If you’ve ever found yourself in a free-fall existential crisis, convinced the universe is winking at you but you can’t tell if it’s in amusement or pity, then Magnolia (1999) is your movie.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 epic is not just a film—it’s a fevered prayer, a confession, a reckoning with karma, and a cosmic parable disguised as a three-hour emotional car crash.

And, yes, it still holds up. If anything, it feels even more vital now, in a world that’s somehow both more connected and more lost.

Most people remember Magnolia for its raw performances, its overlapping narratives, its aching loneliness.

But underneath all that, the film is bursting with hidden spiritual metaphors, biblical allusions, and quiet moments of grace that demand revisiting.

If you strip it down to its bones, it’s a story about forgiveness, divine intervention, and whether or not we’re capable of changing before it’s too late.

When American Beauty (1999) first hit theaters, it was hailed as a revelation—an artful, devastating critique of suburban malaise wrapped in a darkly comedic, visually stunning package.

It won five Academy Awards, which is Hollywood’s way of saying, “We swear this was deep.”

But 25 years later, does the film still make us gasp with existential dread, or is it just another relic from an era when men in crisis were somehow poetic instead of just sad?

Let’s take another look at American Beauty, a film that asks big, important questions, like: Is happiness a lie? Are roses inherently creepy? And should we all quit our jobs and start smoking weed in our garages?

Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (1973) is one of those books that doesn’t just explain something—it rearranges the furniture of your mind.

It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of what makes us human: our unique awareness that one day we will die, and our desperate, often absurd attempts to pretend otherwise.

According to Becker, everything from religion to nationalism, from consumerism to social media posturing, is an elaborate defense against the horror of our mortality.

It’s a bold claim, and like all bold claims, it is both brilliant and flawed.

Some readers find it revelatory, a skeleton key to human nature.

Others find it reductionist, even nihilistic. And yet, whether you embrace or resist Becker’s conclusions, one thing is certain: Denial of Death forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths lurking beneath our daily distractions.

So, what makes this book a masterpiece? Where does it go too far? And why, half a century later, does it still demand our attention?

It’s 2 a.m., the hospital chair is making a permanent dent in your spine, and the beeping machines have become the soundtrack of your life.

And somewhere in the haze of grief, exhaustion, and medically-induced small talk, the thought creeps in: If God is real, why does my kid have cancer?

Not exactly the kind of question that gets answered neatly in a Sunday sermon.

No tidy clichés, no Hallmark-card reassurances. Just a blunt, stomach-churning silence where certainty used to be.

Isaac Asimov once remarked that the most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."

And what could be funnier than the fact that our brains—those magnificent squishy machines—respond to beauty in music with an intricate dance of connectivity, while responding to non-beautiful music with the neural equivalent of a polite shrug?

A recent study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts sought to decode what happens in the brain when we experience musical beauty.

Researchers Ruijiao Dai, Petri Toiviainen, Peter Vuust, Thomas Jacobsen, and Elvira Brattico used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how different regions of the brain communicate when we hear music that moves us.

Their findings suggest that when a piece of music is perceived as beautiful, brain regions responsible for reward and visual processing engage in a unique synchrony, while music perceived as "meh" keeps the brain stuck in more primitive auditory processing loops.

Simone Weil, the philosopher, mystic, and social activist, offers profound insights that, when applied to family therapy, create a value system centered on radical attention, humility, truth, and the sacredness of human relationships.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

Weil’s thought challenges modern notions of power and self-interest, replacing them with a call to self-emptying love (décréation) and an intense, non-possessive regard for others.

What emerges is a family therapy philosophy that prioritizes attention over control, truth over comfort, and suffering as a site of meaning rather than pathology.

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a human tuning fork, a highly sensitive person, highly neurodivergent, vibrating with every sorrow of the world.

She lived like a woman who read the Gospels and said, "Alright, let's see if this works," and then decided to find out the hard way.

Was she a philosopher, a mystic, or a secular saint?

All three. Or maybe none.

Titles didn’t interest her. Only truth did. Simone lived her 34 years with a saintly, almost asinine integrity.

So, it turns out cats have attachment styles. Just like dogs. Just like babies. Just like you. Just like me.

This is unsettling news for a few reasons.

First, it suggests that your cat might actually care about you—or not. Second, it means science has taken another bold step in proving that nothing is special, not even our relationships with our pets.

And third, it means some poor researcher spent their days filming cats to confirm what any cat owner could have told them over a glass of wine: some cats like you, some cats tolerate you, and some cats would burn your house down if they had opposable thumbs.

Love is a drug.

Not in the poetic, “You’re my addiction, baby” way.

In the literal, neurobiological sense.

Your brain, right now, is running on an attachment-based dopamine economy—one that was programmed by your earliest relationships.

• If love was inconsistent, your brain learned to crave the highs and lows.

• If love was unavailable, your brain learned that wanting is safer than having.

• If love was painful, your brain wired itself to expect suffering.

This is not a metaphor.

This is dopaminergic conditioning.

And if you don’t reprogram your brain’s reward system, you will keep chasing the same kind of relationships over and over—no matter how much therapy you do.

So let’s talk about it.

You did it.

You set the boundary. You said no. You left the toxic relationship. You stepped out of the family’s preordained emotional contract.

And now?

Now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your hands are sweating. Your heart is racing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted but wired. Every cell in your body is screaming:

• Go back.

• Fix it.

• Apologize.

• Do whatever it takes to restore balance.

This is not a sign you made the wrong decision.You set the boundary. You said no. You left the toxic relationship. You stepped out of the family’s preordained emotional contract.

And now?

Now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your hands are sweating. Your heart is racing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted but wired. Every cell in your body is screaming:

• Go back.

• Fix it.

• Apologize.

• Do whatever it takes to restore balance.

This is not a sign you made the wrong decision.

This is your nervous system recalibrating after a lifetime of being programmed for survival.

If you want to test your commitment to personal growth, tell your family you’re in therapy.

Watch their faces.

• Your mother may will get defensive, even though you never mentioned her.

• Your father may make a sarcastic joke about "overanalyzing everything."

• Your sibling might say, "But your childhood wasn’t that bad."

And you?

You might start doubting yourself.

• Am I making too big of a deal out of things?

• Maybe I should keep the peace instead of stirring things up.

• Am I the problem?

No, you are not.

But you have violated a sacred rule:

You have disrupted the family’s homeostasis—the invisible force that keeps everyone locked in their roles, no matter how much it hurts them.

And the system?

It will fight to restore order.

Most theories in psychoanalysis focus on what we remember, what we repress, or what we try to forget. But Christopher Bollas took a different approach.

He asked:

• What about the things we know, but have never consciously thought about?

• What about the truths that shape our emotions and behaviors, even though they have never been fully articulated?

• What happens to knowledge that is never hidden—but is also never spoken?

This led him to one of the most influential yet under-discussed ideas in modern psychoanalysis: the unthought known—a concept that helps explain intergenerational trauma, family dynamics, and the silent forces that shape our lives.

To fully grasp the power of this idea, we need to go back through the history of psychoanalysis and understand how Bollas built on, challenged, and expanded the theories of his predecessors.