The language issues are indicative of the bigger problem facing the AI Pin, ChatGPT, and frankly, every other AI product out there: you can’t see how it works, so it’s impossible to figure out how to use it. AI boosters say that’s the point, that the tech just works and you shouldn’t have to know how to use it, but oh boy, is that not the world we live in. Meanwhile, our phones are constant feedback machines — colored buttons telling us what to tap, instant activity every time we touch or pinch or scroll. You can see your options and what happens when you pick one. With AI, you don’t get any of that. Using the AI Pin feels like wishing on a star: you just close your eyes and hope for the best. Most of the time, nothing happens.

A script is words on paper. A film is an interpretive realization of those words as a series of images. But it’s even more than that. Just think of what it takes for words on paper to become a film: The interpretation of the meaning of those words by the actors who deliver them (through not only the words themselves, but body language and other non-verbal cues). Sound, which includes music, sound effects, etc. Visuals, which includes special effects, costume designers, makeup folks, etc. Much, much more. It may seem obvious, but a screenplay is not a film. It’s a tool in service of making a film.

in making websites, the only source of truth is the website people access and use. Everything else — from design system components to Figma mocks to Miro boards to research data et. al. — is merely a tool in service of the final form.

the screenplay is not what moviegoers ultimately experience. They come to watch a film, not read a script. As individual artisans involved in the process of making websites, it’s easy to lose sight of this fact. Often more care is poured into the deliverable of your specialized discipline, with blame for quality in the final product impersonalized

Too often websites suffer from the situation where everyone is responsible for their own little part in making the website but nobody’s responsible for the experience of the person who has to use it.

There’s an art to the screenplay and its form, but that shouldn’t be lost on why it exists in the first place: to make a film. Same for the disciplines involved in making websites. Too much care and craft can be sunk into the artifacts of our own craft while forgetting the whole they serve. Artifacts made in service of the final form are not to be confused with the final form itself. People come to watch films, not read scripts. People come to use websites, not look at mocks.

Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”

Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.

Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking

“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”

We might think of the shifting relationship of human beings to the natural world in the terms offered by German sociologist Gerd-Günter Voß, who has traced our movement through three different models of the “conduct of life.”

The first, and for much of human history the only conduct of life, is what he calls the traditional. Your actions within the traditional conduct of life proceed from social and familial circumstances, from what is thus handed down to you. In such a world it is reasonable for family names to be associated with trades, trades that will be passed down from father to son: Smith, Carpenter, Miller.

But the rise of the various forces that we call “modernity” led to the emergence of the strategic conduct of life: a life with a plan, with certain goals — to get into law school, to become a cosmetologist, to get a corner office.

thanks largely to totalizing technology’s formation of a world in which, to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels, “all that is solid melts into air,” the strategic model of conduct is replaced by the situational. Instead of being systematic planners, we become agile improvisers: If the job market is bad for your college major, you turn a side hustle into a business. But because you know that your business may get disrupted by the tech industry, you don’t bother thinking long-term; your current gig might disappear at any time, but another will surely present itself, which you will assess upon its arrival.

The movement through these three forms of conduct, whatever benefits it might have, makes our relations with nature increasingly instrumental. We can see this shift more clearly when looking at our changing experience of time

Within the traditional conduct of life, it is necessary to take stewardly care of the resources required for the exercise of a craft or a profession, as these get passed on from generation to generation.

But in the progression from the traditional to the strategic to the situational conduct of life, continuity of preservation becomes less valuable than immediacy of appropriation: We need more lithium today, and merely hope to find greater reserves — or a suitable replacement — tomorrow. This revaluation has the effect of shifting the place of the natural order from something intrinsic to our practices to something extrinsic. The whole of nature becomes what economists tellingly call an externality.

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule.

all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside

In his exceptionally ambitious book The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016) and in a series of related essays and interviews, Hui argues, as the title of his book suggests, that we go wrong when we assume that there is one question concerning technology, the question, that is universal in scope and uniform in shape. Perhaps the questions are different in Hong Kong than in the Black Forest. Similarly, the distinction Heidegger draws between ancient and modern technology — where with modern technology everything becomes a mere resource — may not universally hold.

Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it; Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.

I think Hui’s cosmotechnics, generously leavened with the ironic humor intrinsic to Daoism, provides a genuine Way — pun intended — beyond the limitations of the Standard Critique of Technology. I say this even though I am not a Daoist; I am, rather, a Christian. But it should be noted that Daoism is both daojiao, an organized religion, and daojia, a philosophical tradition. It is daojia that Hui advocates, which makes the wisdom of Daoism accessible and attractive to a Christian like me. Indeed, I believe that elements of daojia are profoundly consonant with Christianity, and yet underdeveloped in the Christian tradition, except in certain modes of Franciscan spirituality, for reasons too complex to get into here.

this technological Daoism as an embodiment of daojia, is accessible to people of any religious tradition or none. It provides a comprehensive and positive account of the world and one’s place in it that makes a different approach to technology more plausible and compelling. The SCT tends only to gesture in the direction of a model of human flourishing, evokes it mainly by implication, whereas Yuk Hui’s Daoist model gives an explicit and quite beautiful account.

The application of Daoist principles is most obvious, as the above exposition suggests, for “users” who would like to graduate to the status of “non-users”: those who quietly turn their attention to more holistic and convivial technologies, or who simply sit or walk contemplatively. But in the interview I quoted from earlier, Hui says, “Some have quipped that what I am speaking about is Daoist robots or organic AI” — and this needs to be more than a quip. Peter Thiel’s longstanding attempt to make everyone a disciple of René Girard is a dead end. What we need is a Daoist culture of coders, and people devoted to “action without acting” making decisions about lithium mining.

Tools that do not contribute to the Way will neither be worshipped nor despised. They will simply be left to gather dust as the people choose the tools that will guide them in the path of contentment and joy: utensils to cook food, devices to make clothes. Of course, the food of one village will differ from that of another, as will the clothing. Those who follow the Way will dwell among the “ten thousand things” of this world — what we call nature — in a certain manner that cannot be specified legally: Verse 18 of the Tao says that when virtue arises only from rules, that is a sure sign that the Way is not present and active. A cosmotechnics is a living thing, always local in the specifics of its emergence in ways that cannot be specified in advance.

It is from the ten thousand things that we learn how to live among the ten thousand things; and our choice of tools will be guided by what we have learned from that prior and foundational set of relations. This is cosmotechnics.

Multiplicity avoids the universalizing, totalizing character of technopoly. The adherents of technopoly, Hui writes, “wishfully believ[e] that the world process will stamp out differences and diversities” and thereby achieve a kind of techno-secular “theodicy,” a justification of the ways of technopoly to its human subjects. But the idea of multiple cosmotechnics is also necessary, Hui believes, in order to avoid the simply delusional attempt to find “a way out of modernity” by focusing on the indigenous or biological “Other.” An aggressive hostility to modernity and a fetishizing of pre-modernity is not the Daoist way.

“I believe that to overcome modernity without falling back into war and fascism, it is necessary to reappropriate modern technology through the renewed framework of a cosmotechnics.” His project “doesn’t refuse modern technology, but rather looks into the possibility of different technological futures.”

“Thinking rooted in the earthy virtue of place is the motor of cosmotechnics. However, for me, this discourse on locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the local and a new understanding of history.”

Always Coming Home illustrates cosmotechnics in a hundred ways. Consider, for instance, information storage and retrieval. At one point we meet the archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge in the village of Wakwaha-na. A visitor from our world is horrified to learn that while the library gives certain texts and recordings to the City of Mind, some of their documents they simply destroy. “But that’s the point of information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on — the central act of human culture.” But that is not how the librarian thinks about it. “Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it” — to practice “unhoarding.”

