Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
What Trauma Does to the Architecture of Connection There is a specific way that trauma disrupts not just an individual's sense of safety but their fundamental relational capacity. Interpersonal trauma...
Read article →What a Breakup Actually Does to the Nervous System Trust is not primarily an intellectual position. When you trust a partner, the brain's threat-detection circuitry is downregulated in their presence...
Read article →When my husband died, I lost my person. That phrase gets used a lot and it sounds simple, but what it actually means is that I lost the only human being on earth to whom I could say anything — the unf...
Read article →Why Saying No Is So Hard for People Who Are Good at Everything Else There is a particular profile of person for whom assertiveness is the last frontier of personal development. They are good at their...
Read article →The Wrong Question About Multiple Selves The moment someone mentions that they are quite different in different contexts — more reserved at work, more playful with close friends, more intellectually e...
Read article →Why Failure Feels So Much Worse Than It Is The anticipation of failure in front of others activates a specific and fairly awful constellation of feelings: the preemptive embarrassment, the imagined ex...
Read article →The Weight of the Road Not Taken At some point in most people's adult lives, there is a version of this thought: what if I had gone the other way? The academic who chose safety over the artist's life....
Read article →Why Relationship Structure Is More Complicated Than We Admit The assumption embedded in most mainstream relationship culture is that the question of whether to be monogamous or not was settled for you...
Read article →The Alter Ego as a Psychological Tool, Not a Performance When Beyoncé describes Sasha Fierce as the persona she adopts on stage — bolder, more aggressive, less encumbered by the insecurities of the pr...
Read article →When the Version of You That Is Shown Is Never the Whole Thing Most people learn fairly early which aspects of themselves are welcome in which rooms. The professional self, the family self, the social...
Read article →What the Metaverse Actually Promised and Why It Fell Short The pitch was compelling. A fully realized virtual world where you could move through digital space with an embodied avatar, encounter other...
Read article →The Thing That Separates the Confident From Everyone Else Watch closely the people in your life who seem most self-assured in public settings — in meetings, at social events, in moments of conflict or...
Read article →Consent, Safety, and Exploration: The Ethics of Virtual Experimentation Philosophy rarely gets the last word in technology debates, but it tends to ask the questions everyone else has to answer eventu...
Read article →Why Safe Experimentation Is the Hidden Engine of Human Growth There is a particular kind of courage required to try something you might fail at, especially when the stakes involve your sense of self....
Read article →The Thing Nobody Tells You About Being Vulnerable Vulnerability gets a lot of press these days. Books, TED talks, and therapists regularly remind us that it is the path to authentic connection, deeper...
Read article →The Conversation We Are Not Having About Curiosity and Sexuality There is a persistent mismatch in how our culture handles sexual curiosity. On one hand, we broadly accept the idea that people are com...
Read article →What It Actually Means to Try On a Different Way of Being For most of human history, personality was assumed to be fixed. You were the type of person you were, and that was more or less that. The last...
Read article →From Shy to Bold: Practicing Confidence in Virtual Scenarios Shyness is one of the most misunderstood qualities in popular psychology. It is routinely conflated with introversion, which is a different...
Read article →What a Development Sandbox Actually Means for Your Life Software developers have always had sandboxes — isolated testing environments where they can write messy code, break things repeatedly, and iter...
Read article →Your Virtual Life as a Sketchbook for Your Real One My grandmother kept actual sketchbooks — not because she was a visual artist, though she had some talent, but because she said she needed somewhere...
Read article →The AI Experiment: Running 10 Social Experiments in One Evening When behavioral researchers want to understand how small changes in presentation or communication affect social outcomes, they run contr...
Read article →The Courage to Try: How AI Lowers the Barrier to Self-Exploration Let me be direct about something that tends to get buried in the softer versions of this conversation: most people do not explore them...
Read article →Playing With Archetypes: Hero, Villain, Lover — AI Lets You Try Them All Clinical psychology has borrowed heavily from analytical theory in ways that are more empirically grounded than critics of the...
Read article →What Your Ideal Self Looks Like: Using AI to Map the Gap I have been thinking about the ideal self for as long as I can remember — not in a self-help motivational sense, but in the genuine philosophic...
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