The articulation of collapse awareness as a pattern-recognition event, and the naming of epistemic independence as a liability in a consensus-driven culture, feels accurate and clarifying. I’m grateful for that clarity.
I want to add a layer, not as a rebuttal, but as a widening. The text implicitly contrasts two cognitive orientations: one less governed by social cues and consensus, the other more attuned to them. That distinction holds in many cases. But for some of us, especially those shaped early by volatility, violence, or stacked disposability, the relationship between pattern-recognition and social attunement is not either/or. It is layered.
I learned to read rooms exquisitely because my safety depended on anticipating shifts before they surfaced. Social attunement was not cohesion-seeking; it was threat detection, and appeasement was not conformity; it was a social/emotional room-stabilisation strategy. In those conditions, epistemic independence needs to be masked. What develops instead is a double vision: the capacity to register structural mismatches clearly, while simultaneously modulating how, when, and whether that clarity can be expressed. So the instruction becomes implicit but relentless: soften the insight, slow it down, make it palatable, don’t break the spell too fast.
This matters because without this layer, we risk mistaking survival-trained responsiveness for cognitive conformity. High sensitivity to social cues does not necessarily signal investment in consensus. It can signal long apprenticeship in managing instability that others were buffered from. Many women, and many people racialised into disposability, are trained early in this dual task: track reality accurately and regulate the field so reality does not provoke retaliation. Overdeveloped relational vigilance layered on top of intense pattern sensitivity, results in hyperfocus, hypervigilance, hypermetabolization (of others' emotional states), hypertranslation (always in service of others) and (often) constant exhaustion.
I appreciate that the essay does not romanticise early perception. I want to underscore that collapse awareness is not only shaped by cognitive style, but by proximity to harm. Some people learn early because they are wired differently, others learn early not only because they are wired differently, but because the consequences of not learning are immediate. The consensus trance fractures differently depending on where one is standing when it breaks.
It took me a lifetime, and a great deal of strategic buffering, to be able to speak publicly about collapse with some degree of protection. Even then, it required learning how to hide bitter pills in excessive amounts of peanut butter. As I go public with work on AI, the pattern reasserts itself: the same social pressures, the same risks. Pattern recognition and epistemic independence are consistently punished.
If our conversations about existential threats are to mature, whether ecological or technological, we will need to hold these layered patterns at once: wide perception without heroics, difference without hierarchy, and engagement stripped of comfort requirements.
Thank you for opening this conversation. This feels like a beginning, not a closure.
Thank you Vanessa, this is a deeply clarifying extension.
It feels right to name proximity to harm as another pathway to early perception, and the distinction you draw between consensus-seeking and survival-trained social attunement feels important. The idea of “double vision” (seeing structural mismatch clearly while regulating its expression for safety) adds a layer I did not articulate, and could not have articulated from my own positional experience.
My intention was not to suggest a single pathway or hierarchy of perception, but to point to shared patterns. Your comment shows how punishment operates differently depending on where one stands, and at what cost.
I’m grateful for the widening. I agree that this feels like a beginning, not a closure.
Thank you for articulating so comprehensively one of my first responses to the article. The individual traumas arising from the social response to neurodiversity: isolation, bullying etc lead to expressions of PTSD, hypervigilance layered on top of the innate wiring features.
Late diagnosed, I also post-diagnosed my parents and realised that I spent most of my childhood managing their neurodivergent moods as a survival requirement. Is it anyone wonder that I'm alexythmic when necessity forces detection and mitigation of external threats before worrying what I might be dealing with inside.
Thanks for this Adrian, I’ve had private convos with a public climate scientist/organizer about this, and we both are neurodivergent, and agreed that it seemed many people showing up are not typical in some way especially in pattern recognition. Will say, people skills also tend to be not very strong, continued struggling with other mental health stuff, makes it tough to collaborate and be in agreement (aka “community building”)
I knew we were collapsing when I was around age 9, and did my own collapsing and grieving then through the rest of my adult life, until finding the work of Rev Dowd who clarified for me that it was okay to let go of that identity- as the impossibly depressed and anxious and liminal-outlier-mysterious type. I still do not fit in anywhere, so am just walking a path, and if I meet up with anyone else, I’m open to it.
