by Tim Egan from the NYT (thanks to Mary Jane F. for sending this)
The unfinished memorial in South Dakota to the Sioux leader Crazy Horse, just a few miles from a county named for a slayer of Native Americans.Credit…Scott Olson/Getty Images
As baffling as it is to find statues of traitors, slaveholders and killers of Union soldiers ensconced in many a prominent square, consider the historical discordance of Custer County, S.D.
The hard beauty of the Black Hills, sacred land to Native Americans, overshadows the county, the main town and the state park, all named for George Armstrong Custer. The hard history was shaped by the slayer of those native people. Custer’s willful trespass into territory promised by treaty to the Sioux set the stage for the last violent encounters between New World and Old.
Here is the American paradox in a grid of stark geology.
No country can last long without a shared narrative. You wonder, on an Independence Day when the mood of the country is more angry and fearful than it’s been in a long time, if this nation can ever have such a thing again.
I think we can. But to make that happen, it will take an imaginative projection of the best instincts of those four imperfect men whose visages are chiseled into stone, as well as the Sioux warrior honored just down the road.
Before we get to them, let’s talk about him. Trump wants a fireworks display in the pine forest around Rushmore in the middle of fire season. There will be no required social distancing for the crowd. And the world’s most powerful narcissist will be projecting his dream to have his face carved next to those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
There you have it — everything that is so awful about him in one appearance, putting the lives of American citizens and a national landmark at risk to protect his eggshell ego.
But what about them? Rushmore was created by Gutzon Borglum, a confidant of leaders of the revitalized 20th-century Ku Klux Klan. Before Borglum took his jackhammers to the Black Hills, he had started work on the largest shrine to white supremacy in the world — the bas-relief sculpture of Confederate leaders in Stone Mountain, Ga.
Still, few people think of Borglum when they gaze up at the four presidents. Instead, the visitor is prompted to think of what those men did for a fragile democracy.
Most revolutions don’t end well. From the kindling of the Enlightenment, France was consumed by a wildfire of fratricide and state-sanctioned beheadings in the late 18th century. Russia’s 1917 revolt eventually led to an epic of mass murder rivaled by Hitler’s Holocaust. And the Irish finally threw off centuries of British rule only to plunge into a bloody civil war in the 1920s over the terms of that independence.
The American Revolution, birthed in part by the looting of British merchant ships in Boston Harbor, was the exception, until our own Civil War over the Original Sin that had been ignored in the founding documents. The protests of 2020 are a legacy of rage dating to 1619.
Each of the Rushmore presidents furthered the ennobling sentiments of men who tried to fashion a democracy from a revolution. Some may never forgive Washington for his slave ownership. But among the nine presidents who owned slaves, only Washington freed them all in his final will.
He also kept the United States from becoming a monarchy when the Trumpians of the day wanted to make him king.
Jefferson was a slaveholding racist who wrote “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. The words outlive, and outshine, the man.
Lincoln needs no defense, except to say that those who want to destroy his statues now should read Frederick Douglass’s nuanced take. Lincoln fought the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, the Trumpians of his day, and ensured that the radical truths of Jefferson would apply to four million formerly enslaved people.
Teddy Roosevelt was no friend of the continent’s original inhabitants. But he evolved. His Rough Riders were multiracial warriors. And as the 20th century’s most influential progressive president, he invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him, the first time any president had broken bread with a Black man at the White House. This, at a time when it was difficult for a Black man to get a meal in a restaurant.
Each of them pushed the revolution closer to an ideal of true equality. And Roosevelt was the first to add universal health care among the truths we hold self-evident.
You can honor the work they started, and desperately needs to be finished, by ignoring Trump’s ahistoric histrionics this weekend and watching “Hamilton,” which is streaming to many parts of the world starting Friday. This founder was an “orphan, son of a whore,” Washington’s better half, and in the person of Lin-Manuel Miranda, he’s a face of the American tomorrow.
At the core of the musical is the founding — reimagined, re-mythologized, rough-edged. A mess of contradictions, like this nation on its 244th birthday.
by David Brooks – thanks Donna D. for sending this.
