Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Four hundred strangers standing in a gymnasium wearing lanyards and the same expression, which I can only describe as aggressively approachable. That was my college freshman orientation. Everybody smi...
Read article →(article-start) The Loneliest Year of Your Life Is Probably 25. You Are Too Old for Your College Friends and Too Young for Your Adult Ones. There's a specific kind of Friday night that only exists whe...
Read article →Last week I stood in the hardware store for forty-five minutes trying to figure out which caulk to buy. There were seventeen kinds. Seventeen. My father, a man who once re-tiled an entire bathroom on...
Read article →You Built a Following of 50,000 People and Still Eat Dinner Alone Every Night. Influence Is Not Connection. Fifty thousand followers. I can say that number now without the little dopamine hit it used...
Read article →You Worked 80-Hour Weeks for a Promotion That Gave You a Title, a Raise, and Nobody to Celebrate With The email came at 6:47 PM on a Friday. Subject line: Congratulations, Senior Vice President. I rea...
Read article →Therapists Have the Highest Burnout Rate of Any Profession and Nobody Asks How the Listener Is Doing My therapist cried once during a session. Not about my stuff. About hers. She caught herself after...
Read article →The data on executive loneliness is unambiguous and counterintuitive in equal measure. A 2012 survey conducted by the Center for Leadership Development and Research at Stanford Graduate School of Busi...
Read article →(article-start) The Loneliest People in the Room Are Often the Funniest. Making Others Laugh Became the Only Way to Stay in the Conversation Without Revealing Anything. I figured out the trick early....
Read article →Infertility Is Grief on a Monthly Cycle. Hope, Then Loss, Then Hope Again. For Years. The pregnancy test sits on the bathroom counter like a verdict. Two minutes. That is how long the instructions say...
Read article →On a Tuesday in March, I went to the doctor and found out the pregnancy was over. On Wednesday, I had a procedure. On Thursday, I bled through my clothes at the grocery store and drove home gripping t...
Read article →Three weeks after my daughter was born, I sat on the bathroom floor at 2 AM with a breast pump in one hand and my phone in the other, scrolling through Instagram photos of women who had apparently fig...
Read article →Stay-at-Home Parents Have a Depression Rate of 28 Percent. Higher Than Any Occupation Including First Responders. I want to throw a number at you and let it sit. Twenty-eight percent. That is the depr...
Read article →(article-start) Nobody Tells You That Chronic Illness Is Lonely. The Healthy Friends Slowly Disappear. The Invitations Stop. The Explanations Get Exhausting. The first friend you lose is the one who s...
Read article →Christine Miserandino was sitting in a diner with her best friend in 2003. They had known each other since childhood. Her friend asked her what it was like to have lupus. Not the clinical version. The...
Read article →(article-start) Chronic Pain Patients Are Not Drug Seekers. They Are Relief Seekers in a System That Decided Their Pain Was Suspicious. I want to tell you about the worst doctor's appointment of my li...
Read article →The average time to diagnosis for fibromyalgia in the United States is 4.8 years. I want to sit with that number for a moment because it represents something more than a bureaucratic inefficiency. It...
Read article →The text was already typed out. Girls' night, finally! Can't wait to see everyone. And then my body did the thing it does. The dull ache that starts in my joints and radiates outward, the fatigue that...
Read article →Your Phone Has Not Made a Sound in 72 Hours and You Cannot Decide If That Is Peace or Abandonment I noticed it on a Tuesday. Not because something happened, but because nothing did. My phone sat on th...
Read article →Last February, my car broke down at 11:15 PM on a Tuesday in a parking lot off the highway. It was thirty-eight degrees and raining sideways and my phone was at nine percent. I opened my contacts and...
Read article →The three dots appeared at 9:47 PM. I know the exact time because I had been staring at my phone for twenty minutes, which is a thing I will admit to you but would never admit to the person on the oth...
Read article →Six billion dollars. That is roughly what the global telecommunications industry invested in 5G infrastructure in a single quarter of 2023. Satellites. Fiber optic cables threaded under oceans. Towers...
Read article →Read 2:47 PM. That is all it says. Two words, a time stamp, and the quiet devastation of knowing that someone saw what you wrote and chose silence. Not the silence of being busy. Not the silence of no...
Read article →Nobody sat me down and explained the transition. One day I was the baby, the one whose mistakes were funny, whose tantrums were chalked up to being little, whose bad decisions were somebody else's pro...
Read article →My mom called at 6:14 AM on a Wednesday because she could not figure out how to refill her prescription online. My daughter threw up at school at 9:30 and needed to be picked up. My dad's cardiologist...
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