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 […]
The post Game Changer - Wool Genie Yarn Feeder used by Mikey appeared first on The Crochet Crowd.
Whether you need some extra cash, want to explore a new field, or desire more time at home with family, these top ten side hustles help you to meet your goals in a new way. With a little help from AI, I’ll go down the list of top-paying roles that you might not realize exist. As an ambitious entrepreneur, influencer, and mom, I find these positions exciting as they are opportunities to explore where your unique talents can make you an extra buck. Let’s get started.
The highest-paying side hustles tend to require more than one online course. Skilled professionals in software development can make anywhere from $60 to $150 per hour. This profession demands some serious coding education and background. According to Forbes, the top coding “bootcamps” in 2025 include: Bloom Institute of Technology Full-Stack Web Development; American Graphics Institute Web Development Certificate; 4Geeks Academy Full-Stack Developer; Nucamp Back-End, SQL and DevOps Developer With Python; Coding Temple Software Engineering Bootcamp; Noble Desktop Front End Web Development; and the General Assembly Software Engineering Bootcamp. It might sound a little intimidating, but according to one report, 83% of bootcamp graduates found employment in a job that used the skills they learned in a bootcamp.
This side hustle is perfect for those with vetted knowledge in business, marketing, or finance, and for professionals ready to create their own schedule. Your level of experience will dictate how much you can make, but statistics show that it can be anywhere from $75 to $200 an hour. Corporate experience is a must. Define your niche and keep learning every chance you get. Build analytical and soft skills, and ensure your website is easy to navigate, thorough, and reflects both your personality and expertise. It’s not enough to be an authority in your industry; to find clients, you must find ways to demonstrate that authority to the world. Focus on networking through social media and in-person events, and watch as your wealth of knowledge helps companies to grow.
Yes, in the age of ChatGPT, human writers are more important than ever. It is difficult for most to sit down and write a manual or book, let alone an email. The authentic written word is seeing a surge in e-commerce and beyond. Writers can make $50 to $150 an hour by doing something increasingly uncommon: Writing as a human for other humans. The best place to begin, if you have the natural talent, is by creating a profile on freelance sites such as Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer. Be ready for a sharp learning curve while you slowly build your clientele.
SAT, GRE, MCAT, coding, math, you name it–if you have a strong background in any of the subjects that young people and adults need to get ahead in life, you can begin to tutor online. The entire spectrum of education has changed in recent years, and online schooling is common and preferred by many. You can expect to make $50 to $120 an hour helping others’ educational dreams come true. What is more exciting than sharing what you know with curious minds? One-on-one coaching can be life-changing for others–and also helps with your electric bill.
There are now 69 million creators on YouTube. While these creators’ passion may be sharing, their downfall is editing their content. Great video editing and motion graphics are crucial for influencers who want the next viral video. It’s also fun to be a part of a creative vision and use your talent to help make a YouTube or TikTok star. A skilled editor can make $50 to $100 an hour. There are several courses online that can teach you content creation and video editing, but if you have your vision set on a career, film school is the best way to get the skills you need to turn a side hustle into a lifestyle.
I’m not going to lie, I had no idea what this was. Here’s AI’s definition: “UX, or User Experience, focuses on the overall journey and feeling a user has with a product, emphasizing research, planning, and testing to ensure it's logical and enjoyable. UI, or User Interface, is the visual and interactive part of that experience—the screens, buttons, icons, and layout a user directly interacts with.” Well…the long story short is that you can make $60 to $120 an hour. There are multiple bootcamps online to get you started in this side hustle, but if you’re already familiar with Figma, Adobe, XD, etc., then skip the bootcamps and start making some extra cash with the genius your momma gave ya.
Our friendly AI told us that the end of this list contains “mid-paying” positions. That doesn’t make them any less important! A virtual assistant is responsible for calendar management, emails, and the general loose ends of someone’s busy schedule. A skilled and organized candidate can receive $25 to $50 an hour in this role. I’m not saying that your life will turn into “Two Weeks Notice” or “The Proposal,” but be prepared to be highly involved in another person’s fast-paced existence. This job will usually have you working for business owners, CEOs, and top-level creators. You’re in for an adventure.
