Tag: The Art of Manliness (page 1 of 2)

The patchwork progress of maturity

This short post outlines in a pithy way how being an adult is so difficult: we mature in different aspects of our lives at different rates. In turn, this makes relationships difficult — especially as a parent.

AI art. Midjourny prompt: "calm, male parent consoling a crying child --aspect 16:9 --v 5 --no text words letters signatures"

We tend to think of immaturity and maturity as dichotomous, uniform states. Once you leave behind the former and enter the latter, you’re mature through and through. 

Yet, in reality, maturation follows a patchwork pattern of progress.

[…]

Maybe you react to receiving criticism with stoic equilibrium, but respond to having your birthday forgotten with perturbed petulance. 

Maybe you can give a presentation at work with perfect confidence, but can’t approach an attractive woman without sweat-inducing fear. 

[…]

As the midcentury writers Harry and Bonaro Overstreet put it, “All through life we have to take turns, as it were, being ‘parents’ to one another — because we all take turns at being children.” 

Source: Sunday Firesides: Parent the Immature in Others | The Art of Manliness

Image: Midjourney (prompt in alt text)

Everything intercepts us from ourselves

🤝 Medieval English people used to pay their rent in eels

🤺 The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents

📜 Archaeologists unearth ‘huge number’ of sealed Egyptian sarcophagi

🌉 3D model of how the Charles bridge in Prague was constructed

💪 Every Man Should Be Able to Save His Own Life: 5 Fitness Benchmarks a Man Must Master


Quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Image from top-linked post.

Inside your pain are the things you care about most deeply

I listened to this episode of The Art of Manliness podcast a while back on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and found it excellent. I’ve discussed ACT with my CBT therapist who says it can also be a useful approach.

My guest today says we need to free ourselves from these instincts and our default mental programming and learn to just sit with our thoughts, and even turn towards those which hurt the most. His name is Steven Hayes and he’s a professor of psychology, the founder of ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and the author of over 40 books, including his latest ‘A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters‘. Steven and I spend the first part of our conversation in a very interesting discussion as to why traditional interventions for depression and anxiety — drugs and talk therapy — aren’t very effective in helping people get their minds right, and how ACT takes a different approach to achieving mental health. We then discuss the six skills of psychological flexibility that undergird ACT and how these skills can be used not only by those dealing with depression and anxiety but by anyone who wants to get out of their own way and show up and move forward in every area of their lives.

Something that Hayes says is that “if people don’t know what their values are, they take their goals, the concrete things they can achieve, to be their values”. This, he says, is why rich people can still be unfulfilled.

Well worth a listen.