It is not information, but relation. This too is cosmotechnics.

a cosmotechnics is the point at which a way of life is realized through making. The point may be illustrated with reference to an ancient tale Hui offers, about an excellent butcher who explains to a duke what he calls the Dao, or “way,” of butchering. The reason he is a good butcher, he says, it not his mastery of a skill, or his reliance on superior tools. He is a good butcher because he understands the Dao: Through experience he has come to rely on his intuition to thrust the knife precisely where it does not cut through tendons or bones, and so his knife always stays sharp. The duke replies: “Now I know how to live.” Hui explains that “it is thus the question of ‘living,’ rather than that of technics, that is at the center of the story.”

my friend showed editorial work they’d done for various publications: beautiful illustrations that would accompany a feature article, a longform essay, or the like. They mentioned they didn’t really do that work any more, in part because of how tiring it was to constantly, quickly, ceaselessly produce concepts for each new piece.

our industry’s relentless investment in “artificial intelligence” means that every time a new Devin or Firefly or Sora announces itself, the rest of us have to ask how we’ll adapt this time. Dunno. Maybe it’s time we step out of that negotiation cycle, and start deciding what we want our work to look like.

I remember them talking about that work, and a phrase they used: “It requires you to be endlessly clever.”

Known as “retention editing” because of its unique ability to keep a user glued to their screen, this style features loud sound effects, fast cuts, flashing lights and zero pauses.

“It’s the Beastification of YouTube,” said Noah Kettle, co-founder of Moke Media Co., a video editing and social media monetization consultancy. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, built his reputation by creating hyper-engaging, fast-paced videos with frequent action on screen. That led smaller YouTubers and content creators to mimic his style.

Donaldson tweeted a plea to his fellow YouTubers to “get rid of the ultra fast paced/overstim era of content.” He said that in the past year, he has slowed his videos, focused more on storytelling, “let scenes breathe, yelled less” and focused on longer videos, all of which has resulted in even more views.

if content creators require fewer editing resources, it could alter the outside editing services that many content creators use.

Creating a retention edited video requires a lot of work. “Every clip in the video should be under two seconds,” said Dara Pesheva, a 17-year-old who works as a freelance video editor for social media content creators. “Every 1.3 to 1.5 seconds you have to have a new graphic or something moving, you have to [use] a lot of effects. For every image and every transition, you have to add a sound effect. You need flashing graphics, and you have to have subtitles in every video.”

TikTok has trained users to scroll away if they aren’t hooked within the first half-second, social media video editors said. This is why so many retention edited videos start with a loud bang or whoosh sound.

“People around my age can’t focus,” Pesheva said. “They have very short attention spans. They’re used to TikTok, and so editors have to adjust for Gen Z. They have to adjust to the fact that people can’t keep their attention on something for more than a second if it’s not entertaining.”

CapCut, the video editing platform owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, allows users to add catchy sounds and special effects to their videos with just a few taps. This has allowed anyone, even children, to create videos with tons of explosions, laser effects and animated text. Replicating those same effects on older video editing tools such as Adobe Premiere or After Effects could take hours and is far more complicated.

Connor Bibow, a freelance videographer in Georgia, said that it’s no surprise retention editing works so well on channels like MrBeast’s that cater to children, because the editing format is very similar to children’s cartoons. “It’s a lot of noises and bright colors,” he said.

Thavaseelen said he began leveraging retention editing after seeing MrBeast speak about it. “MrBeast is very open and transparent with his content, and he tells people what he said,” Thavaseelen said. “He tells people you have to optimize for retention. A lot of clips he puts on short form are retention edited.”

as MrBeast has cooled on the style, experts say that other creators are already beginning to follow. “There’s been a wave of creators who have now transitioned to just making hour-and-a-half videos with just them and a whiteboard,” Kettle said, “and they’re outperforming every single video that they’ve done that was optimized for attention.”

