Psychology, technology + the strange experience of being human right now

Should Kids Use ChatGPT for Homework?

Not a yes or a no. The distinction that matters is whether the AI did the thinking or supported it — and you can usually tell from the finished work.

5 min read

How to Make Your Phone Less Interesting Without Getting Rid of It

A full, staged guide to designing a phone that does its job without competing for your attention every few minutes.

6 min read

Why Is It So Hard for Kids to Stop Playing Video Games?

Stopping a game is not like stopping a film. Rounds, teammates, saves and rank all make the exit costly — and understanding that changes how you ask.

4 min read

Are We Outsourcing Too Much Thinking?

AI can draft the email, summarise the report, and settle the argument before you've finished forming an opinion. The question worth asking isn't whether that's good or bad, but what it's for.

5 min read

Screens + Sleep: Why Your Child Has a Harder Time Winding Down

Blue light is the least important part of this. What actually keeps children awake after screens, and the evening structure that reliably helps.

5 min read

Does Screen Time Affect Children's Attention Spans?

The honest answer is more interesting than either headline. What the research shows about screens and children's attention — and what it cannot tell us.

5 min read

Why Does My Child Get So Angry When Screen Time Ends?

The meltdown is not defiance and it is not about the device. It is what happens when a highly regulated state ends abruptly — and it is very fixable.

5 min read

How Much Screen Time Is Too Much for Kids?

The hour-count guidelines are the least useful part of the answer. What the research supports, what it does not, and the four questions that matter more than the number.

6 min read

What Kids Actually Need to Learn About Digital Life

A working, age-staged curriculum — what to teach at 6, at 10, and at 14 — because 'be safe online' was never actually a lesson.

6 min read

How to Create More Quiet Without Becoming a Monk

You don't need a retreat, a cabin, or a week off the grid. You need a handful of realistic habits that hold up on an ordinary Tuesday.

5 min read

The Psychology of Posting

There's a small pause before hitting post that most people skip past. What's happening in that pause says a lot about why we share what we share.

4 min read

How Phones Quietly Enter Our Relationships

Nobody decides to make a phone part of a relationship's daily texture. It happens in small increments — and a growing body of research on phone presence explains why it matters more than it seems to.

6 min read

Why Walking Without Your Phone Feels Different

Leave your phone at home for a walk and something shifts almost immediately — not because you're missing notifications, but because your attention has nowhere else to go.

3 min read

What Parents Should Know About Kids + AI

From homework help to late-night chats with an AI companion, children are building relationships with AI faster than most parents have caught up with. Here's a calm look at what matters.

5 min read

Helping Teens Build an Identity That Isn't Measured in Reactions

A practical, ongoing framework for parents who want to help their teenager's sense of self grow somewhere other than a like count.

5 min read

Why People Talk to AI About Things They Don't Tell Anyone

The confession nobody else gets to hear, typed into a chat window at 1am. What that says about disclosure, judgement, and what people actually need from listening.

7 min read

The Psychology of Checking

The check itself rarely satisfies anything. It's the space before the check — the not-knowing — that the behaviour is actually about.

5 min read

When Every Quiet Moment Becomes a Scroll

The queue, the waiting room, the ad break — small gaps in the day used to belong to nobody in particular. Increasingly, they all go to the same place.

3 min read

Is Gaming Really the Problem?

For most kids, gaming is where their social life actually happens. For a small number, it becomes something harder to walk away from — and the two situations look different close up.

5 min read

Why Likes Can Matter Even When We Say They Don't

Almost everyone insists they don't care about likes. Almost everyone checks anyway. Both things can be true, and the psychology explains why.

4 min read

The Psychology of Always Having Something Playing

A podcast in the car, a show in the background, music while you cook: for many people, silence has quietly become something to avoid rather than something to notice.

4 min read

The First Ten Minutes of the Day

What you let into your attention before you've had coffee tends to set the emotional register for hours afterward. Most of us hand that decision to whichever app opens fastest.

3 min read

What Parents Need to Understand About Online Life

The instinct to watch everything comes from love. But surveillance and guidance aren't the same thing, and children need one far more than the other as they grow.

5 min read

What Algorithms Learn About Us — And What We Learn About Ourselves

Recommendation systems aren't reading your mind. They're reflecting a narrow, distorted slice of you back at yourself, over and over.

4 min read

When Texting Replaces the Conversation You Actually Need

A quick message can settle a small thing fast. But some things aren't small, and texting them can feel like progress while quietly making them harder to resolve.

4 min read

Group Chat Drama Is Real Social Drama

Who left the chat, who's been left on read, who screenshotted what — it looks trivial from the outside. It rarely is from the inside.

4 min read

Why Apps Want You to Come Back

Retention design isn't a conspiracy — it's a business model with well-understood psychological mechanics, and some of them you can quietly disarm.

