The other day, I bought a cheap bouquet of bright pink sunflowers — I spotted them while en route to a birthday party, and they were too irresistible to pass up. The store was empty except for me and a couple employees, so when the person who checked me out handed me my change, I decided to actually take a few seconds to put it away properly in my wallet. There was no one behind me; I was in no rush — the pressure was off. 

So why, just five seconds later, did I feel like I was sweating under a bare light bulb in an interrogation room? Maybe it was because the guys behind the counter seemed to be staring at me, waiting. Each second felt like it stretched on for two weeks. It didn’t help that I was using a too-full card holder instead of a wallet, and couldn’t slide the cash in easily. Days (milliseconds) later, I gave up on the whole thing. Shoving the bills and loose change into my pocket, I grabbed the bouquet and rushed out into the cold night and onto a sidewalk teeming with people. Were they judging me too? 

It wasn’t until much later on, when I was at the party, that I had the chance to smooth out the crumpled cash and fold it into my card case for real. Then I felt frustrated with myself all over again: I’m a grown adult. What is so embarrassing about putting away change in front of people? 

Something is: Getting flustered while dealing with change in a checkout line is a near-universal experience. Other things that shouldn’t be embarrassing, but are, include: walking out of a grocery store without buying anything; walking toward someone you know, when you’ve both spotted each other but are slightly too far away to casually say hi; opening presents in front of anyone; coughing to clear your throat, and then realizing you really have to cough again. (Of course, during the pandemic, coughing carries more social stigma than before. But pre-pandemic, having to let loose a succession of coughs in, say, math class made me want to hide under my desk.)

Those are the common ones, but many people have unique and often specifically petty, personal embarrassments as well. I run outdoors most mornings, often on the city sidewalks, and I always feel a twinge of self-consciousness when other people are around and I’ve finished my warm-up walk and start running. It’s as if, by picking up my pace, I’m screaming, “Here I am, going for my run!!!” It makes me cringe, but I guarantee no one else even notices. Even if they did, there’s nothing unusual about starting to jog. I’m in workout clothes — surely they understand what’s happening. 

The type of embarrassment you might feel when you realize something’s been stuck in your teeth all day is slightly more understandable to me: Most of us know that it can be distracting or even off-putting to talk to someone who has a bit of lunch wedged next to their incisor, and we hate to think we might have grossed someone out. But I’ve never looked askance at someone who’s just starting off their run. So why do I feel like the spotlight’s on me when I do it? 

“We experience embarrassment when we engage in a behavior that goes against social or moral norms. Basically it occurs when we break the ‘social script,’” explains Matthew Feinberg, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “The factors that are most important are (a) us breaking that script, (b) us feeling like others have seen us breaking that script. Most people have a natural inclination to follow the rules and norms of the society they live in. So, any sense that they are failing to live up to that inclination leads them to feel embarrassed.” 

Of course, people have slightly different viewpoints on what social scripts are and what sorts of behavior breaks them. So while it might seem innocuous to take the time to put away your change properly,  most people in the U.S. would consider “not holding up a line” to be a social script — meaning, the “correct” behavior for the social situation of “standing in line” is “move quickly so as not to delay the other people in queue.” “Many people may feel that they are holding up the line by taking that extra five seconds,” to put away their change, Dr. Feinberg explains. Even when no one is behind you, as was the case during my spontaneous sunflower purchase, you might feel that you’re delaying the checkout person; or, the script may simply be so ingrained in you that you feel pressure to stick to it in all situations.

The same explanation can be applied to many of the other petty personal embarrassments we feel, even my jogging awkwardness: Suddenly breaking into a run violates the social script regarding walking on a public sidewalk. Similarly, the social script for grocery shopping is to buy goods, hence the embarrassment about walking out empty handed. The social script for being in a quiet room is to not be disruptive, which explains why it’s embarrassing to be hit by a prolonged coughing fit. The script for passing an acquaintance is to exchange hellos, which falls apart when you’re walking down a long hallway toward someone you know, leaving you floundering, unsure of when or if to say hi. 

Dr. Feinberg says that in situations like opening gifts in front of a crowd, there are two scripts happening at once. One calls for you to open the gifts and demonstrate your gratitude. But another societal norm is to avoid being the center of attention for too long, which can explain some people’s self-consciousness about the tradition. “I don’t think everyone will feel embarrassed. It likely depends on how much an individual focus is on one script or the other,” he notes. 

Of course, really dissecting why certain, very human experiences are embarrassing can make you question the entire idea of social scripts in the first place. Who decided these things, and who’s forcing the entire human race to stick to them? I’m all for social courtesy, but the fact that I apparently feel so dedicated to preserving a mostly unspoken rule that I break out into a sweat just because the grocery store didn’t have the type of mustard I wanted makes me feel brainwashed and restricted, not polite.

Dr. Feinberg’s view is slightly more rosy. “The key point that our research makes is that embarrassment — although unpleasant to experience — actually serves a very important function,” he says. “It signals to others that you care about the social order, and as a result, it can lead others to trust you more.” And when I think about it, maybe I would be a little suspicious of someone who takes their sweet time putting away their change in a checkout line, without even stepping to the side to let the line continue to move.    

If you don’t feel embarrassed about these situations, though, it probably doesn’t mean you’re bad or rude — just that you have a different understanding of social scripts, the situation you’re in, or the rules and norms of the society you’re currently in. The social scripts I’ve described are specific to the U.S., where I live; different places have different etiquette systems and beliefs.  

As much as I sometimes wish there was something to be done about this particular kind of embarrassment, understanding that the only thing to do, really, is embrace it as one of those quirks that come with being a human who cares about being a part of a community is its own kind of relief. There’s some comfort in knowing, after all, that we’re all slightly ridiculous. In fact, it’s beautiful, in a way. We’re all just trying to make it through this world as best we can, without stepping on anyone’s toes — especially in that moment we shift from walking into a steady jog. 

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Why Quitting Is Good Actually

I Became a Cat Lady During the Pandemic

Eating Pasta Off Your Counter Is Good, Actually

A few years ago, in the interest of learning how to do a little more with my money, I asked my dad about how he learned to budget. I wasn’t surprised when he quickly brought up emergency savings funds. 

My dad and I have similar money philosophies (risk-averse savers), and as such, I felt pretty confident about my emergency savings account. I’d always heard that it was best to have six months of living expenses saved in a liquid cash fund, and I’ve done my best to stick to that advice since I’ve been self-supporting. In practice, my emergency fund probably covers three to six months of my living expenses at any time. I’ve had to dip into it, but when I do, I prioritize building it back up again. 

That night in our living room, my dad repeated the same old “six month” advice that I’d always heard. But then, he said that his preference is actually to save a full year of living expenses in an emergency fund. That number seemed high — even over-the-top to me — but he made a pretty solid case for it. 

When he was younger, he told me, he’d had a job that he truly despised, the type that left him dreading weekday mornings. He quit as soon as he could, but that wasn’t soon enough for him. He hated that he’d wasted so much time on something that made him so miserable. If he’d had 12 months of living expenses saved up, he explained, he would have felt safe walking away with nothing else lined up. Instead, he’d had to wait until he had a plan, rather than rely on what he calls — politely, because he’s a dad — an “F You Fund.” 

As mentioned, I inherited my money personality from my dad, and I’m thrifty to a fault. Left to my own devices, I would never spend a dime, which, I’ve come to realize, isn’t entirely a good thing. These days, I try to remind myself that money is a tool — something that can provide me with security, yes, but also something that enables me to spend quality time with my loved ones and have enriching experiences. 

