The last few months have felt like a giant misstep.

It seems like the only thing I’ve been able to think of to write for the report lately is how not fun writing has been…

When I started, I was just in it for the love of the game. And that love ended up resonating. A couple of viral posts (by Substack standards, anyway) skyrocketed my subscribers. In a relatively short amount of time, I began regularly finding myself on the charts and became a bestseller.

All of a sudden, I had an audience. A paying audience, at that. My mindset immediately shifted from expressing and exploring ideas I found interesting to providing value. To being liked. Palpable. Digestible. I was even aware it was happening while it was happening, and yet, I wouldn’t—couldn’t do anything about it.

Attention is a hell of a drug.

When things started going well, I panicked. How am I going to keep this going? How can I replicate this and keep the opportunities knocking?

Nothing makes the creative mind shrivel up like a raisin quite like pressure.

There are times—more often than not— when my mind is as barren as a desert. Other times, ideas crash into me like a tidal wave, and I frantically struggle to capture them before they retreat, leaving behind only the skeletal remains of what they were, and me to desperately try to breathe life back into them. They never really seem to resemble the form in which they came to me.

It’s been… draining. It used to take me maybe three afternoons to write an article—now it takes 5 days. And not necessarily because I’m writing longer, more in-depth pieces (I often am), but because it’s become tedious. A grind.

A part of me thinks I should probably take a break. But as a serial quitter, I’ve learned that the only way out is through. You have to iterate your way out of a hole. Lying down in it does fuck all. And I promised myself that I wasn’t allowed to quit this time.

But still, it’s exhausting—trying to unstick yourself from where you’ve been on the road to where you’re going while you’re still on the road, like glue from a metal table on a hot day. This, I suppose, is the creative’s journey.

Last night I had a dream where I accidentally published and sent an article to only paid subscribers. Recognizing my error a day later, I republished it and sent it to everyone. Then, within a span of a minute, my subscriber count plummeted from 12,000 to 800 as I watched, frozen, as the numbers plummeted, praying for it to stop.

I don’t typically have vivid dreams, and if I do, I forget them within minutes of waking, and usually don’t put too much stock into them. But once in a blue moon, I have a dream so visceral that it feels like something’s reaching out to me from the ether.

This was one of those dreams.

After sitting with it (and diving into the Jung of it all), I realized that my subconscious (unsurprisingly) was asking: if everyone disappeared, would our work still have value? Would we still have value? If we shared more authentically, would everyone go away? And then what?

I think as creatives, this is such a common thing we wrestle with: What if doing the authentic thing costs us everything we’ve built?

What remains?

What changes?

The thing is, in the dream, I was immediately crestfallen by terror and panic. I reached out to Substack to see if it was a glitch (it was, though irreversible). I tried to fix it six ways to Sunday. But when I eventually realized there was nothing I could do, I felt… relieved. Like I could go back to writing whatever I felt like (but don’t take that as me saying it would be a favor to me if you left… please don’t lol). Like the shackles had been removed.

But I realized that that feeling doesn’t have to be tied to any physical reality. It’s a state of mind. We choose what we focus on—what rules we play by—and that molds our reality. Focusing on subscribers and money vs. focusing on the creative process, being honest, and telling the truth create very different realities that feel very different to live inside.

It’s true what they say—that life is a never-ending process of losing your spark and getting it back. For me, nothing extinguishes my spark faster than when I forget who I am. It’s so easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing. But, as I must learn time and time again, you cannot get where you’re meant to go by taking someone else’s path. When you covet someone else’s gifts, you fail to see your own.

I’m also reminded of all the bad art every good artist had to make to make good art. The process of iteration isn’t failure—it IS the creative path.

I guess I’m really writing this as my permission slip to myself (and you, if you need it) to change things up without needing anyone’s approval. To try, fail, and try again. To get lost and come back, all for the sake of going all in and seeing what the journey teaches me—how it changes me.

At the end of the day, the artist path isn’t up.

It’s in.

reading —

My Friends by Fredrik Backman | This book came highly recommended by several friends, but I gotta be honest—it’s like a 3/5 for me. I found the writing style to be weird and a little juvenile (also really could’ve benefited from some em-dashes. I know everyone wants to hate because of AI and all that, but they seriously help with clarity), and the story wasn’t groundbreaking to me.

now what am i going to do with all this potential? by

nobody believes in later anymore by

A New “Movement Class” Is Emerging by

eating —

Einkorn bread | My favorite local bakery started making an Einkorn sourdough and I desperately wish there was some way I could convey to you how good it is because it’s legitimately some of the best bread I’ve ever had.

Bagel sandwich | There is nothing (NO. THING.) I love more than getting sweaty and dirty doing some sort of heavy physical activity, and then absolutely housing a sandwich back at the car. Lox and labneh on a sesame bagel on the tailgate? Proof of the divine.

playing —

Ted Lasso | Rewatching season 4 in anticipation of the new season! That is all!

obsessing over —

Sunbathing | I am a fair-skinned gal, and I live in a northern latitude where summers are increasingly interrupted by wildfires. I have a history of getting sunburned pretty easily because in the past I had a habit of only getting long periods of intense sun exposure—but no longer.

We’ve been sold so much propaganda that the sun is our enemy, but a huge body of research reveals that the benefits of being in the sun, from lowering blood pressure, to hormone regulation, improving mood, and lowering all-cause mortality, outweigh the negatives. The notion that this thing that literally gives everything on this planet life is dangerous, full-stop, end of discussion, is absurd when you stop to think about it. I definitely fall into the camp that not over-doing and avoiding burning, but not avoiding the sun, is best practice.

Not only have I committed to being intermittently outside as much as possible, but I also lay in the sun every day for 20 minutes and I feel incredible.

Preparing for delight | wrote about a lunch she went to off the coast of Sardinia with a couple who packed goggles so they could swim back to the boat instead of taking the tender boat. She shared that the thing that struck her the most was that they had prepared in anticipation of delight, rather than inconvenience, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Lately, when I leave my house, I think about what I could have on hand that is not only anticipatory of delight, but also helps me step into the version of myself that I’d most like to be. Really, it’s been anything that keeps me off of my phone in public—a book, my journal, a swimsuit, whatever. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but it might just be a life-changing practice…

recommending —

Acupuncture | Last month I was trying and it’s back because now I’m recommending it! 10/10, now a very important part of my monthly body maintenance.

HARA the label | I got sent some pieces for an upcoming article (!!!) and bought a few more of my own because it’s that good.

trying —

Bike park | Last year, I started mountain biking, which quickly became one of my favorite outdoor activities, and now, thanks to peer pressure, I started going to the bike park at our local ski resort (for those unfamiliar, this is proper downhill mountain biking with a full-face helmet and pads required). I’m gonna be real, I’m not 100% on it—it’s… scary lol.

Running | Well, well, well, would you look who’s back to running (for the 10th time). Last fall, I went through this whole thing with my back (wrote about it here) that put me on a long, slow road to regaining full function. Running was one of the things that was an absolute non-starter, and I knew that it was probably going to be the last thing to tackle. I’ve started introducing 20-minute runs, and so far so good! Honestly, to be at this point is such a sign of progress, and I’m so grateful.

Varicose oil | I have pretty rampant spider veins on my legs that are getting out of control. I was researching what can be done for them (lasers, etc.) and learned that it’s all pretty expensive and doesn’t always work. But in that search, I came across this homeopathic oil that had surprisingly good reviews, and thought, what’s the harm in giving it a shot? It’s going to sound crazy, but after just a couple of days, they definitely look different. I asked my husband, and his initial “no way” quickly turned into, “wait, what the fuck?” Will report back.

Not even fat. Just simply… not skinny.

Kate Winslet being relentlessly fat-shamed during the Titanic press tour, America Ferrera cast as the “fat friend” in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the entire plot of Bridget Jones Diary being centered around the titular character being fat, when she wasn’t, even in the slightest. Then, of course, around the same time, we had Kate Moss dropping gems like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, The Biggest Loser, that fucking Yoplait itsy-bitsy yellow polka dot bikini commercial…

Every ad, every magazine cover, every movie and TV show made the message loud and clear: your worth as a woman—the love you will be allowed to receive, the opportunities available to you—is entirely predicated on how thin you are.

As children, we come into this world clean slates. Societal norms and expectations must be taught to us. And those things that we’re taught shape our perception of reality. Everywhere we looked gave us the same, clear message. And so, our brains became wired to seek deprivation.

Young girls and women of that era became consumed by it. Eating low-calorie, low-fat, and as little as possible. Doing every “fat-burning” exercise that crowded the pages of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Our waking thoughts—that is, what thoughts we had the brain power left to muster—were entirely preoccupied with the discipline it took to withstand and navigate the hunger, and using whatever means possible to obtain the so-called “perfect body.” If we caught a glimpse of so much as a dimple of cellulite, we took it as a sign that we needed to invest more time and energy in its pursuit.

And then, the fatigue set in. The brain fog. The anxiety. The depression. The hair loss. The cold fingers and toes. The missed periods.

The complete absence of any life force energy whatsoever.

The complete absence of anything that feels like a life.

But it went beyond depriving ourselves of food. Along the way, that same wiring translated to every aspect of life. Even if we at least somewhat repaired our relationship with food, we still deprived ourselves of all sustenance, not just taking up less physical space, but energetic space as well. Instead of denying ourselves food, we denied ourselves joy, rest, pleasure, expression, and delight. We became comfortable living in scarcity of all of life’s deeply nourishing elements in order to signal our virtue and worthiness.

When you live an energetically depleted life, everything becomes a transaction. Meditation as a means to get rid of anxiety. Eating healthy as a means to grow our hair back. Lifting weights as a means to build metabolically active lean muscle. Cold plunges to activate (also metabolically active) brown fat.

On the surface, it looks like we’re taking care of ourselves. And in a lot of ways, we are. But underneath it all is just more performative extraction in service of meeting socially prescribed standards so that we might be chosen, all the while still not choosing ourselves.

And let me tell you, from the horse’s mouth, that living this way is exhausting. It’s like mining your life force for the perception of safety. But the great irony is that, in the long term, it does the opposite. We take and take and take from ourselves until all that’s left is the desolate wasteland that is (was) our spirit.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been on a journey to unwind these patterns of deprivation. I didn’t really know that when I started, I just knew that something had to change. Everything I was doing—even the things that looked like self-care—took so much effort. The things I was doing to try to give my life more juice were draining it instead.

It’s been a process of learning and unlearning that is still ongoing. But I wanted to share what I’ve learned so far, because I know I’m not alone in feeling this. So many of us suffer behind closed doors as anxiety about how we look and feel often sends us into spirals of self-flagellation. I think we deserve so much more.

Here’s how it started…

The nervous system carves the path

Read more

First up is the CEO of Girl Science herself, Carlisle Studer.

I first came across Carlisle via an Instagram post where she described a health journey that was nearly identical to mine, and I stayed around for her light-hearted, whimsical, and fun take on wellness (and I’m SITNGY with who I follow on IG, especially when it comes to health-related accounts). I know you’ll enjoy getting to know Carlisle just as much as I have!

What’s the common thread that runs through the way you’ve built your life?

Living in my own little world! I believe it’s really important to build a beautiful, tiny little world inside your own head at a very young age that nobody else can touch. So you always have somewhere safe to retreat to. You can fill it with trinkets, oddities, secret hobbies, theories, files…whatever you like, but that’s the thread that has always led me to my next adventure. I’ve found serendipity to be a skill and a reflection of a rich inner life.

How do you start most days?

Caffeine + sunshine + no phone. I like leisurely mornings and despise being rushed. Usually, some herbal tea as well.

And end?

Legs up the wall, some type of lymph massage, magnesium, a very dramatic oral care routine because I psyopped myself into enjoying flossing, ½ tsp of baking soda in water if I’m feeling stressed. I’m quite a night owl, and lately I've been having way too much computer time in bed working late. I love the night, and I wish I never had to sleep.

What’s always within arm’s reach?

Tiny flower essence vials, some type of lip balm, aspirin, cash, and sometimes nicotine mints.

What’s a tiny ritual you practice that punches above its weight?

Breaking the pattern. Nearly anything can be fixed with closing loops and breaking patterns.

What’s something in your life that looks inefficient from the outside but feels essential from the inside?

Dilly-Dallying. Or, as David Lynch would call it, “going dreamy”. From afar, I probably look like I’m inefficient and wasting gobs of time, but everything I’ve ever created I’m truly proud of came to me while I was dilly-dallying. There’s an art to it; daydreaming can be constructive, you have to be an open server to download good ideas.

What’s a “rule” you’ve broken that changed your life for the better?

Choosing curiosity over logic.

What’s a belief you once held that you’ve since changed your mind about?

That suffering equates to virtue.

I used to really deeply glorify the idea of always working, work being a priority over everything, and wished I could be a workaholic. I now see that the “work” I was doing was just working harder and not smarter.

What do you find yourself valuing more as you get older?

Brutal honesty + audacity

And less?

Materialistic items! The stuff I used to dream of owning now seems so silly. I really despise the notion that things that aren’t even that pretty are bought and used as wealth signifiers. It just seems silly.

When you feel out of alignment, what brings you back?

Creation of any kind. A recipe, a tea, putting together a video I’m proud of. If I go too long without creating something, I get the morbs big time.

If I’m not feeling creative, then usually a really sweaty gym session in baggy clothes with the same song on repeat the whole time.

What’s a book, person, place, or idea that has shaped how you live?

The idea that the way you live your life should be a work of art and your greatest accomplishment.

What’s been bringing you genuine delight lately?

Tiny creatures I see in the wild. I love to see how many things I can encounter. Baby opossums, salamanders, frogs… I get so excited anytime I see a tiny living thing.

What’s a piece of wisdom/insight that no one could have explained to you–that you learned the hard way?

Everything compounds. Saving money, working on an idea, working out, etc. Everything that feels boring compounds in ways we can never expect, and I wish I understood that sooner.

Last question: What does it mean to you to be human?

God’s greatest creation. It’s the acknowledgement that we only get one precious, perfect life and that everything really does matter.

Interested in more from Carlisle? Find her on Instagram @carlislediana

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He laughed.

I say “probably” because I have a horrible memory when it comes to the timelines of my childhood. I only remember this in the first place because I was never allowed to live it down. Even now in my 30s, it gets brought up.

But 7-year-old (ish) Erin was on to something. She was, in fact, ahead of her time. Because even then, I understood what seems to now be on everyone’s lips.

Hot girl summer, tomato girl summer, jam girl summer, rat girl summer, goblin girl summer, brat summer… Call it what you want, but they all point to the same thing: a summer of doing jack shit. Whether it's lying in the sun with nectarine juice running down your forearm, sipping Aperol spritzes and eating bread dipped in olive oil on the Amalfi coast, or waking up at noon in last night’s make-up, the sentiment is the same—the goal for our summers is to just exist. To rest. To be a little messy. To be unencumbered by… anything. To drop the masks that we tirelessly work to maintain and just be.

But this year, in the year of our Lord 2026, we’re not trying to hide the fact that we want a break behind the facade of an aesthetic with some cutesy name like “strawberry girl.”

No.

Frankly, we’re too tired for that.

This year, the trend I’m seeing play out is a cut-and-dry, no two ways about it hedonistic summer. And that might not exactly be a good thing.

For the last few years, wellness has looked and felt more like a Silicon Valley start-up, full of metrics, KPIs, and, of course, optimization. People have been in deep, tracking every metric, consuming endless amounts of information, spending every available (maybe even unavailable) dollar on supplements, programs, gadgets, subscriptions, and memberships, all in pursuit of their “best selves.” And it’s looked and felt like a Silicon Valley start-up because… it kind of has been.

The “quantified-self” movement was a version of wellness that tech-bros could understand and get behind. At long last, the nerds could become jocks. They realized that the more optimal their health was, the more productive they could be, giving them an important edge in the increasingly competitive tech world. Through meditation apps and sleep trackers, they could stave off burnout and just… keep going. Wellness as a means for crushing the competition. Naturally, a lot of capital got dumped into the health tech space, and that same ethos got passed down the consumer pipeline to us—be healthy so that you can keep working.

But now, the self-quantification that was intended to prevent burning has people going down in a blaze of glory from the sheer volume of things they’re supposed to do (which is really telling about American work culture, if you ask me).

As a result, people are throwing their Oura rings into the sea (metaphorically) and paring down their supplement cabinets in search of the one very important piece they missed while they were busy tracking: pleasure.

Over the past decade and a half, research about how stress, loneliness, and isolation are some of the highest risk factors for all-cause mortality has elbowed its way to the forefront of the wellness conversation. Starting with a meta-analysis done by Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad in 2010 that produced the famous stat that lack of strong social bonds and prolonged isolation results in the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Then, in 2015, Dr. Robert Waldinger from the Harvard Study of Adult Development—the longest running longitudinal study in history—revealed that the chief finding from the study thus far is that joy and community are the most important factors for living a long, healthy life.

And because research takes 10-20 years for research to become mainstream, in 2026, the time is ripe for pleasure to take over the wellness sphere.

As the person who coined the “post-wellness era,” I think it goes without saying that I not only saw this shift coming a mile away, but am wholeheartedly here for it. The realization that being so obsessed with our health is costing us the things that make us actually well is hitting escape velocity. As a result, people are taking rest, socialization, and fun more seriously.

That said, if you look deeper, there are some less-than-rosy, even insidious dimensions to this trend that are worth taking a closer look at.

People gravitated towards optimization, at least in part, as a reaction to an unstable climate—a way to feel a modicum of control in a world that often feels like it’s coming off the rails. But now we’re too tired and burnt out from it all to keep up the performance. Optimization is about delayed gratification. But when the future is so uncertain—when you’re actually unsure if you’ll even be able to reap the benefits of your hard work—it’s hard to know what you’re even optimizing for. Might as well enjoy what we can now, lest it all turns to shit soon. The scent of sweaty towels being thrown in is in the air. Resistance feels futile. People are kind of… giving up.

But dive even deeper, and we find that “hedonistic summer” might not even be a rejection of optimization culture, but rather, its mirror image. “Unoptimizing” on purpose is being performed as a lifestyle brand—just the next rung of the wellness ladder. If slowing down, being stress-free, and fostering deep connections is what we’re learning the deepest layer of wellness is really about, then it comes as no surprise that wellness influencers are now posting themselves eating croissants post-run instead of their Strava stats.

In his 1997 book The Conquest of Cool, cultural critic Thomas Frank argues that the 1960s counterculture wasn’t simply a grassroots rebellion against consumerism, but was actively encouraged and absorbed, and even started by corporate advertising, which discovered that rebellion itself could be marketed. When mainstream movements start to fall under scrutiny, capitalism isn’t obliged to keep the order. Instead, it sells the differentiation. Counterculture is a powerful market engine.

When the Global Wellness Summit listed “over-optimization backlash” in their 2026 trend report, it wasn’t just an indicator of human behavior—it was a signal of a burgeoning consumer market. Corporations have no prerogative to beat you, so they join you—or rather, convince you to join them and make you think it was your idea. If it’s profitable, they’ll sell it. And since, at the end of the day, consumption is one of the ways we express ourselves, we’ll buy whatever aligns with the identity we’re trying to project.

