It started with a careless comment at my brother’s wedding. His new mother-in-law—the type who reads self-help books exclusively and believes crystals can fix national debt—cornered me by the hors d’oeuvres. “Jamie,” she said, examining me through narrowed eyes, “you’re carrying so much emotional baggage! I can practically see the weight of it bending space-time around you.” Now look, I’m used to being psychoanalyzed at family functions (hazard of being perpetually single in your thirties…
Here we go again. Another day, another massive data breach, another carefully crafted corporate apology that lands with all the sincerity of a politician caught with their pants down. Last week, TechGiant Inc. (not their real name, but you know exactly which company I’m talking about) finally admitted that hackers had accessed the personal data of 37 million users. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and for the really unlucky ones, partial credit card details and location…
I’d been looking forward to this wellness retreat for months. Six days of digital detox in a converted farmhouse somewhere in rural Wales – no phones, no laptops, no Wi-Fi. Just meditation, yoga, healthy food, and reconnecting with myself. The brochure promised transformation. A reset. “Return to your life refreshed and recentered,” it said, alongside photos of serene-looking people in linen clothing gazing thoughtfully at mountains. What it didn’t mention was the itching. The mental…
I always thought I had a pretty solid grasp on human creativity. The paintings in museums? Expressions of our aesthetic sensibilities. The symphonies that move us to tears? Manifestations of our emotional depth. The skyscrapers puncturing clouds? Triumphs of our problem-solving prowess. Then I read Geoffrey Miller’s “The Mating Mind,” and everything went a bit… sideways. It started as most of my intellectual rabbit holes do—with a seemingly innocent question that popped into my head…
I’ve always prided myself on being financially responsible. Not in a “I’ve got six months of emergency savings and max out my pension contributions” kind of way (though honestly, good for you if that’s your situation). More in the basic “I generally know how much money I have and don’t spend more than that” sense. Pretty low bar, right? Well, automated payments have a funny way of making even that modest achievement feel like scaling…
I spent about three hours and forty-two minutes of my life on the planet, trapped in what I can only describe as the ninth circle of customer service hell. My internet connection- an service I pay for monthly- had decided to transform from high-speed to dial-up, and I thought that calling for help would be a good idea. After performing the rituals of turning the router off and on a couple of times, unplugging random…
You know that feeling when you’ve spent years just sort of… existing with whatever free promotional water bottle happened to be closest to your hand? That was me until about six months ago, when I suddenly developed what my partner Rob calls “the world’s most pointless obsession.” It started innocently enough. I was at the gym, desperately sucking the last drops from my ancient plastic bottle – you know, the kind that’s been through the…
I was standing in the lab, pipette in hand, when it hit me. The samples I’d been studying for months weren’t just fascinating from a microbiological perspective—they were teaching me something profound about my professional life. “Hey, Mei,” I called across the lab to my girlfriend, who was deeply focused on her quantum computing models, “did you ever notice how Dave from Marketing is basically a textbook example of a social parasite?” She didn’t look…
There was a time, not long ago, when my phone was just that; a phone. It called people. It texted. Sometimes, if I felt very adventurous, I would use the calculator. My relationship with this device was very easy; I used it and it waited quietly like a well-trained gadget, doing nothing extra. Those days of simple life are gone and turned to dust. My current phone has the attitude of an attention seeking toddler…
I distinctly remember the moment I became fascinated with memory itself. I was rifling through my parents’ photo albums (seeking embarrassing material to defend myself against my mother’s habit of telling my girlfriend about my childhood disasters), when I found a picture of myself at age six standing proudly next to a science fair volcano. The problem? I have incredibly detailed memories of that science fair – the smell of vinegar and baking soda, the…