life

Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”

Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words.

As unbecoming as they may be, the portrait a child takes might be the most frank visual diary of contemporary parenthood that can be found on one’s bloated camera roll. They are technicolor tributes to what it felt like to be in these homebound moments together, featuring us as we are, with a lot of chins, a lot of cellulite, a lot of messy hair. The photos do what kids do best: they wholeheartedly engage with the present moment.

…That means electric bicycles, which have become a much lower impact solution than cars, are booming in many Amish communities.

It’s a lot quicker to jump on your bike and go into town than it is to bring your horse into the barn, harness it to the buggy, and go. It’s a lot quicker and you travel faster too.

In an age where so much agency has been taken away from young adults, when they face futures saddled with debt, unable to access the basic material trappings of adulthood… a retreat into the dubious comforts of a pseudo-childhood will have its pull

I’ve been saying this for a few years now, but it’s worth recording here for the record: It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.

In our 2022 Culture issue, out April 24, T followed a group of artists — musicians, chefs, designers, writers and others — throughout the course of a day, exploring the intimate moments of their lives that contribute, in ways small and large, to their creative process.

Consider these two people: One flies weekly for work; the other lives in a studio apartment and walks to the office every day. On the surface, it’s clear here who has the bigger carbon footprint. Flying is notoriously awful, emissions-wise, and when you compare a weekly flight to the energy use of a small home and the emissions of a daily walking commute, the outcome is obvious.

But here’s a wrinkle: The weekly flier is a climate scientist who travels around the world teaching about the dangers of climate change. The second person works for a marketing agency, making ads for an oil company. So who is contributing more to the climate emergency, really?

So you’ve acquired a new thing. And now you want accessories. Ask yourself: Will the potential experience be worth the cost to the supply chain?

I define a heresy as: something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand.

With that criterion in mind, here are a bunch of Contemporary Heresies I’ve collected. These are not necessarily my heresies, although some are, some are not; many are “plausible — not insane” heresies that others around me believe.