About two-thirds of the way through it, the people in front of my group started to mosh. These were big, sweaty men and they were throwing their bodies around with purposeful carelessness. More than once I jerked back, terrified a head-bang would break my nose. It only took a couple minutes for me to know they were ruining my experience. But my

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I used to believe that growing older and wiser would mean becoming increasingly attuned to the moods and thoughts of other people so that I could act accordingly. Only recently have I genuinely started seeing that way of being as a hindrance, or at least a complicating factor, to engaging in adult relationships.

Technology babies us all the time. Putting aside the marginal good these apps do for people who rely on them, their ads are clearly focused on a capable, upper-middle class that’s learned to take its neuroticism a little too seriously. They exploit what probably started as compassion-driven conversation about burnout into a recursive push for... See more

I think it’s less about the specifics and more about understanding what it means to assert—but not baby—yourself, given who you are and what you need.

I baby myself by assuming I can’t go in alone; I baby my friends by assuming they can’t handle me asserting needs in opposition to theirs.

It makes me sound a little like a boot-strapping, we-can-do-hard-things motivational speaker who is secretly a psycho and also had it easy their whole life. Obviously those people are annoying. But I find the overly sensitive, we-don’t-have-to-do-hard-things counter-narrative grating in its own way. I think a lot of us do—I hear just as much... See more

Unfortunately I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to navigate social situations using a tawdry, homespun radar for what everyone’s thinking and feeling at a given time, and instead of transforming me into an intuitive genius, it’s made me (at times) a neurotic little freak. To be fair, I love the neurotic freaks in my life, but together we can make... See more

Managing your social life requires self-knowledge: Will you be in the mood next week? Will they be mad if you cancel? Will you have fun tonight even though you’re dragging your feet? The trick to answering these questions, I’m finding, is not technology or mind-reading or asking for surpluses of empathy. It’s to stop being a huge baby.

It only recently occurred to me that what we actually needed was to grow up—get to know ourselves, learn to communicate. Trying to weasel out of all that with an app is, well, basically the entire value prop of Silicon Valley, but more importantly antithetical to growth.