We
Americans enter the July 4 weekend of 2020 humiliated as almost never before.
We had one collective project this year and that was to crush COVID-19, and we
failed.
On Wednesday, we had about 50,000 new positive
tests, a record. Other nations are beating the disease while our infection
lines shoot upward as sharply as they did in March.
This failure will lead to other failures. A third
of Americans show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, according to the
Census Bureau. Suspected drug overdose deaths surged by 42% in May. Small
businesses, colleges and community hubs will close.
At least Americans are not in denial about the
nation’s turmoil of the last three months. According to a Pew survey, 71% of
Americans are angry about the state of the country right now and 66% are
fearful. Only 17% are proud.
Americans are reacting in two positive ways.
We’re seeing incredible shifts in attitudes toward race. Roughly 60% of
Americans now believe that African Americans face a great deal or a lot of
discrimination. People have been waiting for a white backlash since the riots,
or since the statues started toppling. There isn’t much if any evidence of a
backlash. There’s evidence of a fore-lash.
Second, Americans have decided to get rid of
Donald Trump. His mishandling of COVID-19 hurt him among seniors. His racist
catcalls in a time of racial reckoning have damaged him among all groups.
I’ll be delighted when Trump goes, but it’s worth
pointing out that it wasn’t only because of Donald Trump that Americans never
really locked down, and then started moving around again in late April.
It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe,
Austin and Los Angeles in June. It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns and
told the American people you could suspend the lockdown if your cause was just.
Once you told people they could suspend the lockdown for one thing, they were
going to suspend it for others.
Our fixation on the awfulness of Donald Trump has
distracted us from the larger problems and rendered us strangely passive in the
face of them. Sure, this was a Republican failure, but it was also a collective
failure, and it follows a few decades of collective failures.
On the day Trump leaves office, we’ll still have
a younger generation with worse life prospects than their parents had faced.
We’ll still have a cultural elite that knows little about people in red America
and daily sends the message that they are illegitimate. We’ll still have
yawning inequalities, residential segregation, crumbling social capital, a
crisis in family formation.
Trump’s rise in 2016 was a symptom of all these
crises, long before he had a chance to become an additional cause of them.
What’s the core problem? Damon Linker is on to a
piece of it: “It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think
in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common
or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”
I’d add that this individualism, atomism and
selfishness is downstream from a deeper crisis of legitimacy. In 1970, in a
moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for
long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives,
so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and
property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”
A lot of people look around at the conditions of
this country — how Black Americans are treated, how communities are collapsing,
how Washington doesn’t work — and none of it makes sense. None of it inspires
faith, confidence. In none of it do they feel a part.
If you don’t breathe the spirit of the nation, if
you don’t have a fierce sense of belonging to each other, you’re not going to
sacrifice for the common good. We’re confronted with a succession of wicked
problems and it turns out we’re not even capable of putting on a friggin’ mask.
In the days leading up to this July 4 weekend,
I’ve been thinking about a scene in “Good Will Hunting.” We’ve seen Will
perform all these mathematical feats and flights of verbal brilliance, but the
Robin Williams character sits him down on a park bench and confronts him with a
rot at the core of his character. “I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent,
confident man; I see a cocky, scared” kid.
The last three years have been like that Robin
Williams speech for a whole nation — an intervention, a truth-telling. I had
hopes that the crisis would bring us together, but it’s made everything harder
and worse. And now I worry less about populism or radical wokeness than about a
pervasive loss of national faith.
What’s lurking, I hope, somewhere deep down
inside is our shared ferocious love for our common country and a vision for the
role America could play as the great pluralist beacon of the 21st century.
July 4 would be a good day to find that faith.
Posted inGovernment, Health, Politics|Comments Off on David Brooks: The national humiliation we need
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A farmers’ market in Athens, Ga., in May.Credit…Joshua L. Jones/Athens Banner-Herald, via Associated Press
By Veronica Penney
Greetings and welcome to Plastic Free July! This month, millions of people across 177 countries have pledged to cut down on the amount of plastic they use.
