I once again bare my soul to you in an attempt to get my shit together, financially.
The last time I wrote about personal finance, it was mostly a cautionary tale. I told you exactly how bad with money I’ve been, and in an attempt to rectify that, I went on my own personal cancel culture crusade. That’s right: I cancelled a bunch of automatically renewing subscriptions I had no business continuing to pay for. Gone were my Wall Street Journal and Hulu subscriptions. I went in person to the Union Square Planet Fitness to cancel a lingering gym membership from 2015. …
A little over a year ago, back when you could do such things, I found myself at a “mindfulness” session, hosted by a fitness startup and held at a retail location in Flatiron for an athleisure brand that would later end up acquiring the fitness startup. I went because I was reporting a feature on the startup and I thought going would add good color, and maybe I’d learn something. I don’t know much about being good at mindfulness or meditation. I’m not sure I’ve ever relaxed once in my life. I can’t be alone with my thoughts in complete…
Vaccine scolding is the perfect end to a pandemic year full of personal judgments
No matter how you’ve conducted yourself over the past year, someone has decided that the way you’re handling the pandemic is wrong. This judgment, anger, and confusion stem from the fact that nobody at any level of government is providing us with specific guidelines for conducting our behavior, so in absence of any real leadership, we’re all becoming snitches.
We got mad at runners for running, even while masked! Then we got mad at people for going to parks, posting pictures of people who wanted to relax on a patch of grass after being confined to their homes. We were…
I applied for over 100 jobs and dealt with a surprise lawsuit while grappling with a pandemic
Just over a year ago, I was sequestered inside my apartment, barely leaving if I could help it. In late February 2020, the pandemic hadn’t yet become a terrifying reality in Brooklyn, where I live, but the thought of opening my front door filled me with an all-consuming, existential dread. I had already put myself into lockdown mode.
For a number of reasons (but many of them career-adjacent), I’d already made up my mind that 2020 would be a lost year. My contract at the New York Times had just ended and finding another journalism job was proving difficult. An…
Every week, it would appear there is a new pandemic wall, and we are all hitting it
I knew this would happen at some point in the pandemic, but this is the week I finally feel like I’m fully losing my mind. I am going to go ahead and assume you are an ungenerous reader and get my stupid little self-aware disclaimers out of the way now. I am a young, relatively healthy person in my late twenties. I live in a big city, I don’t have a family to support, I have the privilege of working from home, and I don’t have to interface with the general public a whole lot. I have the financial stability…
But I will tell you exactly how bad I am with money so you don’t have to be.
This post is a few things: A cautionary tale, a PSA, a story about money, and an explanation of how I finally attempted to get my shit together in a small but meaningful way. I am not known for being good with money: As I explained last week, I’ve never really “had” money so it did not make sense to me to learn how to be better about handling money. I might as well have bought a children’s toy cash register and learned about savings that way, or played with Monopoly money.
But at the beginning of this year I…
There’s a fine art to reporting on sketchy companies with billions while making $13 an hour
Ihave never had a lot of money. And I’ve also never been particularly good with money. It did not occur to me to get better with having money, perhaps because it did not make sense to me to learn how to be better about handling money I didn’t have.
Why would I learn about investing in the stock market, for example, when every dollar I made was going toward rent or paying off my student loans? Does the stock market let you invest your leftover $40 after taxes and expenses? (Do not answer this question. I still have not put…
On needing to feel pure nostalgia because we’re not making new memories right now
There’s a memory imprinted onto my brain from the Before Times. Sometimes it’s so vivid and pure I think there’s no way I experienced it in real life, I must have dreamed it.
It’s late summer 2018 and I’m on the first actual vacation I’ve taken in years. We’re zipping down a highway on the Sicilian coast in a rental Audi we picked up at the airport. My friend Corey is driving, I’m in the passenger seat, and my friend Amanda is in the backseat. We’d just spent the day in the coastal town of Cefalù. We ate cannoli and…
Maybe this is the kind of life I would have had if I had just done a few things differently.
No matter where you run, you cannot hide from the realities of our cruel, cold world. I should know. Over the past 10 months I’ve tried everything: Spending money, spending less money, doing yoga, riding my dumb stationary bike, watching Gossip Girl. But at the end of the day, when I am still in my stupid little apartment and my brain is still on fire, I do have one last outlet I turn to to avoid the crushing reality of, well, everything: My trad wife influencers.
Lucky for me, my two best friends went to a small liberal arts college…
Nostalgia drew me in. But the escapism, absurdity, and innocent stupidity of the late 2000s kept me watching.
It’s the second Friday in March, and nobody seems to be going outside anymore. I’m glued to my couch watching season 1, episode 11 of Gossip Girl, in which Blair Waldorf is coming to terms with her dad. He’s recently come out as gay and is moving to Paris to live with his boyfriend, who — scandal upon scandal! — used to be a model for Blair’s fashion designer mother.
Now it’s July, and I’ve moved a mile down the street from my old apartment. Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey is, improbably, getting a story published in the New Yorker as…
Maya Kosoff
i’m a freelance writer and editor. you can also read me in places like the new york times and vanity fair.
