This isn’t really about gaming so please stay with me as we flesh this out… but I am a gamer - so let me begin by saying something that will immediately divide the room into sensible adults and people currently vibrating with rage behind anime profile pictures.

Cheaters in video games exist.

They absolutely exist.

Some people really are running around online gaming multiplayer lobbies with software stitched together in what I can only assume is a dark Romanian basement lit exclusively by RGB keyboards and Mountain Dew vapour. Human beings have always cheated at things. Sports, taxes, marriages, cycling, board games, politics, calorie counting and now, naturally, Call of Duty. This is not new information.

What is new, however, is the strange modern belief that emotional intensity itself is now evidence of correctness.

And gaming, oddly enough, might be one of the purest places to observe it.

And that’s because if you spend enough time online, particularly around competitive games, you start noticing something fascinating happen to people under emotional stress. The angrier someone becomes, the more convinced they become that they must therefore also be correct, or morally justified, or supremely perceptive, or incredibly insightful, spiritually evolved even, trauma-informed for sure, boundary-aligned and quite possibly the final surviving adult in a collapsing civilisation. Meanwhile they’re typing manifesto-length Facebook posts at traffic lights because someone teabagged them in Call of Duty.

Which, when you slow the moment down enough, is objectively magnificent.

And I don’t mean cheating, I mean psychology.

Because buried inside these tiny explosions over (let’s be honest) utterly meaningless digital warfare is a much larger modern phenomenon. People are increasingly trusting their feelings about reality more than their personal behaviour within it. If they feel strongly enough, then the feeling itself begins to acquire the status of proof. “I am furious” quietly transforms into “therefore I am right,” and from there it’s only a short journey toward believing your emotional reaction grants you specialist authority on whatever has just unfolded.

So you end up with situations where a fully grown adult risks actual human lives on a public road (see header image) to immediately inform Facebook that another grown adult may have been unfairly accurate with a virtual sniper rifle.

And nobody pauses long enough to notice the trade being made there.

That’s the bit I find fascinating.

Because years ago, if someone became so emotionally destabilised by a leisure activity that they then endangered themselves and others while documenting it in real time, we probably wouldn’t have concluded they possessed superior insight into the situation. We might, in fact, have arrived at the opposite conclusion. We may even have gently suggested they go outside for a bit and perhaps reconnect with other systems like weather, foliage, or even other carbon-based lifeforms.

Now, however, online culture does something strange to people. It rewards emotional certainty. The stronger the reaction, the more socially believable the person often becomes, especially if they can wrap the reaction in therapeutic or moralistic language. Suddenly the issue isn’t just cheating in a game. It’s integrity. It’s abuse. It’s manipulation. It’s a violation of the social contract. By paragraph three the individual is essentially preparing evidence for The Hague because somebody moved suspiciously quickly through a map, on a video game.

And to be clear, this isn’t really about gaming.

Gaming just strips the process naked enough for us to see it clearly.

Because the same thing now happens everywhere.

Someone has one painful relationship and becomes an attachment-style cryptographer. Another watches four TikToks on narcissism and begins diagnosing entire bloodlines over brunch. Someone attends a weekend mindfulness retreat and returns speaking like an exhausted guru oracle 5th dimesion light worker who can no longer tolerate “low-vibrational energy” in a group chat.

The internet of things has created a dangerous culture where confidence routinely outruns competence, and where emotional activation is increasingly mistaken for wisdom.

Which is dangerous, because emotions are quite real, but they are not always accurate. Anger tells you something matters to you. It doesn’t automatically tell you your interpretation is flawless. Hurt tells you something affected you. It doesn’t magically transform you into an infallible narrator of events. Yet modern online spaces do continuously blur that distinction until people begin treating self-awareness as optional provided the emotional monologue is passionate enough.