Grinding is no longer aspirational. Being over-optimized is gauche. Slowing down and having time to relax and enjoy yourself has become the new mark of affluence. As a result, things like IRL events, travel, and things that add a layer of friction, like film cameras and wired earbuds are coming at a premium. Campsites and backcountry passes are increasingly difficult and competitive to nab. Things that used to be incredibly plain and democratic now cost a pretty penny. It’s no longer enough to hang out on a beach in Santorini. Now, only a small island with no tourism infrastructure will suffice. Brands, from skin care, to beverages, to olive oil, to cookware, to running are increasingly leaning in to hedonistic, analog, leisurely—dare I say aggressively human—iconography in their ads.

But just because companies are finding ways to capitalize doesn’t mean the backlash is fake or that the resistance is insincere. Wellness and optimization place all of the responsibility onto the individual. But we’re collectively waking up to the role that systems play in our well-being. How certain things work against us by design. How we wouldn’t have to try so hard if we had some social support. When the fish is sick, you clean the tank—you don’t blame the fish. There’s freedom in realizing that and relinquishing some of that personal responsibility. We are social primates. It can’t all be on our shoulders and our shoulders alone.

Ultimately, there’s a balance to be struck. We cared about our wellness in the first place because we live in an environment that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the dolce far niente lifestyle. Wellness absolutely has its place.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When wellness hit so aggressively a few years ago, anyone who’s ever seen trend cycles play out would’ve predicted the pendulum swinging this way. Eventually, though, the momentum will slow, and most people land somewhere in the middle. There is a place for wellness, and a place for fun.

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I arrived at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday. The parking lot was a zoo. Bursting at the seams with people clamoring around in their best “outdoorsy” cosplay—or in jeans—talking loudly, iPhone speakers blasting tinny rap, children arguing with their parents:

You said this wasn’t a hike!

A quarter mile doesn’t count as a hike.

They are all hobbling up to the viewpoint to take a picture of the waterfall to post on Facebook as proof of what a good time they had in Oregon, as proof of how much they just loooove nature. Then, they will hobble back to their cars to fulfill their lunch plans.

I am only a mile down the trail, maybe less, before I see my last person for a while. It’s not a hard trail, but most people only come out here to see the big, impressive thing. The thousands of gallons of water crashing over a cliff. They want to get their picture and leave. They merely want to say they were here.

Like so many other things, people just want the big, obvious, flashy thing. They never go deeper.

Not even that much further away from viewpont, away from the parking lot zoo, a world appears. Vibrant textures and colors—water sparkling in the sun, tiny pocket meadows of wild flowers, entire universes on tree trunks. But these worlds are only revealed for those who can withstand the silence. In this silence, I find not only tiny universes, but little fragments of myself.

Most people are afraid of what will come up when they let the quiet in. They’re so addicted to the noise and distraction that silence and solitude are painful. They’re too wrapped up in what’s happening on the surface to go deeper. To feel what’s underneath. So most people live surface lives. And they mindlessly move about the surface world, wrapped up in their own neurosis, wondering why existence feels dull and disconnected, wondering why they’re so stressed, blaming it on everyone and everything they can.

We avoid going deeper into the wilderness because we fear the unknown. We avoid going deeper into ourselves because we fear the unknown. We’re afraid of what we’ll find—of what we won’t find. We keep treading water at the surface, afraid to sink. But when we stop kicking, become still, and let the sediment settle, we get clarity.

and then a page-long rant about the people who came and sat 10 feet away from me on my rock in the river in the middle of the forest with so many other places to be and wouldn’t stop talking and I’m aware of the many layers of irony that’s cloaked in… on to the report…

reading —

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake | A really interesting book about fungi and the role they play in… pretty much everything. I learned something new and interesting on every page.

Lifeform by Jenny Slate | How dare I forget that Jenny Slate is one of the funniest, most earnest, brilliant comedic minds of our time. This book is quite a ride—I’m sure it’s a good read, but the audiobook is literal performance art.

eating —

Snap pea salad | It’s farmers market season, which means I just grab whatever looks good and figure it out later. In this case, with snap peas, I’ve been making an iteration of this salad (but I add cucumber to it), along with honey miso salmon and kimchi, and I’ll be eating it on repeat until snap pea season is done

Hibiscus cherry lemonade | I made this recipe from for a gathering and really loved it! Definitely recommend topping it with some sparkling water. I also added a little ACV to what I had left over the next day, and that was also lovely!

playing —

The Drama | Somehow I avoided spoilers for months—it pays to not be chronically online, I guess! I know when it came out, there was a bit of discourse around it—many didn’t like it—but I actually really liked it. Even got a little teary-eyed at the end.

House of the Dragon | I’m obsessed with anything in the Game of Thrones universe. Sue me.

The Bear | Ok, I think most of us can agree that this show can never live up to the first season, but I still love it for 3 reasons: 1) it makes me feel all nostalgic and romantic about the service industry, and I think it does a good job of depicting what its actually like (minus the leaving in the middle of an overbooked service to have a heart to heart—that would never happen), 2) I find the pace and style of story telling compelling, and 3) the acting. From literally everyone.

obsessing over —

Bryan Johnson’s got an autoimmune disorder | Ok, putting this in the “obsessing over” category feels a little insane and tacky, but it’s not in the way that you think, just… let me explain. Last week, Bryan Johnson, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist who spends a reported $2 million a year on optimizing his health, who has 30 doctors, tracks everything, and whose IG bio reads “we may be the first generation who won’t die”, came out and announced that he has autoimmune gastritis.

FIRST LET ME SAY — I don’t know Bryan, but he is a complex person like the rest of us. This revelation doesn’t please me, and I wish him no ill will. I think his treating himself like a human guinea pig is a net positive for humanity as a whole, and his willingness to share this probably took a lot of guts. I am NOT obsessing over the fact that he has an autoimmune disorder.

What I am obsessed with are the conversations coming out of this revelation. While I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say, which a lot of people are, that if he weren’t vegan, didn’t pound 100 pills a day, and didn’t avoid that sun, this wouldn’t have happened—we don’t, and can’t know that (although I personally don’t agree with those things). But the resulting discourse that you can spend and hack and optimize and do everything “perfect”, and still get sick that’s happening in certain corners of the internet is illuminating. It’s really shining a spotlight on what it means to live a life well lived, and about the realities of what being “well” actually entails, which is kinda my whole thing.

My prediction is that this is going to usher in a new wave of looking at the deeper nature of how stress, perfectionism, and suppressed emotions impact health.

recommending —

Sinus support | It’s grass season here in Oregon, and everyone’s allergies are going insane, which means I’ve been proselytizing the Sinus Support pills from Beekeepers Naturals. I take one daily to help combat nightly histamine increases, and two when airborne pollen is bad. I gave one to a coworker who hates taking pills of any kind, but was suffering so badly she acquiesced, and she was shocked by how well it worked.

TBM | Every summer for the past two years, I’ve done the To Be Magnetic manifestation program. I know many will bristle at this, but I’ve found that it works—if not for manifesting, then for helping me cut through noise and grounding me in my authenticity, especially in times of transition. Every time I do it, I feel like another layer gets peeled back. So, I’m going in again. If it’s at all compelling to you, I encourage you to give it a shot!

trying —

Acupuncture | I’ve had acupuncture once before, and I hated it. But I felt the pull to try again, mostly because I read that it can be effective for histamine intolerance, so I decided to give it another shot, and I LOVED it. It was a totally different experience from the first time I tried it. I can’t wait to see what happens by going regularly.

what you missed last month…

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So instead of offering prescriptions, Notes On is moreso me sharing my experience—the things I’ve struggled with, questioned, researched, sat with, and how I found my way (or am in the process of finding my way) out of them.

Think of them less as guides and more as field notes. An honest account of what I’ve learned so far, offered in the hope that something here might help you make sense of your own experience.

I’ll be honest with you—I was debating whether or not to write this. I love working with herbs and plants. I think they’re incredible. But as is my affliction, I always think there are better, more qualified people that you could be getting your information from, and I have a severe aversion to telling people what to do.

But then, as I was scrolling, I came across this ad for a “rest and digest” tea:

Intrigued, with a bit of curiosity and excitement, I opened it. I’m 100% here for herbal remedies becoming more mainstream, and I was interested to see what they were using in their blend, if only to confirm, test, and expand my own herbal knowledge.

But as I scrolled the page, my heart sank a little. First, with the price—$45 for 30 servings. Ok… I mean, could be worse… let’s see what’s in it…

Then I looked at the ingredients, and the wind was completely taken out of my sails:

Cumin and Coriander seed.

That’s it.

A “proprietary blend” of… cumin seed and coriander seed.

And that got me fired up, so here I am.

No shade to the doctor who formulated and sells this tea—we’re all just trying to survive capitalism, and, as I said, I’m all for herbal remedies going mainstream. But to me, a $45 tea of some of the simplest and most accessible herbs is indicative of a deeper issue: we’ve forgotten how to work with plants. Heck, we’ve forgotten that that’s even a thing. This tradition and its deep wisdom that spans thousands of years and is a cornerstone of the human experience, all but lost in the modern era.

And its remembering is being sold back to us as a luxury good.

If your experience was anything like mine, you were raised to look down on anything “natural” (which, honestly… insane). As educated people of science, natural remedies were for white people with dreadlocks who smelled like patchouli, hugged trees, and didn’t vaccinate their children. These “natural” folk would surely perish for their folly.

At the same time, albeit ironically, there was a religious, patriarchal undertone that associated naturalists with paganism of witchcraft, which would surely see them burn in hell once they did succumb to the common cold.

Meanwhile, I was pounding ibuprofen basically every day for every minor ache and pain.

Fantastic.

So much of what we allow into our reality comes down to our beliefs about our identity. If we see natural remedies as being for people who smell like patchouli and walk around in public barefoot, and we don’t identify with those things, then we will believe that herbs must be for them and not us.

But the world becomes so flat and uninteresting when we put ourselves into boxes like that. When we divorce ourselves from curiosity, life only narrows. It’s possible to believe in science and in plants. In fact, I’d argue belief in the former and not the latter is simply ignorance. Do not limit yourself with labels—we contain multitudes!

So, over the last couple of years, I’ve transitioned from having a casual interest in herbalism to it becoming a full-blown hobby. It started in my early 20s. Left disillusioned and disheartened by conventional medicine, I began searching for other methods to try to heal myself—to address the root issues of the problems I was facing, instead of simply getting prescribed a run around of pills (after almost zero discussion) to treat my symptoms.

Alongside lifestyle adjustments, I started using different herbal remedies to help. I mostly went in blind, relying on the internet and companies that made different blends to help. Companies that sell herbal remedies, much like the one listed above, have an important role to play. The average person has very little to no herbal knowledge. Companies that make and sell different blends make them feel safe and accessible. But I view these things as training wheels—gateways to learning.

The medical industrial complex exists on a predication that they have the knowledge, and we don’t (which, in their defence, don’t ask me to perform a surgery), leaving us at the mercy of the keepers of the gates, making us helpless to their medicines. But the truth is, nearly every medicine in your cabinet was derived from plants, whether directly or indirectly through creating synthetic versions of plant compounds. The use of herbal medicines dates back nearly 60,000 years to present-day Iraq, and has subsequently been used by every indigenous community around the world for many thousands of years.

Aspirin is derived from white willow bark, metformin was inspired by compounds found in French Lilac, quinine—and its synthetic counterpart, hydroxychloroquine—is used to treat malaria, and is derived from the Cinchona tree. Traditional herbal use of foxglove informed the development of one of the first effective heart medications, Digoxin. Research on Madagascar Periwinkle revealed compounds that revolutionized the treatment of certain leukemias and lymphomas.

I want to be clear: I am NOT advocating that modern medicine is bad. Modern medicine is a miracle, and there’s no time I’d rather be living in right now. But it’s not with out it’s drawbacks. Both things can simultaneously be true. As money and politics get increasingly involved, medicine and healing get further and further diluted. And now, we’re at a point where we’ve entirely outsourced our knowing and authority to people in white coats (who are, at the end of the day, fallible humans like the rest of us, who are subject to their own incentives and biases) and have completely severed from and forgotten the healing powers of nature available to all of us.

If we learned anything in 2020, though, it’s that our institutions are fragile. And when they crumbled under the weight of a crisis and the veil was lifted, we realized what a lack of self-sufficiency and over-dependence on these institutions really costs us.

So, what follows is my small contribution to a reawakening. There are a lot of ways to use herbs—from salves and balms, to tinctures, poultices, and compresses. But today, we’re going to be focusing on the primary way I use them, and what I think is the friendliest way to work with them for beginners: teas and infusions. I’m going to give a breakdown of herbs by category and their traditional uses, focusing on the most efficacious and accessible varieties. Keep in mind that it is perfectly acceptable to rely on premade teas, tinctures, etc., as a way to still get the herbal benefits with a lower barrier to entry, or if walking into your local apothecary feels intimidating (and if you don’t have one, my local apothecary ships!).

May you not get duped into paying $45 for cumin and coriander.

Also of note before we dive in: The beauty of herbs is that many fit in more than one category, meaning you could get a small handful of herbs and cover a lot of bases! Nettle, for instance, is an herbal powerhouse that I consume pretty much daily for a variety of uses. And, of course, nothing in the body works in isolation—something that is good for stress is also probably going to be good for inflammation, skin, etc. So when things show up repeatedly, they will simply be listed without their description. This doesn’t mean it’s secondary! It’s just to save space. Nonetheless, I think organizing them by categories like this is helpful and is the exact way I learned!

This is not intended to be medical advice, and I am not a professional. Consult your healthcare provider.

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This curiosity has led me to some surprising places—from light pollution, to powdered wigs, to lawns, to exercise. The sources of collective existential angst seem to know no bounds. Forgive us, I suppose. We know not what we do.

But now, my curiosity has led me to a behemoth that put me on my heels: time.

The idea came to me via working in the service industry. I noticed that the worst customers to encounter aren’t the ones with high-maintenance orders or who take forever to make a decision. It’s the people who are in a hurry—who are late, and make it your problem.

It occurred to me that time—these somewhat arbitrary and entirely made up numbers—had the power to destabilize and dysregulate people like few other things could.

So, I started to dive into the history and science of it. But I had no idea I wasn’t just diving into the deep end—I was diving into the ocean. The Marianas Trench of deep dives. And let me tell you—the way we relate to time and the ways that got to its current iteration in society is… complex, to say the least.

It wasn’t easy, but I did my darndest to try to distil what I learned into something that is tangible and, ultimately, as is always my goal, something that helps us understand ourselves a little bit better.

Enjoy

xx Erin

Ask any person on the street how they are, and you’d be wise to bet that their reply will be “busy.”

In our society, being busy is the ultimate status symbol. The more packed the schedule, the more we assume someone is successful and important. If we measure the value of our lives by how much we can jam into each passing moment, then having no moment go idle or unaccounted must mean we’re winning.

But if hanging out with friends can only be done by appointment three weeks in advance, if meals are eaten over a keyboard, if our leisure is only done for its measurable gain… If our relationships are suffering and our sense of self is destabilizing, then clearly this relationship we have to time—one in which time is a linear resource that can be spent, saved, wasted, bought, planned, and managed—isn’t working.

Our experience often feels defined and determined by the bounds of time. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years. Work days and weekends. Meetings and lunch breaks. Paydays and vacations. When we start school, we are introduced to the concept of a schedule—reading, math, history, lunch, breaks, start and end times all happening at the same time, every day—and we carry that order with us into our adult lives (by design). We live by the clock, always hurrying towards the next thing, and then the next thing after that… rinse and repeat forever.

These rhythms become the very scaffolding of our lives, shaping not only how we spend our time, but how we experience it.

It’s hard to imagine that this isn’t how things have always been—that there’s any other way to relate to time. After all, we’ve been conditioned to move through the world in this way since we were wee babes. But like most things, the way we view time is merely a construct, developed and created over time (a relatively recent time, at that) to solve specific problems and satisfy particular needs.

But now, we’re operating under a framework that is no longer entirely relevant to us, and it’s driving anxiety, dysregulation, and isolation in ways that we don’t even recognize. We’re living in a system that wasn’t created for us and no longer serves us, and it’s time to wake up.

Let’s take a little journey down the rabbit hole…

For most of human history, we related to time through cycles of nature. There were no clocks or other numerical ways of measuring time (so far as we can tell, there weren’t even numbers for the first 250,000 years of our existence). Instead, we relied on cues from patterns in the natural world: the sun, moon, tides, animal migrations, seasonal shifts—the blooming of flowers, ripening of fruits, and their eventual decay.

As societies grew larger and more complex, it became increasingly necessary to coordinate time more closely. You can see this in ancient archaeological sites like Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Chichén Itzá, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, and the Karnak Temple in Egypt, where certain architectural features were oriented towards the solstices, equinoxes, and certain planetary alignments.

As societies continued to grow and became more interconnected still, we began using sundials and water clocks for even more precise ways of coordinating time for things like markets, courts, military operations, and religious ceremonies.

The Ancient Greeks used “seasonal hours,” or horai kairikai, in which day and night were divided into 12 equal hours. However, the length of an hour was not fixed—an hour of daylight on the summer solstice, for example, was about 75 minutes, and 45 minutes on the winter solstice. Nighttime hours worked in the inverse.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, monks in medieval Europe needed a way to wake for midnight and dawn prayer rituals. Sundials had their obvious drawbacks—they didn’t work at night or when it was cloudy, and water clocks froze in the winter. So mechanical clocks emerged as a practical solution, using gears and weights to ring bells at fixed hours so religious observances could be kept consistently throughout the year. Eventually, mechanical clocks advanced and moved into town squares, where the bells began coordinating daily life beyond prayer.

And now’s where things start to get juicy: Fast forward to the early 1670s (right on the doorstep of the Enlightenment and a shift away from a participatory relationship with nature toward a more empirical and observational one, mind you), and we find British astronomer John Flamsteed tackling that pesky problem of the Earth not moving at a perfectly constant speed through the sky. Flamsteed and other astronomers calculated an “average sun”—one that moves along the celestial equator and travels at a perfectly constant rate all year long—and called it “mean time”.

When the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London was established to improve navigation and astronomy by creating more accurate star maps, Flamsteed was appointed Astronomer Royal. There, he had pendulum clocks installed and set to mean time… Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), to be specific.

Shortly after, in the 18th century, the more accurate celestial charts from the Royal Observatory were used to overcome the age-old maritime conundrum of determining a ship’s longitude while at sea. Part of which involved Greenwich becoming the prime meridian—the main reference point for their calculations.

Fast forward again to 1884, when representatives from 25 countries came together to establish a global system for measuring time. You see, things over the last century had gotten… messy. After mean time was created, every city set its own local mean time. That meant it could be noon in Greenwich, 11:48 a.m. in Liverpool, and about 11:44 a.m. in western Cornwall, with a 30-minute total differential from the eastern edge of the country to the west. In the United States, things were even more hairy, with a 4-hour differential from coast to coast. This is obviously still the case, but in the absence of time zones, it would be noon in Boston, about 11:48 in New York City, 11:02 in Chicago, 9:07 in Los Angeles, and 8:51 in San Francisco, with thousands of variations in between.

Local mean time is fine if you’re staying within the confines of your own city, but obviously, that’s not how reality was playing out. Navigation, telegraph communication, and scheduling became confusing. The railway system in particular was a concern, with inconsistencies in time across routes becoming confusing for passengers at best, and fatal at worst.

All of this chaos was put to rest at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., which established Greenwich as the official prime meridian, and GMT as the world’s time standard. The international 24-hour time-zone system eventually grew from this, in which all zones refer back to Greenwich as the prime meridian.

