalism.

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Pointing out that the virtual world has transformed our conception of connection is cliché. But how that online connection can be developed isn’t. It can inhibit or lay the grounds for us to build meaningful relationships. If we’re doom-scrolling half our days to distract ourselves, we’re more likely to feel not just isolated, but of no use to ourselves or others.

This feeling is growing now that both X and Instagram have dropped in content quality because of AI, so the first step for social media platforms to regain value would be to implement an AI filter, and a filter on the content we would like to see independently from the algorithm (instead of having to fight the algorithm by selecting what topics we don’t want to see). Substack has managed to implement the first option successfully, and that’s why users are flocking here. But regardless of company policies, the issue of virtual connection replacing real connection has been affecting us since the dawn of social media. I need to delve into a few, not-so-optimistic statistics and diagnoses on disconnection, before exploring the more optimistic outlook.

A recent Harvard study explored the epidemic of loneliness. To this day, almost a fourth of people report suffering from existential loneliness, which many times includes not having a friend to rely on. Others report having at least two close friends. If you have one truly close friend, you’re already above average for today’s standards. Not just because of the quantity, but the qualitative aspect: Real friends are hard to find. If not, know that you’re not an outlier. With remote working and self-employment, even the workplace can’t offer the connections we found in the pre-technological periods.

We’re entering an automated society where most labour-based jobs will be replaced. Both radical left and right-wing thinkers have analyzed how post-capitalism would inevitably lead to self-sufficiency, and therefore a necessary end to exploitative labor. Aaron Bastani, a British socialist journalist, explored in his book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, how AI would lead to excessive abundance and therefore a communist utopia. A similar diagnosis was developed by reactionary political theorist Nick Land in The Dark Enlightenment, but he concluded that we should accelerate into capitalism so that its dissolution would bring new, functional anti-democratic systems of government. I would disagree with the idea that this world of independent automation will produce utopian communism or organic city-states; in my view, it will create a society of content creators who will assemble around their interests, and another competition-based hierarchy will naturally result from it. But the diagnosis here is important because technology and automation have created a post-scarcity society through self-reliance. As a result, we’re no longer motivated by the necessity of labor, and with modern tools making us less inclined to seek support from others, we become more alone. However, this solitude isn’t sustainable.

We’re reaching a turning point regarding human connection that deserves more attention, not least because we’re not surviving as a civilization. The relationship arena is substantially affected by this radical transition into automation. Most individuals in the West are no longer having children because they are becoming unaffordable due to inflation and rising costs of living. Children were once needed for labor, and they added to the economic output of the family; today, the opposite is true because labor is no longer needed, and men and women don’t need each other to survive, either. Romantic connection and creating a family are becoming an intentional choice, even a sacrifice. Only 59 percent of men are married by age 35-39, a stark decrease from our parents’ generation. By 2030, 45 percent of women are projected to be single and childless between the ages of 25-45 (the same or similar numbers apply to men). And what makes these statistics more concerning is that these conditions exist without the previous support system of an extended family, a broader community, or a workplace to alleviate the solitude, so instead, we resort to social media.

The basic question we can ask ourselves, instead of delving too much into analyses of the causes and symptoms, is: How do we reconnect?

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“Looksmaxxing” is a new trend driven by social media fixation on our image, and as a result, cosmetic surgery continues to rise. Public figures face the most scrutiny, with before and after photos being analyzed with high-pixel, maximum contrast in the most unflattering depictions possible, often as a subject for mockery. A few times, to show what a great job has been done. Others, to point out how the subject in question is a liar for claiming they’ve had no work done. But in this context, what is becoming increasingly apparent is that the taboo surrounding cosmetic procedures has lost its power. With a 102 percent increase in procedures since 2021 for both men and women, it’s becoming less of an outlier and a part of regular life. The question is no longer about whether a procedure was done, but how.

I make figurative oil paintings. I painted fruit recently, and found that the elements others thought strange - cuts, blemishes, drops - are what gave my paintings life, what made them distinct from a simple illustration. If my fruit were OGM-painted, there would be nothing interesting about it. Likewise, if I made a hyperrealist, photographic fruit, it would be the same or similar to a photo. In other words, it would lose its most sacred quality: Imperfection.

Perfection is machine-like. It is not awe-inspiring. Imperfection, on the other hand, creates uniqueness, which is a necessary trait of beauty. It’s a form of imperfection that, unknowingly, can create the image of beauty in our minds.

Another technical lesson I learned through painting faces, in particular, is just how much a fracture of a difference can radically change an expression or structure of a face. One tiny stroke on a nose can change that nose entirely. Adding cheekbones can make the lower part of the face suddenly look disproportionate. Creating bigger lips, even just a single extra line, can create a fish-like look. The harmony of a face is determined by extremely minor, almost imperceptible differences that, however, change the whole entirely. Surgeons are mostly ignorant of this reality because they’re not trained as artists; they’re trained as mechanics. A study reveals that most cosmetic surgeons receive only one anatomy session during the first year of medical school. The same study found that the best surgeons, however, are first and foremost, the best anatomists. In contrast, anatomy is a mandatory, in-depth subject for most students of figurative art.

In our contemporary society, we are exposed to an unprecedented degree of high-quality photography and film. We can easily fall prey to excessive self-consciousness, studying every part of ourselves, comparing ourselves to predetermined definitions of beauty. Industrialization first introduced the idea that perfection, in the sense of strict symmetry and equal parts of a whole without an outlier, equates to beauty. Technology has further exacerbated this trend by creating artificial perfection in a virtual reality, even more focused on eliminating flaws. Yet, we are not satisfied with these depictions - and there is a reason for it. God’s design may sometimes appear chaotic; one can just visit the wilderness to understand how. But the intricate details beneath it are orderly.

Beauty is one of life’s greatest privileges; a virtue that requires no explanation, one which reason fails to justify. Plato wrote,

Beauty is a natural superiority.

But it relies on the feeling it produces, like awe or wonder. No one would be expected to explain why the Northern Lights were wondrous or why the mundane isn’t. It’s an intuitive sense of impression. A replication of the Northern Lights, however perfectly executed, would lose that impressive ability and instead impress a sense of uncanniness.

A carefully curated park is not as beautiful as a wild forest. But there is also an argument to be made that a wild forest requires some manmade interventions to retain its equilibrium. And here is where cosmetic surgery can have some value, if performed correctly.

For Plato, beauty is a means to ascend to a higher revelation of virtue. He argued,

Beauty lifts us beyond this world … The contemplation of beauty causes the soul to grow wings.

Creating beauty in our physical selves allows us to develop internal goodness. Some were born without the gift of nature’s beauty, or they may have suffered an accident or disease, sometimes even an extremely stressful period, and they hope for that to be corrected. Surgery can be an equalizer, a way to make life fairer and to develop that goodness inherent in beauty. Despite the stigma attached to cosmetic surgery, some individuals achieve remarkable results. Lives can be changed. Self-esteem can be rebuilt. So, how can cosmetic surgery be performed with a positive outcome, restoring the Platonic conception of beauty as a reflection of our souls?

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It is a warm summer day in Bulgaria, my grandmother has prepared moussaka for our family: potatoes, vegetables, meat, oil, and creamy yogurt on top. A confluence of local, seasonal ingredients, culinary skill, and a recipe that, by this time, amounts to a family treasure. There are no questions from those around the table: no scrutiny of the ingredients; no angst over whether it was cardio-protective or ketogenic; no one asks if it is gluten-free.

On days like these, food anxiety seems like a contradiction in terms.

We didn’t grow up analyzing food; we embraced it. The only dietary restrictions were out-of-season ingredients; the only rules were the handwritten recipes we had inherited. Our tomatoes in summer dripped with soil and juice. My grandfather kept a garden with a cherry tree, and we never washed the fruit before tasting it. We didn’t eat with the intention of controlling our bodies. We couldn’t wait for the moment when we could sit at a table with those we loved and taste the passage of time.

Years later, when I moved to Italy, I encountered a different kind of reverence. Pasta wasn’t always buried under heavy sauces; it breathed. Aglio, olio, peperoncino, garlic, olive oil, and peppers. In Austria, where I studied in Vienna, food still retains a structure rooted in a history where its people survived on meat and butter. Food was a given, not sanctified. Certainly not feared.

Then came California.

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Suddenly, the authenticity I once thought of as a good available to all, was a privilege afforded to a few. A carefully branded premium, locked behind price tags and wellness labels. “Food”, with all its comforts and pleasures, was out, “nutrition” was in, trailing behind its advice and warnings, disclaimers and recommendations.

In a supermarket aisle, I paused in front of a carton of almond milk. I hadn’t tasted dairy in weeks. In the U.S., I discovered that I was lactose intolerant. For the first time, I felt I needed to go through hurdles before any ingredient made it to the shopping cart; food meant tests were expected to be passed, and failure meant abstinence.

There is a kind of violence in putting our bodies through constant micro-testing. Not the kind that screams, but the kind that creeps. That whispers: You must optimize and purify. You must transcend the sin of pleasure.

And yet, somewhere in my bones, a hunger stirred. Not for perfection, but for something older. Something known in the blood of my ancestors.

In Greece, my husband and I eat grilled fish by the water. We dip white bread into olive oil, still green from the press. We sip ouzo without occasion. The breeze carries oregano, and the sea glistens like a God’s eye.

Greeks like to dance, so many of our waiters would sing to us, and tell us stories, pulling us from our chairs to twirl under the stars. Most of the tavernas were inherited: Family-run, woven into the village like the olive trees surrounding them. Tradition wasn’t a performance; it was the water they swam in.

Still, the more American I felt, the harder it became to renounce the labels I’d internalized.

In the U.S., PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) now affects up to 13 percent of women of reproductive age. In Bulgaria, the condition was once so rare it felt almost fictional. Now, even there, it grows. As does gluten intolerance, lactose intolerance, and the litany of no’s we memorize before entering a kitchen.

While to a limited extent these prohibitions are founded on legitimate medical conditions, their accelerating expansion and the traction they’ve gained with society at large represent a larger, more insidious cultural shift.

Michel Foucault described, “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.” He characterised this phenomenon as the onset of biopower. The body becomes supervised “through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population”.

The advice, warnings, quantification of nutritional value, and disclaimers that pervade food labels are not neutral expressions of fact. They constitute specific technologies of power, regulating our relationship to our food under the guise of wellbeing. Those institutions created the contaminated food we are subjected to today. First, make the disease, then create the cure.

In this context, the anxiety we feel in the aisles of a supermarket doesn’t reflect a justifiable fear of bread or milk. It is an instinctive rejection of the power that is subtly being exercised over our choices. The fragmentation through the unknown ingredients. The loss of trust. The abstraction of food from the community we were meant to enjoy it with. Something as elementary as real food became complicated, increasingly challenging to obtain.

I often ask myself: When did food become a trend to categorize? Were we not watching closely before, or has the trend metastasized - moved from ingredients to identity? We don’t just eat differently. We brand our eating. “Vegan,” “keto,” “anti-inflammatory,” now, even “intuitive eating.” Do we have to label it intuitive? The words crowd the packaging, but that sense of health we might briefly feel from eating the “right” food doesn’t nourish our souls, as around 25% of Americans now dine alone.

This self-imposed dietary surveillance doesn’t just constrain what we eat; it imposes a moral architecture on eating itself. The “clean” eater is the hyper-conscious consumer. Food choices are governed by what is optimal for them alone. Meanwhile, those who still eat spontaneously and without scrutiny, or still find value in the communality of a shared table, are viewed as relics of a cruder, less sophisticated time.

But food is not merely a tool to render our performance more optimal. It’s a ritualistic inheritance.

I miss the ignorance. There’s something holy about ignorance when it comes to food. The kind that trusted your grandmother’s hands more than the Instagram of a wellness influencer. They believed cabbage rolled around rice and meat was enough, and the more you ate, the better you felt. That didn’t question whether a cake would shorten your life, because you were too busy living it.

