Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
A 44-country study finds that mental ill-being now declines with age, largely because younger adults have deteriorated. The data are striking, but more specific than the headline suggests.
In a world designed to constantly demand your attention, rewatching the same beloved film becomes an act of psychological resistance—a space where you know exactly what happens next.
The reversal from cared-for child to trusted reassurer happens quietly, without ceremony or warning. Both generations grieve a role neither realised they were about to lose.
The wellness industry's favorite brain-boosting foods largely fail rigorous testing, revealing a gap between viral nutrition advice and what science actually shows.
Our snap judgments about class are built on dining codes we mistake for character—and they stick with us despite being almost entirely learned.
For people who grew up before mobile phones, unreachability wasn't a lifestyle choice — it was the default condition of being alive. The mental health cost of what replaced it is only now becoming legible.
The pop version of Dunning-Kruger — confident people are stupid, smart people are humble — bears almost no resemblance to what the 1999 paper actually found, and the misreading has become the internet's favourite rhetorical weapon.
The brain treats names like strangers at a party—it recognizes the face but never quite gets introduced to the label attached to it.
Our brains aren't failing us in old age—they're revealing which chapters of our lives we deemed worth preserving in crystalline detail.
The chilly-house adult is often not frugal or tough but running an old rule about who is allowed to be comfortable. The thermostat becomes a daily referendum on permissions absorbed in childhood — and the guest test reveals exactly what is happening.
Going quiet during group photos isn't shyness — it's often a small, principled refusal to perform a feeling on cue and let a staged expression stand in for a real day.
Average loneliness does not have a midlife moment. What changed is which decade you were born in, and which country you were born in.
