Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

Spring is here, which means the pests are back. My parents’ house has an ant problem. I found weevils in my pantry, and I know people with wasp infestations in their places. Tick season has begun, and last year’s bedbug scare was legitimately traumatic. I don’t like killing insects, but if they’re in my space uninvited and I can’t just take them outside and easily prevent them from coming back, I’ll do it.

But I do feel bad about doing it, even sparingly. I think it’s plausible that insects feel pain, so I try to make it quick, yet I’m still making the choice to kill them and it’s not one I’m proud of. I think that pests, like all living things, have some moral weight — but there’s not room enough for the two of us. Is it bad to kill them? Is there a more ethical way to approach this?

Dear Bugging Out,

I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling.

You’re right to think it’s plausible that insects feel pain. We don’t know for sure yet, but in recent years, scientists have been accumulating evidence that suggests at least some insects possess sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). 

Bees, for example, appear to play — just for fun. They also actively seek out mind-altering drugs like nicotine and caffeine, which suggests there may be a mind there to alter. Plus, bees seem to experience pain consciously, not merely flinch from it by reflex. In a 2022 study, bees approached a sugary snack even though it meant facing uncomfortable heat, weighing costs against benefits in what scientists call a “motivational trade-off.” A pure automaton couldn’t do that; it would flee heat in every situation. The capacity to weigh competing drives is one of the markers of sentience.

Meanwhile, fruit flies have shown signs of anhedonia — the loss of interest in previously pleasurable things (like food) that we know as a symptom of depression in humans. Treat the flies with a human antidepressant and it’ll suppress the depression-like state in the insects, too. 

One of my colleagues confessed to me recently that evidence like this makes her feel super guilty: When she goes around killing these insects in her kitchen, she asks herself whether she’s “a fruit-fly Nazi.”

But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them. 

Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.  

So, how can you know if or when it’s okay to kill a bug? 

I think the most compelling response comes from Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary philosopher who subscribes to the school of thought known as pragmatism, which sees moral truths as socially embedded and historically contingent, not fixed and objective.

Anderson points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and their energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although some non-Western societies have long ascribed moral worth to animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals,” she writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

Anderson has noted that we feel different levels of moral obligation to different species, and that has to do not only with their intrinsic capacities like intelligence or sentience, but also with their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, or whether they live in the wild. It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us.

Thinking about pests is a great (if gross) way to bring this point home. If you find bedbugs in your house, nobody expects you to say, “Well, they’re maybe sentient and definitely alive, so they have moral value. I’ll just live and let live!” It is absolutely expected that you will exterminate the shit out of them.

Why? Because with pests, Anderson writes, “there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace…Indeed, we have an obligation to our fellow members of society (whether human or animal) to drive them out, whenever this is necessary to protect ourselves.”

Anderson’s point is not that sentience doesn’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

Embracing this value pluralism makes things tricky. It suggests that the best we can do is look at creatures’ intelligence and sentience and relationships to us as clues about how we should negotiate life with (or without) them. But it doesn’t tell us how to weigh those clues — and what to do when they conflict with the interests of other animals, including us.

“There’s no simple formula,” Anderson once told me. “I think that’s a hopeless quest.”

That is, for my money, the most intellectually honest position. The absence of a fixed formula doesn’t mean you should exist in a state of guilty indecision or paralysis. Instead, the best thing you can do is have the integrity to recognize that sometimes life presents you with trade-offs where you have to make a choice. And when it comes to insects, you’re making that choice from a position of considerable power. 

This is the conclusion Robin Wall Kimmerer reaches in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The scientist describes how she had an algae-filled pond in her yard that she wanted to clear out so her daughters could swim in it. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though, she believes that all life has moral worth. So as she raked out the muck and found that it was full of tadpoles, she plucked them all out so they could go on living. Then she inspected the pond water under her microscope and saw a ton of teensy organisms, each one a moral dilemma. She writes:

As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse.

But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil.

In a way, it’s an unsatisfying solution — a lot of us would probably sleep easier if nature came inscribed with clear bright lines and moral instructions. But there you have it. Like Kimmerer, I think you should practice a kind of harm reduction. To the extent that you can “live and let live” with insects, that’s ideal. Try to minimize how many you kill. But when you do make the choice to kill them, try to do it in a way that reduces the risk of suffering (think: quick and painless crushing rather than long and drawn-out poisoning).

