TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from August—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

It’s been a summer of watching and reading. Here are some of things I can’t stop thinking about.

Clips abound, but have you ever watched the entire debate? It’s worth dropping everything non-essential.

James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley

Remake by Ross McElwee

Ross McElwee, best known for the documentary Sherman’s March, hasn’t come out with a movie for 15 years. His latest film, Remake, reveals the reason, and it’s shattering. This film absolutely ruined me, but I’m deeply grateful that I got to “meet” Adrian McElwee, Ross’s late son, who died too young. I was profoundly moved by him, and this story.

Eno by Gary Hustwit

I’ve shared Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies before, and lately I’ve been digging more deeply into his work. Gary Hustwit, an independent filmmaker, worked alongside technologist Brendan Dawes to arrive at a generative film about Eno. Every time you watch it, you get a slightly different film. Rather than simply telling you about Eno's artistic philosophy, the film embodies it: you watch a documentary about Brian Eno while simultaneously experiencing the generative principles that define his work.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the prompt the writer Linda Rosenkrantz gave to photographer Peter Hujar: Keep track of everything you do in a day. From the moment you open your eyes until the moment you close them at night.

Rosenkrantz then recorded Hujar recalling his day, and she kept the transcript. When she came upon it 50 years later, she donated it to the Morgan Library where they maintain Peter Hujar’s archives. The filmmaker Ira Sachs stumbled upon it and turned it into a mesmerizing film called Peter Hujar’s Day.

I took the prompt on myself and also challenged you, my readers, to participate. So many of you did—what fun!

Today’s Friday Drop is another prompt. Well, 3 prompts.

Find them after the jump.

In 2013, I interviewed the relationship coach Matthew Hussey. We talked for three hours and genuinely liked each other. So much so, we're still in touch today.

He invited me to his 5-day retreat in St. Petersburg, Florida, focused less on relationships and more on upending our bad habits, challenging our false beliefs, and removing the obstacles blocking us from living the life we want. He offered me a huge discount. I can't remember how much it cost, but I think it was $2,000. I hemmed and hawed. I read the literature. From all the testimonials to the schedule, it did, indeed look rather life changing.

But. But. But. Five days just to focus on myself? ALL DAY LONG?

If I had the opportunity to study abnormal psychology, advanced editing techniques, or even how run a small business, I don't think I would have waffled as much. It would have felt more necessary. I need to understand advanced editing techniques—I'm a writer! Abnormal Psychology is part of what I write about. Being self-employed means running a small business.

But this wasn't about external world-building, it was about internal excavation and rebuilding and that felt less important.

Besides, I didn't have the money.

No problem, he said, I could pay in installments.

I didn't have anyone to watch Busy!

No worries, my friend said, she'd watch Busy.

I didn't have kids, I didn't have a traditional day job, I didn't have any responsibilities tying me to Brooklyn for those five days, so why was I still hemming and hawing?

Here I was, being offered five days in Florida to learn about who I was, what I wanted, and how to get it; I could pay in installments; a friend was happily watching my dog, so what was my problem? Why was I so resistant to invest in myself?

And then I realized why.

Because I grew up with a panic disorder that went undiagnosed until I was 25, I am preoccupied with naming the unnameable. The sense that something is wrong without knowing what’s wrong is a specific type of alienation. In addition to not knowing I had panic disorder, I didn’t know the name for my dislocation, the experience of living in the gap between knowing and naming. My formative years were spent in this gap, and it lay the foundation for what would shape my interests and career.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I can across a term coined by British Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion that I felt best gave the experience its unique finger print.

NAMELESS DREAD

That term is Nameless dread, and it defines an intense, pre-verbal, and unthinkable state of existential panic that goes un-contained or un-managed by a caregiver. Bion built the concept around infancy: a child's fear needs a caregiver to take it in, make sense of it, and hand it back in a form the child can understand and bear. When that caretaker is unresponsive, erratic or unavailable, the fear stays formless. Left alone with this oppressive shapelessness, a child will often make sense of it anyway, filling the gap with whatever explanation is closest at hand. Typically, it sounds like, “Something is very wrong with me.”

This experience of nameless dread often follows the infant into adulthood.

He first described this in his book Learning From Experience. (The author photo on his book cover fills me with nameless dread.)

