From & To Sathish #7 - Page 77

Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2025

THE GOLDEN ROAD (TO UNLIMITED DEVOTION)

David Avallone

Her name was Dawn, as far as I knew. Later I found out it wasn’t: she had picked it, with great intention, for reasons both obvious and known only to herself.

In the summer of 1987, I was on my way to California when my beat-up ’71 Chevy Impala convertible blew its engine in some desert nowhere and stranded me. I found a furnished dump and got a job in a furniture factory while a sweaty jacka.s named Reid worked very slowly on my car. Refurbishing the engine would eat up the humble stake I had saved to start my new life, which meant that, even after Reid the Snail finished, I’d have to stick around until I earned it back.

I spent a couple of months assembling the rails that hold cubicles together. It felt like working in one Dickensian workhouse to put together the cells for other poor suckers in some future workhouse. But the pay was fair, as was Dawn, my supervisor.

Even before I knew it was an alias, her name had a fanciful Ian Fleming feel. I clocked in at six every July and August morning and was greeted by a tall and gorgeous woman who called herself Dawn Summers. She had a sunny smile and an explosion of frizzy blond hair like a supernova. She whistled while she worked, and from her it was somehow sweet, rather than annoying. Her eyes were blue and kind, and as blue as they were, they were kinder than they were blue.

She was thirty-something and fun and charming. I was twenty-two and fresh out of school. I wasn’t without some kind of rudimentary charm myself, but I’d never asked out an adult woman and was paralyzed by the prospect. Dawn was flirty, sure, but wasn’t she at least a little flirty with everyone? There was something in her eyes when she looked at me that I was desperate to take personally, but should I? My confidence was still very much under construction, a fragile structure in need of more concrete and rebar.

By the first week of August, Reid had finally finished the Impala, and by the second week the sack of cash under my bed had almost hit my “time to move on” goal. On the one hand, I couldn’t wait to get back on the road. On the other, there was Dawn, and the way she looked at me, which I was desperate to take personally.

One sun-blasted morning, a truck was late with a shipment of rails, and my section of the line shut down. Me and five other guys stood around the loading dock, killing time. Five other guys and Dawn.

I didn’t socialize much at work. Our routine didn’t allow for more than a few words with each other in the break room. The other guys had all gone to high school together. They called me “Hollywood,” because I’d been dumb enough on Day One to explain where I was going. These guys would live and die within fifteen miles of the hospital they were born in, and my kind of dream—the kind you cross a continent for—seemed like a fantasy to them. At first, “Hollywood” was intended to needle me, but we’d grown on each other just enough that it didn’t feel like a tease anymore. Just a nickname.

While we waited for the overdue truck, one of the other workers—a handsome dude whose name was probably John—asked Dawn, “What are you doing Saturday night?”

The rest of the boys made predictable noises of surprise and admiration at John’s taking the big swing right there in front of us. That was the kind of boldness I didn’t yet possess, and I was envious. Also, cliché or no cliché, my heart literally sank. It was a long time ago, but I can still remember my disappointment. Maybe she’d say yes, maybe she’d say no … but how could I ask her out now that John had made his move? It would seem like he’d given me the idea.

But something happened that was completely outside my life experience. Dawn gave him that big sunny smile and said, “I’m busy Saturday night.” She took a dramatic pause, then looked directly at me with a shy conspiratorial grin. “David is taking me out.”

I would love to report that I was smooth, but I can’t imagine my face was clear of surprise. Lucky for both of us, this wasn’t the most observant crowd in the world.

“That’s right.” I probably blushed. “We have a date. Saturday.”

The boys made more sitcom-audience noises. (I say “boys,” though they were all older than me, some by a decade. But that seventh-grade bio-class boy energy was still there.) Dawn blushed prettily in return, and my heart shot back from the bottom of my stomach, smashed its way through my brain, and shattered my skull on its way to the bright blue desert sky.

Before the situation became unbearably awkward, the truck showed up, and we returned to making partitions to keep future corporate drones separated and lonely.

At the end of the day, I found Dawn in the parking lot, leaning on her Volkswagen Bug. Waiting for me. For me. I went a little lightheaded at the sight of her.

“Surprised?” she said.

“Honestly? Yeah.”

“Silly boy. I thought I was obvious.”

If I’d had the self-awareness back then that I developed in the years that followed, I could have told her that my peer group had treated me like a homely weirdo for most of my life, and a couple of pretty girlfriends hadn’t managed to drown out that childhood chorus. But the guy who could have said all that didn’t exist yet.

“I wasn’t sure. I figured … I’m just some guy passing through, you wouldn’t be interested.”

She laughed. “An attractive man who’s not going to stick around and complicate my life? Baby boy, you’re perfect.”

From anyone else, I would have chafed like hell against that “baby boy,” but I was new at this, and the prospect of a woman wanting to use me and let me go was startling and wonderful.

“There’s a pretty good band Saturday night at Jerome’s,” she said. “Do you dance, David?”

She had never once called me “Hollywood.” Another thing the older, wiser me might have taken note of.

Jerome’s was a friendly dive bar in an abandoned mining camp just outside of town. Did I dance? After a fashion. I knew how to hold a woman and swing her around.

“I’ll pick you up at eight,” I said, and tried not to stammer.

Jerome’s was hopping, and the band was surprisingly great. They played an impressive array of cover tunes from a wide spectrum of pop, and I felt a particular pang when they hit Steely Dan’s “My Old School.” But Annandale was over two thousand miles in my rearview mirror. They followed it with “Cream Puff War,” and maybe I should have listened a little closer to the lyrics, like Bogart dancing with Bergman to “Perfidia” in Casablanca. Maybe you never notice those things while the story is in progress.

Freed from the confines of the furniture factory, Dawn was a revelation. Dancing with joyous abandon, eyes shining like diamonds in the neon light, singing along, kicking off her shoes and dancing barefoot on the sawdust. I was careful not to step on her pink-painted toes. I could tell she liked my arms around her, liked the gentle pressure on the lower back that telegraphs the upcoming swing. She was a little taller than me and giggled uncontrollably when I dipped her. I played into that a bit and dipped her almost to the floor. “Don’t drop me!” she cried.

Dawn, radiating light and heat, uncontainable, captivated the crowd. Every eye in the place was on her, and that suited me just fine. I’d wondered, on the drive to pick her up, if the locals would resent seeing their resident supernova squired by the itinerant city boy … but she was more intoxicating than anything coming out of Jerome’s taps, and her joy obliterated any jealousy that might have lingered in an observer’s heart.

And then, during what turned out to be our last dance, she pulled me close and kissed me. If there were any jealous eyes watching, I was too delirious to notice. I might have started shaking—I was still young enough for that—but a couple of drinks had taken the edge off my nerves.