That’s not only for the bug’s benefit, but for yours, too. Harming any animal can harm our character if we do it mindlessly or callously, because it desensitizes us to life. But when we let ourselves be touched by life, we can maintain our reverence for it. The reverence — not the guilt — is the thing you want to hold onto. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This piece on “What It’s Like To Be a Worm” taught me that Darwin was obsessed with…worm sentience! He even argued that earthworms are capable of motivational trade-offs: “Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light…and we have seen that when their attention is engaged, they neglect impressions to which they would otherwise have attended; and attention indicates the presence of a mind of some kind.”
  
• This Aeon essay about the history of eugenics is absolutely fascinating. It reveals that some disabled people actually supported eugenics in the 1930s, seeking out sterilization for themselves. I think internalized ableist logic had a whole lot to do with this.
  
• I loved psychologist David DeSteno’s recent piece, “Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?” If you ask me, we keep making the Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking morality is primarily undergirded by rationality. But if it’s undergirded by emotion, it’s a fundamentally embodied human pursuit and the desire to mathematize it is itself irrational.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

If you’ve ever taken a yoga class or gotten a massage, you may have heard that stress is stored in specific parts of the body: Emotion in the hips. Strain in the shoulders. Anxiety in the gut. And, it seems lately, particularly online, trauma in the jaw.

On social media, videos abound of young women lying face up on massage tables with someone’s hands in their mouths. Labeled as a “buccal massage,” “jaw release,” or “intraoral massage,” the videos depict clients weeping after having their cheeks and jaws manipulated from the inside of their mouths. The caption of one recent video read: “A lot of the time when we work on the jaw, we see deep emotional releases from anger to grief and sadness. It’s as if every time we don’t express ourselves, the emotions move up through the body and end at the mouth.” “While other massages work surface-level, buccal massage reaches the deep facial muscles where we store our unspoken words, unexpressed grief, and unprocessed trauma,” said another. Recently, the singer LeAnn Rimes went viral for appearing in such a video herself, crying after a “deep jaw release.”

Experiencing tension in the jaw isn’t a new phenomenon, though, Dan Ginader, a physical therapist in New York, told Vox. Jaw pain is easily identifiable — maybe you’re a lifelong grinder — and once you notice it (or become aware of it through social media), the ache is hard to ignore. The fact that so many people are talking about the jaw’s association with emotional release right now could be rooted in the particularly stressful state of the world.

Our minds and bodies are connected, but do our jaws (or any specific body part) really hold “trauma,” as these practitioners claim? Probably not. People do experience real relief when their jaw muscles are massaged, experts say, but the intense emotional reaction happening on social media is actually fairly uncommon in the real world. 

How your jaw stores tension

Stress impacts nearly every aspect of your body; it’s a well-established cause of muscle tension, shortness of breath, increased heart rate and cortisol production, and gastrointestinal distress. These reactions are your body’s way of fighting off or fleeing from threats. 

Without a signal that the threat has passed, your body can hold onto the stress. “Over time, the brain and body begin treating tension like a baseline instead of a short term reaction,” Cheryl Groskopf, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, told Vox in an email. “When you hear the phrase ‘our bodies store tension,’ it’s really about the nervous system repeatedly practicing certain survival responses.”

This stress might cause you to activate your shoulders, grind your teeth, and clench your jaw, all of which contribute to jaw pain. “People can store tension or store stress in all different parts of their body, the most common being the head and neck area,” Ginader said. “You hunch up your shoulders and that can create a lot of tension in your upper traps and any sort of tension that drifts into the neck will also drift into the jaw. One of my favorite physical therapy professors said that if you don’t know what to do with a case of jaw pain, just treat the neck and likely the jaw will follow suit.”

The stress can be rooted in something physical, too, according to Robert Kerstein, a retired prosthodontist whose career centered on bite alignment and muscle tension. For example, pain related to your teeth can be incredibly stressful and negatively affect your mental health. In a recent paper, Kerstein and his co-authors found that patients with jaw pain had lower cortisol levels after their teeth were slightly adjusted to reduce the amount of time their teeth were in contact when their jaw was moving. In another study, patients had lower levels of depression after their teeth were adjusted. In other words, “reshaping the teeth so that they have a lot less friction and create a lot less muscle activity” makes people less stressed and depressed, Kerstein said. 

The mental relief people feel after having their teeth adjusted isn’t due to unlocking trauma. “The depression went away, because they were no longer living in chronic pain,” Kerstein said. And, once you feel physically better, you might feel less stressed.

The emotional component of physical therapy

In his physical therapy practice, Ginader has seen patients experience an overwhelming emotional response similar to those he’s observed online, but it’s very rare and people shouldn’t expect to shed tears during a jaw massage, he said. A general sense of relief is much more common. “They oftentimes didn’t even realize how tight and tense and stressed they were until you remove it,” Ginader said. 

