Tag: Psychology
Procrastination psychology: Why your brain always delays
You stayed to read this despite having other things to do. That is not weakness. That is procrastination psychology doing exactly what it was built to do. And understanding it changes how you think about every task you have ever pushed to tomorrow. Procrastination is not laziness. It is not poor time management. It is…
Why memes replace feelings. And why that should worry you
The relationship between memes and feelings seems obvious until you look at it directly. You feel something. Someone else made a meme about something close to it. You forward it. The feeling seems shared. But something in that exchange is not quite what it appears to be. You learned the word pointing at the same…
Solomon Shereshevsky: The man who could not forget anything
Solomon Shereshevsky arrived at Alexander Luria’s office in Moscow sometime in the 1920s as a journalist who had been sent there by his editor. The editor had noticed something strange. Shereshevsky never took notes in morning briefings. Never wrote anything down. Yet he could repeat back every instruction, every name, every figure, without error. The…
Why daylight saving time still exists, Nobody voted for it
Daylight saving time Europe has been trying to end itself since 2018. It has not managed it yet. The European Commission asked 4.6 million people a simple question. Should we stop changing the clocks? Eighty-four percent said yes. The Parliament voted to end it in 2019. The deadline was set for 2021. It is now…
Ahamkara: the ego the Gita actually warned you about. It is not what you think
Duryodhana says something in the Mahabharata that most retellings quietly skip. He says: I know what is right. I cannot do it. I know what is wrong. I cannot stop myself. The Gita has a name for the mechanism behind that admission. Ahamkara meaning, in Sanskrit, is literally this: the I-maker. And understanding it changes…
Evening walks in Victoria Park: What the light took with it
There is a version of arriving somewhere that is not really arriving. I know this because evening walks in Victoria Park have a way of correcting you before you even sit down. You intended a different gate. The app had other plans. I had been cycling for eleven minutes inside Victoria Park looking for somewhere…
After Twenty Years by O. Henry: the promise both of them Kept
After Twenty Years by O. Henry is told in less than a thousand words. It contains three scenes, two twists, one note, and four words that do more work than most novels manage in three hundred pages. Those four words are: Somehow I couldn’t do it myself. Everything the story is about lives in that…
Why Did No One Help Draupadi When She Asked the Most Logical Question in the Room?
Why did no one help Draupadi? It is a question that has sat unanswered for three thousand years. Not because there is no answer. Because the answer is uncomfortable. What Had Just Happened Yudhishthira sat down to gamble with Shakuni playing on behalf of Duryodhana. Round by round he lost everything. His wealth. His kingdom.…
Abhimanyu knew how to enter the Chakravyuha. Nobody taught him how to leave
Abhimanyu learned the Chakravyuha meaning before he was born. His father Arjuna was explaining it to his mother Subhadra one night. The chakravyuha was a military formation shaped like a spinning wheel, seven layers of soldiers rotating inward, each ring harder than the last. Arjuna was describing how to enter it, how to read the…
A Horse and Two Goats by RK Narayan: the funniest sad story ever written
A Horse and Two Goats by RK Narayan is the only story on this list that will make you laugh. It will also, if you sit with it long enough, make you feel something considerably more complicated than laughter. This is what Narayan does. He finds the comedy in the gap between people and then,…
