{"id":31954,"date":"2026-06-12T15:29:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T20:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/?p=31954"},"modified":"2026-06-12T21:06:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T02:06:27","slug":"why-your-brain-needs-struggle-to-feel-satisfied","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/tech\/ai\/why-your-brain-needs-struggle-to-feel-satisfied\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Your Brain Needs Struggle to Feel Satisfied"},"content":{"rendered":"
Jordan Takahashi is 26, grew up in Brampton<\/a>, and has never once had to wait for anything important. Not information -Google and then ChatGPT took care of that. Not entertainment -the algorithm always had something next. Not directions, not answers, not feedback on his writing, not even the basic friction of being bored on a bus with nothing to do. By the time he graduated with a marketing<\/a> degree in 2021, AI tools could do in four minutes what his courses had spent four years teaching him to do by hand.<\/div>\n
\n

So Jordan did what a lot of smart, capable Gen Z graduates did. He got good at using the tools. Stayed current. Kept optimizing. And somewhere around age 24, on a Sunday afternoon with nothing particularly wrong in his life, he noticed something he couldn't quite name.<\/p>\n

\"Everything was fine,\" he says. \"Like, objectively fine. But I'd finish something and feel... nothing. Not bad. Just nothing. Like I'd watched someone else do it.\"<\/p>\n

He started making things with his hands -first bread, badly, then furniture, also badly. Took up bouldering at a gym where the walls change every two weeks and the problems are rated by difficulty. Slowly, something came back. Not when life got easier. When it got harder.<\/p>\n

So here's the thing Jordan figured out at a climbing wall in Brampton that neuroscientists have been trying to explain in labs for decades: your brain doesn't actually run on pleasure. It runs on the anticipation of reward. And without something to work toward, something with real stakes and genuine uncertainty, it starts to short-circuit in ways that feel a lot like emptiness but aren't.<\/p>\n

This matters more right now than it ever has. Because the same forces automating our workplaces are also automating our obstacles -and Jordan's generation is the first to have grown up with the frictionless world as their factory setting.<\/p>\n

\n

The Dopamine Myth You Were Sold<\/h2>\n

Most people have heard the story about dopamine. It's the \"pleasure chemical,\" the thing that fires when something good happens, the neurological reward your brain hands out for eating well, exercising, falling in love. The problem is that this story, while not exactly wrong, leaves out the most important part.<\/p>\n

Dopamine doesn't fire when good things happen. It fires when good things are\u00a0about to<\/em> happen -or more precisely, when your brain predicts that effort will lead to a reward. It's not the pleasure system. It's the\u00a0motivation<\/em>\u00a0system. The difference is enormous.<\/p>\n

Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, demonstrated this in a series of studies using monkeys and food<\/a> rewards that became foundational to how we understand motivation. (A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward, Schultz, Dayan & Montague, Science, 1997<\/a>) What he found was that dopamine neurons fired most strongly not when the monkey received the food<\/a>, but when it heard the signal that food<\/a> was coming -and crucially, they fired even harder when that reward required effort to obtain. Easy rewards barely registered. Effortful rewards lit the system up.<\/p>\n

Researchers at Vanderbilt University took this further in 2012, scanning the brains of human volunteers and sorting them into \"go-getters\" -people willing to work hard for rewards- and \"slackers\" who preferred easier, smaller payoffs. The go-getters, it turned out, had higher dopamine activity in the brain's reward and motivation centres. The slackers had higher dopamine in the area associated with risk and emotion. (Dopamine Impacts Your Willingness to Work, Vanderbilt University, 2012<\/a>) The upshot: the brain doesn't just respond to rewards. It responds to the\u00a0cost-benefit calculation<\/em> of whether a reward is worth the effort -and it needs that calculation to stay calibrated.<\/p>\n

Remove the effort entirely, and something goes wrong. The system has nothing to calculate. The volume, as Jordan put it, goes to nothing.<\/p>\n

\n

Labor Leads to Love (Even for a Wonky Bookshelf)<\/h2>\n

So if dopamine is the anticipation -and- effort system, what does that mean for satisfaction -the feeling after the work is done?<\/p>\n

This is where things get genuinely surprising. In 2011, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon of Yale, and Dan Ariely of Duke ran a set of experiments that have since become famous in psychology circles under a name that perfectly captures the finding: the IKEA Effect. (The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love, Norton, Mochon & Ariely, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The basic experiment: participants were asked to assemble flat-pack IKEA boxes, fold origami figures, or build Lego sets. They were then asked to place a value on their creations alongside identical items made by experts. The builders consistently valued their own work far more than the identical pre-made versions -even when the results were, by any objective measure, a bit rough. In one round of the origami experiment, people valued their amateur cranes nearly as highly as expert-made ones. The act of making something, it turned out, fundamentally changes how you feel about it.<\/p>\n

