After the Bondi shooting, what unfolds across news coverage, social media, and everyday conversation is not just reaction. It is a shared system under stress adjusting itself in real time. People feel fear, grief, anger, and vigilance because something genuinely terrible has happened. Those feelings are not secondary effects. They are the human reality of […]
Affective resonance is the synchrony that precedes understanding—the subtle entrainment of physiological and emotional states that aligns individuals before they think in unison. Like oscillators in the Kuramoto model, human nervous systems phase-lock through tone, cadence, and shared temporal fields. What we call meaning often arises only after this alignment has already occurred, retroactively justified […]
Blame draws breath. Inhale the fear of other people. Exhale the accusation that keeps the fear alive. Each cycle promises control—naming enemies, drawing boundaries, standing strong—but strength here is a mask. What passes for rebellion only generates new codes, new rituals, new obligations. Rules always return, harsher and more brittle, precisely because they are denied. […]
Extreme economic doctrines—whether right or left—are structural performances, temporary galvanizations around dysfunction. They flare precisely because they replicate the fractures that sustain them. What appears as crisis-management is, in fact, a choreography of failure made durable. The intentional destruction of poverty is not an error of policy but a condition of possibility for wealth at […]
The more you blame others, the more afraid you become. The more afraid you become, the more you need to blame others. Blame draws breath: inhale the fear of others, exhale the accusation that keeps it alive. The cycle is seductive because it feels like control—naming enemies, drawing lines, standing strong—but what sustains it is […]
The greatest physical pain a person can ever feel is quite probably bounded by suffering any one of a dozen or so uniquely unpleasant ailments but the greatest emotional pain is almost singularly attributable to the suffering of others. Emotional experience is the essence of compassion and peace of mind but it is a subjective […]
It strikes me as fascinating that the most significant things we ever experience in our lives are quite impossible to describe with language. Emotional life and other experiences occur at a level prior to language or ordered cognition. When we try to explain it, all we ever do is see our own descriptions reflected back […]
The first sign that you are emotionally mature: you acknowledge that no one ever truly is. The generative discontinuity of insecurity is very much the mischievous absence around which we build our subjective selves and each iteration of developmental sedimentation into (and as) memory, experience and learning only ever really amplifies this uncertainty in useful […]
Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]
Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to act in spite of fear. Only a fool knows no fear and were it not that we demonise emotional experience in the ways we all do and as a function of the constructive paranoia that binds us all into one writhing mass of […]
You might think it’s about being loved for how you look. But what you truly need is to be loved for who you are—beneath the image, before the performance, outside the frame. Only one of these forms of love endures. And only you can sense which one matters. This isn’t something you understand by reading […]
Daedelus Kite 