I think this is exactly where feminism needs to go to stay relevant. Postmodernism has led us down the same road that tanked the Roman Empire—endless deconstruction with nothing real to replace it. It’s time to reignite the pursuit of higher truth.
I also went through a similar experience with mental health. Therapy was absolutely trash. I healed myself by cutting off all validation by living like Henry David Thoreau for a year in the backwoods of California and Oregon. I wrote about it.
Can’t wait for you to read my next post on my beef with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—and how it’s turned our culture into a machine of mindless consumption. It’s going to be a doozy.
That explains some of the madness you encountered. I think cultural anthropology might be the worst of all the humanities and social sciences on some of this stuff from what I’ve gathered! But I wasn’t first-hand in that field myself to say.
I took an actual full-length course on Critical Theory. (I did a German Lang & Lit PhD) The professor was actually quite sane, she didn’t push any agenda, but we read much about Derrida, Lacan and many others and this was a big part of where I lost faith in the possibility that academia could improve the world. I recall a specific instance in which a far-left fellow student remarked that when HRC went to China and said “women’s rights are human rights”, that was an example of cultural imperialism.
I'm curious -- any particular book by Newport you'd recommend? I have read So Good They Can't Ignore You, but that seems focused more career advice than life advice. And frankly, I think he is too quick to dismiss passion, both as a source of intrinsic happiness as well as passion being a source of motivation / energy to pursue career capital.
That's a fair critique. Deep Work and Digital Minimalism did the most for my life. I finished Slow Productivity recently and it helped me build on what I started with those two books. Digital minimalism I'd recommend over the others because it is foundational for the ability to do deep work.
I tried to find discipline in my life for years, read philosophy, tried to sort myself out — but remained internally stuck until my mid thirties. Finally, I decided to look into therapy. It didn’t take much. I worked with a few different people over the course of a year and it changed everything. After those emotional breakthroughs and inner realizations, I signed up for meditation classes, gym/yoga memberships, or cared qi gong every morning, and started getting shit done. And then all of that prepared me to do some really deep work with psychedelic-assisted therapy, which was like a spiritual rebirth and greatly potential-unlocking.
These days it’s not uncommon for people to ask “how do you do all this stuff?” (I now have a busy and intense life). It wouldn’t have been possible without the help of amazing therapists. I so appreciate the work they do.
I offer this as a counterpoint to your claims about therapy. It wasn’t the thing you needed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not what someone else needs.
I agree with this! I actually do need therapy and am in it right now, but I also think it has many practitioners that harm their clients’ sense of agency and only validate when some people may need a push to change things. I would have loved a therapist as a teenager, and I should have perhaps phrased what I said differently. I did many of the things you did minus heavy meditation, and they all helped me more than therapy because they involved action of some kind, while therapy was all talk. I can understand how that would be helpful, but at a certain point one has to actually take action. Does that find us a middle ground?
What I find so interesting about this is how much your experience mirrors mine, but in slightly different ways. I started out as more of a libertarian ideologue and gradually moderated from there, and despite being a mostly Mediterranean creature, I was actually drawn to Buddhism for many of the same reasons you seem to have been to Stoicism. It certainly helped me through my own struggles with depression. Anyway, lots of good advice and valuable insight here. Thanks for writing it.
Philosophy was indeed my savior, because I started my journey into Greco-Roman and Indian branches. It both challenged me and taught me how I should live, develop the self, cultivate virtue, etc. The hardest thing to transcend is the anger, I’ll admit.
For me the problem is something I see often, which is people referring to "therapy" very generally, and based on their personal experiences or something they've read on the internet. The kinds of talk therapist you might find through your insurance provider do not represent the larger field of therapeutic work. And there are, in fact, therapists who will encourage discipline and other action items. And there are forms of therapy like "somatic experiencing" which skip the years of sitting on the couch and can be incredibly fast and effective at undoing trauma.
So where you say "therapy" throughout your article, it would be more appropriate to say "my therapist" or "the therapy I experienced." There's already a lot of stigma around mental health care, and the problem for a lot of people is not a lack of discipline, its their en-cultured belief that seeking help makes you weak. So reading that therapy is akin to "wallowing in disempowerment" or that "entirely omits the concept of discipline" etc, is more than just a little misleading. And I can say from personal experience that my therapeutic care was deeply, deeply empowering. Without it, I would have never been able to build discipline, because I was carrying way too much pain around. After releasing that, it became so much easier to build other forms of strength and resiliency.
Many women still yearn for traditional gender roles which simply aren't available any longer. Many women's discontent about how those roles aren't available any longer or with the system at large have no meaningful expression (bc of the decrepitude of the system), and express as discontent with men, or doubling down on their self worth by joining a cadre of similarly discontented others. And of course women have always more easily connected with one another about emotional topics, so, x wave feminism is an amalgam of related issues and that largely have nothing to do with what they actually complain about, which often isn't actually even true.
Well, that's a can of worms based on a cursory skim of paragraph one. I think anthropology sheds the best light on it, psychology second, sociology only third. I'll say more when i see what response this preliminary comment gets.
I think women by and large don't want "equality" in the gender role sense but feminism swallowing all of political discourse, there's no room to express that maybe, women do want to stay home with small children and more women would have children if there were more college educated men they'd want to marry, but there aren't because men overall are doing badly. So, it's easy to blame men for their individual failure to be desirable partners. I think there are still repulsive men out there but there are just repulsive people in general - plenty of women would make bad partners because of lack of emotional regulation (me, before). Plenty of feminists would chose not to work if they could, and I, too, want freedom from corporate life one day, but I obviously aspire to still be an equal contributor to the household until that's possible (if ever- because I don't expect it). I think also the fact that most of the economic gains of the past 40 years are from women's labor force participation is telling - is the ability to work really liberation or a source of freedom, or is it a story we like to tell to justify economic exploitation of women and the dispossession of men without degrees? On the other hand, I grew up with the singular goal of being financially independent of any man because my father never really provided for my family (warped my view of men). I am glad to not be dependent, but at the same time being 'dependent' is a sort of economic privilege that the only the richest women get, while they also try to tell us that we should want to work. It's a luxury belief in a way.
All I can do is draw together anthro and psych to make inferences on these topics. "x wave feminism is an amalgam of related issues and that largely have nothing to do with what they actually complain about, which often isn't actually even true." - yes, I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, feminism has warped my mind about a lot of topics whereby I feel guilty about certain opinions even though they're perfectly reasonable outside the feminist paradigm.
