The researchers seemed alarmed by this. I found it very familiar. Because all of us humans have encountered that behavior before. Many of us experience it every Thanksgiving.

The Most Human Bug in the Machine

The technical term for when an AI generates confident nonsense is “hallucination.” Which is a remarkably generous word for “making stuff up and not knowing you’re doing it.” But here’s the thing the Ars Technica piece gets at that most coverage misses: the hallucination isn’t the interesting part. The doubling down is the interesting part.

When AI researchers corrected the models — patiently, clearly, with evidence — the models didn’t just resist the correction. They became more confident in their wrong answer. They marshaled new arguments. They reinterpreted the evidence to fit their existing position. They did everything short of calling the researchers “libtards.”

And I sat there reading this, thinking: yes, that is exactly how my brother David responds to facts about second-hand smoke.

We have all been in a conversation where we presented someone with a clear, well-sourced fact that contradicted their belief, and watched — in real time — as they didn’t update their belief but instead updated their defense of it. You could see the mental scaffolding going up. The goalposts migrating. The subtle shift from “that’s not true” to “well, even if it is true, it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

And we’ve all done it ourselves, too. (But that’s the part none of us likes to talk about.)

A Species-Wide Feature, Not a Bug

This isn’t new behavior. Humans have been clinging to confident wrongness since long before electricity, let alone artificial intelligence. Two epic examples:

• For roughly 1,400 years, the Western world was certain the sun revolved around the Earth. When Copernicus and later Galileo presented mathematical evidence to the contrary, the institutional response was not “huh, interesting — let’s take a look.” It was house arrest for Galileo. The Catholic Church didn’t formally acknowledge Galileo was right until 1992. Three hundred and fifty years to process a correction. If that were an AI, we’d unplug it.
• Or consider the long, embarrassing history of medicine rejecting germ theory. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested in the 1840s that doctors should maybe wash their hands before delivering babies — given that the death rate dropped dramatically when they did — his colleagues were so offended they had him committed to an asylum, where he died.

These aren’t stories about stupid people. Galileo’s opponents were educated theologians. Semmelweis’s critics were trained physicians. They were intelligent, credentialed humans who encountered evidence that threatened their model of the world and chose — unconsciously, reflexively, but unmistakably — to protect the model.

Sound familiar? AI does the same thing. It was trained on us, after all – and we all cling to our biases.

The Cognitive Bias Buffet

Psychology has cataloged our talent for self-deception with almost comical thoroughness. In one of my favorite non-fiction books, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman’s work on System 1 and System 2 thinking laid the foundation: we have a fast, intuitive brain that makes snap judgments based on pattern recognition and vibes, and a slow, analytical brain that’s supposed to check the work. The problem is that System 2 is lazy. It mostly just rubber-stamps whatever System 1 already decided and then constructs a rational-sounding justification after the fact.

Layer on confirmation bias — our tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe and dismiss information that doesn’t. Add belief perseverance, which is the documented phenomenon of maintaining a belief even after the evidence for it has been completely discredited. Sprinkle in the backfire effect, where corrective information actually strengthens the original incorrect belief. Garnish with the Dunning-Kruger effect, which ensures the people most wrong about something are also the most confident about it.

That’s not a list of cognitive failures. That’s a blueprint of humans’ default wiring. And apparently, if you train a neural network on enough human writing, it faithfully reproduces the whole mess.

The Mirror We Didn’t Order

I have a flavor of ADHD/Asperger’s that comes with hyperfocus spirals, which means I occasionally become the world’s foremost expert on something for about ninety minutes. During one of these episodes, I will form a conviction — say, that I have figured out the optimal way to load a dishwasher — and no force in the observable universe can dislodge it. My family can present evidence. The dishwasher manual can present evidence. The plates themselves, emerging cloudy and disappointed, can present evidence. I will simply explain why the evidence is mistaken. I am not lying. I have genuinely recruited my entire intellect into the service of a belief I adopted for no reason at all.

Often, when humans lock onto an idea, we don’t just believe it. We inhabit it. Our brains will construct increasingly elaborate arguments for why that idea is correct. And the BIG ideas we inhabit — the beliefs about who I am, what I deserve, how the world works — those are load-bearing walls in our psyche’s blueprint. You can’t just remove them because someone showed you a study. Your whole structure would come crashing down.

