Some words of gratitude

or how I did not stop writing

I recently released a piece with Works in Progress (WiP), Fertility on demand, that was quite well-received. It’s all about emerging fertility technologies and how they could help women “have it all” in the future. The whole idea is that one’s 30s are crucial in one’s career trajectory, especially in “greedy careers” (or careers where returns to time invested in working/ networking are non-linear). Think lawyers, entrepreneurs, doctors, scientists and so on. But one’s mid 30s is also when women’s fertility starts to decline (and perhaps even worse, we do not have good ways of telling how much it declines for any individual woman). Taking time off to have children during this period has a massive professional impact for women who work in greedy careers and the result is both a gender gap in progression, but also highly educated women being the group with the largest gap between desired and actualized family size. I believe giving women more control over their fertility windows via emerging technologies will help ease this pressure. Getting DMs from women telling me they are now considering egg freezing and fertility preservation.

Anyway, this is not a post a about the WiP article. Leaving aside this piece, in general, writing on the internet has been great for me in many ways (and sorry for the pause, I am writing my PhD thesis and pre-prints — will get back to my substack very very soon).

But the reception that “Fertility on demand” got, reminded me of another piece I wrote,

more than a year ago, in which I analyzed, very in depth, the success rates of egg freezing and whether it was a viable method for fertility preservation, as well as what could be done to improve it. Yes, I have been obsessed with this topic for a very, very long time! I remember spending a lot of time understanding various aspects of fertility treatment, emailing with the author of the main study I included in that piece to make sure I got everything right etc. (on this occasion I wanna say how great Dr. Sarah Cascante, the author in question, was in answering all my questions). This was quite a lot of effort, back when nobody was really reading what I was writing. But I was frustrated by the way in which the media portrayed egg freezing (very inaccurate, as I explain in this tweet), as well as how little reproductive technologies seemed to be discussed in relation to women’s career advancement. In my undergrad career, I attended a few “Women in [insert X prestigious thing]” events and everyone seemed more interested in talking about rude male colleagues and microaggressions than discussing how to help women take control of their reproductive fate. So I wrote about this and other topics that I thought were important (e.g. the fallacy of “misinformation studies”).

The reality is such topics had always been on my mind. Before, I simply used to rant about them over a beer or sometimes even at lunch at work (bad idea), annoying those around me. So of course, there was another catalyst that led to me actually starting to *write* about all this ~ August 2023: I was recovering from a depression due to a personal tragedy. I do not want to dwell on what that was (but it’s as bad as you can imagine). After a few months of feeling extremely down, I just felt this deep, unshakeable compulsion to write, a compulsion that I could not get rid of. Mario Vargas Llosa, one of my favourite writers, compares the desire to write with an intestinal worm that eats at one’s entrails and refuses to allow one to live peacefully until they put words on paper. The worm demands to be fed with writing. And something about the personal tragedy and the depression and everything made this worm grow inside me. I was doomed… I should remind everyone that this was before “the vibe shift” and back then, having a substack as an academic, where you discussed anything that was outside the accepted consensus (e.g. misinformation studies being bad) was a really, really bad idea.

Plus the time commitment was high. And not many people were paying attention to what I was saying. At the time I was doing something called cell sorting, a laboratory technique used to separate a mixed population of cells into distinct groups based on specific characteristics like the presence of particular markers. This involved a lot of waiting around for reasons I won’t bore people with — the upside was that the waiting around gave me a window for writing. A typical 6pm November/December 2023 for me was sitting next to the cell sorter, making sure the tubes the cells were sorted in were not overflowing and changing them if they were. And alongside that, writing about misinformation or egg freezing or whatever (& occasionally even taking selfies). But I was still very, very tired from everything I was doing and also generally dejected, since I had not quite fully recovered from the depression. My writing was not doing very well. And to the extent that I got messages about it, it was about how what I was saying was really bad and poisonous, how it was going to hurt my career and so on. So I considered, very seriously, giving up.

A typical late October/December day in 2023

But two things, or rather, two people happened: Nate Silver and Tyler Cowen. Somehow, I have no idea how, Nate came across one of my misinformation articles, shared it and

recommended my Substack. It probably took him 5 minutes to do that. To me, it meant incommensurably more. Here was someone I had read and admired who recommended my Substack! In my mind, the thought that maybe I did have something to say started to take hold. One month later or so, I met with Tyler, who was not only very encouraging, but offered me an Emergent Ventures Grant. It was not a large grant, but that was not the point. Tyler read my articles and he offered suggestions and shared my writing. And most importantly, I felt like he took me seriously. I cannot quite explain what that means, and maybe in reality he does not take me seriously, but that’s how I felt. Tyler, the writer of the blog I held in such high esteem. It can be hard for people who have reached a certain point in their career to understand how much impact they can have on those at the beginning of theirs. But it was really these two things that led me to continue writing: Nate recommending my Substack and Tyler taking me seriously (at least according to my perception). So I want to say thanks for that.

I have met so many people and learned so many things by writing on the internet. It opened opportunities. And I really think none of these would have happened without the rather serendipitous encounters with Nate and Tyler, that I shall be forever grateful for. There are many others who have supported my work, and I will write a post thanking them all. But it was these two encounters that stopped me from stopping.