All to say, I didn’t need my dad to walk me through the pros of the F You Fund; it made intuitive sense to me. If you quit with nothing lined up, you’ll probably find a job within six months, but you’ll almost definitely find one within 12. Having the extra cushion means you’re prepared for a worst-case scenario — a long period of unemployment, or some other unexpected expense you hadn’t accounted for when you were cataloging your living costs. And if everything goes as planned and you find a job within a few months, you’ll be left with a robust emergency savings fund still intact. It felt right to my risk-shy gut: If I were in a toxic work situation and had six months of expenses saved, I’d probably want to find a new job before quitting; if I had 12 months saved, I’d feel that much more empowered to just leave.

Unfortunately, the reality is that most adults don’t have a Fuck You Fund (FYF). As of July 2021, over half of Americans have less than three months’ worth of emergency savings, and a solid 25% have nothing at all, reports Bankrate. Meanwhile, we’re in the midst of the so-called Great Resignation, with 4.3 Americans quitting their jobs in August alone. That’s nearly 3% of the entire workforce, and double the number of people who left their jobs each month in 2013. 

Of course, there were also 10.4 million job openings in August, a number that had gone down slightly month over month but was still record-breakingly high. So it stands to reason that many people who are quitting have new jobs lined up. But others are leaving their work without their next steps planned, a sign of, as Whizy Kim writes in her astute piece about the burnout generation, “how fed up people with the conditions of work.” 

I knew what felt right to me, but I was curious what financial experts thought about what amount made for a fiscally responsible FYF. The answer was predictably noncommittal— it depends on the individual, they said — but it was also accurate. When I asked over 100 people what they would need in their FYF to feel safe quitting without a plan, the responses varied widely. While the most popular answer was six months, most people said they’d need anywhere from three and 18 months of living expenses saved to feel like they could really just say: Fuck you. 

This makes sense. An FYF, after all, is different from an emergency savings fund. The latter is objective: the amount of money you’d need to keep the lights on until you could find steady income again. The former is subjective: the amount of money that would empower you to say “fuck you” when you’re in a bad situation, and then follow through on it. This means having the ability to leave without necessarily offering two weeks’ notice or sending out a pleasant “it’s been nice!” email. What the FYF asks people to consider, then, is how much money they need to feel secure enough to start from zero, and given how emotional our relationships with money can be, it’s no wonder that the FYF figure can be a moving target. 

When Becky Blake, the founder of financial coaching company TwentyFree, quit her corporate job in January 2020, she’d saved an even $100,000. “I have to admit that I chose $100,000 a bit arbitrarily because it felt like a powerful amount of money. What can’t a girl do if she has $100,000 in the bank?” she says. Like my dad, Blake called this her F-you money, “because it gave me the freedom to say F-you to circumstances that were no longer serving me — including my day job.” 

While Blake had some liquid savings, a huge chunk of that $100K was invested into retirement accounts, which most experts will tell you aren’t the same as emergency savings, since you’ll be stuck paying a big penalty fee if you withdraw it early. But, she explains, “the amount in my investments was enough to be on track to retire at 65 without investing another penny.” 

Hillary Swetz, who runs the frugal-living website Homegrown Hillary, says she resigned from her job as a public school teacher one month before the pandemic hit the U.S., and only had a couple thousand dollars saved in a bank account. And yet, Swetz — who is married and has two children — says that was still enough. “For my family, it wasn’t about how much we’d saved, but how much debt we’d paid off… That was more important to us, because it brought down the necessary income requirements for our family,” she says. 

Of course, Swetz’s spouse still had a full-time job, which underscores how much individual circumstances can affect a person’s final FYF number. “Are you single? Are you married with kids? Do you live at home? Is moving home to save money an option? Do you have a mortgage? These are all great things to consider before figuring out your ‘magic number’ in terms of savings,” says Brendan Heffernan, the co-founder of basketball website Dunk or Three, who is preparing to leaving his full-time job in the education industry to pursue freelance writing. Another important factor is identifying what your ideal next move would be. If you want to slide into a comparable job to the one you’re leaving, you may feel comfortable with a smaller amount in your savings. But if you’re hoping to make a career change, or your line of work is highly specialized or very competitive, you may prefer having a little extra, says Sharon Van Donkelaar, the chief marketing officer at Expandi. 

A person’s past experiences around being out of work can also affect their Fuck You Fund mindset. “One time, I didn’t save six months and I felt rushed to find a job. Ultimately, I ended up taking a job that didn’t fit what I was looking for and I quit it over a year later,” says  L.J. Jones, a financial planner and the founder of Developing Financial LLC. “The second time, I saved up six months and I was able to take some time off to evaluate what I was looking for, take time to visit a friend, and let me find the ideal job I wanted without the pressure to take jobs that didn’t fit my criteria.” 

Trysta Barwig had the experience of having quit a job with only three months’ worth of living expenses saved, but then having to spend six months finding a new job. Barwig, founder of the travel blog This Travel Dream, ended up having to ask her family for financial support during that time, an experience that pushed her into a more conservative end of the FYF spectrum. Now she says she wouldn’t quit without a full year of expenses saved up. Then there’s Christine Wang, the founder of the skiing site The Ski Girl, who says that even though she’s found that getting a new job can take longer than you think, for her, three months’ worth of expenses is enough of a FYF — although, she also recommends trying to have some other source of income lined up.

The truth is that there is no one figure that makes it “okay” or “not okay” to leave a job. And while we can speculate about our FYF number all we want, it’s also very possible that we’d feel differently when we’re really in that situation. What’s the balance between my tolerance for workplace toxicity, my respect for my own wellbeing, and my fear of losing control of my finances? If an environment is harmful enough, it could (and maybe it should) outweigh my desire for a massive financial safety net.

To that end, my favorite response to my FYF questions came from Adam Garcia, a financial expert and the founder of The Stock Dork. “This will sound weird, coming from an expert in finance and investing: There is no amount of money that can make it safe enough to quit your job. Not because safety is difficult to achieve, but because it’s an illusion,” Garcia says. “Not quitting a job because you don’t have a Plan B can turn out to be even less safe than jumping ship, particularly if you consider that job’s downsides to your mental or physical health. More and more people are realizing this, and it is the direct cause of what we came to call the Great Resignation. Paradoxically, such a way of thinking and the courage to not only take risks but to admit that they are inherent to our condition can yield unexpected (and unexpectedly good) results because it spells liberty, and liberty is precisely what our creative juices thrive on.” 

This isn’t, in any way, to say that money is meaningless, because it’s not. Having little or no debt and lots of liquid assets is life-changing. But, it is possible to become too attached to the idea that money gives us complete control over our futures and our safety, or that there’s ever any such thing as having enough of it. When it comes to leaving a job, then, how much money you have saved should be one factor in your decision, but not the only one. 

As for me, I haven’t been keeping close track of it, but my Fuck You Fund hasn’t gotten much bigger since my dad first told me about his 12-month rule, but it’s not a high priority for me. I don’t know if this was his intention, but the lesson I took away from our conversation wasn’t that I needed to sock away even more cash, but rather that it’s important to value yourself and your happiness over your job. Maybe the theory of the FYF is powerful enough on its own, and will help remind me that if I’m ever in a situation that makes me wish I had just a few months’ more rent saved up, I’ll prioritize getting myself out of there — no matter how much cash I have on the side.

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“Asians Don’t Quit”

Millennials Never Wanted Ping Pong Tables At Work

Put The Salary In The Job Post, You Cowards

“If you were a tree, what kind would you be?” It’s the type of inane question that many people would roll their eyes at if it were asked during an icebreaker exercise or on a first date. But for Sally Gibson, the question was posed someplace much, much worse: a job interview. 

“​​I was completely thrown by it. I basically froze,” recalls Gibson, the founder and owner of Someone Sent You A Greeting. “I was silent for longer than I care to remember and ended up just saying the first tree that came into my head — elm. I didn’t elaborate any further and just lapsed into more silence and I think the interviewer realized there wasn’t much point following up as he moved on after that.” This happened about 20 years ago, and Gibson says that she still looks back at that moment and cringes. 

