I recently came across a LinkedIn post by Dr. Tunde Okewale OBE that has been circulating widely, and something about it snagged in me — not just the resonance, but the friction against what life has taught me, especially in the latter half. Before I said anything publicly, I wanted to understand who was speaking and what he had actually built, because a response formulated without that understanding wouldn’t be fair to him or honest about what’s actually worth engaging with. What I found gave me considerably more respect for both the man and the work, and also sharpened my sense of exactly where I think his framework has limits that matter for its healthy generalizability.

Dr. Tunde Okewale OBE has spent his career doing something the systems around him were structurally arranged to prevent. Raised on a council estate (the British term for public housing built and managed by the local authority) in Hackney, the first in his family to attend university, he went on to become a barrister (a specific type of lawyer in British contexts, primarily focused on court settings) at one of Britain’s most distinguished chambers, to found Urban Lawyers (a charity that has since guided over 32,000 students into legal careers and educated over 50,000 people about their rights) and to receive an OBE (Order of the British Empire) awarded in the King’s New Year Honours 2024 for his services to criminal justice and social mobility. He did this while navigating institutions with active, vested interests in not recognizing his potential, in ecosystems where recognition was genuinely scarce and where the competition for it was genuinely zero-sum. When he writes about the flat landing, the unreturned pause, the slow negotiation with yourself to say less and soften it and fit in, he is describing something real. I feel confident that anyone who has moved through the world in a body, a mind, or an identity that institutions weren’t designed to accommodate knows exactly the erosion he’s naming.

I’m engaging with his post from my own adjacent, if very different, experience: as a disabled white American mother and sociologist whose specific focus, across decades of formal training and considerably more decades of applied fieldwork, has been socialization processes and how those shape outcomes across the lifespan and across relationships and communities. I couldn’t complete that education by staying inside ivory towers. The parts that mattered most to fulfilling my life’s purpose required me to go off and repopulate the abandoned village I discovered on the edge of the forest. The overlap between his experience and mine is genuine, and the path I took leaving the credentialism of academia looks like I am following his prescription but feels very different living within it. Additionally, the structural causes of the pain we’ve both experienced are not identical, and I want to be careful not to blur that distinction.

What I want to engage with is not the diagnosis in Dr. Okewale’s post, which I think is largely accurate. It’s his prescription — and specifically what happens when a survival strategy forged in one kind of ecosystem gets offered as universal guidance for all of them. His framework makes complete sense for the competitive, credential-centered, zero-sum institutional spaces where he built his career. What I want to think through, collectively, is what his advice does when it travels into spaces that are trying to be something different. Specifically, into the kinds of spaces that look more like villages than like institutions.

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What Gets Mythologized

The hinge of Dr. Okewale’s prescription is a single instruction: “Go back to who you were before you learned to edit yourself. That version was not naive. That version was intact.”

His words are doing something philosophically specific here. They propose that the pre-socialized, pre-shaped self is your purest and most valuable form — that what happens to you in community is fundamentally corruption rather than cultivation. And if we’re staying in organic metaphors, which his post itself invites, then this is asking you to go back to being a seedling, before your roots started pulling nourishment and shaping from the contexts you were born into.

That’s not a return to wholeness. That’s a return to potential that hasn’t yet become anything.

From the moment we sprout, we are “edited” by our contexts. The oak that stands for three hundred years carries in its rings every drought, every wound, every season of abundance, every competition for light it had to navigate. Those rings aren’t evidence of compromise. They are the autobiography of how it became capable of holding an entire ecosystem. The tree that has never been stressed by wind has shallow roots and risks being uprooted by a severe storm, prematurely becoming compost instead of home to countless organisms. The one that lost a major branch to ice and rerouted its growth around the wound is the one still standing after the storm, still providing, when so much else has fallen.

Both Aristotle and the Stoics understood development this way — not as the recovery of an original intact state, but as the ongoing cultivation of capacity through engagement with exactly the kind of friction Dr. Okewale advises you to exit promptly. Marcus Aurelius returned to this again and again in his Meditations: every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature. Not the starting point. The path. The path is not where you begin — it is what you become through the act of traveling.

What we genuinely need to develop, then, is the capacity to distinguish which edits were formative growth and which were illegitimate pressure to diminish ourselves. That distinction is real and worth making with care. But Dr. Okewale’s framework doesn’t help you develop that discernment — it resolves the question in advance, in one direction, every time.

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The Epistemic Trap

Here is the most dangerous line in Dr. Okewale’s post: “Small minds do not gather around small dreams.”

Read it carefully. What it functionally does is pre-emptively invite the reader to convert all negative feedback into evidence of your own greatness. Every critic, every person who pushes back, every space that doesn’t receive you with open arms becomes, by definition, a “small mind” threatened by what you represent. The loop is completely closed. There is no longer any mechanism by which you could ever be the difficult one in the room.

That is not discernment. That is an epistemic monoculture — and monocultures, as any ecologist will tell you, are extraordinarily brittle. It forecloses on the feedback that could genuinely improve a worthy idea — the kind of intentional pruning that allows the whole ecosystem to grow alongside it, at its own pace.

I’m not suggesting that illegitimate resistance isn’t real — it absolutely is, and it falls with particular weight on people navigating spaces that weren’t built with them in mind. But there is a meaningful difference between recognizing “this space is organized around keeping people like me small” and concluding “anyone who has difficulty with my presence is operating from smallness.” The first is structural analysis. The second is a thought-terminating move that makes genuine growth impossible — because genuine growth requires the capacity to be wrong, which requires the capacity to let other organisms in the ecosystem have real, informative effects on you. Even if they’re as small and seemingly insignificant as squirrels or mushrooms.

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Loneliness Is the Hidden Cost

Dr. Okewale acknowledges, almost proudly, that following his guidance will cost you “access, proximity, people.” He frames this as noble sacrifice — the price of integrity. But I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is being offered far too lightly.

We are in a loneliness epidemic of genuine severity. And one of the underacknowledged drivers of that epidemic is the way that trauma-informed hypervigilance — which is real, and which protects people who have been genuinely harmed — can also generate false positive alarm signals at scale. When nervous systems trained by exposure to genuinely harmful patterns start flagging imperfect-but-safe people as threats, the social cost to the ecosystem as a whole is enormous. People who are willing to grow, who are capable of repair, who are not perfectly performing safety at all times but are genuinely available for connection — they get pre-emptively canceled before they can demonstrate what they’d be capable of over time.

Think of it in forest terms: it’s the equivalent of a tree that has been damaged by a parasitic vine developing a chemical response so aggressive that it also suppresses the beneficial organisms in its root zone — the very network it depends on for connection with every other tree around it. The defense mechanism that protects against one real threat ends up severing the relationships that make thriving possible.

Dr. Okewale’s post can turbocharge that process by providing a philosophically prestigious reason to do what the hypervigilant nervous system already wants to do — leave, outgrow, outbuild — without asking what might have been possible through patient tending, or honestly counting the accumulated cost of leaving a hundred small rooms across a lifetime.

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What the Oak Actually Does

Dr. Okewale’s image of the “large” self is implicitly competitive — the growing thing that outstrips its container. But, ecologically, largeness doesn’t work that way.

The oak tree is considered a keystone species not because it outgrows and abandons the forest, but because it stays, drops acorns — a tiny fraction of which go on to become new oak trees while the rest feed the ecosystem in other ways, builds soil, creates canopy, and supports somewhere between five hundred and two thousand other species in the structure of its presence. And beneath the forest floor, invisible to any animal passing through, there is an enormous web of threadlike connections lacing through the soil, linking the roots of trees to one another and to the living things growing between them. Through this web, trees share water, nutrients, and even warning signals when one part of the forest is under stress. The oak participates in this web. It does not own it, it does not control it, and it cannot fully thrive without it. The oak is not sovereign over the network beneath its feet. It is a member of it.

An oak forest with one enormous tree and nothing else isn’t a monument to that tree’s power. It’s a sign of dysfunction — a tree that somehow has been poisoned to the point that the conditions for everything else to grow alongside it is gone.

This is also what the Stoics meant by oikeiôsis (the Stoic practice of expanding who we consider “us”), the process of ethical maturation as an expanding circle of concern, where the interests of family, community, and eventually all of humanity become progressively more familiar and weighted to you. Stoic moral development is not a movement toward self-protection and exit. It is a movement toward increasing responsibility for the health of the whole system you are part of. Marcus Aurelius put it directly: “Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?” The bee’s job is not to outgrow the hive. And as Marcus Aurelius also wrote: “What injures the hive injures the bee.” The boundary between self-interest and collective interest, in a genuinely healthy ecosystem, eventually stops being a boundary at all.

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An Alternative Proposition

What I’d offer instead of Dr. Okewale’s exit narrative is something less dramatic and considerably more sustainable: become skilled at managing the flow of your contribution rather than the force of it.

Every context has a carrying capacity. A flooding river is not more powerful than a channeled one; it is just more destructive, and more prone to leaving significant parts of itself stranded in its own silt, far from where it was needing to go. I’ve found that calibrating the flow of my nourishing energy to what a given context can actually metabolize (while distributing across multiple contexts rather than demanding that any single one hold all of it) creates something far more durable than either shrinking or flooding.

It also means I’m not betting everything on one space’s capacity to receive me. When I encounter the dam behavior Dr. Okewale describes — the ego-driven resistance from someone who doesn’t want the nourishment a more capable person provides — I don’t need to insist on flooding through it. I redirect the current to somewhere it’s wanted, and allow whatever bucketfuls are wanted from my flow to do the work in that context. The dam stays, the river finds another path, and the possibility of the dam eventually shifting (because rivers do reshape the environment, even stone, given time) remains open in a way that a catastrophic flood could permanently destroy.

And here is what Dr. Okewale’s image of the solitary magnificent oak misses entirely: a healthy forest is not just oaks. It is oaks and understory shrubs and wildflowers and fungi and insects and birds and (running through it or around it somewhere, sometimes unseen underground) rivers. The river does not become the oak in a visible way, even as its waters are part of sustaining the oak. The oak does not become the river, even as it contributes redistribution of nutrients through the water that flows past. Both are large. Both are necessary. Both shape what is possible for everything around them. The forest needs the water the river brings, and the river needs the root systems that hold the banks it carves. A landscape with only one kind of large thing in it, no matter how impressive that one thing is, is a diminished and fragile ecosystem.

The goal was never to be the only impressive thing in the room.

The goal was to help build a world where impressive things are not rare.

Dr. Okewale is right that you should not become small to stay somewhere you were meant to expand. But the acorn’s goal was never to become so large that nothing else can grow beside it. The goal is to become the kind of presence that makes the whole forest more complex, more resilient, and more alive — and that requires staying in relationship with the smaller organisms, not as a compromise of your greatness, but as its fullest expression.

The oak doesn’t leave the forest to prove it has outgrown it.

The oak is the forest.

We had our first kiss, outside my Psychology 101 classroom, on April Fool’s Day.

Twenty-six of those years we have been legally married.

In that time, I have given birth to our five sons )the oldest two now young adults, the youngest still in elementary school), welcomed his parents into our home, navigated disabilities, financial chaos, cultural collision, and the particular exhaustion of loving someone across multiple aspects of intersectionality.

We have had years of ease and years of genuine misery.

And somewhere in the last twelve months — after a long downward spiral I intend to be honest about in much more detail eventually — we turned something around.

I want to tell you what turned it, and this series of seven sacred-to-us mini-essays that might grow into a book on Stoic marriage will get into some of that.

But first, I want to talk about a word, because the word has been doing a lot of damage.

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I. The Word Itself

Commit comes from the Latin committere — com, meaning “together with,” and mittere, meaning “to send” or “to entrust.” The same root gives us mission, transmit, permit, and message. At its oldest, “to commit” did not mean to lock yourself into a cage. It meant to entrust something precious to another’s keeping. To send yourself — your vulnerabilities, your future, your daily irritations, your 2 A.M. fears — together with another person, into a shared life.

Most of us were taught a different meaning. We were taught commitment means staying even when you don’t want to. That framing turns it into an act of will against desire, which eventually makes it feel like a prison sentence; or as a rabbi friend recently relayed, some people view following commandments as a form of enslavement. This is how strong the modern fear of commitment has become, through its being polluted by popular culture. The older meaning turns it into an act of trust, which is something you can choose to practice daily, even when the feeling isn’t there (yet).

What life has taught me (repeatedly, and not infrequently the hard way due to my innate stubbornness) is that in order to get to the delicious, nourishing fulfillment of authentic intimacy, we need to be in a fully committed relationship with someone we know in our bones won’t ghost us.

I have spent about four decades thinking about the difference. I had reasons to start early.

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II. Learning From Absence

My father left his marriage to my mother for another woman when I was two years old. I was raised, consequently, in a world where commitments were contingent — honored until they became inconvenient, real until a more appealing option appeared. That is not a verdict on my father as a person. It is simply what I absorbed about how the world worked.

What this does to a child’s nervous system is not subtle.

Through my studies of social sciences and neuroscience, I have come to the firm conclusion that there is no authentic intimacy — no state where your nervous system can actually rest and reset in another person’s presence — when there is no foundational trust that the person will still be there tomorrow.

Without commitment in the older sense, the body never fully arrives in the place of sanctuary where it can fully become. Part of the nervous system stays near the door, one hand on the frame, just in case a quick escape is necessary for survival.

I did not have language for this when I was young. I just knew, very early, what I was looking for in relationships, and not just romantic ones, thanks to the commitments unrelated others honored with me when it wasn’t their job to do so.

I was lucky to have some truly excellent neighbors, who committed to being present in my young life as much as circumstances allowed. I was able to rest, reset, and grow because of them.

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III. Recognizing It When I Saw It

Six weeks after Garvin and I became a couple, he left.

Not the relationship; just the state, due to a prior commitment.

Before he had ever expressed romantic interest in me (which he genuinely expected would not be reciprocated), he had made a commitment to spend the summer working as a staff member at Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities in upstate New York that had been a seedbed of the American disability rights movement since the 1970s (and which many people know now from the Oscar-nominated 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution). The pay, after housing expenses were deducted, from what I remember him telling me at the time, came out to something under two dollars an hour (in 1996 money).

He had made the commitment before we were a couple. He honored it anyway, even though it took him from my arms at a pay rate lower than he could have gotten if he’d stayed near our university for the summer and couch surfed. We were long-distance for two months at the start of a new and uncertain romance because he had given his word, and his word meant something to him independent of what it cost him.

I was nineteen years old, and I recognized what I was looking at.

The ancient Stoics (practitioners of a Greek philosophy that is much less about emotional suppression than popular culture suggests, and much more about understanding what is genuinely in our control and acting well regardless of outcome) have a concept that maps onto exactly what I witnessed in those two months. The Greek word (which, no, I cannot pronounce and yes, I need the internet to help me spell — I include these words for others who need the vocabulary for further learning) is kathêkon, usually translated as “appropriate action” or “proper function.” It means doing what the situation and your own nature as a decent person actually calls for, not what is convenient, comfortable, or only what will be sufficiently and immediately rewarded. You do it because it is the right thing to do. You do it because you are someone who does this thing. That is virtue, in the Stoic sense — not a feeling, and not a performance, but a practice demonstrated through choices, especially inconvenient, discomforting, or costly ones.

The boy who left for two months to keep a promise to a camp full of people who needed someone like him, for wages that barely covered their own deductions, without any guarantee I would still be interested when he got back? I recognized, at nineteen, that I was watching someone practice virtues worthy of considering aligning the rest of my life plans with. I built a life on what I saw in those two months.

Tonight, thirty years later, we are eating cake with the village I’ve put forth effort to immerse our family in for the last decade.

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IV. What Atrophy Looks Like

Here is what neuroscience says, in plain language: your brain physically reshapes itself around what you pay attention to. This is called neuroplasticity — “neuro” for the brain and nervous system, “plasticity” meaning it can be molded, like clay.

In a W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) society that has engineered away most of the ordinary daily friction that once required us to genuinely need each other, most of our attention is routed outward — to screens, to work demands, to logistics, to the thousand small urgencies that feel impossible to ignore. When we do have time together, we often sit side by side watching other people live curated versions of lives on a screen.

There is nothing wrong with watching television together, in moderation. But it is not, on its own, true connection — though it can lead to deeper connection if it serves the role of sparking meaningful conversations. The neural pathways that carry the felt experience of fully loving and being fully loved within any kind of relationship will, without regular use, quietly narrow.

You will not stop loving them.

You will simply stop feeling it much.

And then someone will ask if your marriage is fulfilling you, and you will hear yourself say “not really,” and the advice you receive from well-meaning people will, I suspect, almost certainly be wrong if the goal is honoring commitments and deepening intimacy.

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V. The Practice of Micro-Moments

Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, calls the basic unit of real connection a micro-moment of positivity resonance — a shared moment of warmth, eye contact, or synchronized attention between two nervous systems. These moments are not grand. They are ten seconds of eye contact over coffee. A hand on a shoulder in passing. A joke only the two of you understand.

She found that these micro-moments are not merely emotionally pleasant; they are physically and mentally health-protective, measurably so over time. They accumulate. They build the neural infrastructure that makes it possible to feel, in the middle of a stupid argument about who forgot to put something absolutely essential and needed for the next day on a shopping list for a store that closed five minutes ago, that you are still fundamentally safe with this person.

A marriage does not drift because the love runs out. It drifts because the micro-moments stop, and the nervous systems stop knowing how to find each other in moments of distress. The drift is not a verdict. It is an atrophy of skills from a decay of connection, and that can be healed with appropriate interventions.

Last year on this day, I gave my husband a book as an anniversary gift: organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s Shatterproof, which had just been released. The concept at its center — that we each have resilience ceilings we don’t know about until we hit them — opened a door for my husband that had been stuck for a long time. It led him to finally deeply engage with Matthew Fray’s This Is How Your Marriage Ends (which I’d been trying to get him to read for at least a year at that point) and to join the support groups Matt runs. My husband began attending those twice-weekly support group meetings as his schedule allowed at the end of last school year. It led us to reading Terry Real’s work together after my husband found a New York Times interview that caught his attention — several of Real’s audiobooks had been sitting in my collection for years, patiently parasocially accompanying me in my waiting. Real’s words in Us helped us understand one another better; his I Don’t Want to Talk About It broke something open within my husband that finally let some of his light shine through again, including ending his decades-long lapse in writing poetry.

I tell you this not to perform vulnerability, but because one of the most persistent myths about long marriages is that the good ones don’t need outside help. The truth is that the ones that last are the ones where at least one person keeps reaching — for a book, for support from others who know the struggles, for a framework, for anything that might reopen a door.

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VI. The Architecture of Daily Return

The practices I started building into our days as our wounds from a string of ruptures started to heal are small ones practiced frequently, which is necessary for neuroplasticity to do its work. Relationship researcher John Gottman calls these “bids for connection” — small reaches toward another person that say I want to feel closer to you right now. His research found that couples who responded to these bids about 86% of the time were still together years later. Couples who responded about 33% of the time were not.

We have established several micro-rituals that are consistent bids for reconnection.

One is that I set my alarm ten minutes earlier than I need to get up. That snooze time is exclusively reserved for the opportunity to cuddle — no phones, no talking about the day yet, just we are here, we are warm, the day hasn’t gotten us yet. Sometimes our youngest joins in, three spoons nested together in a big, warm bed.

Additionally, when either of us are exiting the shared audiological space, even just to go to a different floor of the house, we make brief physical contact as a way of taking leave. A hand squeeze. A shoulder touch. A kiss on a forehead. Just enough to register as: a trace of me will still be here within your nervous system until I return.

Another quirk of our relationship is that I only say “I love you” to my husband (and only my husband) in German — ich liebe dich.

My parents were each half German, so the majority of my ancestors spoke that language, and everything those ancestors endured to bring me into existence happened in and around that language. When I reach for those words instead of the English ones I use with everyone else who sparks feelings of affection within me, I am leaning into all of that — the survival, the displacement, the stubborn persistence of bloodlines across catastrophes across history.

Those words, in their language, remind me that whatever is irking me about my husband on any random day is a modern triviality, not a feature of his core humanity. Their language keeps me from committing the Fundamental Attribution Error every time I use it to remind myself that this is the person I have chosen to throw in with for the rest of our lives, and that he is worthy of that commitment.

Throwing in with one’s spouse — especially thoughtfully, especially choosing this relationship again and again after years and a long downward spiral — is, I have come to believe, one of the most reliable ways to become a good ancestor to our own lineage.

The Stoics had a word for disciplined daily exercises you perform whether or not you feel like it: askēsis (from Greek, the root of “ascetic” — meaning someone who practices rigorous self-discipline). Love, in the Stoic understanding, is not a state that descends upon you and then abandons you like a strong wind. It is something you practice your way back into, repeatedly, for as long as you are committed — which, if you remember, means as long as you are entrusting yourself to this.

Our youngest son, currently 9 years old, has a ritual he and I built together. It started with me kissing him goodnight in a particular sequence — forehead, cheek, chin, other cheek, nose — and at some point, he decided he wanted to be the one doing the kissing. Now, before he goes to school and before he goes to bed, he approaches me for what our family calls “compass kisses.” North, east, south, west, and center. The whole orientation of the world, in a five-point constellation on his mother’s face.

I did not intend this to be a way for him to show love to me. But he grew up in a house where connection is enacted, not just felt. Where you approach a person you love and make the bid. Where love is a verb practiced at thresholds — at leaving, at returning, at the edges of sleep. He is learning the grammar of relationships. He will know how to initiate it. He will know you do not wait until you feel like it first.

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VII. The Village That Holds the Light

No marriage survives on its own internal resources alone. Our ancestors knew this. The village was not a backdrop in front of which life happened — it was infrastructure. It held the stories of what long relationships actually flow like across decades, with their rhythms of ebbs and flows. It offered repair wisdom from people who had already been lost in the same kind of darkness we feel stuck in, and quietly applied a kind of social pressure that made leaving feel less casually available as an option when things got hard.

We have largely lost that. What has partly replaced it in popular culture — the steady diet of televised marriages in crisis, relationships performed for drama and ratings — does the polar opposite. It trains our negativity bias on other people’s worst moments and offers those moments as the primary available template for what partnership looks like over time, while hiding the true costs of leaving when things are going off-script from the fairy tales. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, quite a lot of damage done very consistently.

Garvin and I have spent more than two decades building what I think of as pseudo-villages into the fabric of our family’s life. One of them is our local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism (S.C.A.) — a historical recreation community — whose weekly meeting we have committed to attending together as a family every Wednesday when it is reasonably possible to do so. Over more than a decade of those Wednesdays, we have built intergenerational relationships with people who understand what it means to show up for each other in ways that make life meaningfully less difficult in hard times. These are people who have watched our children grow, who have cooked alongside us, who have been present for the small losses and the quiet celebrations.

Tonight, thirty years after Garvin and I decided to figure out what we were to each other, we are spending our anniversary in that community. He ordered the cakes (Cleveland Cassata Cake, which is the special occasion cake from my family of origin including being present at our wedding, and Choclate Decadence Torte which strongly resembled the groom’s cake at our wedding except with buttercream instead of ganache), from a bakery, without being asked — which, if you have been reading closely, you will recognize as a bid for connection while also not adding any more to my overfilled to-do list.

I recognized it.

I turned toward it.

It was delicious.

We do not become who we are capable of being alone. We become it in relationship — through the friction and the repair, the micro-moments and the compass kisses, the Wednesday evenings and the thirty years.

Ich liebe dich, Garvin. We’ve been worth every bit of it.

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For Further Learning

(prioritizing works available free online and/or in audio)

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020), dir. Nicole Newnham & James LeBrecht. Currently on Netflix. Camp Jened’s history is also documented at nyccivilrightshistory.org.

Fredrickson, Barbara. Love 2.0 (2013). Research summarized freely at peplab.web.unc.edu. Audiobook available from Hoopla at: https://www.hoopladigital.com/audiobook/love-20-barbara-fredrickson/11576042 (a free service from public libraries).

Eurich, Tasha. Shatterproof (2025); her earlier Insight (2017) about internal and external self-awareness is also highly relevant; both books are widely available in audio from public libraries that use the Libby/Overdrive service.

Fray, Matthew. This Is How Your Marriage Ends (2022). Both the audiobook and ebook are available on Hoopla: https://www.hoopladigital.com/artist/matthew-fray/10419839016 and support communities findable through his website matthewfray.com as well as Substack.

Real, Terrence. Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (2022). Most of his books are in audio, I Don’t Want to Talk About It and How Can I Get Through To You are available as audiobooks on Hoopla https://www.hoopladigital.com/artist/terrence-real/7393894; The NYT article that caught my husband’s attention was https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/podcasts/family-men-therapy-terry-real.html.

Gottman, John. “Bids for Connection,” freely at gottman.com. The Relationship Cure (2001) is widely available in libraries via the Overdrive/Libby system as audiobooks and ebooks.

Musonius Rufus, “On the Chief End of Marriage.” Written around 100 CE (aka AD). Free translation at iep.utm.edu/musonius, or skip straight to this section narrated by Robin Homer aka Vox Stoica here (it’s forcing an embed instead of just a link):

Here is something I have been watching happen in my own home, in real time, for years.

My third son (15, turning 16 in May) has been spending more and more of his waking hours with his headphones on, retreating into algorithmically driven music playlists in a way I recognize (from recognising the amplification of the Walkman Effect in the generation born with iPod access) as numbing rather than regulating. This past Sunday, the accumulated emotional load he had been carrying alone, while technically together in his self-imposed quasi-isolation, hit a breaking point on the way to our Unitarian Universalist church. He was on the same route, with the same people, at the same time and day of the week as the car accident that happened just over two months prior — the accident that, in a “Sliding Doors” type alternate reality, ended his life. I wasn’t with him when that emotional breakdown happened. His two elder brothers were, and they did their best to hold him. But the weight of that route, combined with his friends’ struggles and the headlines and everything he had been storing in his headphones instead of bringing to his people, became too much.

What happened next is the reason I have been intentionally embedding my children in a Unitarian Universalist community since before any of them were born. I have been an active UU, immersed in community in that context at least once per week on Sundays, since shortly after my wedding; that was three years before my first child was conceived. I arrived at church to find that my son had already been caught in the intentionally woven safety net. Several elders in the congregation had noticed his distress before I could reach him and moved to comfort him. Members of the village context I had spent years deliberately constructing functioned exactly as intended. The safety net held. He did not fall into the abyss alone.

Too few of his peers have that net. That absence is what this piece is about.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in my household, my parents-in-law are usually to be found settled in front of their streaming devices, consuming hours of content in their native Chinese, buffered from the shared life of the house by their screens. My husband is often physically present but mentally absent, unwinding from the strain of carrying more than his share by retreating to his own device. Somewhere in between, I am trying to hold the regulatory coherence of the whole household together and write about Village Deficit Disorder at the same time in my open floor plan home office (where my attention is constantly shredded by my children), which has a certain recursive quality I am not going to pretend I don’t notice.

Every generation in my house is experiencing the same root deprivation. The screens appear to be filling it differently for each of them. But screens are not filling anything. They are a shoddy, unsustainable patch job on a gaping chasm that requires something the market cannot sell.

That is what Village Deficit Disorder looks like from the inside.

A note before I go further: I write about Stoic concepts that have Greek and Latin names that I need to look up nearly every time I use them, because I’m dyslexic and practice these things in English-only daily life rather than in classical languages, and I can’t reliably pronounce the original terms well enough to get speech-to-text to render them accurately (which is also why I rarely say them conversationally). I name them anyway, with their definitions, because readers who want to cross-reference or verify what I’m describing deserve the proper search terms. The words are signposts. The practices are what matter, and I have been practicing them, without always knowing their names, for more than thirty years.

With that said: the Stoic practice of prosoche (attentive self-watchfulness, the habit of observing your own impressions and responses as they arise rather than being swept along by them unawares) is what allows me to see the pattern I just described in my household rather than simply living inside it unreflectively. And what prosoche keeps showing me is that what I call “village deficit” is not a childhood problem that better parenting could solve. It is a whole-lifespan condition that the village was designed to address at every stage, and that goes unaddressed at every stage when the village is absent.

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Village Deficit Disorder Is Not a Childhood Problem

The framing that tends to emerge when people first encounter the concept of Village Deficit Disorder is that it is primarily about children — that the solution is more attentive adults, stronger family structures, better parenting. This framing is understandable and partly true. It is also incomplete in a way that makes the actual problem harder to solve, because it locates the deficit in one generation and the solution in another, when both the deficit and what reconstruction looks like are distributed across every generation simultaneously.

The term comes from the familiar saying “it takes a village to raise a child.” I want to pause on that framing, because the focus on a child (singular, as if the whole village existed to produce one well-raised individual at a time) is itself a trace of the toxic individualism I’m pushing back against. The village did not exist to raise children. It existed to sustain the full human lifespan: every generation, in every stage, simultaneously. The elder needed it as much as the infant. The middle generation needed it as much as the adolescent. Village Deficit Disorder afflicts every cohort the village was supposed to serve — which is every cohort, without exception.

The household containing multiple generations is not automatically protected from this. It may simply be experiencing the dysfunction in surround sound, with each generation’s specific vulnerability shaping how the symptom presents.

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The Elder Generation: Comfort as a Slow Poison

There is a widespread and understandable narrative that elders in retirement have earned their leisure — that years of passive consumption and pleasant diversion are a just reward for decades of labor. I want to be careful and compassionate with this framing, because the people living inside it are not wrong to seek comfort. The desire for rest after a demanding life is human and legitimate.

But comfort is also addictive. And in excessive quantities, continued for an excessive amount of time, it weakens us — not metaphorically but neurologically. The research on cognitive reserve (the brain’s accumulated capacity to sustain function against age-related decline) is consistent and well-established: the primary protective factors against dementia and cognitive deterioration are sustained intellectual engagement, social complexity, and purposeful activity. The brain operates on a use-it-or-lose-it mechanism that does not pause for retirement. Passive screen consumption builds no cognitive reserve. It may actively deplete what has been built over years of effort, by substituting frictionless stimulation for the kind of demanding engagement that keeps neural networks active and adaptive.

I know this in my bones as well as in the research, because I have family history on my mother’s side that makes it personal. I had a great-grandmother who lived into my teen years but had dementia severe enough that I am fairly certain she never knew who I was. She was fun and adorable and a true treasure of my youth — and I carry the awareness that I am at risk of that trajectory if I do not actively work against it. Keeping my mind sharp and very active during the years of raising small children has been a conscious choice, not a byproduct of a busy life. If I am so blessed as to live long enough to exist in the living memory of my great-grandchildren, I want to have done everything I can in the decades leading up to that so that I get to actually know who they are before I die. I want to be the elder who is present — not the elder who is physically there but psychologically absent.

Watching my parents-in-law move toward the latter — consuming hours of passive streaming content daily, in ways I understand neurologically to be self-sabotage, with no avenue available to me to reach them with that understanding — is its own specific grief. This is not judgment. It is the grief of someone who can see what is being lost and cannot stop it.

The “golden years” as a life stage defined primarily by consumption and withdrawal from productive social function is historically recent and culturally narrow. It is, in significant part, a market construct — a demographic segment identified and cultivated by industries that profit from elder consumption of leisure products. In virtually every traditional community structure across human history and geography, elders did not retire from social function. They transitioned into their most socially essential role: keeper of community memory, transmitter of hard-won knowledge, moral anchor for the young, the person whose presence communicated that it was possible to survive what life throws at you and emerge with something worth passing on.

This is where melete becomes relevant — another term I have to look up rather than carry by sound (speech-to-text renders it as “melody,” which creates similar cognitive interference in my brain when I try to retrieve the word). Melete is the Stoic practice of thinking ahead, of mentally rehearsing difficulty and accurately assessing what is actually in front of you rather than what you wish (or fear) is there. It is disciplined preparation of the mind, the cultivation of clear-eyed readiness. An elder who has practiced melete across a long life — who has already inhabited, imaginatively and then actually, versions of the difficulties younger people are facing for the first time — is a living resource. Their accumulated rehearsal is available to others through story, through counsel, through the witnessed example of someone who has navigated the darkness and knows something of what is in it. That transmission is one of the primary village functions of the elder generation. It is irreplaceable.

