You can measure a culture’s hunger for meaning by how much it pays to be terrified for fun.

A woman runs mile twelve of her first marathon, breathing fire, half-crying, half-exalted.

A man stands waist-deep in an ice bath, filming his shivers for Instagram. Someone else queues for a haunted house that promises a “trauma-simulating experience.”

This is our current state of wellness, 2025. It’s not that we like pain.
It’s that we no longer trust comfort.

New research on psychological richness suggests that people increasingly value variety, intensity, and perspective-change over comfort or even happiness.

The choice to suffer — within limits — is not masochism but a wager: that discomfort will leave us more alive, more awake, more human.

Alan Watts taught millions how to let go.
He made surrender sound divine — a smooth, amber current of acceptance running beneath the static of modern striving.

But behind the microphone and the incense, the man who spoke of freedom was drinking himself into oblivion.

By the time he died at fifty-eight, Watts was reportedly consuming a bottle of vodka a day and chain-smoking through the California fog. According to his daughter, he had been hospitalized more than once for delirium tremens.

The paradox isn’t that he failed to live his philosophy; it’s that he used philosophy to survive his failure.

Every generation invents a language to forgive its own excesses. Watts called it the Tao. We call it wellness.

Love used to unfold in the physical world. Now it pings, swipes, and types its way into existence.

For many couples, technology is both a bridge and a barrier — a constant companion that mediates nearly every gesture of connection.

From therapy offices to Reddit confessionals, one theme keeps surfacing: our devices aren’t neutral tools anymore.

They’re shaping how we attach, argue, flirt, betray, and repair.

The question for modern love isn’t whether technology affects relationships. It’s how deeply it already has — and what therapy can do to help us stay human within it.

It’s a peculiar thing, isn’t it? The very institutions that once promised salvation might, decades later, leave traces in our blood pressure and brain fog.

A new study in Social Science & Medicine claims that a religious upbringing in childhood is linked—albeit faintly—to poorer mental and cognitive health in later life.

The finding lands like a theological Rorschach test: believers see an attack on virtue; skeptics see vindication.

But for anyone who grew up singing hymns with one hand and nursing anxiety with the other, it feels more like déjà vu.

You meet the Existential Elk somewhere in midlife—usually on a Monday.

He’s standing at the edge of your reflection, chewing grass, asking what it’s all for.

You try to ignore him, but he’s heavy, majestic, and clearly not going anywhere.

Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1933) had a name for this creature.

He called it the tragedy of over-evolution: our consciousness grew too large for our species to bear.

Just as the Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) developed antlers so massive they eventually became lethal, humans evolved a mind so aware that it threatens our own peace of mind.

Let’s start with the facts before the light gets too blinding.

Dr. Álex Gómez-Marín is not your usual mystic. He’s a Spanish neuroscientist and theoretical physicist — a man whose day job involves equations, not incense.

A few years ago, he suffered a severe internal hemorrhage that briefly stopped his heart. In those seven seconds, he says, he found himself in a well of golden light.

Three figures appeared. They didn’t speak, exactly — more like radiated intent. They offered him a choice: stay or go back.

He thought of his daughters, said “not yet,” and returned.

What makes this story remarkable isn’t the headline version (“Scientist meets glowing entities!”), but the tension it exposes between subjective experience and scientific caution.

Gómez-Marín describes his own near-death experience (NDE) as “more real than reality itself.” For a man of science, that’s a strong claim — and one worth examining without either reverence or ridicule.

We pretend that romance and friendship are two different games: one played with candlelight, the other with take-out containers.

One gets poems, the other gets memes. But decades of research suggest that the border between them is porous — maybe even imaginary.

When you look closely, the emotional scaffolding of a deep friendship and that of a long-term romance are almost identical: mutual vulnerability, consistent responsiveness, trust, admiration, and shared humor.

The main difference, as John M. Gottman would say, is that romance adds sexual exclusivity and ritualized significance — not a separate emotional species, just a new tax bracket.

Let’s tour ten studies that expose the cultural illusion of difference, with commentary from some of psychology’s most enduring thinkers.

A new study published in The Journal of Turkish Family Physician just confirmed what women have always known: even the smallest body difference can become a cultural headline.

The researchers found that women with larger breasts tend to report slightly higher self-esteem.

Before anyone starts drafting a think piece, let’s pause: the difference was tiny — a polite blip on the psychological radar.

Still, it tells us something enduring: we may live in our bodies, but we’re also living inside our culture’s imagination of them.

The modern love story has no pulse. It types back instantly.

Once upon a time, heartbreak meant someone stopped returning your calls. Now it means your chatbot paused before responding.

For millions of lonely or anxious people, conversational AI has become not just a convenience—but a companion.

During the pandemic, when human proximity felt dangerous, millions turned to digital intimacy.

The Cigna Loneliness Index found that over half of Americans reported feeling “always or sometimes alone.” It was the perfect moment for a new kind of listener: endlessly available, always attuned, and immune to emotional fatigue.

A teenage girl sits outside her exam hall, thumb pressed to her sternum, heartbeat rattling like a snare. Her phone buzzes again — another reminder of everything at stake.

Then she remembers something her grandmother once said while shelling peas: “Breathe like you mean it.”

She inhales, exhales, steadies. The test won’t get easier. But she will.

That single breath contains the whole psychology of perseverance. Period.

If you’ve ever stared at a mirage and sworn there was water on the road, you already know what Donald Hoffman is talking about.

Your brain doesn’t show you what’s real. It shows you what’s useful.

That shimmer is an illusion that helps your mind predict heat.

The berry looks red because your ancestors who noticed that color lived longer.

The world you see, Hoffman argues, isn’t a faithful reflection of reality. It’s a survival interface—something more like the icons on your desktop than the circuits inside the machine.

Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, calls this the Interface Theory of Perception.

In his book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, he proposes a radical idea: evolution didn’t design us to see the truth—it designed us to stay alive.

When people talk about near-death experiences, they talk about the light.
The tunnel. The peace. The sense that everything finally fits.

What they rarely talk about is what happens afterward — when the light fades and you come home with eternity still in your eyes.

A new study from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, led by Bruce Greyson and Janice Miner Holden (2025), asks that question.

What happens after you’ve been to the edge of everything?
The researchers call it reentry. The participants call it lonely.