It sounds empowering on the surface and in a situation of unhealthy relationships, of course, having boundaries is important. But when we look closer, the line between healthy self-love and functional narcissism has almost disappeared. We definitely haven’t built a culture of self-love and respect; we have a culture of hyper-individualism.

When everyone believes they are entitled to receive everything while owing nothing in return, there is almost no way to build a healthy relationship. A genuine connection requires compromise and mutual sacrifice. When our baseline assumption is that any discomfort or conflict means we are being undervalued(?) then human connection becomes super fragile.

And that fragility most likely will not lead to empowerment we are hoping for but to a suffocating disconnection and depression.

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So, on the biological perspective, when we look at our close relatives, female primates often have several partners.

In many monkey and ape species, females don’t just choose one male and stay with him. Around the time they can get pregnant, they often mate with several males. That means different males’ sperm are competing inside the female’s body.

Why would a female primate want more than one partner?

Because having several partners can bring advantages for a female.

• Higher chance that at least one male’s sperm is good and she actually gets pregnant.

• Mixing genes from different males can give healthier or more diverse offspring

• If several males think they might be the father, they may protect the baby instead of harming it.
  

Also, females are not just “receivers” of sperm in a passive state. Female body can influence which sperm wins. For instance, chemicals in a woman’s reproductive system can attract some men’s sperm more than others, so the egg is not just accepting the first sperm that arrives which makes variety of sperm an ideal option for mating.

So the argument “men are naturally meant to sleep with many women, women are naturally meant to choose one man” is mostly a sociocultural story, not a biological one.

Both men and women have evolved strategies that can involve multiple partners and women also have ways both behavioural and biological for mating.

I wanted to share all this information especially for women.

Don’t let men manipulate you by using “evolutionary biology” to justify their own promiscuity while shaming you when you have multiple partners. That is a patriarchal structure and moral stance, not a biological fact.

I also want to add some of the interesting replies I received when I posted these online, together with a few articles I found while doing research on the subject.

I’m happy to hear any counterarguments as long as you back them up with biological, scientific evidence.

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Schizophrenia is a serious, chronic mental disorder characterized by distortions in the way reality is perceived. Main symptoms include disorganized speech and delusions or hallucinations, such as hearing voices. The condition typically develops gradually in individuals during late adolescence or early adulthood. There is no objective diagnostic test; diagnosis is based on observed behavior, and there is no cure. However, lifelong treatment with medicines and therapy can help manage the symptoms.

Since schizophrenia is an extremely complex phenomenon, it remains a subject of intense scientific research. In this context, a study conducted by the University of Western Australia has provided fascinating findings that congenital or early cortical blindness, that is, when people are blind from birth or shortly after, is protective against schizophrenia.

While visual impairments in general tend to increase the risk of schizophrenia (which I find fascinating), early blindness may have the opposite effect.

Professor Vera Morgan, the lead researcher of the study, suggests that the brain’s plasticity could be the key link. One theory might be that a person blind from birth learns to think in ways that are protective or the brain learns to use that extra cortex in ways that are protective.

Visual impairment vs. early blindness

People with schizophrenia often experience visual problems like issues with their retina and abnormal blinking patterns. These visual abnormalities happen to occur before psychotic symptoms start, sometimes working as predictors of a schizophrenia diagnosis.

Shoham et al. (2021) wanted to find out if poor distance vision during childhood could predict the development of psychotic experiences (like hallucinations or delusions) later in life. They conducted a longitudinal study where they tracked a large group of babies born at the same time and followed them through their lives for more than twenty years. First, researchers assessed the children's vision at the age of 7 and 11. Later, participants were interviewed once again, this time for psychotic experiences at the age of 17 and 24. And the results showed that children who wore glasses or met the criteria for visual impairment at age 11 had over a 60% higher risk of reporting psychotic experiences later in life. The worse their vision was, the higher the chance they had of having psychotic experiences later. The authors explain these findings through our brains‘ reliance on visual data to build mental models of the world. Blurry or distorted visual input during critical childhood developmental period might impair how the brain processes information and later cause hallucinations or delusions.

