Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

Viktor Frankl

@underscored

resiliencemortalityexistentialism

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

Edward R. Murrow — Address to the Radio-Television News Directors Association

@underscored

journalismperceptioncognitive-bias

Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships.

Maria Popova

@underscored

polyvagal-theoryattachment-theorytrauma