I’ve tried approximately 347 productivity systems in my lifetime. I’ve bullet journaled, time-blocked, and pomodoro-ed my way through countless workdays. I’ve downloaded apps that turn productivity into a game, apps that lock me out of social media, and apps that supposedly analyze my “focus patterns” (which, as it turns out, don’t exist). The result? My to-do list is longer than ever, and I’ve added “feel guilty about productivity apps I paid for but don’t use”…

I didn’t expect to spend three grand and ten days of my life learning how to teach other people to sit still and breathe. But there I was, in a sweaty yoga studio in Bali, surrounded by twenty other Westerners in various stages of spiritual awakening, all of us furiously taking notes on the correct way to instruct someone to do nothing. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Not entirely, anyway. Let me back up…

I was driving home from work last Tuesday, minding my own business, when my music app’s algorithm committed what I can only describe as a personal attack against my eardrums. After playing a perfectly acceptable run of indie rock tracks I genuinely enjoy, it suddenly pivoted to a country-pop crossover song that made me physically recoil and lunge for the skip button like it was a life preserver in shark-infested waters. “Why on earth would…

It started, like most of my questionable scientific endeavors, at approximately 3:17 AM on a Tuesday. I’d been reading about evolutionary psychology while simultaneously reviewing some paleontological journals (look, my brain doesn’t do the whole “focus on one thing” very well), when I had what Mei later described as “another one of your concerning mental connections.” “What if,” I whispered to my half-empty coffee mug, “our personalities aren’t just random collections of traits but evolutionary…

It started innocently enough. A dinner party at my friend Laura’s place back in 2018. I brought a bottle of mediocre red wine like any normal person would. Nothing fancy, just something I’d grabbed from Tesco on the way over that wouldn’t make me look completely cheap. “Oh, wine! Thanks,” Laura said, adding it to a collection that already included four other identical bottles of Merlot. Rookie mistake on my part. I remember looking around…

It started with an itch, really. Not the metaphorical itch of scientific curiosity—though that certainly followed—but an actual, physical irritation three weeks into my decision to stop shaving. Mei had been visiting her parents in Seattle, and I’d embraced what Josh calls my “control group regression” (the tendency for my personal hygiene experiments to flourish whenever accountability leaves town). Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, scratching absently at my increasingly substantial facial hair, I…

I got another one of those emails yesterday. You know the type – starts with “Dear [First Name]” but instead of actually using my name, it literally says “[First Name]” because someone forgot to check their mail merge settings. Or worse, they call me “Jennifer” when my name is absolutely not Jennifer. Not even close, actually. It was from a company I’d bought running shoes from about six months ago. The email cheerfully began: “Dear…

It all started when I was seven and stumbled across my dad’s old physics textbook. There was this diagram of sound waves that showed them as nothing but particles bumping into each other, creating compressions and rarefactions in the air. I remember staring at it, then looking up at my mother who was practicing Debussy on our out-of-tune upright piano, and thinking, “Wait, that’s IT? That beautiful thing is just… air getting shoved around?” This…