What my parents-in-law have been sold is presented as comfort and delivered as slow cognitive atrophy. The streaming services are not giving them meaning or purpose. They are validating the disappointments of a contracted life, numbing the hours until they pass, and asking nothing of the people consuming them — so long as the subscription fees keep getting paid. The melete those years of lived experience should be making available to the next generations is instead sitting behind a streaming interface, inaccessible to the grandchildren who most need it while playing out as an ongoing at-home Still Face Experiment.

They have been sold a false bill of goods dressed in the language of earned rest. The market that sold it to them has no stake in our flourishing, only in our continued subscription payments feeding their quarterly profits.

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The Middle Generation: Holding Everything Together With Both Hands Full

The adults in the middle of a multigenerational family are not simply tired. They are structurally under-resourced in a way the general conversation about work-life balance almost never names accurately.

The nuclear family was never designed to be the sole source of scaffolding for children, and it was never designed to be the sole source of support for aging elders. Both of those functions were historically distributed across the village — which meant that no single adult (or couple) was the only option available when either generation had a need arise. The middle generation in a nuclear or near-nuclear family is doing the labor of an entire village with the resources of one or two adults, often against countervailing forces from multiple directions simultaneously.

The Stoic practice of askēsis (the deliberate undertaking of difficulty as a means of building capacity and virtue) is the disposition the middle generation’s position demands and what, practiced consciously rather than endured resentfully, it can actually build. Chosen hardship is categorically different from suffered hardship: the distinction between training and being injured, between the weight you lift deliberately to grow stronger and the weight that falls on you when your attention is directed elsewhere. I made choices that front-loaded my life with deliberate difficulty: I intentionally had double the culturally typical number of children, carried and birthed them from a disabled body that some believe should not be producing genetic offspring at all, and structured my household around being a consistently present scaffolding figure for all of them across their full developmental spans. I rarely resent the daily hardships of parenting. When resentment arises, it is not toward my children. It is toward the chronic absence of reliable, mature others I can tag in when I need to tag out — toward the unrealistic expectations that devalue my actual capabilities and land on me in ways that feel dehumanizing precisely because the village that would have distributed that load without constantly pushing individual capacities simply is not there.

What I resent is not the difficulty. I chose the difficulty. What I resent is being asked to do it without the support structure my foremothers had as a consistent baseline.

Askēsis practiced without recovery support is not discipline. It is damage accruing slowly. The practice requires rest, and rest requires genuine relief, and genuine relief requires the distributed network that the nuclear household cannot provide alone. When the middle generation’s regulatory coherence occasionally fails, that failure is not a character flaw. It is a predictable outcome of a structural configuration that was never adequate to the load it was asked to carry. Blaming individual parents for the outcomes of village deficit contexts is like blaming a single load-bearing wall for failing to hold up a building that needed a minimum of four such walls.

I will say considerably more about what this costs, and what it looks like from inside, in a later article that is currently sitting as an outline in my drafts folder. What belongs here is the structural point.

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The Children and Adolescents: Claiming Affiliation Without Paying the Membership Dues

My fourth son (who turned 13 this past November) has been assembling a wardrobe aesthetic associated with a specific subculture he has encountered primarily through the social media accounts he has only recently gained access to — access that comes with turning 13 and that I am watching closely. He is not wrong to find the aesthetic appealing. The visual language of subcultures is genuinely expressive, and trying on identities through external presentation is developmentally appropriate for a thirteen-year-old. What interests me as both his mother and a sociologist (and what the cynical GenX shadow side of me is quietly calling out as poser behavior) is the mechanism: the aesthetic is available for adoption without the community, the practice, or the relational transmission that originally gave it its meaning and form. There is also a cultural misappropriation dimension worth naming; when a subculture’s visual language gets commodified and made available for purchase to anyone with the financial float, something is extracted from the community that developed it without anything being returned. The costume is purchasable before the character has been written, and the culture being used as a costume gets nothing from the transaction.

I redirected my son toward thinking like a theater costumer — a frame that works for this kid in particular because he wants to be an actor. What does this wardrobe say about the character you are building? What assumptions will your audience make based on this costuming? Is that the character you actually want to be performing for the world? The theater costumer frame takes the same identity-exploration impulse and redirects it toward intentional authorship rather than passive adoption. This is askēsis applied to identity: the harder path of actually building the character, through practice and relationship and genuine investment, rather than purchasing the aesthetic markers at a retail outlet. The market is very happy to sell markers of belonging as a packaged product. The village, on the other hand, required you to show up and do the work.

The adolescent storm-and-stress that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) culture treats as a universal developmental inevitability — the opposition, the withdrawal, the apparent rejection of adult guidance — is, the cross-cultural evidence increasingly suggests, substantially a product of peer orientation rather than adolescent biology. When children grow up in sustained relationships with a range of trustworthy adults across their developmental years, adolescence looks less like rebellion and more like apprenticeship into adulthood. The drive to individuate does not disappear. But it gets expressed through integration rather than through opposition, because there are adult relationships worth moving toward rather than only parental authority to push against.

The storm is not the biology. The storm is the deficit.

What I observe with my third son (15, turning 16 in May) — navigating driver’s education and the expanding autonomy that comes with it while processing through the experience of being in a car accident, carrying his friends’ emotional loads in his headphones instead of bringing them to the people around him who have already navigated those waters — is peer orientation in its most recognizable adolescent form. The village elder, the trusted neighbor, the older community member further along the path: all of those relational resources are functionally unavailable to him in the form they would have taken ancestrally. The headphones are frictionless, always available, and ask nothing of him in return. The real relationships require vulnerability, and vulnerability requires trust, and trust requires the kind of sustained investment that village life used to make structurally inevitable and that we now have to build deliberately against the current.

Which is why the Sunday morning I described at the opening of this piece mattered as much as it did. The elders who caught him before he fell were not his biological relatives. They were not legally obligated to him in any way. They caught him because they were there, because they knew him well enough to perceive his distress even when he tried to mask it, because the community I had spent years building around my children had made their presence and his presence a regular shared reality. That is the village functioning. That is what we are trying to reconstruct.

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The Counterfeit Village

What strikes me most about the screen consumption patterns across generations in my household is not that they differ but that they are, at root, the same response to the same absence — and that what is being offered in response is not a substitute but a counterfeit.

A substitute attempts the same function as the thing it replaces. A counterfeit is designed to be mistaken for the real thing while serving an entirely different purpose. The digital platforms are not attempting to provide what the village provided. They are engineered to produce the feeling of accompaniment (the neurological sensation of being with others, of being related to, of belonging) while delivering none of the relational content that makes accompaniment actually nourishing. They provide stimulation calibrated to keep us engaged, content selected to feel personally relevant, interaction designed to produce the chemical rewards of social connection without requiring the vulnerability, the reciprocity, the obligation, or the sustained effort that real connection demands. They are, in a phrase that arrived in my thinking while writing this, “relatable without being relational.” That distinction is doing a great deal of damage.

Relatable means the content mirrors something in your experience back at you. It recognizes your situation, validates your feelings, speaks in a register that feels familiar. This feels good, and the feeling is not entirely false — recognition is a real human need, and having it met, even by a screen, produces a genuine neurological response. But relatable is a one-way sensation. Relational is a multidirectional bond. Relational requires the other party to actually know you (not a data profile of your historical viewing choices, but you), to be changed by you as you are changed by them, to still be there when you are boring or difficult or not performing wellness for an audience. The village was relational. What we have been sold in its place is relatable, and the two are not interchangeable no matter how convincingly the algorithm makes them feel that way.

This is the mechanism by which the counterfeit village does not merely fail to fill the gap. It actively deepens it. The more you feed the hunger for connection with frictionless relatable content, the lower your tolerance for the friction that real relationship requires to sustain it. Genuine relationship (with its demands, its unpredictability, its requirement that you show up as yourself and be affected by others) starts to feel like “too much.” The counterfeit trains you out of the capacity for the real thing while appearing to provide it.

My parents-in-law, my sons, my husband: different generations, different screens, one wound. None of us consciously chose this. The pain is real, the need is legitimate, and the market has provided a product specifically engineered to feel like relief while ensuring the wound stays open. That is not an accident. It is a business model.

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Fiction as Hypothesis Testing

I write fiction as well as theory, and some of my characters are thought experiments in what the Village Deficit Disorder variables produce when they are changed — what a person becomes when genuinely adequate scaffolding is present across their whole development, versus what a person becomes when scaffolding is absent but competent adults intervene at critical moments, not because they were obligated to but because they chose to.

I originally planned to write fiction under a pen name — a decision I made when my firstborn was my only child, back when it seemed reasonable to keep the two bodies of work in separate compartments as well as install some shielding around our family when I thought I’d be writing while gestating later-born children. I’ve since rethought that. The social science and the fiction have become too genuinely interwoven for the separation to be held with integrity; the theorizing feeds the narrative and the narrative tests the theory, and readers who encounter my work in either genre deserve to know that the same person is doing both, for the same reasons. With that transparency established (and without going into details that would take a separate article to properly introduce), I’ll say that exploring these questions in narrative form has consistently sharpened the theoretical framework rather than merely decorating it. Some truths about human development are most legible in the heightened clarity of story, where the inputs can be controlled and the outcomes watched across time. The research and the fiction keep converging on the same conclusion: the presence of even one genuinely invested, competent adult who doesn’t have an obligation to be involved at a critical developmental moment is a more powerful variable than almost anything else. Not a perfect parent. Not an ideal village. One person who shows up and sticks with you through the moments that really suck is enough to keep us alive. That’s what every story I’ve experienced has told me.

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What Village Reconstruction Actually Looks Like

I want to be careful not to imply that any single approach to this problem is the right one, because the structural nature of village deficit means that individual solutions (however wise and intentional) are always just partial fixes. Families who make unconventional choices about how their children are educated, seeking to protect them from village deficit’s worst effects, are responding reasonably to a real problem. The question of how those choices interact with the broader commons (particularly with the children and families who don’t have the same options) is one I’ll take up more directly in an upcoming article. It does not resolve cleanly, and I am suspicious of anyone who tells you it does.

What I can describe is what reconstruction looks like in practice from where I am. I also carry a particular form of this tension around my children’s education. My sons transition to virtual asynchronous learning for grades 6 through 8 (with some continuing elements into high school), which gives them the schedule flexibility to participate in Ohio’s College Credit Plus program (dual enrollment in college coursework, formerly known in Ohio and still referred to in other states as PSEO) beginning in 7th grade, as all of them thus far have done. This keeps their intellectual development moving at a pace appropriate to their individual abilities rather than to the classroom average, and preserves their childhood by not demanding that academic time consume every waking hour. It is the right choice for my children. It also means I am not an adult presence in the middle school PTA, not contributing my scaffolding capacity to the commons that other children depend on, and not building relationships with families who enter our district in that time window. That feels, at times, uncomfortably close to the opportunity hoarding I will be writing about more directly in an upcoming article. I hold that tension without resolving it.

In my lived practice, it looks like treating all the kids as “my kids” (not just the ones who happen to be my offspring) because I absorbed that ethic in small doses from the neighbors who were present in my own childhood, and I know from the inside what a difference even small doses make. I’m often heard saying “All these kids are all my kids; some of them are also my spawn.” I’ve lost count of how many “bonus kids” I serve as a “bonus grownup,” and I feel honor-bound to fill that role whenever the opportunity presents. When a stranger’s child inquires about my wheelchair while I’m out shopping instead of staying focused on whatever other distraction in the environment is trying to contain them, that is a kid I’m going to take a genuine moment with — because that is what the earlier versions of my village did, and that is what I have to offer.

It looks like being present in an open space where my family can see what I’m working on, modeling the use of technology as a tool rather than an escape hatch from reality — practicing what I’m writing about, in plain sight, so the modeling is available whether or not anyone consciously notices it. It looks like crafting small objects to place in the hands of people I know are existing in the darkness, because objects carry meaning across distances that words sometimes can’t reach. It looks like writing, in long form, for people who can handle complexity, because the guiding lights that were held out for me when I was navigating my own darkness were held by people willing to go to the depth the moment required.

This is melete offered outward: the accumulated rehearsal of difficulty, made available to people who are facing their own versions of it for the first time. I have already been in some of those dark rooms. I know something of what is in them. Writing it down is the least I can do with that knowledge.

Keeping my own mind active and engaged — through the writing, the theorizing, the fiction, the research synthesis, the raising of five humans across more than two decades — is also my own hedge against the trajectory I watched claim my great-grandmother. I am doing, consciously and by choice, the opposite of what the market keeps trying to sell me. I am choosing the friction. I am choosing the complexity. I am choosing to be necessary rather than merely comfortable, for as long as I am capable of it.

The village is not coming back in its original form. The question is what we build in the space that has long been left vacant, with what we have, from where we are now.

Every item I crochet is a piece of a legacy worked through my hands. Every post I write is an attempt to hold out, for whoever needs it, the kind of light that was held for me.

That is what village reconstruction looks like. It is slower moving than the deficit, and quieter than the social platforms, and it requires more of the humanity within us than the algorithm ever will.

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Further Reading

Neufeld, G., & Maté, G. (2004). Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. Knopf Canada.

The foundational text on peer orientation as the mechanism through which village deficit produces its most visible adolescent symptoms. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the storm is the deficit, not the developmental stage. Available as an audiobook.

Putnam, R. D. (2015). Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Simon & Schuster.

Documents the widening stratification of scaffolding resources across the socioeconomic spectrum and makes visible the village deficit as a class-distributed phenomenon rather than a uniform social condition. Available as an audiobook.

Lam, J., et al. (2026, March). Television and computer use and dementia risk in older adults with low social activity. Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12967449/

Free access via PubMed Central. Published the same month as this article, making it among the freshest data available on this question. Directly supports the elder section’s claim that passive television viewing is associated with increased dementia risk in socially inactive older adults, while moderate interactive computer use is protective. The distinction between passive and interactive engagement is the empirical backbone of the cognitive reserve argument.​

Owsiany, M. T., et al. (2026, January). Prediction of burnout and psychosocial differences among sandwich generation caregivers. Frontiers in Psychology.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12994609/

Free access via PubMed Central. Confirms that caregiver burnout is significantly higher in sandwich generation caregivers than in caregivers of children only or parents only, and identifies the quality of relationships (rather than task load alone) as a primary predictor. The relational dimension of burnout is directly relevant to what an upcoming post will develop further.​

Hollenstein, T., & Lougheed, J. P. (Eds.). (2023). Adolescent storm and stress: A 21st century evaluation. Frontiers in Psychology.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10435984/

Free access via PubMed Central. This editorial collection directly supports the article’s claim that storm-and-stress is substantially lower in traditional cultures than in WEIRD ones and increases as globalization increases individualism — evidence that the storm is a cultural and structural product, not a developmental inevitability.​

Felt, L. J., et al. (2021). Peer influence during adolescence: The moderating role of parental support. Journal of Child and Family Studies.

https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1228&context=chphsr_articles

Free access PDF. Demonstrates that the link between peer influence and both internalizing and externalizing problems is significantly stronger at low levels of parental support — meaning sustained parental relationship quality buffers against the peer orientation mechanism even when parents can no longer directly supervise. This is the empirical grounding for why the relational work of the middle generation matters even when it appears to be failing.

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A small postscript, written the same night I finished editing this article:

Our eldest guinea pig died tonight. My firstborn (21) was cleaning our herd’s cage, and I noticed she wasn’t behaving normally as I held her during the cage cleaning. Given that we’d just lost the herdmate that was roughly 8 months older less than two months ago, as I held her I told her how grateful I was for the joy she’s brought my family for nearly six years, and that we’d be okay if she needed to pass into the beyond. My secondborn (18) was in the room, and watched over her movements with his elder brother after the three guinea pigs were returned to their cage. They were petting her and speaking calmly to her as she drew her last breath. Afterward, the three of us held each other and sobbed.

I note this here because it is evidence. Two young adult men who did not isolate into their devices in a moment of grief. Who turned toward each other and toward their mother. Who felt the loss of a small being fully, without armor, without performance.

The scaffolding is slow work. Tonight I saw some of it holding. We will explore more scaffolding work later, when my grief is a bit less intense. It might be a few more days than my recent average; please give me grace.

Viktor Frankl was 37 years old — a neurologist, a psychiatrist, a husband of nine months, and already a substantial thinker in his field — when he and his wife Tilly were arrested and “deported” to Theresienstadt in September 1942. He had spent his entire adult life building a philosophical and clinical framework for understanding how human beings find and sustain meaning under suffering. His logotherapy — a form of psychotherapy centered on the human drive to find meaning as the primary motivational force of life — was not a response to the camps. It was a fully developed intellectual architecture that the camps then tested, at the most extreme possible pressure, for three years across four concentration camps. Frankl survived. His wife, his mother, his brother, and his father did not.

What the camps could not touch — what Frankl argued they could never touch, in any human being, under any conditions — was prohairesis: the faculty of choosing one’s response to circumstances that cannot themselves be chosen. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” he wrote after liberation.

Frankl was 37. The brain structures responsible for mature self-governance were fully developed. His philosophical scaffolding had been built across decades of rigorous intellectual and clinical practice. His capacity to locate and exercise that inner freedom had been developed long before it was needed for survival.

This is not a small detail.

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The Thread Luba Slodov Passed Through Her Hands

I want to introduce a second person before we get to the research, because she is part of how I understand this subject from the inside.

When I was a student at Case Western Reserve University in the 1990s, I learned to crochet from a woman named Luba Slodov — an American artist, born in 1933, died in 2007, and, by her own account to me directly, the youngest survivor of the concentration camp she was in. Luba taught textiles and weaving at CWRU. Her work in wire crochet is her legacy of presence in area synagogues. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds her 1986 work The Village — needle lace, needle weaving, and crochet in cotton — a piece I discovered as I was refreshing my memories of my beloved teacher nearly two decades after her death, and holds special significance now that I have spent years developing a theoretical framework I call Village Deficit Disorder. The loving guidance she gave me in that classroom has woven more than yarn-based talents into my neurology.

Luba told me stories of her time in the camps, including this one: she had entered knowing how to crochet, a skill she brought with her from her life before. In her bunk at night, she participated in small acts of what her childhood self thought was sabotage, by stealing bits of wire from the forced-labor factory and crocheting them in secret. The wire was not the medium she had been taught with. The conditions were not the conditions under which any craft is supposed to flourish. And yet: she emerged from the camps with a unique artistic style in wire crochet that she would not otherwise have developed. The skill she entered with became, under the most extreme pressure imaginable, something entirely her own — forged precisely because the constraints forced her to improvise with what was available. I have tried to crochet wire myself in the decades since she taught me. My hands have never been strong enough. The medium itself carries the weight of what it cost her to build strength within extreme constraints.

Every item I crochet is a piece of Luba’s legacy worked through my hands. The baby layettes I made for each of my own children carry her forward. The skill simultaneously regulates my nervous system — the rhythmic, repetitive, tactile engagement of crochet is one of the most reliable self-regulation tools I have — and gives me freedom of artistic expression that Luba forged for herself in circumstances that make my most difficult days look like mild inconvenience.

Luba and Frankl are what I think of as my psychological honored ancestors. I have no known Jewish ancestry. That is not the point. What they gave me — through a body of work and through a pair of hands guiding mine — is a model of how inner strength is built through suffering rather than despite it, and how that strength, once built, becomes something that can be transmitted to others. They taught me, each in their own way, that the capacity to survive long enough to authentically thrive on the other side of pain is not a gift you are born with. It is a practice you develop, with scaffolding, over time — ideally before the worst arrives, not during it.

This is what the developmental science is now telling us, in considerably more technical language.

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A Note on How I Know What I Know

Before going further, I want to be transparent about the nature of my expertise in what follows, because intellectual honesty is a Stoic practice too.

I am not a neuroscientist. My formal training is in psychology and sociology, completed at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland State University. My engagement with neuroscience literature began not from academic interest but from urgent practical need: in 2014 and 2015, two of my sons sustained serious concussions — one involving the parietal lobe and motor cortex, the other involving three separate impacts to the prefrontal cortex within a six-week period in autumn 2015, each resulting in fully symptomatic Post-Concussion Syndrome lasting more than six months. I applied the research synthesis skills I had developed across my academic training to a situation my family was living in, because that is what the situation required. What I learned in that process expanded into the broader neurodevelopmental framework I now draw on in this writing.

I should also name that I have my own neurological relationship with this material. When I was in high school, an anomaly in my left temporal lobe was identified — almost certainly the source of my tendency to go mildly aphasic as an early warning sign that a migraine is building if I don’t change what I’m doing. The aphasia has not worsened since it was noted in adolescence, and I take it as useful data rather than cause for alarm. Like my other disabilities (more than half of which are invisible to a casual observer) I have developed who I am within the constraints these conditions impose. It is from exactly that background that Intersectional Stoicism emerged as a framework.

I share all of this because I believe the people who most need access to this research are often those least likely to encounter it through academic channels, and making it accessible without misrepresenting my credentials is part of the work. I am interpreting and synthesizing; I am not the primary source. The sources are linked below so you can evaluate them directly.

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What the Prefrontal Cortex Does, and When It Finishes Developing

The prefrontal cortex — the region at the front of the brain most directly responsible for mature self-governance — manages the capacities we recognize as adult decision-making: holding long-term consequences in mind while suppressing short-term impulses, evaluating options against internalized values rather than immediate emotional pressure, and tolerating ambiguity without collapsing into reactivity. These are the capacities that Frankl exercised in the camps. These are the capacities that prohairesis describes, in Stoic terms.

The prefrontal cortex is also among the last brain structures to complete myelination — the process by which neural pathways are insulated and stabilized into reliable function. That process continues well into the mid-twenties. In early adolescence, the prefrontal cortex is functional but not mature, and that distinction matters enormously. A 13-year-old is not simply a small adult with incomplete information. They are a person whose inhibitory architecture — the neurological equipment for suppressing compelling impulses — is structurally incomplete in ways no amount of motivation or intelligence fully overrides.

When we hand a child a choice that requires the prefrontal cortex to do work that it isn’t yet built to sustain, we are not giving them an opportunity to grow. We are applying a load to a structure that isn’t finished yet, and then, when it buckles, attributing the failure to character rather than developmental timing. This misattribution is not benign. Two reinforcing mechanisms from the social science literature describe exactly how it causes lasting damage to a child’s developing self-concept.

The first is the Fundamental Attribution Error: the well-documented human tendency to explain other people’s behavior primarily through dispositional factors (who they are) rather than situational ones (what they were up against). When a child fails to self-regulate in a context that genuinely exceeds their regulatory capacity, adults who don’t understand the developmental picture will reliably conclude that the child is impulsive, lazy, defiant, or lacking in character. The child, absorbing those attributions from the adults whose assessments shape their world, begins to build a self-concept that incorporates those conclusions: I am someone who can’t control myself. I am someone who makes bad choices. This is who I am.

This triggers a second mechanism called Labeling Theory in the sociological literature: when significant adults apply problem labels to a child — impulsive, defiant, out of control — those labels don’t simply describe behavior. They restructure both others’ expectations of the child and the child’s own developing identity. Identity is substantially constructed through the reflected appraisals of the people who matter most to us, and a child has very few tools for resisting a label that the most powerful people in their world are consistently applying. The label, through repetition and reinforcement, becomes self-fulfilling. The behavior that was a developmental-stage response to unrealistic regulatory demands becomes, through the labeling process, an identity, and an identity is considerably harder to outgrow than a developmental stage.

Together, these two mechanisms describe a pathway from unrealistic expectations for this developmental stage to lasting self-concept damage that operates entirely below the level of anyone’s conscious intention. No one has to mean harm for this to happen. It happens whenever we mistake a structural developmental limitation for a permanent character flaw. In family systems where few available others are, or were recently, in a similar developmental stage to compare and norm against, this kind of mistake will happen. I’ve been studying child development and socialization processes for three decades, and yes, I still make these kinds of mistakes.

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The Premature Autonomy Paradox

Researchers at the Oregon Social Learning Center identified and named the concept of premature autonomy — what happens when parental monitoring and guidance withdraw faster than the child’s own regulatory capacities develop. Their findings were counterintuitive in exactly the way the WEIRD cultural ideology about child development would not predict: the children most harmed by early autonomy granting were the children who already had the lowest internal sense of control over their own lives.

For a child who already experiences the world as unpredictable and themselves as poorly equipped to navigate it, early autonomy does not feel like freedom. It registers in the nervous system as abandonment-to-overwhelm. The implicit message — you can handle this — lands as a statement the child’s own experience directly contradicts, and the resulting gap between external expectation and internal reality produces not confidence but chronic low-level stress. The family management structure that withdraws before the child has the resources to self-manage does not produce self-sufficient children. It produces children whose nervous systems orient toward whatever structure is available — and in the absence of adult scaffolding, in the last many decades that has almost always been peers who are equally under-resourced. Now, it’s more and more often the unfiltered internet.

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Why No Single Household Is Ever Sufficient

This is the point where I want to be specific about something that gets lost when parenting is framed primarily as an individual responsibility: no household, no matter how attentive and intentional its adults are, was ever architecturally designed to take on the full weight of providing everything a developing child’s nervous system needs. This is not a statement about parental failure. It is a statement about human evolutionary design.

Children’s nervous systems developed across hundreds of thousands of years in multi-adult, multi-generational village environments where regulatory scaffolding was distributed across an entire network of people at varying maturity levels with different relationships, different authority levels, different personalities, different skills, and different developmental functions. An infant had a few primary attachment figures and many secondary ones. A toddler moved through a range of environments and relationships with diverse maturity levels, while also assisting in caring for infants with consistent oversight. A child had aunts, uncles, grandparents, older cousins, neighbors, mentors, and community elders providing overlapping and redundant relational structures — each contributing something slightly different to the child’s developing sense of who they were and what they were capable of.

An adolescent, in the ancestral environment, had trustworthy adults available across a range of relationships and authority levels — which meant that the biological developmental work of individuation and identity formation could happen through integration into the adult world rather than through opposition to it. The adversarial parent-adolescent conflict that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) culture treats as a universal developmental inevitability is, the cross-cultural evidence suggests, substantially a product of peer orientation — itself a product of the village deficit. When children grow up in sustained relationships with a range of adults throughout childhood, adolescence looks less like rebellion and more like apprenticeship into adulthood. The storm is not the biology. The storm is the deficit.

The single-household nuclear family — two adults, or one, primarily responsible for meeting a child’s full range of developmental needs across the entire span of childhood — is a historically recent and demographically narrow configuration. It is also, by any evolutionary standard, drastically under-resourced relative to the environment in which children’s nervous systems were shaped. Even two unusually skilled, attentive, well-resourced, and intentional parents cannot provide the relational range, the distributed authority structures, the variety of adult models, and the redundant attachment networks that the ancestral village provided as a matter of baseline social organization. They can approximate it, albeit poorly. They cannot replicate the full neurologically complex richness of it.

What this means practically is that parental failure is frequently not parental failure at all. It is systemic structural insufficiency — a building being blamed for failing to hold a load that was never part of its design specifications. The parents who are most attentive to this reality attempt to compensate by actively constructing whatever village structures they can manage: intentional communities, co-housing arrangements, deeply networked family friendships, multigenerational living. These undoubtedly help. They are also, I can confirm from deep experience, exhausting to maintain against the grain of a culture that has organized housing, employment, transportation, and social life around the nuclear household as the default unit, leaving village-building to individuals who must accomplish it without institutional support — and often without their neighbors’ cooperation (and sometimes with their active undermining).

The children who fall through the gaps of this structural insufficiency are not falling through because their parents didn’t try hard enough. They are falling through because the load-bearing architecture was never adequate to the weight it was asked to carry. That distinction matters for how we respond — both as individuals and as a society.

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Freedom Is Not the Starting Condition

Epictetus — the Stoic philosopher I find myself returning to most consistently, more than Seneca, more than Marcus Aurelius — was born enslaved. He spent years in external constraint so complete that he had, by any modern measure, no agency over the conditions of his life whatsoever. And he taught, from inside that condition and from the freedom he eventually gained, that prohairesis — the capacity for genuine inner freedom — is not acquired by removing external constraints. It is built inside them.

The distinction between Epictetus and Seneca matters here and is worth naming plainly. Seneca was born into wealth and spent much of his life at the center of Roman imperial power. His Stoicism is the Stoicism of a man who had to manage abundance, temptation, and complicity — real challenges, but challenges of a fundamentally different texture from those of a man who owned nothing, including his own body, and had to locate freedom entirely within the domain of his own response. My lived context most closely resembles Epictetus — the external conditions of my disabled life are not within my power to change, and the only question is how I will meet them — it is Epictetus I reach for, not Seneca. His philosophy was forged in conditions closer to the ones I find myself needing it for. Because of this, I have been working on a reinterpretation of Epictetus’s writings to make them more accessible to modern readers across the age span.

This is the Stoic developmental claim that the research literature is now confirming in neurological terms: the capacity for genuine self-governance does not emerge from early freedom. It is forged through scaffolded constraint, graduated expectation, and the sustained experience of having one’s regulatory efforts both supported and held to account by a structure larger than oneself. What Epictetus called virtue, the developmental psychologists call internalized regulation — and both traditions agree that it does not arise spontaneously from liberation. It is the outcome of a long and supported process of building.

And here is the part the permissive parenting ideology never quite grapples with: without that foundational layer of internalized regulation, there is no authentic liberation. The individual who has not built genuine prohairesis does not achieve freedom when external constraints are removed. They simply move from the imprisoning structure of one dopamine-driven impulse to the imprisoning structure of the next — from the algorithm’s pull to the peer group’s pull to the substance’s pull — each feeling in the moment like a choice, none of them constituting one in any meaningful Stoic sense. What looks like freedom from the outside, and feels like freedom in the instant, is the nervous system surfing from one external regulator to another because it never developed the internal architecture to govern itself. The cage doors are open. The bird does not fly; it hops from perch to perch inside a larger cage it cannot see.

The WEIRD cultural ideology that frames parental structure as an obstacle to natural self-actualization and freedom is not a finding from developmental science. What it is, is a market ideology that happens to align perfectly with what quarterly-profit-driven corporations need consumers to believe about children’s preferences: that those preferences are natural, legitimate, and should be resourced and respected through purchasing consumer goods rather than mindfully shaped to the child’s context. It dresses itself in the language of child development. The actual child development literature does not support it.

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What Scaffolding Actually Means

The research on authoritative parenting — warm, high-expectation, explanatory rather than punitive structure — consistently produces the strongest outcomes across psychological, behavioral, and academic domains, across cultures and income levels and family configurations. The key word is explanatory: structure that tells a child why, that treats the child as a developing moral agent whose capacity for reasoning is being built rather than bypassed, that makes the connection between present choices and future flourishing explicit rather than leaving it as an implied threat.

This is not the same as control. Control is structure that exists to serve the parent’s need for order or the institution’s need for compliance. Scaffolding is structure that exists to serve the child’s developing capacity for genuine self-governance — a structure whose explicit purpose is to make itself progressively unnecessary. The goal of scaffolding is not a permanently scaffolded child. It is an adult who has internalized the regulatory architecture that the scaffolding was temporarily providing, and who can therefore exercise prohairesis with genuine rather than performed freedom.

Frankl did not discover meaning-making under duress in Theresienstadt. He brought it with him, built across thirty-seven years of intellectual and clinical practice before the worst arrived. Luba Slodov did not learn to transform suffering into art in the camps. She brought a skill with her — one that had been taught, practiced, and scaffolded in ordinary life — and the constraints of the camps forced that skill into a form it would never otherwise have taken. The wire she stole and crocheted in her bunk in secret was not the medium she had been taught with. But without the foundational skill that had already been properly built before, there would have been nothing to transform. The development of personal agency that supported her survival was possible because the scaffolding had already done its work.

