This essay examines Marta Keen’s Homeward Bound as a psychological architecture of maturity. Through lyrical analysis and Sir Bryn Terfel’s performance, it explores autonomy, belonging, calling, and return as developmental tensions rather than sentimental themes. The piece argues that adulthood requires integration: the capacity to pursue vocation without severing attachment, and to remain connected without forfeiting authorship.

This essay examines how early social media functioned as a shared social room built on casual presence and low-stakes acknowledgment, and how that warmth quietly disappeared. Through the lenses of irony, context collapse, branding, and emotional withdrawal, it explores how ordinary sharing became embarrassing, public spaces cooled, and connection migrated elsewhere—leaving behind content without contact.

Belief is often discussed as doctrine or conviction, but its deepest psychological role emerges under existential pressure. This essay explores how religion and spiritual practice function as meaning-making responses to illness, loss, near-death experiences, family vulnerability, aging, and mortality. Rather than defending or dismissing belief, it examines how humans use symbolic frameworks to remain coherent when life fractures.

Anger is often treated as a flaw or a failure of control. This essay explores a quieter truth: much of modern anger is the residue of blocked agency. When movement, authorship, and responsibility are deferred too long, anger stagnates rather than explodes. Read as a psychological field note on how anger becomes a signal asking to be translated back into action.

Shakespeare’s forgotten Sonnet 146 becomes a map of the modern existential crisis. This Field Notes entry explores the tension between the outer self we perform and the inner life we neglect. It’s a reflection on identity, mortality, and the quiet turning point when a person realizes they’ve been feeding the wrong self. A meditation on depth, meaning, and psychological truth.

When absolute belief meets contradiction, something inside the mind gives way. This essay examines the psychology of belief collapse—the confrontation between myth and reality, and what follows when certainty dies. Through the lenses of religion, magical thinking, and existential psychology, it explores how disillusionment can destroy coherence or deepen awareness, and what it means to rebuild meaning after faith fails.

A late-night conversation with Alexa becomes a study in modern reflection. This essay explores why we ask machines the questions we can’t ask each other, how artificial listeners contain anxiety, and what it means to find coherence in responses that don’t truly understand. In an age of simulation, the device becomes a mirror: not a source of empathy, but a structure for meaning. The act of asking is the point; the echo helps us hear our own mind.

A meditation on time, familiarity, and the quiet psychology of repetition. Living Inside the Ongoing explores how consciousness settles into the rhythm of days—the blur of tasks, the comfort of order, and the strange beauty of continuity itself. It reflects on what it means to keep creating, to leave something behind, and to live with awareness as the light begins to change.

Existential anxiety isn’t a disorder—it’s the human condition felt in motion. This essay explores the quiet unease that surfaces when life feels both full and hollow, the awareness that freedom and limitation coexist. Through psychology and philosophy, it reframes anxiety as a sign of consciousness itself—a signal not to be cured, but understood as the pulse of being alive.

In this classroom lecture, Dr. Matthew Collins introduces students to RJ Starr’s paper on existential liminality—the suspended state of identity disruption and transformation. The talk brings Starr’s theoretical work to life, showing how anthropology, existential psychology, and cultural change converge to illuminate the in-between spaces we all experience.

In a culture drowning in noise and outrage, it is easy to feel powerless or consumed by despair. Existential psychology reminds us that meaning does not come from waiting for calm but from how we choose to live in the present. To live where your feet are is to reclaim freedom, ground yourself in daily life, and resist the pull of abstraction with presence, responsibility, and authenticity.

What does it mean to live in a body you trust? This essay explores medical sovereignty as a psychological posture—not rebellion, not denial, but a quiet refusal to live in fear. When peace is treated as negligence, self-trust becomes radical.

Even when life offers you choices, freedom doesn’t always feel free. This essay explores the ache of agency—the quiet weight of knowing that every decision shapes what will be, and erases what could have been. When the ability to choose brings dread instead of clarity, what does that say about how we understand freedom?

Not every reconnection is harmless. Sometimes, when people from our past reach out, it reactivates versions of ourselves we’ve spent years outgrowing. This reflection explores the quiet power of saying no; not from bitterness, but from clarity. Because some chapters don’t need to be reopened, even if others still miss the scenery.

You’re functioning, doing what needs to be done—yet something feels off. This reflection explores the quiet ache of emotional disconnection that can arise even when life is stable. It’s not crisis, it’s misalignment. And it deserves attention, not shame.

Some people seem fine on the surface—capable, kind, composed—but quietly ache to be seen more deeply. This reflection explores the psychological toll of being emotionally unseen, why it often affects high-functioning people, and how to begin reclaiming visibility without shame.

Mornings can feel heavier than they should. Even when life is calm, waking up often brings anxiety, longing, or dread. This reflection explores why returning to consciousness is emotionally charged—and how biology, memory, and the weight of identity all quietly converge in those early hours.

“You made me feel…” is a phrase we use without thinking, but it carries a lie at its core. Our emotions may be shaped by others, but they are authored within. This essay explores the emotional and existential cost of outsourcing responsibility for how we feel—and what it means to reclaim it.

Sometimes it’s not the past we miss, but the version of ourselves who lived it. This reflection explores the grief of outgrowing yourself, the ache of losing inner simplicity, and the quiet hope of reconnection—not by going backward, but by remembering who you were before life asked you to become so guarded.

Many of us carry a quiet fear that our lives won’t amount to anything memorable—not because we crave fame, but because we want to matter. This entry explores how the myth of exceptionalism distorts meaning, why visibility gets mistaken for worth, and what it truly means to live a remarkable life that no one may ever applaud.