Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Why Your Brain Treats Embarrassment as a Survival Threat You say something wrong in a meeting. The room goes quiet for half a second too long. Your face heats up, your stomach drops, your chest tighte...
Read article →As Someone Who Grew Up Online Here Is What I Wish I Had Known Earlier I had an internet connection and unsupervised time with it before I had the prefrontal development to use it wisely. This is not a...
Read article →As a Nonbinary Person in a Binary World Here Is the Tax on My Attention I want to describe something that is difficult to quantify but very easy to feel, which is the cognitive overhead of existing in...
Read article →As Someone With OCD the Intrusive Thoughts Are Not Who I Am People find out I have OCD and they think they understand what that means. They think it means I like things clean, or that I check the stov...
Read article →As a Woman Who Was Told She Was Too Sensitive Here Is What I Know Now I was told I was too sensitive the way other people are told they are too tall. As if it were a fixed fact about me, slightly inco...
Read article →Why You Feel Worse After Scrolling Instagram Even Though You Kept Scrolling You open Instagram to kill five minutes. Twenty minutes later you put the phone down and feel vaguely hollow — aware of a ga...
Read article →Why Multitasking Feels Productive and Destroys Your Output Anyway You are on a call, answering a message, and half-reading an article at the same time. It feels efficient. You are covering ground on m...
Read article →Why Embarrassing Memories Wake You Up at 3 AM Years Later You are about to fall asleep. And then, without invitation, your brain replays the time you called your teacher "Mom" in fifth grade. Or the t...
Read article →Why You Hate the Sound of Your Own Voice but Everyone Else Does Not Notice You press play on a voice memo and immediately want to delete it. The voice coming out of the speaker sounds wrong — too nasa...
Read article →Why You Bond With People You Endure Hard Things With There is a type of closeness that forms fast and runs deep — the kind that happens between people who go through something difficult together. A gr...
Read article →Why Procrastinating on One Thing Makes You Worse at Everything Else You have a task you are avoiding. It is sitting there, acknowledged but untouched. Meanwhile, you are getting other things done — an...
Read article →Why You Always Think of the Perfect Response Three Hours Too Late The French have a phrase for it: l'esprit de l'escalier. The wit of the staircase. The perfect thing you should have said arrives to y...
Read article →Why Horror Movies Make Some People Feel Better and Others Worse A horror movie ends. The credits roll. One person on the couch feels loose, almost relieved, ready for a snack and a normal conversation...
Read article →Why You Cannot Stop Doom Scrolling at 3 AM Even When You Want To You know you should put the phone down. You have known for the last 45 minutes. You have told yourself, multiple times, that this is th...
Read article →Why You Feel Personally Attacked When Someone Does Not Text Back You sent the message. You know they have read it. The three dots appeared and disappeared. Nothing has come back. And now something tha...
Read article →Why You Apologize for Things That Are Not Your Fault Someone bumps into you on the sidewalk and you say sorry. A meeting gets rescheduled because of a conflict you had nothing to do with and you apolo...
Read article →The Average American Is $22,000 in Debt Excluding Mortgages Strip out mortgages — the debt most people consider legitimate, structured, tied to an appreciating asset — and the average American househo...
Read article →Why Cutting Your Hair After a Breakup Actually Works Psychologically It is such a predictable move that it has become a cliché, which tends to make people feel slightly embarrassed about doing it. Som...
Read article →Only 14% of Americans Practice Any Form of Regular Mindfulness The word is everywhere. Apps, corporate wellness programs, hospital waiting rooms, school curricula, therapy practices. Mindfulness has s...
Read article →Therapy Has a 50% Dropout Rate and the Profession Is Starting to Ask Why Half of people who begin therapy do not finish it. Not half of people who consider therapy — half of the people who make an app...
Read article →The US Has the Highest Healthcare Spending in the World and Among the Worst Outcomes The United States spends approximately $12,500 per person per year on healthcare. The next highest spenders — Switz...
Read article →Americans Take More Psychiatric Medication Per Capita Than Almost Any Other Country The United States consumes antidepressants at roughly twice the rate of Canada and three times the rate of Germany,...
Read article →The Number Ninety-six. That's the average number of times Americans check their phones per day, according to research by Asurion. If you're awake for sixteen hours, that's one check every ten minutes,...
Read article →Social Media Companies Have Internal Research Showing Their Products Harm Teens This is no longer an allegation. It is a documented fact. Leaked internal research from Meta, published through whistleb...
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