And this is where gaming becomes such an unexpectedly useful little lab for human behaviour because a video game is ultimately meaningless. Now, I say that lovingly as someone who has absolutely muttered dark spiritual curses at what is likely a twelve-year-old called “xX_SkullCrusher_Xx” after being immediately turned into vapour on the Warzone. But that’s precisely why it’s useful. The stakes are low enough that the emotional overreactions become visible in their purest form in the ego, tribalism, insecurity, paranoia, status anxiety and the desperate need to preserve the idea that we are competent special little soldiers in the theatre of existence all come screaming to the surface over something that just doesn’t matter at all.

Which means the real issue often isn’t cheating. It’s the growing inability people have to examine their own emotional state before assigning themselves moral authority within a situation - once outrage itself becomes proof, self-awareness quietly dies.

And when self-awareness dies, every disagreement starts looking like persecution, every frustration starts looking like injustice, and every minor inconvenience starts deserving a public declaration written from the driver’s seat of a moving vehicle like the final diary entry of a man escaping societal collapse rather than losing composure over a sniper rifle in a video game.

Which, now I think about it, may actually be the most modern thing imaginable.

What’s happening across culture now, I think, is that people increasingly experience emotion not as information to be interpreted, but as proof to be obeyed. The feeling arrives first and the reasoning assembles itself afterwards like a defence lawyer arriving late to court carrying several obviously forged documents and a smoothie. The stronger the emotion, the more urgently the mind begins constructing explanations for why that emotion must not only be valid, but… objectively correct.

And gaming under a microscope exposes this beautifully because the stakes are so laughably low.

A man loses repeatedly on say, Call of Duty and within minutes he’s assembled an entire moral framework to explain why the experience cannot possibly reflect his own limitations, his own emotional impulsivity or his inability to accept temporary defeat. No, the problem is corruption. Cheating. Broken systems. Conspiracies. Malicious actors. Shadow organisations operating from industrial estates in Belarus specifically to ruin Keith’s Thursday evening.

And we laugh because it’s ridiculous.

But then the exact same psychological mechanism appears everywhere else and suddenly nobody’s laughing anymore because now it’s politics, relationships, parenting, identity, spirituality and public discourse itself.

Someone disagrees with us online and instead of examining the disagreement, we examine the sensation the disagreement created inside us. If the sensation feels sufficiently unpleasant, we increasingly conclude that the other person has therefore behaved improperly. Not incorrectly. Improperly. Harmfully. “Toxic” if we’re feeling particularly contemporary and own at least one Himalayan salt lamp.

That’s the shift.

Feelings have moved from being part of the conversation to becoming the adjudicator of the conversation. And once that happens, logic starts struggling for oxygen. Because logic is slow and logic asks irritating questions. Logic occasionally arrives at conclusions we emotionally dislike. It requires tolerating uncertainty long enough to examine multiple possibilities simultaneously, which is deeply unfashionable in a culture now built almost entirely around immediate emotional resolution.

Emotion, meanwhile, is pretty instant.

Emotion gives clarity immediately, even if that clarity is sometimes completely wrong.

Which is why people now routinely confuse emotional certainty with insight. They believe that because they feel something strongly, they have perceived something accurately. And if you challenge that interpretation, they don’t experience it as intellectual disagreement. They experience it as invalidation of the emotional state itself.

Hence:

“You’re manipulating me.”

No. I’m saying something you dislike.

Those are not remotely the same thing.

But if a person has learned to treat emotional discomfort as evidence that somebody else has crossed a line, then almost any difficult conversation can be reinterpreted as harm. The emotional reaction itself becomes the proof. Which is psychologically seductive because it removes the burden of self-examination entirely. You no longer have to ask, “Why did this affect me so strongly?” You simply identify whoever triggered the feeling and place them into the role of the aggressor.

Again, gaming shows this in miniature constantly and consistently.

The emotionally regulated player loses, gets mildly annoyed, maybe mutters something concerning another man’s ancestry, and then simply moves on with life.

The dysregulated player however, transforms the whole experience into a moral event to justify their emotions rather than to sit with them.

That is the distinction.

