
Essays
Essays on self-awareness, emotional intelligence, identity, and the psychology of living with clarity, purpose, and connection.
Some truths don’t fit in a post — they need room to unfold.
These essays offer more than takes — they offer perspective. Drawing from psychology, lived experience, and cultural insight, each piece explores what it means to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and human in a complicated world. Written to make you think, feel, and come back to yourself — not just scroll past.
Asian Women: The Psychology of Visibility
Marginalized individuals often face the paradox of being both invisible and hyper-visible. This article explores how invisibility and objectification dehumanize in opposite ways and offers strategies like boundary-setting, selective visibility, and community solidarity to reclaim agency.
The Afternoon of Life: A Journey to Freedom and Meaning
The "afternoon of life" marks a midlife shift from external achievement to deeper meaning. This article explores how restlessness and disillusionment can spark authentic self-discovery, drawing on Jungian psychology to reveal the potential for renewed purpose and emotional freedom.
The Psychology of Decision-Making
Decision-making is shaped more by subconscious forces than pure logic. This article explores how biases, emotions, and environmental cues distort choices, how factors like overload and fatigue worsen decisions, and offers strategies to structure choices and manage emotional interference.
The Psychology of Resilience
Resilience is a dynamic process shaped by flexibility, coping strategies, and learned behaviors. This article explores emotional regulation, cognitive reframing, and purposeful action as core components, showing how resilience grows through manageable challenges, support, and self-compassion.
The Psychology of Lone-Actor Terrorists
Lone-actor terrorists are often driven by personal grievances, marginalization, and identity fusion with extremist narratives. This article explores how traits like alienation and victimhood combine with online radicalization, and how early warning signs could enable prevention efforts.
Ceremonies, Rituals and Purpose
Ceremonies and rituals meet psychological needs by turning ordinary moments into meaningful narratives. This article explores how structured traditions regulate emotions, mark transitions, and foster identity, emphasizing how intentional rituals combat modern alienation and provide existential grounding.
The “Us vs. Them” Mentality
The "us vs. them" mentality stems from evolutionary instincts and social identity needs, fostering division and conflict. This article explores how binary thinking fuels dehumanization and stereotypes, and how recognizing shared humanity and embracing complexity can help break the cycle.
The Psychology of Christmas Carols
Christmas carols hold psychological power by triggering nostalgia, strengthening social bonds, and evoking warmth and belonging. This article explores how their simple structures and traditions create emotional connections, serving as lasting markers of time and cultural identity.
Choosing Who We Become
Personal growth is not about finding a fixed self but actively shaping identity through deliberate action. This article explores how consistent choices, reflection, and behavioral commitments drive transformation, showing that true change emerges from reshaping habits and self-narratives over time.
The Psychology of Objectification
Objectification reduces people to tools or obstacles, fostering psychological distance and enabling harm. This article explores how dehumanizing language, stereotypes, and power imbalances diminish empathy, and offers strategies like agency restoration and perspective-taking to counteract it.
Public Shaming and the Psychology of Humiliation
Public shaming uses humiliation as social control, triggering primal fears of ostracism and deep psychological distress. This article explores how digital platforms amplify shame’s harm and highlights restorative alternatives that separate behavior condemnation from personhood destruction.
Understanding Social Anxiety and Avoidance
Social anxiety arises from fear of negative evaluation, driving avoidance behaviors that worsen distress over time. This article explores the psychological mechanisms behind the cycle and presents strategies like graduated exposure and cognitive restructuring to build resilience through discomfort.
The Hidden Psychology Driving the Decline of Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is declining not from lack of intelligence but from environments that discourage it. This article explores how cognitive overload, algorithmic curation, and social reinforcement erode deep analysis, and how intentional effort can help reclaim thoughtful engagement.
The Psychology of Cheap Content
In an age of viral snippets, society increasingly mistakes cheap content for real value. This article explores how shallow engagement erodes critical thinking and argues that reclaiming depth requires resisting algorithmic ease and intentionally prioritizing substance over superficiality.
The Psychology of Family Conflict
Holiday family tensions often stem from clashing expectations and unresolved history, not surface disagreements. This article explores how shifting from debate to active listening and empathy can defuse conflict and foster genuine connection or peaceful coexistence.
Understanding Resistance to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Resistance to DEI initiatives often stems from perceived threats to identity or fairness beliefs, not outright prejudice. This article explores how understanding underlying fears and motivations can foster more effective engagement and reduce polarization around equity efforts.
Anchored in the Past
Cognitive anchoring and stability bias cause us to judge others based on first impressions, even when new evidence emerges. This article explores how outdated perceptions persist and how recognizing these mental shortcuts can help us make fairer, more accurate assessments.
From Ethics to Existence: Kantian Philosophy and Existential Psychology
Kantian ethics and existential psychology approach human purpose from different angles—universal moral duty versus individual meaning-making. This article explores how combining Kant’s structure with existentialism’s focus on authenticity can create a more balanced framework for living.
Misinformation and Political Polarization: A Social Psychology Perspective
Misinformation thrives in polarized environments by exploiting tribal psychology and group identity. This article explores how confirmation bias and motivated reasoning fuel echo chambers and argues that breaking the cycle requires addressing the social needs behind polarization, not just correcting facts.
Embracing Life as an Introvert Homebody
Introversion and homebody tendencies are often misunderstood as limiting, but they offer deep satisfaction and fulfillment. This article explores the psychological benefits of a quieter, inward-focused lifestyle and offers strategies for thriving in an extrovert-driven culture.