Megan Nolan says millennial adulthood feels just as uneasy as her teenage years.  Short term job contracts and expensive housing has left her generation with a permanent sense of insecurity. As a teenager, Megan struggled to find her identity and place in the world, and felt 'wrong and different in the most profound and private of ways'.  She was told these feelings would pass. Now as an adult, however, the anxiety about her place in society has returned. 'Not knowing where your body will be from one year to the next, once you're out of your younger, wilder years, conjures a feeling not dissimilar to the nameless dread of adolescence,' she writes. This leaves Megan and her peers 'in a state of constant insecurity, certainly now, but in a deeper sense, always.'  Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Brenda Brown
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Insecurity

Personal Journals

Society & Culture

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

Megan Nolan on the allure of New York and the city's 'main character' syndrome.  The city is, she says, 'the place that makes me happier to be alive than anywhere else - not in spite but because of its thoroughly human hopelessness.' 'Nature is nature, permanent and without moral taint,' writes Megan, 'but cities are paeans to the marvellous filth of the human spirit.' 'The real challenge is being moved by the effort to remain open to one another despite being consoled by surroundings made not of beauty and relief, but of cement and strife.'  Producer: Adele Armstrong 
Sound: Peter Bosher 
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey 
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Protagonists of Reality

Patients care apps - which give patients unprecedented access to their health records - are being rolled out by NHS trusts across the country.  You might imagine, says Will Self, that 'this previously unimaginable access to such a wealth of medical data should empower me, make me feel I have a choice, and enable me to assist those treating me by being what every conscientious statistic wants to become: a good patient.'  Will argues that, on the contrary, this 'revolution in healthcare' only makes us more impotent, reduces patients to the status of customers and undermines the authority and expertise of medical professionals.   Producer: Adele Armstrong 
Sound: Peter Bosher 
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey 
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Me and my medical data

Caleb Azumah Nelson on why anger is no longer a stranger to him, but a friend. He talks of a childhood in which he tried to navigate a world which was 'already coding a young black man as dangerous, threatening. Angry.'  'As I've grown older,' writes Caleb, 'the question is not whether I should be angry, but do I love myself enough to be angry, to object when I feel wronged or faced with injustice.' Producer: Adele Armstrong 
Sound: Peter Bosher: 
Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman 
Editor:  Richard Fenton-Smith

On Anger

Sara Wheeler reflects on the experience of being a sibling to her brother who has a lifelong disability.  "Posting on social media on National Siblings Day, which fell on a Wednesday this year, brothers and sisters like me express pride. 'You love them more, not less' is a common thread. Because what all this is really about is the sibling's acute awareness of the lack of empathy routinely shown to the disabled - after all, childhood gives us, the siblings, a unique perspective. It's 'Does he take sugar?' times ten - ignoring the point of view of the disabled person and not even trying to stand in her shoes. Ask us. We know."    Producer: Sheila Cook
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Penny Murphy

It's all right for you

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the extraordinary experience of ‘crossing the rubicon separating non-motherhood from matrescence’.   ‘I had never quite put aside an abiding ambivalence about having a baby, even during pregnancy,’ writes Zoe.  But in the space of thirty minutes - and the delivery of a baby girl by C-section - Zoe says, ‘my hop over the long-tended, long-contemplated border with motherland rapidly resolved as her tiny features came into focus and a sense of interestingness became a sense of desperate affection and even of familiarity.’ Producer: Adele Armstrong 
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Insecurity

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