My response to your response on Metaphysics is edited into the response above it, bc technology. I'm putting this here bc i don't think you'll be notified of that edit. I'm going to respond to this article shortly...
I love this beautiful story about adversity and overcoming. You taught me a lot about online leftism and digital communities around mental health issues. Your experiences have expanded my point of view, thank you for sharing.
Also, when it comes to eastern spirituality, stoicism, and anything from Cal Newport, you are speaking my language. Keep up the good work 🙏
Means so much that you read it given all the content out there. I rarely meet people who’ve heard of Newport; I evangelize his work to basically everyone I know. I wish leftist women of color who struggle with depression were more willing to hear the advice of people who don’t share their identities, and there’s ample evidence that liberal women are far more depressed than conservative women, and I’ve always suspected that the online discourse and general political paradigm are causing and/or encouraging it. I don’t see that many people are making this connection either so I appreciate your perspective and validation that it could in fact at least be a correlation or causation. It makes me sad because it holds us back from living our best lives. I also see lots of communities that are trying to replace the hole the rejection of Christianity left, but they’re not actually encouraging looking inward and finding a higher self. If you’re interested in that topic at all, btw, I highly recommend Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton since you mentioned spirituality. :)
Excellent piece! Don’t know if you’ve read Jordan Peterson - he’s been so helpful to young men who are so badly lost in our culture too. He’s all about discipline.
JP is an excellent psychologist in general but his Practical Wisdom fails at step 0 by assuming that fitting into society as it is is desirable. Being perfectly adapted to a sick society is not mental health.
He's a solid thinker but he has many of the basics wrong. I have a list of respected thinkers who are wrong, and why, if anyone wants it.
Who knew that she gave birth to Shiva and ate his intenstines? Had no idea Canadian "scholarship" was this bad. At least their universities are free, aren't they? If not they should be. And in the case of Peterson, students should get their money back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbbWGHOgFc
There's nothing ethically suspect about understanding myth and symbology and how they evolve, and so forth, but he takes ancient wisdom to be modern truth and that's wrong at every level of analysis.
Kaiser ji, did I say there is something "ethically suspect about understanding myth and symbology and how they evolve"? The point is he didn't understand the myth or symbology of Ma Kali at all. Forget the fangled, faux Jungian archetypal interpretation, he couldn't even get the basic narrative correct. In fact he got it completely and bizarrely wrong at every level. A 47 second google search by an 8 year old on the subject could have helped him yet he couldn't even be bothered with that. Anyway, below is a correction to his misunderstanding, separated into parts since Substack comments have a character limit:
GODDESS KALI SWALLOWS JORDAN PETERSON WHOLE
Smashing Fleeting Visions of Culture and Behavior in Favor of the Infinitely Possible
By Josh Schrei
Until yesterday, I had entirely avoided entering into the fray around Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson, nor had I really subjected myself to much of his online content. He speaks about hot-button topics that I don’t always feel inclined — or qualified — to comment on. I know a lot of people have already put him through the shredder, probably more articulately than I can.
I also generally try to avoid the ‘left/right’ polarity as much as possible. I don’t see it as truly relevant political terminology anymore, and it’s so charged and polarized that I think ultimately this terminology is going to have to be discarded if political progress is going to be made. With regards to Peterson, there are people I respect who can’t stand the guy. And there are people I respect who find his ideas interesting. I was content to simply be neutral on the topic, and I did that mostly by avoiding him.
Until yesterday, when I saw a clip of him speaking about the Indian goddess Kālī.
It gave me pause, because one thing that people on all sides of the opinions-on-Jordan-Peterson spectrum can usually agree on — even if they don’t agree with his conclusions — is that if nothing else he is well-studied and smart.
I may not feel it’s my place to enter into a debate about his position on the use of trans pronouns and whether or not that should be legislated. However, I do feel qualified to take a position on what he has to say about Kālī. I’ve studied her for many years, I’ve read her relevant texts, I’ve been to her major and minor temples across the Indian subcontinent, I have had dialogues with temple priests and householders, and conducted podcast interviews with PhDs who’ve written entire books on her.
And there’s no getting around the fact that 99% of what Jordan Peterson said about Kālī — in two lectures — was wrong. And I mean just plain wrong, from a factual perspective.
I’ll explain how in just a moment, but what inspired me to look a little deeper into Jordan Peterson after this was not so much that he was wrong, it was that while he was in the process of being wrong he was conveying, through voice and gesture, an absolute certainty that he was right. Like for him the permutations of the goddess Kālī were child’s play and anyone within earshot should be wowed by his knowledge of obscure Indian goddesses. It’s nice I guess to have a captive audience of mostly 18-year-olds. Raise your voice, wear a tie, and make a few bold gestures, and suddenly whatever you say is right.
Well if the guy was capable of exuding such certainty when speaking about something that he had no idea about, how did that translate into other areas of his work, I wondered? How did this type of myopia color a worldview that he presents — often and vigorously — as absolute truth with that type of professorial certainty that shuts down question or dissent.
Let’s start with Kālī. You know her, right? The mother goddess with the protruding tongue, wreathed in heads, wearing a skirt of limbs? The swallower of time, she is sometimes called. For Tantric practitioners she is the absolute reality itself, that force which transcends life and death, space and time, the supreme consciousness. Her form challenges her devotees to see all of this wheel of life and death, all of it, even the uncomfortable stuff, as sacred. She is adored by millions of people. In Kerala, her rituals involve trance-mediumship, dance, and music. For those in Bengal, she is right at the center of their spiritual and material life. They see her intimately, as a mother who is always present, both fierce and tender at once.
I’m going to talk about her a lot more in future episodes of this podcast, so I’m not going to go into too much detail now.
First of all, Peterson doesn’t know how to pronounce her name. He calls her Callie, which rhymes with Sally. In this day and age, if you’re going to be a Western professor purporting to expound the mysteries of a goddess who is actively worshipped by millions of people, who is studied by academics, who is sung to by devotees, who is written about by scholars, you should probably start by knowing how to say her name.
In one lecture, he compares an eight-legged version of her to a “spider” a fairy-tale vision of evil as she “traps the unwary.”
She dwells in a “web of fire,” he says, and represents the “sum total of all fears.” Which sounds like a great Jungian interpretation, until you realize that it bears no resemblance to how Kālī is actually viewed or described in India.
Kālī is all about “how to deal with threat,” Peterson goes on, about humans “trying to come to terms with the category of all awful things.”
