I used to assume extractor fans were the blunt instrument of bathroom care. Switch on the fan. Wait ten minutes. Problem solved. Not quite. In hundreds of homes I have poked around the damp and the steamed mirrors tell a different story. Bathroom fans are supposed to evacuate moist air but in practice they often … Read more
There is a tiny domestic tragedy taking place in bathrooms across the country. You finish a shower thinking the glass looks fine then two days later it looks as if a miniature fog has settled into the surface. This article is about that fog and why most fixes are temporary. I will be opinionated. I … Read more
I keep meaning to sort the paperwork on my kitchen table. I mean to answer three short emails. I will, I tell myself, after I close one tab or finish that thirty second scroll. Hours later the paperwork is still a mess and the emails are little ghosts in my inbox. Small things that should … Read more
Most of the things written about pressure sell it as an emotion first and a cognitive problem later. That is a tidy story and it is comforting to think mood explains everything. I want to argue the opposite. Ongoing pressure is not primarily about feelings. It is about attention. It hijacks the mechanisms that let … Read more
There is a quiet collapse that descends not when something dramatic goes wrong but when everything goes right enough to be the same. Motivation fails when life becomes repetitive because repetition eats the feedback we need to feel alive. We mistake sameness for stability and then complain about spirit fatigue as if it arrived uninvited. … Read more
I have spent years watching people arrive at the weekend a little less intact than they were at the start of the week and then act surprised by Monday. There is a texture to that surprise that is not mere fatigue. It is a slow reconfiguration of how the brain chooses to spend its attention … Read more
I remember standing in the kitchen at 7 a.m. watching the kettle and thinking I had already run a marathon. Nothing heavy had been lifted. No emails had been sent. Still I felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my willpower. People called it laziness. I did not call it that. What I felt … Read more
There is a stubborn line people draw between the 1960s and 1970s and our present day as if the earlier decades were an era of thicker skin and wider horizons. That claim feels partly true and partly sentimental. This piece argues that the 60s and 70s did not treat every problem as personal because the … Read more
There is a stubborn, oddly polite silence stitched into the bones of people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not the silence of secrets so much as the silence of habit. A person from those decades will often give you a short answer, tidy and final, and then move on … Read more
There is a quiet stubbornness in how people born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s learned to get through life. It was not dressed up as motivational slogans or relentless optimism. It was a habit of returning to the same things day after day. That rhythm shaped careers marriages and grief in ways the … Read more