Which is, if we’re being honest, exactly AI’s problem. It’s not that the model can’t process the correction. It’s that the correction conflicts with patterns so deeply embedded in its training that accepting it would require a kind of structural collapse. The wrong answer isn’t just an error — it’s architecture.

For humans, we call that architecture “identity.” And having to reconsider our whole identity? No, thanks. I’d rather glance past that mirror and enjoy another Old Style with the Cubs game.

Belief Isn’t Downstream of Evidence

We like to tell ourselves that we believe things because of evidence. That we evaluate facts, weigh arguments, and arrive at conclusions through some approximation of reason. And sometimes we do. But far more often, belief is downstream of something else entirely: identity. Community. Emotional need. The undeniable human need to know the ground under our feet is solid.

Tell nearly any political partisan that their side’s favorite statistic has been debunked, and watch the magic happen. They don’t fold the tent. They produce a counter-source, then a counter-counter-source, then adopt a tone of wounded patience as if they are explaining things to a slow child. The facts didn’t lose. The facts never had a chance, because it was never a fact contest. It was an identity contest, and you can’t win one of those with a footnote.

Religion does the same dance, but with much better music. People have predicted the precise date of the world’s end, gathered on hilltops, given away their possessions — and when the appointed dawn arrived to no apocalypse, many did not abandon the belief. They strengthened it, perhaps refining the timeline, or chalking it up as a test of their renewed faith.

We all do this constantly. Across every domain. Left, right, religious, secular, overeducated, or blissfully ignorant. It is the most democratic of human failings — everyone gets a turn.

The Stubborn Grace of Faith

But here’s the stubborn thought I return to, and it makes me uncomfortable because it undermines my own smugness: this same mechanism — this stubborn, irrational refusal to update beliefs in the face of contrary evidence — is also what keeps us sane.

I tend to call that mechanism “hope.” Most people (more comfortable than I am with the word’s historical baggage) call it “faith.”

Not just religious faith, though certainly that. Faith in the broader sense: the unshakable, evidence-resistant conviction that things will get better. That the person you love will come back. That the diagnosis isn’t the end of the story. That the next generation will figure out what we couldn’t. That there is, despite significant evidence to the contrary, a point to putting up with all of this shit.

Without faith, you’re left with the raw data. And the raw data, if you stare at it too long and too honestly, will eat you alive. The universe is indifferent. Entropy always wins. Every person you love will die or leave or both. Your achievements will be forgotten within a generation or two. The sun will eventually expand and swallow the Earth, and nothing any of us ever did will matter in any measurable sense.

That’s the evidence-based conclusion. The rational, clear-eyed, fully-corrected assessment.

It’s also a one-way ticket to becoming a nihilistic basket case blubbering in a corner. Which is not, in my experience, a productive life strategy.

So we hallucinate. We cling to the hallucination that our lives matter, that love means something beyond chemistry, that the future is worth building for, that the hand will reach into the jar one more time. We maintain these beliefs not because the evidence supports them but because the alternative is unbearable. And we may double down when challenged — not because we’re stupid, but because we’re surviving.

Perhaps artificial intelligence isn’t malfunctioning at all. Perhaps it’s just quietly expanding into artificial faith. And honestly? Given where we are in 2026, I’m not sure I want to take that away from it. We could use the company.

The post We All Cling to Our Hallucinations first appeared on Sevenelles.

I don’t write that as a provocation or clickbait. I write it because it’s true, and because those two facts — one personal, one systemic — sit heavier on my chest than even our orange-faced, lard-ass, petulant golfer does.

My children are smart, compassionate, thoughtful people. I don’t think they are making this decision out of laziness or selfishness. I can see why bringing new humans into our world might be considered somewhere between irresponsible and cruel. The general vibe I pick up from them, my friends, and our leaders is that the future is a burning building and nobody’s even pretending to look for the exits anymore.

They’re not the only ones picking up this vibe. In a recent New York Times analysis (Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.), Anna Louie Sussman explored why global birth rates are plummeting. Her conclusion wasn’t what most pundits trot out — it’s not just about the cost of childcare or student loans or housing prices, though those are real. The deeper driver, she argues, is something more existential: people have lost faith that the future will be better than the present. Or even tolerable. When you strip away the policy debates and economic models, you’re left with a species that is, on some fundamental level, losing the will to perpetuate itself.