The joy was in repetition. In slicing tomatoes every summer the same way your mother did. In kneading dough by feel, not by measurement. In knowing that a certain salad shows up on the table when the plants ripen, and not a week sooner. That kind of eating doesn’t just nourish the body, it ties you to time, to climate, to seasons, to your people. It makes you a natural element of your environment.

California bears its gifts. Farmers’ markets are ripe with fruit I wasn’t aware existed. One of my favorite places is a small farm stand in Bolinas, near the coast. No cashier, no signage. Just a wooden table, a Venmo code, and natural vegetables still covered in soil. That dirt feels honest.

My husband and I found a small, family-run vineyard in Napa where we held our wedding. They make just a few hundred bottles a year. It wasn’t just about the wine for us, but the sense of belonging that transpired through creation with authenticity.

But even here, a fever of anxiety lurks beneath the surface in our relationship to food. A form of hyperawareness. Food is something to be managed, not something to share; the dining table has become displaced as the hub of the home, and food feels severed from family.

Across the U.S., and increasingly in Europe, labels multiply, traditions thin, and access narrows. Organic becomes luxury. Food becomes performance. We begin to question whether real food is still meant for everyone, but it is.

We can bring the joy of trusted food back into livelihoods. I believe this loss of simplicity is rooted in something deeper: A loss of control over our roots.

When we lose our sense of identity and continuity, of where our food originates, and what it means, we become unanchored. We begin to fear the very thing that once grounded us. We lose the ritual, the rhythm, the connection. And this isn’t just about food. It’s about life.

That simplicity can return.

Not through branding or labelling it. But by making it our default option. I will fight for that kind of eating. For its honesty, its pleasure, and its quiet power.

Kristina Vassileva is a writer on human psychology and modern cultural identities.

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Both sides of the younger political spectrum share common ground. With a rise in nativist sentiments among nationalists, taking care of one’s own is becoming the new priority. Young progressives, despite aspiring for a different outcome, share a similar communitarian sentiment in principle. The societal schism is becoming less ideological and more age-based: The era of rootless, hedonistic individualism is over. We’re aspiring for more.

The soul of the Boomer is reflected in the hippie-rock aesthetic. Their revolt found expression in the counterculture movement of “free love”. The peace-preaching music of Bob Dylan, the Woodstock festivals, the anaesthetizing drug use, the concept of unbound, universal acceptance, of living in the present moment, and of the mantra, “I did my best”. It was, in essence, an inversion of the Silent Generation’s values of prudence, responsibility, and sacrifice.

While the Silent Generation built its politics around creating possibilities for the unborn generations, the Boomers grounded theirs in preserving privilege for themselves. They turned their gaze inwards. A Narcissus, fixated on their own reflection. In doing so, they managed to hoard not only wealth, assets, and power, but time.

The notion that Boomers are aging and fading from view is inaccurate. The last members of the Silent Generation are only now dying. With their passing, the Boomers have inherited more power and wealth. But a revolt is underway. The recent interview between Piers Morgan and Nick Fuentes pointed to a deeper, psychological fracture: Younger generations are responding with mockery to the Boomers’ hypocrisy of moral superiority. They’re no longer engaging with measured, reasonable responses, but with a form of defiance rooted in contempt. There is a reason for this sentiment, however disagreeable it may appear.

Boomers could climb the economic ladder in the span of a few years in their youth. A construction worker or a secretary in the 1980s for a small company could afford to buy a home worth 30k, a car to commute safely to work and take their children to school, maybe even a second holiday home with an upgrade. That world no longer exists. That same house is worth at least 600k today, and salaries have remained stagnant, while prices skyrocket with inflation, and it’s no longer safe to walk on the street alone in any major Western city.

Millennials and Generation Z studied and worked harder, more competitively, and longer than their parents to survive in a rigged, perilous system. Stagnant wages, student debt, lifelong mortgages, and unemployment, while competing with labor from a global market through open borders, as their own hometowns are becoming foreign to them. This makes the aspiration of a family increasingly elusive, not just spiritually, but on a practical level, so the birthrates continue to plummet. A recent comment on an online reel about our generation having fewer children was striking: “No one wants to raise a kid in an apartment, living check to check.” Children were indeed made in far poorer conditions, but not ones where the cost of living was proportionately so high, without ownership.

The most pressing sociological anomaly today is an aging population. The percentage of political representatives who are over the age of 70 across the Western world has skyrocketed to 25 times higher than in the past. A very young leader is now considered to be approaching 50. Examples are Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy (and that is young for a leader, but not at the 70 benchmark). Pointing out this reality isn’t ageism. It’s confronting the truth that we live in a gerontocracy: A rule by the old. And it’s not just that we’re being ruled by the old, that wouldn’t necessarily be an issue per se, if it weren’t that this older generation is directly inhibiting younger generations from fulfilling their future.

More than half of Gen Z and Millennials, who are barely represented in their political systems, report that they’re depending on their inheritance to achieve any semblance of financial security. It’s perhaps no surprise that single women are turning to OnlyFans and young men are becoming crypto brokers. These are the few professions that offer quick ways to make a decent income to meet the purchasing needs of our time. But a civilization where the most promising prospects for the young are prostitution and scamming, while the old live comfortably from the proceeds of late-stage rentier capitalism, is hardly one with a promising future. For a society to flourish, it must produce and reward value.

The lack of creation in value, coupled with the increasing unaffordability of life, is a unique feature of our post-industrial, speculative era. It means that our society cannot sustain itself, and therefore that it cannot reproduce. By definition, that organism is struggling to stay alive.

Immigrants arriving from poorer, agrarian countries are simultaneously becoming stronger. They enjoy the backbone of united families, where costs are cut, and contributions are compounded because they are shared. They hold healthy pride and unapologetic self-love towards their ancestry. In contrast, the average Western individual is atomized, vilified, turned into the villain of his own story, and must be fully self-reliant in a society where such independence is made impossible by design.

To understand why we find ourselves at this impasse of precarious solitude, one needs to know where the source of the issue is: the Western Boomer. Their philosophy of life is the underlying reason for our civilizational collapse.

The Boomers’ dismissive attitude towards this grievance is part of a wider generational malaise: A lack of self-awareness, a blind selfishness to the concerns of the young. Their typical response falls into: “You’re owed nothing; you should make it on your own.” It is natural for youngsters to cherish their elders, to view them as sources of wisdom, and for these elders to offer some necessary constructive criticism. But the Boomers have managed to become uniquely resented by those who succeed them because their children are picking up the rubble from their poor choices. Instead of trying to make amends for their mistakes, Boomers continue to view respect from their descendants as a birthright while compromising the very opportunities their children need to succeed. The inter-generational chain of trust has been broken, and animosity towards them is growing.

Millennials and Gen Z are accused of acting like victims by Boomer philosophers like Jordan Peterson. The usual argument against victimhood is that it’s a dangerous mindset because it can lead to failure, and that self-responsibility is a virtue because it leads us to improve ourselves. That is true, but not always for the reasons implied. Failure can also come from refusing to stand up to a system that is sabotaging one’s opportunities to succeed, while self-responsibility means finding the courage to change it.

Boomers have amassed $84.4 trillion, which is set to be inherited by their children through 2045, representing the largest generational wealth transfer in history. Boomers are, in fact, the wealthiest generation in all of recorded history. But what is concerning about these numbers is the level of comparative generational inequality they represent.

Earning wealth isn’t a zero-sum game. A person earning wealth for themselves doesn’t deny another to earn theirs. But for the first time in our civilization, the young earn and own drastically less than their parents, and they’re unable to compensate because the odds are stacked against them by the political economy they’ve inherited. They feel betrayed and sold out.

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A characteristic of our aging society is a pension system that is becoming unaffordable. It is Millennials and Gen Z who, despite the large disparity in wealth compared to their parents, work to pay for Boomer pensions, which are becoming unsustainable because of demographic decline. The response by Boomers who still hold positions of power is to let in more migrants to compensate for a labor gap. But migration causes downward pressure on wages, uses limited welfare resources, and raises housing prices. These factors directly damage younger generations. Mass migration also erodes the social and cultural fabric that defines a people’s sense of identity. In its worst manifestations, it creates ethnic and religious strife - the likes we already routinely witness.

The Boomers are immune to this reality. Such concepts should be sacrificed at the altar of their material comfort, the only currency that is palatable to them. They use GDP as a tone-deaf metric to justify their self-indulgence. Living in a harmonious society was a given, and they won’t live long enough to see the consequences of their misguided dreams of inclusivity, the euphemism deployed to justify the import of cheap labor and the expansion, to breaking point, of their pension system.

They’re not concerned with how this contracted economy will make it prohibitively expensive for their children to own a home, have children of their own, to benefit from any remaining resources from a government they’re increasingly taxed by, or to use their talents for the betterment of society. Boomers are, by definition, a parasitic class that, instead of investing in the young, leeches off of their good nature. The bootstrap argument fails to address the reality that hides beneath their moral posturing. Boomers benefit from the system they’ve created, while the young generations lose from it. Necessarily, our interests are conflicting; not commensurate.

This goes some way to explaining why they have carved a unique place in history as the most hated generation. Entire books have been dedicated to their actions. A Generation of Sociopaths, How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future, and Why They Should Give It Back.

A photo of Boomers enjoying the Woodstock festival on X recently received a wave of hateful comments: “The most worthless generation, they took everything and gave nothing.” Another one wrote, “The most vile generation”. Charles Murray, a political scientist from the Boomer generation, posted a thread on social media trying to lecture young generations on how they could “make it” on their own. He was met with vitriol for the hypocrisy of his arguments. Recently, a user posted, “Boomers raped and pillaged all the good things life had to offer on their way up to the ivory tower, then pushed the ladder away when they got to the top.” These are not isolated comments; they are becoming viral. Some anonymous accounts are even threatening to end the lives of their parents in their retirement homes, a form of hatred that is unhealthy, symptomatic of exasperation.

That said, it’s important to analyze their own circumstances, not to justify their behavior but to understand it. Boomers are largely products of their environment. The Silent Generation, their parents, and our grandparents, were not the most outwardly affectionate or supportive. They carried the psychological fatigue from surviving the Second World War, a war that used the first weapons of mass destruction. It shouldn’t be surprising that they believed in a form of “tough love”. This was not arrogance. They were tough. As survivors of one of the most catastrophic wars in world history, their love could be nothing else.

But the Silent Generation made sure their children could live with the security and dignity they had been denied. With this mindset, the post-war economic “boom” was born. Hence, Boomers grew up with a lethal combination of an absence of personal love from their parents, coupled with unearned good fortune. Plagued by their perceived inadequacy relative to the accomplishments of their parents, insecure by the lack of any defining struggle of their own, the result was one of reckless indulgence. Boomer parents lacked presence with their children, just like the Silent Generation, but with the added feature of being unable to provide guidance or to leave behind a legacy their children could rely on. In contrast, Millennial parents are reported to be more present with their children, more willing to spend time and take care of them, and more active in wanting to redress the injustices they have suffered, whatever their political affiliation may be.

Assured by their own fantasy that old age can be a new adolescence, the Boomers have indefinitely prolonged their own childhood and passed on the costs to the young. This is the principle that explains some of their most devastating actions: Inflating market bubbles, clinging to seats of power long after the erosion of their cognitive faculties, letting their children be replaced in their only homelands, denying them opportunities to create families, or to contribute to the hallmarks of excellence that have characterized our civilization (instead of, say - having to work at an Amazon service to pay off a studio apartment mortgage).