What I received from her — what I am still working forward through every item I make — is not just a skill. It is proof of concept: that the structures human beings build inside and around themselves, through practice and through relationship and through the patient transmission of hard-won capacity from one set of hands to another, are what allow us to survive long enough to authentically thrive.

That is what scaffolding means. And it is what we owe the children in our care — not freedom before they have the tools to use it well, but the patient, relational, graduated building of the tools themselves.

What we call freedom before virtue is, in Stoic terms, simply license. The neuroscience agrees.

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Further Reading and Influences

Start here if you’re new to Frankl — watch first:

Rare 1977 interview with Viktor Frankl on YouTube (note it is 2 hours long, and the flickering can be problematic for people with strobe-affected neurological issues)

Hearing Frankl speak before reading him reorients the entire experience. His affect and cadence carry the weight of the ideas in ways the page alone cannot reproduce.

Viktor Frankl archive lecture footage. Viktor Frankl Institute of Ireland: https://viktorfranklireland.com/video-gallery/
Additional archive clips from the Viktor Frankl Institute of Vienna, including material on freedom, responsibility, and the relationship between logotherapy and existentialist philosophy.

When you’re ready to read:

Frankl, V. E. (1978). The Unheard Cry for Meaning. Simon & Schuster.
Narrated on audiobook by Bronson Pinchot (yes, Balki from Perfect Strangers).The most accessible entry point into Frankl for readers not yet ready for the full weight of the camp narrative.

Frankl, V. E. (1946/1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
The foundational text. Available as an audiobook and in full on YouTube. Essential, and genuinely difficult. Be in a stable place before you listen.

Epictetus. The Enchiridion.
There are numerous translations available, including old ones that have entered the Public Domain and have been made accessible on Project Gutenberg. I am working on my own, which includes adaptations to be more trauma-aware and inclusive, and I’m narrating it. I’m still trying to figure out how and where to share it, as I want to turn it into an EPUB3 to have “read to me” features. Reach out directly if you’d like access to the current draft or have skills to share on how to make an accessible version like that available without having to use the Kindle WhisperSync ecosystem.

Neufeld, G., & Maté, G. (2004). Hold On to Your Kids. Knopf Canada.
The most direct theoretical antecedent to the aspects of Village Deficit Disorder under discussion here. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why peer orientation — not adolescent biology — produces the family conflict WEIRD culture has mistaken for a developmental universal.

This post is going to piss off some of my music-loving friends.

There is a question I suspect most of us have never thought to ask, even those of us who have spent years building intentional self-awareness practices: What am I consenting to let into my nervous system right now?

We think about what we eat. Many of us think carefully about how we spend our time, what we read, and what we watch. Those of us working inside Stoic frameworks spend considerable energy on the quality of our attention and the content of our judgments. But few of us treat our auditory environment — the sounds surrounding us through most of our waking hours — as something we are actively either choosing or failing to choose. It simply happens. Music plays. An algorithm decides what comes next. We half-listen, or we don’t listen at all, and the sound keeps coming.

I want to be transparent about something before I go any further: this is not a theoretical concern for me. I have been aware of the effect of sound on my nervous system for as long as I have had the cognitive capacity to observe my own nervous system. The homes of my family of origin were places where radios and televisions were constantly on. As soon as I developed the abilities, I was a mixtape girl, then a burn-your-own-CDs girl, in the days before playlist software existed, because my nervous system genuinely does not do well with the unpredictability of others’ whims determining what will hit my ears next. I disliked listening to the radio in my adolescence for exactly this reason — and adolescence was also when I first started writing seriously, contributing to multiple literary zines and serving as editor on two before I earned my high school diploma. I noticed even then that certain albums listened to in full, in the order the artist intended, would reliably produce an intense surge of creative engagement in me that I could use. The creative state that the music generated was usable. The creative state, interrupted by a radio DJ who might play anything or report on news that was irrelevant to my immediate context, was not.

I have three decades of careful, lived attention to bring to this subject. Neuroscience has been catching up to my observations the entire time, and it now has quite a lot to say.

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A Hundred Years Is a Blip

At the start here, this needs to be said plainly: the way most people in wealthy, connected countries now consume music is so radically different from any previous human relationship with sound that we have no meaningful ancestral precedent for it. For the overwhelming majority of human history (and for the overwhelming majority of people alive today in contexts outside the global technoconsumer economy), music was not something you received or passively consumed. It was something you participated in making, or something you expended energy to travel to where others were making it. It was communal, contextual, effortful, and rare enough that its presence was always marked. A wedding had music. A harvest had music. A ritual had music. The soundscape between those events was the soundscape of the natural and human world going about its business, with any loud unexpected noises being signals that survival demanded we attend to.

The phonograph was patented in 1877. Commercially recorded music became widely available in the early twentieth century. Music became portable around when I was born, with boom boxes then Walkmans (see also: The Walkman Effect in the psychological literature, which informs this piece). On-demand private streaming, the condition in which a single person can summon any music ever commercially recorded to play (silently to others) into only their own ears at any moment of day or night with effectively zero friction — that is a development of roughly the last fifteen years… within my children’s lifetimes. We are, as a species, roughly one hundred years into a relationship where a middle-class person has access to on-demand recorded sound, and roughly fifteen years into its most extreme and individualized form. In evolutionary terms, this is not even a rounding error. Our nervous systems were shaped across hundreds of thousands of years, in which the auditory environment was something that happened to everyone present together in ways that tuned the instruments of their nervous systems into one symphony of community, and in which music specifically carried social, relational, and contextual meaning that everyone in earshot shared.

The evolutionary research on music’s role in human social development supports this framing directly: music appears to have functioned primarily as a mechanism for social bonding, group coordination, and shared emotional regulation — a communal nervous system technology, not a private one. That context shaped the ear that evolved to receive it. What we have done in a century, and most sharply in the last decade and a half, is sever music nearly entirely from that context and reroute it through individual earbuds into individual nervous systems, with individual algorithms deciding what comes next based on an individual’s historical listening behavior — divorced from every social, relational, and environmental context that, for most of human history, gave music its meaning and its regulatory function.

This is not a minor adjustment in delivery format. It is a civilizational experiment being run without informed consent on human neurological hardware that was never designed for it.

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The Nervous System Never Stops Listening

Your brain does not passively receive sound the way a microphone does. Even when you are focused on something else entirely — even when you would sincerely describe yourself as not really listening — your auditory cortex is continuously generating predictions about what should come next in your soundscape and flagging deviations from those predictions. This response, called mismatch negativity in the neuroscience literature, is measurable on EEG whether or not you are consciously attending to the sound source. Your nervous system is in a constant ongoing negotiation with your acoustic environment, whether you have opted into that negotiation or not, and whether or not you are aware it is happening.

For most people, in most conditions, this background processing is metabolically manageable. But for anyone like me with lower sensory gating — the automatic filtering system that keeps environmental input from flooding conscious processing — this is not a small thing. The auditory environment is not background noise. It is a continuous, resource-consuming conversation that the nervous system is conducting with the world, and what that conversation is about shapes the physiological state of the person having it. This is why chronic noise exposure correlates not only with hearing damage but with measurably reduced cognitive clarity, elevated baseline stress hormones, and a compromised ability to distinguish emotionally relevant signals from environmental ones. The soundscape you inhabit is shaping your nervous system’s operating conditions regardless of whether you are paying attention to it.

This matters beyond the individual, because sound does not respect the boundaries of individual nervous systems. Music functions as what researchers call an affective inducer — it does not merely accompany a shared space, it actively shapes the emotional states of everyone present in that space. When the soundscape in a shared room is algorithmically set and contextually uncalibrated, the people in that room are being collectively steered toward whatever emotional register the playlist happens to occupy, regardless of what those people need from each other or from the moment they are actually in.

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Healthy and Unhealthy Music Use: It’s Not About the Music

A 2024 network analysis in the psychology research literature drew a distinction I find both important and underappreciated: the difference between healthy and unhealthy music use is not about genre, tempo, loudness, or lyrical content. It is about whether the person is using music intentionally — toward a chosen emotional or cognitive goal — or whether the music is simply happening to them.

Unhealthy music use, the study found, negatively correlates with the ability to identify and express positive affect, and positively correlates with alexithymia — difficulty recognizing one’s own emotional states — as well as anxiety and depression. The mechanism is not the music’s content. It is the absence of the person’s conscious assent to what the music is doing. When music functions as something that is happening to your nervous system rather than something you have chosen to deploy toward a purpose, the emotional outcomes tend toward dysregulation rather than regulation — even when the music itself is pleasant, even when you would describe yourself as enjoying it.

I see this play out in my own household in a way that has the particular texture of something tragicomic. My older sons share a family streaming subscription with their younger siblings, and they are openly resentful of this arrangement — specifically because their younger siblings’ listening habits are, in their view, contaminating the algorithm and feeding them music recommendations they don’t consent to. The complaint is real, and I have some sympathy for it (thank all that is good and holy that my youngest is past the “Baby Shark” phase!). But what I find striking is the complete absence of metacognitive awareness around what they’re actually describing: they are distressed about the algorithm’s external influence on their musical consumption, while remaining entirely unreflective about the degree to which they have outsourced their own emotional steering to that same algorithm in the first place. The problem, as they frame it, is that the wrong preferences are shaping their listening recommendations. The problem I observe is that any preferences — including their own — are being laundered through a machine designed to keep them listening, and the question of what the listening is doing to them never gets asked at all.

There is a separate social observation embedded in this, which I will name briefly: a generation that might be getting genuinely enriching music recommendations from their friends and peers, through the kind of relational exchange that mixtapes and burned CDs once made possible, is instead having that exchange mediated by an algorithm — and then retreating into private earbuds where other living, breathing humans cannot reach them. The headphones have become a barrier to exactly the social co-regulation music co-evolved with us to facilitate.

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What Intentional Use Actually Looks Like

I want to be precise about what I mean by intentional use, because it is easy to misread as either ascetic (no music unless you have meditated on it first) or purely intellectual (music only when you can consciously justify it). That is not what I mean, and it is not what the research points toward.

Every long fiction project I work on has, inside my head, a soundtrack — specific songs linked to specific characters, specific scenes, specific emotional registers the narrative needs to pass through. When I am struggling to access a scene that needs to be written, I will play the song I have associated with that scene on repeat until a draft of it exists. The song does not generate the scene. What it does is retrieve the specific neural and emotional state in which that scene lives, and hold me in that state long enough to do the work. There is a side effect I have learned to respect: I cannot casually encounter those songs in other contexts without my brain immediately attempting to drag me toward the writing, until the writing has been done. The association, once made, is too well-established. The music functions as a state-retrieval cue, whether I have invited the retrieval or not, which means I have had to learn to treat certain songs as tools I do not pick up unless I am in a position to use them (this is also why I almost never listen to music while driving). That learning is itself a form of prohairesis — the recognition that choosing not to assent to an impression is as much an act of freedom as choosing to engage with it.

The same principle operates outside of creative work. I have a playlist of OK Go songs I associate with the relational developmental trajectory of my marriage over the last year — a year in which my husband and I have been doing the harder work of repairing accumulated ruptures and rebuilding what should always have been the load-bearing center of our household. When I am struggling to access compassion for the strain I know he is under, I play that playlist. Sometimes just one song. Sometimes all thirty-one minutes of it, which opens with “Here It Goes Again” and closes with “Love.” What it does, consistently, is re-center me in who I want to be in the dynamics of my marriage and family — not because the songs are instructional, but because I have intentionally organized them to reflect back to me that relational intention over time. They retrieve that intention reliably when I call on them. This is not passive consumption. It is a chosen regulatory tool that I deploy toward a specific goal I have set.

The difference between these examples and putting on an algorithmic playlist while you go about your day is not a difference in how much you care about music. It is a difference in who is steering. When I choose the song, for the purpose, in the context where it serves that purpose, I am using a powerful neurological tool toward a goal I have set. When the algorithm chooses, the emotional and physiological outcomes belong to the platform’s optimization function, not to my chosen direction of travel. Research comparing intentional music use to passive consumption consistently finds this: intentional, goal-directed music use predicts mood enhancement and improved emotional clarity, while passive consumption is more closely associated with emotional numbing and compulsive listening patterns — effective in the short term at reducing discomfort, but not at building any of the emotional capacities that would reduce discomfort over time.

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The Shared Space Problem, and the Youngest Persons in the Room

I have watched algorithmically driven background sound produce what I can only describe as a dissociative quality in the people around me: people physicallypresent in the same room as others who are each clearly emotionally oriented toward the music’s world rather than the room’s — toward the feeling the playlist is carrying rather than toward each other. This issue bothers me when the sound environment is shared; it registers to me as unsettling when everyone is wearing headphones and emotively mis-matching as I look around at their body language. The neuroscience supports this as a real rather than metaphorical phenomenon. There is a documented dissociation between the felt emotional experience induced by music and the autonomic physiological responses it generates — the two can be separated depending on which brain structures are engaged, meaning a person can be running emotional and physiological responses calibrated to the music rather than to the actual social context they inhabit, without any conscious awareness that this is happening.

For children, whose prefrontal regulation capacities are still actively maturing through the school years and beyond, this is compounded by a structural limitation: the very neural architecture responsible for suppressing the emotionally compelling pull of a stimulus like music is not yet fully functional. We cannot simply ask children to ignore a sonic environment that is actively engaging their limbic systems and expect the request to land the way it would for a neurologically mature adult. The request asks them to exercise an inhibitory capacity the hardware has not yet finished building.

But the most concerning frontier here is not school-age children. It is the humans in the room with no language yet to communicate what their environment is doing to them.

Research on neonatal and fetal music processing confirms that auditory learning begins before birth — the nervous system is processing and encoding patterns in sound well before the structures capable of conscious reflection are anywhere near functional. A 2019 PNAS study demonstrated that music exposure in preterm infants produces measurable changes in the connectivity of brain networks involving the salience system — the network responsible for detecting what in the environment is important and requires a response. Music shapes the developing architecture of how the brain decides what matters, beginning before most of the rest of the brain is finished building.

This has an obvious positive application: structured, calm, contextually appropriate music in early environments supports healthy salience network development. But the inverse deserves attention that it largely is not receiving. The unstructured, contextually uncalibrated, algorithmically driven sonic environment that now saturates many infant and toddler spaces — background streaming from parents’ and older siblings’ devices, algorithmically generated playlists running continuously, sounds that have no relationship to the sensory and relational environment the baby is actually navigating — is flooding the developing salience network with input that is not organized around the baby’s need to orient to the social world. The music is not telling the developing nervous system this person’s face is what matters, this voice is the safe one, this interaction is what attending to the world will give you. It is competing with all of that, in a nervous system whose filtering architecture has not yet come online.

I want to be careful to frame the next observation as the hypothesis I’m working from rather than established science, because the research has not yet fully caught up to it. My hypothesis, grounded in what I understand of early salience network development and the principles of learned helplessness, is that some portion of what we are now calling pathological neurodivergence — the kind that represents not simply a different neurological wiring but a nervous system in chronic dysregulation — may be partially a product of early sonic environments that trained the developing salience detection system to be overwhelmed rather than engaged. A pre-verbal infant in a continuously overstimulating acoustic environment cannot modulate the incoming flood. They cannot turn it down, move away from it, or make meaning of it in relation to the humans around them. What the research on learned helplessness tells us is that when the gap between an organism’s need to influence its environment and its actual capacity to do so is chronic and unrelieved, the organism eventually stops trying — and that this stoppage has neurological correlates that persist. I believe we owe it to the next generation to take this question seriously before we have another generation of data.

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The Prosoche Practice

Prosoche — Stoic attentiveness, the watchful self-awareness that Epictetus regarded as the foundation of all other Stoic work — applied to our sonic environment does not require austerity or a vow of silence. It requires noticing.

It asks: what is happening in my auditory field right now, and did I choose it? What is it doing to my nervous system, and the nervous systems I’m surrounded by, and is that what I want it to be doing? Is the music in this room serving the moment this room contains, or is it steering all of us somewhere an algorithm decided we should go? And if there are pre-verbal people in this room who cannot yet ask those questions for themselves — who is asking on their behalf?

I am not a technophobe making an argument for silence. I am a technophile who has been paying close attention to what technology does inside my nervous system for more than thirty years, and who has found consistently that the question of who is steering is the most important question to ask about any technology I invite into my life. The tools I choose — including the music I choose intentionally and the careful structure of how I build playlists rather than surrendering to algorithmic curation — serve my chosen direction of travel. The test is whether I am in the driver’s seat or whether I have handed the keys to a system optimized for something other than my flourishing, and the flourishing of the people I share my space with.

What we assent to shapes what we become. That includes what we let play.

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Annotated Bibliography
(because I’m anticipating getting challenged on this by people for whom this is an uncomfortable, inconvenient truthbomb)

Ferreri, L., et al. (2024). “Music’s Dual Role in Emotion Regulation: Network Analysis Reveals Healthy and Unhealthy Patterns of Use.” PMC. PMC11921861.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11921861/

This network analysis identified that the healthy/unhealthy distinction in music use is driven by intentionality rather than content. Unhealthy music use correlated with alexithymia, depression, and anxiety; healthy use correlated with positive affect expression and emotional clarity. Foundational for the intentional/passive distinction argued throughout this essay.

Küssner, M. B., et al. (2019). “Brain Networks Mediating the Influence of Background Music on Working Memory Performance.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN), 14(12), 1441–1452.

https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/14/12/1441/5716608

Demonstrated that background music activates fronto-parietal attentional networks even when the listener is engaged in an unrelated task, and that high-arousal music produces both faster response times and greater distractibility. Relevant to the argument that music competes for regulatory resources whether or not we are consciously attending to it.

Gosselin, N., et al. (2009). “A Neuroanatomical Dissociation for Emotion Induced by Music.” PMC. PMC2656600.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2656600/

Used lesion studies to demonstrate that felt emotional experience and autonomic physiological response to music are neurologically dissociable. Provides the basis for the “dissociative quality” observed in passive listening environments — a person can run physiological responses calibrated to the music rather than their actual context, without conscious awareness.

Marin, M. M., et al. (2021). “Psychological and Physiological Signatures of Music Listening in Different Contexts.” PMC. PMC8147775.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8147775/

Found that identical music produces meaningfully different psychological and physiological outcomes depending on the listener’s baseline state and environmental context. Supports the argument that algorithmically contextless music is not emotionally neutral relative to the actual situation of the listener.

Thoma, M. V., et al. (2016). “Emotional Outcomes of Regulation Strategies Used During Personal Music Listening: A Mobile Experience Sampling Study.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

https://www.academia.edu/21191392

Real-world mobile study finding that intentional, goal-directed music strategies predicted mood enhancement, while passive and rumination-driven use predicted outcomes consistent with emotional avoidance — effective short-term at reducing discomfort, but not building durable regulatory capacity.

Taruffi, L., et al. (2023). “The Impact of Musicking on Emotion Regulation: A Systematic Review.” PMC. PMC11405141.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11405141/

Systematic review confirming the dose-dependent and intention-dependent nature of music’s regulatory effects, and identifying passive consumption as reliably associated with weaker self-regulatory outcomes compared to active or intentional engagement.

Hallam, S., & MacDonald, R. (2016). “What Types of Sound Experiences Enable Children to Learn Best?” MindShift / KQED.

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/46824

Synthesizes research on auditory environments and children’s regulatory capacity, identifying chronic background noise as associated with elevated stress hormones, reduced cognitive clarity, and degraded ability to detect emotionally relevant social signals.

Lordier, L., et al. (2019). “Music in Premature Infants Enhances High-Level Cognitive Brain Networks.” PNAS, 116(24), 12103–12108.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1817536116

Demonstrated that music exposure in preterm infants produces measurable changes in salience network connectivity — specifically the network responsible for detecting environmental importance and organizing a response to it. Establishes that music shapes developing brain architecture at the level of how significance is processed, beginning before conscious reflection is possible.

Nöcker-Ribaupierre, M. (2019). “Neuroprocessing Mechanisms of Music during Fetal and Neonatal Development.” Frontiers in Neuroscience / PMC. PMC6446122.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6446122/

Reviews the literature on fetal and neonatal auditory processing, confirming that musical and acoustic pattern learning begins prenatally and that the developing nervous system is processing and encoding the acoustic environment well before the structures necessary for conscious response are functional.

Morley, I. (2014). “The Evolution of Music and Human Social Capability.” Frontiers in Neuroscience.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2014.00292/full

Examines the evolutionary role of music in human social functioning, supporting the argument that music evolved as a communal, relational, and contextually embedded technology — not as a private one — and that severing it from its original social context represents a significant departure from the conditions under which both music and the nervous systems that receive it developed.

Kennaway, J. (2014). “Historical Perspectives on Music as a Cause of Disease.” PubMed.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25684288/

Documents a two-hundred-year history of medical concern about musical overstimulation, noting that concerns about music’s pathogenic potential predate recording technology and intensified with industrial amplification. Provides historical grounding for the argument that the current moment represents a quantitative escalation of a long-recognized qualitative risk.

Stories are some of the oldest medicines humans carry. Before written language, before formalized religion, before the first healer ground the first herb, there were people sitting together in the dark, turning terror and loss and impossible hope into narrative — and the bodies in that circle were changed by it. Heart rates slowed. Cortisol dropped. The fraying sense that nothing could ever be different got interrupted, if only for the length of a story, by the felt experience that it could go another way.

That is not metaphor. That is neuroscience.

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The Gymnasium of the Spirit

The Stoics used the word askēsis — exercise, training, practice — to describe the work of philosophy. But they knew philosophy needed raw material to work with, situations and scenarios and characters to think through and with. Much of their philosophical literature is, in fact, storytelling: Epictetus recounting the slave who laughed at his master; Marcus Aurelius rehearsing imagined conversations with philosophers long dead; Seneca spinning hypotheticals about ships in storms. They understood that you cannot build virtue in a vacuum. You need a gymnasium for the spirit — a safe space to practice responding well before the actual crisis lands in your lap.​

Well-constructed, well-told stories are those gymnasiums. When we follow a character through an impossible choice and feel the weight of it land in our own chest — that is not passive entertainment. That is rehearsal. We are teaching our nervous systems what it might feel like to hold steady, to choose the harder right thing, to stay in relationship when every instinct says flee. We are, in the language of modern neuroscience, literally thickening the neural pathways for those responses. The story is the training.

But here is what the gymnasium metaphor requires that we say plainly: you cannot fully train in a gymnasium that doesn’t have your body in mind.

The neural rehearsal that fiction enables depends, at its foundation, on identification. Not perfect identification — part of the miracle of story is that we can inhabit perspectives radically unlike our own. But there is a categorical difference between expanding your imaginative range by visiting an unfamiliar life, and searching the entire canon for a single character who shares your embodied reality and finding, repeatedly, that character is either not there, or is there only to make someone else’s story more meaningful.

If you are disabled, the characters who share your body in mainstream fiction are disproportionately there as objects of pity, as inspirational backdrops for non-disabled protagonists, as burdens whose deaths arrive as merciful releases. This is what scholars of disability media have called “inspiration porn” — the reduction of a disabled life to its capacity to motivate the non-disabled. The message, delivered through story after story, is not subtle: your life has value only in proportion to what it teaches someone else. Your experience is not interesting in itself. You are not the protagonist of your own story.

What does that train in a disabled person’s nervous system, consumed across a lifetime? It trains the deep story: I am a supporting character in a world built for someone else. That is not rehabilitation. That is not a gymnasium. That is a hall of mirrors designed to make you smaller, and I’m feeling the urge to smash them with my wheelchair.

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Not All Medicine Works the Same Way

What’s worth pausing over is how differently various forms of storytelling work on us — because they are genuinely different medicines, not just different doses of the same thing.

A story told in a few minutes around a table, or performed live by a skilled storyteller, hits the nervous system fast and directly. The co-regulation is immediate: you’re breathing with the teller, your facial muscles are mirroring theirs, your body is in the room with other bodies who are also receiving the story. It’s closer to acute care — fast-acting, bioavailable, absorbed through the skin of shared presence. Humans have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. It is deeply wired in.​

But the long form — the multi-book epic, the series you live inside for months or years, the story that spans generations of both characters and readers — is a different medicine altogether. It works more like physical rehabilitation: slow, cumulative, restructuring something at a deeper level than a single session can reach. You carry those characters around with you. I read Rachel Aaron’s work (she’s my favorite female novelist) and find myself thinking “how would Julius handle this?” or “what would Bex do?” when a situation arises in my own life. You return to scenes in your memory the way you return to a piece of music, letting it work on you again in a new context. The characters become, in the truest sense, members of your extended cognitive family — part of the village your nervous system consults when navigating hard things. My own family lives this way quite literally. My family is all MCU fans, and I’ve set my notifications on my phone to the character each of them brings to mind: Thor for my eldest, Loki for my second, Captain America for my middlest, Bucky for my fourth, and “Avengers, Assemble” for the family group text thread.

This is remarkable, if you stop and think about it. We are the only species on the planet that does this — that can hand a stranger a story and have them receive, through that story, thousands of hours of accumulated human wisdom about how to be alive. We are, as a species, still learning what this capacity can do. The invention of literacy made it possible to preserve and transmit stories across centuries. The printing press blew those stories open to millions. Audio recording gave us the voice back — the teller’s presence folded into a digital file, available at 2am when you need it. We are still, honestly, in the early days of understanding what this technology of storytelling can do for human flourishing. I find that genuinely wondrous.

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When the Medicine Is Poison

But every powerful medicine has a shadow pharmacology. The problem runs deeper than which roles disabled characters are given — it’s also about who is doing the imagining.

Stories don’t just heal. They also wound, condition, and transmit. The same neural mechanisms that make a story of courage feel like rehearsal for your own courage make a story of threat feel like a threat you personally experienced. This is why witnessing another person’s trauma — through their telling, through film, through literature — can produce genuine traumatic symptoms in the listener. The body does not always distinguish between “this happened to me” and “I watched this happen, repeatedly, in high definition, for thirty minutes every night before bed.”​

This is what is happening with a significant portion of our news media consumption, particularly in its current forms.

The modern news cycle is, structurally, a story machine optimized for activation, not resolution. It delivers threat after threat, rarely with the narrative arc that allows the nervous system to complete its stress response. There is no third act. There is no “and here is how it resolved, and here is what it cost, and here is what we carry forward.” There is just the next threat, and the next, each one priming your system to stay in alarm. Consumed daily, this is not information delivery. It is trauma inoculation in reverse — not building tolerance, but building reactivity. It is teaching your nervous system that there is no resolution, no agency, no moment where the story comes around. Learned helplessness delivered as a subscription service.

This matters enormously if you care about your capacity to act, to connect, to stay in your values under pressure. The storytelling you consume is training your nervous system just as surely as the kind of storytelling that can be healing. The question is: what are you training it for?

The news cycle is one form of this shadow pharmacology. But there is another, quieter form that lives inside the fiction that is supposedly meant for us.

Consider what it means to be a member of a marginalized group whose primary representation in mainstream storytelling comes from people who do not share that experience. An author writing a disabled character from the outside (however well-meaning) is making guesses about our inner life, our priorities, our relationships to our own bodies and limitations. Those guesses are almost always contaminated by the dominant culture’s discomfort with disability, its overestimation of tragedy and underestimation of adaptation, its tendency to center loss over the genuine texture of a life lived differently. When we read that type of character, we are not receiving medicine. We are receiving a portrait painted by someone who finds the character, at some level, sad. And we know it, in our bodies, even when we can’t articulate why the story feels slightly off — why the character doesn’t quite breathe right.

This matters because the story still does its neural work. It still trains something. What it trains, in a disabled reader receiving inspiration-porn narrative after inspiration-porn narrative, is a script for understanding our own experiences that was written by people who have never had it. It teaches us to see ourselves through their discomfort. It is, to use the Stoic framework, a corruption of judgment — except the corruption is being delivered from outside, through the very medium that is supposed to be the gymnasium.

For BIPOC and trans people, I have seen the harm take an additional and particularly vicious form: villain-coding. When the characters who share your identity are disproportionately the threats, the monsters, the unstable dangers to be neutralized — that story also does its neural training. It trains non-BIPOC, non-trans readers to have a felt, rehearsed fear response toward bodies like yours. And it trains BIPOC and trans readers in something perhaps even more insidious: the deep, cellular story that something about me is the problem. Something about how I am made is what threatens order. The gymnasium, in this case, is running a program specifically designed to erode your sense of your own legitimacy.

This is not abstract. This is neuroscience. This is what stories do.

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The Fire That Feeds the Fire

I want to be honest about what feeds my own writing: it is, in no small part, consuming other people’s excellent fiction.

I spent the past several weeks in a ritual I return to whenever a much-anticipated final book is coming: re-listening to the full audiobook run of a series in the weeks of anticipation, so I can arrive at the ending properly saturated in its world. I finished the final book of Rachel Aaron’s Tear Down Heaven series this weekend. What Aaron does — and has done across the Heartstrikers series, and the DFZ universe, and now across these five books — is build worlds where power is real, where the cost of things is never hand-waved, and where found families figure out together how to use that power toward something worth the price. The warmth is earned. The hope is structural, not decorative.

I finished the last book with the specific physical sensation of a nervous system that had just been taken through a full rehabilitation circuit — taxed, challenged, brought to the edge, and returned to me stronger than I started. That is what excellent long-form storytelling can do. That is the medicine.

I noticed, too, the easter eggs Aaron tucked into the ending for those of us who had lived in this world long enough to catch them — the small gifts that say I know you’re here, I’ve been paying attention to you too. That is the covenant between a storyteller and a long-term reader, and it is not a small thing.​ I am trying to put similar gifts into my own writing.

A brief word to future audiobook narrators: if you haven’t listened to Nicholas Cain narrate this series, particularly for the bloopers he includes at the end of the fourth and fifth books, please do. Those bloopers do something quietly important — they pull back the curtain and say: this was made by a human, imperfectly, with joy. They reduce the gap between the polished artifact and the messy process that produced it. For those of us who want to make things but are stopped by the fear of imperfection, that kind of transparency is itself a small act of medicine. It belongs in the pharmacopeia, too.

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Why the Ahmieverse Exists

I am a reader the way some people are gardeners — it feeds something essential, and it makes me want to grow things myself. But I am also a disabled woman, a sociologist, a lay community minister who has sat with a lot of people in a lot of pain, and I have spent a lifetime noticing the ways the medicine cabinet was stocked without people like me in mind.

Not just absent — though that absence itself matters. But actively, repeatedly stocked with stories that told people like me what we were: pitiable, inspirational only in our tragedy, secondary characters in someone else’s plot, or (especially for those who happened to be Black or brown or trans) the threat. I know the particular exhaustion of having to mentally edit every narrative you consume, translating it past its assumptions to get to the part that might actually nourish you. That translation work is real labor, and it costs something, and it means you are never quite fully in the story the way you need to be for the deepest medicine to work.

Every book that does its job well — that actually sees its characters from the inside, with the kind of truth that can only come from proximity — is a bonfire that calls me back to my own work. The Ahmieverse exists because I needed stories that would work on my nervous system without requiring me to do the translation first. And because I knew I was not the only one who needed them.

So I am trying to become a pharmacist in this ancient apothecary. Not because things are bad right now (though they are), but because this has always been what stories are for. I want to create and share characters whose moments of courage and solidarity and costly love become part of the reader’s own repertoire for how to be fully alive. I want to contribute to the part of the pharmacopeia that has few serious side effects and potentiates everything else: connection, meaning, courage, the felt sense that the story could go another way.

There will probably be more essays unpacking what the Ahmieverse is and how it fits together. Some essays here will arrive after long delays, especially when my muses have become particularly noisy or my family has given me the grace of space to create fiction (I have honed the skill of writing non-fiction amidst constant interruptions — it’s how I made it through grad school starting with two kids and finishing with four). For now, the simplest version is: I am building the stories I needed, for the people who need them, because the village apothecary has a shelf that could use more stocking.

