Serartonin Club

Illustration by Sally Thurer I have at least 150 tabs open (each. on my phone and my laptop.) This is me trying to close them one by one and writing about each as I go. Some will still be open after I hit publish. Think of it like a cat bringing things in as they often do with no context or explanation. A introduction to philosophy course by stanford that I have been making very slow progress on. I started this course in an attempt to be unambiguous and articulate. Philosophy is all about arg...

The way you persist at solving problems is actually frightening and inspiring. And you hold this enormous amount of space for me, more space than I knew another person could hold. My problems are huge and unwieldy and you just make room for all of it. One thing I know deeply now, after getting to know you, is that you genuinely want the best possible outcome for me. Not in some vague well wishing way but in a concrete, active way. As far as good can be obtained, you want me to have it. And I ...

Kayla Mattes, DOOMSCROLL, 2022, Courtesy: Kayla MattesThe RealizationDo you know how many reels you watch in a day? Let’s say your screen time on Instagram is about 2.5 hours. If the average reel runs for a minute, that’s about 150 reels a day. I had to do the math because I was sick of myself, sick of scrolling incessantly, of filling every gap in my day with reels. Each time I surfaced from a scroll session, it felt like coming up for air. Two hours had passed by and I had no recollection o...

New York is fast, but I chose to sit and do nothing for two hours on a perfect June afternoon with some of the city’s slowest moving residents. For almost two hours, I sat inside a gazebo in Central Park, watching people cycle in and out like wind-up toys on borrowed time. Everyone who passed by stopped to comment on the turtles. They were peeking their heads out, basking in the sun, and then disappearing as mysteriously as they came. It became a ritual. Spot the turtles. Squeal. Leave.turtle...

I know Mother’s Day falls on the first Sunday of every May, but I often forget when Father’s Day is. Is it the first Saturday of March or the second Sunday of June? It is not until an all too familiar promotional email reminding me to buy a gift for my father that I remember. I don’t quite know what gift I would buy. Perhaps a Parker pen or new frames from Warby Parker. Or maybe I’d buy a wallet and be cliché, if I got the chance. In the past few years, I have been trying to piece together th...