Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
What Authenticity Was Before We Turned It Into Content Authenticity used to be a philosophical problem — Sartre and Heidegger arguing about bad faith and being-toward-death and what it means to live a...
Read article →The Ending That Never Quite Ends There is a scene that appears across a remarkable number of movies, therapy plotlines, and personal essays: the person finally gets the conversation they needed, hears...
Read article →The Assumption Built Into "Real" Therapy Ask most people what therapy looks like and they describe a physical room. A couch or two chairs. A box of tissues within reach. The therapist on one side of a...
Read article →The Grief Stages Model Was Always a Description, Not a Prescription Elisabeth Kübler-Ross never intended her five stages to be a roadmap. She developed them in 1969 by observing terminally ill patient...
Read article →Before You Diagnose the Person There is a specific rhetorical move that characterizes discussions of heavy internet use: the quick transition from description of behavior to description of person. Som...
Read article →The Smile and the Wound Underneath Toxic positivity has excellent branding. It arrives with good intentions, warm affect, and a vocabulary that sounds therapeutic without being therapy. "Everything ha...
Read article →What the Word Was Supposed to Mean The psychological concept of boundaries has a clear and useful clinical meaning: the recognition of where one person ends and another begins, the articulation of wha...
Read article →The Map That Became the Territory The introvert/extrovert distinction began as a theoretical concept in early-twentieth-century psychology, developed by Carl Jung as a way of describing general orient...
Read article →The Terms of the Debate The argument that AI empathy is fake is easy to make and largely correct. When a language model responds to an expression of grief with warmth and apparent concern, there is no...
Read article →The Story Everyone Agreed On The quiet quitting narrative arrived in the summer of 2022 with remarkable speed and spread with even more. Workers, it was reported, were no longer going above and beyond...
Read article →How a Useful Concept Became a Liability Red flags started as a reasonable piece of relationship shorthand. The idea: certain early behaviors predict later harm, and you are allowed to notice them and...
Read article →The Inner Critic Never Asked for Your Sexual History At some point — through a combination of religious messaging, pop culture, outdated sex education, and the comments sections of a thousand think pi...
Read article →From Brené Brown to Brand Asset Vulnerability was a concept with genuine clinical and relational meaning before it became a marketing category. In therapeutic contexts it described the willingness to...
Read article →What We Mean When We Say Productive The vocabulary of productivity has become so naturalized that we rarely stop to examine what it is actually saying. To be productive is to produce — to generate out...
Read article →The Experiment Began With a Question The question was whether my constant drive to improve myself was actually making me better, or whether it was functioning as a very sophisticated way to avoid bein...
Read article →What Happened Around Thirty-Five Something changes in the social world around the mid-thirties for most people, and it happens without announcement. The friend group that felt stable — built through c...
Read article →The Question the Research Actually Answers Whether attachment styles can change is a question that generates a lot of confident assertions in psychology-adjacent spaces, mostly in the direction of "no...
Read article →What Wanting to Be Seen Actually Means Seeking validation is frequently described as a weakness. Self-help culture has an extended vocabulary for it — needy, approval-seeking, externally motivated, em...
Read article →The Conversation That Keeps Circling Every few years the burnout conversation surges. A high-profile person describes their collapse. A journalist writes about the epidemic. Researchers publish preval...
Read article →When Sadness Became a Symptom There is a specific and telling moment in the history of modern psychology when grief was given a time limit. The DSM-5, published in 2013, removed the bereavement exclus...
Read article →What the Body Is Doing Loneliness registers in the body before it reaches consciousness. Heart rate variability drops. Cortisol levels rise. Sleep architecture fragments — the restorative deep sleep s...
Read article →Two Different Things We Conflate People frequently seek from romantic partners what they actually need from a broader social network, and the partner frequently cannot provide it, and both people end...
Read article →When Therapy Becomes an Identity and Stops Being a Tool Something has shifted in how therapy is talked about in particular cultural circles. What was once a private practice — useful, sometimes transf...
Read article →A Generation Raised on the Wreckage The statistics are delivered with a kind of exhausted regularity now. Gen Z reports higher rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness than any previously measured...
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