Social media management includes: “The strategic process of planning, creating, publishing, and analyzing content to maintain and optimize a brand's online presence across social media platforms.” If you can successfully achieve this, you’re a smart cookie. For $20 to $50 an hour, you’ll experience the ins and outs of helping small businesses, content creators, and other creatives manage their output and see how it’s landing. This requires a broad skillset combined with practical experience in monitoring social media metrics. When your vision aligns with someone else’s, their brand comes to life (and then you can splurge at a restaurant).
Although this one is referred to as “passive” income, there’s nothing passive about it. Some of the real heroes on this earth sell stuff on Etsy. Have you seen what beautiful human creativity can be found there? This category also includes self-publishing, selling original music, and any creative venture under the sun. This side hustle is incredible because not only does it allow you to pursue your artistic passions, but it also lets you learn the ropes of becoming an entrepreneur while making cash off your creative drive.
I appreciate that AI suggested this side hustle, but I want to take it a step further. Real estate photography can earn you $50 to $200 per job, but you may also want to consider wedding, event, and family photography. If you’re a budding artist, feel free to get your feet wet in these high-demand fields.
With all of these top side hustles, let your passion guide you. Work at your local grocery store as you pay the bills and pursue your talent at painting. Do what you need to do while you study coding, singing, crafting, or cooking. Turn that long-time interest into a side hustle. Get a bit more cash flow. Then watch as your passion becomes your career.
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.
The questions I tackle in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house.
My partner is due to give birth to our first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. I decided to tackle her dilemma in my last column before beginning my parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward.
We’re about to have our first baby. I’m so excited! But I’m also a bit overwhelmed by all the actions and choices that go into trying to raise a kid who’s happy and healthy. I feel like the modern world’s never-ending desire to optimize everything has crept into parenting. Yet the world is so unpredictable. And there are so many opportunities to mess up and harm a kid in ways both big and small.
The questions swirling through my mind range from “How soon after birth should we take the baby into crowded indoor places, knowing their immune system isn’t fully formed?” to “When should we introduce our kid to sugar?” to “How much unsupervised play time should we let them have as they get older?”
There’s not a lot of definitive data about certain things. And a lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible. For example, I’ve heard some parents aren’t letting their kids go to sleepovers anymore because they’re worried someone will touch them inappropriately. The likelihood is that sleepovers are going to be positive experiences for most kids, but there’s always a small chance of something negative happening. Trying to think through these situations feels like a little bit of torture. If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?
Dear Parent-to-Be,
Can I confess something? When you voiced this question, I actually felt relieved, because the same question has been secretly hammering at me for months.
I haven’t talked about it much because I thought maybe it was just a function of my own anxiety. But I’m starting to think it’s more common than I realized. So I’m going to share the idea that has helped me the most with it. It doesn’t come from a parenting book or even the mental health field, but from that philosopher I’m always yammering on about, Bernard Williams.
In 1976, Williams coined the term “moral luck.” It’s a surprising term, because what does morality have to do with luck, right? Surely what matters for my moral status is “what I did” and not “what the world did”! But Williams’s point is that life does seem to present us with situations where our goodness or badness depends a lot on factors that are out of our control — on whether we get lucky or unlucky.
Just fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does, and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here.
How can that be?
To illustrate, Williams invites us to imagine a truck driver who accidentally runs over a kid. The driver isn’t drunk or careless or negligent. He’s just driving along when suddenly a child darts out into the road. The kid gets hit and dies.
Clearly, a terrible harm has occurred. But has the driver done anything wrong?
Now let’s imagine another truck driver. He sets out that same day on that same road. But this guy is drunk. He careens down the road carelessly. He could easily hit somebody. But guess what? It just so happens that no kid darts into the road. The driver makes it home without incident.
In this scenario, no one’s been harmed. Yet the driver has obviously done something wrong. But for fortune, he would forever be branded a killer. He just got morally lucky.
What’s useful about this thought experiment is the way it clarifies that harm and wrongdoing are two separate things. We usually clump them together in our minds, because it’s often the case that a harm results from someone doing something wrong. But they can occur separately.
And when they do, how guilty should a person feel? Take the first driver, who wasn’t drunk or careless and yet ended up killing a child. It wouldn’t make rational sense to feel remorse, per se, because it’s not like he voluntarily did a bad thing. It’s more like the bad thing happened to him. At the same time, he certainly won’t feel nothing. He’ll probably feel pained in some nebulous, hard-to-name way.
