• I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me

• Why do we want what we want?

• If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit

• What do you need to become who you are?

• I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

• Internal conversation as a form of object relating

• A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

• LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

• Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

• Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are

• An experiment: how to use Claude Opus 4 to help myself say ‘no’ to stuff at work

• The unpredictable, unfathomable point of decision

• Chapters abstracts for my new book

• A reluctant (and partial) defence of Mark Zuckerberg’s claims about AI friends

• ✍️ How to enjoy writing in spite of the lure of generative AI

• Machine writing and the challenge of a joyful reflexivity

• My last 10 Claude conversation topics

• Every time you make a decision you confront your symbolic castration

• We can’t escape the trap of desire, but we can approach that trap with greater poise

• A symptom isn’t a symptom until it’s reflexively recognised as such by the analysand

• LLMs and cognitive lock in

• Reflexivity was always integral to Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology

• The libidinal economy of symbolisation

• Our conception of the lifeworld needs the mundane as much as it needs the dramatic

• How to enjoy writing #17: creative confidence means accepting the tensions in how you think

• Am I a voluntarist about technology?

• Capaciousness as a sociological category

• Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating

• Five thoughts about combining sociological reflexivity and psychoanalysis

• Articulating what is latent is easier then articulating what is repressed

• Intuition as social theory

• Margaret Archer’s interest in reflexivity was there from 1979

• A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric

• Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

• Using generative AI to analyse your writing

• What I’m ultimately interested in

• What does it mean to be composed?

• A list of human cognitive biases and the assumptions underpinning them

• Sociotechnical change as an invitation to reflexivity

• The unconscious as overflowing with other people’s desires

• ChatGPT: analyse Margaret Archer’s four modes of reflexivity in terms of Lacanian theory

• Simone Weil’s apophatic concept of attention

• On rushing and apophatic reflexivity

• Every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience

• A theory of learning for the future: the realist concept of reflexivity and the pragmatist concept of experience

• Cultivating a relationship of gratitude towards the world

• Reflexivity, contingency and platforms

• Do you use Margaret Archer’s approach to reflexivity in your work?

• On being reflexive about how you e-mail

• New Chapter: Growing Up in a World of Platforms

• Platform socialisation and the possibility of freedom

• Dewey on the over-socialised conception of ‘imitation’

• The socialising role of community

• Ian McEwan on the mundane reality of reflexivity

• Panic and reflexivity

• Durkheim on bounding variety

• Durkheim on the origin of reflexivity

• Durkheim on neuropathy and the inability to settle into a stable life

• Externalisation as defence mechanism

• The social ontology of trans-human life

• The Sociology of Escalation Effects

• The Sociology of Awkwardness: Being (very) human in a digital age

• Reconciling the psychoanalytical and the reflexive 

• Mining resonance to the point of exhaustion, or, why does this sound so shit to me now?

• The Sociology of Stupid Assumptions

• Understanding the agency of people we disapprove of

• Some thoughts on the bullet journal, omnifocus and getting things done

• Social media and the devaluation of introspection

• Margaret Archer and Bernard Lahire as post-Bourdieusian social theorists

• Social media didn’t create the ambition to rethink scholarly communication, it gave us the tools to do it effectively

• The Dispositions of the Metricised

• Digital Social Science and the Challenge of Reflexivity

• Conceptualising ‘distraction’

• the sociology of executive coaching

• life planning as navigational guide rather than existential blueprint

• institutionalised goal setting in tech firms 

• some thoughts on responsibility

• what makes human beings distinctive amongst animals?

• are you conducting research on reflexivity?

• images of the human in digital social science

• the sociology of ‘blotting out’ experience 

• digital distraction and human concern 

• towards a meta-critique of data science 

• the cognitive costs of escaping the filter bubble

• the synchronised society

• freedom from self-imposed metrified tyranny: some thoughts on the moral psychology of self-tracking

• Reflexivity and the Social Production of Distraction

• Podcast: Andrew Sayer on Why Things Matter To People

• Workshop: Investigating the Internal Conversation

• When shopping is a baffling ordeal

• Overcoming your modernist training for constant improvement, advancement, development and accumulation

• The businessman and the fisherman

• The Pleasures of Acceleration

• Ghosts of Sociologists Past in the Accelerated Academy

• Higher Education and The Temporal Conditions for Critique

• Productivity culture, cognitive triage and the pseudo-commensurability of the to-do list

• The role of reflexivity in explaining rather than describing technological diffusion

• Technology and Human Nature

• Graham Scambler on an interdisciplinary approach to the ‘structuring of agency’ – November 11th @SocioWarwick

• Graham Scambler on an interdisciplinary approach to the ‘structuring of agency’ – November 11th @SocioWarwick