Refills available. Bloopers included.

There is no path to true mastery or authentic greatness that does not include a lot of boring, grinding slog time doing crappy tasks you didn’t choose and don’t want to do. Not some of the time. Not occasionally. A lot of the time, as in at least 95% (Edison famously said 99%) is the gross, sweaty grind level stuff. The grind levels are not an unfortunate detour on the way to the good stuff. They are the good stuff, working on you from the inside out while you’re too busy complaining about them to notice.

I know this is not what anyone wants to hear. The culture we’ve built around talent and passion hasn’t helped. We’ve collectively spun a story — sold most aggressively to young people, though plenty of adults have bought it too — that if something is genuinely hard, relentlessly boring, or consistently unpleasant, it must mean you’re on the wrong path. That the right path will feel like flow, like calling, like things clicking effortlessly into place.

That story is a lie, and it is doing measurable harm — and neuroscience can tell us exactly why.

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What Your Brain Is Actually Doing During the Grind

Here is what is happening inside your skull when you drag yourself through a task you didn’t choose and don’t want to do: you are literally rewiring yourself.

Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reorganize its own structure in response to experience — does not operate on inspiration. It operates on repetition. Every time you work through a difficult, tedious, or uncomfortable task, you are laying down and reinforcing neural pathways. The more you repeat a behavior, the more myelinated those pathways become — myelin being the insulating sheath that makes neural signals faster and more efficient. This is the biological substrate of what we call skill. What we call mastery. What we call character.

This is why the grind levels are not optional. You cannot think your way to the neural architecture that difficult repeated action builds. You cannot watch someone else do the hard thing and absorb their myelin. The only way to wire yourself for capability is to do the work, repeatedly, over time, including and especially when it is boring and unpleasant. The boss battles require a nervous system that has been tempered by the grind — one that can access hard-won capability quickly, automatically, without burning through all your cognitive resources just to function under pressure. You are not grinding toward the boss battle. You are grinding into the person who can survive it.

The Stoics understood this without the vocabulary of neuroscience. Their term was praxis — repeated right action as the mechanism of virtue. Marcus Aurelius didn’t become one of history’s most admired leaders because governing a vast empire felt effortless and inspiring. He became that person because he kept choosing discipline over comfort, duty over preference, presence over escape, day after grinding day. Epictetus built his philosophical framework while literally enslaved, doing work that was not his choice, because he understood that his inner life — his capacity to respond rather than merely react — was built precisely in that resistance. The grind doesn’t interrupt the hero’s journey. The grind is the hero’s journey, most of the time.

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The Mantra, the Beads, and the Chain from Thought to Destiny

I repeat the following to my sons so often that they could probably recite it in their sleep:

Guard your thoughts, they become your words.
Guard your words, they become your actions.
Guard your actions, they become your habits.
Guard your habits, they become your character.
Guard your character, it becomes your destiny.

This is the Stoic discipline of prosoche — self-attention, the watchful turning of awareness toward what we are rehearsing — translated into a form a teenager can actually hear. And it is not merely philosophy. Every repeated thought lays down or reinforces a neural pathway. Every repeated action grooves a habit deeper into the architecture of the self. Over time, the network of those habits becomes character. This is not metaphor. It is neuroscience.

I’ve designed 3D-printed beads with the first letter of each of those words and arrows pointing to the next one, to turn into bracelets. My firstborn is now wearing the first one I made — three ropes of crocheted black cotton binding blue-glow-in-the-dark square beads with the letters painted in gold nail polish. Every time he looks at his wrist, he is looking at a map of how human beings actually change. I didn’t wake up one day just knowing how to crochet or do 3D design; those were skills I spent countless hours grinding until they became muscle memory, and now my child wears the results.

Every one-off practice is a practice of a pattern. Deciding whether it’s a pattern worth continuing is what is in our control. Momentum generates motivation; relying on mood is self-sabotage. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it is the only thing that makes progress. Sometimes all we can manage is to not make a bad day worse — and that is enough.

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Two Failure Modes, Same Outcome

The neuroplasticity argument runs into two very different cultural obstacles, and it’s worth naming both of them clearly because they look nothing alike from the outside.

The first is a disadvantaged context: an environment with so little stability, safety, or agency that the nervous system is perpetually in threat-response mode. When your cognitive and emotional resources are constantly being consumed by navigating unpredictable environments — poverty, chaos, chronic stress, violence — there is genuinely less capacity available for the sustained focus that grind-level work requires. This is not a character failure. It is a neurological reality. The grind levels become exponentially harder when your environment is actively working against your ability to concentrate, plan, and persist. This matters enormously for how we structure support for young people in those contexts, and it is a separate conversation we need to be having.

The second failure mode is, paradoxically, the opposite situation: a life so abundantly cushioned that the grind levels never become necessary. When a young person has enough resources to hire out every unpleasant task — laundry, cooking, administrative hassle — and enough options to fill every moment of discomfort with a more pleasant alternative, and enough social infrastructure to crowdsource solutions to problems that would otherwise require them to develop skills — the grind levels don’t disappear; they just become avoidable. And the supercomputers in our pockets have made them more avoidable than at any point in human history, with an endless scroll of pleasant distraction always one thumb-swipe away.

The paradox of choice described by psychologist Barry Schwartz amplifies this. When there are always other options — always something more interesting, more immediately rewarding, more comfortable available — the psychological cost of staying with something difficult goes up. The grind levels feel more optional because, logistically, they kind of are.

Except that the neural pathways don’t care about logistics. The myelin doesn’t accumulate because you could have done the hard thing. It accumulates because you actually did the hard thing.

This, I think, is why Commodus did not turn out like his father.

Marcus Aurelius is one of the most remarkable human beings in recorded history: a man handed near-unlimited power who spent his private journals interrogating his own failures and reminding himself to be better. His only son to survive to adulthood (with more than half of his siblings not making it past childhood), Commodus is remembered for gladiatorial vanity and the accelerating collapse of everything his father built. The difference was not genetic. It was, in large part, structural. Marcus was raised with challenge, with expectation, with the requirement to earn his capabilities. Commodus was raised with every cheat code available, quite likely because of the profound, well-justified fear his parents had that he would not survive to be his father’s successor. By the time the boss battles arrived, he had none of the neural architecture required to meet the challenges — because no one had been authentically kind enough to him to get him intrinsically motivated to grind for it.

The siren song of the cheat codes is real. It is compelling. It promises all the rewards without the slog. And it produces, reliably, adults who are reactive rather than responsive — NPCs in their own stories, waiting for external cues rather than driving their own direction.

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The Part Where I Admit This Is My Grind Level Too

One of my kids is actively resisting this truth right now. I’m not going to detail the specifics, or even disclose which of my five it is, because his story is his to tell (and, honestly, by the time this posts one of the others will probably do the same behavior pattern anyway and even my sons might not be sure which one I’m writing about here) — but the shape of it will be recognizable to many parents: a capable, intelligent young person who has hit a grind level and is exerting enormous creative energy trying to route around it rather than push himself through it. Who is, in various mostly subconscious ways, angling for some kind of rescue or cheat code.

I’m not providing the rescue, and that is severely annoying him.

Every time, even more than 21 years into this task, it is harder than I expect it to be — which means it is, in fact, my own grind level.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about holding this kind of boundary: it requires that you hold two things in tension simultaneously. You have to see clearly who your child actually is right now — struggling, frustrated, maybe making choices you find genuinely baffling in ways that tempt you to smack your head against your desk or wall or at least facepalm for prolonged periods — while simultaneously holding with equal clarity the vision of who you know they are capable of becoming.

The version of my son I know he can grow into is worthy of the kindness and compassion of being challenged. Rescuing him from the grind level he’s on right now would not be love. It would be a failure of imagination about who he actually, at his core, is.

When I became a parent, I came to a clarifying realization about what success in this whole endeavor would actually feel like to me: I wanted to raise people I would want in my closest circle of chosen connections, independent of the luck of being related to them. People I would seek out. People whose character I would admire and whose company I would actively choose.

Sometimes, in their adolescent immaturity, my kids resent the challenges I am expecting them to learn to manage while I watch nearby, tending to the safety net as best as I am able. Occasionally, one of them will threaten to go no-contact once they can independently support themselves. When that happens, I find I am able to be genuinely at peace — because I would not want someone in my closest social connections who would go no-contact with someone just because that person challenged them uncomfortably to grow into their own capability.

That’s the Commodus path.

That’s the cheat code masquerading as self-determination.

I love my kids too much to hand them that paradox.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, whose work on raising capable adults has been a genuine lantern in the dark for me, puts it plainly: when we smooth every obstacle from our children’s paths, we don’t protect them. We deprive them. We send them into adult life having never developed the internal architecture that difficulty builds — the frustration tolerance, the capacity for delayed gratification, the bone-deep knowledge that they can endure hard things and come out intact. Angela Duckworth’s research on grit confirms it from another angle: the variable that most reliably predicts high achievement across domains is the capacity to persist through difficulty, boredom, and repeated failure. Not talent. Not inspiration. Persistence.

So I’m on my own grind level right now: staying present to someone I love while he works through something hard, without flinching, without fixing, without making his difficulty about my feelings. It is not the boss battle. But it is absolutely the work that will determine whether I’m ready for what comes next.

The grind levels are the point. For both of us.

It’s still too cluttered to show in a photo on the public internet, so here’s a picture of the part of my “Sacred Bookcase” next to my desk - this is where my eyes land when I look up and to the left in thought:

I’m also posting after a stretch of Substack silence for the same reasons as my desk looking like FEMA needed calling in, as well as my fiction muses have been particularly loud of late — partly connected to the Storytelling As Medicine thread I started pulling in my February 1st “Flipping Tables” post, and partly because I finally built a wiki for the fictional universe gestating in my brain for more than twenty years. I kept my writing practice alive in my early twenties through fanfiction, and the wiki serves a similar function: a space where other writers can invite my characters on a playdate, and where the world survives me if I die before the novels are released. I work under a strong memento mori orientation.

Last weekend I was at Cleveland ConCoction — the only convention my family reliably attends given my stamina and accessibility needs — and I logged into the previous Friday session from the hotel room on genuinely terrible wifi, because these meetings have become an essential weekly anchor. ConCoction is a too-brief micro-village for my nervous system: three days of exactly the kind of people I want to be around, gone before the nourishment fully settles. I’m already turning over the idea of creating something intentionally smaller during a different part of the year for people who want more of that particular quality of contact.

All of which is context for what this post is actually about: what it means to have people — a real, felt, neurological sense of people — in a world that makes it structurally difficult to sustain that.

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The Container Matt Built

For more than six months I have been participating in the support group run by Matthew Fray — author of This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships — and what has happened in that time is this: my nervous system has stopped categorizing these people as “internet strangers.” At this point, I would show up for the members of this group the way I’d show up for extended kin. That is not a casual statement from someone who has spent more than a decade developing the Village Deficit Disorder framework.

I want to name something Matt will likely be uncomfortable reading: he quite clearly struggles with imposter syndrome, and it is one of the more poignant ironies I observe, because what he has built is genuinely rare. His credibility was earned through the willingness to excavate his own divorce with radical honesty and publish the findings in a book that doesn’t protect his ego. That kind of self-testimony is what makes it possible for others to be honest in the space he holds. You cannot manufacture that quality. Matt brings it, and then apparently spends energy doubting that it counts.

It counts.

Village Deficit Disorder, as I’ve been developing the concept for more than a decade, describes what happens to human nervous systems — particularly those with more vulnerable neurological profiles, lower sensory gating, higher baseline need for co-regulation — when chronically deprived of the wrap-around witnessing and distributed cognition that ancestral villages provided as a baseline condition of human life. We are not built for the radical atomization of late-stage capitalist WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) culture. Modern WEIRD conditions render us all in near-constant depletion — not occasionally, but structurally.

An online Zoom group should be, by my own theoretical account, a thin substitute. In one real sense it is: I cannot show up at someone’s door, have my children scoop up their children, wash their dishes, and tidy their house while I take the other depleted parent out to help recharge them in whatever way works for both of us. When a mother in the group described barely carving out time to be the person she wants to be, because her toddler has escaped the house repeatedly, my whole body tightened with the vicarious fear of all the cars, the bodies of water, the open stairwells that a functional village would cover with collective, watchful eyes.

And yet my nervous system has genuinely encoded these people as kin. What Matt has built functions as a neurological village analog: not the full thing, but substantive enough that the brain stops filing it under “helpful strangers online.” A weekly gathering that consistently provides attunement, honest witnessing, and grace extended even to the people who aren’t in the real or virtual room is a genuine, partial mitigation of a real structural deficit. I am becoming a believer — from lived experience, not just theory — that effectively facilitated support groups fill relational needs that professional therapy, for structural reasons, cannot fill. Therapy is boundaried in ways that prevent it from functioning as village. Your therapist doesn’t notice you didn’t text back for three days and reach out because they’re worried. The people in Matt’s group do.

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“Aha” Is a Map, Not a Road

A recurring theme in yesterday’s session was the gap between understanding something and changing it. Someone listens to a podcast, lands on a crucial insight, feels the ground shift — and then, in real-time interaction under stress, responds exactly as they always have.

I keep returning to thinking of this through a stroke rehabilitation metaphor: changing a deeply entrenched relational pattern is more like recovering from a stroke than having a realization. A deeply ingrained interpersonal habit is a neural superhighway. Insight gives you the map; it doesn’t rebuild the road — it doesn’t even put up a particularly noticeable “detour recommended” sign for the next time you’re speeding down the familiar pathway under stress and distraction.

Which is also why written communication creates a false sense of progress that real-time interaction quickly exposes. It is much easier to commit to change in writing, where you can edit before sending, than to enact that same change when your nervous system is flooded and the old route is the fastest one available. Written commitment can coexist with completely unreconstructed in-person reactivity — and often does. This is not insincerity. Sincerity and neural rewiring operate on different timescales, and conflating them is one of the ways people give up on each other too soon, or trust too quickly, depending on which side of the dynamic they’re standing on.

The daily, incremental work of actually rebuilding the road is what Terry Real calls the shift from “you versus me” into “we” — and his book Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship is less a blueprint than a mirror, one my husband and I held up together by listening to that audiobook between Mother’s and Father’s Days last year. Real’s argument is that hyper-individualist culture trains this corrosive positioning into us so early and so thoroughly that dismantling it isn’t a conversation you have once; it’s a daily, embodied rehearsal with no set performance schedule.

My own marriage, like countless others, very nearly did not survive the compounded weight of pandemic stress, parenting, elder care, and other domestic upheaval. Listening to Us together was one thread in the repair — but the deeper shift began a few months before when I gave my husband a hardback copy of Tasha Eurich’s Shatterproof: How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos on release day. I’d pre-ordered it the moment I saw it coming, having gotten so much from her earlier Insight that I wanted this one in my hands immediately. The physical copy now holds a place of honor on my Sacred Bookcase — on the shelf reserved for family momentos and autographed books directly relevant to the work I’m doing, in my upper-left peripheral vision as I write this, on a shelf that is not permitted to get randomly cluttered. What cracked something open in our household that other approaches hadn’t reached was her concept of the resilience ceiling: the point at which “just keep going” stops working, not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve genuinely hit the structural limit of what sheer endurance can carry.

Listening to just the right podcast as we’re banging our heads against our resilience ceiling might be the start of closing high-speed lanes on our shoddily constructed interpersonal neural highway system, but it’s not an automatic or instantaneous process.

Projection Is Not Empathy

During the same session, a male participant articulated something with real precision: he realized he had been practicing what he called “putting my head on someone else’s body” — imagining another person’s experience by transplanting his own capacities and history into their situation rather than genuinely attending to theirs. He recognized, out loud, that this was not empathy. It was projection wearing empathy’s clothes.

This distinction matters enormously to me as a Disabled person. I’ve been adapting to chronic pain since the tail end of elementary school. The abled people who project misery onto my situation are imagining themselves — people with long histories of full physical agency — suddenly acquiring my limitations. That would involve genuine grief for them. But I never had an unimpaired adulthood to lose. This is simply my normal. The cognitive dissonance my authentic happiness produces in others is a perfect illustration of how projective “empathy” becomes erasure — centering the observer’s nervous system rather than the other person’s actual experience.

Intersectional Stoicism asks for something more rigorous: holding our own framework in check long enough to actually hear someone else’s reality. This does not mean self-erasure. Boundaried empathy requires that we do think of ourselves — with awareness of how that lands for the other, while honoring our own core needs (which is what Tasha went into in her prior book, Insight). Without healthy limits, empathy devolves into what psychologist Craig Malkin, in his book Rethinking Narcissism, calls echoism: the self-erasing survival strategy at the opposite pole from narcissism. Echoism looks like generosity from the outside; it is often fear of abandonment from the inside. By contrast, Stoic virtue is chosen, not compelled — self-erasure from fear is the nervous system in survival mode wearing virtue’s face.

Relatedly, I’ve been following Brené Brown’s work for longer than some of my children have been alive. Her shame gremlins — the internal voice feeding us false testimony about our worth and others’ intentions — is a concept I return to constantly. In Matt’s group we don’t just notice our own gremlins privately; we name them out loud, and we call them out for each other when they’re clearly constructing a harsher interpretation than the evidence warrants. Crucially, we extend that grace to the absent members of participants’ families too. The people not in the room are not flattened into villains to validate whoever is present. We hold them as full humans whose gremlins are also probably lying to them. That discipline — holding grace for the absent while fully supporting the present — is, I think, what makes this group function as a village rather than a sophisticated echo chamber.

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Why I Keep Showing Up

I started attending Matt’s group looking for, and to, support the changes my husband was to make within himself; he’d been attending for about a month before I showed up for the first time, and I had a biweekly schedule conflict for the first few months of my attendance. Six months into showing up weekly, I show up because these are my people — in the neurological sense of that phrase, not just the affectionate one. Logging in from a hotel room on terrible wifi last weekend rather than skipping was not because it felt like an obligation. That was attachment in action.

The group has not solved Village Deficit Disorder. Not even close. Nothing about being human in late-stage capitalism solves it. But it has, with a consistency I continue to find genuinely surprising, partially filled a structural gap in my relational ecosystem — one I had largely stopped expecting to be filled.

What makes it work is Matt, and the specific quality of what he brings: not credentials, but the credibility of someone who looked at his own wreckage honestly and built a room where others could do the same. That room has become, for a meaningful number of people including me, a place where the nervous system rests slightly differently than it does everywhere else. That is the village function. Partial, screen-mediated, not enough on its own — and real.

It deserves to be named as such.

If you’re reading this and thinking, I never had anything like those early rungs, you’re not alone. I didn’t either. Rather than overloading this essay, I’ve written a separate companion piece on how to rebuild missing foundations in adulthood and how I’ve tried to do that for myself and my sons in the context of modern life. If you start to feel activated or adrift while reading this piece, you can step into something more practical and anchoring by switching to that article. It’s called “Rebuilding the Ladder When You Started on Bare Rock” and I posted it a few minutes before posting this one.

What esteem actually means

Esteem comes from Latin aestimare (also written existimare), meaning to value, to appraise, to judge the worth of something after consideration. It’s also the root of the word estimate. Embedded in it is the idea of careful judgment, not vague positive feeling.

That matters. It means:

• Esteem is not just liking something; it is evaluating its worth.

• Self‑esteem is, at root, self‑appraisal — how we estimate our own worth based on what we know of ourselves.

Honest self‑appraisal depends on evidence. We can only appraise what we have actually seen ourselves do: do I show up, do I repair, do I persist, do I act with integrity when it’s hard?

If I rarely see myself behaving in trustworthy, dependable, disciplined ways, there are two paths:

• I appraise myself accurately and end up with low self‑esteem.

• Or I patch over the gap with fantasy and defensiveness and end up with brittle, narcissistic “self‑esteem”.

The self‑esteem movement tried to skip the evidence and go straight to the verdict, then is surprised when our inner judges don’t render the convictions expected. (Hmmm, perhaps that metaphor is a little messy - I was watching my middle son’s Mock Trial competition while starting to compose this!)

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The first rung: inherent worth as lived experience

Underneath all the later rungs sits something even more basic: being treated as inherently worthy.

Discipline costs time, energy, sleep, comfort, and convenience. Adults only pay that cost for children they believe are worth the effort. So the true first rung of the ladder is not “teach kids discipline”; it is:

1. Children are treated as inherently worthy of effort and sacrifice by a community.

Many psychological theories quietly assumed this. The early attachment theorists, and later many self‑esteem advocates, treated “babies are valuable” as a universal human given. They rarely asked: which babies, in which families, under what conditions? They also did not spend much time in low‑cost childcare rooms with high turnover, or in households where poverty, racism, disability, and chronic stress make any extra effort feel impossible. The initial research was also conducted in a time when extended families were much more available to support caregiving.

In practice, especially in WEIRD (Wester, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies like the contemporary United States, we do not treat all babies and young children as inherently worthy:

• Other people’s children are framed as private responsibility, public nuisance, or budget line items.

• Some parents, particularly those under intense stress and isolation, struggle to consistently treat their own children as worth sacrificing comfort or pleasure.

• Infants in cheap care settings often experience adults as hurried, inconsistent, and emotionally unavailable — not because those adults don’t care, but because the structure makes attuned responsiveness nearly impossible.

Before children have language, they are learning something profound: am I worth the trouble? If the answer, in practice, is often no, that becomes the emotional background music for everything that follows.

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The second rung: trustworthiness as something modeled, not preached

If a child is consistently treated as worth the effort, a second layer becomes possible:

2. Multiple adults model trustworthiness and dependability in ordinary life.

Children learn trustworthiness by being on the receiving end of it:

• Adults doing what they say they’ll do.

• Adults returning when they say they’ll return.

• Adults regulating themselves instead of exploding or disappearing.

• Adults repairing when they’ve harmed.

• Adults cooperating with one another in visible, predictable patterns.

You do not infer what trustworthiness feels like if no one ever behaves that way toward you. Abstract lectures about “responsibility” don’t substitute for lived experience. The template for being reliable is built from embodied memories of others reliably showing up.

Intersectionally, this is not evenly distributed:

• Underpaid, overstretched caregivers in institutional childcare cannot be reliably present to each child; ratios and employee turnover make disruptions to attachment constant.

• Parents juggling multiple jobs, discrimination, or unsafe housing may desperately want to be dependable, but crisis after crisis keeps tearing them away.

• Adults themselves are often living in chronic depletion from solo self‑regulation, with little co‑regulation or rest.

Children raised in these conditions are not simply “undisciplined.” They have lacked living examples of what dependable adulthood looks and feels like.

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The third rung: co‑regulation and discipline from the village

If children are treated as inherently worthy and see trustworthy adults around them, then a third rung becomes available:

3. Children receive consistent co‑regulation and discipline from those adults.

Co‑regulation is what happens when a more mature nervous system helps a less mature (or equally mature, but distressed) one calm down, make sense of experience, and find a path through big feelings and impulses. Discipline, in its original sense, shares a root with disciple and disciplina – instruction, training, learning. It is structured guidance that helps children:

• learn what to do with their impulses

• practice tolerating frustration and delay

• internalize patterns of this is how we behave when we care about each other

Historically, this was never the job of one exhausted adult in an isolated dwelling — that was the recipe for a very short life expectancy in historical contexts. Our bodies are wired expecting a whole network of support from our first breath until our last.

In ancestral, village‑like settings, children were immersed in:

• many adults carrying out daily tasks reliably, in full view of the children

• older children and teens helping care for younger ones

• grandparents, aunts, neighbors, and unrelated community members who corrected, soothed, and redirected kids as part of daily life

It took a village of nervous systems to supply enough co‑regulation and discipline for all the children.

Modern WEIRD life expects two, or even one, constantly depleted adult to provide all of this in isolation, in a culture that tells everyone else to mind your own business. The result is predictable: parents living in chronic depletion and guilt, and children not getting the quantity or quality of co‑regulation their developing brains actually require.

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The fourth rung: neuroplastic self‑discipline

When those earlier rungs are at least partially in place, neurobiology begins to work in our favor:

4. These experiences drive neuroplastic changes that support self‑regulation and self‑discipline.

The brain wires itself based on experience. Repeated cycles of:

• being soothed, rather than abandoned

• being guided, rather than shamed

• being given structure, instead of enduring chaos

strengthen the neural circuits for impulse control, planning, and emotional balance. Discipline development is neuroplasticity in action. Children literally build the brain structures that make self‑discipline possible through experiences of being disciplined, kindly and consistently, by others.

Where this is missing, telling a child to “just use self‑control” is like telling a kindergartener to perform advanced calculus, when they can’t even recognize numbers or letters reliably.

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The fifth rung: self‑trust

Only after those layers comes the internal shift:

5. Self‑discipline slowly builds self‑trust.

Self‑trust is the quiet conviction: when I say I’ll do something, I probably will. It grows from small, repeated experiences:

• getting up when the alarm rings

• finishing tasks that matter

• resisting certain impulses because we care about longer‑term goods

• sticking with routines even when no one is watching

We attempt these behaviors because someone, somewhere, once did them for us and with us, and taught us that this is what caring people do. If no one ever modeled steady, dependable behavior toward us, asking us to be steady and dependable toward ourselves can feel alien or impossible.

Habitual acting on impulse, which erodes self‑trust, is often not a simple moral failure. It is the nervous system’s emergency workaround when it has not been adequately held, modeled, and supported.

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The sixth rung: confidence – acting with faith in oneself

If self‑trust takes root, we reach:

6. Self‑trust supports confidence – acting with faith in oneself.

Confidence comes from Latin confidere: con (with) + fidere (to trust, to have faith). To act with confidence is literally to act with trust, with faith. Not blind bravado, but a grounded sense that:

• I have faced challenges before.

• I have evidence that I can persist.

• Even if things go wrong, I can survive it and learn.

Confidence is not “I am exceptional because someone told me so.” It is “I have enough lived proof of my own dependability to act with faith in myself now.”

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The seventh rung: self‑esteem as accurate self‑appraisal

Finally, at the top of this ladder:

7. Confidence supports self‑esteem — accurate, appreciative self‑appraisal.

Now the etymology of esteem makes sense. Self‑esteem becomes a careful valuation of one’s own character and contributions, grounded in real experience. Healthy self‑esteem sounds like:

• I have strengths and weaknesses.

• I’ve become more reliable over time.

• I can trust myself more than I used to.

• I matter, and I act like I matter – to myself and to others.

The self‑esteem movement tried to start here. It tried to hand children an evaluation without giving them the experiences that make such evaluation coherent.

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Where early theorists and ancient Stoics missed the foundations

Early attachment and self‑esteem theorists made at least two big mistakes:

• They treated inherent worth as a universal psychological given, rather than something that is either embodied or denied through practice.

• They generalized from relatively privileged, often white (or at least most likely members of the dominant culture in the context), research samples and assumed those conditions extended across class, race, migration status, disability, and care settings.

They did not look closely enough at the infants in overcrowded age-segregated childcare centers, the children in precarious housing, or the babies who — from birth — were treated as burdens rather than investments.

The ancient Stoics also missed a foundational layer. Their schools largely worked with young men whose lives already contained:

• enough safety and nourishment to survive to adolescence

• enough caregiving (mostly from women, servants, and enslaved people) to be able to sit in philosophical conversation instead of scrambling for survival

By the time a young man showed up at a Stoic school, much had already been poured into his nervous system and sense of self. Stoic teachers focused on shaping character through askesis – deliberate practice in perception, judgment, and action – but took the earlier layers for granted. Epictetus is, perhaps, the counter-example here (and that’s probably why I feel so much kinship with him).

They did not systematically ask what happens when:

• a child was never treated as inherently worthy

• no one reliable ever modeled dependability

• indulgence, neglect, or fear saturated the early years

Rome’s history offers some answers. Young nobles raised with indulgence instead of grounded, dependable discipline give us figures like Nero and Commodus. Philosophical teaching laid on top of that early formation may be too little, too late.

Today, we repeat a similar pattern when we try to “teach resilience” or “do Stoicism” with adolescents and adults whose foundations were never properly laid, while still leaving them in contexts of isolation, scarcity, and lack of communal support.

Intersectional Stoicism has to do something different: name and honor the invisible caregivers whose labor makes philosophical development possible; recognize that many modern adults are trying to practice Stoicism without the early rungs; and explicitly rebuild co‑regulation, communal support, and experienced worth as prerequisites, not luxuries.

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Rebuilding the ladder together

Putting it all together, the developmental path looks like this:

1. Children are treated as inherently worthy of effort and sacrifice by a community.

2. Multiple adults model trustworthiness and dependability in ordinary life.

3. Children receive consistent co‑regulation and discipline from those adults.

4. These experiences drive neuroplastic changes that support self‑regulation and self‑discipline.

5. Self‑discipline slowly builds self‑trust.

6. Self‑trust supports confidence – acting with faith in oneself.

7. Confidence supports self‑esteem – accurate, appreciative self‑appraisal.

The self‑esteem movement started at step 6 or 7 (sorry for invoking that brainrot meme!!!) while our culture was actively eroding steps 1 through 3. No amount of praise can substitute for a childhood in which no one had time or the necessary social support to prove, by their actions, that you were worth the trouble.

If you were lucky enough to have most of those rungs, this ladder may simply describe what you’ve taken for granted. If you weren’t, and this stirred pain or a sense of impossibility, there is more to say. The companion piece Rebuilding the Ladder When You Started on Bare Rock is for you: it’s about how to lay missing foundations later in life, and how Stoic practice can serve as a tool for that reconstruction rather than another way to blame yourself.

This one is for those of us who read that ladder and thought: I didn’t get those early rungs at all. What now?

My own missing rungs

I did not grow up with the full ladder.

My parents were deeply invested in their own pleasures and preferences. They divorced when I was two. My mother moved us away from the little micro‑village I was born into in Parma, Ohio — retiree neighbors who quietly provided consistency and care when I wasn’t in under‑staffed, lowest-possible‑cost childcare — and took me to Colorado the summer before first grade.

I became a latch‑key kid at seven. My mother couldn’t afford both rent and after‑care, so I was home alone after school for several hours each day while she worked a full-time job, and sometimes also while she worked at an additional part-time job. What rescued me from being swallowed whole by that isolation were other people’s families: PTA moms at my elementary school, as well as parents of friends who, once they realized I spent afternoons alone, started inviting me over regularly. They did this instead of calling it “neglect” and handing us over to a system that might have been even worse.

Those borrowed households showed me that family life could be different. They became my templates for parenting later.

There were more ruptures. A paternal half‑brother and half-sister I barely got to know due to moving to Colorado shortly after the brother was born. A 12-years-younger half‑brother that resulted in my needing to care for our mother as her labor attendant, and then as his full-time babysitter as soon as school let out when he was 6 weeks old. A return to Parma that severed my contact with the adults who had been consistently present for me for the middle six years of my childhood. A neighborhood, blocks away from where I started my life, that was less village‑like than the Parma we had left. Elderly neighbors across the street raising grandchildren because their own daughter put out cigarettes on their arms as “discipline.” My own disability and health issues layered on top of relational instability from being repeatedly uprooted.

In my teens and early adulthood, I had to assemble something like secure attachment for myself, in a family and a society that repeatedly tried to tell me I, in my disabled female body, was not worth the effort. It was in this time that I started practicing Stoicism, and a few years later learned about Attachment Theory in my undergraduate psychology courses. I began building fragile, splintery rungs to fit into the slots that had been empty spots on the vertical rails of the ladder life provisioned me. Later, I tried to supply sturdy rungs for my own sons, shaped with little experience of how to form them, inside a modern world that strains every adult’s nervous system’s rung to breaking points on the daily.

If any of that feels familiar, this essay is for you.

The key idea is this: the ladder is developmental, not strictly chronological. You can lay missing rungs later. It is harder to do, and they’re not as sturdy — but it’s not impossible.