Well, Williams came up with a name for that: “agent-regret.” It’s the feeling you might experience if you inadvertently do a bad thing through bad luck.
What’s the upshot for you, me, and everyone who fears failing or accidentally harming someone they love?
Your goal is not to control every possible outcome. The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.
Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.
Could something bad still happen? Yes, and that’s gutting. But remember that even if harm occurs, that doesn’t mean you were guilty of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t mean you deserve blame. It means you deliberated as well as anyone could have expected of you and something terrible happened anyway. That’s not your fault.
Risk of tragedy is just the cost of living in our world.
And I do think you should live in it. Fully. Bravely. Without endlessly second-guessing every move you make.
That brings me to the contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, one of Williams’s best interpreters. In her essay “The Moral of Moral Luck,” she questions what we should take away from his concept.
“Morality is deeply and disquietingly subject to luck,” Williams wrote. But, Wolf asks, is that just the result of our own irrational judgments?
Wolf considers a slightly different truck driver thought experiment. In her version, two equally negligent truck drivers set out on the road. One has good luck: No child darts into the road, so no one gets hurt. But the other has bad luck: A child darts in front of the truck and is instantly killed.
If humans were purely rational beings, surely we’d judge both drivers just as harshly, even though one killed a kid and the other didn’t. That’s because they’re both equally guilty of wrongdoing. But Wolf observes that, in reality, the driver who strikes the child is probably going to feel a lot more guilt. And members of society are likely to direct a lot more blame at him — after all, he actually killed someone, and they’re going to feel angry about that (while they won’t even know the other guy was ever driving negligently).
It’s tempting to say that this condemnation doesn’t tell us anything real about the unlucky driver’s moral status — it’s just an artifact of human irrationality, and we should toss it out. But Wolf doesn’t want to go that far. She thinks it’d be “positively eerie” if the driver who struck a child saw himself as being in the exact same moral position as the driver who didn’t. He’d be revealing a sense of himself “as one who is, at least in principle, distinct from his effects on the world.”
Wolf suggests that there’s a better way to see ourselves:
We are beings who are thoroughly in-the-world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control, and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately.
To form one’s attitudes and judgments of oneself and others solely on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way, to extricate oneself and others from the messiness, and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet.
This is a beautiful passage that describes a beautiful virtue: the ability to recognize that none of us is a separate and independent self. Wolf says this virtue has lived without a name, so she calls it “the nameless virtue.”
But I think it’s only nameless in Western philosophy. In Buddhism, it’s a foundational principle known as “dependent co-arising” or “interbeing.” The idea is that nothing has its own fixed, boundaried essence. Everything is always changing, because everything is subject to different causes and conditions, which act upon it all the time. That includes us human beings. We are constantly remaking each other — through the kind or unkind things we say to each other, through the ideas we expose each other to, through the actions we do or don’t perform.
We are all each other’s causes and conditions.
This undercuts the traditional Western understanding of agency. According to that view, I’m a discrete agent and when I decide to take a certain action, that decision starts in my own mind. My intent is what sets a causal chain in motion. Therefore, if I decide to do a bad action and harm results, I’m blameworthy.
But from the Buddhist perspective, we can’t say that my decision “started” with me. The “I” that decides isn’t a self-contained originator of action — it’s a node in a web that runs in every direction. That means the clean line between “what I did” and “what the world did” was always a kind of fiction. All my decisions have been conditioned by everything and everyone that ever influenced me in life. Which means blame, in the clean Western sense, doesn’t really hold up.
Williams found moral luck disquieting because it seemed to undermine the self-originating agent at the heart of Western ethics. But in the Buddhist view, there was never such an agent. That means that when something bad happens, it’s appropriate to recognize that you’re part of the causal web that yielded harm — but not to blame yourself as an individual.
You asked me: “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?”
No, I don’t think you always will. Although you’ll probably feel pained if some decision of yours leads to harm, eventually, your pain will not take the form of “I’m a terrible person.” It’ll take the form of “I was doing the best I could with the information and awareness I had at the time — with the conditions I was given. I wish that the conditions could have been different.”
We’re all so used to the Western understanding of agency that our brains default to it in situations of crisis or panic, making us prone to self-blame. But I’ll be there to remind you of this other understanding. And I feel lucky knowing you’ll do the same for me.
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.
Feel free to email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here!
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.