People who use their mouth and jaw frequently for work — musicians, actors — may have a bigger rush of feelings because their facial muscles are directly connected to their ability to earn a living, Ginader said. “There’s another layer of emotion, because you can start to become worried that you’re losing the way that you make money and you’re losing the thing that brings you life, and then, all of a sudden, somebody has given you the relief that you felt like you needed to get back to doing that thing,” he said.

Performers — and people who share their lives on social media — are also used to being vulnerable and in touch with their emotions, which may also explain the over-the-top reactions online, Ginader said.

“In some of the cases I think they might be hamming it up for the camera or they are just caught up in the moment,” Ginader said. “There is an emotional release to having longtime tension resolved but a lot of the reactions do seem to be a little over the top.”

Massage is beneficial, of course, but it doesn’t entirely address the underlying cause of the tension, which is either stress- or muscular-related. For Ginader’s patients who work office jobs, stress is typically the root issue, while performers often have tension due to physical overuse. 

If the source is stress, Ginader recommended practices that regulate your nervous system, like breathing exercises, meditation, gentle stretching, or yoga. For physical causes, Ginader suggested looking at your form in the gym to see if you’re overusing your trapezius (the muscle in your shoulder and upper back). If it’s becoming a chronic problem, you may also want to see a doctor, dentist, or both. Regardless of the specific cause, you may benefit from a massage of your jaw muscles, too. Ginader also recommended setting periodic reminders on your phone to check in on your body and posture: Are you clenching your jaw or shrugging your shoulders? If so, “just take a few deep breaths and allow everything to relax,” Ginader said.

Ultimately, the jaw does relate to emotions, since grinding your teeth is a common stress response, Kerstein, the retired prosthodontist, said. And a facial massage feels good in the moment. “There’s an emotional elation of positivity, but the symptoms will come back,” Kerstein said. “They’ll return, which is very well-documented, and none of the external therapies have any true longevity. … So the person will have an emotional relief because they feel better, but then they’ll also have the downside of it getting worse, returning, and having to deal with those emotions as well.” 

Mikey has a preferred crochet hook that can be found on Amazon, and you will likely be able to see it on various Amazon platforms worldwide. There are two sets of crochet hooks that he has, and he has several sets. I discovered these hooks in 2019 and switched the preference of the hooks. They […]

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America remains a growth market for British businesses, but slower corporate profits, sticky inflation and a patchwork of state-level rules mean the bar for success has been raised, according to leading audit, tax and advisory firm Blick Rothenberg.

The United States is still expanding, but the easy tailwinds that once carried ambitious British exporters across the Atlantic are fading. Fresh figures from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis show real GDP grew at an annualised rate of 1.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, with real final sales to private domestic purchasers up 2.4 per cent, a sign that households and businesses are still spending, even as profit growth softens.

For UK firms weighing an American push, the message from Blick Rothenberg is blunt: the opportunity is real, but the margin for error is narrower than it has been for some time.

A growth market, but a tougher one

Michael Holland, Partner and Lead for US Expansion at the firm, said the latest BEA data confirms the US remains a viable growth market for UK exporters and investors. “The US economy is still growing, with GDP expanding at an annualised rate of 1.6 per cent in Q1 2026. Core domestic demand is still holding up, with real final sales to private domestic purchasers rising 2.4 per cent, which suggests customers and businesses are still spending. However, with inflation remaining elevated and corporate profit growth slowing sharply, the bar for success is rising.”

His comments land against a backdrop of rising friction in the transatlantic trade corridor. According to the Office for National Statistics, UK goods exports to the US have been volatile since Washington introduced its latest round of tariffs, with sharp month-on-month swings as British exporters rework supply chains and pricing.

America is not one market

Holland is clear that the most common strategic mistake is treating the US as a single, uniform target. “British firms’ strategy to succeed in this environment needs to start with recognising that the US is a very large and highly varied country, not one single uniform market,” he said. “Successful expansion strategies usually focus on specific regions first, whether that is the East Coast, the Pacific North West, the North East or the central states — rather than trying to target the entire US at once.”

For founders looking at where to plant a flag, the practical questions are familiar to anyone who has crossed the Atlantic before: is there genuine demand, what does the local tax and regulatory mix look like, and how do tariffs and operating costs reshape the unit economics? As Business Matters has explored in its guide to key strategies for UK tech companies expanding to the US, local hiring, partnerships and a region-first mindset routinely separate the winners from the costly retreats.

