How to be a reality-based human in 2025

Finally got around to reading this piece by Pamela Paul in the NYT that I had saved at the end of January. While it's supposed to be humorous all of the points she makes are dead-on. Some of them had me absolutely dying like:

Let go of 2020. Like skinny jeans and bucket hats, not everything that appealed five years ago looks as good in the cold harsh return-to-office lighting of today. Feel free to retire any residual circa-2020 flourishes like the compulsion to virtue-signal your progressive bona fides, whether it’s wearing an N95 mask to meetings despite having no underlying medical condition or attaching italicized pronouns to your email signature like an ancestral signet or fancy job title.

Given what has happened on Mastodon since last summer, in the "tribe" I was in, this one hit hard:

Break up with your tribe. Belonging to any group that requires ideological, behavioral and even aesthetic commitment isn’t necessarily the best way to connect with fellow humans in a highly pixelated and polarized world. You can be a singular individual while still forging community with the people around you — preferably in actual geographic space rather than an imagined cyberspace — despite your disagreements. Technically, it is possible to embrace people who differ from us and still stay true to who we are.