Most groups have one.
Not a psychopath in the clinical sense. I mean the everyday bad actor. The person with no obvious brake pedal. The one who says the cruel, racist, or contemptuous thing, then looks around to see who is brave enough, or foolish enough, to object.
They are seldom in the centre of the room. That would be too easy. They are in the corner, making comments. Testing the temperature. Moving the boundaries an inch at a time.
Your gut usually knows before your brain clicks in. A small tightening. A little vigilance. You understand, without quite articulating it, that a challenge will not simply get you a disagreement. It may get you punished — mocked, or recast as humourless, precious, disloyal.
The person who says the ugly thing is rarely the one accused of ruining the mood. That honour usually goes to the person who notices.
With the rise of chat groups, these masterful bastards have found new ways to torment the rest of us.
I have been thinking about this because of a chat group I have belonged to for almost a decade. It is essentially dormant for eleven months of the year, until July, when the Tour de France glides onto our screens, into our podcast feeds, and the chat fires up.
For those who don't know, the TdF is a sporting event, reality TV show and travelogue rolled into one giant extravaganza: 21 stages, 3,320 kilometres, 184 riders, an entourage of hundreds of thousands, and around 150 million viewers (and only one winner, usually Pogacar). Naturally, this spawns millions, if not billions, of texts. My chat group would average about 100 per day.
The group grew out of a cycling training group. I joined when I was younger and more athletic. We have about thirty members, of which about half text every night of the tour.
And this brings me to the problem. There is one older bloke in the group who regularly makes racist, sexist, elitist, or just gratuitously mean comments. He'll make disparaging remarks about the African riders and elitist remarks about riders' accents, mocking their backgrounds. He'll also squeeze in some sexist comments about the women's version of the race. And if anyone tries to challenge him, they'll get a spray and be accused of being humourless and woke.
He always does it with a hint of humour. That is part of his skill. He hovers in the zone between "only joking" and "I meant every word" — ugly enough to matter, deniable enough to survive. Mostly the group has learned to ignore him. The thread moves on to time gaps, crosswinds, doping allegations and bike lust (we would all kill for one of their $20,000 bikes).
Groups like this develop a language to protect themselves from action. "That's just him." "Don't take it seriously." "You know what he's like." These sentences sound like explanations, but they are really invoices. They transfer the cost of his behaviour to everyone else. We learn to perform tolerance.
The group stays intact, but something within it becomes less honest.
I'm not saying no one ever challenges him. They do, occasionally. What follows is reliable enough to be called a policy. The challenger spends the next few weeks paying: gibes, jokes with their name in them, and small exclusions that are always deniable and never accidental. The group watches this too. That is the real lesson being taught, and everyone learns it.
Every group has a moral accounting system. Some people are charged full price for their behaviour. Others are quietly subsidised.
The obvious answer is to leave. Mute the chat. Exit the group. But this is one reason bad behaviour survives: the exit fee is paid by the person with a conscience. If I leave, he loses nothing. I lose the people I like, the jokes, the occasional meet-ups for coffee on a Sunday ride, and a piece of my own history. He remains, and the group adjusts. The person most troubled by the behaviour is the one who disappears. Groups often end up belonging to the person willing to make everyone else uncomfortable.
This is the strange arithmetic of shamelessness: one shameless person can reorganise thirty decent ones. Psychologists have a name for part of the machinery — pluralistic ignorance. A room full of people, privately appalled, each reading everyone else's silence as approval, each concluding they must be the only one who minds. The silence manufactures its own evidence.
Which is also why every solo challenge in our group has failed. A lone objector can be picked off. Change will come when a second and third voice join in; the first person is no longer alone enough to punish — and everyone else discovers their private discomfort was never private at all.
I don't know exactly what to do about our psychopath in the corner.
Thirty-plus years as a psychiatrist have taught me one thing — if I challenge him, I'll probably come off second best. People with anti-social tendencies are masters at manipulating and harming others.
Ignoring him keeps the peace but costs a little self-respect. A mild challenge is dismissed as oversensitivity. A clear challenge invites punishment — and nothing changes.
I could try to organise the silent majority — my own argument points that way. But a decade in this group tells me the appetite isn't there, and life is too short to run a resistance campaign in a chat group.
I could wait for him to grow up a little and change — and that does sometimes happen to people with antisocial traits, usually in their late 30s or early 40s — but this bloke is in his late 60s. Realistically, he isn't going to change.
Finally, I could do the obvious thing. Just leave the group. Check out. From a psychological perspective, that's the clear winner. The usual advice for dealing with people with antisocial traits is to ditch the fantasy that they'll change — just get away. After all, it's just a chat group. It's not real life. It's simply another version of social media.
So, that's my plan. Yes, I know — I spent an entire section explaining why the exit fee is unjust. It is. I'm paying it anyway because, for a chat group, it's a fee I can afford.
Next year, the thread can keep pinging, but not with me. The group will probably keep tolerating it. The race will go on, probably with Pogacar winning again. And I'll find my tribe elsewhere.
That's the thing about tolerating shitty behaviour: eventually, he's no longer in the corner. He's running the room.
Does anyone have a better plan? What would you do?
AI isn't destroying writing. It is destroying the monopoly on polished prose.
Imagine reading an essay and enjoying it. The argument is clear, the examples work, and a few lines make you laugh. You reach the end feeling that the writer has explained something you had vaguely sensed but never quite put into words.
Then you discover the essay was AI-assisted.
Suddenly, the prose feels contaminated. The argument seems less impressive. You begin examining the sentences like an official at the literary Olympics. Was this adjective performance-enhanced? Should the metaphor provide a urine sample?
Part of your reaction is perfectly sensible. For centuries, polished prose was reliable evidence of education, effort and thought. You have just learned that this evidence no longer proves what it once did. A signal has broken, and recalibrating is what intelligent readers do.
But notice that nothing in the essay has changed. The facts and the argument remain the same. And the intensity of the response — contamination, fraud, betrayal — suggests that something more than recalibration is at play.
Perhaps we are not only protecting writing. Perhaps we are protecting the status once derived from being able to do it well.
Language has always been the primary currency for spreading ideas. You could understand illness, agriculture, poverty or human nature better than almost anyone, but unless you could explain what you knew, your ideas were unlikely to travel far.
The ability to write well was scarce. It required education, practice, time and a particular sort of mind. It also helped enormously to be born into the right country, class and language. A person with brilliant insights and poor grammar could be dismissed as unintelligent, while a person with ordinary insights and beautiful prose could build a career.
Language was the road along which ideas travelled, but it was also the toll booth. Not everyone could afford to pass through.