And increasingly, society rewards the second person more loudly because emotional intensity performs extremely well online. Calm reflection doesn’t trend particularly well. Nuance has terrible engagement metrics. But outrage? Outrage spreads magnificently. Outrage creates tribes. Outrage monetises really well. Entire platforms now operate like giant emotional accelerators, rewarding people not for being accurate or thoughtful, but for simply being activated.

Which means we’re slowly creating a culture where the least emotionally regulated person in the room often gains the most social power.

And that… kind of historically speaking… is usually not a fantastic sign of things to come.

Hello there…

There’s this assumption sitting underneath most conversations about social media and your children, and it’s one that rarely gets examined closely because it’s doing a very useful job. It allows people to acknowledge that something ain’t quite right without having to ever fully confront what that something might actually be.

The assumption is simple enough: it’s probably not ideal, it might even be causing some harm at the edges, but fundamentally it can’t be doing anything too serious and at worst, it’s a habit problem. Too much time spent on screens, too little time spent elsewhere, something that can be corrected with a wee bit of discipline, a few boundaries, or perhaps the occasional policy intervention if things begin to look particularly untidy.

The framing is comforting.

It’s also, in all likelihood, VERY wrong.

Because what’s taking place here isn’t best understood as usage at all. It is much closer to exposure, and more specifically, exposure during the exact period in which a human brain is still working out how to organise itself. A child doesn’t approach social media as a finished individual making conscious decisions about how to spend their attention. They encounter it while their sense of relevance, reward, identity and meaning is still being assembled, and that assembly process does not run on logic. It runs on repetition. Whats seen often begins to matter. What produces a reaction begins to carry weight. Whats returned to again and again becomes, quietly and without any ceremony, part of the internal architecture of the child.

Placed inside that context, social media is not simply something a child uses. It is something that participates in building them.

What that environment offers, on a continuous and largely unregulated basis, is a density of emotional and informational input that no previous generation had to metabolise at that stage of development.

The scale of it is difficult to appreciate precisely because it has become normal so quickly. A child can move, within the space of minutes, between humour, outrage, aspiration, humiliation, intimacy, conflict and performance, without any meaningful transition between those states. Each piece of content arrives as if it matters, because the system is designed to ensure that it feels that way, and the brain responds accordingly by attempting to process it, store it, and then adjust to it.

Over time, that adjustment becomes an expectation.

The nervous system calibrates itself to a level of stimulation that no natural environment would reliably provide, and once that calibration has taken place, anything slower, quieter or less immediately engaging begins to feel not simply different, but insufficient. Attention does not disappear, as is often suggested. It moreso fragments. The capacity for sustained focus is still present, but it is no longer being rehearsed in the same way, and like any capacity that isn’t used, it begins to weaken. Depth then becomes something that requires effort rather than something that emerges naturally, and silence, which once allowed thought to gather itself, begins to feel faintly uncomfortable, as though something that should be happening has momentarily stalled.

Now, at the same time, identity formation is taking place under conditions that are historically very unusual and incredibly heavy. Previous generations had the option, whether they valued it or not, of forming themselves within relatively contained environments. There were social pressures, of course, and hierarchies, and the familiar complications of growing up, but there was also a degree of privacy in that process. Versions of the self could be tried on and discarded without being permanently recorded. Mistakes faded as contexts changed. Embarrassment by example had a lifespan. What replaced it wasn’t perfection, but the possibility of revision.

That possibility has now narrowed significantly.

A child now forms an identity in a space where visibility is constant, comparison is immediate, and response is both rapid and persistent. Under those conditions, identity becomes less something that is discovered over time and more something that is performed, adjusted and maintained in response to external feedback. The distinction is subtle while it is happening and significant once it has settled. A self that is formed through performance becomes attuned to reaction in a way that is difficult to step back from, because reaction is the mechanism through which it has learned to understand itself in the first place.

