The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

Being in your mid to late twenties can be hard. There's a nagging feeling at the back of your mind that you really ought to have got your shit together by now. I think it's probably human nature that you look to those around you and you find yourselves surrounded by people in long-term relationships and marriages, people who have young children and have very much settled down and found their place in life. I suspect that's always been the case but in the twenty-first century this is amplified by social media. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of good things about social media. But it can be soul destroying as you see a constant stream of how wonderful other people's lives are. Of course that's curated by them and it doesn't necessarily mean they are happy. From the other side though it's easy to sit there and believe you are worth less than other people. My mental health has proved challenging for much of my twenties. I find myself deeply uncomfo...

Last week I had the daunting prospect of attending a wedding. I had a week of trying to put it to the back of my mind because I was anxious about it. Just the prospect that it would involve a journey along the motorway in the dark at the end would probably be enough to make me anxious but that wasn't even my main concern. The biggest issue for me was the fact that I would hardly know anyone attending. There were two people I knew from university and though I generally like both of them I didn't know them well enough to call them more than acquaintances and besides, I hadn't seen either of them for some years. I had met a few of the bride's family but again barely knew them. The only person I really knew was the bride who is my best friend. On any other occasion I would have not turned up but this wasn't about me. Whilst I am probably just one of many friends to the bride, she is my best friend and in the nearly ten years I've known her she's been loyal...

Strap in folks, it's time for some science! Specifically, psychology. It's been understood in the scientific world for some time that a general factor of intelligence, or "g-factor", exists. Put simply, people who score highly on one test of intelligence also tend to score high on other tests of intelligence. This means that you can reliably test intelligence using any kind of intelligence test as long as it is complex enough. This week I read about a 2018 paper which uses the same principle but for a different area of the human personality: malevolence. The researched have come up with the idea of a general dark factor of personality or "D-factor". The use of the word 'dark' comes from personality psychologists who use "dark traits" to mean to describe characteristics of people who display behavior which is ethically or morally questionable. It can be quite complicated when you delve into the details of the paper but the idea is that p...