Mindfulness is no substitute for a unionised workplace. Nap rooms don’t prevent us from working overtime – rather, they help us to do so. Free therapy may make a round of layoffs less psychologically agonising, but it does not prevent them from happening. Individualised workplace mental health initiatives can help us weather the ravages of capitalism with a smile, but they cannot address the root causes of work-related anguish. They do not even begin to touch on the underlying principle that each person must work for a wage to survive; a ‘fact of life’ that normalises mass death and alienates us from its horror. Workplace mental health interventions also have no internal politics – therapy may help the worker manage their emotions around being fired, or it can help calm the conscience of the boss who is doing the firing. Given this ability to boost productivity and smooth over the emotions associated with exploitative practices, it is no wonder that mindfulness, for example, was imported to the US workplace by Apple CEO Steve Jobs; and continues to be favoured by union-busting CEOs, for both themselves and their employees.

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

“Our culture is nothing if not data obsessed, but taking a spreadsheet approach to the topic is profoundly misguided. Any set of checkboxes you come up with for a potential match including red flags can easily be manipulated. Many warning sings are only clear in hindsight. Honest people will take tests sincerely and the stricter those tests are the more likely they are to fail. The genuinely bad people will just lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want and this kind of screening unintentionally gives them the edge. Creating an unreasonably high standard means only people willing to cross any ethical line to meet it will make the grade.”

“Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it.”

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with beings who liberate you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too debilitating for us to suffer new bondages, new captivities from those whom we love. This is how I am your friend: I love your happiness, your freedom, your adventure, in a word - and I would like to be, for you, a companion you can be sure of, always.”

Unlike the usual analytic patient, we must remember that for the person carrying around a dissociated trauma experience, integration or "wholeness" is initially experienced as the worst thing imaginable. These patients do not experience an increase of power or enhanced functioning when the repressed affect or traumatogenic experience first emerges into consciousness. They go numb, or split, or act out, somatize, or abuse substances. Their very survival as cohesive "selves" has depended upon primitive dissociative operations which resist integration of the trauma and its associated affects — even to the point of dividing up the ego's "selves" into part-personalities. Analytic work with them, therefore, must involve "softer" techniques than the usual interpretations and reconstructions we consider mutative in analysis.

"I don't have to tell you this, but: it is good to protest and riot against 'family separations' especially when young people and their companions are being ripped apart and warehoused in cages in their thousands rather than helped to make the crossing over arbitrary lines on the earth. Forced family reunification is not always a good thing, and can even be lethal to some people, but the separational techniques of the border of any nation-state are at the very heart of the family regime. Border-torture tramples and even targets kin-relationships in part to uphold the fiction that the nation-state respects the integrity of families once they have been admitted. Border guards do not somehow abolish the family, they are its prime enforcers. Fighting the family regime might thus look like several different things: prising the state's boot off the neck of a 'legal' family of 'aliens,' for instance, and at the same time offering solidarity to a queer kid in that same family, should she need it, against her parents."