The Soap Box

Since 2020, I feel like every year we all collectively look at each other hopefully on January 1st and say, "Well, it's got to be better than last year, right?" So how's 2025 so far? I was going to write a whole diatribe with many bullet points about the things that are frustrating me (and they are legion), my take on current events, a treatise of my political positions, point out the inconsistencies and hypocrisy and hysteria all around and in general all the things that are threatening to kick-start another stress-driven shingles outbreak.  And then I remembered my Stoics. I'm not a Stoic by nature.  I am prone to anxiety and anger.  I get really stressed out about current events, from Biden's ghostwritten presidency to Trump's bullying foreign policy to preventable disease outbreaks to Doge uprooting the government to the perpetual hysteria over literally any statement or policy that comes from the current president.  I am greatly frustrated by things o...

I used to read a lot.  I was never pulling down 10 books a month but I considered myself pretty well read.  I still read a lot with the family.  While I love that, I decided to challenge myself and get back into reading for me again.   1 book down, at least 11 to go. I started off 2025 with a book a friend recommended a couple years ago-- The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  Frankly, everyone needs to read it.  It's one of the books of our era (one of the smut-free ones, anyway), and it makes up for the lack of darkly handsome and amoral fey lords by tackling some of the biggest social issues and consequences of our time. The book focuses on the sharply increasing fragility of the rising generations. I appreciate the authors' assertion that this fragility is not natural.  Humans, Lukianoff and Haidt assert, are actually anti-fragile; we are naturally resilient to trauma and stress.  However, we can be train...