Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode, usually only available to members.

These episodes are comprised of our crew of researchers, Amanda and myself all getting

together for a roundtable discussion on topics that we find interesting.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can know what all the fuss is about.

We do have some pretty good and interesting articles that we're diving right into.

So we have no time for nonsense.

The first one is titled, Self Love is Making Us Lonely.

This is from Time.

And the article is about the social phenomenon of, in recent years, it's really ramped up.

A lot of talk about the importance of self-love, self-care, all those kinds of things,

mental health, take care of yourself, you can't do anything else until you're taking care of yourself.

All of that is good.

And then capitalism got a hold of it and that is always bad.

I mean, I guess there might be some exceptions, but if you're going to guess one way or the other,

it's probably going to be bad.

And so, just from early on in the article, it says,

to navigate the harsh terrain of radical individualism, self-love has emerged as our tool for survival.

But it can come at a cost, especially when the type of self-love we turn to is the kind that

has been manipulated by corporate ad campaigns and social media.

In its commodified form, self-love is not really self-love at all.

Instead, it's more like self-sabotage, convincing us to hyper-focus on ourselves

...