If Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky had been locked in a room and told they couldn’t leave until they agreed on the meaning of life, one of two things would’ve happened:

A duel at dawn (Tolstoy trained with pistols; Dostoevsky preferred psychological torture),

Or a 4,000-page co-authored religious treatise involving farm labor, murdered children, forgiveness, and the moral significance of buttered bread.

Either way, you wouldn’t be leaving with a bumper sticker.

If Leo Tolstoy wrestled the question of life’s meaning like a man hacking at firewood in a snowstorm, Fyodor Dostoevsky dragged it down into the basement, locked the door, and started interrogating it with a candle and a loaded revolver.

Dostoevsky didn’t so much answer the meaning of life as demand that it confess under pressure. His novels—The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Demons—are not self-help manuals. They are psychological crime scenes, each with God as suspect, human freedom as weapon, and suffering as evidence.

And yet, if you read him closely (and survive the theological whiplash), a fierce, trembling answer does begin to emerge. But you’ll have to forgive a few corpses and confessions along the way.

Leo Tolstoy—aristocrat, soldier, novelist, peasant-fantasist, proto-vegan, devout Christian anarchist, self-appointed prophet—lived so many philosophical lives in one that the question

“Did he discover the meaning of life?” feels almost quaint.

The more urgent question might be: Which Tolstoy are we asking?

Because by the end of his life, he was no longer the Count who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, nor the moralizing bearded hermit who gave away his copyrights.

He had become, in his own words, “a man lost in midlife, staring into the abyss with a Bible in one hand and a suicide note in the other.”

And from that abyss, he returned with a meaning—one that still haunts therapists, theologians, and Tumblr reblogs alike.

He can’t say I love you, but he’ll rebuild your suspension.

Men, as a species, are not known for emotional eloquence.

But give one a busted 1994 Miata and a weekend alone in the garage, and you'll see something like prayer. Not the soft, weepy kind. The kind done with socket wrenches and cursing and occasional bloodshed.

You want to understand a man? Don’t ask him how he feels. Ask him what he’s building.

Love Is a Job. And You're on Leave.

Swipe fatigue is real. The never-ending queue of emotionally undercooked situationships, breadcrumbing ghosts, and voice-notes from men who call themselves sapiosexuals has created a new digital phenomenon: the Micro-Retirement from Dating.

It’s not a dry spell. It’s not a breakup.

It’s a self-imposed sabbatical from the economy of affection.

Think of it as stepping back from the romantic labor market to recalibrate your emotional 401(k).

“Everything isn’t your mother’s fault—unless you’re monetizing it.”

It started as a meme.
Now it’s a reckoning.

In today’s therapeutic culture, especially online, one wound gets more airtime than any other: the mother wound.

Scroll through your feed and you’ll see it refracted a thousand ways—Reels whispering about emotional neglect, swipe carousels diagnosing maternal trauma, and downloadable PDFs promising “inner child liberation in 5 steps.”

This is the Mother Wound Industrial Complex—a uniquely American phenomenon where deep familial grief is transformed into content, identity, and profit.

I Said I Love You. He Fixed My Sink.

You know this couple. Maybe you see this couple every Tuesday at 3 p.m. in your therapy office.

One partner whispers, “I just want to hear I’m loved.” The other earnestly replies, “But I charged your phone, picked up your prescription, and cleaned out your hairbrush trap in the shower drain.”

They’re not in crisis. They’re just speaking entirely different dialects of affection.

Welcome to the quiet hilarity—and tender bewilderment—of Love Language Mismatch Comedy, where heartfelt gestures get mistranslated and therapists sit gently in the middle, trying not to smile too knowingly.

A new study has quietly shifted the center of gravity in our understanding of school shootings.

Published in PLOS One (Nassauer, 2025), the research finds that for most school shooters in U.S. history, guns weren't just tools of destruction — they were early symbols of affection, belonging, and identity.

If that sounds unsettling, it's because it is.

A fascinating new study published in The Journal of Sex Research (Kruger et al., 2025) suggests that psychedelic experiences may do more than temporarily alter perception—they may also quietly, sometimes dramatically, shift the way people experience sexuality, gender, and intimate relationships.

Surveying 581 adults who had used psychedelics, researchers found that the majority reported noticeable changes in sexual attraction, gender expression, and relationship dynamics—sometimes fleeting, often lasting well beyond the immediate effects.

Grief may not end at the grave.

A new study suggests that the majority of bereaved souls—whether mourning a spouse or a beloved pet—report vivid dreams or waking sensations involving the deceased.

Far from being rare or pathological, these experiences appear to be a common part of the human grieving process, tightly woven into how people maintain emotional bonds after death.

In fact, people who dream of their lost loved ones are significantly more likely to experience their presence while awake.

This overlap between dreaming and waking encounters challenges older assumptions that such experiences are signs of denial, avoidance, or mental instability.

Instead, they may represent something far more ordinary—and far more vital to healing.

There’s a room in the public health clinic where I work most mornings — quiet, often softly lit — where families sit in a circle of mismatched chairs.

A tissue box rests on the coffee table like a silent witness to what’s about to unfold.

It’s here, in this space that feels both foreign and familiar, that the work of family therapy begins.

At first glance, it might look like just another meeting.

People show up late. They forget to make eye contact.

They sit too far apart, or too close.

But underneath all that is a kind of trembling — a hope mixed with fear. Because family therapy isn’t just about fixing problems.

It’s about stepping into the heart of something raw and tangled. It’s about telling the truth after years of speaking in code.

A growing number of folks are in committed romantic relationships yet choose to live separately. These people are not simply part of a logistical LAT (Living Apart Together) arrangement due to external constraints.

They are apart-ers—those intrepid souls who intentionally structure their romantic lives around autonomy, spatial sovereignty, and emotional self-regulation.

In many ways, the aparter may represent a countercultural posture against the enmeshment and performance-driven intimacy norms typical of Western relational life.

Rather than merging homes, calendars, and identities, apart-ers assert that intimacy can thrive with deliberate distance.

This post explores the psychological, sociological, and cultural underpinnings of the apart-er identity, situating it within broader trends of cultural narcissism, attachment diversity, and relationship decoupling from domesticity.