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. Find her on BlueSky at MarieSnyder or through email: marie.snyder.27 [at] gmail.com.
Website: https://medium.com/thrice-removed
by Marie Snyder A recent article in The Guardian asked one of the UK’s top climate scientists, Professor Ed Hawkins, to bust the biggest myths about climate change. He tells us we can’t keep adapting to rising temperatures; burning fossil fuels is what’s primarily affecting climate; harvests are suffering; we’ve known the basics of all…
by Marie Snyder My cat died of pancreatic adenocarcinoma a few weeks ago. In March she had an annual check up and was deemed to be in good health for 13, although a bit overweight. We noticed that she was walking a little funny sometimes, so the vet suggested we think about arthritis medication. Then…
by Marie Snyder “When asked about a ‘major cyberattack’ from China, the president shrugged with indifference. ‘It is what it is.’ … Three days earlier, the president described China’s support for Iran as just ‘one of those things’” —Steve Brown A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism…
by Marie Snyder I’m curious about the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, and the more I read, the more closely they all appear to intertwine until they’re sometimes indistinguishable. Buddhism overlaps with Stoicism, which influenced Albert Ellis’s REBT (then CBT and all its variations). They dig down to acknowledge and question mistaken core beliefs.…
by Marie Snyder A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine the entire system. There are less courageous things we can do within our capacity. While that’s…
by Marie Snyder How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us. He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and…
by Marie Snyder I’ve had several conversations this week about how to be in a time like this when the U.S. government is so overtly corrupted. I’m just the upstairs neighbour in Canada, but we’re high on the list of countries to be overthrown. Even without being in that position, it’s hard to be aware…
by Marie Snyder The recent show Pluribus has got me thinking differently about the kind of ideal state that might be a laudable direction and how to get there. The show is overtly about a hive mind interconnection, that started with a lab-leaked experiment, which affects almost all of the world except for 13 people…
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…