#Freud is garbage and should feel bad | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

severalspoons · 5 years ago

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Eye of Michael Discord Update

My friends continue to be hilarious.

Tumblr is kinda like having a diary except you can get validation. -- @pinkskyredclouds

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I feel bad for Cloud. He's dealt with all kinds of crazy shit. Monsters. Horrible massages. An evil entity. Cross-dressing. -- @pinkskyredclouds

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Solution to zombie nightmares: Have them salute and watch their arms fall off. -- Our Legato

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Hey! It's not a Trigun tale if someone isn't depressed. -- @mrhyde786

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They like to show their love by chopping their close loved ones arms off. – Dagdaddy, explaining how Knives and Darth Vader are similar

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Freud was right about one thing, though - having parents will fuck you up somehow. -- @ragtagbunchofmisfitism

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The entire plot of Trigun could have been prevented with good parenting, the end -- @ragtagbunchofmisfitism

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he's a sweet person.. but he's the harbinger of black holes. -- Our Vash’s description of Vash

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I need a hero / I’m holding out for a heeeero til the morning liiiiight / He’s goootta be strong and he’s goootta be fast/ And he’s gotta be ready for killing tiiime! -- Vaki

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Why when I was a kid, everyone was prepared for everything! Typhoons, earthquakes, and customers who go to a store to buy what it sells! –Vaki

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I’m not supposed to do what’s expected. --Vaki

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Me: when Vash acts like an idiot, he's largely just pretending to be anime Rem.

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@mrhyde786: Everything’s going to hell for everyone in Eden.

@vash-crybaby-stampede: ::hands you a basket:: Something to put Hell into.

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Grape medicine tastes like death and the tears of small children. -- @pinkskyredclouds

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She’s cheer captain and the ghost of Wolfwood’s on the bleachers... -Me

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Potatoe tomato. -- Our Vash

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Two heads are better than cooked well done. -- Our Milly, screwing up a proverb

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Wish I knew what Knives said in the vid. But knowing him, it’s either about Vash or vermin. The big Vs. -- Dagaddy

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@mrhyde786: Okay. Thank goodness. So Actual Knives is off elsewhere, and Vash is cuddling a corpse.

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Our Legato: (re: a plot point in an old rp where Knives’ body is brought in) Hey kids wanna see a dead body?

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Not a fanfic without Vash and donuts. -- Vaki

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Dear Brothering intensifies. -- Vaki

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Me: Knives did COVID.

Dagdaddy: Knives caused 2020

@mrhyde786: Damn it Knives.

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like ... maybe if having kids was seen as something like a prize... maybe people would work harder to treat them better??? -- @vash-crybaby-stampede

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a brain divided against itself can't stand. –me

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Dagdaddy, on having cancer: “The ticket to your future is always blank, and as for me, well, it’s complicated.”

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“I missed something while away. Knowing you all, it was meaningless.” -- Holiday Knives (Dagdaddy)

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:briefly wonders if eating garbage would technically be a form of cannibalism in Knives' eyes. He dismisses the ludicrous thought.: -- The Superior Legato Bluesummers

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“Hey there, Vash. You can stop hiding behind this other Knives’ ego.” --Holiday Knives (Dagdaddy)

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@pinkskyredclouds: I heard that he wasn't actually an absent parent by choice, he died when Cloud was young, but i’m not sure how canon that is Me: hmm....that would be sad. was he supposed to be shinra or something? @pinkskyredclouds: We don't know. That's the thing he could've literally been anyone. Involved with Shinra? Possibly Me: It could have even been... ::dramatic pause:: ...your mom.

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“Doubt isn’t a sin,” Vash said, “It’s just a part of being human.” Nick had said that during one of their philosophical debates, and it stuck with him. -- Me

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Me: (Talking about Vash’s beliefs) ...But it's so different in manga vs. anime. Anime he clings to them, makes them his identity, and tries to force them on everyone else. He's like the Christian people bothering you on the sidewalk. "do you have a minute for Jesus?" no, f*** off

Dagdaddy: Knives: Do you have time to die?

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@vash-crybaby-stampede: you don't get a toy with your Kinder eggs? not even on the side?

Me: nah, someone might choke and their parents might sue

Dagdaddy at 2:16 PM: Lmao They made it illegal because you couldn’t get a gun in one

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I'm teaching you fuckers how to english and write a paper wether you like it or not lmao -- @vash-crybaby-stampede, telling me what I should say to my group members for a class project === @vash-crybaby-stampede: whose wedding? Dagdaddy: Uhhh tbh might happen to my mom and her bf Me: lol "happen to.” "What happened? I feel like I was hit by a truck." "A wedding happened to us, baby." "Oh. I guess we're married now" === Dog poop is a blessing in disguise. You can save it and throw it at your enemies to assert your dominance. -- Dagdaddy ===

What if you take dog poop, a butter knife, spread it on toast, layer it under a thick coat of Nutella, and feed it to your worst enemy to assert your dominance? -- Dagdaddy === "I don't snore, Broomhead." He mumbled out from over his cigarette. The biggest lie in the history of lies. Everyone snores. -- @vash-crybaby-stampede‘s Wolfwood

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@ragtagbunchofmisfitism: and I didn't quite sit on it. more like, i was reaching across my bed and my leg was laying across the keyboard

Me: like a cat

@ragtagbunchofmisfitism : I DON'T HAVE CATS FOR LEGS OKAY! STOP TRYING TO SPREAD A SCURRILOUS RUMORS

Me: BUT YOU WOULD LOOK SO MUCH BETTER WITH CATS FOR LEGS (EVERYONE WOULD)

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cerastes · 6 years ago

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Completely aimless post in which I just talk about a plethora of things with no real goal other than that I felt like talking about it.

Martial arts are an art, end of the day, but one that is particularly difficult to be self-taught in. You really do need the instruction of someone, especially at first. If you have a solid base that was polished by a good master, then you can continue to improve yourself from there, but I think it’s exceedingly improbable for someone to be able to be truly self-taught as a martial artist. Just like with writing or drawing, there’s a difference between “good martial artist” and “good master”. Someone that is great at the arts might not be good at teaching them. Finding a good master, thus, is a task that should be viewed as it is under this lens. Likewise, you, as a student, can also be a good student or a bad student. A good master and a good student are a beautiful combination. Strive to be good, the rest will follow.

In a way I believe many people will understand it better: It’s incorrect to think of martial arts as active skills. ‘Martial Arts’ is a skill tree composed 80% of passive skills. You practice a punch or a kick or a clinch or a defensive maneuver not to do them consciously, you practice them so they become ingrained in your body language, so you react with them when they need to be used, and so you have the discipline to automatically know when they should be used. It is only in the highest levels of combat or when you are against someone of your level that mind games and the 3D chess games of “I’ll do this and that and this and that so they do this to which I respond with this but I should keep in mind they might do this at bullet point 3 so I’ll watch out for that and do this and that in that case instead” come into play, and they are thoughts that happen in a second, because they do not happen in words, they happen in motions you have ingrained in your body after laborious training. It’s why amateur martial artists tend to lose to street fighters but adept martial artists tend to wipe the floor with the same street fighters: Amateurs are still under the idea of “active skills” martial arts, whereas the adept simply does. Do, and the rest will follow.

It’s unhealthy to not realize and admit to your mistakes, but it is also unhealthy to never forgive yourself for them. Likewise, it is unhealthy to keep ‘friends’ that won’t let you forgive yourself, whether they make it manifest through words or simply through actions, subtle as they can get. It is a sad reality, but it is true. Avoid these friends. Make distance with them if they are not willing to let their own fears or grudge subside after you’ve proven you are not the you of yesterday. Don’t let them think you need to spend a lifetime atoning for once having been the you of yesterday. No one is, was, or will be flawless, but we can and should be better. Don’t let them not let you be better or feel better.