As a result, we are having fewer children and are becoming less motivated and inspired. In fact, young generations are suffering from existential angst and depression. Boomers offer them therapy, the consolation of psychiatric numbness. But these are only nominal solutions that exacerbate the problem. They neutralize legitimate feelings into silence. Youngsters are seeing the intent behind this playbook, and a healthy rebellion is growing beneath the surface.

Boomers cannot be trusted with the levers of power. This isn’t a question of impatient princes and princesses demanding an early seat on the throne. It’s about the survival of something resembling the Western civilization our ancestors built. Power must be passed down to rest with those who will live with the consequences of how it is exercised. And if increased lifespans preclude this from occurring biologically, and Boomers refuse to do so willingly, it should be enacted in policy. It isn’t an act of revenge. It’s a restoration of the idea that society is held in trust for the future.

The pace of change requires leaders who understand the present domains. We cannot meet the challenges presented by AI from a generation that can’t remember their Yahoo password or convert a PDF file. New technologies represent revolutionary powers that need to be harnessed for the public good, and they necessarily require leadership from those who are aware of how they operate and whose horizons extend beyond the immediate future.

Asking Boomer parents to help their descendants might not be helpful: They’re not legally obliged, and most have already expressed their unwillingness to do so. Legislation, and social pressure, are our only options.

It is now beyond argument that the young do not enjoy meaningful political agency: We are outnumbered, as a voting bloc, by those older than us and by foreign-born voters who unite to advance narrow, culture-specific agendas. Meanwhile, the average age of elected representatives in Western democracies continues to climb, and candidates, for reasons of political self-interest, increasingly cater to the wishes of non-native voters and to the older generations who lobby and finance them. We need to restore power to the disaffected. The young natives whose voices have been voiceless for too long.

One can start with affirmative action, opening up positions of office for native Millennials and Gen Z, who find themselves destitute and unrepresented. This isn’t pettiness, nor is it rooted in the reparation of historical injustice, as race- or gender-based quotas are. It would be a pragmatic necessity to steer the wheels our society is headed towards through policymaking.

Addressing the underrepresentation of the young in political office will only solve part of the problem. Meaningful change requires redressing the imbalance of capital. Another policy would therefore be aimed at transferring a percentage of Boomer assets, 60 to 80 percent, depending on each case, to their successors. The prevailing hypersensitivity to “Marxism” makes any capital transfer seem tyrannical even to young conservatives today. “Redistribution” remains a terrifying word. But this policy wouldn’t risk providing resources to the government, because it would be transferred rather than taxed to heirs, while Boomers retain the residue of their assets and their entitlements to pension support. It would be immune, as a result, to inflationary pressure or the risk of government expansion.

The objection to this policy is familiar. That one’s accomplishments must be determined on merit alone. But a lack of meritocracy is precisely the issue at stake. The transfer is intended as an ad hoc measure to redress a historical anomaly that denies merit. When one generation has monopolized the very power and capital that create opportunities for younger generations, the notion of meritocracy becomes meaningless. To suggest that correcting a de facto generational class system based on age must be opposed on the grounds of “Marxism” is to internalize another of the Boomers’ arguments, a remnant of the Cold War era, that only two systems of government exist: Communism and Capitalism. But this restorative approach represents neither. It’s a corrective measure to address a failure of the Boomers’ making in the dysfunctional system they’ve created.

Bruce Cannon Gibney in his book against Boomers, observed that,

Even a plague of generational locusts like the Boomers can do only so much damage in a lifetime, however unduly prolonged that lifetime may be courtesy of benefits funded by the young.

I disagree. The damage will continue until the chain of succession between generations is re-established. The social contract that binds us as a civilization depends on the belief of the governed that those in power have a meaningful stake in the future. Instead of blaming Millennials and Gen Z, who voice their grievances and who are unable to create futures of their own, one should start to understand why those grievances exist.

The recent uproar from our generation against Boomers isn’t a fantasy. It reflects the rage of children waking up to the betrayal of their parents. It should be enough to make Boomers recognize that their time is up, and that peaceful retirement is preferable to revolution.

Alessandra Bocchi is editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.

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I deactivated my X account despite the fact that I had my largest following on that account alone. It’s worth explaining why, because it might make a difference, and because there’s a deeper lesson to learn from it. One we can trace back to mythology.

Whatever your interests were, but especially if you were engaged politically, Twitter as a social media platform uniquely made you feel like you were part of a mission larger than yourself. Unlike other platforms, it offered the opportunity to share your ideas in writing and have others directly engage with or critique them. That’s what made Twitter both toxic (because of the constant verbal conflict) and noble (because of the aspiration for a higher purpose).

That sense of visionary comradeship was gradually lost once Elon Musk purchased Twitter, turned it into X, and started rewarding fast entertainment at the expense of substantive thought. Opting for posting some photos here and there with a “GM” caption felt simpler than my previous analytical posts that required research, until I grew tired of the spectacle: I cut off the bull’s head and deactivated my account entirely. I felt no resistance; it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution intended to control screen time or addiction to social media. It felt swift and easy, and I feel cleansed because of it. A clean breakup.

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With the rise of AI, many of us feel more cautious about posting ourselves online. As Grok started undressing women, there was a sense of violation of our dignity that rightfully caused an uproar. That was the last straw for me. I wasn’t excited to log on to see who was saying what; I didn’t feel like sharing my ideas there anymore. Not because I didn’t feel passionately about them. I feel more passionate now than I ever did. But because the Twitter I once loved has become something I no longer recognize.

It’s not worth ruminating on the past. That’s why I deactivated. “Bye Felicia” is more often than not the mantra we need when something we tried to make work stops working for us. But when we become so accustomed to a change, we forget how things were before that change took place. It’s worth remembering the past to track whether there has been progress and to see if there are lessons to learn.

Twitter is where I started out sharing my work as a journalist. I barely used social media before that; it represented an alien world to me.

That quickly changed when, at the age of 22, I aspired to become a journalist rather than pursue a PhD in Philosophy. I was told I needed to create a Twitter account, so I did. But I barely used it - I had 200 followers. Yet, my career took off as a journalist, quite randomly, thanks to Twitter.

I was DM’d by two Vice journalists when I argued and had quite an aggressive fight on the platform with an unhinged British jihadist apologist who was threatening to ruin my life. This man had one hundred times my follower count and far more traction. Because I felt cornered, I went for the jugular and told that man to stop attacking me, and exposed him for being a propaganda mouthpiece for TRT - the Turkish State Television Network. When the Vice journalists messaged me in private to show their support for my response to him, I looked up their names and realized they were “famous”, while I was struggling to get myself and other employees paid by the newspaper I was working for, which could barely stay afloat. It made me feel more protected, like I wasn’t alone. This was while I was working my first job in journalism in the Arab world at 23, by myself, so I didn’t feel as safe given the ideas I was espousing at the time against the Islamic takeover of Europe.

Why do I mention this? Because a young journalist like myself with 200 followers who barely held a job could rise through the ranks by simply being bold and having something of substance to say. It was a time when these virtues still mattered. That’s no longer true. I enjoyed Twitter because we could share our most intricate thoughts, and you could see compelling debates unfold in real time with pretty much anyone, including heads of state.

Twitter was a realm of unfiltered ideas for us as dissidents, where we could speak freely of the most taboo topics affecting us, before the censorship began. We were fighting an uphill battle: The regulators and the mainstream blue checks were opposed to us. But this made the fight all the more invigorating because you had the opportunity to stand out. I was invited to the first events, interviews, TV shows, documentaries, magazines, newspapers, podcasts... All through Twitter. I was always camera-shy, part of it was self-consciousness, part of it was not wanting to be rewarded or picked apart for my looks, but to be valued for the quality of my work, despite the many offers to fit the “pipeline” of trad-journalist girls - creating viral media content with the fandom of right-wing men. That was going to be an easier path to fame. But I was too prideful and perhaps too vain to go down that road. So I remained a journalist who wrote, rather than one who appeared, and Twitter allowed me to do just that when other platforms rewarded image and video content only. There were editors for magazines and newspapers who reached out to me. I was used to sending my story pitches into the abyss; suddenly, I was being asked to write thanks to the exposure Twitter afforded me.

I met the most interesting and exceptional people. It was a space where you could connect with like-minded individuals through the virtual world, to the point that connections in real life that didn’t share that ideological affinity felt less authentic. Strong counter or subcultures were created through this platform alone.

To make it on Twitter, you had to have something original to say, and you needed to be fearless about your views, while still walking a thin line to avoid being banned. There were standards, however much we disagreed with them.

But what was formerly Twitter has now become a place without standards at all, one for artificial slop and an echo chamber of nihilistic irony. To give credit where it is due, Elon held a noble vision for purchasing the platform. He sought to remove the censorship and compensate creators monetarily through engagement. But as the proverb goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The opposite took place. Now we have endless brain-dead AI videos with the usual community note disclaimer, “This video is AI”, engagement rewards the most inane posts, feeds are congested with an algorithm that promotes whatever is most popular, instead of what we intentionally decide to follow, and what adds value to our lives and our understanding of the reality we inhabit.

The concept of algorithmic rewards is also fairly recent, and it doesn’t make much sense. Clicking on one post does not, in any way, mean that it is your sole interest and that you should see a million versions of the same subject. The algorithm stripped us of our sense of autonomy and intentionality. We could once decide for ourselves what to see, and we were exposed to what we didn’t like, too. We could learn and grow from that exposure, but that exposure was controlled; it wasn’t forced on us. Now, many of us find ourselves waging a war against an algorithm that tries to impose what becomes viral or what we may have clicked once out of idleness. We have to mute certain words or go on a tirade of blocking certain accounts. The machine appeals to our lowest impulse, rather than our highest virtue. But is this a war worth fighting? Many, like myself, have realized it isn’t.

The fall of Twitter follows that natural cycle of life, and there is no need to be nostalgic about it. Empires rise and fall, and so do companies. To keep up with the pace of change, you need to adapt, but not outgrow. Elon is a brilliant innovator in the field of mechanical engineering. But placing a man with autistic tendencies and a very optimized outlook on life in charge of our social interactions online wasn’t the wisest idea. He was not fit to lead a giant communication-based company like Twitter because his understanding of human emotions or relationships is more limited. That doesn’t mean he’s less of a genius because of it; it just means he was out of his depth in this particular circumstance. He could have bought the platform and chosen a trusted advisor to manage the major decisions to fulfill his vision.

The first signal of Twitter’s decline was changing the name from Twitter to X. The bluebird, meant to portray birds chatting, represented by the onomatopoeia of a “Tweet” (the sound birds make when they speak), was endearing. Then Elon decided to replace it with an anonymous, alienating black X, which resembled the slogan of a dystopian technocracy. Images matter.

The second mistake was removing blue checks as a hierarchical system based on status and making them about a payment. Elon intended to democratize the system and remove a snobbish attitude that liberal, establishment “experts” with blue checks had over the rest of the masses. But status is not supposed to be a commercial exchange that you can buy your way into, like purchasing a t-shirt, or it loses its value. I agree, the previous blue checks were annoyingly condescending, and a new system was needed. But I was required to earn my blue check by winning a prize at the WSJ. I’m not saying that’s the standard we should aspire towards. But you need a standard, or you risk falling into relativism.

The third mistake was making it the “everything app”. There’s an Italian proverb, “Chi troppo vuole, nulla stringe.” It means, “Those who want too much, achieve nothing.” Like the Greek myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, Elon’s vision was so ambitious that it turned into hubris. Elon should be appreciated nonetheless for his intention to create a project that would allow us to become free to express ourselves. It just so happens that when you aspire for too much, you end up falling with your face flat on the ground. That didn’t happen to Elon, but to X. Achievement requires a degree of humility, not just ambition. The following quote was attributed to Oscar Wilde, the Irish poet and author:

Never regret they fall, Icarus of the fearless flight, for the greatest tragedy of them all, is never to feel the burning light.

