Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  If I ask for a chair, I risk looking like an old fart who doesn’t know how to sit on a bouncy ball or like a prima donna demanding some kind of special treatment. But if I do sit on this thing I’m pretty sure that I will immediately fall off. I imagine myself, age fifty-two, toppling off an orange bouncy ball and onto the floor, as a bunch of young women look on and try not to laugh. Some awkwardness ensues as I ask Zack if it might be possible to find an actual desk chair. We scavenge a chair from a desk in another room. The crisis is averted. Zack goes to his desk and gets to work on whatever it is that Zack does, while I take my seat at my little desk, which is empty save for a new MacBook Air. Is this really it? Is this my job? Will I really go to work every day and sit at this shitty little desk in this shitty little room? Are these people now my colleagues? Will I have to sit in meetings with them and listen to them talk? What exactly is my actual job? Once I finish doing all the first-day paperwork, once I have my picture taken and get my ID badge and set up my parking garage pass, what am I supposed to do? Zack seems to have no idea. He’s so new that he hasn’t even figured out what his job is, let alone mine. I spend the day filling out paperwork and trying not to freak out. Surely, Halligan and Shah would not have hired me and then just stuck me in a room, working for Zack. There must be some kind of mistake. When Cranium gets here, he will sort things out. Then again, is it a bad sign that Cranium made such a big deal out of hiring me and then wasn’t here to meet me on my first day? Stay calm, I tell myself. Take deep breaths. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t block out the sound of that little fuck-fuck-fuck voice, which keeps telling me that I’ve made a very big mistake. Soon I will discover that the little voice is correct. One [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] Beached White MaleN ine months earlier, it’s the summer of 2012, and life is good. I’m fifty-one years old, happily settled into married life in a suburb of Boston, with two young kids and a job I love. At Newsweek , I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking. To me, Newsweek is more than a company—it’s an institution. And being a magazine writer seems like the very best job in the world. Then one day, without warning, it all just ends. It’s a Friday morning in June.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Surely, Halligan and Shah would not have hired me and then just stuck me in a room, working for Zack. There must be some kind of mistake. When Cranium gets here, he will sort things out. Then again, is it a bad sign that Cranium made such a big deal out of hiring me and then wasn’t here to meet me on my first day? Stay calm, I tell myself. Take deep breaths. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t block out the sound of that little fuck-fuck-fuck voice, which keeps telling me that I’ve made a very big mistake. Soon I will discover that the little voice is correct. One Beached White Male Nine months earlier, it’s the summer of 2012, and life is good. I’m fifty-one years old, happily settled into married life in a suburb of Boston, with two young kids and a job I love. At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking. To me, Newsweek is more than a company—it’s an institution. And being a magazine writer seems like the very best job in the world. Then one day, without warning, it all just ends. It’s a Friday morning in June. The kids are at school. I’m sitting with my wife, Sasha, at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and going over the plans for our upcoming vacation, a three- week trip to Austria. It’s a bit of a splurge for us, but by using frequent flyer miles and staying in modest hotels we can just about afford it. Our kids—twins, a boy and a girl—are turning seven in a few weeks, and they’re finally old enough to handle an adventure. Sasha has just left her teaching job, because she’s been suffering from chronic migraines and spending too much time in emergency rooms. She needs time off to take care of herself. A few weeks in the Alps seems like a good way to start. We’ll miss her paycheck, and her insurance, which is first-rate, but I can get decent insurance from Newsweek, and in addition to my salary I’ve been making some money on the side by giving speeches. So we’re good. Sasha can quit her job and we can still afford the vacation. It’s all going to be great. That’s what we’re telling each other as we pull up the website for one place where we’ll be staying, a cluster of chalets perched on a hillside in a remote village surrounded by mountains. A local guide takes tourists on day hikes and offers a rock-climbing class for kids. A nearby stable offers trail rides on sturdy little Haflinger horses with shaggy blond manes. We leave in three weeks. My phone beeps. It’s an email from my editor, Abby.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Now he’s coming to HubSpot, and although he’s arriving late to the party, he has taken a small salary and loaded up on stock options. He doesn’t need to be super rich. He just wants to make enough money to pay off his mortgage, buy a vacation house, and “put enough money in the bank that I just don’t have to take shit from anyone,” he says. Trotsky is a wildcatter. Hire him, and he’ll work your oil field and see if he can strike it rich. If he doesn’t, he’ll move on. Silicon Valley is filled with people like this who spend their careers jumping from one tiny dysfunctional company to another, chasing a pot of gold. “I was stunned when I was doing recruiting in the Valley,” a former software executive recalls. “Everyone is a mercenary. Every resume you’d look at had all these stints of a year here, a year there. Like if they didn’t hit the jackpot in a year, they’d go place a new bet.” I think of this as a kind of mental disorder—the Start-up Disease. I know the symptoms, because I am suffering from them myself. But Trotsky has an even more severe case, and he’s been afflicted for a lot longer. Trotsky says the clock is ticking down on him and his career. He’s already too old to be working in tech. If he doesn’t strike it rich at HubSpot he’ll get one more chance, maybe two. By then he will be fifty, and nobody will hire him. He tells me that his first impression of HubSpot is that it reminds him of Logan’s Run, the dystopian sci-fi movie where people are killed when they reach the age