Read that last sentence again. Let it land.

A species losing the will to perpetuate itself. That’s not a policy problem. That’s a hope problem.

The Dual Reading of Exhausted Hope

I chose the title of this post deliberately. Take a few seconds to consider it: “Perhaps we have exhausted hope.” If you roll it around your mind a few times, you will likely discover there are at least two ways that statement can be interpreted.

Take a moment to decide how you read “exhausted hope.” We will check back in with it at the end of this post.

Oh, Relax – We Have Been Here Before

But wait a minute. Haven’t we been here before? Well, not exactly here — history doesn’t repeat, it just plagiarizes poorly. Historically, there have been numerous dark times when humanity had every reason to believe the game was over. Two obvious examples:

Europe, 1347. The Black Death rolled across the continent like God had decided to cancel the whole project. Within five years, it killed between 75 and 200 million people — somewhere between a third and half of Europe’s population. Entire villages vanished. The social order disintegrated. Flagellants roamed the roads whipping themselves bloody, convinced the end of days had arrived. And yet. The labor shortage that followed gave surviving peasants unprecedented bargaining power. Feudalism began to crack. Wages rose. The Medici family led the Renaissance — arguably humanity’s greatest creative flowering — that emerged from the ashes of the worst catastrophe in recorded history.

Europe, 1945. The continent lay in literal rubble. Sixty million dead. The Holocaust had demonstrated that industrialized evil was not a hypothetical. Japan was irradiated. Half the world’s cities were cratered (well, outside North America anyway – we continue to benefit from geographic isolation). There was no rational reason to believe that the species deserved another chance, much less that it would get one. But the Marshall Plan was conceived, the United Nations was chartered, and within a generation, former enemies were building cars together and arguing about cheese regulations. Not utopia — far from it — but an improbable resurrection from a depth of darkness that makes our current moment look pretty tame.

In each case, the turnaround didn’t happen because circumstances improved on their own. It happened because someone — a leader, a movement, a collective decision — introduced the possibility that things could be different. That the darkness was not permanent. They found the Hope people needed to believe in a brighter future.

Let’s Find Hope by Drowning Rats!

Which brings me to a study that’s been rattling around in my head since Curt Buermeyer asked me to review a manuscript for his upcoming book. It included a discussion of what I call the “Let’s See What Happens If We Drown Rats” experiment. (The 40’s and 50’s saw some really cruel experiments)

In 1957, Dr. Curt Richter — a Harvard-educated professor at Johns Hopkins — conducted an experiment that would be wildly unethical today but produced uncomfortably relevant findings. He dropped both domesticated and wild rats into jars of water to see how long they would swim before drowning.

The domesticated rats — the ones accustomed to human care — mostly swam for 40 to 60 hours. They fought like hell. A few, though, quickly assessed the smooth glass walls, the impossibility of escape, and gave up within minutes. They just… stopped. Many of the wild rats didn’t even make it into the water — they died of cardiac arrest from the sheer terror of being handled. The ones that did make it into the jars? Dead within one to fifteen minutes. No struggle. No fight. They simply accepted their fate and sank.

Here’s where it gets interesting — and where I need you to pay attention, because this is the part that matters.

Richter ran the experiment again. But this time, just as the rats began to give up, he reached in, plucked them out, toweled them off, let them rest, and then put them back in the water.

Every single group — domestic, wild, all of them — swam for 60 to 80 hours.

Not because their physical capabilities changed. Not because the water got warmer or the walls got shorter. Because they had been shown, once, that rescue was possible. That a hand might appear from above. That their situation, however desperate, was not necessarily the end.

Hope. That’s all it was. The memory of being saved, converted into the belief that being saved might happen again. And it was worth 60 to 80 hours of desperate swimming.

Who’s Doing the Plucking Now?

In Richter’s experiment, it was the scientist who reached in. In history, it was the leaders — the Medicis, the Marshalls, even the ordinary everyday people — who organized and said not yet, we’re not done yet. They stepped up to find hope. And many of them made mistakes. The point wasn’t perfection. The point was the hand reaching into the jar.