But here's the part that often gets left out of the summary: the IKEA effect only appeared when participants actually finished the task. When researchers had them build and then immediately destroy their creations, the effect vanished. When they failed to complete the project, it vanished. Labor leads to love<\/a> -but only when the effort lands somewhere. Only when you can stand back and say: I made that.<\/p>\n

So the brain needs two things, working in sequence. First, the anticipation of a meaningful challenge (dopamine, effort, the tightening feeling of a problem not yet solved). Then, the completion -the moment of standing back, of the thing existing in the world where it didn't before. Miss either half, and the satisfaction doesn't come.<\/p>\n

\n

What Happens When Everything Is Too Easy<\/h2>\n

Here's where we get to the uncomfortable part.<\/p>\n

The modern world has been systematically removing friction from everyday life for decades. This is largely a good thing -nobody misses washing clothes by hand, or three-week ocean crossings, or dying of a tooth infection. But the same frictionless design that makes life physically easier has spread into areas where a little resistance turns out to be neurologically necessary.<\/p>\n

Food arrives in 20 minutes with three taps. Answers to questions appear before you've fully formulated the question. Entertainment queues itself up based on what kept you watching last time. Navigation systems mean you never have to figure out where you are. And now, increasingly, work itself -the place most of us spent the majority of our waking hours, the place where we solved problems and learned things and occasionally made something we were proud of- is being handed to algorithms that do it faster and more consistently than we can.<\/p>\n

Research in computational neuroscience has shown that after extended exposure to optimized digital stimuli, the brain's sensitivity to natural rewards decreases measurably. (Montag & Diefenbach, 2018, in Psychology Today<\/a>) The effort-reward relationship gets recalibrated downward. You start needing more stimulation to feel the same level of engagement, and naturally occurring rewards -the satisfaction of finishing a project, the pleasure of learning a skill, the quiet pride of cooking a meal<\/a> from scratch -register less and less.<\/p>\n

This isn't a moral failing. It's a calibration problem. And it's happening at scale.<\/p>\n

The rising rates of what psychologists are calling \"motivational anhedonia\" -not the inability to feel pleasure in the clinical sense, but a blunted capacity to find satisfaction in ordinary effort- particularly among younger adults who grew up with frictionless technology, are starting to show up in the data. Researchers Michael Treadway and David Zald at Vanderbilt have studied effort-based decision making in people with depression and found that the pattern of avoiding effortful tasks, even for good rewards, tracks closely with dopamine dysfunction. The brain, without regular exercise in the effort-reward cycle, forgets how to run it.<\/p>\n

\"Hands-pressing-into-bread-dough-on-a-floured-countertop-Sunday-morning-light-1024x576<\/p>\n

\n

The Fraud Feeling Nobody Talks About<\/h2>\n

Here's the part of Jordan's story that didn't make the opening paragraphs. The part that's harder to admit.<\/p>\n

Jordan didn't just feel nothing when he finished AI-assisted work. He felt something more specific than nothing. He felt like he'd gotten away with something. The client was happy. The brief was met. The output was, by every measurable standard, good. And Jordan knew -in the specific, quiet way you know things you don't say out loud- that it wasn't really his.<\/p>\n

Not entirely. Not in the way that mattered to the part of him that was paying attention.<\/p>\n

He kept using the tools, because of course he did. They made him faster, more capable, more competitive. His productivity went up. His value to employers went up. By every external signal, he was flourishing. And underneath all of that, so quietly it was easy to ignore, something was asking:\u00a0but what can you actually do?<\/em><\/p>\n

So sometimes, not always, but sometimes, he'd write something the long way. Draft an email<\/a> without prompting the AI first. Work through a brief by hand before running it through the tool. Not because anyone asked him to. Not because it produced better results -often it didn't- but because he needed to know he still could. As if the long way was a kind of penance. As if doing it himself was proof against something he couldn't quite name.<\/p>\n

This is the part nobody talks about publicly, because it doesn't have a clean resolution and the internet has limited patience for unresolved things. But it is perhaps the most honest question the AI era has put to Jordan's generation, and quietly, to all of us:<\/p>\n

