Why would anyone turn to AI to work through a psychological aversion to the natural sciences — or to process complicated feelings about medical school classmates they’d rather not see? The answer, it turns out, is stranger and more revealing than the question itself.
In this post, I reflect on an unexpected journey: using AI conversations to untangle a deep-seated psychological distaste — not just for medicine and biology, but for the whole constellation of natural sciences, from chemistry and physics to geology and astronomy. What began as an oddly specific inquiry into whether doctors are boring slowly became something far more personal: a reckoning with how our inner landscape distorts our perception of the outer world.
Perhaps the most unsettling insight is this — we don’t see fields of knowledge as they are; we see them as we are. Our psyche, in its quiet wisdom or its quiet woundedness, nudges us toward certain domains and away from others, not always by rational design but by emotional necessity. For those of us who needed the humanities and social sciences to feel whole, that detour wasn’t a failure of intellect. It was a form of healing.