Startups

March 23, 2026

Sometime around my late thirties, I looked at my phone and realised I had hundreds of contacts and almost nobody...

Startups

I’m 62 and I just realized I’ve never once entered a room and thought about what I wanted from it. I only ever think about what the room wants from me. And I’ve been calling that social skills for decades.

My friend Gerald, who spent thirty-five years as a hospital administrator, told me something last year that I haven’t been...

Startups

Research says growing up lower-middle class in the 1960s and 70s created some of the most resourceful problem-solvers alive today — people who learned to fix, repurpose, and make do before making do was rebranded as sustainable living and started appearing in lifestyle magazines

My dad worked in a factory outside Manchester. When something broke in our house, he fixed it. Not because he...

Startups

I asked my mother what she thinks about when she looks at old photographs of herself and she said “I think about how worried I was and how little of it mattered” — and the simplicity of that sentence from a woman who spent decades carrying everything has been sitting in my chest for three weeks because it contains a permission I’m not sure I’m brave enough to take yet

“I think about how worried I was and how little of it mattered.” That was my mother’s answer when I...

Startups

I grew up thinking my mother was cold because she never said I love you. I’m in my 60s now and I finally understand she said it every single day. She said it in packed lunches and ironed uniforms and the way she sat outside the school fifteen minutes early so I’d never have to look for her.

Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. The people who love us most fluently are often the ones we...

Startups

People who were always the strong one in the family often become the loneliest person in the room after 65

Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. You know the person I’m talking about. Every family has one. They’re...

Startups

Research says the more intelligent a person is the fewer friends they have — not because they’re difficult to be around, but because the older they get the less willing they become to spend their limited social energy on conversations that go nowhere and people who stay on the surface

Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. I noticed something a few years ago. The older I got, the...

Startups

Research suggests adults who find it easier to bond with animals than with people aren’t antisocial — they’re drawn to a form of connection where the terms are visible, the loyalty isn’t conditional, and the relationship doesn’t require them to monitor a constantly shifting set of expectations that human attachment taught them to treat as a second job

Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. Tell someone you find it easier to connect with animals than with...

Startups

I’m 37 and I realized last month that I have two hundred contacts in my phone and not a single person I could call at 2 AM without feeling like I was being a burden — and that math broke something in me