If the output is indistinguishable, does it matter how it was made? And if it doesn't matter to anyone else, why does it still feel like it matters to you?<\/em><\/p>\n

You could argue -and many people do, convincingly- that using the best available tools is simply what competence looks like in every era. The accountant who switched from a ledger to a spreadsheet didn't mourn the arithmetic. The photographer who moved from film to digital didn't apologise for not developing by hand. Tools change. Adapting is intelligence, not cheating.<\/p>\n

And yet. There is something in Jordan that won't fully accept that argument, even when he makes it himself. Some version of him that keeps asking whether expanding what you can produce with AI is the same thing as expanding what you can do. Whether being more productive is the same as being more capable. Whether the skill you didn't develop because the tool was faster is a loss, even if nobody -including you- can see the gap it left.<\/p>\n

Who judges? There's no court for this. No performance review that measures the atrophy of the thing you didn't practice. No external standard that distinguishes the person who can do the work from the person who can direct the tool that does it. The line keeps moving, and nobody officially announced where it went.<\/p>\n

So Jordan keeps baking bread. Not because bread is important. Because when he stands in his kitchen on a Sunday morning with flour on his hands and the dough doing something unexpected, there is no tool between him and the result. Whatever comes out of that oven is entirely, uncomplicatedly his. Good or bad, dense or light, it is the product of his hands and his attention and nothing else.<\/p>\n

It doesn't resolve the question. He still uses AI on Monday morning. He's still not sure where the line is, or whether there even is one, or whether the discomfort he feels is wisdom or just nostalgia for a slower world dressed up as principle.<\/p>\n

But he keeps asking. And maybe that's the thing -not the answer, not the resolution, not the peace that doesn't quite come- but the refusal to stop asking. The insistence that the question matters even when nobody else is watching and the output looks the same either way.<\/p>\n

Though it's worth saying clearly: not everyone asks. And that's not a failure.<\/p>\n

Some people pick up the tool and feel nothing but capability. No guilt, no stewing, no Sunday morning penance baking. The question of authenticity simply doesn't present itself to them the same way, and they're not morally deficient for that. They may be wired differently. They may have already settled something internally that others are still negotiating. They may just have a healthier relationship with the idea of tools than the rest of us do. Whatever the reason, their ease is legitimate. We can't all be the same, and the fact that some people feel this acutely doesn't make it universal, or make those who don't feel it somehow less honest.<\/p>\n

But for the ones who do feel it -and there are more of them than public discourse suggests, because this particular discomfort doesn't get shared in professional settings where everyone is performing confidence about the future- the feeling deserves something better than \"get over it\" or \"you're being irrational.\" It deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.<\/p>\n

What those people are looking for, usually, isn't a verdict. They're not asking to be told they're right or wrong to feel the friction. They're looking for something closer to grace. A way to keep going that doesn't require them to either fully embrace the tool and silence the discomfort, or fully reject the tool and pretend the world isn't changing. A third path. A hybrid. A version of themselves they can look at steadily without flinching.<\/p>\n

The French have a phrase for the kind of looking that makes this possible:\u00a0le deuxi\u00e8me regard.<\/em> The second glance. Not the first impression, which is always reactive, always a little panicked, always reaching for a verdict. The second one -slower, quieter, after the initial shock of the question has settled. The one where you see the same thing differently. Not resolved. Not at peace necessarily. But held in a way that doesn't require you to be someone other than who you are.<\/p>\n

Jordan hasn't arrived there yet. He might not for a while. But the bread is part of it. The bouldering is part of it. Not because they solve the question but because they give him somewhere to be entirely himself while he figures out -slowly, without a deadline, without a judge- what kind of person he is choosing to be in a world that keeps changing the terms.<\/p>\n

That's the work. Not the output. Not the productivity metric. The slow, private, often uncomfortable work of deciding who you are in relation to the tools you use, the shortcuts you take, the things you let go of and the things you insist on keeping.<\/p>\n

Nobody grades it. Nobody sees it. It's just you, and the question, and whatever you can live with when the room is quiet.<\/p>\n

\n

Chosen Difficulty Is Not the Same as Suffering<\/h2>\n

None of this is an argument for making life hard for its own sake. The distinction that matters is between difficulty\u00a0imposed<\/em> from outside -poverty, illness, injustice, the kind of hardship nobody should romanticize - and difficulty chosen<\/em>\u00a0as a way of staying honest with yourself about what you can actually do.<\/p>\n

