Obviously, nobody chooses not to have kids because they’d rather sleep in late. It’s a very visceral decision, and it’s a complicated decision. – Meghan Daum
For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked. – Meghan Daum
It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are. – Meghan Daum
We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we’re actually working hard. – Meghan Daum
It’s not that I don’t get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig. – Meghan Daum
Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get. – Meghan Daum
Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs. – Meghan Daum
As humans with egos and feelings, none of us wants to be pilloried. But as thinkers and writers, it’s our job to express opinions forthrightly and without qualifying them out of existence. – Meghan Daum
Confessions are not processed or analysed; they’re told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime. – Meghan Daum
I don’t confess in my work because to me, that implies that you’re dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you. – Meghan Daum
If anything, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy. – Meghan Daum
Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I’d be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place. – Meghan Daum
Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings – and when it does, especially without warning, there’s rarely anything good on the other end. – Meghan Daum
What I want is to have people’s notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you’re not really a mature person until you become a parent. – Meghan Daum
We’re not handed situations based on our established likes and dislikes; we get what’s available. – Meghan Daum
Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It’s what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us. – Meghan Daum
Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don’t. – Meghan Daum
I’ve always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences. – Meghan Daum
I don’t keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I’ll send emails to friends, and that’s a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I’ve never been a journal keeper. – Meghan Daum
As with ‘feminism,’ not to mention ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism,’ ‘political correctness’ tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness. – Meghan Daum
Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you’re going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you’re honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn’t happen. – Meghan Daum
People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it’s not something that they’re up for, and I don’t know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that. – Meghan Daum
The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own ‘likes’ to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who’s in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately. – Meghan Daum
Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone’s either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays. – Meghan Daum
In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That’s not the general cultural expectation of women. – Meghan Daum
Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that ‘whoosh’ sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot. – Meghan Daum
To me, having ‘material’ for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be. – Meghan Daum
I always tell writers that it’s good to have an area of expertise. It’s a really practical answer, I know, but know about science or about sports or about medicine, so you can work as a science writer or a sports writer. Don’t just know about yourself. – Meghan Daum