“Let’s go look at the stars,” she whispered in my ear.

And we did.

The Fair Grounds were a couple of miles farther out of town. At night, I couldn’t tell what made them “Fair Grounds” and not just a patch of scrubby grass in the desert. The nowhere town didn’t put out much in the way of light pollution, and I—growing up in New Jersey suburbs—had never seen so many stars.

The star-gazing part didn’t last long. Despite our being grown adults who both had keys to rooms with doors that locked, the back seat of my convertible under the starry sky was where it happened. The supernova consumed me. At first with a flattering impatience, and then again with slow-motion intensity.

In between, we talked. I can be embarrassingly chatty in the afterglow, or mid-glow, or whatever you want to call it. I talked about where I was going, about my dreams. It didn’t occur to me how that might strike her, but she was as kind as her blue, blue eyes.

I don’t remember when we collapsed into unconsciousness.

I woke up entangled in her, in every sense you can imagine. The sun was just beginning to crack the sky and flood the desert plain with golden light. I sat up and watched it rise. I looked down at her and her eyes were open, and just that much bluer and kinder. She sat up with me and took in the view.

“This is my favorite. My favorite time,” she said.

“Dawn’s favorite time is dawn.” I kidded. “That follows.”

She smiled, but her mind had gone somewhere else, and she was still there.

“See the road?” she said. “The golden road?”

I followed her gaze to the lone country lane that ran from horizon to horizon. The daybreak had painted it with molten sunlight.

“It’s like the Yellow Brick Road, but even more beautiful, more …”

She trailed off. Thoughtful.

“It’s an invitation,” I offered. “To go and keep going,”

She turned to me, nodding. “I knew you’d get it. You were following it, following the golden road, when you got shipwrecked.”

I gestured to the Impala’s endless black hood. “It took him a while, but Reid has repaired the mast and patched the hull.”

I wouldn’t say she frowned, but she got serious. I put my arms around her and kissed her. “That doesn’t mean I’m going. Not—”

“—not right now,” she interrupted me. “Not today. But you are going. You have to.”

“You said that was part of the attraction.”

“And it was. Is. You fall for a sailor, you can’t be mad when he goes back to sea.”

“Am I a sailor or the Scarecrow? We’re mixing our myths.”

She laughed, and she was so absolutely stunning I said a thing I hadn’t expected to say. “It’s a big car, Dawn. Seats two, with plenty of space left over. You could take the golden road, too. Take it all the way to the sea. With me.”

“Oh, baby boy … you don’t mean that. It’s sweet, but don’t confuse a girl.”

I took a deep breath and looked out at her golden road. Did I mean it?

“Before yesterday,” I said, “I had a clear path ahead. Another paycheck or two, and then westward I’d go. Things are less clear today. The boy is as confused as the girl.”

We both looked back at the brightening desert plain, and I decided to change the subject. I looked at my watch. “The Red Fox is open. Nothing confusing about coffee and flapjacks.”

So we ate breakfast and drank coffee and stared at each other with that comfort and bliss and affection completely unique to a “morning after” with no regrets. We spent the rest of the day in my furnished dump and continued to make up for lost time. We didn’t talk about the future, or any yellow-brick or golden roads, or Odysseus and Calypso.…

On Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, she spent the night with me, then slipped out while it was still dark to shower and dress for work at her own home. We kept it cool at the factory, but the boys on the floor knew. They teased me about it, but it wasn’t mean. They were envious, sure, but they were also impressed. And they started asking me when I was planning to leave town, which was as charming as it was unsubtle.

Dawn and I made plans to go back to Jerome’s on Saturday night.

“Farewell party?” she said, with a sad little smile.

“One-week anniversary,” I said, and she laughed and beamed.

Thursday night, she didn’t come over. I called her place, and she didn’t pick up. I tried not to let my jealous, insecure twenty-two-year-old heart fry my brain. But I also didn’t get any sleep.

Friday morning, she wasn’t at work. Me and the boys got to it, assembling cubicle walls, but my heart was in my throat. Another cliché, but how else do you say it? My head was pounding. If you can’t remember that kind of physical pain, then you don’t remember your own fragile young self.

On my first break, I was picking up a payphone to try her at home when the cops walked in.

I hung up without dialing and watched them talk to the receptionist. Saw her point at me. My mind went to the worst thing, but I didn’t guess right. There were other bad things it could have been, including at least one that never would have occurred to me.

They held up a picture of a woman with straight dark hair and sad eyes. Black and white, so you couldn’t see the blue. But you could see the kindness. They asked the obvious question.

“Of course. That’s Dawn, my supervisor. Did something happen to her?”

I got that smug-cop smirk. The “I know something you don’t know” smirk. I kept my face blank and impassive.

“She didn’t show up to work today. You know anything about that?”

“Nope. She seemed fine yesterday.”

“What about last night?” His self-satisfaction was at its peak, but I didn’t bite.

“In general, yesterday includes a full twenty-four hours. But I didn’t see her after work, if that’s what you’re being cute about.”

He didn’t like that. He wanted a confession I’d been sleeping with her. “And the night before?”

“The night before, she was her usual happy self. What happened?”

“You her boyfriend?”

“You her mother?” I don’t usually mouth off to cops. They have guns and limitless sadism and immunity from any consequences. But a bunch of folks from the floor had stopped work and were watching from a safe distance. I felt like my odds of getting beaten up or killed were slim.

“Listen, as.hole. We know you’ve been sleeping with her. Did she ever tell you her real name’s Alice Yvonne Bennett? And that she’s a fugitive?”

“The one-armed man did it,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. This was a few years before the big movie, so the cop just got confused and angrier.

“The one-armed—what the f.ck are you talking about?”

“Look,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It was a joke. I’m worried about her, and you two aren’t making me less worried. What’s she wanted for?”

The cops looked at each other. The silent one finally spoke. “Murder. Your girlfriend Dawn who’s really Alice? Well, thing is, she murdered a man and ran away. Still worried about her?”

I played the part of shocked clown for a bit, and they calmed down. It wasn’t entirely an act. I could think of reasons why a perfectly good person might run from a murder charge, but did I really want to start making excuses without hearing the story from her? Murder was hard to square with the woman I knew—but how well did I really know her? How well does anyone know anyone? Maybe for Dawn-who-was-Alice, the appeal of the golden road was just the appeal of escape.

I finished my day. I gave the front office the address of my old college buddy Bill in Los Angeles to send my last check to. With any luck, I could be on Bill’s doorstep before the check hit his mailbox. I knew quitting now would look suspicious and leaving town only more so. Maybe those two cops and their buddies would chase me to the state line. Maybe they’d check to see if she was in my trunk.

