JUNE 2026

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The internet has changed the way we communicate.

I mean, duh. Yes. Hello, captain obvious. But what does that mean for you and me today, and why do we care?

Let’s start by calling in Mercury where he belongs. Its core function is communication. It's all about information, either freestanding resources or information passed between two or more parties.

We express ourselves daily through email and text and leave comments on Youtube videos or recipes. Far beyond parsing “email tone” (or the older generation’s curious habit of “yelling” by typing in all caps), we watch as new micro-cultures and slang spawn with each new generation more and more entangled with the digital space. There are lawyers who specialize in the use of emojis, simply because there is a need.

The technology itself is Aquarian, but its purpose is Mercurial. Communication. Connection. Messages.

Social media has taken this angle a step further. 

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer us increased access to other humans—you don't have to meet them in the town square to insult their fashion, just drop a nasty comment at 11 pm and they'll find it in the morning—yet with decreased intimacy and accountability, where you are spared the look on someone's face after you call them a slur. Shrouded and insulated by this distance, people say things in the comments of a Yahoo business page that they would never have the guts to speak "in real life."

But the problem with that is, so much of our lives are conducted online now, who is to say what's "real" or not?

Teenagers have been cyber-bullied to death. Misinformation campaigns have swayed elections and worse. The internet is very, very real indeed, and it is both enhancing and degrading our ability to connect with other humans.

As a teenager who maintained incredible friendships with people all over the world, I am the first to love the internet for how it broadened my world socially and literally. We know more people now than we ever have, and we know more about them. Casting a “world wide web” allows us to find community when we thought we were the outcasts of outcasts, or join a passionate fan club for an unpopular character in a show, or even assemble meaningful data on incredibly rare illnesses with a big enough data pool.

This is connection. This is fabulous. But crossing continents in a nanosecond and accessing the entire world through a screen comes at a cost, because our sense of scope, scale and priority inevitably get warped. 

In being a part of the global community, we often lose our footing and our power in our home community, because everything is equidistant through that dang screen.

While we have more connections through the internet, these connections decrease in intimacy. If we want to, we can treat our online friends like numbers on a screen, and then shut that screen off when we're "done". If you say a nasty thing to someone in Germany, you won't have to deal with them at the lunch table tomorrow, staring at you. Making you uncomfortable with their discomfort. Keeping you accountable to and perceptive of disruptions in your community.

There is value in being able to be uncomfortable. It is a place of learning about yourself, and about others, and the places where it all begins to chafe. It’s also the point at which many of us mute that one friend, shut off our computers and call it a day. We seek shelter with those who share our same worldview, who dislike that same friend for unspoken reasons, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Conversations are another cost of the internet, which is especially ironic, considering it was made for exchange of information. The issue is that darn human element. Conversations can be an incredibly intimate exchange, as long as they are just that: an exchange. Unfortunately, the internet has changed the way we approach conversations, and it's for the worst.

More and more, conversations are no longer a shared attempt at communication. In the trenches of the comment section, “conversation” has become an avenue of domination. It's an ongoing, ever-changing battle—of wits, of clout, of sheer numbers. Conversation is just short-hand for “Who is Right and Who is Evil?”. If you represent a side (and you must always pick a side), you must have receipts (and in doing so you will make new receipts, which may be held against you in future battles). You must post the most, you must say the right things, and internet favor must fall on your side.

You will always find someone absolutely horrified “that you thought that was okay to say/do/think,” even if your crime is something as inconsequential as pairing red wine with fish. The psychodrama gets very intense, very fast, and all frames of reference implode.

Conversations aren't earnest exchanges of information as much as pre-packaged fights, and no one wants to admit what they don’t know when the screenshots could follow them forever.

The mercilessly archival nature of the internet is another aspect that drains our humanity and grace in the way we relate to one another. Human memories soften. We can re-tell our stories in our own healing, and find organic ways to reconnect with people who have hurt us.

