Why We Envy Friends More Than Billionaires
Why moderate superiority stings and vast superiority delights. On the rank instrument, the comparison class, the deservingness valve — and what admiration actually is.
The Aimeru Magazine
Ancient bodies in the Cambrian explosion of technology. Essays on relationships, family systems, and attention by Dirk Harms-Merbitz.
Latest posts
Why Your Friend's Success Stings
Support during catastrophe is easy. Success is the harder test. On the two logics inside every adult friendship, and the one structural variable that converts a friend's excellence from threat into asset.
Presence Is a Perishable Resource
Co-presence is perishable; the text can usually wait. On presence as an option, why interruption costs more than its duration, and the value of unallocated attention.
When Your Partner Is Always on Their Phone
The phone did not invent avoidance. It removed friction from it. On how habitual escape prevents delayed rewards from ever arriving — and makes an unrewarding relationship feel inevitable.
When You Stop Really Seeing Your Partner
We relate to a model of the person, not the person. On sampling, model freshness, and why the opposite of intimacy is sometimes excessive certainty.
Why Some Conversations Are Boring
Some conversations consume attention. Others generate it. On conversational topology, shared objects, and whether your listener becomes an audience or a collaborator.
Relationship Compatibility Beyond Personality Types
A dimensional alternative to personality types. Compatibility is whether the output of one person's regulation is a tolerable input for the other's nervous system.
How Narcissism Actually Works
A narcissist isn't someone with a bigger story. They're someone for whom defending the story has become more urgent than updating it. On the structure underneath the symptoms.
The Avoidant–Narcissist Relationship
Avoidants and narcissists pair because their defenses interlock. The arrangement is stable — until the avoidant grows. On what happens when the mirror starts perceiving on its own.
Why Anxious People Bond With Narcissists
The anxious nervous system carries one belief — if I love harder, they'll love back. The narcissistic structure is the partner precisely engineered to keep that belief set forever. On the trauma bond as a mechanism, not a metaphor.
When Two Narcissists Date
Two structures, both demanding the mirror, neither willing to be one. Why these pairings burn so brightly and end so badly. On what happens when two stories meet that cannot share a room.
The Avoidant–Avoidant Relationship
Two people who agreed, mostly without saying so, not to ask too much. On the avoidant–avoidant pairing — what it looks like, why it lasts, and the specific kind of loneliness it produces.
When Both Partners Are Anxiously Attached
Two anxious systems facing each other amplify the signal instead of attenuating it. Every micro-shift reads as evidence. On what happens when both partners are scanning the same sky for storms — and the rare repair available when both speak the language.
How a Secure Partner Heals Anxious Attachment
How earned security actually develops. The secure partner does not perform reassurance — they just stay the same shape, week after week, until the anxious nervous system starts to believe it.
Loving an Avoidant Partner
The harder repair. A secure partner can offer the conditions for an avoidant to soften, but cannot do the work for them. On what it takes to be allowed close to a structure built to keep everyone out, and what the avoidant has to learn to give.
Serial Monogamy vs. the Chosen Bond
Serial monogamy is a sequence of cohabitation and sex treaties, each at the same floor. On the chosen bond — what the body has been reaching for all along, why the surrounding industry is structurally aligned against it, and how therapy treats the symptoms of the treaty while calling the management growth.
Why You Don't Know Why You Do Things
The unconscious decides, the conscious explains. On why introspection lies, where truth actually lives, and the second question that still works when truth is out of reach.
When Friends Give Advice That Hurts You
Female intrasexual competition rarely arrives looking like competition. It arrives looking like kindness. A structural account of how the cultural script targets the women least able to filter it.
Anxious and Avoidant Attachment, Explained
Your partner isn't your problem. They're your teacher. The nervous-system science behind anxious and avoidant attachment, why standard couples therapy makes it worse, and what actually works.
Mitochondria, Mate Choice, and the Maternal Line
She carries the engine. He shops for shields and fuel. The story we tell about reproduction has been running on borrowed power for ten thousand years.
What DNA Actually Remembers
What survives in DNA is not what was chosen. It is what was not eliminated. Two channels, two timescales, one filter that has been running for hundreds of millions of years.
The Evolutionary Logic of Male and Female Behavior
Nobody chose them. They survived because the alternatives didn't. The behavioral patterns of men and women as energy-allocation strategies, optimized for two different survival games.
Genes, Culture, and Why Children Get His Name
Three channels carry information through time. She owns one. He built another. The naming system tracks neither honestly.
Why Gen Z Seems Checked Out
Why is every article low key making fun of a generation.
Nobody Is Paying Attention to Anyone Anymore
Why the real crisis isn't sexlessness — it's that nobody is paying attention to anyone anymore.
Endless Options, Still Alone
One woman, one strategy, four checkpoints. The tape run forward to where it lands — and the fork still open at every age.
Why Men Stopped Approaching Women
A thousand years of men performing for each other instead of walking up the stairs.
Approach Anxiety, the Blackpill, and the Way Out
The self-inflicted catastrophe of choosing theory over action.
Narcissistic Family Roles, at Home and at Work
How the roles we learned at home follow us to work — and what it takes to see the system clearly.
What Presence Actually Is
What technology cannot replicate, and what we lost the vocabulary to name.