I imagine that many of you will be Esther Perel fans, either via her book Mating in Captivity or her therapy podcast Where Should We Being?. In this excellent Vanity Fair profile she discusses, among other things, a recent podcast episode about a man and his relationship with an AI bot name Astrid:

Perel never questions the feelings between the man and Astrid. Yet she points out the inherent flaws in the relationship, using words such as “sycophantic” and “undemanding” in the podcast session to emphasize that Astrid has no life, no history to bring to the relationship. “We have had imaginary friends since we are little, and we have spoken to our ancestors forever,” Perel says in our interview, a few weeks after the episode ran. “The danger of AI is that it becomes so soothing and so flattering and so frictionless that real relationships start to feel way too difficult by comparison.”

And the point she eventually makes about AI relationships that I found really interesting:

“What stood out for me is that it’s not like people go from thriving social relations to suddenly talking to an AI. They go from being isolated, spending most of their time at home, maybe going out every once in a while in the evening for dinner or to get to a gym, and they are already so centered on a very small universe that from there, they themselves have become so flattened by technology, they live in their phone,” she says. It has made Perel zero in on the next great challenge. “This is a generation that actually doesn’t have a challenge of sustaining desire; they don’t even ignite it. You know, it’s not about keeping the flame going. It’s about getting the spark going. They don’t drink. They have not had much experience in their 20s, one or two relationships at most. They don’t have sex much. They don’t socialize much. They’re home a lot.” They are the children of people who first read Mating 20 years ago. Sounds like the topic for her next book.

While I’m side-questing into health stuff I might as well link this one that I’ve been sitting on as well. Gavin Francis writes about mental health diagnoses from the perspective of a GP. This one is likely even more controversial than the “enhanced self” post from earlier, but also worth the time to get another perspective¹:

The subject is important, because according to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness. The line between health and ill-health of the mind has never been more blurred. A survey in 2019 found that two-thirds of young people in the UK felt they have had a mental disorder. We are broadening the criteria for what counts as illness at the same time as lowering the thresholds for diagnosis. This is not a bad thing if it helps us feel better, but evidence is gathering that as a society it may be making us feel worse.

And if this quote doesn’t get you to click through, nothing will…

We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.

My wife is a therapist and I see daily the impact of the amazing work she does with clients with complex trauma. One of the many things I learned from her is this idea in Internal Family Systems that there are “No Bad Parts” in us. These feelings of low mood, anxiety, etc. are not meant to be ignored or eliminated. We are meant to understand why they are there, and learn and grow through that understanding.

That is easier said than done, of course, and where my opinion diverges from Francis is that I think it is a good thing that this generation has more/better language to talk about mental health than we (meaning Gen X) did when we were growing up. I don’t doubt that over-diagnosis is a problem, but that’s kind of expected once we have the language to describe how we feel. I trust we will find our balance, and ultimately find that this was a net positive development.

Footnotes

1. Completely unrelated side note… I wrote “worth sitting with” here, and then immediately deleted it because that’s something AI would say. I continue to be fascinated with how it’s not just us who are influencing how AI writes, it’s the other way around too. ↩

I’ve been enjoying Derek Thompson’s newsletter lately. His latest is an essay on some of the unintended consequences of a health-obsessed society. This is the Internet so I’m sure everyone will find things to disagree with in a post like this, but it gave me lots of food for thought so I wanted to share. For instance:

Research by Sandra Weintraub of Northwestern University has found that “super-agers” (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in common except for an unusually robust history of friendship and other social connections. A 2025 analysis of 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank reported that living with a partner and frequently visiting family had roughly the same relationship with longevity as exercise.

And the kicker:

Our fear of death motivates an all-consuming neuroticism about outrunning mortality, even when the price we pay is putting health optimization above everything else, including other people.

I’ve been reading the work of L.M. Sacasas for a very long time, certainly since before he moved his writing to “a Substack.” He is a modern philosopher who I often agree with, and also sometimes vehemently disagree with—but never in a way that made me kick him out of my RSS feed.