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 […]
The post Mikey's Preferred Crochet Hooks on Camera and In-Person appeared first on The Crochet Crowd.
My biggest issue with the term junk drawer is the word junk. If something truly has no purpose, why are we storing it in valuable space in our kitchen, mudroom, or office? Now don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying everything in your junk drawer needs to be high quality or particularly valuable. What it does need to do, however, is serve a purpose.
When organizing any space in your home—from your fridge to your closet—every item should earn its keep. If you don’t wear those black pumps, donate them. If you keep buying that bag of spinach but never finish it, it might be time to re-evaluate. The items in your junk drawer should follow the same rule.
Once you stop thinking of it as a catch-all space and start thinking of it as a utility drawer with a purpose, it becomes much easier to keep organized. Below is my step-by-step system for organizing a junk drawer so it actually stays that way.
Rachel Rosenthal is an organizing expert and founder of Rachel and Company, a Washington, DC-based professional organizing firm. Since 2007, Rachel’s firm has worked with 3000+ clients and teamed up with prominent brands, including West Elm, Pottery Barn, The Container Store, and Four Seasons. Rachel’s expertise has been featured in 100+ publications, including Real Simple, Martha Stewart, House Beautiful, The Rachael Ray Show, and local NBC, ABC, and Fox morning shows. Rooted in the belief that organization can be achieved by all, Rachel emphasizes solutions that are easy to use and enhance a home’s existing aesthetic.
If you want the quick version, here’s the simple system I use:
Now let’s break down each step.
The biggest problem with a junk drawer is the catch-all mentality. We’ve been conditioned to toss items we don’t know what to do with into one drawer and deal with them later. That’s how you end up with drawers bursting at the seams and never being able to find the battery you know you have, or the matchbook you need when the power goes out.
Just like every other space in your home, your junk drawer should contain intentional categories. When every item has a place, the drawer becomes useful instead of chaotic. Changing your mindset from “junk drawer” to a drawer that holds categorized items with purpose is the first step in organizing it.
Yes, everything. I know the thought of it can make most of us wince, but the first step to organizing your junk drawer is to dump it all out. It’s the only way to see exactly what you’re working with. Once the drawer is empty, wipe it down so you’re starting with a clean slate.
Next, declutter the items you pulled out of the drawer. Some things will be obvious—like tossing trash or recycling old receipts. But don’t stop there. Write with each pen to make sure it works. Test batteries. Turn on flashlights. Check tape rolls. You might be surprised how many items in a junk drawer are actually broken or unusable. Think through which items you truly need in your home and which ones can be discarded or donated.
After decluttering, look at what remains and decide whether it actually belongs in this drawer.
For example:
Relocating items helps prevent your junk drawer from becoming a storage space for things that belong elsewhere.
Once you’ve decluttered and relocated items, you’ll be left with the things that truly belong in the drawer. Now it’s time to create categories.
For example:
Grouping items into categories makes it much easier to find what you need—and maintain the system over time.
Once you’ve identified your categories, measure your drawer so you can add organizers that fit. Some type of bins or drawer dividers is essential for junk drawer organization. Because these drawers often contain multiple categories, organizers prevent everything from sliding together into one big pile.
Measure the width, depth, and height of the drawer, then find organizers that fit your space and categories. Adjustable dividers, small bins, or modular trays all work well. Think of it like playing a little Tetris until everything fits perfectly.
Now comes the satisfying part—putting everything back. Place each category into its designated organizer or section. But before you close the drawer, take it one step further.
This step will be unique to your junk drawer, but consider sharpening pencils, folding the end of the tape over so it’s easy to grab, refilling a lighter, or pairing batteries by size. These small finishing touches make a big difference. Now everything in your junk drawer is ready to be used at a moment’s notice.
A well-organized junk drawer typically holds small, frequently used household items that don’t have another obvious home.
Some common items include:
The key is that every item serves a purpose and belongs to a category within the drawer.
If your junk drawer never seems to stay organized, one of these habits might be the reason.
Treating it like a catch-all.
A junk drawer should not be where random items go to disappear.
Keeping broken items.
Dead batteries, dried-out pens, and tangled cords create clutter quickly.
Not using drawer dividers.
Without organizers, everything slides into one chaotic pile.
Mixing too many categories.
Limiting the drawer to a few simple categories helps keep it functional.
Never editing the drawer.
A quick reset every few months keeps clutter from building up again.