However, the internet is cold and timeless. Faced with a thousand screenshots with our time, date, and location, and a shockingly puritan online culture that is increasingly interested in documenting “crimes” over working solutions, it’s difficult to move on from anything, good or bad.

Most importantly and most problematically, someone always has to be Right in a world where there are always receipts.

People are obsessed with being "right" before they can even properly learn a thing. Or rather, they are obsessed with being "not wrong", which is even more damaging to a human sense of development which relies on iterating failure to explore and then solidify itself.

Failure is punished on the internet. Forever.

How is anyone supposed to be brave enough to learn anything when every failure could be screencapped and meme'd for the rest of their lives?

How is anyone supposed to be honest with themselves or others when any deviation from this week's norms can be copy-pasted into a private discord and then used as a reason for their expulsion from a social circle?

A world where we can be held hostage with our every word does not encourage exploration, trust or generosity of spirit. Authenticity is too much of a risk. It forces us to shut down and conform to survive. Thread the needle and cringe from contact, which is just conflict in disguise.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder people have turned to chatbots for relief. It’s a “friend” who won’t fight them. In fact, chatbots are encouraging! So incredibly encouraging!

(If you thought we were gonna get out of this without an AI mention, you’ve come to the wrong newsletter. Sorry not sorry!)

But it's not acceptance, even though our brain reads it as such. It is frictionless sycophantry.

So where is the middle ground? If conversation is an exchange of information, we’ve got that covered. Chatbots can give us information (of dubious veracity, sure) … but they are incapable of challenging us or our worldview. They react, but they don’t respond.

Communication itself may involve challenge and challenges, but that’s not a bad thing. That is how we grow as people and as friends, not to mention as members of a community that should be built to harbor a wide variety of souls. Just because it’s a challenge doesn’t mean it's a fight, and this is where we need to increase our comfort with discomfort.

We must be okay with not knowing the correct answer, immediately or ever. We are not and cannot be unimpeachable, and the very effort or anxiety of it blocks the process of learning how to be a better person.

Not the best person, you must note. A better person. Better than yesterday, bolstered and informed by the failures that came before. Contrary to what the insecure hivemind/egregore of the internet would have you think, being wrong does not make you evil, or dangerous, or incapable of being saved.

We are meant to learn from those around us. The internet could be the single greatest boon of connection and conversation humanity has ever achieved, bar the printing press, but some social media platforms have become the howling antithesis of equal, gracious and honest exchange. There is no trust there, only the threat of being the next Main Character of the week, strung up in the digital town square for all to see.

Remember, too, that not all of these flaws of internet communication are mistakes made by fellow humans; many of these flaws come from intentional decisions made by algorithms and bots to drive engagement via rage. Rage bait is a misuse of the art of communication. It is intended to drive engagement, to create "noise", not connection. Because clicks make cash and anger captures attention. Your attention is your most precious commodity these days, and it’s constantly being diverted to false bids for communication from bad faith or completely fake sources. And though mindfulness about how you approach digital communication can help, sometimes the only solution is to go offline.

Apparently, our bodies like to be present among other bodies for deep learning, anyway. It is best done closely, in community, over wine or coffee and at the oddest of hours. We learn best among people we trust to hold our incomplete opinions and questioning selves without judgment. We are meant to ask questions and hold concepts in our hearts and minds for a time before deciding if it feels right, for us, in that moment, and how long we will choose to carry that truth forward may depend on where we journey next.

Moving Forward

Reflecting on the way you communicate on the internet is a useful in-road to developing better and more fulfilling habits overall. We would do well to remember a few things going into conversations, too, to stop ourselves from going into fight-or-flight when speaking to others.

Am I beginning this conversation to prove that I'm right, or to exchange information/thoughts with this person?

Are the contents of this conversation mostly subjective or objective? Is the point to figure out how a person feels about something, or to understand what is happening to them? (This one is tricky, because what someone is feeling can be a real thing happening to them while not objectively correct.)