He’s right, because without risk, there is no chance of success. However, we can also learn from Icarus about the importance of level-headedness. Let’s not be too hard on Elon, but let’s be hard enough that he’s required to make adjustments based on the admission that his goal hasn’t borne the fruits he hoped for. Not necessarily by returning the platform to what it once was, but by using the greatness of its past as a blueprint and adapting it to the needs and tools of today.

Substack now seems like the only place where we can find quality again - thoughts and individuals of substance. Though it’s missing the punchiness and the cutting debate of the previous Twitter, it’s a space where you can read about the ideas of our time in a calmer, denser essay format. It’s different, but it’s good.

I’m done with X - because I loved Twitter. I may return to promote these essays on Substack, but I still won’t enjoy it as much as I once did. I hope Elon can restore the talking, often hysterical but lively birds from the hellish AI slop and the banality of content it has become.

He certainly still has the power to recover from Icarus’ fall.

Alessandra Bocchi is editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.

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I launched Alata in January and felt animated by your feedback. As a small team based in Europe, we didn’t start with endorsements from prestigious newspapers or magazines. I didn’t want any of it, precisely because I was so accustomed to that credentialed environment in journalism.

I was seeking something radically different, something that met our needs for transcendence. By metaphysical journalism, the intention was to create journalism rooted in philosophy.

Your reception of Revolt Against Stoicism, the magazine’s first piece, moved me. I remember my nervousness after publishing, concerned that my first contribution to the project would be met with blowback. Instead, it went viral with many of you relating to its controversial premise. We surpassed the most popular publications on this platform. Your engagement gave me the signal I needed to know I was moving in the right direction.

We hosted original writers along the way. All of the images accompanying the pieces were crafted by an exceptionally talented graphic designer with our mission in mind.

We took a break not to retreat, but to recalibrate. We are eager to keep exploring the philosophical ideas that help us navigate modern life. Our team is small, but our dream is big: To create avant-garde, bold journalism for a brighter future in the West. One beholden to no special group or interests, but only to our people.

The grind culture wants us to believe that we should work hard by the rules of a system that has failed us. Hedonistic escapes give us the false illusion of rebellion. Da Vinci once noted that great minds sometimes need to sit around and do nothing. That’s where the greatest inspiration comes. That’s how we feel now.

In the first few months, we ran an experiment. Based on your feedback, I will be writing most of the pieces moving forward, with occasional guest writers chosen to deliver the highest quality of philosophical journalism to you. Brick by brick, we’re building on this foundation to create more content for our readers.

I was asked by some of you to create drawings for the images in the articles. I realized that my art and writing didn’t need to be separate, but could be fused into one, coherent vision. That’s why, as I prepare my first exhibition, my paintings will also be inspired by my work here.

As a free subscriber, you will have access to half of the content. As a paid subscriber, you will have access to the full articles and archives, to comment, and to join the private group chat. Founding members will be sent an original, handmade drawing by me from an article of their choice, signed and shipped to their address.

Our civilization feels increasingly adrift. Change is becoming inevitable, but the shape of that change is still to be determined. That is why creating during this time of uncertainty feels so invigorating. I wish to bring that enthusiasm to you and to enrich your life with meaning.

All the best,

Alessandra

Since Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance, the topic has lost significance. But our surveillance architecture has only grown more steadily.

We have become accustomed to being recorded through data-gathering because the digital power structure in which surveillance operates has become necessary for our survival. Living off the grid is no longer possible, unless one desires a life of seclusion that comes at the cost of connection or influence. In this sense, our society appears to have reached a state of indifference by not caring about surveillance at all. But it is merely a faux indifference. Even here, we see a quiet rebellion growing beneath the surface: self-destructive timers on our chats and anonymous online profiles are becoming the new norm. “Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth,” Oscar Wilde once said.

This statement is especially relevant to the mental health industry in ways that are not immediately apparent, and may even seem contradictory to its patients. Although the industry presents itself as a panacea that offers us comfort and a cure, it can produce the opposite. It can be weaponised against those who dissent from prevailing orthodoxy. Records are kept, and a judge can compel psychologists and psychiatrists to break their confidentiality to report a given condition that may help resolve a case. Therapists keep files not just for their sake, but because they are legally required to do so, while declaring to their patients they hold an ethical duty to protect their privacy. If that were true, one should ask why they are compelled by the law to keep a record of that information in the first place. Why is it not a choice left to a therapist’s discretion? The answer is inevitably one that resolves around security, but security is often justified as a tool for control.

This overarching system has not been created without warning. Philosophers like Michel Foucault had theorized about the dangers of “biopolitics”, creating institutions of wellbeing where our lives are optimized and standards of behavior sanitized by expert opinion. He wrote:

The asylum reduces all manifestations of madness to symptoms. Everything becomes a sign to be read by the psychiatrist, who imposes meaning upon the madman’s words and behaviours from the outside.

He further argued about the effects on the patient:

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.

The ship, a supposed means for freedom, becomes the madman’s prison. He is confined to a space of mobility without destination, of decision without agency. Once he rides the ship, he is bound to it, without a means to escape. His homeland becomes alien to him because he becomes an identified patient, set apart from the “normalcy” surrounding him.

By definition, the madman’s deviance from the system means disobedience that requires compliance. The very idea of mental health diagnosis and criteria implies that there is an aspiration of mental health that is perfect, or at least advisable. One defined by new operators of power who divulge this information to the public, and which the public accepts as given. These theories permeate legal, cultural, and social structures creating established modes of behavior.

Claiming that one needs help is now romanticized as an act of courage, a heroic gesture, and one must ask if there is a reason for it. We do, indeed, all need help, at certain stages of our lives, and in different modalities. But in the mental health industry, it means that now strangers have a say over your life, and that knowledge can be one day utilized and examined by third parties.

Where previously we may have voiced our concerns and asked for help from family members, friends, loved ones, or spiritual institutions, there is now a well-designed path towards being “cured”. Advertisements for prescription medication in the US and supposed success stories of therapeutic engagement are ubiquitous. Individuals can be involuntary committed if the circumstances arise. These twin pressures—to increasingly scrutinize ourselves and confess deviations from the apparent “norm” on the one hand or to be forced through it against our will, and to solely seek support from mental health professionals on the other as agents of scientific knowledge—has led to an increasingly powerful industry that evades questioning.

Religious structures once offered the opportunity for confession and discussion of one’s sins. Priests often did not know who would enter the confession chamber: There was a punctured wall dividing one from the other to guarantee secrecy. The kind of help offered today by the mental health industry is no longer sanctified through privacy, the idea that you are an independent soul irrespective of your identity. It is “professionalized” with a medical figure in a position of authority who holds the power to pathologize your identity, and within a surveillance-infrastructure that can hold you accountable.

Let’s look at the legal implications, where mental health has become a critical factor in determining trials. If there is a legal case, the value of mental health tests becomes dubious at best, and manipulative at worst. The concept of a mental health diagnosis becomes unreliable for a few reasons.

We’ve seen this most prominently with the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, in which viewers were in awe at how a therapist hired by the latter was able to dismantle the credibility of the former. Likewise, a therapist hired by the former sought to discredit the claims of the latter. Was Amber suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Borderline Personality Disorder? The answer to this question depended on whether she was being defended or prosecuted. What was most evident in this case was that Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s credibility was questioned not by the evidence provided, but by who was considered the “most sane”. A traumatized or personality-disordered woman against a drug addict and alcoholic. The battle became not one of proof, but of credibility. The categorization of each party’s mental health became instrumentalized in the service of revenge.

The problems presented by the intersection of mental health with the law are not the result of misapplied tests or misinterpreted results. The problems result from the system itself being fundamentally flawed. It creates a sterilized environment based on behavioral control, in which we are expected to follow specific, preordained patterns of wellbeing. A failure to conform to these patterns, and the categorization of non-conformity under any of the increasing number of mental health “conditions”, provides a legal basis for adverse decisions to be made against non-conformists. They lack capacity, become unable to make choices in their own best interests, and suffer a credibility loss. Their beliefs are acceptable only if they pass through a medical gaze.

Under these circumstances, it is easy to forget that our mental state is not proof of our trustworthiness. A person who seeks mental health support and is deemed mentally ill may be more truthful than a person considered sane for never having sought that support.

Take, for example, someone suffering from undiagnosed psychopathy. They are uninterested in seeking treatment and therefore not subject to the scrutiny it entails. They would appear to be a functional and trustworthy member of society. Despite an inclination towards deceit and lack of empathy, they may be considered more credible than a conscientious person who has sought help. In this sense, the psychopath doesn’t merely fall through the cracks of the mental health industry: He bypasses it entirely through its self-defeating logic. Take, also, an individual who suffers from narcissistic tendencies who lacks self-awareness on the nature of their behaviors. If they seek therapy, the therapist’s understanding of their condition is one-sided, and may be mistaken. Presenting mental health practices as scientific can discourage critical thought and create a false sense of objectivity.

As religious structures have fallen to the wayside, mental health support can become tricky, because it is not, by definition, confidential, nor is it reliable in terms of its scientific judgment. In this context, fragility can become a tool of power instead of support. Rather than creating an environment of trust and care, the mental health industry can create one of fear and control where profit is the end-motive, and where self-aware, and often innocent members of society become not only collateral damage, but the intended target. A helpful reminder is that admitting flaws in this system may carry the risk of liability in high-stake contexts.

Mental health criteria are ever-evolving, with some claiming that most of the population would be categorized as “disordered” at some point in their lives. Human challenge becomes pathologized, locked into a definition that stains, rather than one that is transcended. The idea that you can become another version of yourself becomes elusive: You are a patient, and now, you can remain one. Suppose that they can “cure” you, the system itself will still be guarded if you deviate from the norm again, and their version of cure doesn’t match trends in society: mental health treatments are on the rise, but so are individuals who need help. This suggests a failure in the system.

While there are laws to guarantee confidentiality, what matters is the power of the pen. It can be utilized to fit diagnostic criteria, and that label can be legally enforceable if the occasion arises. That is enough to make someone hesitant to feel like they can properly express themselves and obtain the help they truly need. And sometimes, individuals need more than family and loved ones, they need to simply confess their thoughts to an outsider, even ones that are not deemed acceptable in the realms of modern definitions of sanity. To have someone listen to them without fear of judgment. It’s not that they have something to hide, it’s that anonymity, through the knowledge that there will be no record, allows them to feel free to be themselves, rather than alienated from their identity.

It is perhaps no surprise that spiritual healers are growing in our society. This trend is not merely because they offer a system of transcendence that the modern health industry lacks, but because they’re immune to the legal structure of surveillance surrounding it. Individuals feel protected by the spirituality that comes from being unencumbered by temporal institutions of control.

It is not by creating new systems of surveillance based on a conception of wellbeing that can be used as a targeted weapon, that individuals can be helped to overcome their troubles. They are yearning for freedom: They need privacy.

Alessandra Bocchi is editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.

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I was a young man when I first encountered Jordan Peterson. It was in 2015, a time when the world felt fragmented and headed towards a tipping point. Conversations with friends and family about society felt either dishonest or too filtered by new speech dogmas to be meaningful or valuable. In that vacuum, Peterson, then a relatively obscure psychology professor from the University of Toronto, emerged like a rogue prophet. Armed with Jungian archetypes, Biblical metaphors, and an inexplicable obsession with crustaceans, he wasn’t your average academic. He was a thinker who spoke with urgency, conviction, and clarity about order, suffering, and meaning in an era that felt adrift.