Once your drawer is organized, a little maintenance will go a long way toward keeping it that way. A quick five-minute reset once a month can help prevent clutter from building up—use that time to toss broken items, test pens, or remove anything that’s found its way into the drawer without a real purpose. Try to return items to their designated sections after using them so categories stay intact, and be mindful about what you add back in. If something doesn’t serve a clear purpose, it likely doesn’t need to live there.
A junk drawer doesn’t need to be perfect, but with a simple system in place, it can stay functional, tidy, and easy to use.
Once your drawer is decluttered and categorized, the right organizers make all the difference. Drawer dividers, small bins, and modular trays keep items from shifting around and turning back into one big pile.
The right tools help ensure that every item in your drawer has a home—and stays there.
This post was last updated on March 22, 2026, to include new insights.
The post The Secret to Organizing a Junk Drawer (Hint: Stop Treating It Like One) appeared first on Camille Styles.
It's not as bleak as it sounds, but it has started a death clock for me. While I am not religious, I do believe I am here for a reason, but I am not knowledgeable enough to understand exactly why. The lessons of the good, bad and ugly are intended for me. Even for situations […]
The post What is Mikey's End-of-Life Plan? appeared first on The Crochet Crowd.
Mikey from The Crochet Crowd uses textured crochet stitches in stitch samplers pretty consistently. For most projects, an 'odd number' stitch count is usually the easiest to pair fun stitches together. Defining the Odd Number We need to define exactly what an odd number is; it's not the beginning chain count, but the number of […]
The post Top 5 Textured Crochet Stitches: Odd Numbers appeared first on The Crochet Crowd.
SINGAPORE: One Singaporean man is wondering whether love alone is enough to save his relationship after his fiancée told him that earning S$100,000 a year still isn’t “sufficient.”
The 30-year-old shared his situation on the r/asksg forum on Wednesday (May 27), saying he and his partner have been together for five years and are due to wed in the next few months.
However, he admitted that instead of being excited about the wedding, he feels stressed, drained, and honestly quite defeated.
According to him, his fiancée keeps comparing him to people around her who are allegedly earning S$30,000 to S$40,000 a month.
“[She feels I’m] lacking behind because there are people around her earning S$30-40k/month,” he said.
“Yes, I can be a provider, to provide food, etc. But it has come to my realisation that I have to buy luxury bags whenever she wants, cover the entire vacation cost whenever she wants, and that I am falling behind because I do not have a second, third, or fourth income.”
He also confessed that she has made him feel “very useless in society” and like he’s “nothing” if he cannot immediately pay for whatever she wants.
What upset him even more was her response when he tried to suggest budgeting and planning for the future together. Instead of discussing finances as a team, she simply told him to “earn more money.”
“It’s never enough,” he lamented. “I feel it’s her comments about how I’m way below societal norms when it comes to my income—[saying] why others can do things I can’t—that make me feel bad. And yes, maybe she means it to push me to do better, but I feel like I’ll never reach the end goal.”
Many commenters felt the man was already doing well for himself and questioned why he was being made to feel inadequate by his partner.
One user said, “Your earnings are already really good, but she’s whining? Sorry, she sounds like someone who just talks down on every single thing you do.”
Another wrote, “Celebrate your personal wins. 30M earning ~100k PA is commendable.”
Some also urged the man to leave the relationship. One individual explained, “Leave. 5 years is a long time, but spending the rest of your life feeling ‘not enough’ is even longer.”
“A partner should make you feel valued, appreciated, and supported, not constantly compared to other people’s incomes or lifestyles. From your post, it sounds less like she cares about you as a person and more about what you can provide for her image and expectations.”
Another added, “If my son is dating a woman like that, I will ask him to cut his losses. Losing the deposit for whatever you’ve paid for is cheaper than the divorce procedure in the future. You deserve someone better!”
In other news, a man in his 20s recently shared that his strict parents, who take 15% of his salary every month, expect him to buy a home by the time he turns 35.
In a post on the r/asksg subreddit, he shared his fears, saying he does not have enough money to fulfil his parents’ wishes.
Read more: Man says parents take 15% of his pay, leaving him unable to save for a home
This article (SG man says earning around S$100K a year is still not enough for his fiancée, who compares him to people making S$30K to S$40K a month) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.
