RJ Starr
Public Intellectual and Professor of Psychology
If you are new to my work, this is where to begin.
The Psychology of Being Human
A lifetime of psychological inquiry, brought together.
This book articulates a unified framework for understanding how perception, emotion, identity, and meaning are formed and sustained. It works at the level of lived psychological life, examining how people make sense of experience, regulate emotion, and maintain coherence over time. It serves as the foundation of my work and the clearest expression of how I understand human life.
I’m RJ Starr, a professor of psychology whose work examines lived experience—how people make sense of perception, emotion, identity, and meaning in a complex and demanding world.
This work begins from a simple premise: psychological life is not abstract. It unfolds through attention, interpretation, emotional regulation, and the stories people tell themselves about who they are and what is happening to them.
Across essays, books, podcasts, and courses, I develop and articulate psychological frameworks that clarify how these processes shape the way we think, relate, and endure change. The focus is not on simplification or diagnosis, but on understanding experience as it is actually lived.
For those new to this work, The Psychology of Being Human offers the foundational framework that underpins everything presented here.
This is a space for careful thinking, emotional maturity, and psychological understanding that holds complexity without turning it into pathology.
How This Work Is Organized
Human experience doesn’t fragment randomly. It tends to break down along a small number of recurring psychological lines. Across my work, I organize these patterns into four core domains: how we think and perceive, how we regulate and relate to emotion, how identity is formed and sustained, and how meaning is constructed over time. Every book, course, essay, and framework you’ll find here lives somewhere within that structure. Some focus on a single domain. Others intentionally bridge them. This architecture exists so readers can enter the work from wherever they are, without needing to consume everything at once.