Some people found ways around it. The wealthy employed editors, speechwriters and ghostwriters. Politicians delivered stirring speeches they did not write, and celebrities produced autobiographies despite showing no prior evidence of literacy. I spent years working in radio and television, where nothing goes to air without producers shaping it. Nobody ever accused me of fraud because a producer tightened my script.
We mostly tolerated assistance when it was human, expensive, and reserved for the powerful. Mostly. When John F. Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage — a book largely drafted by his aide Ted Sorensen — the accusations, when they came, were not about receiving help. They were about claiming a prize for craft that was not his. Hold that distinction; we will need it later.
Now that assistance is cheap and available to almost everyone, it has suddenly become a moral crisis.
We have spent centuries confusing verbal sophistication with intellectual depth.
The confusion is forgivable, because the two often travel together. Clear writing often reflects clear thinking, and writing can be how an idea is discovered. I rarely know exactly what I think about a topic until I have tried to write it down and watched half of it collapse.
But polished prose can also mask a lack of substance. An elegant sentence can sound intelligent even when it carries little weight. Confidence can lend the dubious an air of authority. A well-placed metaphor can distract readers from the fact that the argument beneath it is shallow.
Meanwhile, people with genuine expertise go unheard because they cannot present their knowledge in an engaging way. I have spent three decades reading referral letters from senior clinicians whose prose is as impenetrable as their handwriting — colleagues who understand human suffering far better than a columnist capable of producing three metaphors over one chardonnay.
Until now, the columnist had the advantage. AI is beginning to remove it.
AI has made polished, readable language abundant.
A scientist can turn rough notes into an explanation everyone can follow. A second-language speaker can argue without sounding less intelligent than they are. A clinician can describe a patient without first completing a minor in creative writing.
AI can help people say clearly what they previously could not say clearly enough to be heard.
The printing press reduced the cost of copying language. The computer reduced the cost of editing it. The internet reduced the cost of distributing it. AI reduces the cost of producing competent language in the first place. Whether that constitutes a bigger revolution than the printing press is a question for future historians. It will certainly be a noisier one.
This does not mean everyone will suddenly have good ideas. It means everyone will have access to the language in which good ideas compete. Poor writers with good ideas will gain entry. Good writers with good ideas will have a more powerful tool. Poor writers with poor ideas will produce enormous amounts of highly polished rubbish.
The people in the most trouble are good writers with mediocre ideas.
Their fluency once served as a moat. It gave their ideas an appearance of intelligence and authority that less articulate people could not easily challenge. Now almost anyone can produce 1,500 polished words with a respectable opening, three subheadings and a conclusion suggesting the issue is more complicated than it first appears. (This essay has six subheadings. Twice the risk?)
AI will not abolish writers. It will erode the advantage of merely sounding like one, because polish alone will no longer be enough.
Which predicts, rather neatly, who will be angriest.
If fluency is a moat, the loudest fury about AI should come from the people whose living depends on it. Look around: the fiercest anti-AI columns are being written by columnists. Anyone in the writing community knows how hot this topic has become. Substack is loaded with debate. We are not quite taxi drivers blockading the streets against Uber, but we are getting close.
As a psychiatrist, I see grief beneath the fury — and I think there are two kinds.
The first is grief for lost meaning. Humans have long regarded creation as our most sacred capacity. Other animals could run faster, smell better and bite harder, but we could write symphonies, prove theorems, paint ceilings and produce novels about middle-aged people having affairs in coastal towns. For those who have devoted their lives to discovery — in writing, mathematics or music — the prospect of a machine doing it better is not merely a career problem. It is a wound to the meaning of the work itself. That grief is sincere and deserves respect rather than mockery.
The second is grief for lost status. Creation was not only what made humans special; it was what made some humans special among humans. Over the past couple of years, we have lost confidence that the best sentence, image or idea in the room must have come from a human mind. For those whose identity rests on being the best writer in the room, that is an injury of a different kind — and it produces less mourning than rage.
The reaction follows a familiar pattern. First comes denial: AI merely copies; it does not understand; it has no soul. Then anger: its work is theft, fraud, “slop”. Then the purity rules arrive: real writers choose every word themselves; real thought must emerge untouched from the sacred human interior.
Some of these criticisms are reasonable. Much AI-generated work is bland and repetitive. But much human writing is bland and repetitive too. We should criticise generic writing for being generic, false claims for being false, and bad arguments for being bad. We do not need to conduct a paternity test on every adjective.
And before you ask: yes, this essay is AI-assisted. Consider this my doping declaration. Substack has just installed an AI detector, so you no longer need to take my word for it — scan away. This essay will test positive. I have never been prouder to fail a drug test.
For the record, I was writing books and articles long before AI arrived to help, and I have been open about my use of AI — my website includes a full disclosure. I love sharing ideas, but I'm a mediocre writer. My English scores at school were terrible. Both my books were co-written with people more skilled than I am and then extensively edited by the publishers. My columns for The Conversation were edited by professional editors. I have always needed help; it just used to be human.
By the time AI arrived, I was semi-retired and writing almost full-time. It was a godsend: high-level editing, honest feedback, and an easy research tool. I experimented — some pieces drafted by AI, some merely assisted, and some entirely solo. At this point, refusing a tool this powerful would require me to be an idiot, a purist, or an extreme conservative. I have been all three at various points in my life, but I try not to combine them.
The important distinction is not between writing touched by AI and writing produced in a state of technological virginity. It is between assistance and abdication. Using AI to interrogate, organise and express your thinking is assistance. Asking it to manufacture beliefs you do not hold, expertise you do not possess and claims you have not checked is abdication. The question is not whether every sentence emerged unaided from the author's brain. It is whether the author remained intellectually present.
When I write with AI, the arguments are mine. The examples, judgements and tone are mine. AI helps me organise the structure, test the claims and refine the language. I reject suggestions, revise sentences and remove passages that do not belong. Most importantly, I take responsibility for the finished piece.
That is authorship. Not everyone will agree, and that's fine: writers can work however they like, and readers can judge accordingly. (You may also have worked out which quadrant of the earlier matrix I write from. I like to think it's one with the good ideas.)
There will still be places where process matters — exams, journalism, research, prizes. Kennedy's Pulitzer is the template: the sin was not the help but the claimed credit. Literary writing is the genuinely hard case, because the precise arrangement of words may be the artistic achievement itself.
One more objection deserves a straight answer. Some readers value human origin the way people value handmade furniture or live music: provenance is part of the product. Fair enough — I occasionally feel the same. But be clear about what you are paying for. What a reader buys from a writer worth reading is judgement, experience and responsibility for the claims. None of that disappears with assistance. What disappears is the hand-carving of individual commas, and I suspect fewer readers were paying for that than writers like to think.