For many young men, including myself, he was a lifeline. At the time, the concept of masculinity itself was considered toxic, something to be condemned, even eradicated. Peterson didn’t just reject that narrative; he torched it, and for a moment, the blaze illuminated a vision of masculinity to aspire to, rather than to endure. He told us to take responsibility and stand up straight with our shoulders back. He told us our suffering held meaning, and that meaning mattered more than happiness. He didn’t offer us platitudes. Instead, he provided structure, a philosophy rooted in existentialism, Christian morality, and analytical psychology. Life is suffering, he said. Confront the dragon, carry the cross, and aim upward. You are not a victim. You are an agent of change in your life. It made sense for a generation left behind by postmodern deconstructionism and academic invalidation. It made sense to me. The Canadian urged us to stop waiting for the world to change and start changing ourselves first. And yes, he brought up lobsters. A lot.

He was one of the only public intellectuals willing to confront the cultural chaos head-on. And he did so with razor-sharp analysis, emotional intensity, and a sense of depth. His opinions were far weightier than clickbait contrarianism, proposing a worldview grounded in classical liberalism, individual responsibility, and psychological integration. He fused Carl Jung with Christian ethics, warning of the dangers of collectivist ideology while encouraging people to strive for meaning over expedience.

A decade later, I watched the same man burst into tears during a recent discussion with Piers Morgan. But this time, the outburst of emotion wasn’t unusual. Peterson cries often now. He cries about young men. He has cried about Antifa. He cried when the actress Olivia Wilde criticized him. On this occasion, the tears came when Morgan asked him what it meant to be a role model for young men.

“I was in contact with thousands of people,” he told Morgan, voice cracking. “And they shared their experiences with me. I could see this demoralization, you know?” He went on: “It’s part of fatherlessness, broadly speaking, and sometimes specifically. I could see the pathway to rectifying that.” Then, visibly trembling, he added: “You embrace adventure by taking on maximal responsibility... That’s the symbol of hoisting your cross voluntarily and trudging up the hill.”

It was Peterson at his most raw, but also at his most incoherent. His metaphors collided mid-sentence. His ideas seemed to spiral. It wasn’t clear whether he was offering a roadmap or mythologizing his own self-pity.

Peterson should not be mocked. He has navigated the depths of what may be defined as a psychological hellscape —drug dependency, health complications in his family, public vilification. He is, I believe, someone whose intentions are pure. But being well-meaning isn’t enough when you’ve positioned yourself as a guide for millions of young men.

What we're witnessing is, to use Peterson-like language, the fall of a hero, a tragic story about the irony of fate. Not because external forces destroyed him, but because he crumbled under the weight of his own convictions. His view of masculinity was rooted in control, discipline, and responsibility. But what happens when a man who preaches stoicism becomes emotionally unhinged, and when the prophet of order loses the plot?

The cracks begin to show not just in his demeanour, but in his philosophical message. Nowhere is this more evident than in his refusal to answer whether or not he believes in God. That’s not a "gotcha" question. It’s a foundational one. If one has spent years creating multi-hour YouTube lectures on Genesis, Revelation, and Biblical symbolism, the question of belief is a fair one to ask, and one should be able to answer it. Yet, when asked directly, Peterson dodged it, insisting that he acts “as if God exists. That’s what I say”. It sounds clever, but it feels unfulfilling. It’s akin to claiming to live as if love is real, without having ever loved anyone. For many listeners, especially those of faith, it felt shallow and evasive. That sentiment reveals a deeper issue at play. Peterson no longer seems certain of what he believes, and there’s a reason for it.

He became the embodiment of a man trapped inside his own mythology, a teacher who has become his own cautionary tale. An example of how fate will test the courage of your convictions. He once warned about the dangers of becoming lost, irresponsible, and erratic. But today, his public persona feels just the same. He’s no longer the anchor; the boat is sailing without a destination.

Once a place for ideas and philosophical clarity, his X account turned into a punching bag for his most erratic impulses, replete with sarcasm, bitterness, and defensiveness. The deeper we tried to look for wisdom, the more we found grievance.

In short, Peterson became the figure he warned us against. A man consumed by chaos, no longer capable of clean, ordered thought. Part of this fracturing stems from Peterson’s hyper-individualist philosophy built on the idea that we are the sole architects of our destiny and that we must fulfill it without complaining. It left little room for human fragility, let alone failure. He lectured young men to carry the burden of existence with courage and conviction. To hold the line. But when his life began to spiral, he couldn’t follow the very code he had created. His benzodiazepine addiction wasn’t a footnote. It was the expression of a deeper contradiction. The drug that was meant to quell anxiety became the crutch of the man who once told others to conquer theirs.

Psychologically, it makes sense, in a tragic way, one that has created a myth of its own for our generation. The rigidity of his philosophy left no room for grace or fallibility. And when that rigidity cracked, so did the man. As many psychologists will attest, chronic suppression of emotion doesn’t produce strength. Instead, it produces psychosis. To his credit, Peterson appeared to recognize this, albeit briefly. In Beyond Order, the follow-up to 12 Rules for Life, he admitted that too much order can be as dangerous as too much chaos. It was his most vulnerable book. It showed a man beginning to see that his philosophy, while powerful, was incomplete. It lacked mercy. Yet, for all that insight, he failed to fully heed his own warnings.

This isn’t schadenfreude. Peterson once helped me think clearly. He introduced me to Jung, Solzhenitsyn, and even to life itself in a way that finally made sense to me. He made me believe that masculinity was not a curse but a calling. He inspired me to read more challenging books, to dare to hold deeper conversations, and ask better questions about the state of society around us. That matters, and it’s part of why watching his decline hurts.

Now, he seems lost in a role he helped create but can no longer control. And that, perhaps, is the final lesson the myth of Jordan Peterson has to teach us: that even the man who tells you to conquer the dragon can be devoured by it. In trying to save a generation of men from being consumed by chaos, he may have been consumed by it himself. Sometimes, the person who taught you how to find meaning can lose sight of it, too.

Now might be the time for Peterson to take a moment. To stop filming. To stop crying on camera. To stop dragging his half-answered questions across every available screen. And instead, to do what he once told the rest of us: clean up his own house first. That begins by understanding that there is more to life than pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. Maybe then we’ll be able to see the man at the center of his own mythos and show him the understanding he’s owed.

John Mac Ghlionn is an essayist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Post, The Hill, and others.

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What is wrong with you?

Joe Goldberg, stalker, assassin, and protagonist of the You series on Netflix, poses this fundamental question to the female sex. After five years of romance and homicide, Joe lies in his cell, reading letters of adoring women who continue to love him, despite all his murder convictions. Or perhaps, because of them.

So we should ask ourselves, what is wrong with us women? Joe, a New York librarian, finds a new female character in every series whom he adores, akin to Dante’s Beatrice, but who, in most cases, ends up killed by him. Joe is the prototype of the toxic lover: controlling, manipulative, and, ultimately, a serial murderer. Yet, notwithstanding his record, Joe was loved, idealized, and romanticized by millions of female spectators. A post from The Single’s Woman claimed, “He be killing people & still be able to text back.” The Single’s Woman further asked her readers: “Raise your hand if you want a love like the one of Joe Goldberg.” Almost five thousand women responded with a “yes”. In its first month, You attracted 40 million viewers, and was renewed for four more successful seasons. It was, however, a series impacted by controversy over the romanticization of its homicidal protagonist. Joe was too lovable to be a villain; too much of a prince to be cruel. Even the actor playing the protagonist, Penn Badgley, felt uncomfortable with the popularity surrounding his character.

So, what did women love about Joe? The series touches on a fundamental paradox. The love that Joe held for his female characters: Beck, Love, Marianne, Kate, and finally, Bronte, is toxic. A love that controls, surveils, and kills anyone who poses a threat to the beloved object, which he perceives as his own, from disrespectful exes to inconvenient friends. The façade, beautiful though it is, can’t be sustained, and the women discover who Joe is. Most want to turn him in for his crimes, so Joe is “forced” to kill them. Joe demonstrates little remorse: the women he idealized are instantly devalued for their perceived betrayal, for not understanding his true nature and intentions to protect them.

Joe wants to be accepted for who he is, but only if that allows him to remain a “hero”, albeit a dark one. Love, the only partner who is also a serial killer, who truly mirrors him, frightens and repels Joe, not just because she forces him to look at the worst parts of himself, but because she takes away his role as savior: axe-wielding murderous wives rarely need rescuing. Even Kate, a powerful, billionaire CEO and dominant figure, fascinates him only until she denies his deepest need to feel useful with his murderous instinct. Yet, the male spectators are often drawn to these powerful women: Love, the BPD-killer character who oscillates between sweetness and insanity, and Kate, the cold, rational CEO. Therein lies another male, paradoxical desire: rising to the occasion of a woman who can challenge them.

Yet, until the moment Joe’s character is unveiled to the blinded female protagonists, that toxic love doesn’t hurt. To the contrary, it’s good for them. The women who are oblivious to his true crimes, are happy to be rescued by Joe. Beck is finally understood as a writer, Love finds her killer soulmate, Marianne feels at peace from years of personal turmoil, Kate finds refuge from a toxic family, and Bronte fulfills her dreams of becoming someone besides a dental assistant. The provocative message behind You is that it portrays a masculine figure who is dangerous at his core, but that danger is constructed in such a way as to guarantee their happiness. Joe kills, but he protects. He controls, but he reassures. Joe provides order to the chaotic lives of the women he loves. He “improves” them, at least for a while. And that “for a while” is what causes the circuit to end: until Joe is discovered for his crimes, he appears as the perfect prince. He’s considerate, intelligent, cultured, devoted, gentle, filled with attention and protection. He does all the things that women desire in a man who loves them unconditionally.

You confronts us with a closed circuit: it shows how behaviors we define as toxic in the abstract, such as control, surveillance, jealousy, and idealization, can appear as romantic when embedded in a well-crafted narrative. In an era where even minor deviations from “healthy” norms are enough to label someone as “problematic”, where men are shamed as “simps” for pursuing women, You disarms us with the power of a paradox: it makes us empathize with a killer-stalker, as long as he's acting in the name of love. And that’s exactly where the discomfort kicks in: we can’t help but question just how fragile, and negotiable, our moral compass really is.

As much as women may ethically resist this urge, they desire a man who looks at them, who sees them for who they are, and who remains devoted to them fully, activating an ancient reflex in the female psyche: feeling special, chosen, and secure. You exposes a dilemma that our feminist ideology has been unable to resolve without a degree of embarrassment: The female need for protection. Joe satisfies this desire, and that’s why women find him so appealing in an era where they’re forced to protect themselves. The female desire for protection is neither a fault nor a flaw. It’s a biological inheritance that is hard for us to admit, because it means conceding that the female body is more vulnerable, more exposed, and less armed in the face of danger than that of men. This natural truth is now denied because it could be used to justify the patriarchy. Yet, denying this primordial female need for protection leaves us without the ability to fully express ourselves: How do we admit our need to feel protected without declaring that we are, indeed, more fragile?

This question is confronted in another HBO series that has garnered success: The White Lotus. In the first season, Nicole, a successful executive, mother, and wife to the less accomplished Mark, finally finds her husband sexually attractive when he saves her from an aggressor. “You’re my hero,” she says. In that moment, Mark is able to find strength in her words, a vitality and potency that had been taken away under his perceived inferiority. He begins beating his chest like a primate. The immediate comedy in this farcical display of masculinity gives way to a quiet, unsettling truth, admitted through clenched teeth: Our female need to be supported, heard, and to not have to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders.

The female need for protection isn't merely biological. It finds its root in the heritage of Romanticism. Heathcliff, in Emily Brontë’s Withering Heights, is a violent and uncompromising lover who chases the woman he loves even after her death. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that the last woman Joe loves, the only woman who was able to outsmart him, is called Bronte.

The archetype of the dark prince, the predator who is in love, the wolf who growls at whoever comes close, but who allows the woman he loves to touch and nurture his vulnerability, is seductive. The promise is that the man can be a monster with the rest of humanity, and only tender with you. But, it is precisely here that Joe in You betrays us: He appears as the ideal partner until you try to turn on him. If you do, he will direct that ferocity at you. He doesn’t offer us an agreement: He decides for us. He loves us “for our own good”, he kills “to protect us”, and in the end, he only leaves us two options: submit or die.

