Campbell Kitts Blog

  "The greatest wealth is to live content with enough"  Plato Navigating the Trap of the Puer Aeternus: When Growing Up Becomes Optional Human history is filled with archetypes that mirror our deepest psychological truths. Among the most fascinating—and quietly destructive,is the concept of the Puer Aeternus (often referred to in analytical psychology as the eternal youth, or famously popularized as the "Peter Pan syndrome"). Originally a mythological term for a child-god who remains forever young, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung adopted the phrase to describe adults whose emotional and psychological development remains frozen at an adolescent level. On the surface, the puer (or puella for women) often appears charming, deeply creative, and brimming with potential. They possess a vibrant idealism and a sparkling intellect. However, beneath this dazzling veneer lies a profound paradox. The eternal youth is terrified of commitment, boundaries, and limits. To the puer, ch...

  The Solitary Burden of Vision The foundational realization of any ambitious endeavor is a sobering one: absolute autonomy is the default state of creation. No matter the verbal agreements, handshakes, or initial promises exchanged, you will ultimately be left to navigate the labyrinth of your own execution alone. Psychological research underscores this disparity of investment. Under the lens of the Self-Center Bias and fundamental attribution errors documented in social psychology, individuals are overwhelmingly consumed by their own cognitive landscapes, survival, and immediate priorities. They simply do not—and biologically cannot—care about your vision with the same fervent intensity that you do. Worse still, your innovation often triggers latent friction; disruptive ideas threaten the status quo, frequently meeting passive resistance or active skepticism simply because they introduce unpredictable variables into established environments. The Friction of Independence and the P...

When Algorithms Decide What You Pay Imagine two shoppers browsing the same online store at the same moment for the identical product. One sees a price of $49.99; the other is charged $64.99. No coupon, no membership difference, no supply shortage—just data. This is surveillance pricing : the practice of using personal data and artificial intelligence to set individualized prices based on what an algorithm predicts each consumer is willing to pay. Unlike traditional dynamic pricing , which responds to market-wide factors such as inventory levels, demand spikes, or time of day (think Uber surge pricing during a concert or airline tickets rising as seats fill), surveillance pricing targets the individual. It draws on location, demographics, browsing history, shopping patterns, device type, mouse movements, abandoned carts, inferred income, battery life, and more to estimate a person’s “ reservation price ”—the maximum they will accept before walking away. Origins The roots of personalized...