Lemonada

I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

As I have said many times, too many times, I love a proverb, an aphorism, a secret of adulthood.

I have some favorites that I repeat all the time.

Here are a few proverbs that I quote constantly. You can't push a rope.

A stumble may prevent a fall. Learning makes a man fit company for himself. That's very relevant in the age of AI.

One of my very favorites is, it's not a bug, it's a feature. This proverb is invoked by software developers when they argue that something that might

have been seen as a mistake or a flaw in their program is actually something useful

that it has been purposefully created to do.

This turns out to be surprisingly applicable to everyday life.

I find myself repeating this line often. It's

astonishing how often something that one person describes as a bug can also be claimed as a feature.

For instance, with medication, sometimes one person's negative side effect is the very reason that someone else takes that medication.

I have a serious cat allergy, but I don't like taking certain kinds of antihistamines

because they make me feel so sleepy.

And other people take those antihistamines because they want to feel sleepy.

They don't care about the effect on allergies.

One person's negative side effect is another person's reason for taking the medication.

I recently joined the

newsletter platform substack. One thing about substack is that it's very easy, even for a non-technical

person, to figure out how to send a newsletter. It's very simple to use. That's a feature and a bug.

If you're trying to do very complicated or sophisticated things with a newsletter,

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