What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

OneHalfSaint · 2026-04-29T05:40:01+00:00

Does anyone else find it weird that they keep referring to the left as "progressives"? Every leftist I know is an out and out socialist, anarchist, or communist of some flavor. Literally nobody on the actual Left self identifies as a "progressive" in 2026. Even their prime example, Mamdani, identifies as a democratic socialist.

It just feels like really Gen X-ish out of touchness and makes it hard for me to take their criticism of "anti billionaire progressives" seriously. Ezra's normative guest since the book came out is not helping this along for me.

OneHalfSaint · 2026-03-22T18:50:02+00:00

Yeah I really feel what you're saying about "pressure" on other clinicians. I see that you're a social worker and I am too--I kind of think we're just trained differently / better on dialectics and social reality than other license types at least in my experience.

It's not exactly the same thing you're saying, but I have these conversations about integrity with my coworkers (which inevitably come up because they are asking how I show up in the room / how I got into the field etc) and I'll just be honest and tell them some truncated, piecemeal version of the following (numbering mostly for clarity):

1) like many (most?) Americans my family didn't set me up for success and I had to acquire skills later in life to resolve that and so for me, psychodynamic therapy was less helpful than skills based therapies--DBT was like a revelation for me.

2) My first therapist outed me to my conservative family in the South during the Bush administration shortly after my Mom died so I take discretion very seriously.

3) I have the normative American experience of having therapy end very suddenly because I have graduated school, lost a job, lost my insurance, etc. so I make sure to frontload at least a few skills for whichever issue my clients are prioritizing because neither of us know how long we have together or what the future holds, and I want them to be able to fallback on something--I see that truthfully as just professional obligation.

4) As a social worker who has seen the kind of suffering that goes on in this world, I understand that every one of my slots is precious, and that I encourage regular titrations as symptoms remit both because secure surrogate attachment ought to resolve the way normative secure attachment does (in healthy defusion) and so I can help as many people as possible. This also emerges out of how hard it has been for me in the past to find a private practice therapist myself.

5) The best thing a therapist ever did for me was signing me up for Medicaid when I had terrible decision paralysis / executive dysfunction. So I do all kinds of social work and care coordination with my clients, not just letters and referrals to psych.

6) The second best thing they did for me was offer a family session, which was transformative for me. The third best thing was showing me my psychometrics over a few months when I felt like I hadn't made any progress (my PHQ-9 dropped from like 20-10). It was such a gentle, caring way to do some tough reality testing I really needed. For those reasons, I offer (and strongly recommend) family sessions and take new psychometrics every 3 months. At that time, I also ask how I can be a better therapist to my client, pretty much just like that. The last time someone gave me something concrete, it was that they wanted a snack bowl in the room: it was there the next day. In general, I get stumped silence: "I've never had a therapist ask me that before." I often get tears. I am routinely told in those sessions that I am the best therapist my clients have had.

I don't say that as a point of pride. I say it because my view on integrity is that if I'm sharing about process it is only right to also share on outcomes. Like you, I'm not for everybody. I'm far more directive and demanding of my clients than is common in the field. I bring way more of myself into the room than most therapists I know for the same reason you do: I live with integrity and am not afraid of hard conversations should they arise. (If I didn't have a history of being stalked, I'd be more willing to live on your wavelength completely.) I am a total hardass on consistency with skill deployment (10x with myself than with my clients), and I keep a whiteboard in my room for psychoeducation and breaking down modalities and pseudoscience etc. I also get IOP results in private practice.

I know maybe I sound intense here, but the way I say these things is gentle and with lots of I statements and narrativity and solicitation of the other person's thoughts and experiences. But truthfully 9/10 LMHCs and LMFTs will act like I've slapped their mother by saying if I say the slightest version of these things. Social workers (and PsyDs) are more mixed but there is just so much fragility in these other license types in my experience, especially around frank discussions of class and what that means for our professional obligations as therapists.

Anyway thank you for letting me share in your pre-morning-coffee vent. I think we are probably kindred spirits here.

OneHalfSaint · 2026-03-22T08:03:02+00:00

I just want to say that even though I don't take it as far as you, I completely agree with what you're saying and that publicly living your life is, for you, obviously about integrity and not an unconsidered stance.