None of this requires intent in any deliberate sense. It is simply the outcome of a system that rewards certain patterns of attention and behaviour because those patterns keep people engaged. Speed is rewarded because it keeps the stream moving. Emotional intensity is rewarded because it increases interaction. Certainty travels further than nuance because it is easier to process quickly. Over time, these patterns are not merely observed, they are absorbed, and the individual becomes increasingly fluent in them without necessarily realising that anything has been learned at all.

This is where the conversation tends to shift toward intervention, and quite understandably so. When the downstream effects begin to surface in the form of anxiety, distraction, comparison and a general sense that something is out of balance, the instinct is to step in and create distance between children and the environment that appears to be contributing to those outcomes. The logic is quite straightforward. If the input is problematic, remove the input. If the system is too intense, restrict access to it, particularly during the years when development is at its most sensitive.

On the surface then, that seems not only reasonable, but really necessary.

What it doesn’t account for though, is the extent to which the system has already done its work or, as we may come to realise, its damage to delicate minds.

By the time restriction becomes a serious consideration, the patterns have often been rehearsed for years. The brain has already adapted to a certain rhythm of input, a certain expectation of stimulation, a certain relationship to attention and then validation. Removing the environment at that point does not remove those adaptations. It simply removes the place in which they were being expressed.

What remains is the expectation without the outlet, and that creates a different kind of instability.

The restlessness that follows is not simply boredom in the traditional sense. It’s a nervous system that has been trained to anticipate a level of engagement and now finds itself in a space that doesn’t provide it. That gap does not sit quietly. It looks for resolution, and in the absence of the original environment, it tends to seek out substitutes. Sometimes those substitutes take the form of workarounds and hidden access. Sometimes they emerge in other behaviours that recreate similar patterns of stimulation. Sometimes they appear as a more diffuse sense of disconnection from peers who remain embedded in the very systems that have been removed.

This is where the timing of intervention begins to matter.

If access is delayed without any meaningful change to the underlying system, then what is being created isn’t protection so much as postponement. The individual eventually encounters the same environment, often at a point where social identity carries even more weight, but without the gradual acclimatisation that might have allowed some degree of orientation to develop over time. The system they meet at that stage isn’t static. It’s continued to refine itself. It’s more efficient, more responsive, more capable of holding attention than it was before.

Which raises a question that sits slightly outside the usual frame of the discussion.

What, exactly, are we preparing children for?

Because if a developing brain is repeatedly trained to prioritise rapid stimulation, external validation and continuous comparison during its formative years, those patterns don’t simply dissolve at an arbitrary age threshold. They become part of the way the individual navigates the world. The distinction between online and offline begins to matter less, because the underlying mechanisms of attention and response are shared across both.

At that point, the issue is no longer confined to children. It becomes structural.

Because once you begin to look at what is actually being rehearsed inside these systems, a slightly more unsettling pattern begins to emerge, one that has less to do with distraction or attention span and more to do with the way a sense of self is being organised under continuous observation.

A mind that learns to locate its value externally, to monitor how it is received, to adjust itself in response to feedback loops it cannot fully see, begins to develop a very particular relationship with identity. It becomes attuned, not just to being, but to being seen.

That distinction matters more than it appears to at first.

A self that is formed primarily through external reflection tends to become cautious in ways that are difficult to detect from the outside. It learns to present, to calibrate, to manage impressions. It becomes fluent in what works and quietly discards what doesn’t. Over time, this can produce something that looks, on the surface, like confidence or adaptability, but underneath it often carries a more fragile structure, one that is heavily dependent on maintaining a certain version of itself in the eyes of others.

This isn’t the loud, obvious form of narcissism that people tend to imagine. It is not grandiose, not overtly dominant and not particularly interested in declaring itself. It is subtler than that. More inwardly organised. More concerned with perception than expression. It doesn’t necessarily believe it is superior, but it becomes increasingly uncomfortable being unseen, unvalidated, or even unreflected.

