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I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks.

Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter. Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city. I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred. All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said.

Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

Izzy recently decided to stop using X and her decision was based on the app's algorithm: "It feels like the algorithm wants you to see stuff you don't like so that you engage with it and it also shows your stuff to people who won't like it," she says, explaining that this was making her experience of using social media almost entirely negative.

"The follower is no longer a peer, they’re the audience, while the creator is more similar to a conventional, mainstream media broadcaster than to an independent creator."

Izzy agrees that this has been one of the biggest changes in her experience of using social media during the past decade: "I do think brands and influencers dominate my social media a lot more - it's constantly ads on my feed. I choose to follow my friends and often I don't see their stuff," she says.

It reflects the lack of space for genuine interaction and meaningful communities online right now, something that was once considered to be one of the main plus sides of social media.

"There aren't really niche internet jokes anymore because you have trend forecasters and people whose jobs it is to hop on these trends and make it about a brand," Izzy says adding: "The memes aren't as funny when you know they're going to be co-opted."

The lines between technology and culture are blurring. And so, it’s no longer enough to build great tech.

Whether in expressed via product design, brand, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed — whether it’s software or hardware or both. Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture.3 People now engage with technology as part of their lives, no matter their location, career, or status.

founders are realizing they have to do more than code, than be technical. Utility is always key, but founders also need to calibrate design, brand, experience, storytelling, community — and cultural relevance. The likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are admired not just for their technical innovations but for the way they turned their products, and themselves, into cultural icons.

The elevation of taste invites a melting pot of experiences and perspectives into the arena — challenging “legacy” Silicon Valley from inside and outside.

B2C sectors that once prioritized functionality and even B2B software now feel the pull of user experience, design, aesthetics, and storytelling.

Arc is taking on legacy web browsers with design and brand as core selling points. Tools like Linear, a project management tool for software teams, are just as known for their principled approach to company building and their heavily-copied landing page design as they are known for their product’s functionality.4 Companies like Arc and Linear build an entire aesthetic ecosystem that invites users and advocates to be part of their version of the world, and to generate massive digital and literal word-of-mouth. (Their stories are still unfinished but they stand out among this sector in Silicon Valley.)

Any attempt to give examples of taste will inevitably be controversial, since taste is hard to define and ever elusive. These examples are pointing at narratives around taste within a community.

So how do they compete? On how they look, feel, and how they make users feel.6 The subtleties of interaction (how intuitive, friendly, or seamless the interface feels) and the brand aesthetic (from playful websites to marketing messages) are now differentiators, where users favor tools aligned with their personal values. All of this should be intertwined in a product, yet it’s still a noteworthy distinction.

Investors can no longer just fund the best engineering teams and wait either. They’re looking for teams that can capture cultural relevance and reflect the values, aesthetics, and tastes of their increasingly diverse markets.

How do investors position themselves in this new landscape? They bet on taste-driven founders who can capture the cultural zeitgeist. They build their own personal and firm brands too. They redesign their websites, write manifestos, launch podcasts, and join forces with cultural juggernauts.

Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.

The dictionary says it’s the ability to discern what is of good quality or of a high aesthetic standard. Taste bridges personal choice (identity), societal standards (culture), and the pursuit of validation (attention). But who sets that standard? Taste is subjective at an individual level — everyone has their own personal interpretation of taste — but it is calibrated from within a given culture and community.

Taste manifests as a combination of history, design, user experience, and embedded values that creates emotional resonance — that defines how a product connects with people as individuals and aligns with their identity. None of the tactical things alone are taste; they’re mere artifacts or effects of expressing one’s taste. At a minimum, taste isn’t bland — it’s opinionated.

The most compelling startups will be those that marry great tech with great taste. Even the pursuit of unlocking technological breakthroughs must be done with taste and cultural resonance in mind, not just for the sake of the technology itself. Taste alone won’t win, but you won’t win without taste playing a major role.

Founders must now master cultural resonance alongside technical innovation.

In some sectors—like frontier AI, deep tech, cybersecurity, industrial automation—taste is still less relevant, and technical innovation remains the main focus. But the footprint of sectors where taste doesn’t play a big role is shrinking. The most successful companies now blend both. Even companies aiming to be mainstream monopolies need to start with a novel opinionated approach.

I think we should leave it at “taste” which captures the artistic and cultural expressions that traditional business language can’t fully convey, reflecting the deep-rooted and intuitive aspects essential for product dev

The modern makers’ machine does not want you to create heavy things. It runs on the internet—powered by social media, fueled by mass appeal, and addicted to speed. It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production. It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter. Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax.

even the most successful Substackers—those who’ve turned newsletters into brands and businesses—eventually want to stop stacking things. They want to make one really, really good thing. One truly heavy thing. A book. A manifesto. A movie. A media company. A momument.