of thirty, in order to prevent overpopulation. Even Trotsky has never worked in a place that is so exaggeratedly young. He tells me how Penny, the receptionist, who is twenty-three but looks seventeen, told him when she first met him, “I think it’s cool that they’re starting to hire some older people now.” Trotsky was startled both by the sentiment and by her lack of tact. Bemused, he asked Penny what age she considers old. Where is the cutoff between young people and old people? “I guess about thirty,” she said. I tell Trotsky that if he thinks HubSpot feels weird to him, imagine working there at my age. A few months ago I turned fifty-three. When I was fifty-two I could almost deal with HubSpot, because the average employee is twenty-six, and so I was exactly double the average. Now I’m more than twice the average, and somehow this feels worse. “It seems like a line you don’t want to cross,” I say. I tell him about Zack and his crazy memos in ALL CAPS about CONQUERING THE WORLD. I kvetch about Cranium’s latest management innovation, a service called TINYpulse that bombards us with weekly happiness surveys.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The philosophy of the period reflected the agonistic quality of political life, as well as the Greek yearning for poise and harmony. This was especially evident in the work of Heraclitus (540–480), a member of the royal family of Ephesus, who was known as the “riddler” because he presented his ideas in lapidary, baffling maxims. “Nature,” he once said, “loves to hide”; things were the opposite of what they seemed.72 The first relativist, Heraclitus argued that everything depended upon context: seawater was good for fish, but potentially fatal for men; a blow was salutary if delivered as a punishment, but evil if inflicted by a murderer.73 A restless, unsettling man, Heraclitus believed that even though the cosmos seemed stable, it was in fact in constant flux and a battlefield of warring elements. “Cold things grow hot, the hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens.”74 He was especially fascinated by fire: a flame was never still; fire transformed wood into ash, and water into steam. Fire was also a divine force that preserved order by preventing any one of the competing elements from dominating the rest—in rather the same way as the clash of opinions in the council maintained the equilibrium of the polis. Yet beneath this cosmic turbulence, there was unity. Flux and stability, which seemed antithetical, were one and the same; night and day were two sides of a single coin; the way up was also the way down, and an exit could serve as an entrance.75 You could not rely on the evidence of your senses, but must look deeper to find the logos, the ruling principle of nature. And that also applied to human beings. Heraclitus had discovered introspection, a new activity for the Greeks. “I went in search of myself,” he said.76 You could learn a little about human nature by studying dreams, emotions, and people’s individual qualities, but it would always remain an enigma: “You will not find out the limits of the soul by travelling, even if you travel over every pole.”77 In their political reform, the Greeks had found that it was possible to jettison traditional institutions without calling down the wrath of the gods, and some began to question other time-honored assumptions. Xenophanes (560–480), another philosopher from the Ionian coast, rejected the Olympian gods as hopelessly anthropomorphic. People thought that gods “are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like our own.” They were guilty of theft, adultery, and deception. It was clear that people had simply projected their own human form onto the divine. Horses and cows would probably do the same.78 But, he believed, there was only “one god, greatest among gods and men,” who transcended all human qualities.79 Beyond time and change, he governed everything with his mind (nous); no sooner did he think of something than it was done.80

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing! We need to create an email campaign and send spam to thousands of people urging them to click on a link and subscribe to the podcast. If enough people do that, we can trick Apple into thinking that we have a huge audience, and Apple will put our podcast near the top of its ratings. Numbers: We need them! How many listeners will we have in six months, and in a year? Where will the podcast rank in the iTunes Store? How soon will we get into the top ten? At what point can I promise that this will be the number- one business podcast in the entire world? These are projections that I need to make, and once I make them, I have to hit them—or else! As far as my career at HubSpot goes, everything is riding on the podcast. “It’s a very simple situation,” Trotsky says. “If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job.” “And if it doesn’t, then what? I get fired?” Trotsky scowls. “Just make sure it’s a success,” he says. Left unspoken is how we will define success. My guess is success is whatever Trotsky and Cranium decide it will be, and no matter what I do, I will never achieve it. Meanwhile, Trotsky rides me. Constantly. Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast? Why have I not solicited their help? So I do have those meetings. The question then becomes, Why didn’t I do that sooner? When is our deadline? When do we go live? Why can’t we start sooner? Do I not realize that I am now a project manager, responsible for every step of this project? Why have I not sent Trotsky a full report on my progress, in writing? Why have I not created a full podcast marketing campaign document and shared it via Google Docs with everyone in the marketing department so they can read the marketing plan and add comments? Once I do create that document, why am I not responding to comments immediately? Where are my responses to the list of comments that Trotsky has placed into the document? We’re creating a dedicated web page for the podcast. It looks great, but the designers miss their deadline and ask for a few extra days. I tell them that’s fine. Why did I do that? Why did I tell them they could have those days? Why did they miss the deadline in the first place? Did I fail to communicate the deadlines clearly enough to them? There’s a person I think would be great as a guest on the show. I send an email to Cranium asking him what he thinks. Trotsky leaps in: Why am I writing directly to Cranium? Why am I asking him to get involved in minor details like this?