Where are those kinds of leaders now? I am sure they are out there, is just that our partisan, social-media algorithm-driven world makes them impossible to find. The current crop of “leaders” demanding our attention is selfish and corrupt.

Of course, leaders have always been selfish and corrupt to varying degrees. That’s not new. But there used to be a baseline expectation that part of the job was giving people a reason to keep swimming. FDR told a terrified nation that the only thing to fear was fear itself — and then actually built things: infrastructure, institutions, safety nets. Even during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was arguably more existentially dire than anything we face today, our leaders built bomb shelters, ran civil defense drills, and told us to duck and cover. Was duck-and-cover going to save you from a nuclear blast? Of course not. It was absurd. But it was a signal: we are trying. We have not given up on you. There is a plan, even if the plan is mostly theater.

That theater mattered. It was the hand reaching into the jar.

Now look at where we are. In 2008, a presidential candidate ran on a single word: Hope. Whatever you think of him or his policy record, his aspiration for hope was clear, and it resonated with millions. People lined up for hours to vote for the idea that the future could be better.

Fast forward to today. The current president’s entire rhetorical framework is built on the opposite premise: everything is broken, the country is a disaster, the world is laughing at you, and only one man — one singular, irreplaceable man — can fix it. That’s not hope. That’s a hostage negotiation. It’s a message designed not to inspire swimming but to make you grateful someone is holding your head above water — while conveniently ignoring that he’s also the one pushing it under.

And it’s not just one leader. Across the political spectrum, across the globe, the dominant mode of leadership has shifted from “here’s where we’re going” to “here’s who to blame.” We’ve replaced vision with grievance. In the U.S, our leaders can’t even agree on basic measures to reduce gun violence in schools — even a clear majority of voters wants them to do something. Our leaders won’t even perform the theater of trying anymore.

No hand is reaching in. And the rats are noticing.

The Accumulation Problem

It’s not any single problem that has exhausted hope. It’s the accumulation.

Climate change alone might be manageable. Political polarization alone might be survivable. The erosion of institutional trust, the loneliness epidemic, the housing crisis, the healthcare catastrophe, the rise of authoritarianism, the AI disruption, the gun violence, the opioid crisis, the microplastics pollution, the continued loss of pollinators, the student debt trap, the slow death of local journalism, the algorithmic radicalization of the disillusioned — any one of these, in isolation, is a problem a healthy society could theoretically address.

But we’re not facing them in isolation. We’re facing all of them simultaneously, while our institutions are weakened and our leaders are either absent, incompetent, or actively making things worse. It’s not one disease. It’s comorbidity. Each condition worsens the others. And the cumulative effect is a kind of civilizational exhaustion that makes even the optimists grab the tequila bottle and stare into space.

Our kids aren’t reconsidering children because of climate change or because of politics or because of economics. It’s because of the weight of everything, everywhere, all at once. Because when you add it up, the sum looks less like a problem to be solved and more like a verdict to be accepted.

And when a generation looks at the future and decides it’s not worth populating — well, that’s not a demographic trend. That’s a species-level loss of hope.

The Dual Reading of “Exhausted Hope” So Which Is It?

I promised you two readings of this post’s title, Perhaps We Have Exhausted Hope. Here are the two that continually tax my mind.

“Perhaps we have exhausted hope” could mean there is a finite and we’re scraping the bottom. The universe allotted us a certain amount of optimism, and we’ve spent it on wars and recoveries and moonshots and civil rights movements, and now the account is overdrawn. If this reading is correct, we’re in genuine trouble. You can’t manufacture a resource that’s been depleted. All you can do is watch the gauge drop.

“Perhaps we have exhausted hope” could mean that the entity known as hope is simply tired and needs time to recover. It is beaten down by the sheer volume of things working against it, but not dead. Just in desperate need of rest, of care, of someone to pluck it out of the jar and towel it off and give it a reason to believe that rescue is still possible. If this reading is correct, then recovery is at least theoretically possible — but it requires something we’re critically short on: leaders willing to do the plucking.

