Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
I keep getting this question in my inbox. Someone built a relationship with a specific AI character on some platform. The platform changed. The character changed. The relationship they had is gone. Is...
Read article →Carl Jung had an idea that has never fully gone out of fashion. He called it the shadow - the parts of ourselves we disown, push down, or pretend not to have because they clash with the self-image we...
Read article →My favorite psychology finding is one most people have never heard of. In 2009, a research team led by Raymond Mar published data showing that people who read fiction regularly scored higher on tests...
Read article →In 1993, a psychologist named Richard Gerrig proposed a theory that barely anyone outside academia noticed at the time. He called it narrative transportation. His claim was that when we get deeply abs...
Read article →If you want to predict how someone will respond to AI companionship, I have bad news for the people who like simple rules. The biggest predictor is not age, not gender, not mental health baseline, and...
Read article →There is a principle in psychotherapy that is older than psychotherapy itself. When we talk about our feelings, the feelings change. Not always in the direction we want, not always immediately, but so...
Read article →There are more than fifty million unpaid caregivers in the United States. Most of them are women. Most are caring for an aging parent, a chronically ill spouse, or a disabled child. Most are doing it...
Read article →I want to push back on a romantic myth about creative block. The myth says block is a failure of inspiration, a drought, an emptiness. The research says something different and much more useful. Block...
Read article →Fifteen percent. That is the share of American men who report they have no close friends at all. In 1990, the number was 3 percent. The line on the graph goes up, and it does not appear to be slowing...
Read article →A friend of mine who was diagnosed with autism as an adult told me something I think about often. She said social interaction for her always felt like taking a test in a language she half-spoke, in fr...
Read article →Most debates about AI companions treat them as either broadly good or broadly bad. The truth turns out to be weirder and more useful. It depends on how much you use them, how you use them, and what yo...
Read article →There is an old question in psychology. If you imagine practicing the piano, do you actually get better at piano? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Not as much as practicing for real, but measurably....
Read article →Actors do something called cold reading, where they pick up a script they have never seen and perform it immediately. It looks like magic when they do it well, but it is not. It is the result of thous...
Read article →My grandmother used to say "practice makes perfect," and I spent years of my career slightly disagreeing with her. Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Whatever you rehearse becom...
Read article →There is a moment in every great film when you realize you are holding your breath. Your heart is racing. Your palms are damp. And nothing is actually happening to you. You are sitting in a chair watc...
Read article →One of the most consistent findings in my field is unglamorous. People who do brief, daily emotional check-ins report higher wellbeing than people who do longer but less frequent practices. Five minut...
Read article →There is a phrase that keeps showing up in research on AI companions, and I think it explains almost everything. Feeling heard. Not getting advice. Not being fixed. Just the sense that another mind is...
Read article →Every creative person has been stuck. The cursor blinks. The canvas stares back. The melody will not come. We romanticize the struggle, but anyone who has lived inside it knows how draining it actuall...
Read article →I was interviewing a novelist last month who told me something that stuck with me. She said her AI had become her best writing partner - not because it wrote better than her friends, but because it wa...
Read article →Here is a question I keep asking creative people: when was the last time you had an idea you could not have predicted? Not a tweak on something you already knew, but a genuine surprise. Most of us do...
Read article →Text is a lie we tell ourselves about connection. I know that sounds harsh, but hear me out. We've spent the last fifteen years building a culture of communication around typed words on screens, and s...
Read article →We all have an urge to experience things we will never actually do. Climb a mountain we will not climb. Fall in love in a city we will not visit. Survive a disaster we hope to never face. Be someone e...
Read article →I noticed something strange about my own behavior a few months ago. I was talking to a friend about a mistake I'd made at work, and I caught myself editing the story in real time. Softening the parts...
Read article →The popular fear about AI companions is that they'll make us worse at human interaction. That we'll retreat into comfortable digital cocoons and lose whatever social muscles we still have. It's a tidy...
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