Bad Vibes Only: (and Other Things I Bring to the Table)

People are messy, unpredictable, and prone to taking things personally, on account of being persons.

The irony is that for all the personality a brand is said to have, all the hundreds of millions of dollars that are poured into the theater of personification, a brand is nothing but a rigid set of standards: a logo paired with standard fonts and colors and tagline protected by armies of litigators, copyrights and trademarks. A brand is nothing but

while I’m not sure what exactly late-stage capitalism is, I’ve read enough headlines to tell me that I think we’re here.

I’ve spent treasured hours of my own life watching speaker after speaker smile into their professional video setups in their expensive homes, encouraging people who struggle to spell the word “entrepreneur” (myself included) to ditch their day job and work for themselves.

I’m sure it feels like anyone can do it when you have a self-reported six-figure affiliate income from your nearly one million followers. But that math doesn’t work for people with just a few hundred or even a few thousand followers. The idea that there is a market for every person on this livestream to be an online teacher of their own course mate

creative and engaging and compassionate, and spending time with their family always makes me want to be a mom who does stuff instead of a mom who just watches stuff on Netflix.

The universe has plenty of rough edges, but we expect to be able to dodge them with the right accessories, the right education, the right situation. As parents, we’re supposed to be the buffer between those rough edges and our children.

The writer and rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author of the famed When Bad Things Happen to Good People, in writing about things just like this, said, “Why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can’t we let the universe have a few rough edges?”

Most of parenting is decidedly dull; a long slog of laundry and meals and wiping surfaces you just wiped, surfaces that seem destined to hold on to the grime and stickiness of life, surfaces that exist just to keep you busy, keep you wiping. Maybe it’s this monotony that keeps us from crumbling under the weight of this uncertainty, that anything ca