u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack

A friend brought up the usual hypothetical a few weeks ago: what would you do if God appeared tomorrow and somehow made it impossible to doubt that he was actually God?

Most people at the table said they'd kneel. I said I'd probably have a lot of questions first.

Because proving that you're God only proves that you're God. It doesn't automatically prove that you're good, or that I owe you worship.

And if we're talking about the God described in the Bible, there are some pretty serious questions there. The flood. Job. The destruction of entire groups of people. Hell, depending on how you understand it. I'm supposed to look at all of that and conclude that unlimited power must also mean unlimited moral authority?

The usual answer is that God's ways are beyond human understanding. But that creates a weird problem. If being more powerful means you're automatically beyond moral judgment, then morality has basically become another word for whoever has the most power.

I don't have a problem with people finding meaning or comfort in religion. I'm questioning the assumption that worship is automatically the right response to power.

If God is good, I'd want to know why. If the answer is simply "because he's God," then that's not really an answer.

I realized I use "buck" all the time without thinking about where it came from. A hundred bucks, five bucks, these expressions feel completely normal today, but the connection between a deer-related word and money is not obvious anymore.

How did a word connected to deer become such a common way to describe money?

There's a self checkout kiosk at my gas station. You scan your own chips, bag your own chips, and pay. Last month the screen started asking for a tip. Eighteen, twenty, or twenty five percent, flipped toward you, with two people waiting in line behind you.

No employee actually helped me. I was the employee.

Tipping used to have a simple logic. The service happened first, then you paid according to how it went. The tip came after the work, and that's what made it feel like a tip instead of a price. Gratitude for something that already occurred.

The screens reversed the order. Now the request comes first. Before anyone makes your drink, before anyone finds your size, often before anyone has spoken a single word to you. And it arrives in public, timed while a worker watches you decide.

That's what people are actually declining when they press skip. Not the worker. The order of operations.

And to be fair, the people behind those counters are usually underpaid, which is the real scandal. It feels like employers found a way to put the raise on the customer's conscience, one screen at a time, and call it optional. If the labor belongs in the price, put it in the price.

I still tip when a human actually does something for me, and that's exactly the line these screens keep crossing.

The kiosk still asks. I still press skip. Nobody has served me chips yet.

The King of Siam offered Lincoln elephants in 1862, apparently even suggesting they could be useful for military purposes. Lincoln turned the offer down.

But what if he had accepted?

You are Lincoln's advisor. A ship arrives with a herd of battle trained elephants and their handlers. How do you deploy them? Or would they end up being mostly useful for hauling supplies and artillery? And what happens when you try to keep a bunch of elephants alive through Virginia winters?

Some countries seem like they were one or two major breaks away from becoming a completely different kind of global power.

The Ottoman Empire, Japan, Brazil, Russia and others all had periods where their future could have looked very different.

Which country came closest to becoming a superpower but never quite got there? What was their window, and what ultimately closed it?

I can smell smoke on my jacket the next morning after sitting around a campfire, even after the fire's been out for hours. Sometimes I can still smell it on my hair or skin.

But other smells, like food or perfume, seem to disappear much faster. What makes wood smoke so good at sticking around?

And why does the smell sometimes seem to get stronger again when I put the jacket on? What’s actually going on?

Every founder profile has the same line near the top: he started with nothing. Three paragraphs later there's a school that costs more per year than most people's houses. Nobody writing the profile seems bothered that both sentences are in the same article.

Zuckerberg was at Phillips Exeter before Harvard. Sam Altman went to a private school in St. Louis. None of this is hidden. It's in their biographies, usually right before the chapter where he drops out.

That's how "self-made" works. The help can be right there in the story. You just decide the story starts after it.

A school like that gives you more than classes. It's the room around you. The people you know, the parents who pick up the phone, and the fact that failing once doesn't necessarily end the whole thing. You still have to build the company. You just don't have to clear the ground first.

Exeter admits on merit, and nobody there was handed a finished company. The work is real. I'm not saying otherwise.

But the starting line was already behind them. And "self-made" gives us a convenient place to stop looking backward. I think that's part of why people can spend years wondering why they didn't work hard enough, when they were never starting from the same place.

For three years, our all-hands ended with some version of "we're a family." The CEO said it all the time. We had company picnics, birthday cards, Thanksgiving emails, all that stuff.

Last month, someone on my team asked for a slightly different schedule twice a week so she could help her mom get to medical appointments. She offered to make up the hours. Her manager said they needed consistent coverage.

A few days later, the company announced we'd made a "Best Places to Work" list again.

That's when the family thing started bothering me more than it used to.

I don't think the people here are fake. Some of my coworkers are genuinely good friends, and people do help each other out. But I don't think that's what the company means when it says we're a family.

It seems to mean loyalty, flexibility, and going the extra mile when the company needs it. When the employee needs something back, suddenly it's about staffing and business needs.

Maybe that's just what a workplace is supposed to be. I just wish they'd call it that instead of family.

I was at a barbecue last summer and someone put on one of the biggest songs of the decade. Everybody knows it, a billion streams, it plays at weddings and grocery stores and middle school gyms. Half the yard rapped along. Then the chorus hit, and about half of those people went quiet for one specific word while the other half said it without even thinking. Same song, same word, same barbecue. Only one of those groups was one phone camera away from losing their job.

I'm not going to write the word out, and I'm not interested in arguing about who's allowed to say it. That's the argument everyone has 400 times a day. I'm interested in the rules underneath it, because we're currently running two of them at the same time.

Rule one: this word is so damaging, so uniquely harmful, that context doesn't matter. Reading it, singing it, quoting it, no justification survives.

Rule two: it's a warm greeting among friends, a term of endearment, casual as hello.

Both rules get enforced hard, in the same conversations, by the same people. And here's the problem. They can't both be true.

Think about how anything else that's harmful works. Poison doesn't check the ID of whoever drinks it. A live wire doesn't shock the homeowner less than the trespasser. If a word actually causes damage on contact, then daily casual use is spraying it around the neighborhood, no matter whose mouth it comes out of. And if it doesn't, if it's harmless in friendly hands, then it was never about the word. It was about intent and context, which is exactly the thing rule one says doesn't matter.

So pick one. Either the word is too harmful to use, in which case the goal should be hearing it less, everywhere, from everyone. Or it's harmless enough for everyone, in which case the song can stay on at the barbecue and nobody's career depends on which half of the yard they were standing in.

Now, I understand the reclaiming idea, and I'm not telling any community what to do with their own history. Turning a weapon into a joke was supposed to drain the sting out of it, and there's a real argument that it worked. But you can't have a word as a slur when it's convenient and a salute when it's not. That's not a standard. That's a mood.

You can't ban a word and pass it around at the same time. Pick one.

Did the math at 2am because sleep was not happening. That is $365,000 a year. Ten years and you are a multimillionaire for the price of skipping beer.

Easy yes at first. Then the edges show up. Champagne at your own wedding. Wine tasting in Italy with your partner. A toast at your best friend's funeral. Does one sip void the whole contract? Is there a compliance office where a guy in a tie reviews your bloodwork?

The part that makes it more than a money fantasy: the deal is trivial for people who do not drink and brutal for people with a problem. The ones who need the money least take it without blinking.

I drink maybe four times a year, so my yes is cheap. Which makes me wonder what my real version is. A grand a day to never gamble? Never touch social media again? Never eat sugar?

My parents have been divorced for 20 years, and their relationship has been extremely bad ever since. They can barely hear each other's name without getting angry.

My mother has told me very clearly that she doesn't want to hear anything about my father or anything related to him.

My father died about a year ago. A few days ago, an insurance company contacted me and told me that he had taken out two life insurance policies when I was 10. One names me as the beneficiary, and the other names my mother.

The company said there are benefits that now need to be claimed or handled. They can only reach me, so I'm the one dealing with the paperwork.

Now I'm stuck between two choices:

A: Tell my mother about the policy in her name, even though she explicitly told me she doesn't want to hear anything about my father.

B: Don't tell her about the policy. Respect her wish to have nothing to do with him, but make sure she still receives whatever money she's legally entitled to, without telling her where it came from.

I don't want to make this about whether my father was a good or bad person. I'm really just wondering where the line is between respecting someone's wishes and making sure they know about something that financially belongs to them.

Which would you choose, A or B?

I seeing a lot of people online talk about helping homeless people with this weird set of conditions. They'll say they're willing to help, but only if the person uses the help in a way they approve of.

And I get the instinct. If you're giving someone something, you want to know it's actually helping. That's understandable.

But sometimes the conditions become the whole point. You give someone food, then judge what they do with it. You offer help, then expect a certain reaction. You decide what they need before even asking them.

At that point, it starts feeling less like generosity and more like a test. Will they accept the help the right way? Will they be grateful enough? Will they use it exactly as intended?

You don't have to give someone anything. That's completely your choice. But if you do decide to help, I don't think the person should have to pass an interview first to prove they're worthy of it.

I get that there are legitimate reasons to be careful about how you help. Maybe there's a reasonable middle ground here. But I'm not sure we should call something unconditional help when it comes with a list of conditions attached.