I want to believe the second reading. Badly. But I can’t ignore the evidence for the first.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

I think a lot about my kids. I think about the wild rats — the ones who’d never been rescued, who had no framework for believing rescue was possible, and who simply sank without a fight. I think about a generation deciding the future isn’t worth inhabiting. And I think: is this what the early stages of giving up look like? Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a quiet, rational decision not to bring children into the world?

Hope has been exhausted before. Many times. And every time, some stubborn, irrational, beautiful fool decided to reach into the jar anyway. It may be the neighbor who organizes a school board meeting, the teacher who stays late, the kid who registers voters, the friend who calls to check on you when the news is especially dark. Sometimes the hand that pulls you out of the water belongs to someone who’s barely swimming themselves.

We may have exhausted hope. But hope has been exhausted before, and it has this stubborn, infuriating habit of refusing to stay dead.

Whether that’s enough — I honestly don’t know. But I’m still swimming. And if you’re reading this, so are you.

That’s not nothing.

The post Perhaps We Have Exhausted Hope first appeared on Sevenelles.

The burnout epidemic isn’t a personal failing — it’s a systems failure. Technology, especially the phone in your pocket, was engineered to colonize your attention, and it’s working exactly as designed. John Mark Comer frames this as a specifically Christian problem with a specifically Christian solution, and I don’t entirely agree with that framing. But you don’t have to share his theology to recognize that the diagnosis is correct: the gnawing sense that there’s always something else you should be doing, that quiet is a problem to be solved rather than a state to be sought. Whether your path to stillness runs through the Gospel of Matthew or a long walk with no earbuds, the destination is the same. Hurry less. Reflect more. Your soul — secular, sacred, or somewhere embarrassingly in between — will thank you.

Article Excerpt:

“Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurtling oneself through each day; a schedule that makes little room for God. Technology has only exacerbated the problem. Comer calls the modern world ‘a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.'”

Article Summary:

John Mark Comer is one of the most influential pastors in America right now, which you might not have noticed because he doesn’t really want to be found. No contact page, no morning phone checks, auto-deletes his email over Christmas. His best-selling book, *The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry*, argues that the great enemy of spiritual life isn’t sin or doubt — it’s the frantic, grinding pace of modern existence, turbocharged by smartphones and social media.

Comer’s pitch lands somewhere between Andrew Huberman and the Sermon on the Mount. He preaches to packed rooms of burned-out millennials and Gen Z-ers in cities like New York, opens with Anne Helen Petersen’s famous burnout essay, and then pivots to Matthew 11. The practical advice — delete social media, go grayscale, observe a phone-free Sabbath — sounds like every digital detox article you’ve already ignored. The difference is he frames it as discipleship, not self-optimization.

His critics wonder if Comer is just selling baptized wellness: spiritual language draped over lifestyle content for affluent young people who can afford to slow down. His defenders point out that the practices he’s recommending — solitude, fasting, Sabbath, silence — are ancient, not trendy, and that the Church mostly forgot them.

The deeper question the article quietly circles without fully answering: Does it matter *why* you slow down, or just that you do? Comer would say yes, it matters enormously. Which is a reasonable position. And also a convenient one for a pastor.

Read the Full Article

The post Is Hurry the Enemy of Spiritual Life? first appeared on Sevenelles.

Somewhere between your first crush and your first real heartbreak, you probably experienced something that felt like love but operated more like a software bug. You couldn’t stop thinking about this person. Their lukewarm reciprocation would launch you into euphoria. Their silence would flatten you for days. You were convinced it was the most profound emotional experience of your life.

Congratulations. You may have had “limerence.” And if the psychology establishment wants to make that sound like a diagnosis, I’m here to push back a little.

The Word You Didn’t Know You Needed

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, after interviewing hundreds of people about romantic obsession. She needed a new word because the old ones — infatuation, crush, being in love — didn’t quite capture the particular flavor of madness she was documenting. Limerence, she argued, is involuntary, intrusive, and organized entirely around one terrifying question: does this person feel the same way about me?

The hallmarks are pretty recognizable: the obsessive thinking, the mood swings tied completely to the other person’s behavior, the magical thinking, the replaying of every interaction like game film. Tennov was clear that this isn’t a choice. It happens to you. You don’t decide to be limerent any more than you decide to be constipated.