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing. You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating. Post–heavy thing people have crossed the threshold. They’ve made something substantial—something that commands respect, inspires others, and becomes a foundation to build on. And it shows. They move with confidence and calm. (But this feeling doesn’t always last forever.)

No one wants to stay in light mode forever. Sooner or later, everyone gravitates toward heavy mode—toward making something with weight. Your life’s work will be heavy. Finding the balance of light and heavy is the game.4 Note: heavy doesn’t have to mean “big.” Heavy can be small, niche, hard to scale. What I’m talking about is more like density. It’s about what is defining, meaningful, durable.

Telling everyone they’re a creator has only fostered a new strain of imposter syndrome. Being called a creator doesn’t make you one or make you feel like one; creating something with weight does. When you’ve made something heavy—something that stands on its own—you don’t need validation. You just know, because you feel its weight in your hands.

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, 'Just do things.' The machine rewards movement, so we keep going, collecting badges. One day, we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

Why does it feel bad to stop posting after weeks of consistency? Because the force of your work instantly drops to zero. It was all motion, no mass—momentum without weight. 99% dopamine, near-zero serotonin, and no trace of oxytocin. This is the contemporary creator’s dilemma—the contemporary generation’s dilemma.

We spend our lives crafting weighted blankets for ourselves—something heavy enough to anchor our ambition and quiet our minds.

Online, by nature, weight is harder to find, harder to hold on to, and only getting harder in a world where it feels like anyone can make anything.

Biederman so succinctly put it, at some point between the first Trump administration and the second, “Article World” was defeated by “Post World”. As he sees it, “Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters. And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that Article World, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online.

during the first Trump administration, the president’s various henchmen would do something illegal or insane, a reporter would find out, cable news and newspapers would cover it nonstop, and usually that henchman would resign or, oftentimes, end up in jail

this is why the media is typically called the fourth branch of the government

This also explains why Texas is trying to pass the “Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education,” or “FURRIES” Act, based on a years-old anti-trans internet conspiracy theory. It’s why Trump’s team is targeting former President Joe Biden’s autopen-signed pardons after the idea surfaced in a viral X post shared by Libs Of TikTok. And it’s why US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is investigating random social media reports that military bases are still letting personnel list their preferred pronouns on different forms. Posts are all that matters now. And it’s likely no amount of articles can defeat them. Well, I guess we’ll find out.

When was the last time you truly felt consensus? Not in the sense that a trend was happening around you — although, was it? — but a new fact or bit of information that felt universally agreed upon?

A UN commission investigating crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” That’s an accurate description of what Trump wants to do in Gaza. What else would we call it? And where are they going to go? Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even the West Bank all reject this plan. One of Gaza’s defining characteristics is that over 80% of its inhabitants are descendants of people displaced following the 1948 war; that history is part of what makes Gazans so committed to staying in place — but Trump wants to run it back.

the route of peacemaking he’s pursuing is making one of two sides just go away. That’s not peacemaking; it’s domination. And it’s a means of diplomacy that tends to create the preconditions for future conflicts.

The same president who criticized nation-building in Afghanistan and wanted to avoid conflict in Ukraine now wants to “take over” Gazan reconstruction.

Trump tends to push interpretations of his statements towards the poles of either optimistically brushing him off or paranoia, depending on the person or the topic. For me, on this topic, it creates paranoia. What exactly does Trump mean by “we’re going to take it over?”

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Trump wants to remove Gazans from the strip temporarily, but Trump also literally said he wants to permanently relocate them and then rebuild Gaza “for the world’s people”

Trump consistently phrased his descriptions of Gaza to avoid apportioning any amount of responsibility to Israel. Gaza is a “demolition site,” but demolished by whom? “Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” meaning the location itself is hostile to Palestinians? Gazans have suffered “bad luck,” meaning that bad things have just happened to occur to them?

Since January, Israel has repeatedly violated the terms of the ceasefire; it refused to withdraw its soldiers, it continued military operations (150 Palestinians were reportedly killed in Gaza during the “ceasefire”), and it blocked electricity and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza — a violation of international humanitarian law.

this week, he became the first Israeli leader to ever fire the head of Shin Bet, an intelligence agency in Israel that recently put blame on the Israeli government (and Netanyahu) for failing to act on warnings about the October 7 attack. With Netanyahu’s governing position secured and critical voices banished, the bombing started again in earnest.

while Hamas may be responsible for the horror it unleashed on Gaza with its October 7 attacks, I find it hard to dispute that — within the scope of the last two months — the primary fault for this deal collapsing lies with Israel.

