If you ever wondered why you find one thing beautiful and another thing exhausting, science has finally delivered the answer, and it is exquisitely humiliating: your brain is cheap.

New neuroscience research from the University of Toronto—published in the sleekly titled PNAS Nexus, a journal that sounds like it should arrive encrypted—tells us that beauty is not cultural, not divine, not mystical, and certainly not a mark of taste.

Beauty, they say, is a biological bargain. It’s whatever costs your brain the least metabolic energy to process.

It turns out “easy on the eyes” was never a compliment. It was a financial report.

The brain, that famously expensive organ that eats 20% of your daily calories just to keep you upright and not sobbing in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, prefers images that require fewer neurons to fire.

Less neural activity means less glucose burned. Less glucose burned means your brain is happier.

Happiness, apparently, is just low energy expenditure wearing a romantic coat.

This is the kind of news that ruins poetry but kinda explains your dating history.

The modern West has always loved its own slogans.
They roll off the tongue with the ease of a creed and the hollowness of a television jingle:

God is dead. The lone wolf lives. We live in free markets.

Three sentences that were never entirely true, then became increasingly false, and now survive only as the flickering neon above a civilization that no longer believes in its own mythology.

What follows is not an argument.
Arguments require an audience with hope.
This is a eulogy.

A ruined-beautiful lament for a world that still stands but no longer shelters.

And like all eulogies, it begins with the cause of death.

Every society has a word it weaponizes and later pretends to regret.

The f-slur is ours.

It has lived many lives—bludgeon, joke, code, seduction, provocation, elegy. We declared it dead several times. No one believed us.

The word has returned, not sheepishly but triumphantly.

It appears on theater marquees, in gallery titles, across queer gaming circles, inside performance art manifestos. It is a ghost with tenure.

And like all ghosts, it only appears when the living have unresolved business.

The f-slur survives because the culture that produced it never dismantled the conditions that made it necessary. A slur is not a word. It is a system reporting on itself.

And this system is very much still here.

If you want to understand the fragile beauty of human psychology, don’t look at brain scans or meditation retreats.

Look at the Milan, Italy subway, where a man dressed as Batman recently doubled the rate at which commuters offered their seat to a pregnant woman.

It is one of the most charming, rigorous, and quietly revolutionary demonstrations of the Batman Effect—a phenomenon where unexpected events disrupt commuter autopilot and trigger prosocial behavior.

Let’s go deeper, because the effect is not just funny or heartwarming.

I

t’s a rare, real-world glimpse into how the human brain manages attention, how novelty triggers present-moment awareness, and how social contagion spreads prosocial cues through a crowd without anyone realizing what’s happening.

This is not comic-book morality. This is neuroscience, urban psychology, and the exquisitely delicate machinery of human perception—disguised in a cape.

Sunday, May 24, 2026. Gentle readers, there are dates that mean nothing and dates that behave more like thresholds. Pentecost falls into the second category.

You don’t need to believe anything theological to appreciate the symbolism: according to an old story, it was the day people who had been talking past each other somehow started making sense again.

Frankly, that’s as close to a marriage miracle as anything I’ve seen in clinical work.

So yes—The Monastic Marriage Series launches on May 24, 2026.

And no, you don’t need to light candles or mumble in ancient languages.

You just have to acknowledge that most of us are trying to maintain modern relationships with nervous systems that should’ve been retired three upgrades ago.

Everything is too loud, too fast, too insistent. You’ve already misinterpreted your partner three times by breakfast.

Most couples aren’t short on love.
They’re short on interior quiet—the kind that lets meaning arrive undistorted.

On Pentecost, Sunday, May 24, 2026. I’m opening a private, paywalled 10-part series that drags the most durable contemplative practices into the overstimulated American marriage.

Smart women rarely burn out for the reasons people assume.
They don’t collapse because they’re overwhelmed.
Or because they “took on too much.”
Or because they “care too deeply.”