And yet, the Bengali poet Ramprasad sang hymns of love to her, and the saint Ramakrishna would go into ecstatic trance merely at the mention of her name. How can this be? When devotees sing to her, she is called “the oceanic nectar of compassion” and “full of grace,” “whose mercy is without end,” the “vessel of mercy” herself.
Yet for Peterson, she’s an “embodied representation of the category of frightening things. Some poor artist was thinking of ‘how do I represent destruction…’” he surmises, when speaking of her origins.
The central image that Peterson references in both of his lectures is not a standard vision of Kālī at all. It is a Tantric statue, perhaps even Buddhist, almost definitely Nepali or Tibetan (it is difficult to see in the video). Yet Peterson skips the entire foundational introduction to Tantric iconography and the fact that Tantra is a major world religious tradition and that its challenging iconography is a vehicle through which the individual meditator can access certain states of consciousness and files the whole thing under one moniker — fear.
Then he says one accurate thing. That there is in fact ritual sacrifice that takes place in honor of Kālī.
He goes on to talk about sacrifice, in a pre-Joseph Campbell colonial-era anthropologist kind of way. He speaks of the human realization that we could bargain with the future, which he extols as a “major development” for human beings, but in doing so he also wittingly or unwittingly categorizes sacrifice and ritual — and all things Kālī — squarely in the realm of the primitive. The implication being that yes, that was a step along the way (what “way?”) but we’ve grown a lot since then.
People “sacrifice to what [they’re] afraid of in hopes that good things may happen,” he says. This skips, of course, the centuries of high meditative texts to Kālī, the vision of her as twelve vibrational aspects of consciousness, each of which can be accessed and refined over time, it skips the entire corpus of devotional literature to her. It skips all this in favor of a particular vision, which is central to Peterson’s worldview. A neat polarized version of reality in which the old trope of male/light/order and female/dark/chaos is actually — in his mind — hardwired into human behavior and therefore male societal dominance is a natural expression of male “competence.”
Kālī, of course, smashes this vision in half. She is order itself. She “dwells within the order” and is “at home in the yantra”. She is not evil, she “destroys evil.” Yet Peterson’s descriptions ignore all this and sound a lot like the accounts of British colonists who first encountered Kālī in 18th century Bengal.
The fact that Peterson, like many early anthropologists, is incapable of seeing ritual as anything beyond “transaction” because he comes from a culture that centers transaction above all else is indicative of the core problem with Peterson’s worldview. It’s late capitalist thinking, presented as hard human truth.
Material transaction — “I’ll give the gods this corn if they make it rain”— is one small aspect of ritual, but it is not in any way the only or most important aspect. One could say it’s possibly the least interesting aspect of ritual, and for those who actually understand ritual and its permutations, this is a western dumbing down that has far more to do with the detached scientists that were viewing the ritual than the ritual itself in context.
For example, the gaining of a transcendent state of consciousness — in which the practitioner is privy to intuitive vision — is far more interesting and important. That ritual could actually be advanced technology for propelling human beings into the trance state so that they can see reality more clearly eludes most anthropologists because to understand this one would have to understand why a society would want to center the trance state. We’re not a society that values meditative states. We’re a society that values material transaction.
This is just one example — the inability to see outside of the prism of modern western capitalist culture leads Peterson to make vast assumptions about human nature and present them as static, in the process ignoring history.
Agree - for a long time I had only heard of him as a sort of awful boogie man who should be avoided. Then I listened to an episode of his podcast and realised I had been severely misled! I think he offers good advice - advice that used to be common! Seems we are not teaching this to our children any more and they are clearly suffering.
This was me with people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and several others for a long time. I regret refusing to hear what they're saying because other people told me to. Same with Peterson. I actually don't understand this concept of refusing to engage with ideas because of one idea you might disagree with.
Early on I was confused too, my natural inclination is to change my views if more/new info says my old view was wrong. However I notice for some people encountering a view different from their own causes a kind of psychological distress. I think they have made a particular view central to their ‘identity’ and when this is challenged it means their whole identity is too. Or it could be an ego thing, and they have to save face by doubling down.
Indeed. I like to take time to give consideration to the notion that I might be 'wrong' about whatever, because ultimately what I want is to be right, and just blindly marching on believing that I'm right seems like an injustice to myself. My relationship with myself is the most important relationship that I engage in and so I want respect this person deeply. To hold conviction in one hand whilst retaining an element of self doubt in the other is an approach that I like to take. There can be a feeling of vulnerability surrounding the viewpoint of being 'right'. It might seem odd, but I frequently find myself desiring to be 'wrong', because then hopefully I can self correct and then ultimately be 'right' . ✌️
The unfortunately reality is, I think, that people would rather be accepted by their peers who believe these things than stand on their own in their opinions and be defenestrated. But that’s a theory based on studies of human tribalism I’ve encountered over the years.
Yeah I find the whole tribal identity mindset an interesting paradigm to observe. But, I dunno if I view it as being 'unfortunate' . I'd maybe find it unfortunate if I was to fall under its spell, but that isn't happening right now so it isn't my problem. Viewing us as a species through an anthropological lens I find the tribal behaviour of others not at all surprising, after all for thousands of years through out evolution, belonging to a tribe was most definitely essential to one's own survival. So, given that we are only just embarking upon our transition into a technical/sedentary/individual/indoor and largely non- physical tribal period I find it wholly understandable that we are still carrying our pre- modernity phycological baggage with us as evolution burns on a low flame. What always stokes my cognitive mechanism though is encountering outliers - those that perceive and act apart from the crowd ( tribe) like adventures, innovators, creators, visionaries et alia as that is where wisdom resides.
It's funny, I had the thought just today that I need to read him so I can respond to it. I'm somewhat familiar with his thinking from his appearance on Bill Maher's Youtube show and I think he has some arguments with which I vehemently disagree. At the same time, I think progressive women unfairly malign him for wrongthink, and he is one of the few people to call it out as a feminine tendency to cancel people. And he's done men a favor by writing about these things for men who might struggle without that sort of advice.
I've read only 12 Rules 1 and part of 2 (until i got fed up with the conservative kool-aid), but in watching Maps of Meaning (incl. different years) and many interviews and discussions, i think you've got him wrong on that. You'll have to draw your own conclusions of course, as if you had a choice. ;). Also he has a great relationship with his wife and daughter and they've stuck together through some shit, so...
Yes I’m mostly an atheist (w/ a lot of respect for ritual and role of religion - go figure!) so there’s stuff I disagree with too. But then I pay attention to a lot of people I don’t agree with fully but have great admiration for… he’s one.