The talking point from Netanyahu and Trump is simple: Hamas didn’t release the remaining hostages. But it’s also incomplete. Hamas did the most important thing it had committed to in phase one: It released all 33 hostages, as the deal called for, and came to the table to negotiate phase two.   Israel violated the agreement’s terms first by not meeting on the ceasefire’s 16th day to discuss the plans for phase two. Phase two was always going to be the sticking point, because it required an actual end to the war and Israel leaving Gaza.

Trump then began insisting on an extension of phase one, which was not in the text of the agreement. Then Israel broke the commitment to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor. Then Israel broke its promise to continue aid while second stage talks were ongoing. Then Israel broke the promise to actually cease firing. Israel did all of this before Hamas balked on additional hostage releases.

Netanyahu has abandoned the hostages to extend his political life. From the early days of the war, this has been the story; it’s why he refused to end the war earlier, and it’s how he has survived this year and a half despite his political obituary being written on October 8. Once again, it is politically advantageous for him for the war to continue. Netanyahu needs approval for a budget before March 31, which he can’t get without support from the far-right wing of his party, which wants him to do exactly what he’s doing now.

Gazans have no ability to restrain or resist Hamas, a group that cares more about killing Israelis or pretending it may have a way to win this war than it does about protecting its own people. Israelis are at the whims of a leader who consistently ignores their pleas for a ceasefire, caring only about his own political survival.

we have the leaders of Hamas holding on to all they have, which are literal human bargaining chips, and the Israeli prime minister openly defying the desires of the hostages’ families. Meanwhile, the U.S. president openly muses about permanently vacating Palestinians from Gaza

To write about anything well, you have to do a lot of research. Even just trying to work out the chronology of a few years of one person’s life can take hours of interviews. If you’re writing about a scientific debate, you may have to trace it back 100 years through papers and books. To understand how someone sequenced 400,000 year old DNA, you may need to become excruciatingly well acquainted with the latest DNA sequencing technology. Once you’ve done all that, you will feel a sense of victory. You get it. You see how all the pieces fit together. And you can’t wait to make your readers also see that entire network of knowledge as clearly as you do right now. That’s a recipe for disaster.

When I was starting out, I’d try to convey everything I knew about a subject in a story, and I ended up spending days or weeks in painful contortions. There isn’t enough room in an article to present a full story. Even a book is not space enough. It’s like trying to build a ship in a bottle. You end up spending all your time squeezing down all the things you’ve learned into miniaturized story bits. And the result will be unreadable.

It took me a long time to learn that all that research is indeed necessary, but only to enable you to figure out the story you want to tell. That story will be a shadow of reality—a low-dimensional representation of it. But it will make sense in the format of a story. It’s hard to take this step, largely because you look at the heap of information you’ve gathered and absorbed, and you can’t bear to abandon any of it. But that’s not being a good writer. That’s being selfish. I wish someone had told me to just let go.

Find time to write at least a couple hours a day, every day. And I mean real writing, not dithering on the Internet telling yourself you’re doing “research.” Get a blank notebook and a pen if you have to. It’s in those long stretches of time with your own words, sentences, and paragraphs that you come face to face with all the great challenges of writing, and you find the solutions.

I just started watching “The Sopranos” for the first time. If you listen to the dialogue, they completely nailed it, because everything always comes back to the viewpoint of the emotionally immature character. It’s always all about them. Another one is the lack of empathy. The parent just doesn’t get it. They say, “Why are you so upset about this?” Or, “This is not a big deal.” They cannot enter into the reality of their child’s emotional truth

The broad definition of emotionally immature parents is parents who refuse to validate their children’s feelings and intuitions, who might be reactive and who are lacking in empathy or awareness. But can you give me examples of emotionally immature behaviors?

how do people distinguish between normal, flawed parental behavior and behavior that’s detrimental enough to rise to the label of “emotionally immature”? If you think of emotional maturity and immaturity as being on a continuum, all of us have a spot that we tend to hang out on. It doesn’t mean that we stay there. If you’re tired or you’re sick or you’re stressed, you are not going to be as emotionally mature as you could be when you’re rested and well and not stressed. However, if you’re in one of these compromised states, you may do some things that look immature, but it’s going to bother you. You’re going to think about what you did. The emotionally immature person, it’s like: “That was in the past. Why are you wallowing in it?” The more emotionally mature person would get why you’re still upset, and they’re going to do something that indicates that they have felt for the other person’s experience.

