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...rituals as symbolic techniques for making oneself at home in the world.

The constant typing and swiping on the smartphone is an almost liturgical gesture, and it has a substantive impact on our relation to the world. I swipe away the information that does not interest me. I zoom in on the content that I like. I have the world firmly in my grip. The world has to accord with my desires. In this way, the smartphone amplifies self-referentiality. Through all my swiping, I submit the world to my needs. The world appears to me under the digital illusion of total availability.

Laing's important concepts of "ontological security" and "ontological insecurity" in The Divided Self are about our "at-homeness" in the world. The ontologically secure person feels his or her life as "real, alive, whole[,] as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly this his identity and autonomy are never in question". This is not the case for the ontologically insecure person who in ordinary circumstances "may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.

My love, I’m so pleased you’re putting on the pounds. I love you utterly. I am kissing you, my head-spinning happiness, every little pound by itself …

Essential Feminist Texts Booklist

There is also much truth in the clichés that "behind every man there is a woman," and that "women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne." (Male) culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

Nearly everything I’ve learnt about love, I’ve learnt in my long term friendships with women.