In other words, it begins to resemble something closer to a covert form of narcissistic organisation, not as a fixed personality disorder, but as a set of learned tendencies that sit just beneath the surface of everyday functioning.

And importantly, those tendencies aren’t random.

They’re reinforced. Because the system rewards them.

A person who monitors themselves closely will adapt quickly to what gains attention. A person who adapts quickly will remain engaged. A person who remains engaged will continue to feed the system. There is a compatibility between an externally-referenced identity and an attention economy that thrives on continuous participation.

The more a person learns to derive meaning from how they are received, the more effectively they can be kept within a loop that continually offers them feedback about that very thing.

This is not a conspiracy.

Its alignment. And alignment, when it scales, really does begin to shape culture.

What starts as individual adaptation gradually becomes a shared norm. Communication shifts slightly. Expression becomes more performative. Certainty becomes more valuable than reflection because it travels further and lands faster. Ambiguity becomes uncomfortable because it does not produce clear feedback. Over time, this begins to influence not just how people present themselves, but how they interpret others. Motives are assumed more quickly. Positions are taken more firmly. Dialogue becomes less about exploration and more about reinforcement.

None of this requires malice, actually It only requires repetition.

The longer this continues, the more it begins to touch something deeper than behaviour.

It begins to touch the underlying assumptions a society makes about what is real, what is valuable, and what is worth paying attention to.

A culture that rewards visibility will gradually prioritise what can be seen. A culture that rewards reaction will begin to favour what provokes it. A culture that builds identity through external feedback will slowly lose its tolerance for anything that can’t be immediately validated or understood through that lens.

And that is where the concern stops being about children and starts being about long term continuity.

Because moral frameworks, the kind that allow a society to function with a degree of trust and shared understanding, are not built on immediate feedback. They are built on slower processes; of reflection and restraint. The ability to hold conflicting ideas without resolving them instantly. The capacity to act in ways that are not immediately rewarded.

Those capacities require a different kind of attention. And if that attention is no longer being practised at scale, it doesn’t disappear dramatically. It moreso just quietly erodes.

Which leaves a final, slightly uncomfortable question sitting at the edge of all this.

Not whether social media is harmful.

But whether the version of human behaviour it’s currently encouraging is one that a stable, morally grounded society can sustain over time.

Because if the answer to that question is uncertain, then what we are looking at is not a passing phase of technological adjustment. It’s a shift in the way minds are being formed.

And shifts like that tend to outlast the systems that created them.

.N

There are checklists everywhere. Warning signs. red flags. survival guides. Entire ecosystems of advice explaining how to escape someone whose personality structure has already been fully interpreted for you by someone with a ring light, a houseplant, and a working familiarity with the phrase trauma bond.

What there are rather fewer of, strangely, are explanations for why the relationship felt so familiar in the first place.

I say that with some affection for the ecosystem in question, because about ten years ago I was standing somewhere inside it myself. Not loudly or aggressively like some. But recognisably enough that I even ended up running a space called Narshole the Lonely Monster, which gathered something like fifty thousand followers and eventually grew legs of its own in podcast form.

At the time, that felt entirely reasonable.

There were people trying to understand something confusing. There were patterns that didn’t make sense yet. There were relationships that had clearly left marks that needed explaining somehow. And the language of narcissism seemed to offer a map that worked well enough to get people out of the forest, even if it wasn’t especially interested in explaining how they’d ended up there in the first place.

It helped people. Including me.

Which is why it took rather longer than I’d like to admit before I noticed that something important was missing from the conversation.

The codependent.

One of the more interesting features of modern narcissism discourse is how efficiently it identifies the narshole while quietly stepping around the question of who keeps agreeing to dinner with them.

This isn’t a criticism, it’s an observation. Because if narcissists were the only active participants in narcissistic relationships, they would be remarkably lonely people with excellent lighting and nowhere to point it.

Instead they appear, with suspicious regularity, in relationships with individuals who are unusually patient, unusually perceptive, unusually loyal, and unusually willing to explain someone else’s behaviour long after most witnesses have already located the exit.