Chosen difficulty has a completely different neurological signature. When you decide to attempt something genuinely hard -learning a language, building a piece of furniture, training for a race you're not sure you can finish- you're setting up the precise conditions the dopamine system needs. Uncertain outcome. Real stakes. A gap between where you are and where you want to be. The brain treats that gap as a problem to be solved, and it rewards the solving with something that the frictionless version of the same experience simply cannot produce.<\/p>\n

This is why people who run marathons don't just run them once for the medal. Why gardeners keep growing things even after the tenth crop failure. Why the bread you baked yourself, a little dense, slightly uneven, will always taste better than the identical loaf from the bakery three doors down. The effort is not incidental to the pleasure. The effort is the mechanism that creates the pleasure.<\/p>\n

So what does this mean practically, in a world where more and more of the effort is being taken off your plate?<\/p>\n

It means the people who figure out how to introduce meaningful challenge into their lives -not as a workaround or a hobby, but as a genuine ongoing practice- will have a significant neurological advantage over those who don't. Not in productivity, not in output. In something harder to measure and more important: the basic experience of finding life satisfying.<\/p>\n

\n

Jordan's Bread and the Bigger Principle<\/h2>\n

Jordan Takahashi's bread has gotten considerably less bad. He bakes on Sunday mornings now, experiments with different flours, keeps notes on what worked. The bouldering has progressed from the green problems to the reds, which are humbling in a way he describes as \"the most useful feeling I've had in years.\"<\/p>\n

And then there are the other moments. The ones he didn't expect and doesn't fully know how to talk about yet.<\/p>\n

A few months ago he was working on a campaign<\/a> brief -a real one, for a client he cared about- and he spent the better part of an evening not just prompting the AI but genuinely wrestling with it. Pushing back on outputs that were close but wrong. Reframing the angle three times. Asking it to try something he'd never seen done before, in a register he could only half-describe, chasing something he felt but couldn't yet name. And when it finally came back -the fourth attempt, restructured, with a line in the second paragraph that landed like something inevitable- he sat back in his chair and felt something he hadn't felt at his desk in a long time.<\/p>\n

Pride. Actual pride. The quiet, lit-up kind.<\/p>\n

Not because the AI had done it. Because\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0had called it into existence. The brief was his idea, shaped by his instinct, refined by his dissatisfaction, and finally pulled into being by his refusal to accept the versions that were merely fine. The AI was the instrument. The vision was Jordan's. The effort -different in form, but genuinely effortful- was his. And the result was something that hadn't existed before he'd pushed hard enough for it.<\/p>\n

That moment didn't resolve the fraud feeling. It coexisted with it. Both things were true simultaneously: the guilt of the shortcut and the exhilaration of the craft. The atrophy of one skill and the strange new growth of another. The bread made by hand on Sunday, uncomplicatedly his, and the campaign<\/a> brief made on Wednesday through something harder to name but no less real.<\/p>\n

So he doesn't choose. That's what he figured out, eventually, at 26, without anyone telling him it was allowed.<\/p>\n

He chose both.<\/p>\n

The bread is still his. The brief is also his. The climbing wall gives him back something the desk takes away. And the desk -on the good days, the days when the prompting is precise and the result is genuinely surprising- gives him something the climbing wall can't: the feeling that his imagination has range he hasn't fully mapped yet. That there are things he can summon that haven't been summoned before.<\/p>\n

The boredom that started all of this -that Sunday afternoon flatness, that \"like I'd watched someone else do it\" feeling- hasn't disappeared entirely. It comes back sometimes. But it doesn't stay the way it used to. It gets interrupted by the bread, by the red bouldering problems, by the occasional Wednesday evening when something comes back from the tool and it's unexpectedly, undeniably alive, and Jordan knows exactly why.<\/p>\n

He called for it. It came. That counts.<\/p>\n

And sometimes -not often, but sometimes- it's more than pride. Sometimes the thing that comes back is so unexpectedly, precisely true that it breaks something open. Jordan doesn't talk about this easily. But there have been evenings when a piece came back from the tool and he read it and felt his eyes sting, and he sat there for a moment not entirely sure what had happened.<\/p>\n

It matters that he'd felt numb before those moments. Genuinely flat -not sad, not struggling, just absent from himself in the way that too much frictionless living produces. The kind of numb where you finish things and feel nothing and wonder distantly if that's just what adult life is, this low hum of adequate and fine and moving forward.<\/p>\n

And then something comes back that he summoned, that carries something he intended but couldn't have written alone, and it cracks through. The tears -when they come- aren't about the AI. They're not even really about the work. They're about finding out you still have that place in you. That it didn't close over. That the numbness was a season, not a sentence.<\/p>\n

