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Victress Hitchcock's avatar

As another enneagram 4, reading this piece felt like reading my own mind. After years of trying to figure myself out, pursuing happiness through self reflection, I am realizing more and more that sweeping my porch in the morning and watching the squirrels chase each other around the cottonwood tree is infinitely more satisfying.

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Haley Hodges's avatar

Evocative read full of bright and instructive moments---thank you Sarah and Inkwell!

Still, I can't help but wonder--having lived long in the age of incessant self-broadcasting AND finger-wagging reactions against it--if we're missing the point when we chastise specific groups "the self-obsessed hot girls" (even in the abstract)

I've become increasingly curious about proactive antidotes to our social-media maladies--- what might it mean, for example, to cultivate and encourage deep engagement with the world/others---the outward gaze---instead of defaulting to more lamentation about the proliferation of new-age digital egoism and its (already well-documented) harms?

Awareness that constant self-indulgence is problematic and reaffirmations that only God can rightly identify/heal our wounds hasn't done much to reverse the cultural trends.

How might this conversation be changed by questions like 'how do we tempt (shift, coax, delight??) the gaze out (from the navel) into the world we are called to love, or up to the God we are called to worship?

I lovedddd the invitation to think of our brokenness as a portal to divine communion and the nod to Arthur C. Brooks, one of our finest--and Catholic, if you didn't know!

Not to be an out-and-out contrarian, but when my friends post a 12/10 selfie, I'm 'yasss kweeen-ing' with the best of them. Lol.

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