"At Go Get 'Em, Tiger, the coffee shop in my Los Angeles neighborhood, everyone looks a little stooped, as if the air itself were heavy. The name alone vibrates with ambition: Go get 'em, tiger. The command is baked right into the signage. Every time you step inside, you are already being told to strive, to push, to chase. Inside, people stand in line gazing into pastry cases while their shoulders slump beneath invisible weight."
"That morning, watching the tremor of caffeinated hands, I wondered what invisible creature each person might be carrying. Some hybrid of hope and worry, ambition and fear. A beast on the shoulder, whispering: Keep going, work harder, you are almost there. A few days later, on my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, where my co-host Emily and I search out unusual words, I learned there is a name for such a creature: Chimera."
A Los Angeles coffee shop radiates pervasive private pressure, with patrons stooped, shoulders slumped, and clutching cortados while halos of laptop glow frame jittery concentration. An ambient hum rises from tables: the script, the pitch, the pilot, the memoir, the dream, and a gravity of expectation settles like steam. Each person carries an invisible chimera — a hybrid of hope and worry, ambition and fear — urging relentless effort with whispers of 'keep going' and 'you are almost there.' The word chimera, rooted in a Greek fire-breathing hybrid, evolved in French (chimère) to mean a compelling, shimmering illusion: a desire that may not exist as imagined. A nineteenth-century Laplace anecdote is introduced.
Read at Psychology Today
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