I spent three hours standing in the freezing rain outside a closed trattoria in Trastevere back in 2018 because a “top-rated” travel app told me it was open, and that was the day I deleted about 40% of the junk on my phone. Most travel apps are built by people who want to sell you …
It was 11:42 PM on a Tuesday in October 2022 when I realized my entire intellectual life was a lie. I was staring at a conflict error in Obsidian. 400 of my ‘permanent’ notes had somehow glitched during a sync, leaving me with nothing but strings of garbled code and broken backlinks. I sat there …
The 40-hour workweek is a scam. It was invented a century ago for factory workers who stood at assembly lines, and yet here we are, sitting in ergonomic chairs staring at pixels, pretending that the same math applies to us. It doesn’t. I realized this back in 2018 when I was working at a mid-sized …
Three years ago, I spent an entire Saturday—roughly eleven hours—building the ‘perfect’ dashboard in Notion. I had linked databases for my reading list, a weather widget I never looked at, and a gallery view for my ‘goals’ that featured high-resolution photos of mountains I will never climb. By 10 PM, I felt like a god …
I spent three hours last Tuesday archiving 142 emails just so I could see that little picture of a hot air balloon on my Gmail screen. It felt great for exactly nine seconds. Then I realized I hadn’t actually written the project proposal that was due at 5 PM. I work in logistics—I deal with …
I remember sitting in my kitchen at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday in June 2022, staring at a screen filled with purple and blue emojis. I was building a “perfect” Notion dashboard for a local community garden fundraiser I was helping out with. I spent probably forty hours that week setting up relational databases, rollups, …
I am staring at a pixelated version of my boss’s left nostril and I can feel my soul leaving my body. We are forty-two minutes into a “sync” that could have been a three-sentence Slack message. I look at the gallery view. Fourteen other people are doing the exact same thing: nodding performatively while clearly …
I remember sitting in a cubicle back in 2017 working for a logistics firm in suburban Ohio. It was 2:15 PM on a Tuesday. I had finished every single one of my tasks for the day—hell, for the week—by lunch. I had two options: ask for more work (which would just be busywork) or sit …