You can't cry from nothing. You can only cry from somewhere you care about, somewhere real, somewhere that still has a nerve ending attached. So when it happens -when the thing you called into being moves you- that's not weakness or sentimentality or confusion about what the tool did and didn't do.<\/p>\n

That's proof.<\/p>\n

Proof that the intention was genuine. That the effort, strange and rerouted as it was, still travelled somewhere that mattered. That underneath the questions about authenticity and authorship and what counts and who judges -underneath all of it- there is still someone there who wants to make something true.<\/p>\n

And still can.<\/p>\n

He hasn't heard of the IKEA effect. He'd never use the phrase \"dopamine system calibration.\" But somewhere between a climbing wall in Brampton and a kitchen covered in flour and a laptop open late on a Wednesday, he found what the neuroscientists have been trying to explain in academic language for thirty years.<\/p>\n

The brain does not run on comfort. It runs on the gap between where you are and where you're trying to get. And the gap, it turns out, can open in more directions than anyone told you. In the bread. In the rock wall. In the fourth attempt at a brief that finally -finally- says the true thing.<\/p>\n

The effort didn't vanish. It moved.<\/p>\n

And in the moving, it became something Jordan can live with. Something he can, on the good days, even love.<\/p>\n

\n

Maurice Joseph writes about technology, the brain, and what it means to be human at\u00a0inthacity.com\/blog<\/a>. If you found this useful, the next article in this series - on the surprising psychology of voluntary hardship and why people are paying good money to feel broke - is worth reading too.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"A-bouldering-gym-wall-at-night-one-climber-mid-route-concentration-visible-1024x576<\/p>\n

The numbness, it turns out, was never the whole story. Underneath it, patient and quiet, something was still waiting to be called.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Sources & Further Reading<\/h3>\n

- Schultz, W., Dayan, P. & Montague, P.R. (1997).\u00a0A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward.<\/em>\u00a0Science, 275(5306).\u00a0Read the paper \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

- Treadway, M.T. & Zald, D.H. (2012).\u00a0Dopamine Impacts Your Willingness to Work.<\/em>\u00a0Vanderbilt University.\u00a0Read the study \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

- Norton, M.I., Mochon, D. & Ariely, D. (2012).\u00a0The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love.<\/em>\u00a0Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453-460.\u00a0Read the paper \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

- Montag, C. & Diefenbach, S. (2018). Cited in:\u00a0The Dopamine Deficit: Why Success May Feel Empty.<\/em>\u00a0Psychology Today.\u00a0Read the article \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Your Questions, Answered Plainly<\/h3>\n

Is this saying I should make my life harder on purpose?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not exactly. There's a real difference between suffering imposed on you and challenge you choose. Nobody should romanticize hardship. But yes -choosing to attempt things that are genuinely difficult, with uncertain outcomes, appears to be something the brain actually needs to function well. A little friction, chosen freely, is different from a hard life.<\/p>\n

What if I try hard at things and still don't feel satisfied?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That's worth paying attention to. Motivational anhedonia -the blunted capacity to feel satisfaction from effort- can be a symptom of clinical depression, not just a lifestyle issue. If the effort-reward cycle consistently feels broken regardless of what you try, talking to someone is the right move, not just adding more challenges to your week.<\/p>\n

Does this mean video games or creative hobbies \"count\"?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, genuinely -as long as they involve real challenge, real skill development, and the possibility of failure. A game you play on the easiest setting doesn't do much. A game you're trying hard to actually beat, or an instrument you're genuinely trying to learn, absolutely activates the same systems. The brain doesn't distinguish between \"serious\" and \"recreational\" effort. It just responds to the gap.<\/p>\n

Is this why retirement is sometimes hard, even for people who wanted it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly why. The research on retirement transitions consistently shows that the difficulty isn't usually financial or social -it's the loss of structured challenge, of problems that need solving, of a reason to show up and try. The people who navigate it best are the ones who rebuild that structure deliberately, in whatever form suits them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jordan finished the AI-assisted brief, sent it, got praised for it, and felt absolutely nothing. Neuroscience has a precise explanation for why \u2014 and it has unsettling implications for a generation that grew up with frictionless everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":31959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[270],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/A-young-man-at-a-laptop-late-at-night-face-lit-by-screen-glow-expression-distant-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31954"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31977,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31954\/revisions\/31977"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inthacity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}