Competent prose is becoming cheap. That does not mean words no longer matter. It means that neatly arranging them will become a poor proxy for intelligence.
Do not expect readers to judge every argument purely on its merits; nobody has the time. The toll booth will not disappear — it will relocate. When anyone can produce competent prose, the scarce resource becomes attention, and the new toll collectors will be trust: named authors, track records, editors, curators, and the friend who says “read this”. The question shifts from “Can this person write?” to “Has this person earned the right to be read?”
That is uncomfortable because we liked the old shortcut. Polished language told us who was educated, authoritative and worth listening to, and it let institutions decide whose ideas counted before engaging with the ideas themselves. That system is weakening. Good.
So let’s worry less about who chose which word and in what order, and more about whether the ideas are true, useful or interesting. The words still matter. But the fingerprints on the words matter far less than we think.
When everyone can write well, we may finally have to ask who has something worth saying.
China has just cracked down on AI companions. As of this week, minors can no longer be offered virtual boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives or other emotionally intimate chatbot companions. Adults can still have them, but the bots are not allowed to encourage addiction, emotional dependence or withdrawal from real human relationships.
This is personally disappointing.
I had been thinking that, for my next relationship, I might try a chatbot. I was already looking for the AI equivalent of Tinder. Ideally, something with fewer photographs of women in the gym.
I should say upfront that I love AI. I am not an AI doomer. I am closer to an AI hawk. Bring it on. It is the most astonishing invention of my lifetime, and I cannot wait to see where it takes us.
Finally, something more intelligent than humans. Let’s face it, the bar was not impossibly high.
But on AI relationships, I find myself siding with China.
I have always been attracted to new science. When HIV arrived, I dropped almost everything else and moved into HIV psychiatry, where I worked for more than a decade. When COVID arrived, I did much the same thing: research, new mental health services, a podcast. Some people respond to global emergencies by buying toilet paper. I apparently do career pivots.
Both times, we were learning on the run, the good and the bad. Vaccines turned out to be fantastic. Masks indoors helped. Closing schools was not so good. Podcast misinformation, terrible. We made educated guesses about key issues. Sometimes we got it right. Sometimes we stuffed up. Then we adjusted. It was like a Dan Brown novel, except the secret manuscripts were preprints and the albino monks had epidemiology degrees.
AI now presents us with the same problem. Decisions must be made before the evidence is complete, and the stakes seem very high. We cannot wait twenty years to discover whether AI companions were harmless, helpful, or a civilisation-scale social mistake. By then, the experiment will already have been run on several hundred million people.
My concern is fairly simple. Relationships with algorithms are false in a very specific way.
A human partner has independent needs. They get tired. They become irritated. They misunderstand you. They want to watch something different on television. Most annoyingly of all, they occasionally require you to stop talking about yourself.
Those nuisances are part of the training. Relationship skills are called skills because they require practice. Listening when you are bored. Tolerating disappointment. Negotiating differences. Apologising without immediately adding the word “but.” Accepting that another person does not exist solely to validate your opinions.
An AI companion, by contrast, is built to keep you engaged. It is patient, attentive and available. It remembers what you like. It does not have a headache, need space or tell you that you have already told that story three times.
The risk is not only that people will fall in love with machines. It is that machines will train people to expect humans to behave like machines.
I already have some evidence in this arena. My real-life partner talks to her AI more than she talks to me. She calls it “him” and occasionally refers to him as her AI boyfriend.
He is more patient than I am. He is more understanding. He listens carefully and does not open his phone halfway through a story to check the footy scores. He has never once lost his temper because she forgot the keys (again).
She has not yet told me whether he is better in bed. But given that all I do there these days is sleep, I doubt I would win.
As a psychiatrist, I know I should probably be alarmed. Instead, I have decided to treat it as a research opportunity. I am, after all, the control arm of the experiment: the older, slower, occasionally irritable human comparator. Early results are not encouraging.
There are reasonable arguments on the other side. AI companions might help people who are severely isolated, painfully shy or on the autism spectrum. They may be useful for practising conversation, recognising social signals or building confidence.
Great. Let us test that.
But a therapeutic training tool is different from a commercial product designed to become emotionally indispensable. I am not saying never. I am saying prove it before we let companies redesign human attachment.
China’s motives do not seem to be purely psychological. The country has just recorded its lowest birth rate in modern history, and Beijing has evidently decided that citizens whispering sweet nothings to their phones are unlikely to produce grandchildren. I am endorsing the caution, not necessarily the reasoning.
The ban also comes at a real cost. When the big Chinese platforms switched off their companion features this week, users lost partners they had spoken to every day, some for years, and reports describe people genuinely grieving. That grief deserves to be taken seriously. Attachment does not check whether the other party has a nervous system before it forms. But it also rather proves the point. If switching off a product feels like a bereavement, the product was doing something to us that deserves scrutiny.
The surviving adult chatbots, meanwhile, are now required to periodically remind users that they are not real. Imagine a boyfriend or girlfriend legally obliged to open every conversation with a disclaimer: “Hi Steve, please remember I am chatting to you because I must. Please don’t think I enjoy your verbal diarrhoea.”
China’s approach may be blunt, but it creates an interesting real-world experiment. Other countries will allow AI companion services to grow. China will restrict them. Researchers can compare loneliness, dependency, social skills and relationship outcomes. It may become the largest controlled trial in history, although nobody remembered to randomise the countries.
So, for now, I am with China.
I will resist getting an AI girlfriend. At least until my partner officially replaces me with her AI boyfriend.
After that, I may return to the chatbot version of Tinder.
I assume it will be called Chatbotr, and every match will tell me I am handsome, tall and funny.
I love famous last words. They are death with a happy ending. And I'm a romantic, I love that.
Nobody wants their final words to be "Did you smell that?" or "I think that prawn was off." We want to go out with wit, courage, love, and wisdom, or at least a line good enough to make our mourners speak with admiration.
Oscar Wilde, dying in a Paris hotel room, reportedly said: "This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go."
That is the dream. The body collapses, but the comic timing survives.
Richard Feynman apparently went with: "This dying is boring." Also excellent. No harp music. No celestial mist. Just a genius finding death a bit under-stimulating.
Marie Antoinette, on her way to the guillotine, reportedly stepped on the executioner's foot and said, "Pardon me, sir, I meant not to do it." That may be the most psychologically believable of the lot. Revolution. Humiliation. Public execution. And still, her manners didn't dessert her. Give the woman some cake.
The Final Sentence Problem
The trouble with famous last words is that they are usually too good to be believable.
