I saw a twelve-year-old girl at Sephora last week holding a $70 bottle of firming serum with polypeptide chains and I almost staged an intervention right there in the aisle. Her skin was perfect, aside from two tiny hormonal spots on her chin, and she was about to incinerate her moisture barrier because a girl …
Why 2026 Nail Art is Going to be Weirdly Aggressive (and I Love It)
Stop trying to make almond shapes happen for everyone. It’s been three years of everyone pretending their fingers look like elegant willow branches, and I’m over it. By the time we hit 2026, we’re going to look back at the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic—that whole milky white, perfectly manicured, quiet luxury vibe—and realize how incredibly boring …
Why most collagen serums are a total scam and the three I actually use
You’re being lied to by basically every skincare brand that puts the word “Collagen” in big, bold letters on the front of a glass bottle. It’s a physiological heist. The industry knows we’re desperate to stop the slow, inevitable sagging of our own faces, so they sell us a dream in a 30ml dropper. But …
Stop learning Python just to talk to a chatbot
Most of the advice you see about AI is written by people who want you to feel small. They want you to think that unless you can navigate a GitHub repository or write a Python script to ‘automate your workflow,’ you’re basically a horse-and-buggy driver in a world of Teslas. It’s a lie. I work …
Why I’m Done Chasing the Homeownership Dream (And Why You Should Be Too)
I almost ruined my life in 2019 over a two-bedroom condo in Logan Square, Chicago. I had the 20% down payment saved up—roughly $72,000 that I’d scraped together by living like a monk for five years—and I was convinced that if I didn’t buy right then, I’d be locked out of the market forever. My …
Traditional SEO is finally dead and I’m actually happy about it
SEO is a corpse. We’ve been poking it with a stick for three years, pretending the smell is just another ‘core update’ and not the literal rotting of the search experience as we know it. If you’re still out here obsessing over keyword density or trying to manifest a featured snippet like it’s 2018, you’re …
Why Your Remote Team Is Ignoring You and How to Actually Fix It
Quiet quitting is a fake term. It was invented by people who think work should be your entire personality and get offended when you don’t answer a Slack message at 8:00 PM on a Tuesday. If someone is doing exactly what’s in their job description and nothing more, they aren’t ‘quitting’—they’re just working. But I …
Why 90% of CRM Migrations Fail and How to Save Yours Before It Starts
The first time I broke a company’s entire sales pipeline, it was a Tuesday in November. 2018. We were moving from a messy pile of spreadsheets to Salesforce because the VP of Sales thought it would magically make the team hit their quotas. It didn’t. I spent my 29th birthday—November 14th, if you’re curious—huddled over …
Why Flow State is a Trap and Deep Work is Just Boring Labor (That Actually Works)
Flow state is the most over-marketed lie in the modern workplace. Everyone wants to talk about ‘getting in the zone’ or ‘finding their flow,’ like they’re some kind of jazz musician or an Olympic surfer. But you aren’t surfing. You’re probably staring at a CRM or trying to figure out why a spreadsheet formula is …
Stop building a startup and just build a $1M business by yourself
In 2018, I sat in a glass-walled office in downtown Chicago and realized I was paying $6,000 a month for a ‘Growth Lead’ who spent most of his day adjusting the padding on our internal slide decks. I had four employees back then. We were doing okay—maybe $400k in revenue—but after payroll, rent, and the …