Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The term "third culture kid" was coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950s to describe children raised in a culture other than their parents' or passport country. Useem was looking at the chi...
Read article →Pregnancy is discussed in our culture primarily as a physical event — the growing body, the medical appointments, the moment of birth. What receives considerably less attention is the identity transfo...
Read article →There is a specific experience of getting dressed in the morning that feels fundamentally different depending on how free you feel to present yourself as you actually are. For many people — queer peop...
Read article →There is a phenomenon that receives far less attention than it deserves: the experience of losing weight and finding that the mirror has not caught up. People who have made significant changes to thei...
Read article →There is a particular cruelty to the way chronic illness intersects with identity. The illness itself is difficult enough — the symptoms, the medical system, the practical constraints, the uncertainty...
Read article →Menopause is one of the most significant transitions in a woman's life, and it is also one of the most culturally mishandled. The predominant narrative — when there is one at all — frames it as a medi...
Read article →There is a particular kind of change that happens when you stop accidentally encountering difficulty and start seeking it on purpose. The distinction matters more than it might initially seem. Acciden...
Read article →Body dysmorphic disorder lives in public consciousness primarily through its association with eating disorders and concerns about weight. This is understandable — the overlap is real and the eating di...
Read article →There is a particular quality to the moment when you realize your body has changed in ways you did not choose and cannot reverse. It might be gradual — the accumulation of a decade's slowing, the soft...
Read article →The ability to reframe setbacks — to see them differently without lying to yourself about what happened — is genuinely one of the most consequential cognitive skills a person can develop. It shows up...
Read article →The dominant narrative in mainstream culture about disability is still, despite decades of disability rights activism and scholarship, predominantly structured around tragedy, limitation, and overcomi...
Read article →Learned helplessness is one of those psychological concepts that explains more about human behavior than its name initially suggests. Most people associate it with Martin Seligman's famous experiments...
Read article →Angela Duckworth's concept of grit — the combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals — became one of the most discussed ideas in psychology after her 2013 TED talk and subsequent book....
Read article →Comfort zone expansion has become one of those phrases that sounds motivating until you examine what it actually means in practice. The self-help version tends to go like this: your comfort zone is ba...
Read article →Post-traumatic growth is a concept that has moved from academic psychology into mainstream culture at a speed that has outpaced careful thinking about what it actually means. The basic idea — that peo...
Read article →Self-efficacy is one of the most useful concepts in psychology for understanding why people with similar abilities perform so differently — and why confidence that feels real and grounded differs so f...
Read article →I have spent years sitting with people inside their failures — the ones they replay at night, the ones they have built elaborate avoidance structures around, the ones they mention almost in passing be...
Read article →Something shifts in how you relate to hobbies when you grow up. When you are a child, play is the default mode of existence. When you are an adult, it becomes something you have to justify. You have t...
Read article →Resilience is one of those concepts that gets invoked constantly and examined rarely. It shows up in job descriptions, school mission statements, and therapy goals, usually meaning something like "the...
Read article →The word Ikigai is one of those Japanese concepts that travels badly. Not because the original idea is too culturally specific to translate, but because the version that circulates in English-language...
Read article →The distinction between who you authentically are and who you have learned to be in order to survive is one of the more important ones in psychology, and also one of the most difficult to act on. Not...
Read article →The clients who come to me for second act career work are not usually in crisis in the conventional sense. They have not been fired. They are not broke. They have built careers — real ones, often impr...
Read article →Most of the ways we are taught to understand ourselves run through deficiency. The therapy intake form asks what is wrong. The performance review identifies areas for improvement. The inner critic hel...
Read article →Fixed versus growth mindset has become one of the most repeated frameworks in self-help, education, and corporate culture. Carol Dweck's research out of Stanford is cited everywhere, often stripped do...
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