And one final time, we fast forward to 1926, when Henry Ford shifted his factories to an 8-hour a day, 5-day work week, cementing the nature of work from task-oriented labor to clock-disciplined labor—a model of work that would come to define modern life… and later be skewered by Dolly Parton.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, why the fuck did you take me down this rabbit hole? To which I reply:

1. Because almost none of us understand how we inherited the system that shapes the very basis of how we conceive of and relate to time—I certainly know I didn’t learn this in school.

2. To illustrate how we relate to time is malleable based on context and social forces, and

3. The system we currently abide by is far from how we’ve related to time for the vast majority of our time as a species, and is an entirely unnatural way to be orienting our lives around.

So this begs the question: What even is time?

In truth, no one actually knows for sure (and trying to understand it might make your head explode).

Aristotle believed time was a measurement of change.

Einstein believed time was a relative dimension woven into the fabric of spacetime, not a universal clock ticking the same for everyone.

We know that time exists because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems in our universe move from states where energy is highly organized and concentrated to states where it becomes more dispersed and evenly distributed (or from low entropy to high entropy, for the nerds that are still with us). This is what gives time its direction—why we don’t age backwards a la Benjamin Button, and why spilled milk doesn’t gather itself back into the glass.

But the issue I’ve long had with the scientific explanations of time is that it doesn’t exactly capture what it feels like to exist in time. Sure, you can tell me that the faster an object is moving, the slower time moves, but that’s fundamentally useless to me when I’m stressed because I’m missing deadlines, upset because I can’t stay out and look at the stars because I have to work at 6:30 AM and need to go to sleep instead, or can’t fully drop in, be present, and get fully absorbed into anything because I know I’ll have to leave to my next engagement/obligation at 2:00. Most of the dis-ease I feel fundamentally breaks down to how I feel at odds with time.

Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language, and the way we talk about it is very telling: time is money, make hay while the sun shines, strike while the iron is hot, the early bird catches the worm—time is squeezed, pressed, carved, killed, running out. We race against and try to beat the clock. Having an adversarial relationship to time is baked into our vernacular.

Relating to time differently might be a fundamental yet overlooked way to unwind the constriction of late-stage capitalism that keeps so many of us in a constant state of anxiety.

Psychologists Rosemary Sword and Philip Zimbardo coined the term “hurry sickness” to describe a chronic behavior pattern driven by a relentless sense of urgency and anxiousness. It’s the compulsive need to rush through life, perform tasks ever faster, and become deeply flustered when encountering delays.

We all know these people—heck, we’ve all been these people. It’s a feeling of being held hostage by time—of turning into deranged animals when we’re in a rush. When we’re expected to do so much in a late-stage capitalism society, every little thing must be precisely scheduled, our time must be optimized, and we’re left with very little in terms of flexibility. When life gets like this, I call it “the straight jacket feeling”—like I’m unable to stretch out and take a breath.

It is our compulsion to commodify and optimize our time so that none of it is wasted that drives this sickness. The moment time was divided up and rationalized, when we went from following our ancient attunement to the rhythms of nature, when time stopped being relational and local and starting serving capital and global markets, when the movement of the sun was supplanted by factory whistles… we set in motion what is now culminating as a culture of profound dysregulation, disconnecting us from the natural rhythms that are embedded in our DNA.

The way we perceive time is obviously not linear. We’ve all experienced this—being so engrossed in an activity that an hour feels like 20 minutes. Being so grossly uninterested in what’s in front of you that time drags like wet cement. The way time slows to a halt in a car accident. The way it dissolves completely when we enter a flow state.

But it’s hard to dissolve into timelessness, or even tend to our needs in real time, when our time is compressed. We can’t fully process distress or melt into ecstasy when your Google Calendar beckons you to move on to the next thing. So we suppress and bury things down to be dealt with at a later time that never comes.

In Alan Watts’ 1967 famous lecture on time, he said, “Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world — the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains, and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm — rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm, and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.”

He continues, “We actually spend most of our time and a great deal of our emotional energy living in time, which is not here; living in an elsewhere which is not concretely real. So much so that, although we may be quite comfortable and happy in our present circumstances, if there is not a guarantee, not a promise, of a good time coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we’re at once unhappy even in the midst of pleasure and affluence.”1

We treat life as a means to an end. We go to school to have a career. We work to get to retirement. We spend our days waiting for 5 PM and our weeks waiting for Friday.

But the future only exists as an idea.

Time is a map, not the territory. We created a system for organizing and coordinating ourselves as we move through space. But in the same way that looking at a map isn’t a substitute for actually being in a place, orienting your life towards some future time (or ruminating on the past, for that matter) doesn’t mean you’re actually living. It only means you’re planning to live… at some point. And when that point you’re planning on or waiting for does arrive, will you even notice, enjoy, or fill it? Or will you still be so deep in the habit of planning for the future that you don’t even recognize it?

Until relatively recently, I remained mostly blind to the rhythms of the world—I paid little attention to the moon, the stars, and their positions in the sky, or to the cycles of plant and animal life. I didn’t know when the solstices or equinoxes were, nor did I care. I had a vague awareness that these shifts existed, but other than that, I didn’t really care.

I don’t remember how or why I started noticing the rhythms of the natural world (to which we are biologically evolved alongside and adapted to)—maybe when it was I started meditating regularly and began noticing all manner of things a little closer—but now I can’t unnotice it. And while I’m still learning them, it’s softened my relationship to time. It’s added a layer of tangibility and depth to my life that simply can’t exist when you’re being swept through the raging current of busyness.

But it’s created a new tension:

I still live and operate within a system that largely doesn’t adhere to, notice, or even know about these cycles. Ours is a society transfixed on blasting off into the future, full steam ahead. No time for unplanned detours or noticing what the moon is up to. There is simply only moving from point A to point B, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I’ll say it as many times as I need to: an efficient life does not equate to a good life. In our current system, time is often valued less for how it is experienced than for what it can produce. It is a resource to be extracted, rather than a dimension to be inhabited. The only way I can really think to describe it is like we’re experiencing time in one dimension, when it is meant to be experienced in four. And ironically, we “get” a lot less out of it when we experience it in this way.

But there are other ways to experience time.

Polychronic cultures around the world—such as Mexico, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and many others—view time as relational and prioritize the natural flow of events over rigid adherence to timelines and schedules.

In ancient Greece, there were two concepts of time: Chronos and Kairos. Where Chronos describes sequential, linear time, Kairos is the qualitative, situational, opportune moment of action. The current challenge we face—in the same way trains were colliding in the 1800s—is too much Chronos, and not enough Kairos. The next iteration of time ought to be how we might bring them into balance. We’re all Chronos—entirely monochronic. Yes, schedules and automation brought us great prosperity, but now, we’re suffering.

I’m not suggesting we go back to sundials, using local solar time, and throwing away our clocks and calendars—I’m not trying to romanticize the past here. But what I am suggesting is finding the next iteration of what the experience of time looks like for our species, because what we’re working with now clearly isn’t working. What that actually looks like is for someone much smarter than me to figure out, but the great conundrum will be to figure out how to still coordinate time while allowing us to play within nature’s rhythms. Yes, the nature of our planet, but the nature of ourselves, as well. To no longer be severed from the things that make us human.

I imagine a world where the solstices and moon cycles are revered and celebrated just as much as man-made holidays (but at this point, I’d settle for noticed). A world where there is virtue in listening to our bodies, instead of glorifying waking up at 5 AM, no matter the season, your energy, or where you are in your cycle. A world where meals are cooked slowly and intentionally, away from the clutches of convenience. Where friends linger just a little bit longer.

And I think this world starts with us—with what we say yes and no to. With what we settle for, or refuse to accept.

It starts by refusing to be busy.

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Pretty much since I started on Substack over two years ago, I’ve released something nearly every Sunday, with very few exceptions. But over the past few months, this cadence—this format—hasn’t felt right to me.

Initially (and still a little currently), I was frustrated by this. I felt like my consistency was a huge driver of my success here. But the truth is, my life looks wildly different now than it did two years ago.

I’m different, too.

I took this frustration to my therapist: Why, after freeing myself up to write, can’t I write as much as I used to? I won’t bore you with a play-by-play of the conversation, but from it, I got some advice worth sharing:

You have to treat this time like an internship. When you’re in a phase where things aren’t so clear, and you don’t know what to do, that’s when it’s time to fuck around and find out. Play, experiment, learn. Sometimes it will feel like nothing’s happening, especially when you’re holding yourself to the standards of yore. You’ll be wondering why you’re fetching coffee, feeling like it’s a profound waste of time, but everything you do in your self-directed internship is there to teach you something, and something will come out of it.

We are not meant to repeat the same patterns forever. Things change. We (hopefully) change. And peeling away the past to give way to the future is never comfortable.

So, I’ll be playing around with different formats here. Call it a part of my internship. There will be more paid content, maybe an interview series, different types of essays (journalism?!)… Maybe this thing will start to resemble something that looks vaguely like a real publication—who knows! What I do know is that I’m excited to shake things up.

xx Erin

Here’s what I got into in May….

reading |

Famesick by | There are times when I eschew the zeitgeist, and then times when the buzz is so loud that I just have to find out for myself. This was one of those times. I’ll admit, I went into this book with a critical lens (I love to be a contrarian, sue me), but I can’t say a bad thing. Lena Dunham is as good at the craft as everyone says, and if nothing else, it made me a little nostalgic for my 20s, when I had Girls on heavy rotation because it made me feel like less of a fuck up. Now in my 30s, Dunham’s honesty in Famesick is still making me feel less alone.

Jungle Keepers by Paul Rosolie | Deep inside me (but if I’m honest, not all that deep) is an ardent environmentalist. Although I don’t talk about it explicitly (yet?), my love for this miracle of a planet and desire to repair our relationship with it is the undercurrent that motivates 90% of what I do. And this book… let me tell you… I’m already a big fan of Rosolie’s work. I’ve enjoyed following on Instagram for years, and will listen to pretty much any podcast he goes on, but this book… I can’t stop telling people to read it. He’s an incredible storyteller, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more passionate about the natural world. It moved me deeply.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rosolie’s work, he’s a conservationist and founder of Junglekeepers, a nonprofit organization working to protect rainforest in Peru’s Madre de Dios region. To date, they’ve saved around 140,000 acres of Peruvian Amazon from being cut down. You can join me in contributing to their mission here.

eating —

citrus pistachio olive oil cake | Every year, my husband requests an olive oil cake for his birthday, and I use it as my once-a-year opportunity to develop a cake recipe and go all out. This one did not disappoint. Light, moist, not too sweet.

I formatted the recipe for your pleasure here (tip! if I were to make this again, especially for a group, I would double the recipe and make it a layer cake)

grasslands bbq | We went to Hood River, OR on a mountain bike trip with a group of friends and had lunch at Grasslands BBQ, and it was, without exaggeration, the best BBQ I’ve had in my life… by a lot.

playing —

Lord Huron | Per usual, whenever I go to a concert, I get obsessed. This one’s been in my head for a solid week+:

Welcome to Wrexham | Maybe it’s because all the old players are gone and they haven’t really established a connection with the new ones, but I’m so underwhelmed by this season.

Project Hail Mary | Was expecting it to be good, but wasn’t expecting to bawl my eyes out?? Suffice it to say, I loved it.

obsessing over —

hydration | As the weather gets warmer and I’m out in the sun sweating more, I’ve been really trying to step up my hydration game. Turns out, just chugging plain tap water doesn’t cut it, and can actually deplete your body of critical minerals. If you’re someone who guzzles water all day but still feels thirsty, this may be why. Now, hate is a strong word, but I’m really not a fan of any of the electrolyte powders on the market right now. They have too much salt for me and not nearly enough potassium, magnesium, calcium, and other trace minerals, and they generally taste way too sweet or artificial for my palate.

So, in my quest to become deeply hydrated without overpriced powders, I’ve been making this herbal electrolyte drink from Sophia Esperanza, and drinking Sun Days coconut water—a local brand that is truly the best coconut water I’ve ever had (I personally recommend the pineapple one).

libraries | In a rare moment of “I’m so happy my tax dollars are funding this,” my city built a GORGEOUS new library less than a 10-minute bike ride from my house, and it’s my new favorite work spot. I’ve never been a library person, but I’ve been using the hold system to help me pick what to read next—it’s a great system to reduce decision fatigue (and motivates me to read more to meet the return deadline).

recommending —

oio lab skincare | In my “posting a photo of my face for 30 days” experiment, I realized that it’s probably a lot easier to just learn to accept my rosacea instead of fighting it so hard. That said, it is uncomfortable and can be quite painful, and I’ve long been searching for the right topicals to calm it.

Deep in my search, I came across the Oio Labs Forest Retreat Calming Facial Emulsion, and I’m floored by it. It’s so hard to find a product that is both clean and effective, and I’ve had little to no flare-ups since using it. I use it at night under my YFE Sensitive Skin Facial Lotion, and it’s the perfect pairing.

I’m keen to give some of their other products a go as well!

trying —

rosehip relief | After last month’s low-histamine diet experiment, I, for better or for worse, found that I do indeed have an issue with histamine (I felt SO much better). Now, my task is to help my body to better process histamine on its own. I’ve been playing with different herbal remedies and supplements, and one of those is the rosehip extract from Organic Olivia. TBD on its effectiveness, but I’ve been mixing it with sparkling water and a touch of apple cider vinegar, and it’s delightful, nonetheless!

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“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.”

- John Stuart Mill

Over the years, I’ve taken something of a casual interest in quantum physics. And by that I mean: I watch Brian Cox videos on YouTube and feel my brain turn to soup as I proceed to feel like I must be the dumbest person on the planet.

But still, I like it.

It makes me feel like magic is real, and fills me with awe about the mysteries of the universe—about the hubris of our species to assume we know anything at all about what we call “reality”.

One of my favorite concepts of quantum mechanics to try to wrap my head around is the Observer Effect: the idea that the act of observing or measuring a phenomenon inherently alters the state of what is being measured.*

Even though the Observer Effect of quantum physics is about particles and photons, not emotional states, and even though John Stuart Mill was born over a century before the emergence of quantum physics as a science, he knew something—a universal truth, as salient now as ever—that it doesn’t take a quantum physicist to figure out. That sometimes, the act of measuring, monitoring, or evaluating a thing changes the thing itself.

There’s a paradox playing out right now: The happier and “better” people try to be, the more miserable they become. We take courses, listen to podcasts, take supplements, adopt habits—and yet, the harder we try, the more information we get, the more we dissect it into its nondescript parts and try to piece it back together, it eludes us.

It makes sense that we do it. Life inherently wants to thrive. But sometimes, in this world, the conditions are stacked in such a way that it feels like we must will thriving into existence tooth and nail. Corporations are degrading our environment, corrupting our food system, mining our attention, and pitting neighbor against neighbor for profit… Flourishing doesn’t exactly come by default. Given how much access we have to information and scientific research, it makes perfect sense that we would try to do all we can to correct for our errors.

But now, we’ve dug ourselves into a hole. We play because it’s good for us, laugh because it’s good for us, lie in the grass because it’s good for us. We move because it’s good for us, have hobbies because they’re good for us, make friends because it’s good for us. We sing and dance because they’re good for us, partake in delight, whimsy, awe… all because they’re good for us. And we can even track and measure that they are.

We toil over the cost/benefit of staying out with friends, even though it will wreck our sleep scores. “Fun” is planned and calculated. We’ve gamified well-being. And all it’s done is turn every last dusty corner of enjoyment we have left in this world into yet another item to check off a list. No stone has been left unturned. No crumbs of joy left untainted.

In psychology, they call this the Overjustification Effect—The phenomenon where offering an incentive for an activity someone already enjoys decreases their intrinsic motivation to do it. By rewarding a loved activity, we subconsciously turn it into a task and begin to view it as work rather than play.

In a world obsessed with optimization, anything done without a purpose is time wasted. We must always strive to be our “best selves”. Every action you take is a vote for the kind of future you want to create, after all. But by giving these things—these life-affirming things—purpose, they lose what makes them inherently valuable. Socializing because you heard it’s going to add a few years to your life negates its effects. Going out in search of awe because you read it’s good for creativity, and you’ve got some problems to solve, renders the experience moot. We

The harder we tighten our grip on trying to have the most optimal experience, the more it slips through our fingers. The type of future we create by measuring, tracking, and making sure every little action is justified is one void of depth and meaning (and makes you entirely insufferable to be around).

It may feel—with every improved blood marker and achieved activity score—that we’re winning the battle. But ultimately, we’re losing the war. We think we want everything to be optimal. But people aren’t actually searching for a “perfect” life, according to the data. What they’re looking for is the felt experience of being alive. And these are two totally different aims. One is a means to an end—an end that is, ironically, purely imagined—the other is simply a means.

But that doesn’t come with a clear-cut prescription from a handsome (albeit misogynistic) internet neuroscientist. It’s a vast wilderness you must enter with a machete and blaze the path yourself. Following a prescription for what a “good life” looks like is a one-way ticket to a life that doesn’t feel like yours.

It’s much easier, and much more gratifying in the short term, to track, measure, build routines—to essentially become a human robot. It does feel good in the moment. You feel a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic world. But in the long run, this doesn’t get anyone any closer to what we’re actually looking for—in fact, it’s the opposite. Going into that wilderness takes guts.

Let’s look at what’s really happening here:

In essence, optimization is getting more per unit of resource expended. When we’re talking about optimization in wellness/productivity, that unit is almost always time. We listen to podcasts and books at 1.5x speed so we can get more knowledge faster, we optimize our gym routines to get results faster, our workflows to free up time, our health so that we can live longer.

For humans, time is our most limiting factor. Time, at least in the way we experience it, is finite. It is what it is. So, theoretically, making everything as efficient as possible is an attempt to artificially create more of it. But paradoxically, we get obsessed with the efficiency itself—instead of using that time, we just… keep optimizing.

One of the best ways to run away from a problem is to solve a completely different problem. So many people are living with a primordial ache of nothing feeling real. There’s a palpable existential angst in the air. People are starved for meaning and purpose. And with the collapse of religion in the West, there’s more than likely a lot of unaddressed fear of death. And beings who are afraid often act irrationally.

Instead of processing and coming to terms with the fact that our time here is finite, we attempt to bend the laws of reality—rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as it were. In the process, we become, as George Bernard Shaw put it, “feverish, selfish little clod[s] of ailments and grievances,” treating ourselves too preciously, rendering us totally ineffectual, inflexible, and unable to adapt to life’s challenges. Which, by all accounts, is the opposite of being “well.”

We end up insulating ourselves, rather than building resilience. We can’t drink that water, breathe that air, look at that light, or eat that meal. But if we can’t thrive unless the conditions are absolutely perfect, then the spectrum of experiences that we allow ourselves to enjoy or imprint on us only narrows. By trying to outrun a meaningless existence, we run right into it.

Aristotle had this idea of the “golden mean.” That virtuous action—and as a result, a good life—lies between the extremes of excess and deficiency. The right amount of courage, for example, is not maximal courage, which is recklessness, and not minimum courage, which is cowardice, but somewhere in the middle. Confidence lies between arrogance and self-depreciation. Wit, between buffoonery and boorishness.

People who are consumed with optimizing their health, who require maximal health at all times, are, in fact, according to the gold mean, not healthy. These things, according to Aristotle, are vices, not virtues, and do not lead to a life well lived.

So, tell me earnestly, what were you planning to do once your life is perfect?

Once your waist is snatched, your skin is glass, your gut is healed? Once you’ve expertly crafted the perfect routine? Once you’ve eradicated blue light from entering your eyes after dusk?