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1. Re‑grounding in inherent worth (when no one taught you that)

If no one consistently treated you as worth the effort, you will not suddenly feel inherently worthy because someone says the words. Instead, you can begin to gather new evidence:

• Remember and name the exceptions. Who, if anyone, treated you like you mattered? A teacher, a neighbor, a friend’s parent, a librarian, a coach, an online community? What exactly did they do? Let your nervous system register: some people did see me as worth effort, even when others did not.

• Practice micro‑acts of self‑worth. Choose tiny actions that slightly inconvenience you in your own favor: drinking water before coffee, eating something nourishing, making a medical appointment you need, turning off a screen ten minutes earlier than usual. Each small choice says: I am worth a little effort.

• Place yourself in contact with communities where mutual care is the norm. That might be a congregation, a support group, a hobby space, or a small online circle. For me, these were Unitarian Universalist spaces, and the Society for Creative Anachronism — try the former if you’ve not had too much religious trauma to be in any “faith-based” spaces, the later might be a better option if you need things to be entirely secular, though do be warned that there are “behind the curtain” issues that may be trauma-triggers. You’re looking for places where people check on each other, remember each other’s lives, and follow through. If neither of those options work for you, and you’re stumped thinking of where to go, feel free to drop me a message to try to figure out options. If you’re reading this, I consider you worthy of that kind of attention. If this was forwarded to you, that person also considers you worthy.

You are not trying to conjure a feeling from nowhere. You are letting a trickle of new experiences slowly carve a different channel.

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2. Finding models of trustworthiness now

If you didn’t grow up around dependable adults, you can start studying them now:

• Scan your current world for people who tend to do what they say: a coworker who meets deadlines, a friend who actually calls when they say they will, a neighbor who always returns what they borrow. Watch how they do it. Do they plan ahead? Do they say “no” more often than you do? How do they respond when they slip?

• Seek “virtual elders.” Memoirs, long interviews, and essays from people whose character you respect can function as models when your offline world is thin. Perhaps this Substack is your starting point — I’ve got links to others I recommend, and I’m working on adding “for further learning” sections to my articles to help guide people to more sources of motivation (not just inspiration). Focus on how they make decisions, how they handle their own limits, how they repair after mistakes.

• If you have access to even one older adult with a reasonably steady presence, treat them as an informal teacher. Ask small questions like, how do you decide what to commit to? or what do you do when you really don’t feel like following through? Some of my most cherished relationships with elders in my communities have started from my letting them know that I admired their way of showing up in the world.

You can’t retroactively give yourself dependable parents. But you can surround your nervous system with more examples of steadiness than it had before.

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3. Building micro‑villages and shared nervous‑system labor

We cannot recreate an ancestral village at will, just because we crave it so deeply. We can build micro‑villages – small, intentional webs of mutual support.

• Intentionally trade co‑regulation with peers. Instead of only venting, make regular check‑ins with one or two friends where part of the purpose is to help each other calm down, remember your values, and decide on one or two next steps.

• Lower the bar for who counts as a “villager.” A neighbor who reliably smiles and talks with you; another parent you swap short childcare favors with; a relative who reads a bedtime story over video chat; a group text where you can say “today was hard” and get three compassionate responses – these all help distribute the nervous‑system work.

• If you are parenting, name your limits with your kids in age‑appropriate ways: I love you and I’m very tired right now. I need ten minutes to calm my body so I can be the kind of parent you deserve. This honesty is itself a model of regulated, trustworthy behavior.

It will not match the richness of a true village. But it is still real, it is available now while we rebuild the true villages, and your body will feel the difference over time.

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4. Using deliberate practice and neuroplasticity

As an adult, you can combine the Stoic idea of askesis with what we know about neuroplasticity: the brain changes based on what we repeatedly do.

• Start with laughably small commitments. One glass of water in the morning. Stepping outside for two minutes. Writing one sentence. The goal is to create commitments that you can meet even when depleted.

• Track follow‑through somewhere visible. A paper chart, a notes app, a calendar. Each check mark is a tiny piece of counter‑evidence against the story I never follow through.

• When you don’t follow through, respond with analysis, not attack. Was the commitment realistic? Did something unexpected happen? Do you need to shrink the goal, change the time of day, or add support?

You are giving your brain the “training reps” it did not get in childhood.

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5. Rebuilding self‑trust in tiny increments

Self‑trust is rebuilt through many small, kept promises:

• Make promises at the level you can realistically keep. Chronic over‑promising is a self‑trust killer. Under‑promise and slightly over‑deliver.

• When you keep a promise to yourself, pause for a moment. Notice it: I said I’d do this, and I did. That matters.

• When you break a promise, include repair as part of the promise. If others were affected, apologize and reset. If it was just you, write down what got in the way and adjust the next commitment accordingly.

Over time, I never follow through can soften into sometimes I follow through, then more often than not I do follow through.

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6. Practicing confidence as acting with faith, not feeling ready

For those of us who did not have secure foundations, confidence rarely feels like effortless ease. It often looks like:

• Acting even though your stomach flips, because you have collected enough proof that you can survive discomfort.

• Taking small, meaningful risks: speaking up once in a group, trying a new routine with your kids, initiating a hard but kind conversation.

• Measuring success by did I act in line with my values? rather than was I fearless and impressive?

Confidence becomes the practice of acting with faith in yourself based on a growing record of small, kept promises.

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7. Allowing self‑esteem to emerge as a by‑product

Rather than chasing self‑esteem directly, treat it as something that emerges gradually from:

• being in spaces where you are treated as worth some effort

• noticing and learning from trustworthy people

• sharing co‑regulation and small “village” tasks

• practicing tiny, follow‑through‑able commitments

• accumulating evidence that you can, in fact, trust yourself a bit more now than before

Self‑esteem, in its original sense of careful self‑appraisal, can then begin to sound like: I have come a long way from where I started. I’m not perfect, but I am more reliable than I used to be. I matter enough to keep doing this work.

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Intersectional Stoicism: starting where you actually are

Many people come to Stoicism with backstories far harsher than mine. Some survived outright abuse, systemic neglect, or state violence. Others grew up in materially comfortable but emotionally barren homes. For them, language about self‑discipline and virtue can feel like another way the world is saying, you should have been better, even though we failed you.

Intersectional Stoicism has to answer differently. It says:

• You did not choose the first rungs you did or did not get.

• You are responsible now, but not to do the impossible alone.

• The work is not to blame yourself for missing foundations, but to take the next small, real step from where you actually stand.

Rebuilding this ladder in adulthood is slow, imperfect, and often painful. It is also profoundly dignifying. Each tiny act of self‑care, each honest boundary, each kept promise, each moment of co‑regulation given or received is an act of quiet rebellion against the message you were not worth the effort.

You were. You are. And you can begin, exactly here. I’m here for it, and so are countless others — if you have the courage to start carving your rungs with us.

The culture sells eros — passionate, magnetic, that electric pull toward beauty — as if it’s the destination. The right match on the app, the chemistry that stops time, the soulmate who completes you. And when that initial intensity fades, as it always does, people think the relationship is over. They move on, looking for the next hit of that feeling.

But what if eros was never meant to be the whole plant? What if it’s just the first attention-catching flower — gorgeous, yes, but carrying something more important inside: a seed?

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What the Greeks Knew About Love’s Architecture

The ancient Greeks didn’t collapse all love into one word the way English does. They had eros for that passionate spark, yes — but also pragma for enduring partnership, philia for deep friendship, storge for familial bonds, agape for generous care that flows outward, ludus for playful affection, and philautia for healthy self-regard.

Most important: they understood these weren’t separate loves you either have or don’t have. They’re stages, seasons, different expressions of the same organism growing over time.

Think of eros as that first stunning flower. Inside it is a seed. If you plant that seed in good soil — two people who know themselves, who are growing in virtue and self-command, who can be honest about power and difference and wounds — it can take root as pragma.​

Pragma is the long-lived perennial. It’s not the showy part. It’s the steady trunk that grows year after year, the kind of love that chooses partnership on the hard days, that doesn’t need constant intensity to keep choosing. Over time, pragma develops thick bark — that’s storge, the protective familial “I’ve got you” layer that shields the relationship through storms and winters.

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When the Same Plant Bears Different Fruit

Here’s where the metaphor gets richer. From that pragma-rooted plant comes fruit — and it’s the same essential fruit, just harvested at different stages of ripeness.

When it’s underripe, you get ludus: tangy, playful, the lightness of teasing and flirting without the weight of commitment. As it ripens perfectly, it becomes philia — the sweetness of deep friendship, liking the person you’re partnered with, delighting in their character. Let it concentrate further, and you have agape: extra-ripe generosity that feeds not just the two of you but flows outward to children, community, the wider world.

Some of that harvest gets brought back to yourself as philautia — a nourishing dish that feeds your own soul, the self-love that becomes possible when you’re held inside wise, durable love instead of constant scarcity. And yes, in good seasons the plant flowers again with fresh eros — not because you’ve found someone new, but because deep roots can send up new blooms.

This isn’t abstract philosophy for me. This is my marriage: the eros-seed planted across cultural differences, taking root through disability, economic pressure, three generation household integration, five sons’ worth of chaos. The pragma-trunk that kept growing. The storge-bark that held through frustrations and bone-weary exhaustion. The fruits that keep coming in their seasons — philia in our late-night co-processing after the kids are in bed, agape in my lay community ministry work, ludus in shared jokes only we understand, philautia learned slowly because I’m loved well enough to practice loving myself.

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The Village Deficit Makes Everything Harder

Here’s the Stoic and sociological piece that matters: we’re trying to grow these plants in depleted soil. Village Deficit Disorder (VDD) — the absence of the ancestral village structures that used to provide co-regulation, mentorship, distributed caregiving, ritual marking of transitions — means modern relationships carry loads they were never designed to bear alone.

Two people, or even a nuclear family, trying to be everything for each other: romantic partners, best friends, co-parents, financial unit, emotional support, entertainment, spiritual companions. When the village was intact, those roles were distributed across dozens of people. Aunties helped young couples metabolize eros’s intensity. Elders modeled pragma across decades. Cousins and neighbors provided philia. The whole community held agape together.​

Now, pragma has to be the entire root system, with no support. Which means when people hit the normal developmental shift from eros-intensity to calmer bonding, they think something’s broken — because there’s no village to say, “This is what it looks like when real partnership is forming.”

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Teaching This to the Next Generation

I think about my sons constantly. They’re growing up in hookup culture, swipe culture, where eros is sold as disposable entertainment, and pragma is barely visible. The Stoic question I want them to ask when they feel that first flower-bloom of attraction isn’t “Is this my soulmate?” but “Is there good soil here? Can this seed take root? Do we both have what it takes to tend a long-lived plant?”

Eros feels like the prize because it’s immediate and intense. Pragma is the actual prize because it’s what lets all the other loves fruit across decades. But pragma requires things eros doesn’t: patience, justice, courage when it’s hard, the practical wisdom to keep choosing.

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What Grows From Chosen Partnership

The metaphor works for more than romance, too. When you’ve had that “I found my people” spark when you were in a space and felt truly seen — that’s communal eros, previewing what pragma as chosen village could become. Under VDD, we have to rebuild intentionally: support groups, multigenerational households, lay ministry circles, Stoic study communities. Plant those seeds in good soil, and they grow the same way — storge-bark of shared history, fruits of philia and agape ripening in seasons, space to tend your own philautia because you’re held.

The Stoic concept at the heart of this is oikeiōsis — the natural expansion of concern outward from self to household to community to humanity. But oikeiōsis needs structure to expand into. It needs the plant, not just the flower.

Where’s your soil right now? What seeds are you tending, and which ones are you mistaking for the whole garden? What fruit are you hungry for, and what does the plant need to produce it?

The garden lives. It just needs wiser tending than the culture teaches.

For Further Learning

“How to Build a Strong Relationship: A Stoic View” – Via Stoica Podcast (23 minutes)
Benny Voncken explores Stoic approaches to partnership, grounded in Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Great for commutes or chores; includes practices you can try.​

“The Ancient Greeks’ 6 Words for Love (And Why Knowing Them Can Change Your Life)” – Roman Krznaric, YES! Magazine
Short, warm essay that started a lot of people’s journeys into Greek love vocabulary. Non-academic, very shareable.​
https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2013/12/28/the-ancient-greeks-6-words-for-love-and-why-knowing-them-can-change-your-life

“Stoicism, Erotic Love, and Relationships” – Greg Sadler, Modern Stoicism
How ancient Stoics actually thought about romantic and erotic bonds. Scholarly but accessible; pushes back on “Stoics don’t feel” stereotypes.​
https://modernstoicism.com/stoicism-erotic-love-and-relationships-by-greg-sadler/

“Oikeiosis: The Stoic Secret to Understanding Self and Society” – Orion Philosophy
Explains the Stoic concept of expanding circles of concern (self → family → humanity). Key to understanding how the seven loves scale beyond romance.​
https://orionphilosophy.com/oikeiosis/

“Exploring the Various Forms of Love and Ways to Recognize Them” – KinderMind blog
Written for a therapy context but very plain-language. Includes recognition tips (”How do I know if this is storge vs. philia?”).​
https://kindermind.com/blog/exploring-the-various-forms-of-love-and-ways-to-recognize-them/

Intersectional Stoicism is my framework blending ancient Stoic philosophy, modern neuroscience, and justice-aware attention to power and difference. Village Deficit Disorder (VDD) names the structural absence of ancestral co-regulation networks that leaves modern people dysregulated and isolated. What resonates for you?

I’m editing this on February 2, 2026 to give a “TLDR” section for folks who are too overwhelmed to read this level of complicated writing in one pass. I’ll also be trying to create audio/video content with a shortened version of this (it’s exceptionally hard for me to get quiet time for this in the context of my life, might be a messy minivan recording while waiting for kids to do something somewhere).

• This piece sits with the urge to “flip tables” in the face of ICE shootings and state violence and treats that as a sane, nervous‑system‑level response rather than a moral failure.​

• It centers BIPOC grief, unpacks how authoritarians weaponize learned helplessness against our bodies and minds, and offers storytelling as medicine for flooded nervous systems.​

• The aim is to protect your capacity for hope and meaningful action when the news cycle is a firehose of cruelty.​

If you want to deep‑dive in specific parts of this post, skim or “find” these exact section headings (I knew how to make these into links to jump to text back in the HTML coding days, but I don’t know how to do it on here):

• Go to “Holding BIPOC Grief At The Center” if you need grounding in how this lands for BIPOC communities and why you’re right to be furious about whose deaths “count.”​

• Go to “Authoritarians, Learned Helplessness, And The War On Your Nervous System” if you want the social science on how bad actors are actively trying to break your hope and keep you frozen.​

• Go to “Storytelling As Medicine For Flooded Nervous Systems” if you want the most practical piece: why narrative work regulates the body and how to use stories as nervous‑system first aid.​

And now, back to the original post.

The shooting of Alex Pretti outside a Minneapolis donut shop was one of those days for me. He was a U.S. citizen, a registered nurse, carrying a fully licensed handgun at his waist, which he never touched. He had nothing in his hands but a cell phone and the woman he was comforting after she was shoved by an agent of our so‑called “representative democracy.”

My beloved Second‑Amendment Christian Republican cousins: you need to sit with the fact that ICE would have shot Jesus Himself in that moment. Alex Pretti’s final moments were Christ‑like. The question that haunts me now is: what are your next many moments going to be like?

From an Intersectional Stoicism lens, I have to hold two things at once: first, that my anger and grief at this killing are rational proto‑passions — the nervous system’s sane alarm in the face of egregious injustice — and second, that what I do with that activation is where my moral responsibility lies. The ancient Stoics warned that unexamined anger quickly becomes a kind of temporary insanity, but they also insisted that we are called to act for justice with clear eyes and steady hands. My project is not to suppress the signal, but to metabolize it into courageous, neighbor‑serving action rather than despair or blind rage.

Intersectional Stoicism, as I use the term, is the practice of applying those Stoic tools — discernment of what is and is not in our control, checking our judgments, cultivating courage and justice — in a world where power, risk, and vulnerability are not evenly distributed. It refuses the fantasy of a neutral “universal citizen,” and instead asks: how do we use whatever relative safety and privilege we have to reduce harm to those who have been targeted for generations?

As soon as the weather lets us, my family will be preparing to protect as many neighbors as we can from the pain of a possibly long government shutdown — because people of good conscience have to stop these abuses of power and this senseless loss of life, even when the tools available are imperfect and carry signficant short‑term costs. The Senate may yet manage a stopgap that hurts, but far less than letting unchecked violence become normalized and entrenched in our democracy. The Bible shows Jesus flipping tables; I hear that as a call to love one another fiercely enough to disrupt the systems that would otherwise devour us.

Alex Pretti’s death was a martyrdom, full stop. How will you honor that sacrifice? What will you demand of those elected to wield the power that is supposed to belong to us, as well as of your best self? How many of your neighbors can you help weather this storm so more of us survive with the strength and skills needed to rebuild later?

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Holding BIPOC Grief At The Center

All of this is landing in a body that already carries a lot of grief.

I am holding my beloved BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community members in my heart right now, knowing how full-on obscene it is that the deaths of two suburban, class‑affluent white people suddenly trigger a nationwide empathy surge when the ongoing slaughter and disposability of your kin rarely even registers for the broader public. Any anger you are holding about that will be 100% validated by me, personally.

The sacrifices demanded of your communities were already far too much long before the deaths of Good and Pretti. When I center these two in my public writing, it is not because their lives “matter more.” It is triage. It is an attempt to use the kinds of stories that do break through to white, suburban audiences to reduce the ongoing levels of harm hitting your close‑kin groups. It is me trying to train as many people who look like me — especially my white elders and others who aren’t in homes with minor children — to treat this as a basic duty of care: it should not be any of our children being slaughtered or abducted by government agents.

We need to protect our children, especially our young and “emerging” adults (who are currently at severe risk of injury or death if they get dysregulated at a protest), so they can rebuild, improve, and ensure this kind of horror is never again inflicted on their neighbors in lifetimes that extend beyond our own. I am disgusted by how my BIPOC beloveds and your kin have been treated, and horrified by the behaviors of people who look like they could be my very near biological relatives.

Underneath all of that, I hold a stubborn conviction: we are all cousins, all members of the same human family tree. You are all beloved to me, even those of you who have done some bad things. A core aspect of my abiding faith in humanity is that even people who have allowed themselves to be degraded into being definitively “bad people,” by contexts that socialized them that way, can be transformed into truly good — not merely “decent” — people.

The main part of my life’s work is holding space for those transformations, because they only happen with compassionate support that recognizes that possibility. It is rare, but I have seen it enough to keep me from sliding into pessimism. That lived evidence, plus a growing body of research on narrative and behavior change, is the hope that keeps me going — and informs how I think about restoring democracy.

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Authoritarians, Learned Helplessness, And The War On Your Nervous System

There is a quote I can pull from memory verbatim: “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” Barack Obama said that in 2008, when my family encountered him on the campaign trail with my then-preschooler firstborn and then-literal-babe-at-breast secondborn, and it rooted itself deep in my nervous system.

The truly bad actors right now are working overtime to make us feel hopeless, because hopelessness breeds helplessness, and helplessness keeps us from acting. Psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier named this pattern “learned helplessness” in the 1960s, after showing that repeated exposure to uncontrollable pain taught animals not to even try to escape. Later research linked this to depression and to the way abuse victims often come to see themselves as powerless even when exits start to appear.

What the authoritarian playbook has done is scale that dynamic to the civic level. If they can keep your nervous system flooded with horror, confusion, and a sense that nothing you do matters, you will stay home. You will doomscroll instead of organizing, numb out instead of knocking doors, lash sideways at your neighbors instead of upward at the systems harming you both.

The social scientist part of my brain is screaming: they are using very old conditioning research on us on purpose. The more of us who recognize those roots, the harder it is for them to keep pressing the same buttons. But knowledge alone is not enough. Our bodies, not just our thoughts, need ways out of the flood.

This is where Stoicism and modern neuroscience shake hands. Our emotions, the Stoics keep reminding us, are not just raw forces but patterned judgments — stories the brain is telling itself about what is good, bad, safe, or unbearable. When we consciously choose different stories, grounded in justice, interdependence, and our actual sphere of control, we are literally reshaping those judgments and the neural pathways underneath them.

Narrative medicine gives us practical tools for doing exactly that.

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Storytelling As Medicine For Flooded Nervous Systems

When the news cycle is a firehose of state violence, targeted cruelty, and institutional collapse, our brains are not designed to metabolize it all in real time. We need stories that help us regulate, make meaning, and remember that other futures are possible.

There is now a substantial research literature on what is sometimes called expressive writing and sometimes narrative medicine: structured ways of putting traumatic experiences into language that help people integrate them rather than stay stuck in chronic stress. Psychologist James Pennebaker’s decades of work show that writing or speaking about deeply upsetting events — organizing them into a story — can reduce both psychological symptoms and physical health problems over time. Stories, especially when heard rather than silently read, recruit very old neural pathways for co‑regulation and memory.​

For 99 percent of human history, stories entered our awareness primarily through our ears; most of our ancestors were not literate. When we return to spoken narrative — around literal or metaphorical campfires, or through audiobooks and podcasts — we are tapping into millennia‑old circuitry for metabolizing danger, grief, and hope together. That is why I talk about storytelling as medicine.

In my own practice of staying in the work without burning completely out, I lean heavily on certain kinds of fiction as a deliberate neurohack. I gravitate toward stories that center collaborative change‑makers who use their resources in prosocial ways to transform systems and build resilient friendships. Two series I have been recommending a lot lately are:

• The Fred the Vampire Accountant series by Drew Hayes.​

• The Tear Down Heaven series by Rachel Aaron.​

• The Serwa Boateng trilogy by Roseanne A. Brown

The first two are YA‑ish urban fantasy, the third is “middle grades fiction” but my favorite trilogy published since the pandemic for any age. All of them are available in audio somewhere in the public‑library ecosystem, feature characters who build unlikely coalitions and keep choosing the hard, relational path over easy cruelty. In Tear Down Heaven (the only one of those three that is not yet a completed series — the fifth and last book should be published soon; the audiobook is currently in production per the author’s updates), Bex and Adrian keep finding ways to turn trauma, betrayal, and terrifying power imbalances into deeper commitment to their people instead of surrendering to cynicism — exactly the kind of narrative groove I want my own neurons to fall into.

Even if you are not usually an audiobook person, I recommend trying them in that format. Hearing a skilled narrator bring these worlds to life can help displace the echoing sounds of sirens, gunshots, and shouted slurs that so many of us carry in our bodies from videos and firsthand experiences. If you, like me, have a neurodivergent attention system, you may find it helpful to increase the playback speed until your brain has to stay just barely stretched to keep up; that slight challenge can paradoxically make it easier to stay focused.

From a Stoic‑neuroscience perspective, this is not escapism; it is nervous‑system first aid and values training. Repeated listening to stories that align with how we want to be in the world gives us internal scripts to quote when we are distressed. They become touchstones we can reach for when the headlines hit too hard: “What would Fred do?” “What would Bex and Adrian do to keep their people alive and human?” “How do Serwa’s friends keep her aligned with who she wants to be?”

If you have other stories — especially freely accessible ones — that serve as medicine for you in this way, please share them widely. Think of each recommendation as another little trauma‑care station on the long road to justice.

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Share The Load, Not Just The Road

A day after writing about Alex Pretti, I made an image that looks like a street sign reading “SHARE THE ROAD,” with the R painted over so it becomes “SHARE THE LOAD.” Galatians 6:2 says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” That is the heart of what I am asking us to do now.

Sharing the load looks like mutual aid during shutdowns, yes. It looks like watching each other’s kids so more of us can testify at hearings or rest when our bodies insist on it. It looks like teaching our elders how to navigate disinformation‑choked platforms and how to show up — as safely as possible — for younger generations under state surveillance. It looks like white folks using our relative safety to stand between armed agents and those they target, and also working tirelessly to dismantle the conditions that make those agents feel untouchable in the first place.

Classical Stoicism talks a lot about the dichotomy of control — what is up to us and what is not — but that was never meant to be a permission slip for passivity. In an intersectional context, “what is up to us” includes how we show up for those whose bodies, identities, and neighborhoods are targeted more heavily than our own, and how we use whatever relative safety or privilege we have as a shield instead of a cushion. The externals may not be fully within our power, but our sustained, collective response to them is, and that is where justice‑seeking becomes a daily Stoic discipline rather than a one‑off performance.

Hope is not a mood; it is a practice. It is choosing, again and again, to resist the learned helplessness others are trying to install in us, and to cultivate learned hopefulness instead. It is organizing your block even when you would rather crawl back under the covers, making one more phone call to a wavering relative, bringing one more pot of soup to a neighbor’s door.

I am not asking you to be calm. I am asking you to be regulated enough — through whatever storytelling medicine works for your nervous system — to keep showing up for yourself and for the wider cousinhood we share.

Convention season is coming. Election seasons and legislative battles are always coming. If you would like me to help hold a space — a workshop, a panel, a story circle — around these themes of narrative medicine, democracy, and not surrendering our nervous systems to authoritarian conditioning, I am absolutely down for that, even virtually. Creating these images and these words is part of my own spirit’s medicine.

May we flip the tables that need flipping, protect the neighbors who need protection, and keep telling the kinds of stories that make it possible to imagine, and then build, a more just world.

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For Further Reading (No Paywalls, I Promise!)

All of these are free to access; some require a public‑library card, but not any particular corporate vendor account.

• First book in Drew Hayes’ Fred series: The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant
  https://www.hoopladigital.com/audiobook/the-utterly-uninteresting-and-unadventurous-tales-of-fred-the-vampire-accountant-drew-hayes/11305188

• First book in Rachel Aaron’s “Tear Down Heaven” series: Hell for Hire
  https://www.hoopladigital.com/audiobook/hell-for-hire-rachel-aaron/16964039

• First book in Rosanne Brown’s Serwa Boateng series: Serwa Boateng’s Guide to Vampire Hunting https://www.hoopladigital.com/audiobook/rick-riordan-presents-serwa-boatengs-guide-to-vampire-hunting-roseanne-a-brown/15626976

• VA Whole Health Library: Narrative Medicine overview — accessible explanation of narrative medicine and how storytelling supports healing.
  https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/tools/narrative-medicine.asp

• Narrative Medicine: The Power of Shared Stories to Enhance Healthcare — open‑access scholarly article.
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11232909/

• SimplyPsychology: Learned Helplessness — clear summary of the classic Seligman research and later developments.
  https://www.simplypsychology.org/learned-helplessness.html

• Wikipedia: Learned Helplessness — broad overview with history, key experiments, and contemporary critiques.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

• Narrative & Storytelling: A Democracy Resource Hub Guide — free compilation of resources on using narrative to strengthen democracy and counter antidemocratic rhetoric.
  https://commonslibrary.org/democracy-resource-hub-narrative-storytelling/

I typically have comments locked to paid/comped subscribers to preserve my own attentional capacities and keep them focused where I need them to be, but for this essay I’m allowing public comment. Be kind and courteous, or be reported and blocked.

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I’m going back to my posts in reverse chronological order to put in some quick-reference options for people who do not have the capacity to engage in my long-form prose style. Here’s the TL;DR for those who need it:

• This piece uses a nightmare about a giant snake and a re-examining of The Giving Tree to sort three states: being eaten alive, being used up, and being held.​

• It shows how a child learns to seek comfort, respect others’ limits, and critique exploitative stories instead of absorbing them as unquestionable truth.​

• The focus is on growing humans who feel safe enough to reach for help, can reality‑check their fears, and can tell the difference between real love and self‑erasure.​

If you want to go deeper in specific parts of this post, you can skim or “find” these exact section headings:

• Go to “What I’m Trying To Grow” for the clearest description of the kind of kids this parenting approach is trying to raise and the specific relational skills it emphasizes.​

• Go to “For Further Study” for links and research on why snakes are scary, how stories change children’s fears, and critical re‑readings of The Giving Tree.​

Original post:

At 2 a.m. this Saturday morning, my nine‑year‑old asked for consent to climb into my bed because he’d had a nightmare.

I’d been sound asleep for several hours when he came in, and he wasn’t asking me to switch on my full analytical brain. I was awake enough to know that he wanted physical closeness, not a seminar. I warned him that my body was hurting and that I might toss and turn in ways that could accidentally kick him while I slept. After a bit of half-awake cuddling, he thoughtfully positioned himself out of range of my limbs and drifted back off.

I woke for the day in my usual way. I have intentionally trained my nervous system to become fully alert sometime in the first half of the 6 a.m. hour, and I’m able to do this without external triggers roughly 80% of the time. This morning was part of the 20%. Assisted by my gentle alarm clock going off at 6:15 a.m. playing “Wonder” by Natalie Merchant (as it does on weekend days to remind me I don’t need to be making sure this child gets to school on time; weekdays it’s a chapter from “Practical Stoicism” by Grey Freedman narrated by Robin Homer aka Vox Stoica to prime my waking brain to Stoicism and facilitate my moving towards writing in the morning before the kids get up), I awoke and hit “snooze for 30 minutes” before it woke my son up. Those 30 minutes are my routine to let my mind wander (aka allowing my “Default Mode Network” to have some time to do its thing) while I coaxed my joints into place and waited for any muscle spasms to calm down. That quiet, in‑bed liminal time is part of my own self‑regulation and pain‑management routine. I require my body to be out of bed no later than 7 a.m. (when “A Summary of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius” by Robin Homer starts playing from the smart speaker in my home office and is audible from my bed) so that I can have at least 30 minutes of writing process time before my sons are awake.

By the time my youngest woke up for the second time (he was the first of my children to be awake today), I had already been up for about an hour, moved into my office, and had 16 ounces of coffee in my system.

Only then did he tell me what the nightmare was about.

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After Breakfast: A Giant Snake Eats the World

By the time he came to debrief the dream, he had already eaten breakfast with his father.

I was at my desk, still in my intermittent fasting window, processing feedback on my writing. He did what he’s learned to do when he wants my attention while I’m working in this space: he moved quietly into my peripheral vision and waited, sitting on the backless rolling stool behind my right shoulder (which exists in our home for me to dance while seated on, when not being used by a conversation partner — before acquiring that, I kept bruising my upper body on the office chair when I felt the inspiration to dance). When I finished the sentence I was in the middle of typing, I turned toward him, and he began to describe his night.

The dream, it turned out, was not a simple “there was a scary animal” story. In his nightmare, a giant snake was eating everyone on Earth. The scale was total. No one was special, no one could escape. It was an annihilation scenario. I’m not entirely sure what sparked that nightmare, but I suspect it was from an audiobook he’d enjoyed without me recently. In this family, we’re all avid fans of meaning-making epic storytelling like Rick Riordan books and MCU movies. I’d heard him start to re-listen to the Harry Potter audiobook collection that I’ve had stored on our home server since before he was born, so perhaps it was because of Voldemort or that fiend-fire scene.

Now fully awake, with coffee and my own early‑morning mental wandering behind me, I had the bandwidth to do the kind of co‑processing he was seeking, knowing that I’m able to provide it for him: help disentangle the irrational elements, keep his nervous system from building a lasting phobia, and make meaning together.

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Using Accuracy to Defang a Nightmare

Once he had his arms around me and we’d hugged each other tightly, his breathing had slowed, and I shifted us gently toward curiosity.

“What do you know about how real snakes eat?” I asked him.

He wasn’t sure, beyond the cartoonish images most kids pick up.

My own mind jumped to Shel Silverstein’s poem “Boa Constrictor” — the one where the narrator sings about being eaten, body part by body part, which I’d performed in school around his age with several classmates (I had the part starting with “oh dread” while an enormous kid-crafted snake blocked each of us from the audience’s view):

“Oh, I’m being eaten
By a boa constrictor…”

The poem is vivid and darkly funny, but hilariously wrong about actual constrictor behavior. It presents being eaten as a kind of incremental slapstick — first the foot, then the knee, then the waist — rather than the slow, methodical constriction and swallowing real snakes use. That inaccuracy is an opportunity. It gives us a version of “being eaten” that is recognizable and absurd rather than zoologically accurate.