Caitlin Squier-Roper, 45, recently discovered an intriguing club on Instagram: Philly Cooks a Book, a monthly meetup where locals prepare and share an assigned recipe from a specified cookbook. She could’ve enrolled through the group’s social media and shown up to a meeting, dish in hand, not knowing a single soul. So she held off on joining.
It wasn’t until Squier-Roper and her husband Anthony Fernandez, 42, attended the Philadelphia Activities Fair that she decided to get involved. Squier-Roper and Fernandez recently moved to Philadelphia after living in Seattle for over a decade and didn’t have a network in their new city beyond their families. When they heard about the Activities Fair, a one-day exhibition of clubs, civic groups, and community organizations enrolling new members, the couple thought it the perfect opportunity to spread their social wings.
Thousands of other people had the same idea.
On a Sunday in April, around 2,300 attendees crowded every inch of available space in a historic downtown civic center to discover, and potentially sign up, for a club. Outside, it was the perfect kind of spring day: abundant sunshine, a light breeze, giving way for the serendipitous pop-ins from curious passersby. Inside, spectators shuffled, shoulder to shoulder, in single-file lines up and down the building’s winding staircase and through two rooms of tables representing more than 40 clubs, including a community for Black artists, a book club but for podcasts, and an a cappella group, stopping to chat with organization leaders and join their ranks. It was in one of these glacial plods around the ground floor of the event space when I met Squier-Roper and Fernandez. They’d already signed up for the cookbook club, the a cappella choir, and a cycling group.
The event itself, structured as it was, was novel for the couple and Squier-Roper said she was nervous to attend. “It seems out of the box and vulnerable,” she told me. But, looking around the room, she was in good company. “It’s helpful to see how many other people are here in the same searching situation,” she said. “It’s pretty cool.”
If Squier-Roper and Fernandez have felt socially adrift as of late, they certainly are not alone. The 2025 American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey found that about half of US adults reported feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship at least some of the time. According to Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project’s 2024 survey, 21 percent of respondents said they were seriously lonely, over two thirds of whom felt like they lacked belonging in meaningful groups.
Loneliness has become something of a buzzword: The US surgeon general and the World Health Organization have issued warnings about its harms, and brands and startups shill their products as the potential solution. Despite the shallowness of viral marketing campaigns and AI chatbots designed to absorb the role of friends, the problem is serious. Decades of research supports the dangers of chronic loneliness and social isolation: increased cardiovascular health risks; links to personality disorders, suicide, cognitive decline, and depressive symptoms; even a higher likelihood of mortality.
Although many Americans say they’re lonely, and perhaps have become more aware of its negative impacts, they don’t seem to be prioritizing activities that foster connection. According to the American Time Use Survey, people spent nearly half of their waking time — more than six-and-a-half-hours — alone in 2024, compared to just under five hours in 2003. Young people spent 45 percent more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2010. What are we doing with all this time in solitude? Watching TV, staring at our phones, gaming, mostly.
Against this backdrop, a crop of community-minded organizers stumbled into a similar train of thought: People are disconnected (perhaps I am one of these people). My city has a treasure trove of hobby clubs and civic organizations. If I lead a horse to water, can I get it to drink? From this seed of an idea, a genre of connectedness events was born — the activity fair, stuff to do fair, joining fair. From Philadelphia to Oakland, a wave of well-attended one-day activity fairs are the latest grassroots efforts to combat loneliness and connect people to their communities. These festivals operate under a simple premise: getting people in a room with club representatives is more effective and less overwhelming than scouring the internet, and it lowers the barrier to entry.
“If there are things to join, people will join them,” Pete Davis, co-director of the documentary Join or Die, told me. But first they have to find them.
From the dawn of civilization, humans have hung out in group settings. The Romans had professional organizations known as collegia, medieval Europe had guilds, Victorian England had (exclusively male) social clubs. In the United States, people formed and joined groups of all kinds, from the Freemasons and abolitionist societies to women’s suffrage clubs and the Elks.
But participation in these groups has declined, as political scientist Robert Putnam famously explained in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, first published in 2000. Putnam found that enrollment in clubs of all kinds had dropped since the 1960s. Conditions have seemingly not improved. The inaugural Social Connection in America report, released last year, found that two-thirds of participants don’t belong to or never attend a meeting of any sort of organization or club. A 2024 survey from the Survey Center on American Life found that fewer than two in 10 Americans were members of hobby or activity groups, neighborhood associations, sports leagues, or parent groups.