The movement started small almost a decade ago in Australia, but last year more than 250 million people pledged to participate. This year, the annual challenge arrives as plastic is making something of a comeback amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Efforts to ban plastic bags in cities across the United States have stalled and some grocery stores won’t allow customers to bring their own reusable bags. Many restaurants are open for takeout service only, and that means disposable containers and flatware. A lot of the masks people wear are laced with microplastics.
While health should be the primary concern during a pandemic, “Caring for the planet doesn’t mean we can’t care for ourselves,” said Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, who founded Plastic Free July in 2011 as a challenge for herself, her family and a few others. “We can do both at the same time.”
Even if this year is complicated, breaking free from our normal routines — whether by skipping the bottled water, cooking at home more or shopping at a farmers’ market — can present an opportunity, said Susan Clayton, chair of the psychology department at The College of Wooster in Ohio. “When you’re forced to think about your behaviors instead of behaving automatically on the basis of habit, that provides you an opportunity to think about how you behave.”
Group actions like Plastic Free July can also foster a sense of connectedness. “It makes you feel like you’re doing something good, in line with your values, and that’s good for self esteem,” Dr. Clayton said. “And it can make you feel more powerful. When it comes to global climate change, a lot of people feel so helpless.”
That was echoed by John P. Holdren, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: Even if climate change feels overwhelming, small actions can make a difference.
“It matters a great deal what people do as individuals to reduce their impact on the environment,” said Dr. Holdren, who also served as a science adviser to President Barack Obama, in an email.
The government plays an important role in regulation and clean energy research, Dr. Holdren said, yet personal decisions, from the appliances we purchase to the way we commute, can “add up to significant shares of pollution and impacts on global climate.”
Years ago, I met Dr. Dement and attended lectures given by him. He supported my efforts to move sleep apnea testing into the home, controversial at first but now standard practice. Locally he’s affectionately remembered for having jazz sessions on his houseboat on Lake Union. He opened the world’s first sleep laboratory at Stanford and became internationally famous for his research on dreams and REM sleep.
Dr. William Dement at his sleep research laboratory at Stanford University in 1982. Next to him was a device used to track electrical signals given off during sleep.Credit…Ed Souza/Stanford News Service
Dr. William Dement, whose introduction to the mysteries of slumber as a postgraduate student in the 1950s led him to become an eminent researcher of sleep disorders and to preach the benefits of a good night’s sleep, died on June 17 in Stanford, Calif. He was 91.
His son, Nick, a physician, said the cause was complications of a heart procedure.
Dr. Dement spent his working life as a popular professor in the department of psychiatry at Stanford University, where he started what is believed to be the world’s first successful sleep disorders clinic. He taught a class on sleep and dreams that drew as many as 1,200 students.
When he awakened dozing students with spritzes from a water gun, Dr. Dement gave them extra credit if they recovered and shouted, “Drowsiness is red alert!” — his rallying cry to make sleep deprivation a public health priority.
Drowsiness was the last step before falling asleep, he often said. Sleep deprivation put people at a higher risk of an accident on the road, diminished their productivity, increased the likelihood of their making mistakes, made them irritable and actually hurt their ability to fall asleep.
I was interviewed recently by Katy Sewall (formerly at KUOW and Town Hall) for her podcast “The Bitter Sweet Life.” We discussed the fears and disruption of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whatever his wobbles, Joe Biden has, from the start of his presidential campaign, got one thing exactly right: The 2020 election is a battle for the soul of America. That’s not just a pretty slogan. It’s the stomach-knotting truth — and it’s the frame he should use for choosing his running mate.
It’s why he should pick Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
She’s a paragon of the values that Donald Trump, for all his practice as a performer, can’t even pantomime. She’s best described by words that are musty relics in his venal and vainglorious circle: “sacrifice,” “honor,” “humility.” More than any of the many extraordinary women on Biden’s list of potential vice-presidential nominees, she’s the anti-Trump, the antidote to the ugliness he revels in and the cynicism he stokes.