Cicero, the Syracuse University instructor, said that YouTube, like many art forms, has different styles that define different periods. Retention editing, he said, has defined the 2020 to 2024 era, but fatigue eventually sets in.“Early on, it was very easy to blow up and become a viral hit with [this type of editing], but now it’s a lot harder,” he said. “There are these waves of different trends in editing, or in fine art, or in music, where you have these different styles. Maybe retention editing is like the impressionist period for YouTube.”

A Pivot To Video tends to arrive in stages, with each stage being more expensive and producing less interesting content as things progress. Usually it goes like this: The experimentation phase, the factory phase, and the bloat phase. A great editor I worked for during the second Pivot To Video, roughly 2013-2017, who, herself worked through the first, roughly 2003-2007, described it as a massive waste of resources that wastes more resources as it becomes clearer to everyone not directly involved how much of a waste of resources it is.

It’s a fundamental issue with video as a medium that online platforms haven’t fixed and, I suspect, never will because it makes user-generated content platforms feel more professional and consistent. Like TV. The cost to produce video content always balloons as you add more people, more tools, more structure to the workflow, pushing out smaller creators and teams. And even with the pandemic lowering the barrier of entry for making video online considerably, it’s still happening again. We’re in the bloat phase now.

MrBeast, the platform’s biggest star, is spending between $3-$5 million per video right now, up from around $200,000 a video just a few years ago. To put that absolutely outrageous number in perspective, a MrBeast video is roughly the same cost per video as any episode from the first five seasons of Game Of Thrones.

Guides last year were saying you had to capture viewers in the first three seconds. I’ve read a few guides from this year that are now saying hooking a TikTok user has to happen in the first 1.5 seconds. There’s an oft-quoted “shoeshine boy” theory of markets, usually attributed to Joe Kennedy in the late 1920s, who said that when the boy shining his shoes had stock tips, he knew the market was about to collapse. Well, here’s a similar rule for digital video: If you’re trying to optimize your video in microseconds, the video pivot is probably already over.

YouTube is laser-focused on capturing the world’s televisions. In fact, the platform’s CEO, Neal Mohan announced yesterday that the platform is adding even more features for YouTube’s TV app. And TikTok, if it’s not banned or whatever, is trying to use its massive inventory of short-form video content to prop up both a search engine and an e-commerce operation. And we haven’t even talked about Meta’s video products here. There is simply no incentive for these platforms to regress even though users seem to want them to.

Tastes are clearly changing. The Washington Post article pointed to Sam Sulek, a giant muscleman on YouTube who posts 30-minute workout vlogs with barely any editing as a possible direction this is all headed in. I tried watching one of his recent videos and I’m not even sure it has any cuts in it? It’s possible that’s what’s coming next, but it’s less certain if platforms will, or rather can, allow it. Time to find out if they know how to pivot.

Once a company becomes an industry leader, its employees, from top to bottom, start thinking defensively. Suddenly, people feel they have more to lose from challenging the status quo than upending it. As a result, one-time revolutionaries turn into reactionaries. Proof of this about-face comes when senior executives troop off to Washington or Brussels to lobby against changes that would make life easier for the new up and comers.

Years of continuous improvement produce an ultra-efficient business system—one that’s highly optimized, and also highly inflexible. Successful businesses are usually good at doing one thing, and one thing only. Over-specialization kills adaptability—but this is a tough to trap to avoid, since the defenders of the status quo will always argue that eking out another increment of efficiency is a safer bet than striking out in a new direction.

Long-tenured executives develop a deep base of industry experience and find it hard to question cherished beliefs. In successful companies, managers usually have a fine-grained view of “how the industry works,” and tend to discount data that would challenge their assumptions. Over time, mental models become hard-wired—a fact that makes industry stalwarts vulnerable to new rules. This risk is magnified when senior executives dominate internal conversations about future strategy and direction.

With success comes bulk—more employees, more cash and more market power. Trouble is, a resource advantage tends to make executives intellectually lazy—they start believing that success comes from outspending one’s rivals rather than from outthinking them. In practice, superior resources seldom defeat a superior strategy. So when resources start substituting for creativity, it’s time to short the shares.