Are my questions coming from a place of curiosity (expansive, exploratory) or correction (binary, punitive)?

Am I being invited into this conversation to solve a problem, or to witness, or both?

Do I trust this person to let me speak, and to listen? Do I trust this person to speak without expecting immediate conformity?

Am I treating this subject matter with the proper respect (which might be “none”)?

Am I being honest about what I do and do not know, and know that ignorance can be just another invitation to adventure?

Do I know that I can stop this exchange of information when I need or want to? I am not trapped in this conversation and there is no forgone conclusion to be drawn.

Do we share the same level of investment or seriousness about this subject? If we don't, what is there to learn from that gap, and how can we respect the more invested partner?

Lastly, true conversation is not a battle. It is a meal. We do not take our spoons and forks and stab each other's hands as we share a plate.

And friends who you can truly share yourself with, and enjoy any kind of meal together, are worth keeping for life.

All communication involves ambiguity. It’s a simple fact of life. Sometimes, as we discussed above, your response should be to get comfortable with that ambiguity, and find a way to hold the truth of it while still moving forward with others. Sometimes, as we’ll discuss below, that ambiguity should be a bright red warning flag.

In 2004, celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne told Louwana Miller that her missing daughter was dead. Heartbroken and believing Browne’s supposed message from the beyond, Miller died a year later. In 2013, Miller’s daughter, Amanda Berry, was found alive after having been held captive for more than a decade.

Berry later revealed she would watch Browne’s segments on daytime TV during her captivity, wishing her mother would go on TV so that Browne could tell her Berry was still alive. Instead, she watched Browne tell her mother she was dead, stealing that last spark of hope from both of them.

Now, if you’re in the spiritual community, you probably have many, possibly complex thoughts about Sylvia Browne and the whole class of famous psychics. But for the sake of our discussion, let’s put aside any consideration of any particular psychic and their reputation, or any question of frauds vs. legitimate psychics. (Though if you’re interested in thinking more about the very real fraudulent parts of the psychic community and the damage they cause, you should check out this episode of Last Week Tonight:)

No, for today, I want to talk about something everyone in the spiritual community can learn from this dark story and the hundreds like it. You may never find yourself consulted on a cold case or receiving a reading from a psychic who has been on television, but if you’re going to utilize your spiritual gifts for other people or if you’re going to patronize those who do, it is absolutely essential that you do some serious thinking about the appropriate role of those spiritual gifts, and their necessary limitations. (Though we will mostly be talking to those who utilize their psychic abilities in this piece, these same questions are just as important to take into consideration as a someone who seeks out such services.)

I want to talk about an aspect of discernment that you might not have thought about before, but that is just as important as any other skill you can develop: Epistemic humility.

Exploring one’s psychic gifts necessitates developing a certain trust in one’s abilities, as well as a discernment that helps you determine what information to pass on. We certainly don’t want to discourage you from that trust and discernment; we stress how important they are all the time. You will have to have the confidence to trust your own judgement. But the dark side of developing such deep trust is the ego that can come with it.

It is easy to get relaxed, especially the longer you have been practicing your psychic gifts and sharing them with others. It is easy to simply trust the information coming in and to stop asking the important questions, to stop approaching each message with the necessary skepticism to allow you to truly evaluate it. And when you stop second-guessing yourself entirely, when you stop approaching your gifts with the humility to know you may be wrong, you become not only more likely to be wrong, but more likely to do serious harm.

Every message you get will not be accurate, no matter how experienced you are. Sometimes you’re tired or distracted. Sometimes you’re getting multiple signals or mixed messages. Sometimes you’re getting messages from another source entirely, and not always a trustworthy one. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish your own perspective and advice from the call of Spirit, and it all gets mixed in with the message. Sometimes it’s just an off day.

Knowing this, and knowing that what we do has the potential to cause real harm, we have a very real responsibility to carefully weigh the possibility of our messages being wrong alongside the potential for harm caused if they are. We must weigh the types of questions we are willing to answer against the cost of being wrong.

