SummerlyMars

Honestly, I'm on board with 'yeet'. It's versatile, playful, and is unambiguous as to what it means (transferring something quickly from one place to another).

This reminded me a bit too much of myself. Never actively religious, unlike the author, I developed (pure obsessional) obsessive compulsive disorder in my teens and fixated on the nominally Catholic identity I'd been introduced to as a child. I was never happy about what little religion I had, but I came to the conclusion that it was absolutely true, and I took everything I knew about it to its (seemingly) logical conclusion. The years of shame, guilt and loneliness that I experienced as a result aren't something that I'd wish upon anyone. It's worth pointing out that my beliefs were far from mainstream, but if you'd pressed me on it, I would have insisted that no, I was right and everybody else was doing it wrong.

Thankfully, I got on antidepressants a few years ago, and anafranil works like a charm for me (Fluoxetine, aka Prozac worked as well, but I've found the anafranil to be more effective with less side effects. That's just me though, and there's no reason to assume it would be true for others). I can look at my past obsessions as deluded and wonder why many of the things that bothered me actually did. That, combined with regular cannabis use[1], therapy, and making extra effort to be critical of my thoughts and feelings has given me my life back. Despite covid anxiety, I'm in one of the best mental states of my life now.

I'm not advocating for anything here. I haven't discovered some sort of cure-all treatment, just a series of interventions that I've associated with improvements in my mental health. Talk to your doctor before trying anything, don't use cannabis if you have a history of psychosis (and start low if you don't, anxiety, paranoia, and possibly even psychosis in the middle of a mental crisis is the last thing you want), etc.

If there's a moral to this ramble, it's this: even if it feels hopeless, even if you think you're damned, you can't know for sure. I've improved, maybe you can too.

[1] My hypothesis as to why it was useful to me for stopping episodes of rumination is because of the way it reduces short term memory while high. It's hard to obsess when it takes effort to remember your most recent thoughts.

This is what I've done recently with my approach to playing music. I'd always have described myself as very 'self-critical' of my musical skills, but this criticism was never more than "Ugh, this sucks. Try harder!"

What I've realized fairly recently (and wish someone had told me when I was much younger) is that my self-criticism wasn't constructive criticism. I was aware that I was unhappy with my performance, but I wasn't aware of why. Now when I'm not happy with my playing, I try to stop and think about exactly what it is that's bothering me about it. If it's multiple things, I'll just pick one to focus on and try to improve that. I'm still self-critical, but it's constructive criticism now, and that's something I can improve from.

The "not my fault" mentality you mentioned feels safe, because if someone believes there's nothing that could have done to change the outcome, then there's nothing that might make them feel bad[1]. Of course, sometimes things really aren't your fault, and believing there's something you could have done when there's in fact nothing is also a problem. There's a balance to be struck between the two perspectives.

[1] I'm not saying they ought to feel bad, just that I think it's common experience to feel bad when we don't achieve our goals, and worse when we think of something we could have done differently.

I agree, and I should've made that clear in my comment. Word usage doesn't guarantee group membership, but they can still lead to someone assuming you are a member of this group. I don't believe it makes a difference to what I'm saying if a stereotype is accurate or not, but rather whether your conversation partner thinks it's accurate. Should people do this? No, probably not. Do they? I believe so.

To abstract my argument further, when we converse, we speak words which convey information. Some of that information is intentional on our parts (we choose words to make our point), and some is unintentional (others interpret words counter to how we meant them). It's probably impossible to avoid transmitting unintentional information completely, but attempting to minimize it seems like a useful goal, especially when we think our information is important enough to spread to others.

> I am a big fan of using contentious terms but then in close proximity expressing views slightly incongruent or even outright contradictory to those held by a stereotypical member of one of the term-using group, to get readers to question the usefulness or applicability of their stereotypes. I have no idea if I achieve my goal or if I just confuse people.

I don't know either, but I think this approach has value.

Suppose we want to optimize user productivity. For any given UX, some users will feel they're more productive with it, and some less. Finding a UX that maximizes the number of users who feel productive is going to help attract users to the product, and money can buy the design expertise needed to find that UX.

It might be the case that users only feel more productive with a given UX and aren't actually more productive with it. Even then, if a majority of potential users think that the UX is making it easier to accomplish their goals, a project will have an easier time attracting users.

The point I was attempting to make was that even if you replace the variables with anything that results in an intelligible sentence, it's still going to be difficult to read. Regardless of whether you understand the terminology. The structure of the sentence itself is contributing to the difficulty in interpretation. Could time have been saved by writing it in this style? Sure, but it takes the readers' attention away from the actual argument and forces them to spend extra effort on interpreting the sentence structure.

I see this as a problem with academic (and even popular) writing in general. It's far from being exclusive to either Judith Butler or philosophy.

As someone on the outside of philosophy as a discipline, this is the only sort of description of postmodernism I see. Regardless of its prevalence or correctness, what do you think leads people to interpret postmodernism in this way?