Making and getting lots of phone calls was a raison d’etre for millions of Millennial girls in particular, but once we hit our thirties, the phone became the equivalent of junk mail. Did this have unintended consequences?
Millennials, especially those of us on the older end who were born in Reagan’s second term, are a generation of many dualities. Duality comes up in so much of my work and I always thought it was just because of a vast amount of personal circumstances and life events.
But it turns out my entire generation is riddled with them. Our lives have been colored by hope and doom alike, and we watched technology and communications advance at different speeds.
We saw the end of the old world and the last decade of relative stability and prosperity for many Americans…
Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones is treated by the media crit community as this virtually satirical character who’s been touted as unrealistic by viewers, particularly younger viewers coming across the show for the first time. But as my forties loom closer, I find her MORE realistic and relatable than ever before.
I distinctly recall this conversation I had with this guy I slept with after a punk show in 2010.
“So, what’s your plans?” This was the exact conversation I wanted to avoid. I somehow woke up in some bumblefuck place in Suffolk County, a ways off from my safe and solitary dumpy domicile in The Bronx. Being a grad student broker than Mike Pence after Biden’s inauguration, and the fact that it would take a couple years before rideshare apps would become de rigeur, I unfortunately had to depend on this lamentable one-shot deal for a ride back to the…
We live in a data-driven society now: how data gets interpreted is a HUGE deal, and small business data is no exception. An oft-cited SBA figure was cherry-picked to make people think a 9–5 job is your only option.
People think the United States is a country that supposedly loves entrepreneurship. Well…only incredibly rich ones who grace the cover of Forbes, Fast Company, and so on whose parents paid their Stanford tuition or have been some type of oligarch for generations. For the rest of us peons? In my day to day life, I constantly encounter people who say some variation of “How come you don’t want a regular job? Being an independent consultant and managing video game sales sounds SO hard!”
Because I’d rather get a pap smear from Edward Scissorhands than be someone’s employee ever again, thanks…
Making a list of people, places, eras, and things you grieve may sound like it’ll make you wallow in it further: but it’s actually quite helpful and cathartic.
The second I got my first vaccine dose in late February, I went full speed ahead with my plans to move to Los Angeles that had been incubating for about 10 months. Booked a flight, talked to a business attorney about migrating my current entity and the next one I’m starting, and made a spreadsheet of 17 potential properties I could call home. After narrowing it down to five, I took a few virtual tours and decided on one even though it was too early to begin the leasing process.
I felt in control of my destiny. Seeing rising vaccination…
Your choice is valid no matter the reasons, but it’s rather sobering that the structural reasons behind it are this deeply-embedded and foreboding.
I was talking with a friend who was hit with a colossal dental bill for her teenage son. It was a ghastly amount she couldn’t afford, she even said out loud in the waiting room, “I’m going to kill myself.” She was being sarcastic, but the receptionist actually got concerned.
She said to me, “You’re wise for not having kids.”
This statement felt like getting whacked by an oncoming train despite my being pretty damn adamant for almost two decades about not wanting children.
Yes, I know how it feels to get unexpectedly slammed with a huge dental bill and…
Heralded as one of the most memorable romances of the 1990s, this movie really just exposes how 90s romcoms made us fall in love with the IDEA of romantic love, rather than actual people.
The Internet is crawling with professional and amateur media crit like roaches on day-old pizza in a prewar studio, and I’m just another schmuck shouting my musings into the void here. But as a girl who grew up in the 1990s, came of age around 9/11, and then due to personal trauma and cultural constraints just wasn’t allowed to be romantic until I was a lot older? I GOT THOUGHTS on the schmaltzy romcom that many consider a classic, Sleepless in Seattle.
I didn’t see this movie until recently, at the age of 35. With that in mind, it’s always…
A staggering number of people defending the disgraced three-term governor of New York are middle-aged liberal women convinced the whole thing is a Republican or even leftist psy-op. They don’t realize they’re upholding what they say they’re against.
You know, I’ve written quite a bit lately about questioning dating norms and enjoying single life in my mid-thirties, utterly refusing to settle— and that stance has been cemented in the past few weeks.
Because I am not locking it down with a guy unless he will stand with me the way I see scads of middle-aged HR managers and insurance salesmen who don’t even live in my state cape for the corrupt sex pest that is Governor Cuomo.
I’ve seen victim-blaming. As an alternative woman and a child abuse survivor, I’ve received more than my fair share of it…
I’ve pulled back the curtain upon making to the Emerald City of Back Pain that is your mid-thirties. That’s no wizard; it’s someone trying to sell you a whole bunch of shit and get you to settle for a trash relationship.
Women are sold so many myths. Like, a BIZARRE amount of myths that are easily disproven.
Millennials are the disseminating and unpacking generation. We have this unique duality of having lived in The Before Time when the Internet was just a DARPA proposal, then watching this technology evolve and be used to simultaneously expose truths yet spread disinformation. Nevertheless, we’re able to yank back the curtain on the numerous lies Boomers told us and the lowered expectations Gen X told us to keep in check.
The one I’m pulling back? The whole idea that single women don’t have options. For love and sex, comfort in our own skin, career satisfaction, damn near anything!
For scope’s sake, I’m going to focus on that first one: this idea that women…
This movie is WAY darker than later generations were led to believe it was and while it says a great deal about Boomer nihilism of the era, it says even more about rape culture.
Content Warning: As the title implies, there is discussion of sexual violence in this piece. Reader discretion is advised. And spoilers abound if you’ve never seen this classic film.
Throughout my childhood in the 1990s, I’d seen various representations of and references to Saturday Night Fever and its iconic poster. My mother’s trashy tabloids were often topped with headlines about Saturday Night Fever reunions accompanied by recent photos of John Travolta juxtaposed to stills of him strutting his stuff at 2001 Odyssey in the 1977 film. …
Check yourselves and stop yelling at childfree women about how we’re going to be so sad, alone, and regretting it at 50 when this seems to be projection. Oh, and less than 1% of female sterilization patients ever look to reverse the procedure!
Dear Modern Parent,
Your content keeps popping up in my Medium feed despite my adamantly not wanting kids. I don’t know why, but I guess it’s because there’s a lot of pandemic-related content tying with parenting plus it’s an inherently feminist issue so I presume that’s why Medium’s algorithmic gremlins keep sending you my way. I’m not the intended audience, but those titles definitely make me want to click.
Thing is, those titles confirm something I’ve suspected a long time and that I feel is a grave injustice: more people regret having children than NOT having them.