One quick suggestion: Treat every belief you have about your business as nothing more than a hypothesis, forever open to disconfirmation. Being paranoid is good, becoming skeptical about your own beliefs is better.

Arthur C. Clarke hypothesized that "our technology must still be laughably primitive; we may well be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms, while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime".

I couldn’t help but wish that other missing parts had been included in the adaptation: a scene that uses a billiard table as a metaphor for a particle accelerator; Liu’s deeper exploration of the VR game, which allows the reader to try to untangle its collection of mysteries along with the characters instead of just watching them solve it; more details about the ingenious “human computer” in VR, which looks cool but isn’t really explained on-screen.

“The pressure doesn’t come from the money. It comes from the fact that you’re asking people to trust something that, on the face of it, doesn’t look very trustworthy.” He gives, as an example, sitting in a car park outside Atlanta, asking his Civil War cast to believe that one day the VFX blue screen behind them will be a night sky lit up by mortar fire. Or on Ex Machina where, “Alicia [Vikander] and Sonoya [Mizuno] are trusting that nudity is going to be dealt with thoughtfully and respectfully … [when] cinema leans towards not doing that.”

This is the deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew that “literally keeps me awake at night”.

He is always considered in his responses, typically offering up several alternative answers to a single question, and then self-reflexively evaluating the relative accuracy of each.

Garland’s sombre, anti-war stance doesn’t prevent Civil War from producing some awe-inspiring spectacles of US military might, with helicopters a recurring motif. “They’re very visceral objects and experiences,” he explains. “They make much more noise than people expect, and the noise has a kind of fast, heartbeat pulse in it, that your own pulse rate matches. I’ve done a lot of flying in helicopters for one reason or another. Not least work, actually.”

The film’s warning against our descent into dystopia is urgent and sincere, but it simultaneously declines to map out the specific arguments and ideas that might take us there. Why is Garland both-sidesing like this?

he recognises this as a potential misinterpretation of a film that posits “polarisation” as cause – not a symptom – of our current malaise

“What I’m usually doing in films is presenting more than one opinion, so it’s more like a conversation, rather than: ‘Do this, think that’. So there are several ways you could look at Ex Machina; as a film about sentience, or where gender resides, or objectification. The same is true of Men. And somewhere, coded within that, I will be taking a position. But I’ve tried to do it in a way that isn’t interrupting the conversation.”

Design Engineers at Vercel blend aesthetic sensibility with technical skills. This allows us to deeply understand a problem, then design, build, and ship a solution autonomously.The team is made up of people with a wide array of skills and a lot of curiosity. We constantly experiment with new tools and mediums. This multidisciplinary approach allows the team to push what’s possible on the web.

Design Engineers care about delivering exceptional user experiences that resonate with the viewer. For the web, this means:Delightful user interactions and affordancesBuilding reusable components/primitivesPage speedCross-browser supportSupport for inclusive input modes (touch, pointers, etc.)Respecting user preferencesAccessible to users of assistive technology

Being part of the Design team gives Design Engineers the autonomy and ability to work on things that would often get deprioritized in an Engineering backlog.

The team puts resources towards polished interactions, no dropped frames, no cross-browser inconsistencies, and accessibility. Examples of design-led projects are:Vercel’s Geist font: A Sans and Mono font. An interactive playground to see every glyph and try the font.Vercel’s design system documentation: An interactive docs playground used by engineers across the company to ship Vercel.Vercel’s Design Team homepage: An exploratory page for testing new web techniques and providing design resources.Delighters in the Vercel Dashboard: Features in the Vercel Dashboard that bring it to life and delight the user.