The common core of all religions is dogma, an instance of faith. Faith is belief without appeal to evidence and is always intellectually regressive. There's nothing available through religion that isn't better available in some other way that's compatible with truth.
But just in case, i created a "religion" that cannibalizes all of the psychologically beneficial parts of all religions while rejecting all of the dogma and woo. I call it The Inner Journey. There were actual physical services for a short while long ago... it's due for a renaissance.
This was basically my path out of illogical beliefs that are not even about literal religion but more about the plague of social justice fallacies. However, I've found that there the Inner Journey requires either religion or philosophy. If one is disinclined to pursue philosophical inquiry, religion is better than the church of social justice.
I’ll be the second to recommend Jordan Peterson. I realize many people on one side hate him, especially progressive women, but I’ve heard men speak about how much he helped them take responsibility for their lives in a meaningful way—and that men feeling better about their lives should be seen as a positive by progressive women. It’s hard to think of a time when resentful men who feel beleaguered by the world have a positive effect on women.
That being said I don’t listen to him regularly, and likely have disagreements with him about some things. (He has a funny way of wording things that is amusing if you listen to him for a bit.)
I love that you mention temperance and wonder if it isn't time to dust the term off. For the longest time it meant abstaining from alcohol but also moderation or self-restraint. There is such wisdom in Stoicism. I'm curious if generally speaking women can benefit from it more than men in modern culture. As a male social worker I see so many men flock to it on YouTube as a way to suppress their emotions and it rarely ends well for them. On the surface it overlaps nicely with what some call toxic masculinity and leads them down a rule bound path with less moderation. Its hard to explain to those guys that it takes discipline to endure painful feelings without complaint. It is actually more stoic for them to feel more deeply but not be led by the emotions.
I do think that women can benefit from it more and are sadly less likely to seek it out. I'm still contemplating why that is, because only men ever want to discuss this topic with me. The disparity in gender in the audiences of the people whose ideas I follow is pretty extreme. Even people like Cal Newport have primarily male audiences even though his advice is applicable to everyone. There is something in the water making us less likely to develop intellectually in many ways and it really bugs me.
I think temperance is an antidote to whatever toxic tendencies men might have. I also think masculinity has been unfairly maligned in a generalized way that makes positive masculine traits impossible to discuss. I think men should reclaim it and start pushing back on this stuff. I think men could also stand to let their emotions out, and it's a shame they feel they can't. I intuit that this is also due to women punishing them for it, though I of course can't prove it. My partner recovered from alcoholism and now practices these virtues, and they're reinforced in his social associations. I try to discuss these things among women as often as I can.
It is so refreshing to discuss the nuances at play here and so hard to discuss gender without making generalizations. I try to be especially aware when I generalize. I can't speak for whether women could benefit from stoicism but anything that helps them chart a course with less social pressure makes me happy. My partner recently started doing her daily cold plunges so maybe stoicism is next? I got sober in 2003 and resonate with how your partner has benefitted - there are certainly stoic undertones to recovery. I'm glad that depression no longer rules your life like it once did.
I'm curious if you have any gender based observations here. I'm trying to ask basically every man I come across about these differences in orientation toward knowledge acquisition.
This is so well written, and comprehensive—that I feel guilty reading it on my phone & have to focus it later on my laptop.
I’m trying to regain my attention span by avoiding X for Lent, but finding myself here on Substack more as a substitute. Distraction is easy to find in our modern age.
I was skimming bits of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations last week and had to laugh at how he was chastising himself about succumbing to distractions. I was thinking, “what could possibly be distracting in an age before technology?” 😂
Thank you for this piece. I was invited to a small women’s group after church recently and despite my introvert brain resisting… I know developing in person relationships is more sustaining than staring at my phone & communicating from a distance, so I’ll try it out.
Thank you for the compliment! Regarding X, I have never been on it actively and can say that Substack is a better use of time because it allows for actual idea exchange :-D. Those kinds of fast distractions are why I was so deep in the hole.
And regarding Aurelius it's also that he had all this power at his disposal so sometimes it's hard to take him seriously but, his ethos is aspirational. In one of Seneca's letters, people who flit from book to book feel like the ancient allegory for phone addled people. I hope your efforts to form in person community are fruitful!
I did the same things; exercise regimen, diet change, daily walks, discipline in reading, and truly difficult introspection. I appreciate your sharing that. I've been medicated since 2012, and I've gotten off a few but putting off the others, though I know I can live without them. I think some people might benefit, but I wish I had been held accountable through therapy to make changes while on medication; instead medication in a psychiatric context is immediately prescribed, and it's why too many of us are now medicated who shouldn't be, because the effect of so many meds is to dull emotions.
Re: Peterson, I kind of see him as Jay Shetty's counterpart in terms of charlatanism. Shetty appeals to left women (I only ever hear women mentioning him) and Peterson to right-leaning men, though I've heard plenty of men who aren't conservatives mention him in the same breath as Joe Rogan. I think it's necessary to engage with the work of these kinds of people if nothing else to develop rational arguments for refutation and really know what I'm arguing against. If I don't read these things, I can't know the real argument. I find that a kind of derangement manifests with some of these people among the left that reminds me of Trump derangement. I think Bill Maher is also a culture warrior but I find him correct much of the time. I do think it's good for people in general to learn discipline, but I wish he didn't also present it with a kind of disdain for female equality. At the same time, I've heard him diagnose women's anti-social behavior when it comes to these topics accurately. So I'm not sure what to conclude yet.
Yes 👏👏👏
I think this is exactly where feminism needs to go to stay relevant. Postmodernism has led us down the same road that tanked the Roman Empire—endless deconstruction with nothing real to replace it. It’s time to reignite the pursuit of higher truth.
I also went through a similar experience with mental health. Therapy was absolutely trash. I healed myself by cutting off all validation by living like Henry David Thoreau for a year in the backwoods of California and Oregon. I wrote about it.
Can’t wait for you to read my next post on my beef with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—and how it’s turned our culture into a machine of mindless consumption. It’s going to be a doozy.
Great piece! I’m curious what you studied in grad school but I’m guessing it will come up in a subsequent essay.
History, religion, anthropology, with a focus on South Asia:)
That explains some of the madness you encountered. I think cultural anthropology might be the worst of all the humanities and social sciences on some of this stuff from what I’ve gathered! But I wasn’t first-hand in that field myself to say.
