Stop Lying to Me. I once saw a “Good Vibes Only” sticker slapped onto the bumper of a car parked outside a hospice. I wanted to rip it off with my teeth. Look, we’ve all been there. You’re standing in the wreckage of your life—maybe it’s a divorce, a bankruptcy, or a death that makes … Read more
You’ve been told that quitting is for losers. That ‘pushing through’ is where the magic happens. Lies. All of it. I spent years in the grind. The kind of grind where you wake up at 4 AM, drink coffee that tastes like burnt rubber and disappointment, and spend ten hours a day trying to ‘optimize’ … Read more
The Closure Trap: Why the “Final Conversation” is a Lie I spent years thinking I was just one “honest talk” away from peace. You know the feeling—that itching need to send one last long text, to have that final sit-down, to get the “truth” so you can finally stop thinking about it. We treat closure … Read more
The Performance Review of Your Soul: When ‘Optimization’ Becomes the Prison “I felt great until I checked my ring.” Read that again. The biological reality—actually feeling rested, alert, and alive—was overridden in a split second by a digital score. This is the modern trap: we’ve stopped trusting our own nervous systems and started outsourcing our … Read more
The Pressure to ‘Get Over It’ is Violent “Just move on.” If I had a nickel for every time some well-meaning “positive” person told me to just get over it, I’d have enough money to buy the silence of every guru on the planet. Look, let’s be honest: telling someone to “get over it” isn’t … Read more
The Illusion of the Gap Most of us spend our entire lives running a race toward a finish line that moves every time we get close. We call it “self-improvement,” but often, it’s just a sophisticated form of torture. “People may set goals and engage in various behaviors to bridge the gap between their actual … Read more
I keep seeing these posts. You know the ones. Someone’s on a beach in Bali or hiking some trail in Bogor, captioned: “Finally taking time to heal.” Look, let’s be real: That isn’t healing. That’s a vacation. Now, don’t get me wrong—vacations are great. I love a good beach. But we’ve rebranded “taking a break” … Read more
Are You Doing Self-Help, or is Self-Help Doing You? There is a dangerous side to the optimization game. We get so caught up in the mechanics of “betterment”—the habits, the routines, the books—that we mistake the preparation for the actual game of life. “You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of playing, the … Read more
The Illusion of the Gap Most of us spend our entire lives running a race toward a finish line that moves every time we get close. We call it “self-improvement,” but often, it’s just a sophisticated form of torture. “People may set goals and engage in various behaviors to bridge the gap between their actual … Read more
Stop Dating Your Future Self There is a study from UCLA that is honestly kind of terrifying. Social psychologist Hal Hershfield used fMRI scans to look at how our brains process the idea of our “future self.” The result? When most of us think about the person we will be in ten or twenty years, … Read more