Years ago, I was immature due to my own bad experiences with some people that hurt me deeply and came to the conclusion that cutting people off was the right thing to do if they crossed you. Thinking back on it, it was me being afraid of being hurt again. I’ve long since moved on from this way of thinking, and I’ve embraced contact as the right way to handle things. However, as much as I regret the way I was, I decidedly do not regret cutting off the people I cut off, I simply regret the way in which I cut them off. The people I cut off are people I still do not want around me, and that I would’ve cut off anyways. What I regret is not talking to them and letting them know “hey, you’ve been shit to me, I really do not want to know you anymore,” because it’s unfair to wordlessly cut off someone, but it’s also unfair to subject yourself to more pain because supposed “friends” keep hurting you. I have apologized many times for being the way I was, but I will not apologize, not once, for the people I actually cut off. They are not all bad people, some of them are pretty decent, honestly, but they did me wrong, and not once or twice or thrice. Me cutting them off wordlessly wasn’t something I did after one tiny whoopsie, it was something I did after being wronged several times, and no one can say I didn’t give a bunch of these people chances, because I kept some around even after tons of fights and supposed ‘break ups’, forgiving them for their shit until I simply couldn’t take it anymore. What I’m trying to say here is that I’ve already paid my dues, I regret what I regret, and I acted bad, but that doesn’t mean I’m the bad guy and the other party was composed of poor wittle sunshines that were wronged by the big bad Dreamer. They had it fucking coming, and that’s all I have to say. If I have to feel like a perpetual villain around you because you happen to be friends with one of the people I cut off, then we might as well not be around together any longer, because fuck that noise. I am not saying your friend is a bad egg and you should consider your morality or the viper in your chicken coop or whatever, all I’m saying is that they wronged me pretty bad as well, and I don’t have to deal with your shitty ambivalence. You want to come to terms to this properly? Then fucking talk to me. Communication is the morale of the story, after all.

Yet, life seems to have a knack for having me, by chance or circumstance, be stuck with these people that feel this ambivalence for me for things I’ve already settled years ago. It’s getting really tiresome, and I do not have much patience left in me, years-long friends or not. Having to walk on egg shells because of their fears and/or over something long buried feels terrible, especially when the egg shells are from four-five years ago and everyone has moved on except these third parties.

It’s true that politics have different weights in the lives of different people: For some, it’s just a topic among many, and for others, it’s a matter of life or death. In that regard, I respect the decision to ignore the whole “I’m not going to lose friends over politics”: It is completely valid to part ways with someone over political ideas, for their abstract beliefs may mean concrete consequences for you. That said, I also respect the decision to want to part ways with someone for being too immersed in politics, because even though it may be their livelihood on the line there, perhaps you simply do not have the emotional energy to want to invest into a fight that’s not yours, when you already have your own fights. I personally am someone who doesn’t like politics getting in the way of friendship, but I’d also really rather you don’t turn everything into a political joke, either. It gets very exhausting for many reasons.

The ambivalence born from my love for neuroscience and my incredible distaste for memorization-heavy disciplines is something I think about every day. I love reading article after article of the fascinating new advances in neurosciences, but I cannot for the life of me sit down in front of a moldy textbook and memorize all of these names. It’s too boring. I like the part where we discover and experiment with cool new stuff, not the part where I learn what the name of the little bean-shaped thing behind the eye is.

I don’t think psychoanalysis is inherently a terrible form of therapy and that Freud should be dug up and shot again: I do not agree with most of what Freud said and I do not like psychoanalysis as a form of therapy, but it is true that Freud got the ball rolling for a lot of the future advances of psychology, arguably giving birth to the discipline in the first place, be that in the form of contributions to his theory or counterpoints to it. Whenever I see yet another post saying “SIGMUND FREUD ACTUALLY DID NOTHING FOR THE WORLD,” I simply chuckle, murmur “tumblr not knowing things again, I see,” and I carry on. What I hate about psychoanalysis, however, are the politics behind it. The moment you turn something that should be used first and foremost for the benefit of the people that need it, in this case mentally ill or afflicted people, and turn it into a game of power and influence for your own goals, is the moment you are inhuman garbage and should be removed as a psychologist. Suicide ratings are tragically high, mental health is still seen as a joke among many people, and you want to keep the hegemony of the “original form of analysis” just for the sake of tradition and your own benefit? Die. Really, just die. I don’t use this word seriously very often, but I really think you should die for the benefit of the world if you act this way. You are putting so many people in danger just because of your little game of politics. We are better off without you.

Final thought about psychoanalysis: If it works for some people, it works, and that’s great. The patient shouldn’t be molded for the technique, it is the technique that should be shaped to fit with the patient.

The video game difficulty dilemma is always... Annoying, to be honest, between people that miss the point and the sheer vehemence between both sides, it’s really hard to mediate, but aside from being annoying, it is also a genuinely fascinating topic. I love high difficulty, but I also love games being more accessible. End of the day, though, I think that the idea of bashing your head against a wall until you become skilled enough to surpass the challenge is a beautiful concept, so part of me really thinks that shouldn’t be changed when we specifically talk about FromSoft games. And it’s fine if that’s not your cup of tea! It really is, I’m not saying everyone should like this, but, well, it’s big part of their appeal and their “never give up” message, I don’t think it’s right to facilitate things, to be honest. There’s appeal in the “learn under hostile conditions” idea, after all, and I really don’t know how it is that you can keep that with facilitators. I’d be delighted if they can find a way, though, because I do want more accessibility and all. Hard topic. I immediately refuse to engage with people that see it as an ��us vs them” topic, though, lol, I’m here about that constructive dialogue.

Writing is writing, roleplaying is roleplaying, and tabletop roleplaying is tabletop roleplaying. They encompass very different methodologies, I’ve come to learn. It’s pretty fascinating. I love writing walls of text, but tabletop roleplaying, I’ve come to appreciate as a fast and short form. Much like I’ve come to appreciate roleplaying, really. I don’t really do 21 paragraphs anymore, ever, haha. I’ve come to understand the beauty of rapid pacing in the last years. I think it’s pretty essential in a tabletop environment. My DnD group, for example, is composed of Busy People, myself included, and we can’t spare more than one day per week on it, so we try to make every minute of every session count. The verbal nature of it can’t be beat, and were I to DM a game on the net, I really think it would be ideal if we had voice chat to go with it. Though, I understand there would be other problems associated with that, but that’s another story.

Really wish I had more free time, I want to play Trails of so bad.

I fucking hate cooking, bwahaha, I cannot get myself to like it. I like the end result, but I hate the process. Still, I endure, because I like food the way I make it: For me.

Really miss sensei.

I can’t stand people that look at something somewhat dark and immediately dismiss it as ‘edgy’. Where’s your sense of style?

On the same token, though, grown ass people being unironically edgy is painful. “Don’t pretend you don’t want an unhealthy, sexy relationship” alright fam. Unhealthy dynamics aren’t the only way a relationship can be spicy, lol.

Wanna play some basketball.

It’s fucking autumn, baby, the sun has finally fucked off.

Winter palettes are still the best, and combinations of white, purple, turquoise, pink, and shades of green can’t be beat.

Wanna rewatch Shirobako.

I’m pretty fucking tired and short on patience towards numerous people for different reasons, the main definitely being that the thesis is fucking tiring, but I am overall having a good time and I am enjoying life.

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xtruss · 4 years ago

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Magic Mushrooms May Be the Biggest Advance in Treating Depression Since Prozac

— By Adam Piore | 09/22/21

For most of his adult life, Aaron Presley, age 34, felt like a husk of a person, a piece of "garbage." He was trapped in a reality that was so excruciatingly tedious that he had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Then, all at once, the soul-crushing, depressive fog started to lift, and the most meaningful experience of his life began.

The turning point for Presley came as he lay on a psychiatrist's couch at Johns Hopkins University, wearing an eyeshade and listening through a pair of Bose headphones to a Russian choir singing hymns. He had consumed a large dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in what's more commonly known as magic mushrooms, and entered a state that could best be described as lucid dreaming. Visions of family and childhood triggered overwhelming and long-lost feelings of love, he says, "like heaven on earth."

Presley was one of 24 volunteers taking part in a small study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of a combination of psychotherapy and this powerful mind-altering drug to treat depression—an approach that, should it win approval, could be the biggest advance in mental health since Prozac in the 1990s.

Depression, often characterized by feelings of worthlessness, profound apathy, exhaustion and persistent sadness, affects 320 billion people around the world. In a typical year in the U.S., roughly 16 million adults, or 7 percent, suffer from a depression-related illness such as major depression, bipolar disorder or dysthymia. Roughly one-third of those who seek treatment won't respond to verbal or conventional drug therapies.

Magic-mushroom therapy is offering some hope for these hopeless cases. In the Hopkins study, published last year in JAMA Psychiatry, the therapy was four times more effective than traditional antidepressants. Two-thirds of participants showed a more-than 50-percent reduction in depression symptoms after one week; a month later, more than half were considered in remission, meaning they no longer qualified as being depressed.

Larger clinical trials underway in the United States and Europe are aimed at winning regulatory approval. Two studies that have enrolled more than 300 patients in 10 countries were given "breakthrough therapy" status in 2018 and 2019 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which will now expedite its review of the results. If the trials succeed, new protocols that combine psilocybin with psychotherapy in a clinical setting for the treatment of depression could be established quickly. Treatments could appear in clinics as early as 2024.

The rehabilitation of psilocybin as a medical treatment raises some concerns. Some scientists worry about the drug, which can induce psychosis in some people, becoming widely available outside of clinical settings. And they are loath to see a repeat of the 1960s embrace of recreational LSD, which caused much harm and set research into psychedelics back decades.

But many scientists in the mental health profession believe that the risks pale against the potential benefits, which include not only effective treatments for depression but also a new understanding of the neural basis of many mental health disorders. "We're convinced that the effects of these drugs are pretty profound and that there is a story that will be relevant to understanding new approaches to brain disease," says Jerrold Rosenbaum, a Harvard Medical School professor, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Massachusetts General hospital and leader of its new Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics.

Left: A laboratory researcher removes a Psilocybe mushroom from a container at the Numinus Bioscience lab in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, on Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021. James MacDonald/Bloomberg/Getty Middle: Aaron Presley. Courtesy of Aaron Presley Right: Psilocybin Mushroom. Getty

A New Renaissance

Although psychedelic drugs have been used by indigenous populations for millennia, they only entered the western medical mindset in 1943, when Albert Hoffman, a chemist at the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Sandoz, accidentally ingested a compound called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. He promptly entered "a dreamlike state" and hallucinated "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors." Hoffman became convinced LSD might have some use in medicine and psychiatry.

Not long after, a Manhattan banker named R. Gordon Wasson took a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, sampled psilocybin mushrooms, and published a 15-page account of his psychedelic experience in Life magazine, introducing the American public to the power of the plants.

Psychiatrists were soon reporting therapeutic benefits. By the 1960s they had dosed more than 700 alcoholics, half of whom subsequently stayed sober for at least a couple months. Other researchers discovered that the drugs were helpful for anxiety, depression, the existential angst of terminal cancer patients, and other mental health disorders—provided they were administered under supervision.

Psychedelic drugs lost their legitimacy soon after the counter-culture embraced them for recreation, triggering a spate of suicides, mental breakdowns and bad trips. Federal research funding dried up. Over the years, however, a few groups in the U.S. and abroad continued to conduct experiments on mice and map out the strange molecular-level gymnastics that give psilocybin its ability to so profoundly alter human perception.

Molly, Psychedelic Drug, Shows Promise As Mental Health Treatment: StudyREAD MORE Molly, Psychedelic Drug, Shows Promise As Mental Health Treatment: Study

Key to the action of the drug is its ability to bind to a special class of tiny proteins that protrude from the surface of many brain cells and detect passing chemical signals—in this case the neurotransmitter serotonin. What made the active molecules in LSD and psilocybin so powerful was a quirk in their geometry that caused the chemicals to get stuck in these proteins—known as serotonin 5H 2A receptors—and linger for hours, rather than quickly washing out as normal neurotransmitters would. Once the chemical was wedged inside a the receptors, it began to wreak havoc on the cell's internal signaling, causing some neurons that normally wouldn't fire to pop off like firecrackers, and prompting others to go dark.

These insights didn't come close to explaining the deep questions scientists had about the drugs—why, for instance, they elicit deep spiritual experiences?—which could only come with human trials. In the early 1990s, after a campaign of lawsuits and lobbying by psychedelic advocates, the FDA re-evaluated psychedelic drugs and other "drugs of abuse" and indicated it would be open to applications to study them.

Clinical trials on mystical experiences, terminally ill cancer patients and addiction came in the mid-2000s from such prestigious institutions as New York University, UCLA and Johns Hopkins. Meanwhile, brain-scanning tools helped document the remarkable effects of the drugs on the brain. In recent years, a clearer picture of how these drugs work their magic—and why they might work as a therapy for mental disorders—has begun to emerge.

The Mystical Brain

Both LSD and psilocybin profoundly disrupt the normal communication patterns in the brain—researchers can detect these changes using brain scanners that show which areas of the brain appear to be active simultaneously or in quick succession (suggesting which ones are communicating). In particular, they seem to interfere with the connectivity and functioning of networks of brain structures involved in planning, decision making and associative thinking—many of the high-level circuits we rely upon to interpret and make sense of the world. The drugs also seem to interfere with the functioning of the thalamic reticular nucleus, a structure close to the center of the brain that regulates the volume of sensory signals, allowing us to focus our attention on some inputs and block out others.

Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist who recently moved from Imperial College London to U.C. San Francisco, has articulated one of the most widely cited theories on how the drugs induce transformative experiences. He believes it stems from their ability to somehow shut down a specific constellation of brain structures known as the "default mode network." This network is most active when our mind wanders—when we are daydreaming. It gives us that voice we hear in our heads, which is often hyperactive in depressed and anxious patients who are tormented by negative thought loops.

Some scientists think of the default mode network as the neural correlate of Freud's "ego," that portion of human personality we experience as the "I" that remembers, evaluates, plans, helps integrate our outer and inner worlds and provides the mental filter through which we experience and interpret our moment to moment experience. Aaron Presley's experience shows how this network can go awry. Prior to his treatment, Presley recalls, he routinely told himself he was a waste of space and there was no hope of getting better. This repetitive, unproductive thinking, or "faux problem solving," is known in the field of psychiatry as "rumination." According to Harvard's Rosenbaum, rumination plays a key role in mental health conditions like depression, addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD.

For Presley, the psilocybin experience caused his unhelpful rumination to cease. It knocked the critical, domineering voice in his head off-line. He glimpsed a level of self-acceptance and a sense of agency in his own life that he did not know was possible.

Charles Raison, a psychiatrist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in depression, explains such experiences in Freudian terms. With the ego knocked offline, Freud's unconscious is given free rein to express itself, often revealing inner truths and deep insights that those taking the drugs might normally be blind to.

"The idea psychedelics liberate some of these powerfully valent, deeper emotional areas of the brain—the limbic areas involved in memory and emotion—to have their say is consistent with what people are reporting," says Raison, who also serves as director of clinical and translational research for Usona Institute, a nonprofit that is leading a clinical trial of psilocybin. "They are often overcome by these really, really powerful emotions that are surprising, as if they're coming from the outside but yet seem completely credible and utterly believable. These areas are liberated and get their day in court."

None of this, however, explains perhaps the most enduring mystery of these drugs—what Raison calls "the holy grail," and others have referred to as the "black box" or the "hand wave" in our current scientific understanding.

Many brain disorders are defined by a "narrowed mental and behavioral repertoire" that confines those who suffer from them to "suboptimal patterns" they cannot break out of," says Matthew Johnson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins and one of the coauthors of the depression study Aaron Presley participated in. These "suboptimal patterns" manifest as behaviors, such as ruminative thinking and a reflexive expectation that things will go badly, and they also manifest physically in abnormal brain activity. Many mental health disorders are characterized by aberrant brain activity, in which populations of specialized neurons, known as circuits, get stuck in rigid communication patterns and lose the ability to communicate effectively with other brain circuits. The brain loses the flexibility and the nimbleness that would allow it to respond to and interpret new situations and react accordingly. We become sick.

"When the drug wears off and it's all gone, somehow that leads to re-set and these brain networks go back to a healthier pattern," says David Nichols, a retired Purdue University chemist, who has been studying the molecular biology of psychoactive drugs for more than 50 years. "And that's the big question I think psychiatrists are going to be looking at for a long time. What's that re-set mechanism?"

In recent years some scientists have begun to uncover evidence that suggests one tantalizing possibility—that the drugs might somehow prompt the brain to release growth agents that not only send a global signal that allows the cells of the brain to rewire themselves and forge new connections. That the drugs may even catalyze the brain to begin regenerating itself.

In one study, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine used a laser-scanning microscope to peer into the brains of mice. In particular, they observed "dendritic spines," the branch-like projections on the end of neurons that allow them to communicate with neighboring brain cells. Chronic stress and depression are known to reduce the number of these neuronal connectors and cause existing ones to shrivel. When Yale researchers took a bunch of stressed-out, depressed mice with shriveled dendrites and fed them psilocybin, their dendrites bloomed.

Remarkably, this rewiring of the brain after a single dose appears to be long lasting: a month afterwards, the psilocybin-fed mice had 10 percent more neuronal connections than before they had taken the drug. The increased density of these crucial neuronal connectors had observable benefits: mice showed behavioral improvements and increased neurotransmitter activity.

"These new connections may be the structural changes the brain uses to store new experiences," says Yale's Alex Kwon, associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and an author of the paper.

Other groups who have exposed human brain cells to the drug in petri dishes report a growth of new brain cells—a process called "neurogenesis." One theory is that the drugs ability to wedge serotonin receptors in the "on" position for an extended period of time somehow kick off a series of chemical reactions that prompts neurons to release hormone-like signals that stimulate neurogenesis

If scientists can reverse engineer and map out these chemical reactions, says Harvard's Rosenbaum, they could shed new light not just on what goes wrong in various brain disorders but also develop new treatments for many intractable brain disorders that have been difficult to treat.

Left: Dr.Charles S. Grob. Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Getty Right: Harvested Mazatec psilocybin mushrooms. Joe Amon/The Denver Post/Getty

A Night and Day Difference

As Presley lay on his psychiatrist's couch, he wasn't thinking about his blooming dendrites or his Freudian id. He was a seven-year-old kid again, sitting in a church pew with his family during a Sunday sermon. He and his two brothers were trying to make one another laugh.

"I could actually feel my brothers on either side of me—and just how fun it was," he recalls. "And I just felt how much love I have for my brothers and my parents. It's one of those moments where you make each other laugh until you cry."

The church scene morphed into other visions. Presley saw his own funeral, that of his parents, and those of others he loved (all of whom were still alive). He traced a possible future with his girlfriend. He sobbed so hard it felt as if he'd been kicked in the stomach, and conversely felt his body flood with pure joy and gratitude. Presley knew what he was experiencing wasn't technically real. But the scenes were so detailed, so infused with passion and meaning, they felt real.

When it was all over, after he'd processed it with his Hopkins facilitators, something had shifted. In the weeks and months that followed, the visions of joy and meaning he'd glimpsed became his guide stones. He joined a musical choir, because singing gave him joy. He shaved his beard and his head and once again began attending social events. He made an effort to reconnect with old friends and family members. With the aid of Hopkins therapists who were on hand to help "integrate" his experience, he made to-do lists of actions he could take if—or when—the darkness returned: Call a friend or loved one, go to a climbing gym, lift weights, sing, play the piano, reach out to experts in academia and initiate conversations about their work.

"I was so tired, so drained," he recalls of his time before the treatment. "It felt like I was underneath a huge weight. And all of a sudden, that's lifted. It's, like, night and day difference."

Such transformative experiences are common in the cozy, dimly lit offices of mental-health professionals, with their soft couches, Buddha statues and landscape paintings. Mary Cosimano, director of facilitator services at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, has taken part in more than 475 sessions with volunteers in clinical trials. The individual experiences vary widely but share some common themes.

One volunteer taking part in a study of psilocybin to treat anorexia experienced a feeling of being held and accepted by a higher being—"resting in the arms of God"—which gave her a sense of peace and may have helped her to let go of her need to control so many aspects of her life. Another volunteer described feelings of worthlessness that made her afraid to speak with anyone at her job. In one session, she had a vision of herself at work. She watched her coworkers become "really, really little," and then ate them. The experience left her with the sense that "we are all connected, all one." When she returned to work she felt like an equal with her co-workers and was able to treat them as peers.

Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, who worked with terminal cancer patients in the early 2000s, says many of the patients he worked with emerged from the experience with a newfound ability to focus on the present moment.

Most of his patients came in experiencing high levels of existential distress, demoralization, depression and anxiety. After the psilocybin treatments, they often left with a newfound sense of peace and a determination to spend the rest of their days connecting with loved ones and making the most of the time they had left.

Often when we become seriously ill, he explains, "we lose that part of the identity, which is so vital for our function, and this kind of treatment process seems to re-establish that sense of meaning and identity anchored in who one has been in the past," he says. "You no longer feel cut off and kind of marooned from your old sense of self. We found that this in many respects was existential medicine."

Cosimano emphasizes that the trip itself is just part of the clinical protocol. At Johns Hopkins, and in most of the trials currently underway, what happens afterwards is just as important. After their sessions are over, volunteers are asked to write "session reports," sometimes simply bullet-pointing their experiences. They then read the reports to their facilitators, who help the volunteers explore what the experience meant to them and how they might integrate the insights into their daily lives.

"If you don't do something with what you experience, it's just going to go back to the way you were before," says Cosimano. "It is a discipline. It's something that you have to make a commitment to."

Left: Matthew Johnson. Courtesy of Seth Jacobson Right: Magic mushrooms are displayed in a refrigerated case at Innerspace, a smart shop in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on Monday, Oct. 8, 2007. Roger Cremers/Blooberg/Getty

Mary Cosimano. Courtesy of Mary Cosimano

A Heavy Mandate

If the drugs are ever to make it into the clinic and help actual patients, advocates will have to avoid the mistakes of the past. Many of those pushing the therapies believe it is important to distinguish between abuse of the drugs outside the clinic and the experiences of those who use the drugs in a tightly-controlled, supervised, safe therapeutic setting.

This mandate weighs heavily on George Goldsmith, one of the founders of Compass Pathways, the publicly-traded London-based biotechnology company conducting a 22-site, 10-country study with 233 patients who meet the diagnostic criteria for "treatment resistant" depression. Goldsmith has a personal connection to the issue: He and his wife Ekaterina Malievskaia discovered psychedelic therapy while searching for a cure for her mentally ill son and committed themselves to taking it out of the shadows.

In designing the trial, he and Malievskaia conferred closely with regulators—indeed, a British regulator first suggested they design their first trial to treat drug-resistant depression. They have also recruited a board of well-respected advisors that includes Tom Insel, former director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, Paul Summergrad, former head of the American Psychiatric Institute, and Sir Alasdair Breckenridge, the former Chair of the UK's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

"I'm of the opinion we need innovation in this space," Insel says.

Insel worries about these efforts being overtaken by other events. In the U.S., an active movement to decriminalize psilocybin has picked up momentum in recent years, with voters in Denver, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Washington, D.C., and Somerville and Cambridge in Massachusetts voting in favor. Although the drugs remain illegal under federal law, he worries what might happen if they become widespread outside the clinic. Without supervision, psychedelics can accelerate the onset of psychosis in those who are vulnerable to it. That could lead to the kind of tragedies and bad publicity that derailed the drug in the past.

The gold rush for treatments, however, has already begun. Hundreds of new biotechnology companies are raising money for therapeutics and research groups studying the compounds for clinical use have exploded to well over 100.

The therapy Compass is proposing includes a protocol designed to ensure the drugs can be taken safely and experts are on-hand to help should a patient begin to feel overwhelmed. Patients are screened, required to attend preparatory meetings with a therapist, supervised and monitored during their dosing sessions and attend follow-up sessions aimed at integrating their experiences.

If the FDA approves the therapy, it is likely to do so with special provisions stipulating that the drugs cannot be taken outside the clinical setting, are carefully controlled and can only be administered by a trained healthcare professional.

"Quite often, you can have a very challenging experience and still have a lot of benefit," Goldsmith says. "I don't think that a bad trip is necessarily a bad experience. It's a challenging experience. It's content you may not want to look at, but it actually could be quite therapeutic to do so. And that's why it's important to have the therapist present. In the wild, God knows what happens."

In the proper clinical settings, however, the therapy may be able to help many people who have resisted other therapies. Three years after his Hopkins experience, Aaron Presley's depression still comes back sometimes. But when it does, it no longer overwhelms him, and he knows what to do to climb out of it. The experience inspired him to reach out to his parents and brothers to connect more deeply. He is more open about personal stuff he previously would have avoided discussing, he says.

"I realized it's possible to have a set of actions and activities, just the right combination and sequence, that produces ideal features for myself. And I have the agency to be able to make it happen. I found my passions again, what really motivates me deep down inside."

— Source: Newsweek

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oovitus · 7 years ago

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Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements?

By Joshua Fields Millburn · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+

If the following screed were a peer-reviewed journal article, its abstract would be brief: advertisements suck.

Well, at least most of them do.