I suggested that learning how snakes really hunt and eat might help his brain let go of the nightmare’s potent but fictional monster logic. I have learned through multiple experiences that, if fear is built on an impossibility, understanding that impossibility can take some of the charge away.

This fits well with what we know from research. Humans, including children, are “prepared” to detect snakes and spiders quickly — infants and even other primates show faster attention and orienting to snakes than to flowers or rabbits — but the step from attention to phobia is heavily shaped by learning. Storybooks and adult reactions matter: one experimental study found that children who heard positive stories about snakes were more willing to approach a real (safe) snake than children who heard negative stories.

So in this conversation, I wasn’t just reassuring him. I was trying to put accurate knowledge and curiosity between his nervous system and a potential future snake phobia.

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“Wait, That’s the Giving Tree Guy”

As we talked about poetry and snakes, I mentioned that the boa constrictor poem was by Shel Silverstein.

He immediately replied that Silverstein also wrote The Giving Tree — a connection I had not pulled up at that moment and wasn’t completely sure about. I did a quick internet search to confirm he was right. Then he told me, quite firmly, that he doesn’t like The Giving Tree.​

When I asked him why, he went straight for the relational core. In his words, “the boy” in that story is “a narcissist.”

It would be easy to assume this is just the internet talking. After all, “narcissist” is one of those words that has escaped its DSM‑5 cage and now roams freely through playgrounds and comment sections. But the way he used it here was strikingly aligned with the adult critical reading: the boy is selfish and exploitative, treats the tree as an inexhaustible resource, and shows no real gratitude or reciprocity.

Adults have been arguing for years about whether The Giving Tree is a tender story of unconditional love or a disturbing catechism of exploitation and self‑erasure. Some theologians read the tree’s self‑loss as a Christlike ideal (which, given the use of female pronouns when referring to the tree, strikes me as an overly generous status-quo-preserving lens and I remind my readers that this book was read to me when I was a young girlchild too young to read it for myself); others, including ethicist Mary Ann Glendon, have called the book “a primer of narcissism, a catechism of exploitation.”

My nine‑year‑old son, embedded in a family culture that talks a lot about boundaries, emotional labor, teamwork, and mutuality, has landed firmly in the “this is not okay” camp. He doesn’t just say “I don’t like it.” He has a reason: the boy’s relational pattern is narcissistic, based on examples he can pull from his memory unprompted, and he finds that relational dynamic repellent.

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Being Eaten, Being Used Up, Being Held

In the space of a single morning, we were touching three very different experiences of being consumed:

• His nightmare of a giant snake eating everyone on Earth — an impersonal annihilation scenario, likely from the epic fiction we engage with as a family.

• Silverstein’s comedic poem about slowly being eaten by a boa constrictor — an inaccurate, theatrical danger story.

• The Giving Tree — a story where one (unnecessarily feminized) character is emotionally and materially used up by the (male) other, and the text invites readers to see this as fully appropriate relational dynamics or even noble.

In each case, something or someone is being taken in, used up, and ultimately destroyed for the exclusive benefit of one other living being. But our real‑life interaction that morning was about none of those. My son was not being eaten, and he was not using me up.

He had come into my bed during the night for physical proximity, with full respect for my body’s limitations. He had delayed the analytic conversation until I was awake, caffeinated, and mentally available. He approached me at my desk in a way that honors my work beyond the walls of our home and my attention patterns. And when he wanted to talk about a book we both dislike, he came armed with a specific critique.

The same author who gives us an absurd, inaccurate boa constrictor also gives us a profoundly inaccurate model of “good” caregiving. One misrepresents snake biology. The other misrepresents healthy relational dynamics. In both cases, my son and I are now at a point where we can say, together, “That’s not how this works.”

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Story as Co‑Regulation and Reality‑Testing

From the outside or a quick synopsis of our actions, this might look like I was “just” cuddling a scared child and chatting about books. From the inside, several layers were happening at once in ways I’ve been building protocols around for decades.

First, straightforward co‑regulation. His instinct to seek me out physically — at 2 a.m. for proximity, later in the morning for a hug and distributed cognition — and my willingness to meet him there are how his nervous system down‑regulates from an annihilation scenario. The fact that my sons, including this one, routinely initiate hugs, maintain their own negotiated “minimum hug quotas” with me (and others), and know they never have to hug anyone they don’t want to if I’m around, is behavioral evidence that they experience my body and presence as safe, not as consuming.​

Second, reality‑testing in the Stoic sense. Nightmares are impressions: vivid, emotionally charged images that the mind reacts to as if they were actual external events. A core Stoic move is to slow down and interrogate those impressions: What exactly happened? Is it accurate? What part of this is under my control?

In this context, that looks like:

• Naming the content of the dream precisely.

• Comparing it with real‑world snake behavior and probabilities.

• Noticing how stories like Boa Constrictor dramatize danger in particular ways.

• Choosing a response: hug, learn, talk, hug again, and then move on with the day.

Third, narrative hygiene. That experimental work on “scary snakes and cuddly frogs” shows that storybooks are not neutral entertainment; they actively influence children’s fear beliefs and avoidance behavior. Negative stories about snakes increase fear and avoidance, while positive stories reduce both. Similarly, a book like The Giving Tree can, if left uninterrogated, normalize a pattern where consuming others is coded as love and virtue.

I’m not aiming to shield my kids from all frightening or problematic stories. I am aiming to sit in the afterglow of those stories with them and ask, “What is this really teaching? Do we actually believe that? Do we want to treat this as a model worth applying to our own lives?”

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Village Deficit and Canonical Texts

In a world with robust villages, there would be many adults engaged in this kind of story‑processing with our children. A snake‑loving grandfather could counter the disaster documentary. An aunt who left a narcissistic partner might gleefully deconstruct The Giving Tree at a family gathering (I’m not leaving a narcissistic partner, but I may well play the role of that auntie, just as a forewarning; similarly, do not get me started on the topic of Pokémon if you’re a fan of that).

In our current Village Deficit reality, a few canonical children’s books and poems — often written decades ago by people who never met our kids — can end up carrying a wildly disproportionate weight in shaping their fear maps and relational templates.

That is part of why I see my work, both as a parent and as a writer, as “story curator and co‑interpreter.” I am not trying to ban Silverstein or any other writer/content creator. I am trying to refuse him, and all others (including myself), the unearned status of unquestionable scripture.

When my nine‑year‑old:

• Seeks proximity at night without demanding cognitive labor from a sleeping parent,

• Waits for my attention respectfully when I’m working,

• Brings me his nightmare content when I am resourced,

• Joins me in fact‑checking how real snakes function,

• Connects authors across works via a quick search,

• And offers a conceptually appropriate critique of The Giving Tree as a narcissistic dynamic,

He is doing exactly the kind of relational and epistemic work I want for him.

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What I’m Trying To Grow

I am trying to raise boys who do not expect a tree‑mother (or tree-wife) to give them everything until she is a stump. I am also trying to raise boys who do not go through life incapacitated from action because they are convinced that the world is always one nightmare scenario away from being destroyed by an unstoppable threat.

I am trying to raise humans who:

• Feel safe enough to seek co‑regulation when they’re scared — and who also learn to respect the reasonable limits of other living beings

• Learn to examine their impressions and stories against reality, using curiosity and science to reduce unnecessary suffering.

• Notice when a text asks them to applaud exploitation or self‑erasure, and feel a healthy internal “no.”

• Can distinguish (in their bodies and relationships) between being held with compassion, being used up as a consumable resource, and being eaten alive by an unstoppable force.

On mornings like this, when a child tells me that a giant snake ate the world in his dreams, and in the next breath critiques The Giving Tree, I see the threads coming together in a beautiful way that is the driving force behind the work I do in the world. He was afraid, but not helpless. He is critical, but not cynical. He reaches for contact without assuming I exist to be consumed.

From the outside, some of my other parenting choices — like high‑structure wake‑up scaffolding that eventually includes cold water as a last‑ditch, fully avoidable consequence — can sound harsh when ripped out of this context in which they’re deeply embedded and continue to evolve. People who don’t see the 2 a.m. consent requests, the careful positioning to avoid my involuntary kicks, the hug quotas, or the way we jointly dissect the stories that shaped our childhoods, can easily misread the whole system.

From the inside, though, mornings like this are the norm that all my children have reliably come to expect. They are the evidence that my mix of structure and high warmth is, as demonstrated today with my youngest son, cultivating exactly what I’m aiming for: a nervous system that can face fear, a mind that can interrogate stories, and a heart that refuses to confuse love with being devoured.

Now that I’m done processing through this, and drinking my daily teas, it’s time for me to break my fast and move on with my day.

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For Further Study

A few starting points if you want to go deeper into the science and debates behind this article:

• Why snakes are so scary (and why phobia isn’t inevitable)

  Overview of how kids’ brains are especially quick to notice snakes, and how social learning and stories shape whether that turns into fear or curiosity:
  https://parentingscience.com/fear-of-snakes/​

• How stories change children’s fears

  Open‑access research paper on how positive vs. scary animal storybooks affect children’s fear and avoidance of animals like snakes and frogs:
  https://ducklab.squarespace.com/s/Conrad-et-al-2023.pdf

• Rethinking The Giving Tree

  Short, accessible critical review that lays out why many adults now see the boy’s behavior as selfish and the tree’s self‑erasure as unhealthy:
  https://mralexbookshelf.com/2020/04/26/review-the-giving-tree/

• Essay reflecting on The Giving Tree as a story about narcissism and exploitation rather than healthy love:
  https://pyritewealth.wordpress.com/2023/08/28/the-giving-tree/

This essay is part of the “Intersectional Stoicism” framework, which weaves together Stoic philosophy, intersectionality, and neuroscience to understand parenting, self-regulation, and the development of authentic autonomy. It also includes some of the budding framework for my “Village Deficit Disorder” social sciences concept, which I’m hoping to turn into a dissertation topic if logistics can line up for me to enter a doctoral program. I publish these here as a “momento mori” practice, so that if I die before getting that work fully processed into the world, enough of it will exist for others to use.

Please note: this is long, and broken up into sections to facilitate pausing and returning as your own mental bandwidth allows. I have faith in your ability to comprehend this, and recognize that others need more time to process and reflect than I do

. Do not push yourself to read this all in one sitting if that’s going to exceed your capacities; it’s not going anywhere. Return when you’ve got time.

Edit on February 2: I'm offering this “TL;DR” option for those who need this information but do not have the bandwidth to make it through this longform prose

• This piece argues that structure is a form of care, not cruelty, especially in village‑deficit conditions where kids don’t have many other adults buffering their nervous systems.​

• It explains how co‑regulation, clear boundaries, and the Stoic dichotomy of control work together to build real autonomy over time instead of fear‑based compliance or learned helplessness.​

• The focus is on authoritative (high emotional warmth + highly structured) parenting and why it is different from authoritarian control, even when consequences for misbehaviors are unpleasant.​

If you want to go deeper in specific parts of this post, you can skim or “find” these exact section headings:

• Go to “Autonomy Does Not Mean ‘No Structure’” for the clearest explanation of how co‑regulation, routines, and boundaries actually grow long‑term autonomy, and how this connects to the Stoic dichotomy of control.​

• Go to “Authoritative, Not Authoritarian: Why People Get This Wrong” for the section that tackles common criticisms head‑on and spells out the difference between firm, high‑warmth structure and coercive control.​

When Your 9‑Year‑Old Questions the Rules, You’re Doing Something Right

Yesterday, on his first day back to elementary school after “winter weather days” closed the building for three consecutive school days, my 9‑year‑old left the house for school without his winter coat when the wind chill was below zero. His 18‑year‑old brother drove him there but failed to notice the missing coat. My older son reported the problem to me when he returned home, and I told him he needed to return to the school, deliver the coat to the office himself, and manage the loss of time that poor attention had cost him. That consequence — the disruption to his morning plans and the reminder that noticing matters — was his to experience.

My 9‑year‑old wore a coat home from school that afternoon, delivered by a sibling annoyed at the errand.

This morning, I reminded the 9‑year‑old again of our standing rule: dress for the weather every time you exit our home. He pushed back. He tried to carve out exceptions. He acted as if yesterday’s problem had been a one‑off. He was testing whether the boundary is real.

He is grounded from entertainment video for the rest of the day. No Half‑Asleep Chris. No Haminations. He did wear his coat this morning, but the bickering almost made him late to school and backtalk has consequences in our family. He is currently enjoying an audiobook — checked out from the library on my phone, playing through one of my Bluetooth speakers — while cleaning his room.

Earlier this same morning, before that coat conversation, my 13‑year‑old failed to be out of his room where I could perceive him by 8 a.m. He is virtual/asynchronously schooled to allow for college coursework — he is enrolled in 6 college credit hours this semester, making him the fourth of my sons to enroll in college as a 7th grader. The expectation for all three of my younger boys (ages 15, 13, and 9, who share a bedroom with a bunk and a loft bed) is that they are capable of being up and visible by 7:45 a.m., the latest time they could leave for our assigned public middle and high schools without being tardy.

They each have their own alarms — smartwatches, open‑ear headphone setups playing from devices that stay outside the bedroom (the same devices they are permitted to use to listen to familiar audiobooks that don’t keep them awake, a neurohack I have been using with them since the older two were very young, back when I still had time to be involved in online fandoms). But only the youngest wakes up reliably and gets dressed on his own. The other two’s skills have atrophied since they moved to virtual/asynchronous school at 6th grade, even as they complain about wanting more time with friends who are still in traditional school. My rule is that they need to do their schoolwork while their friends are at school, so they are available for social time after school — not pushing their own work into late hours and stealing sleep.

Worth noting is that they are allowed to take an early afternoon nap if needed, a behavior I sometimes need to model myself to manage my own disability-related fatigue. We are consolidating our sleep on advice from a sleep medicine doctor who has seen members of our family, and we need to be awake at set times for at least a five-hour stretch to keep from getting too dysregulated.

The 13‑year‑old also lost the privilege of watching entertainment videos for the day. I deeply resent being objectified as an alarm clock, so today I added another scaffolding layer: at 8 a.m., “Danger Zone” plays on the bedroom speaker. That song marks a threshold — a transition from “you can still reset your day and have age-appropriate autonomy” to “you are now in the zone where consequences escalate,” including the risk of having a damp comforter that needs to go through the wash. (Some think this is harsh, but trust you me when it comes to adolescent boys, more‑frequently‑washed bedding is not a downside.)

By tomorrow night, I can almost guarantee that some well‑meaning adult will tell me I am too strict. That under my rules, they would have been on permanent restriction. That I should “let natural consequences teach” — meaning, let my son walk home in the cold without a coat, despite the very real risk of frostbite and temperature dysregulation that would derail our entire family system for days.

Those critiques feel loving on the surface, but they rest on WEIRD assumptions about autonomy and who can afford to gamble with risk. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — a term researchers use to describe the cultural bubble in which much developmental research (and parenting advice) originates. They also misunderstand both Stoic philosophy and child neurodevelopment.

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Autonomy Does Not Mean “No Structure”

The popular WEIRD script goes something like this: let children make their own choices, let natural consequences teach them, and avoid “controlling” rules. Real autonomy, in this view, comes from adults backing off.

Neuroscience and lived experience say the opposite.

Autonomy — the kind that persists into adulthood — develops through years of supported decision‑making within clear boundaries. Not despite structure, but through it. Co‑regulation is the bridge between “external structure” and “internal self‑regulation.” Co‑regulation refers to the process by which warm, responsive adults help children develop their own capacity to manage emotions and behavior — not by controlling them, but by creating the conditions in which self‑regulation can grow.

In practice, co‑regulation looks like:

• Warm, responsive relationships.

• Predictable routines and environmental cues.

• Explicit expectations with understandable reasons.

• Opportunities to make choices and feel the consequences while still held in a safe relational field.

Stoicism gives us a conceptual backbone for this in the dichotomy of control. Epictetus — who taught adolescents and adults, not young children, and whose students arrived well past the “age of reason” with years of invisible caregiving already embedded in them — preached that we control our own judgments and actions, not external events. Applied to parenting, that means:

• My child controls whether he remembers his coat.

• I control the home environment I help design, the boundaries I set, and the consequences I follow through on.

Even “the home environment” is only partially within my control. My husband, my in‑laws, and my older sons sometimes rescue a younger sibling from natural consequences in ways that undermine developing responsibility, because their thresholds and tolerances differ from mine. I cannot control that entirely, either. What I can do is remain consistent in my part of the system and keep naming the pattern.

When I say “dress for the weather every time you leave the house,” I am not controlling my sons’ bodies. I am controlling the conditions under which they are allowed to participate in the larger social world. He retains full agency to comply or not. I retain full agency over access to privileges like entertainment time and rides.

That is not a failure of autonomy. It is the training ground for autonomy.

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Authoritative, Not Authoritarian: Why People Get This Wrong

Some of my critics (I choose to perceive them as trying to be loving critics, in the framework I picked up from Simon Sinek) argue that what I’m doing is authoritarian rather than authoritative. They see firm boundaries and real consequences and label that “control.”

Developmental research does not support that reading.

• Authoritarian parenting is high in structure and low in warmth. It demands obedience without explanation, uses fear or shame, and is not emotionally responsive. Children raised this way show higher anxiety, lower self‑esteem, and more externalizing problems.

• Authoritative parenting is high in structure and high in warmth. It sets clear expectations, explains the “why,” listens to the child’s perspective, and uses consequences as teaching tools rather than as revenge. This style is consistently linked with better emotional regulation, higher academic achievement, and greater independence.

One of my professional catchphrases — which I use as a disability and accessibility advisor in complex systems just as much as I use it with my children — is this: “When they understand why, they’re more likely to comply.” Compliance born from understanding is not obedience; it is alignment.

No one who spends significant time with my family would mistake us for cold or distant. There is affection, joking, cuddling, shared projects, and a granular knowledge of each child’s preferences, talents, and limits. I know my children’s minds better than many modern adults ever know another human being — and I use that knowledge to direct them toward meaning, purpose, and connection. I do not aspire to be their best friend; I aspire to be their most trustworthy advisor and the source of an inner voice that will guide them long past my corporeal existence.

High structure plus high warmth is not authoritarian. It is authoritative. If someone’s internal dichotomy is “either you let kids do whatever they want or you are authoritarian,” that is a problem with their model, not with my parenting. I find it genuinely amusing that my parenting comes across as “strict” at all. I do not see myself as a Tiger Mom pushing relentless achievement. I see myself as squarely in the middle of the parenting spectrum — somewhere between the Tiger Mom demanding perfection and the Free‑Range Unschooling mom letting life teach through chaos. I understand where both ends of that spectrum come from. We all want the best for our children. We are all doing what we think is right.

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The Adolescent Brain Is Asking “What Kind of Person Am I?”

The old pop‑science story said: adolescent brains are just dopamine‑crazed and under‑controlled, so we should not expect much of them. Newer work paints a more nuanced picture.

During adolescence, the limbic reward systems do ramp up. But at the same time, regions like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) become more engaged in integrating self‑related information and the value of potential actions. This region is involved in:

• Evaluating “what kind of person am I if I do X?”

• Weighing trade‑offs between short‑term desire and long‑term commitments.

• Building a coherent self‑concept across domains (academic, social, moral).

That development is experience‑dependent. It changes in response to the kinds of choices and feedback loops adolescents encounter. Family environments with more supportive structure are associated with more mature brain macrostructure and better self‑regulation; persistent conflict and chaos correlate with less mature patterns.

The metaphor I have borrowed from my own experiences with physical therapy is “doing reps.” Modern life does not afford the consistent practice opportunities that village‑based childhood did. Our ancestors would have been doing reps in self‑regulation, problem‑solving, and delayed gratification constantly — through embedded routines, through watching adults handle problems, through having their own struggles co‑regulated by multiple caring people across time. My job is to engineer those reps into the home environment, often at an actual financial cost, in a way that ancestral villages used to provide for free without anyone needing to remember to schedule or order anything.

So when I install smart bed‑rail lamps that shift from dim warm light at night to bright cool light at 7 a.m., when my husband attempts a verbal wake‑up between 7:00 and 7:20 as part of his morning routine, and when I add an 8 a.m. “Danger Zone” at full volume routine to the smart speaker as a clear threshold for consequences, I am creating a layered sensory and social environment that:

• Makes it easier for them to succeed without me as a human alarm clock.

• Gives their brains repeated reps in noticing cues, choosing, and integrating the outcomes into their sense of self.

That is co‑regulation. A practice brief from UNC describes co‑regulation as the combination of a warm relationship, environmental structure, and coaching in self‑regulation skills — and emphasizes that this remains critical from birth through young adulthood.

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What About Sensory Processing Differences and Inherited Vulnerability?

My sons inherited Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) from me to varying degrees. My Auditory Processing Disorder was diagnosed before my first pregnancy, and my “dyslexia” diagnosis is more likely Visual Processing Disorder. I am more sensory‑avoidant in my presentation than they are (especially when tired or flooded; my auditory processing ability can nearly shut down entirely after I have pushed hard, requiring sleep to perform a “reboot” on my nervous system). They are generally more sensory‑seeking than I am, at least up to a point (and this may be an immaturity issue, as they do get overstimulated and “crash out” from overexposure).

Cold intolerance seems to be primarily a “me problem” at this point, though I am noticing some early indications in my eldest now that he’s at his final adult height. The air temperature yesterday, from my discernment, was simply too low to permit “natural consequences” as a reasonable teaching tool — the risk of frostbite was real if there was any dilly-dallying on the way home. The rule exists in part because of premeditatio malorum, that classical Stoicism practice of contemplating potential harms. Even when we travel by car, my children are expected to dress for the outdoor weather. A vehicle can break down or crash (as happened not quite three weeks ago). My children need to have the provisions they require to minimize risk from environmental exposures if they find themselves stranded in the cold, which is why this has been a rule in our household for many years.

For those unfamiliar with it or who don’t know, Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) has a neurological basis: UCSF researchers have documented abnormal white matter tracts in people with SPD, primarily in the posterior brain regions that handle auditory, visual, and somatosensory (tactile) integration. These are the “highways” that carry sensory information, and when they are disrupted, the timing of sensory transmission becomes irregular, making it difficult to process stimuli and integrate information across multiple senses. SPD is inherited; children can carry a genetic predisposition just as they inherit eye color or body type.

Given the inherited vulnerabilities in my family and the accumulating sensory demands of modern life, providing structure is not optional. My children, with their lower sensory gating, cannot always learn from natural consequences the way a typically developing nervous system can. Walking home in the cold without proper clothing could generate such intense discomfort and stress that the cortex does not engage meaningfully with any “lesson.” The consequences would not be pedagogical. They would be harmful and dysregulating.

So I substitute an artificial consequence (grounding from entertainment) in place of a potentially dangerous natural one. That is not softness. That is design.

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Virtual School, College Credit Plus, and the Practice of Growing Up

To be specific about my 13‑year‑old’s situation: he is enrolled in college coursework through Ohio’s College Credit Plus program while still in middle school through our public school district’s online alternative education option just as his elder brothers were. Being virtual/asynchronously schooled allows him to manage a college schedule alongside his siblings’ needs, shared resources, and our family rhythm. He is the fourth of my five sons to enroll in college during 7th grade.

My eldest began his college coursework as a 7th grader in spring 2017. He completed his Associate of Arts from the community college in May 2020. He then completed his B.A. in Organizational Leadership through College Credit Plus at the local state university in mid‑May 2022 — fully funded by the CCP program and including support from disability services at both institutions as stipulated in the 504 Plan he’d had since elementary school. His 18th birthday was May 26, 2022; he graduated from high school the day after, on May 27. His university commencement was around Mother’s Day weekend two weeks prior. Three of his younger brothers have now also enrolled at that same community college during their 7th grade years. His 15‑year‑old brother just finished his own Associate degree before turning 15 in May 2025. So far, all of my sons have earned Associate’s degrees before they were age-eligible for an Ohio driver’s license. Also, the older two are single (and yes, they groan that I point that out, but I want to see them well-partnered without relying on dating apps, so I mention it… a lot).

The 8 a.m. threshold is not arbitrary. It is the boundary between “I still have time to make my day work” and “I am now at risk of missing commitments.” For a young man managing college coursework, sibling schedules, and his own growing executive function, that threshold matters.

My eldest made a pun about this, calling himself “a well‑grounded kid” because of how frequently he was grounded from a preferred activity that did not align with who he wanted to become. His Minecraft obsession got redirected to LEGO bricks. He is now a second‑generation Adult Fan of LEGO, along with both his parents. The point was not punishment. The point was scaffolding him toward the person he actually wanted to be — not the person the algorithms were training him to become.

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Intersectionality: Who Can Afford “Natural Consequences”?

Permissive parenting — framed as trust in children and respect for autonomy — is not equally available to everyone. It is a classed and racialized luxury.

A white, middle‑class family can often absorb missed deadlines and absences. Teachers may assume a rough patch. Parents can provide tutoring or negotiate make‑ups. If their teenager stays up all night gaming, a missed day of school does not automatically trigger legal questions.

That is not the reality for many Black, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, or low‑income families. Too many missed deadlines or absences can be read as “educational neglect” — potentially triggering investigation by child protective services. A child melting down in public may be read not as “having a hard time” but instead be read as a threat. There is a non‑trivial risk, in some communities, that “read as a threat” ends with an encounter with police — or with a child being shot.

Research documents that Black families are more likely to be reported to and investigated by child protective services for parenting behaviors that are accepted or ignored in white families. The exact same boundary‑setting can be interpreted as “strong, caring parenting” in one neighborhood and “abuse” in another, depending on who is doing it and how they are racialized.

So when WEIRD, privileged adults tell me that my firm boundaries are “too authoritarian,” they are often speaking from a position in which institutions default to seeing their parenting style as benign and normative. They are not considering how different the stakes are for families who do not get that presumption of innocence.

Intersectionality — the way race, class, gender, disability, and immigration status intersect to shape risk — belongs at the center of any conversation about human development structuring, not at the margins.

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Village Deficit Disorder: Why Structure Does Double Duty

In ancestral contexts, the kind of co‑regulation my kids need was distributed across a village. There were alloparents — grandparents, aunties, uncles, older cousins, older siblings, neighborhood teens, neighbors, elders — who shared the load of noticing, correcting, soothing, and modeling. An alloparent is any person who functions as a caregiver or mentor outside of the biological parent(s), regardless of age. This can include older siblings, cousins, teenagers, preteens, or community members like the neighborhood babysitter I was during my own tween and teen years — a role that was inspired in me through my love of the Babysitters Club series. My household is an intentional partial restoration of that distributed care, but it is still thinner than what humans evolved with.

My husband’s parents came to the U.S. in the 1980s and naturalized while their two sons were still minors. My husband attended U.S. public schools starting in 2nd grade and was fully mainstreamed without ESL support by 4th grade. They lived in New Rochelle while working in New York City. When the garment industry outsourced their jobs, my husband’s parents moved in with us in Cleveland in 2006, which is where I had come of age and met their eldest son during our first year at college. They have lived with us for nearly two decades.

I expected them to provide the kind of co‑regulation and cultural transmission I had hoped for — the kind I had received from neighborhood alloparents in my own childhood, which is precisely what taught me how to become a functional parent. My own father came from Germany and was distinctly authoritarian; he broke a paddle over my younger brother’s backside for talking back when my brother was kindergarten‑aged. It was the neighborhood adults, teens, and other community members — not my family — who showed me what different, warmer parenting could look like.

My husband’s parents, however, are now enculturated in American Boomer entertainment consumption patterns. They are not providing the co‑regulation and cultural continuity I thought they would offer when they moved in. I have been unsuccessful in persuading them to transmit their cultural legacy instead of defaulting to over‑indulgence in entertainment alongside the grandchildren.

Because of my disabilities — and because I do not have the childcare support from my in‑laws that I had anticipated — I have not been able to maintain formal employment. I am self‑employed in ways that currently do not generate a stable income. As my youngest child finishes elementary school and requires less intensive parental support, I am attempting to re‑enter academia. Whether that effort will yield a stable income stream is uncertain; I may never draw steady paychecks. But that constraint has allowed me to build extensive social capital: neighbors, congregation members, community colleagues, and other adults (and sometimes youth in the form of my numerous “bonus kids”) who function as alloparents and “distributed cognition” for me and my sons. My ability to have time for these relationships — and to be present when my children interact with these people — is part of how the village we are intentionally growing gets built.

Even so, this is a small, not tightly-knit, village compared to human history. When you remove that secure social safety net for most families and then tell parents “just let natural consequences teach,” you are asking a single exhausted caregiver (usually a mother) to do what used to be the work of dozens of people across all ages.

Children with lower sensory gating — like my sons with Sensory Processing Disorder profiles — are especially vulnerable in this village‑deficit context. Sensory gating (the brain’s ability to filter repeated or irrelevant sensory input) typically matures through late childhood and early adolescence, and deficits are implicated across multiple neurodevelopmental conditions. When gating is low, “natural consequences” like walking home in subzero wind can generate such intense discomfort and stress that the cortex cannot engage meaningfully with any “lesson.”

So I compensate by being more intentionally structured, not less. The boundary‑setting I do at home is, in some ways, trying to provide what ancestral families would have gotten from a whole network of people.

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What Backtalk Actually Means (Spoiler: It’s Good)

When my 9‑year‑old questioned the coat rule this morning, he was doing exactly what he should be doing developmentally. He was testing: Is this boundary real? Is it reasonable? Does my parent actually care about this, or did they just say it casually?

This is how children learn which authority figures are worth listening to.

In Stoic terms, he was exercising his capacity to form judgments. He was beginning the process of deciding whether this rule aligns with his own emerging sense of what is reasonable. That is a real developmental task — not a failure of respect or a sign that my parenting is too harsh.

My response — the logical consequence of forgetting his coat yesterday and not remembering it again today despite reminders — is not about punishment. It is about information. It is saying: this boundary is real. These are the consequences of not respecting it. Now, what does your developing judgment tell you?

The backtalk gets him grounded for today because it is also information: I am teaching him that how you engage with authority matters. You can question the rule; you can explain your reasoning — but you must do that respectfully. That is not crushing his autonomy. That is teaching him how autonomy actually functions in a world where other people exist (not just NPCs who are supports to build your “Main Character Energy”) and have legitimate authority.​

I am also teaching my sons to complain constructively rather than just bickering or whining about something that is not going to change. I want them to have strong, healthy negotiation skills. I do not want them to be whiney, entitled brats that people avoid — because people naturally avoid entitlement, and the kind of mature people who would bring opportunities into their lives avoid entitlement most of all.

Stoics call this prudence — understanding context, recognizing that his behavior is in his control and my response is in mine. Neither is “wrong.” Both are choices with consequences.

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Protective Factors and the Reality of Finite Capacity

The research on Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) is clear: children who experience supportive relationships, emotional responsiveness, and stable routines show lower rates of depression and mental health problems in adulthood, even when they have also experienced adversity. Data from a nationally representative study published in Pediatrics in 2023 found that adults who reported 5 to 6 PCEs had a 26% lower risk of any psychiatric condition compared to those with 0 to 2 PCEs. This held true even after controlling for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).​

What I am doing is maximizing those protective experiences: stable relationships with caring adults who know us deeply, safe and predictable routines, opportunities to contribute and problem‑solve, and spaces where our full selves are welcome. In this political climate, anxiety could very well develop anyway — among my children, among their peers, among any of us. My project is inoculation through accumulated positive experiences, not magical immunity. We’re still very much vulnerable to infection from the absolutely real ambient dis-ease.

Here is something that does not get enough attention in parenting advice: my emotional regulation is finite, too. I snap sometimes. I get more sharp‑edged than I prefer to be. I hit my limits. The expectation that caregivers should apply all this research flawlessly at all times is itself dehumanizing. We are not malfunctioning AI when we reach our capacity. We are human beings, in difficult systems, doing the best we can with imperfect bodies and histories.