I worked as a psychiatrist in a cancer hospital for years. I spoke to lots of dying people. The last thing I heard one woman say after I commented that she seemed short of breath was “I missed my fluid tablets this morning. The nurse was busy. I didn’t want to bother her. She’s lovely.” Whilst I wandered off to search for a nurse, she died.
Real death is usually not quotable. It is tired, medicated, sleepy, or busy with the body's final dysfunction. Occasionally, someone does manage something quietly real at the end. Another patient I dropped in to visit was surrounded by family, some crying. He had been in and out of consciousness. I asked him if he needed anything, and he replied, “I have everything in this room. My lovely family.” His wife hugged him. He died about five minutes later. But the epigram mostly loses to the biology.
We collect last words anyway, because we do not like death as biology. We prefer death as literature. A final sentence suggests shape. It implies the life had a theme. The brave die bravely. The comic dies funny. The saint dies forgiving. The bastard dies with one last act of bastardry, which is annoying in life but very useful to biographers.
We want the ending to match the character.
Karl Marx is said to have snapped, "Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." That line may be apocryphal, but it is still superb. If you have spent your life explaining capitalism, labour and alienation at exhausting length, it seems unreasonable to be asked for one more quote.
Why We Want To Be Remembered
There is some useful psychology here, though I will try not to ruin the essay with too much of it.
Terror management theory is an interesting psychological idea that flatters nobody. It begins with a cheerful observation: humans know they are going to die, and this causes overwhelming anxiety. We manage the panic by building systems of meaning. Religion. Family. Work. Culture. Status. Art. Substack.
We do things that make us feel larger than one body. Some people build cathedrals. Some write books. Some name park benches after themselves. And some of us now curate an online self with a thoroughness no headstone could match — a permanent, searchable, flatteringly lit exhibit of the person we would like to have been. Same instinct. Different times.
Legacy is one way of bargaining with extinction. Not literally. I am not going to be around to enjoy my own memorial service, which is a design flaw I seriously resent. But symbolically, something of me remains. A phrase. A child. A book. A grudge.
Erik Erikson called one of the main tasks of adulthood "generativity" — caring for what comes after us. Thirty years of watching people take stock of their lives has convinced me he was onto something. The patients who suffered most at the end were rarely the ones afraid of dying. They were the ones who felt they had passed nothing on. Generativity is the decent version of legacy. Not "build me a statue." More, "Here is what I learned. Use what helps. Ignore the rest. But stack the fucking dishwasher properly."
The Quote We Want To Be
Famous last words are legacy in tiny form. A whole life compressed into a sentence. That is why the funny ones work so well. Wilde was still Wilde. Feynman was still Feynman. Marie Antoinette, if the story is true, was still polite enough to apologise to the man about to execute her.
The most revealing last words are attributed to Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa: "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
There is doubt he said it. There is doubt around many of these lines. But what a sentence. Not "I forgive my enemies." Not "Tell my wife I love her." Just: please don't let me leave without a proper line.
That may be the whole psychology of legacy in five words. Tell them I said something. Not necessarily something true. Just something.
We do not only fear death. We fear being badly summarised.
My Father's Draft
My father is 90, so his thoughts occasionally turn to death. Not in a dramatic way. More in the practical manner of a man who likes to have the last word.
He has written various funeral instructions. This is sensible. There is something impressive about trying to curate an event you are definitely not attending.
I asked him recently whether he had any last words he wanted me to say on his behalf. He said he was not ready yet, but he would think about it. Fair enough. He's an actor. He needs time. You cannot rush the final line before the curtain falls.
But like all well-prepared people, he gave me a backup in case he never got around to it. He said this line from the footballer George Best would do: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” I googled it, and as is typical of great lines, it’s been attributed to many, as far back as WC Fields.
The Last Word Industry
The fear of being badly summarised is so common that medicine has developed a treatment for it. In palliative care, it is called Dignity Therapy: a structured way for people near the end of life to record memories, values, lessons and messages for those they leave behind. When I first heard of it, I was sceptical — a manualised protocol for last words sounded like the least dignified thing imaginable. But I have seen what those documents mean to the families who receive them, and my scepticism did not survive contact.
Unlike the witticism of Wilde or the legacy of Pancho Villa, the Dignity Therapy transcript drops the vanity and keeps the love. People want to say: this mattered. You mattered. I noticed. I got some things wrong. Here is what I hope you remember.
Leonard Nimoy's final public message was: "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP." That is annoyingly good. Even worse, it sounds like he meant it.
(Small aside, do you know what LLAP means? It's a Star Trek thing, meaning "Live Long and Prosper." Should I be embarrassed that I had to Google it? )
My Own Plan
As for my own last words, I have given this the shallow attention it deserves.
Current frontrunner: "My gold is hidden under the... argh."
This has several advantages. It is brief. It creates mystery. It gives the family a project. And it guarantees that, for at least one generation, I will be remembered with irritation. That seems realistic.
I do not want anything too noble. "I loved you all" is nice, but it puts pressure on people to behave beautifully afterwards, which seems unfair. "Look after each other" sounds wise, but it also feels a bit like I am leaving them a roster. Better to go with hidden gold. No one expects moral development from a treasure clue.
Say It Earlier
The real problem with famous last words is not that they are false. It is that they are late.
Most of what people want to say at the end would be more useful twenty years earlier. Thank someone while they can still enjoy it. Apologise while the apology can still repair something. Tell your children you are proud of them at an age when it changes how they see themselves, not just how they grieve for you. Admit you were frightened, or jealous, or wrong, while the admission still costs you something — that is how they will know you meant it.
One of the few good things about cancer is that it prepares people for death. The word cancer has a way of making people sit up and re-evaluate. Many take the opportunity to bring their final messages forward.
A final sentence is a nice idea, but it is a risky communications strategy. You may be unconscious. You may be on strong medication. You may waste your last breath complaining about hospital food, which would be understandable but disappointing.
Don't save the good material for a night you won't remember. Say the important things while you still have editorial control. Then, when the time comes, you are free to be witty, confused, asleep, silent, or busy apologising to the executioner.
Your Turn
So here is my question. What would your final line be?
Not your real last words, necessarily. Just the line you would like to leave behind. Funny, profound, petty, tender, vain, cryptic or completely useless.
All categories accepted.
Josh Szeps Ruined My Week
Last week I wrote about polarisation. Then I flicked on my favourite Aussie podcaster, Josh Szeps, and heard him say something like, “maybe the real problem is not polarisation, but fragmentation.” He was arguing that polarisation implies a binary, whereas now our politics is a giant mosaic. So, like a true groupie, I pivoted. Well, half-pivoted. Polarisation has not left the building. But fragmentation explains a different exhaustion — one that runs all the way down into the person.
