Almost
Rational.
Writing at the intersection of love, psychology, and sociology. Unpacking why we do what we do.
We are neither logical machines nor chaotic beings. We live in the deeply human space of being almost rational.
Writing
The Smart Person's Trap
A series on how intelligence becomes a liability in love. Smart people are the worst at relationships — not because they feel less, but because they think too much. Working on Part 2: why overanalyzing someone's behaviour is just fear wearing a lab coat.
Reading
Kahneman + Fromm
Re-reading Thinking, Fast and Slow for the third time — each read surfaces something new. Also deep in Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, which argues that love is a skill, not a feeling. Most people have never been taught it.
Obsessing Over
The Vulnerability Performance
How social media created a generation of people who are very good at performing vulnerability and very bad at actually being vulnerable. There is a real essay in here about the difference between sharing pain and processing it.
Fresh off the press
Latest Articles
You Cannot Think Your Way Out of Mental Illness. Here Is Why.
The most common advice given to people struggling with mental health is some version of 'change your thinking.' It sounds reasonable. It is often completely wrong. Mental illness is not primarily a problem of incorrect thoughts, and treating it as one causes real harm.
7 min readThe Diagnosis Trap: When a Label Helps and When It Cages You
A diagnosis can be a lifeline. It can also become the story you tell yourself about why you cannot change. The same label that opens a door to understanding can close the door to possibility. The difference is in how you hold it.
7 min readWhy Intelligent People Are More Likely to Suffer
There is a persistent romantic idea that suffering and intelligence are connected. The research suggests it is not entirely wrong, but for reasons that have nothing to do with romance. Higher cognitive ability creates specific vulnerabilities that most people never examine.
8 min readThe Therapy Industry Has a Problem It Does Not Want to Talk About
Therapy is the most promoted mental health intervention in the world. It is also one of the least consistently effective, for reasons the industry has strong financial incentives not to examine closely. This is what the outcome research actually shows.
9 min readTrauma Does Not Make You Stronger. That Is a Lie We Tell Survivors.
The idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is one of the most persistent and damaging myths in psychology. For most people, trauma leaves a wound. The wound can heal. But healing is not the same as emerging improved. The distinction matters enormously.
8 min readAttachment Styles Are Childhood Survival Strategies You Never Updated
Secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganised: the attachment research has been absorbed by pop psychology and stripped of its actual meaning. Here is what it really says about why you behave the way you do in relationships, and whether any of it can change.
9 min readWorth your time
Editor's Picks
Narcissism Was Not Born in You. It Was Built.
We talk about narcissists as if they emerged fully formed, incapable of empathy by nature. The developmental psychology tells a different story: narcissism is a structure built in childhood to survive specific kinds of emotional failure. That changes what we should do about it.
Depression Is Not Sadness. It Is the Absence of Future.
We have spent decades misunderstanding depression as extreme unhappiness. It is not. It is the collapse of the feeling that anything will ever be different. That distinction matters more than any antidepressant.
Why Some Spouses Kill: The Psychology of Intimate Partner Homicide
Most people who kill their partners are not monsters. They are ordinary people who reached a specific psychological state that ordinary people can reach. That is the part that should disturb you.
The writer
Satyam
I write about the space between logic and emotion: where love, psychology, and sociology collide. If you have ever made a decision and then wondered why, this is for you.
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