Topic
relationships
Writing topic
relationships essays
A focused view of essays tagged relationships. Use this page to find ideas and implementation patterns tied to this topic.
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Latest matching essays
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Reading guide (optional)
These essays read like postmortems: what systems do under stress, where failure lands, and who carries the repair cost.
They track procedure as allocation—time, composure, documentation, persistence—not just money.
Expect operational facts over moral positioning: clocks, escalation paths, reversibility, ownership, and closure records.
When something goes wrong, who is forced to carry the cost—and how long can the system remain wrong without consequence?
Start here
Start with these 3 essays
Published
Modern Adulthood
Modern life rewards a kind of “maturity” that often has very little to do with being right.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
If Every User Is a Potential Threat...
People are not becoming inherently dishonest, lazy, or cynical. They are becoming game-theoretically optimal for the environment they have been…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Optimizing the User
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
~1 min read For history teams.
Filtered essays
Published
Modern Adulthood
Modern life rewards a kind of “maturity” that often has very little to do with being right.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
If Every User Is a Potential Threat...
People are not becoming inherently dishonest, lazy, or cynical. They are becoming game-theoretically optimal for the environment they have been…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Optimizing the User
Resilience is a subsidy we pay to cover the cost of structural failure
~1 min read For history teams.
Across healthcare, bureaucracy, and customer service, systems increasingly avoid decisions while appearing responsive. This essay argues that modern…
~1 min read For history teams.
The loading screen is a weapon. "Pending" is a governing strategy of attrition designed to make you carry the weight of the process until you give up.
~1 min read For history teams.
We keep describing our institutional crisis as one of 'belief' or 'truth.' But in practice, the bottleneck is 'standing.' An essay on why 'we hear…
~2 min read For philosophy teams.
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Older essays (54)
A guide to the difference between moral language and structural constraint
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
A theory of Primitive Accumulation applied to time. Just as capitalism once enclosed land to create value where there was none, it is now enclosing…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
The Death of Slack
Modern efficiency hasn't solved volatility; it has just offloaded it onto you. An analysis of how the removal of buffers, inventory, and downtime…
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Lucid Disorientation
AI's fluency removes the friction that keeps our heads on straight. On lucid disorientation, and rebuilding resistance to machines that never say no.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Engineering Mutuality
Critiquing the myth of self-sufficiency and outlining a new politics of shared dependence, where care, maintenance, and cooperation become the…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Variance ≠ Deviance
We have a deep-seated instinct to punish what doesn’t fit. Here's how data, management, and moral culture pathologize deviation.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Everyone is a Crumple Zone Now
Machines once bent to save people. Now people bend to save machines. A design essay on how digital systems reverse the ethics of safety, making…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Puncture the Cleanroom!
"Sterile control" makes systems fragile. Why reason must move from purity to porosity, embracing error, feedback, and accountability to survive.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
To Be is To Be Maintained
A new framework for understanding persistence. This essay redefines stability, arguing that justice is the allocation of repair and proving…
~1 min read For history teams.
When "okay" stops being a feeling and becomes a clearance code, care collapses into compliance. A new essay on "clearance culture" and the ethics of…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Finitude As Love
Why embracing human limits can make our relationships, ethics, and systems more resilient. An essay on how dependence and maintenance define love,…
~1 min read For history teams.
“Charismatic systems” replace persuasion with smoothness. From social media to AI ethics dashboards, design now governs through affect. This essay…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
Who Has the Right to Sound Kind?
The real danger isn't that AI is cold and inhuman; it's that it's becoming perfectly, fluently "kind." "Counterfeit tenderness" is a new form of…
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
The In-House Ethicist
Before an institution can do immense harm, it must first learn to feel good about itself. It must learn to translate its contradictions into virtues…
~1 min read For history teams.
The moral geometry of measurement, and how to read the metrics that lie without lying.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
We need to need fewer heroes
When a society, an institution, or even a piece of software continually produces heroes, it offers clear evidence of a broken architecture.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Sanctiphagy (Virtue Extraction)
A good system shouldn’t need saints. It should metabolize harm before someone has to transcend it.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Stricter in Love Than in Law
Why do we grill our loved ones harder than corporations or governments? Stricter in Love Than in Law reveals how modern institutions turn excuses…
~2 min read For history teams.