Group membership confers many benefits. Research has shown that joining a community group led to reduced loneliness and increased social support for older adults. A scientific review found that sports team participation improved well-being, reduced stress, and increased social functioning. Being in multiple groups makes people happier.
The regularity with which you meet makes clubs effective friendship-builders: If you see someone frequently enough, it’s easier to forge a relationship with them. Even if full-fledged friendship isn’t the goal, simply making acquaintances is sufficient to stave off loneliness and foster a sense of belonging. As Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, “As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.”
America has appeared to be club-curious as of late. In the years following the Covid-19 lockdowns, many people have yearned for tangible social connection, with the proliferation of supper clubs, run clubs, silent book clubs, and other activity- and identity-focused groups. “What I’m seeing is really in this last year, such a renewed interest in hobbies, hobbies for health,” said Julia Hotz, the author of The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging.
Activity fairs are the natural next step in bridging the gap between the crop of niche and hyper-local clubs and a curious, but overwhelmed, populace. The concept is no different than welcome week activities at college campuses where a quorum of university clubs table and recruit new members. Designed to reach members of the wider community, club fairs operate as a live directory of a city’s offerings, all under one roof. “There’s no shortage of Instagram accounts and apps of things to do, concerts, events,” Brian Adoff, the founder of Join Philly, the group that organized the Philadelphia Activities Fair, told me. “And people still can’t find stuff.”
Adoff has long understood the benefits of clubs. In 2023, he and a friend founded a choir, bringing strangers of all ages to bars for impromptu concerts. Many attendees, he noticed, were attending solo, new to the city, or both, and formed friendships from the group. But it wasn’t until he attended a screening of Join or Die, a 2023 documentary extolling the benefits of joining clubs, compounding on Putnam’s work, that Adoff thought, I want to do this.
When I checked in with Adoff at the Philadelphia Activities Fair, he was standing on a stage overlooking the ground floor of the event, getting a good glimpse of the hundreds of locals learning about the dozens of clubs he’d brought there.
Join Philly initially began as an online directory of clubs and associations, and the issue wasn’t finding clubs to showcase — there were plenty of those. It was getting people to participate. Sure, locals could scour the internet for a hobby group, but what if they weren’t even sure what to search for? What if they’re a little shy and walking into a room full of people they don’t know makes their stomach turn? Putting the club-curious in the same room as the groups solved some of these issues, a concept Adoff refers to as a participatory “on-ramp.” “That was the first on-ramp,” Adoff said. “How do we make this easier?”
C.C. Tellez, 48, the executive director of Lez Run, an LGBTQ+ running club, found this direct approach effective at quelling prospective members’ concerns. “Online, people like the idea of something, but they’re afraid to take the first step,” Tellez told me over the thrum of the Philadelphia Activities Fair. Tellez was approached in person by people who follow Lez Run on Instagram but were concerned about the pace, about being new. “We let them know we welcome everybody: different paces, different setups, whatever you’ve got going on, we welcome it here,” Tellez said.
I first became aware of activity fairs in 2025, when I learned of one happening in Lancaster, a small Pennsylvania city not far from Philadelphia. Hundreds of people crowded into a community center in the middle of winter to learn about a brewing club, rugby team, a mechanical keyboard club.
The event’s organizer, Sav Thorpe Capizzi, had a lightbulb moment after a friend invited her square dancing a few years ago, something she’d never done before. As she do-si-do-ed with strangers, Capizzi wasn’t worried about how she looked or her skill (or lack thereof). “I just felt so alive in that moment and I was just so grateful to the part of me that just said yes to potentially looking a little foolish,” she told me. “And I was like, ‘Okay, so I need to invite everybody I know to every club I can think of right now.’”
Unaware of any other event geared specifically toward adults, Capizzi sent an email first to the town library, then a guild of crafters, and eventually cobbled together a list of exhibitors. She dubbed her version the Stuff to Do Fair and from that initial event sprung an offshoot in a smaller Pennsylvania town and, also the more robust second-annual Lancaster Stuff to Do Fair. This year, Capizzi doubled the amount of exhibiting clubs to 50 and nearly 600 people attended, she said.