Another layer to this story feels even more unsettling: our familiarity with the monster. Not the gothic monster, deformed and repugnant, but the polite, handsome, humorous, and kind one. The one who reads Virginia Woolf, who listens to Nina Simone, and who prepares breakfast for you in bed. He tells us about his nature, but in a way that we find understanding, perhaps even erotic, in seeing what is bad justify itself so eloquently for love. This is a weakness that women don’t readily admit, but it finds expression in the true crime boom. Instances of horrific misogynist violence become stories to consume with fascination; a yearning to confront oneself with male brutality and to understand it. They’re fascinated by men who destroy, but only if they’re explained with a grace that justifies the character. This is where You catches women in their fallibility. Joe is narrating his story, so he looks us in the eye and tells us: “I know how to speak to you. I know how to make you feel safe. I can be different, just for you.”

Beneath it all, there’s one final truth, simpler, and more disturbing: Joe is handsome. And beauty has always been the most forgiving ethical pass. This foundational skew in human perspective is not new. “The beautiful” and its close interrelation with “the good”, permeates Plato’s work. Two millennia later, Schiller wrote, “Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty”. Nor has this been the subject of solely philosophical inquiry: a study found that, “Physically attractive persons assumed to possess more socially desirable personalities than those of lesser attractiveness.” We’re inclined to justify what is beautiful, to believe it must be good, or at least redeemable. If Joe were ugly, crude, or unpleasant, his character wouldn't have worked. But with his beauty, his violence walks through an open door. Beauty suspends judgment. It makes us stay. It makes us hope. And You knows this all too well: It uses it, deceives us, and then asks us to answer for our complicity.

The success of You lies in this paradox. In how easy it is to confuse love with possession, care with domination, dedication with dependence, and beauty with goodness. The series fulfills these contradictions with an entertaining journey, and here lies another controversy. You is filled with scenes that force us to close our eyes, gruesome moments that, at the same time, keep us glued to the screen until the end. We lose the game of the series because we begin to empathize with Joe. The ending of the narrative was suddenly turned “politically correct”, with the villain being locked in jail and his female victims finding renewed power and independence. But this moralizing ending was precisely what led so many spectators to feel unsatisfied. The series made us love Joe, only to contort itself at the last moment to make us feel shame for doing so.

The finale was a desperate attempt at infusing Joe’s story with a moral message. Joe becomes unmasked, and the proper “order” of things is restored. Beck, his first victim, who found posthumous success as an author, is redeemed. Her book, we are told, becomes even better without the ending Joe had crafted to avoid prosecution for his crimes. The series asks us to accept that the relatively ordinary Beck is the better writer, despite Joe having been portrayed as a literary genius until then. His talent is stripped away because portraying a profoundly intelligent serial killer would be “wrong”.

This ending left many spectators feeling disappointed and confused. Disappointed because the appeal of You was never to chastize or lecture the viewer with morality, but rather, to make us indulge in the narrative without guilt, as we’re left wanting more. The series placed a mirror in front of us: If Joe had been real, would we have fallen for him? How many of us would have been able to outsmart him? Are we wrong for thinking that, at some point, we would have wanted Joe’s devotion? Are we flawed for wanting a man who makes us feel secure?

With Joe in jail and his last girlfriend depicted in a flowery dress walking defiantly through the streets of Manhattan with the sun in her eyes, we’re provided with all the “right” answers. But this is what we dislike, because what we enjoyed most was how the series revealed the questions we were seeking to answer about ourselves.

Silvia Bignami is a painter and former journalist at La Repubblica.

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To the modern psyche, belief in the occult seems antiquated. When reason prevails, returning to an age of magic seems unthinkable. It is a misconception, however, that scientific progress has erased humanity’s metaphysical yearnings. There is no endpoint in history where we become wholly logical, our mystical beliefs reduced to relics behind museum glass. The pendulum continues to swing, and belief in mysticism is now rising once again.

While scientific discoveries have helped elevate our material comfort and wellbeing, it is becoming increasingly clear that reason alone cannot answer our longing for a transcendental purpose. The persistent rise of mental health conditions, despite the supposed achievements of psychology and psychiatry, speaks to this reality. One study notes, “A move toward secularization of modern populations should also be considered [as a factor in the rise in depression and anxiety], as religious activity is correlated with lower risk of depression and more social support.”

Nietzsche defined this as an age of nihilism: “Any answer to the question why is lacking. Nihilism means that the supreme values devalue themselves.”

The trend began with the Enlightenment, a movement in the West that advanced a philosophy predicated on pure reason. Its defining premise was the triumph of secular humanism over irrational superstition. While it helped liberate us from medieval Christian dogma and enabled scientific advancements, it moved beyond the humanism of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment brought the veneration of the empirical at the expense of the metaphysical. Like a closed circuit, it sought answers within a purely material reality, but its questions were transcendental.

Today, as our lives become increasingly rational, mysticism and a hunger for hidden knowledge stir beneath the surface. A variety of occult groups are reemerging: Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, Wicca, and European neo-Paganism are a few of them.

My own journey towards the esoteric began when I was a teenager. At the time, I was discontented, adrift, and in search of change. I began to consider religious ideas seriously. Although I had always believed in the divine, I was unconvinced by the teachings of my Protestant upbringing, troubled by the gaps between the Old and New Testaments, and the critiques of Christian morality that were, by then, finding more vocal expression in Western society. When I began my spiritual exploration, I first looked into folk traditions from Appalachia and Wicca. These traditions, rooted as they are in practice rather than doctrine, were not wholly satisfying. While the rituals did bear positive outcomes, I craved a system that extended beyond practice. One that contained metaphysical explanations for the cosmos. For this reason, I moved on to Pagan occultism.

The rise of occult groups speaks to a human desire not just for metaphysical knowledge and meaning, but for belonging and communal purpose. Cults are regarded as a dangerous form of extremist groupthink by the individualist ideology of our age. However, esoteric societies based on voluntary commitment and inner transformation can offer their members a profound sense of connection.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an occult secret society that grew in the 19th and 20th centuries as a response to the Enlightenment. To join the organization, a student was required to undergo a series of hierarchical initiations, including advanced metaphysical teachings. This process created a sense of being a valuable member of a community that shared a spiritual mission. Interestingly, the Golden Dawn had several high-status members in multiple nations. A century later, seeing intelligent and creative minds moving towards a similar occultist reawakening should be welcomed, rather than feared.

Belief in the mystical is revived whenever reason seeks to exclude it. While people are sometimes imagined to be fundamentally rational beings, guided by immutable logic, this theory denies an innate aspect of our humanity: A desire to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Across centuries, we have looked up at the sky, wondering about who created us, and sought answers. The occult emerged quickly after the Age of Reason because the empiricism it advanced was incapable of addressing these foundational questions. Occultism speaks to the essential mystery of our condition. We have created symbolism and rituals as phenomenological expressions to honor our mystical beliefs; they are reflections of a primordial truth that can only be felt and cannot be proven. There is a reason why even the most atheistic cultures, ones where individuals abandon their religion, are still tethered to folk customs, festivals, and rites of passage, like weddings and graduations that were inspired by those religions. They provide grounding and structure to our lives. Their original meaning may be lost on the attendees, but the need for them endures.

The current resurgence began with increasing curiosity about ‘the spiritual’. In most cases this curiosity was vague and detached from any understanding of doctrine. “I’m spiritual, but not religious”, is an expression of this nebulous pull towards esotericism that has entered into common usage. Astrology, crystal healing and Tarot readings are gaining traction. For many, this remains a surface-level interest, but others are taking it further. They recognize that spirituality without conviction feels hollow. We need more; we need to feel divinely guided. This is why Europe’s ancient polytheistic myths have risen in prominence. In America, Paganism is now the fastest-growing religion.

The rise in esoteric modalities reflects the recession of Christianity as a transcendental, spiritual religion. Incenses, hymns, and sacral preaching have faded from a Christian tradition that is motivated by a desire to be accessible and contemporary. But this is driving people away from the church: When a faith sacrifices its message and traditions to remain palatable, it betrays uncertainty in itself and an earthly focus antithetical to its spiritual purpose.

While there are strains of Christianity, particularly within Catholic and Orthodox denominations, that honor their mystic heritage, most Christians in Europe have subscribed to a form of rational morality that denies the key tenets of their faith. The concept of demons and angels, for example, or of miracles, is an inherent part of Christian belief. Yet, the majority of churches have minimized these “irrational” theories to keep up with the rise in scientific knowledge. But science isn’t concerned with metaphysical questions and, as such, it can be reconciled with the supernatural. The two need not be mutually exclusive.

Historically, even art had a devotional and sacral element. From statues carved to honor Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses in Temples, to medieval mosaics in Churches that illustrated Biblical stories, to Renaissance paintings that brought Pagan myths and Catholic beliefs back to life. Unsurprisingly, as religion declined, our art likewise descended into the conceptual, and non-representational. Art was stripped away from the richness of meaning that once made it awe-inspiring.

The secularization within Christianity and the politicization of the Catholic church, has led many to feel unfulfilled and move towards a more overtly esoteric path to find a spiritual identity, either through traditional forms of Christianity or neo-Paganism. The appeal of religion is precisely that it offers an avenue away from the mundane aspects of our lives and towards the divine and magnificent. The occult is simply an esoteric way of exploring this fundamental truth.

Religious desire cannot be contained. When this is attempted, new religions fill the void. More questions are asked. There is no time in which humans have not tried to seek communion with a higher power, and there likely never will be. It is hard to understand the world if a person lacks a spiritual belief because we cannot understand what we cannot grasp: The meaning of our existence. The new occult revival simply provides an alternative answer to this fundamental question.

Georgina Rose is a YouTuber, podcaster, and writer exploring esotericism and alternative religious thought. She can be found on the podcast Pagan Perspectives By Georgina Rose.

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Wake up at 1 a.m. in the freezer. Uncomfortable? Good. Drag a tire to work by listening to five self-improvement podcasts at once, fire ants in a diaper to keep you going. Get to work on Chinese keyboards, don’t know Chinese? You will. Broken glass for lunch. Get hit by three cars while driving home and listening to audiobooks at two-times speed. Broken legs? Good. New Record. Roaches kissing you all over, they understand the grind. - Be Jocko, by Wormwood and Countereculture.

The most alarming part about this video isn’t its content. It’s how familiar and recognizable the rhetoric is. Anyone who’s scrolled too long on social media will have seen a clip of a tough-looking man describing daily rituals of self-inflicted suffering as a means to achieve success. That, in short, is the definition of the grind: working hard, against all odds, on your own.

David Goggins, a retired Navy SEAL and one of the best-known proponents of the philosophy says, "It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.” He’s not alone. Goggins, Jocko, and the rest of the former commandos of the grind vanguard have found an audience. Although not gender-specific, it’s more popular among men, particularly those in their 50s.

But the message is falling increasingly on deaf ears. For many, particularly among younger generations, modern life already feels distinctly like suffering. Scheduling it into your day seems not just unnecessary, but a form of increased submission to a system that is no longer conducive to a life of value.

The grind men “made it”. They came from a challenging background. They’ve been through hell. Yet, they were able to ascend regardless, by working hard, by being disciplined, by refusing to let emotions get the best of them. It didn’t matter if they had a bad day; they still put in the work. Every injustice was endured in silence, alone. Through sheer willpower, they proved that obstacles were temporary, resistance was futile, and the doubters were wrong. Goggings claims it’s how he went from being bullied in school and told he had learning disabilities to becoming the “toughest man in the world”.

