September TL;DR
Pieces too long? Read this monthly summary!

Hi friend!
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.
SEPTEMBER 2024
On September 4th, 2024 I wrote about Dr. Ruth's Rules to Combat Loneliness
Many prominent figures throughout history grappled with a deep sense of isolation and a yearning for connection.
Despite their struggles, they often left behind profound works that continue to offer insight and advice on dealing with life’s most difficult challenges.
The late Dr. Ruth Westheimer, beloved sex therapist, who built her career talking openly about sexual dysfunction.
Toward the end of her life, not wanting to be known as only a sex therapist, she turned her attention elsewhere, toward a different significant and equally stigmatized societal concern, isolation and loneliness.
She lobbied Governor Hochul for a job that didn’t exist—Ambassador of Loneliness.
She was delighted when Hochul gave her the position.
An extrovert by nature, Dr. Ruth loved going out, and rarely kept food in the house because she seldom ate there, much less cooked.
Then, Covid came, and it hit her hard.
During the time she was confined to her house, she experienced a profound sense of loneliness and alienation. The feelings were familiar, and she traced their contours back to childhood, remembering that she’d written about this same unpleasant internal state in her journals, growing up.
She went in search of these old writings, and she found them.
Discover what she learned from these journals, and her tips for feeling more connected.
September 11th, 2024 Piece Was About The Astonishing Results of a 1963 NASA Study That Reveal How Education Kills Creativity.
We live in a world that claims to value innovation and original thinking, yet as we move grade through grade, we are indoctrinated out of making unexpected connections between disparate subjects to arrive at creative solutions.
When we need to be moving, they force us to sit still. When we need our sleep, they wake us early. We are expected to pay attention for long periods of time to learn in only one style, measured against arbitrary standards using one type of test, in a staid environment, for which we are graded.
We are forced inside from outside the box.
The baffling thing about the system of educating children and teens is its whole-cloth misapprehension of what children and teens need. This is why our system excels at diminishing our creative capacity. By the time we’re fully grown, our school system has eradicated our innate inventiveness by nearly 100%. This is not hyperbole, nor conjecture. This, dear readers, is fact.
In 1968, NASA wanted to assign their most innovative engineers and scientists to tackle the most challenging problems. But they lacked the tools to precisely identify the most creative and imaginative on their team. They commissioned Dr. George Land, author and general systems scientist who discovered Transformation Theory, and business leader Dr. Beth Jarman to create an instrument to pinpoint creativity.
While the method was successful, it didn’t answer a fundamental question: Where does creativity come from?
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To answer this question, Land replicated the study, but this time used 1600 children aged 4-5. The test presented children with problems and asked the kids to come up with new or different ideas to solve them.
What they discovered stunned them—98% of those 1600 children scored at the “creative genius” level for imaginative thinking.
That’s right.
You heard me.
They be Brills.
But something even more shocking and unexpected occurred when they decided to use the same test on adults…
September 18th, 2024 Was a Piece About When it Truly WAS All in Your Head.
I believe a central question lurks in the depths of every person, and our lives unfold in pursuit of the answer. For some, the question surfaces fully articulated; for others it remains mumbled, tangled in the soft algae of their subconscious.
In the 18th Century, a young German boy named Franz Gall, seemed born in possession of a question that began in childhood and ended only in death: Why are people different from one another?
He began from the outside in, studying the externals: his siblings features, the people in his town, his parents.
Soon, peculiarities began to stand out. His classmates, for instance—some had large foreheads, others had small ones. He began looking for commonalities. The boys with more pronounced features seemed preternaturally good at memorization, while those with strangely shaped skulls struck Gall as linguistically gifted.
Gall believed there was a connection there, between the shape of a skull and the capacity of the mind it held.
This one deeply held belief (couched in some real science) turned into a pseudoscience practiced by the elite, until it went mainstream, and took the world by its eugenics-laced storm.
Until I got to college, I was a terrible student.
My undiagnosed panic disorder made processing information impossible. Even with extra time, my anxiety overrode everything.
As a result, I did poorly and got bad grades, which caused concern and led to years of IQ testing, tutoring, and whispers about learning disorders. This, in turn, led me to believe I was incapable of learning—that I was, in fact, stupid.
It wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when I fell in love with the smartest guy in school (he received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 10th grade to research and write a paper on the Civil Rights Movement!), that someone finally challenged my deeply held conviction that I was an idiot.
It was from him I realized I was capable of learning, and it was from learning I gained confidence. I’ve spent my entire adult life dedicated to the pursuit of understanding what I don’t know.
When I got to college and received my first syllabus for a film theory class, I had a religious awakening. The syllabus was a magical portal into worlds I hadn’t known existed, and I could not get enough of them.
I still can’t.
Today, as a bonus, I’m sharing a syllabus of the wildly prolific (in both marriage and writing—four wives!) postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme compiled for his students at the University of Houston.
Lovers of syllabi and fiction—rejoice!
On September 25th, 2024, I Wrote About How The Art Of Catastrophizing Isn’t Hard to Master.
In 2004, I had a six-week fellowship at MacDowell, an artists’ residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. A few weeks before heading there, I moved in with someone I shouldn’t have.
Now, after a blissful few days visiting me, he was driving back to Brooklyn from Peterborough.
The drive back was long—around six hours—but when I hadn’t heard from him after a few hours on the road, and my calls went straight to voicemail, I knew he was dead.
Of course, he was dead.
What other possible explanation was there?
That he was driving?
That he was getting gas?
That he was getting food, in a bathroom, at an outlet store because...WHO DOESN’T LOVE AN OUTLET STORE?!
You call those options?
He was dead.
I was inside the belief, already filled with grief and the sad ever-after that follows when a true love dies too young. Would I have it in me to speak at the funeral? Probably not. I’d also have to move. How would I afford a new place on my own? I would not survive this…
The frothy state I’d whipped myself into is called, in cognitive parlance, Catastrophizing or awfulizing (a term that didn’t catch on, but I love it so much).
Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion—an irrational or harmful thought pattern causing a misperception of reality—that leads a person to jump to the worst possible conclusion based on limited, often subjective, information. It’s a common symptom of anxiety disorders and clinical depression, typecast as the trusty antagonist that comes in to make things worse when things could go either way.
Later, after he called back to reassure me that he was not dead, I reflected on the moment. I recognized my impulse to skip the rational middle and jump straight into the disaster of the irrational. I’d been doing it my entire life.
The renowned psychologist Albert Ellis (1913–2007) believed irrational thinking patterns were at the root of most psychological problems—he coined the term catastrophizing.
On September 29th, 2024, I Offered Paying Subscribers A Sunday Treat.
It’s a rainy Sunday here on the east coast.
There’s no better weather than this to reach back in time, to the 50s and 60s, to highlight the one man everyone turned to for laughter and spirit lifting.
This clever, funny, piano-playing satirist-turned-mathematician recently put all his music into the public domain, so everyone can use it.
They don’t make men like this anymore.
Enjoy the songs I grew up with (thanks, dad!) and listen to when I need a jolt of intellectually stimulating wordplay.
Do you know who I’m talking about?
Find out after the jump…
And if you’re actively looking for a therapist 👇
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Amanda
VITAL INFO:
Nope, I am not a licensed therapist or medical professional. I am simply a person who struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues for over two decades and spent 23 years in therapy learning how to live. Now, I'm sharing the greatest hits of what I learned to spare others from needless suffering.
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