Maybe it would take a little pressure off her if they wasted their time following me.

I didn’t care. I hadn’t killed anyone, and without Dawn I was done with this nowhere desert town.

I went back to my furnished dump and packed what little I had. I looked out the window and, sure enough, Tweedledum and Tweedledee had parked their cruiser across the street. Real subtle. Sterling police work.

I thought I was ready to roar off into the desert and leave Dawn behind me. In 1987, there were no cell phones and no internet. If I hit the road, the golden road, that would be it. I would never see her again, never know her story.

That didn’t feel right, and I had a hard time accepting it.

Around dusk, I realized where she might be, if she wanted to see me one last time. If she wasn’t already halfway to Mexico. First I had to lose the cops. I had an idea about that, too.

They watched me lug my duffel bag out to my car. They watched me leave the key to my dump in the mailbox. I’m sure they were excited. I got in the Impala and took a little tour of the nowhere town. They probably thought I was trying to lose them, but mostly I was trying to bore them.

After about a half hour of meandering, I drove into Reid’s junkyard. The cops parked outside the entrance and waited.

Reid was surprised to see me. We didn’t like each other. I was playing a hunch, though. His whole operation was shady, and there was no way in the world he liked cops. I told him these two were hassling me. I told him I’d noticed he had a back gate that led to a desert road. He stared at me in silence until I gave him a fifty. He took in the grim visage of President Grant, and said, “I’ll open the gate. Let me pull my tow truck across the entrance, so they can’t see you or follow you through the yard.”

I spotted something helpful in his office and bought it for another twenty. Reid was having a big day.

He unlatched the back gate, then went around to fire up his truck. The sun had set. My lights were off. If I could keep off the brakes, they wouldn’t see me driving into the desert. If I fought the impulse to speed, they wouldn’t see a dust cloud. Reid rolled his tow truck to the front gate, and I pulled slowly out onto the dirt road. I took the time to get out and close the gate behind me, just in case.

The road was ruler-straight for miles. I didn’t know how long it would take Tweedledee and Tweedledum to figure out what had happened, but I planned to be invisible long before they did.

A few miles down the road, I looked in the rearview and saw no signs of pursuit. Bless you, Reid. You overcharged for the engine block, but you came through in the end. I’d gambled on him loving a scam, any scam at all, more than he disliked me, and I’d been right.

With the help of a tattered map I’d picked up when I first hit town, I found the Fair Grounds. They were empty, of course. But I parked in roughly the spot I had a week ago, before the stargazing, and sat on the hood of my Impala. And waited.

The Milky Way wheeled slowly overhead. I tried to remember if I’d seen it before, but mostly I thought about the supernova whose name was Dawn or Alice. Dawn the explosion of life and joy, Alice the sad-eyed murderess.

I figured I’d give her until an hour or two after daybreak, then find my way to the closest thick horizontal line on the map and turn west.

It was still full dark when I saw headlights, small and close together. Not a cruiser. More like a VW Bug.

I got off the hood and watched her approach.

In spite of everything, her smile was still breathtaking, a supernova by starlight. We didn’t embrace. She knew there had to be some talk first.

“I don’t know if I’m surprised or not surprised,” she said. “I wanted you to be here.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me again. But if you did …”

She let it hang there, looked at her feet. “What did they tell you?”

“They told me you killed a man.”

She looked up at me. “I did, David. I did that. I won’t lie to you.”

“There’s a lot of reasons a woman kills a man. Which one was it?”

“Maybe not the first one that comes to mind.”

I mulled that for a minute, then took a stab at it. “So it wasn’t you? Then who was it? Mother, sister, niece …?”

She looked at the horizon. The light had started to creep over. “You’re smart,” she said. “I always liked that about you.”

“Go on.”

She made eye contact again. “I have a sister. She had a husband. She showed up at my house one night, and her face … well, I barely recognized her past the bruises and the blood. I was washing out her wounds when he came pounding on the door and yelling for her.” There was a pause. She bit her lip. “I kept a baseball bat by my front door.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“He never got a chance to. Swinging the bat at his head was … it wasn’t a hard decision. It was no decision at all. It felt good. Overdue. Even when I saw the blood, I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.”

She wasn’t emotional about it. I wondered how long ago it had been. The girl in the photo with the dark straight hair looked maybe five years younger. But that didn’t matter.

“Was there a trial? Or did you not stick around?”

“I didn’t stick around. Her husband was a cop, David. I beat a cop to death. So it was another easy decision. I called an ambulance for my sister, kissed her on the forehead, and then—”

“—and then the golden road.”

“Something like that,” she said. We both looked over at the sunrise. Alice, not Dawn, but also Dawn. She gave a small laugh. “You kill anybody back in Jersey, David?”

“No. I’m one of those idiots who’s running away from a perfectly fine life. There might have been an unpaid parking ticket or two.” I took a breath. “You could leave the Bug here and get in the Impala.”

She smiled again. “I couldn’t. You’re the sweetest boy, and your future is bright. I’d bring you down, and those dreams of yours … they wouldn’t come true. They’d never have a chance.”

“I’m tougher than I look. And smart, like you said.”

“All that is true. But you didn’t sign up for this. I know how you feel right now, but … we just met. Really. You don’t owe me the things my troubles would take from you. You owe yourself a new life, like I did when I ran. Chase it. Give it your unlimited devotion and be happy. I’ll be okay. I promise.”

“Dawn,” I started, but it was all I said.

“David.” That was all she said. But it said everything.

I got my dusty Mets cap from my trunk and handed it to her. “Stuff your hair under that until you have time for a new dye job.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Then I went back into the trunk for the set of license plates I’d bought from Reid and a flathead screwdriver. I replaced the plates on the Bug, while she stared off at the golden road, stretching out to her next new life.

Last kisses are a lot like first kisses.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/dating-trends-reached-lows-throning-120100328.html

Dating trends reached new lows this year. What are ‘throning,’ ‘Shrekking,’ 'Banksying’?

https://slate.com/culture/2025/10/biopic-pronunciation-pronounce-how-springsteen-beatles-movie.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_03&position=7&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=20416cc4-479d-4c0f-a58e-91213e47b595&url=https%3A%2F%2Fslate.com%2Fculture%2F2025%2F10%2Fbiopic-pronunciation-pronounce-how-springsteen-beatles-movie.html

How Do You Pronounce Biopic? No One Seems to Agree.

It’s one of our most controversial genres. But even more controversial is how you say it.

As the Oscar war horses line up one after the next—wait your turn, Shakespeare, Bruce Springsteen was here first—it’s hard to avoid talking about one genre, perhaps the most reliable, and most maligned, form of awards-season hopeful. But if you’re having that conversation in person, beware: The way you say one word may make others wince, or recoil in purest horror.

