Marie Snyder is a retired high school teacher (civics, philosophy, social sciences, and film studies) living in Ontario. She writes sporadically and conversationally about politics, philosophy, environmental issues, pop culture, autism, and her own struggles with the inane decisions made by those with power. Mask, vax, and ventilate, and not about us without us. Find her on BlueSky at MarieSnyder or through email: marie.snyder.27 [at] gmail.com.
by Marie Snyder Emma Wilkins’ excellent piece “On Housecraft” in The Philosopher, discusses Helen Hayward’s book, Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping in such a compelling way as to provoke some thoughts without having actually read the book in question. So this is a critique of a review of a book I haven’t read,…
by Marie Snyder There are contradicting views and explanations of what dopamine is and does and how much we can intentionally affect it. However, the commonly heard notions of scrolling for dopamine hits, detoxing from dopamine, dopamine drains, and craving dopamine, appear to be more like a story we’ve constructed to understand our actions than…
by Marie Snyder It feels like I understand the idea that all suffering comes from expectation in a way I didn’t used to. Now it seems so obvious, but I’m not really sure what flip was switched. It’s not just that if we stop expecting to get things, we’ll be happier, but how ridiculous it…
by Marie Snyder We’re living at a time when the glorification of independence and individualism is harming the world and others in it, as well as leading to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Jay Garfield, the root of suffering is in our self-alienation, and one symptom of our alienation is clinging to the notion…
by Marie Snyder In my last post of meditation, I suggested that there’s not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn’t need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, in Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John…
by Marie Snyder In reading about attachment theory, David Wallin‘s description of Peter Fonagy’s work was intriguing, so I went down that rabbit hole. Fonagy developed Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) to improve emotional regulation, as distinct from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Fonagy sees our mental development as relational, but in order to have empathy…
by Marie Snyder Attachment theory is part of the vernacular now. Even the Norwegian show Porni mentions it, and the dramatic eldest daughter blames her mom for her “relational damage”! We’ve largely accepted the questionable idea that mom’s attentiveness in childhood creates our attachment patterns for life — the gist of the theory as it’s…
by Marie Snyder CW: As the title suggests, there will be discussion of death and dying and some mention of suicide in this post. I thought nothing of following up my last post on Irvin Yalom on the meaning of life with Yalom on the meaning of death, until I started writing here. The very…
by Marie Snyder About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness, and these cases require a different method of treatment. We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. We are “not told by…
by Marie Snyder Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope is a beautiful book, the kind you want to treat with care and won’t dare dog-ear a page. Anselm Kiefer’s illustrations throughout provide a place for contemplative moments between ideas. It’s more immediately accessible than The Burnout Society, which took me weeks to wrap my head…
by Marie Snyder I recently watched the lovely film, A Real Pain, about two cousins (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who travel to Poland to visit their departed grandmother’s home. In the first 20 minutes of the movie we’re shown two dramatically different personalities, both neurotic in their own way, but one more…
by Marie Snyder We’re being asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We have to reckon with several upheavals at once: more conflicts, discrimination, poverty, illness, and natural disasters than many of us have ever seen in our comfortable lifetimes, and without a clear path forward. It’s unsettling. It feels necessary to find courage…
by Marie Snyder Timothy Snyder’s dictum, “Do Not Obey in Advance,” seems to be everywhere these days. It’s the title of the first chapter of his book out in 2017: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which is worth a revisit along with conformity experiments that back up his concerns and some clarification…
by Marie Snyder “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” —Furiosa Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to “help people through the horrific information that they are being given,”…
by Marie Snyder I dipped my toe into Stoic Week again this year. I’ve done it before a decade ago, and even went to StoicCon once! I was hoping to find the attitude necessary to manage all this (gestures broadly at everything). I got stuck on the first day. They start with Epictetus’s bit on…
by Marie Snyder I started reading about burnout when I walked away from teaching earlier than expected. Suddenly, I couldn’t bring myself to open that door after over thirty years of bounding to work. A series of events wiped away any sense of agency, fairness, or shared values. Their wellness lunch-and-learns didn’t help me, and…
by Marie Snyder Many of us live in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It’s an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much loneliness. We can’t connect when we’re working with…
by Marie Snyder Noam Chomsky was rumoured to have left us almost a month ago, but he always told us not to trust the media! It appears he’s still alive at time of writing, and recovering at home from a stroke. Both The New Statesman and Jacoben published obituaries. Yanis Varoufakis claims his article about…
by Marie Snyder A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. ~ Alexander Pope Is it, though? We’re in a mental health crisis and people need more access to help. How much learning is necessary to help one…
by Marie Snyder Over thirty years ago I was in an on-again-off-again relationship that I just couldn’t shake. After months of different types of therapies, I lucked into a therapist who walked me through a version of the Gestalt exercise of talking to a chair, which ended my longing for this guy on a dime. …