Unfortunately critical theory ran through all departments I took courses in sigh
I took an actual full-length course on Critical Theory. (I did a German Lang & Lit PhD) The professor was actually quite sane, she didn’t push any agenda, but we read much about Derrida, Lacan and many others and this was a big part of where I lost faith in the possibility that academia could improve the world. I recall a specific instance in which a far-left fellow student remarked that when HRC went to China and said “women’s rights are human rights”, that was an example of cultural imperialism.
I'm curious -- any particular book by Newport you'd recommend? I have read So Good They Can't Ignore You, but that seems focused more career advice than life advice. And frankly, I think he is too quick to dismiss passion, both as a source of intrinsic happiness as well as passion being a source of motivation / energy to pursue career capital.
That's a fair critique. Deep Work and Digital Minimalism did the most for my life. I finished Slow Productivity recently and it helped me build on what I started with those two books. Digital minimalism I'd recommend over the others because it is foundational for the ability to do deep work.
Thanks, I'll give that a go.
I tried to find discipline in my life for years, read philosophy, tried to sort myself out — but remained internally stuck until my mid thirties. Finally, I decided to look into therapy. It didn’t take much. I worked with a few different people over the course of a year and it changed everything. After those emotional breakthroughs and inner realizations, I signed up for meditation classes, gym/yoga memberships, or cared qi gong every morning, and started getting shit done. And then all of that prepared me to do some really deep work with psychedelic-assisted therapy, which was like a spiritual rebirth and greatly potential-unlocking.
These days it’s not uncommon for people to ask “how do you do all this stuff?” (I now have a busy and intense life). It wouldn’t have been possible without the help of amazing therapists. I so appreciate the work they do.
I offer this as a counterpoint to your claims about therapy. It wasn’t the thing you needed, but that doesn’t mean it’s not what someone else needs.
I agree with this! I actually do need therapy and am in it right now, but I also think it has many practitioners that harm their clients’ sense of agency and only validate when some people may need a push to change things. I would have loved a therapist as a teenager, and I should have perhaps phrased what I said differently. I did many of the things you did minus heavy meditation, and they all helped me more than therapy because they involved action of some kind, while therapy was all talk. I can understand how that would be helpful, but at a certain point one has to actually take action. Does that find us a middle ground?
Hi Radha, one of your male readers here. Honestly I think I found your article very helpful for my own circumstances as well. Thank you.
What I find so interesting about this is how much your experience mirrors mine, but in slightly different ways. I started out as more of a libertarian ideologue and gradually moderated from there, and despite being a mostly Mediterranean creature, I was actually drawn to Buddhism for many of the same reasons you seem to have been to Stoicism. It certainly helped me through my own struggles with depression. Anyway, lots of good advice and valuable insight here. Thanks for writing it.
Philosophy was indeed my savior, because I started my journey into Greco-Roman and Indian branches. It both challenged me and taught me how I should live, develop the self, cultivate virtue, etc. The hardest thing to transcend is the anger, I’ll admit.
For me the problem is something I see often, which is people referring to "therapy" very generally, and based on their personal experiences or something they've read on the internet. The kinds of talk therapist you might find through your insurance provider do not represent the larger field of therapeutic work. And there are, in fact, therapists who will encourage discipline and other action items. And there are forms of therapy like "somatic experiencing" which skip the years of sitting on the couch and can be incredibly fast and effective at undoing trauma.
So where you say "therapy" throughout your article, it would be more appropriate to say "my therapist" or "the therapy I experienced." There's already a lot of stigma around mental health care, and the problem for a lot of people is not a lack of discipline, its their en-cultured belief that seeking help makes you weak. So reading that therapy is akin to "wallowing in disempowerment" or that "entirely omits the concept of discipline" etc, is more than just a little misleading. And I can say from personal experience that my therapeutic care was deeply, deeply empowering. Without it, I would have never been able to build discipline, because I was carrying way too much pain around. After releasing that, it became so much easier to build other forms of strength and resiliency.
Cheers.
Alrighty, fair critique, and will do next time I write about this.
re: gender identity
Many women still yearn for traditional gender roles which simply aren't available any longer. Many women's discontent about how those roles aren't available any longer or with the system at large have no meaningful expression (bc of the decrepitude of the system), and express as discontent with men, or doubling down on their self worth by joining a cadre of similarly discontented others. And of course women have always more easily connected with one another about emotional topics, so, x wave feminism is an amalgam of related issues and that largely have nothing to do with what they actually complain about, which often isn't actually even true.
Well, that's a can of worms based on a cursory skim of paragraph one. I think anthropology sheds the best light on it, psychology second, sociology only third. I'll say more when i see what response this preliminary comment gets.
I think women by and large don't want "equality" in the gender role sense but feminism swallowing all of political discourse, there's no room to express that maybe, women do want to stay home with small children and more women would have children if there were more college educated men they'd want to marry, but there aren't because men overall are doing badly. So, it's easy to blame men for their individual failure to be desirable partners. I think there are still repulsive men out there but there are just repulsive people in general - plenty of women would make bad partners because of lack of emotional regulation (me, before). Plenty of feminists would chose not to work if they could, and I, too, want freedom from corporate life one day, but I obviously aspire to still be an equal contributor to the household until that's possible (if ever- because I don't expect it). I think also the fact that most of the economic gains of the past 40 years are from women's labor force participation is telling - is the ability to work really liberation or a source of freedom, or is it a story we like to tell to justify economic exploitation of women and the dispossession of men without degrees? On the other hand, I grew up with the singular goal of being financially independent of any man because my father never really provided for my family (warped my view of men). I am glad to not be dependent, but at the same time being 'dependent' is a sort of economic privilege that the only the richest women get, while they also try to tell us that we should want to work. It's a luxury belief in a way.
All I can do is draw together anthro and psych to make inferences on these topics. "x wave feminism is an amalgam of related issues and that largely have nothing to do with what they actually complain about, which often isn't actually even true." - yes, I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, feminism has warped my mind about a lot of topics whereby I feel guilty about certain opinions even though they're perfectly reasonable outside the feminist paradigm.
Have you seen The Red Pill?
No, I try to avoid these things but depends on what it’s about. Is it about how women are destroying men or is it actually logical?
It's about how MRA's are legitimate.
I should probably expose myself to the view to refute it but it's an unpleasant thought
Nup. It's rational and you're rational. There will be no big deal.
I think you'll make the right decision for yourself. Be warned, many feminists hate it. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3686998/
My response to your response on Metaphysics is edited into the response above it, bc technology. I'm putting this here bc i don't think you'll be notified of that edit. I'm going to respond to this article shortly...