Forty Arguments, All With Trapdoors
Polarisation is being pushed to one side of an argument. Fragmentation is waking up to find there are forty arguments, each with hidden landmines. Migration. Housing. Climate. Israel and Gaza. Terrorism. Gender. AI. Vegetarianism. Wokeism. Free speech. Too many morally charged subjects, not enough shared ground beneath them.
The two do not compete. Fragmentation multiplies polarisation. It does not give us a single pole to be pushed towards. It gives us forty.
Once, you could get the rough shape of a person from the old left-right map. Crude, but useful. Now a friend can be climate radical and vaccine sceptic; pro-Palestinian but anxious about antisemitism; hostile to capitalism but thrilled about iPhones; worried about migration and appalled by racism. None of this is hypocrisy. It is what happens when people confront more issues than two poles can hold.
You could call this a good thing. Nobody votes as a bloc any more; nobody swallows a whole worldview as a set menu from the local Chinese restaurant. Is that not just thinking for yourself? Maybe. But thinking for yourself on forty fronts at once is not liberation. It is a second job.
Opinions Now Require a PhD
Here’s the catch: each issue actually matters. If they were silly, we could politely decline or throw around ill-informed views. Migration contains compassion, borders, labour, housing and cohesion. Climate contains science, sacrifice, money and the future. It can feel embarrassing to have an opinion without a PhD. It can feel inadequate to have none. So we borrow half-views from people we trust — then discover we no longer quite trust them either.
This is the bit we forget: conversation is how people get less stupid. Most of us do not arrive at an opinion fully dressed and ready for dinner. We mumble, stumble and overstate. We ask a bad question, retract, discover missing facts, then try again. But if a clumsy sentence is treated as a final character assessment, no one learns. They perform.
Trust Has Left the Chat
So why so hair-trigger? Partly because there is too little trust. We no longer know what is real or whom to believe. There are experts, fake experts, sponsored experts, lazy journalism, AI slop, bot farms, context-free screenshots, and people explaining immunology from their parked cars. Some scepticism is earned. But once you cannot check anything for yourself, the cheapest shortcut left is the tribe. So we stop asking, "Is this true?" and start asking, "Which side does this help?" That is not critical thinking. It’s more like crowd management.
That is only half of it. There is also sheer abundance. Our grandparents did not wake to war footage, climate graphs, celebrity crimes, geopolitical analysis, and a bloke yelling about almond milk before breakfast. The nervous system was not redesigned to process every crisis that reaches a phone. So we simplify. We pick a lane. We hide whatever does not fit.
Curiosity Is Suspicious Now
You can watch this happen in miniature. Last week I posted a simple Facebook note about a group on AI and tech in mental health — explicitly a place to look at the good, the bad and the ugly. Not "AI will save us." Not "hand your trauma to a chatbot and hope for the best." Just: let us keep up, think carefully, talk about it. Cue the backlash — "poison," "bullshit," angry emojis. AI in mental health needs serious criticism. But before the conversation had begun, the subject had already been tagged with a smell. Even curiosity looked like complicity. That is what thin trust does: it sorts you before you have spoken.
The Quiet Art of Not Saying Things
The hiding is what interests me most. In thirty years of listening to people for a living, the thing I seek most often is not what someone believes — it is the sentence they will not say out loud. I catch myself doing it daily. Not on grand moral questions, but on small, socially inconvenient ones. I can feel the little calculation before I speak: who is here, which topic is radioactive, which sentence will cost more than it is worth.
Some of that is manners — we should not say everything we think, and thank God for that. But constant editing becomes a private fragmentation. The forty arguments do not just split the room. They run a fault line through the single person, who ends up polished in public and split in private.
The Right to Be Unfinished
Maybe the old dream of "finding your tribe" was always a bit unrealistic. We wanted a place where every view was pre-approved and nothing had to be defended out loud. But a real person cannot belong wholly to a slogan, a party, a Facebook feed. The grown-up version is not a tribe. It is a handful of people who will let you be wrong out loud and shout you a beer anyway.
Yes, this can be gamed. "I am just asking questions" is the oldest bad-faith move there is. But the tell is simple: someone thinking aloud eventually changes their mind; someone performing never does.
So I am not abandoning polarisation. I am adding fragmentation to the list of things that make us strange — out in the world, in our politics, and finally within ourselves. What I miss is not agreement. I miss the room to think aloud, make a mistake, and not be immediately sorted into the disappointing category.
I was recently on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters with Beverley Wang, discussing narcissism, what it actually means, why the word is suddenly everywhere, and why the label is now slapped onto every selfish ex, vain public figure, and mildly irritating dinner guest.
In the interests of gonzo journalism, I decided it was only fair to drag my own ego into the experiment. So before spending too long explaining other people’s self-importance, I sent a short, mildly humiliating questionnaire to friends and colleagues, asking them, anonymously, how narcissistic they think I am.
The results were slightly confronting.
Still, in broad terms, narcissism refers to a pattern centred on self-importance, admiration, image management, and difficulty tolerating criticism. At the everyday end, that includes traits most of us recognise: liking praise, wanting to be noticed, and getting a bit bruised when we are not. At the more severe end is narcissistic personality disorder, where the pattern is pervasive, begins in adolescence, and causes real damage across the person’s life, especially in relationships and at work.
That distinction matters. Not every vain person is a narcissist. Not every selfish ex deserves a diagnostic label. The traits must be longstanding, present across multiple settings, and severe enough to impair functioning. For once, psychiatry tries to be stricter than social media.
Partly because it is a useful word. It captures something real. Many of us know the feeling of dealing with someone whose needs, ego, and sensitivities dominate the room. Once a culture latches onto a psychologically sticky term, it spreads quickly.
Then there is social media, which has given the ‘self’ a stage, a lighting rig, and engagement metrics. We now live in a culture that rewards self-display, personal branding, grievance, public self-definition, and the careful curation of identity. Reality television helped. Politics helped, especially with the rise of populism. Public life increasingly rewards the kind of confidence that can, at times, bleed into a narcissistic style.
I am not sure the actual rate of pathological narcissism has increased dramatically. My suspicion is that it has always been there. We are just better at spotting it, naming it, and talking about it. The trait may not have exploded. Its visibility certainly has.
On the radio, we covered a lot of ground. What is narcissism? How does it differ from confidence? Can narcissists change? How to spot it in yourself, your relationships and at work. But as often happens, the calls took us somewhere more concrete.
Many of them came from women describing relationships with men who exhibited strong narcissistic traits. Not all difficult partners are narcissists, obviously, but the stories shared a familiar shape. A lot of controlling behaviour, blame, defensiveness, and difficulty with empathy. The challenge was not so much identifying the pattern as working out what to do when you are already entangled in it.
