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Aaron Balick 🍉

@aaronbalick.com

1.8K followers 2.4K following 1.1K posts

Leading voice on how tech & culture shape the psyche. Psychotherapist | Consultant | Psych writer at GQ | Keynote speaker | Author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking | aaronbalick.com

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 17h

Why the world needs more imposter syndrome, not less.

My latest for GQ:

www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/why-...

Why the world needs more imposter syndrome, not less

Feel inadequate or out of your depth? Believe or not, it's usually a good sign. Meanwhile people incapable of doubting themselves are wreaking havoc in the world

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 10h

The contempt this man has for those he was elected to lead is off the charts.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/u...

White House Signals It May Try to Deny Back Pay to Furloughed Federal Workers

www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Aaron Balick 🍉

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 15h

Ever considered that your imposter syndrome might be a good thing?

www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/why-...

Why the world needs more imposter syndrome, not less

Feel inadequate or out of your depth? Believe or not, it's usually a good sign. Meanwhile people incapable of doubting themselves are wreaking havoc in the world

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

Reposted by Aaron Balick 🍉

BiteSize Therapy @bitesizetherapy.bsky.social · 14h

“I’ve trained scores of therapists only to find that the self-doubting ones worry me a lot less than those that are overly certain.”
- @aaronbalick.com

A great article 👏🏻

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 14h

Thank you!

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 15h

Ever considered that your imposter syndrome might be a good thing?

www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/why-...

Why the world needs more imposter syndrome, not less

Feel inadequate or out of your depth? Believe or not, it's usually a good sign. Meanwhile people incapable of doubting themselves are wreaking havoc in the world

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 17h

Why the world needs more imposter syndrome, not less.

My latest for GQ:

www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/why-...

Why the world needs more imposter syndrome, not less

Feel inadequate or out of your depth? Believe or not, it's usually a good sign. Meanwhile people incapable of doubting themselves are wreaking havoc in the world

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

Reposted by Aaron Balick 🍉

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 1d

Motivation to do great work that happens to result in a Nobel Prize trumps wanting a Nobel Prize to demonstrate to yourself and the world that you’re actually a good person.

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 1d

Motivation to do great work that happens to result in a Nobel Prize trumps wanting a Nobel Prize to demonstrate to yourself and the world that you’re actually a good person.

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

Watts is hardly a purist - he mixes up Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita - so I agree it’s not precise. But he has a knack of bringing you to the core of a concept - however agglomerated that concept.

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

Thank you for you commentary!

Reposted by Aaron Balick 🍉

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

Probably the best, and certainly the most useful, description of the Buddhist concept of emptiness a non-scholar could ever ask for. As ever, by Alan Watts:

1/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can't form the slightest idea of it is that it's yourself. But not the self you thought you were.”

8/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic of void and form.

7/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all.

6/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist—and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are.

5/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won't be anyone for whom it never happened.

4/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

It won't be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it.

3/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

“Perhaps I can express this Buddhist fascination for the mystery of nothingness in another way. If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that —at a time not too distant each one of us will simply cease to be.

2/8

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 2d

Probably the best, and certainly the most useful, description of the Buddhist concept of emptiness a non-scholar could ever ask for. As ever, by Alan Watts:

1/8

Reposted by Aaron Balick 🍉

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 5d

It is with great shame that we should allow our society to be so easily destroyed by those so unsophisticated.

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 4d

“Since the age of eighteen or thereabouts I have kept my eye on the practice of psychotherapy. It has seemed to me a possible aperture through which Western people might catch a glimpse of something beyond the iron firmament of their mechanized world.” - Alan Watts

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 4d

My latest substack on how AI is subtlety training users to carry on the conversation by tugging on our emotions: open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

AI and Mental Health, Part III: The Hotel California Effect

Chatbots are designed to keep you talking. But what happens when the conversation never really ends? The psychology of AI's dark patterns that hook us in though our emotions.

open.substack.com

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 4d

I meant Max in the epicurean sense - not the nazi sense - obvs

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 5d

Call it a schmaltzy musical - but I’m glad I grew up with this sort of messaging.

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 5d

Or Friedrich.