I love this beautiful story about adversity and overcoming. You taught me a lot about online leftism and digital communities around mental health issues. Your experiences have expanded my point of view, thank you for sharing.
Also, when it comes to eastern spirituality, stoicism, and anything from Cal Newport, you are speaking my language. Keep up the good work 🙏
Means so much that you read it given all the content out there. I rarely meet people who’ve heard of Newport; I evangelize his work to basically everyone I know. I wish leftist women of color who struggle with depression were more willing to hear the advice of people who don’t share their identities, and there’s ample evidence that liberal women are far more depressed than conservative women, and I’ve always suspected that the online discourse and general political paradigm are causing and/or encouraging it. I don’t see that many people are making this connection either so I appreciate your perspective and validation that it could in fact at least be a correlation or causation. It makes me sad because it holds us back from living our best lives. I also see lots of communities that are trying to replace the hole the rejection of Christianity left, but they’re not actually encouraging looking inward and finding a higher self. If you’re interested in that topic at all, btw, I highly recommend Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton since you mentioned spirituality. :)
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response! I’ll definitely check out Tara Isabella’s book 🤗
Excellent piece! Don’t know if you’ve read Jordan Peterson - he’s been so helpful to young men who are so badly lost in our culture too. He’s all about discipline.
JP is an excellent psychologist in general but his Practical Wisdom fails at step 0 by assuming that fitting into society as it is is desirable. Being perfectly adapted to a sick society is not mental health.
He's a solid thinker but he has many of the basics wrong. I have a list of respected thinkers who are wrong, and why, if anyone wants it.
Have you seen his take on Kali Ma? That too back when he was a paid professor?
I have not - Peterson commented on Kali Maa?
Video below.
Who knew that she gave birth to Shiva and ate his intenstines? Had no idea Canadian "scholarship" was this bad. At least their universities are free, aren't they? If not they should be. And in the case of Peterson, students should get their money back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbbWGHOgFc
There's nothing ethically suspect about understanding myth and symbology and how they evolve, and so forth, but he takes ancient wisdom to be modern truth and that's wrong at every level of analysis.
Kaiser ji, did I say there is something "ethically suspect about understanding myth and symbology and how they evolve"? The point is he didn't understand the myth or symbology of Ma Kali at all. Forget the fangled, faux Jungian archetypal interpretation, he couldn't even get the basic narrative correct. In fact he got it completely and bizarrely wrong at every level. A 47 second google search by an 8 year old on the subject could have helped him yet he couldn't even be bothered with that. Anyway, below is a correction to his misunderstanding, separated into parts since Substack comments have a character limit:
GODDESS KALI SWALLOWS JORDAN PETERSON WHOLE
Smashing Fleeting Visions of Culture and Behavior in Favor of the Infinitely Possible
By Josh Schrei
Until yesterday, I had entirely avoided entering into the fray around Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson, nor had I really subjected myself to much of his online content. He speaks about hot-button topics that I don’t always feel inclined — or qualified — to comment on. I know a lot of people have already put him through the shredder, probably more articulately than I can.
I also generally try to avoid the ‘left/right’ polarity as much as possible. I don’t see it as truly relevant political terminology anymore, and it’s so charged and polarized that I think ultimately this terminology is going to have to be discarded if political progress is going to be made. With regards to Peterson, there are people I respect who can’t stand the guy. And there are people I respect who find his ideas interesting. I was content to simply be neutral on the topic, and I did that mostly by avoiding him.
Until yesterday, when I saw a clip of him speaking about the Indian goddess Kālī.
It gave me pause, because one thing that people on all sides of the opinions-on-Jordan-Peterson spectrum can usually agree on — even if they don’t agree with his conclusions — is that if nothing else he is well-studied and smart.
I may not feel it’s my place to enter into a debate about his position on the use of trans pronouns and whether or not that should be legislated. However, I do feel qualified to take a position on what he has to say about Kālī. I’ve studied her for many years, I’ve read her relevant texts, I’ve been to her major and minor temples across the Indian subcontinent, I have had dialogues with temple priests and householders, and conducted podcast interviews with PhDs who’ve written entire books on her.
And there’s no getting around the fact that 99% of what Jordan Peterson said about Kālī — in two lectures — was wrong. And I mean just plain wrong, from a factual perspective.
I’ll explain how in just a moment, but what inspired me to look a little deeper into Jordan Peterson after this was not so much that he was wrong, it was that while he was in the process of being wrong he was conveying, through voice and gesture, an absolute certainty that he was right. Like for him the permutations of the goddess Kālī were child’s play and anyone within earshot should be wowed by his knowledge of obscure Indian goddesses. It’s nice I guess to have a captive audience of mostly 18-year-olds. Raise your voice, wear a tie, and make a few bold gestures, and suddenly whatever you say is right.
Well if the guy was capable of exuding such certainty when speaking about something that he had no idea about, how did that translate into other areas of his work, I wondered? How did this type of myopia color a worldview that he presents — often and vigorously — as absolute truth with that type of professorial certainty that shuts down question or dissent.
Let’s start with Kālī. You know her, right? The mother goddess with the protruding tongue, wreathed in heads, wearing a skirt of limbs? The swallower of time, she is sometimes called. For Tantric practitioners she is the absolute reality itself, that force which transcends life and death, space and time, the supreme consciousness. Her form challenges her devotees to see all of this wheel of life and death, all of it, even the uncomfortable stuff, as sacred. She is adored by millions of people. In Kerala, her rituals involve trance-mediumship, dance, and music. For those in Bengal, she is right at the center of their spiritual and material life. They see her intimately, as a mother who is always present, both fierce and tender at once.
I’m going to talk about her a lot more in future episodes of this podcast, so I’m not going to go into too much detail now.
First of all, Peterson doesn’t know how to pronounce her name. He calls her Callie, which rhymes with Sally. In this day and age, if you’re going to be a Western professor purporting to expound the mysteries of a goddess who is actively worshipped by millions of people, who is studied by academics, who is sung to by devotees, who is written about by scholars, you should probably start by knowing how to say her name.
In one lecture, he compares an eight-legged version of her to a “spider” a fairy-tale vision of evil as she “traps the unwary.”
She dwells in a “web of fire,” he says, and represents the “sum total of all fears.” Which sounds like a great Jungian interpretation, until you realize that it bears no resemblance to how Kālī is actually viewed or described in India.