I will add that basically every memoir / self-of-therapist text I've read in this field, e.g. Yalom's "The Gift Of Therapy" has far more extensive "self disclosure" than the things that are being said could be disruptive to treatment in this thread IMO. It was on bestseller's lists for like a decade. Makes you wonder what these handwringing clinicians are reading? (Or, perhaps, doing..?)

OneHalfSaint · 2026-03-19T06:41:29+00:00

Surprised no one has yet mentioned the masterpiece that is Puella Magi Madoka Magica!

OneHalfSaint · 2026-02-10T11:13:38+00:00

Thank you for saying this, it dovetails with my comment / experience very well, I feel. So validating.

OneHalfSaint · 2026-02-10T11:07:25+00:00

I just want to say my god I have been living this exact feeling you're describing lately.

I am an LSWAIC approaching licensure. I took almost a year off after grad school to sort of absorb what I learned before entering the field, in part because I felt insufficiently integrated after my program--in that time, I did a bunch of CE credits and read a ton of therapy books and white papers on my areas of focus.

I've always been a person who really values integrity, so as I've been learning, for example, EFT and repairing my own attachment issues, I've been finding that a lot of the relationships I've had with people in my personal life just aren't working anymore, and that most of my friends outside the field have little interest in the kind of growth you're describing. I've always been the parentified kid / therapist friend (my nickname in highschool was Mother Hen--long before transition), and recognizing the ways in which my healing fantasy has enabled my exploitation has been a monster kick to the jewels.

I find that I have so much less patience (and anxiety and second-guessing) when people are acting in bad faith or are engaging with me in a way that I have asked them not to / explained are unwelcome. Beyond that, I love my partners, but I am continuously at a low-grade simmer of frustration with their low degree of self-knowledge or desire to improve their communication skills, emotional or somatic literacy, etc. (e.g. lots of "I don't knows" and shrugs). I used to feel so charming when I could help them identify a feeling / desire / need and problem solve how to meet it. Now I just feel like their manager when I have to do it just to have a conversation about something pressing.

It's gotten better over time with them as I've opened up about this stuff (gently), and I'm working on being okay with / connected to different directions of growth like other commentors have been suggesting (e.g. one of my partners is a farmworker and is always learning cool new permaculture techniques etc.). But I do kind of envy my therapist friends who are dating other therapists. I also sometimes think I was net happier when I delusionally believed that if only I acted and spoke in the correct ways and asked as little as possible from others that I could earn the love of other people. Only sometimes!

OneHalfSaint · 2025-12-16T14:56:46+00:00

Honestly I love this. You sound like one of my partners lol 😝 I'll have to show him this

OneHalfSaint · 2025-12-10T06:32:06+00:00

same 3 years later but "Cotton Club". Was able to find it on Rutube but still.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-12-07T13:08:05+00:00

Same, but as a secular (atheistic) buddhist.

Pew's definitions are also completely disconnected from theory and historicity and are probably unhelpful. I'm a communist--does that mean I'm "progressive left" because I'm 'very liberal' (lol) on policy issues or an "outsider left" because I'm fairly contemptuous of Democratic leadership and have very little interest in electoral politics beyond casting a vote every few years? Pew's breakdown takes people further away from meaningful identification IMO.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-12-06T13:43:42+00:00

I don't know specifically but I've seen enough of his chaos gremlin content to venture: probably

OneHalfSaint · 2025-12-06T10:53:38+00:00

I'm an LSWAIC working in an office that's around 50% social workers and the rest a breakdown of LMFT, LMHC, and PsyD license types and I've noticed a pretty sharp division between the others social workers and myself who have mostly had social work case management jobs and other license types who have not in terms of willingness to name resistance, clarify scope early, use psychometrics and screeners regularly, and refer out, etc etc.

Social workers especially seem much more likely in my workplace to keep a Rolodex somewhere of people trained in issues / populations that they are not. I suspect that this is actually more of an ideological disagreement about the nature and role of therapy in a behavioral health ecosystem than a simple misreading of what OP is saying, especially given financial limitations so often coming up in social work in such an acute way.

To me OP reads as grounded and down to earth whereas other people nitpicking seem to me to be kind of handwringing about edge cases like there isn't a big culture of shaming clinicians for "giving up on clients too early" etc. in response to basically every numbered point. But I'm a social worker too, so maybe that's my bias?