Pricing, routes to market and the cost of getting it wrong

Holland argues that British firms need to be far more disciplined about pricing and capital allocation before they commit. “Firms need to test whether there is a genuine customer base for their product or service, decide which areas offer the best fit, and understand how local rules, taxes, tariffs and operating costs could affect margins,” he said. “They also need to think carefully about pricing, routes to market and how much investment is needed before the business becomes commercially viable.”

That diagnosis chimes with wider advice on market entry during international expansion, which routinely flags under-pricing and under-capitalisation as the silent killers of overseas ventures.

For SMEs in particular, the temptation to chase headline US revenue without a hard look at landed cost, state sales tax exposure and distribution economics can quickly turn a promising launch into a cash drain.

Pulled into America, not pushed

The most resilient UK entrants, Holland suggests, are those responding to demand rather than chasing it. “The British businesses most likely to succeed are often those being pulled into the US by real customer demand and that have a well thought out strategy to make the most of that opportunity,” he said.

That advice echoes the work of trade bodies such as BritishAmerican Business, whose trade and investment guide for UK firms in the US has become a standard reference point for boards weighing the transatlantic move.

The 2026 playbook

Holland’s closing message is one British founders and finance directors should pin to the wall. “The British businesses that will prosper in 2026 are those that are targeted in where they play, disciplined in how they price, and realistic about the cost and complexity of scaling in the US.”

In a year when American consumers are still spending but corporate margins are tightening, the UK firms that win in the States will be those that resist the urge to plant a flag everywhere, and instead pick their patch, sharpen their numbers and earn their growth.

Read more:
UK firms need a sharper strategy to win in a changing American economy

What is gauging anyway, and why is it important? Gauging is the process of determining how to match exactly what is in a pattern to something you are making at home. Everyone in the world crochets in their own style. Daniel is exceptionally tight in crochet, and I am really loose. It's our rhythm in […]

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SINGAPORE: After a man acknowledged in an anonymous social media post that he was “struggling with attraction” to the woman he’s dating because she’s overweight, commenters told him flatly that he doesn’t love her and that the kindest thing to do is to let her go.

In a May 29 post on the SGWhispers Facebook group, the man wrote: “ I thought looks don’t matter… until they did.”

On paper, the woman is everything he could ever ask for, with a 10/10 personality and a heart of gold. Moreover, “she treats me better than anyone ever has,” he added.

However, he confessed to feeling like a villain because the woman’s looks didn’t measure up to his expectations. The woman “struggles with her weight,” although she’s made a lot of effort, including going to the gym and dieting, but, like her family, is heavyset.

The post author expressed concerns that later on, if they get married and life gets stressful and kids begin to come, she might struggle with weight gain even more.

He wrote, “I used to tell myself I’m not superficial. ‘Looks fade, personality stays.; I genuinely believed that.

But when I see her physically out of shape, I struggle with attraction. And that scares me. Because I love her now, but I’m afraid that one day I won’t. I’ve never cheated in my life, and I never want to, but a small, honest part of me wonders — if the attraction fades completely, can I 100% trust myself years later?”

He wondered if he was “ignoring a red flag about myself” and if an issue that “feels small now might slowly break the relationship in the future.”

Commenters, most of whom were women, told him that it would be better if he and his girlfriend broke up.

“Gonna be upfront. You don’t love her. Your practical mind is telling you she’s the one for you, but you don’t love her enough to look beyond,” wrote one.

“You think you won’t grow fat or have a pot belly or lose hair or even go bald when you hit middle age? If you can’t accept someone when she puts on weight, pls let her go. You don’t love her. You are shallow. She deserves a better man who appreciates her as-is condition,” another added.

“She deserves someone else. Period. The problem lies with you and not her,” a woman weighed in.

“Don’t punish the poor girl based on your likes and dislikes, now and in the future. If you really love her, let her go NOW. Because if you cannot change… she is not obliged to. Short-term pain is better than long-term pain,” added another.

“Let her go. Let your girl find someone who will appreciate her fully,” a commenter agreed.

“The best thing you can do for her is to let her know so that she can find someone who will love her truly and be happy,” advised a woman whose former partner told her it would be a dealbreaker if she lost her hair or gained weight. /TISG

Read also: You’ve put on weight’ — Woman asks if it’s normal in Singapore to openly comment on someone’s weight

This article (‘You don’t love her,’ Commenters tell Singapore man who’s struggling with attraction to overweight girlfriend) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.

Editor’s note, May 31, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on October 6, 2024. This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June.

My grandmother had a teenage pregnancy she hid from her family before giving birth in secret and immediately giving the child up for adoption after birth. I accidentally discovered this after I received a message on an ancestry DNA website from someone closely related genetically to me. She told me she knew barely anything about her birth parents and was desperate to just have an answer. I accidentally exposed this secret to my mother and grandmother by asking if anyone knew who this person who messaged me was.