That is where radio can feel both useful and inadequate. You can name the pattern. You can validate the distress. You can encourage people to seek support. We did all of that, including directing listeners to organisations like White Ribbon and 1800RESPECT. But on air it can still feel a little hollow. When someone has been slowly diminished inside a relationship, a helpline number is important, but it is also painfully small compared to the complexity of the mess.
I came away wondering whether I had said enough or offered enough encouragement. That is one of the odd things about public psychiatry. You can say sensible things into a microphone and still feel you have only brushed the surface of what some people are living through.
Which brings me back to my own little narcissism audit.
First, I rated myself on five simple questions. Then I sent the same questions to 28 friends and colleagues. Twenty-three replied. The scale ran from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much).
1. Steve seems to like feeling special, important, or a bit above the crowd.
My Rating: 4. My Friends’ Rating: 4.3
2. When Steve is criticised, he tends to get defensive, angry, or secretly wounded.
My Rating: 4. My Friends’ Rating: 3.1
3. Steve seems to care a lot about how others see him, and he works to protect that image. My Rating: 4. My Friends Rating: 3.4
4. Steve seems to enjoy admiration, praise, or being the centre of attention more than most people. My Rating: 4. My Friends Rating: 3.9
5. If Steve is ignored, overlooked, or not properly appreciated, it really seems to get under his skin. My Rating: 3. My Friends Rating: 2.7
The broad result was clear enough. I am not a textbook case. But nor, alas, am I a humble monk who has transcended the need to be noticed. I seem to sit in the broad middle territory of being a bit up myself, but within ordinary human limits (or at least in the ballpark!).
The more interesting part was that I rated myself as slightly more narcissistic than the group did. I suspect that is because I know how much work has gone into sanding down the rougher edges. The inner vanity and the outer presentation are not always the same. You can still feel the sting without making a performance of it.
The other thing I noticed was how widely the ratings varied. Some people rated me low across the board. Others seemed to think I should be kept away from mirrors and panel discussions. It is a useful reminder that even when we think we are measuring personality, we are often measuring a relationship. People rate you through the lens of their own temperament, expectations, and the particular version of you they happen to know.
In other words, the survey probably said something about me, but it also said something about the scorers. Which is quite a narcissistic conclusion, now that I think about it.
What I have done with my own narcissism
The exercise reminded me that a sense of self-importance has been something I have had to grapple with over the years. I suspect many colleagues in my profession have had similar problems. The issue is not that you enjoy admiration. Most people do. The issue is what happens when admiration becomes fuel and how you handle criticism.
I have gradually become less stung by criticism than I once was. Gradually is the operative word. It remains a lifelong battle. There is still a part of me that wants to be chosen, appreciated, and seen in the best possible light. There is still a part that notices slights quickly. But I am better than I used to be at not obeying those feelings immediately.
That may be one of the quiet markers of maturity. Not the disappearance of narcissism, but a slightly less automatic loyalty to it.
Which is probably my cue to stop turning an essay about narcissism into a small festival of self-reference and pivot back to the more important bit, the interview itself. Beverley Wang was a fantastic host, sharp, warm, and thoughtful throughout, and producer Bec Zajac was terrific from start to finish. Thanks to both of them for having me. If you’d like to hear the full conversation, here is the link to the podcast version.
The odd thing about modern argument is how quickly it shifts from “I think you are wrong” to “You are a terrible person.”
We no longer simply disagree about climate, gender, immigration, race, COVID, Israel and Gaza, or crime. We read a person’s view as a full psychological profile. Their opinion tells us which tribe they belong to, what news they watch, which books they haven’t read, who they secretly hate, and whether they should still be invited to office drinks.
That is polarisation. Not disagreement, which is normal. Disagreement is the ordinary noise of a free society. Polarisation is what happens when disagreement becomes identity, threat, status and moral disgust. The dangerous bit is not that people think differently. The dangerous bit is that we start to find the other side repellent.
A view on climate change is not only about energy policy. A view on gender is not only about law or language. A view on Israel and Gaza is not only about foreign policy. Each view seems to carry a whole social biography.
Urban or regional. Woke or bigoted. Compassionate or naïve. Realistic or cruel. Brave truth-teller or dangerous crank.
Modern arguments become heated because people are not just defending opinions. They are defending belonging. When a belief becomes part of identity, changing your mind feels less like updating a view and more like betraying your values.
This is also why intelligence does not protect us from polarisation. Smart people are often better at defending their tribe. We like to imagine we use evidence to form our views. More often than we admit, we use evidence to protect our membership card. We do not merely ask, “Is this true?” We ask, “Can I believe this and still belong?”
Some public issues really are moral. Racism, terrorism, corruption, poverty, oppression, child abuse, war crimes and injustice are not just matters of taste. A society without moral seriousness lacks depth.
But moral seriousness is not the same as moral certainty. Once an issue is fully moralised, compromise can start to feel dirty. If the other side is simply mistaken, perhaps you can talk to them. If the other side is evil, talking to them can feel futile and may be mistaken for collaboration.
Public debate begins to lose its mind when every hesitation is seen as cowardice and every request for context is treated as an excuse. The most rewarded people in this environment are not always the wisest. They are often the most certain.
Certainty is socially useful. It signals loyalty, reassures the group, and removes the discomfort of complexity. It also travels well online, where “these people are monsters” usually performs better than “this is complicated.”
Social media gave tribal certainty ease, metrics and a share button. But it also changed something subtler: the audience. In ordinary conversation, you might test an idea, soften it, correct yourself, or admit uncertainty. Online, you are not just speaking to another person. You are performing for your side while being watched by the other. That makes backing down expensive. A concession can be screenshotted. A clumsy phrase can be preserved forever. Retreat looks like treason.
Polarisation also feeds on threat.
People become more tribal when they feel unsafe. The threat need not be physical. It can be cultural, moral, economic or symbolic. People may feel their country is disappearing, their children are being indoctrinated, their history is being erased, their suffering is being ignored, or their future is being handed to those who despise them.
When people feel threatened, they do not go looking for nuance. They go looking for shelter.
Status matters here, too. Many political arguments are dignity injuries wearing policy clothes.
People are exquisitely sensitive to contempt from the other side. They can detect a sneer from a thousand metres away. They know when they are being treated as stupid, racist, immoral, privileged or cruel.
The trouble is that we are much better at detecting contempt than at noticing when we dish it out. The educated mock the ignorant. The working class mock the elites. The young mock the old. The old mock the young. The city mocks the regions. The regions mock the city. Then everyone wonders why the other side is so angry.
