Weekly Review Issue No. 19
On mortality awareness and meaning; the cost of dying; the brain-body link and 90s booze-hounds.
Hello and welcome back to another Review. I hope you’ll at least one thing you find interesting, useful or enjoyable. If something particularly resonated, I’d love to know about it.
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What’s alive for me
I’m conducting interview with people around the world at the moment, to learn more about meaning and mortality, I’m exploring how mortality awareness impacts the search for meaning and wellbeing in life, and I’m having some incredible conversations and learning a lot. I’d love to hear what you think.
So if you are interested in talking to me about it, I’d be very happy to pay you (£10) for 30 minutes of your time. You can sign up here, or if you know someone who’d be a good person to speak to, please share this post!
With that in mind, onto the links!
Research on the edges
🚶🏻♂️The man who walked around the world: Tom Turcich on his seven-year search for the meaning of life
I loved this story and Tom’s journey. It began with a similar experience I had as an adolescent, so it immediately grabbed me. I didn’t have the guts to take my life into my hands the way he did, but I did other things. However, it’s also great to hear, that despite all the global travels, where he considered home and what really mattered.
Did anywhere feel like his spiritual home? “Man, that’s a good question.” The more we talk about his journey, the more it brings out his inner hippy. “Probably Croatia, because that’s where my ancestors are from on my dad’s side, so I was able to see a lot of my family there, and visit my great-great-grandfather’s house and great-grandfather’s house. There’s a cemetery on the island of Krk, and a third of the burial plots are Turcich. I’d travelled a lot by then, but this was the first place I felt this deeper, inherent connection, knowing this is where I came from.”
😔 The photos that chronicle the cost of dying
This is a potent, poignant set of stories from back home. This project - both highlighting the economic burden of dying, but also value of creative approaches to documenting these stories - is difficult reading. But as my nurse friend Imo often says with a particularly raw things relating to death: “Read this. It’s important.”
When 53-year-old Andy arrived at the hospice, he was concerned about naming his estranged family in his admission forms in case they were left burdened with his funeral costs.
His diagnosis of throat cancer made it hard for him to communicate. He was very sick and "simply wanted to die".
Hospice staff were able to help Andy reunite with his family - his daughter and a granddaughter he never knew he had.
The photos that Andy contributed to the exhibition show bags of food his daughter brought him in the hospice.
Photographer Margaret Mitchell noticed a jar with sticky notes by his bedside. Andy explained that he was writing notes to leave to his granddaughter when he was gone.
👩🦱 Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest
I’m glad that people are starting to untangle the great cable-mess we call the ‘global mental health crisis’ because its just an unwieldy thing to talk about. This piece I thought was quite a lightning rod for a lot of discussion. At the time I shared with a lot of friends who work in higher education because it seems to come up again, and again, and again. That female students - often in art, design, architecture courses - are seriously struggling. My friends can’t seem to place the origins, so this piece felt like a powerful investigation into it. Again, there is no single truth to any of this, but multiple perspectives.
Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”
🧠 Evaluation of Brain-Body Health in Individuals With Common Neuropsychiatric Disorders
A fascinating paper that continues to build the links between our brain and body and the relationship required for good health. As one of author commented: “We show that individuals diagnosed with these mental disorders are not only characterized by deviations from normative reference ranges for brain phenotypes, but also present considerably poorer physical health across multiple body systems compared to their healthy peers.” What the Ancients knew to be true, we continue to robustly evidence is so.
In this study, marked deviations from normative reference ranges for brain and body health were evident across multiple organ systems in people with neuropsychiatric disorders in this study. The metabolic, hepatic, and immune systems showed the poorest health and function for the disorders studied. Despite the unequivocal neural basis of common neuropsychiatric disorders, the findings of this study suggest that poor body health and function may be important illness manifestations that require ongoing treatment in patients. Routinely monitoring body health and integrated physical and mental health care in psychiatric practice may provide cost-effective targets for reducing the adverse effect of physical comorbidity in people with mental illness.
🎧 Listen
While I’ve been re-decorating/stripping/wailing into the wind about the previous owners terrible mistakes in our new house, I’ve been necking a lot of 90s music to pass the time. Something about the distracted, deep memory of lyrics and childhood that pass the time whilst stripping years of wallpaper and paint off things.
A surprising favourite is Sheryl Crow’s 1993 classic “All I Wanna Do”. I love this song because its encapsulates something wonderful about that transition from the late-20th century into something will emerge in the millennium, or something that will be lost eventually. Something about the romance of beer-hounds and dive bars. Obviously this was a big thing in the late 2000s/early 2010s (dive bars) but Crow captures something so intoxicating (to me) about American culture. I realised listening to this, just how deep it dug into my adolescent subconscious about how Americans live and whats romantic about it. See also: Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vegas, all of Charles Bukowski’s work.
It turns out this song is almost an entire mapping of a poem by Wyn Cooper, called Fun. I’ll pull out one of my favourite bits, but please enjoy this call back to 1993, when everything was a bit rosier:
A happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close
To one another, like this is a motel,
But they clean up their act when we give them
A look. One quick beer and they're out,
Down the road and in the next state
For all I care, smiling like idiots.
We cover sports and politics and once,
When Billy burns his thumb and lets out a yelp,
The bartender looks up from his want-ads.
🤔 Last thought
https://twitter.com/cluesdotlife/status/1645844744441049088?s=20