Americans can feel good — no, wonderful — about voting for a ticket with Duckworth on it. And we’re beyond hungry for that. We’re starving.
That ache transcends all of the other variables that attend Biden’s deliberations as he appraises Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Val Demings and others: race, age, experience, exact position on the spectrum from progressive to moderate.
Duckworth, a former Army lieutenant colonel who lost both of her legs during combat duty in Iraq, is a choice that makes exquisite emotional and moral sense. Largely, but not entirely, because of that, she makes strategic sense, too.
For the uninitiated: Duckworth, 52, is in the fourth year of her first term in the Senate, before which she served two terms in the House. So unlike several of the other vice-presidential contenders, she has ascended to what is conventionally considered the right political altitude for this next step.
But it’s her life story that really makes her stand out. It’s the harrowing chapter in Iraq, yes, but also how she rebounded from it, how she talks about it. It’s her attitude. Her grace.
As my colleague Jennifer Steinhauer explained in a recent profile of Duckworth in The Times, she didn’t just serve in the Army: She became a helicopter pilot, which isn’t a job brimming with women. And as she flew near Baghdad one day in 2004, her Blackhawk was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. The explosion left her near death.
She later received a Purple Heart, but she bristles when she’s called a hero. That designation, she has often said, belongs to her co-pilot, Dan Milberg, and others who carried her from the wreckage and got her to safety.
She put it this way when, as part of a “Note to Self” feature on “CBS This Morning,” she read aloud a letter that she had written to the younger Tammy: “You’ll make it out alive completely because of the grit, sacrifice and outright heroism of others. You haven’t done anything to be worthy of their sacrifices, but these heroes will give you a second chance at life.” She paused there briefly, fighting back tears.
To Steinhauer she said, “I wake up every day thinking, ‘I am never going to make Dan regret saving my life.’” Her subsequent advocacy for veterans, her run for Congress, her election to the Senate: She casts all of it in terms of gratitude and an obligation to give back.
This is a quiz for
people who know a lot! These are not trick questions.
They are straight questions with straight answers…
1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators
nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.
2. What famous North American landmark is constantly
moving backward?
3 Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on
their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted
every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?
4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?
5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy,
with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle
is genuine; it hasn’t been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the
bottle?
6. Only three words in standard English begin with the
letters ‘ dw’ and they are all common words. Name two of them.
7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar.
Can you name at least half of them?
8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold
frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.
9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your
feet beginning with the letter ‘S.’
Answers To Quiz:
1. The one sport in which neither the spectators nor
the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends: Boxing.
2. North American landmark constantly moving backward: Niagara Falls … The
rim is worn down about two and a half feet each year because of the millions of
gallons of water that rush over it every minute.
3. Only two vegetables that can live to produce on
their own for several growing seasons: Asparagus and
rhubarb.
4. The fruit with its seeds on the outside:Strawberry.
5. How did the pear get inside the brandy bottle? It grew inside the
bottle. The bottles are placed over pear buds when they are small, and are
wired in place on the tree. The bottle is left in place for the entire growing
season. When the pears are ripe, they are snipped off at the stems.
6. Three English words beginning with dw: Dwarf, dwell and
dwindle…
7. Fourteen punctuation marks in English grammar: Period, comma, colon,
semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point,
quotation mark, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.
8. The only vegetable or fruit never sold frozen,
canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form but fresh: Lettuce.
9. Six or more things you can wear on your feet
beginning with ‘S’: Shoes, socks,
sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes, stockings, stilts.
PLEASE DO YOUR PART; Today is National Mental Health Day.
You can do your part by remembering to send this e-mail to at
least one genius challenged person. Okay, my job’s done!
Don’t send it back to me. I’ve already failed it
once.
Posted inEntertainment|Comments Off on Do you know a lot?
SEATTLE — Seattle’s police-free “autonomous zone” is coming to an end.