When someone’s vision is abnormal, their brain receives all kinds of confusing signals about the world and basically forces them to make more predictions to make sense of it all. Since their vision is affected, they can’t pick up on inconsistencies between what they know to be true from past experiences and what is happening through new sensory information in real time. This, sometimes, causes them to make false predictions. Researchers say that even “healthy” people can experience hallucinations when their vision is temporarily blocked for even just a few days.

On the other hand, when someone is blind from birth, the brain is conditioned to process sensory information by relying on different cues to build a mental picture. Theoretically, they wouldn’t make false predictions about the world around them and would be less susceptible to psychotic symptoms. As a result, they are protected from the false visual cues associated with schizophrenia, which make them immune to the disorder.

It is also important to mention that because congenital cortical blindness is rare, naturally studies around blindness and schizophrenia have limited statistical power (the number of participants is small) but the absence of cases still stands.

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References

Chamsi, F. Z., Katir, I., Korchi, A., Belbachir, S., & Ouanass, A. (2022). Schizophrenic or blind but not both. European Psychiatry, 65(Suppl 1), S793. https://doi.org/10.1192/j.eurpsy.2022.2049

Morgan, V. A., Clark, M., Crewe, J., Valuri, G., Mackey, D. A., Badcock, J. C., & Jablensky, A. (2018). Congenital blindness is protective for schizophrenia and other psychotic illness. A whole-population study. Schizophrenia Research, 202, 414–416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2018.06.061

Natalie Shoham, Joseph F Hayes, Claudia Cooper, Magnus Theodorsson, Gemma Lewis, Association Between Childhood Visual Acuity and Late Adolescent Psychotic Experiences: A Prospective Birth Cohort Study, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 48, Issue 2, March 2022, Pages 325–334, https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbab121

The famous picture was shared together with this caption: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

The caption added, “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

“The Backrooms have been associated with an internet aesthetic known as liminal spaces, which include images of uninhabited spaces.” source

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To define the Backrooms, we must first understand liminal spaces. Because all Backrooms levels are liminal spaces, but not all liminal spaces are the Backrooms.

Liminality, overall, describes a state of transition or being in-between. The word comes from the Latin “limen”, which stands for "threshold”. It refers to the moment of crossing from one state or place to another.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, such states can be understood as moments in which the boundaries that usually structure life, such as between conscious and unconscious, inside and outside, and self and other, become unstable. In this sense, liminality does not only refer to a spatial or temporal state as we usually encounter in the mainstream media but also to a psychic one.

Traditionally, the unconscious is often seen as something hidden inside the psyche. In the Backrooms, however, the unconscious content seems to spill into everyday, mostly public environments. These spaces feel unsettling because fundamental elements like humans, meaning and symbolic structure are missing. In this way, liminal spaces become a psychological symbol of our modern existence. We have spaces where meaning dissolves.

The Backrooms can therefore be understood as a medium of the collective unconscious where liminal spaces become projections of shared psychological experience. I have to warn you here that I don’t mean “collective unconscious” in a literal Jungian sense but as culturally produced products of shared symbolic imagery. These environments are manifestations of our society’s unstable psychic states. And it functions by giving spatial form to experiences of transition and the weakening of symbolic boundaries in our modern life.

This also explains why the Backrooms feels so powerful to so many people.

It turns our collective “in-between” state into architecture itself. Space no longer reflects stable social meaning, instead, it feels paused or waiting for something that never arrives. This is similar to how the mind feels during liminal periods in which an individual has left an old structure of identity or life but has not yet formed a new one.

