Amanda Stern

Amanda Stern Author | Writer of The How to Live Newsletter

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Amanda Stern is an author, arts organizer and writes the newsletter How to Live. I'll introduce you to ideas, concepts, and people whose contributions to psychology and mental health can help us live a deeper, more meaningful life. It's free. https://amandastern.bulletin.com

Someone you haven't seen since you were thirteen asks why you never got married.You've just spent an hour listening to h...
08/18/2026

Someone you haven't seen since you were thirteen asks why you never got married.

You've just spent an hour listening to him describe how hard marriage is. How close they are to divorce, how children changed everything, how expensive it is, how little freedom he has, how lost he often feels.

And then: "So why didn't you ever get married?"

You almost laugh but you ask him the same question, "Let's start with you. Why did you get married?

"I don't know," he said. "It's just what people do."

There it is.

The world has a way of making you answer for your life when it doesn't match. You are forced to explain yourself to people who have never once had to explain themselves. You internalize, without meaning to, the messaging that implies, "you're living life wrong." Some days you believe it. Soon, most days you believe it.

One day, annoyed at yourself for feeling like you've broken some promise to people you never made, you realize something. Throughout time, men have tried to ostracize women who didn't mold. The "spinsters" were cautionary tales. Girls are raised to fear being like "them." But you suddenly realize something. These women were revolutionaries. They weren't broken; they were early. They bucked the system before anyone had language for it, and the world pitied them. But they were living their lives, while everyone around them weren't.

When others look back on this moment, on women like me who never had children and didn't marry, what will they call us?

I wrote about what happens when the one-size-fits-all life doesn't fit all.

https://bit.ly/3RQtSCr

You are standing in a room at 7pm in March, watching what the light does to the walls.It has done this before; It will d...
08/16/2026

You are standing in a room at 7pm in March, watching what the light does to the walls.

It has done this before; It will do this again. Yet, every time, it calls up something specific inside you. It's a texture, a quality of interior feeling that arrives with that particular turn of light and with nothing else.

You cannot name it, you struggle to describe it, and you've never been able to explain it. The closest you can get is to gesture at it sideways: it feels like...It looks like...It's something like...

Philosophers had the same problem.

A Harvard logician named C.I. Lewis was trying to solve how knowledge get built from raw experience. He realized he needed to distinguish between two layers: the conceptual layer, where thinking happens, and something underneath: the pre-interpretive feel of sensation itself, arriving before any thought catches up.

He called it a quale. The what-it's-like-ness of experience.

Qualia, Lewis noted, have no names in ordinary language. They can only be pointed at obliquely. He was naming the unnamed while using language to prove language couldn't do it.

What is left over when you subtract all the physical facts of sensation is the experience of what it feels like to be you.

Everyone is walking around with an interior life that cannot be fully shared, spoken, or transferred. We have always been pointing at it sideways.

I wrote about this for the How to Live Newsletter.

https://bit.ly/496vJZL

You are eight years old and you are terrified of being wrong.Wrong about facts. Wrong on a test that decides you with a ...
08/15/2026

You are eight years old and you are terrified of being wrong.

Wrong about facts. Wrong on a test that decides you with a number.

Alfred Binet never wanted the IQ test to do that. Nor did his collaborator, Theodore Simon.

Binet, a French psychologist, built the original IQ test in 1905, alongside Simon, for a single, humane purpose: to identify the children who needed more help, so France could give it to them.

Not to rank children; not to sort, route or contain anyone, but to help the kids who needed it.

They were so afraid of how the final score might be used that they said repeatedly: this is not a measure of intelligence. Intelligence cannot be measured. It is rooted in experience, and it changes.

They recommended children be retested frequently, trying to keep the number from calcifying into a verdict.

Then the American eugenicist Henry Goddard flew to Paris, brought the test back to America, and rewrote it to prove white racial superiority.

He and fellow eugenicist and psychologist Lewis Terman added fixed definitions to each score range. The number that was meant to find children who needed support became the evidence used to institutionalize and sterilize them.

The Stanford-Binet test, the one still echoing through schools today, is built on this version, not Binet-Simon's.