While no individual is expected to have all the skills, the team collectively is able to execute on ambitious designs because we can:Design in FigmaDesign in codeWrite production codeDebug browser performanceWrite GLSL shadersWrite copyCreate 3D experiences with Three.jsCreate 3D models/scenes in BlenderEdit videos using CGI and practical camera effects

You can see our team’s work across Vercel:Creating and maintaining components for the internal design system used on everything from Vercel.com to the Vercel Toolbar and the Next.js documentation.Websites like the Next.js Conf website and Vercel’s product pages.Product work and docs for Vercel and Next.js.Building proof of concepts for branding and marketing.Improving the accessibility of all Vercel web properties.

Players must assume full responsibility for their cards, a strategy dubbed “C.P.E.” — Conception, Planning, Execution — that was designed to combat the male tendency to execute (pick up milk from the market when asked) but leave the conceiving (recognizing that your toddler only drinks 2 percent milk) and planning (monitoring the fridge to ensure the 2 percent doesn’t run out) to the female partner. In other words, as Rodsky told me, “Own. Your. Shit.” Partners also must agree to a Minimum Standard of Care (or “M.S.C.”) for tasks, meaning that even if the owner of the Garbage card is fine with empty pizza boxes piling up on the kitchen counter, he may still have to throw them out promptly.

often, several persistent challenges emerge. Implementing the practice is time-consuming and so is maintaining it. In fact, in all of my interviews, I failed to find a couple who followed the rules to a tee for longer than a few months. Just to get Fair Play off the ground, the initiator has to read the book, procure the cards, create an organizational system (I’ve seen everything from Google spreadsheets so detailed they resemble stock-portfolio trackers to oversize whiteboards dotted with custom Etsy chore magnets), then explain it all to a partner.

A woman recently polled one group to ask whether her spouse should be expected to pick up his own socks if she owned the Cleaning card. Another turned to the Fair Play community after a family member died, seeking advice on how to ask her partner to cover her chores while she grieved. All this time and effort falls overwhelmingly on women by design.

social movements start with the oppressed,” Rodsky says, because “people who want the status quo maintained” won’t push for change. As Rodsky recently said on a podcast, “You teach somebody something now because it will benefit your future hours.” But the prep work has pushed many women away because, as one Brooklyn mother put it, it’s “more than I can handle right now.”

Stories also abound of partners agreeing to cards only to quietly drop them. This sometimes leads to “chore chicken,” a resentment-fueled phenomenon in which Partner A refuses to pick up the slack on Partner B’s tasks, so the dirty dishes fester or shirts languish at the dry cleaners. Partner A silently rages because this isn’t how C.P.E is supposed to work.

Other spouses, when invited to play fair, have responded with “I get it. You want me to do more. But I don’t want to play a game. Just tell me what to do.” That’s what Paige Connell, 33, a Boston mom of four under 6, heard when she first showed her husband the deck. “But that places the burden right back on the woman,” she says. “I don’t want to be his project manager.”

The manner in which the “fewer cards” partner responds to the Fair Play system can serve as a barometer for the health of a relationship, says Jenny Cooke Malstrom, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle. Fair Play doesn’t cause divorce, she says, but it’s more likely to backfire in at-risk relationships where the baseline level of love and respect is already low. “To have your husband straight up say ‘This isn’t important’ makes what’s already implicitly happening explicit,” Malstrom says.

a 2017 Sex Roles study which suggested that the perception of fairness in family labor is a stronger predictor of maternal mental health than the actual division of labor. The study is the primary reason her system intentionally prioritizes feelings of equity over literal equality. Rodsky isn’t the only relationship expert to say that a 50/50 chore split isn’t realistic. Brené Brown famously went viral in a 2020 appearance on The Tim Ferriss Podcast, when she explained that the balance of responsibility in her marriage changes day to day depending on each partner’s mental and emotional capacity — and that constant responsibility trading is critical to supporting one another.

“It was never written to be prescriptive. My intention was to [help women] hold their boundaries in a different way. Any movement towards ‘I’m not going to live this way anymore,’ I consider a win.”

I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early. So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened.

Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies.

I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one?

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl.

Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.

we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone.

She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.

Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty?

There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan.

the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write.

I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing.