Member-only story
When painful things happen in your life, you tend to turn to your friends. Sometimes it’s a close friend, sometimes it’s someone you’ve met once, or perhaps you’ve never met them at all and know them entirely online. Last week (without boring you with the details) was one of my more poignantly awful mental health weeks I’ve experienced — a crippling loneliness mixed with an embarrassment and sadness that I hadn’t faced in quite some time. I’m not looking for your sympathy — and, indeed, if you were expecting a remote work newsletter today you’re going to be disappointed — but something has really struck me about how lucky I am to be born today.
And, more specifically, how lost I would be if I had been born earlier. Dead, even. I have no idea how I would have functioned if I was not able to build substrates of technology that I have today, and it is remarkable how different (and bad) things would have been had things not shaped out as they have in the tech industry.
In the crisis I had — I won’t be going into detail, because who cares? — I was able to text several friends, hundreds (or thousands) of miles away and make actual human contact. iMessage has become a lifeline for communication for me — my coordinational disability dyspraxia means that the consistency of message history across devices meant that as I walked around, it was far harder for me to avoid (or justify avoiding) conversations with people that wanted to help me when I wasn’t really into being helped.