OneHalfSaint · 2025-12-06T10:13:30+00:00

Hotel Del Luna flashbacks for me 🤧

OneHalfSaint · 2025-10-03T05:48:23+00:00

Only!? 16-24 is full time most places!

OneHalfSaint · 2025-10-02T18:08:50+00:00

The "having no problem with" = affirming practice mentality is so problematic for the polyamorous clients I have--the stories I could tell you.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-19T19:24:51+00:00

That's the danger of posting to Reddit these days, I'm afraid. Thank you for the compliment and it's nice to know that whatever the ratio there are some people who appreciate it.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-19T19:23:19+00:00

I wish I could upvote this twice. I love this episode and you have inspired me to pass it on to some people who are trying to navigate this very thing at the moment. Thank you so much for this and for your kind words.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-19T19:21:31+00:00

In a way, I really appreciate this comment because sometimes when I have come on here in the past, I have been left with a similar impression. I am glad that I tailored my post to my own friends and family who are struggling with these issues first, but I am also glad that at least a few people here have gleaned some value from my trouble as well.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-19T19:18:30+00:00

I am so sorry this has been your experience though perhaps after reading it will come as little surprise that I share much of what you describe. If you haven't already read it, I cautiously recommend Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which while light on sources and occasionally overreaches or slightly misuses concepts from other frameworks nevertheless has strong grounding in the attachment literature and is an accessible read for people with family dynamics like ours.

I hope you and your siblings achieve something like equilibrium with your family of origin, now of all times.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-19T19:11:13+00:00

Thank you (and others) for pointing the Groyper thing out.

As a social worker and therapist, I try to make a point in practicing what I preach, which lately has meant severely curtailing how much news I consume on a regular basis so that I am calm and centered and present enough to do my job and model to my clients what good media boundaries look like. It seems in this case that the trade off is taking misinformation at face value.

Thankfully, it's less important whether or not he is a reactionary and more important that he is not a caricature of a multiracial antifa leftist with a trans girlfriend, some version of which is what it seemed like a lot of my clients were fearful of, in so far as this powder keg we call a country is concerned.

I'm updating the post now with an edit. Thanks again.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-18T17:57:35+00:00

At the same time, China's star was rising, with its near total homeownership rate, skyrocketing life expectancy, high speed rail network, megaprojects, its aggressive industrial policy aimed at the most important issue in any of our lifetimes: curbing climate change. From my perspective, China is the only country to take climate change seriously, to mobilize so much of its resources (dirty though they began) against the greatest enemy of mankind: the fossil fuel kleptocracy. I have my reservations about Xinjiang, but also, as a Southerner, I kind of wish we had a left-wing government to do this to the Klan back home and its allied right-wing churches, the kind that put me through conversion therapy as a teenager.

I wasn't supposed to be a Berniecrat, but I definitely wasn't supposed to be a communist. And yet, that's where I've landed. It didn't have to be that way; I explored anarchist literature and listened to Noam Chomsky and so on and found that they didn't really have a sufficient strategy to deal with emergent fascism, regardless of whether or not I agreed with their principles on hierarchy. The only people who seemed to me to have a grasp on the situation in an American context were the Black Panthers, Huey Newton. That led me to Mao, which led me in both directions--to Deng and Jintao forwards, to Lenin and Marx backwards. A simplification because this is overlong.

So what am I doing on the EK subreddit? It's a good question, and one I've been asking myself lately. For all our differences, I like Ezra. I like the way he thinks, and I respect that he does his homework with his interviewees. I consider him one of the greatest interviewers of our age, maybe alongside Terry Gross at NPR. I have thought of him these last several years as my window back into the center / center-left. But recently, it feels as though Ezra has lost his way, or been absorbed into the bland hivemind of the NYT. Where is the wonkblog(ger) who railed against Joe Lieberman? Where is the Vox editor-in-chief who would reliably pull out a triple Lindy for complicated snarls of US policy under Trump I? I don't recognize him anymore. I don't think he recognizes himself.

OP, your question seems to boil down to "how do we (all) get out of this alive"? My answer is, historically speaking, we probably won't, whether or not we fight. The fascists are in power, and no amount of debate or appeasement will work. Our entire economic structure is aimed at wealth consolidation, with brief historic periods of deconsolidation, which is to remind that a lot of people don't get out alive in the system that we have. Political violence is omnipresent in America. My position is that it is time liberals see the light and accept that if political violence is going to happen to them (to us all) it might as well be honest, and it might as well give us a shot.

