Why some people feel their safest emotional bond is with an animal
For some people, the safest place to be vulnerable is with a creature that will never disappoint them, betray them, or keep score.
Mind
The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work inside the technology economy.
856 articles · Mind
An analysis of 12 million blogs found happiness shifts from excitement toward…
The happiness that feels vital at twenty—a rush of excitement—may feel like a burden by sixty, when contentment looks more like calm.
After a relationship ends, men appear to want another partner more than women do…
Men struggle more with singlehood and rush back into relationships faster than women do, new research suggests, upending a familiar narrative about who truly needs another person.
The claim that the kindest people have few friends is mostly false: kindness and…
A flattering myth tells lonely people their isolation reflects virtue; the data suggests the opposite is largely true.
The line about the 21st-century illiterate being those who cannot learn, unlearn…
Your brain is wired to stick with what it knows—which is precisely why unlearning matters more than learning ever could.
Researchers sampled 467 people’s real conversations and found 74.3% of gossip was…
What we call gossip is mostly just information sharing—and women do it more openly when there's no judgment attached.
In a 10-year study, adults reported more positive, stable emotions as they aged…
The emotional benefits of ageing peak in early sixties, independent of physical decline—challenging the assumption that growing older means growing sadder.
There’s a quality that’s almost gone from adults under fifty and still fully…
A generation learned early that no one was coming to fix things, so they learned to fix them themselves—a quality that's quietly vanished.
People who become more stubborn and unbearable to live with in their 60s and 70s…
What families call stubbornness in aging parents may be the final assertion of autonomy against a slow erasure of choice.
A Framingham social-network study found loneliness clustered up to three degrees…
A famous study suggested loneliness spreads like a virus through social networks, but new research shows the same pattern could arise from entirely different causes—raising questions about what the data actually proves.
At twenty-five, most people are afraid of being ordinary. At sixty, most people…
The ambition that drives youth—to escape an average life—often becomes the very thing maturity learns to cherish.
The parents who stay closest to their adult children aren’t the ones who call the…
Frequency of contact is the metric parents most often use to measure closeness with their adult children. It is also the metric that hides the actual dynamic: whether an honest answer produces a lecture, a worry spiral, or a week of guilt.