That deserves a closer look.

Codependency rarely introduces itself dramatically. It doesn’t arrive wearing a personality disorder label and announcing its intentions in advance. It tends to appear disguised as reliability. As understanding. As loyalty that stays slightly longer than comfort would normally recommend. As the ability to keep relationships functioning even when one person inside them has temporarily misplaced the instruction manual for mutuality.

And if you learned early enough in life that relationships stayed safe when someone in the room remained steady, then becoming that steady person doesn’t feel like self-abandonment.

It feels like competence.

Which is precisely why it takes so long to recognise.

The internet, unfortunately, prefers villains. Villains are easier to explain. They fit inside diagrams. They come with bullet points. They allow people to leave relationships with a sense of clarity that feels decisive rather than complicated.

What they don’t usually allow is reflection.

Because once the narshole has been identified, the story appears to have ended. Except it hasn’t. It’s only just reached the interesting part.

The reason the interesting part begins there is that narcissistic relationships almost never start with deception in the theatrical sense people later describe when they are trying to understand what happened.

They begin with recognition, and recognition is a much more complicated thing than manipulation because it involves both people participating in something that feels immediately familiar before either of them understands why. The narshole partner recognises someone unusually receptive to intensity, unusually tolerant of asymmetry, and unusually capable of maintaining connection when connection begins to behave unpredictably. The codependent partner recognises someone unusually expressive, unusually confident, and unusually certain about who they are in ways that feel reassuring rather than alarming when you’ve spent a lifetime learning how to keep emotional weather stable for everyone else in the room.

At the time this doesn’t feel like danger. It feels like clarity.

It feels like finally meeting someone who already understands the language you didn’t know you’d been speaking your entire life.

That sense of fluency is one of the least discussed aspects of these relationships, partly because it complicates the story people understandably want to tell themselves afterwards. It is much easier to describe what happened as something that arrived from the outside than to recognise that something inside both people had already been trained, long before they met, to respond to exactly this configuration of intensity and steadiness as though it were not only familiar but promising. When two people meet with those complementary expectations already in place, the relationship rarely begins slowly. It begins with momentum, and momentum is one of the most convincing emotional experiences human beings are capable of mistaking for destiny.

The childhood origins of that momentum rarely look dramatic when they are examined carefully, which is another reason they are so easy to overlook. The child who later becomes organised around admiration usually did not grow up deciding to become difficult. They grew up learning that visibility stabilised relationships, that being impressive helped maintain connection, and that attention functioned as a form of safety rather than decoration.

When attention arrives unpredictably but matters enormously when it does, children become extremely good at generating it. They become perceptive about what others want to see. They become skilled at presenting something that keeps the emotional environment steady enough to remain inside. Over time that skill becomes identity, and identity becomes expectation. By adulthood admiration no longer feels like a preference. It feels like oxygen.

The child who later becomes organised around codependency learns something equally adaptive but in the opposite direction. Instead of discovering that visibility stabilises relationships, they discover that stability itself keeps people close. They learn to anticipate emotional shifts before those shifts become visible to anyone else. They learn to translate silence before silence becomes distance. They learn to remain available even when availability is uncomfortable because availability itself becomes the way belonging works. None of this feels like sacrifice at the time. It feels like competence. It feels like being the person who keeps things functioning when other people begin to struggle.

When these two patterns meet in adulthood, something extremely persuasive happens very quickly. One person experiences admiration as connection and the other experiences steadiness as care, and for a while both people are correct.

The relationship works precisely because each partner is providing something the other already knows how to recognise as meaningful. The narshole partner experiences reliable attention without needing to ask for it explicitly, and the codependent partner experiences intensity that makes their steadiness feel necessary rather than invisible. From the inside this arrangement doesn’t look unstable. It looks efficient. It looks like two people who understand each other unusually well.

Which is precisely why it can take so long to recognise what is happening.

Modern online discussions about narcissism often begin at the point where that efficiency starts to fail, because that is the point where the pain becomes visible enough to require explanation. But by the time the relationship reaches that stage, both partners have usually spent a considerable amount of time reinforcing the pattern that made the connection feel compelling in the first place. The narshole partner has learned that admiration continues to arrive even when accountability becomes uncomfortable, and the codependent partner has learned that stability continues to preserve connection even when stability requires increasing amounts of emotional effort to maintain. Neither of those lessons is taught deliberately. They emerge slowly as the relationship adapts around the expectations both people brought into it from much earlier experiences.

This is the part of the story that becomes difficult to discuss honestly in public spaces shaped by simplified psychological language, because it requires acknowledging that codependency is not simply what happens to someone when they meet a narcissist. It is something they learned long before the narshole arrived. It is a survival intelligence that worked well enough in earlier environments that it continued operating automatically in later ones. It is also one of the reasons narcissistic partners often describe the early stages of these relationships as unusually supportive rather than unusually exploitative. From their perspective they have met someone who does not withdraw when emotional intensity increases, who does not become unpredictable when admiration becomes necessary, and who appears unusually comfortable maintaining connection even when the structure of the relationship becomes uneven.

None of this excuses harmful behaviour.

But it does explain why the relationship rarely begins with harm as its defining feature.

It begins with recognition strong enough that both people mistake it for safety.

.N

Hello you,

There’s a small chance you’ve just received this email and thought:

“Hang on… did I subscribe to this?”

The honest answer is: possibly not in the traditional sense.

If you’re reading this, it’s because at some point in the last decade you crossed paths with something I wrote — most likely during the original Narshole the Lonely Monster era — and when this new version of the space quietly came back online, your name was still on the guest list.

Which means two things are true at once:

You’re very welcome here.

And you are absolutely free to leave immediately with no emotional consequences whatsoever.

In fact, if your inbox is already full of newsletters about productivity systems, sourdough hydration ratios, or people explaining attachment theory using diagrams that look suspiciously like railway maps, I strongly encourage you to protect your peace and unsubscribe without hesitation. I will not take this personally. The monster will not take this personally. Even the smaller supporting monsters in the banner image will cope.

However, if you do decide to stay, here’s what this space is about now.

Narshole the Lonely Monster (v2.0) isn’t a project about hunting narcissists or diagnosing strangers across the internet from a safe observational distance. It’s a long-form exploration of the patterns people carry into relationships without realising they’re carrying them — families, siblings, partners, ex-partners, friendships, loyalties, boundaries, agency, and the strange moment when something feels familiar long before it becomes understandable.

It turns out most of us were never officially trained for any of this.

So this is the field guide I wish someone had handed me earlier.

If that sounds useful, stay.

If it sounds like something you already solved in 1998 and have been living serenely ever since, I salute you and release you back into the wider internet with gratitude and admiration.

Either way — thank you for reading anything I wrote in the first place. It mattered more than you probably realised at the time.

Warm regards,

.N

About ten years ago, quite by accident and with very little adult supervision, I created a small corner of the internet called Narshole the Lonely Monster and eventually handed the blog space on to others when it became clear I needed to understand the map more deeply than I did at the time. It turns out some projects aren’t meant to end. They’re meant to wait until you’re ready to read them properly.

At the time I believed I was writing about narcissists.

It turns out I was writing about relationships.

This is an important difference, although it took me roughly a decade and several thousand conversations with strangers, a brief and slightly surreal stint explaining emotional pattern recognition to people at dinner parties who hadn’t realised they’d walked into it, and a long and occasionally uncomfortable look at my own codependent wiring before I understood exactly what the monster had been trying to tell me.

The internet, as many of you know, was going through a phase back then.

Everything was a narcissist..

Partners were narcissists. Parents were narcissists. Managers were narcissists. Dogs refusing recall were probably narcissists. Cats are still narsholes. At one point I’m fairly sure the Wi-Fi router was being described as narcissistic simply for disconnecting when it felt misunderstood.

Into this environment wandered a small cartoon creature with large emotional eyes and limited coping strategies.

People recognised him immediately.

Which should have been my first clue that he wasn’t fictional.

The original Narshole the Lonely Monster gathered rather more readers than I had expected at the time, which was both flattering and faintly concerning because I hadn’t actually intended to become responsible for a small but emotionally energetic corner of the internet populated almost entirely by people trying to work out what on earth had just happened to their relationships. Most of them weren’t looking for monsters in the theatrical sense. They were looking for explanations. They were trying to understand why certain connections felt magnetic at the beginning and destabilising later, why some people seemed to recognise them immediately in ways that felt meaningful rather than suspicious, and why leaving those relationships often required far more effort than entering them ever had.

At the time, the language available online for describing those experiences was almost entirely organised around the figure of the narcissist, which was helpful up to a point and then quietly unhelpful after that point had passed. It gave people a shape to work with. It gave them a word. It gave them permission to say something real had happened. What it didn’t do particularly well was explain why so many thoughtful, capable, perceptive people kept finding themselves in the same kind of relational weather more than once.

Eventually it became difficult not to notice that the monster people were describing wasn’t the only creature in the room.

Which was awkward, because by then I’d already drawn him.

So instead of continuing to expand the wildlife catalogue, I stepped away for a while and started paying closer attention to something slightly less photogenic but considerably more important: the patterns that form between people long before anyone begins diagnosing anyone else. Families turned out to be involved rather a lot more than expected. So did siblings. So did loyalty, responsibility, silence, humour, and that curious instinct many people have of becoming the calmest person in situations where calm was never officially part of the job description.

It also became clear, slightly to my surprise and only after a reasonable amount of personal negotiation with reality, that I’d been standing inside some of those patterns myself.

This is always an inconvenient discovery.

It’s one thing to explain relational dynamics to strangers on the internet. It’s another thing entirely to notice you’ve been quietly participating in them while holding a clipboard.

So the monster and I both took a short break while I learned something about agency, something about sovereignty, and something about boundaries that are not the same thing as exits but are often mistaken for them until you’ve tried building a few properly.

During that time the internet continued doing what the internet does best, which is confidently explaining complicated human behaviour using diagrams that would have made medieval mapmakers nervous. Narcissists multiplied. Attachment styles became horoscopes. Entire personality structures were diagnosed between breakfast and lunch. And somewhere in the middle of all that activity a quieter question began to appear underneath the noise, which was not “how do I identify the narcissist?” but “why did this relationship feel so familiar in the first place?”

That question is much harder to answer.

It is also considerably more interesting.

Because once you begin looking there, the story changes. The villain becomes less important than the pattern. The ending becomes less important than the repetition. And the monster begins to look less like a creature that arrived unexpectedly and more like a signpost someone had been walking past for years without realising what it was pointing toward.

That is more or less where Narshole the Lonely Monster 2.0 returns.

Same creature. Better eyesight.

This version isn’t interested in diagnosing your ex, your boss, your mother, your neighbour, or the barista who looked at you slightly too intensely while handing over a cappuccino in 2017. It isn’t here to explain why everyone else is the problem. It isn’t even here to explain why you are the problem, which is usually where the internet goes next once it has finished explaining why everyone else is.

It is here to do something quieter and, I hope, more useful.

It is here to look at the patterns that form between people long before anyone thinks to name them.

We’ll talk about families, because most relational maps start there whether we notice them or not. We’ll talk about siblings, because they often remember versions of us we’ve already outgrown. We’ll talk about friendships that quietly stabilise entire decades of our lives without ever receiving formal recognition for doing so. We’ll talk about romantic relationships that begin as chemistry and slowly reveal themselves to be negotiations with nervous systems that met much earlier than we realised. And occasionally, when the situation requires it, we’ll talk about monsters again.

Because monsters, as it turns out, are usually just relationships that haven’t been translated yet.

.N

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