Stoicism, for me, is not a performance of serenity. It is a toolkit for returning to what matters after rupture — for apologizing when I overshoot, for recalibrating boundaries, for remembering that I have choices even under constraint. And sometimes, becoming a well‑grounded adult requires repeated grounding events in childhood, a little bit of friction, a little bit of “no, that is not going to work,” so that their own internal compass has something to push against while it is forming.

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Bringing It Together

From the outside, my parenting can look “strict” — coat rules, 8 a.m. thresholds, alarms, consequences. From the inside, it is a carefully constructed set of scaffolds designed to:

• Compensate for a missing village.

• Respect my children’s sensory vulnerabilities and safety needs.

• Honor intersectional realities about who can safely “let natural consequences teach.”

• Build the neural and psychological structures they will need to become truly autonomous adults.

• Titrated and tempered to meet the evolving needs of my sons, so they can thrive in their areas of excellence without excessive distress around their weaknesses or too much social sacrifice on the paths to achieving their full potentials.

Stoic philosophy gives me the language of the dichotomy of control and of virtue. Neuroscience gives me the mechanisms of co‑regulation and identity development. Intersectionality gives me a realistic map of risk and privilege. And social science research methodology — including the IRB‑overseen human subjects research I have played active roles in as a sociologist since the 1990s — gives me a healthy skepticism about whether parenting advice is actually evidence‑based in universally generalizable ways — or just culturally comfortable.

Together, these frameworks justify what my gut has known since I was a latchkey kid paying attention to everything: structure is not punishment; structure is love spread over time.

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For Further Study

Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Health — Huang, Schickedanz, & colleagues (2023), Pediatrics, 152(1). Shows that 5–6 PCEs are associated with 26% lower risk of any psychiatric condition. Free full text:

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/152/1/e2022060951/191565

Co‑Regulation From Birth Through Young Adulthood: A Practice Brief — UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Institute (2018). Describes the three pillars of co‑regulation: relationships, environmental structure, and skills coaching.

https://fpg.unc.edu/publications/co-regulation-birth-through-young-adulthood-practice-brief

SPD Has a Biological Basis — UC San Francisco (2013) documented neuroanatomical differences in white matter tracts in children with sensory processing disorders. Brief overview:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2013/07/107316/archive-breakthrough-study-reveals-biological-basis-sensory-processing

The Development of Self and Identity in Adolescence: Neural Perspectives — Crone & Steinbeis (2018), Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(2). How the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates identity during adolescence in response to experience-dependent neural maturation.

Heads up: there’s going to be some coarse language occasionally in this one, because of what FAFO is short-code for. It’s also significantly longer than my average Substack post (on final word count check, it’s more than twice as long as my longest prior post). I might break this up into multiple parts later to make it easier on the mental processing of readers who don’t have time for this deep dive in one article. Please send me a message if you need me to make that a priority to enable your engagement around this. This has been simmering, sometimes boiling over, inside me for more than a decade. My family has been setting off my already-frayed-by-last-weekend’s-car-crash nervous system massively this week, which got this writing prioritized as part of my self-regulation processing needs. Part of that is “closing the loop” of getting this off my to-do list in time to have it available for feedback from members of my virtual village, whom I’ll be synchronously interacting with tomorrow, so I’m pushing this out as one article now for that reason. My family also wound up all being home from school today, constantly interrupting my efforts to edit this after drafting it yesterday, so I cannot edit it down and still meet the goal of it being available in time for some chance of my village to give me timely feedback. I’ve added in subscribe prompts to make that easier on anyone who gets partway in, then decides they need to have a “pause/resume” button on this post (I’m not usually this aggressive with the subscription suggestions!).

A bit of background: I live near the middle of zip code 44107 in a western inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. This is a short bike ride — roughly two and a half miles — from Cudell Recreation Center on West Blvd, the park where twelve‑year‑old Tamir Rice was shot by police in 2014 for holding a toy gun. At the time, my fourth son was not yet two; my oldest was ten and a half. I had, up to that point, spent all of my motherhood years embedded in gentle and attachment parenting communities, marinating in promises that if we just validated feelings hard enough, our kids would grow up safe, regulated, and free to “use their voices” with authority in ways that could shift the world to be more fair and just.

When Tamir was murdered, staying aligned with that discourse, knowing that my beloved Black neighbors were openly terrified that any hint of “attitude” could get their sons killed on streets my own sons can bike to, felt completely out of alignment with the Virtues my Stoicism calls me to embody.

That tragedy broke through some of my cognitive biases that had been keeping me from applying my analytic mind to the aspects of that parenting ideology that did not align with what I knew as a social scientist. It changed my behavior in some fundamental ways, but I didn’t openly discuss it much. I now feel that it’s time to have an honest, frank conversation around the harm I see this ideology perpetuating.

Mama bear, Stoicism, and the lie about “losing it”

Gentle parenting didn’t just ignore village structures; it asked mothers to override our own nervous systems. When a parent (particularly one who has had their nervous system rewired by gestation) perceives their child is threatened, the body does not politely check in with Instagram discourse; it slams into a caregiving defense state fueled by oxytocin, cortisol, norepinephrine, and related systems that exist to keep offspring alive, not to keep everyone comfortable. In lab and animal studies, postpartum females show dramatic neuroendocrine shifts: oxytocin and other hormones remodel circuits in regions like the medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and lateral septum, increasing maternal vigilance and aggression toward intruders while also supporting caregiving. Under acute social threat, cortisol levels can more than double within about 20–30 minutes, with recovery often taking an hour or more; in females, stress responses tend to rise faster and recover more slowly than in males, meaning mothers can stay neuropsychologically “lit up” long after the triggering event is over. In that state, posture, voice, facial expression, word choice — all of it — can look and sound radically different from baseline. From the inside, it feels like tunnel‑visioned emergency. From the outside, especially to someone cultishly invested in you as a parent looking perpetually gentle, it is easy to reframe as “you’re hysterical,” “you’re overreacting,” or “you’re the real problem.”​ This is a way countless mothers get set up in DARVO situations by abusive partners, who take legal advantage of those labels getting applied after their abuser has triggered this neurological cascade. Relevant peer-reviewed link, and another, and another, and one more for good measure, now go do your own academic article searching if you’re not convinced that I know what the hell I’m talking about here — just know there are plenty more available at any of our fingertips and if you try to fight me on this one I’m coming “loaded for [defending the mama] bear.”

That cascade is not identical across genders or bodies. Gestation, birth, and lactation appear to flip additional switches in the maternal brain, tuning oxytocin‑rich and noradrenergic circuits in ways that dial up both caregiving and defensive aggression toward threats to offspring — a kind of last‑line defense mode when the rest of the village fails. Fathers and non‑gestational parents absolutely form fierce attachment bonds and protection responses, but typical male (and, from what I’ve read, possibly parental figures in biologically female bodies who have not gestated) stress patterns skew more toward fight‑or‑flight directed outward, while postpartum maternal wiring more often routes that activation into “position yourself between the threat and the child,” even at significant personal cost. From a Stoic standpoint, none of this is moral failure. Stoicism has always distinguished between involuntary first interpretations/impressions and chosen assent. The surge of fear or fury is involuntary, what happens next is where virtue or vice comes into the situation. The problem is that in many households, that absolutely predictable maternal defense state is being framed — by gentle‑parenting discourse and by narcissistic or abusive partners — as proof that the mother is unstable, abusive, or “the real danger,” while the behaviors that triggered the cascade (from kids or spouses) are minimized or denied. That is DARVO by way of pop neuroscience: deny the threat, attack the mother’s character, and reverse victim and offender by using her evolutionarily predictable defense response as evidence against the whole of who she is able to be.

I’ve watched similar processes play out to undermine the credibility of countless people who are wholeheartedly trying to effect social change. It’s not just a problem at the private level, this is used systemically, and there is no demographic identity that makes one invulnerable to this. It’s been attempted against me more times than I can easily count, with varying levels of success at damaging my social capital.

The gentle‑parenting line that “kids should always feel safe with you” sounds compassionate until you map it onto actual survival contexts. Some behaviors should never “feel safe” in any form of interpersonal relationship or community context. Driving a car while intoxicated should not “feel safe.” Screaming at a woman until she dissociates should not “feel safe.” Escalating backtalk with authority figures who can physically end you should absolutely not “feel safe” — yet that is often what I watch get practice time in “gentle parenting” families. As I tell my kids nearly daily, “you will perform what you practice — for good or for bad.” As the neuroscience community says all the time, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” In a functioning village, those behaviors would trigger swift, calibrated consequences from multiple adults, long before the police or the courts ever got involved or the neuropathways that lead to these becoming entrenched habits could get wired in. In a village‑deficit suburb, all of that weight gets dropped on one or two parents, with no daily alloparenting support, who are simultaneously told that any flash of anger is “traumatizing” and any firm discipline of a transgressed boundary is “authoritarian.” That is not trauma‑informed science; it is maternal gaslighting, demanding that we view our evolved defense systems as pathological instead of survival equipment.​

Intersectionality: who can “use their voice” and live?

Gentle parenting, as it is marketed in white, class‑affluent, neurotypical circles, quietly assumes a level of safety that simply does not exist for many families. It is one thing to coach a child with a high level of social capital from their family of origin to speak up to teachers or police when the likely consequence is a detention or stern warning. It is quite another to raise Black kids this way in Tamir’s neighborhood, or disabled kids in a country where Autistic meltdowns, stimming, or flat affect can be read as threat and answered with force. White Autistic families have known for a long time that they live in that crosshairs too, especially when non‑typical prosody or shutdown responses are misread as defiance or intoxication. Framing backtalk, refusal, and public dysregulation as “healthy self‑expression” in these societal conditions is not liberation. It is training vulnerable kids to misread danger in systems that will not give them a second chance.​ I cannot change the societal conditions, but I will side with being in solidarity in the struggle my marginalized neighbors encounter. That is what the Stoic Virtue of Justice, interwoven with intersectionality, calls upon me to do.

Intersectional Stoicism starts by asking the oldest Stoic question — what is, and is not, within our control — but refuses to pretend everyone is starting from a position of equality of choices when they ask it. A Black Autistic boy in the inner city, a white neurotypical girl in a wealthy exurb, a teen from an immigrant household crossing cultures at home and school: each faces a different ratio of risk when they “speak their truth” to power. Justice, as a Stoic virtue, demands that parents factor those unequal risks into how we socialize our kids, even when that means telling some of them, explicitly, that the world will not treat them fairly and they cannot afford the same level of “fuck‑around” as their peers can before they “find out” in potentially lethal ways. That ugly asymmetry is not something gentle parenting can brush away with emotional validations and consistent empathizing. I run into similar ugly asymmetries when I seek professional mental health support, because it is a waste of my time having a therapist validate and empathize with my struggles getting through doorways. The doorway is the reality. Not every body can go through it, regardless of how graciously the door is held open. That is the understanding needed to comprehend the intersectional pressures on these families. I will stay on the same side of the door as those in struggle, for as long as it takes to make the door fully accessible to all.

Expertise, extraction, and colonizer fetish in the parenting aisle

Several years after Tamir Rice’s killing jolted my neighborhood, I watched the parenting communities I’m embedded in — particularly the white, affluent, liberal ones — fall in love with Hunt, Gather, Parent, written by Michaeleen Doucleff. Dr. Doucleff has made a career for herself as a global health correspondent prior to writing this book, and she came at it with what looks like significant levels of obliviousness to how much privilege she embodies. I seem to be the only reader to note that her academic background that entitled her to put “PhD” on her byline is in chemistry from UC Berkeley, and none of her prior academic studies were in a social sciences field — she has zero documented formal education emphasis in anthropology or ethnography (to save you the internet search, dear reader, her Masters is in Viticulture and Enology — grape growing and winemaking — and her Bachelors is in Biology just like my husband’s). The problem is not that Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe families have nothing to teach us; it is that a white, U.S.‑based scientist‑journalist overflowing in class privilege biases flew in, extracted parenting techniques from brown people’s communities whose child‑rearing is embedded in thick village networks who depend on one another for mutual survival on a daily basis, and repackaged them as portable hacks for exhausted affluent Western nuclear families in village‑deficit contexts. From where I sit, that is not not a foundation upon which to give advice, it is colonizer behavior with a side helping of exoticizing families and fetishizing their methods as raw material for capitalistic gain, while ignoring the structural conditions that make those practices possible and safe in the first place.​ She did extract some valuable observations that add value to my life, and I am likely to cite that book if I ever get around to writing a Stoicism-centering parenting book, but the cost at which she did so is morally and ethically questionable from my perspective. I view it like the HeLa cell lines — the damage has already been done, and it is out of respect of the harm suffered that I use it in a transformed way to create something that might be healing to others. Oh, and she only had one child, who was younger than compulsory schooling age at the time, while doing all that cultural extraction labor, which further reduces the generalizability of her “doctorate-level” observations that the cover promises to readers. I have five children, and my youngest is nine and a half years old (roughly double the age her lone daughter was during her writing process) as I’m writing this.

For additional contrast, my own academic work has actually lived in this messy low-resourced, stretched thin parenting terrain. I hold a BA in psychology and sociology with a strong childhood and lifespan focus. After a gap decade, I went on to earn a MA in Sociology with my primary focus being on socialization processes, as a wheelchair user sandwich generation in a multicultural immigrant three generation household, starting with two sons and finishing with my fourth still exclusively breastfeeding (the photo I use of me in my graduation robes on this publication is from that commencement; I’m seated in a mobility scooter wearing my then-5-month-old fourth son in a soft baby carrier as I breastfed him before going up on the stage to receive my diploma). No, I don’t have any academic credentials in Stoicism, but I’ve been using Stoic tools in my daily life since I was in high school, so chalk it up to “independent learning that doesn’t make it onto a transcript.” For the past two decades, I have kept studying these fields (formally and informally), including attending attachment‑parenting symposia, interacting with some of the most prominent figures in that movement, and being personally encouraged by Dr. William and Martha Sears to write a parenting book from my disabled perspective. That is why credential placement on Hunt, Gather, Parent grates so badly: listing a chemistry doctorate on the cover of a book about parenting and Indigenous child‑rearing is not harmless; it deliberately leans on consumers’ trust in “doctor” while wandering far outside the field that title actually represents and makes a heavier lift for actual experts like me.​

When publishers slap any “PhD” on a parenting book, regardless of field, they are not honoring expertise; they are weaponizing a credential to trigger authority bias in readers who are desperate for guidance, and in this case, doing it on top of colonizer fetishization in a way that can slip through subtly for attracting the white gaze (for profit) without triggering white guilt and bonus for having a low likelihood of liberal backlash. She was, after all, “centering the experiences of People of Color” even as she did so while strip out the context that made those experiences usable. Parenting advice is never just about ideas; it is about who gets framed as an expert, and whose everyday life becomes raw material for other people’s brands. That asymmetry keeps the money and microphone in the hands of those who can afford to treat other people’s villages as laboratories, and it leaves those villages’ own scholars and parents as background color in their own story as told, polished, and presented for personal gain.

And it is not only unsafe for marginalized kids when those techniques are transplanted; it is also a form of gaslighting aimed at suburban families who no longer have villages. Selling “ancient” parenting hacks to isolated parents (who lack everyday access to co‑regulating adults, task sharing for essential life functions with extended family across the age span, and the distributed cognition of actual elders who know the full context of their lives since their own birth) pretends that you can get village outcomes without village structures. In ancestral contexts, the wisdom behind these practices is reinforced thousands of times in passing conversation, shared labor, ritual, and gossip; no one has to schedule time to read a book by a distant “expert” to know how to respond when a child melts down or mouths off. In a village‑deficit suburb, telling parents they can reproduce those results by sheer force of technique — while they are cut off from the hour-by-hour access to more than a dozen people like aunties, uncles, and grandparents who would normally help metabolize the stress — is not what support looks like. It is a bait‑and‑switch that blames them for failing to achieve outcomes that were never designed for a lone, burned‑out adult in a two‑bedroom apartment or cul‑de‑sac.​

The toolbox: what Stoicism doesn’t say “never” about

Here’s where I rather dramatically diverge from Gentle Parenting. When asked for parenting advice, I commonly say “don’t leave functional tools rusting in the toolbox.” To be absolutely clear: yes, that includes corporal punishment — and it also includes the possibility that, for some parents, that particular tool should stay perpetually off-limits. There are adults whose own childhood trauma, dissociation patterns, or unmanaged rage make any physical contact during a stress-filled parenting moment a straight shot from “intended swat” to “out‑of‑control beating.” For them, the most loving, responsible choice is a hard no. If they cannot trust themselves to stay within the narrow band where a brief, non‑injurious physical consequence might function as inoculation instead of injury, they should not go near it. Stoic self‑knowledge and temperance start here: know your limits, and do not pretend virtue lies in flirting with the edge of your self-control where others might be harmed.

There are other parents who absolutely can use calibrated physical consequences as one tool in a much larger relational system. I firmly believe it should not be the first, or even second, tool a parent reaches for, but that it is in some cases the most efficient tool for a specific situation. Used rarely, with full awareness, in a context of deep attachment and ongoing repair, a quick, proportionate physical consequence can build relational resilience and social awareness — a kind of psychosocial vaccination that stings for a moment to reduce, though never eliminate, the risk of far worse harm later. In that framing, an occasional smack to interrupt truly dangerous or relationally toxic behavior is less about venting adult anger and more about injecting a controlled dose of discomfort now so that a young person is less likely to get annihilated, socially or physically, when they run the same pattern into a world that will not handle them with gloves. This is aligned with the mothering exhibited across species amongst mammals. The Stoic question is not “did I ever use this tool?” but “did I use it in line with justice, wisdom, and self‑control, aimed at my child’s long‑term flourishing rather than my short‑term relief?”​ The amount of shaming I’ve seen around this topic in Gentle/Attachment Parenting contexts over the last two decades made writing that an act of courage for me, and I know there are others who feel likewise. There are some absolutists who will absolutely cancel me for this.

That is part of why Bad Therapy (which many of my liberal friends absolutely hate, but I read it anyway a few months ago) landed very differently for me than Hunt, Gather, Parent. Abigail Shrier’s core critique — that therapeutic overreach, “gentle” parenting dogma, and consequence‑free classrooms have produced kids who are both more fragile and more dangerous — overlaps heavily with what I have watched unfold in real time in my own communities and society at large. She overstates some things and misses others, but at least she starts from an intellectual neighborhood adjacent to the problem: philosophy, law, and sustained reporting on families and institutions warped by therapy culture, instead of hard science in unrelated lab fields. And she didn’t plop her academic credentials in her byline.

Honestly, I find myself roughly ninety percent agreeing with the foundational premises of both Hunt, Gather, Parent and Bad Therapy: kids need embeddedness, responsibility, and less psychologized micromanagement, and they crumble when adults outsource all authority to feelings and experts. But it is exactly that overlap that makes the extraction and credential games so glaring — one author air‑drops into brown people’s villages with an irrelevant doctorate prominently featured on the resulting book’s cover, the other dissects therapy culture with training in law and philosophy, and meanwhile I, living in the social sciences and parenting trenches for decades, get treated as “just a mom with opinions as valid as anyone else’s, even a teenager’s.”​ That is a common conflict trigger in my household, a household that is inundated by gentle parenting ideals that do not match my embodied experiences.

FAFO Parenting as survival‑accurate cause and effect

The kids and young adults who grew up steeped in gentle‑parenting discourse were often taught a dangerous half‑truth that Bad Therapy only partially touches upon: that as long as they spoke their feelings and explained their intentions, the adults and systems around them would respond with infinite curiosity and care. What Bad Therapy misses is that, in practice, that script has collided with school administrators, cops, judges, employers, and intimate partners who do not have the training, time, or willingness to treat every interaction as a teachable moment. When you have been socialized to believe that your “voice” should always be welcomed, it is a brutal shock to discover that mouthing off to the wrong person at the wrong time can cost you your job, your relationship, your freedom, or your life.​

FAFO Parenting is a refusal to keep sending kids into the realities of America in the 21st century with outdated Disneyland maps. It tells the truth: if you fuck around with certain boundaries — other people’s bodily autonomy, shared resources, public safety, power backed by weapons — you will, sooner or later, find out, often in ways that hurt far worse than an earlier life inoculative experience. It’s not because your mother is cruel, but because the world will enforce those lines with far less love (and far fewer second chances) than she does. In a FAFO framework, consequences are not random punishments; they are rehearsals for real‑world feedback, delivered while there is still a soft place to land and someone who loves you enough to say, “If you do this out there, they will not care why. They will just hit back in ways that will harm you.” That is deeply Stoic: let reality be the teacher when possible, intervene firmly when necessary, and never confuse wishful thinking with how power actually behaves.​

If you were raised in a home where adults took great lengths to never raise their voices, where “we don’t do punishments here” was a point of pride, and where any attempt at boundary or consequence got framed as abuse, it can be disorienting to step into a world that does not play by those rules. You may find yourself furious at elders who “ruined your vibe,” resentful of teachers or bosses who “weren’t trauma‑informed,” or confused about why friendships and relationships keep blowing up when you “just say what you feel.” From the inside, it can look like everyone else is cruel or emotionally stunted. From the outside, it often looks like you were never given a clear map of how cause and effect actually works once you leave the carefully padded comfort of your family home. I also feel it’s worth pointing out how much of that “gentle” context is made possible by chemical alteration of the maternal bodies in that — a lot of these same moms are posting “it’s wine o’clock” memes on social media and/or openly talking about their prescription drug dosages. Correlation is not causation, but this looks to me like capitalism profiting in one more way off the effects of gaslighting mothers into the “stay sweet” gentle parenting ideology. Some of you are only now realizing that the adults who were “too hard” on you may also have instilled skills and resiliency that will keep you alive when the struggles get more intense. They were the ones who told you, sometimes sharply, that you could not talk to a cop the way you talked to your therapist. That you could not scream at a romantic partner the way you screamed at your parents. That you could not show up late, high, and unprepared to a job and expect endless understanding. You have every right to sort through what was fair and what went too far, but part of growing up in the context you are living in is recognizing that “I didn’t get to do whatever I wanted without consequences that discomforted me” is not the same thing as “I was abused.” Sometimes it is just “I was trained, imperfectly, for a world that is less gentle than the one my parents ernestly wished I would exist in.”​

Village deficit and what real “village work” looks like now

None of this is an argument for going it alone as a hardened FAFO parent in a hostile world. In ancestral contexts, the job of enforcing reality did not fall on one exhausted mother with a dysregulated nervous system, a stack of parenting books, and hopefully an adult partner in weathering the storms of life while trying to keep everyone housed and fed. It was distributed across aunties, uncles, grandparents, older siblings, neighbors, coaches, faith leaders, and the random elder at the market who would give your kid a look that said, “Don’t even try it.” Village structures spread the load of consequence, co‑regulation, and course correction so that no single caregiver had to be perfect, and no single flash of anger carried the whole weight of a child’s socialization in ways that put everyone involved at risk of PTSD.​

In village‑deficit suburbs and cities, rebuilding that distribution is part of the work. It looks like trusted adults comparing notes instead of sniping behind each other’s backs. It looks like parents being honest about which tools they can and cannot use safely, and having other adults ready to step in before (not after) their limits are hit with the intense forces of life. It looks like communities quietly agreeing that certain lines — cruelty to animals, racist harassment, terrorizing vulnerable others, reckless endangerment — will trigger swift, coordinated response from multiple adults, not just quiet concern from a significant distance and maybe a hope-filled text exchange. Stoically, it is about accepting the world we actually live in, taking responsibility for the roles we can play, and refusing to pretend that either total permissiveness or isolated harshness will do anything of worth in the effort to save our kids.​

So no, gentle parenting as an ideology does not get centered here. It will not be the framework that carries tweens and teens — especially boys, especially neurodivergent kids, especially Black and brown youth, especially kids who cannot hide their marginalized identities in overpoliced neighborhoods — through the next decade intact. A parenting culture that treats every spike of maternal rage as pathology, that fetishizes brown people’s village-embedded lives while gutting actual local community, and that tells kids they should always “feel safe” even while they are actively endangering others, is not preparing anyone for what is coming. FAFO Parenting is not a brand I’ll consent to participate in building; it is, in my case, a begrudging, field‑tested admission that biology, power, and consequence still run the show — and that our job, particularly those of us who recognize ourselves as intersectional Stoic parents in village‑deficit times, is to teach kids how to read that reality early, with as much love and as much village as we can scrape together, before the systems that don’t love them at all get there first.​

On Sunday morning, January 11, my phone rang while I was driving to church, about five miles ahead of my older sons. My 15-year-old Lincoln’s voice came through the speaker: “Mom, Liam hit ice on 77. The car spun out and hit the guardrail. We’re all fine. The car is not fine.”

Shortly thereafter, the following photo arrived in the family text thread:

I felt my nervous system register the information, run a quick diagnostic (everyone safe, car replaceable, next steps clear), and settle into crisis-manager mode. I had my fourth son use his phone to call our “church grandma” to arrange childcare coverage while we parents handled the situation. My husband, sitting in the second row next to our youngest, stayed quiet. After nearly 30 years together, he knows not to distract me with unnecessary commentary when I’m managing a crisis.

After dropping my 13-year-old and 9-year-old off with our beloved elders at church to free up space in the van for our older sons and anything they had from the car, my husband and I were on our way roughly 10 minutes after the accident. I looped back onto the highway to get to the McDonald’s parking lot, where the police would take our boys, reducing the risk of another accident trying to get them into the van on the side of the interstate. Within minutes of the loop closing, I felt relief-based happiness, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot, the spark of joy at seeing my sons safe and unharmed caught easily.

This is what more than three decades of Stoic practice have bought me.

The Problem with “Don’t Dress-Rehearse Tragedy”

Brené Brown has written extensively about what she calls “foreboding joy” (that experience every parent I know knows intimately, where intrusive thoughts of loss immediately invade a moment of pure happiness with your child). Your toddler is laughing in the bathtub, and suddenly your brain offers you a vivid image of them drowning. Your teen drives away, and you imagine the call from the hospital. Brown’s advice? Don’t dress-rehearse tragedy. Practice gratitude instead. She argues that imagining disaster doesn’t actually prepare us and only robs us of joy in the present.

I respectfully but firmly disagree.

The issue isn’t the thoughts themselves. The issue is leaving them as open loops.

Premeditatio Malorum: The Stoic Practice Brown Misunderstands

The Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum (premeditation of evils — deliberately imagining worst-case scenarios, not to torture themselves but to build psychological resilience and clarify values while also pre-planning what to do next if the dreaded situation strikes, which is also sometimes modernly referred to as a “premortem”). Marcus Aurelius imagined betrayal, loss, death, and other disasters in his Meditations. Epictetus told students to kiss their children goodnight while remembering they are mortal. This wasn’t morbid pessimism. It was strength training.

But there’s a key aspect that makes this practice functional rather than pathological, in my experience: you have to actually complete the thought process. When my brain offers me the image of one of my sons in a car accident, I don’t push it away, and I don’t let it loop endlessly in the background. I set a timer (usually 5-10 minutes, depending on complexity) and I work through it systematically:

If this were actually happening right now, what would I need to do?

• Receive the call and assess the situation

• Redirect to a safe meeting point

• Contact my husband and coordinate logistics for the younger kids

• Assess injuries and arrange medical evaluation

• Deal with insurance, police reports, and vehicle towing

• Manage my own nervous system, so I’m a source of calm competence rather than another chaotic variable others have to manage

• Access whatever resources (community, financial, emotional) we’d need

Whenever my brain offers up the practice opportunity in my downtime, I move through the scenario like I’m running a disaster drill. Then the timer goes off, I consciously close the mental file, and I return to the present moment. Loop closed. My brain is satisfied that there’s a plan. Within minutes, I often experience relief-based happiness, and if the context offers a glimmer, the spark of joy catches easily from there.

The Zeigarnik Effect and Open Loops

The Zeigarnik Effect describes how our brains obsess over uncompleted tasks. An interrupted task takes up more mental bandwidth than a completed one. When we have “foreboding joy” moments and try to suppress or redirect the thoughts without actually processing them, we create open loops. The brain keeps running that disaster scenario in the background, consuming resources, generating low-level anxiety, and preventing full presence or rest.

When I actually complete the thought process (if X happens, I will do Y, then Z, and life will go on being set up for as much success as I can realistically contribute), my brain registers it as handled. The loop closes. I can return to baseline contentment, often experiencing relief-based happiness quickly — and from there, joy can catch hold of me easily.

Sunday Morning, Practiced

So when Lincoln called from the side of I-77, I wasn’t encountering that scenario for the first time. I’d practiced versions of it dozens of times over the years. My nervous system had the pattern already built: assess safety, determine next actions, move through the logistics, and maintain calm so I can be useful.

I drove to the McDonald’s parking lot. I warmly greeted my sons and thanked the officer profusely for caring for them. The boys had already taken photos of the car for insurance before the police transported them off the highway. I felt sad about the car (Liam had named it “Nimbus” and genuinely loved it) and relieved beyond measure that everyone walked away. But I didn’t collapse. I didn’t panic. I didn’t become another chaotic variable to account for in the problem of the moment.

We brought the boys to church, where I recruited a “community auntie” who is both an EMT and massage therapist to evaluate them and provide advice on recovering from any whiplash-type issues her knowledgeable hands could predict they would encounter. Liam attended his scheduled Leadership Development Council meeting and did a brief initial internet search for replacement vehicles. Our “church grandma” friend took my four younger children out to lunch after church before delivering them to our home, giving my husband and me the space to focus on the next steps with Liam.

Those next steps included attempting to go look at a similar-to-the-wrecked-one vehicle that Liam had found online. He’d misread the listing as available at the CarMax dealership closer to the church than our home (that car is, in fact, in Tennessee and would cost $150 to have delivered to that dealership, so we’re looking at options within a 90-minute drive first). But having viewed that listing for myself, the car he was looking at ticked every single box I would have if I were searching for a replacement vehicle. He’s definitely internalized the training I’ve been trying to impart. He’s done so better than his brother Delano, who kept interrupting my thought processes to show me vehicles that were cheaper but would have been filtered out using checkboxes if I’d done the internet search myself (they’re either too far away, have problematic vehicle histories that risk them being more expensive within months of ownership, or not a good passenger/cargo capacity fit for our use cases). These were all factors that led to the selection of Nimbus in the first place when we were in the market for a used hybrid to take to Society for Creative Anachronism events packed full of people and gear.

This is what premeditatio malorum bought me. Not the absence of feeling, but the capacity to feel while still functioning. Not toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing, but genuine equanimity built on realistic preparation.

Contentment as the Foundation for Joy

Brown worries that dress-rehearsing tragedy makes us too afraid to be joyful. My experience is the opposite. When I’ve closed the loops, when I know I’ve mentally practiced for the scenarios that terrify me most, I can be more joyful. The joy isn’t haunted by unprocessed dread running in the background. It’s clean joy, springing from a solid baseline of contentment that isn’t dependent on everything going perfectly.

I’m not saying everyone should practice this way. Neurotypes and other life loads differ. Some people might find this approach makes anxiety worse rather than better. But for me (and I suspect for others who struggle with intrusive thoughts about disaster), the practice of actually completing the thought, setting boundaries around it with a timer, and consciously closing the loop has been transformative.

Memento Mori: They Are Mortal, and So Am I

The other Stoic practice woven through this is memento mori (remember that you will die, and so will everyone you love). This sounds grim. It’s not. It’s clarifying.

When I remember that my sons are mortal, every ordinary morning becomes precious (even when they’re also stressful and I’m simultaneously practicing premeditatio malorum around scaffolding their abilities to get themselves up and going as they should be developmentally capable of doing at their current ages). When I remember that I am mortal, I stop postponing the conversations and connections that matter and that increase the odds that when I die, I will leave some version of the kind of legacy to the world aligned with my intentions. When I remember that the whole fragile enterprise could end at any moment, I’m motivated to make sure we’re actually living in alignment with our values right now, not at some fantastical point in the future when everything is more convenient.