That word is biopic—and before we proceed any further, say it out loud, and put yourself on record. Did you say BYE-oh-pic or bi-AH-pic? Because either way, you are going to be judged.

Officially, there is little dispute. The major dictionaries—Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, the Oxford English Dictionary—all agree that BYE-oh-pic is the correct, or at least preferred, pronunciation. But a stubborn minority of about 10 percent, according to lexicographer Grant Barrett, insists on bi-AH-pic, and can get pretty snippy about it. “It’s bi-opic and if you say bio-pic then you sound like a little dumb baby,” wrote one irate Redditor. “There’s no justification. Grow up.”

According to the OED, the word biopic first appeared in print in 1947, courtesy of the famously slangy industry trade paper Variety, which claims to have invented the term. (A friend at Variety tells me that, though the publication has used biopic 16 times in the past week, people there never say the word out loud. She, for the record, pronounces it BYE-oh-pic.) A Google Ngram search shows usage holding relatively steady for the next half-century. But toward the end of the 1980s, the trend line began to slant steadily upward—perhaps because the decade’s Academy Awards were dominated by such biopics as Raging Bull, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gandhi, Amadeus, and The Last Emperor, or perhaps because that’s when, as Roger Ebert observed, ordinary movie viewers began to treat the industry’s fortunes as a spectator sport, thinking as much like executives as audiences. Or maybe it’s just that as viewers became more aware of concepts like narrative arcs and three-act structure, terms that were once rarely heard outside a studio lot drifted into common parlance, and deploying a quick snippet of insider jargon became an easy way to acquire a veneer of expertise. But regardless of the cause, the word’s use seems to be at an all-time high. We have reached Peak Biopic.

Biopic is what linguists call a “misle,” a word whose appearance gives rise to mistaken ideas about its origins. If you didn’t know that misled meant “being led in the wrong direction,” you might look at that -ed and assume that it was the past tense of the verb “to misle.” A barfly is a person who spends a lot of time in bars, but without any context—say, plastered on the cover of a Charles Bukowski novel—you could think it was an adverb and not a compound noun. (Yuck.) Biopic is industry slang for a movie that depicts the life of a historical figure—a biographical picture—and as such, it retains the pronunciation of its component parts: bio and pic.

But if you’re a bi-AH-pic die-hard, you’ve at least got a leg to stand on. While he’s firmly in the BYE-oh-pic camp, Barrett, who devoted a segment of his NPR show A Way With Words to the thorny topic, says that that alternative pronunciation is “morphologically sound,” even if it’s, sorry to the haters, wrong. “Your instinct as a speaker of English tells you to do that,” he explains. “There’s a long history that gives that as a logical pronunciation.” Bi- is a common English prefix—bilingual, bifocal, bisexual—and -opic a common ending (tropic, microscopic, and so on). So if you didn’t know anything about biopic’s meaning or its origins, bi-AH-pic seems a perfectly reasonable assumption. But it’s also a little, well, myopic. What, pray tell, is an opic? And what would it mean to have two of them?

In my own informal, highly unscientific polls, both in person and online, those who say BYE-oh-pic seem to outnumber those who say bi-AH-pic by about 85 percent to 15 percent, with some in the former group being horrified to learn that the latter even exists. (The bi-AH-pics, in contrast, all seem acutely aware of their mortal enemies.) But there’s some evidence that the ah-sayers are gaining ground. The American Heritage Dictionary, for one, recognizes bi-AH-pic as a secondary pronunciation, and even Seth Rogen is on board.

It’s less a matter of who’s right, Barrett says, than of what he calls “best choices.” “The best choice is BYE-oh-pic,” he says, “because your main goal as someone who communicates is not to have people get caught up in your speech. But the problem is, biopic is undergoing a transformation, and many people do say bi-AH-pic.” Or, rather, that’s what he meant to say. But after several minutes of discussing variant pronunciations, he transposed the two for the length of an entire answer, arguing the case for ah when he meant to say oh. Once you open the door to saying the word more than one way, it’s hard to keep yourself from slipping, no matter how hard you try. So maybe the best way to pronounce biopic is not at all.

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-respond-to-annoying-things-with-greater-ease?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_04&position=5&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=7a951d3b-6ef9-4836-bdd9-d6a03c3e4a17&url=https%3A%2F%2Fpsyche.co%2Fguides%2Fhow-to-respond-to-annoying-things-with-greater-ease

How to tolerate annoying things

Hassles are part of life, but the way we react often makes them worse. ACT skills can help you handle them with greater ease

by Patricia E Zurita Ona, clinical psychologist

Something like this has probably happened to you recently, maybe even today:

You spilled your coffee while rushing out the door.

You struggled to change a setting on your phone, only to give up in frustration.

You got a bug bite, or sunburn, or stubbed your toe.

You had to stand in a long line or wait in traffic.

Someone spoke (or chewed gum, or slammed a door) too loudly.

Someone interrupted or ignored you.

These are not the kind of events that disrupt the course of your life. But they are all annoying, and sometimes bothersome enough that they could set the tone for the rest of your day. Annoying experiences like these have also been dubbed ‘micro-stresses’ or ‘daily hassles’. They usually come your way unexpectedly, cause you some stress, and interrupt your flow. Though they are minor compared with, say, a personal attack, an injury or a significant loss, I’ve seen in my work as a psychologist how often people struggle to tolerate annoying things or underestimate their impact.

It’s quite likely that you’ve been told ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ and ‘focus on the bigger picture’. Despite our best efforts, though, many of us sometimes find it hard to shrug off the lingering emotional effect of an annoying experience. Making it worse, you might judge yourself for not being able to just let it go. Even if a particular stressor seems insignificant on its own, annoying experiences can have a cumulative effect. Like drops filling a bucket, they can eventually spill over until you’re suddenly snapping at someone, or tearing up.

Research suggests that accumulated stressors might take a toll in other ways too. For example, a study in the 1980s found that people who experience more daily hassles report greater fatigue, headaches, and gastrointestinal symptoms. More recently, researchers have shown that increased stress and hassles significantly predicted the consumption of high-fat and high-sugar snack foods, with implications for physical health. And clinical researchers found that people who reported high levels of daily hassles were significantly more likely to develop generalised anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder or panic disorder over a follow-up period of several years.

Annoying experiences are a normal, inevitable part of life. So, whether you’re concerned about their cumulative impact on your wellbeing or just want to reduce the frustration you feel in the moment, there is value in learning to handle annoying things better. This is where evidence-based psychological skills are handy.

In acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), there’s an important distinction between unavoidable pain and avoidable pain. Micro-stressors such as running late, spilling something on your shirt or receiving a curt text message represent the unavoidable pain that comes with being human. Daily hassles happen. But how you choose to respond to those moments determines whether you add to the stress. Skills grounded in ACT – which I’ll draw from in the rest of this Guide – can help you reduce the avoidable pain that often comes with aversive experiences, including common annoyances.

Studies have shown that ACT can be effective in managing various forms of psychological distress, including those stemming from daily hassles. I’ve seen this happen in my own therapy practice. One client, for example, used to become agitated by his neighbour’s dog barking at random hours of the day and night. Despite his attempt to address the problem by talking to his neighbour, the dog wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was his frustration. Over time and with practice, though, he began to approach the barking with a kind of detachment. The dog didn’t stop barking, but what changed was his ability to pause, notice his frustration, and apply coping skills of the sort I’ll be describing here. That made all the difference. With practice, you too can learn to relate to annoyances in a more skilful way, whatever your next ‘barking dog’ might be.

What to do

Embrace ‘radical acceptance’

It’s natural to want to fix or undo the annoyances you encounter. But insisting that a frustrating experience shouldn’t have happened doesn’t change that it did happen. What it does do is deepen your stress. It’s like tugging on a locked door: tiring and ineffective. That’s why you need radical acceptance.

Life’s little stressors can feel like a series of tiny battles. If you get lost in knee-jerk responses such as wishful thinking (I wish this weren’t happening), rumination (Why did that happen?), self-blame (Why am I so careless?), or blaming others (They ruined my day), it keeps you stuck in your head, takes you away from the present, and prolongs your unpleasant emotions. Instead of just feeling irritated about a lost key or a rude comment, you end up dealing with extra mental fatigue, shame or resentment.

Radical acceptance means recognising the reality of what has occurred without resisting it. It doesn’t mean you approve of what’s happened. It simply means you’re no longer fighting something that can’t be changed. It is about laying down your weapons and saying to yourself: This is happening. How can I work with it without getting lost in it? You’re choosing to no longer let it set the tone for your day.

Here are a few prompts you can use as gentle reminders to practise radical acceptance:

This is how things have unfolded right now.

I can’t go back and change what’s happened.

Fighting what happened only fuels my pain.

When I resist the past, I lose the present.

Right now is the only moment I can shape.

This is how radical acceptance looks in action: you lose your keys. Instead of spiralling into thoughts like Why does this always happen? or This is just what I need right now, you pause and tell yourself something like: This is not ideal. But I don’t want to get stuck on this right now. I’m going to take a breath and calmly retrace my steps.

When you stop resisting reality, you give yourself room to move on with your day, not by denying the frustration, but by refusing to add to it.

Make room for your emotions

Emotions are like waves that rise, crest and gently fade away, often within minutes, especially when you give them the space to do so. Each emotion naturally urges you to respond. When you act based on these feelings, it’s called emotion-driven behaviour.

Sometimes, small hassles can trigger big emotional reactions, leading you to quickly engage in emotion-driven behaviours. Have you ever watched someone cut in line at a store? Maybe you experienced a sudden rush of irritation and found yourself glaring at the person, mumbling your disapproval, or speaking curtly to a store employee who wasn’t even aware of the cutting. As natural as it is, automatically doing what a momentary emotion pushes you to do can sometimes take you further away from being the kind of person you want to be.

Here’s what you can do instead:

Notice your feelings: emotions live in our bodies first. If you misplace something important, you might feel a knot in your stomach, or your heart racing. When that happens, ask yourself: what am I feeling and sensing right now? Simply noticing your feelings and sensations might seem like a passive response, but it is critical for minimising your entanglement with unpleasant mental content, and it can help you respond to stressors more thoughtfully.

Name your feelings: take your noticing one step further. You don’t need a poet’s vocabulary to name your feelings; a short and sweet label works. I’m feeling frustrated. Or: This is anxiety. You can even imagine that you’re introducing a friend to your feelings: Meet my annoyance. It’s here because the line at the café is moving slower than a sloth.

Check the workability of your response: within the ACT model, ‘workable’ actions are the ones that are aligned with your personal values and goals. Basically, the idea is that every behaviour takes you closer to or further away from the life you want to build for yourself. So, you must ask yourself whether doing what an emotion pushes you to do in the moment would get you closer to that or further from it. You might ask yourself, for example: If I yell at this barista for getting my order wrong, does that help me live the way I want to live? Or: If I fixate on this person’s annoying hiccups, will it serve me later on?

Workability is less about what works in a conventional or problem-solving sense, and more about what works for you in relation to your values. It is a question of inner alignment and direction. An impulsive response to feeling annoyed – such as cursing at someone, slamming a door, or texting a snarky message – might bring you temporary comfort, but it isn’t workable if it pulls you away from your values. (As I will describe below, you can also use your values, rather than just your momentary emotions, to guide more workable responses.)

Here is one more example to demonstrate all these ways of making room for emotions without letting them dictate your behaviour. Let’s say you’re stuck in traffic, and you feel the frustration building. You can first notice what you are feeling in your body. Then you can name the emotion(s) you are feeling (I’m feeling annoyed, and also powerless). Finally, you can ask yourself about the workability of what you feel the urge to do: Will honking randomly at other drivers help me be the person I want to be? You can make space for what you are feeling and still make a choice about what to do next.

Centre yourself

Sometimes, even if you have applied the preceding skills, you might find yourself tense, restless or stirred up. Centring practices offer you a simple and powerful way to return to a place of steadiness.

The 60-second reset is a versatile skill to help you pause and ground yourself. It has multiple variations. I suggest you try out each of the suggestions below, practising one of them for 60 seconds when an annoying experience leaves you agitated.

Feel your feet. Bring your attention to the soles of your feet. Imagine roots anchoring you to the earth beneath you.

Belly breathing. Place a hand on your stomach, inhale deeply for a count of 4, hold for 2, and exhale slowly for a count of 6. Repeat.

Ground through touch. Press your palms together firmly, or grip the edge of a table or chair.

Sigh it out. Take a long, audible exhale, like a balloon slowly deflating. Let your body soften with the breath. Breathe in and repeat.

Quietly hum.

Tense and release. Clench your fists for 7 seconds, then let go for 14 seconds. Repeat a few times to release pent-up tension.

It’s important to note that these centring activities aren’t just quick, temporary fixes. Each one helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system – the branch responsible for rest, relaxation and restoring calm. With regular practice, these exercises can help you gradually build your capacity to handle daily stress.

Commit to acting based on your values

Values, in ACT, are freely chosen qualities of being that reflect how you truly want to live and behave. Your values are your compass. You can think of them as verbs, as ongoing patterns of action. For example, you might recognise ‘being caring’ as one of your most important values. In day-to-day life, you could turn this into specific, values-based actions such as a weekly check-in with your neighbour or a phone call with your friend to see how they are doing. There are concrete steps you can take to put your value into practice; to actively live out your value, rather than just thinking about it.