Once you’ve balanced your blood sugar, gotten 10,000 steps every day, achieved the best possible HRV? Once your time is blocked, pomodoroed, and your inbox is zeroed?

What then?

What will be left? What will you do? Who will you be?

Life isn’t asking you to be perfect; it’s asking you to participate. Meaning can’t be meticulously planned for. Meaning is created through the seemingly mundane. Through the chance encounters and random conversations. To saying “yes” to things you might feel inclined to say “no” to.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s something to be said for wanting to improve, to learn about yourself, and move toward a more aligned life. This is a good thing, especially when the aim is to have a more positive effect on the people around you. But we don’t get there through obsession. Being obsessed with becoming your “best self” often only drives a wedge between you and what you’re after.

We weren’t meant to look at these things so closely. Admittedly, our hand was forced. But just like looking at particles changes how they behave, putting a magnifying glass to our well-being changes the motivation, and fundamentally corrupts the goal.

How we bring simply allowing ourselves to exist without making that a new goal or task, I do not claim to know. But awareness, I suppose, is the first step.

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As someone who grew up in a small town, the locker room was a foreign concept to me—at least how it’s used in a major metropolis (I’m assuming—I’ve only been to one gym in one city). I would leave the house in the dark, gym bag packed with work clothes and skin care routine, and drive into the city, well before the traffic got bad. After my workout, I’d proceed into the locker room to shower and get ready for work, along with a dozen other women.

But what stuck me most wasn’t the way the women would all share a mirror space, asking about products and getting blasted by each other’s hair driers, or the way it leveled social hierarchies—I couldn’t tell you who in there was a CEO or who was a dog walker. While all of that was lovely in its own right, what captivated me most was the casual nudity.

Women of all shapes and sizes, ages, and walks of life, naked together. Platonically. Casually. In the locker room sauna, most women saunaed at least partially nude. All different types of bushes, nipples, breasts, tummies, stretch marks, and cellulite—just… existing.

It was an environment that bewitched me. Not because I’m a perve (doth protest too much?), but because it was so unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Growing up, I hardly ever so far as caught a quick glimpse of my own mother’s unclothed body—always an accident on both of our parts, her wiry figure lurching for a towel to cover up in a blur. Early on, I was taught, whether on purpose or not, that a naked body—mine or otherwise—was shameful.

As a result, the only bodies I ever saw with enough regularity to absorb into my psyche were those of women whose job it was to have their bodies be perceived—the models in the Cosmopolitan magazines I hid in my nightstand, the celebrities I worshiped, and later, the fitness influencers I would follow. Bodies that had been posed and angled, sucked in and touched up, obsessed and toiled over to appear palatable and acceptable for mass consumption.

All my life, feeding myself this steady diet of homogenously thin, “toned”, tanned bodies, with long torsos and even longer legs, unsurprisingly, did a number on how I saw my own body. All I could see (and in my luteal phase, still see) were all of the ways my own body didn’t measure up. My pale Anglo skin and the way it showed the blue of the veins, the dimples in my thighs, small breast, short torso, a comically large derriere proportional to the rest of my frame, knobby, wrinkly knees… Every time I looked in the mirror, it wasn’t to see myself, but to pick apart the things about myself that I longed to change—If only I could get my stomach flatter, lift my butt a bit, then I’d be satisfied.

But when I looked around at the women in this locker room, I wasn’t comparing them or tearing their bodies apart. I, to my genuine surprise, found them all gorgeous. Goddesses, every one. I found every quirk, flourish, and idiosyncrasy charming and beautiful. I saw, for the first time, the collective average of the female form, and the reservations I had about my own body started to evaporate.

I took this observation out of the locker room and started noticing, while at the grocery store or at the park, that almost no one’s bodies looked like the ones I’d become so accustomed to seeing online. It was like I had been moving through life with blinders on, and now that I could see the full picture, I was suddenly awakened to the fact that what I thought of as an acceptable body was merely a mirage the whole time.

Several years ago, I moved and left this gym. Starved of the environment that had so significantly altered my perception, my new perspective slowly began to fade. And with women’s bodies becoming an ever-growing topic of discussion, fascination, and critique, I was back to picking my body apart with the precision of a forensic analyst.

That is, until about a month ago, when I began taking swimming lessons at my local community center, and the same sentiment came flooding back.

It got me thinking: If more of us had this kind of exposure—this casual, neutral, un-objectified exposure to women’s bodies, as opposed to the hyper-sexualized, shame-riddled exposure many of us got, what kind of world would we live in? Surely it would be different than the current paradigm, where nearly up to 84% of American women experience body dissatisfaction, and where 3.3 million healthy life years are lost to disordered eating each year.

So I went in search of a common cultural thread to pull on:

Turns out, comparative, country-by-country data on eating disorders was much harder to find than I assumed it would be. Social stigma, underreporting, and differing criteria between countries make comparing the data nearly impossible. Some sources suggested the Nordic countries have the lowest eating disorder rates, while others maintained that they actually had some of the highest. Other sources suggested the Netherlands and Poland actually have the lowest rates.

The one thing that seemed conclusive was that non-Western countries have lower eating disorder rates than Western countries, but even those are on the rise as Western media is starting to permeate the furthest reaches of the globe.

Just as it seemed I had hit a dead end, ready to throw my hands into the air and declare, “Never mind, people, we’re actually all screwed—Godspeed,” I, while down a rabbit hole that was starting to feel desperate, came across “Objectification Theory.”

Originally proposed in 1997 by researchers Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-An Roberts, Objectification Theory states “that girls and women are typically acculturated to internalize an observer’s perspective as a primary view of their physical selves.” Particularly in Western society, women are sexually objectified, their physical appearance outsized, leading people to treat them as objectified targets—as if they were merely objects of sexual desire.

Over time, cultures that continually reinforce objectifying experiences result in self-objectification—a third-person perspective of the self where women’s perception of their bodies becomes first and foremost an object for evaluation by others.

It’s what causes so many women to disconnect from their physical experience, disregard their own thoughts, feelings, and intelligence, and, in effect, torture themselves to satisfy the male gaze.

While I think most of us know that a culture where women’s bodies are constantly sexualized, talked about, and debated has led to so much body shame, dissatisfaction, and ultimately, harm, Objectification Theory provides tangible evidence.

Self-objectification is what keeps a $700 billion beauty industry and $190 billion weight-loss industry afloat. It’s what causes women to put themselves in harm’s way—from GLP-1 related osteopenia, to extreme diets—all to satisfy an insatiable and often impossible standard of beauty. In a patriarchal, capitalist system, it is objectively not advantageous for women to feel content or empowered. But it is advantageous to keep them disconnected from themselves and their body’s infinite wisdom.

For such a system to exist, we must be fed a steady diet of messaging that tells us we’re flawed and inadequate. As a result, the average woman spends around 4 hours a day on her appearance— although I’m willing to bet this doesn’t include researching and shopping for products and treatments or consuming beauty-related content.

Here’s the thing—Humans are primed to care about our appearance. The ancient Egyptians were the pioneers of the skincare routine. In Renaissance Italy, dilated pupils were all the rage, and women would drop poisonous nightshade extracts into their eyes. There’s even evidence of Neandertals using red ochre, shell beads, and feathers to adorn themselves. Around the world today, women are stretching their necks and lips and otherwise going to great lengths to fit beauty standards that the Western mind simply can’t comprehend.

In the absence of mass media and TikTok, we still have a drive to compare ourselves and adhere to cultural beauty standards. There’s no way around it. But modern Western media is inflating this drive to the nth degree, amplifying the mental bandwidth it takes up and the amount of distress it causes until it becomes all-consuming.

In my original search, what I was looking for was something that, despite exposure to social media and Western beauty standards, was insulating women from the associated mental and emotional burdens. Why was it that so many women succumbed to body dysmorphia and disordered eating under the social pressure, and others, often in the same cultures, did not? What I was really looking for was confirmation that my locker room experience has some sort of universal element in it that might serve as an antidote to the mental anguish so many women suffer at the hands of insane beauty standards. Turns out, I wasn’t totally wrong.

There are certain behaviors that can individually and culturally protect us from the woes of self-objectification:

Lower social media use

I hate to start with the obvious here, but social media use is strongly correlated with self-objectification behavior and eating disorders. Maybe even the most strongly correlated. It’s always the damn phones. To me, this best exemplifies what I call the “look up and look around” effect—when you’re not on social media (or consuming traditional media, for that matter) you’ll notice that almost no one looks like the vast majority of people you see behind a screen. Those people were all picked and placed there—either by algorithms or people in a board room—because they were deemed to most closely personify some ideal. And good for them—I can’t fault anyone for getting theirs—but it’s not representative of the average woman. If you don’t manage your exposure, it’s harder to notice it, and it’s more likely to overtake you.

You can read my guides on kicking your social media habit here and here

Communal eating

Millennial women, especially, were conditioned to believe that having an appetite was a moral failure. With overwhelming pressure to be thin, eating in front of people could often feel like a minefield: becoming competitive and exposing, rather than nourishing in any sense of the word. As a result, many of us took to unusual eating habits—eating in secret, or in solitary environments where we could control our input, or at the very least not be observed.

The United States, in particular, is already a highly individualistic culture. As such, meals are often eaten alone, in cars, and at desks. However, research shows that communal meals, so long as they don’t involve criticism or food-policing, are correlated with lower prevalence of extreme weight control conditions. But unsurprisingly, only around 30% of American households eat at least one meal a day together.

The US often takes on a “food is fuel” approach to eating, viewing food merely as calories. But in the Western countries with the lowest prevalence of eating disorders (insofar as I could find), particularly in the Balkans, food is more than that—it’s celebration, connection, pleasure, and love. They know this, and don’t try to pretend otherwise. Meals are slow, long, and shared consistently. According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, meal sharing ranks among the strongest predictors of well-being.

Contrast that with countries like the US and Australia that have some of the highest eating disorder rates in the world, and where food is seen almost as an inconvenience, it starts to make sense.

Public nudity

For my own vindication, there actually is a fairly solid body of research about how public nudity affects body image. One study found that non-sexualized communal naked activity resulted in higher body appreciation and lower physique anxiety—strong predictors of body satisfaction.

A longitudinal study out of UCLA found little evidence that early exposure to parental nudity or sexually liberal family environments caused long-term psychological harm, leading the authors to conclude that “pervasive beliefs in the harmfulness” of such exposure “are exaggerated.”

Another study found that more participation in naturist activities predicted greater life satisfaction, including more positive body image and higher self-esteem.

From my own anecdotal experience, when a household exhibits shame and secrecy around nakedness, it only serves to reinforce self-objectification and reduce body acceptance. Forced modesty can sometimes have the opposite of its intended effect, putting more emphasis and attention on how one’s body is perceived, not less.

Look, I’m not saying we all need to join a nudist colony tomorrow (or ever, unless that’s your style), but I think it is time to have an honest look at the outsized exposure we have to idealized bodies vs. normal ones, and what that does to our psyches—and I don’t think that happens in a vacuum.

At its core, it comes down to more communal spaces, and community and general. When people isolate themselves and 90% of what they’re exposed to are exceptional bodies in peak form, of course they’re going to develop all-consuming body dysmorphia, body shame, and disordered eating patterns. But the antidote is repeated exposure to ordinary, diverse bodies in non-evaluative contexts.

This might look like community saunas, bath houses, locker rooms etc. But more realistically—because not everyone is going to be drawn to those spaces—it’s simply getting together. Slowing down and breaking bread with a diverse group of people from different walks of life. It’s tipping the scales of exposure from majority “perfect” bodies to regular ones —which also includes spending a heck of a lot less time on your phone.

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In the town where I currently live, much of the road construction, to the dismay of many, is not exactly accommodating for the influx of traffic, but for revitalizing pedestrian and bike access.

The road outside the cafe where I work—a busy street that connects the east side of town—is one such road. Several times a day, I have the same conversations: How long is it going to be closed? Is it affecting business? Is it loud? But my favorite conversations thus far come from the What are they doing? questions. The eye rolls when I tell people that they’re building a sidewalk and bike lane. “They did all that work down on Onley, and I haven’t seen a single bike on it!” one man said. I shrugged, “I mean, I like to ride my bike around town and I enjoy the improvements”. Conversation over.

A year ago, almost to the day, I sold my car. The decision didn’t come easily. I loved my car. It was the first major purchase I made all on my own, and she was perfect for me. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I shed a tear when I watched the 18-year-old kid who bought it drive out of the neighborhood. Having grown up in a small town that was mostly suburban and highly rural, with no public transportation, having a car was everything. Because everything was so spread out, often needing to go one or two towns over to be anywhere worth going, a car was a necessity.

But since moving, my car mostly sat in the garage. And since it was getting up there in mileage, it made sense to part ways with it. But instead of trading it in for a new car, as most people and past versions of myself would probably do, I opted to use the profits to buy e-bikes for my husband and me.

At first, I felt naked. A car, for so much of my life, was synonymous with freedom—the ability to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Now, whenever I needed to go somewhere by car, the use of our now-shared vehicle needed to be planned in advance (we went from a two-vehicle household to one). In the beginning, this was an inconvenience and a slight source of frustration. I value freedom over almost anything else, and suddenly, it felt like I had to have permission to leave the house. I was practically crawling out of my skin. I felt stranded.

But with time, we got the hang of it. The initial discomfort of sudden and unfamiliar friction dissipated. I got used to biking most places, and my husband and I learned to be more communicative about our schedules so we wouldn’t have competing, car-necessitating commitments.

And now, with a year on a bike under my belt, I see so clearly what I, and so many people like me, have been completely blind to: We live in a culture that was built for cars, not for people. And when it comes to the plummeting quality of our physical and mental health, and the skyrocketing rates of loneliness and isolation, no one wants to seem to cite it as an issue.

For most Americans—like me up until 365 days ago—living in a car-centric society seems normal. It never even occurs to us that there’s another way for things to be. People even get angry at the suggestion that we improve pedestrian and bike access and public transportation, calling anyone who might propose such a thing a communist.

We simply accept traffic, gas prices, and giant parking lots as the natural order of things. But it’s not. It is simply familiar. The prevalence of car-centric infrastructure was a choice. It was planned and intentionally designed for. And it might just be time for us to unchoose that choice.

Why we became so car-centric

92% of US households have access to a car, while only 55% have access to public transportation. While ridership is increasing, only about 4% of people regularly use public transportation.

There are many practical reasons for this:

1. The United States has a relatively low population density compared to its land mass. The US has about 95 people per square mile. While this varies widely by region—for example, New Jersey has over 1,260 people per square mile, while where I am in Oregon has about 44—over half the country lives in suburban areas, 20% live in rural areas, leaving less that 30% of the population in core, urban areas. This happened because in the 19th and early 20th centuries, land was abundant and cheap. With little economic pressure to expand upward, cities expanded outward.

   Compare that to the EU with ~280 people per square mile and 40% residing in urban areas, and it becomes easy to see why walkable cities and reliable public transport are so much more prevalent across Europe.

2. People can often only afford to live where cars are necessary. Living in walkable areas comes at a premium, so people are often left with no choice but to spread out and commute.

3. The country is simply newer. Especially on the West Coast, many major cities weren’t incorporated until the mid 1800’s, meaning they only existed for around 70 years before the automobile became widely popular. It’s a lot easier to design cities to accommodate for cars when you’re not having to navigate around 500-year-old infrastructure. Many US cities and towns developed right alongside the rising popularity of the car.

It would seem, given these factors, that we were destined to become a car-centric culture, right? That we spread out so much that the car was the only option. RIGHT?! Not so fast. Like I said, the prioritization of the car was a deliberate choice. We could have easily optimized society for public transportation, walking, and biking—but… we didn’t.

It wasn’t like Americans were spread out and cars just so happened to come in and save the day—at least, not until industry and private interests got involved. Early US cities were moderately dense and organized around walking and streetcars, with interurbans serving as a connection between population centers. But with the rise in accessibility of mass-produced cars, a feedback loop began: people could live farther out, which lowered density, which made cars even more necessary, which spread people out even more, ad infinitum.

After World War II, this dynamic was supercharged by policy and subsidies. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 poured public money into highways, while federal mortgage programs made it easier to buy single-family homes in suburban areas than in cities. At the same time, coordinated lobbying and public campaigns by auto, oil, and tire interests—and groups of car clubs, dealers, and manufacturers that called themselves “Motordom”—pushed for road expansion, normalized car ownership, and helped ensure that transportation funding, land-use rules, and urban planning all prioritized the automobile. The result was a self-reinforcing system: investment in cars, and their infrastructure, led to, unsurprisingly, further investment in cars.

To this day, there are legalities in place that keep us from moving away from such a car-dependent society, even if we did want to kick the habit. For example, land-use laws require buildings in most cities to have attached parking, while zoning laws often restrict residential development to single-family dwellings.

Then there are the financial incentives. There’s a huge network of money tied to highway expansion that governments can tax and industries, with powerful lobbies, can profit from—gas taxes, vehicle-related taxes and fees, property tax from increased land use from the urban sprawl they allow for, sales tax from suburban shopping centers… Then of course there’s oil companies, automotive manufacturing, towing companies, drive-throughs, insurance companies, private construction firms, media conglomerates making millions off ad revenue. In essence, highway infrastructure unlocks suburban development, increases land values, and expands commercial activity across entire regions (and yet, road construction and maintenance are still highly subsidized, and no one cries socialism…).

On top of all of this, there’s the unmistakable cultural phenomenon of car ownership’s association with prosperity. Cars are a depreciating asset with a high financial burden, so owning one is a way to signal wealth and status—the nicer the car, the more disposable income (or access to debt) you can assume someone has. Especially after the post-WWII economic boom, cars became inextricably entangled with economic success, social mobility, personal freedom, suburban homeownership, access to better neighborhoods, and identity.

But it’s funny—even though we see cars as symbols of wealth and status, partaking in car culture is decidedly unglamorous. Nothing breaks your mind, body, and spirit quite like spending hours of your life—over 54 a year (assuming you retire at 65, that’s over 100 days of your life)—stuck in traffic. Just sitting on the asphalt, looking at concrete and metal, inhaling fumes. Filling your life with stress and rage. Aside from traffic, the average American will spend 400 days of their life in a car. This doesn’t exactly scream “prosperity” or “glamor” to me. To me, this feels like loserish behavior.

What we lost to parking lots

Most of us are all too familiar with the conventional critiques of cars: pollution and safety. And while it’s true that cars produce 3.5 billion metric tons of CO2 globally, and that they kill 1.19 million people annually, these facts are clearly not enough to get people to think differently about cars. We hear those stats, shrug our shoulders—these are merely the price of admission for personal freedom—and carry on. They’re too nebulous, too insurmountable. They affect us somewhere down the road, if we even live to see them affect us at all. I can’t blame anyone—humans are first and foremost concerned with immediate survival. What we need is to see the everyday absurdity of a world designed for cars and not humans. How it shapes us, limits us, and what it’s making us miss out on.

Over the weekend, I was on FaceTime with some friends who live in Amsterdam. It was 9 AM here, 6 PM there—dinner time. Halfway through the call, one of them left to go to the store to pick up ingredients for dinner. He was back well before the call was over (which was, all told, about an hour). And they do not have a car.

