Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Office Was Built for Someone Else I spent four years in open-plan offices before the pandemic sent everyone home. During those four years, I had exactly two stretches of time where I felt like I w...
Read article →The Part That Doesn't Make the Highlights The clip goes viral. Sixteen hundred APM, inhuman reaction speed, a comeback from an impossible deficit. The comments fill with words like gifted and natural...
Read article →The Grief Nobody Names When you leave a religion, people expect you to feel liberated. They picture you walking out into the sunlight, lighter without the weight of doctrine. What they don't picture i...
Read article →The Advice I Hear Constantly Wake up at 5 AM. Write your three priorities in a notebook. Use the Pomodoro technique. Build the habit. Track your output. Block your calendar. Use the two-minute rule. P...
Read article →A Line That Moves Coping is adaptive. This is where any honest discussion of the topic has to start. The behaviors that are most commonly labeled unhealthy coping — drinking, avoidance, emotional eati...
Read article →What You Mean When You Say That "You don't look autistic" is almost always meant as a compliment. I know this. The person saying it is usually expressing something like: you seem capable, relatable, e...
Read article →The Volume Is Always Too High There is a specific experience that happens when I walk into a busy restaurant. The conversations from adjacent tables enter my awareness with the same signal strength as...
Read article →The Second Order Problem Anxiety about a threat is a response to something in the world. Anxiety about anxiety is a response to something in yourself — specifically, to the experience of feeling anxio...
Read article →My Body Wants the Night I do not stay up late because I am undisciplined. I do not sleep in because I am lazy. My body begins to produce melatonin approximately three to four hours later than the aver...
Read article →The Two Errors People Make About Trauma There is a version of thinking about childhood trauma that says it determines you — that adverse experiences in childhood create damage that shapes your psychol...
Read article →The Question I'm Tired of Defending People ask me to justify it. Not because they are genuinely curious about my experience — if they were, they would listen to the answer — but because they have alre...
Read article →A Problem With Many Ages When the Harvard Study of Adult Development released findings on loneliness in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, it identified social isolation as among the strongest predictors of poo...
Read article →The Logic That Makes Avoidance Attractive When something makes you anxious, avoiding it works. Not metaphorically — it actually works, in the sense that the anxiety drops when the threatening thing is...
Read article →The Skill That Isn't Taught Formal education spends years teaching children to read, write, perform mathematical operations, and understand historical events. It spends almost no time teaching them wh...
Read article →A Theory That Rewired Psychology In 2008, Roy Baumeister and colleagues published research suggesting that willpower functions like a muscle. Use it, and it depletes. Rest, and it recovers. The specif...
Read article →A Relationship That Goes Both Ways Most people know, on some level, that sleep and mental health are related. What is less appreciated is how deeply bidirectional and mechanically specific this relati...
Read article →What the Book Gets Right Atomic Habits is a genuinely useful book. James Clear synthesized a significant body of behavioral science research into an accessible framework, and the four-part habit loop...
Read article →The Signal That Gets Misread Loneliness is commonly described as an emotion, which is understandable — it has an emotional texture, it arises in response to circumstances, and it is unpleasant in a wa...
Read article →A Crisis With a Specific Address The midlife crisis has a remarkably precise cultural location. It exists, as a widely recognized phenomenon, primarily in North America and Western Europe. Ask people...
Read article →The Framing That Gets It Wrong Ask most people what ADHD is and they will say something about not being able to focus. Kids who can't sit still. Adults who lose their keys. A short attention span that...
Read article →The "Forgiveness Is For You" Insight The idea that forgiving someone primarily benefits the person doing the forgiving rather than the person forgiven has become something of a therapeutic consensus....
Read article →What We Got Wrong About Resilience The dominant metaphor for resilience — bouncing back — suggests that adversity compresses you temporarily, and recovery means returning to your original shape. This...
Read article →What People Mean When They Want Closure After a relationship ends, people often describe wanting closure — some kind of conversation, explanation, or acknowledgment that would allow them to stop think...
Read article →Where the "Secondary" Label Comes From The claim that anger is always a secondary emotion — a surface reaction covering fear, sadness, or hurt underneath — is widespread in therapeutic and self-help c...
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