At the time, she kicked herself for not being more prepared for an off-the-wall question like this, because they’d become very popular in the early-2000s. Job seekers were told to expect to be asked things like: “How much does the Empire State Building weigh?” “How many golf balls would fit into a 747?” “Why are manhole covers round?” or, a question immortalized in the 2013 film The Internship, “You’re shrunk down to the size of nickels and dropped into the bottom of a blender. What do you do?” 

Privately, however, Gibson has always considered this type of question basically useless. “You don’t learn anything really insightful about the person you’re interviewing and they seem more like a ‘gotcha!’ moment or attempt to trip people up rather than be of any real value,” she says. 

Amra Beganovich says she was asked brain teaser questions “about a dozen-plus times” between 2006 and 2008, while interviewing for consulting positions as an economist for companies like IMR and Worldbank. Once, she was asked how she could place three balls into two boxes so that there were an equal number in each box. Her answer was to cut open one side of each box and combine them so they overlapped, then place one ball in each box and one in the overlapping portion. This was deemed correct, but she, too, came away with a distaste for the questions. “[They don’t] test critical thinking or creativity. People who performed best on these were mentored by others on how to answer brain-teaser questions as they often repeated in various interviews. Basically, it puts those without a mentor at a disadvantage,” says Beganovich, who’s now the CEO of a digital marketing agency, Amra & Elma.

The questions plagued job seekers across industries. While interviewing to be a dental assistant in 2018, Michelle Keldgord was asked, “You have two coins that equal 30 cents, and one of them is not a nickel. What coins do you have?” She knows the answer is relatively obvious (a quarter and a nickel; the quarter is the coin that’s not a nickel), but she was nervous and had already gotten off to a bad start with the interviewer, so at the time she was “dumbfounded,” she says. “I was peeved [that] I was being asked to answer a riddle in a professional environment. I don’t think it showed my wit or understanding. I would have much rather answered questions related to the dental field to show how smart I was,” says Keldgord, who went on to co-found BakingHow. 

Considering the fact that they’re nearly universally despised, you have to wonder why these questions exist in the first place. Their origin is actually a bit fuzzy. In the early-aughts, prevailing wisdom was that they were used during Google interviews. But in a 2010 post on her website, Gayle Laakmann McDowell, who had been a software engineer at Google and served on the company’s hiring committee, said that this wasn’t true. “Years ago, rumors used to circulate about Microsoft interviews,” she wrote. “They were the hot, new company that everyone wanted to work. With envy came the urban myths. These rumors have since been transfered to Google, and will surely be transfered to some new company in due time. Bloggers — always desperate for links and traffic — have capitalized on this, with scary articles about their ‘nightmare interview’ and ‘crazy questions’. Let’s just stop this right now, shall we? [sic]” She went on to state that brain teasers are explicitly banned at Google (and Microsoft) during interviews.

This post didn’t appear to quiet the rumors much, if at all, though. In a 2013 interview with The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, who spent 10 years as senior vice president of people operations at Google before leaving the company in December 2016, brought up the questions again — although he didn’t explicitly address whether or not they’d ever been used at Google. He simply said that studies the company had conducted showed “that brain teasers are a complete waste of time… They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.” 

Eric Cole, the founder of InterviewIQ, agrees. “As a hiring manager for over 35 years, and now as a career coach and interview coach, I have heard and even asked some pretty bad questions,” admits Cole. “Unfortunately, most interviewers who ask those impossible ‘brain teaser’ questions are really more interested in flexing their ego and showing off.” 

He says that brain teasers are ostensibly designed to gauge a candidate’s critical thinking: As long as the person can walk the interviewer through their logic, their answer should count as “good,” even if their actual answer to a question like “How many marbles would fit in the Louvre?” is wrong. But not every candidate has a thinking style that’s well-suited for brain teasers, Cole says. Some people are better able to think out loud than others, who may need inward reflection time before they can walk someone through their thought process. There are much better ways to gauge a candidates’ problem-solving style and critical-thinking skills than to ask them a random riddle, such as asking how people juggle competing priorities, how they best grow, the most useful lesson they’ve learned from a more senior colleague, or for an example of a time they made a mistake and how they handled it. 

Brain teasers aren’t just annoying. Cole says interviewers who rely on brain teasers can sometimes want to make a candidate feel uncomfortable — and that information might give you useful insight into that company’s culture. I spoke to a friend of mine, Sarah Hudson*, a talent director in the advertising industry in New York City with 12 years’ experience interviewing job candidates, and she says that these questions can even hint at something iffy going on at the hiring company. “Particularly as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion, there’s a lot of conversation going on right now about making sure that you’re standardizing questions and that you’re asking things that will get to a certain point to really understand the person,” Hudson says. If she were ever asked a brain teaser question in an interview, she’d assume the person isn’t trained in the latest interview techniques, and would see it as a red flag. 

As for Gibson, she says if someone asked her a similar question today, she thinks she’d be less easily thrown off her game — although she’d certainly be annoyed. “Having been through many interviews now I still don’t see what you gain from a question like that. I’d like to think I’d be brave enough to ask how relevant it is but I don’t suppose that would do me many favors!” she says. “I definitely think they’ve had their time though and would be surprised to find interviewers still using them.” 

Now if only we could get interviewers to do away with, “So, where do you see yourself in five years?”

*Hudson’s name was changed for privacy.

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Why Burnout Is A Broken Promise

Millennials Never Wanted Ping Pong Tables At Work

Are Your Childhood Dreams A Scam?

When Rod Thill graduated college in 2013, “everyone,” he remembers, “wanted to work at a startup.” Thill, who’s better known as @rod on TikTok, where he creates content focused on explaining the millennial experience, says that “Silicon Valley, Apple, Google were so idolized.” He recalls thinking, Okay, I can’t work at Google — but how can I get close enough to that? Startups, he says, were known for being relaxed, collaborative, innovative spaces, full of fun perks for their employees — the opposite of the typical, soul-crushing workplaces portrayed in Office Space or Workaholics. Who wouldn’t want that? 

But just as images populated by rows and rows of identical cubicles became shorthand for “the death of creative freedom,” it wasn’t long before startup-styled workplaces, filled with exposed brick and in-house coffee bars, began to reflect a different kind of professional malaise. Thill noticed that workplaces used office features to signal that they offered all the supposed perks of startup-style work in an attempt to recruit young, millennial workers. But Thill, who often brings up The JED Foundation in his posts to raise awareness around mental health, says those gestures often weren’t backed up by the office culture that was promised. “I think all of that ‘startup mentality’ of having the coffee bar, the Slim Jims in the break room, the pool table, and the open-floor plan has created toxicity in the work environment,” he says. Only this toxicity was something these workplaces took pains to cover up; at one job, Thill says he was asked to submit a positive Glassdoor review. “They were like, ‘We need to make sure this looks like a good place to work.’ And it’s like, ‘You should actually try to fix it!’” 

Thill’s experience is part of a bigger trend that has played out at organizations across the country over the last decade or so: the pandering to millennial workers, and refusal to acknowledge that aesthetic flourishes are no substitute for healthy work environments. All of this was done based on a series of assumptions about millennials’ collective generational personality, but even though millennials are now the largest percentage of the workforce, you rarely hear much about what they might need or want at work anymore. The corporate world has moved on, training its lens on Generation Z in a way that feels very familiar to what happened with millennials — and just as toxic. 

This is how it goes, says Lisa Finkelstein, PhD, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Northern Illinois University: While conversations about workplace productivity and happiness are constant, what shifts every decade or so is their focus — what Dr. Finkelstein calls the “hot” generation of the time. 

The catch is that generational divides, as they pertain to the workforce, don’t really exist. “If you really think about all the differences among all people born in a certain time period,” Dr. Finkelstein says, “it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to think they all want the same thing. It’s rather insulting, I think, when you make assumptions about someone rather than get to know them as an individual.” 

