Silicon Canals

People raised by very demanding and critical parents tend to carry two traits into adulthood above all, perfectionism and a harsh inner voice, though the research is c…

The scars of a critical upbringing are real but not inevitable—understanding the difference could free you from patterns you ...
Silicon Canals

Cursor went from $100 million in annualized revenue to $2 billion in just 13 months—a twentyfold surge that outpaced the early growth of Slack and Zoom an…

Cursor’s reported revenue run rate multiplied twentyfold in 13 months, but the headline figure leaves accounting, margins and ...
Silicon Canals

The people who never speak badly of others have a strength worth naming, and a blind spot worth watching

There is a particular kind of person we tend to admire without quite examining why: the one who never speaks badly about ...
Silicon Canals

People who grew up with minimal affection often describe the same pattern in middle age: a delayed grief for something they didn't know they were missing until …

A few years ago I spent four days with a friend's family in a house outside Melbourne. On the second morning his daughter ...
Silicon Canals

The famous limit of 150 friends a human brain can supposedly hold turns out to rest on a calculation whose own confidence interval runs from 2 to 520 — too wide to s…

The number 150 shows up in strange places for something that started as a footnote about primate brains. A Facebook executive ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology says people who internalise their distress aren't cold or self-sufficient — they're often running a constant, invisible calculation about whether their pain is ba…

There is a particular kind of person who says “fine” with total sincerity while quietly coming apart. They are not lying.
Silicon Canals

There is no phrase a woman only says if she loves you, but the research on how couples talk points to something more reliable than a decoder list: patterns of assurance ...

The genre of content that promises to decode a partner from a fixed list of phrases is durable, and, read literally, wrong. No sentence is spoken only by ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology says people who feel emotionally numb for long stretches aren't broken or cold — they're often people who felt too much for too long, and the nervous syst…

A friend rang me a while back to tell me his father had died. I said the right things. I offered to get on a plane. Then I ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology says people who have made peace with their worst choices aren't usually in denial or pretending; they've done something harder, which is to find the thread …

The worst thing I ever did took about four weeks, and I did it in a good mood. Early 2020. I stood in front of my staff and ...
Silicon Canals

The things a person with high standards will never tolerate in a relationship, read through the research rather than the meme, come down to two failures far more ser…

Relationship checklists obsess over status and appearance, but decades of research points to just two failures—both about ...
Silicon Canals

Twentysomethings who feel quietly derailed by their own life aren't uniquely broken — a study spanning eight countries, from Athens to Jakarta, found the same crisis e…

There's a particular kind of unease that shows up sometime in the twenties: the sense of having built a life that technically ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology says people drawn to music and films from before they were born are not usually longing for memories they actually lived — they are often reaching for an e…

A friend's daughter played me her favourite song last week. It came out in 1977. She's seventeen, which makes this roughly ...