Your values matter when you have annoying experiences because they give you a direction to move in. If you’re feeling irritated by an itchy bug bite after a hike that already wasn’t going the way you planned, you might call to mind your core values and remember that being patient with yourself is one of them. If you’re struggling with setting a ‘smart’ thermostat at home, you might remind yourself that you value being curious, and then decide to search for some pointers online (rather than giving up or slamming the wall in frustration). If you’re annoyed that someone isn’t listening to what you’re saying, you might recall that you value being compassionate, and then ask, respectfully, if they can give you their full attention. These would all be examples of ‘workable’ responses that help you be the kind of person you want to be.

Think for a moment of Elena. She’s working out of her office at home, midway through an important work assignment, when suddenly, outside her window, a parked delivery truck starts beeping loudly and won’t stop. She notices her heart beating faster and a rush of heat flushing her body. She acknowledges the stress to herself (This is causing me stress right now). Although she has the urge to pound her fist on the desk and even shout at the delivery driver, she pauses instead and asks whether that would serve her. She realises she’s actually faced a few frustrations today, and she takes a minute to centre herself, using the ‘sigh it out’ exercise.

She also asks herself, what really matters right now? And, as she answers that question, Elena taps into her values of being compassionate and being flexible. Knowing the driver is just doing their job and will probably depart soon, she fetches her earbuds to help block out the distracting noise until it passes. She resumes her work, feeling like she’s already started to release the stress she was feeling.

Using the practices I’ve shared, I hope you’ll find that, as disruptive as little annoyances like these can be, they also present everyday opportunities to live in a way that’s more closely aligned with your values.

Learn more

When are you extra-sensitive to annoyance?

Although hassles can arise at any time, you might find that certain contexts leave you feeling especially vulnerable to irritation. Perhaps it’s during your morning routine, or when there is an unexpected change of plans, or while you are preparing meals. Some physiological states, such as fatigue, overstimulation or a lack of sleep, can also be precipitants of annoyance.

Becoming aware of your own ‘tender times’ or vulnerability factors can help you anticipate them so that you can respond more gently to annoying things when they pop up. This is why I often invite my therapy clients to get curious about these patterns as they happen. One client, for instance, realised that the middle of the day, when his energy was running low, tended to be his most reactive time. Another client noticed that his tender time was when he arrived home from work, emotionally exhausted after a long day of talking to people in distress.

See if you can recognise the contexts that seem most conducive to frustration for you. This is not about getting rid of frustration or irritability altogether during these times, or trying to control your daily hassles. It’s about entering these situations with an awareness of what makes them challenging – and remembering to practise the skills you’ve learned.

Meeting annoyance with self-compassion

If you want to be less easily rattled by annoyances going forward, practising self-compassion can also help. Self-compassion is treating yourself with kindness in difficult moments, staying present with what you’re feeling, and remembering that struggling is part of being human. It’s like talking to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend who’s having a rough day. People who practise self-compassion tend to be more emotionally steady, bounce back faster, and worry less. The psychologist Mark Leary and his team found that self-compassion acts like a shield, helping people handle little irritations without getting overwhelmed by them.

There are different ways to practise self-compassion, and you can choose the forms that feel right for you. There are longer, more formal exercises like loving-kindness meditations or journaling, for example. There are also brief and practical ways to bring self-compassion into your day; in my podcast, I refer to these practices as self-compassion on-the-go. To practise self-compassion anytime, anywhere – including when you’re dealing with everyday hassles – all you need to do is acknowledge how you feel and check what you need.

Picture this: you’re stuck in a slow-moving line, or you’re cooking dinner and your partner says something that rubs you the wrong way. After you first name what you feel, as I recommended earlier (eg, This is frustrating or That comment really bugs me), you then ask yourself: How can I respond to myself with kindness? You might also ask yourself what you need to hear at that moment, or what a kind friend would say to you. All it takes is a little willingness to be gentle with yourself, even if just for a moment.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/nov/01/workaholic-signs-am-i-addicted-to-work?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_04position=6&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=e60fc4f0-2392-4034-8be6-f095e62db8a4&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmoney%2F2025%2Fnov%2F01%2Fworkaholic-signs-am-i-addicted-to-work

Even when unthinkable things were happening to me, my first instinct was to work. Am I addicted?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/11/06/g-s1-96448/ai-artificial-intelligence-tb-tuberculosis?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_06&position=4&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=6a007ede-a996-49e5-9bf6-7d2d40a61cce&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoats-and-soda%2F2025%2F11%2F06%2Fg-s1-96448%2Fai-artificial-intelligence-tb-tuberculosis

AI steps in to detect the world's deadliest infectious disease

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-your-brain-creates-aha-moments-and-why-they-stick-20251105/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_06position=6&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=d386a063-61dd-48f6-9bd8-3494871ba4c7&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quantamagazine.org%2Fhow-your-brain-creates-aha-moments-and-why-they-stick-20251105%2F

How Your Brain Creates ‘Aha’ Moments and Why They Stick

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/relationships/a69182560/attachment-styles-definition/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_06&position=10&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=a4e1ced9-2880-481a-804b-e97bc1e2fd4e&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmopolitan.com%2Frelationships%2Fa69182560%2Fattachment-styles-definition%2F

What’s Your Attachment Style? The Four Types, Explained

Understanding how they form and still affect you to this day is key to breaking negative relationship patterns.

The rise of therapy-speak has paved the way for attachment styles to become a mainstay in daily conversation, which isn’t a bad thing. Your attachment style is like your personal emotional blueprint—it can help explain how you act in relationships and why, for better or worse. The good news is, more awareness means that the more you know about yourself, the better you’re able to understand, well, why you are the way you are (and how to work on things you want to improve). But this rise in popularity has also made the attachment styles feel…kind of confusing. Even though all four of them are different, there are some ways in which they overlap, and it’s hard to know which one you fall into without really doing some soul-searching and talking to a professional. That’s why we’re breaking them down below—not as a replacement for therapy, but as a starting point to help you understand what the attachment styles are, and how they can apply to your life.

“Attachment theory sheds light on how humans form and maintain emotional bonds,” explains relationship and EMDR therapist Ashley Starwood, LCSW. Developed by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the ’50s, attachment theory centers on the profound impact of our earliest interactions. “It’s these initial connections with our parents or caregivers that set the stage for how we engage with others throughout our lives,” Starwood adds.

She explains that from birth, we instinctively seek close bonds that offer security and comfort. Those early attachments developed during childhood shape our attachment style—be it secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized (aka, fearful-avoidant)—and influence our later relationships.