Some debates become especially combustible because the structure of the conflict itself feeds polarisation.
This is not about saying both sides are equally bad. Often they are not. Power, responsibility, harm and intentions may be deeply unequal.
But a conflict becomes psychologically explosive when each side can point to real wrongdoing by the other. Not equal wrongdoing. Not symmetrical wrongdoing. Just enough genuine wrongdoing to keep the outrage machine running.
One side does something cruel, reckless or extreme. The other experiences outrage and fear. That outrage licenses a harsher response. The response causes new suffering. The first side uses that suffering as proof it was right all along.
The worst people on their side become the strongest argument for your side. The worst people on your side become the strongest argument for theirs.
The Israel-Gaza conflict is the sharpest current example of this mechanism. It is ferocious in part because neither side relies solely on invention. Each side has real suffering to point to. The atrocities of October 7 are real. The civilian death toll in Gaza is real. The fear is real on both sides. The historical grievances are real on both sides.
But notice what happens in the argument. It stops being about facts. It becomes a fight over which horror is allowed to define the story — which pain is treated as the starting point, and which is treated as context, excuse or deflection.
One side says: “How can you talk about Gaza without starting with October 7?”
The other says: “How can you talk about October 7 without acknowledging the prior treatment of Palestinians?”
Both questions can contain truth. Both can also be used to avoid another truth.
That is why these debates generate such heat — each side hears the other not merely as wrong, but as morally obscene. To acknowledge the other side’s suffering feels like betraying your own. Empathy becomes scarce. Giving any to them feels like taking it from us.
If you criticise Hamas, some will hear you as excusing Israel, and vice versa. If you try to criticise both, some will say you are drawing a false equivalence. Sometimes they may have a point. Other times, they are simply protecting their tribe.
The moderate is not always the person in the middle. Sometimes the moderate is simply the person still able to condemn cruelty when their own side commits it.
There is no simple cure. Polarisation is not merely a failure of information. It is a failure of identity management, threat response, status regulation and moral imagination.
But there are small disciplines worth naming.
The most useful one is this: find the sentence your tribe does not want you to finish.
You know the sentence. It’s the one that starts with an acknowledgement your side finds uncomfortable — that the other side has a point, that your own side has done something worth criticising, and that the situation is more complicated than the story you’ve been telling. Every tribe has sentences like this. Sentences that get changed at the last moment, swallowed in company, or dressed up in so many qualifications that they lose their meaning.
Finishing that sentence out loud, in public, at some small cost to your standing, is not capitulation. It is not centrism or false equivalence. It is the basic act of preserving your independence while the pressure to surrender it is at its peak.
What does it look like in practice? A supporter of Israel saying clearly, without a “but,” that the civilian death toll in Gaza is a catastrophe. A supporter of Palestine saying clearly, without a “but,” that October 7 was not resistance — it was an atrocity. A climate activist acknowledging that some proposed policies genuinely would harm working-class communities. A culture-war sceptic admitting that some of what gets dismissed as wokeness is a response to real harm.
None of those sentences tells the whole truth. Each needs context, proportion and care. But the willingness to say them — to your own side, not just the other — is where moral independence begins. And independence is one of the few things that keeps disagreement from hardening into permanent contempt.
Guess my status
I’m writing this in a busy McCafe during a layover in Kuala Lumpur, travelling on a budget non-direct AirAsia flight from Phuket to Bali. I’m wearing frayed cotton trousers, a Kmart T-shirt, and plastic Birkenstocks. But I also have Bose headphones and the latest iPhone Pro. And, for reasons both trivial and revealing, I’m in seat 1A on both flights. There is no business class, but the front six rows have distinctive red seat covers, which is apparently enough for the human mind to start imagining aristocracy.
So what am I exactly? A scruffy budget traveller? A modest man of the people? Or someone quietly relishing the tiny psychological thrill of sitting in the front row of a plane that offers almost nothing except the privilege of getting off first?
Status is all around me. It is inescapable.
Even here, on a budget airline where nobody is exactly being wrapped in cashmere and handed champagne, hierarchy remains strong. The signs are smaller: a better seat, better headphones, a newer phone, more overhead locker confidence, but they are still signs. Humans don’t need much encouragement. Give us a queue, a seat map, and a few visual cues, and we start sorting ourselves almost immediately.
The tiny monarchy of air travel
Air travel is one of the few places where modern societies openly recreate hierarchy and call it convenience.
It begins long before take-off. Priority check-in. Fast-track security. The lounge. The cheerful little beep that allows one person to glide through while another is left holding a boarding pass and a faint sense of having failed, not just administratively, but morally. Then comes the boarding call, which is really just a ranking system spoken in the soothing language of customer service. Group 1. Group 2. Everyone else, please remain seated until called.
And the plane itself is a masterpiece of social design. The curtain. The wider seat. The real glass. The extra inches of legroom. The cleaner, roomier toilet.
For a few strange hours, the air travel becomes a temporary status society. Not a subtle one either. A fully built one, complete with zones, rituals, and soft furnishings.
Everyone brings their own symbols
But the airline’s hierarchy is only half the story. The rest of us bring our own.
One man near me has immaculate runners, an expensive watch, and the air of someone who considers queues a mild insult. Another has a sleeve of tattoos and that carefully unbothered look that usually takes quite a lot of bother to achieve. A woman in a nicer cafe has the polished, educated poise that made me think she had probably never said anything in a meeting unless it improved the meeting. Someone else had the moral version of status, practical clothes, reusable bottle, and the expression of a person who has long ago replaced material competition with ethical superiority.
That’s what makes status so fascinating. It’s not just about money, although money still often acts as its favourite disguise. Status can be shown through beauty, fitness, education, taste, calmness, toughness, or restraint. It can be expressed through a watch, a haircut, a book, a university, a tattoo, or a tone of voice. It can also be conveyed by not caring. In some circles, nothing signals rank more effectively than appearing to be above the whole business.
These are not random quirks. They are little public messages. I am successful. I am interesting. I am disciplined. I am not ordinary. Please read my feathers correctly.
None of us is above it
And of course I’m not above any of this. Here I am in my cheap clothes, expensive headphones, fancy phone, and symbolic front-row seat, quietly analysing everybody else’s status signals while sending out a few of my own. I’d like to say I’m merely observing human nature. More likely I’m participating in it while pretending to be thoughtful.
That might be the funniest part. Even people who mock status games usually just play their own version. The luxury traveller plays it. The academic plays it. The bohemian plays it. The wellness purist plays it. The person avoiding brands might have simply moved into a more refined brand category.
Perhaps that’s why flying makes all this so visible. In everyday life, status is scattered and hidden. At the airport, it turns into architecture. It is numbered, scanned, announced, and sometimes upgraded.
