Help Me Hera: I’m lactose intolerant but I can’t stop eating cheese

This week: a compendium of one-sentence problems.

If you would like to submit a one-sentence problem (or an ordinary-length problem) for a future instalment, please email helpme@thespinoff.co.nz or fill out this form.

I’m lactose intolerant but I can’t stop eating cheese

Unless your allergy causes you tremendous distress and pain, you’ve got to take a Nixon-esque approach to your corporeal health and refuse to negotiate with terrorists. If you start giving in to your body on matters of gluten and dairy and other nutritional irritants, it’s only going to embolden your already fragile anatomy to develop new and more insidious allergies and intolerances. Sometimes you need to eat a little cheese to show your gut biome who's boss, like an ancient emperor inoculating himself against poison, even if it means accidentally shitting yourself at the work Christmas function. Either that, or you have to revert to only hard and aged cheeses with a low lactose content, which a very cursory internet search tells me are Parmesans, sharp cheddars, romanos, pecorinos, Swiss cheeses, Gouda’s and gruyeres. 

My Gen Z colleagues have been playing the same millennial radio hits playlist of the 2000s on repeat in the shop. I thought I left 2000s radio hits in the past. How do I tell them it’s uncool?

Unfortunately, you cannot tell your Gen Z colleagues what is uncool, because once you age out of your 20s, the power to arbitrate what is or isn’t cool passes directly and irrevocably to the generation below. If your colleagues think millennial radio hits playlists from the 2000s are cool, then they are, by definition, cool, and there is nothing you can do but wait for the baton to pass to an even younger demographic. However, this doesn’t mean you have to suffer through The Killers in silence. You should advocate for your rights as a newly geriatric individual, and leverage your advanced years and implicit seniority to dust off the gramophone and carve out an hour a day to play your own music, in the hope that some of it will unconsciously filter down to the generations below, like a dead whale to the ocean floor. 

I can’t finish my PhD thesis and it's been 7.5 years, help

As someone who has taken approximately the same length of time to write a still unfinished book of fiction, I feel your pain. I don’t honestly know if it’s possible to force it. You can set yourself deadlines, but the problem with setting yourself deadlines is that you, the deadline setter, know deep down they are completely arbitrary. How do people write a book every three years, unless, like Steven King, they have a near-infinite supply of amphetamines? I’ve long since concluded things take as long as they take, and as long as you’re putting in regular, sustained effort and making measurable progress, that’s the best you can do, beyond simply phoning it in. If you think about the whole thing at once, you’ll become paralysed by the enormity of the task. Break it up into small sections, and work through it piece by piece, as if you were slowly eating a Ford Fiesta with a knife and fork. 

I work in an office, and my face absolutely cannot hide how much I despise corporate-nonprofit management-slash-marketing speak; every 'sassy disruptor synergy' strategy slide makes me grimace, and everyone can see it. 

Lean in, Sheryl Sandberg, and have a little fun with it. Not only should you start integrating their sickening patois into your own presentations, but start inventing some of your own terms to amuse yourself. Every week, see if you can coin a new phrase to deploy on your unsuspecting coworkers, and make these phrases an integral part of your office culture. Start small, making minor adjustments. Instead of “low-hanging fruit”, try “low-hanging testicles.” Try “yassify the spreadsheet” or “hydrogenate the numbers”. Then you can move on to more obscure phrases, like “trim the parson’s wig” or “greasing the fiscal donkeys”. Soon everyone will be talking about “punching the cake” and “squeezing the stakeholder’s pincushion”.

Is it ethical to have a baby when the world is on fire?

Is it ethical to live at all? Who knows. But a world without children is a world without hope for the future, and we all need something to hope for. Although the future seems admittedly grim, the human race has survived ice ages and plagues and generational catastrophes, and although there is a non-zero chance we could suffer an extinction-level event at any time, I can only attest that it is wonderful to be alive, and to bear finite witness to the terror and beauty of the world, even as we slide irrevocably towards the end. I am grateful to my parents and their parents and their parents’ parents ad infinitum for catapulting me headlong into this beautiful simulation against my will. There is no way to make a perfect decision on this subject without being able to see the future, so you just have to make an imperfect decision. Have your baby and shower it with love. We’re all going to die in the end.