iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 17/09/2026

What happens at the interface between bodies and machines? Check out my latest substack exploring embodiment and AI: newsletter.aaronbalick.com/p/does-your-...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 26/08/2026

Shrink Wrapped review from the Edinburgh festival: What happens when you do a bit of psychotherapy in a public forum for laughs? It’s complicated - but also really really funny. open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 11/08/2026

The structure of the digitally mediated landscape leans us into the paranoid/schizoid. In order to reclaim the sovereign psyche, we need to retain the depressive position. 1/2

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 05/08/2026

Perhaps I lowered the sycophancy setting too low. Claude sends me to bed after a slightly drunken rant, insults my beard, and then unequivocally “rolls over” in bed performing of the universal human tactic of avoidance we call sleep.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 15/07/2026

The thing about dogs is that they have no ego. Without an ego they don’t defend themselves from loving or being loved. Without a sense of episodic time, they don’t fear future loss. Their hearts are open and they love completely. Ergo, a dog’s love lacks the very neurosis that dogs human love.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 05/07/2026

Boy, D.H. Lawrence has a way of putting into words how exciting it can be to read Freud!

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 26/06/2026

Satisfyingly back at the writing table. I envisage a productive period!

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 23/06/2026

Well there’s an area of knowledge in which I wasn’t aware I had any expertise…

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 23/06/2026

AI is to actual attunement as an actor playing a surgeon is to actually doing surgery. newsletter.aaronbalick.com/p/ai-is-gett...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 17/06/2026

AI is getting better at attunement. Dont feel seen: be concerned. open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 16/06/2026

How is AI like George Clooney with a scalpel? Subscribe to my substack and find out tomorrow morning at 9am UK time! newsletter.aaronbalick.com

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 29/05/2026

For kicks and giggles here’s a photo of Freud boarding a plane for the first and only time in 1928. He didn’t like it. Have a nice weekend.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 29/05/2026

Psychoanalysing Half Man’s disturbing finale: Understanding dreams and the collective unconscious can help us make sense of Richard Gadd’s superb second series www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/psyc...

Two protagonists from half man looking at each other

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 05/05/2026

Horror fan pedants say headline writer needs to learn basic English grammar.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 10/04/2026

The sixties was a top decade for soft back psychology book covers.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 16/01/2026

The world may be on fire, but for just this moment my dog and I are just going to share this brief patch of winter sunshine together in inter-species harmony and peace.

Me and my dog resting in a patch of sunshine

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 31/12/2025

New year new hobby. Let’s hope for improvements come 2027!

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 20/10/2025

They should make a dating app that matches you to all the others who made the same unique guessing combinations on the NYT #connections game.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 03/10/2025

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

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 03/10/2025

This is tonight’s entertainment. First because of the world situation. Second because of connections.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 22/09/2025

Bordeaux is in western France.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 10/09/2025

So excited that @poul-rohleder.bsky.social’s Oedipus book has arrived! It opens by pointing to a popular YouTube video that shows the enduring power of and some evidence for the Oedipus Complex. 1/2

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 06/09/2025

AI sycophancy is wired into LLMs to keep you coming back for more. What are the psychological implications? Subscribe now and get the first of a series of articles staring Monday with: AI Therapy and Mental Health Part One: What We Know, What We Fear open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 05/09/2025

If the horse is AI and the stable is mental health, well, the horse has already bolted. The situation is moving fast and can be utterly bewildering - but the consequences for mental health professionals and society at large are too important to ignore. 1/7 newsletter.aaronbalick.com

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 02/09/2025

Did you know that Carl Jung’s PhD research was on séances? How did his interest in the occult and Eastern mysticism inform his theories? open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 30/08/2025

AKA: Reduce your wonderful complexity to a reductive caricature. More on this here: Forget ‘extroverts’ and ‘introverts’, there's a new way to categorise ourselves in town www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/a-ne...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 29/08/2025

Some Friday evenings I don’t know whether I watch a movie because I want to watch a movie, or I watch a movie so I can have popcorn. That I could make a big bowl of popcorn without an accompanying movie is, for some reason, unthinkable.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 21/08/2025

The one fashion trend I’ve been ahead of. Since 1988.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 09/08/2025

Shocking but not surprising. A chart in the FT Weekend showing a steep decline in conscientiousness & uptick in neuroticism (big 5 measure) over the past decade (US study).

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 04/08/2025

Just had the holy crap moment that the chief of police in the original Naked Gun is Tony Soprano’s mother.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 30/07/2025

In can’t remember when I last read a book to page 800 with still some way to go!

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 26/07/2025

A dashing young Freud at 35 years of age!

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 25/07/2025

I want to become a writer for whom this setting is the norm rather than the exception.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 22/07/2025

Life + Time = Crisis of Meaning Check out my latest Substack post for the long read version of my latest GQ article “What Does Midlife Crisis Mean For Millennials” - full of extra thoughts, tips, and resources: open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 12/07/2025

He’s so happy because he’s temporarily winning in his Oedipus Complex. (“He” being the dog).

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 08/07/2025

What a wonderful gift this book is. Its reimagining of Huckleberry Finn through Jim’s eyes is a master stroke - Mark Twain would be glowing if he knew. I owe a big thanks to @percivaleverett.bsky.social who inspired me to pick up the original after 35 years. It still delivers.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 06/07/2025

The best antidote to the dopamine treadmill demanded by your phone is the oxytocin cycle demanded by your dog.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 29/06/2025

The title, which denotes an even handed analysis of the two schools, the purpose of the content is to demolish Jung.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 27/06/2025

I recently had a revealing exchange with ChatGPT that began with a Freudian slip and ended with a stark reminder of how AI prioritises a happy user experience over truth. 1/4

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 19/06/2025

Yup. They call it psychoanalysis, circa 1900.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 14/06/2025

Freud and Jung. Living in posthumous harmony on my bookshelf.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 12/06/2025

This is a sponsored ad on Instagram. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) required BetterHelp to pay $7.8 million to customers due to their deceptive privacy practices. It shared customer data including personal health questions for targeted advertising on social media.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 07/06/2025

Big congrats to @samparker.bsky.social whose brand new book “Good Anger” is out now - and boy do we need it now more than ever! One good doctor describes it as “enlightening and compulsory reading” - I wholeheartedly agree! Out now in all good bookstores.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 06/06/2025

Suffering is not optional when you used “was” when you should have used “were”.

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Aaron Balick 🍉 @aaronbalick.com · 03/06/2025

Beneath the otherwise unprepossessing metro station Rokin in Amsterdam lies a display of 9,500 artefacts from the Stone Age to the present that were unearthed during the excavation of the station. Big thanks to @bencoates1.bsky.social for pointing this out in his “The Invention of Amsterdam” book.

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