Smart women burn out because for a very long time, they’ve been doing two jobs in every relationship they’re in:
the job they signed up for, and the job they absorbed quietly because no one else was willing or able to do it.

Most smart women don’t even realize they’re overfunctioning.
They think they’re coping.
They think they’re being competent.
They think they’re “just handling things.”

Meanwhile, their nervous systems are keeping the receipts.

What follows is not a pep talk.
It’s not a manifesto.

It’s a scientifically grounded explanation of why smart women overfunction and why their bodies eventually revolt.

There is a moment in a troubled marriage when the arguments stop having edges and start having consequences.

Not the dramatic kind—no slammed doors or clever insults—but the quieter, more existential kind where every gesture feels charged and every decision feels like the wrong one.

This is the emotional double bind: the relational configuration where every available choice injures something essential, and both partners begin to realize—silently, resentfully—that they are trapped inside a psychological geometry not of their making.

A double bind is not the same as a fight.
Fights have content.

Double binds have architecture instead.

There comes a point in many marriages when the noise stops but the suffering doesn’t.

The shouting fades, the arguments flatten, and the couple begins to live together like two exhausted nations engaged in a negotiated ceasefire—no longer fighting, but no closer to peace.

This is Emotional Gridlock: the quiet catastrophe of a relationship that can’t move forward, can’t move back, and can’t bear to stay where it is.

Gridlock is not about dishes, or tone, or who asked more generously last week.

Those are merely the costumes worn by a more existential drama.

Gridlock is what happens when the marriage loses its shared emotional language but continues speaking anyway, like two translators arguing over a text neither of them has read.

It is the stalemate between meaning and fear.

There is a particular kind of forgetting that happens only in the aftermath of an almost-relationship.

It is not graceful, and it is not poetic.

It is the kind of forgetting, for some, that feels like a survival strategy invented by someone who has never actually survived anything.

This is Situationship Amnesia—the neurological blackout that convinces you the person who barely showed up for you might, under slightly improved astrological conditions, be the great love of your life.

There are mornings when the house looks peaceful—sunlight on the floorboards, coffee quietly percolating, the kind of silence that feels borrowed. Then someone walks into the room, touches the back of a chair, and says, gently, “Do you have a minute?”

It’s a harmless question.
It’s practically nothing.

And yet your body responds with a quiet internal flinch, the nervous system version of a low battery warning.

You’re not impatient. You’re not angry. You simply do not have a minute—not emotionally, not neurologically. The budget is gone.

This is emotional bandwidth mismatch: when two nervous systems have unequal capacity at the exact moment one reaches for the other.

Early morning, half-light.
The house is quiet in the way houses rarely are. You stand in the kitchen watching the coffee drip, holding onto the stillness like it’s the last clean surface in your life.

Then you hear it—the soft, almost apologetic way someone clears their throat in the hallway. It’s not loud. Not hostile. Not anything that should matter.

But your body reacts anyway. A small tightening behind the ribs. A shift in breath. The faint sense of being summoned.

Nothing has happened yet, and you’re already tired.

This is where attunement fatigue begins: not with conflict, but with the slow, steady depletion of your ability to track another person’s emotional life without abandoning your own.

We talk about attunement as though it’s a spiritual achievement—limitless presence, infinite empathy, a kind of interpersonal sainthood.

But attunement in its physiological form is not transcendence.

It is labor. Real labor. And the nervous system, generous as it is, has a limit.

Attunement fatigue is the moment the body sends the invoice.

There are moments in a marriage—small, unremarkable moments—when something inside the body gives its verdict before the mind has even filed the paperwork.

A partner walks into the kitchen. A child drops a backpack by the door. Someone exhales with just enough force to alter the air in the room.

You feel it. Not emotionally, not conceptually. Physically.

Your body settles or braces.
There is no in-between.
Here’s the thing. The autonomic nervous system has no diplomatic wing.