My grandmother was horrified, and wants nothing to do with her. How do I respect the choice my grandmother felt she had to make at that time in her life and protect her peace, while also acknowledging that this person should be able to at least know who the people who created her are and prominent family medical history? I feel guilty for exposing this secret accidentally but now I feel like I have an obligation to protect my grandmother and offer this person some peace of mind.

Dear Caught-in-the-Middle,

Your question reminded me of an idea from Bernard Williams, one of my favorite modern philosophers. He said that someone facing a moral trade-off can make what is, all things considered, the best decision, and — even though it was the right call — find that it still results in some cost that deserves acknowledgment or feels regrettable. Williams called that cost “the moral remainder.”

Regret is a trickster of an emotion. We’re used to viewing it as an indication that we’ve done something wrong. But as Williams explains, sometimes all it means is that reality has forced upon us an incredibly hard choice between two options, with no cost-free option available. 

Your grandmother is not in the wrong for giving up her child all those years ago — or for wanting to keep her distance now. As you said, it’s the choice she “felt she had to make at that time in her life.” Pregnancy outside of marriage, especially in her generation, often came with a massive serving of shame, and the fact that she felt the need to hide it from her family and give birth in secret suggests this was a pretty traumatic experience. 

It’s understandable if she’s scared to reopen that trauma now. She has a right to decide if and how to process it — a right to self-determination.

At the same time, her grown child is not wrong for wanting answers today. The desperation felt by this newfound relative of yours is the “moral remainder” of your grandmother’s decision. 

As technology shifts over the generations, moral norms shift along with it. When your grandmother gave up the baby for adoption, she had no idea DNA testing would become commonplace — but it has. And as cheap testing kits like 23andMe have exposed all kinds of family secrets, more and more kids who’d been kept in the dark are making their experiences known. 

Some were never bothered by their obscured origins, but discover an extra measure of joy and connection once they meet long-lost relatives. Others say they always suffered from an uneasy sense that they’re different from their siblings. Still others say it’s important to know your biological family’s medical history, especially with the advent of precision medicine.    

All this has led to an increasing belief that children have a right to know where they came from — a right to self-knowledge.  

Take it from Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance, who found out as an adult that her beloved father was not her biological father. She writes: 

The secret that was kept from me for 54 years had practical effects that were both staggering and dangerous: I gave incorrect medical history to doctors all my life. It’s one matter to have an awareness of a lack of knowledge — as many adoptees do — but another altogether not to know that you don’t know. When my son was an infant, he was stricken with a rare and often fatal seizure disorder. There was a possibility it was genetic. I confidently told his pediatric neurologist that there was no family history of seizures. 

Some bioethicists, like Duke University’s Nita Farahany, are also building this case. Following the famous proclamation from Ancient Greece — “Know thyself!” — Farahany argues that people have a right to self-knowledge, including when it comes to medical information. She writes that “access to that essential information about ourselves is central to the self-reflection and self-knowledge we need to develop our own personalities.” It helps us shape our own lives and empowers us to make choices about our future.

That means that self-knowledge is actually a subset of self-determination — the exact same value that your grandmother is asserting. And it seems only fair for us to acknowledge that if your grandmother is entitled to that, then so is her child. 

If both people have a right to self-determination, and their rights are in conflict with each other, then … well … what do you do?

Even John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher who literally wrote the book on liberty, didn’t think that anyone’s right to liberty or self-determination is an absolute right. Instead, it’s a qualified right — the kind that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others. 

So it feels appropriate here to strike a balance between your grandmother’s wishes and her child’s. There are a few different ways to do that, but here’s one: You could assure your grandmother that you won’t pressure her to talk to the child or hear any more about her, but you will give the child family medical information and a general understanding of her birth story, including the aspect that might feel most important to her: why she was given up for adoption. 

Without mentioning your grandmother’s name or any details that would make it easy for the grown child to track her down, you could say something like, “Your birth mom is one of my relatives. She got pregnant as a teenager and didn’t have the means or support to take care of you. She made the hard choice to give you up for adoption in hopes that you’d have a better life than she could provide. She doesn’t feel comfortable being in contact now, and I feel that I need to respect her wishes and her privacy, but I hope this message brings you at least a little bit of peace.” 

Ultimately, you won’t have total control over what your relative does with this information, because internet sleuthing is a force to be reckoned with. And you won’t be able to control whether she feels fully satisfied with what you tell her. That’s a feature of this kind of moral dilemma: You can’t please everyone 100 percent, but you’re doing what you can to honor the values at stake.

