Anemoia, a coinage from the writer John Koenig – author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – refers to a feeling of nostalgia for a time one didn’t live through. I previously wrote about why this feeling arises, namely, by connecting it to Daniel Laidler’s concept of hagioptasia: the tendency to project ‘specialness’ onto certain aspects…
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Emo music is full of references to car crashes. When you’ve listened to enough of this type of music or watched enough music videos for emo songs, it can become apparent how recurrent this theme is in the genre, similar to the theme of ‘getting out of this small town’, ambulances, or hospitals. Examples of…
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Writing is sometimes described as both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because of the enjoyment and all the benefits that come with a writing practice, and a curse because, as many writers know, it can feel like an itch that always needs to be scratched. When not writing, or there’s a writing project…
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Jungian psychology is highly popular in New Age culture, and this is for several reasons, some perhaps quite obvious, and others less so. I would like to detail these connections between New Age spirituality and Jungian psychology mainly as an effort to show how particular models of reality and mind lead to an embrace of…
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A client recently gave me some feedback on an article I wrote, and they picked up on my use of en dashes (in this piece, mostly to offset parenthetical information) and thought it best to avoid them, as these dashes are now associated with AI-generated content. It’s true – these dashes (the one I just…
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