THROWNNESS

In Being and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger wanted vocabulary for the parts of existing that precede thought, choice, or self-description. He was trying to give name to a single, irreducible fact: humans do not choose to exist. What, he wondered, might he call the condition of finding yourself already in a situation you never chose: your body, your era, your family, your language? How might we describe not consenting to being born, and “thrown” into a world and a set of circumstances that you never agreed with? He arrived at Thrownness, or Geworfenheit, in German.

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Nobody likes me. I’m a failure. I’m too ugly to love.

Our thoughts are so convincing that we often mistake them for truth.

We confuse feelings for facts, invent fictions on behalf of others, and cling to our own distorted interpretations of events. And when we act on our misguided thoughts, we typically wind up on the wrong side of truth, because the mind lies.

So many of us spend our lives living down to our self-distortions instead of up to our desires.

It’s bonkers! Yet, utterly common.

And until 50 years ago, psychology had no systematic way to help people stop it.

In the 1960s, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck was watching his depressed patients play a simple card-matching game. According to everything he'd learned in medical school, success should have made them feel worse. Freudian theory insisted that depressed people had an unconscious "need to suffer," so achievement would threaten their psychological equilibrium and deepen their misery.

Instead, with every correct match, Beck's patients grew more confident, and their moods improved.

This shouldn't have happened. It violated the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatry for decades. But Beck couldn't ignore what he was seeing: his patients' moods weren't being controlled by mysterious unconscious drives. They were being hijacked by the thoughts they were having right now, in real time.

Beck had stumbled onto something that would revolutionize how we understand human misery: Depression isn't a disease. It's a con game your mind is running on you.

Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist who died on November 1, 2021, at the age of 100, is considered one of the five most influential psychotherapists since Freud (and not just in my household.)

Dr. Beck changed the face of American psychiatry and is the reason that so many of us who struggle with mental anguish (I am NOT a fan of the term “mental illness” and will write about that another time) are not simply standing, but thriving in ways we never believed we could.

His contribution to psychology and mental health will outlast him by centuries.

Known as the “Father of Cognitive Therapy,” Aaron Temkin Beck (called Tim by his close friends and family, and ATB by his colleagues) was born in Rhode Island to Jewish Russian immigrants in 1921, the youngest of five children and arriving two years after his parents lost two children amid the influenza pandemic.

His mother, who suffered from mood swings, was still grieving her lost babies and remained profoundly depressed when Aaron was born. Beck’s mother was loving but fiercely and understandably overprotective after losing two children.

As he became more consciously aware of his place in his family, he became convinced that he was a replacement for his sister, who died in 1920, the year before he was born; he believed his mother was disappointed that he’d not been born a girl.

Despite suffering from chronic asthma, Beck was a typically active young child, a Boy Scout who spent most of his time outside in the woods or with friends playing sports.

His parents encouraged his interest in science and his love of nature. He credited these early explorations with bird watching, learning to identify plants and trees, and becoming a naturalist and a camp counselor as the origin of his curiosity about “what makes people tick; particularly what makes them happy or sad, and confident or insecure.”

Yet, like many children throughout the history of time, especially the outdoorsy types, he broke his arm when he was around 7—an injury that greatly impacted his quality of life. Instead of racing around with his friends and playing sports, he was relegated to more sedentary indoor activities, like reading (my favorite athletic sport).

To add injury to injury, because of his physical inactivity and perhaps the less sophisticated medical care of the time, Beck developed a near-fatal blood infection at the site of his broken bone and was immediately hospitalized.

But this early experience in the hospital proved to be a traumatic and formative one: Beck would learn much later that his blood infection had a 95% mortality rate, and that he’d nearly lost his arm to amputation.

He missed so much school that he was asked to repeat first grade while the rest of his friends advanced.

And, if things weren’t bleak enough, during one of his stays, the surgeon began his incision before young Beck was fully anesthetized, triggering the first cascade of several phobias—hospitals, surgery, blood injuries, and the smell of ether.

Because of the severity of his injury, he understood that he’d not be able to avoid hospitals, and all the attendant sights, sounds, and smells. So this young stoic decided on a rational approach—he’d treat it himself. "I learned not to be concerned about the faint feeling, but just to keep active,” Beck was quoted in a New York Times profile. Through exposure and willpower, he slowly faced his fear of hospitals.

He would soon discover how to use his resilience as fuel to conquer his demons.

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Until next week, I will remain,