I do want to add that many people in earth-first cultures (often indigenous) can easily see connections and patterns, now called “systems thinking”, and I don’t think all of them are technically neurodivergent, so there could be a nature and nurture element to seeing clearly our reality. Worldview from birth, that kind of thing.
I got diagnosed with ADHD professionally(not via social media or something which has made a mockery out of ADHD) this year. And when you read about hunter-gatherers or the indigenous tribes. ADHD people are actually way more suited in those environments then in the normal industrial society. So again being neurodivergent in today's society may be the norm in the future
Definitely have personally seen this might be true, was in the bushveld this year learning tracking and trailing, some of the students were neurodivergent, and the sense of fitting in better was clear there. I had a lesson that emphasized the importance of meditation for honing that way of experiencing and perceiving the world
There's actually been studies done on fruit gathering, with ADHDers scoring significantly higher than neurotypical folks. This thinking underscores the hunter vs farmer hypothesis.
(THPI here non autistic but with hyperthymesia). What you describe resonates profoundly with dome experience of talk I had with some persons last week.
"I’ve seen figures before that show only ~3.5% of a population have the brain wiring to ‘get it’ - to see the overall picture, to think in systems rather than in polemics and emotions.
So no, there will be no peak mass collapse awareness never mind acceptance, until modernity is gone.
Peak awareness will come when the trucks stop rolling, the stores start emptying and the TV & internet starts going blank due to intermittent energy. Even then, they’ll look for someone to blame rather than look to overshoot.
I suspect what is happening here on Substack and over at YT is the mopping up and coalescing of that 3.5%."
"I don't even know what the scientific term would be for those few that are capable of "getting it". I tend to call it joined up thinking, or the ability to see the bigger picture, which appears to be an ability I have. As an artist with a powerful imagination, it is something that is both a blessing and a curse.
It's anecdotal, somewhere in the Damn the Matrix blog back in 2018 I think it was, I recall it being referenced. The article at the time stated that someone else running a collapse blog, when he realised the sorta 3.5% figure, shut his blog down, because basically he was talking to the converted and there was little possibility of others embracing his awareness. It's one of them where I didn't keep a note, I'm sorry to say. I vaguely recall the figure somewhere again since, but damned if I can find either source now. Durr!"
Maybe you just answered the question of where this sort of 3% figure came from.
FWIW, the thoroughly informative book "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone" (Astra Taylor) examined that claim and found it to be based on manipulated statistics.
Pattern recognition is. My terminology for it. Official diagnosis in my late 50s and because I spent a lifetime trying to understand the "other" so I could fit in, my diagnostician informed me that pattern recognition was so far developed that it approached "Savant" status.
It's been more of a curse than a blessing because I thought everyone could see what I did and said the quiet part out loud only to be accused of invasion of privacy, witchcraft, snooping into things I had no business knowing about....the list is now 71 years long and continues growing. When social skills are below average and pattern recognition above average, it makes for a very isolated existence.
This is fascinating Adrian. I would suggest that giftedness is also linked to collapse awareness - gifted people tend to have heightened pattern awareness, systems thinking, a strong sense of social justice and emotional sensitivity. There is some overlap between giftedness and autism, but only some gifted people are autistic, and only some autistic people are gifted. Both involved brain based differences in how connections are made and how information is processed. Neuroscience is beginning to shed light on the overlap and differences. Short story: we need these divergent thinkers, whatever the mechanisms involved.
Thank you. I’m late diagnosed. I’ve long felt that something was off, in my freshman year of college my professor told us that the US would be facing massive income disparities when I was in my 40’s ( I’m 49) that could lead to govt disruption and possibly authoritarianism. For some reason- it hit me like FUCK he is right. But everyone around me told me it was wrong but I held on to it, secretly researched, wrote essays etc but at the same time doubted myself because all the “ experts “ my parents, the media, the govt was telling me everything was great. Then 2008 happened, then 2015 primaries and I knew
I also in early 2000’s had a theory that China was going to overtake us
And a theory on climate crisis being way worse than we were told
Again I doubted myself on everything because of the experts.
And after I was late diagnosed i decided to just start trusting myself.
