Author: Navneet Shukla
Why the 90s Feel More Real Than Yesterday
What were you like in the 90s? The question is everywhere right now. On social media. In comment sections. In the particular glow that comes over someone’s face when a certain song starts playing. But here is what nobody asking the question has told you. The reason the 90s feel the way they feel has…
Who Are You When Everything Changes?
The psychology of identity tells us that the self is not fixed. But nobody warns you what it actually feels like when it starts to shift. It is not a breakdown. It is not a crisis in the clinical sense. It is the quiet, persistent unsettledness of a person who no longer quite recognises the…
The Drug That Works Like Magic Mushrooms but Keeps You in the Room
Psilocybin without hallucinations has been the goal of psychedelic medicine for most of the last decade. This week, for the first time, something that looks credibly like an answer arrived. On March 7, researchers published a study in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry describing a chemically modified version of psilocin, the active compound your body…
Kama Is Not What You Think: Desire as a Sacred Goal
Kama is the most misunderstood word in all of Hindu philosophy. Say it to most people and they think of one thing. The Kama Sutra. Dimly lit book covers. A manual for sexual acrobatics that someone’s aunt had hidden on a shelf. That is not what Kama means. It never was. Kama is the third…
Pretend Play Apes: The Study That Changed What It Means to Be Human
Pretend play apes. That sentence would have been scientifically controversial five years ago. It is now the conclusion of a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science in February 2026. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of St Andrews set up a tea party with empty cups, an empty pitcher, and a bonobo…
Are Fireflies Disappearing? What the Science Actually Says
Are fireflies disappearing? The short answer is yes, in many places, measurably and quietly, for reasons that have everything to do with how humans have reorganised the night. The longer answer is more interesting than the viral version of this story, which has been circulating in various forms since 2024 and tends to announce that…
What Is Moksha: Why Liberation Is the Aim Nobody Talks About
Moksha is the fourth and final aim of Purushartha, and it is the one modern life has the least language for. Dharma, we understand, at least conceptually. Do the right thing. Live with integrity. Artha we understand extremely well. Earn, build, accumulate. Kama we understand in our bones. Want, pursue, enjoy. But Moksha, the aim…
Adult Adhd : Are We Disordered, or Just Paying Attention to the Wrong Things?
Adult ADHD has become one of the defining medical conversations of the 2020s. A 2024 meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry puts the global figure at 366.3 million adults. In the US alone, 15.5 million have been diagnosed, roughly half of them in adulthood rather than childhood. Online searches for ADHD grew by 270 percent across…
Proto-Writing Stone Age: The 40,000-Year-Old Marks That Rewrote History
Proto-writing Stone Age artifacts are forcing a rewrite of one of humanity’s oldest assumptions. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on February 24, 2026 analysed more than 3,000 geometric signs carved into 260 objects from cave sites in the Swabian Jura, a mountain range in southwestern Germany. The objects…
Artha Meaning: Why Getting Rich Is a Spiritual Duty, Not a Sin
To understand this properly, we first need to clarify Artha meaning in Hindu philosophy. In the Purusharth framework, Artha is one of the four aims of human life. The word Artha is usually translated as wealth, but that translation is too narrow. Artha refers to material well-being, economic security, power, influence, and the practical means…
