Cheaper Than Therapy: A Newsletter by Shani Silver

A healing newsletter for 80s babies.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver. 

I’ve never seen the world the way other people do. Whether it’s a product of growing up in the “out-crowd” or something to do with the planetary placements at the moment of my birth I really don’t know. There’s an iconoclastic nature to me that I fought too hard for too long. Instead of celebrating my perspectives, I hid them, ashamed to see and feel things differently, thinking that hiding myself meant I’d be loved. When I found the bravery to share one of my against-the-grain perspectives, “being single isn’t bad,” my life unfolded like flower petals. I want more. 

Age is the next place I need to go, but I need to talk about getting older in terms of value, of what we gain, not just the charming physical changes and the things we’ve been groomed to think we can’t do anymore. Open any email in your inbox and it’s easy to see where marketing teams and content creators think you fit in. They think you don’t. But there are countless, priceless acquisitions that come along with this mercifully less lost stage of life. I don’t want to spend my time trying to reverse myself. I want to see what’s waiting for me moving forward and I want everything there to feel just as relevant and valuable as the world that expects us to stay 25 forever. As usual, if I can’t find what I want, I write it myself. 

When I get older, I don’t grieve—I grow. Let’s talk about that.  

I was born in 1982. We were the last teenagers to ever know the world before and after the internet. We began high school without an email address and ended it with several. No other generation has that perspective. Now, we still exist on an internet that no longer exists for us. It’s paints us as old, over, something shameful or less-than compared to those a decade or two less-lived. And rather than bitch about being forgotten, I’d rather create something specifically to center us, the way the content on the internet used to. 

I don’t like feeling as though the internet has forgotten me, because I was among the first class of kids to ever use it. We built this city, fuck you. 

If you like my writing, my personal taste for some reason, and love being exactly the age you are (or want to learn how), 1982 is yours. 

What to expect: 

• Unlearning the childhood beliefs that (still) limit us as adults.

• Personal essay & opinion on age, entertainment, and ever-increasing value (she’s a writer y’all)

• Good Follows (a manageable morsel of the entire internet handpicked by me)

• Generation Y/Elder Millennial beauty & style (for people who aren’t really beauty & style people) 

• Personal growth centering emotional maturity & relationships (all kinds of them)

• Auditory Autobiography (songs we used to love, re-enjoyed)

• No-Reboot Nostalgia (celebrating and learning from the past without re-creating it)

What NOT to expect: 

• A list of things to “stop doing after 40”

• The message that you’ve “aged out” of the internet

• “Wellness.” There’s enough.

• Singlehood stuff. That’s another arm of my work that will continue on as scheduled. 

• News, politics, tougher (but vital) topics — I leave these to far more capable voices — though do tell me if you’d like links to them 

• The term “age-appropriate”

• Trends that only apply to people with a “2” in front of their age

• The feeling that you no longer matter as much as those 20 years your junior

• Stress, pressure, or shame of any kind. 

Cheaper Than Therapy publishes weekly & costs $5 per month.