Author: The Present Minds
All the Versions of Yourself You Have Already Been
There are versions of yourself you have completely forgotten. Not the big ones. Not the you that graduated or moved cities or ended something that needed ending. Those ones you remember. Those ones have stories attached, photographs, the occasional 2am revisit when something in the present nudges something in the past and suddenly you are…
Why Do I Feel Guilty for Resting? The Answer Is Not What You Think
Why do I feel guilty for resting? It is one of those questions most people ask privately, usually on a Sunday afternoon when they are lying on the sofa doing nothing and a familiar unease has started to settle in. Not a crisis. Not even discomfort exactly. Just the low, persistent sense that they should…
Yoga Kshema Meaning: The Bhagavad Gita Verse Nobody Finishes Reading
Yoga kshema meaning, in its simplest translation, is this: acquisition and preservation. Yoga is the act of obtaining what you do not yet have. Kshema is the act of protecting what you already do. Two words. Two anxieties. The entire architecture of the human mind. The verse they come from is Chapter 9, Verse 22…
Why Does Music Give You Chills? The Science Behind Frisson
Why does music give you chills? Because your brain just did something extraordinary. It predicted beauty. And it was right. That shiver down your spine has a name. Scientists call it frisson, from the French word for a brief but intense feeling. Most people describe it as goosebumps, a sudden tightening in the chest, hair…
Solitude Psychology: What Being Alone Actually Does to the Brain
Solitude psychology is one of the most misunderstood fields in modern mental health research. We have spent decades studying loneliness, its harms, its causes, its epidemic spread through wealthy societies with more screens and fewer third places. Loneliness research is abundant, urgent, and well-funded. The research on solitude, on chosen aloneness, on the specific and…
Does Personality Predict Support for War? A New Study Has a Disturbing Answer
Does personality predict support for war? The question sounds abstract until the week it is published, which happened to be the same week missiles hit Tehran and three American soldiers came home in coffins. A study by researchers Alexander Yendell and David Herbert, published in the journal Politics and Governance, surveyed over a thousand people…
Moral Fatigue: Why Good People Stop Caring Online
Moral fatigue is not apathy. That distinction matters. The person who has stopped retweeting every crisis, stopped signing every petition, stopped feeling the same spike of outrage at the fifteenth injustice of the week that they felt at the first, is not a bad person who has stopped caring. They are a normal person whose…
Before Ikigai and Maslow, There Was Purushartha.
Somewhere in California, a startup founder is paying $3,000 to attend a retreat trying to answer a very old question. What should a human life actually aim for? A coach with 400,000 Instagram followers has just launched a course on “aligning purpose with profession.” A productivity guru is preparing a TED Talk about the four…
The Lockdown Generation
The pandemic social skills gap is becoming visible in young adults now aged 22 to 24. They are 22, 23, 24 years old now. They have jobs, or are looking for them. They are navigating first relationships, shared flats, job interviews, social situations that require a particular kind of ease. From the outside, they look…
The Guilt of Outgrowing Your Family
Success guilt does not always feel like success. You are sitting at the dinner table you grew up around. The food is the same. The voices are familiar. Everything is, on the surface, exactly as it has always been. And yet something feels different in a way you cannot explain without it sounding like a…