Take job-hopping, a stereotypically “millennial” behavior that is meant to indicate the fickleness of this generation specifically when it comes to their careers.  A 2016 USAToday article cited a Fidelity survey that found that even though 86% of millennials were happy at work, half were still open to changing jobs, even when it meant less money. John Sweeney, executive vice president of retirement and investing strategies at Fidelity, told USAToday that this desire for change is reflective of millennials’ inherent impatience. “The fact that today’s millennials want more control over their work/life balance shouldn’t be surprising to us given that these people have grown up in an era of somewhat instant answers,” he said. “They’re used to being able to find what they want fairly quickly.”

Okay, except for the fact that this categorization completely ignores the way that young workers have always tended to switch jobs relatively often: They’re still trying to figure out what they want to do, and they have fewer encumbrances than they might later in life. In fact, although baby boomers have a reputation for being one-job wonders, data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth has shown that between the ages of 18 to 22, boomers held 4.4 jobs and millennials held 4.6; between 18 to their early-30s, boomers held 8.6 jobs to millennials’ 7.8. 

“People believe that there are dramatic differences between workers from different generations, but the data are not consistent with these beliefs,” says Eden King, PhD, an associate professor of Industrial-Organizational (IO) Psychology at Rice University. She points to a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) as evidence of the fallacy of generational differences. In fact, the report shows that focusing on these differences can “lead to prejudice, bias, and stereotyping in the workplace.” 

Nancy Tippins, the principal at The Nancy T. Tippins Group, LLC, who led the NASEM report, says, “We found that most of the research findings that are attributed to generational differences are really a shift in the characteristics of work more generally, or simply the variations among people as they age and get experience.” Some workplace changes that are attributed to a certain generation may be an inevitable result of the rapid technological innovations that occurred in the early 2000s, for instance. Other human qualities or habits might apply to certain age groups across generations.

“The other thing that we found is that a lot of the research makes assumptions that that really aren’t true,” Tippins adds. For example, she says, “I have lots of education and have a very white-collar kind of profession, and I sit at a desk all day. I’m different from the woman who is my age and works as a waitress or on an assembly line. To make the assumption that we’re homogeneous simply because we were born between certain years is really a false premise.” Tippins points out that someone in their 30s with two young kids might actually have more in common, with respect to assistance with care, with someone in their 50s caring for ailing, elderly parents than with a childless person in their 30s — something that underscores the shortcomings of trying to categorize people by generation. 

Companies’ insistence on using generational differences as a shortcut to understand and appease their workers is emblematic of what’s wrong with corporate culture today, wherein buzzwords are a replacement for substance. In effect, corporations are classifying entire groups of people under one insufficient and oftentimes contradictory umbrella as a way to avoid listening to what their workers are actually saying about what they want and how they feel, so they can instead tell them how they feel and what they want. It’s a shallow and performative attempt to “appeal” to each new generation of workers, to slap a bandage on top of what are often deeply troubling systematic issues. Ultimately, when these “accommodations” fail to make workers happy, blame falls on the workers themselves, with companies citing young people’s entitlement, indolence, or selfishness, and never looking at what they did — or didn’t do — to contribute to the problem 

What better example is there of millennials being given “what they want” than the rise of the office ping pong table (or pool table, espresso machine, IPAs on tap, etc.), the “work perk” du jour when millennials still represented the youngest class of incoming employees? In a 2010 paper entitled “Generation Y in the Workplace”, the authors conducted a survey that included just 85 millennials, and noted that 72% of them listed “work environment” as something that they consider when making workplace decisions. From there, the study authors concluded: “Who could imagine that for a holiday party, the theme would actually be the movie Animal House (1978), and togas were the preferred costume? This may seem unusual, but many companies are starting to realize that environments like this are just what this new generation is looking for.” 

This one paper alone didn’t move mountains — other research had been drawing the same conclusion for years by the time this was published — but it’s representative of the kind of framing of generational desires that led companies to reach for low-hanging fruit and, say, buy a pool table for their break rooms or make that year’s holiday party toga-themed (please, no), and not understand why their Glassdoor reviews continue to plummet. 

Janet Pogue McLaurin is the global workplace research leader at Gensler, a design and architecture firm that has been behind many “next-gen” office redesigns. She says that a company’s office space can “go really far” in terms of improving workplace culture, and relies on insights from The Gensler Research Institute combined with client needs to inform some of the concepts Gensler brings to their design plans. But any office design changes “have to feel authentic to that organization and their culture. And that can’t be just to placate employees because people see through that,” she says. “The best designs really reflect what that personality is and how that particular organization truly works. And it starts with listening to their employees. It doesn’t just come from leaders.” McLaurin is talking about office design, but the same holds true for all aspects of office culture: The best work environment can be found in organizations that are willing to actually listen to their employees, and adapt to their needs and wants. Too often, companies rely on shortcuts that claim to tell them what workers really want and how they can easily deliver it. In the process, most companies totally miss the point. 

“The problem is people believe [that there are massive generational differences], and that then creates problems [because] people think others are so different from them or all have certain attitudes and characteristics,” Dr. Finkelstein says. It can be frustrating when, for instance, a manager assumes that all of their youngest hires will prefer communicating via Slack to in-person meetings without asking first, or when companies cite the fact that millennials and Gen Z have long wanted better work from home options to tell them that the pandemic-related WFH mandate is actually a “benefit.” 

Generational identity rhetoric in the workplace has already begun to affect Gen Z. The major stereotype that’s currently bubbling up is that the so-called “woke generation” attaches significant weight to a company’s social impact, ethical practices, and commitment to inclusion and diversity. One would hope that identifying this value — even if it’s not necessarily tied to Gen Z alone — would spur corporations toward more meaningful change than investing in an office rec center. But it’s more likely that companies will look for a simple, performative fix. Just as some companies bought pool tables to act the part of a fun-loving workspace that valued play and social connection, now others will talk endlessly about the carbon offset benefits they offer their employees and hope it distracts from the fact that they offer their executive board NetJets memberships as part of their comp package. 

The oldest millennials turn 40 this year, and many of the work perks companies had instituted in order to attract them have been hijacked by the pandemic. Free communal snacks and open-floor plan offices are meaningless if nobody’s working on-site anymore, and there’s still no federal requirement to reimburse remote workers for work-related expenses, which means many companies have simply opted not to. Workers across all age groups are experiencing tremendous amounts of burnout and anxiety, and although many companies have already begun to pay lip service to their inclusive, Gen Z-friendly culture, it’s clear that they’re simply trying to repeat the same empty promises they made to millennials, repackaged for a new generation.

But, if generations are a lie, and the only way to foster a truly inclusive and happy workplace culture is to actually listen to your employees, and try to tailor your benefits to what the majority of them need. Dr. King offers a good place to start: “It turns out that the evidence suggests that people from all ages and generations appreciate flexible schedules and autonomy in their work.” Who would have guessed?

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Almost 30 years ago, in 1995, two researchers from the University of Mississippi were granted a patent for “the use of turmeric for wound healing.” At that time, turmeric was not known in the U.S. for being a wellness “super-ingredient”; the age of golden oat milk lattes had not yet risen. But, of course, turmeric had been a staple in South Asian countries for centuries, as both a cooking spice and a healing agent. And so India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) challenged the patent, on the grounds that the researchers were attempting to personally capitalize off  traditional cultural knowledge, and therefore didn’t fulfill the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s requirement for novelty or inventiveness. The year-long legal battle cost the CSIR $15,000, but they won, and the patent was revoked in 1997.

