Love
2026
Dropping the Mask
Text
So this is the most aggressive form of assimilation where you desire to change the underlying identity altogether. And it's very difficult, Shankar, for me to remember that young man knelt down in prayer because he so ardently wish the annihilation of the human being I have become.
So I'm now currently, happily married. My husband and I have 2 kids and so on and so forth, but that would have been unimaginable to that young man. ◈ 15:59 This is 1991. Hmm. He just thought, if I'm gonna have any kind of life at all, not just a professional life, but also, perhaps more importantly, to him at the time, a personal life of marriage and children, that it was inconceivable that you could be an openly gay person and have that life.
So what I desperately wanted was to convert and to change the underlying identity.
Hidden Brain hiddenbrain.org ↗
Are You Taking Fun Seriously Enough?
Text
…exception there was time with friends. Time Speaker 4: with friends was almost like chocolate chips in a cookie. Speaker 4: You can just add more and it keeps being better. Speaker 4: So that was pretty interesting.
And We also found one Speaker 4: of the surprising findings in that data was that spending Speaker 4: time on relaxing and leisure was actually associated with a Speaker 4: lower probability of having an especially good day. ◈ 8:36 And we Speaker 4: were like, I thought my grad student analyzed the data wrong.
Speaker 4: I made him go back and look at it again. Speaker 4: But it turned out it was about 70% of the Speaker 4: time that people were engaged in leisure and relaxation. They Speaker 4: were actually like watching Netflix, watching TV. And again, going Speaker 4: to what you're saying about that sort of false flow Speaker 4: or whatever.
It wasn't actually…
My note
This entirely makes sense. I know what it's like to force myself to have quote-unquote leisure time where the whole time I cannot stop thinking about what I could be doing, even though really what I need to be doing is taking a break.
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos omny.fm ↗