From VHS to TikTok: How Nostalgia Became a Billion-Dollar Business
Picture this: a teenager filming themselves in their bedroom, wearing butterfly clips and a baby tee, dancing in front of a CRT TV they found on Facebook Marketplace. There’s a VHS-style filter layered over the whole thing, complete with fake tracking lines and a time stamp reading “1996.” The soundtrack? A sped-up remix of a […]
Soak, Scream, Repeat: The History of Self-Care From Roman Baths to 90s Burnout Culture
These days, self-care can mean anything from sipping turmeric lattes to deleting Slack off your phone and pretending your boss doesn’t exist. It’s a term that’s been hashtagged into oblivion, and attached to everything from skincare routines to spiritual retreats. It’s become a little hard to tell where the wellness ends and the branding begins.
Fad or Future? A Brief History of Diet Crazes That Took Over the World
Humans have been trying to game the system of eating since the invention of, well, eating. If there’s been a way to lose weight fast, detoxify something mysterious, or magically “cleanse” a perfectly functional liver, chances are someone has tried it – with a side of lemon water and probably a little regret.
Future-Proof: The Most AI-Resistant Jobs—And What History Says About Them
It would be almost impossible to avoid the implementation of AI into our culture at this point. There are numerous applications that have been explored from the processing of scientific data to customer service systems and many more. But, despite the hype this doesn’t mean that AI is going to remove the human workforce entirely. […]
Time’s Up: The Invention of the 9-to-5 Workday and the Fight for Balance
Our modern societies have the 9 to 5 working schedules deeply embedded in their roots. Even to this day, this is regarded as the typical framework for full-time jobs. But, what was the inception of this schedule? Where are these hours of work considered to form the working part of the day? Let’s answer these […]
From Safety Net to Survival Strategy: How Social Security Programs Evolved
Let’s start with the obvious: social security isn’t exactly sexy. No one’s swiping right on pension plans or getting in heated group chats about unemployment insurance. But here’s the twist – if you’re working, aging, raising kids, or just trying not to fall through the cracks of a hyper-volatile economy, social security is quietly shaping […]
Quiet Quitting vs. Conscious Quitting: Two Modern Movements With Deep Historical Roots
In the modern workplace, there are two terms that have entered the lexicon that highlight the tensions that can exist between employers and employees: quiet quitting and conscious quitting. Both terms refer to an insistence to set boundaries and a rejection of expectations that reflect a dissatisfaction with work and/or the workplace. Some employees may […]
The Great City Escape: Why Millennials Are Ditching Big Cities (Again)
During the last decade, an urban migration has been quietly underway as millennials that seemed to thrive in cities have slowly moved to the suburbs, smaller cities, and beyond. This is reminiscent of the waves of urbanization and the de-urbanization that we’ve seen in the past. A notable example is the 1930s Dust Bowl exodus […]
Beat the Bill: How to Lower Medical Costs Without Losing Your Mind
We are born into one body, which we need to take care of because it must last us our entire lives. So, it should come as no surprise that for most Americans their top priority is great healthcare. But, the cost of healthcare insurance premiums and services and prescription drugs have risen dramatically leading to […]
How Wearable Tech Detects Illness: From NASA to Your Wrist
What do astronauts, Olympic sprinters and your annoying coworker who insists on sharing her daily step count have in common? They’re all part of a decades-long experiment in wearable tech. Only now, instead of measuring heart rates during spacewalks or shaving milliseconds off a 100m sprint, we’re using it to track how well we slept, […]