Full/Sad Disclosure: Lelaina from Reality Bites is the fictional character I would have most absolutely married. Possibly still.

As a fan (and a 30-something human guilty of some of the perceptions the article diagnoses), I thoroughly enjoyed this in-depth look at the career and symbolism of Winona Ryder, “Winona Forever”. It’s full of interesting stuff on how an actress represents a generation, how an individual gets trapped in time because of that symbolic role, and so much more.

“If you spend your most crucial adolescent years being watched by millions of people being told what’s good and what’s bad, you have no sense of who you are,” Ryder explained. She saw a therapist who diagnosed her with “anticipatory anxiety” —feelings of dread over anticipated events—and, quaintly, “anticipatory nostalgia.” (In the Times,psychologist Dr. Constantine Sedikides recently described this lesser known “condition,” which could be considered our current era’s raison d’être, as the drive to “build nostalgic-to-be memories.”)

…

“To us, Winona Ryder is a bona fide icon,” designer Marcus Wainwright said. “She also has this beautiful timeless quality.” But it’s actually her timeliness that gives her value—she is a human incarnation of ‘90s nostalgia.

We cannot see Ryder without seeing the grunge era. In the New York Times Magazine in 2011, Carl Wilson riffed on the “20-year cycle of resuscitation” that had finally turned to Gen-X nostalgia.

…

As Tavi Gevinson told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, “how I feel when I see pictures of teen Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp holding hands in leather jackets, like, nobody can match that.” The only person that can come close is Winona Ryder now, because embedded in Winona Ryder now is Winona Ryder then. She carries her past with her. The teen actress who sought to make her own life nostalgic before it had even passed her by peeks out from within the woman Marc Jacobs now imbues with nostalgia—she is a Russian nesting doll of reminiscence.

Sorry for the overbearing quotation, but there’s just so much to unpack here! Let’s go most straightforward to most abstract:

Which celebrities do you feel represent your youth, or your most core values and beliefs and personality that will never really change?

As they get older, and you get older, how does that connection change?

Do you ever feel “anticipatory nostalgia”, the need to create memories to remember later? Is that a useful or healthy tendency, or anti-social, neurotic, and potentially detaching you from authentically enjoying your experiences?

Not hating, but I’ll still take a King Size Snickers any day.

Recently the artisan foodie community went nuts when intrepid food bloggers revealed that some Brooklyn (of course) chocolate makers’ process may not live up to their professed “bean to bar” ideals. Heavens!

This New Yorker piece examines where the furor comes from and what responsibility both haters and lovers of “hipster food” may have to bear for buying into the myth.

For consumers, it is embarrassing to have been seduced again—by the Masts, if you agree they did anything wrong; by artisanal food that can’t possibly remain true to its ideals when it becomes a category of mass appeal; and by the glib, high-class opt-out from contemporary life that the hipster aesthetic depends upon. The backlash against the Masts has far more to do with pent-up irritation at the self-satisfaction of urban cultural élites than it does with cocoa beans. We can only hope that the embarrassment is pervasive enough to kill the tired-out hipster category altogether.

But whether you care about this at all may be the most revealing thing about the whole debate.

How do you feel about hipster foodie culture in general? Good? Bad? Annoying? Overrated? Exciting?

Have you benefitted from this trend? Has it hurt you in any way, or do you believe it has hurt or helped society in general?

Why do you think you have any response at all? Where are your opinions coming from? What are they based in?

I’ve been to the Google campus. They have mint flavored water.

The stories of tech company largesse and their endless perks are the stuff of legend. Free gourmet lunches, access to gyms, biking around campus, private shuttle busses with wifi and cushy seats. It all makes working in tech sound like paradise from the outside. But The Economist cites a survey that maybe all the free snacks and massages only go so far.

A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, under-appreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy in their jobs and only 17% said they felt valued in their work. In many areas they were even more discontented than non-tech workers: 36% of techies felt they had a clear career path compared with 50% of workers in areas such as marketing and finance; 28% of techies said they understand their companies’ vision compared with 43% of non-techies; and 47% of techies said they had good relations with their work colleagues compared with 56% of non-techies.

If free candy can’t make a person happy with their job (to the point of being DISCOMBOBULATED, no less!), then I ask you: WHAT CAN?

Would the lavish perks of the tech sector make you like your job more?

Which perks actually improve life vs sounding good from the outside?

If not, what is the real key to being happy at a job?

Are unhappy tech workers right to be dissatisfied despite the perks, or are they being entitled and not appreciating their good fortune?

Playing an instrument is the least interesting answer, but still valid.

In a piece called “Bringing Up Genius”, about a family of chess prodigies whose parents started them young, practiced with them constantly, and produced some of the world’s top players, we hear from some experts who make the argument that any child can be exceptional with the right amount of dedication and guidance. Others say it’s a combination of inborn talents and practice; not all who put in the “Ten Thousand Hours” will become great, not all who become great have to practice nearly that much to achieve that greatness.

But this line of research is only so useful: it’s too late for us adults to put these findings to use on ourselves, really. (Although one example, a man who quit his job to practice golf for 10,000 hours in an attempt to go pro, makes for a fun anecdote.) It is however, fun to imagine what could have gone differently. Our answers, looking back, tell us what we really value now that we wish we had known sooner in life.

If you could change one thing about how you were raised, what would you wish your family had done differently?

How would that make a difference in your life today?

Would you be a “better” person, or just a different one? 

Not addressed: all those downward-facing photos with feet poking into frame.

Rarely do I feel my mind changing dramatically in real time. This was one of those moments.

I, like many, looked at obsessive selfie-takers with contempt. “So self-absorbed. How can a person enjoy the world around them if they’re only ever looking at themselves? If someone’s highest priority is posting images to show off the curated version of their life they want to represent online, aren’t they simultaneously cutting themselves off from truly engaging with that very life in the world as it happens?”

This (quite) long and well-reasoned argument from Medium entitled simply “Selfie” may take a while to read, but is full of passionate (and convincing) reasons that I was simply wrong. That selfie-taking is more about learning to love oneself, and take control of the way we are seen by the world. It’s powerful stuff.

Here’s the secret: Nothing destabilizes power more than an individual that knows his or her own worth, and the campaign against selfies is ultimately a crusade against widespread self-esteem. What selfie-haters fear, deep down, is a growing army of faces they cannot monitor, an army who does not need their approval to march ahead. They fear the young, the technologically savvy, the connected… so these selfie-haters want to silence and erase the faces they don’t understand. It is that simple. Anyone who hates selfies outright is likely in the position of privilege to never have felt invisible. They fail to perceive the value that a new way of seeing can bring to so many lives.

This article gets one of my very highest recommendations for provoking conversation on a topic that I’m guessing has very entrenched stances on either side.

Forcing yourself to consider selfies as a socially empowering and positive tool, how does that change how you see other people taking selfies?

How might it change your own behavior around taking and posting your own?

Or if you don’t buy into this argument at all, what’s your best explanation for the rise of the selfie? What needs are being met, what social role do these images play?