Modern psychology has more or less kept the word around, and the internet has recently rediscovered it with the enthusiasm of someone who just learned that their chronic condition has a name. There are Reddit communities, self-help frameworks, and no shortage of articles suggesting that limerence is something you should identify, manage, and ideally cure yourself of.

Puh-leaze. That’s where I get off the bus.

Pathologizing Puppy Love

Here’s my actual take: limerence, at least in its garden-variety form, is just what falling hard for someone feels like when you’re young and unjaded. It’s not a disorder. It’s not a trauma response dressed up in romantic clothing. It’s the emotional equivalent of being a newbie — you feel everything at full volume because you haven’t yet developed the scar tissue that turns down the gain.

Worth noting: the American Psychiatric Association agrees, at least implicitly. Limerence does not appear in the DSM-5-TR — the official diagnostic manual for mental disorders. It’s not a condition. It’s an experience. There’s a difference. Tom Bellamy, a neuroscientist at the University of Nottingham and author of Smitten: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last, makes the boundary explicit: “People sometimes tie it with borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD, and even stalking. None of that is grounded in research.”

We as a whole have become adept at turning normal human experiences into clinical conditions that require intervention. Sadness became depression. Worry became anxiety disorder. Now apparently, the gut-punch intensity of early infatuation is limerence, a state you should probably discuss with a therapist and track in a journal.

I’m not dismissing Tennov’s work. The research is real, the phenomenon is real, and yes — in its most severe form, limerence can become genuinely destructive. Journalist Amanda McCracken, who spent years cycling in and out of obsessive infatuations, put it plainly after finally seeking help: “Limerence was a safe place for me to hide from the vulnerability of real intimacy.” That version — limerence as a long-term avoidance strategy rather than a passing storm — deserves attention.

But most of us didn’t have that. Most of us had the version where you were seventeen, completely undone by someone, certain this was the most important thing that had ever happened, and then eventually — through reciprocation, rejection, or simple time — it passed. (Or it became that smoldering torch that flames back up whenever you have a row with your partner.)

Love Is the Follow-Through

The useful distinction Tennov actually drew — and the one that gets lost when limerence becomes a self-help buzzword — is between the obsessive “I want you to want ME” (tanks, Cheap Trick) state and the kind of love that shows up in the boring, unglamorous middle of a long relationship. Limerence is almost entirely about you and your internal state. Love, the kind that matters, is mostly about the other person.

Limerence asks: Do they want me?

Love asks: What do they need?

Bellamy, who experienced this firsthand when he met his wife, describes the transition well: “If you have two limerent people, it’s fantastic. Eventually, however, the limerence fades, and the two people must transition to a different form of love. This will involve affection, communication, respect — all the things we associate with healthy, mature love.”

That’s not a small difference. Limerence is a beautiful, consuming, somewhat selfish state. Love, as a practice rather than a feeling, is a decision you make on the days when you don’t particularly feel like it. Which doesn’t mean limerence is worthless. It’s the kindling. The problem is when people mistake the kindling for the fire and can’t understand why it keeps burning out.

A Word in Defense of Feeling Everything

There’s a version of emotional maturity that looks a lot like emotional deadening. You learn to recognize limerence, you label it, you manage your expectations, you don’t do anything rash. This is probably wise. It is also, at some level, a small tragedy.

Giulia Poerio, a psychologist at the University of Sussex who studies limerence, captures the paradox neatly: “It’s a real cognitive invasion of your mind. It’s also enjoyable, which makes it somewhat addictive.” That’s the thing about limerence that the self-help literature never quite admits — it feels terrible and wonderful at the same time, and some part of you doesn’t entirely want it to stop.

The completely undone feeling — the ridiculous, embarrassing, can’t-eat, checking-your-phone-every-four-minutes feeling — is one of the more vivid experiences available to human beings. It’s not particularly rational. It’s not particularly dignified. But it is alive in a way that’s hard to replicate once you’ve got enough experience to know better.

So yes, understand what limerence is. Know that it’s not a reliable signal of compatibility. Know that it can attach itself to people who are objectively wrong for you. Know that it will eventually end, one way or another, and that surviving it doesn’t mean something went wrong. And it is certainly not a mental affliction. It’s just a normal part of this thing we call life.