“Understanding your attachment style is akin to decoding your personal love language. It’s a game changer for unraveling your relational behaviors and the dynamics you gravitate toward,” says Morgan Anderson, PsyD, an attachment theory expert and author of Love Magnet.

We’ve enlisted top therapists and relationship experts to unpack the four primary attachment styles, illustrate how they manifest daily, and help you identify your own. Let’s decode your relationships, shall we?

How Are Attachment Styles Formed?

Attachment styles are developed through early childhood experiences. “Your parents’ ability to be attuned to your needs and be emotionally safe caregivers greatly impacts your ability to build secure attachment,” Anderson says. For example, caregivers who consistently and compassionately meet their child’s needs foster a sense of trust. “Conversely, inconsistent, neglectful, or even abusive caregiving can create feelings of insecurity, anxiety, or fear in the child,” adds Starwood.

Anderson says early non-familial relationships can also play a key role in forming your attachment style. In fact according to eharmony's September 2023 Dating Diaries report, “84 percent of Gen Z singles believe that past heartbreaks have made them ‘more cautious’ about relationships, and 72 percent say it made them ‘less trusting’ in relationships,” notes eharmony relationship expert Laurel House.

Additionally, you might find that you form more secure attachments with some people and are more anxious, avoidant, or even fear-avoidant with others. The attachment type of others can influence your own, as can current circumstances and feelings of self-worth.

There are four main attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. Read on to learn more about each, including what they look like and how they’re formed.

Secure Attachment

As the name suggests, a person with a secure attachment style feels just that: secure in forming and maintaining healthy relationships. Not only do people with the secure attachment style value closeness in their relationships, Anderson explains, but they also know how to set healthy boundaries and communicate their needs effectively. “In securely-attached relationships, partners experience ‘interdependence,’ meaning they are able to practice self-soothing simultaneously and can also ask their partner for support and reassurance,” she says.

How it’s formed: House says caregivers who are consistently present and responsive to their child’s needs within the first year of life and beyond lead to secure attachments.

Anxious Attachment

While a person with an anxious attachment style might crave closeness with their partner, Starwood says they often harbor a deep-seated fear of abandonment and rejection. These are the ~waiting for the other shoe to drop~ kinda folks. They frequently seek a lot of reassurance from their partners yet struggle to internalize the reassurance when it is given.

“With anxious attachment, there is often coping through excessive communication, becoming a ‘chameleon’ in your relationships, passive expression of needs, and even codependency,” Anderson explains. “Unconsciously, the anxiously attached person is thinking, I will do anything not to be abandoned.”

How it’s formed: “Emotionally inconsistent and unpredictable caregivers contribute to creating adults with anxious relationships,” says House. Parents who are sometimes available and sometimes distant can lead to children (and eventually, adults) who are anxious about future connections.

Avoidant Attachment

Think of avoidant attachment as the polar opposite of anxious—instead of craving constant reassurance, they value hyper-independence and often feel uncomfortable with closeness. “If you have an avoidant attachment style, you struggle to be vulnerable in your relationships and may find yourself pulling away from people,” Anderson explains. “Avoidantly-attached individuals still crave intimacy, but their fear of it outweighs their desire to be close. There is often a lack of emotional awareness with avoidant attachment, meaning these individuals are not connected to their own emotional experience, which in turn makes it nearly impossible for them to connect to the emotional experience of others.”

How it’s formed: Dismissive, disconnected, and distant caregivers shape avoidant adults, House says. Children’s emotional needs aren’t being met within relationships, so they grow up feeling they can generally only depend on themselves.

Disorganized Attachment

The final attachment style is disorganized, or fearful-avoidant (FA), and according to Anderson, it’s often linked to childhood trauma. “An individual with an FA attachment style experiences both anxious and avoidant strategies simultaneously,” she says. “This can manifest as a pendulum swinging from fear of abandonment to desiring complete independence. Those with a fearful-avoidant attachment style have a hard time trusting anyone and struggle to form lasting relationships.”

How it’s formed: This attachment style typically arises from highly unpredictable or abusive environments. “Fearful-avoidant attachment is characterized by inconsistent or unpredictable caregiving experiences,” Starwood explains. “It involves a mix of behaviors, where a child might seek closeness but then become withdrawn or fearful, reflecting the instability they experience at home.”

Some people might have just had a lightbulb moment after reading about the different attachment styles, but for others, it might take a bit more work and self-reflection to figure out which one makes the most sense. Starwood suggests reflecting on your childhood, experiences with caregivers, and past relationships, noting how each impacts your sense of security and trust.

There are also online tests that can help you uncover your style. Try this popular attachment style quiz from the Attachment Project or Anderson’s own five-minute attachment style questionnaire. Whichever one you take, Starwood stresses that this is just a starting point on your road to understanding your style.

“A psychotherapist can provide a more in-depth assessment of your attachment style using standardized tools and clinical interviews,” she says. “This can be particularly helpful if you're interested in a deeper understanding of your attachment patterns and how they might impact your relationships."

How to Change Your Attachment Style

Good news: You’re not stuck with the emotional patterns you formed as a kid, even if they might be hard to shake on your own. Understanding your attachment style is like hitting the refresh button, says Anderson. “It starts with awareness, followed by actively releasing outdated patterns through emotional regulation and secure relationship skills like assertive communication and setting boundaries.”

Starwood says therapy can be a huge game changer here. A therapist isn’t just a guide; they’re like your personal relationship coach, helping you unpack your baggage, swap out your old coping mechanisms, and learn how to (healthily) express your true feelings.

And hey, all this self-work deserves a round of applause. “Celebrate your progress, no matter how small, and be patient with yourself,” Starwood adds. Focus on building trust and connection now, not on the static from your past.

This isn’t just about tweaking a few habits; it’s about transforming how you handle all your relationships moving forward. Kinda major, right? So give yourself (and your inner child) a little self-compassion, then get ready to embrace a more confident and secure future—for your partners and for yourself.

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-ais-hallucinations-are-like-the-illusions-of-narcissism?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=3e84d5173b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_11_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e23a7006c-838120577

Why AI’s hallucinations are like the illusions of narcissism

by Jennine Gates, researcher

Unable to handle uncertainty, AI mimics the narcissistic compulsion to fill voids with plausible but false narratives

It is well known that artificial intelligence systems ‘hallucinate’, generating confident but false information in response even to straightforward searches. From inventing criminal histories for law-abiding citizens and fabricating case law and policy changes, to making factual errors in solving mathematical problems, hallucinations are a persistent, and sometimes harmful, menace. But unlike most wrinkles in the system that get ironed out over time, AI hallucinations are getting worse.

