Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
There is a particular kind of unhappiness that does not announce itself cleanly. It is the unhappiness of doing work you love — genuinely love — and still feeling like something is missing. The passio...
Read article →I have kept a journal most of my adult life, and I want to be honest with you about what that means and what it does not mean before I make the case for it. It does not mean I write every day. It does...
Read article →I have a complicated relationship with personality typing. Not because the frameworks are useless — some of them are genuinely illuminating — but because of what happens to them once people get hold o...
Read article →The question of how meaning survives tragedy is not an abstract philosophical puzzle. It is the question that confronts anyone who has lost something central to their life — a person, a capacity, a fu...
Read article →Moving back in with your parents as an adult is one of those experiences that resists simple description. It is not quite failure — though it can feel that way. It is not quite comfort — though there...
Read article →I want to tell you about an exercise that I have used with clients for years, not because it is complicated or counterintuitive, but because it reliably produces something that more elaborate framewor...
Read article →People who adopt later in life are often asked some version of the same question, sometimes with genuine curiosity and sometimes with a skepticism they are supposed to pretend they cannot hear: Why no...
Read article →Nobody tells you about the grief. When you announce that you are downsizing — moving from the four-bedroom house to a two-bedroom condo, or from the two-bedroom apartment to the studio — people respon...
Read article →I was thirty-one when I walked into my first undergraduate lecture. The professor was younger than me by several years. The students filing in around me were wearing the easy confidence of people for...
Read article →There is a particular experience that comes with growing up between two cultures that people who've lived it often struggle to put into words for those who haven't. You know both worlds well enough to...
Read article →I have covered a lot of stories about relationships, and the first year of marriage is one I keep returning to — not because it is the most dramatic, but because it is the most quietly consequential....
Read article →The stepparent identity is one of the least-mapped territories in contemporary family life. There are clear cultural scripts for biological parents — imperfect, contested, but present. There are even...
Read article →There is a particular kind of surprise that comes when something you have anticipated for years finally arrives and turns out to be nothing like what you imagined. Becoming a grandparent is often that...
Read article →Nobody tells you that the hardest part of the first year after divorce might not be the grief. The grief you expected. The grief has a name, and it shows up on schedule, and everyone around you knows...
Read article →Adolescence is when most people first begin to feel the weight of the question that will follow them for the rest of their lives: Who am I, actually? Erik Erikson placed ego identity formation at the...
Read article →When adult children move back home, the floor plan stays the same but everything else shifts. The rooms are familiar, the coffee maker is where it always was, and yet something fundamental about the h...
Read article →I have spoken with dozens of people who took a career break — for a child, for a parent, for their own health, for a partner's relocation — and what strikes me most is how consistent their experience...
Read article →The version of yourself you present at work is probably somewhat different from the version you are with close friends, which is probably different again from who you are in your family of origin. Mos...
Read article →There is a reckoning that waits at the end of every life, and Erik Erikson had the nerve to put it at the center of his developmental framework. The final stage he described — Ego Integrity versus Des...
Read article →Identity doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in a family that spoke a particular language, kept particular customs, told particular stories about who its people were. For many people, the influence...
Read article →Some concepts resist translation not because they are vague but because they are precise in ways that another language lacks the structure to hold. Two-Spirit is one of those concepts. When Western me...
Read article →Erik Erikson gave us one of the most useful maps of human development ever put to paper, and one of the concepts on that map — role confusion — describes something that teenagers themselves often don'...
Read article →There is a question that waits for people somewhere in their forties or fifties, and it doesn't ask politely. It arrives in quiet moments and in the middle of the night, often without a clear precipit...
Read article →The most common thing I hear when people first encounter asexuality as a concept is some version of "but everyone feels attraction." They don't mean it cruelly. They're just reporting what their own e...
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