If you want, you might choose to meet with the grown child without involving your grandmother. Or you might decide that your notion of kinship isn’t rooted in biology and you don’t feel any particular need to bond with someone new to you. 

Either way, what I love about Williams’s idea of the “moral remainder” is that it encourages you to view everyone in this tricky situation (including yourself!) compassionately. Regardless of which specific step you take next, you can move forward from that place of compassion.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• 23andMe is floundering, to the point that the company’s CEO is now considering selling it. As Kristen V. Brown notes in The Atlantic, that would mean “the DNA of 23andMe’s 15 million customers would be up for sale, too.” It’s one of the many reasons why I’ll never spit into one of those test tubes.

• I recently reread the philosopher Susan Wolf’s 1982 essay “Moral Saints,” and it feels more on point than ever. Wolf argues that you shouldn’t actually strive to be “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible” — and not just because those people are incredibly boring! 

• David Brooks is not my usual cup of tea, but I appreciated him writing in the New York Times about how, contrary to popular opinion, “emotion is central to being an effective rational person in the world.” 

In the background of Mikey's tutorials or photographs, you are seeing a Wool Genie. In the unboxing below, I give you context on how I discovered this product. Since unboxing, I now own four of these. I love this tool so much that I would possibly marry it if I could! Yeah, yeah, I'm obsessed […]

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The art of reading a crochet diagram is a method I prefer over reading written words. It's like teaching yourself hieroglyphics but for crochet. The symbols mean something and are a language all their own. For myself, my first crochet book, when I was fourteen, had written words and diagrams for each pattern. Standard Crochet […]

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Ricky and Royce Marnell, 28-year-old fraternal twins from Orlando, Florida, have seldom done anything apart. Together, they competed on the wrestling team throughout their childhood and adolescence. On weekends, they’d venture to the nearby park to play football. When boredom struck, they’d head to the garage for a friendly game of ping pong. When it came to college, the brothers attended Florida State University (which they swear was merely a coincidence), where they also roomed together. Although they have different careers as adults — Ricky is a data analyst and Royce is a 3D artist — they find time to collaborate on a podcast about their twinness. They also share the majority of their friends.

Although the twins were in separate classes in elementary and middle school, Ricky took the lead on cultivating friendships. Royce was shy and uncomfortable, and he struggled to form social connections. So when Ricky, the extrovert, made plans, Royce tagged along. “It was also just always easier to lean on Ricky and just be friends with his friends because I didn’t have to put in any work,” Royce tells Vox. “They were always there.”

In college, they moved as a unit, picking up friends wherever they went — at orientation, outside of the dorm, in the elevator. At Ricky’s recent bachelor party, almost all of the attendees were mutual friends made during undergrad.

From birth, twins’ lives are inextricably linked. Brought up in the same environment at the same time, these siblings often inhabit similar educational, extracurricular, and social spaces, contributing to the expectation that twins share virtually everything, from interests to abilities. Because of this overlap, it makes sense twins would have overlap in their social circles, too. But as twins age and forge unique identities in young adulthood, they may find themselves making friends independently for the first time — a shift impacting both the sibling and friend relationships.

The unique experience of being a twin influences friendship

Being a twin doesn’t necessarily help or hinder the friend-making process, experts say. But having a constant companion may influence how twins approach friendship. When twins actively want to be more alike, they develop a common social network, according to research. At the same time, they often acknowledge being too dependent on one another, which might hold them back from making more friends. 

“The research has shown that there’s no difference in the numbers of friends, but the closeness piece may be a little bit different,” says Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University. “If you have someone who knows you so well…that you really trust and feel like you can confide in, you’re probably not going to need that many other friends in your life to have that kind of deep friendship, intimate friendship with.”

When it comes to twin social circles, there is plenty of overlap, but twin type impacts the extent of the commonality. Studies have found that identical twins share a majority of their friends while cross-gender fraternal twins had far less overlap.

“If you think about identical twins, they are genetically the same. Their similar genes predispose them to like similar places, people, and events. So they naturally gravitate towards the same kinds of people,” Nancy Segal, a psychology professor and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University Fullerton, tells Vox. “Fraternal twins tend to go in different directions. They tend to have separate friends, and this is a trend that seems to remain fairly stable across the life span.”

Having a shared social network is usually a matter of convenience. One twin is usually more outgoing, Segal says, and may take the lead when making friends, especially if they’re in the same class as children. Even if they move in different social contexts and form relationships independently, it’s hard to avoid the other twin during playdates at home. 

