I found this fun and interesting. It's a bit long, but it felt like there was a lot to build out. Doing that reading while not knowing where things are going is tough, but I found the reward, the synthesis of different sides, to be a surprisingly good conclusion to the piece.
And just having the pleasure of this paragraph, I think, will impact me forever:
> Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of "self-improvement." Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
And just having the pleasure of this paragraph, I think, will impact me forever:
> Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of "self-improvement." Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.