This isn’t just about turmeric, though, nor is this type of cultural property theft limited to international appropriation. Thirteen years after becoming a state, New Mexico adopted a new state flag; a simple, impactful design, the flag features a crimson red sun symbol centered on a golden-yellow background. The symbol, though, belonged to the Zia, an Indigenous tribe of the region. Long used by a small sect within the Zia as part of their religious healing practices, the sun symbol was never intended to be distributed widely, even within the Zia’s own community. In fact, it only became more widely known after a piece of pottery featuring the sun symbol was stolen from the Zia and later displayed at a museum, where it inspired the state flag’s design. 

The Zia’s continued fight to protect this sacred symbol has been long and complex; since it has been treated as part of the public domain for so long, the legal options have been limited. In the late-1990s, after decades of New Mexico’s desecration of its sign, the Zia Pueblo asked the state to pay it around $74 million in reimbursement for using the symbol without permission. New Mexico didn’t pay, but The New York Times reported in 2000 that the Pueblo hadn’t expected the state to. The Zia had hoped that their request for reimbursement would put pressure on the state and raise awareness around the issue of Indigenous intellectual property protections — and it has, but the solutions put in place have been imperfect. 

The Times notes that not long after the Zia asked New Mexico for reimbursement, the federal Patent and Trademark Office released a statement acknowledging the issues around protecting Native American insignia. It also created an insignia database to help protect these cultural expressions. But Frank Ettawageshik, the executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, says databases like this aren’t a viable solution for many Indigenous communities when it comes to protecting their heritage. “Most of that knowledge we can’t put in that database, because it’s secret and sacred,” Ettawageshik says. In fact, it’s possible that the Zia Pueblo would have been unable to put the sun symbol into the USPTO database, but it still deserved to be protected. 

This highlights the fundamental tension between how many native or Indigenous cultures view their own traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and cultural expressions, and how non-Indigenous legal systems treat such resources. “Under the conventional intellectual property system, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions are generally regarded as being in the public domain, and thus free for anyone to use. Indigenous peoples, local communities, and many countries reject this so-called ‘public domain’ status, arguing that being considered as such opens the door to unwanted misappropriation or misuse,” explains Anna Sinkevich, an Indigenous Fellow at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). 

“The largely oral nature of transmission of these traditional forms of creativity and innovation from one generation to the next adds an additional layer of complexity,” Sinkevich adds. The lack of a written record can make communities that benefit from traditional knowledge more vulnerable to theft or exploitation.

The way the U.S. and many other legal systems view ownership is another point of friction. “In non-Indigenous thought, intellectual knowledge is considered an invention of the human mind. If the human mind gets this beautiful, wonderful idea and makes a widget of some sort, the maker of that widget can get a patent for it and then will be the sole person to profit from any money that’s made from it for a period of time,” Ettawageshik says. 

But, as Sinkevich points out, that way of thinking doesn’t correspond with Indigenous concepts of ownership, which, she explains, reflect the idea that “traditional knowledge is generally regarded as being collectively held, meaning that any rights and interests in it belong to the community rather than an individual member, including in cases where an individual member of a community has developed traditional knowledge.” If a community were to try to apply for a copyright, patent, or other intellectual property protection, “it may be difficult to identify the ‘owner’ of the intellectual property rights,” Sinkevich says. “In addition, it could be the case that more than one community shares the same or similar traditional knowledge or traditional cultural expressions. So even if they were to individually qualify for the protection of their rights, how would you, for example, offer fair and equitable protection to each of these communities separated by modern international borders?”

Another reason communities may not want to seek existing intellectual property protections like a patent is that these eventually expire, and once they do, the property becomes public domain, Ettawageshik says. And again, the knowledge that’s being protected may not have been intended to be part of the public domain or even necessarily profited from in the first place.  

But, even though the current legal system isn’t set up to protect traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expression, and genetic resources, it’s still essential to find a way to properly safeguard these resources. “When traditional knowledge is put in the wrong context by a third party, in particular without the community’s consent, it can be not only offensive to the community but also runs the risk of misrepresenting or distorting the perception of the community and their traditional knowledge,” Sinkevich points out. “From a financial perspective, the lack of protection for traditional knowledge as such can have a negative economic impact on its holders, possibly even preventing them from benefiting from their own traditional knowledge or traditional cultural expressions,” she adds.

Unfortunately, getting the legal system and large corporations to recognize communities’ rights to protect their own traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, and genetic resources has been a struggle for community leaders. Sinkevich says that developing countries are responsible for much of the negotiations done in this area, although many developed countries — especially those with Indigenous populations — have taken part as well, and many countries do have some legal protections or guidelines in place. Organizations such as the Native American Rights Fund are set up to push for legal recognition and protection for Indigenous communities in the U.S., and similar organizations exist internationally. Sinkevich says that the WIPO Secretariat’s Traditional Knowledge Division “facilitates a normative process among Member States, which aims to develop an international legal instrument for the protection of traditional knowledge,” one that addresses “the intersection between the intellectual property system and the concerns of practitioners and custodians of traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions, and genetic resources.” 

Ettawageshik has been heavily involved in negotiations with governing bodies, including the U.N., regarding the rights of Indigenous peoples to protect their intellectual property, and the need for international intellectual property law to adequately accommodate the unique collective and temporal nature of Indigenous intellectual property. The work of Indigenous communities and the people intent on protecting the sanctity of traditional knowledge has led to changes that have allowed for actual accountability. In 2016, for example, Urban Outfitters settled with Navajo Nation after the clothing company illegally used the tribe’s name in a collection. 

Ettawageshik says that protecting cultures’ traditional knowledge, and specifically protecting Indigenous intellectual property, is not about making sure no one outside of Indigenous communities can use it: “When you’re talking about protecting indigenous knowledge… it’s also what we’re willing to share.” But not all Indigenous or traditional knowledge is meant to be disseminated in that way, and in an ideal world, Ettawageshik says that “people would respect Indigenous knowledge and not abuse that relationship.” The world is far from ideal, but this is a baseline everyone is capable of practicing — as is being more conscious about why a golden latte isn’t just another wellness trend.

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Two years ago, I got married and took my husband’s last name, adopting my original surname as my middle name and dropping my birth-given middle name altogether. My husband seemed mostly apathetic about me doing this. He was flattered that I wanted to take his surname, but wouldn’t have been bothered if I hadn’t. But I wanted to do it. It’s what my mother had done, and what I always imagined I’d do, too.

It wasn’t until a month after our wedding, though, when my driver’s license expired, that I really got the ball rolling on my name change. As I filled out the paperwork required to get a new Social Security card, I felt my first pangs of misgivings. Why was I doing this? Was it anti-feminist? The feeling my imminent name change suddenly gave me was not one of joining, but instead of shrinking. I felt like I was burying a part of my own identity — and for what? To adopt a surname that was laden with a history to which I had no connection? 

I talked about my shifting perspective with my new spouse, who encouraged me to forget about the process. But I didn’t. My list of reasons for changing my name seemed to overshadow my new and nebulous feelings of doubt. I wanted us — and any future kids we might have — to have the same last name. Part of me wanted to put some distance between myself and my family of origin’s surname, to symbolically step into a new stage of life, one centered around the family my partner and I were creating. Objectively, I preferred my partner’s surname to my own, and of the two of us, he felt the most connection to his last name (I’d grown up expecting to change mine, after all). I don’t think he would have taken my name, though I never seriously asked him to. 

But my discomfort has persisted. I like having the same last name as my husband. I just miss my original name, too. I miss strange, specific things. Even though I disliked my middle name, I had liked the roundness its first letter, B, lent to my initials — MBK, versus MKZ. I miss spelling my last name out on the phone, and ending by saying, “F F like Frank Frank,” which is how my mom always spells it and which always made me think of her. While I love my in-laws, I feel strange sharing a last name with them, tied to them in a way I hadn’t anticipated. And I wonder whether it was wrong for me to take part in an inherently patriarchal tradition, one that’s relatively easy to opt out of. 