Sunday could have ended very differently. The car could have rolled. Another vehicle could have been involved. My sons could have been hurt or killed. They weren’t, but I know very well that they could have been. And because I’ve practiced sitting with that reality (not obsessively, not pathologically, but intentionally and in bounded inoculation-style doses), I can hold both the grief of what others have experienced or might yet come for my family, and the gratitude for the actual, without either one overwhelming the other.

Closing and Practical Matters

If you’re someone who experiences foreboding joy, if intrusive disaster thoughts invade your happiest moments, I’m not going to tell you to just practice gratitude and push the thoughts away. Instead, I’m suggesting you try completing the thought. Set a timer. Work through what you’d actually do. Build the plan. Close the loop. See if that frees you to be more present, not less.

The car spun. My sons are safe. I knew what to do. And now we rebuild, grateful for practiced resilience and the community showing up to help carry the load.

A final note on closing loops: writing this article is itself an act of that practice. I initially thought I would wait to compose and post this, spacing it out so I wouldn’t have multiple long Substack posts back-to-back. This morning, however, I quickly discovered that leaving this as an open loop was keeping me from progressing with other tasks I needed to do today. The accident, the thoughts about premeditatio malorum, the disagreement with Brown’s framework, the recognition of what the time spent in countless practice sessions bought me in that moment — all of it was running in the background, consuming cognitive resources, demanding to be processed and completed. So I’m writing it now. When I hit publish, the loop closes. The mental bandwidth frees up. I can move on to the next thing.

This is the practice working in real time.

Liam is taking full financial responsibility for getting our household back to the vehicular capacity we had 36 hours ago, but doing so is going to obliterate the financial cushion he’s been building for himself in preparation for starting law school at Cleveland State University this fall. Full-time first-year law school students aren’t supposed to have paid employment during the academic semesters. If you’re able to contribute to Liam’s car replacement fund, so he doesn’t lose that cushion, we’re deeply grateful. If you can’t contribute financially but want to help close this particular loop for our family, sharing the fundraiser helps too. Here’s the link. I’m also going to go ahead and open this one post up to comments instead of putting them behind a paywall (which is my typical way to reduce the cognitive load that comes with moderating public posts on the internet) — feel free to leave a message for me to share with my children even if you can’t afford to chip in towards the expenses.

And so, the practices continue…

Not because I ran out of things to say; I have a virtual folder stuffed with half-drafted articles on caregiving, marriage, friendship, and a mild mistranslation of Stoic virtue that keeps tickling my brain at night. Not because I lost interest in Intersectional Stoicism. I stopped publishing because my family needed me in ways that required my full nervous system, and I did not have the capacity to both show up for them the way I needed to and maintain my early-autumn publishing rhythm.

So I chose rest. Or more accurately: I chose presence. I chose right-relationship with myself and my embodied roles over consistency with a mostly invisible and non-local audience I’m still building.

And then I spent weeks wondering if I’d failed this project in ways that will do lasting damage.

The Tyranny of Consistency

We live in a culture that worships consistent output. Post three times a week. Publish every Tuesday. Build your brand through relentless visibility. The algorithm rewards frequency; audiences punish gaps.

Stoicism, as it’s often sold to us (especially in its “Broic” manifestations) reinforces this. Discipline. Daily practice. No excuses. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in a tent during military campaigns, so what’s your excuse for missing a deadline?

But this framing erases something the ancient Stoics understood intimately and we’ve forgotten: human beings are seasonal creatures embedded in seasonal systems. Meditations was written over the course of 19 years, and resulted in a finished length that is “too short” for a modern self-help/memoir to be considered for publication. Seasonality, the ebb and flow of life itself embodied in a man doing his best and still failing to turn out a son worthy to be called his successor, was baked into Marcus’ writing process. And so it is with mine.

Ancient Seasonality vs. Industrial Time

The ancient Stoics were embedded in a primarily agrarian society and knew that not all seasons demand the same labor. You plant in spring, tend in summer, harvest in fall, and rest the fields in winter. The soil itself needs fallow periods to regenerate. Work that ignores seasonality destroys the land within the span of a few years, not a lifetime.

Yet we’ve built a culture that demands constant harvest. As Tricia Hersey writes in Rest Is Resistance, rest has become a revolutionary act precisely because capitalism requires our exhaustion. “Grind culture” is not a motivation problem — it’s a system that extracts value from bodies and nervous systems until they break.

Somewhere between then and now, “Stoic discipline” became indistinguishable from capitalist productivity.

Nervous System Seasonality

Here’s what I’ve learned from living in a body that doesn’t cooperate with industrial time: my nervous system has seasons.

There are periods when my capacity is high. Ideas flow, I can write daily, manage family needs, show up for community, and still have bandwidth to spare for writing and planning and organizing. These are my harvest seasons.

And there are periods when holding my family together, keeping my marriage intact, shepherding my sons through what their adolescent brains perceive as crises, and maintaining my own basic regulation takes every bit of energy I have before noon, and I am so depleted that I have no choice but to take a nap in the afternoon. These are my winter seasons — not because I’m lazy or undisciplined, but because that is what my actual roles demand in that moment.

Stoic justice means fulfilling your life roles appropriately: being in right relationship with the people and responsibilities you actually have, and also internally with your core self. For me, that means being a parent to my minor children first, a mentally strong partner to my circle of inner-ring connections second, a supporting community member third, and a content creator when there’s capacity left over.

I have learned the hard way, after repeated painful “learning opportunities,” that Stoicism practiced without awareness of variable capacity becomes a tool of self-violence.

What’s “Up to Us” When Capacity Isn’t Stable?

This is where Intersectional Stoicism diverges sharply from mainstream self-help Stoicism. The Stoic concept of what’s “up to us” (the domain of our real choices) gets weaponized when we ignore how power, access, and biology shape what agency we actually have.

A wealthy Roman citizen writing philosophy in his leisure hours (with others, including paid staff, to do the necessities of maintaining his home and biological life needs) has different choices available than a disabled caregiver managing chronic illness in a nuclear family with little logistical village support.

I could have kept publishing through my family’s season of intense need of my unique qualities. I could have sacrificed sleep, emotional presence, or my own nervous system stability to maintain “consistency.” That would have been a choice.

But it would have been a bad choice from the perspective of the Stoic virtues. It would have been a violation of my true responsibilities, not an expression of discipline.

The Stoic question isn’t “What can I force myself to do?” but “What does wisdom demand of me in this specific context within these specific constraints?”

And sometimes wisdom demands rest.

Building Stamina vs. Accepting Limits

I want to be clear: I’m not romanticizing my limitations. Part of my work right now is building practices and stamina so I can create Stoicism content more regularly even when life is demanding, because I know within the core of my being that my perspective as a disabled mother who has been practicing Stoicism for more than 30 years is one that is urgently needed in the world right now. I’m learning tools for nervous system regulation, time management, and sustainable creative practices and I’m implementing more explicit boundaries with my maturing sons around when they can reasonably expect to have my full attention after they’ve repeatedly tried to reap during planting season in the last few weeks.

But there’s a difference between:

• Building capacity (a virtue practice)

• Denying seasonality (self-violence disguised as discipline)

I can strengthen my stamina for winter seasons. I cannot eliminate winter.

How to Tell the Difference

The hardest question: How do I know if I’m honoring genuine limits or just avoiding something difficult?

Because let’s be honest. Sometimes “I don’t have capacity” is true, and sometimes it’s a story I tell myself because writing is vulnerable and publishing invites judgment and it’s easier to say “I’m depleted” than “I’m scared.”

Here’s what I’ve learned to ask myself:

When I imagine doing this thing, where do I feel resistance?

• If it’s in my shoulder blades and lower neck (fear, vulnerability), it’s probably avoidance.

• If it’s in my whole nervous system (sensory processing shutdown, overwhelming fatigue), it’s probably genuine depletion.

What happens if I do it anyway?

• If I push through and feel energized after? It was avoidance.

• If I push through and crash for days? It was a real limit.

What else is happening in my life right now?

• If everything else is fine, and this one thing is “too hard”? This is probably avoidance.

• If I’m barely (or outright failing at) keeping myself and my household fed/safe/regulated? I am probably at capacity.

Am I scared of the work or exhausted by everything?

• Scared? I do it anyway (usually).

• Exhausted? I rest (usually).

This isn’t a perfect science. Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes I rest when I should push, or push when I should rest — I usually regret the latter far more than the former, because struggling with chronic fatigue since adolescence has taught me the price is generally higher when I push when I need rest. Asking these questions honestly — without judgment, just curiosity — has long helped me discern between “this is uncomfortable” and “this will harm me.”

And here’s the Stoic wisdom: getting it wrong sometimes is part of being human. Practical wisdom is developed through practice, including the practice of misjudging and learning from the discomfort that causes.

Seasonality Is Intersectional

Who gets to have “off seasons” is determined by power.

Financially well-off people can pay for high quality childcare when they need to work. Able-bodied people don’t budget energy for pain management. Men are not expected to be the default parent when schools call. White families don’t navigate the additional cognitive load of raising kids under racialized surveillance.

The same work costs different people different amounts of energy. See also “Spoon Theory” by Christine Miserandino, which I’ve been using as a metaphor longer than I have been a mother.

This is why Intersectional Stoicism insists on structural awareness. A Stoicism that ignores how class, race, gender, disability, and caregiving shape capacity becomes victim-blaming philosophy: “If you just had more discipline, you could publish weekly like [insert person with completely different structural support].”

What I’m Committing To (And Not)

Going forward, my intention is to publish an article per week — most weeks.

Not every week, because I’m done pretending my nervous system operates on factory time. Not no weeks, because creating this content is part of the legacy I want to leave the world, and I generally have extra capacity that I want to use. Most weeks, with the understanding that “most” will vary by season.

When my family is in a time of high need of me or I have a flare-up of my conditions (such as from falling or getting a bad cold), I might go quiet for a month. When I’m in a harvest season, you might get three essays in a week. This is not inconsistency; it’s seasonal responsiveness.

I’m building practices to smooth the extremes and find more sustainable rhythms that work with my nervous system instead of against it. But I refuse to weaponize Stoicism against my own finitude.

Invitation

If you’re reading this and feeling the tyranny of consistency in your own life (whether it’s content creation, caregiving, work, or simply existing in a body that won’t cooperate with your ideal schedule) I invite you to consider:

What would it mean to practice Stoic virtue with your seasonality, not despite it?

What roles are you actually responsible for? What does right relationship demand in this season, not an imagined season where you have more capacity?

What would change if you stopped measuring yourself against people with completely different structural support and started measuring yourself against wisdom?

Closing

The Stoics believed virtue is the only true good. But virtue practiced without wisdom becomes vice. And wisdom, in a finite body with real roles in a world that lacks villages, sometimes looks like stopping.

I’ll see you next week. Or the week after. Or whenever the season turns and I have something to say that won’t cost me my presence with the people I love.

Because that—that choice to honor what’s actually up to me and let go of what isn’t—that’s the most Stoic thing I know how to do.

Postscript

I initially composed and mostly edited this before heading to my Unitarian Universalist congregation with my family on January 11, 2026. My family takes two vehicles to church, with my two or three eldest children driving separately (depending on how much we’re schlepping or who has meetings that day). That morning the roads were slushy near our home, but we didn’t think much of it. The roads on I-77 were more than just slushy — they were actually icy. My 21-year-old son spun out when trying to change lanes, and it looks like that vehicle is likely totaled. My children are all physically fine and no other vehicles were damaged, but I’ve now got a significant addition to my to-do list with sourcing a new vehicle. My next post will explore how my long-established Stoic practices helped my family weather this incident with far more calm than typical, but my schedule might be thrown off a bit more than I anticipated when I was editing this post twelve hours ago.

I’ve been meaning to make Wednesday posts into an “Ask Auntie Epicteta” event, but wound up letting myself get distracted instead of setting up the formatting for that. Combined with other aspects of my life taking up my mental bandwidth in the last week, I’ve failed in my plans to edit several drafts and post them on this publication. A large part of this is because I went into “data gathering mode,” as I’m prone to do when my embodied contexts restrict my ability to focus on generating content. Where we are at in the academic cycles, plus the cold snap Cleveland has been under triggering an elevation in my pain levels, plus home remodel stress, plus the whole family having Friday off, plus community commitments, plus plus plus…. it all added up to the focus time attention needed to edit the articles sitting as drafts in my queue was not available for the last week.

So, I decided to make this first “Ask Auntie Epicteta” post a self-directed one.

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Here’s how it started:

I joined a lively Substack thread the other day — one of those sprawling conversations where people are earnestly trying to make sense of pain, culture, and the practice of staying human in messy times. I’m not linking to it in this post because I do not want to potentially pour fuel on a fire that I inadvertently fanned, but if you look at my profile’s comment activity and put forth a little effort, you can find it easily enough. The essay was written by a Religious Studies professor (I’ll call her “Dr. B”), unpacking a conversation between two men about meditation and racial pain. She was writing from within her own Buddhist-informed lens, and her point was sharp: Western secular meditation has a bad habit of stripping spiritual practices for parts and then acting like it invented mindfulness.

That’s a fair critique. So far, so good. Also, very much aligned with what I see happening in modern Stoicism as it cross-breeds with Bro Culture and the Grindset.

By the time I arrived, there were about two hundred comments already made — many of them long, nuanced, sometimes raw. I read through them all before making my own top-level comment. That’s a habit of mine: if someone else already said what I would have, I’d rather amplify them than add noise. I did some of that amplifying in replying to some of the existing comments where I felt it was aligned with the existing dialogue. When I did speak up, I shared how Stoicism — when practiced as a living philosophy rather than an abstract performance — can offer tools to metabolize the kinds of cultural pain being discussed. I use the term intersectionality with intention because ignoring intersecting axes of identity while talking about suffering feels like trying to balance a table with missing legs.

Most people met my responses to their higher-level comments with warmth or curiosity. But one commenter bristled. I’ll call him “R,” as it’s his username’s first initial, and I don’t feel inclined to give him any more attention than a single letter. His tone had that clipped, defensive energy that says you’re not part of the conversation, you’re invading it. For reference, R is his first initial, if you feel inclined to look up this thread to draw your own conclusions about how I comported myself.

My reading his reply, where he attempted to “school” me on Substack etiquette (based on his patriarchal preferences, not the way it was modeled in the page we were interacting on) and implied that I’m not actually good at this Stoicism stuff, is where my Stoic practice modeling began in earnest in Dr. B’s space.

In the book I’m currently working on, around applying the Stoic virtue of Temperance to technological use, the guiding metaphor I’m utilizing is a dam with floodgates. This is related to my own inborn neurodiversity issues being someone with “low gating” For reference, I’ve been formally diagnosed with Visual and Auditory Processing Disorders, which is a clinicalization of the experience of living with low gating in bright, noisy, overly busy modern contexts — while these issues are only situationally disabling, I am constantly embedded in conditions that result in my “low gating” neurology subjected to random flooding that “disorders” my nervous system in ways that people with higher sensory-neurological “gates” do not experience. I’ll be using the same dam-with-floodgates metaphor in this post.

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The First Gate: Pause

Epictetus said, “Remember, it is not the one who reviles you or strikes you who insults you, but the opinion you form of these things as insulting.”

William B. Irvine (my favorite modern Stoicism writer, that’s a link to his Substack) reiterates, expands upon, and deepens this concept in his book “A Slap to the Face,” an audiobook (link is to Hoopla, a free service offered by many public libraries) that has gotten frequent replay in my household.

Epictetus’ line becomes all the more real when you’re staring at someone’s irritation across a screen, when no one in the conversation has had nonverbal communication involved, and co-regulation of nervous systems isn’t an option. My body did what most human bodies do: a spark of heat lit in my chest and a rush of “explain yourself!” energy flooded my brain. But the work of Stoicism isn’t to suppress that—it’s to notice it without immediately obeying it.

So I didn’t fire back. I took inventory of the dam’s layout. R probably wasn’t reacting to me, but to what intersectionality represents to him. For some people, the term feels like a gateway that leads straight into a knife fight. For me, it’s the blueprint of reality. Two people can encounter the same word and perceive very different realities.

The Second Gate: What’s Mine, What’s Not

Epictetus again: “Some things are in our control and others not.”

R’s interpretation of my engagement in Dr. B’s space? Not mine.

My phrasing, tone, and boundaries? Entirely mine.

There was already an existing gate on my comment section in place — it wasn’t a reactionary boundary, but a structural choice to preserve mental bandwidth. Not a wall — just a gate. Stoics aren’t ascetics of engagement; we just understand the difference between dialogue and a drain. If a comment thread stops being a conversation and starts being a stressor, it’s no longer in service of virtue.

Of note, I have consistently offered complimentary subscriptions to every free subscriber who wants to engage with my posts, and continue to do so. This isn’t about shutting down dialogue; it was about enabling meaningful conversation without introducing unnecessary stress or transactional friction in a community centered in vulnerability. If you, reader who has already given me so much of your precious attention, want to comment on my posts, just become a free subscriber and send me a DM to nudge me to open the gate for you.

Stoics aren’t ascetics of engagement. We recognize the difference between dialogue that cultivates insight and commentary that drains focus. By making this space accessible yet protected, participation remains aligned with the purpose of my practices: reflection, growth, and shared exploration, rather than being hijacked by ego or distraction.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The best revenge is to be unlike the person who injured you.” I wasn’t injured in any meaningful way this time, but I still do the maintenance of repeating the lesson: don’t become reactive in reaction.

The Third Gate: Seeing the Systems at Play

Dr. B’s essay was already navigating the tightrope of identity, appropriation, and sincerity. She analyzed the way a white man responded to a Black man’s expression of racial pain by talking about his secular meditation practice — a floodplain in which cultural and spiritual extractions are constant, and often exploitive.

When I entered as a Disabled Sociologist and Stoic, I added another node to the web of conversation. My comment was about how these frameworks — Buddhist, Stoic, or otherwise — can become distorted when we pull them away from the social realities in which they evolved. That’s the point of Intersectional Stoicism — to make sure “virtue” doesn’t float off into abstraction while real people are left floundering in a flood of real inequities.

R’s reaction revealed more about him than about my contribution — he was reacting to a perceived disruption in hierarchy. And that’s worth studying, not resenting. As Seneca wrote, “Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.” Observing the social architecture behind a response is more productive than letting personal offense take hold.

Maintaining the Gates: Criticism as Resistance Training

Every Stoic knows: if you want to build moral muscle, you need friction. Criticism, misunderstanding, snark—it’s all the same material in the gym of the soul.

Musonius Rufus put it plainly: “It is not living according to nature to waste your time in anger or grief, but to accept what happens as it happens.”

That doesn’t mean silence. It means discernment. You can acknowledge the sting without letting it set the plan for your response. R’s tone gave me something to examine — why did my words land so hot for him? What cultural scripts was I bumping up against? What assumptions are being projected, and how am I provisioning the projection equipment in ways that make it likely to be misused?

The Stoic move isn’t to win the argument — it’s to understand the ecosystem of reactions, then reengineer instead of react. This exchange was just one prototype failing with one beta tester. Collect the data, revise in future prototypes so that the whole dam thing is more sustainable.

The Reasons for the Gates: Protecting the Village

Afterward, I thought a lot about what it means to “gate” a space. Marcus Aurelius described a good person as “a fire that turns all it receives into brightness and flame.” People often frame boundaries as exclusion, but they’re actually an act of care — like tending a hearthfire. You don’t throw the door wide open to every gust of wind; you shelter the flame so it can keep giving warmth and light.

Turning to Marcus again: “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” If I let every comment thread dye my thoughts with defensiveness or resentment, my work would stop being about philosophy and start being about policing reactions. No thanks. I’ve got better uses of my attention, and so do the readers coming here to engage wholeheartedly with these concepts.

R’s misreading, my pause, the ensuing reflection — all became kindling. Misinterpretation is an opportunity to refine articulation; conflict handled well is an example of living a philosophy rather than just quoting it.

Stoicism in public is going to be tested publicly, I knew that coming into this creation process. That’s not a flaw — it’s the point. Virtue is visible only when it encounters a misguided force pushing back. When the virtue is authentic instead of just being performed for an audience, it will become stronger. This can happen collectively, by being practiced where others in the village can join in — if they can be nurtured out of the shadows of fear they’ve been silenced into.

A few reminders from our Stoic Uncles worth keeping close:

• “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca

• “If someone is mistaken, instruct them kindly. Show them their error without anger.” — Marcus Aurelius

• “What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgments about those things.” — Epictetus

As you deepen your practices with the tools Stoicism provisions, you’ll learn that criticism isn’t an interruption of your Stoic practice — it is your Stoic practice.

Take what’s useful. Release what’s not.

And keep the hearthfire steadily burning. We need more warmth and light in these shaddowy times.

If you’ve got a family full of characters, you know there’s always that one uncle who can hold court at the dinner table. The one with the velvet voice, sharp turns of phrase, and a way of making everyone lean in closer. In the Stoic family, that’s Seneca. He’s the uncle who can write you a letter that feels like it was written yesterday, even though he died almost two thousand years ago.

Seneca knew how to turn words into gold. But he also knew how to turn words into power, wealth, and favor — sometimes in ways that leave us squirming. Because while he preached about the virtues of simplicity and detachment, he lived in a mansion, took massive bribes, and served as tutor and spin doctor to Emperor Nero, one of Rome’s most infamous tyrants.

This is the double-edged truth about Uncle Seneca: he’s both a teacher of clarity and a cautionary tale about compromise.

He tells us, “Life is long if you know how to use it.” He reminds us that time is the only resource you can’t replenish, that chasing wealth or status will never quiet the soul. Those words hit hard because they’re true. But they hit even harder when you remember who said them: a man who wrote passionately about freedom while being tangled in the golden chains of imperial politics.

So what do we do with him? Do we toss him aside as a hypocrite? Or do we recognize that maybe his contradictions make him more like us than we’d like to admit?

Think about it: have you ever worked for a boss whose ethics made your stomach turn, but you stayed because you needed the paycheck? Have you ever said one thing in public and lived another in private? That’s Seneca’s territory. He knew the struggle of trying to be good inside a corrupt system — and he didn’t always win.

Uncle Seneca is not the purest Stoic voice, but he is perhaps the most human. He shows us how philosophy sounds when it’s pulled into the mess of real life. Sometimes he’s inspiring, sometimes he’s disappointing, but he’s always a reminder that Stoicism isn’t about building a perfect statue of virtue. It’s about wrestling with your own contradictions and still trying to make progress.

At the family table, Seneca is the uncle who will charm you with eloquence, pour you a glass of wine, and then quietly remind you that the cup of life will be empty sooner than you think — so don’t waste your hours on nonsense. Just be ready to raise an eyebrow at him when he forgets to take his own advice.

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There’s always a new word that promises to save us. “Self-care” had its run until it became a marketing jingle. “Mindful” followed, vampirically drained of meaning the minute it hit a product label. Now it’s “intentionality,” whispered like a spell that might keep burnout at bay by buying the right scented candle or planner.

But what if our craving for intentionality isn’t about productivity or even self-actualization? What if it’s coming from a disguised grief — grief for the distributed mind we used to share before everything we once did together was shoved into the narrow, overloaded bandwidth of individual cognition?

When I hear people talk about wanting to live more intentionally, I don’t hear a desire for optimization. I hear the nervous system’s plea to rest inside coherent roles, steady rhythms, and mutual responsibility. The craving isn’t for “focus”... it’s for belonging.

The Mirage of “Intentionality”

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard the word “intentionality” in the last month, I could buy back a sliver of my own attention from the digital marketplace that keeps reselling it. “Intentional living.” “Intentional relationships.” “Intentional parenting.” The word is now applied to everything from capsule wardrobes to color-coded planners, as if a well-curated bullet journal could restore the steady pulse of purpose our ancestors once knew simply by waking up to shared labor and familiar faces.

The modern hunger for intentionality isn’t shallow; it’s misdirected.

We are trying to buy back with money something that used to emerge organically from interdependence derived from being embedded in a community. For most of human history, the question of “What should I do with my day?” wasn’t an existential crisis; it was a collective rhythm. You moved with others. You were needed, witnessed, and mirrored at a neurological level that helped maintain a steady rhythm for all involved.

It was cognition that was distributed across kin and task, across ritual and role. No individual brain carried the full burden of being. Our core selves were held, at a deep level, by the perpetual presence of others in a way that stabilizes our minds.

Modern life smashes all of that, then harvests the shards for profit.

Stoicism Meets Intersectionality: Whose Control Are We Talking About?

Ancient Stoicism framed human freedom around a dichotomy: what is within our control and what is not. Elegant in theory; terribly messy in practice in a body like mine — one that’s had to learn Stoic practice under conditions the ancients never imagined. The line gets far blurrier when social hierarchies slice through the developing psyche before it even forms a stable “I.” A person born into a marginalized identity — one that doesn’t have the advantage of being born with the dominant skin color, gender, religion, social context, or embodied abilities, among other struggles — navigates not just the universal limits of control but the manufactured limits imposed by systemic bias.

Intersectional Stoicism has to account for that. The invitation to focus only on one’s internal states can ring hollow when the external world constantly chips away at the mental bandwidth required to do so. It’s easy to say “guard your reasoned choice” when your self-concept has never been distorted by chronic invalidation, role diffusion, or code-switching fatigue.

For many marginalized people, the “self” being asked to exercise rational agency is constantly fragmented by the necessities involved in surviving the life fate has placed them in. These brains have been trained to monitor threat, continually manage tone, and suppress aspects of identity to survive in spaces designed around the preferences of others. This fragmentation constantly consumes cognitive bandwidth. Every ounce of mental energy spent translating yourself for acceptance is energy that can’t be used for the quiet deliberation Stoicism holds sacred.

So when mainstream culture parrots “be intentional,” it’s missing the neurobiological and sociocultural context that determines who even can access that calm, deliberate state of mind. Intentionality presumes a sturdy enough sense of self to generate coherent goals in the first place. It assumes a margin of safety that a sizable minority — possibly, in fact, a majority — do not have.

It presumes — let’s demonstrate the virtue of courage, and properly name it — privilege.

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Cognitive Bandwidth and the Fractured Self

Neuroscience helps us see this with brutal clarity. Executive functions — the prefrontal cortex’s power tools for self-regulation, decision-making, and intentional action—are exquisitely sensitive to stress and social threat. Living under chronic microaggressions or systemic instability reroutes brain energy toward vigilance and away from reflection. This is because reflection will cause pain, and enduring that pain without collapsing requires exactly the resources that are already depleted. The ability to reduce the pain stemming from all of this lies far beyond any individual’s ability to reduce, and even collaborating with others can only slightly reduce the flow of the constant flooding.

In simpler terms: when your nervous system is running a permanent background scan for danger, you don’t get to luxuriate in “intentional living.” You’re constantly doing triage while in the middle of a trauma setting that keeps inflicting more injuries.

This is why the Stoic ideal of the tranquil mind must be reframed through an intersectional lens. Calm isn’t a default state we all get born into and can return to through an act of will. Calm is a state of being we learn to inhabit outside the womb, via the nurturing of mature caregivers who co-regulate our developing nervous systems. In the perpetually depleted contexts that babies have been born into for the last many generations, it’s a luxury that few families have to lay as a foundation within the developing child. For most of us, this means we’re trying to “reconstruct” what was never fully constructed, and we’re doing it under constant strain. To be intentional under oppression is not to light a scented candle and set affirmations — it’s to reclaim the ancestral mental real estate that’s been occupied by the constant demand to justify your individual existence.

Distributed Cognition: The Village We Lost

Here’s the twist that most self-help influencers will never grasp: the modern self’s exhaustion isn’t because we’ve failed to “try hard enough” to be mindful or intentional. It’s because we’ve been forced to internalize work that used to be shared. That shared work was constantly done within intergenerational groups that flowed with the realities of their lived context, not in age-sliced demographics staying task-directed according to the rigid demands of calendars and clocks designed by strangers.

Our ancestors didn’t live “intentionally” in the influencer sense. They lived interdependently. Cognitive tasks were distributed: memory was shared through storytelling, moral reasoning was built through rituals, and childcare happened in the context of shared space. Through these processes, emotional regulation was shared across people as a natural developmental pathway. A village grandmother remembered the lineage and carried it forward by telling stories to the children while the adults did the life-sustaining work. A friend might notice your mood shift before you do, from the repeated experiences of observing you through a variety of joys and struggles. Ritual gave structure to grief, celebration, and change.

Today, that distributed web of cognition has been reduced to a single, overloaded processor: the individual mind. That mind developed in a context that never learned it was safe to trust others. Our evolved, village-shaped neurology is born still expecting that flow and rhythm — and grieves its loss. And capitalism, never one to miss a monetization opportunity, tells us to fix the overload with purchased products — planners, apps, coaching subscriptions — rather than the communal architectures that actually sustained our ancestors enough to bring us into existence.

The Stoics understood that human reason functions best when oriented toward the common good. “We are made for cooperation,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. But cooperation isn’t just moral — it’s neurological. We regulate one another’s nervous systems. We think better together. Strip that away, and intentionality collapses into self-surveillance, which ultimately increases the stress load it was intended to ease.

Intentionality as a Craving for Belonging

So when people say they want to “live intentionally,” what they often mean is they want to feel real again. They want their actions to align with something larger than performance metrics and survival modes. They want to stop feeling like a disembodied task list entirely devoid of meaning in the grand scheme of their one precious life.

Intentionality, properly understood, is centered in the dichotomy of control — making the conscious choice to shift your focus toward what is fulfilling and meaningful, instead of excessively indulging in whatever numb-out option happens to be available in the moment. When applied this way and paired with seeking interdependence, intentionality can spark the deep calm that comes from knowing where you fit in the human web — which is the Stoic concept of Sympatheia (the Stoic idea that all beings are interconnected in mutual belonging). It’s the grounded awareness our ancestors found through shared ritual and purpose. We crave that not because we’re weak or distracted, but because our nervous systems were designed for it through the survival of the generations that preceded us. Historically, those who failed to respect this dynamic were significantly less likely to have offspring that would survive to become our ancestors.

For those navigating modern life while embodying multiple marginalized identities, this craving is often compounded by centuries of enforced disconnection — from heritage, language, land, and the consistency of communal care from those who understand the experience without it having to be carefully explained to them. Rebuilding intentionality, then, is not a personal development project. It’s cultural reclamation.

Toward a More Honest Stoic Practice

Stoicism, at its best, offers tools for discernment: what can I change, what I can influence, what must I accept, and how do I act with virtue in the midst of all this without crumbling. But those tools need updating for a world where control itself is unevenly distributed.

Intersectional Stoicism doesn’t discard the dichotomy of control — it deepens it.

It recognizes that some people’s “externals” have been colonized into their interiors: internalized oppression, trauma, hypervigilance. The work of discernment now includes distinguishing what authentically lies within from what has been cultivated by a status quo unworthy of being maintained.

And here’s where neuroscience gives us back a thread of hope. The brain’s plasticity means that an inner authentic sense of safety and coherence can be rebuilt after trauma (or, with significantly more effort, built in a way we were failed in the initial construction), especially in a community. The practices that restore distributed cognition — mutual aid, traditions, shared reflection, collective problem-solving — aren’t nostalgic quaintness. They’re the medicine our chronically ill spirits desperately need.

The Way Back

The real project isn’t to become more “intentional” as atomized individuals. It’s to recover the web of shared mind that made intentionality possible in the first place. That means building localized micro-villages inside a society that profits from our isolation. It means designing contexts where we can think together, regulate together, and remember that control was never meant to be a solo act.

Maybe the Stoics would call that living according to nature. Nature, after all, is not a lone hermit — it’s an entire ecosystem.

If the word “intentional” still calls to you, keep it. Just stop aiming it at your planner. Aim it at your people. Every time you share a thought, a task, or a burden, you’re restoring a piece of the collective mind our ancestors never had to think about, much less name. They didn’t call it intentionality. They just called it living.

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