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In fact, he believed that a martyr could be a “witness” to divine truth even if he died peacefully in bed. 11 Azzam’s classical jihadism was condemned by some scholars, but it had strong appeal for young Sunnis who were embarrassed by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran. Yet not all the volunteers were devout; some were not even observant, although in Peshawar many would be influenced by such hard-line Islamists as Zawahiri, who had suffered arrest, torture, and imprisonment in Egypt for alleged involvement in the Sadat assassination. And so Afghanistan became a new Islamist hub. Young militants from East Asia and North Africa were sent to the front to increase their commitment, and the government of Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its own young to volunteer. 12 To understand the Saudi influence, one must reckon with what may seem a contradiction. On the one hand, after the Iranian Revolution, the kingdom had become one of America’s chief regional allies. On the other hand, it subscribed to an extremely reductive form of Islam, which had been developed in the eighteenth century by the Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92). Ibn Abd al- Wahhab had preached a return to the pristine Islam of the Prophet and repudiated such later developments as the Shiah, Sufism, Falsafah, and the jurisprudence (fiqh) on which all other Muslim ulema depended. He was particularly distressed by the popular veneration of holy men and their tombs, which he condemned as idolatry. Even so, Wahhabism was not inherently violent; indeed, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had refused to sanction the wars of his patron, Ibn Saud of Najd, because he was fighting simply for wealth and glory. 13 It was only after his retirement that Wahhabis became more aggressive, even to the point of destroying Imam Husain’s shrine in Karbala in 1802 as well as monuments in Arabia connected with Muhammad and his companions. At this time too, the sect insisted that Muslims who did not accept their doctrines were infidels (kufar). 14 During the early nineteenth century, Wahhabis incorporated the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah into their canon, and takfir, the practice of declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, which Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself had rejected, became central to their practice. 15 The oil embargo imposed by the Gulf States during the 1973 October War had sent the price soaring, and the kingdom now had all the petrodollars it needed to find practical ways of imposing Wahhabism on the entire ummah. 16 Deeply disconcerted by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran, which threatened their leadership of the Muslim world, the Saudis intensified their efforts to counter Iranian influence and replaced Iran as the chief ally of the United States in the region.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In 258, however, Valerian was the first emperor to target the Church specifically, ordering that its clergy be executed and the property of high-ranking Christians confiscated. Once again, not many people seem to have been killed, and two years later Valerian was taken prisoner by the Persians and died in captivity. His successor, Galienus, revoked the legislation, and Christians enjoyed forty years of peace. Clearly Valerian had been troubled by the Church’s organizational strength rather than by its beliefs and rituals. The Church was a new phenomenon. Christians had exploited the empire’s improved communications to create an institution with a unity of structure that none of the traditions we have discussed so far had attempted. Each local church was headed by a bishop, the “overseer” who was said to derive his authority from Jesus’s apostles, and was supported by presbyters and deacons. The network of such near-identical communities seemed almost to have become an empire within the empire. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons (c. 130–200), who was anxious to create an orthodoxy that excluded aggressive sectarians, had claimed that the Great Church had a single Rule of Faith, because the bishops had inherited their teaching directly from the apostles. This was not only a novel idea but a total fantasy. Paul’s letters show that there had been considerable tension between him and Jesus’s disciples, and his teachings bore little relation to those of Jesus. Each of the Synoptics had his own take on Jesus, and the Johannines were different again; there were also a host of other gospels in circulation. When Christians finally established a scriptural canon—between the fourth and sixth centuries—diverse visions were included side by side. Unfortunately, however, Christianity would develop a peculiar yearning for intellectual conformity that would not only prove to be unsustainable but that set it apart from other faith traditions. The rabbis would never attempt to create a single central authority; not even God, much less another rabbi, could tell another Jew what to think. 130 The Buddha had adamantly rejected the idea of religious authority; the notion of a single rule of faith and a structured hierarchy was entirely alien to the multifarious traditions of India; and the Chinese were encouraged to see merit in all the great teachers, despite their disagreements. Christian leaders would make the Church even more threatening to the authorities during the forty peaceful years after Valerian’s death. When Diocletian finally established his palace in Nicomedia in 287, a Christian basilica was clearly visible on the opposite hill, seeming to confront the imperial palace as an equal. He made no move against the Church for sixteen years, but as a firm believer in the Pax Deorum at a time when the fate of the empire hung in the balance, Diocletian would find the Christians’ stubborn refusal to honor the gods increasingly intolerable.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  She sends us this email: We’ve got a brilliant team and, at times, it can be hard to innovate due to fear of failure and the pressure of our day-to-day goals. That’s why we’re creating this day to exist in total isolation to work on ANY project that you’re passionate about. The only goal: Be Fearless. I read the email and forget about it. A couple weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon, I’m sitting at my desk when Ashley from the blog team suddenly asks me, “So what are you going to do for Fearless Friday?” “Oh,” I say, “when is that?” “It’s tomorrow!” Her big eyes widen with alarm. “Did you not sign up? You were supposed to sign up! Each team is doing a different project.” “I think I’m going to skip it.” “You can’t skip it! You have to pick one of the activities.” “What are the choices?” I say, filled with dread. “It’s all on the wiki,” she said. “I’ll send you a link.” “No, look, you can just tell me.” She is, after all, sitting right next to me. “No, I’ll send it to you,” she says. I guess she thinks it will be good for me to learn how to do these things by myself. I pull up the link. The idea of Fearless Friday is that we will break into small teams and spend the day doing something fearless . That can be anything we want, but there is one thing we cannot do, which is our actual job. No matter how busy you are, the prime directive is this: No working on your actual job. There’s no getting out of this. There are no exceptions. I have no idea by whose authority we are commanded to do these things. Jordan is not my boss, but here she is, making us all stop work for a day. After doing some research, I discover that Jordan was one of Cranium’s first hires, and that in fact he knew her before he came to HubSpot. They worked together at a software company where Cranium was a marketing manager and Jordan was a college intern. At that company, Jordan’s uncle was the VP of marketing. He was the one who hired Cranium. He’s also a longtime HubSpot customer. In other words, at HubSpot Jordan can do anything she wants. In this case, I believe Jordan wants to demonstrate her leadership abilities by appointing herself the leader of our whole group for a whole day. Marketing people are obsessed with leadership. Attend any marketing conference and you will find someone giving a speech to an auditorium full of glassy-eyed marketing drones, telling them that they are all leaders. Jordan has added a clever twist by attaching her exercise to Sandberg’s feminist manifesto. Tech companies like HubSpot are sensitive, and rightfully so, about having so few women in top positions.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We could live in the Rocky Mountains! We should make a list of the best places to live, rent a Winnebago, visit each one, and then decide. We could spend the whole summer traveling around the country! We could see the Grand Canyon, and Zion, and Yellowstone, and Yosemite. In a way this whole thing is a gift. Because now we have all this free time! When are we ever going to have a chance like this again? Sasha knows that I’m full of shit, and she also knows I’m panicking, because this is what I do when I’m panicking—I talk and talk and talk. But even as I’m reeling through my list of fantasy mountain towns where I can wear plaid shirts and drive a pickup truck and grow a beard, Sasha has arrived at the truth of our situation, which she feels the need to explain to me, as if by speaking the words out loud she might feel more in control of the situation. “Let’s just talk about where we are right now,” she says. She’s working hard to remain calm. “The reality is that I just quit my job, and I can’t get that job back. They’ve already hired someone else. And now you’ve been fired.” “Laid off,” I say, because that sounds better. “Point is, we’re both unemployed, and we have six-year-old twins, and no health insurance, and no income. And we’re about to go on a really expensive vacation.” “Well,” I say, “when you put it like that.” “How else would you put it?” I launch back into my spiel about moving to the mountains, but she cuts me off. None of that is going to happen, and we both know it. We’re not going to spend the summer cruising around the United States in a Winnebago like the Griswolds on some zany adventure. “Look,” I say, “I’ll get another job. I’m going to start hitting the phone today. Right now. I’m going to email everyone I know. I’ve got a bunch of speeches booked, which should keep us going into the fall. And I can pick up some freelance work.” I’m trying to sound confident. But the truth is that I’m fifty-one years old and I have never gone looking for a job before. I’ve always had a job and then moved to a better one. I’ve never had to call my friends and ask them to keep me in mind if they hear of anything. I’ve always been the guy on the other end of that call, and I’ve always felt bad for those friends who were calling me. Sure, I told them, I’ll pass the word around. I’ll keep an eye open. I’m sure you’ll find something. But we all know the reality of our situation. Every year there are fewer jobs in journalism. It’s a game of musical chairs, with a bunch of laid-off old hacks running around and fighting over the few remaining seats.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  As Wundt and others agree with Helmholtz here, and as their conclusions, if true, are irreconcilable with all the sensationalism which I have been teaching hitherto, it clearly devolves upon me to defend my position against this new attack. But as this chapter on Space is already so overgrown with episodes and details, I think it best to reserve the refutation of their general principle for the next chapter, and simply to assume at this point its untenability. This has of course an arrogant look; but if the reader will bear with me for not very many pages more, I shall hope to appease his mind. Meanwhile I affirm confidently that the same outer objects actually FEEL different to us according as our brain reacts on them in one way or another by making us perceive them as this or as that sort of thing. So true is this that one may well, with Stumpf,[221] reverse Helmholtz's query, and ask: "What would become of our sense-perceptions in case experience were not able so to transform them?" Stumpf adds: "All wrong perceptions that depend on peculiarities in the organs are more or less perfectly corrected by the influence of imagination following the guidance of experience." If, therefore, among the facts of optical space-perception (which we must now proceed to consider in more detail) we find instances of an identical organic eye-process, giving us different perceptions at different times, in consequence of different collateral circumstances suggesting different objective facts to our imagination, we must not hastily conclude, with the school of Helmholtz and Wundt, that the organic eye-process pure and simple, without the collateral circumstances, is incapable of giving us any sensation of a spatial kind at all. We must rather seek to discover by what means the circumstances can so have transformed a space-sensation, which, but for their presence, would probably have been felt in its natural purity. And I may as well say now in advance that we shall find the means to be nothing more or less than association—the suggestion to the mind of optical objects not actually present, but more habitually associated with the 'collateral circumstances' than the sensation which they now displace and being imagined now with a quasi-hallucinatory strength. But before this conclusion emerges, it will be necessary to have reviewed the most important facts of optical space-perception, in relation to the organic conditions on which they depend. Readers acquainted with German optics will excuse what is already familiar to them in the following section.[222] Let us begin the long and rather tedious inquiry by the most important case. Physiologists have long sought for a simple law by which to connect the seen direction and distance of objects with the retinal impressions they produce. Two principal theories have been held of this matter, the 'theory of identical points', and the 'theory of projection'—each incompatible with each other, and each beyond certain limits becoming inconsistent with the facts. The Theory of Identical Points.