That last concern didn’t occur to me in a vacuum. When I began asking people what they thought about women taking a spouse’s last name after marriage, many called out the practice’s sexist roots. Renée Warren, 39, the CEO and founder of business coaching company We Wild Women, explained her decision to keep her last name after marriage by saying, “I am a feminist and had also built up a little bit of a brand around my name. Going through the motions of changing my last name not only didn’t feel right, to me, [it] put feminism back a few more years.” Sabrina Beaumont, 40, the CMO of Passion Plans, said, “The practice of taking your spouse’s name is truly one that helps maintain the ingrown sexism we see in society. If there was any sort of reason, 50% of couples would take the woman’s last name but that’s not so. With no functional purpose, taking the man’s name is a tradition that should be stopped in its tracks.”

The modern American tradition of marital name changes is a holdover of Anglo-American coverture laws, which dictated that in marriage, a woman’s rights were subsumed by her husband. The suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone is typically credited for being one of the first to publicly and vocally push back against the tradition of married women changing their names in the United States. She kept her name when she married in 1855. Even so, in 1879, she was denied the right to vote in a school election unless she added her husband’s name to her signature. Over the next 100-ish years, state governments continued to rule on the question of whether women should be forced to change their last name in order to vote, open a bank account, and even secure their own passport. By around 1975, though, every state law that had required a woman take her husband’s last name after marriage had been eliminated. This was thanks to the women’s rights movement, in which marital names became a core issue insofar as they pertained to a woman’s personal liberty. It was such a prominent issue that the number of women keeping their birth-given surnames hit an all-time high in the 1970s, according to a small 2015 Google Consumer Survey analyzed by The New York Times’ The Upshot. That figure dipped in the more conservative 1980s, before rising again each subsequent decade.

That said, the significant majority of women in the U.S. still adopt their spouse’s surname after tying the knot. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact number, since many studies analyze limited populations — one used The New York Times’ wedding announcements, Harvard University alumni records, and Massachusetts birth records, for instance — groups that tend to be composed of high-income, mostly white, straight couples. But the research I’ve seen indicates that roughly 70% to 90% of women in the U.S. adopt their spouse’s name after marriage. 

At the same time, more than 60% of U.S. women described themselves as feminist in 2020, the Pew Research Center reported. That means there are plenty of people who, like me, consider themselves feminist and still took part in this patriarchal tradition — by which I mean taking a spouse’s name, not just marriage in general. 

Considering how much it was nagging at me, I was surprised to find that many people apparently don’t think about changing their name all that much. In a small 2013 study that looked into students’ reasons for marital name change, researchers from East Carolina University found that about half of them thought the practice just wasn’t that big a deal. The majority saw changing their name as a family expectation, a tradition that was worth honoring, a way to unify their family, or just easier. Very few respondents indicated that the practice was a way of giving a husband power over their wife — but a significant number thought it was a sign of respect toward their husband, an answer that didn’t sit all that well with me.

When people hesitated, it had more to do with their sense of self than with their thoughts on the patriarchy. They talked about being sad to lose their personal identity, a degree of autonomy in their career, and, significantly, their family heritage — a common thread that came up among the people to whom I spoke. Iqra Mehrin Azhar, for example, said, “As a Pakistani South Asian woman, I know that, culturally, women take on their husband’s names. But growing up, I strongly associated with my religious identity, which is that of a Muslim woman. And as a proud Muslim woman, I knew that God did not require it in Islam,” the 33-year-old digital marketer and businesswoman explained. “If I had taken on my spouse’s last name, I would have felt like I am simply leaving my family and my past behind.” 

Rayna Weiss, 35, on the other hand, worried it would be inappropriate or even appropriative for her to take her husband’s Colombian last name, Londoño, since she wasn’t Colombian herself. And both Weiss and her husband agreed that the Latin American tradition of adding “de” plus the husband’s last name to a married woman’s name — which would have made her Rayna Weiss de Londoño, roughly translating to Rayna Weiss of the Londoño family — felt chauvinistic and possessive, so she chose to keep her original name. 

For others, family heritage motivated them to shed their name. Writer Carol Gee, 71, for instance, told me that when she took her husband’s last name 48 years ago, it was “what folks did,” but then too, “there was also some question about my paternity and maiden name, so I was happy to rid myself of it.” I also heard about people who were eager to change their last names because their family of origin was abusive.

One of the main reasons I wanted to change my name was because I thought it would help me feel more like my husband and I were building something together, a family of our own. I’d dated my partner for about a decade before we got married, and lived with him for half of that time. Adopting his name felt like a tangible step toward something new. But Simon Duncan, PhD, emeritus professor of Comparative Social Policy at the University of Bradford in the UK, who has studied marital name change traditions in Britain and Norway, notes that many women change their name in order not just to feel like a unified family, but to look like one. “You don’t just have to be a good family; you have to be seen to be a good family by other people,” he says. That reason is colored by institutionalized sexism, he points out. It also made me wonder about how the pressure to appear “official” affects couples who are already often invalidated by society as a whole, like LGBTQ couples.

“I don’t know if we necessarily thought about it consciously, but I do think in a lot of ways we as a couple have always tried to be just like all of our straight friends,” Ali Sousa, 31, who married her wife Carly, 34, in 2018, tells me. “We aspire to have a family, and raise our kids in a world where we are just like all the other families, and they just happen to have two moms. I think in some ways, using one of our last names, having the same last name, and being a family where the kids and all the parents have the same last names, kind of levels us up with other hetereosexual families.” 

Carly says their decision over which last name to take was just “a rock-paper-scissors of which of these things is worse? And honestly, there’s more room for bullying with her last name, it being a verb.” (Ali’s birth surname was Grab.) For Ali, the change took some getting used to, but was ultimately exciting. But for Carly, the decision to keep her last name came with its own anxieties. “Not getting rid of my last name was hard for me,” she says. “I really struggled with the roles and responsibilities and norms of what a homosexual relationship entails. For me, to keep my last name meant that I was quote-unquote the man of the relationship. I, for a long time, was sort of like, ‘Oh man, I’m going to be the boy, that sucks. I don’t want to wear the pants. I don’t want people to think I’m the masculine one. I want to be a beautiful, attractive, feminine girl. I want to be the mom.’” 

Carly was able to put those fears to rest, but only after doing a lot of work around how she thought about the roles in her relationship, even down to their division of household labor. “I also think we found ways to make sure that Carly felt like she was in the more feminine role,” Ali says. “So for example, I proposed. And even though we each walked down the aisle at our wedding, I went first and Carly came second as the final bride moment. So even though those aren’t necessarily the big-picture items, like having the same last name and choosing hers, it’s about trying to find ways to give her opportunities for her to feel like she didn’t have to necessarily carry out that role all the time.” 

As I talked to Carly and Ali about the ways in which they fit into and chafed against society’s heteronormativity, something clicked for me: My concerns weren’t really just about my decision to change my name. That choice had come to represent the ways in which I was meant to fit into the entire institution of marriage, one that doesn’t always treat me like an equal, or even a full individual. My husband and I are both feminists, and we try to be intentional and thoughtful about our relationship. But gender roles run deep. Can we always identify which roles we had chosen, and which we had simply slipped into? After all, sometimes, quietly accepting what’s being forced onto us can feel a lot like making the right choice.

Before we got married, I felt comfortable in the roles we’d taken in our relationship, largely because I still felt completely independent from my partner — despite living together, we operated as two separate people, with robust lives that only occasionally intersected. After our wedding, despite wanting to create a more parallel existence to my new spouse, I started to question things about our relationship that had never bothered me before. I began refusing to do the dishes, a chore we’d always split. I dragged my feet when my husband asked if we could open a joint bank account. I trust him and I trust his principles and his respect for me — but I’m scared to lose my autonomy. I’m scared to become “a wife.” 

