#psychobabble

Dedicated to the Divine Feminine CEO, who bravely charges $444 for a PDF on breathing. May your vibes stay high, your taxes stay low, and may your followers never discover that "Mercury in Retrograde" is just you having a bad Tuesday.

THE SOVEREIGN OF SELF-HELP: A MANIFESTO

O Mystic Queen of the Neon West, In Lululemon and linen dressed, She stands upon a pile of rocks And sells us "Keys" to "Unseen Locks." The sovereign of the Psychobabble, Ruling o’er the seeker-rabble, With words like "alignment" and "cosmic shift," She’s mastered the art of the spiritual gift.

She’s "Quantum-leaping" through her lunch, With a side of sage and a "Holy Punch," Explaining that logic is such a bore Compared to the "Ether" she likes to explore. "Your trauma is simply a frequency glitch! Your bank account’s dry? It’s a mindset, you witch!" She manifests Ferraris from thin, scented air, With a halo of product in her highlights and hair.

The chakras are spinning, the crystals are charged, Her ego is "humbled"—but mostly enlarged. She’s 90% "intent" and 10% mist, With a "Mastery Course" you simply can't miss. So bow to the Muse of the American Mall, Who has all the answers, but no point at all, The high-priestess grifter, the queen of the blur, Because reality simply isn’t "aligned" with her.

She’ll charge you three grand for a Desert Retreat, To sweat out your "demons" in five-thousand-degree heat. Between the Pink Himalayan lamps and the juice, She’s finally cut your last brain cell quite loose. One final vibration, one swipe of your card— The path to "Enlightenment" has never been so hard.l

I hate it. I hate that everyone is going to therapy. I hate that everyone is so focused on their own emotions and psyche. I hate that every character in every movie nowadays has to psychoanalyze themselves and each other, out loud.

Hate it.

Their choices are supposed to cause you to psychoanalyze them. That’s why it’s a story, and not a character-description you’re reading from a Pitch deck.

I hate that Zootopia 2 did this and everybody ate it up. I hate that the two to three clips I’ve seen of Stranger Things’ last season contrived scenes over and over to have characters just explain exactly what their own deepest fears and insecurities are to one another.

Remember when you were watching Finding Nemo, or Rocky, or Big, or On the Waterfront, or even Labyrinth, and you watched the story, and it ended, and that’s when you had to engage and think about what the characters were thinking and feeling? I mean even in kid’s movies, they don’t spell it out for you. You just get it because you don’t need to obsess over what the character’s inner world is. Their decisions made their inner world clear—and their inner world was only a topic in the story because it taught you something. Not because it’s just interesting to sort your personality into little slices.

We didn’t used to be so fascinated with how our own emotions and traumas and triggers worked. We used to just live life.

And obviously, if you notice a repeated pattern of doing something wrong or getting in a bad mood, you get called out by a friend or you notice the consequences of that and you try to correct it. In extreme cases that meant seeking help in therapy. But now everybody is a sidewalk therapist or patient. And everybody is having to neatly categorize their whole inner world into easily-sharpied labels and whip those out every five seconds.

It’s the self-obsession that I can’t stand. Look up. Look out. Figure out how you can make life easier for somebody else or make things outside of you better, or easier to understand.

I have no idea why the relationships you mentioned are so often represented as homosexual in certain fandoms. Since neither sociology nor psychology is in my wheelhouse, I can't begin to speculate, and that's all it would ever be. More importantly, however, is the dearth of any real evidence of such sexual orientation for any of these men. Since they can't exactly be interviewed, we're left with nothing substantive on which to base any suppositions, and I don't go down those roads.

Brian Martin made a valiant and rather strained effort to raise this issue in his book, Napoleonic Friendship, and failed, as far as I'm concerned, although I admit I limit my opinion to Lannes. I know nothing about Duroc or Junot and care less.