When I say "transhumanism," I'm not talking about inhabiting Mars or becoming a multi-planetary species. I'm talking about the philosophical position that human limitation is a fundamental error.

A book about presence, written by someone who seems barely present with or tolerant of the reader's actual experience of reading it: that's the central irony I kept returning to, and I was never quite able to shake it.

Perhaps sadly, the thing I remember most fondly about spending the evenings at my grandparents' house was the unfettered and largely uninterrupted internet access. No one else ever seemed to use that computer, and no one ever nagged me for how much time I spent on it. It was all mine at their house - the internet itself felt like it belonged to me.

The American school system is no stranger to harsh criticism. And at the end of this school year, the most anticlimactic to date, I'm left wondering what we are actually asking students to come to school for, and whether that still makes sense to them, to their generation.

There is a very specific thing the vast majority of the world wants, and the sophisticated word for it is reconciliation.

I don't so much mind the overstimulation leaking onto other areas of my life, but lashing out at the person I love most is the saddening, sobering consequence of a pattern continuing for far too long. Not only are the tasks not handled, but I come home irritable and no fun to be around. It's a lose-lose.

It's really no woman's fault that she feels the need to diet, obsessively work out, or take a drug to lose weight. It is what is not-so-subtly asked of all of us. Especially now, in the most conservative era we've lived through in quite a while. But this is where everyone's got it backwards.

If we perceive that the "big players" - the private-jet-celebrities and the fossil fuel CEOs - aren't doing the heavy lifting, our brain registers our own small efforts as futile. We start abiding by the thought process of "no ethical consumption under capitalism" and call it a day. We aren't necessarily becoming "bad" people, we're just tired of being the only ones trying.