Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Independent's lifestyle newsletter.
"We're on our way!"
You may be familiar with this four-word linguistic bombshell that indicates when your friend is bringing their partner (who wasn't invited) along to a friends' catch-up. "People constantly inflict their partners on their social circle against their will," writes Lydia Spencer-Elliott this week. "What starts as introducing a new love interest to the group quickly becomes an attempt to shoehorn them into every occasion. Girlfriends are taken to uni group drinks, to secret groans from the room. Boyfriends are brought along to birthday dinners, despite not being invited."
But really, springing your partner onto a social group can be inherently selfish (and one of the main reasons friendships end, according to research). "In the warm glow of the honeymoon period, and indeed the cosiness of a comfortable relationship that comes after that, it can be easy to forget the importance of having separate social circles. Not just so you don't lose yourself, but so your friends don't lose you too," writes Spencer-Elliott.
Elsewhere this week, Katie Rosseinsky looked into the most banal paradox of modern life: paying for digital storage subscriptions.
I don't know about you, but I constantly receive mildly threatening notifications from Apple and Google Drive about paying an extra £2.99 per month for my hoards of cloud storage. As annoying as it might be to keep paying out for our personal data storage, the environmental implications are far, far more alarming, however. "Data centres are now responsible for more emissions than the aviation industry," writes Rosseinsky. One expert says that powerful processors "require large and constant electrical input", which generate a large amount of heat, and so another energy-intensive part of the process is pumping power into cooling down the servers.
"More than anything, though, we need to change the way we think about our data: instead of viewing it as something nebulous and intangible, it's time to start considering the very real implications, and remembering that the cost is more than just financial." Read more here.
In this week's newsletter you can expect:
- The death of therapy speak
- Why you need to stop bringing your partner everywhere
- The hidden costs of your digital storage – and how to clean it up
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