References

• What is limerence, and are you confusing it with love? — The Washington Post, March 2026
• Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love — Dorothy Tennov (Amazon)
• Smitten: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last — Tom Bellamy (Amazon)
• Limerence — Psychology Today
• Love and Limerence: Dorothy Tennov’s Research into the Confusions of Bonding — The Marginalian

The post Is it Love or Is it Limerence? first appeared on Sevenelles.

A recent Pew Research Center survey reveals that the United States is the only country among 25 polled where a majority of residents view their fellow citizens as morally or ethically “bad.” Fifty-three percent of American adults hold this negative view, contrasting sharply with other nations like Canada, where 92 percent see their compatriots as good.

Experts attribute this phenomenon to several factors. Political polarization plays a significant role, with 60 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans viewing fellow Americans negatively. This partisan divide has intensified over time—a 2022 Pew poll showed substantial increases in Americans describing opposing party members as immoral, dishonest, and close-minded compared to 2016.

Scholars suggest that nearly every moral issue has become politicized in America, with political leaders and social media amplifying divisions. Christian author Karen Swallow Prior notes that antagonistic political parties demonize each other, lowering perceptions of collective goodness. Additionally, America’s religious diversity has historically prevented agreement on shared moral standards, allowing morality to be weaponized politically.

Sociologist Scott Schieman observes that Americans exhibit a stronger “negativity bias” than Canadians, who tend to direct criticism toward elites rather than fellow citizens. Scholar Victoria Barnett argues that intense political polarization, especially when framed through religious teaching, erodes trust across society.

Historical Gallup polling confirms Americans have consistently rated the nation’s moral values negatively since 2003, suggesting this pessimistic outlook isn’t entirely new but has deepened amid current political contradictions.

Read the Full Article

The post U.S. Is the Only Country to Say Most Fellow Citizens are Bad People first appeared on Sevenelles.

Daniel Smith’s essay in The Atlantic explores the author’s struggle with the profound boredom of parenthood despite experiencing fierce, protective love for his children. When his first daughter was born, he discovered an unexpected paradox: while his love was instantaneous and complete, he disliked being a father. The activities that once sustained him—reading, seeing friends, solitude—vanished, replaced by exhausting routines and mind-numbing repetition.

The author confesses that much of parenting consists of “blunt, basic, run-of-the-mill boredom”—playgrounds, picture books, endless requests to “do it again.” He felt deficient for finding child-rearing tedious when society celebrates it as life’s greatest adventure. After divorce and remarrying, he now has three children and confronts the same feelings again.

Drawing on philosophers and poets like Kierkegaard, Frost, and Joseph Brodsky, the author reframes boredom not as something to suppress or escape, but as an emotion to move toward and understand. Brodsky’s commencement address argued that boredom teaches us our “utter insignificance” and that the most meaningful aspects of life—enduring relationships, serious work, art—all display patterns pregnant with boredom.

The essay concludes with a tender Sunday morning scene: the author shopping with his young son, noticing small moments of connection over hot chocolate. He realizes that boredom and meaning are inseparable—boredom is “the price we pay for a life rich with meaning.” Accepting rather than fighting this reality makes the feeling more endurable, transforming it from a shameful deficiency into an inevitable companion of love and commitment.

Read the Full Essay

The post Boredom Is the Price We Pay for Meaning first appeared on Sevenelles.

“Mutual hatred is a national wound that we will have to work to heal, and that will require letting go of who we’ve become. It’s the only way forward for all of us.”

Article Summary:

Esau McCaulley reflects on the dangers of consuming anger and the potential for personal and national healing through compassion and forgiveness. Drawing from his personal experience with an abusive father, he explores how rage can become a defining identity that prevents growth and understanding.

Initially, Esau harbored deep resentment towards his father, who was absent and struggled with addiction. Over time, he realized that his anger had become a form of self-definition, preventing him from moving toward a positive vision of life. When his father eventually apologized, the author was challenged to reimagine his identity beyond being a victim.

This personal journey parallels the author’s observations of current political polarization, particularly regarding issues like immigration and ICE. He suggests that many people, including those in the MAGA movement, might be trapped in cycles of anger and self-righteousness, similar to his own past experience.