Published
Career Ladders Are Just Filters
Feeling stuck or hollow in your career? This essay explains why the "career ladder" is a myth and a hidden "filter" rewards conformity over merit. A…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
“Be real” is the gospel of our age, chanted by politicians claiming to speak from the heart, influencers in “no-filter” confessionals, and…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Terrain Over Character
Why the same harms keep recurring, no matter who is in charge.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
Culture Used to Keep Us Alive
What we call “vibes” today are the sedatives left after centuries of cutting survival out of culture
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
"No One Takes Me Seriously!"
How to Fight the Feeling and Reclaim Your Voice
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
When Explaining Makes Things Worse
We often use lengthy explanations after a mistake to manage our own discomfort. But true accountability requires concrete steps, not just eloquent…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Anarchism is often described like a bonfire: a political philosophy of no institutions, no coordination, just a perpetual “no.” But the anarchist…
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Sacralization is power’s aftermarket armor. It’s the trick that makes the preventable untouchable.
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
In Praise of Fickleness
“Fickleness” is not always a moral failure; it’s fair to oscillate between incompatible demands.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
"What I said came out wrong."
On Revision Privilege, a system that quietly distributes grace to the powerful while demanding finality from everyone else
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
"I ruin everything!"
Everywhere you look, people are proving how sorry they are through self-condemnation.
~1 min read For politics teams.
Published
If You Won’t Do It For Yourself
You’ve heard the advice before: choose yourself; put on your own oxygen mask first. It sounds rational, but when you try to apply it, another voice…
~2 min read For autism teams.
Published
How to Smuggle an Idea
An idea can be banned without being outlawed; when the direct route is blocked by formal censorship or the chill of algorithmic disfavor, ideas…
~1 min read For history teams.
It’s a neat, tidy, and incredibly convenient fantasy for cops, bosses, and security guards.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
When is "I'm Concerned" a Command?
Are they really helping or just trying to take control? Here's how to know.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
How to Leave the Dishes in the Sink
Try it tonight and see what happens.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
How 'Must' Became Law
Tiny, everyday verbs like must, should, may, ought, have to, and need to function as subtle carriers of authority
~1 min read For history teams.
Published
The Person Behind the Desk
Bureaucracy isolates us on purpose. Still, in the margins, people find each other.
~1 min read For politics teams.
Published
The Myth of Moral Decay
How American Policy Manufactures Bystander Inaction
~1 min read For inherent care teams.
Published
My Feminism Is Not Soft
It’s structural, intentional, and systemic.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
You text “Dinner?” at six and only see the reply when you’re elbow-deep in dishes.
~1 min read For politics teams.
Published
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Why Denial Is the Core of Structural Power
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
It Really Does Take Two
Power’s greatest conquest isn’t crushing lone rebels or dispersing crowds—it’s sneaking into the everyday interpersonal bonds we rely on.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Perverse Stability vs. Authentic Peace
We’ve grown so accustomed to equating silence with peace that we overlook the heavy toll it exacts.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Heartbroken and Devastated™
What happens when grief is routinized? When mourning scripts follow mass shootings, airstrikes, or police violence—but policy doesn’t move?
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
What I Hope Happens to You
I don’t want you to just avoid burnout, I want you to see labor as a site of struggle, defaults as political choices, and for us to reforge our…
~2 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Pretending Is Half the Job
You’re looped in once the decisions are made—asked to “help it land,” not to change it. You learn to turn harm into “alignment,” risk into “tone.”…
~2 min read For politics teams.
Published
When Early Detection is Deviance
Clarity that arrives before the group is ready gets coded as friction. And friction gets managed, not engaged with.
~1 min read For corporations teams.
Published
Frictionless for Whom?
Seamlessness isn’t always neutral. It’s often subsidized—by someone else’s time, attention, and emotional capacity.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Some pain will, of course, be there.
You arrive at the hospital from the airport, taking MARTA straight to Northside.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Is Honesty an Expensive Hobby?
When does cunning becomes a strategic choice? Or, why are shitty people so wealthy?
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Refusability is the Future of Design
Why “No” Makes Every “Yes” More Real
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
Will the World Deserve Our Kids?
We Grew Up Asking If We’d Get To Have Kids. Now We’re Asking If We Even Should.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Published
We Almost Paid for Cat-Sitting!?
How Strict Building Rules Undermine Real Community
~1 min read For tech teams.
Published
Cynicism is an Adjustable Shield
We live in an environment flooded with illusions.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
Gatekeeping is what blocks care, not scarcity.
~1 min read For philosophy teams.
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