That’s not to say that all advertising is inherently evil, or even bad, because not all advertisements are created equal—they run the gamut from informative to downright destructive.

To understand the inherent problems with advertisements, it’s important to first point out that advertising isn’t the same thing as marketing. Though these two terms are often used interchangeably, they are different in practice.

Advertisements

Advertisements are paid announcements via a public medium—mattress commercials, “infomercials” for the latest exercise fad, and seemingly harmless adverts for harmful prescription drugs—and they are generally not an endorsement by the platform on which they are displayed.

In Latin, advertere means “to turn toward,” and that’s the exact aim of today’s ad agencies: they’re willing to pay heaps of money to turn your eyes toward their products and services. And if the demand for a product isn’t as high as the supply, no problem! Advertising can create a false demand if the budget is high enough.

In recent years, worldwide spending on advertising has topped half a trillion dollars a year. Even writing the full number—500,000,000,000.00, commas and all—doesn’t come close to truly understanding its depth.

So let’s put it into perspective: If you leave your home today and begin spending one dollar every single second, it will take you more than 15,000 years to spend half a trillion dollars. In fact, if you’d’ve spent a million dollars every single day since the fall of Rome, you still wouldn’t’ve spent half a trillion dollars by now.

And we’re spending more than that every year on advertising. Which isn’t so bad in and of itself. After all, it’s just money being spent on informing people about useful stuff, right?

Yes, that sort of used to be true.

A Brief History of Modern Advertising

Before the twentieth century, advertising largely connected the producers of goods with consumers who genuinely needed those goods.

But then, as Stuart Ewen describes in his book Captains of Consciousness, “Advertising increased dramatically in the United States as industrialization expanded the supply of manufactured products. In order to profit from this higher rate of production, industry needed to recruit workers as consumers of factory products. It did so through the invention of [advertising] designed to influence the population’s economic behavior on a larger scale.”

By the Roaring Twenties, thanks to Edward Bernays, who’s sometimes referred to as the founder of modern advertising and public relations, advertisers in the U.S. adopted the doctrine that “human instincts could be targeted and harnessed.”

Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, realized that appealing to the rational minds of customers, which had been the mainstream method advertisers had used to sell products, was far less effective than selling products based on the unconscious desires that he felt were the “true motivators of human action.” Since then, we’ve witnessed ten decades of advertising agencies reaching—and overreaching—into the depths of the human psyche.

Overreach of Advertisers

Fast forward to the present day.

One of the most obvious examples of advertisers’ rapacious (over)reach in recent years is the drug Sildenafil, which was created as a treatment for hypertension. When clinical trials revealed the drug wasn’t effective, that should have been the end of its life cycle.

But then advertisers stepped in.

After discovering several male test subjects experienced prolonged erections during clinical trials, the makers of Sildenafil had a solution that desperately needed a problem. So they hired an ad agency who coined the term “erectile dysfunction,” and Viagra was born. This campaign took a relatively flaccid problem and created a ragging $2-billion-per-year blue pill.

Of course, Viagra is a rather anodyne example. There are many pharmaceuticals whose side effects are so expansive that their commercials are forced to use gratuitous green pastures, yearbook smiles, and handholding actors to conceal the terror of “rectal bleeding,” “amnesia,” and “suicidal ideation.”

In a sane world, misleadingly selling harmful prescription drugs would be a criminal act. Actually, it is: it’s illegal in every country in the world—except the United States and New Zealand—to advertise drugs to consumers.

But we let the almighty dollar get in the way.

In 1976, Henry Gadsden, then CEO of Merck & Co., told Fortune magazine that he’d rather sell drugs to healthy people because that’s where the most money was.

We’ve been sold new “cures” ever since.

But please don’t think this is an anti-boner-pill diatribe. According to the research, Viagra seems to be a relatively benign drug. Thereby, there’s little wrong with the pill itself. It’s the paid advertisements that are troublesome.

Many ad agencies employ writers, demographers, statisticians, analysts, and even psychologists in an effort to divorce us from the money in our checking accounts. With the help of a fine-tuned agency, even the “disclaimer” is part of the sales pitch: “Consult your doctor if your erection lasts longer than four hours.” I don’t know about you, but I’d rather consult my partner with my everlasting hard-on.

Viagra isn’t the only product pushed beyond its initial conception. Did you know Listerine was previously used as a floor cleaner, Coca-Cola was invented as an alternative to morphine, and the graham cracker was created to stop you from masturbating?

Hmm. If at first your product doesn’t succeed, hire an ad agency!

Selling Insecurity

Making men believe their erections aren’t firm enough isn’t the first time corporations have capitalized on human insecurity.

For decades, women have been sold an inferiority complex. Our glowing screens would have the average female believe her waist isn’t skinny enough, her breasts aren’t big enough, and her eyelashes aren’t lush enough. Don’t worry, though, whatever your ailment, consumerism has the cure.

In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk prophesied of a dystopia in which a cunning con man could sell our own fat back to us after extracting it from our bodies. He was only half right, however.

In the book, the fat is repackaged as soap—a metaphor for cleansing ourselves by way of consumerism—but in the real world we’re sold our fat in the form of autologous-fat transfer (butt injections) so we can look like our favorite reality-television stars.

In a Kafkaesque bait-and-switch, advertisers sell us the food that makes us obese because we “deserve a treat,” and then they sell us the diet plans and exercise equipment to combat our gluttony.

The sleight of hand doesn’t end with “male enhancers” and weight-loss remedies. Advertisers go much further, capitalizing on our fear (and greed) with radically overpriced timeshare properties, precious metals, and end-times survival kits. You may not’ve known the world was ending, but now that you do, there’s a product you can purchase to prepare.

Selling Scarcity

Speaking of the end of the world, why does it seem like the ads we experience are always taking place in a state of perpetual emergency?

Act now! Limited time only! While supplies last!

These advertiser-induced artificial limits are almost always imaginary. The truth is that if you “miss out” on a so-called sale, you’ll be just fine because corporations are always looking for a new opportunity to sell you something today. I mean, what’s the alternative? “Sorry, Mrs. Customer, you’re screwed—you waited an extra day to make your decision, so we no longer want your money!”

Why, then, does almost every company inject urgency into their ads? Because, as Bernays recognized a century ago, this tactic takes advantage of our primal nature: humans make quick—often rash—decisions in times of perceived scarcity.

This made sense when our number one concern was starvation; it makes much less sense when we think we’ll never be able to own that big-screen television, video-game console, or clutch purse unless we get in on this weekend’s doorbuster bonanza.

Selling Nonessentials

Advertisers have gotten so skilled that they can even sell us trash and tell us it’s good for us. Literally.

Since American farmers are faced with unprecedented hoards of soybean and corn crops, and thus unprecedented waste products from those crops, advertisers have found a way not to safely dispose of that waste but to repackage it and sell it to you as hydrogenated oil, a supposed “alternative” to healthier oils from olives, avocados, and almonds.

Inferior cooking oils are just the start of the garbage that’s sold by the food industry. The amount of junk food that is peddled to us is so immense and so dangerous that there isn’t room in this essay to meaningfully explore the sugar and processed foods vended by America’s largest corporations, but it can be summed up in a single stat: in 2018, you are more likely to die from obesity than of a violent crime, terrorism, war, starvation, or a car crash.

Junk foods aren’t the only junk we buy. Unbeknown to us, advertisers have helped turn our homes into mausoleums of trash. To justify our clinging, we’ve invented cute nicknames for our junk—trinket, knickknack, novelty, doohickey, tchotchke, collector’s item, memento—as if what we call our trash increases its importance.

But in the real world, the cheap plastic things we purchase at gift shops aren’t of importance, which might be fine if they made us happier or improved our lives, but they don’t.

Instead, we experience a dull high that wears off soon after the cash register dings its quiet victory, and we sit in the aftermath of consumption with an unusable artifact. Then, in time, we feel icky because we’re too ashamed to let go, so we purchase plastic storage containers to hide—ahem, organize—our past mistakes.

Each year, Americans spend $1.2 trillion on nonessential goods. In contrast, we contribute less than $200 billion to charities every year. In other words, we spend a trillion dollars more on shit we don’t need than on helping people in need.

Advertising to Children

Advertisers have found perhaps the easiest way to flood our homes with nonessentials: by advertising to our children. Not only do kids lack the critical thinking skills to say no to the foods that are killing us, but if they develop brand loyalty early, then Ronald McDonald has a lifetime customer.