The men who invented the original IQ test spent their final years afraid of what it would be used to do.

Most tools outlive the intentions of the people who made them. The question is whose hands they end up in, and what those hands decide a child is worth.

I wrote about this for the How to Live Newsletter.

https://bit.ly/43fvCri

You look down at your hands, but you don't recognize them. You know they're yours and yet, they feel unreal, like your l...
08/14/2026

You look down at your hands, but you don't recognize them.

You know they're yours and yet, they feel unreal, like your limbs belong to someone else.

This experience is frightening, and when it first happens, many rightfully assume something they're catastrophically broken.

They're not.

This psychological experience is known as depersonalization, and it feels like being detached from yourself. You're watching your own thoughts, movements, and emotions from the outside, as though you are both the movie and the viewer.

Derealization is detachment from the world around you, surroundings that look flat, two-dimensional, cardboard. Both can happen at once.

Both can feel frightening.

What most people don't know is that dissociation is a defense. When experience becomes too much to bear, the mind creates an exit. It is one way to escape when you cannot physically escape.

I wrote about it for the How to Live Newsletter.

https://bit.ly/3RGRauq

Martin Seligman was a 24-year-old experimental psychology graduate student when he walked into a lab and found the other...
08/12/2026

Martin Seligman was a 24-year-old experimental psychology graduate student when he walked into a lab and found the other students baffled by dogs that wouldn't save themselves from being hurt.

The dogs were getting shocked on one side of a box. (Horrific, and sadly, common for the time period). The barrier to safety was low for the dogs, but they had learned from an earlier experiment, that nothing they did changed the pain of getting shocked. So they lay down and took it.

Seligman spent the next decade studying how some helplessness is learned, and later psychologists began asking what kinds of environments teach people that their actions don't matter.

One area where helplessness is often learned is when a well-meaning parent rushes to remove obstacles from their anxious child's path.

The parent who does their child's homework for them, instead of alongside them; who rushes to solve discomfort rather than helping them manage it, unintentionally teaches their child that difficulty is not survivable, that someone else must handle it, and that trying is not really the point.

This is often well-intentioned and comes from love: the parent can't tolerate their child's distress, and wants to free them from pain, so they remove the burden.

What they may not see is that the obstacle is often the path.

Some children grow up without confidence in their own ability to endure frustration, solve problems, or recover from failure. Being protected from difficulty instead of prepared for it can set them up for learned helplessness.

I know this, because I was that child.

Seligman's work revealed how helplessness can be learned, and in today's How to Live Newsletter, I write about what he found, and the ways we can attempt to unlearn it.

I wrote about it for the How to Live Newsletter.

This piece is paywalled, but here's a gift link: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/learnedhelplessness?gift_content=7a8f20a6-434b-4a42-89b1-c41e15330dc7

08/12/2026

40K followers!!! Wow!! Thank you everyone for your interest in this work. I’m so happy for your meaningful engagement with my articles. 🙏

You learned something before you had words for it.You learned it from the quality of the silence when you cried. From wh...
08/09/2026

You learned something before you had words for it.

You learned it from the quality of the silence when you cried. From whether the arms came quickly or not at all. From whether the person who left always came back, or only sometimes, or never quite the same way twice.

You were not yet one years old; and your nervous system was keeping track; taking notes.

A psychologist named Mary Ainsworth set up a plain laboratory playroom and watched what happened when mothers left and returned to their infants.

You might think she was interested in what happened when the mothers left. But she wasn't. It was the reunion that mattered. She was interested in the moment the door opened and the baby had to decide what to do with their feelings about the person who'd left.

What she found was that based on months of accumulated evidence, the baby had already decided whether that person could be trusted to stay.

This led Ainsworth to a necessary and profound insight: The expectation of care set by the primary caretaker becomes the framework upon which the baby bases all future interactions.

Not just with their caregiver, but with everyone.

Every relationship you've ever been in began in that metaphorical room. Every time you pulled away before someone could leave, or held on longer than you should have, or couldn't explain why closeness felt like danger, began in your first years of life.