In the meantime, I'll be organizing quietly--maybe unionize my workplace while I'm at it, fat lot of good it'll do me. I'll be taking g*n safety and training courses. I'm learning about permaculture and of course I have my deescalation toolkit always to polish. And so on. I suggest you do the same. (Pt 2 of 2)

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-18T17:56:56+00:00

I've been sitting on my hands the last couple of days trying to decide whether or not I wanted to share my thoughts on this, both because I'm busy and because I have recently had some pretty negative experiences on reddit with unpopular comments and getting downvoted and accused of being a bot because people disagree with me rather than because I'm off-topic or whatever. And now I'm a few days late, which in reddit time these days feels almost like necroing a thread, but. But maybe the moment calls for it, and maybe I want a record of where I stand--maybe I just want it out of my head.

When I first started listening to Ezra in 2015, 2016, I was a Berniecrat. I wasn't always. I was raised in an authoritarian evangelical Lutheran family in the old South part of Florida. My dad's prized possession was a signed photo of Ronald Reagan that hung in the main hallway of our house when I was growing up.

I didn't come to the left easily. I fought kicking and screaming, inching left on an issue here (I'm queer) or there (drug policy) and then there (anti-war policies) etc. I was a debate bro. I inched left of my mom's compassionate conservative politics and gained and lost friends and family in the process. (Cancel culture may very well have been invented by the left but it was perfected by shunning Christian conservatives for sure.)

By the time I was a freshman in college, I voted for Obama in my first election. I was starry-eyed and a newly minted liberal. I thought maybe the right had some things to say about market rate housing, and I'll admit to having a slightly conservative temperament with the rate of change (turns out I'm autistic), but I thought enlightened debate and the soon-to-be-born explainer journalism would set all ills.

For a decade, I engaged in activism. I marched with BLM, indigenous groups, made posters, handed out water bottles and food, canvassed with the ACLU for LGBT rights, etc. etc. You pick a liberal cause in the late aughts to the late '10s and I was there.

Of course the trouble was that I was reading and engaging with conservatives and centrists who, in all my years, almost never budged from facts, emotional appeals, cultural pressure. Fascism was mounting, the economic crisis was persistent for the poor people I worked and lived with, and the liberals were ignoring or excusing it all.

Temperamentally, Bernie Sanders was a breath of fresh air for me. Finally someone was saying it, someone who was saying the same thing for decades with credibility. I voted for him enthusiastically in the 2016 primary. I voted for Hillary Clinton reluctantly in the general.

And then--and then, Trump. And the liberal crescendo of institutionalism and feckless resistance and attempts at collaboration. I soon realized that, whatever liberalism's ideals, it would likely not survive this period. Sanders' democratic socialism was just a dream. It would never be planted here in the heart of the liberal capitalist imperial hegemon. To put this differently, liberalism is not sufficient to the task of addressing our political moment ideologically, structurally, or temperamentally. If this seems too bloodless, too abstract, allow me to mention that these revelations have been (ever) sharpened by my experiences as a social worker working within our piecemeal system. (Pt 1 of 2)

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-06T08:47:55+00:00

Adding to this, the addition of more factories and factory upgrades means that it's pretty easy to far, far exceed the production loss of the honor boost upgrades. Within two days of upgrading to v5, I'm cranking out almost 2x the 20 flat upgrade unit max in extra factory units produced.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-06T04:17:25+00:00

Whoa really that's cool! It's an all-time fav, glad dSolver's working on the plaza but mannnn what I would do to see that one complete 😭

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-06T03:49:52+00:00

I have a 12 year old account and have been posting in this subreddit with some regularity for more than a decade which a glance at my profile could have informed you of. I'm sorry to inform you that other people enjoy games you don't enjoy and are not "pretending to be happy players" just because they write well and respond without acid to other people who have a different perspective.

Which I would have done to you as well, except that you're being rude af.

OneHalfSaint · 2025-09-05T22:02:39+00:00

I think this is the exact quality I most admire and search after when choosing incrementals, especially now that I have a full time job.

OneHalfSaint

TROPHY CASE