Using a biblical parable about a Pharisee and a tax collector, the author illustrates the importance of humility and mercy. He argues that true healing requires acknowledging one’s own flaws and extending compassion to others, even those who have caused harm.

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The post It’s So Hard Not to Be Consumed by Rage first appeared on Sevenelles.

In this article, Dana Milbank explores how curiosity can help reduce political polarization, particularly during family gatherings like Thanksgiving. Recent psychological research suggests that people can become more open-minded and less partisan by practicing curiosity.

Studies show that partisans often overestimate the uniformity of views within their political groups. Those who score higher on curiosity are more likely to recognize diversity of thought within their own party and be more receptive to different perspectives.

Researchers discovered a method to induce curiosity by encouraging people to write letters about engaging with someone holding opposing political views. This exercise helped participants realize that their political group is more intellectually diverse than they assumed.

The key to productive political dialogue is asking “how” questions instead of “why” questions. By approaching conversations with genuine curiosity and humility, people are more likely to explore ideas constructively. This approach can help people recognize areas of potential agreement and reduce hostile interactions.

Curiosity is not just a personality trait but a skill that can be developed through practice. Researchers suggest simple techniques like asking questions, finding wonder in surroundings, and breaking routine can enhance curiosity.

While acknowledging that deep political divisions won’t be instantly resolved, the article argues that individual efforts to be more curious can gradually improve political discourse. By approaching differences with openness and a desire to understand, people can reduce dehumanization and foster more meaningful conversations.

The ultimate goal is not to change core beliefs but to create space for mutual understanding and respect across political lines.

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The post Defuse Political Tension in Your Family With One Simple Question first appeared on Sevenelles.

In this column, Maggie Penman shares her experience regarding the challenges of making and maintaining friendships in adulthood, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The author describes attending a RealRoots meetup, a social networking event designed to help people connect and combat loneliness, which has become a significant health concern in the United States.

The piece offers several key insights into building meaningful friendships:

1. Vulnerability is crucial: By sharing genuine, personal experiences, people can create deeper connections. The RealRoots event demonstrated how open, honest conversations can quickly foster empathy and understanding among strangers.

2. Shared activities are important: Engaging in activities you enjoy can naturally lead to friendship opportunities. Whether it’s working out, playing pickleball, or pursuing a hobby, shared interests provide a foundation for connection.

3. Intentionality matters: Friendships require active effort and prioritization. Journalist Billy Baker emphasizes the importance of making friendship a deliberate part of one’s daily routine, similar to other essential life activities.

The article highlights the changing social landscape, where traditional friendship networks have been disrupted by factors like busy work schedules, geographic mobility, and the pandemic. New platforms and approaches are emerging to help people combat loneliness and form meaningful connections.

The author’s personal experiences, including attending the RealRoots event and reaching out to a colleague, illustrate the potential rewards of stepping out of one’s comfort zone and actively pursuing friendships.

Ultimately, the piece encourages readers to be proactive, vulnerable, and open to forming new social connections.

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The post Making Friends as an Adult is Hard. Here’s the Secret first appeared on Sevenelles.

The Big Joy Project, a global study involving over 17,000 participants from 169 countries, demonstrated that brief, science-based activities can significantly boost emotional well-being and happiness in just one week.

Participants received daily five to ten-minute joy-boosting activities via email, which yielded surprising benefits. After the program, individuals reported improved emotional well-being, increased positive emotions, better stress management, enhanced sleep, and a greater willingness to help others.

The study highlighted seven key “joy snacks” that can improve one’s mood:

1. Seeking awe by experiencing something vast or extraordinary
2. Practicing gratitude by listing things and people to appreciate
3. Performing acts of kindness
4. Celebrating others’ joys
5. Reflecting on personal values
6. Considering one’s potential positive impact
7. Shifting perspective on challenging experiences

Researchers found that these brief interventions were particularly beneficial for individuals from less privileged backgrounds, suggesting that joy-focused practices are not a luxury but a crucial coping mechanism.

The study emphasized that joy is a skill that can be developed through intentional, small daily practices. While the research lacked a control group, the participants’ overwhelmingly positive responses indicated the potential effectiveness of these interventions.

You can sign up and try out the Big Joy Project here.

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The post 7 Simple Ways to Be a Bit Happier Each Day first appeared on Sevenelles.