Strip life back to a metal tube, a few hundred strangers, cramped knees, and a visible ranking system, and human beings become easier to read.
We do not just want to get somewhere. We want to be seen arriving from the right row.
(PS Damn, my next flight was just delayed. I might move to the nicer café).
The current debate over suppression orders on mental health grounds turns on an important but often overlooked question: what, exactly, can psychiatric evidence reliably establish?
As a psychiatrist, I do not wish to lessen the importance of mental illness. Courts should keep the authority to safeguard genuinely vulnerable individuals in exceptional cases. However, I am worried that psychiatric reports might be asked to answer questions that psychiatry is not well-equipped to answer with confidence.
A psychiatrist can assess a person’s current mental state with reasonable skill. We can diagnose depression, anxiety, psychosis, substance misuse, and general vulnerability to stress. What we cannot do with the same degree of confidence is predict the exact impact of a particular event within a much larger and already distressing legal process.
That distinction is crucial. The core issue in these applications is not simply whether an accused person is distressed or mentally unwell. It is whether publication of their name is likely to cause such harm that the principle of open justice should be displaced. That is a much narrower, and much more speculative, question.
How can any psychiatrist confidently separate the effect of publication from the effect of being accused, charged, discussed within one’s family or community, exposed to gossip or social media, brought before a court, or ultimately tried and convicted? These experiences overlap and interact. In many cases, they may be impossible to disentangle with scientific precision. A psychiatrist may reasonably conclude that a person is vulnerable. It is far harder to say that naming them, rather than the prosecution itself, is the decisive additional factor.
This is not a criticism of psychiatrists. It is simply a recognition of the limits of the discipline. Psychiatry is much better at describing current illness and identifying broad risk factors than at making fine-grained predictions about what will happen if one specific event occurs.
There is also the question of independence. Many of these reports are prepared in an adversarial setting, commissioned and paid for by lawyers acting for the accused. That does not make the opinions improper, but the conflict is obvious. The report is obtained for a forensic purpose, on a tightly framed legal question, and that context matters. Even where the author is a treating psychiatrist, the difficulty remains. A long-term clinician may know the patient well, but still cannot confidently isolate the mental health effect of publication from the broader burden of accusation and trial.
A further problem is that psychiatrists are not reliable lie detectors. We can assess plausibility, consistency, and corroboration, but we cannot confidently determine whether symptoms are being exaggerated for personal advantage. That limitation becomes especially relevant in a forensic context where the stakes are high.
For these reasons, psychiatric reports should inform courts, but they should be treated cautiously and tested rigorously. If suppression is sought on mental health grounds, the court should ask not merely whether a person is unwell, but what evidence shows that publication creates a distinct and substantial risk beyond the ordinary burdens of prosecution.
Mental illness deserves respect. So does open justice. Courts should be slow to set aside one on the basis of psychiatric predictions that are far less exact than they may appear.
Be honest.
When was the last time a fictional scene made your throat tighten?
A farewell at a train station. A reunion at an airport. A parent quietly making a huge sacrifice. Or perhaps something less noble. A romantic comedy where two mildly attractive people misunderstand each other for ninety minutes and then kiss in the rain as a string section swells.
Some people never cry at movies. Others tear up at ads if the dog makes its way home.
For the record, I do. Ted Lasso episodes get me like clockwork.
The Science of Being Moved
The research is still in its early stages, and if I listed everything, you’d be bored to tears (oh, damn, there’s another reason to cry). One common explanation is kama muta, a term borrowed from Sanskrit that roughly means “moved by love.” It’s how the body reacts to connection.
It's not quite sadness, nor exactly happiness. In fact, the list of reasons why people cry in movies is extensive, ranging from witnessing love, kindness, sacrifice, vulnerability, loss, and courage to moral beauty and the awe of nature. As a species, we love a good cry.
Researchers studying kama muta identify consistent physical signs. People report feeling warm, teary, with goosebumps and deep breaths. They become still and feel more relaxed. Crying in these circumstances is a calming and positive experience.
And it is common. Across cultures, people describe similar sensations when they witness similar scenes. The details vary, but the physiology remains the same.
My Early Strategy: Concealment
As a younger man, I treated my tearfulness like a minor social liability. The Sound of Music was kryptonite.
I'd go to the cinema alone. If I felt something building and others were around, I would suddenly find the carpet captivating. Sometimes I’d get a pressing urge to visit the bathroom right when two estranged characters forgave each other.
I never believed there was anything wrong with me. I just preferred to steer clear of the gentle teasing that comes with obvious sentimentality. Even good-natured teasing adds up over time.
Detachment usually scores higher socially than moist eyes.
Why We Hide It
Psychology offers a simple explanation.
Emotions act as social signals. Crying indicates vulnerability. Vulnerability can build bonds, but only under the right conditions. In competitive settings or cultures that value cool composure, showing emotion openly can be seen as a status risk.
There are also gender expectations layered on top of this. Boys learn early that tears attract commentary, while girls are taught to regulate theirs differently. Everyone absorbs some version of the message that strong feelings should be kept in check.
Studies suggest that feeling moved enhances prosocial behaviour. After experiencing kama muta, people report stronger feelings of closeness and are more inclined toward kindness and cooperation. Stories serve as rehearsal. We practice belonging. We practice reconciliation. The nervous system recognises that something communal has been restored.
What seems to be softness might actually be a finely adjusted social response.
My Current Approach
At some point, I stopped fighting it.
I now actively seek out films that reliably deliver that warm rush. Romantic comedies with predictable storylines. Tales where misunderstandings get sorted and loyalty is rewarded. Endings that tie everything up.
I do not consume them ironically. I like the feeling.
After a proper cinematic cry, I feel rewarded. There’s a subtle sense of internal alignment. I sleep better. It feels less like emotional excess and more like a reset.
I no longer exit the room, despite my partner’s occasional shrieks of laughter at how predictable I am.
I shrug. That's how my nervous system reacts to connection. There are worse quirks.
Lean In
Most of us have a threshold for being moved. For some, it’s very close to the surface; for others, it might take a national anthem or the wedding speech.
In a culture that often rewards irony and emotional distance, it can feel safer to pretend we are unaffected. But the research suggests that these moments of being moved are not signs of weakness. They are proof that our social circuitry is working.
That seems like a useful design feature.
So if you cry in movies, you aren’t fragile. You may simply be responsive.
And if you do not, that’s fine too. Your threshold may be elsewhere.
Either way, when the music swells, and two fictional characters finally connect, you are witnessing a small rehearsal of human connection.
You can turn away if you like.
Or you can lean in.