After two largely peaceful weeks, shootings over the last several days near the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area, CHOP for short, left a 19-year-old man dead and three others wounded. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on Monday that the city would retake the abandoned police precinct at the heart of the zone and wind down the occupation.
In its brief life, CHOP has reinforced Seattle’s reputation as a quirky left-coast bastion of strong coffee and strong progressive politics. Many white Seattleites like to think of their city that way too. But Seattle’s progressive appearance is deceiving.
It is a city and region with a long history of racism, of violent marginalization, and of pushing back against more radical movements for social change. It is, in short, much like the rest of America.
The global protests of the last few weeks have rightly generated the feeling that the world is at a turning point on redressing racial inequities. This moment has great possibilities, but the history of Seattle and other seemingly progressive places should make us realize that change is not that simple.
A 2008 report found that black people make up less than 10 percent of Seattle’s population but well over half of the drug-related arrests. The Police Department was placed under federal oversight in 2011 after incidents of excessive use of force on nonwhite residents. The public schools here are more segregated than they were three decades ago. Less than three weeks ago, the police sprayed protesters with tear gas on the same streets now given over to the teach-ins and community gardens of CHOP.
There is, to be sure, a radical streak in the city’s history. In 1919, Seattle shut down for five days as 60,000 unionized workers walked off the job in a general strike. In the 1930s, the Communist Party was so ascendant here that James Farley, a close adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, said that “there are 47 states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”
Huge anti-globalization marches greeted delegates to the World Trade Organization meeting here in 1999, causing a partial shutdown of the conference and such a ferociously violent police response that the chief was forced to retire.
But these movements often have been squelched by pushback from political leaders, even those who once were allies. Mayor Ole Hanson, who led Seattle during the 1919 general strike, once had been a labor-friendly moderate, but quickly turned into an implacable union foe.
“The Soviet government of Russia, duplicated here, was their plan,” he wrote in an essay published on the front page of The New York Times shortly after the strike’s end. Now, he assured anxious readers, “law and order are supreme in our city.”
Paul Schell, who was mayor during the 1999 protests, was less pugnacious in his analysis but remained reluctant to condemn the police. “I wish everybody had behaved themselves,” Mr. Schell later reflected. “And that it would have been more civilized.”
But the story here goes beyond political leadership. It involves deep, systemic racial inequalities baked into the fabric of this overwhelmingly white city.
“For most of its history,” James Gregory, a historian, observes, “Seattle was a segregated city, as committed to white supremacy as any location in America.”
Discriminatory mortgage lending and racially restrictive covenants limited Seattle’s nonwhite population to a single neighborhood, the Central District. Fair housing laws opened up new parts of the city and suburbs to minority homeowners and renters after the 1960s, but Seattle’s overwhelmingly single-family zoning limited the housing available to new buyers.
Such zoning has been remarkably difficult to change. The region’s homeowners may vote Democratic and plant racial solidarity signs in their front yards, but often resist higher densities that can increase the affordable housing supply.
Civil rights issues, particularly measures to combat anti-black racism, can be subsumed by broader social justice agendas. The city’s most prominent voice on the left in recent years is Kshama Sawant, a socialist elected to the City Council in 2013. She has focused much of her ire on Seattle’s high-tech employers and the politicians who support them.
As protests escalated in recent weeks, Ms. Sawant frustrated some allies by renewing her push for an “Amazon tax” on large employers to bolster homelessness initiatives. After the tax became a rallying cry at a recent Sawant-led demonstration at City Hall, one protester asked in exasperation, “I want to tax Amazon too, but can we please for once focus on black lives?”
Similar patterns have shaped politics and opportunity in other seemingly progressive cities. In Minneapolis, the poverty and police violence that killed George Floyd are legacies of a century of racial segregation, enforced by restrictive covenants, zoning and an Interstate highway that sliced through the city’s largest black neighborhood. A comparable mix of public policies and local prejudice have maintained segregation and inequality in Oakland and San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, Los Angeles and New York.
Nevertheless, this looks like a moment when Seattle and other cities like it might move past their histories of racism and exclusion.
