Sign in with Facebook
Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.
“The native peoples of North America were stripped of their land and their culture—and collapsed into mass alcoholism. The English poor were driven from the land into scary, scattered cities in the eighteenth century—and glugged their way into the Gin Craze. The American inner cities were stripped of their factory jobs and the communities surrounding them in the 1970s and 1980s—and a crack pipe was waiting at the end of the shut-down assembly line. The American rural heartlands saw their markets and subsidies wither in the 1980s and 1990s—and embarked on a meth binge.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
“If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
Alexander’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alexander’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,128 books
|
12 friends
234 books
|
39 friends
1,196 books
|
184 friends
1,297 books
|
66 friends
183 books
|
81 friends
362 books
|
24 friends
181 books
|
91 friends
243 books
|
10 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Alexander
Lists liked by Alexander
