I Think This Is Why You're Stressed

I'm willing to bet much of modern stress can be laid at the feet of two things:

1. Increasingly complex rules of morality

2. Information overload

It feels like I’m juggling a bottle sterilizer, a browser with 37 open tabs and a national identity crisis — all while strangers on the internet yells instructions or obscenities.

Last year the internet told me any parent who only washed bottles in hot soapy water was basically marinating their child in pathogens. We rarely sterilized the bottles. Spoiler: he lived.

Studies show parents drowning in advice end up more anxious, not reassured.

Add the wider problem of opinion shopping — Googling until you find a “source” that agrees with you — and you get a recipe for stress comparable to Barry Schwartz’s classic paradox-of-choice headache: too many “best practices.”

Not only that, you now have to layer on 14,737 people on TikTok telling you that you’re the human equivalent of a dumpster behind Dunkin Donuts.

The list of acceptable opinions you’re allowed to express in “polite” conversation seems to shrink by the day. The result is that the amount of mental bandwidth it takes to self-censor, for many people, can cause an immense amount of stress. They fear that anything they say can be used as a weapon to get them fired or in many of the British colonies now, jailed.

Why does voicing a reasonable opinion feel like ordering pineapple on pizza at an Italian wedding?

Canada is not doing so hot right now, my spicy take this week was going to be, "Does Canada owe Don Cherry an apology?" But, I’m not quite pissed off enough yet and this topic actually acts as a great segway to a piece like that in the future.

Online you can find peer-reviewed studies proving kale both cures and causes insomnia — sometimes in the same journal. Faced with infinite experts, we cherry-pick the one who already agrees with us and call it “due diligence.” We have an information buffet and we’re really bad self control.

Why can I open 14 Chrome tabs to try and find out which sippy cup is least likely to destroy the planet? Or has the lowest BPA and PFAS content.

Picture your mind as a browser after an all-night Reddit spree: windows stacked, autoplay ads blaring, RAM begging for mercy. Each tab represents:

• The latest safe-sleep guideline that contradicts last month’s.

• Five think-pieces arguing why you’re morally obliged to buy carbon-neutral diapers. Wrong diapers? Get back in the dumpster at Dunkin!

• A study “proving” screen time builds both empathy and ADHD.

No wonder we’re frazzled. We’ve replaced intuition with an eternal open-book exam.

Chris Williamson loves this joke about how the internet used to have exactly the appropriate amount of information for humans… Sometime between 2008 and 2010. And we’ve gone screaming past it, to an endless amount of increasingly contradictory slop.

The antidote might be as unsexy as clicking the little “X” on a few tabs and trusting your gut. Keep your kid alive, recycle the obvious stuff and maybe fact-check once instead of twelve times. And, next time strangers declare your lunch morally problematic, ask: do they have a point, or do they have some misplaced ambition.

What’s one browser tab you can close this week?

Words I Wish I Wrote

Links & Learnings

• 817,000 people immigrated to Canada in the first 4 months of 2025.

• “The end of the world is usually dramatized as convulsive and feverish, but population loss is an apocalypse on an instalment plan.” - from The End of Children by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

• The Grumpasaurus

Psst… DSTLLD has a podcast now, too. I know — like the world needs another podcast, right? But here’s the thing: if you can tolerate my written rambles, you’ll probably find my in-person yammering… well, moderately tolerable. It’s basically me and a guest chatting about the same offbeat stuff you read here, except now you get to hear me stumble over big words in real time. I’m not saying it’s the greatest thing in the universe (trust me, I’ve listened to it), but if you like DSTLLD, there’s a good chance you won’t hate it. Win-win! Subscribe or follow on your favourite podcast platform:

• Youtube

• Spotify

• Apple

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PHOTW (Parenting hack of the week): The single biggest predictor of your child's material success in life is the affluence of the zip code in which they grow up. Choose accordingly.