In the Wake of Infinities

A friend of mine summed this book up jokingly as 'nothing will help you kick your ocd like asking 'and if i did this for six thousand years would that be interesting and cool of me or would i look like this guy [gestures at lucifer].'' I gotta admit this sentence is hard to beat. This novella is one of the most excoriating looks I've ever read of an aspect of trauma that no one wants to really discuss: it makes you a worse person, but not necessarily as in 'morally worse.' More humiliatingly than the evillest supervillain, I mean worse as in more boring, stupider, slower, duller, more conservative, more reactionary, more superficial, less tolerant, less able to engage in abstract and complex thought, less flexible, less passionate, less brave, less curious, less, less, less. Less alive. Less of a person. The more unfair and intractable cost of suffering trauma. 

There's no replicatable one-size-fits-all method to overcome it, and the book doesn't purport to give an answer to one. The method of overcoming it that worked here would be a dreadful idea for most people to follow. But the book does convey how urgent it is to overcome it, and conveys through its depiction, something of an idea of how to take the opportunity by the neck if by some chance it happens to start working.