Ironically, when kids are younger, they’re more likely to set clear boundaries with their twin, Kramer says: I want to play with Carly by myself today. Or they may hang out at their friend’s house without telling their sibling. It can be helpful to have these same frank conversations as they get older if they want to forge an independent relationship with a mutual friend.

In middle school, Royce Marnell remembers Ricky attempting to set such a boundary with him. Every day before class, Ricky and his friends would wander the halls with Royce tagging along. Ordinarily, it wasn’t a problem, but every once in a while, Ricky would tell his brother to kick rocks. “Ricky would just whisper in my ear, like, ‘Let me have this morning to myself,’ or ‘I want to talk to them about something and I don’t want you to be there,’” Royce says.

“Dang, I don’t remember doing that,” Ricky says. “I don’t really remember isolating Royce from my friend group because there was always guilt associated with that.”

That guilt was often reinforced by others in their lives: their parents and mutual friends asking why the other wasn’t invited. If Ricky wasn’t available to hang with a friend he made independently, the kid might reach out to Royce as backup. Their social lives, at times, felt out of their control. 

When a classmate only wants to befriend one twin, the rejection can send the other into a tailspin — because despite their perceived similarities, someone clearly prefers one to the other. “The existential questions about who we are and our personalities and [which] people like us, it heightens those concerns in a way that I think people with a different-age sibling just don’t [understand],” Kramer says. (As with all relationships, it can be difficult to articulate those unintelligible, intangible qualities that attract you to someone and repel you from others, even if they are a twin.)

As twins pursue independent lives, their friend groups diverge

By high school, twins start to forge their own paths and consider who they are as a unique individual opposed to a unit. Through a process known as deidentification, twins might play up their differences to minimize competition and jealousy, by, say, enrolling in different classes and extracurricular activities. “We see that during that time, there may be much more of an interest in each twin developing their own friendships,” Kramer says.

In college, this separation intensifies if the siblings attend different schools. On their own for the first time — not as one half of a pair, but as just another student — they embark on a potentially new experience of making friends solo. In her research, Kramer says fraternal twins are more eager to break free from their sibling, as opposed to identical twins who understand the inevitability of independence, but want to delay it.

This interdependence might hold twins back from expanding their social networks. In Kramer’s research, identical twins who attended the same college reported relying on their twin in moments of loneliness, perhaps to their detriment. “Some of them did say that they felt a little bit too comfortable with this arrangement because their sibling was always there and available,” Kramer says. “It didn’t put as much of a pressure on them to go out to be a little more extroverted than they might ordinarily prefer.”

Because the reality is, twins will have to live independently, even if they continue to live near (or with) their sibling. Employers and significant others typically don’t look for pairs. Having the social skills and confidence to forge new relationships without their twin as backup is valuable in the long term.  

It took until college for Jaclyn and Nick Lore-Edwards, 26, to transition from being known as “the twins” to simply “Jaclyn” and “Nick.” Growing up, the siblings had mutual friends; Jaclyn initially formed the relationships in elementary school, and those kids eagerly welcomed Nick. They both had the same interests — theater, books, dance, piano — and genuinely enjoyed being around each other, so they never had a reason to hang out with separate people. Being a twin meant strength in numbers.

“If I’m joining a new club and I don’t know if I’m going to know anyone, at least my brother is there and I can talk to him so I’m not just sitting by myself,” Jaclyn, a video editor and comedian, says. “I feel like that was definitely a big anxiety relief for me to always have him there.”

In addition to going to different colleges, their interests eventually diverged, and Jaclyn and Nick started meeting new people. Nick got involved with campus politics and model UN, while Jaclyn leaned into film and art, and each formed friendships with similarly minded people. Still, the act of making friends on their own was a relatively new experience. Having a twin, they say, was good practice for how to be a friend, not necessarily how to make them. “That was probably the first time I felt I have to do this alone,” Nick, a data scientist, says. “I can’t just rely on my sister to start talking to someone.”

While Jaclyn was the initiator in childhood, Nick thrived on his own in college: He came out as gay and gained confidence in himself. The friends he made knew exactly who he was and loved him for it. Jaclyn sensed that their high school friends, and by some extension her, had lost their luster, that the conversation really wasn’t that deep. “I could feel, when he would come home, maybe a little less interested in being with our friend group,” Jaclyn says. “That hurt my feelings. Me and you are best friends. But it wasn’t about me and our friends. He finally felt, I think, good at college.” Meanwhile, Jaclyn’s social circle was more intimate than Nick’s wide-ranging cohort, she says; her preferred friendship style mirrors that of a twin relationship. “I like having one really close friend or one person to go do stuff with,” she says.

Although they both live in New York City, they’ve still maintained their independent college friend groups. They represent the unique, individual adults they are now, not the packaged duo they once were.