• From Cultish (2021)

  To enter ritual time, some symbolic action typically must take place, like singing a song, lighting a candle, or clipping on your SoulCycle shoes (really). Rituals like these signal that we’re separating this religious thing we’re doing from the rest of our daily life. And there’s often an action at the end, too (blow out the candle, repeat “namaste,” unclip the shoes) to get us out of ritual time and back to everyday reality. There’s a reason the word “sacred” literally means “set aside.” But an oppressive group doesn’t let you leave ritual time. There is no separation, no going back to a reality where you have to get along with people who might not share your beliefs, where you understand that performing a mantra or citing the Ten Commandments in the middle of lunch would be a violation of the unspoken rules for how to be. With destructive groups like Scientology, the Moonies, the Branch Davidians, 3HO, The Way International (a fundamentalist Christian cult we’ll talk about later), and so many others, there is no longer a “sacred space” for that special language. Now words like “abomination,” “curse,” and “lower vibration” or whatever unique vocabulary the group uses holds that almighty power all the time. In American culture, religious language (particularly Protestant language) is everywhere, informing secular choices we make without us even explicitly noticing. I recently came across a frozen low-fat mac ’n’ cheese meal with the word “sinless” printed on the packaging. Conjuring the devil to talk about microwavable noodles felt a touch melodramatic, but that’s how deep religious talk runs in American culture: There are sinners and saints, and the latter choose 2 percent dairy. The permeable membrane between religion and culture is also what allows so many corners of the capitalist marketplace to call upon God to promote their products . . . including and especially the multilevel marketing industry (a cult category we’ll discuss in depth in part 4 ). Christian-affiliated direct sale s companies like Mary Kay Cosmetics and Thirty-One Gifts encourage recruits by saying that God is actively “providing” them with the “opportunity” to sell makeup and tchotchkes . . . and to convert others to do so, as well. Billion-dollar businesswoman Mary Kay Ash was once confronted in an interview about her famous tagline: “God first, family second, Mary Kay third.” When asked if she thought she was using Jesus as a marketing plo y, she responded, “No, he’s using me instead.” iv.You could fill a book longer than this one with a list of all the thought-terminating clichés, loaded language, and us-versus-them labels cultish religions around the world use to convert, condition, and coerce their followers. To start, take a look at Shambhala, where thought-terminating clichés were disguised as wise Buddhist truisms. In 2016, ex-Shambhalan Abbie Shaw moved to the group’s idyllic Vermont commune to work the front desk and study meditation for what was only supposed to be a casual summer.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  A WORD ABOUT AIDS AND SAFE SEXIt’s difficult to imagine anyone who’s unaware of the international scourge of AIDS. All of us, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, must evaluate our sexual behavior to minimize the risk of exposure to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. There’s disagreement about the odds (seemingly quite low) of contracting HIV through activities such as tongue kissing or oral sex without ejaculation. But the centerpiece of any safe sex policy is the decision never to engage in vaginal or anal intercourse without using a latex condom—or to abstain altogether. The only sexually active people who needn’t be concerned are couples who have been monogamous for at least six months and have both recently tested negative for the antibodies to HIV, indicating that they’ve never been exposed. As long as these couples can trust each other to avoid unsafe sex outside the relationship, HIV isn’t an issue. Keep in mind that AIDS prevention is not covered in this book. You’ll notice stories of peak sex involving intercourse in nonmonogamous situations that don’t mention condoms. Of course, some of these encounters occurred before the AIDS epidemic. Other people may have used condoms but didn’t say so because it was merely a practical consideration (like birth control) that, although important, didn’t play a role in making their encounters memorable. Some people undoubtedly took unwise risks. Fantasies, of course, are totally exempt from all practical considerations. If you have questions about AIDS and how to prevent it, ask your local health department, an organization concerned with AIDS, or your physician. ATTITUDES FOR SELF-DISCOVERYHaving had the privilege of guiding hundreds of men and women on voyages of erotic self-discovery, I’ve consistently observed that venturing into the erotic realm is dramatically more rewarding for those who, right from the start, make a point of learning how to (1) suspend judgments, (2) trust themselves, and (3) use a gentle approach. SUSPENDING JUDGMENTSMy most fervent belief about erotic self-discovery is that deep erotic truths do not reveal themselves to judgmental eyes and nonaccepting hearts. The secrets of the erotic mind become visible only to those who consciously cultivate the ability to set aside critical evaluations long enough to perceive what’s actually there. Until you learn this all-important skill, your perceptions will be skewed and their usefulness dramatically reduced. The most emotionally charged judgments arise from moral convictions. Not surprisingly, those who believe in immutable moral doctrines usually have the most difficulty setting aside their automatic inclinations to reject or criticize actions and thoughts that violate their concepts of right and wrong. But not all judgments are rooted in morality. Many people experience a similar visceral discomfort when their erotic experiences don’t match their expectations, or when they realize that what truly excites them conflicts with their ideals.

• From Cultish (2021)

  It’s both a nonsense thought-terminating cliché and a flashing neon sign of us- versus-them conditioning. But while MLMs talk a lot of smack about corporate America and corporate America thinks of MLMs as a scammy joke, they are ultimately both derived from the same Protestant capitalist history. And the toxically positive fable that our society is a true meritocracy—that you can climb the ladder from the bottom to the top if you just work hard and have faith— imbues the rhetoric of our “normal” workforce, too. Many modern companies actively aim to gain a cult following in the image of companies like Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Ikea—brands that succeeded in cultivating extreme solidarity and loyalty among both employees and patrons. To learn more about the language of cultlike corporations, I hit up a Dutch business scholar and management consultant named Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.” This jargon isn’t damaging in and of itself. As always, words need context. And when used in competitive start-up environments, those in power can easily take advantage of staffers’ eagerness to achieve (and basic need for employment).

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  At night I lie awake in bed, unable to sleep, secretly afraid that I might never get hired again. That Newsweek story about “beached white males” wasn’t a work of fiction. I know guys my age whose careers are over. They’re in their early fifties and once held senior-level positions, and then got downsized only to discover that no one wants them. Those guys have all been where I am now—freshly out of work, still hopeful, going on interviews. But six months goes by, and then a year, and at some point people stop taking your calls. I’m not there yet. I’ve landed some freelance work, I’m still making money doing speaking gigs, and my lecture agent has promised that he will try to keep me working, but he also has warned me that without the word Newsweek in front of my name those speaking gigs are probably going to dry up. What happens then? Sure, we have savings. But those won’t last forever. For now we’re doing our best to economize. The kids know what’s going on. We don’t talk about it a lot around them, but I have to say something. I don’t know if talking makes things better or worse. I get the sense that they are a bit freaked out, especially my son. He’s a sensitive kid. One night when I’m putting him to bed I recognize something in his eyes that I’ve never seen before—it’s not that he’s scared, it’s that he knows what I’m going through and he feels sorry for me. It’s almost too much to take. “Come here, dude,” I say, and I give him a hug and try to make him laugh, and he does laugh, and I laugh, too, but I’m also trying not to cry. I realize that the way he sees me now is different from the way he saw me before. For the rest of my life I’m going to remember that flash of pity in his eyes. That look is going to haunt me. I need a job. Any job. Soon enough, I get one. This happens in September 2012. It’s not a great job. It’s not even a good one. There are a lot of drawbacks, chief among them that the job will take me away from home, but I don’t hesitate. I jump on it. Suddenly I am the editor-in-chief of a struggling technology news website called ReadWrite, a tiny blog with three full-time employees and a half-dozen woefully underpaid freelancers. ReadWrite is based in San Francisco, which means I fly out on Monday and take a redeye back to Boston on Thursday or Friday. On weeks when I’m not in San Francisco I’m either in New York, where ReadWrite’s parent company is based, or in some other city, making sales calls, trying to get tech companies to buy ads from us. It’s not a lot of fun, but I’m making a paycheck and keeping my eyes open for something better.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  4 . Y et the high priest accused Jesus of blasphemy. Because no blasphemy was committed, it seems unlikely that the trial proceeded the way that it’s described in Mark, our earliest source. (One could conceive of his statement as blasphemous only by assuming, with Mark, that Jesus was the Son of Man, because then Jesus would be saying that he had a standing equal with God. The high priest would have had no reasons to think that Jesus was referring to himself when he mentioned the Son of Man.) V. We can say a good deal about Jesus’ final hours before his appearance before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. A. He was almost certainly betrayed by one of his followers, Judas Iscariot, who may have divulged to the authorities some of Jesus’ secret teachings that he had given to the inner circle of twelve. B. These teachings concerned his own identity — something he was loathe to discuss publicly. Jesus seems to have thought that he himself would be appointed the ruler of the coming kingdom by God. C. Once the local Jewish authorities learned this, they had all the grounds they needed to make a quick arrest to get Jesus out of the public eye. ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 45 D. Working stealthily, the authorities had Jesus arrested at night and brought him into an informal interrogation. We don’t know exactly what happened there, but it clearly was enough to make the authorities to hand him over to the Roman governor for trial. Essential Reading: Mark 14-16; Matthew 26-27; Luke 22-23; John 18-19. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, chap. 12. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, chap. 16. Suggested Reading: Brown, Death of the Messiah. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Questions to Consider: 1 . Consider the various options for why Judas decided to betray Jesus. What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of each option? 2. Why might some scholars doubt the historicity of the following stories found in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last hours? What historical arguments can be mounted in their favor? Where do you stand on the issue? (a) The institution of the Last Supper (Mark 14:22-25; Matt 26:26-29; Luke 22:15-20; 1 Cor. 11:23-26), (b) Jesus’ washing of the disciples feet (John 13:1-20), and (c) Jesus’ prayer in the Garden before his arrest (Mark 14:32^12; Matt 26:36^16; Luke 22:39^16). 46 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership Lecture Twenty-Two The Death and Resurrection of Jesus

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  I considered quitting, then recalled those tongues of molten ice trailing across my skin. Taking a deep breath, I entered. Cigarette smoke hung in the yellowing light and a ceiling fan turned sluggishly as if enervated by the heat. Half a dozen men sat alone at separate tables, smoking, reading or staring into space. No one paid me any notice and I was grateful. I took it to be one of those places where everyone is a stranger, even people who’ve been drinking side by side for years. When I approached the counter with my empty jug, a customer seated there cast me a look of lazy appraisal. He wore a white T-shirt and I took him to be the guy I’d seen from my balcony. Big nosed with dark hair feathering across his forehead, his wrinkles added interest to a strong, angular face. But irrespective of rugged charm, middle-aged men who believe they’re entitled to leer unsettle my 110 Kristina Lloyd confidence. I was self-conscious in asking for ice and when my request was met with a frown, I stumbled in repeating myself. ‘The bartender wiped the counter with a cloth, apparently loath to serve me. Behind him, among shelves gleaming with bottles and glasses, a mirrored Coca-Cola clock said quarter past two. The clock’s red logo gave me that old jolt of jarring familiarity, making me feel I was on territory at once homely and strange. “T have money,” I said. With that, the bartender disappeared into an adjoining room, a curtain of plastic strips clattering lightly as he passed. I waited, wondering if the drinkers could see the ice tonguing my skin; if they could see me at night, water coursing over my flesh; if they could see how I tried to kill the heat of my longing, failing as the ice melted away and I climaxed once again. I felt they could and it troubled me. On the counter, a wedge of tortilla sat forlornly under a plastic dome. I could hear the bartender on the phone in the adjoining room. All this for some ice? When he returned with my jug blissfully full, I asked how much I owed him. Before he could reply, Big Nose interrupted, addressing the bartender in Catalan, a language I wasn’t yet familiar with. The bartender poured a large brandy, then set it in front of me. “Gratis,” he said. Unwilling to risk offence, | accepted the drink while trying to convince myself it left me under no obligation. So bloody English of me. Why couldn’t I decline the brandy, pay for the ice conventionally and leave?

• From Cultish (2021)

  To my delight, she responded within the hour: Omg of course I’ll talk about it! I did a diet program last year called Optavia. And that shit was legit a crazy cult. “Oh, goodie,” I replied. ii. Heyyyyy boss babe! Thank you soooooo much for responding!! I really think you’ll be a perfect fit for this! I don’t have much info to send via DM, the only website I have is for my current clients, but we have several different plans available depending on what you’re looking to accomplish. We treat our clients like family, so it’s really important I have the right information before moving forward, and I won’t know what’s best until we chat. The call will only take about 20 minutes :) I’m so excited to share more!! xoxo * * * To me, MLMs’ ra-ra speech style—the excessive exclamation points and “Just believe in yourself, and you can become rich”—reeks of toxic positivity . . . or forcing a silver lining around an experience that is actually quite complex, upsetting, and deserving of more careful attention. In the messaging of every single MLM I looked into, from Amway to Optavia, there was this startling hybrid of love-bomb-y talk about the power of a positive mind-set and ominous warnings about the danger of a negative one. On its face, promoting a chin-up attitude to your business associates might sound good and fine, but MLMs condition their recruits to fear “negativity” so viscerally that they avoid breathing a word of criticism about the company or anyone in it. “You don’t gossip. You don’t say bad things about other people. If they hear you doing it, or hear about you doing it, you will hear from your director,” cautioned one ex-Amway distributor. Amway labels any attitudes or utterances they don’t like “stinkin’ thinkin’.” Using this deceptively cute catchphrase, they’re able to isolate followers from any stinkin’ thinkers on the outside, who will pose a threat to their success. If a friend or family member expresses doubt in the company, you’re instructed to “snip them out of your life.” Followers become conditioned to speak in the MLM’s unnaturally cheerful register everywhere they go—with friends, family, strangers, and especially on social media. On Instagram and Facebook, you can clock a boss babe instantly, whether they explicitly mention a product or not. All it takes is that robotically chirpy syntax to give them away. It’s as if someone is standing behind them as they type, cracking a symbolic whip to make sure they’re always selling and recruiting, even if they’re just posting about their dog.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  The woman’s hands ball into fists, then fall back on the bed in helpless surrender as the man’s hips lunge at her in angry insistence. It’s too much. Dominique can’t watch any more. She switches off 8 Valerie Grey the TV and puts down the remote. She’s breathing deep, her face is flushed. It’s so remarkable what sex does to people: how they need it so much, that terrible intimacy of release in another’s arms. With her own ardour quenched and battered by the pain of her break-up, she’s been able to look at it more objectively, as an outsider, and it seems so strange. In the past months she’s come to realize how hard it is to maintain one’s existence in the world, to keep one’s ego intact in the face of all that tears at it and attempts to grind it down, and now it seems so strange to see how people fight and contend to give themselves away, to throw themselves at one another and lose themselves in their lover’s embrace. She feels a sudden urge to masturbate that takes her quite by surprise. Since she broke up with Michael she has had no sex, and absolutely no desire for sex. That’s why she’s come to this place, to try to rekindle that spark, and yet she lives in fear that she might be permanently damaged, that she may have lost the capacity to respond to that kind of intimacy. She worries that she might be the victim of some form of hysterical frigidity brought about by the trauma of her separation, and that it might be permanent. She’s afraid to push herself beyond the level of mild interest she feels now, afraid that she won’t respond She makes herself behave, letting herself feel the subtle tension in her body that she recognizes with welcome relief as the beginnings of sexual arousal. She feels as though some energy within her is being renewed, as if the mainspring of a watch is being wound and tightened. It’s a good sign, but it makes her nervous. She sits at her dressing table and does her face: nothing too elaborate, some eyeliner and shadow, some blush, her lipstick. She brushes her hair and studies herself in the mirror: the large, expressive brown eyes, the fine features. She’s lost her girlish sparkle, but perhaps she’s gained a degree of depth and maturity. Michael used to call her his princess for the fineness of her features and the regal way she carried herself, and she wonders now whether her carriage has changed: whether she still walks with her back straight and her head erect. It’s something she hasn’t even thought to notice before. It would be easier to stay in tonight, she thinks. She could order in from room service and go to bed early. She wouldn’t have to dress, she wouldn’t have to see anyone.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  with her fiancé? One can only attribute this rebellion to the actualizing tendency that had been suppressed for so long but that finally asserted itself. However, because she had distrusted her own experience for such a long period and because the self by which she was living was so sharply different from the experiences of her organism, she could not reconstruct her true self without help. The need for help often exists when there is such a great discrepancy. Now I am discovering my experiences—some bad according to society, parents, and boyfriend, but all good as far as I am concerned. The locus of evaluation that formerly had resided in her parents, in her boyfriend, and others, she is now reclaiming as her own. She is the one who decides the value of her experience. She is the center of the valuing process, and the evidence is provided by her own senses. Society may call a given experience bad, but when she trusts her own valuing of it, she finds that it is worthwhile and significant to her. An important turning point came when a flood of the experiences that I had been denying to awareness came close to the surface. I was frightened and upset. When denied experience comes close to awareness, anxiety always results because these previously unadmitted experiences will have meanings that will change the structure of the self by which one has been living. Any drastic change in the self-concept is always a threatening and frightening experience. She was dimly aware of this threat even though she did not yet know what would emerge. When the denied experiences broke through the dam, they turned out to be hurts and angers that I had been completely unaware of. It is impossible for most people to realize how completely an experience can be shut out of awareness until it does break through into awareness. Every individual is able to shut out and deny those experiences that would endanger his or her self-concept. I thought I was insane because some foreign person had taken over in me. When the self-concept is so sharply changed that parts of it are completely shattered, it is a very frightening experience, and her description of the feeling that an alien had taken over is a very accurate one. Only gradually did I realize that this alien was the real me. What she was discovering was that the submissive, malleable self by which she had been living, the self that had been guided by the statements, attitudes, and expectations of others, was no longer hers. This new self that had seemed so alien was a self that had experienced hurt and anger and feelings that society regards as bad, as well as wild hallucinatory thoughts—and love. As she goes further into self-discovery, it is likely that she will find out that some of her anger is directed against her parents. The hurts will have come from various sources; some of the feelings and experiences that society regards as bad but that she finds good and satisfying are experiences and feelings that probably have to

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I tell her about the guy who I thought was someone’s administrative assistant and who turned out to be my boss, and how I’m sitting in a room called the content factory, crammed in with two dozen people. Inside, something has happened. My daughter is screaming. She sounds like she has been set on fire. “Want a paper bag to breathe into?” Sasha says. “No, I want a plastic bag, and you can put it over my head and tie it around my neck.” “That’s the spirit,” Sasha says, and we open the door and head inside to face the mayhem. Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That’s a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I’m supposed to be doing here, or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on. Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better. Our head trainer is Dave, a wiry, energetic guy in his forties with a shaved head and a gray goatee. On the first day we all go around and introduce ourselves, and tell everyone about something that makes us special. Dave’s thing is that he plays in a heavy metal cover band on weekends. Dave is part teacher and part preacher. Every two weeks he gets a batch of new recruits, and he goes through the same spiel, showing the same slides, telling the same jokes. He’s good at it. He loves HubSpot, he tells us, unabashedly. He’s had lots of jobs, and this is by far the best place he’s ever worked. This company has changed his life. He hopes it will change ours as well. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Dave tells us. “HubSpot is leading a revolution . A movement . HubSpot is changing the world . This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives. We are changing people’s lives.” He tells a story about a guy named Brandon, a pool installer in Virginia. His business was struggling. He could barely get by. But then he started using HubSpot software, and his business took off. Soon, his company was installing pools all around the country. He was rich! Eventually he was doing so well that he hired someone else to run his pool company so that he could become a motivational speaker. He travels the world spreading the gospel of inbound marketing, transforming the lives of thousands of other people. “This guy has become a superstar ,” Dave says. “He’s a rock star . And it all started with HubSpot.