Thank you. I was diagnosed as neuro divergent when my husband was diagnosed autistic. Both of us in our early 60s at the time. Things started making sense then, but this perspective is like being curled up in a warm blanket with a cup of hot Cocoa. A brief moment to acknowledge that, yes, I am aware of what goes on around me and how some days, it can be so difficult looking at those who aren't able to see. Thank you for that perspective also.
I’ve seen much writing that recognizes neurodivergent thinking as beneficial in ways that were not previously understood. Thank you, Adrian, for adding another perspective from which this is true.
Wow. Thank you so much for this, Adrian! I have long suspected this was true based on the number of my collapse-aware clients who self-identified as neurodiveegent. I so appreciate your research citations here!
This is one of the clearest accounts I’ve seen especially the distinction between linear cognition and threshold dynamics.
One additional layer that feels important: collapse awareness isn’t only filtered by neurotype, but by social penalty.
Systems often select against early pattern recognition because it threatens cohesion, careers, and identity. Many people can see the cracks they just learn quickly that acting on them is costly.
Neurodivergent cognition may surface collapse earlier not because others are incapable, but because it’s less coupled to those stabilizing incentives.
Great comment—and more of us need to read this one comment carefully and reflect. Perhaps nowhere have I felt more different from others than in the workplace. In almost every workplace where I've worked, I've felt surrounded by neurotypical people. And being different (despite excellent job performance) has cost me more than once—in the form of losing a job (typically through selective layoffs). Though of course I could never prove it (organizations are expert at "leaving no fingerprints"), I always felt certain I was being laid off because the neurotypical others felt my "otherness" and were uncomfortable around it. So yes—social penalty is very real.
The mechanism isn’t hostility so much as selection pressure: environments reward behaviors that preserve local coherence, even when those behaviors delay recognition of deeper problems.
What gets labeled as “otherness” often just reflects lower coupling to those stabilizing incentives which makes it costly long before it becomes useful.
I noticed something was wrong with the world, that things didn't add up, when I was 6 years old and began leaving my parent's orbit - but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain my feelings.
When I pointed out inconsistencies, double standards, and hypocricies, it was MY fault, there was something wrong with ME.
A fascinating piece Adrian. I am struck by the pattern recognition and the question of neurodivergence. I am an old guy who recently learned that I am an INFJ, from the Meyers Briggs personality types. It was only this morning where I was reading that the IN group of four may well be considered neurodivergent due to our ability with pattern recognition and our empathic talents. We do not fit in well with typical social constructs, being labelled too intense, too serious, too "out there". We also need considerable quiet time to recharge our batteries.
I have seen the collapse evidence for a long time, have been so often struck by the blinders and ear plugs too many of us wear, and I have simply become resigned to being unable to stop the momentum, while still doing what I can to make a difference. Everything in the Universe moves in cycles and it is inevitable that our species will come to an end one day. It does not sadden me, in fact it gives me peace, and gratitude for the moment in time we have.
Late self-diagnosed autist here. I have sometimes said "the metacrisis is my special interest", and this seems to validate it.
Also recognize the not being able to ignore higher level harm, such as my job helping the energy transition also enabling an infinite-growth mindset. And then I try to explain that to people and they can't even see that there could be any problem.
The articulation of collapse awareness as a pattern-recognition event, and the naming of epistemic independence as a liability in a consensus-driven culture, feels accurate and clarifying. I’m grateful for that clarity.
I want to add a layer, not as a rebuttal, but as a widening. The text implicitly contrasts two cognitive orientations: one less governed by social cues and consensus, the other more attuned to them. That distinction holds in many cases. But for some of us, especially those shaped early by volatility, violence, or stacked disposability, the relationship between pattern-recognition and social attunement is not either/or. It is layered.
I learned to read rooms exquisitely because my safety depended on anticipating shifts before they surfaced. Social attunement was not cohesion-seeking; it was threat detection, and appeasement was not conformity; it was a social/emotional room-stabilisation strategy. In those conditions, epistemic independence needs to be masked. What develops instead is a double vision: the capacity to register structural mismatches clearly, while simultaneously modulating how, when, and whether that clarity can be expressed. So the instruction becomes implicit but relentless: soften the insight, slow it down, make it palatable, don’t break the spell too fast.
