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I would love to be Type A.

These people really seem like they have it together. The organization! The clarity of mind! The routines they follow with seemingly zero effort!

These are not people who have to go on a weekly hunt through their office for abandoned Diet Coke cans, because they remember to drink their drinks, rinse out any rema...

Work is not your life. Your life is not your work. We try really hard to separate them.

But, hey! We live in a world where that’s not possible all the time. As a former corporate girlboss who was once chained to her laptop panicking over the dimensions of banner ads and now a podcaster and writer full-time, I get it. Work is a massive pa...

America has a healthcare problem.

Rather, healthcare problems too numerous to elaborate on in a single episode. But one of those problems is Health Insurance, which I have said before and will say again, loudly and with my whole entire chest, is a scam.

* What do you mean I am paying a monthly premium and then also paying tens of thousand...

I believe in signs.

I’ve met with mediums (on purpose and accidentally) and gotten actual messages from The Other Side, but I learned from Laura Lynn Jackson that the only thing we really need to receive a sign is to ask for them and look for them.

When I see a 666 out in the wild (a receipt, my odometer, the cost of my gas) that’s Aaron...

Love is so insane.

You meet someone. You hand each other your hearts and you trust that they will treat them like the fragile and precious objects that they are. But do they, always? No. Sometimes someone grabs your heart, looks it over and decides that what this fragile and precious object needs is to be hammered into smithereens.

And ...

Grief is so disorienting.

It breaks your world and your sense of self: there is before, and there is after. Jayson Greene’s life was split into two with the death of his daughter, Greta, which he documented in his memoir Once More We Saw Stars.

We talked to Jayson about that book and that grief in this episode back in 2019, and when we c...

Dolly Parton really said it best, didn’t she?

Nine to five, yeah, they got you where they want youThere's a better life and you think about it don't youIt's a rich man's game no matter what they call itAnd you spend your life puttin' money in his wallet

She wrote that song in a simpler time, when it was 9-5, with an hour for lunch. Now it...

I learned when I was going through grief that people say the wrong things. Not because they’re trying to hurt our feelings or because they don’t care, but because people are people and people are, by nature, clumsy. We trip over things physically and metaphorically. And it feels like nothing trips us up quite like a coffee table that ha...

If you’re having an existential crisis – and who isn’t! – this episode is for you. Things are tough right now, to put it mildly. 

The day that I’m recording this, the US economy is crashing, tariffs are looming, our government has been hijacked by a deranged billionaire with a breeding fetish, our few flimsy social safety nets are being ...

Last week’s pep talk episode was such a hit we’re back with more (and I’m making some phone calls today because WOW WE ARE ALL GOING THROUGH IT RIGHT NOW!!!)

Today we have two callers: a 32-year-old who feels lost after losing both of her parents and receiving a tough diagnosis, and a 23-year-old who is a little too wise beyond her years...

Nora McInerny: Tell me the story of your wedding again.

Chelsey: So leading up to it, they didn't really want to come to begin with mostly because it was a far away wedding. Like it was five hours from where we live. And so they showed up and I was like, they came. That's good, I guess.

A quick quiz for today’s episode:

Who was today’s ...

I live in a city where driverless cars are replacing the Ubers that replaced cabs. Most of the cashiers at my local stores have been replaced by self-checkout. Nearly anything can be delivered to me in a matter of hours.

It’s all so convenient! And it’s all so disconnected.

I know from my own experience that even a small amount of intera...

🫢🫢🫢 This episode is FREE FOR EVERYONE because I forgot to send a Sunday email and if there is anything that drives me, it’s GUILT, BABY! But if you want to become a paid subscriber anyway, you’re always welcome and it’s ALWAYS optional (ask me for more sales tips, I am Tommy Boy) 🫢🫢🫢

There are people who will not relate to this episode, and those are, simply and broadly speaking, people who are too mentally healthy to spend th...

There are certain words and phrases that give me a (negative) physical reaction:

* Kiddo

* Doggo

* Really adding -o to any word, I guess

* Salacious

* It is what it is

* Self-care

That last one is tough because it’s everywhere, and to paraphrase our guest and friend Sarah Super when discussing how self-care was recommended after she survived ...

Of all the stages of grief, the least appealing one has to be anger. People can at least try to understand your denial, your bargaining, your acceptance, your deep sadness, your confusion, the sharpness of your pain and grief. But anger?

That’s a tougher sword to swallow. It’s scary! It’s unpredictable! It’s ugly, and we prefer our grie...

Grief is weird.

And the grief of losing a partner/spouse is it’s own brand of weird. You miss the person you had, you miss the life you had, you miss the life you thought you would have together, you know what love looks like and what your standards are, and you’re also — to put it mildly — very disoriented.

Today’s caller is a widower ...

When we first met David, he was just a few months out from the death of his wife Marian.

The two of them had been together for 40 years, and he described the grief he felt as a Void.

His episode is one of my favorites because it was just him, him talking through the rawness of his grief, the audience serving as his witness.

But that was ...