Women are sharing live locations, checking the backseats of cars, carrying their keys between their knuckles and holding their hands over their drinks.
Men are doing 3 hour podcasts about how unfair it is that women don't smile at them.
A psychologist recently explained something interesting why 90s kids developed different thinking patterns than Gen Z, largely because of games. Back then, no autosaves, no hints, just three lives. Games like Super Mario Bros. and Prince of Persia taught: fail, restart, keep going you had to earn progress. Games like Tetris and The Legend of Zelda trained maps and patterns, building memory, navigation, and patience. Finish a level turn off the console. No infinite dopamine. Play was social: one couch, one screen, real conflict and cooperation.
Today, games like Fortnite and Roblox are endless, with autosaves and reward systems that keep you playing. They hold attention but don’t train completion the same way. The difference is simple: 90s kids built focus and tolerance for failure, while today’s players are shaped by constant stimulation. What do you think about this?
The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.
In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.
So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.
An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.
The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.
older generations had something we will never get back. time. bad news traveled slow. by the time fear reached you half the problems had already resolved themselves. the world was heavy but it moved at a human pace. they had places to disappear to. a corner of the world where nothing could reach them. we have wars updating in real time. ai reshaping everything faster than we can process it. notifications that make sure global anxiety lands in your pocket before your morning coffee. there is nowhere to go anymore. every corner of the world is connected to every problem in the world. and we are expected to just carry it all and function normally.
Callum Turner reveals to The Sunday Times that he and fiancée Dua Lipa were reading the same book the night they first met:
“We sat next to each other and realized we were reading the same book, which is crazy. It’s called ‘Trust’ [by Hernán Diaz] and I had just finished the first chapter and I told her and she looked at me and said, ‘I just finished the first chapter too.’ I said, ‘So we’re on the same page.’”