According to the American Psychology Association, commercial appeals to children became commonplace with the advent and widespread adoption of television, and they grew exponentially with the proliferation of cable television, which allowed programmers to develop entire channels of child-oriented programming and advertising.

It is estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion each year to reach the youth, and children view more than 40,000 television commercials each year—an exponential increase from decades past.

The American Academy of Pediatrics believes this targeting occurs because advertising in the U.S. alone is a $250 billion a year industry with 900,000 brands to sell, and children and adolescents are attractive consumers: teenagers spend $155 billion each year, children younger than 12 spend another $25 billion, and both groups influence another $200 billion of their parents’ spending every year.

Perhaps the solution is to follow Sweden, Norway, and Quebec, and completely bar advertising to children under the age of 12. But more than likely it’s up to us as parents to develop the systems and communities that will better influence our kids’ viewing habits.

The Upside of Advertising

When done carefully, however, as rare as that might be, advertising can help fulfill an existing need. In fact, a hundred years ago, many ads did just that: they connected potential customers with a product that would improve their lives.

I myself have benefited from informative advertisements. Living in Los Angeles, I’m exposed to more billboards than most of the world’s population. Even though they’re a horrendous eyesore, I can honestly say that I’m more informed about the available media—movies, music, television series—than if these advertisements didn’t exist.

The same is true for the tailored ads of the Internet. Google does a great job matching their content with my perceived needs. If a website is going to clutter their sidebar with banner ads, I would rather be served messages that are geared toward my interests: the bookshelf I’ve been considering instead of a cosmetics display, the socks I need instead of an automobile pitch, the concert I want to attend instead of a beer commercial.

It would be hard for me to claim that ads don’t occasionally provide some quantifiable good to my life. I’m simply not sure whether the pros outweigh the cons.

True, the ads are “better” than ever, but maybe I’m more likely to spend my money irresponsibly when I’m constantly presented ads that match my precise interests. And while L.A.’s billboards are more informative than, say, the ambulance chasers who fill the outdoor displays in most American cities, they’re still intrusive, and I’d prefer they didn’t exist at all—and I’m not alone.

The People’s Preference

While I was driving from Burlington to Boston last year, something felt off. The rolling emerald landscape was unsullied, not unlike a tranquil screensaver, and I felt an unnameable calm as the mile markers ticked away.

Then I crossed the Massachusetts state line, and it became obvious: the trip’s serenity was produced largely by its lack of billboards, which are illegal in the state of Vermont.

Currently, four states—Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont—prohibit billboards. And more than 1,500 cities and towns have banned them throughout the world, including one of the largest cities on Earth—Sao Paulo.

When Sao Paulo introduced its “Clean City Law” in 2007, more than 15,000 billboards were taken down. To boot, an additional 300,000 intrusive signs—pylons, posters, bus and taxi ads—had to go.

The strangest result of ridding the world’s third largest city of these advertisements? In a poll done after the removal, a majority of Paulistanos actually preferred the change. What a novel idea: ask people what they like instead of letting profitability dictate the cityview.

From Good to Great Profit

If all ads were unobtrusive and informative, it would be hard to have anything bad to say about them. But many twenty-first century advertisers have figured out how to manipulate the system for maximum profit.

In the era of mass media and Internet spamming, they’ve crossed a line: we went from connecting people with products they need; to creating a false desire for objects that add little value to our lives; to selling objects that get in the way of a richer, more fulfilling life.

Many of the things advertisements make us think we need are actually the source of our discontent. You see, the easiest way to sell us happiness is to first make us unhappy. It’s a painful cycle for us; it’s big business for them.

Unfortunately, we’ve accepted ads as part of our everyday life; we’ve been conditioned to think they are a regular part of “content delivery.” After all, advertisements are how we get all those TV shows, radio programs, online articles, and podcasts for free, right?

Alternatives to Advertisements

There’s no free lunch. Every hour of network television is peppered with nearly 20 minutes of interruptions, and the same is true for most other mediums, which one could argue is more costly than the “free” price tag because we’re giving up our two most precious resources—our time and attention—to receive the product.

If we don’t want ads storming our attention (or our children’s attention), then we must be willing to pay for the things we associate as “free.”

Netflix, Apple Music, and similar services are able to sidestep the traditional advertising model by providing a service people value. Other businesses and individuals—Wikipedia and Sam Harris come to mind—follow a variation of this ad-free model, frequently called a “freemium” model, where creators provide content for free, and a small portion of their audience supports their work monetarily. (By the way, this model is what keeps The Minimalists Podcast advertisement-free.)

When asked why he chooses not to run ads on his popular Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris responded, “I don’t feel I can credibly run ads on my podcast, even for products and services I love and use myself. The one ad I read for a while was for Audible, which I do use, but even in that case, I don’t feel entirely comfortable telling you that you should subscribe to Audible. I mean, should you? Perhaps you shouldn’t. I have no idea. And that would go down as the worst Audible ad ever.

“In any case, I’ve discovered that I don’t feel comfortable selling ads, which is fine because I hate what ads have done to digital media. The advertising model is responsible for almost everything that is wrong online. But not running ads puts me in a position of asking my audience for support. This is something I approached with real trepidation in the beginning. However, having done it, I’ve discovered it’s actually the most straightforward relationship I can have with my audience.”

No matter your feelings about Netflix, Apple Music, Wikipedia, Sam Harris, or similar companies and individuals, their approach undoubtedly improves their creations by making them interruption-free, and it increases trust since their audience knows these creators aren’t beholden to the desires of advertisers, which allows them to communicate directly with their audience in a way that strengthens the relationship because the customers are in control, not the ad buyers.

Moreover, as consumers, our willingness to exchange money for creations forces us to be more deliberate about what we consume. If we’re paying for it, we want to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth. It’s a mystery why we don’t do the same for so-called “free” programming, where we pay no money, but we rarely get our attention’s worth.

Whether your time is worth $10, $100, or $1,000 per hour, you likely spend tens of thousands of dollars every year consuming messages from advertisers. Think about that: in a very real way, you’re paying to be advertised to. And there are no refunds on your misspent attention.

Marketing

The flipside of advertising isn’t the absence of communication—it’s marketing.

In his book, The Mindset of Marketing Your Music, Derek Sivers writes, “Don’t confuse the word marketing with advertising, announcing, spamming, or giving away branded crap. Really, marketing just means being considerate. Marketing means making it easy for people to notice you, relate to you, remember you, and tell their friends about you.”

What Sivers is describing here is the most honest form of marketing: informing people without manipulating or bothering them. At its ethical zenith, marketing considers the needs and points of view of an audience and works hard to meet those needs by connecting the creators with consumers in an authentic way.

In neutral terms, marketing is an unpaid endorsement, often by the creator herself, communicated directly to an audience who’s eager to learn more about the product or service. When done well, this is what Seth Godin describes as Permission Marketing: “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”

It is possible to engage in world-class marketing without spending a penny on advertising. True, both advertising and marketing are forms of promotion—both allow creators to present their goods and services to a group of people—and when executed poorly, even well-intended marketing can be overkill. Like advertisements, not all marketing messages are created equal.

Bastardized Marketing

Unfortunately, not every marketer is a paragon of integrity. Just like the advertising world, marketing messages can be laced with misinformation, exaggerations, and propaganda.

When creators stray from their audience’s preferences—when they stop providing value and abuse their permission with over-marketing—they fail; they fall victim to vapid self-promotions, the most egregious examples of which include spam emails, website pop-ups, clickbait headlines, begging for followers, searching for “Likes.”

As “The Minimalists,” we provide loads of high-quality free creations—essays, podcasts, and quotes—and we occasionally use our platforms to promote a book, event, or service. And if we’re being forthright, even though we attempt to market with integrity, even we struggle to walk the line between informative and overkill.

While Ryan & I refuse spam, pop-ups, and salacious titles, and we strive to add value, we, too, have fallen victim to the “look at me” Internet culture—occasionally putting our preferences above our audience’s best interests. Whenever we catch ourselves straying, we course correct, and we work diligently to improve.

Marketing as Part of the Creation

Regardless of how you feel about marketing, it is the final step in the creative process. Marketing helps creators get their creations in front of people, and when approached delicately, it benefits their audience. But when creators focus more on promoting the creation than the act of creating, the product suffers and so does the audience, and trust is eroded.