But this philosophy isn’t resonating among the millennial and zoomer generations, and there is a reason for it: It doesn’t work for them. They’ve tried it, and haven’t seen the fruits promised by the Gogginses and Jockos of the world. Most now get up early, perform unrewarding work late into the evening for an indifferent conglomerate, and then carry themselves home to a small, empty, mortgaged apartment they may be able to pay back in a few decades. It’s not just that the work is unrewarding; it’s fundamentally discouraging because no tangible fruits can be reaped at the end of this process. If you follow the rules, you won’t necessarily “make it” anymore. Claiming that the fault is yours fails to assess the deeper issues at play.

Many articles are dedicated to how our generation is afflicted by too much comfort. The proponents of toughness argue that an excess of security creates passiveness from an absence brought by adventure. This argument is valid, but not for the reasons they suggest. The baby boomer generation lived a life of relative ease, with a stable, well-paid employment, affordable housing, and the bull markets of their time. Theirs was a utopia that is scarcely imaginable now. We don’t need to descend into a victimhood mindset to observe that what is missing isn’t struggle, but meaning through the suffering.

The grind philosophy primarily derives from a generation that came after the boomers and before ours: Generation X. They rode the wave of baby boomer ease before the impending societal dissolution. This reversal found expression in the grind. They preach to a young generation how to “make it”, because they were only just spared the consequences of the new era of precariousness.

Determination, resilience, and discipline are necessary, but no longer sufficient virtues. The problems that we’re seeking to solve—the atomisation of the individual, cultural and spiritual loss, the capitulation to a depressed economy—are not susceptible to brute force. They can’t be worked away. They are indifferent to personal effort, and require creativity and collaboration to create a new system antithetical to grind culture's individualist quest.

Even if we take the grind philosophy on its own merits, abstracting it from the generational circumstances that led to its rise, it is still found wanting. It is rooted in a combination of stoicism and a work ethic based on discipline. Stoicism is a philosophy predicated on control, though I argued in this article, it represents an unhealthy suppression of our emotions that leads to passiveness. The work ethic philosophy is one of sacrifice to achieve success against the odds. The two combined can create a dangerous mix of passivity while suffering with the illusion of control. Achievement comes not from doing more with less, but making the best of the cards you were dealt with. Feeling like you are constantly suffering is a clear sign that the environment is malfunctioning. This is a law that applies equally to all living organisms.

As a way of being, the grind is fundamentally solipsistic. Reality becomes externalised, something to be stoically endured. All that matters is the self-discipline with which reality is approached. The old ‘live to work or work to live’ dichotomy becomes blurred, the struggle is life. In this sense, the grind becomes what Kierkegaard would describe as the despair of defiance. The defiant self “wants to spite or defy all existence and be himself with it, taking it along in steely resignation with him, almost flying in the face of his agony.” For Kierkegaard, despair constitutes a failure to properly relate to oneself.

Enduring challenges for a greater purpose is fundamentally distinct from deliberately creating suffering, as an end in itself, to stress yourself and touch the limits of your tolerance. The “grind” shouldn’t be a life of intentional pain but about finding the beauty in it. That can only be realized through a lens where suffering is not the objective, but a necessary consequence of meaningful change. Nietzsche distills this down to the axiom, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” In inverting this principle, the grind mentality shows its limitations, sacrificing the richer ‘why’ at the altar of a dubious ‘how’.

Grinding is also a self-referential philosophy: “I promote this lifestyle because I became noteworthy for promoting this lifestyle.” If we observe individuals who achieved greatness by breaking down barriers and creating something larger than themselves, we can observe a different dynamic at play. This philosophy is prevalent with men of military background, but not so much among pioneers and leaders. Even if we look at combat sport icons, who are supposedly grind disciples, the reality is that they live a life of “dysfunctional functionality” to turn their dreams into a reality. They rely not just on effort but on the power of instinct, which is antithetical to control.

In an interview, the UFC champion Conor McGregor spoke of the fact that he was never an early riser, that he trained in combat sports until late at night but that you “wouldn’t catch me in the morning”. Maybe if he had forced himself to be “functional” and wake up at 5am, as advocated by the grind philosophers, he wouldn’t have become a UFC champion, because excellence requires a degree of listening to our unique needs. That doesn’t mean indulgence; it means observance of the dysfunction that sometimes can make us function better. Likewise, Jon Jones, widely considered the greatest MMA fighter of all time, claims that he would deliberately be dysfunctional before a fight to make sure he showed up relaxed and unprepared. “I had this crazy thing I would do where I would party a week before every fight, my logic was, if this guy were to beat me, I would look at myself in the mirror and think, ‘Well I lost because I got hammered before the fight.’” He said, “When I didn’t do that, I had my worst performance.” By not training to the best of his ability before a fight, he would not be forced to face the possibility that he could be beaten at his best. It was not necessarily a “healthy” belief system, certainly not one consistent with the grind mentality, but it allowed him to enter a flow state that made him undefeatable. These men train, suffer, fight, they fail and they work hard to get back to the top, stronger than before. But they do so with a vision, and they practice discipline with a form of surrender to their instinct in order to create it, and, more crucially, to let the vision create itself.

This is especially true for those working with creativity and invention. Efficiency and optimization come at the price of genius and quality. Sometimes, descending into the abyss and letting it swallow you up allows you to find new ideas there, better ones than before. To realize where you could improve. Grinding doesn’t leave you that room to pause, because you become akin to a drone machine that never stops charging. Quality fails under these circumstances, because sometimes, you need to hit rock bottom to resurface. It’s not about quitting, because that would mean never coming back. It’s about embracing the cycle, reflecting on its lessons, and recommitting to yourself.

Leonardo Da Vinci took 14 years to complete the Mona Lisa, he was busy otherwise with other projects he never finished, brainstorming on human anatomy and airplanes, for the sake of learning and nothing else. He was financed by patrons who trusted in him, allowing him to live this lifestyle without worrying about financial repercussions. He said, “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” What would we have made of him today, with market demands forcing him to grind?

I’m a writer and a painter. While I require a base level of stability around me to function, I wrote my best pieces late at night, engulfed by the silence and darkness that allowed me to focus. Sometimes, I need to pause for hours, to distract myself and come back with new eyes. “Creative people need time to sit around and do nothing,” said the author Austin Kleon. In our efficiency-oriented society, these words appear as a form of idleness, because we’ve become accustomed to a mindset based on strict productivity. But my best paintings weren’t the ones I made when I was forcing myself to reach perfection or struggling to respect a deadline. Those were my worst paintings. My best paintings came when I was somewhere between discipline and surrender. That feeling of meditation that derives from being so immersed in a practice you forget outside reality exists. It feels, not like a grind, but effortless.

Rigid routines, in this context, can inhibit potential. Though structure is necessary as a point of reference, sometimes we need to trust ourselves to bend it. That’s how intention and dedication meet spontaneity and momentum. Some work better under pressure, I’m certainly one of them. But there’s a kind of pressure that allows your mind to act instinctively, to reach the height of its potential. It provides an exciting challenge. The grind is about forcing gruesome pressure you don’t need consistently, and instead of rising to an occasion, we end up feeling drained by exhaustion: the occasion doesn’t show up.

Grinding is based on rigidity, the idea that we have to keep going, no matter what. That we have to reach the best result, always, in a stable, formulaic manner. But that can lead to neuroticism. If an elements falls out of place, unpredictability under this maximized routine can cause the system to fall under its own weight. Giving our best involves working through ups and downs, and learning to ride each wave as it comes. Being flexible means that we are alive. We can adapt according to what we face. Only inanimate objects are inflexible, and those don’t achieve much.

Life today is challenging enough as it is. Not because we’re overloaded with comfort, but because challenge is presented under the guise of comfort. The disconnection brought to us by social media, the inflation brought to us by printing more money, and the chaos by a political system that claims to listen to our needs. It leads us to feel increasingly frustrated. We’re not fighting wars in the trenches like our grandparents, but we’re fighting much more subtle, insidious battles, against an enemy that tells us to grind away the last sparks of energy and inspiration we have left. We must, instead, rebel against it. The virtue of courage today is the rarest, and the most needed.

It’s a grind to resist the temptations on the internet. It’s a grind to wake up every morning without the promise of a better future ahead of you. It’s a grind to keep working despite not seeing the results your parents enjoyed without an ounce of your effort. It’s a grind to endure the loneliness of a pandemic lockdown, to survive an economy working against you, to witness rising crime at home and the threat of a war on the horizon, to feel uncertain about every moment.

We don’t need more grind; we need less. We need to find joy through meaning and lightness through instinct. We need to feel the adrenaline of excitement running through our veins. That’s when we gladly carry the suffering that may come with it.

Alessandra Bocchi is editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.

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We are on the cusp of a temporal revolution—perhaps we are already living through it. Our ideas about the future are changing, and fast.

Six months ago, I became a father. That’s when my perception of time changed radically. I started reflecting on my responsibilities towards a small creature who makes funny faces at me, and, of course, the need to provide for her. Time, as a value, became less relative and more urgent. I see my daughter growing as I get older by the day. The cycle of life is staring at me in the face, unflinchingly.

Time transcends the physical and metaphysical. Contemporary society presents the illusion of an eternal present, but our temporal choices determine our lives in ways that modern culture doesn’t always appreciate. Every generation is defined by the decisions of its predecessors: Is it better to cultivate land or to plunder another, as warrior cultures would have seen it? The answer to this question changed the course of history.

Today, our currencies represent how we create and exchange wealth in our economy. Understanding the value of these currencies and how they operate allows us to evaluate the options that lie ahead.

Fiat currencies, such as the dollar and the euro, created by our governments and central bank systems, follow a cyclical form of life: birth, hyperinflation, and death. After this process, a new system arises.

The US dollar is the fiat currency with the most longevity, but it has lost more than 96 percent of its purchasing power since the height of its glory. In 1925, a brick builder earned around 0.40 dollars an hour, amounting to an annual income of about 1,300 dollars. That may seem like little to us today, but it represented a dignified salary at the time. And it was proportional to purchasing needs: A Ford Model T cost around 320 dollars, a three-bedroom apartment with a small garden, around 7,000 dollars. Building a life was simple.

Monetary inflation resembles a watch with a battery that slowly drains—a quiet surrender of time to the thermodynamic entropy that erodes value. When a central bank introduces more and more units of currency within a system (some call it quantitative easing), money loses value: every unit is worth less than before, and we come closer to the point of transformation. The effects of this process are evident to all of us: an increase in prices and a decrease in living standards.

Our condition may seem dramatic, and it is. But we should remember what G. Michael Hopf said, “Hard times create strong men”. Technological acceleration is an ally in the war against time and the thermodynamic exhaustion of the fiat currency.

Cryptocurrencies represent a development in technology that offers us a new opportunity. It’s perhaps prophetic that blockchain, the technology at the basis of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was originally called “timechain”, revealing the relation of the present to the future.

Bitcoin possesses properties that combine technology, computational work, and thermodynamic energy. Through its decentralized protocol, Bitcoin introduces a new mechanism that universally coordinates a global temporal consensus, forming a chain that traces the history of the network. Each block is a bundle of verified transactions that are cryptographically linked to the previous one, forming a digital chain that remains cohesive and is protected from forgery or hacking.

Cryptocurrencies suffer their own form of instability: critics often highlight their high volatility as a flaw, seeing them as an unreliable and speculative asset. However, I argue their price instability doesn’t stem from an inherent dysfunction but from their role as an emerging and disruptive technology and due to their residual ties to the legacy financial system.

It’s worth making a distinction between investing in cryptocurrencies, which requires knowledge and wisdom, and using them as currencies for transactional purposes. Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, can be highly volatile, but the most risk-averse individuals could pick stablecoins, like Tether (USDT), which, by definition, are immune to the same changes in value.

Investing in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to limit the effects of our expropriation by the traditional financial system may not be enough. We've seen how crypto markets reacted to the latest tariff war, but the key is that they offer an option.

