#95: Are you baby? A litmus test

The other day some friends and I were reminiscing about an app idea we had years ago that would allow you to “blind cancel” on your friends. That is, flag if you were open to canceling a plan, which your friend would only see if they also flagged it. Basically, it was Tinder for bailing. This was our ultimate dream: an official, guilt-free conduit ... See more

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 self-c... See more

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.

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 comfo... 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.

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.

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. 

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

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.