If you are wrong about a minor event happening on a specific day or fail to help someone find a lost object: No harm, no foul.

If you are wrong about someone having cancer or their missing loved one being dead, the potential for harm is exponentially higher. Can you honestly say you are so sure of your gifts, of the messages you receive, that such harm is an acceptable risk?

If your answer is yes, it is coming from a place of immense epistemic arrogance. It is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what psychic gifts are, how they work, and what kind of knowledge they can afford you.

Different knowledge systems give us different kinds of knowledge, with different levels of certainty and objectivity. Psychic gifts yield knowledge that is highly subjective, filtered through several layers of necessary interpretation and sensitive to many different kinds of distortions.

To put it plainly, though you perhaps cannot be 100% certain of knowledge you attain through direct observation or careful science, you can be close to it. You cannot be so close to certain of the accuracy of any information gleaned from your psychic abilities, no matter how certain it may subjectively feel at the time. We believe there are kinds of messages that, because of the risk of harm, it is simply never ethical to communicate to someone unless you can be close to 100% certain it is actually true.

To put it even more plainly: You will never be sure enough of your psychic gifts to justify telling someone their missing loved one is dead. And if you believe you are, you have let your ego and your desire to be special unmoor you from your reason and your responsibilities.

So how do you do this “epistemic humility” thing? Well, it’s a virtue, not a static trait, which means it is achieved through practice.

You must practice approaching each decision you make with the sense that you might be wrong, and make responsible decisions in the face of that possibility. You can set yourself up for success by thinking through some things at the beginning: What kinds of questions are appropriate to answer with my gifts? What kinds of questions am I uncertain of? What kinds of questions will I never be able to responsibly answer?

(As an aside, we strongly encourage you to give the most careful consideration to anything involving mediumship or communication with specific dead loved ones, as even light and positive messages pose a real risk of harming the vulnerable population experiencing grief. Additionally, avoiding any kind of financial exploitation of the bereft should be carefully considered.)

You’ll want to revisit these questions periodically, but it should give you a foundation to start from. Then, as you are approaching individual decisions, you cannot go wrong with borrowing a philosophy from physicians: First, do no harm. If you are unsure if the potential harms of the message you want to pass on are justified, then you can always err on the side of saying nothing. Silence is always an option, and often the most responsible one.

Of course, all of this leads into a larger conversation about what you should be using your psychic gifts for.

Though we understand the need to monetize such gifts in our current capitalist hellscape, I think most of you will agree that celebrity TV psychics have made the whole spectacle about themselves. Centering the whole thing on their own ego necessitates them to get bigger and more specific messages, to impress an audience who seek not understanding, but a sideshow.

You should be using your spiritual gifts to offer guidance and perspective to those who ask. You are not an ATM machine that spits out perfectly accurate information about specific things in the world. That is simply not how these gifts work, not how interpreting the signals works. And, in our view, it’s not even something we should desire.

Why would we want our psychic senses to be mere extensions of our physical senses, when they are meant to be more, to connect us to deeper, stranger, truer knowledge? Why would we want to use them to answer mundane questions, no matter how important, when they are meant to connect us to higher questions and our higher selves? To re-connect us to the spirituality of our ancestors that we have lost so much of in our modern lives?

In the end, of course, what your gifts are for and where exactly the lines are drawn is a judgement call. It is something you will have to figure out for yourself, and something that reasonable individuals can disagree on. But the question of harm reduction and proper discernment is not something you can abdicate if you are going to participate in the spiritual community. And as you are figuring out these boundaries for yourself, I urge you to approach the project with a spirit of epistemic humility and, when in question, err on the side of silence.

Happy Pride to all our fellow queers, those questioning, and all our wonderful allies. Remember that it’s a privilege to live your truth out loud. And remember that you’re a part of the queer community not matter your identity, your experience or lack thereof, and whether it’s safe for you to be out of the closet or not! May the future see the destruction of every closet door.