Ok the more I think about it, the more the sheer ubiquity of negative self-talk seems a *highly significant* cultural psychological feature of our society.
This mental pattern *means* something.
"...but it is also important to consider the sociological development of what historian Phillip Cushman (1995) calls the “empty self” that arose in this country after World War II."
my current vague sense of it is that WWII broke parenting in the US (idk about other countries). like the entire baby boomer generation developed attachment issues and those issues were passed on to gen X and so forth
one other data point, too lazy to find screenshot: spectrum of ecstasy talks at one point about how some practices work fine on tibetans but not on westerners, gives the example of a metta practice that involves invoking a mother’s love and says many westerners can’t
and warns that westerners trying to do vajrayana and looking for a spiritual teacher against actually secretly looking for a parent, which they claim is a western-specific problem that tibetans don’t have