The American mind cannot comprehend this. I live relatively close to a grocery store. That is to say, a 9-minute drive. Most Americans go grocery shopping once or twice a week. They shop in hauls, buy in bulk, and plan meals ahead of time (that is, if they’re eating whole foods and trying to minimize waste). Europeans, on the other hand, broadly speaking, make several shorter trips throughout the week. Now, many factors contribute to this—Americans tend to have more food storage capacity, longer supply chains, and tend to eat more processed, shelf-stable food. But one of the main factors is that going to the store is a major, inconvenient time suck.

Most of us can’t walk out of our front doors, round the corner, and arrive at the grocery store—especially a decent one. The average American lives 3.7–4 miles away from their preferred grocery store, and 2.1 miles from the closest.

Even if people do live closer to their daily destinations like grocery stores, cafes, gyms, etc., they still wouldn’t walk because the infrastructure isn’t there. They’d need to navigate labyrinths of busy streets, and even interstates, without safe pedestrian and bike access.

This is why a 15-minute walk feels too far, yet a 15-minute drive to the grocery store or restaurant is nothing. It’s not about the time spent. And for all of the claims about American laziness, I don’t think it’s that either. It’s about the experience. If anything, the design of our communities has conditioned such aforementioned laziness. The option was designed out of the equation before we were given the opportunity to choose.

Which brings me to the fact that living in a car-centric culture creates distance. Literally and figuratively, it drives a wedge between us. Not only does it create logistical barriers for social connection, but cars become armor, causing us to behave in ways that we wouldn’t if we were on the street. I would never, for example, flip someone off and call them a dumb ass if they unknowingly stepped in front of me on the street. I would say excuse me and carry one. But I’ve done this in my car plenty of times.

Because cars create an isolated bubble, it becomes easy to dehumanize our neighbors. Add to that the stress and anxiety that come with simply driving, and we have a recipe for disaster. In the “what’s wrong with society” conversation, people love to talk about how social media makes it so easy to dehumanize people, but no one ever mentions cars.

Then, there’s the issue of just how much cars and their infrastructure take up. You know how earlier I said that cheap land was one of the factors that made highways and suburban sprawl possible? Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but land ain’t exactly cheap anymore.

Just using New York City as an example, if you added up all the space Manhattan devotes to cars, you’d have an area nearly four times as large as Central Park. In Los Angeles, land for parking alone exceeds the entire land area of Manhattan—enough space to house almost a million more people at Los Angeles’s prevailing density.

When we’re so used to things—when things are so normalized and accepted—we tend not to notice them. We just accept them as an inevitable part of life. Parking lots, highways, multi-lane streets… they all take up a ton of space. And now you’re not going to be able to unsee it. In many cities, where space is a premium and highly competitive, 50-60% of space is dedicated to vehicles. If we redesigned that land and optimized it for human movement and habituation, you could see a 100% increase in housing capacity. And it’s not just the capacity— removing this infrastructure reserved for our cars would also create a quieter, safer, cleaner, and cooler environment for those people (concrete jungles often create “heat islands” where surface temperatures can be up to 20°F hotter than surrounding areas).

Something I’ve encountered a lot is when I suggest to people that going car-free is better, they scrunch up their nose. Suggesting to someone that perhaps they don’t need 200 horsepower to go a few blocks might as well be like asking them to give you their kidney. People love their cars. They love them so much, they won’t even entertain the idea that they’re impractical, dangerous, expensive, isolating, and obtrusive. There’s a term for this, that I learned in ’s piece, the best financial advice I can give you is to sell your car (I highly recommend if you want to dive deeper into the economics of driving): Car brain. An unconscious bias towards automobile-oriented transportation.

We make so many assumptions about cars and public transportation: cars = freedom and autonomy. Walking, biking, and public transport are dirty, unsafe, and for the poors. Like plastic surgery, cars are a way for people to signal their status and identity. Take that away and put them on the same playing field as everyone else; how else will anyone know how special you are? That you have very important and urgent things to attend to?

This mindset is a barrier that keeps us from better solutions.

If driving is such high-status, then why do walkable cities/areas cost such a premium to live in? Why are these the places where people want to visit most? Why are they replicated in places like Disneyland and Universal, and sold to you for a $200 ticket? We were stripped of walkable communities, just for it to be sold back to us as a luxury. It’s looked down on to walk, bike, or take public transit, all the while, cities and areas around the world are romanticized and bucket-listed, and living in them comes with a side of status all its own—with walkable areas making up only 1.2% of the land mass of the largest 35 metropolitan areas in the US are walkable urban areas, homes in walkable areas cost 14-50% more then their suburban counterparts.

We’ve gone to great lengths to sacrifice our well-being for convenience. But that convenience is only perceived. The reality is that having to get into your car and drive to the store is infinitely more inconvenient, more stressful, and more mentally taxing than walking, even for the same amount of time the drive would take. In most instances, car superiority is the product of conditioning and advertising.

What can be done?

For those of us living in suburbia, it feels impossible to imagine a reality where coffee shops, grocery stores, dining, gyms, and parks are all within a walkable distance. And in some sense, you’d be right—sprawling suburbs often don’t have the density needed for such things, and residential zoning laws pose a massive barrier. Springfield (pick a state) is unlikely to become the next Copenhagen.

But that doesn’t mean all is lost. There are examples all over the world of cities that are starting to shift from car to human-centered living.

In Utrecht, Netherlands, a canal that was paved over for a freeway in the 1970s was restored within the last decade, in a move to build a more connected city by dedicating more space to people, rather than cars. Ghent, Belgium created car-free zones, prioritizing pedestrian, cycling, and public transit infrastructure. The move, according to Ghent’s Deputy Mayor Filip Watteeuw, was yet again about “quality of life, [building] a city of people, not for cars.”

Even Amsterdam, which is synonymous with cycle culture, was once a haven for cars. Becoming the “bike capital of the world” was not an accident. It was a problem was was consciously rectified, mostly through grass-roots lobbying (see, it can go both ways).

Even in the individualistic culture of the United States, where civil projects like these are initially unpopular, and getting people on board is like pulling teeth, things are starting to shift. Boston’s “Big Dig” project, a massive, 15-year-long effort to reclaim the city from car infrastructure by moving its elevated highway underground and replacing it with greenspace and pedestrian-friendly streets in an effort to reconnect neighborhoods, is now accepted, and even loved, by some of its early opponents. Similarly, Seattle’s removal of the Alaska Way Viaduct transformed an unsightly sea of concrete into a gorgeous pedestrian-accessible waterfront park.

Not only is change possible—it’s happening. In a world where human and planetary health are tanking, people are starting to wake up to the fact that maybe optimizing our cities for inanimate objects wasn’t the move.

As we continue to develop growing cities—and make improvements to existing ones—I believe this mindset should and will be the way of the future.

In Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck outlines what this looks like with his “general theory of walkability”, which maintains that a walk must be:

1. Useful: Daily needs—housing, groceries, work, cafes—must be close together so people don’t need cars for every errand.

2. Safe: Pedestrian access must be protected from cars through slower car speeds, better crossings, physical barriers, and reduced traffic dominance.

3. Comfortable: Shade, trees, blue and green spaces, narrower lanes, and reduced exposure to fast traffic.

4. Interesting: Walkable places must have visual interest, with street life, with “activated edges”—boundaries where buildings meet street are engaging and interactive—that make walking enjoyable rather than purely functional (and since we’re all into whimsy this year, this is where spontaneity is allowed for).

This feels obvious. Like this is how it clearly should have been all along. But you see the same thing playing out with every new technology, from social media to agriculture: at first, it’s great. It solves a fundamental need and improves our lives. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We adopt these technologies past the saturation point, until we suffocate under the weight of—our resistance to change leaving us blue in the face. But the option to pivot and revive ourselves is always there.

Here’s the thing: I just rode my bike to the farmer’s market. It’s one of my favorite weekly activities. It’s about a 10-minute drive and about a 14-minute bike ride. On my ride, I’m noticing the birds, the butterflies, the flowers blooming. I feel the air and sun on my skin. I cut through parks, interesting neighborhoods, and ride along the river. I ride through a pedestrian underpass where I’ll often pass people playing instruments or singing in harmony, beckoned by the tunnel’s bewitching acoustics. When I happen to go by car? The experience is getting stuck at lights, frustrated by traffic, and trying to find parking.

I’ll take the extra 8 minutes.

I don’t think it’s feasible for everyone to get rid of their cars. Nor do I think we should. My husband and I still have a truck between us. It’s a utility that has many use cases for our lifestyle. There are advantages to having cars, and not everyone wants to live in a city. But I think it’s insane that we’ve designed a society where it’s preferable to drive your car to a gym that’s half a mile away, as opposed to walking. The fact that the majority of us have to drive to get to a place to go on a walk is peak absurdity. If I had reliable public transportation available to me, I’d take it, as I’m sure many people would.

I know it’s tricky to cast an entire industry in such a negative light—the fact is that not only did we create a society dependent on cars, but we created an economy where tens of billions of jobs depend on it. I am not a transportation expert. I can’t spell out the details of how we begin to unwind what has already been done. But what I do know is that, in a time where everyone is so isolated and divided, the fundamental way in which we designed our communities has to be examined. In a world obsessed with optimization, we failed to optimize for the things that matter most.

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But before I do—I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this without sounding like a pick-me. But turns out there’s really no elegant way to explain why you’re plastering your face all over the internet for 30 days without sounding like a pick-me, so… forgive me and it is what it is.

It all started when I was writing last month’s report. I was looking through my camera roll (I often do this to help me remember what was notable about the past month) and was struck by the lack of photos—initially, just in general. Just pictures of the moon and sunsets, my cat, some latte art, and some screenshots of memes and recipes. But then I realized I had almost no photos of myself—from the entire year thus far.

I know it’s unusual—how much we see ourselves, how much we document in our modern lives. Some would argue it’s unnatural. That we’re not meant to see our faces so much. I know there are arguments to be made about neuroses, self-obsession, and performative identity when it comes to what and how much we capture. But intrinsically, I like it. I have a terrible memory and an outsized negativity bias. Taking pictures helps me remember and amplify the good times.

Despite this, the amount of photos I take has been dwindling, in part—and embarrassingly—because I stopped posting on Instagram. There’s a fine line between documentation and curation. And apparently, taking photos to share was at least partially a motivating factor in what I chose to capture.

My suspension from posting on IG wasn’t planned. I just kind of… stopped. Maybe it was because curating got to be too exhausting, especially after spending more time on Substack. Maybe it was because I’ve gone through a pretty dramatic identity shift over the past 6 months and I didn’t want to be beholden to the identity I’ve created there over the years. Maybe it’s because the vibes are off.

But I can’t discount a pernicious fourth thing, which is that I started cringing at the sight of my own face.

For some time now, I’ve avoided taking pictures of myself or even looking too long in the mirror. When people take pictures of me, I often turn around. When my husband airdrops photos he’s taken of me, much to his disappointment, they mostly get deleted (although, in my defense, there will never be a worse photo of you than one taken by your husband, and it’s a phenomenon that needs to be studied).

When I started the challenge, I originally said that it was to help me get over the fear of being seen. But after some thought, I realized that it was also a fear of seeing myself.

It’s so hard to see ourselves objectively. We lock in on anything that could potentially be seen as a flaw, especially when we’re so inundated with faces that are so obscenely beautiful they start to become a caricature of beauty itself. I can’t help but compare. I notice my skin texture, my jaw line, the wrinkle under my left eye, and the wrinkles around my mouth from years of biting the inside of my lips and cheeks—an anxious tick. When I see myself, I don’t see myself—I just see everything I don’t like.

When I wrote I who have never stuck a needle in my face, I wrote it for myself. I needed to remind myself that physical augmentation is not in line with my values, no matter how normalized it becomes. That, as much as the world tries to get me to believe it, it will not be the thing that gives me self-esteem. I know this. And still, I struggle with it all.

But I don’t want to live a life where I feel so self-conscious of how I look that I begin to shrink myself. That I feel so uneasy in my skin that I omit myself from being documented in my own life. So, I decided on exposure therapy. Just my face, every day.

And let me say, aside from the fact that men are still as obnoxious on Substack as they are on every other social media platform—the block feature has come in handy more than once—the practice of it is working. A little over a week in, and what started as I can’t allow anyone to see this is becoming yep, that’s my face.

And more than acceptance of what I look like, in a weird way, it’s subtly translating to an acceptance of self—of the things I like, the things that make me laugh, the things that I won’t tolerate. Posting myself online without a cherry-picked narrative is like your curated, online narrative self crashing into and melding with your experiential self.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments saying “you have nothing to worry about, you’re beautiful!” or “if someone like you is unhappy with how you look, then we’re cooked”, which is nice, but not really the point. In fact, I’d rather not really have any external validation. It’s not about how I do or don’t look. It’s about my internal experience. It’s about my relationship with myself in a world that constantly bombards women with messaging aimed at deteriorating their self-esteem in order to a) keep them compliant, and b) keep them consumers—to keep them chasing an infinite revolving door of beauty standards that’s impossible to keep up with (this piece from is perfect). No matter what you look like, we’re all susceptible to this.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But the most important beholder is ourselves. And what we behold has very little to do with how we look and more so with how we feel about what we see.

reading | (and listening to)

*this time I’m putting audiobooks here because I consumed a lot of media worth mentioning this month and I make the rules lol*

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion — Catching up on all the things Substack has made me feel like I should have read. I thought it was just… fine. Don’t come for me. I’ve yet to experience major grief, so I just couldn’t relate.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green — Really fun premise, slightly morose tone (although, it is John Green)

The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell — An exploration of the psychological biases that we fall prey to in the modern age. Really great listen—Amanda is a great narrator!

For Small Creatures Such as We by Sasha Sagan — The daughter of Carl Sagan explores the rituals of the modern, largely secular world and how we use them to make life worth living. SO lovely. I listened to this one as well, but I kind of wish I had read it. I might buy a physical copy and get my eyes on it at some point.

eating | not histamine

*sigh* I’m doing a low-histamine diet right now. Riveting, I know. As a rule, I try to avoid elimination unless it’s absolutely necessary, but right now I’m deep in a journey to try to systemically heal my rosacea, and from my research, I learned there is a strong connection between rosacea and histamine (I have other symptoms that would suggest a histamine intolerance as well). So, I’m experimenting. But it means I (temporarily) have to avoid or minimize a lot of the foods that make up a huge chunk of my diet—no avocado, no leftovers, no bone broth, no aged cheese or dairy of any kind, no vinegar, no fermented foods, no chocolate (I’ve made an exception, for obvious reasons). It’s definitely stretching my capacity to come up with meal ideas. Any other rosacea sufferers here? Curious to know what’s worked for you!

playing | movies, shows, podcasts, music

Hamnet — A perfect movie. No notes. Jessie Buckley deserved the hell out of that Oscar.

Beef — One of the most unhinged shows I’ve ever seen. I LOVED the first season and was happy to see it come back! If you like shows like The White Lotus, you’ll like this.

Rachel Zoffness (on pain) on Armchair Expert — I haven’t been able to stop bringing this episode up, all about the new science of pain. And by new, we mean it’s just now starting to break into the mainstream. Present me with something about the mind-body connection, and you’ll have my undivided attention.

Noah Kahan: Out of body — I once saw someone on Reddit call Noah Kahan “the world’s most famous nobody,” and I can’t stop thinking about it. He feels like your friend from high school who got famous and still has no idea. This doc only made me love him more.

The Great Divide — The crux of my media consumption that I’ve been looking forward to for months—and it didn’t disappoint. It’s almost overwhelming how good it is. I’m seeing him on tour in Seattle in August—I’m practically crawling out of my skin in anticipation.

obsessing over | Vintage windbreaker

I got this 80s windbreaker at a vintage pop-up and I can’t stop wearing it. Over the last couple years, I’ve been slowly working on developing a personal style and trying to break out of my black/white/grey rut (that I’ve been in for years). The land of color is still a little foreign to me, and this feels like jumping into the deep end in a fun way!

recommending | 🍄

Ok, I don’t know that I recommend microdosing, per se, but it works for me. Do your own research, know thyself, and be an informed, mindful, and respectful consumer—but if you’ve been thinking about it and have been on the fence, this is your sign. I do it quarterly and I get something out of it every time. It’s like if your life was a canoe going down a river, microdosing is like a gentle increase of the current. I don’t feel it acutely (most people don’t, depending on the dose you take), only that it feels like the cobwebs are cleared and I can see myself so much more clearly.

trying | swimming

I’m taking swimming lessons (again)! The last lessons I took were over a year and a half ago, the course was only 5 lessons, and my skin had a bad reaction to the chlorine so I never kept it going. This time, the course is 10 lessons and the whole experience is MUCH better.

Now, I’ve always been able to kind of swim. As in: I can keep myself from drowning. But I have some projects I want to do that all coincidentally involve water, so I wanted to increase my strength, proficiency, and comfort level in the water. I would recommend it to anyone!

What you might have missed this month:

Mr. Ball (his real name—we love an aptronym), the mullet-clad football coach/PE teacher, treated the girls in the class like everyone else. Unlike the dainty lifting with 5 lb weights we were encouraged to do in women’s fitness so we wouldn’t “bulk up” (again, yikes), he expected us to try our hardest. He was never as fired up as he was when a girl out-lifted the boys. I remember breaking the school record for the flexed-arm hang—how proud he was. What a badass he made me feel like. Not badass “for a girl”. Just badass.

Because of this experience, I’ve always found the gym to be a place where I belonged. A place where I was confident in my ability. It was never an intimidating space for me. However, I know that not everyone had this experience. And it breaks my heart.

But now, as research about how closely strength and lean muscle tissue are connected to women’s health and aging is reaching saturation, we’re seeing a surge of women, of all ages, flocking to the weight room in droves. Many of them, overcoming years of cultural conditioning, stereotypes, and feeling like it wasn’t a place they belonged, all in the spirit of taking power over their futures.

There are a lot of health and fitness trends I could tear to shreds. But this one, I emphatically support.

With 16 years of experience, many of which were in a professional capacity, I feel like an elder statesman of this trend. And even though I’ve been out of it as a career for several years, it still remains a big part of my life. So it brings me profuse joy when younger women turn to me for advice. My coworker, who just recently started going after months of psyching herself up, asking me questions about everything from which exercises to do to gym etiquette. The early 20-something group of girls who sometimes workout at the same time as me, starting to warm up to me and ask me for advice.

I love them.

I understand that excitement Mr. Ball was feeling all those years ago. There’s nothing that fills me with more pride than seeing the next generation of women getting strong. I know how much it’s going to do for them, both now, a decade from now, and 50 years from now.

Here are the facts:

Women have largely been left out of the strength training and performance conversation for most of history… and the present. Despite making up 40% of the lifting population, women only make up about 25% of resistance training research. According to a meta-analysis, 65% of studies used all-male samples, while only 11.6% were all-female. And the analyses that included no female subjects covered some of the most practically relevant topics for everyday lifters: training frequency, training volume, and exercise variation.

As Stacy Sims, exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist, puts it, women are not small men. And these glaring discrepancies and gaps in understanding are why so many women don’t feel like lifting weights is for them. But if anything, strength training is just as, if not more, crucial for women than it is for men.

Women fall and break a hip 2-3 times the rate of men. One study found that when the elderly suffer a fall that results in a hip fracture, there is a 14.8% chance of death within 6 months, and a 30% chance within a year.

This affects women particularly because women naturally have around 38% less lean body mass than men. Because of this, women are more susceptible to dying of things like falls at a higher rate than men.

However, building muscle helps protect joints and increases bone density. Not only that, but women who participate in strength training see a 30% decrease in cardiovascular mortality.

