🌜 📜 🌊 Scrolls and Streams: Money and Happiness, Anger and Letting Go, The Legacy of Trauma, and the Joys of Queer Time
Also: Why the worst year of career starts when you become a boss, and what AI will do to the cover letter. In Memoriam: tarotologist Rachel Pollack.
This is Five and Nine, a podcast and newsletter at the crossroads of magic, work and economic justice. We are currently in Season 3, which is all about rest. You can catch up on Apple, Spotify, Google and Instagram.
Scrolls and Streams 📜 🌊 is Five and Nine’s monthly selection of insights and commentary that have caught our eyes and ears. All links are shared in the spirit of “this was interesting” and not necessarily “we fully endorse this.”
Published every 🌜 waning gibbous moon, also known as the disseminating moon.
✋ Top Five
…in 2010, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize-winning economist and psychologist, came out with the theory that there was a monetary “happiness plateau”. Once you hit an annual household income of $75,000 (£62,000), earning more money didn’t make you any happier. In 2021, the happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth released a dissenting study, showing that happiness increased with income and there wasn’t evidence of a plateau. Now the pair have teamed up in a process known as “adversarial collaboration” and released a new study finding that they were both sort of right, but Killingsworth was more right: for most people, earning more money makes you happier.
We're All Fucking Crazy!!!!!!! AHHHHH!!! (Mental Hellth)
Our collective inability to recognize trauma, to admit that we’re feeling a bit insane, to admit we are affected by the world, is something that extends far beyond the pandemic. We’re encouraged to shut up about the world, to let it roll off our backs (like ducks, quack quack), because if we were to individually admit just how mentally fucked the world is making us, it would require a collective reckoning so immense that the world would explode. We’d at least have to have conversations about what we want the world to look like, and realize that we don’t want it to look like this.
Want to Love Your Body? Try Swimming Naked (New York Times Magazine)
Queer time is a sensate way of life, the kind treasured by people who perhaps understand with crackling urgency how circumstances can change in a moment, and the importance of pleasures that even in small doses can sustain you for weeks, months, years after the moment has passed. Alternating between land and sea becomes its own sundial, a rare escape from straight time, which is perhaps why I seek it out so often.
Don’t Hold Onto Anger (Cristina Moon)
Anger can be a useful emotion—for example, when someone or something we care about is being attacked or harmed. But whether or not it's justified, we should let it go, clearing it from our systems once the threat is gone. If we don't, it can burn us up, affecting both our minds and our bodies. Anger raises our blood pressure, strains our organs, and can trigger irregularity in our nervous systems, contributing to higher anxiety, depression, and autoimmune ailments. At the same time, it's a natural emotion. To think we can refrain from ever becoming angry is, for most of us, unnatural, unrealistic, and thus, quite impractical.
Many of the plights of modern society are, he says, natural responses to an unhealthy culture. Take addiction, something that he doesn’t just relate to drink and drugs, but also to “sex, gambling, pornography, extreme sports, cell phones”. His view is that there is no such thing as an “addictive personality”. Nor is addiction a disease. His mantra is: “Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. To understand people’s pain, you have to understand their lives. In other words, addiction is a normal response to trauma.”
More
A gym for your feelings? Emotional support now comes with a membership fee
Gut feelings: why drugs that nurture your microbes could be the future of mental health
Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content
‘Diversity dishonesty’ is the toxic workplace trend we’re not talking about enough
🙏 In Memoriam
Five and Nine honors the memory of Rachel Pollack, American science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divinatory tarot. Her book, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, is a tarot classic, shaping and guiding our own practice.
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Five and Nine is a podcast and newsletter at the crossroads of magic, work and economic justice. We publish “moonthly” — every new moon 🌚 and full moon 🌝 — , and we provide an ongoing critical discussion through readings, reflections and debate.
In this new world, we’re all rethinking the meaning of work and justice in our lives. Our lives and livelihoods are more essential than ever in identifying ways forward for society that can be grounded in care, compassion and sustainability.
Directors of Magic. Dorothy R. Santos and Xiaowei R. Wang
Creative Director. Xiaowei R. Wang
Lead Producer. AX Mina (Ana)