Until recently, the only way a creator could effectively market her product was to plaster her message across television, radio, print, and billboards. Using jargon like “GRPs,” “TRPs,” and “frequency,” advertisers could guarantee their product would reach a particular audience via a robust advertising plan. Even though this shotgun approach was imprecise, it was the only way to get to a mass audience.

Today, the opposite is true. As a creator, you are your own marketing department; you can find an enthusiastic audience without the need to advertise. And because our tools are better than ever, your efforts can be more precise than the traditional approach of yesteryear, so you needn’t cast a wide net to be effective. In fact, a thousand true fans are enough.

Spending time marketing your creation doesn’t need to be tedious, either; it can be creative, artistic, and even fun. That’s why the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing: it feels like a conversation or entertainment or something the audience anticipates. Above all, it feels considerate—not salesy or forced.

Unavoidable Advertisements

All of this poses an interesting and prickly dilemma for us as “The Minimalists.” Because we don’t want to add to the noise, we personally don’t allow ads on our website, podcast, or any other medium we directly control.

However, we appear regularly on television and radio shows, as well as in newspapers and magazines, in which advertisements appear. And we’re honestly conflicted about this.

Even companies we respect and have partnered with—our tour promoter, Live Nation; our primary bookselling platform, Amazon; and the company behind our travel-bag project, Pakt—engage in various forms of advertising.

We could, of course, choose not to appear anywhere that participates in advertising in any form, but because ads are virtually everywhere—Americans see upwards of 5,000 each day—that would greatly limit the amount of people our message reaches.

So we’ve instead decided to ride the line: no, we won’t incorporate ads into our platforms, and we’ll continue to speak out against the innate problems with advertising, but we won’t hide in a cave to shield ourselves from every billboard.

Now maybe you don’t think advertisements are a big deal, but I believe they are one of the worst things to happen to our culture: they are the largest contributing factor toward rampant consumerism in the developed world, and they’re the biggest reason our political climate is where it is today.

Advertisements are much like the islands of plastic haunting our oceans—a giant problem people rarely think about. That doesn’t mean ads (or plastic) shouldn’t exist; I simply don’t feel good about producing either unless they contribute to the greater good.

Values over Money

That said, I’m not allergic to money. And this commentary isn’t meant to be a judgment on other people.

Many of my close friends incorporate advertisements into their creations, and I don’t necessary begrudge them for that. It likely wouldn’t do much good anyway because, as Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The way I understand it, though, is simple: my values trump my ability to make money. And advertisements don’t align with my personal values.

Do I want to earn a living? Yes, of course I do. But I want to live a life that’s congruent with my values, and thus I don’t want money to be the primary driver of my creations. Just because I can advertise, that doesn’t mean I should.

True, money will always be an important part of the equation (everybody has to pay the bills, right?), but if we put creativity and our values first, then we can determine the role of money further down the line.

Conclusion

Suffice it to say, this disquisition wouldn’t see the light of day in any of today’s ad-driven organs. Nor would it find its way into a scholarly journal, because this isn’t a peer-reviewed article; it’s just one guy’s loosely connected thoughts about advertising.

It’s my hope that these musings start a conversation about the oft-ignored pernicious aspects of advertisements. And maybe—just maybe—our society can find a way to make advertisements that don’t suck.

Let’s not hold our breath, though. If we want to produce meaningful creations, we must rely on ourselves. Or, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari once wrote, “You cannot unite humanity by selling advertisements.” This is true even if those ads are for dick pills.

Subscribe to The Minimalists via email.

Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements? published first on

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y0nnanotta-blog · 8 years ago

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Day #11 of Summer 2k17 July 1 I've probably rewritten this so many times on my way from Lola's house to the bus station...which is approximately 10 minutes on foot. The euphoric happiness, if you can even use those two words right next to each other grammatically (it is suggested you use "blissful"), is gradually leaving me and I am very concerned– as a creative input of my own being. I'll try to write this as appropriate to what I am feeling as I can. I should have known that this would be a good day the moment I realised there is a possible storm coming. And I mean this literally; I like storms, especially when it's 40+°C outside (in the shadow). I should've also known the same thing when I met with my friend Annie's grandma, and the bus I entered was climatized, and the way to Lola's house perfected with the cold summer breeze (don't let me forget, her living room well climatized). Before I came to her house, before the climatization, the day was shitty and the only light was HOMESTUCK– which I continued rereading. At moments, I felt odd in Lola's presence, like it has been for the past months before and after the fight. This oddness represented best at one point (just got distracted by a lovely moon) when she told me that I should stop reading The Other Book I Feel Too Self-Conscious To Translate, because I wouldn't/ couldn't understand it (but the thing is, I love it so far, for a book that isn't fantasy). Other times where this constant checking of the mood, and personal thoughts on the situation were well presented were the times including her telling me what would essentially look BETTER on me; as an INFP I take everything as an attack on my personal morals and belief system. I can get past this all. It's actually been a long time since I felt at ease, at least a little bit, around her. I could, at times, make jokes and push them too far without getting personally offended by the complete annoyance she took after a few jokes dragged to infinity. I get it. It's a joke from her side too. I took a sneak-peek at my birthday present as allowed by her. I love when people think about me, as selfish as it sounds, I like when people see something and remember me. More than everything, I love to be recognised, be it small or huge...be it intentional, or out of the blue. I finally got hyped for my birthday. I was honored to feel like Freud whilst I was myself. She layed on her bad and talked about her troubles, and I advised her the best I could, by either listening or giving her advise best for her, the one she would like. Now, this is far from the best of today. It is yet to come; yet it is somehow completely gone. The day is good when I feel like writing, because I can never write if I feel like complete garbage that is ready to be thrown out the window (not even an appropriate throw out, the regular with garbage men). The day is good when I get ideas for my book. When I walked out of her appartmant building/ flat my stomach turned in a fun and most fullfilling way, as if I was going to see someone very important soon. It is very hard and too distinct and personal to explain with simple method as actually using well structured sentences; this feeling is far more than well structured and goes away quicker than you ability to process things. Imagine a scene: a cold breeze lost in a summer haze, not so typical even for the nights of the same summer. A flashes of polarized photographs dangling in your room, set in the coziest place in your mind. And your feelings aren't completely positive, you still hold grudges, but you plan on letting go...once. You'll meet someone important soon, something similar to magic, but an embodiment of importance. You are confident to take a different route home, even by just changing the way you walk, or the pace in which your minds goes over today's events. You make a whole story in your head, and you forget the details. I remember seeing a building, and being fascinated with how high it is, even if the height of the ones around the world, or even this city, is much bigger. It probably had some symbolic value at that exact moment that I pealed my eyes from the pavement, to the building and away from it. But, the thing about euphoric feelings, you forget the details, you forget the feeling, and you forget the meaning it held. I forgot why it made me happy. And it ended. I want to be completely honest; I am in a bus, watching shadows stretch on the floor when the yellow light that the street lights cast hits all the different kinds of people and poles. It stretches , and touches my feet...but I don't feel it...I don't feel the shadows. People are talking loudly, shadows can be mathematically explained, the conductor that reminds me of a vampire (someone that I admire from his outstanding, unusually mistical appearance) is asking if somebody needs a ticket....I feel sick. My former history teacher from fifth grade had previously told me that this is the mare consequence caused by the brain's inability to focus on the writing and the overwhelming sensation of the bus' movement; it can't focus on two overwhelming things. There is nothing to be honest about. Maybe it is just disappointment that I haven't had a chance to meet someone today; someone of great importance... Someone whome I have yet to get to know. I don't know what I am looking for. The hypnotizing sound of a bus existing, functioning through this space steals my attention. I have nothing to write about now. I have nothing to analyse unprofessionally. On my way from the bus to my home, which is still happening, I finally realised what many people meant by proclaiming that my house reminds them of a fairy tale. A moon shining above the rooftop, lighting up the tall pine trees. Disclaimer: Idfk why I am posting this...because it just got ruined...yes...it is past midnight...Why did I think that an 11th day would be perfect, when I fucking hate the way number 11 controls me. Honestly, what the single fuck. I am thinking of posting the bad part of July...but I am afraid that people I know will read it. Idk what time it is currently. I have pictures, I'll post them tmrrw.

