I grew up in a house where sugar was simply furniture. Pastries on the counter, cakes for no particular occasion, chocolates in bowls within arm's reach, processed sweet things tucked into drawers like they were office supplies.
I want to be clear about something before I start, because the premise of this article could easily be misread: I am not someone who stumbled across AI tools recently and was surprised they existed.
The adult human brain contains somewhere between 86 and 100 billion neurons. Each of those neurons can form thousands of synaptic connections.
I study how people form emotional relationships with places and ideas. Which means I notice when those relationships quietly break.
Part of my research involves teaching machines to read emotion from faces, voices, and text.
Calorie tracking works. That part is not the controversy. As a weight management tool, the logic is sound and the evidence broadly supports it.
My mornings run on a specific sequence. Kettle on. Grinder out. The smell before the first pull.
Last year, I was at the International Symposium on Resilience Research in Mainz, hosted with the involvement of the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research.
Bangkok, seventy-eight floors up, and I was gripping the railing of an observation deck like it owed me something.
On my 27th birthday, I watched a film about the sun dying. Project Hail Mary does not waste time on sentiment about this.
At some point in the last few years, using a chatbot to process something emotionally difficult stopped feeling unusual.
I have walked through a lot of difficult periods in my life. Not metaphorically.