Lori Axler Miranda, 41, tells me that she understands that tension, and says that her discomfort around gender roles became more complicated after having her first child. She felt like the bulk of the childcare tasks fell on her shoulders, often by necessity. “Whether you intend to or not, the gender roles really shift. It forced us into these very stereotypical gender roles that we’d never been in before,” she says. Lori adds that having kids also affected how she felt about her decision to take her husband’s name — something she’d struggled with on and off ever since she had changed it, two years after they got married. “It feels strange to change your name — which is a part of your identity — just because you get married. And there is no expectation for men to do this,” she says. “And after having kids… I’m the one who carried [my kids] and I’m the one who birthed them and fed them, but they take my husband’s name.” 

What became obvious to me after looking through the research and speaking to dozens of people is that there’s no one right answer here. People have a million reasons for their decision to change, or not change, their name, and those reasons are all informed by everyone’s unique cultural and personal history. After taking a close look at my apprehensions, I’m actually less bothered now by my decision to change my name than I had been. I can now see that discomfort was a symptom, rather than the source, of my anxiety around what marriage means for me. That said, if someone asked me my opinion, I’d probably suggest taking a year before officially making the change to think about it: Try using the new name, or not. See what it brings up for you, and after some time has passed, you can decide if you want to make the switch for good. 

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Twenty-nine is often a very difficult age. It was for me, anyway. I spent most of my 29th year in a state of upheaval, questioning my career path, my relationships, my financial security. Had I accomplished anything I was supposed to by that point? 

Luckily, by the time my odometer actually rolled over to 3-0, I felt much better. I had used all the uncertainty to my advantage; I’d looked head-on at the areas of my life that felt unsettled and done some work around them. I had a career plan. I had a savings plan. A week after my birthday, my boyfriend of nearly a decade and I decided to get engaged. 

Ever since, I’ve blamed that wild year on my looming 30th birthday, and the expectations I had around that age. But I’m starting to suspect that there was something cosmic about all that anxiety: My 29th year coincided with my Saturn return. 

At the time, I had never heard of Saturn return. It wasn’t until astrologer Lisa Stardust sent me a copy of her new book, Saturn Return Survival Guide, that I looked up when mine had occurred and put two and two — or rather, two and nine — together. 

“Saturn return is your cosmic entranceway into adulthood,” Stardust tells Refinery29. “It happens every 27-and-a-half to 29 years, when Saturn returns to the degree and sign it was in when we were born.” It actually occurs more than once over your lifetime: Once in your late 20s, again in your mid- to late-50s, and if you’re lucky, again in your 80s. You can find out when yours will occur via an online calculator like this one.

“Being that Saturn is the cosmic taskmaster, during its return we’re basically learning a lot who we are, where we’re going, and what our boundaries and limitations are,” Stardust explains. A question that will keep coming up during your Saturn return is” Is the path that I’m on the right one for me? 

Saturn is a karmic planet, notes Stardust. So during your return, you’ll start to see the ramifications of past actions. If you cheated your way through college, you may find yourself with a romantic or business partner who does you dirty. Unresolved family stuff is also likely to come up; Saturn is known as the “karmic daddy” of the zodiac.

Technically, only your first Saturn return is, as Stardust calls it, your astrological bar or bat mitzvah. The second one has more to do with thinking about your next stage of life — often retirement. And the third is about reflecting on the lessons you’ve learned throughout your life. Your inaugural Saturn return tends to get the most attention for good reason, though, because it often brings about a lot of noticeable change. People might switch their careers, rethink their friend groups, and cement — or get out of — their romantic relationships. And sometimes, the changes made aren’t just about external identity markers, but about more fully realizing one’s own relationship with the self.

“I started my 26th year in a cisgender, heteronormative relationship, and I identified as cisgender and bisexual,” explains Birdie, a doula based in New York. “I’m ending my 28th year queer as fuck and coming out as non-binary.” To call Birdie’s Saturn return intense would be putting it mildly — they prefer to refer to it as “a spiritual experience on growth hormones,” made more difficult by the fact that it occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I have lost myself many, many times along the way. I’ve had to shed parts of myself that I loved very dearly, had to shed relationships that no longer served me or the person I’m becoming,” Birdie tells Refinery29. ”A lot of the time I’ve had to put my head down and put one foot in front of the other. I definitely had moments of isolation, especially since the last year of my Saturn return has been during a panic at the disco.” 

Ultimately, they say, “I’ve come to know myself in a deeper and more profound way than I ever thought was possible. I like to think of a Saturn return as shining a spotlight on all the hidden parts of myself that haven’t come out to play yet or the universe helping me to become the truest version of myself.” 

Some people’s Saturn returns are more of a roller coaster than others. “It depends on how much repressed stuff you have to deal with,” Stardust says. Some people may already be on a path that aligns with their true self, in which case they won’t go through as much tumult. Others may hold on really hard to their old lives, which could make their Saturn return a little rockier, as the ringed planet pulls them toward change. 

Saturn can also shine more intensely on certain areas of your life during its return. Mitzye Ramos Ribas, for example, felt like her career was the only part of her life that stayed steady during her return in 2010. Her car had died, she was struggling to deal with her student loan debt, and her friendships felt strained. “I thought I was going through a string of bad luck,” says Ribas, an intuitive tarot and astrology reader in California. Once she was on the other side, though, she was able to put the lessons she’d learned during her return to work. She put the money she’d saved by taking public transit toward a new car, she repaired her relationships, and she ended up marrying her boyfriend. “That’s the lesson we are meant to learn on our first Saturn Return — discipline, how to restructure and to find the tools within us to meet our challenges head-on,” she says.

Jessie DaSilva, on the other hand, says her Saturn return led to major transformations in her work, in part because it happened in her 10th house of career. “I hated my lawyer job at the time,” she says. But during her return, her boyfriend broke up with her, which led to her moving to Washington D.C. and landing her (then) dream job at a legal news corporation.

Whether or not Saturn was in retrograde in your birth chart can also impact how disruptive your Saturn return is, Stardust says. If Saturn was retrograde in your chart, “you really want to boss up and elevate your life,” she says. “Your return period will be about trying to attain success at work and in your relationships. Saturn retrograde people always want to be CEOs, and they’re meant to be them, because they have a relationship with authority that’s like none other. They’re meant to create the roles and take charge — in relationships too.”

If Saturn was direct, though, you may be more focused on healing, dealing with past trauma, and loving yourself during your return.  

While you can try to prepare for your Saturn return — by being flexible and willing to work on yourself and the parts of your life that may be causing friction — to some extent, you’ve just got to be willing to roll with the punches. Most people report being hit by at least some unexpected event.

“I’m an astrologer. So, I thought that by knowing what Saturn return was, I would be prepared when my own return came along. Yeah, that was false,” says Maisy Bristol, who is also a tarot teacher. “During my [Saturn] return, I totally lost interest in my life path. At that point, I decided to channel only my passions — which inspired me to break up with my boyfriend, pick up my life, move to the country without knowing a soul, get a dog, fully engross myself in my astrology and tarot business, and buy a horse. It was a lot. And the fun part? I’m only halfway through.” 

Of course, there are plenty of naysayers who claim that Saturn returns aren’t real, that the period of time between ages 27 and 29 are naturally tumultuous, something that has more to do with that stage of life than planetary movements. Some people just call it their quarter-life crisis. For example, maybe I would have taken stock of my life before turning 30, regardless of where Saturn was in the sky at that point. Similarly, the second Saturn return occurs during another stretch of major change in the mid-to-late 50s. Menopause comes around that time, and it’s also when people’s kids may be leaving home, graduating college, or having babies of their own. 

Stardust acknowledges that not everyone believes in Saturn return, nor does everyone need to. “Astrology is just really a math of the potential that we’re unfolding,” she says. It provides people with a way to make sense of the world, and, for some, guidance for dealing with difficult periods. That’s not for everyone — though, Stardust says, she thinks more people believe in it than don’t. 