Kālī is all about “how to deal with threat,” Peterson goes on, about humans “trying to come to terms with the category of all awful things.”
And yet, the Bengali poet Ramprasad sang hymns of love to her, and the saint Ramakrishna would go into ecstatic trance merely at the mention of her name. How can this be? When devotees sing to her, she is called “the oceanic nectar of compassion” and “full of grace,” “whose mercy is without end,” the “vessel of mercy” herself.
Yet for Peterson, she’s an “embodied representation of the category of frightening things. Some poor artist was thinking of ‘how do I represent destruction…’” he surmises, when speaking of her origins.
The central image that Peterson references in both of his lectures is not a standard vision of Kālī at all. It is a Tantric statue, perhaps even Buddhist, almost definitely Nepali or Tibetan (it is difficult to see in the video). Yet Peterson skips the entire foundational introduction to Tantric iconography and the fact that Tantra is a major world religious tradition and that its challenging iconography is a vehicle through which the individual meditator can access certain states of consciousness and files the whole thing under one moniker — fear.
Then he says one accurate thing. That there is in fact ritual sacrifice that takes place in honor of Kālī.
He goes on to talk about sacrifice, in a pre-Joseph Campbell colonial-era anthropologist kind of way. He speaks of the human realization that we could bargain with the future, which he extols as a “major development” for human beings, but in doing so he also wittingly or unwittingly categorizes sacrifice and ritual — and all things Kālī — squarely in the realm of the primitive. The implication being that yes, that was a step along the way (what “way?”) but we’ve grown a lot since then.
People “sacrifice to what [they’re] afraid of in hopes that good things may happen,” he says. This skips, of course, the centuries of high meditative texts to Kālī, the vision of her as twelve vibrational aspects of consciousness, each of which can be accessed and refined over time, it skips the entire corpus of devotional literature to her. It skips all this in favor of a particular vision, which is central to Peterson’s worldview. A neat polarized version of reality in which the old trope of male/light/order and female/dark/chaos is actually — in his mind — hardwired into human behavior and therefore male societal dominance is a natural expression of male “competence.”
Kālī, of course, smashes this vision in half. She is order itself. She “dwells within the order” and is “at home in the yantra”. She is not evil, she “destroys evil.” Yet Peterson’s descriptions ignore all this and sound a lot like the accounts of British colonists who first encountered Kālī in 18th century Bengal.
The fact that Peterson, like many early anthropologists, is incapable of seeing ritual as anything beyond “transaction” because he comes from a culture that centers transaction above all else is indicative of the core problem with Peterson’s worldview. It’s late capitalist thinking, presented as hard human truth.
Material transaction — “I’ll give the gods this corn if they make it rain”— is one small aspect of ritual, but it is not in any way the only or most important aspect. One could say it’s possibly the least interesting aspect of ritual, and for those who actually understand ritual and its permutations, this is a western dumbing down that has far more to do with the detached scientists that were viewing the ritual than the ritual itself in context.
For example, the gaining of a transcendent state of consciousness — in which the practitioner is privy to intuitive vision — is far more interesting and important. That ritual could actually be advanced technology for propelling human beings into the trance state so that they can see reality more clearly eludes most anthropologists because to understand this one would have to understand why a society would want to center the trance state. We’re not a society that values meditative states. We’re a society that values material transaction.
This is just one example — the inability to see outside of the prism of modern western capitalist culture leads Peterson to make vast assumptions about human nature and present them as static, in the process ignoring history.
agreed on this; there are, however, many ethical lessons to be taken from mythology.
Regarding an accurate representation of Kali and the lessons to be taken from her, read my 3 part reply to Kaiser above.
You mean perhaps ideas like the golden rule and democracy? I say those aren't good lessons at all, they're slave morality.
Agree - for a long time I had only heard of him as a sort of awful boogie man who should be avoided. Then I listened to an episode of his podcast and realised I had been severely misled! I think he offers good advice - advice that used to be common! Seems we are not teaching this to our children any more and they are clearly suffering.
This was me with people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and several others for a long time. I regret refusing to hear what they're saying because other people told me to. Same with Peterson. I actually don't understand this concept of refusing to engage with ideas because of one idea you might disagree with.
Early on I was confused too, my natural inclination is to change my views if more/new info says my old view was wrong. However I notice for some people encountering a view different from their own causes a kind of psychological distress. I think they have made a particular view central to their ‘identity’ and when this is challenged it means their whole identity is too. Or it could be an ego thing, and they have to save face by doubling down.
Indeed. I like to take time to give consideration to the notion that I might be 'wrong' about whatever, because ultimately what I want is to be right, and just blindly marching on believing that I'm right seems like an injustice to myself. My relationship with myself is the most important relationship that I engage in and so I want respect this person deeply. To hold conviction in one hand whilst retaining an element of self doubt in the other is an approach that I like to take. There can be a feeling of vulnerability surrounding the viewpoint of being 'right'. It might seem odd, but I frequently find myself desiring to be 'wrong', because then hopefully I can self correct and then ultimately be 'right' . ✌️
If you want to be right, first get the basics right: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
The unfortunately reality is, I think, that people would rather be accepted by their peers who believe these things than stand on their own in their opinions and be defenestrated. But that’s a theory based on studies of human tribalism I’ve encountered over the years.
Yeah I find the whole tribal identity mindset an interesting paradigm to observe. But, I dunno if I view it as being 'unfortunate' . I'd maybe find it unfortunate if I was to fall under its spell, but that isn't happening right now so it isn't my problem. Viewing us as a species through an anthropological lens I find the tribal behaviour of others not at all surprising, after all for thousands of years through out evolution, belonging to a tribe was most definitely essential to one's own survival. So, given that we are only just embarking upon our transition into a technical/sedentary/individual/indoor and largely non- physical tribal period I find it wholly understandable that we are still carrying our pre- modernity phycological baggage with us as evolution burns on a low flame. What always stokes my cognitive mechanism though is encountering outliers - those that perceive and act apart from the crowd ( tribe) like adventures, innovators, creators, visionaries et alia as that is where wisdom resides.
Seconded, Reena.
It's funny, I had the thought just today that I need to read him so I can respond to it. I'm somewhat familiar with his thinking from his appearance on Bill Maher's Youtube show and I think he has some arguments with which I vehemently disagree. At the same time, I think progressive women unfairly malign him for wrongthink, and he is one of the few people to call it out as a feminine tendency to cancel people. And he's done men a favor by writing about these things for men who might struggle without that sort of advice.
