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
How Organisations Engineer Exits Without Ever Writing a Termination Letter
They will not fire you. Firing you creates paperwork, legal risk, and an uncomfortable conversation. Instead they will make the job unliveable, wait for you to quit, and call it a mutual parting of ways. Here is exactly how they do it.
10 min readThe Loneliness Epidemic Is Not About Being Alone
The most widespread mental health crisis of our time is not depression or anxiety. It is loneliness. And the research on what causes it demolishes the most common assumptions: it has very little to do with how many people you are around.
8 min readYou 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 readWorth your time
Editor's Picks
They Kept You Employed and Destroyed You Anyway
A case study in what a company can do to someone without ever breaking a rule, missing a process, or doing anything that would look wrong on paper. What happened to Priya over three years at a startup was not illegal. It was worse than that. It was policy.
How Organisations Engineer Exits Without Ever Writing a Termination Letter
They will not fire you. Firing you creates paperwork, legal risk, and an uncomfortable conversation. Instead they will make the job unliveable, wait for you to quit, and call it a mutual parting of ways. Here is exactly how they do it.
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.
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.
Join the conversation
Get essays in your inbox.
One email a week. No noise, no spam. Just writing worth reading.
Unsubscribe anytime. No hard feelings.