This connects to the idea of psychological liminality. It is what we experience during life transitions like after leaving a job but before finding a new one, after loss, during recovery, migration, graduation, as well as societal ones where a whole society is facing a sudden event like the COVID-19 pandemic. Such transitions are outside of stable categories and most of the time, they trigger feelings of unease and anxiety.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the momentum of liminal spaces as an aesthetic peaked during the pandemic and we created the Backrooms. This was not a coincidence. Among all other societal factors, as public spaces suddenly got emptied worldwide, we shared a collective sense of liminality. It was in the transition between the world we knew and an uncertain tomorrow.

Interestingly, while the pandemic made liminality clear through the emptiness of physical space, I believe contemporary digital culture produces a different form of it. It is more hidden. Through social media, we now have continuous access to fragments of other people’s private lives: their homes, routines, meals, bedrooms and intimate moments. What was once private has become publicly available to most of us. Our lives fragmented into images and updates available at any moment.

This creates a paradoxical experience of a sense of closeness without geniune connection. We feel as if we “know” others through their daily videos, stories, or reels, yet this knowledge is incomplete or just a part of an online persona. The boundary between what is inside (private life) and what is outside (public presence) gets blurred.

While scrolling through social media, you might move from professional content to someone’s morning routine in their kitchen, then to another person’s bedroom, then to someone’s most traumatic moments all in seconds. This is a liminal experience: private lives and spaces appear as publicly accessible but without geniune meaning or presence. In this sense, the Backrooms can be a manifestation of today’s psychic condition in which life itself becomes liminal.

Similar to how in the Backrooms, environments feel familiar but detached from meaning in a creepy way, digital culture also creates a world in which intimacy is constantly exposed but never fully shared. And what we get is the constant borderline, threshold state. It’s neither fully private nor fully public; people are neither fully intimate nor fully strangers.

So, my conclusion is that the Backrooms is a cultural manifestation of our modern, fragmented, liminal psyche.

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A few days ago, I saw the newly released horror movie “Obsession” by Curry Baker in the cinema. By complete chance, this was around the same time when I started reading the findings of a survey that was conducted last year on how Gen Z still believes in true love but many don’t feel ready for a relationship.

This recent survey found that 80% of Gen Z singles believe they will find true love, yet only 55% feel prepared to have a romantic relationship. This gap says a lot about modern dating: people still desire deep connection but many feel emotionally or practically not ready for it (The Harris Poll for Match Group, 2025).

And while watching Obsession, I realized that the main male character, Bear, was one of those young adults in the survey I was reading. Someone who desires love but is incapable of building a relationship.

I will try to give as few spoilers as possible for those who haven’t seen the movie; I will just mention not-super-important details for the overall storyline. But if you don’t want to know anything at all, you can stop reading now and come back once you see the movie.

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To begin, one of the most disturbing things about Obsession is that Bear is the subversion of the “nice guy” archetype who becomes the actual villain of the story. At first, I believe most of us felt compassion for him. He is that shy, anxious, and emotionally repressed, kind of invisible guy who is clearly completely in love with a girl who doesn’t love him back.

However, Bear is not just that poor guy who is unlucky in love. I feel like he’s acting on a very specific core belief; it is that if he wants someone badly enough and if he’s “good enough”, then magically, they should love him back. And this is exactly where the gap from the survey I mentioned earlier starts to become visible in the movie. The issue is not that people believe in love; it’s what “not being ready” actually looks like.

In Bear’s case, it looks like passivity and avoidance. Even when Nikki directly asks him, “Do you like me?” his response is denial and emotional distance. He doesn’t take the risk of being known. Being vulnerable. He doesn’t actively put effort into building a connection. Instead, he waits for the conditions to be perfect, as if love should happen to him rather than be created with someone.

Have you realized how, from the very beginning of the movie, he puts almost no real effort into having a meaningful conversation with Nikki to know her better? When they were sitting together as a group in the bar, instead of joining the conversation or talking to Nikki, he was somewhere else, daydreaming while she was sitting right next to him. Only later, he was secretly telling his friend, Ian, to take Sarah and leave them alone so that the two of them could have a chat. He always tries to optimize the conditions to finally make a move, but even when he does manage to optimize, he just ends up not doing anything either way.

