What the Fuck, 2026? A field guide to navigating a year that doesn't make sense yet. Something broke. Not the economy. Not democracy. Not the climate. Those have been breaking for years and we've learned to doom-scroll past them. Something weirder. The scripts broke. Your parents&
Series
If you watched Black Sails and thought it was about treasure hunting, you missed the show entirely. This is the most sophisticated meditation on power ever filmed. Every character models a different leadership archetype. Every season demonstrates a different phase of organizational lifecycle. Every betrayal illustrates a timeless pattern in
There's no perfect relationship structure. Only structures whose downsides you can handle. Monogamy costs you novelty and traps you if you chose wrong. Polyamory costs you simplicity and exhausts you if you don't have bandwidth. Relationship anarchy costs you legibility and terrifies you if your nervous
Please enjoy this early draft section from "Tribes of the Edge: Sex, Identity, and Obsession in the Digital Age" - 😘. RZA 🧑🍳 Introduction: Something happened to how people fuck, what they call themselves, and how far they're willing to go. Twenty years ago, sex had a short
Your relationship model isn't biology—it's technology. And like all technology, it was built for problems that may no longer exist. Every culture that's ever existed has experimented with relationship structures. The nuclear family is about 70 years old. Lifelong monogamy as a romantic
Part 35 of 36 in the The 2026 Kink Field Guide series. Throughout this guide, we've touched on evolutionary explanations for various kinks—sperm competition, mate guarding, dominance hierarchies, signaling systems. Now let's pull that thread completely. The evolutionary psychology of kink is contested territory. Some
Batman doesn't have enemies. He has a rotating cast of intimate partners who each meet a specific psychological need that he can't get from any one of them. This isn't metaphor. Through the lens of attachment theory, every member of Batman's rogues
The Kids Are Alright Every generation panics about the next one. Every generation is wrong in the same way. The kids aren't broken. They're adapted to an environment you didn't grow up in and can't fully see. The behaviors that look like
Human intuition fails catastrophically with complex adaptive systems. Understand emergence, feedback loops, attractors, and why typical problem-solving approaches backfire.
The relationship escalator is basically a child-production-and-raising algorithm. Dating, exclusivity, cohabitation, marriage, kids, death. You get on at the bottom and ride to the top. The only acceptable exit is dying. Nobody tells you this is what you're signing up for. They call it "love" and
Your attachment style is filtering your relationship options before you even see them. That polyamorous person who seems emotionally stable? Invisible to anxious attachment—too boring, no chase. That avoidant who keeps you guessing? Magnetic to anxious attachment—the uncertainty feels like home. You think you're choosing relationship
Your metamour is your accidental in-law. No wedding invited them into your life. Your partner's affections did—and now you're connected to someone you didn't choose, might never have met, and have to navigate without any cultural script. In monogamy, this person would be
Both sides are right. Both sides are also lying to themselves. The hierarchical poly people are right that relationships aren't equal. Someone you've built a life with has more entanglement than someone you started dating last month. Pretending otherwise is ideology over reality. The non-hierarchical poly
Solo poly without community is just loneliness with dates. This is the structure where you're your own primary partner—no nesting, no merging lives, no shared bank accounts or cohabitation. You have multiple loving relationships, but you remain the center of your own life. It works beautifully for
Parallel poly is easier for the arms and harder for the hinge. The people on the sides of the V have simple structures—one relationship to maintain. The person at the vertex is running multiple relationships worth of logistics alone, managing separate calendars, processing with each partner individually, deciding what
Kitchen table poly is exposure therapy for possessiveness. You can't avoid seeing your partner with their other partner. You're going to be at the same brunch. This is polyamory's version of chosen family—everyone in the polycule knows each other, shares meals, celebrates holidays
Every polycule has a single point of failure. The question is whether you know where it is. A polycule is the network of people connected through polyamorous relationships—"poly" plus "molecule." And like actual molecules, polycules have structure: bonds, nodes, and stress points that determine whether
Poly is not more fun. It's more work. One relationship is a part-time job. Two is full-time. Three is management-level coordination with calendar software and processing conversations that could fill a therapy practice. The people who do poly don't do it because it's easy.
For some people, authority creates freedom. This sounds backwards until you meet the anxious submissive whose nervous system finally calmed down when someone else took responsibility for the decisions. Or the dominant who found purpose in being accountable for another person's wellbeing. For some couples, power exchange isn&
Anxiously attached men who live in terror of not being enough have found a strange solution: they've made "not enough" the fantasy. The wife has sex with another man. The husband knows—same as hotwifing. But in cuckolding, his inadequacy is central to the erotic charge.
The hotwife dynamic is what happens when a woman's sexual freedom becomes the center of a couple's erotic life—and her husband wants to watch. It's related to cuckolding but not the same. It's related to swinging but not the same. It&