While I find astrology interesting and fun, I wouldn’t say I’m a whole-hearted believer in the practice. Ultimately, though, I’m not too concerned with whether or not Saturn returns are “real.” I got through my 29th-year crisis without knowing that the astrological event even existed, after all. But I can certainly see their appeal. It would be reassuring to know that I wouldn’t necessarily be faced with big existential crises at the turn of each decade; my next return isn’t due until I’m 58 years old. It would also also be comforting and validating to have a clear-cut reason for my difficult year — to know that I hadn’t done anything wrong, that the transitional period had been coming for me since the day I was born. As Annabel Gat, astrologer and author of The Astrology of Love & Sex: A Modern Compatibility Guide, previously told Refinery29, “What’s really great about astrology is that you have this set of reasons for why things are happening. It creates this cause-and-effect paradigm that’s really exciting for people to explore.”

Along the same lines, Stardust notes that many astrologers have pointed to Saturn in particular to explain some of the world-changing events of 2020. The celestial symbol of transformation shifted into idealistic and humanistic Aquarius in March 2020, setting the stage for the exact kind of progressive movements for change that intensified last year.

“Saturn takes 27 to 29 years to move around the zodiac, so it is a very important factor astrologically, and it has an effect on us,” Stardust says. “As above, so below.” 

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Recently, I found myself thinking, Am I getting too old to partake in the latest slang? Of course, even having that realization probably means I’m already too old. Luckily, at the moment, I’m spared from worrying about it too much, because I mostly interact with younger people virtually, and it’s difficult to detect cringe through Zoom.

The only real reason I don’t think I’m already too old to use slang is because I’m an avid consumer of slang, which is another way of saying that I’m on TikTok — a lot. I’m always noticing new words or phases pop up in the videos I watch, and without fail, a day or so later my Gen Z coworkers are peppering our Slack conversations with the same terms. 

One thing I’ve noticed is how, seemingly overnight, slang seems to explode in popularity before it dies out as quickly as it came. It seems like just a few months ago people were talking about Heathers and simping and being the CEO of whatever. And now we’re on to calling each other besties and reacting to everything with “Not the ____” and talking about how we must have “skipped a few episodes.” Of course, some terms have staying power — the word messy, when used to refer to someone’s state of being, comes to mind. But in general, there’s a tremendous turnover in slang phrases that I don’t think existed in my teen years. I mean, I vividly remember in the early 2000s when everyone started calling everything “awkward.” That stuck around for two years, minimum. But has it really changed?

“Your sense that slang is shifting more quickly now is true in that language is becoming popularized more quickly,” says lexicographer Emily Brewster, a senior editor and editorial ambassador at Merriam-Webster. “We, all of us, in the 21st century, have access to the informal language of millions of people and that was never true before,” she explains.

Brewster is talking about social media. Before social media, we didn’t have that many opportunities to hear others’ informal languages. We talked to people in person or on the phone, we watched TV and movies, or we read books and periodicals. Many of those forms of interaction even had a gatekeeper involved — an editor, say — who would keep out more casual forms of speech. So slang was much slower to catch on than it is now.

Today, we have “much more lightweight contact” with other people than ever before, confirms sociolinguist Jessi Grieser, an assistant professor of English Linguistics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I easily interact with 10 times the number of people, from a much wider set of backgrounds, simply from swiping through TikTok than I ever did in high school, when we were just dipping our toes into MySpace and Xanga. 

Social media has also added a visual component to slang, Brewster says. “Slang was traditionally an auditory experience, and now, it’s written. So we have things like ‘periodt,’ which you can not only hear but see, and also the word ‘folx,’ spelled with an x, which is such an interesting word. In conversation, it’s not possible to discriminate that from the ‘ks’ spelling, but you can in print; you can communicate something different because that word does not do the same job that ‘folks’ does,” she explains.

While they agreed that slang becomes popular more quickly these days, Brewster and Grieser were both a little more hesitant to say that popular terms fade away more quickly. That’s because slang doesn’t “die” so much as it reaches an even greater level of popularity, and then becomes entrenched in our common language. Suddenly, you hear your boss or teacher drop it into conversation, with or without a self-conscious little wink-wink, nudge-nudge; your mom goes from asking you what a word means to using it herself; and then there’s the final stage: the brands catch on.

“One of the death knells for slang is when it shows up in corporate social media,” Grieser says. Yes, there are companies that occasionally do social media right; Wendy’s viral Twitter roasts come to mind. “But when they’re saying, ‘Come vibe with our Baconator’ — that’s it,” she says. It’s over.

“Slang is typically an inside language. It’s about a communication between a group of people, and you want it to be cryptic because it’s a way of saying something special,” Brewster explains. “So one thing that can happen is it loses its cool as it gains its broad audience. It doesn’t die, but it can become a regular, ho-hum kind of word.” 

Or as Grieser puts it, “What you’re doing with slang is that you’re showing that you’re a  participant in a particular type of culture or age group. And as the slang starts to circulate and different social groups use it, it takes on different social meanings. Depending on how admirable those social groups are, that can end up leading to a loss of the slang.” 

It’s impossible to talk about slang without also talking about appropriation. Many slang words originate from African American Vernacular English or queer slang. Historically in the U.S., “standard English” has referred to the language spoken by wealthy, highly educated, white men, and anything else — and anyone who spoke anything else — was considered lesser, informal, and fleeting, Grieser says. That AAVE is a rule-governed variety of English just like any other is now widely understood by many, but to this day, Black people are discriminated against for using it. So white people or corporations using slang derived from AAVE to appear “cool” can be appropriative.  

When, how, or how much it is “okay” for people who don’t belong to a certain group to use slang that originated in that group isn’t necessarily the right question, though. “Instead, the question is, to what extent do we understand the way that language replicates existing inequities? To what extent does a white speaker who is using AAVE — say, a particular term they found on TikTok — understand what they’re doing? And to what extent are they able to situate that within the history of racism in this country, and the present situation that we’re in?” Grieser asks, explaining that the same questions should be asked about terms that originate in other groups that face discrimination. “The more we spend time talking about those issues, the more people are going to think about how they replicate language differently,” she says. We’ve already seen that happening with gender inclusive language. People are thinking more closely about the potential language has to cause harm, and how they could mitigate that harm.

This comes up in Brewster’s work at Merriam-Webster too. Part of her job is to be “a definer,” i.e., someone who decides which new words to add to the dictionary every year. “We can put a usage note or a paragraph that talks about a word’s etymology and origin, or the controversy of a word, that notes why someone might want to use caution when using a word or just be better informed of a word’s connotations,” she explains. That’s not just for slang: M-W includes notes like this on terms like color-blind, thug, and uppity to “explain beyond what the word means, that there’s another meaning it’s wrapping up in,” she says.

Brewster says words typically don’t make it to the dictionary unless they’ve become established in common language, which she can tell has happened once she sees a word start appearing in published text without being “glossed.” Hangry, for instance: At a certain point, editors believed enough people understood what it meant to be included in an article without an in-text definition. That’s a sign that it’s ready to be added to the dictionary. 

When I ask whether slang can be forced or intentionally created, thinking of this TikTok about the word “cheugy” specifically, Grieser says she can only think of one example where that’s worked: santorum, which columnist Dan Savage campaigned to redefine as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex” after an interview in which Repubican Rick Santorum made deeply disgusting and offensive homophobic comments. “It was such an amazing moment — we barely had Google at that point. That’s one very clear moment where one person who had a wide enough reach said, I’d like us to redefine this word — and they did it,” Griesler says. “But it’s very, very rare. I can’t think of anything that’s worked quite that way.” 

Ultimately, she says, “Language is fun! And it’s always going to be fun. We have to be aware of what it can do that’s negative, but slang is interesting and TikTok language is interesting, and that’s because language is interesting.” 

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