I appreciate your response, even if it feels patronizing and over-generalized. I don't know how valuable it is to reduce human beings down to generations, or to call people names ("buttercup"?) when you're attempting to convince them of something.

I'm assuming you bring something into your psychotherapy practice other than facts. Healing requires some of the tough love you're suggesting, but also a bit of compassion and active human relating. I can tell you are frustrated with patients who this piece seems to echo, and it looks to me like I've triggered you.

I'm sorry you're not finding it easier to engage with patients of whatever generation you think I belong to in ways that they find healing and you find appropriately productive.

As a PhD myself with more than 20 rigorous, factual books under my belt, I am not one to shy away from rigor, facts, and sober analysis. But I am finding they don't always tell the entire story, or impact society as intended.

For instance, the political candidates who offer the most cogent facts and clear-minded solutions sometimes don't win. Does this mean we abandon facts? No. But we may need to incorporate something else.

What I'm saying in this piece is that the facts alone may not be the best way to get through the current crises. Just knowing and publicizing that the microplastics are in the mountaintops may not be enough to shift society. Rather, we may have to look at the underlying causes for the behaviors that lead to microplastics on the mountaintops. My book 'Survival of the Richest' explores one of the main mindsets contributing to our inability to confront externalities of our actions.

I share your frustration, but I'm working on finding less brittle ways of expressing it. You are on the right track, Jeffrey, I truly believe you are. But your judgmental and patronizing approach convince me all the more that we need to develop an emotional maturity in order to help people confront factual challenges, and that my recent turn from pure argumentation to something more nurturing is even more urgent.