‘Isn’t labeling someone’s parent “emotionally immature” a kind of pathologizing? You could argue that. There’s no way of getting around that you’re boiling down this person that they love into a set of traits, and it calls them a name. It’s pejorative. But when you say “emotionally immature,” it’s not from the diagnostic manual. Although it is a way of categorizing them, it has a more explanatory tone. If you say, “Your father is narcissistic,” I get an immediate caricature of a narcissist. If I say, “Your father sounds like he may be emotionally immature,” there’s a little grace in that.

If somebody goes to their parent and says, “I think you were an emotionally immature parent,” how would a parent ever disprove that? If they would only say, “Tell me what you mean by that.” It would be the curiosity and the caring about what their child was expressing. Emotionally immature people shut the door because they know they don’t handle emotional things very well, and their best defense is to not get into it and to point the finger back at you.

When is estrangement the best option? That is something I start thinking about when they start having physical or emotional problems directly associated with their contact with their parents. Say, a woman who had very demanding, egocentric, emotionally immature parents, and they expected her to come at the drop of a hat, help them out, do something for them. They were as needy as her own children and also entitled, so she was exhausted because when they pulled her into these interactions there was no exchange of energy. It’s like, they need more, and she’s a bad person because she’s trying to set a boundary. It’s always frustrating, and you never feel like you’re doing enough

This woman I’m thinking about, she was developing stress-related physical symptoms, and it was like, OK, let’s talk about the effect on your health. So then you may bring up to the person, “Do you want to keep visiting them?” Lots of times, that’s the first time that thought’s ever crossed their mind.

There’s a moral obligation that is not only implied but explicitly stated: If I have a need, you should be there because you’re my kid. I’m trying to get them to feel the cost of it to them, which often they have completely tuned out because they don’t want to be a bad person.

I think the book’s ongoing popularity has been due to the fact that it said something about the cultural stereotype that we’ve had about parents for eons: that all parents love their children; all parents only want the best for their children; all parents put their children first; children can depend on their parents to be there for them when no one else is. I think people’s actual experience is that these stereotypes and these tropes don’t match up with their emotional experience.

Once we call something something, we think we know all about it. On the other hand, sometimes when you reduce and isolate out the operative factors, it gives you a way to not only recognize it but to control it and do something about it. So it’s a valid point, David, but it is a point that you could say about anything where you have an effective categorization: that it oversimplifies and leads to black-and-white conclusions that are not helpful. I’ve just tried to moderate that by helping people see more of the big picture about why these people became emotionally immature, what they’re trying to do with that kind of behavior and what you can do about it.

Do children owe parents anything? I look at that question differently. I look at it as, do any of us owe anybody else anything? What’s the answer? The answer is, yes, I think we do. If I’m walking down the street and somebody trips and falls, I’m going to stop and help them get up. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where that wasn’t there, but what has happened is that there has been such an assumption that because you’re my child, you owe me something. Or, I’m entitled to your attention, and I can treat you any way I want because we’re family. That’s where you get to a point where there should be a boundary

People could decide, Hey, my unhappiness has to do with being raised by emotionally immature parents, and I’ll work on that. Then six months down the line, they realize there’s still a bunch of things they’re unhappy about. So how do we understand what our expectations for happiness should be? If you ever watch little kids, their default mode is happiness, and that’s because they’re spontaneously going and doing the next interesting thing. They naturally are following their energies. I think that’s what happens with people too. If they feel released to say no to the things that kill their energy, if they don’t feel guilted into acting more compassionate or loving than they really feel, if we take these things off of them, it’s like a cork that bobs to the top of the water.

When we can get the idea that we’re not in this world to function as a sort of auxiliary coping mechanism for people who can’t do it for themselves, we begin to feel our energy coming back. That’s what happiness is. Happiness is like free energy.

what I’m talking about is that with the people that I work with in psychotherapy, the adult children of these emotionally immature parents, the problem was really an excess of compassion. What I’ve seen is that the compassion takes over the instinctual self-preservation, and the person feels too guilty, too ashamed and too self-doubting to even think about what’s healthy for them.

don’t think there’s much possibility of change unless you have self-reflection, and you have self-reflection because you have a sense of self. You developed a sense of self because your emotional needs have been met and you have been responded to as a human being early enough that that sense of self gets in there.