Suppose you give a team of 1860s telegraph engineers a working Starlink dish and router for one month. They get a solar panel, the manuals, and unlimited time to take everything apart and test it.

These are people who built and operated the transatlantic cable. They understand circuits, batteries, relays, and Morse code at a deep practical level. Electricity isn't a mystery to them. But radio won't be discovered for decades, and powered flight is forty years away.

Where would their understanding break first: the dish that has no moving parts yet tracks objects in orbit, the box that delivers messages from every continent instantly, the lack of any operator on the other end, or the power budget that fits in a suitcase?

Could they take anything back that would actually advance telegraphy, or is the gap simply too wide for knowledge to bridge?

I’ve always heard 98.6°F as the “normal” body temperature, but I realized I never really questioned why it’s that specific number.

If we were just trying to describe a normal human temperature, you’d think we might use a nice round number like 98 or 99. So where did 98.6 actually come from?

Is it based on a huge amount of historical data, the way temperature was measured back then?

Why did 98.6°F become the number we all recognize as “normal”?

I recently realized TSA didn't exist before 9/11, which made me curious about how airport security worked before it.

The US had already experienced major hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, and attacks like Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. Yet airport security never became a large federal system like TSA.

What interests me is not just why TSA was created after 9/11, but why previous incidents didn't lead to a similar transformation.

Was it mainly because 9/11 introduced a completely different kind of threat, or were there bigger institutional and political reasons why airport security stayed the way it was for so long?

Every human disappeared instantly. No wars, no rebuilding, no maintenance. Cities slowly collapse, roads disappear, and nature takes over.

10,000 years later, an alien civilization arrives and studies Earth. What is the one thing they would find that would make them say: “A technological species was here”?

Not fossils or ancient bones. I mean something uniquely human. Would it be nuclear waste hidden underground, plastic trapped in geological layers, satellites still orbiting Earth, artificial materials that don’t exist in nature, or something we haven’t even considered?

What do you think would become humanity’s final signature on this planet?

The other day, I was talking to someone I really liked, and eventually the subject of smoking came up. I said I don't smoke, vape, or get high.

Pretty simple, right?

Somehow, it turned into me being the one who was “uptight” because I didn't want to join in.

And I've noticed this more than once. You meet someone you really click with, everything feels easy, and then smoking becomes part of hanging out. Want to relax together? Smoke. Going for a drive? Bring the vape. Want to make the night more fun? Let's get high.

I say I'm not interested, and suddenly it feels like I'm the one being difficult.

That's the part I don't like.

I have no problem with people who smoke. If you enjoy it, that's your choice. But I don't understand why the person who doesn't smoke is expected to be the flexible one. Why is “I don't do that” treated like an inconvenience instead of just a normal preference?

I'm not asking anyone to quit smoking for me. I'm not asking anyone to change their lifestyle. I just don't want smoking to become something I have to participate in or constantly accommodate because I'm dating someone who does it.

Maybe I'm just noticing it more because I don't smoke, but there seems to be a weird social hierarchy here where smoking is treated as casual and normal, while not wanting to participate somehow needs an explanation.

Smoking isn't a personality flaw, and not smoking isn't a moral achievement. They're just different lifestyles.

I just don't like feeling like I'm the difficult one for saying no.

A school psychologist I know has worked with teenagers for more than fifteen years. Recently, she told me something I haven't been able to shake.

She said she can teach a teenager coping skills. Breathing exercises, journaling, asking for help, taking a step back. What she can't always teach them is why the future is worth coping for.

She wasn't describing teenagers who refuse help or can't handle stress. Some of them learn the techniques, use them correctly, and still come back with the same question: "Why should I bother? Look at the world I'm inheriting."

That changed how I think about the whole resilience conversation.

We talk a lot about teenagers being too fragile, spending too much time online, being overprotected, or never learning how to deal with discomfort. But I think we're underestimating what they're actually being asked to carry. They can watch wars, disasters, economic problems, climate threats and political chaos unfold on their phones before they even leave for school. Their social mistakes can be recorded and remembered indefinitely. At the same time, they're constantly told they have never had it easier.

I don't think the problem is simply social media or parenting or schools. I think we've created a strange situation where young people are expected to develop enormous resilience while being given very little confidence that the world they're preparing for will reward their effort.

Maybe I'm wrong. Every generation has probably looked at the next one and thought they were becoming softer.

But I keep coming back to this: coping skills help someone survive a difficult day. Believing that effort can still lead somewhere may be what helps them endure years of difficult days.

Are today's teenagers actually less resilient, or are we asking them to carry burdens that make resilience much harder to sustain?