This is where “believing in love” begins to detach from reality. The survey shows us that Gen Z hasn’t lost faith in love itself, but in practice, that belief can create an idealization of loving the idea of someone rather than the very real person sitting in front of you.

In another scene, we see how little Bear actually knows about Nikki. He doesn’t know that Nikki and her father are not close and she is actually distant from him by choice, even though both Ian and Sarah know about this. Bear and Nikki probably never had such intimate conversations as the ones she had with her other friends. This is because, at a fundamental level, he is not interested in Nikki as a person. He is attached to an idea of her. He has created an image of Nikki, an idealized version of her, as a fantasy, and he is the one who is obsessed with that fantasy and what being loved by her would mean for him.

That’s exactly why the wish he made while breaking One Wish Willow is very important. Bear doesn’t wish to become more confident, more open or more capable of loving. His wish is “I want Nikki to love me more than anyone else in this f*cking world.”

This is not a wish about love. It’s a wish about control. It’s not about what he can give but about forcing her to give something to him. His wish directly violates her autonomy. The real horror comes from trying to force love out of her rather than have the courage to actively create it.

As Albert Camus wrote in his notebooks:
“Whoever gives nothing has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be loved, but not to love.”

And Bear has nothing to give. He is already trapped in that curse before he ever uses the One Wish Willow.

At first, you can almost excuse his behavior. It feels like desperation. But there is a point where Bear realizes something is wrong. Nikki is not acting like herself. He slowly understands his wish actually works. There are clear signs that whatever is happening to her is not normal or healthy and definitely not consensual in any sense.

And he continues anyway.

There is a classic cognitive dissonance reaction where he reframes the situation as “it’s not that bad” or “she still loves me”.

Instead of changing behavior or confronting the suffering he caused, he reframes reality to protect his desire rather than the person.

Ironically, the next scenes in the movie are the peak of his fantasy. We see a lot of “couple goals” kind of moments where they are portrayed as an ideal image of a romantic relationship. These scenes feel familiar because they mirror the kind of relationships we constantly see online. They are curated and aesthetic. They reinforce the idea of love without showing all the mess and chaos behind it which may be exactly why so many feel unprepared for the real thing.

Eventually, there is the moment where there is no confusion about her situation anymore. At this point, it becomes a choice. And he chooses to ignore reality, because the alternative would mean losing the one thing he has always wanted: being loved by her.

There’s a line he says, “What’s so bad about being with me?” and it exposes everything. It’s not about him being insecure. It’s evil because he shows no real empathy for the fact that the person he claims to love is suffering. This is, I believe, reinforced by the film by making this literal through its horror elements. The “entity” that replaces Nikki is a manifestation of his wish and his desire creates something inhuman. What is left of Nikki is not really Nikki. And that’s the horror of it. He gets exactly what he wanted but only by removing the very thing that made her real.

“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.”

― Jacques Lacan

That’s what makes his version of love feel so wrong. He doesn’t love Nikki as a person with her own thoughts and feelings. He loves what she gives him: attention and the feeling that he matters. She becomes less human and more of an instrument for his loneliness because he chooses control over connection.

In this sense, fantasy works because it never asks anything of you. True love, as an idea, is safe because it promises feeling complete by finding your missing half. However, love, as Lacan put it, is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.

That exchange is terrifying. It requires effort, vulnerability and sometimes seeing that you are not enough.

This is where the gap in the survey becomes meaningful. It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t believe in love. It’s that belief is easier to maintain at a distance. Like Bear, it is safer to hold onto the idea of love than to risk the uncertainty of a real relationship but then you get crushed under the weight of your own desires.

And it is very ironic because you will never feel “ready” for love. Being ready would mean being complete on your own. And love doesn’t work like that. Love is about giving up that sense of completeness, letting yourself be open and changed by someone else, to finally fall in love.

P.S., be careful what you wish for.

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