I read an article where the author mentioned two powerful human motivations: the need to belong and the need to reduce uncertainty. He was using these motivations to explain why so many young white liberals are voting for communist/socialistic candidates. Apparently, that party gives them the identity and the certainty they need without their ever having to look beyond the belonging to perhaps a different truth than what they “feel” is true. If that’s the case, I can understand the young falling for the fallacy of getting everything for free, but apparently, in a few of the primaries where the socialists have won, even older white liberals have voted for the so-called socialist.
This need to belong is also the reason (rather a reason) why the leftist media so gleefully touts the avalanche of new people joining that party (the membership stands at little over 100,000 which is not much of an avalanche, and yet their wins make it seem so). The reason this is so damaging is that people want to feel as if they are winners, so they jump where they think the winners are, especially if those winners promise free everything. It explains, too, why people don’t always vote for who they really want — they vote for who they think will win. I suppose that’s part of the need for certainty and belonging. If the person they vote for wins, it validates them. If the person loses, it leaves them feeling uncertain about themselves.
You’d think that after a certain age, people would have learned to live with both a feeling of not belonging and a sense of uncertainty, but apparently not. For me, that acceptance came during my years of grief after Jeff died. Since he was my home, and since we did everything together, being left alone catapulted me into free fall, not knowing who I was, where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to be doing. I still don’t know any of those things, and despite my being settled in my own home, I still feel uncertain and alienated at times. Working in a garden helps with accepting that reality, where every day is a lesson in unbelonging (a garden belongs to itself; a gardener is merely a caretaker since so much is beyond human control) and a lesson in uncertainty (there is no guarantee that a seed will grow, that a plant will survive the weather conditions, that hordes of insects won’t come to feast).
I also see another powerful human motivation at play in the political arena — a need to be agreed with. If you belong to a group that validates you, you never have to deal with unbelonging, uncertainly, or being disagreed with. Although I have come to an accommodation with the first two motivations for human behavior, the third is something I still struggle with. Most of what I know has come from serious study, and it tends to irk me when people just wave that off because they “feel” differently, but it’s their prerogative to feel however they want based on their own experiences. I am learning (trying to learn) to simply let their disagreement pass me by, realizing that that what others think has nothing to do with me, but feeling it inside where it counts is something else.
Still, I wish that those understandable motivations aren’t leading so many people toward an economic policy that has never worked before and certainly can’t work today, because if it ever succeeds, then what they think will matter tremendously, no matter what I think.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
Bertram's Blog 
Not a Private Forum
March 18, 2026 — Pat BertramI got an email from a woman who had left an emotionally raw comment on one of my grief posts. She had been hurting and wanted understanding as so many grievers do. But then as the rawness passed, she got on with her life. She googled herself to see what prospective employers would see, and she was shocked that the comment she left here on this blog showed up in search results. She said she thought this was a private forum otherwise she would never have responded to my post. She asked me to remove her comment, which I did.
I didn’t know comments on blogs could show up on search results. This blog is a rather small cubbyhole — pinhole, actually — in the vastness of the internet, so it never occurred to me that comments were searchable. (Especially since, come to think of it, few people leave their names, and those who do usually want to be recognized.) That this blog itself is searchable is all to the good — searching for help with grief is the major reason that people find me.
I only mention this to warn you not to put anything in a comment you don’t want strangers to find. Of course, by now, most of us know that there is no privacy online anymore, if, in fact, there ever was. Knowing this, there are a few things I never post here — my birthday, my house address, my email address, and probably a hundred other things I am so used to keeping private that I don’t remember. Other than those personal privacy issues (I’ve had a few blog stalkers over the years, and I certainly didn’t want any of them showing up at my doorstep!), my life is an open book. Actually, my life being an open book is why I’ve been careful about those privacy issues. I don’t want all the dots to be connected by people I don’t want connecting the dots.
Quite frankly, sometimes it makes me nervous about how much of myself is on here, especially all the things I wrote about during my grief years. As someone once told me shortly after I started telling a truth few wanted to admit, “It’s time to take off the mantle of grief,” but I never did.
So far, when I’ve found myself feeling nervous about any previous posts, I’ve managed not to delete them. And I won’t. But that means, your comments are there, too.
Anyway, I hope this doesn’t deter you from leaving comments. I cherish every response I get.
***
Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.