Everything's Fine

by Cecilia Rabess

and someone was always shouting. Or sharing a pointless personal anecdote. Or invoking the founding fathers to prove a stupid point.

She considers telling her dad the truth: that she feels like a baby sometimes, needy and helpless. That she is the only one at a loss, the only one who doesn’t have a strong opinion about The Things That Matter:

“The desire to belong is one of the most irreducible human instincts. We’re cognitively wired to want to fit in.”

Though none of them are older than twenty-five, they are obsessed with retiring, the idea that they could have enough in the bank by the time they are thirty—forty at the outside—to do all the things they should be doing now but can’t because they are working: taking trips, eating richly, seeking fulfillment.

“But the problem is that success—money, power, opportunity—follows a power law distribution. So, there’s an asymmetry. Systematic distortions—institutional sexism, racism, discrimination—that exaggerate the skewness. There’s data to prove it. Researchers have done simulations that show the relationship between IQ and success is disproportionate and highly nonlinear. So, if you think we’re lowering the bar… your math is wrong.”

“the hallmark of an agile intellect is the ability to continuously accommodate and integrate new information. To regularly and systematically update one’s mental model of the world. It’s the scientific method.”

Whenever her dad caught her pretending—not hoping or dreaming, but inventing a convenient reality—he’d say, “Are you wishing or are you thinking?” and ninety percent of the time she’d be forced to admit that she was not, in fact, using her brain.

I do think it’s healthy for a soul to have some relationships where there’s no need to explain anything