Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
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...
Read article →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...
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