The good news is that once you understand the pattern, you can change it.

I wrote about it for the How to Live Newsletter.

Find the link to the full piece is here: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/attachment-theory-connect-others-way

You are behind. You have not done enough. You are not enough.These sentences cascade in your head, scrolling behind your...
08/08/2026

You are behind. You have not done enough. You are not enough.

These sentences cascade in your head, scrolling behind your eyes, across the lower third like a chyron.

No one actually said these words to you. Not exactly, but the message is everywhere: in every mainstream movie, in popular culture, all over social media, and even in the books you read as a child.

There is a timeline and you are not on it. You "should" be married by now. You "should" have children, a house, a stable job, a flourishing career, a car.

Most people assume this pressure is just life; the cost of existing in a world with other people.

But, it's not.

It's a system. And it was built, deliberately, historically, by people who needed you to keep producing, consuming, and complying.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the man who pioneered "scientific management" in the early 1900s, treated workers like machines and branded their productivity "efficiency." He found a way to turn time into money. Then came television, which turned desire into debt. Each generation inherited a framework which conveniently benefits men and punishes women.

Perhaps you're miserable because you're measuring yourself against norms you never agreed to.

The tyranny of the "should" is not a personal failing. It's a feature of the design. And the first step out is recognizing that feature is the flaw. The framework upon which our entire society is based is not neutral.

I wrote about it for the How to Live Newsletter.

Find the link to the full piece here: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/norms

Every night, she woke at 2 a.m. to write. Then she went to the factory and inspected potato chips.Octavia Butler had wan...
08/07/2026

Every night, she woke at 2 a.m. to write. Then she went to the factory and inspected potato chips.

Octavia Butler had wanted to be a writer since she was twelve, when she watched a science fiction film so poorly written, she was certain she could do it better.

She went home and started writing.

Science fiction in 1970 belonged almost exclusively to white men with access to the right people. She was Black, dyslexic, poor, and she stuttered. and she had no connections.

So she started writing affirmations. In careful present tense, twice a day: I am a bestselling writer. I write bestselling books. She covered her walls with them.

She sold her first novel in 1976. Her second in 1979, but the bestseller list stayed out of reach.

In 2006, at fifty-eight, she fell outside her home and died.

Fourteen years later, Parable of the Sower hit the New York Times bestseller list. Her other books followed.

Most people read this as a story about manifestation, but it's not.

Butler wasn't writing her future self into existence. She was insisting on a present truth the world couldn't see yet.

She was already the writer whose books would change millions of lives. She was that person at twelve and she was that person when she was inspecting potato chips.

I wrote about it for the How to Live Newsletter.

The link to the piece is here: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/octavia

You are 10 years old. You made something at school, a self-portrait, and you want to show your father. He waves you away...
08/06/2026

You are 10 years old. You made something at school, a self-portrait, and you want to show your father. He waves you away without looking. At dinner you try again, a fight with your best friend, something that felt important, but he's on his phone, scrolling. Before bed you ask to call your mother; he tells you to leave her alone.

That night you feel a hollow emptiness that weighs more than your body. You worry you're disappearing, though you can still see yourself.

This is what it feels like to not matter.

In 1981, a sociologist named Morris Rosenberg identified something existing research couldn't explain. Some teenagers with loving families still felt fundamentally invisible. Others, with far less love and privilege, felt necessary.

If it wasn't love or connection, what, he wanted to know, made someone feel they didn't matter?

He built a five-question scale. Each question a silent punch in the gut. Here are 3:

Would you be missed?
Does anyone depend on you?
Is anyone actually interested in what you have to say?

Researchers at Brown later found that adolescents who scored low on Rosenberg's scale were dramatically more likely to hurt themselves or hurt others, or end their lives. Nearly 70% of posts on Reddit's su***de watch forum contained some version of the same sentence: "I just want to matter."

Most of us have felt it; many struggle to name it.

I wrote about what it means to matter, for the How to Live Newsletter.

It's not what you think it is, and better yet, there are tangible ways to shift the feeling that you don't matter.

Find the link to the full piece is here: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/mattering

Original art by Edwina White

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