Which do you disagree with?
While he's observed facts about how women behave, I think he's regressive overall in his attitude toward us. That said, I haven't read him.
I've read only 12 Rules 1 and part of 2 (until i got fed up with the conservative kool-aid), but in watching Maps of Meaning (incl. different years) and many interviews and discussions, i think you've got him wrong on that. You'll have to draw your own conclusions of course, as if you had a choice. ;). Also he has a great relationship with his wife and daughter and they've stuck together through some shit, so...
Yes I’m mostly an atheist (w/ a lot of respect for ritual and role of religion - go figure!) so there’s stuff I disagree with too. But then I pay attention to a lot of people I don’t agree with fully but have great admiration for… he’s one.
The common core of all religions is dogma, an instance of faith. Faith is belief without appeal to evidence and is always intellectually regressive. There's nothing available through religion that isn't better available in some other way that's compatible with truth.
But just in case, i created a "religion" that cannibalizes all of the psychologically beneficial parts of all religions while rejecting all of the dogma and woo. I call it The Inner Journey. There were actual physical services for a short while long ago... it's due for a renaissance.
This was basically my path out of illogical beliefs that are not even about literal religion but more about the plague of social justice fallacies. However, I've found that there the Inner Journey requires either religion or philosophy. If one is disinclined to pursue philosophical inquiry, religion is better than the church of social justice.
Well... only bc religious people are typically hypocrites. If they adhered to their holy texts they'd be a holy terror.
I’ll be the second to recommend Jordan Peterson. I realize many people on one side hate him, especially progressive women, but I’ve heard men speak about how much he helped them take responsibility for their lives in a meaningful way—and that men feeling better about their lives should be seen as a positive by progressive women. It’s hard to think of a time when resentful men who feel beleaguered by the world have a positive effect on women.
That being said I don’t listen to him regularly, and likely have disagreements with him about some things. (He has a funny way of wording things that is amusing if you listen to him for a bit.)
Reading him is another thoughtcrime so I might as well 😽
Do you want free digital copies so you don't give material support to someone who already has more than enough while others do not?
Yes please
I'll need an email address for that. Is there something particular you want to start with?
I love that you mention temperance and wonder if it isn't time to dust the term off. For the longest time it meant abstaining from alcohol but also moderation or self-restraint. There is such wisdom in Stoicism. I'm curious if generally speaking women can benefit from it more than men in modern culture. As a male social worker I see so many men flock to it on YouTube as a way to suppress their emotions and it rarely ends well for them. On the surface it overlaps nicely with what some call toxic masculinity and leads them down a rule bound path with less moderation. Its hard to explain to those guys that it takes discipline to endure painful feelings without complaint. It is actually more stoic for them to feel more deeply but not be led by the emotions.
I do think that women can benefit from it more and are sadly less likely to seek it out. I'm still contemplating why that is, because only men ever want to discuss this topic with me. The disparity in gender in the audiences of the people whose ideas I follow is pretty extreme. Even people like Cal Newport have primarily male audiences even though his advice is applicable to everyone. There is something in the water making us less likely to develop intellectually in many ways and it really bugs me.
I think temperance is an antidote to whatever toxic tendencies men might have. I also think masculinity has been unfairly maligned in a generalized way that makes positive masculine traits impossible to discuss. I think men should reclaim it and start pushing back on this stuff. I think men could also stand to let their emotions out, and it's a shame they feel they can't. I intuit that this is also due to women punishing them for it, though I of course can't prove it. My partner recovered from alcoholism and now practices these virtues, and they're reinforced in his social associations. I try to discuss these things among women as often as I can.
It is so refreshing to discuss the nuances at play here and so hard to discuss gender without making generalizations. I try to be especially aware when I generalize. I can't speak for whether women could benefit from stoicism but anything that helps them chart a course with less social pressure makes me happy. My partner recently started doing her daily cold plunges so maybe stoicism is next? I got sober in 2003 and resonate with how your partner has benefitted - there are certainly stoic undertones to recovery. I'm glad that depression no longer rules your life like it once did.
I'm curious if you have any gender based observations here. I'm trying to ask basically every man I come across about these differences in orientation toward knowledge acquisition.
This is so well written, and comprehensive—that I feel guilty reading it on my phone & have to focus it later on my laptop.
I’m trying to regain my attention span by avoiding X for Lent, but finding myself here on Substack more as a substitute. Distraction is easy to find in our modern age.
I was skimming bits of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations last week and had to laugh at how he was chastising himself about succumbing to distractions. I was thinking, “what could possibly be distracting in an age before technology?” 😂
Thank you for this piece. I was invited to a small women’s group after church recently and despite my introvert brain resisting… I know developing in person relationships is more sustaining than staring at my phone & communicating from a distance, so I’ll try it out.
Thank you for the compliment! Regarding X, I have never been on it actively and can say that Substack is a better use of time because it allows for actual idea exchange :-D. Those kinds of fast distractions are why I was so deep in the hole.
And regarding Aurelius it's also that he had all this power at his disposal so sometimes it's hard to take him seriously but, his ethos is aspirational. In one of Seneca's letters, people who flit from book to book feel like the ancient allegory for phone addled people. I hope your efforts to form in person community are fruitful!
I did the same things; exercise regimen, diet change, daily walks, discipline in reading, and truly difficult introspection. I appreciate your sharing that. I've been medicated since 2012, and I've gotten off a few but putting off the others, though I know I can live without them. I think some people might benefit, but I wish I had been held accountable through therapy to make changes while on medication; instead medication in a psychiatric context is immediately prescribed, and it's why too many of us are now medicated who shouldn't be, because the effect of so many meds is to dull emotions.
Re: Peterson, I kind of see him as Jay Shetty's counterpart in terms of charlatanism. Shetty appeals to left women (I only ever hear women mentioning him) and Peterson to right-leaning men, though I've heard plenty of men who aren't conservatives mention him in the same breath as Joe Rogan. I think it's necessary to engage with the work of these kinds of people if nothing else to develop rational arguments for refutation and really know what I'm arguing against. If I don't read these things, I can't know the real argument. I find that a kind of derangement manifests with some of these people among the left that reminds me of Trump derangement. I think Bill Maher is also a culture warrior but I find him correct much of the time. I do think it's good for people in general to learn discipline, but I wish he didn't also present it with a kind of disdain for female equality. At the same time, I've heard him diagnose women's anti-social behavior when it comes to these topics accurately. So I'm not sure what to conclude yet.