Hey,
A higher salary, a bigger home, a fuller calendar, a more impressive title, all of these can genuinely improve a life. But they can also add friction, clutter and demands we rarely factor in when we first call something an upgrade. And, that is where #Edition98 starts.
It’s not that ambition is bad, or that easy is automatically better. But it’s more about: are we judging our lives by their features, or by the experience of actually living them?
Inside this Edition:
👉 Prestige Has Terrible UX
🥗 What she’s making, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her
Sometimes the thing that looks premium from the outside is simply not designed for the person using it.
👉 Prestige Has A Terrible UX
Some lives have excellent branding. The title lands well. Salary sounds good. A beautiful house. Prestige can come with a genuinely great life. But prestige can just be a feature for your life and not your whole life.
In design, UX (user experience) asks: what is this actually like to use?
Maybe our lives deserve the same perspective shift!
We are good at evaluating specifications like money, space, influence, opportunities. What we are worse at measuring is friction. The 2 hour commute. A corporate role that interrrupts every family dinner. A bigger home that turns the whole Saturday into maintenance. A social life that leaves no room for spontaneity because every evening is booked.
None of these things automatically make your life bad. We just need to simply evaluate these.
And…that is where Life A and Life B get interesting.
We tend to place A above B, as though one is the premium version and the other is what you choose when you cannot get it. But these are not levels, these are configurations.
One optimises for income, visibility and momentum. The other for autonomy, simplicity and time. And for someone else, Life A might have fantastic UX. Pace of it energises them. Responsibilities suit them. That is the point — A well-designed life is personal!
The mistake is in assuming prestige automatically improves the experience.
Perhaps the better questions are a little less glamorous.
What does this job make an ordinary Wednesday feel like?
What new tasks arrive with it?
What will it ask me to repeatedly do?
Streets of Belgium, A poorly designed fire exit
Good design is not about removing everything demanding. It is about making sure the demands serve the experience you actually want. Our lives can become cluttered for the same reason products do: we keep adding features because each one sounds useful on its own. Another commitment. Another responsibility. Another upgrade. Until the system becomes harder to operate.
So the next time something looks like a step up, look past the packaging.
Ask whether it improves the life around it?
🔍 Currently, Her
💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.
🍋 MAKE: Crispy Lemon-Parmesan Sheet-Pan Gnocchi
Gnocchi, cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, parmesan, lemon: one tray, very little chopping, almost nothing to clean afterward. The kind of dinner that looks significantly more ambitious than the amount of effort it asks from you.
📖 READ: The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff
|A smart examination of what happens when work becomes the main place we look for identity, purpose and proof that we’re doing well. Stolzoff asks a useful question: what if a job could simply support the rest of your life instead of becoming your life?
🎧 LISTEN: A “No-Skip” Playlist
Not a productivity playlist. Not background music for answering emails. Make a 10-song playlist where every track is there because you genuinely like hearing it, no algorithm picks, no songs you think you should appreciate.
✨ For noticing where more stops adding value and starts adding friction.
🗞 Her World, This Week
Yesterday, we began with HWD’s young sister-brand.
Her Daily Download is where the world is downloaded for her before all the things take up her mental and emotional space.
💡 Her Spotlight
Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.
At 58, Lucy Kellaway (@lucy.kellaway1) left what she called “the world’s nicest job.”
She had spent 31 years at the Financial Times – with autonomy, brilliant colleagues and the freedom to write about what interested her. Her life was good. She simply no longer wanted to spend the rest of her working years living the same version of it.
So she retrained as a teacher and co-founded Now Teach, helping experienced professionals begin second careers in education. This new role gave her less autonomy and was, by her own account, exhausting – but she found satisfaction in learning again, improving at something new and feeling useful in a different way.
Sometimes the hardest life to redesign is the one nobody else can see a problem with.
✨ Know more about Lucy Kellaway at @nowteach
🤍 Note to Her
Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.
✨P.S. Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