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 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. …
by Marie Snyder In the West, it feels like we have never lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism, a time without peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners. For thousands of years, the exploitation of people appeared necessary to some of the best minds,…
by Marie Snyder I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology: the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out of the…
by Marie Snyder There are a few ideas I’ve seen floating around on social media about people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) having no empathy, no Theory of Mind, and being in need of fixing instead of accommodating. I just ignored them. But then I heard similar statements in a university class with controversial Autism…
by Marie Snyder I recently binge-watched all of Group, a show inspired by the Irvin Yalom novel, The Schopenhauer Cure. So I revisited Yalom’s non-fiction to see how closely the series aligns to his actual practices. The Gift of Therapy is a fascinating read from 2017 in which Yalom dives openly into his existential psychotherapy…
by Marie Snyder Maybe there are seeds of potential deep within ourselves, but maybe there’s nothing there but a collection of signals. Regardless the outcome, we need to dig in to see what we can find. In several classes I took last term, the idea of a core self that’s fluid came through discussions of…
by Marie Snyder Will re-branding Covid help people start acting to protect themselves from it? Maybe we need an ad campaign to kick-start public health. Outside of judicial rulings and before marketing, we had religious leaders to remind us to the best ways to survive, and before that we had stories passed down for generations…
by Marie Snyder Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. Well, he added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since then and…
by Marie Snyder We’re hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere long-term. For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to…
by Marie Snyder It’s such a go-to now to call the enemy some version of a communist in a weird throwback to 1950s America and McCarthyism. And now the leader of the opposition accused Canada’s Prime Minister of being a Marxist, and he said it like it’s a bad thing! Lisa B0923 5 minute Tiktok explains why Trudeau is…
by Marie Snyder Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands came highly recommended. The title refers to the effect that being enslaved had on his grandmother, and Menakem traces the violence of racism through the specific perspectives of people on either end of racial conflicts. Beyond just explaining how racism affects all of us in variable ways,…