Muscle mass peaks in your 30s. From there, age-related sarcopenia causes a natural 3%–8% decline in muscle mass per decade, increasing exponentially during and after menopause. But regular strength training—at ANY age—can slow, stop, or even reverse this loss, resulting in a higher quality of life, and lower risk of all-cause mortality.

Lack of knowledge is one of the most significant barriers women have to entering the gym. So today, think of me as your strength training fairy godmother. For anyone (but especially women) thinking about going to the gym, just starting in the gym, or who’s been in the gym for a while but hasn’t quite found their rhythm or confidence yet, this is for you.

And one last note: this is not working out for vanity. From my experience, every time the focus of exercise is on aesthetics, you will always be disappointed because you’re chasing an ideal that is, simply, not you. And never will be.

But when the focus is on how you feel and perform? Personally, I never love my body more.

Read more

When I left serving in 2023, I promised myself I’d never go back to service work. I felt that getting paid hourly diminished the value of my time—the value of me. I swore that life would be behind me. Yet, here I was, squelching on that promise only 3 years later, not unlike the deranged yet comfortable familiarity of getting back together with an ex after you said it was done for good.

I started serving in 2021 after COVID had completely decimated the career path I was on. Feeling aimless, unsure of what to do, I took a job at a restaurant where one of my friends worked while I waited for a new path to materialize.

That season led me into freelance writing, which eventually turned into an executive assistant role that gave me flexibility, stability, and time to explore my own work. But after 4 years, it became abundantly clear that the role had stalled out—and so had I. My job had morphed into something that I was no longer excited by, and working from home, by myself, in front of a computer, was proving detrimental to my mental health.

Just as I was realizing it was time to leave, my writing was starting to pick up steam, and my platform started to grow. The more attention I put into it, the more it flourished. All of a sudden, a path emerged that I hadn’t planned for. A way out became clear, and I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t fully pursue it with my full attention.

The only issue was money—writing isn’t exactly paying the bills just yet. Working in a cafe, I reasoned, would offer some level of stability, away from my computer, with real, human interaction, while making something with my hands. But not too much stability to make me complacent in my creative pursuits. It felt like the perfect solution.

The decision to look for a cafe job was one that I wrestled with for months. It felt like going backwards. Like at my age, I should be doing something more stable, secure, noteworthy. And maybe, to some people, it might seem that way.

But getting hired at the new coffee shop that opened a few blocks from my front door—the only shop I had applied at—felt like a sign from the universe that I was making the right decision. But once I started, a demon that I knew I would have to face—the one that kept me wondering if making this transition would be the right move—started rearing its ugly head.

I am older than many of my coworkers by over a decade. Most of them are in school. For some, the school in question is high school. The pop culture reference in the title of this essay is older than a handful of them. I’m 9 years older than the girl who trained me. I’m fairly certain that, aside from the owner, I am the oldest person who works there.

I know this shouldn’t bother me. I’ve heard people say that keeping younger friends can contribute to longevity, or whatever. But truthfully, at least at first, being there just made me painfully aware of how much older I was than my peers. I felt ancient. My coworkers in their early 20s were getting hit on and complimented. Meanwhile, I was getting asked if I was the owner. “Well, maybe someday you could be!” one overly-confident man said, as if to reassure me, after I told him I was, in fact, not the owner.

This man and I, I assume, were raised with a similar set of beliefs. The same ones, I reckon, most Americans were raised with: The American Dream. It’s a simple formula, really—go to school, get the job, buy the house, have the family, and work work work your way up the rungs of society, as high as you possibly can, so you can retire at 65, say “I did it”, and spend the next 20 years slowly dying.

The notion of the “American Dream” was originally popularized by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America, where he described it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” I don’t think Adams meant for this to turn out so… consumption heavy. The original sentiment was a reaction to the egregious inequality and rigid class systems that emerged during the Great Depression. It was intended as a vision rooted in the expansion of opportunity and social mobility. A rejection of fixed class hierarchy, rather than the prescription for material accumulation that it is today.

But the seeds were there, hidden in that last line: with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. While well-intentioned—it is, and I mean this honestly, and an amazing thing to be able to choose and build a life, rather than inheriting your fate—this is where our hyper-individualized and consumption-driven culture stems from. That word. Achievement. Ultimately, “mobility” is dependent on wage-labor and economic advancement, particularly in comparison to your peers. By today’s standards, mobility means nothing if it’s not visible. Without the house, the car, the clothes, the plastic surgery, how will we have evidence of your “achievement?”

These ideals, so ingrained in our culture, have given us a playbook—a simple framework to follow that guarantees “success”. Work hard, follow the steps, and you, too, can have the 🌈American Dream🌈. Seeing someone in their 30s working behind a counter causes dissonance when you believe that this playbook is the “right” way to live. You assume that something must have gone terribly wrong for you to be there.

However, the one thing that’s kept in the fine print, at the back of the book, is that following it doesn’t actually make the user any happier or more fulfilled. Material success is often achieved at the expense of what actually makes us happy: community, relationships, connection, and purpose. Making a lot of money by any means necessary and buying all the things I want is not purpose. It’s a hollow dopamine loop with no satisfying conclusion.

Study after study tells us that spending money on material accumulation doesn’t make us happier. But we don’t really need science to tell us that. In the Bible, Ecclesiastes 5:10-11 reads, “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless.” In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “Money buys everything, except morality and citizens.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1860 essay Wealth that “Money often costs too much.” We know this intrinsically. We’ve known it for some time. And yet, we still chase it incessantly.

put it better than I ever could:

when a profit-driven, materially-oriented, and hyper-individualistic society finds itself incompatible with our inherent psychological makeup, those needs are simply replaced with artificial and distorted needs (consumerism, hedonism, cosmetic perfectionism, recognition, hyper-productivity, entertainment escapism etc). The result in doing so is that it constructs a fragile and misleading psychological theory of self based on the social condition rather than the human condition. This substitution not only breeds personal dissatisfaction but it also alienates us from the very sources of meaning, connection, and stability that sustain true psychological well-being and that has been self-evident.

Striving as our supreme value. Growth at all costs. Ever increasing our income, to increase our standard of living, to increase our income, to increase our standard of living… It is, if you zoom out (and not very far), absolutely fucking silly. Like ants getting caught in a death spiral from following a faulty pheromone trail, walking in a circle until they collapse and die from exhaustion, those who follow the playbook get locked in a struggle of using external validation to fix their lives, to fill the void. They, too, do it until they either look up and recognize the pattern or drop dead.

But here’s where me and that man who told me that if I worked hard, maybe one day I could open my own coffee shop differ: I do not strive towards arbitrary measurements of success, and I do not follow the playbook. I’ve dabbled in its teachings. I’ve seen how it’s played out. And I got fuck all, save for debilitating anxiety and being totally disconnected from myself.

Now, let me be clear about 2 things:

#1. I’m not a monk. I have not resigned all material possessions. There are still things I want, and financial freedom is important to me. But I’ve come to see income as a way to amplify my experience. I have no aspirations of being a millionaire. The only thing I want is to have the flexibility to explore the things that light me up—to be an explorer of the human condition. This is where my mind is 24/7. I only need however much money will help me do that, and not be stressed about basic living expenses. And let me tell you: it’s not a lot of money.

#2. I still strive, but there’s a difference between striving towards arbitrary markers of success like cars, big houses, clothes etc., and chasing a calling. Exploring the texture of what it is to be you. Pushing yourself to the limits of your experience. Growing. Learning. Expanding. Sometimes that pursuit will come with financial abundance. Sometimes that abundance will come in a different form.

Someone on the outside might see me at 33 years old, working at a coffee shop, and take pity on me. And sometimes, the person on the inside (me) agrees. There’s a nagging voice in the back of my mind—the one that was raised on the American Dream—that tells me this is embarrassing. That I should’ve moved on by now. That being 33 and making $15/hour + tips, coming home smelling like stale coffee and milk makes me a colossal failure.

But here’s that thing: I could’ve lived that “safe” playbook life. The life that looks and sounds impressive to others. But after looking around and dipping my toe in, I realized that there really is nothing safe about it. You could lose your job at the drop of a hat—people are losing their jobs to AI left and right these days, the market could crash, or, even worse, you could wake up one day and realize you spent your whole life waiting, kicking the can down the road while you spent your time doing a job that was ultimately meaningless for someone who doesn’t give a lick about you, just so you can look impressive to people you don’t give a lick about.

To some, working at a cafe and becoming a writer at 33 seems like a risky move. But, in my mind, it’s the opposite. Sure, there’s risk involved, but everything in life comes with risk attached. And there’s a huge difference between the risks you choose to take and the risks you unwittingly inherit while you’re trying to avoid risk.

To me, the risk of having gotten to the end of my life having not at least tried to pursue something that lights me up is far too high a cost. The end of my life is something I think about quite often. What I want to be like. What I want to have done. What I want to continue to do. And the truth is, I never want to stop. As James Clear put it, “You are as old as the risks you take. In many ways, aging is not the process of growing old, but rather the slow death of becoming overly protective, scared, and worried about losing what you have.”

As we get older, the many potentialities we have for our lives when we’re young start to collapse. We pigeonhole ourselves with the accumulation of past choices. Our identities become more rigid. Our minds and bodies face decline. But that collapse happens much more rapidly when you believe your best years are behind you. When you become locked in a prison of sunk costs.

But there is still life to be lived, regardless of your age. You can choose to change course at any time. If your priority is to keep up the status quo, then aging is a process of decline. But if your priority is to accumulate wisdom, then aging is a process of growth and renewal. There’s a line going around the internet right now that goes, “Everything is a win when the goal is to have an experience”. I don’t know who originated it, but it’s brilliant.

Julia Child didn’t start cooking until 30, and didn’t release her first cookbook until she was 50. Bob Ross spent 20 years in the Air Force, learning to paint on the side, and became a painting instructor at 37. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first Little House on the Prairie book at 65. Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78, after arthritis made needlework too painful. If they all had believed their life paths were set in stone by the choices they made in their 20s, they wouldn’t have become who they did, and we wouldn’t have their work or their example.

In a 2015 paper from the University and Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, the authors describe a burgeoning phenomenon wherein people over 70 are expressing the desire to end their life, in the absence of life-threatening disease or a severe psychiatric disorder, because they feel as though “life is completed and no longer worth living”. The authors understood the essential meaning behind this phenomenon as “a tangle of inability and unwillingness to connect to one’s actual life”.

In their study, where 70+ who expressed this desire were sampled, they found that these people experienced a permanent and pervasive tension between their daily experience and their expectations of life and their idea of who they were.

In reading the paper, I felt like the authors, in their effort to be scientifically rigorous (which… fine), were dancing around the issue. These people wanted to matter—wanted their lives to feel rich and fulfilling, but weren’t doing anything to make it so. I can only presume (which is me admittedly not being scientific) that these people spent their lives chasing external markers of success and measured their worth by what they produced. Once that was gone, they were left with nothing. They, like so many people, let their lives get narrower and narrower after they stopped working, until they felt like it was no longer even worth living. They were locked out of their lives by their own beliefs. And landmark research by Harvard Psychology Professor Ellen Langer shows that what you believe about aging strongly correlates with quality of life and rate of decline.

This pervasive, Western mindset—where worth is based on what we produce, and the accumulation of material possessions—is the same one that makes me feel like I’m too old to be a barista. But I have what people who may look down on me wish they had: time. Time to write. To create. To imagine and move towards a fulfilling future. To live in a fulfilling present. To construct a world for myself that is full of exciting possibilities. I have nothing but a great expanse before me. My life is mine to create.

Maybe we can’t all quit our jobs. I’m not naive to the fact that money is a real thing, and many people get pigeonholed into a life that they didn’t sign up for because the bills do, in fact, have to get paid. But what we can do, regardless of our situation, is become interested. To be nerdy about the things we love. To find enthusiasm in the intangible. And to design our lives in a way that feeds and amplifies those things.

So if you ask me: no. I’m not too old to be a barista. “Too old” is a construct based on a social and cultural framework built to keep people engaged in consumerism, climbing ladders they don’t like, hitting milestones they didn’t choose. The minute we start saying we’re “too old” to do anything, it’s over—we might as well throw in the towel. You are never too far down the road to choose a different path, to take an exit, or to turn around.

Rather than “too old,” I see my life as it is right now as a badge of honor—a sign of my willingness and bravery to be honest with myself about what I want, how I want to spend my time, and what truly matters to me.

One day, I will look back and chuckle about how I felt old during this period. I am just getting started.

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Every so often, in the midst of writing, I am suddenly struck with an unsettling affliction. A wave of heat runs through my body, and my fingers become paralyzed. Rudely, for seemingly no reason at all, a thought pops to the forefront of my mind: what’s even the point of this?

I’m generally not a nihilist, but I also have in the back of my head that if you ask “why” enough times, you’ll arrive at the end: that there is no “why”. We are here by total random chance. There is no cohesive “meaning of life”, and there isn’t really a reason why any of us do anything. It’s a thought that likes to wiggle its way to the forefront at the most inconvenient times. Like, for example, 3 hours into writing an essay. I’ll be in a flow state, thinking I’m absolutely cooking, only for this thought to materialize like a jump scare and derail the whole thing.

In this age where there is SO much information out there, it can feel like creation is futile—that I’m just contributing to the noise. Adding to the already overwhelming morass of opinions and think pieces on the internet feels fruitless—irresponsible, even. Implicit in “what’s the point” is “no one needs this”.

Then comes the second layer: why would anyone want to know what I think, or hear what I have to say? I’m not an expert. I hold no PhD. Everything I say feels derivative. Like everyone already knows what I know, everything worth saying has already been said, in clearer and more accurate terms than I could ever conceive, by someone with more experience and a better perspective. Or, you could just ask AI.

Writer’s block comes in many forms, but for me, this is what it looks like.

As an experience, it is, in a word, unpleasant. That unpleasantness is only compounded by the fact that I completely flipped my life upside down to write—the stakes only make that voice louder, and the experience that much more agonizing. It’s hard not to see it as a personal and moral failure. As evidence that I am, in fact, an idiot. Just as I suspected. That anything good I’ve ever written was a fluke, and I will never again amount to my past successes.

But after I’m done spiraling and step away from that blinking cursor, taunting me with its insensate pulsating, I remember something important:

Pain and discomfort—in all forms, be it physical, emotional, or psychological—is a request for change. If you’ve been sitting for a long time and your foot falls asleep, your body bids you change positions. If you have a stomach ache every time you consume dairy, mayhaps its time to stop ordering 20-oz lattes. If you feel resentment bubbling up, it might be time to express a boundary. And if you’re creatively blocked, it might be because of something you’re avoiding.

Whenever writing isn’t going well—whenever the words aren’t flowing, or we’re plagued by the insignificance of it all, we throw the term “writer’s block” on it. To me, as much as I use it, it’s a wholly unhelpful term on its own. Calling it “writer’s block” puts the problem over there, as if there were some nebulous, invisible cosmic force preventing you from getting the words out. There is no cure for writer’s block because it’s not an actual affliction, but rather, a way for us to distance ourselves from a problem we don’t want to address. Saying we have “writer’s block” usually only further perpetuates and amplifies the issue, as the typical approach is just to sit there and try to force something to come out. But like a Chinese finger trap, the harder you resist, the more stuck you become.

If you don’t address the root cause of the block, the feeling will persist. As I explained in my essay, the yips, it’s like trying to unclog a drain by running the faucet and hoping it will just take care of itself—the pressure builds as the sink fills with murky water, and the clog doesn’t move. You’ve got to get in there with a drain snake and address the clog directly.

So we need to call a creative block what it is: A flashlight. In the same way a headache is telling you to drink more water and spend less time looking at a screen, writer’s block—or any creative block, really—is trying to shine a light on where you’re not being honest with yourself. That there’s something you’re ignoring that needs your attention. Like the headache, the block is a symptom, not a cause.

As electric beings, our brains emit a rhythmic pattern of electrical activity referred to as brain waves. The voltage of the signal we give off is dependent upon what state of consciousness we’re in, which ranges from the slow, deep-sleep associated Delta waves, to the high-frequency Gamma waves associated with heightened perception and peak experiences, and a whole spectrum in between that includes Theta, Alpha, and Beta waves. Beta waves, which exist just below Gamma waves on the spectrum and range from around 13-32 Hz, are where we spend the majority of our waking hours. At the low end of that range, Beta waves are associated with concentration and active thinking. High Beta brain waves, however, are associated with anxiety, vigilance, and fear. This type of brain wave activity inhibits the prefrontal cortex, impeding executive function (the brain’s system for planning, focusing, and controlling behavior).

Whatever it is that you’re not dealing with—be it a fear of being seen, fear of failure, fear of being a has-been, a fraud, of looking stupid—is waiting for its moment for you to enter that high beta state. The second you feel a ping of self-doubt or frustration, it bubbles to the surface, triggering a fight-or-flight response, effectively suffocating creative flow, and associating the mere act of writing with stress, sending you, if you’re anything like me, into an existential pit of despair.

When we experience it, though, we’re not thinking, “Oh, I’m too stressed about XYZ for ideas to flow, I should deal with the beliefs at the root of that.” No. It just feels like a kinked hose. Mental constipation with no clear cause. Which becomes a vicious cycle when the kink is not addressed.

This is why fighting and resisting it doesn’t help—it only digs you further down into that pit. What we resist, persists.

For me, this started happening more and more as my subscriber count grew. I started thinking about what I should write, as opposed to what I wanted to write. Even though writing what I wanted to write is what got me those subscribers in the first place. I started to categorize myself and put myself into a box. These are the types of things I write now. This is what the people want. I started thinking about providing value over curiosity and expression. My subscriber count was starting to generate opportunities, even income, and I placed the entire well-being of my future self on the things I wrote.

All of this stress creates a very high Beta state from which to try to create.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of flow psychology, said that self-consciousness is the enemy of flow. Self-consciousness divides attention and invites evaluation, rather than allowing full immersion in the experience, which flow state requires.

Flow. The opposite of a block. The proverbial drain, unclogged. The hose, unkinked. If we’re looking for the opposite of a block, I think this is it.

Before the Enlightenment and the takeover of rational humanism, putting the individual at the center of the narrative, the Ancient Greeks and Romans believed that creativity wasn’t something that belonged to an individual, but rather something that worked through them—an intermediary between humans and the divine. The Greeks called this guiding force a daemon. The Romans called it genius. A convenient excuse for a creative block—you can simply blame it on your daemon falling asleep at the wheel. Don’t get me wrong, some distance from the problem and something to blame it on can be useful, but it lacks agency. At the same time, centering the entire responsibility of creativity on the individual—on being the genius, rather than having a genius—is too much pressure.

Instead, I think we ought to consider a hybrid approach: creating conditions for genius to visit. What Rick Rubin calls “source” in The Creative Act builds upon ideas similar to those in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art—that of the Muse. Also derived from classic Greek mythology, the Muse is a creative energy force. But unlike the daemon or genius, which was more fixed, the Muses were transitory. Mere visitors to the creator.

In The War of Art, Pressfield maintains that the Muse shows up when you overcome resistance, which is done through commitment and discipline—you must continually show up to your craft for the muse to visit. While not totally untrue—the Muse does, in fact, need to “find you working”, as Pablo Picasso put it—to me, that’s only half the battle. If inspiration finds you working, but what it finds when it arrives is you in a pit of self-loathing, it will pass.