This matters because without this layer, we risk mistaking survival-trained responsiveness for cognitive conformity. High sensitivity to social cues does not necessarily signal investment in consensus. It can signal long apprenticeship in managing instability that others were buffered from. Many women, and many people racialised into disposability, are trained early in this dual task: track reality accurately and regulate the field so reality does not provoke retaliation. Overdeveloped relational vigilance layered on top of intense pattern sensitivity, results in hyperfocus, hypervigilance, hypermetabolization (of others' emotional states), hypertranslation (always in service of others) and (often) constant exhaustion.
I appreciate that the essay does not romanticise early perception. I want to underscore that collapse awareness is not only shaped by cognitive style, but by proximity to harm. Some people learn early because they are wired differently, others learn early not only because they are wired differently, but because the consequences of not learning are immediate. The consensus trance fractures differently depending on where one is standing when it breaks.
It took me a lifetime, and a great deal of strategic buffering, to be able to speak publicly about collapse with some degree of protection. Even then, it required learning how to hide bitter pills in excessive amounts of peanut butter. As I go public with work on AI, the pattern reasserts itself: the same social pressures, the same risks. Pattern recognition and epistemic independence are consistently punished.
If our conversations about existential threats are to mature, whether ecological or technological, we will need to hold these layered patterns at once: wide perception without heroics, difference without hierarchy, and engagement stripped of comfort requirements.
Thank you for opening this conversation. This feels like a beginning, not a closure.
Thank you Vanessa, this is a deeply clarifying extension.
It feels right to name proximity to harm as another pathway to early perception, and the distinction you draw between consensus-seeking and survival-trained social attunement feels important. The idea of “double vision” (seeing structural mismatch clearly while regulating its expression for safety) adds a layer I did not articulate, and could not have articulated from my own positional experience.
My intention was not to suggest a single pathway or hierarchy of perception, but to point to shared patterns. Your comment shows how punishment operates differently depending on where one stands, and at what cost.
I’m grateful for the widening. I agree that this feels like a beginning, not a closure.
Excellently articulated!
@Vanessa totally agree. Love your articulation of the layering. I am also hyper aware socially and constantly assessing, modulating my comms etc.
I know exactly what you mean. I feel the same way.
Vanessa, I came to the comments to add something similar but I can’t say I would have articulated it nearly as well. Thank you both for the dialogue.
Thank you for articulating so comprehensively one of my first responses to the article. The individual traumas arising from the social response to neurodiversity: isolation, bullying etc lead to expressions of PTSD, hypervigilance layered on top of the innate wiring features.
Late diagnosed, I also post-diagnosed my parents and realised that I spent most of my childhood managing their neurodivergent moods as a survival requirement. Is it anyone wonder that I'm alexythmic when necessity forces detection and mitigation of external threats before worrying what I might be dealing with inside.
Thank you for your nuanced addition. Really appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks for this Adrian, I’ve had private convos with a public climate scientist/organizer about this, and we both are neurodivergent, and agreed that it seemed many people showing up are not typical in some way especially in pattern recognition. Will say, people skills also tend to be not very strong, continued struggling with other mental health stuff, makes it tough to collaborate and be in agreement (aka “community building”)
I knew we were collapsing when I was around age 9, and did my own collapsing and grieving then through the rest of my adult life, until finding the work of Rev Dowd who clarified for me that it was okay to let go of that identity- as the impossibly depressed and anxious and liminal-outlier-mysterious type. I still do not fit in anywhere, so am just walking a path, and if I meet up with anyone else, I’m open to it.
I do want to add that many people in earth-first cultures (often indigenous) can easily see connections and patterns, now called “systems thinking”, and I don’t think all of them are technically neurodivergent, so there could be a nature and nurture element to seeing clearly our reality. Worldview from birth, that kind of thing.
I got diagnosed with ADHD professionally(not via social media or something which has made a mockery out of ADHD) this year. And when you read about hunter-gatherers or the indigenous tribes. ADHD people are actually way more suited in those environments then in the normal industrial society. So again being neurodivergent in today's society may be the norm in the future
Definitely have personally seen this might be true, was in the bushveld this year learning tracking and trailing, some of the students were neurodivergent, and the sense of fitting in better was clear there. I had a lesson that emphasized the importance of meditation for honing that way of experiencing and perceiving the world
There's actually been studies done on fruit gathering, with ADHDers scoring significantly higher than neurotypical folks. This thinking underscores the hunter vs farmer hypothesis.