While college was a period of mutual friend-making for Ricky and Royce Marnell, the twins from Orlando, their social lives did eventually split once they entered long-term relationships; their partners brokered their new adult friendships. After spending the first two decades of their lives under one roof, the Marnells now live with their significant others and with that comes responsibilities and obligations beyond their twin. Ricky’s planning a wedding; Royce just moved.

As a result of their progressing romantic lives, their shared experienced one has seemed to fracture. They don’t spend as much time with their mutual friends — if they do, it’s when college pals come to town — and instead most of their socializing is done with their respective partners’ friends. Before Ricky’s recent bachelor party, their group hadn’t gotten together in a handful of years. 

“I wouldn’t say it’s harder to make friends now without Ricky,” Royce says, “but I would say it feels more lonely.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

SINGAPORE: One Singaporean worker is already considering leaving his job less than a month after starting, after realising the role came with exhausting shifts and “virtually unreachable” KPIs.

On Saturday (May 23), he shared on the r/askSingapore forum that his role involves rotating shifts that constantly change from week to week. Some days allegedly follow regular office hours, while others stretch late into the night, ending around 11 pm or even midnight. There are also overnight shifts that continue until the next morning.

By the end of his first week, he admitted he already felt “pretty overwhelmed.”

“My weekends are non-existent and unpredictable, and I only know which day of my weekend is mine, or not at all, on the week itself,” he wrote. “It’s sort of customer-facing… The only upside is it’s a small place, and it’s relatively near home.”

Seeing how hard his supervisor works also added to his concerns.

“I see how my current supervisor is working, and I’m like: … HOW IS SHE NOT RESTING? ARGH. She works seven days a week and comes back on her off days.”

Apart from the demanding schedule, he also complained about the workload and the expectations placed on employees.

“My KPIs are almost virtually unreachable with the resources that are provided, barely three-digit figures, and half the portion of my work does not contribute to my KPI,” he said. “Which means the work I’m doing is not gonna contribute to my performance.”

He also expressed frustration over the company’s training arrangements, revealing that some sessions were conducted as “overnight camps.”

“Who the hell puts trainings as an OVERNIGHT CAMP? Anyways, as much as I would say give it a try, let’s adapt, etc, my biggest turn-off is the inflexibility of the role in terms of schedule.”

“Like, I cannot apply for leave way way wayyyy in advance, so I can’t really plan holidays or vacations. Even minus overseas vacays, I cannot adapt to not knowing which day of the weekend is mine, meaning I can’t make plans or dates till the last minute. It’s the kind of role that kills your social interactions with your friends.”

Wanting a way out, the worker revealed that he has already started exploring other opportunities and is currently progressing through interviews elsewhere.

At the same time, he admitted feeling conflicted, as leaving a stable job so early could reflect poorly on his résumé and potentially affect future career opportunities.

“What do you guys think? Is it wise to quit within the 1st month?” he asked others.

“Prioritise yourself first. This is not living, man.”

In the comments section, many Singaporean Redditors reassured him that leaving during probation was not something he should feel guilty about.

One commenter pointed out that probation periods are designed for both employers and employees to assess whether a role is the right fit.

“I mean, probation is for both you and the company, so I think it’s totally fine to realise it’s not a good fit early on vs waiting till you need to observe full notice period,” the commenter wrote. “Just communicate clearly what led to your decision to move on.”

Another Redditor said personal well-being should always come before work.

“I value my me time more than career and work. I don’t really care if it’s one month; if it’s so bad, I will just quit,” the commenter shared. “I always remember this quote, ‘Don’t burn your own candles to keep others warm.’ Prioritise yourself first. This is not living, man.”

A third said, “Scheduling sounds really bad. No workplace should block employees from planning and taking leave in advance. Just leave. Unless what you are doing is a stepping stone for your aspirational career.”

A fourth added, “If you have savings and are okay to have job uncertainty for a while, then go ahead and quit. Just omit it from your resume.”

In other news, a new domestic helper has raised concerns after finding out that the family she was hired to work for included more people than what was originally stated in her contract.

In an anonymous post in the “SINGAPORE TRANSFER (No Fees/SD), DIRECT HIRE & NEW HELPER” Facebook group, the helper shared, “In my contract, it states that I am only supposed to care for Sir, Ma’am, and two kids. However, when I arrived at my employer’s house, two aunties were also living here.”

Read more: ‘Is this normal and okay?’: New maid shocked to find extra family members living in employer’s home

This article (SG worker wants to quit just weeks into job over exhausting shifts and ‘unreachable KPIs’) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.