I think there are earth-shattering moments that permanently shift your view of something or your way of thinking. That kind of change can happen in a flash. It’s like a joint goes back into place. There’s a click and it’s like, ah, everything starts to reorganize around that new realization. What I have found, though, is that the biggest change that people seem to have gotten from therapy is that they have a realization of their own inner experience. They now know how things affect them, what they really feel, what they really think, and they use that to guide themselves through relationships and their lives. The insight is not an intellectual exercise. It is like a becoming — an awareness that this is who I am.

What if I’ve come up with something that is most palatable for me? Well then you’ve got a problem, and what will happen is that reality will spank you. [Laughs.]

When we’re talking about relationships between people, is there such a thing as “the truth”? Just to use my own example: I have what I think is a truthful understanding of my relationship with my biological father and how it affected me as an adult. I think he has his own interpretation that is true for him. So what does truth mean in your context? Well, there’s no eye in the sky that’s going to one day give us the answer, but I think we can sense the truth for ourselves. Even if it’s a bad thing, even if it’s a painful thought, you still have those experiences of, I’ve touched on the truth of something. As far as human beings go, the best we can get is that internal sensing of what our truth is. And of course the next question’s going to be, What if I am a conspiracy theorist or a paranoid personality?

if our expectation about childhood is one where happiness is the default, might that retrospectively lead us to feelings of disappointment as adults? I think what I was trying to get at is that if children’s basic needs are met, they want to go and experience things that make them even happier.

you can mess it up early if you don’t pay attention to what something needs when it’s young

My mom and I have a great relationship because I was able to articulate to her, and was willing to, how she hurt me. She was blown away at first and we fought for months about it. Now she has come to terms with yes, she did some pretty terrible things. No she didn’t hit me, but what her and your generation doesn’t understand is there are many ways a parent can hurt their child without putting a finger on them, creating difficulties for them in later years. The fact that my mom could own those things, sit with them, accept that she had hurt me and accept that she had been the villain at times, saved our relationship. We never talk about it anymore. We never fight. We talk everyday. She is now not only the mother I want and need at 36 but my friend and confidant. My father however refuses to accept anything I tell him about how he hurt me. We can’t talk about it because he believes I’m making it up and the culture has taught me my parents are the root of all my problems, that he is the victim, that I have to do what is best for me if that means cutting him off. I did, and don’t regret it

When therapy knocks up against economic reality, one sees how meager therapy’s promise is. The most psychologically healthy person today is limited by destructive environments. If only my outlook was emotionally healthy— maybe then I would be able to—- able to what? Find an affordable rental, send my child to a good school, take time off when I am sick, feel secure about the steps taken to combat global warming, eat healthy food….

Has anyone in the comments actually read this book? The misplaced assumptions are astonishing. It is not about holding a grudge against your parents or about sidestepping personal responsibility. It is about better understanding the emotional landscape we come from so that we can understand what, specifically, we can take responsibility for, and how, specifically, we can truly and wholly forgive. I am a parent, and my mother fits the definition of emotionally immature. Reading this book has helped me have MORE compassion for her and more compassion for myself. It has not made me feel like I’m walking on eggshells around my daughters. It has helped me develop a roadmap for how I can repair our relationship when those rifts inevitably happen

My husband noticed when I was in my 30s that seeing or talking to my dad was hard for me. He said, ‘you get wound-up for a couple of weeks before you see him and it takes you a month to come down.’ So seeing my father once took me 6 weeks to cope. So I didn’t see him much. This story is clearly longer and more complex than the comments section can allow. In the end, I helped him - with his doctor appointments, hospitalizations, moving to assisted living, running errands. I did it for the basic idea of his humanity, and I excused his behavior to help him. But I exposed myself to a lot of toxicity in the process.

if a parent was not emotionally, physically, or mentally abusive then have a conversation. Let the parent know whats happening and how you’re thinking about the relationship. I did understand that she has her own journey and gets to choose those she will share it with. But she didn’t tell me any of that until i asked directly. I want my adult child to be satisfied with her life and to have autonomy. She didn’t have to break my heart to get there. Folks who write books like these make it black and white but people, families, are so many different shades in between. The author should recognize and callout the difference between extreme and repairable.

My own mother has started being able to talk with me about what she wishes she'd done differently while raising me, and that's helping me go easier on her. It's easier to forgive someone who says, "I'm sorry, I didn't handle that well," or, "If I'd known then what I know now," I would've handled that differently."

I think it’s fair to say that one of the problems with contemporary life is how we label other people in ways that are reductive or don’t acknowledge multidimensionality. Is there any part of you that thinks it’s not a good thing for the people who have read your book to be thinking about a parent, Oh, you’re emotionally immature, and that is what defines you now? Absolutely, I think it’s a danger. That is the problem with the categorizing part of our mind.