I’m 37 and I finally understand why I keep saying yes to things I want to say no to — psychology calls it “fawning” and once you see it you can’t unsee it
I said yes to a project last Tuesday that I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t a big project. It ...
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Tag: Psychology
Psychology says if someone quietly can’t stand you they won’t usually give you anything you can confront — they’ll be just friendly enough, just available enough, and just warm enough that you can never quite prove what your gut already knows, and that precision is intentional because the goal was never to reject you openly, it was to make you reject yourself so quietly that even you aren’t sure it happened
There exists a particular category of social behavior that operates in the space between acceptance and rejection, and it tends ...
Psychology says the defining trait of people who always move forward in life isn’t how hard they push — it’s what they do in the hours and days after something breaks them, because the discipline that actually determines a life’s trajectory isn’t the kind that shows up in routines and goals, it’s the kind that surfaces when everything falls apart and nobody would blame you for stopping
I had a friend call me at eleven on a Sunday night, maybe three years back, the kind of call ...
Psychology says people who check on everyone else during a crisis before acknowledging their own fear aren’t selfless — they learned that being needed is the only form of safety their childhood ever reliably delivered
I was 24 years old, crawling out of an attic in Dorchester when the homeowner’s wife started screaming downstairs that ...
Psychology suggests men who are deeply unhappy in life but hide it well aren’t being strong — they’re running a performance that costs them every real connection they have, and the people closest to them almost never see it coming
A growing body of research in emotion regulation and masculinity studies suggests that the men most visibly holding things together ...
Martyrdom And The Psychology Of War
One of the greatest mistakes Western policymakers repeatedly make is assuming that other cultures think the same way they do. ...
Psychology says good people with no close friends aren’t the difficult ones — they’re the ones who asked too little, gave too readily, made themselves so easy to be around that nobody ever felt the particular friction that closeness actually requires
Here’s a contradiction that psychology keeps circling back to. The people who end up with no close friends aren’t usually ...
Psychology says the secret to a good retirement isn’t wealth or health or even relationships – it’s having at least one thing you’re still in the middle of, still becoming, still learning how to do
A friend of mine, a retired engineer named Dave, lives down the street here in Saigon. I watched him last ...
Psychology says people who accomplish more in their 60s than they ever did in their 40s aren’t working harder — they’ve stopped spending energy on things that were never truly theirs to carry
I noticed a couple weeks ago that a woman I know, she’s sixty-three, just launched a small publishing imprint out ...
Psychology says the people who still wear a wristwatch in a world of smartphones aren’t behind – they have a specific relationship with time and intention that most people quietly abandoned without realizing what they gave up
Picture this: I’m sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for an interview source who’s running late. The woman at the ...
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