To understand why they persist, it helps to see them not as acts of deception, but as predictable behaviours of systems built to be fluent. AIs do not ‘think’ like humans; they search, sift and collate, but they cannot critically reflect. Some experts think that hallucinations arise because of so-called overfitting, which is when AIs have been trained so well that they effectively ‘memorise’ information rather than ‘generalising’, which can lead to a form of inflexibility (like arguing with someone ill-informed who insists they are right). Others blame flawed algorithms or bad actors ‘poisoning’ the training data.

However, large language models (LLMs) are just prediction engines: in response to a given prompt, they generate the next most likely word sequence from their data stores. When inputs are incomplete or conflicting, the system still produces an answer because that’s what it has been optimised to do. The coherence is structural rather than reflective: it inheres in the smoothness of a sentence, not in a commitment to the reality it describes, or to its moral valence. AIs lack a mechanism that can robustly hold contradictory information the way that a consciously evaluating mind does, or suspend judgment, or update itself in a way that resembles reflective self-scrutiny. Where there is uncertainty, AIs rush in to fill the gap with plausibility.

An intriguingly similar behavioural pattern appears in ‘narcissistic confabulation’. Here, too, the system, in this case a human psyche, produces a fluent story that protects its own internal coherence. The analogy is architectural: the point is not to pathologise or dehumanise people with narcissistic traits, who often carry difficult histories, nor to claim that AI is ‘narcissistic’, but rather to cast light on why both humans and machines might generate narratives that feel coherent while remaining unmoored from truth.

Narcissism is a morally loaded term, often used irresponsibly as a shorthand to describe almost sociopathic self-absorption. But clinicians view narcissism as a ‘disorder of self that results in character traits of self-emphasis, grandiose ideations and behaviours that impair relationships’. The narcissistic self is brittle, possibly as a result of developmental trauma or insecure attachments, and it lacks an inner core of stability. To cover up or mask this fragility, the individual may project a façade of confidence and entitlement, and an unwavering (if erroneous, or deeply biased) narrative of reality. The deception is not malicious, but rather a defensive mechanism to protect a sense of self that is constantly at risk of fracturing. When someone with a narcissistic personality disorder feels threatened by uncertainty or doubt, their compulsion is often to project authority.

As the narcissism expert Sam Vaknin explains: ‘In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps in memory, narcissists … confabulate: they invent plausible “plug-ins”’ that they fervently believe in. Coherence becomes a defence, used to hide the uncertainty or emptiness that afflicts those with a fragile sense of self – and a crutch, since letting go of a false narrative risks the entire structure of the self coming undone.

While the surface remains polished, the internal check is missing

What constitutes ‘the self’ is a subject of much debate, but even in this contested field experts tend to agree on certain functional hallmarks. A well-integrated self can reflect. A self can withstand contradiction. It can reconcile dissonant information, learn from mistakes, and anchor identity beyond the need for constant external validation. People with a well-integrated self can tolerate holding conflicting ideas such as ‘I love my partner, and I am frustrated with them right now’ or ‘My boss delivered a hard critique and still has my best interests at heart.’ But people with a fragile self want to reconcile or erase contradictions that threaten their (largely projected) sense of internal coherence. And so, for the narcissist, black-and-white thinking replaces nuance, and the opportunity for growth and integration is lost. In short, coherence is paramount, even when it comes at truth’s expense.

Years ago, I was riding in a truck with my then-husband as he was telling a story that became more and more elaborate and improbable as he went on, until I asked: ‘Wait… did this actually happen?’ He paused, then replied: ‘No… but it could have.’ At the time, the answer was merely disorienting. Later, I recognised it as ‘narcissistic confabulation’: the rewriting of reality to protect a fragile sense of self.

This dynamic, in human form, offers a preview of how an AI operates in conditions of uncertainty. In both cases, contradiction is intolerable and plausibility substitutes for truth. Both humans and AIs often double down when questioned, again because letting go of the story threatens to pull apart the primacy of coherence that their architecture (whether psychic or algorithmic) is built to preserve. It’s disarming because, while the surface remains polished, the internal check is missing.

If hallucinations emerge partly from the absence of a self-like structure, one way forward is to design systems that can better tolerate contradiction. This changes the question from ‘Why does the system lie?’ to ‘What would it take for the system to live with “not knowing”?’ This may not mean building sentience but creating architectures that can hold conflicting information without forcing a premature resolution.

One could foresee, for example, how adding persistent memory and self-review mechanisms might allow an AI to flag uncertainty instead of overwriting it. The system would then sit with unresolved inputs until more information arrived, in the same way that a psychologically healthy person is able to say: ‘I am not sure yet.’

LLMs and chatbots reflect back aspects of our own nature with eerie accuracy

The engineering challenge of designing systems that resist the impulse to overwrite inconvenient data is the next hurdle for makers of AI. But exploring how to embed coherence without distortion in AI may also offer fresh perspectives on how to support people living with narcissistic disorders who could benefit from approaches that strengthen the skill of tolerating contradiction. Therapeutic work already aims to help clients develop a more stable internal identity and a greater tolerance for dissonance.

If the greatest risk in confabulation – human or machine – comes less from malice than from emptiness, then cultivating coherence is not sentimental. It is foundational for inspiring trust. In people, this may involve strengthening memory or language to shore up an inner identity that better absorbs discomfort without rewriting history. In AI, it might look like building mechanisms that prefer acknowledged uncertainty over manufactured certainty.

We often talk about the uncanny valley – the discomfort that arises when something appears almost, but not quite, human. The uncanniness in AI is not physical, but psychological: when our LLMs and chatbots reflect back the most brittle aspects of our own nature – and do so with eerie accuracy. In this way, AI acts as a hollow mirror: because it has no sentient self yet it mimics and reflects back the narcissistic compulsion to fill a void with plausible but ungrounded narratives.

What we often fear in AI may not be its difference but its unnerving similarity to the most fragile tendencies we find in human pathology. If we can address the void in machines with architectures that can hold competing possibilities, we may learn something vital about how to shore up a similar capacity in humans. And if in the process we create ways for both humans and AI to better tolerate dissonance, then the reflection returned to us might be less fragile – and more complete.

Jennine Gates is a writer, researcher and veteran. She has worked in public service and aviation, and holds a Master’s degree in justice studies. She writes on the ethics of emerging technologies, justice, and the philosophy of AI. She lives in Victoria, Canada.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-psychology-behind-standing-up-and-saying-no/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_11_07&position=9&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=ec99962e-9350-471b-a730-da1d2b41d9bf&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican.com%2Fpodcast%2Fepisode%2Fthe-psychology-behind-standing-up-and-saying-no%2F

Why We Struggle to Say No—And How to Get Better at It

Why saying no is harder than it should be.