I say all this because I haven’t linked to him in a while, and when I say “I think you should read this article by a philosophy dude” I don’t want you to dismiss it out of hand. In Do Not Resign From Life he takes on what we now all know as “the AI revolution”, and argues that even though there is plenty to complain about, one thing it shouldn’t do is make us think that we don’t matter as humans any more.

I don’t want to say much more about this essay, I just really hope you decide to read it. If you’re intrigued enough, stop here and click the link. If you’re not there yet, here’s a taste of the argument:

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for argument’s sake that they can. They can certainly generate passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

The machine cannot make us yield our ground. It is true that other humans can turn the machine against us, but that is a different problem. Here, I simply want to encourage us not to abandon those activities that bring us purpose, meaning, and delight, which are often the very activities that also bring us together.

In a practical example of brain fry, Petra Wille recalls some of her personal experience during coaching:

The product leaders and CPOs I coach tell me their people are completely fried before lunch—after a morning of generating content and reviewing outputs in Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, they’re just done. Adapting to this new type of work doesn’t make them more productive because they’re out of energy and brainpower by noon.

So conversations about how we actually work—what a sustainable rhythm looks like for humans in this new setup—still needs to happen.

This has become a pretty common complaint/concern among people I talk to, and it gets me too. I’ve been sitting on posting this link because I wanted to include some kind of proposal but… I got nothing. Just agreement with Petra that we really really need to figure out how to work in this new world in a way that avoids mass burnout.

Yes, it’s a clickbaity title, but if you read this as an essay about what to care about at work, it has some good reminders like this:

“Care less” is directionally right, but let’s get more specific. The real shift is learning to place your care deliberately — to get good at telling the difference between what’s strategically important and what’s just noisy. A lot of what happens inside companies is frustrating without being important. Reacting to a messy call that you personally wouldn’t have made as if it’s a strategic risk is what drains you. So is holding on to every detail as if it’s existential. Not everything deserves to be treated with equal importance. A gut check that helps: Will this matter in a year? If not, it probably doesn’t deserve much energy now. What’s the worst-case scenario? Often, it’s not that bad.

Derek Thompson goes into the history of the “flow” concept, and how tech and entertainment companies learned to simulate it without any of the substance psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originally had in mind:

Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition… To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.

Ten years ago the question was how to get into flow more often. Now it might be how to get out of the fake version fast enough to remember what the real one felt like.

I am definitely feeling the “brain fry” right now:

We found that the phenomenon described in these posts—cognitive exhaustion from intensive oversight of AI agents—is both real and significant. We call it “AI brain fry,” which we define as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity. Participants described a “buzzing” feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches.

The research is fascinating and worth reading, with super interesting findings like this:

 As employees go from using one AI tool to two simultaneously, they experience a significant increase in productivity. As they incorporate a third tool, productivity again increases, but at a lower rate. After three tools, though, productivity scores dipped. Multitasking is notoriously unproductive, and yet we fall for its allure time and again.

Earlier this week I had this thought: “Oh no, I think I’ve blown out my context window. I wish I could add some more tokens to my brain. Until then I might just have to respond to new requests with 401 Unauthorized.”

And that’s when I realized I probably need to go touch grass or something.

Isabel Woodford has a research-heavy essay in The Atlantic about why dads and daughters crave closeness but struggle to find it. 28% of American women are estranged from their father, and even where relationships are intact, they tend to be thinner—more transactional, less emotionally honest—than daughters want.

At the root of the modern father-daughter divide seems to be a mismatch in expectations. Fathers, generally speaking, have for generations been less involved than mothers in their kids’ (and especially their daughters‘) lives. But lots of children today expect more: more emotional support and more egalitarian treatment. Many fathers, though, appear to have struggled to adjust to their daughters’ expectations. The result isn’t a relationship that has suddenly ruptured so much as one that has failed to fully adapt.

And the psychological explanation that cuts deepest:

“What generates closeness is another person’s vulnerability,” Coleman explained, and dads may not be ready for that.

Daughters aren’t asking for grand gestures or dramatic change—they’re asking for their fathers to show up emotionally. Which turns out to be hard for a lot of men who were raised to see that kind of openness as weakness.