Hunter versus farmer hypothesis - Wikipedia https://share.google/tErgJZNg4U4DCQvrp
@Corrie Nice observation. I think you are right about cultural worldviews scaffolding certain tendencies for sure.
(THPI here non autistic but with hyperthymesia). What you describe resonates profoundly with dome experience of talk I had with some persons last week.
I am even not a true AI doomer.
But I m worry since 2005-2010 about this :
https://www.ecologicaleconomicsforall.org/limits-to-growth
And https://cdn3.regie-agricole.com/ulf/CMS_Content/2/articles/893273/Carteclimat-1000x562.jpg
Now https://technorealisme.substack.com/p/thermodynamic-realpolitik-when-physics-6b4
-----
My true fear : L’Ombre générative : de l’archive active à l’auto-domestication algorithmique de l’humain
https://anthropo-ihm.hypotheses.org/6018
------
This could be seen as a denial step of a broader Kübler-Rossian process such as I describe here :
https://technorealisme.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-grief-cycle-a-destructoconservativ
Please
This is quite an awesome article again. Thanks again.
Just the other day I made this comment on The Honest Sorcerer's post about peak copper:
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/running-on-empty-copper
I mentioned peak insanity, then
"I’ve seen figures before that show only ~3.5% of a population have the brain wiring to ‘get it’ - to see the overall picture, to think in systems rather than in polemics and emotions.
So no, there will be no peak mass collapse awareness never mind acceptance, until modernity is gone.
Peak awareness will come when the trucks stop rolling, the stores start emptying and the TV & internet starts going blank due to intermittent energy. Even then, they’ll look for someone to blame rather than look to overshoot.
I suspect what is happening here on Substack and over at YT is the mopping up and coalescing of that 3.5%."
"I don't even know what the scientific term would be for those few that are capable of "getting it". I tend to call it joined up thinking, or the ability to see the bigger picture, which appears to be an ability I have. As an artist with a powerful imagination, it is something that is both a blessing and a curse.
It's anecdotal, somewhere in the Damn the Matrix blog back in 2018 I think it was, I recall it being referenced. The article at the time stated that someone else running a collapse blog, when he realised the sorta 3.5% figure, shut his blog down, because basically he was talking to the converted and there was little possibility of others embracing his awareness. It's one of them where I didn't keep a note, I'm sorry to say. I vaguely recall the figure somewhere again since, but damned if I can find either source now. Durr!"
Maybe you just answered the question of where this sort of 3% figure came from.
Also someone posted this:
https://multispective.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/only-3-of-general-population-are-systems-thinkers/
common knowledge amongst the US military it seems.
Thanks Mark, great comment. The 3.5% figure is fascinating. Most people will be oblivious until the end as you say.
FWIW, the thoroughly informative book "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone" (Astra Taylor) examined that claim and found it to be based on manipulated statistics.
Pattern recognition is. My terminology for it. Official diagnosis in my late 50s and because I spent a lifetime trying to understand the "other" so I could fit in, my diagnostician informed me that pattern recognition was so far developed that it approached "Savant" status.
It's been more of a curse than a blessing because I thought everyone could see what I did and said the quiet part out loud only to be accused of invasion of privacy, witchcraft, snooping into things I had no business knowing about....the list is now 71 years long and continues growing. When social skills are below average and pattern recognition above average, it makes for a very isolated existence.
This is fascinating Adrian. I would suggest that giftedness is also linked to collapse awareness - gifted people tend to have heightened pattern awareness, systems thinking, a strong sense of social justice and emotional sensitivity. There is some overlap between giftedness and autism, but only some gifted people are autistic, and only some autistic people are gifted. Both involved brain based differences in how connections are made and how information is processed. Neuroscience is beginning to shed light on the overlap and differences. Short story: we need these divergent thinkers, whatever the mechanisms involved.
Thank you. I’m late diagnosed. I’ve long felt that something was off, in my freshman year of college my professor told us that the US would be facing massive income disparities when I was in my 40’s ( I’m 49) that could lead to govt disruption and possibly authoritarianism. For some reason- it hit me like FUCK he is right. But everyone around me told me it was wrong but I held on to it, secretly researched, wrote essays etc but at the same time doubted myself because all the “ experts “ my parents, the media, the govt was telling me everything was great. Then 2008 happened, then 2015 primaries and I knew
I also in early 2000’s had a theory that China was going to overtake us
And a theory on climate crisis being way worse than we were told
Again I doubted myself on everything because of the experts.