The devaluation of our currencies is nothing new. The ancient Romans diluted metals in their gold and silver coins in times of crisis. As citizens grew desperate, they indulged in this practice more and more, rendering these coins ultimately devoid of value. Some argue that hyperinflation contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, but the Romans didn’t enjoy the alternative to the impending collapse that we are being offered today.

As a response to an inevitable historical cycle, cryptocurrencies and related technologies seem to herald an imminent paradigm shift; a way to escape the horizon of financial crisis threatening to engulf us and future generations.

During times of financial panic, time itself is compressed into a frantic present. In the 1960s, in the US, average personal savings were around 10 percent of disposable income. Today, they’re about 4.5 percent. Unfettered consumerism, debt, pollution, war, and violence are symptoms of a self-destructive society in which the present is more important than the future. This is evident too in the collapse of our birthrates.

Having children forces us to make decisions rooted in understanding the preciousness of time as a value that can be sustained: will I, today, be able to build an inheritance for those who come after me? If so, how? Is it worth worrying about the future, knowing that we will be even poorer next year? Such is the trap of time. Millennials and Generation Z are faced with shrinking options, just like the ancient Romans. But we are the generations going through hard times that will be able to create a better future for our children, if we choose to.

In this scenario, cryptocurrencies are not merely tools of financial investment, but malleable technologies that are creating economic contexts that could emancipate individuals from the mechanisms that are forcing the anxiety of a perpetual present upon us. Instead, we can create one where we feel hopeful that our temporal reality can be made longer.

It’s becoming increasingly easy to work remotely, travel the world, and be paid in crypto: no intermediary, no bureaucratic filter, or digital identity to limit its use. What is otherwise known as “digital nomadism”, but these roots may soon find fertile ground to grow. Borders can be reshaped. The internet may transform our real life. Crypto can allow us to create communities of our choice as financial systems limited by governmental decisions become increasingly unreliable. Crypto offers us a chance to control our financial destiny, and with it, what we leave on this earth.

My advice to you as a reader is to start learning about cryptocurrencies as an option to escape the financial chains of the present, to accelerate into this new digital reality, and to create trust and security for the people you love, for now and for what may come.

Matte Galt is a privacy and cybersecurity expert, author of Cyber Hermetica.

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The philosopher Edith Stein said: “The world doesn’t need what women have, the world needs what women are.”

For most women, motherhood represents a deep-seated, biological desire. While we are beings with souls, ambitions, and egos, we are also, and fundamentally, mammals. Harmoniously reconciling our human consciousness with our instinct for a family is our mission.

This is not to devalue women who don’t have children for personal or circumstantial reasons. It seeks to help women who become mothers navigate that role with strength.

We empower ourselves when we acknowledge and respect the natural limits that form us. These limits are not restrictive; they are a structure that enables us to expand wisely. When we respect our boundaries, our growth becomes a solid foundation for our complete expression. Ignoring them, on the other hand, hinders our potential.

As mothers, our inner landscape is composed of love for our children, the urge to sympathize with their needs, and, in equal measure, the broader desire to create in the world as a means of expression. Many mothers' outer lives fail to reflect this inner reality because our post-industrial society feels dehumanizing, yet we are simultaneously gaslit into believing the fault is ours.

We tend to those needs by nourishing our bodies with organic foods, spending time in nature, warmth, connection, and laughter with other women, and, at the same time, creating something that we feel brings value to the world around us. The modern family set-up often means many of these pillars fall by the wayside. Women should be cautious regarding obligations set by others that deprive us of our needs. There is wisdom in what our bodies are telling us. This takes a proper understanding of who and what we are.

As women, we should live in a way that vindicates our bodies. The way modernity often expects us to live—as if we do not bleed, do not birth life, do not drip milk, and are not responsible for life itself—is why we must defend this vindication at all costs. To flourish as mothers, we should reject ways of living that require us to survive in low-grade physiological denial. We are the vehicles through which life weaves its story, but modern structures want us to forget this reality. We must instead viciously defend it, as to be feminine doesn’t only involve softness and beauty; it is, in fact, ferocity and fervency in equal measure.

We should reckon with the reality that many women feel the need to be at home with their children at an early age. The place where reckoning begins is with women—not policy or the government. Not men. We must stop allowing ourselves to primarily be used during our childbearing years as production units for an economy that defines its success based on the quantity of output. This doesn’t entail that women need not work. Instead, it consists in embracing the synthesis that life can offer us if we choose to work in a way that can be reconciled with our need to be mothers. And if we choose work that values quality.

We can work from home, running an online, profitable business we are passionate about that guarantees our economic independence. We can undertake freelance work. We can trade with neighbors, and help a friend by watching her child when she needs to attend a meeting. We can create communities where we empower each other as women.

The cottage economy—a community in which labor consists of family or individual units working with their available resources, can offer us an alternative. A cottage economy produces goods through handmade work, creating a sense of fulfillment and autonomy. Life becomes localized. It allows us to use riches in nature with others where we can feel simultaneously connected and empowered.

Remembering self-evident truths as mothers allows us to become “undomesticated,” not in the sense that we have no domestic skills or do not inhabit the domestic domain, but in the sense that we are opting out of culture’s default conception of what motherhood should look like today. This is not a call to go back in time or to devalue our higher-order desires, but to take the lessons of the past and use them in a modern context: fulfilling our maternal instincts with larger aspirations.

So often, we are expected to forgo those needs in favor of keeping up with corporate obligations, and in doing so, women can easily lose touch with themselves. This is why conditions like postpartum depression become normalized. We deny our nature, and when we fail to cope as required by our overlords, we are rendered voiceless through a mental health diagnosis. It represents a modern tool of invalidation that causes maladaptive behaviors to become mainstream.

There is dignity in both raising children and keeping a home while preserving the feral aspect of our female nature. Feral means retaining a state untamed by domestication. Paradoxically, the pinnacle of human domestication is the framework offered to us as the standard today. Women often work alienated in a small office, in constant contact with the virtual world, with minimal to no contact with the natural world, relying on remote experts for their health, and unable to feel connected to a purpose that makes them feel valuable.

A feral life means a life dedicated to a refusal to be tamed by these post-industrial forces of domestication. It also means rejecting the traditional, purely performative view of motherhood offered to many women today as a reactionary response.

The excitement that comes with creating is life-giving for our spirit. The creative process is how we take the nebulous and forge it in the material. This means that caring for our domestic context can bring us a sense of fulfillment when combined with our desire to contribute to the world. Using our physical selves to make and curate the spaces around us and transform them to create a sense of wonder, beauty, and comfort is what Stein meant by “what women are.” Women are makers of the vast infinite turned material.

As mothers, we hold the power to create homes that are a living microcosm of both tenderness and fearlessness. When our hearts ache at the events unfolding in the world, we may think that our homes are a mere product of it, but we should upend this paradigm. Homes are a refuge that shape our society. The family is a microcosm through which our reality grows. We should subvert the modern image of a society where the family is a mere product of an economic super-structure. Family should become the foundation in all its complexity and, at times, challenge. It can come to life in a variety of forms. But it remains the essential tassel.

We do not have to be mirrors of the world. We can define it. We have choices and options, history to learn from, nature to inform us, and our present reality that we can learn to harness. By rejecting the dominant, office-obsessed culture, we can move the needle to a life encompassed by capability and curiosity, independence and community, softness and courage, all in equal measure.

Emily Hancock is a mother of three and the author of The Work of Women.

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For a culture to be able to play, it needs a lightness of spirit, a certain confidence. In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, originally published in 1944, Johan H. Huizinga argues that while Homo Sapiens may have been too hubristic, and Homo Faber too aspecific, given that plenty of non-human animals also make and build, play has been neglected in our understanding of human attributes. Animals play too, of course, but, for Huizinga, “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” Pure play, he writes, is one of the main bases of civilization. It is sacred.

Play transcends need. It is not a reflex or purely biological phenomenon: it has a social meaning. If we seek a reductive account, Huizinga suggests, we miss its “profoundly aesthetic quality”. That is to say, we miss that which resists analysis and logical interpretation. Huizinga notes that only English has a word—fun—that captures what play is all about (French, he notes, has no corresponding term at all, while German has “Spass” and “Witz”, which come close). Play, he writes, cannot be denied: “You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.”

What does contemporary culture have to say about play? In one sense, play is everywhere: the video game industry made an estimated $455 billion last year, more than the film and music industries combined. Gamergate, a little over a decade ago, arguably began the pushback against the progressive takeover of culture in the name of fun: “go woke, go broke!” reveals that absolutely no one likes being lectured to. Games, films, music, literature and art that seek above all to impart a moral message—over the past decade usually one that bares no relation to reality, and is nothing but propaganda. And people don’t want to waste what little spare time they might have being told what to think by those who believe they’re more intelligent and moral than their audience.

At the same time, we’ve seen a terrible reification of play—that is to say, a fixing of something that should remain at the level of a fleeting joy. Children, for a variety of reasons, are predisposed to play—as Huizinga puts it, “Child and animal play because they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom”—yet adults in the Western world have sought to capture this freedom and turn it into a static identity. When a child pretends to be an animal, or the opposite sex, or a dinosaur, or an astronaut, they know very well that time itself has become the plateau for a little game. “Every child knows perfectly well that he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun,’” as Huizinga says. Yet our culture seeks to lock down these moments for utterly malign reasons: to profit from them, or to steal the refracted glory of play for adult reasons.

Yet it is in the world of relations between men and women—where all kinds of cultural games, from dancing to flirting to unspoken gestures—come alive, that play has perhaps taken the greatest hit. Young people talk about app-enabled dates as feeling like job interviews, where both parties are auditioning for an unpaid internship. MeToo has created a world in which flirting at work or approaching a woman in the wider world isn’t worth it: one wrong move and you’re broke and your name is splattered all over the internet. Dating apps might act as a kind of filter and give the impression of interest and initial consent, but they run the risk of taking all the surprise out of life: what if you don’t know what the kind of future person you might love is like? Perhaps they won’t share your politics, won’t be your “type” and maybe they’ll introduce an element of joyful chaos into a world of spreadsheets and bureaucracy. But you wouldn’t know if what guides you is a checklist: human relationships are not recipes.

So how do we get back to a culture that is light enough to risk flirting? That finds fun and pleasure in taking the time just to see where a conversation or a flirtation leads? Huizinga suggests that, perhaps surprisingly, there is an affinity between play and order, and has a tendency “to be beautiful”. All play has rules, even if these change as the game goes along. One must demonstrate a certain openness and willingness to go along with what may come, to be, as it were “game”. Games are also intimately connected with secrecy—the exact opposite of the relentless imposition of transparency central to the surveillance, and self-surveillance, age.

We often mourn the loss of rituals in the West. While some religious milestones barely cling on, there is a generalized absence of cultural markers. Platforms are too fragmented, there is little left of a shared culture. Games are played, certainly, but often alone, and without room for spontaneity. Free-flowing conversation online is increasingly policed and locked down, both by states and self-appointment monitors. But all is not lost. The outside world still exists for those finally bored and alienated by the promises of the virtual. Others exist. Spontaneity and delight await: very few job interviews are held in parks, after all.

In Plato’s Laws, he answers the question of the right way of living by stating that “Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the Gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win in the contest.” Our culture is infinitely more fractured than the collective world of the Greeks—though this moment was hardly without its antagonisms—but we would do well to remember that play is intimately connected to peace. An excess of seriousness often contributes to the very thing one is concerned about—be it war or more anxiety. The person who cannot play is in a melancholic place: play reminds us that life and love can be understood with a light heart, and that unexpectedly good things happen the moment we loosen our grip.

Nina Power is a writer, editor, and philosopher. She is the author of “What Do Men Want?” (Penguin:2022).

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