Almost every day for weeks, Seattle has seen peaceful marches organized and led by black and minority activists but drawing heavily white crowds. Silent marches organized by Black Lives Matter brought nearly 85,000 people to the region’s streets one recent, rain-drenched Friday. “B.L.M.” and “Silence=Violence” signs have sprouted along the roads in affluent suburbs. Similar scenes are playing out across the country.
This extraordinary swell of activism is happening in Seattle for many of the same reasons it is happening elsewhere: horror at police violence, anger at Covid-19’s inequities, the pent-up energy created by months of lockdown. Another factor is the energy unleashed during the Trump era. From the Women’s Marches to March for Our Lives to Black Lives Matter, progressives have gotten familiar with inking up protest signs and putting on their marching shoes.
What comes next? Will Seattle and other cities embrace the changes necessary to end racist policing? Will citizens change their everyday lives to match the ideals that propelled them out into the streets?
Clearly something remarkable is blooming in this season of pandemic and protest. It is forcing our city to reckon with truths that can and should make white citizens like me uncomfortable, and that remind us just how much Seattle is like the rest of America: impossibly divided, and impossibly full of hope.
Margaret O’Mara (@margaretomara) is a professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.”
Thanks to Mary Jane F. – this is based on one developed by the Wellesley College Women’s Center some years ago.
A Preface to this Inventory….
Since the subject of
race has been brought again to front and center in our country and city, I
thought it might be interesting to look at this inventory that asks us about
the role our race plays in the experiences of our daily lives.
This ‘racial
inventory’ asks us to consider this. It is based on one developed at the
Wellesley Centers for Women by Peggy McIntosh. It is one way of beginning
to see the role of ‘race’ in our lives.
I’ve taken this inventory and my score is 108.
Perhaps you, also,
might be curious about the role ‘race’ plays in your life.
MJF
Ed note: This article is long, but an important reminder to keep active and to stay engaged during the pandemic restrictions.
From Aeon: Lucy Foulkes is an associate editor at Aeon+Psyche. Previously an academic psychologist, she is interested in social psychology and mental health. Her first book, about the science of mental illness, will be published in 2021.
When you feel low or fed up, it’s tempting to shut down and do very little. You might cancel activities and social events, and choose passive options instead, such as staying in bed or watching TV. It’s easy to understand why this happens: when you feel down or depressed, even simple tasks take a lot of effort and energy. It can also be distressing if things aren’t as enjoyable as they used to be.
Of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have had their activities and social events cancelled for them. For anyone experiencing depression or low mood, these restrictions will have compounded their desire to withdraw, and the prospect of coming out of lockdown might feel daunting. But, paradoxically, one of the most effective ways to improve a low mood is to do the very things you don’t feel like doing.
In 1973, the American behavioural psychologist Charles Ferster noticed that people who feel low tend to do less. In particular, they engage in fewer activities that bring them enjoyment or meaning. He argued that this drop in activity could be an important factor in understanding and treating depression. His observations provided the foundation for his behavioural model of depression, which still informs our understanding of the condition today.
According to behavioural approaches, depression is the result of a problematic cycle between reduced activity and low mood. The cycle begins when a person starts doing less, which means that they become more withdrawn and isolated. This, in turn, leads to fewer opportunities for positive experiences or distraction, exacerbating a person’s low mood. This makes the person even less motivated to try effortful, interesting activities, and the cycle continues.
This negative cycle doesn’t come out of nowhere; it often starts for a clear reason. The low mood seen in depression is often preceded by ‘a big context shift’, says Dean McMillan, professor of clinical psychology at Hull York Medical School and the University of York. This shift is caused by a significant change in circumstances, such as a divorce, a demanding period at work – or a global pandemic. The context shift means that the activities a person used to enjoy become difficult or impossible. For example, after a divorce, people might find it upsetting to go to places they used to enjoy with their partner, or a student under pressure at university might be too tired to try once-loved hobbies. Similarly, after the prolonged isolation and inactivity of lockdown, previously enjoyed routines might be challenging or unappealing.
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