One day you’re dating this gorgeous but ditsy girl but your family pressures you to break up with her once you go to harvard so you do and it ends in tears but whatever.

Next thing you know, she’s at Harvard, dressed in entirely different clothes, saying its easy to get in and she’s pretending she forgot you go there. But you payed your way in and she’s rich too so you kind of assume she did the same thing and fine, so you have a stalker now.

There’s a mixer at the start of the school year. She shows up in a playboy. bunny. costume.

She tries to flirt with you while your fiance is in the next room. You tell her enough is enough and she gets like really angry at you.

You break up with the girl you actually really like because she's hot, but your family expects you to marry a girl who's rich and also smart enough to be a lawyer herself, so you string her along until just before graduation and then tell her so long and thanks for all the fish.

Then you show up at Stanford for orientation and, at the end of the long list of accolades and accomplishments the various students in your graduating class comes in with, the dean of students announces Stanford Law's first-ever beauty queen, and holy shit it's your ditzy ex.

You have already gotten engaged to the girl your parents expect you to marry. Your fiancee is actually in more of your ex's classes than you are, just because of how the schedules line up. There are quite a few people in your class who knew her before and they all mock her. Most of the other students get in on it. You stay out of it.

There's a Halloween party, she shows up dressed as a Playboy Bunny, and she outright tells you she came to Stanford to prove she's good enough for you. You laugh at her.

Your fiancee convinces you to send everything you ever got from your ex back to her. She does this right before first semester finals. You may possibly feel like a jerk, but you do it anyway.

You get your grades back for the first semester. Your fiancee is near the top of the class. You are at the bottom of the class. You are pissed off about this. You decide you need to do something about this situation. What you decide that you need to do is take your ex, who understands you and would never show you up with grades like that and knows how to make you feel like the biggest man in the world, out to dinner, order a meal that your fiancee has managed to convince you to stop eating for your health, declare to your ex that you are going to start making your own decisions again...and have therefore decided to start playing golf again, damn what your fiancee says. You are completely confused when your ex leaves the table in tears.

You may or may not find out that your ex took all her first semester classes pass/fail, which means she technically did better than you.

You apply for an internship with a lawyer who is working on a case involving a woman accused of murdering her elderly husband. You get it, along with your fiancee, a militant feminist, and your ex. The feminist gets the internship because she is an expert in women's rights and particularly as they relate to this case. Your fiancee gets it because she has insanely good research skills and the grades to back it up. Your ex gets it because she is passionate about the case and also has connections with a number of people involved in the case, including the defendant. You get it because your father went to law school with the lawyer in question.

Your ex gets to go along on depositions. Your fiancee also goes to depositions. You are struggling to keep up with the minimal workload you have been given.

The case gets to court. The lawyer is on the verge of losing. Your ex suddenly jumps up and asks to ask the key witness questions. She then manages to skewer the entire testimony based on her intimate knowledge of both beauty routines and sorority politics. She gets mobbed by the press immediately following the case and the lawyer goes on record as stating he is proud of her.

You are delighted. You present your ex with a detailed explanation of how you can now marry her, because your parents will accept her when your dad's old friend tells them how smart she is and you can have a hot wife too. Your ex informs you that she's not interested in you anymore and that she's realized she can do better, and then adds that incidentally your fiancee has been standing behind you this entire time hearing you talk about how she's ugly as a brick fence and you're only marrying her because your parents are making you.

But yeah that seems very obvious.

The saga was covered in a wonderful episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes (highly recommend).

Cliff notes: The book is littered with factual inaccuracies, most of the studies Walker cited he misrepresented or their efficacy was greatly overstated. In general, exercise caution around pop-sci literature that makes sweeping statements or claims breakthrough, enlightenment answers.

If someone gets outraged at you for telling everyone about something they just refused to aknowledge as a wrongdoing, you can just stare at them all wide-eyed and act like you don't understand. Tell them that you don't understand what they're talking about, they literally just said that they haven't done anything wrong and that anyone would obviously understand that. All you're doing is agreeing with them - if they didn't do anything bad, then telling the story is doing nothing to make them look bad.

goblin.tools is "a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult". It is completely free, works on desktop or mobile, and if you really would like an app for it, it's extremely cheap on the app store.

The Formalizer helps if you're not sure how to word an email. You put in what you're trying to say and it will help you word it the way you want, whether you want it to sound more or less professional, casual, etc.

The Judge is good for both sending and receiving messages. It checks how your own tone comes across or how other people may be trying to communicate from their text.

There's also time-management tools:

Magic Todo helps you break down big tasks into smaller pieces, and Lets you tweak how detailed it gets, too.

The Estimator tries to give you an very rough idea of how long a task may take based on what it is and how stressful you may find it. I haven't used this one yet but I think it might help some people who have time-blindness like I do.

The Compiler is good if you have a basic idea of things you need to do, but you're not sure how to break it all down. Just type out your thoughts and it will use that to make a list.

The Chef is for getting cooking ideas based on the ingredients and tools you have available. I know I tend to get paralyzed by trying to figure out making dinner, so this is great. I've seen apps that can do this but I've not had the best results with them, so I'm going to give this one a try.