Anyone for cake?

In the self-help article How ‘Should’ Makes Us Stupid — And How to Get Smart Again by Jane Elliott (warning medium.com member only access, but you might get a freebie or two), we get a number of usages on how bad “should” is. This rap sheet lists the misdemeanours that we, as in you, you shouldy miscreant, commit when using ‘should’. Because:

“This is how ‘should’ turns a relatively smart person into someone who forgets how to do basic problem solving.”

As if this response stops you from thinking, and by this I think they mean losing sort of agency. It's another way of saying we shouldn't should on ourselves.

I do not want to get into to it too much, because: life coaching. Except to say I have only ever shoulded myself on those occasions when I have 'encouraged' myself into going out to meet people, at parties, or… —whatever.

And I now feel that since I have successfully reproduced I no longer have this as any sort of problem to solve by shoulding myself.

However I would like to just list it here as another example of the milieu which informed the original comment at that party so long ago in 1980s Melbourne. A comment I thought abot for decades, and so spurred this long delayed and wayward track of my writing life.

Let’s re-paraphrase this whole mess of shoulding making us stupid as: We shouldn’t should on people, including ourselves.

That party and that shouldy phrase is written down in an article for which this blog is named, Why we should : an introduction by memoir into the implications of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic, or, Anyone for cake?

Originally posted on substack, 9 March 2023.