That’s why I much prefer Rubin’s approach: you have to open the channel, be receptive to its arrival, and reduce interference. I.e., to clear the block. Because in my experience, inspiration often doesn’t, in fact, find me working. It finds me while I’m on a walk, while I’m watching a documentary, or when I’m deep in a conversation. The work that I continually sit down to do is the catalyst—I wouldn’t feel inspired to do anything if that wasn’t the case—but the inspiration? That works in more mysterious ways.

What I’m trying to say is this: In order for creativity to flow, for the Muse to visit, for source to flow, and to access those Theta, even Gamma brain waves of creativity and flow state, you’ve got to figure out what you’re so damn afraid of, and move through it. It’s a bitch, to be sure, but it’s one of the gifts of the creative process. It’s not just about the output, the end result of what you make. It’s about the human journey—the journey inwards, and ultimately forwards.

To commit to a creative path is to also commit to doing the proverbial work. This is both the beauty and agony of creation: it forces us to confront the parts of ourselves that are uncomfortable to acknowledge. Otherwise, we’ll be tortured by it forever. The only way out is through, as they say.

That said, figuring out the block is only part of the journey. Working through a block isn’t an overnight endeavor. Once you’ve figured out the cause, there’s still the work of starting to get the creativity to flow again, and that can be clumsy and clunky. The old ways probably aren’t going to work anymore—they’re what caused this mess in the first place, and are likely to just trigger the same response. We can’t, to keep the drain analogy going, keep putting eggshells and rice down the drain and expect it not to get clogged again. What we need is to nurture our way back with a new approach.

Should I start smoking? was my first attempt at coming back from writer’s block. I knew the central thesis of what I wanted to say, but when I started typing, I would completely lose the thread of where I was trying to go. My thought process is often messy. Connections often come and go faster than I can type. It’s not unusual for me to start a thought and forget where I was going with it.

Admittedly, that’s where some of my best work comes from. Going off on a tangent often unlocks a connection I didn’t know I was trying to make. I don’t want to shut that down. But, at the same time, it can be maddening to spend hours writing, only to come back to it the next day and forget where you were going with it.

When I first started using Sublime, it was immediately clear to me what a useful tool it could be for working your way out of a creative block. For those unfamiliar, Sublime is an (aptly named) inspiration management tool designed for creatives to save, explore, curate, and organize ideas that stir the creative juices. I’ve been describing it to people as Pinterest, minus the ads and body dysmorphia, with actual substance that actually inspires creative action, rather than comparison. I’ve heard others describe it as a “digital garden”—a place where ideas can be cultivated and grown.

Generally, when a new idea comes to me, I put it in a giant Notion database. Usually, it’s just a vague topic or title to prompt me. If the idea was inspired by a piece of content, be it a line in a book, a YouTube video, or a timestamp in a podcast, I’ll try to include that. But most of the time, I don’t.

When it comes time for me to come up with something new to write and nothing feels particularly pressing in the moment, I’ll go to that database and see if anything grabs me. Sometimes it does, but a lot of the time, it doesn’t. Divorced from the spark of inspiration that triggered the initial premise, I come up empty.

When this happens, embarrassing as it is to admit, I start scrolling, desperately looking for something to knock something in my head loose. To absolutely no one’s surprise, this doesn’t work either, and I’m right back where I started, only this time with my dopamine utterly destroyed.

Sublime entered my awareness at the exact right time, recovering from a block, and needing a new approach. What I found was the perfect container—structured enough to hold my ideas, but open enough to let them flow in weird and unexpected ways.

Let’s take should I start smoking?, a piece I wrote about the commodification of community in the wellness industrial complex, as an example. It started with the Global Wellness Summit’s announcement of their Future of Wellness 2026 trend report, which included the end of the over-optimization era—something I’d been predicting for some time. I saved that section of the report to a collection I made in Sublime specifically for this piece I was working on, along with a relevant Joan Didion quote and a couple of topical Instagram reels.

Then I pulled on the thread. I found articles and research weighing community against behaviors deemed “less healthy,” like partying, and how wellness has made us lonelier. I found accounts of the Greek symposium, the festival of Dionysus, and how coffee houses existed as “penny universities” in the 17th and 18th centuries. All were found in or catalyzed by something I found in Sublime.

The discovery and curation aspects of Sublime alone are enough, but what really sealed the deal for me is Canvas, a space where you can organize thoughts, identify patterns, make notes, and watch your garden come to life.

For this piece, the thing that I had a hard time with—the thing that left me blocked prior to using Sublime and that caused me to abandon it for several weeks—was having too many thoughts and not knowing exactly how to connect or organize them. Using canvas, I could see which ideas were similar and categorize them in a way that gave me just enough structure to play.

Sometimes, what our creativity needs are constraints. Being faced with infinite possibilities can cause us to spiral. Green Eggs and Ham was the result of a bet that Dr. Seuss couldn’t write a book using 50 unique words or less, and now it’s the fourth highest-selling children’s book of all time. Constraints help us harness and direct our creative energy. As Jerry Seinfeld put it on the Time Ferris show (that podcast bit was captured with Sublime’s podcast clipping tool, Podcast Magic, btw!), “When you have a creative gift, it’s like someone just gave you a horse. Now, you have to learn how to ride it. You’ve got to learn how to ride this horse…. And you either learn to ride this thing, or it’s going to kill you.”

I’ve never written with any sort of outline before. I’ve always just gone off the cuff. But when that stopped working in the midst of a block, I found I needed it. It was like a bridle and saddle for a creative stallion running amok.

They say creativity is just connecting two or more things that seemingly don’t belong together. That’s what Sublime is—a vector for connection. It doesn’t make the connections for you, like so many algorithms on other platforms do, but rather provides a space for them to emerge.

If you’ve read almost anything I’ve ever written, then you’ll know that I’m a big fan of following the things that light you up. The little visceral reactions we have to certain stimuli, that so often go ignored, are clues. Not everything will be interesting or pertinent to everyone. But the things that are interesting or pertinent to you? Those are the seeds of creativity. You can find them everywhere out in the world. But when you’re feeling raw from a creative block, Sublime offers a way back to finding those things that excite your creativity. Now, whenever something I see touches that nerve and initiates that spark, I save it to Sublime.

Like Rubin points out in The Creative Act, if you want creativity to flow, you need to cultivate curiosity—to open yourself up to new ways of seeing things. There are a lot of ways you can do this, but Sublime is like the oil that gets the gears turning again.

I come back to that voice in my head that says there is no point in creating. Yes, it is correct that we’re here by complete random chance. That icy impacts gave our planet water and settled it just the right distance away from our closest star. The perfect mass gave it gravity, and gases created by volcanic eruptions combined with that gravity to form our atmosphere. And somehow, with enough time, we emerged. Why create? Because that is the very nature of the lineage that we come from. We create because we are a continuation of the same force that created us. We are on a generative planet—we are made from a generative planet. The force that resulted in our existence is the same force that pulls us towards creation.

When that impulse to create gets disrupted, it can feel like a curse. But rather, it is an invitation. To go deeper, to explore, to journey inward.

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I took a big breath in, and with a big exhale, sighed, “work”,

The barista gave a sympathetic frown and replied, ‘bummer.’

I started stammering, “I mean, not totally a bummer… I’m a writer… I’m just having a bout of writer’s block,” in an effort to ensure he knew I wasn’t coming to the coffee shop to do normal, boring work. I needed him to know I was cool.

“Ah’, the barista sympathized, “I find when that happens it’s best to start asking questions.”

I replied, genuinely, “… that’s actually really good advice.”

I sat down, opened my laptop, and got to work immediately ignoring that advice.

I start typing:

I have no photos on my phone of my face and I think that’s weird

*holds down delete button*

Nothing like the first few nice days of spring to make you realize that you were not, as you thought, stupid and depressed, but rather, lacking sunshine and spending way too much time inside.

*delete delete delete. I can’t spend another one of these talking about the weather*

I open Instagram in my browser, still yet to ask a single question, in a desperate attempt to jog my brain to come up with something to say. It’s a bad habit, and I hate that I do it.

While scrolling, I got locked into my art category. The both cool and deeply uncool thing about Instagram is it’s algorithm responds to the things you interact with most. That’s bad news for our dopamine and addiction, and getting siloed into echo chambers. But if you’re conscious about how you use it, you can shape your algorithms to show you things that make you feel better about yourself and the world. Maybe that even fills you with a sense of wonder.

I saw experimental dance films, a girl playing a banjo, and an electric flamenco performance.

There were dancers, musical theater performers, visual artists, photographers. All so electric I forget that just moments ago I told that barista, “I’m just gonna go slam my head on the keyboard”. I was inspired. Not to say anything in particular. A new hot take did not descend from on high. Just… inspired.

It made me think of how many people are out there, making it happen. People are making things just for the sake of doing it. Because it’s cool. And fun. And what else are we going to do while we’re here? People are finding ways to share their gifts. They’re doubling down on expression. They’re fighting back—against AI, against sameness. Against an increasingly gray and unconscious world. Against control and bunk systems.

People are out there doing all sorts of wild and amazing things. And, to me, it’s all proof that you don’t have to live a small, safe life if that’s not what you want. There are more possibilities out there than you can imagine, and certainly more than what you were led to believe.

People are cultivating hope if you look for it.

(all art that inspired me is linked below!)

reading —

Like Streams to the Ocean by — a reread because I needed a palate cleanser, and because it’s fucking good. The first time I read it, I dog-eared a bunch of pages, and it was fun to go back and try to figure out what I found so meaningful about what I had flagged. Like little, mysterious notes from past me.

I spent Saturday doing life admin and accomplished nothing by — because modern life is such a racket and I’m glad I’m not the only one driven to the brink about it.

Sorry But the Manosphere is the Gayest Thing on the Internet by — so good I read the whole thing out loud to my husband and we lol’d together about its accuracy.

exploring —

trying to understand the theory of relativity’s real-world application

playing —

Rooster on HBO — I wasn’t expecting a lot from this, but I’m finding it funny and charming

Ok, I didn’t know whether to put this in “playing” or “reading”, because there’s a lot of debate as to whether audiobooks count as reading, but since I did a lot more “pressing play” than physical reading, I’m putting it here.

I’m brand new to audiobooks. I’ve given them a shot a few times over the years and just couldn’t get into them. But lately, I’ve been so over all of my usual podcasts, but still wanted something to put on while I’m cooking dinner. So I gave audiobooks another chance, and now I can’t be stopped. So much so that I discovered that there’s a 15 hour monthly limit to audiobooks on Spotify, abashedly and begrudgingly paid the $11 to upgrade my account to get more listening hours to finish what I was listening to, got a library card (there’s a gorgeous new library opening up by me so, it was coming anyway) so I could download Libby and cancel that stupid upgrade.

It’s been a journey.

I think I’m learning, at least for me, that there’s an art to what gets read as a book and what gets listened to. Not all books are good listens. But the ones I’m choosing so far (memoirs and books of essays—must be read by the author) have been perfect for filling that podcast void:

Bravey by Alexi Pappas — My husband really loved it by proxy as well—I often heard him snicker from the office as I played it aloud in the kitchen.

Delusions by — It started as, “eh, this will do”, and ended in my own personal delusion of thinking that Cazzie and I could be friends.

obsessing over —

A fan of anything mind-body related as I am, I did a group somatic reading, and it was WILD. We all sent in photos of our hips, knees, and face, and our somatic guide, Brooke, analyzed everything, educating us on how different emotional and psychological patterns influence posture and where we hold tension in the body.

It might sound a little out there to some, but our postural patterns and patterns of tension are not separate from our emotional experience, and looking at where the body is bracing can tell us a lot about thoughts and behaviors that we might not even be aware of.

Knowing nothing about me, Brooke told me things about myself that were nearly identical to what my therapist has been telling me (that I don’t know and/or won’t act on my inner desires. So now I’ve got that to work on. How fun for me).

recommending —

I feel lucky to live in a neighborhood with no streetlights—it makes stargazing, even living in town, with outdoor lighting all around us, significantly better. And by that I mean: actually possible. Every night before bed, I pop my head out to check the sky. If it is deemed to be a “good sky”, I’ll hang out for a few minutes, staring up, hoping to glimpse a shooting star.

One of my goals for the summer is to learn to identify and track the brightest stars and at least ten constellations. Mostly for fun, but also as a practice in expanding my sense of scale and broadening my perspective.

When I was in college, I took an astronomy class over summer term. The professor was from Argentina and spoke very little English, which made learning the material tough. But after the lecture portion was finished, which was mostly learning about light while we waited for it to get dark, we’d go outside with our star wheels and learn to chart the night sky.

After the term was over, I held on to my start wheel. That is, until one of my boyfriend’s friends told me that it was lame, because you could just look at the stars in an app on your phone. Feeling dumb, I got rid of it.

But I think I might get one again, because the last thing I really want to do when I’m trying to connect with the mystery of the universe is be on my phone.

If I were on Subway Takes, my take would be, to no one’s surprise, that light pollution is a crime against humanity.

Let’s all get star wheels and look at the sky more this summer.

treating —

I made some glowy skin gummies and cranked it up to 11 by using a cold infusion of potent, skin-loving herbs for the base and I can’t stop eating them. Here’s how to make them: Make an herbal cold infusion by combining

• 1½ tsp Marshmallow root

• 1½ tsp Oatstraw

• 1½ tsp Calendula

• 1½ tsp Rose petals

• ½ tsp Stinging nettle

• ½ tsp Gotu kola

• ¼–½ tsp Hibiscus

in 1 cup of cold water for 12-24 hours (add a few extra tablespoons of water as the herbs will absorb some of the water). Once it’s sufficiently infused, strain and squeeze as much water out of the herbs as possible (you could honestly stop here and drink the infusion and get a ton of benefits).

To the infusion, add 3/4 cup of pear juice and 1/4 cup of pomegranate juice—you should have 2 total cups of liquid.

Add one cup of liquid to a separate bowl and add 5 TBS of grass-fed gelatin and allow the gelatin to bloom for about 5 minutes.

Put the remaining cup of liquid in a small saucepan and allow it to get warm, but not boiling.

Optional: In a separate bowl, mix a splash of the warm liquid with 1 tsp of rosehip powder to make a slurry, and add it back to the pan (if you don’t make a slurry, it will clump).

Add the bloomed gelatin to the warm pan along with the rosehip slurry and whisk until dissolved.

Pour into gummy molds or into a glass baking dish and allow to chill in the fridge until set.

This is all really flexible! You can leave out the infusion and do two cups of juice, change the ratios, use a different juice, etc.— still good for skin via the gut! The base recipe is always 2 cups of liquid, 5 TBS of gelatin, divide, bloom, warm, and combine. Easy-peasy.

Human, art

THE COLD NEVER LASTS, MY DARLING, IT JUST TEACHES THE HEART HOW TO BURN ARE YOU JOKING

Listen to the whole album while you’re at it (I can’t get over the fact that she ended the album with credits)

It was 11:30 AM.

My boyfriend had left hours ago for his prep shift at the restaurant we both worked at. But I just lay there. I had been asleep for 12 hours. I debated sleeping more. Might as well—what else did I have to do?

But instead, I just lay on that stale mattress, feeling every spring quiver under the weight of my body, as though struggling to hold me up, wondering, How did I get here?

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The anxiety started in the last few months of high school, kindled by being rejected from the university I was certain I’d get into. The script, which had previously been so cleanly laid out for me, had started to unravel. I also had a boyfriend at the time who, frankly, treated me like he hated me (different than the mattress boyfriend. And, despite the questionable—and temporary—living situation, mattress boyfriend was pretty decent, all things considered).

A potent combo that would send any well-intentioned kid who was simultaneously face-to-face with the prospect of being on their own for the first time into a tailspin.

Fast forward three years to that morning in that basement bedroom that has been burned into my memory. I had just dropped out of college. The anxiety had gotten too loud for me to function. I had gone to three schools in two and a half years, and had just quit my third major, an elementary education program that was very competitive and not easy to get into.

If you had told me on my 18th birthday that this is where I’d be in just 3 years, I wouldn’t have believed you. I was a pretty straight-laced kid. Charismatic, outgoing (MOST outgoing, says my superlative in my high school yearbook), straight As… all the boxes checked and hallmarks of achievement accounted for. Everyone assured me I was going to go far.

But now, here I was, experiencing frequent panic attacks and reconciling with the fact that my identity as this high-achieving, makes-everything-look-effortless, effervescent human had evaporated. Or rather, been hit with a sledgehammer. I didn’t know who I was, and realized I probably never did, having lived my whole life according to a script I had no hand in writing—it never even occurred to me that that was even allowed. I thought the story was set. But now, the script was no longer reliable. My reality crumbled, and I along with it.

I wasn’t suicidal, but I had fantasies of spontaneous combustion—that I would just vanish from the face of the earth. The relief I would feel—the crushing weight of anxiety would be instantly lifted. I didn’t necessarily want to die, just relieved of the burden of living. Which, I realize, sounds like the same thing.

After a few months of going to work at the restaurant, going to the gym, and not much else, I knew I couldn’t go on like this forever. I got on Prozac and signed back up for classes. This time, I didn’t care about what I was “supposed to do”. I went to my counselor, and discussed the classes I had liked most and the credits I already had—I could get a major in social science and minor in psychology (because I had bounced a round so much, I had to take summer classes every year to get enough credits for the next major I was pursuing, which left me one class shy of psychology as a double major. On accident. And I still graduated in four years).

Slowly, I started to feel better—I could sustain living, felt like I wanted to vanish a lot less, and eventually came off Prozac (it numbed me too much). I had established more mindful routines and healthier habits. And yet, I was still not in love with life. It was too routine. Too constrained. I had traded one prison for another. The second one felt a lot nicer—not for nothing, it helped ground me back in my life—but it was still a prison, nonetheless. I had put myself on a tight-rope—should one thing not go perfectly, should I falter or be flexible in any way, the whole thing would come crashing down.

Something in me still knew, in my bones, there was more to life. I wanted to be free.

Even though all of this started a decade ago, it’s far from in the rear-view mirror. This version of me still lives within me. It’s not as if there was a date I was “healed” and stepped forth into a brand new day. Learning who I am and falling in love with life was, and continues to be, a process.

Here’s the thing about love—it is not easily shaken. There might be bad moments, bad days, bad seasons. There may be times when you look at the object of your love with vitriol. But the love is always there, waiting for you to return. It’s an internal support structure.

When you fall in love with life, it doesn’t mean you won’t have bad days, and that everything will always be sunshine and roses. There will be heartache, grief, and disappointment. You’ll still have to do your taxes and wait on hold with customer service, and you’ll get sick at the most inconvenient times. Being in love with life isn’t about being happy all the time. It’s about feeling alive. More in your life, as an active participant, instead of just being pushed along. It’s removing the film, clearing the cobwebs, breaking the fourth wall, and being lucid for the experience.

So, from a person who dug her claws deep into the mud to get there—this is how I tended, and continue to tend, to that version of me who wanted to disappear. To help her see that life is worth living. Worth falling in love with.

I’m just a person, and all I have is my lens and experience. But these are the things that took me from sleeping my life away in a basement to a love affair with being alive.

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It’s called semantic satiation.

The fact that I know what it’s called is a) something I like to whip out from time to time to sound smart, and b) really a testament to how often it happens to me.

I mean, when you think about it, it makes sense. We make sounds with our mouths and, inherently, these sounds don’t mean anything until we assign meaning to them. Make those sounds enough, and the neurons that associate that meaning start to fatigue, weakening the link between the sound of the word and the concept it represents until it disintegrates into unintelligible goo.