4 min read

The Attention Residue of Digital Life

Part of your mind is still on the last thing you were doing, even now. That leftover attention has a name, and understanding it changes how you move between tasks.

4 min read

When Your Life Starts Feeling Like Content

Documenting an experience can deepen it or quietly replace it. The difference often comes down to a decision made in the first few seconds.

4 min read

Why It Feels Harder to Read a Book Now

It isn't that you've forgotten how to read. It's that reading asks for something modern attention gets very little practice giving.

5 min read

When Rest Still Contains Input

You can lie down, close your laptop, and still not be resting — because rest, psychologically, has less to do with stillness of the body than with quiet in the mind.

5 min read

Why Your Phone Ends Up in Bed With You

Nobody plans to scroll for forty minutes after they meant to fall asleep. It happens anyway, most nights, for reasons that have surprisingly little to do with the content itself.

4 min read

How to Build Digital Boundaries You Can Actually Keep

Most digital boundaries fail within a week, not because people lack willpower but because they're built on willpower in the first place. Here's a way to build ones that hold.

4 min read

Why Everyone Else's Life Can Look More Complete Than Yours

You're comparing your unedited, ongoing life to everyone else's highlight reel — and you know this, and it still works anyway.

4 min read

Parasocial Relationships: Why People We've Never Met Can Feel Familiar

You know her laugh, her kitchen, the way she talks when she's tired. She has no idea you exist. This is a normal, well-studied part of modern attachment.

4 min read

Why Group Chats Can Become Exhausting

It's not any single message. It's the accumulating sense of a conversation that never quite ends, addressed to everyone, that somehow still feels like it's about you.

4 min read

What Does Healthy Technology Use Actually Look Like?

Not zero, not moderation for its own sake — a working definition built around three questions you can actually answer honestly.

5 min read

Why Switching Between Apps Feels Productive — Even When It Isn't

Flicking between a document, an inbox, and three tabs can feel like momentum. The feeling and the output are measuring two different things.

4 min read

The Lost Art of Waiting

Waiting used to be its own kind of experience — a specific, familiar texture of time. It has almost entirely disappeared, and few people have noticed it going.

4 min read

Who Are You When Nobody Is Watching?

Most of us now spend part of every day performing for an audience that isn't there yet. What happens to a sense of self that's constantly rehearsing for later?

4 min read

Online Friendship Is Still Real Friendship

Some of the most steady, honest relationships people have were never in the same room. Why that deserves to be taken seriously, not qualified.

4 min read

The Psychology of Read Receipts

Two grey ticks turn blue. No reply comes. What follows in the next ten minutes says more about the mind's tolerance for ambiguity than about the person who hasn't replied.

4 min read

Your Brain Wasn't Built for Infinite Scroll

There is no bottom to the feed, and that absence of an ending is doing more work than the content itself.

4 min read

Can We Still Be Alone With Our Thoughts?

A well-known study once gave people the choice between sitting quietly with their thoughts or giving themselves a mild electric shock. A surprising number chose the shock.

4 min read

Why Everything Feels Urgent Online

The read receipt. The typing indicator. The three dots that appear and vanish. Somewhere along the way, waiting became suspicious — and that has quietly rewired how we work and relate.

4 min read

Social Media and Body Image: What We Actually Know

The evidence here is genuinely mixed, and the honest version of the story is more useful than the alarming one.

4 min read

Are We Losing the Art of Calling Someone?

A ringing phone has started to feel like an intrusion rather than an invitation. What we lose when we let calls go to voicemail by default.

3 min read

Why Doing Nothing Feels So Uncomfortable Now

Sitting still used to be ordinary. Now it can feel almost unbearable within seconds — and that says something specific about what your attention has adapted to.

4 min read

The Disappearance of Boredom

Boredom used to be a normal, uncomfortable pause between things. It has quietly become an emergency that gets solved in under three seconds.

5 min read

AI Companionship: What Are We Actually Looking For?

Millions of people now talk to AI the way they'd talk to a friend. The interesting question isn't whether that's strange — it's what it reveals about what we needed all along.

5 min read

Screen Time Is Probably the Wrong Question

The number on your weekly screen report tells you almost nothing about whether your relationship with technology is working. Here is what does.

5 min read

Growing Up With a Public Version of Yourself

Adolescence has always been about trying on identities. What's new is that many of those trials now happen in public, and stay there.

5 min read

The Comparison Trap Has an Algorithm Now

Comparing ourselves to others is ancient and unavoidable. What's new is the sample size, the curation, and the fact that a system is choosing who you compare yourself to.

5 min read

Connected All Day. Lonely Anyway.

You've messaged a dozen people since breakfast. So why does the evening still feel hollow? The answer has less to do with contact and more to do with closeness.

5 min read

What Constant Notifications Actually Do to Attention

Every notification is small. The cumulative cost to a working mind is not. Here is what actually happens between the buzz and the return to what you were doing.

4 min read