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thenoticeblog · 8 years ago

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THIS ARTICLE IS KINDA SORTA ABOUT A NIKE ADVERTISEMENT

By Marty Lloyd Woldman

There was this French guy named Guy Debord who had some weird notions about how we interact with reality. He’s dead now and doesn’t think these things anymore (one would presume), but when he did think them, he wrote of this thing he called Spectacle. Spectacle is difficult to explain. It’s almost like a layer of reality governed by the ruling economy--a miasma of images born from commodity fetishization. Every experience we have is distorted by the spectacle, and what’s worse is that there is nothing more real beyond it. The spectacle is the new real and it swallows everything which attempts to stand outside it.

The smug acceptance of what exists can also merge with purely spectacular rebellion; this reflects the simple fact that dissatisfaction itself became a commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend production to the processing of such raw materials.

-Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Debord is saying that even rebellion against the spectacle will be commodified and sold. Look at the clothing store Hot Topic. Its entire business model is to take various artistic rebellions, turn their insignia into clothing and accessories. Then it’s sold to kids in malls looking for ways of expressing their rebellion against spectacular artifice. From Iggy Pop to Che Guevara, all the rebels are for sale.

That’s all well and good, but what’s that got to do with the price of rice?

I started thinking about the spectacle again when I saw this Nike ad. It’s part of their new Equality campaign. Apparently, the campaign was kicked off by Tiger Woods, who tweeted some inane bullshit because he was paid to.

The tweet read, “IF WE CAN BE EQUALS IN SPORT, WE CAN BE EQUALS EVERYWHERE.” All caps. Because champions don’t use lower case.

This is a really weird statement because we’re obviously not all equal in sports. My understanding is that the whole point of sports is to see who’s better at doing the sport. If everybody was equal and all sports were tied, nobody would watch.

But this puzzling statement was later elucidated in the context of Nike’s new commercial, which features, LeBron James, one of the Williams sisters, and presumably other sports people I don’t know. Still, none of it makes any sense, but at least now there’s context.

Apparently revolutionary rhetoric is the new hot trend in advertising. I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I was getting drunk by the railroad tracks and throwing rocks at trains. But people tell me the Super Bowl ads were co-opting all sorts of revolutionary fervor to sell their respective garbage. The spectacle is moving faster than usual to neutralize dissent.

This Nike commercial here was forced upon my consciousness without the Super Bowl context, and I think I started yelling at my computer. Nike was taking the tone of Black Lives Matter and other equality movements to sell their sweatshop shoes. The commercial implies that on basketball and tennis courts, everyone is equal, and if we could only extend this physical meritocracy to broader contexts, all our social ills could be mollified.

Even a cursory exploration of this thesis renders it false. In a plutocratic utopia, Lebron James is more equal than a 12-year-old kid with advanced cerebral palsy. Remember in elementary and middle school gym classes when the kids who were good at sports were treated exactly the same as the kids who were bad at sports? Yeah. Me neither.

And it seems like, since elementary school, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and the like were telling me that in order to be good at sports, I needed to buy their newest and best stuff. So inside the internal logic of Nike ads, wouldn’t a person who has more money to pay for the latest in Swoosh technology be better equipped to play the sport ball than poor folks?

I would also add, (with the caveat that I have not checked with a lawyer on this), that no governments that I know of on the city, state, county, or federal levels, recognize basketball/tennis court sovereignty. Cops, sheriffs and federal agents are all legally allowed to go on these courts as anywhere else. And once they get there, black people on that basketball/tennis court are still 2.8 times more likely to be shot, three times more likely to be arrested, and three times more likely to be searched as the white folks on that same court.

But even if we are to take this commercial’s ableist, classist, and myopically oversimplified view of equality as true, the conclusion, “If we can be equals here, we can be equals everywhere,” commits the logical fallacy of drawing a universal conclusion from a particular premise. Like South Park’s Underpants Gnomes, the middle step between acquiring the underpants of sport egalitarianism to gaining the profit of universal equality is conveniently left out. That middle part is hard. That middle part might mean paying its sweatshop laborers living wages. It might mean everybody has to be paid a living wage so that everybody can now afford the fair trade Nike shoes. It might mean having to dismantle capitalism and Nike altogether. Wouldn’t it be strange if Nike is actually calling for the demise of their own welfare in this commercial? Maybe that’s what coming next in their new Equality campaign. Something tells me that’s unlikely.

SURE, MARTY, BUT IT’S NOT LIKE THIS IS THE FIRST TIME A COMMERCIAL HAS SPOUTED UNQUALIFIED BULLSHIT. WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

I listened to a podcast about Guy Debord, where a bunch of smart British guys talked about the philosopher. They say Debord places the genesis of the spectacle at 1927, but I think it pre-dates back to August 1914, the beginning of the Great War.

During World War One, the leaders of all countries concerned couldn’t tell the truth of the matter. They couldn’t say that a bunch of nobles was having a spat due to a complex treaty system that nobody fully understood except for the guy who orchestrated them, and he was now dead. That was no basis for millions of people to die. So they had to appeal to the emotional side.

The Germans, whom they called The Huns, were portrayed as awful baby eaters and murdering rapists. This was by no means the first time propaganda was utilized in war, but like everything in WWI, it was the first time it was ramped up to such grand industrial scale.

America came in late to the war to help that extra push in the last year and a half of the four-year conflict. Part of the reason the US didn’t wade into the quagmire was because the general public didn’t want to have anything to do with it. There was a man named Edward Bernays who helped change their minds.

Bernays was highly effective as a wartime propagandist. And as peacetime came, he decided there must be a way to use propaganda after the war. But since the word “propaganda” had such a negative connotation, he coined the term “public relations”. And he hit his stride at just the right time.

After the war, America was staring down the barrel of one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism: how do you have infinite growth on a finite plane? The working class was buying really well-made products for strictly utilitarian purposes. At this rate, demand for products would soon diminish because everybody would have all the stuff they need. That can’t happen if your economic model demands constant growth.

The answer to this problem came twofold. One way was for manufacturers to intentionally make products which were of lower quality, so they would break sooner and thus the demand for more stuff increased. This was called “planned obsolescence” and it’s totally a real thing.

The other way to drive demand was to shift consumers from the mentality of need-based purchase to desire-based purchase. In 1927, a year the spectacle is said to begin, an American journalist wrote:

A change has come over our democracy. It is called Consumptionism. The American citizen's first importance to its country is no longer that of the citizen but that of the consumer.

This is the American duty since. It is not a novel concept to remark on conspicuous consumption. This is something stated repeatedly for nearly a century. Such now that we can’t even conceive of the idea of a shoe commercial stating simply, “Here are shoes. They’re comfortable and they’ll last a long time. Here’s where you can buy them.”

Instead, there must be an ever-evolving exploitation of the mind to coerce one into buying the shoes. Ed Bernays pioneered this coercion by using the works of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to sell to people’s deeper desires, rather than their needs.

The spectacle has grown a deep, abiding disdain for facts, and it’s selling our own rage back to us.

WHY NOT BUY THE WORLD A COKE?

Our cognition wants to reject advertisements. They act as a sort of mutating virus that must constantly change itself to get past our immunity to their claims. At the hippie decline and cultist rise of 1971 came one of the most successful commercials of all time. The hippies were tired. It had been a rough stretch of years they were fucking and getting high for revolution. Their genitals were raw and they were strung out beyond repair. So rather than go through the trouble of a real revolution, buy the world a coke, right? That’s powerful mojo. Cokes are cheap. If universal harmony can be achieved by buying one, that’s a good deal.

Now 45 years later, our generation is feeling pretty antsy with the revolutionary mojo, but we’re way more pissed off. We’re not into flowers so much as smashing Nazis. And we don’t want to buy the world a coke. We want the military budget to be cut so it can buy us a future. We want cops to stop killing folks with impunity. We want the education. We want a living wage. We want some motherfucking ice caps. Fuck a coke. And fuck your shoes, Nike. Your shit’s not that hot. We can get some chronicles from somewhere that doesn’t try and reappropriate legitimate anger to sell slave labor.

#articles #Marty Woldman #nike #worker's rights #marxism

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oovitus · 7 years ago

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Can We Have an Honest Conversation About Advertisements?

By Joshua Fields Millburn · Follow: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+

If the following screed were a peer-reviewed journal article, its abstract would be brief: advertisements suck.

Well, at least most of them do.

That’s not to say that all advertising is inherently evil, or even bad, because not all advertisements are created equal—they run the gamut from informative to downright destructive.