I usually recover quickly—just a temporary glitch in the matrix.

But some things are harder to recover from—the more collective, saturated varieties of semantic satiation. The words that have been used so many times they’ve turned weightless and brittle. Words like:

Trauma, literally, authenticity, fascist, community, burnout, holding space...

But today, our semantic satiation word of the day is self-care.

It’s hard to imagine now, but self-care used to actually mean something, before we started applying it to whatever was most convenient in the moment.

Cancelling plans? Self-care. Binge watching Love Island? Self-care. Spending $300 on a custom astrology reading? Self-care. How else were you supposed to know if your situationship was doomed by Saturn from the start?

But self-care was meant to be deeper. More radical.

Self-care first entered the lexicon in the 1950s within medical, psychiatric, and geriatric institutions as a way to empower patients to manage their own health and foster a sense of independence and self-worth in long-term care settings. Straightforward enough.

But it wasn’t until the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s that it became more widely used, when the Black Panther Party injected the idea into the broader culture as a means to fight back against racism. They realized that, in order to keep fighting against oppression, they needed to take care of themselves and their community so that they could maintain their energy and momentum.

As Audre Lorde would go on to say in her 1988 book A Burst of Light: And Other Essays

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

The state of self-care—and wellness in general—today feels like a far cry from “warfare”.

Quite the opposite. It feels more like compliance—a full-blown industrial complex that has us by the (wrinkleless) throats.

Now, I’m not an expert in business and economics, but I do know that, in order to be successful, a business needs a product or service that delivers value to its customers. That solves a problem. And what they’re willing to pay for it must match the value it provides.

However, it turns out that actually solving problems is bad for business in the long run. What you have to do, and what the wellness industrial complex does so well, is create and perpetuate problems behind every corner. Underneath every stone that gets turned over is—congrats—more stones. Stones to snatch your face. Stones to put up your yoni. Stones to charge under a full moon and put in every corner of your house.

It’s stones all the way down.

And the more stones you flip, the more problems you didn’t even know existed you find.

The evil genius of this industry is that it creates and perpetuates feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and scarcity so that they can sell you the escape. Get ‘em comin’ and goin’, as it were.

You’re never productive enough, optimized enough, regulated enough. Buy the right supplements, track the right metrics, delicately stack your 5 AM morning routine, so that one day, maybe, you can become the actualized version of yourself you’ve been manifesting.

Except that day never comes. It doesn’t matter what you do—that shiny version of you will always remain in the distance, like a desert marriage. Instead, these “solutions” become new obligations. Meditation is just another item on the checklist. Self-care—which began as an act of resistance—seems to have become a part of the very thing we meant to resist. Keeping us on a perpetual treadmill so we don’t have the energy to… shoot, forget resist, but to live in the first place*.*

Because people who live passionately, who live and relish in the moment, are hard to sell to. Hard to exploit. Hard to control.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been around long enough to see that everything the wellness industry touches turns to shit—a caricaturized, watered-down version of wellbeing and humanity. They took our burnout and sold us meditation apps. They took our time stuck indoors in front of computers and gave us a $600 red light shower head (yes, it exists, and I can’t lie, it’s kind of sick).

Instead of real solutions, we get consolation prizes.

Which brings us to… our surprise, bonus semantic satiation word of the day!!

Community.

Big-self-care has gotten so big and hungry that it’s starting to consume (and ruin) everything else. Anything that even kind of looks like well-being is on the menu. It’s the reason things like community are becoming absolutely meaningless gibberish. When someone starts talking about “community”, it’s hard for me not to bristle.

I literally (heh) don’t even know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about “community” anymore, but I have to assume it involves a $300 a month membership and a cold plunge, probably.

People in the “wellness community” don’t actually give a fuck about the loneliness epidemic—they care about the statistic they heard that said that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

Maybe I should just take up smoking. I mean, when you think about it, it provides you with all of the hallmarks of self-care; taking breaks, getting outside, “being in community”, i.e., shooting the shit with friends, BREATHWORK… If I smoke 6 cigarettes a day, but I’m doing it outside with friends, will I actually live longer? Because I’ll do it. And so would a lot of other people if you sold it that way.

Smoking, but this time, for your health. How the pendulum swings.

I’m being facetious. But only partially. This is the sort of meandering logic that gets used for most self-care trends. I have no data to back it up, but I actually think that this is part of why smoking is making a comeback (that and glamorization of all things analog and a bit messy). If smoking becomes a wellness trend in 2027, come back and find me.

The fact that community is becoming a wellness trend—often with an aesthetic and hefty price tag—is very telling to me. Very exposing of the larger game at play here. Because upon hearing “loneliness kills”, the impulse wasn’t to rebuild the free, accessible infrastructure of community, and ask why we’re all too exhausted and automized to connect. It was to commodify connection—sell us Community as a product: friendship coaches, curated community memberships, networking events with entry fees, apps that gamify making friends.

Here’s what I see happening:

People who are into self-care and wellness as a lifestyle seem to be lonelier than most. Maybe because they’re more self-aware, but probably because self-care and wellness, in their modern application, have become very lonely, isolating, dare I say narcissistic practices. We spend all of our time perfecting routines to make us the most optimal version of ourselves—one that is snatched, with clear skin, perfect sleep, no inflammation, no friction, no fun. Living perfect little lives in walled-off gardens.

But inevitably, the garden walls become walls of a solitary confinement cell. Turns out, perfection is a solo pursuit. Other people? Too many variables. I mean, it’s in the name. SELF-care. Not care for myself as a part of the collective, but for me and me only.

When self-care becomes a commodity, it ultimately becomes selfISH. But not in a, I can’t pour from an empty cup, but my oxygen mask on before helping others, kind of way. More of a, I’m going to do these things as a means to justify avoiding obligations and relationships and generally shitty behavior disguised as the former, kind of way.

What’s that, you say? Being lonely is really bad for me? Well, what do I do about that? Maybe… I should go out and make some friends?

That’s not necessary! Here, just buy this membership. All the benefits and none of the inconvenience. It’s actually better for you!

And since you already pay for and invest in your wellness, you’ll have no problem in paying for community. And so, community becomes yet another necessity-turned-luxury, stripped from you so that they can sell you the watered-down version.

Now our social lives are just another optimization tool.

It must not be inconvenient. It must not interfere with our routines. Our fun must fit within the bounds of optimization. Or, better yet, be for optimization—actually, if I can do what I was already going to do with other people around, that would be great. Sweating in a room full of people that I don’t really want to talk to? Excellent. Take my money.

If our fun isn’t productive, it’s moot. I can’t go out drinking on a Friday night because of sleep… and drinking. But 7 AM on a Saturday at a coffee shop with a mid DJ and a bunch of people who just want to take a pic so they can say, “see, care about my health AND I’m still fun” with the subtext that they’re only willing to do anything so long as it doesn’t interfere with their self-optimization journey.

If other people are involved, it’s because they're being used as tools. Same as an LED mask, meditation apps, and creatine. “I need to be in community,” people say. So they join run clubs, take classes, buy memberships, and still complain about how hard it is to make friends because they didn’t actually show up to try to make friends. They didn’t initiate any conversation at all. They just thought that being a warm body among other warm bodies was enough.

This whole thing was spurred by a video I saw of Dan Buettner (the Blue Zones guy) talking about how people in Blue Zones party and drink regularly that sent me into a tailspin. He was saying (in a way that was meant to look like he was having a conversation on a podcast but was almost certainly talking to no one), that these things are a “longevity hack” because of the “physical activity” and strengthening of social bonds.

Hanging out. A hack.

The dissection and commodification of normal human behavior at its finest.

This is how things that are supposed to be fun and nutritious become just another thing to check off the list for the sake of your “wellness”—when we do them just because they’re a “hack” to help us live longer.

This is why I’m dubious of trends like soft clubbing and wellness parties. They take something that’s supposed to be an organic, serendipitous, lived-in experience and turn it into a highly-Instagramable spectacle, with an entrance fee, where everyone is just there for themselves and their own, individual wellness. Not to connect, not to have interesting, nutritious conversation, but to show people how much you care for yourself.

Commodifying connection destroys the thing it claims to provide. Because real community isn’t curated, optimized, or transactional. It’s messy, spontaneous, and crucially—free (or low cost).

Some things are meant to be by-products—not causes or aims. Community for the sake of community is ultimately hollow, and naming it makes it lose its power. “Community” is not a goal. When we say “I need to find community,” we’ve already lost the plot. It’s like pouring flour in a bowl and wondering why it’s not a cake. Community emerges as the residue of shared pursuits. Through working towards a shared goal—through mutual reliance. In the wake of shared rituals and rhythms.

In the 17th century, coffeehouses were referred to as “penny universities”—places where, for the price of admission of a 1¢ coffee, academics, artists, and intellectuals could gather, debate, read, and learn from scholars. They were seen as dangerous, immoral, and seditious. And yet, it’s where the enlightenment took root, and where the ideas of the scientific revolution spread.

Now, all we have are sanitized, algorithmically curated spaces that encourage individualism. Without the friction, there is no spark. No fire. We want things to be easy. Low stakes. But from that, we only get a low-stakes life. You don’t get things like the enlightenment from coffee shops where everyone is on their laptop with headphones on.

And maybe it doesn’t even have to be anywhere near enlightenment. Maybe it’s just to shake ourselves awake.

As Joan Didion put it:

What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you’re alone with your self and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you to just live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try to get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

I think of all of the things that have been sequestered from society and made a commodity by the wellness industry, and have made us worse off as a result. Saunas, run clubs… We can no longer dance because we’re human, and it’s what we do; we do it because it is good for us. We can no longer go out in nature because we ARE nature, we do it because it’s good for us. Even the idea of “third spaces”—things that are just supposed to be inherent to human society—are becoming pay-to-play.

People need a sense of place. Somewhere where they belong. To a place. A culture. A real community. When a person is disconnected, they have no reason to care about what happens to it. That’s why the world feels so untethered—so many people cut off from a sense of belonging. When we don’t feel that, we extract, we consume, we think only about ourselves. We become nasty. Divisive. Cold.

I’m not saying that you can’t do and enjoy these things. I have and do with some regularity. If you want to join a run club, go to a cold plunge meet up, or make some friends on an app, please do. It definitely beats being alone. But more often than not, they are not a substitute for real community.

Community isn’t something you pay for, subscribe to, and it certainly isn’t meant to be squeezed in between your morning routine and pilates. It’s the byproduct of a life lived in tandem with others. And the moment we try to curate, manufacture, and aestheticize it, it loses its power.

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I have a hard time conceptualizing numbers.

When I hear “a billion”, I know that it’s a really big number, but I don’t understand exactly how big. Not really.

But I recently heard it in terms that helped me comprehend it:

A million seconds is 11.5 days,

But a billion seconds? A little less than 32 years.

32 years.

I’m currently 33.

I’ve been alive for over a billion seconds.

1,046,131,200 seconds—and counting—to be exact.

1,046,131,200 seconds.

1,046,131,200 seconds of experiencing the wholly unlikely miracle that it is to even just be born.

Did you know that your odds of being born are 1 in 400 trillion? A trillion seconds is 31,700 years, by the way.

But the odds that I was born, survived for 1,046,131,200 seconds, and went through my entire life in such a way that led me here, writing this?

Incalculable.

The fact that I’ve seen a blood moon during a meteor shower from the top of a mountain. A blue whale. A fox in my backyard.

That I’ve gotten caught in a blizzard in Italy, and swam with sharks in Belize.

That I’ve fallen in love.

That my heart has been broken.

That I’ve felt the cold air burn my lungs so bad I thought I might cough them up, and had legs so heavy I thought they might fall off.

That I’ve noticed the way the morning dew clings to spider webs in the early morning hours, and how the light casts shadows and prisms around my house at 6 pm in September.

That I’ve been cuddled to sleep in fresh linen sheets, and jumped into an icy waterfall pool in the middle of a forest on a hot summer day.

Impossible.

When I see I’ve been alive for over a billion seconds, my immediate impulse is to feel a dull, empty ache.

So much time, so little to show for it. I’ve hardly accomplished even a fraction of the things I thought I would by now.

But then I think about all of the life I’ve absorbed into my bones.

Everything I’ve lost. Everything I’ve learned.

All things felt and witnessed.

Every crutch, every vice, every meandering thought.

Every kiss, every dance, every breath.

It’s all important—it all matters, because it’s all far beyond the realm of possibly.

1 billion seconds are a rare gift.

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Editor’s note: I was initially going to take this week off from writing. I needed a little break and had some admin tasks to take care of (i.e., taxes). But another thing I started doing this week was funmaxxing, and it’s already been doing mysterious things to my brain. To the point that this just… came to me. I initially wasn’t going to share it—it’s a bit of a departure from the style of writing that I’ve come to be known for—but then I remembered that this was the sort of thing I used to publish, before anyone was watching. And something in the ether nudged me to publish it anyway.

If anything, I want it to be a reminder to both you and me that not everything needs to be perfect and polished, and that sometimes the best thing to do is to put things out in the world and not worry so much about how it’s going to be perceived.

See you next week

xx

Just as I was rolling my eyes at myself, boring myself half to death, I realized that what I was writing for the “obsessing over” section below (if you’re new here—hi! I release a special, more casual edition at the end of each month where I review things I’ve been loving!) was much more top-section worthy than me complaining about how stressed out I am (again) and refusing to do anything about it…

So, for all our sakes, let’s talk about Alysa Liu:

I didn’t know who Alysa Liu was before the Winter Olympics. The only figure skaters I could name off the top of my head are Michelle Kwan, Nancy Kerrigan, and Tanya Harding (I am a child of the ‘90s). But after last week, I, along with everyone else, have been totally captivated and transfixed by her.

If you (somehow) don’t know, Alysa Liu took home the gold medal in the Women’s Free Skating competition at the Milano Cortina Olympics. But it wasn’t so much her stunning gold medal performance that set the internet ablaze as much as it was how she did it.

This probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but I’m not really into any sort of “maxxing”—not protein or fibermaxxing, not friction-maxxing, and certainly not looksmaxxing. I tend to be a very moderate person and eschew extremes. But there’s one thing that I can get on board with, that I believe, based on my own observation, is why Liu’s performance was so meteoric:

Funmaxxing.

A perfectly executed triple lutz doesn’t give me goosebumps and make my eyes well with tears. But you know what does? Watching someone do something that so obviously brings them so much joy that it shines out of their face.

Now, Liu is obviously very talented and dedicated to her craft, otherwise she wouldn’t have been there. You don’t make it to the Olympics without profound technical skill. But by my observation, the joy and lightness she skated with is what got her the gold. In fact, grinding and hard work are what drove her to retire at 16. It wasn’t until she could find the fun in it that she returned. And, I would argue, gave her the skill and quality needed to win.

There is nothing more magnetic and captivating than someone who has found—and steadfastly pursued—their soul’s calling.

Any one of “the greats”—at least, the ones I admire—didn’t get that distinction because they clenched their fists and gritted their teeth through it. They played. They enjoyed the process.

Albert Einstein didn’t become Einstein because he ate, slept, and breathed physics. He also played the violin, loved sailing, hiking, and biking. He didn’t rise and grind. He lived his life in a way that pleased him. He believed that imagination was more important than knowledge.

The Beatles didn’t become The Beatles by following formulas and thinking about what was going to sell the most albums—they did weird shit. They experimented with different sounds and loops and treated the process like a playful experiment.

Jane Goodall didn’t become Jane Goodall because she had her nose in textbooks and sought academic accolades—she didn’t even have a degree when she started her work with primates. She started doing it because she was genuinely curious and enjoyed observing animals.

We (I) often get caught in this trap of thinking that, in order to be taken seriously, we have to suffer. Grind it out. Use pain as proof of our legitimacy. But once you get to where you’re trying to go, what do you have? A life of suffering and maybe a few pats on the back and thumbs up? The sum total of our achievements doesn’t even begin to add up to the gravity of the rest of our experience.

When I started pursuing writing seriously just a few months ago, something shifted. It went from my art, my soul’s expression, the thing that brings me joy, to a chore. I immediately burdened it with the weight of my entire future and livelihood. I started seeing the chaotic way a piece takes shape as a chore, rather than mysterious and magical. And with that, the fun and levity were drained, and I felt my writing getting so much worse, resulting in the yips.

A lesson that I’m constantly reminded of is that just because something is fun, it doesn’t mean it’s frivolous. Taking something seriously doesn’t mean it must be heavy and solemn.

You can be serious about fun. Unwavering in how much joy you allow yourself to experience. Your top priority can be funmaxxing. This is a strategy for success. And I would argue, an even better one, because play increases neuroplasticity and lateral thinking, and is just… I don’t know… a better time?

So for the foreseeable future, my top priority will be having as much fun as possible. And if you see me being too serious, call me out. And heads up, this may occasionally result in one less essay per month. But just know that if/when that happens, it’s because I’m out here filling my cup up to the brim with good shit, and falling back in love with the process.

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restacking —

with an all-too-real take on living a creative life: Friction as Evidence

kills it, yet again: What if Trevor Noah is Right About the Left and Religion?

The DEEPEST of dives from: Why Warm Countries are Poorer

exploring —

turned me onto Sublime and it’s such an interesting tool—think Pinterest, but for ideas and no ads. Every time I see something—a post, a line in an article, a video, literally anything—and think, “this is so on brand for me”, I save it to Sublime. It’s becoming my little digital garden. More on this to come!

playing —

I don’t know if I have any Noah Kahan fans in the house, but I’ve been listening to The Great Divide on repeat.

I also don’t know if anyone else got caught in the crossfire of the Great Noah Kahan Ticket War of 2026, but after losing the battle for the Utah show, we won the war for the second night in Seattle, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Also, Mumford and Sons released their new album, Prizefighter, and while I’m sorry to say it’s not a no-skips album, this one has been getting stuck in my head:

obsessing over —

My Herman Miller office chair arrived and I’m loving it. I had no idea how uncomfortable my office setup was. I got a custom Embody (from my partnership with them last month), and I had no idea an office chair could make you feel so… held.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I am still a huge fan of sitting on the floor, varying your resting positions, etc. (I’m sitting on the floor right now), but sometimes, when you need to just lock tf in, having a chair that is comfortable (and increases tissue oxygen perfusion???) is so nice.

recommending —

I recently added Under Luna’s new Hop-Infused Growth Serum, and I’ve been getting an unusual amount of compliments on my hair over the last month. Which is to say, I’ve gone from basically zero compliments to like, 4. But hear me out: my hair is really nothing to write home about. It’s long, sure, but it’s quite fine, I get a basic cut like, twice a year, don’t dye it, and have no styling skills—I let it air dry 99% of the time.

But after the first use, I almost immediately started to notice new growth (even more on top of what ARMRA has been giving me), and my hair has been so silky and shiny and strong. I’ve been telling everyone who will listen about it.

I’ve been an Under Luna stan for YEARS, but this growth serum is *chef’s kiss*.

I use it as a scalp treatment once a week, and follow it up with an ACV hair rinse, and it feels like such a luxurious, nourishing routine.

PS, don’t even think about adding a growth serum until you’ve started giving yourself a daily(ish) scalp massage. Dead serious.

treating —

Back on our lil’ treat/chess dates.

PS, people love it when you play chess in public places. I think it reminds people that you have free will.

What you might have missed this month:

Plant Based

Into the Fridge 🫠

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6 months ago · 68 likes · 2 comments · Katie Stone

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