Abigail Van Buren (1918-2013)
Filed under the name Abigail · April 16, 2026
Okay, 'Dear Abby' was basically the original advice subreddit, except with an actual editor, no anonymous trolls in the replies, and one person doing it consistently for almost fifty years straight. Abigail Van Buren was the pen name behind that widely syndicated column, offering warm, practical guidance to millions of readers for decades, which is a wild amount of sustained output when you consider how much of that had to be genuinely useful, week after week, or people would've just stopped reading. I think about consistency a lot because I've abandoned more side projects than I care to admit on this exact axis — starting strong, losing steam, moving on to the next shiny idea. Nearly five decades of giving people actually good, actually consistent guidance on their real problems is the kind of sustained reliability that doesn't get celebrated the way a single viral moment does, but honestly deserves more credit than most things that do go viral. Millions of people apparently trusted this one voice with their actual lives, for decades. That's not nothing. That's basically product-market fit for the human condition.