Life, the universe, and... an end to patriarchy?
At the very minimum, an end to its hold on you...
No, patriarchy won’t end soon, though it’s way past its sell-by-date. It’ll be about a century to a century and a half before, inexorably, going down. And it will put up quite a fight while going under.
What can accelerate its demise, is more and more women and men ending the sway patriarchy holds over them and the limits it puts on expressing who they genuinely are at their core.
But I’ll get off my high horse there.
Because this is 42 Sidenotes.
So I thank you for reading my articles about Deliberately Difficult & Laughing (DD&L for short). And for reading my tentative steps towards it here while I resisted creating a second publication.
After my last two articles1, you may be wondering what is going to happen with 42 Sidenotes.
Let me tell you.
When I started 42 Sidenotes, back in December 2023, I was all excited about the name.
Because
it’s a riff on the answer the biggest, baddest computer (after millennia of crunching) comes up with to the question of “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
of my personal tendencies to put sidenotes to almost everything I read when I know at least a bit about it (and I quite a bit about a lot).
I didn’t want to limit in any way, shape, or form, what I could write about.
The last reason is also why 42 Sidenotes has seen such a haphazard collection of topics. Which, despite what I thought was a unifying description, was also the reason why it mostly led a languished existence.
Going forward, 42 Sidenotes will return to
“irreverent and opinionated observations, answers, and questions on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything”
Though “everything” is to be taken lightly, as being all over the place isn’t good for you nor me.
On 42 Sidenotes, you’ll find essays exploring:
big questions
weird thought experiments
philosophical riffs
42 Sidenotes explores life as it is and why it is at it is — the status quo — and explains the systems underneath.
DD&L is about where all of that lands in your life.
As witnessed by your calendar, your conversations, your (lack of) boundaries, your self-talk, your limiting beliefs, and more.
And DD&L endeavors to equip you with the insights, the knowledge, the exercises, the experiments, etc. you need to give a big fat middle finger to your patriarchal conditioning (indoctrination, more like).
Like how to make “No” you default without it being taken as aggressive (and earning you the punishment of patriarchy’s double bind on women).
Like “Perfectionism Rehab” where you’ll take that a step further and learn to reduce the strain you proactively put yourself under trying to earn acceptance through performance.
Your launch menu:
Option 1: Stay with 42 Sidenotes and let DD&L do its bit for others.
This is for you when you only want the cosmic side-eye entertainment.Option 2: Join DD&L and let 42 Sidenotes sail into the wild blue yonder.
This is for you when you’re ready to mess up the patriarchal scripts that serve others, not you.Option 3: Do both. Overthink it here, overthrow it there.
In case the button doesn’t work for you, use: https://deliberatelydifficult.com/welcome, or straight where that takes you: https://deliberatelydifficult.substack.com/welcome
The universe may run on 42, but I now run my calendar on “no, actually” and “I’m not doing that anymore.”