In Capizzi’s estimation, fear of being bad at something is the biggest barrier to entry for any potential new club attendee — feeling like you’re not the kind of person who has the body for roller derby or the wit for improv comedy. Activity fairs give the shy, the uncertain, the hesitant permission to imagine themselves as someone who does. “There’s this air of novelty of all of the versions of you that exist at each of these tables,” she said. “It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, and I think it really gives people the opportunity to see themselves actually becoming the kind of person who enrolls in a class or takes up sketching after so many years.”
The Stuff to Do Fair, as well as the Philadelphia Activities Fair and the other club fairs I came across in my reporting, were organized by individuals, and perhaps that’s part of their charm. They’re scrappy and community-driven. But it’s easy to imagine a world in which these events might be sanctioned by local governments to promote public health. Social prescribing, a practice where patients receive a script not for pills but attendance at a community group, has gained momentum around the world, with medical professionals connecting patients to cycling clubs, performing arts groups, or volunteer organizations. Recent research has found social prescribing in the United Kingdom, where it was first developed, has led to improvements in wellbeing, happiness, and life satisfaction.
In place of a medical professional linking individuals to groups and activities that might benefit their mental or physical health, there could be activity fairs. “In other countries where we have more government support for social prescribing programs, what that government support goes to are up-to-date databases of the different activities that exist,” Hotz, the author of The Connection Cure, told me. If online listings and databases are out of date, well-intentioned would-be participants could be easily deterred, however motivated they might be. Solely relying on the internet to disseminate cub information means those with unreliable access or who aren’t tech-savvy are shut out from opportunities, too.
“An activity fair, giving you the information in real time and letting you meet with the people part of it in real time, I think just goes such a long way in making sure that your interest becomes a reality,” Hotz said.
Social prescribing gives people permission to do something meaningful, and to be convivial in the process. And so do activity fairs. “What a joining fair is is answering the question, What are you doing alone that you could be doing together? by having a cooperative recruiting event,” said Pete Davis, one of the directors of Join or Die.
In addition to a traditional screening tour, Davis, and his co-director and sister Rebecca (who was a supervising producer for the second season of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained) helped dozens of community organizers across the country host their own joining fairs in order to promote their film. But even if event planners didn’t work with the Davises directly, their documentary served as a point of inspiration.
Like Adoff in Philadelphia, Jared Joiner watched the Davises’ documentary, and it set the wheels in motion for his own fair in Oakland. That his actual last name is Joiner is not lost on him. “I had not thought about it in this world of joining clubs and joining organizations until the first time that I watched Join or Die and they say ‘joiner’ so many times in it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, am I destined to do this work?’” he told me.
The same day that thousands of Philadelphians signed up for clubs at Join Philly, Oakland hosted its first Join-Up at a brewery in the midst of torrential downpours. Although the event had a smaller footprint — about 250 attendees and 22 organizations — many club representatives told Joiner they ran out of sign-up sheets.
There’s something to be said about the kind of person who attends an activity fair. “There’s definitely a self-selecting group that’s like, ‘I’m going to get off the couch to go to this thing, so I better sign up for stuff once I’m there,’” Joiner says. But there are a myriad of motivating factors getting those people off the couch in the first place: a recent move, a loss, a birth, a new job, a desire to unplug, to learn a new skill.
The consequence, deliberate or not, is the forging of new social connections. When our worlds shrink to the confines of our homes and our screens, intentionally exposing ourselves to newfound (or newly rediscovered) activities and new people helps broaden them again. Clubs, with their regular, predetermined cadence and specific focus, are the ideal entry points to connection: Striking up a conversation is simple when you already have something in common — the activity itself.
Toward the end of my afternoon at the Philadelphia Activities Fair, I ran into Deborah Winter and Terry Borden, both 71, as they finished a lap on the first floor of the exhibition. Winter is moving to Philly soon, and although Borden has been a resident for two decades, they both are still on that never-ending path toward community. “It’s hard to find your people,” Borden told me.
Through clubs they signed up for — a book club, a skill-share — they hope to find both friendships and more casual relationships, something they’re already practicing. As it turns out, the two women are new friends themselves, recently introduced by a mutual.
Even if they didn’t branch out at any of their new groups, I thought, at least they could reminisce, some day in the future, about this event, about the time they went out on a limb and joined a few clubs. Maybe the groups were boring or not quite the right fit, maybe they weren’t. But they tried something unfamiliar, together, and that’s something.
Login