And after I was late diagnosed i decided to just start trusting myself.
Thank you. I was diagnosed as neuro divergent when my husband was diagnosed autistic. Both of us in our early 60s at the time. Things started making sense then, but this perspective is like being curled up in a warm blanket with a cup of hot Cocoa. A brief moment to acknowledge that, yes, I am aware of what goes on around me and how some days, it can be so difficult looking at those who aren't able to see. Thank you for that perspective also.
Thanks so much for this Cynthia 🙏
I’ve seen much writing that recognizes neurodivergent thinking as beneficial in ways that were not previously understood. Thank you, Adrian, for adding another perspective from which this is true.
Hi,
Would you mind naming some of those references? I'd be interested in checking them out.
Thanks!
https://www.google.com/search?q=positive+things+about+neurodiversity&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS992US992&oq=good+things+about+neurodi&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Sorry for long and awkward URL, but there are so many references linked from this search result.
Wonderful, thank you!
Wow. Thank you so much for this, Adrian! I have long suspected this was true based on the number of my collapse-aware clients who self-identified as neurodiveegent. I so appreciate your research citations here!
Whoa. I feel seen.
Ditto
This is one of the clearest accounts I’ve seen especially the distinction between linear cognition and threshold dynamics.
One additional layer that feels important: collapse awareness isn’t only filtered by neurotype, but by social penalty.
Systems often select against early pattern recognition because it threatens cohesion, careers, and identity. Many people can see the cracks they just learn quickly that acting on them is costly.
Neurodivergent cognition may surface collapse earlier not because others are incapable, but because it’s less coupled to those stabilizing incentives.
Great comment—and more of us need to read this one comment carefully and reflect. Perhaps nowhere have I felt more different from others than in the workplace. In almost every workplace where I've worked, I've felt surrounded by neurotypical people. And being different (despite excellent job performance) has cost me more than once—in the form of losing a job (typically through selective layoffs). Though of course I could never prove it (organizations are expert at "leaving no fingerprints"), I always felt certain I was being laid off because the neurotypical others felt my "otherness" and were uncomfortable around it. So yes—social penalty is very real.
This is an important distinction to surface.
The mechanism isn’t hostility so much as selection pressure: environments reward behaviors that preserve local coherence, even when those behaviors delay recognition of deeper problems.
What gets labeled as “otherness” often just reflects lower coupling to those stabilizing incentives which makes it costly long before it becomes useful.
Brilliant 👌
I noticed something was wrong with the world, that things didn't add up, when I was 6 years old and began leaving my parent's orbit - but I didn't have the vocabulary to explain my feelings.
When I pointed out inconsistencies, double standards, and hypocricies, it was MY fault, there was something wrong with ME.
A fascinating piece Adrian. I am struck by the pattern recognition and the question of neurodivergence. I am an old guy who recently learned that I am an INFJ, from the Meyers Briggs personality types. It was only this morning where I was reading that the IN group of four may well be considered neurodivergent due to our ability with pattern recognition and our empathic talents. We do not fit in well with typical social constructs, being labelled too intense, too serious, too "out there". We also need considerable quiet time to recharge our batteries.
I have seen the collapse evidence for a long time, have been so often struck by the blinders and ear plugs too many of us wear, and I have simply become resigned to being unable to stop the momentum, while still doing what I can to make a difference. Everything in the Universe moves in cycles and it is inevitable that our species will come to an end one day. It does not sadden me, in fact it gives me peace, and gratitude for the moment in time we have.
Thank you so much, this really touched me.
Late self-diagnosed autist here. I have sometimes said "the metacrisis is my special interest", and this seems to validate it.
Also recognize the not being able to ignore higher level harm, such as my job helping the energy transition also enabling an infinite-growth mindset. And then I try to explain that to people and they can't even see that there could be any problem.
As a “pattern recognizing” person from early age, who gets very frustrated with others who seem not to see the shifts, I appreciate your article.
As I read this I'm buoyed by an smug, intellectual superiority and also saddened that my doom is not madness.