For several months, I’ve been trying to articulate my feelings about the direction of AI. I start essays, and then stop them. My reasons are predictable: The topic is too big. Too many people are saying too many things about it. I feel too angry to even capture what I am trying to say. I’m not smart enough to say the thing.

However, the last two weeks or so have brought a spate of AI news that make me feel like we’ve crossed a threshold of sorts. It’s no longer intellectually honest for even the most enthusiastic LinkedIn types to see this as a mere productivity tool to help them crush their Q4 goals. Because now, it’s not the skeptics like me who are saying we are in trouble. It’s the employees of the companies themselves. The founders and CEOs. Bill fucking Gates. Credulous tech journalists at the New York Times. They are all loudly saying something that has been pretty obvious to me for a long time: This is looking very bad.

There are two conflicting narratives about AI, and confusingly, it’s possible to believe in both of them at the same time.

One of them is that it’s just kind of dumb. If we define intelligence using the metric that they do — an ability to ingest data and spit out in new iterative ways — then sure, it’s smart. But if you define intelligence by the standards of a fully alive human being — a quality which requires discernment, empathy, context, non-verbal cues, judgement, humor, cooperation, taste, embodied experience — then it’s dumb. That is why it is so obviously bad at writing. ( has articulated that point better than anyone else.) It’s also why I would love to watch it try to convince a reactive three year old to put on their shoes and get in the car in a hurry. It just wouldn’t have access to the multiverse of emotional and intuitive capabilities that are required for that seemingly simple task.

The second narrative is that AI is going to take over the world, and so we are all doomed. That it has, as it was said this week, a >10% chance of bringing about human extinction in the next decade. Again, these are not pie in the sky, alarmist ideas coming from doomers. These are now ideas coming out of the mouths of people who are working for these companies — and their bosses are notably not refuting them. Here is a terrifying run-down from of what has been said in the last week, kicked off by former Anthropic and OpenAI employee Jacob Coxon.

So how can both of these things be true at the same time? How can something dumb be poised to take over the world? It has to do with the underlying logic it’s following.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay about becoming collapse aware. It has since served as a kind of tentpole for this newsletter and my writing, a lens through which I see the world and share those views with readers. And in that essay, I did not mention AI at all, at least not by name. But I was writing about a foundational myth that our carbon-based society is built on. And that myth, that story, is the one that all AI companies are based on, too.

It goes like this: growth and progress can be unlimited, even though the planet and its resources are not.

Most of us haven’t questioned this myth in our lives, even though it’s so plainly irreconcilable. However, for the last few years, for a certain type of person, it’s gotten harder and harder to believe we can find a way out of this bind. The logic of extraction, as I wrote in March, is reaching a palpable upper limit. And the titans of AI have looked at the last roughly 200 years of industrial capitalism, seen how little rope we have left, and said: Fuck it. Let’s run out of rope and see what happens.

I should be clear that I’m not really talking about the resource-intensive nature of AI data centers — the water, the electricity, the carbon emissions — though that’s of course a destructive symptom of the same stupid logic. I’m talking about the even more existential idea that to limit technological progress in any way is antithetical to modernity, to progress, to the future we must claim as ours. That any constraints on growth — even ones that might benefit or protect human beings — must be ignored.

This is how you create a situation where the richest and most powerful men in the world are openly admitting that they are happy to shepherd the end of humankind, as long as it is done in the name of technological progress. So long as it was their company or innovation who achieved it. So long as it wasn’t China.

The formalized and academic expressions of this viewpoint are clear in Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Or Silicon Valley’s favored “effective accelerationism” philosophy. The less theoretical version is what’s played on X in the last week. Either way, it’s never been more clear where we are now: Progress is the only metric these people care about. Human thriving (or even surviving) is expressly no longer a priority. There is nothing to stop them. There is nowhere else left to go. So why would they stop?

When people talk of AI’s “alignment” problem — how to get AGI to align with human goals and values — they often mention the paperclip thought experiment. If you tell an advanced AI system it has a singular goal of making as many paper clips as possible, it simply won’t stop. Once it runs out of available materials, it will engineer all kinds of social chaos (car crashes, wars over resources) to attain more metal to make more paperclips. It will ruin the world in the name of non-essential office stationery.

Why would anyone burn the world down for paperclips? Because if you follow the logic of extraction, why would anyone not? In fact, it’s exactly what the people who run these companies are doing. Instead of paper clips, it’s overly-valued companies.

Sam Altman himself summed it up back in 2015 in his characteristically ghoulish fashion:

“I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created.”

That explains how AI might take over the world. And also why it’s incredibly dumb.

***

There is one wrinkle to this, and I’m not going to say it gives me hope, but it does point to what we do now. And that is the bipartisan “tidal-wave” of backlash to data centers in the US.

Using the word bipartisan in 2026 is a bit silly. Nothing is bipartisan anymore. But David Wallace-Wells wrote this thoughtful explainer in the Times that tries to figure out the nature of the unusual backlash itself. In a time when literally no one agrees on anything, what unites this politically unwieldy coalition of people fighting back against AI data centers? He wrote:

[One] way of reading the backlash is as a many-headed protest against inevitability — about not just the technology itself but also the whole package of breakneck build-out, social disruption and insane wealth creation it has come wrapped in. Is this really the only future on offer?

Wallace-Wells didn’t go so far to call this a spiritual revolt, probably because his editor at the Times would have taken that out. But I believe that’s what is going on. Many normal people are rightly experiencing a kind of moral injury to the idea that this is the future. That these pathological men should decide this for the rest of us. That this can be considered progress. Is this really the only future on offer? No, people are saying, it is not.

It’s not just that people who resist this are luddites. Or are mad about losing our careers, or fetishize doing things the long, slow, interesting way. It’s that we are having an immunological reaction to something that so clearly denies our intrinsic humanness. Because we know that humanness is much larger than the so-called artificial intelligence we’re being told to fear. We may not have all the data, but we can feel what is being lost in real time.

I think we’re at a turning point now. For the last several years, it’s been possible to indulge in a comforting fiction about the direction of AI. I hear it from people all the time, as they use LLMs to write their emails and make their pitch decks and troubleshoot their avoidant relationships.

Maybe it might not be that bad. Maybe there is some ideal middle ground where the bubble doesn’t burst and we still get to be really efficient at our silly little jobs. Or maybe the job losses will stop right at my comfortable and well-compensated laptop job. And hey, maybe it might even cure cancer!

The reason I finally wrote this essay is to say something I’ve known for months, but haven’t had the guts to say with conviction: The middle ground doesn’t exist here. They’ve said the quiet part out loud now — actually they’ve been saying it for years. If you are enthusiastic about AI, the logic of extraction is that you are subscribing to. I don’t see another way around that anymore. We have to call this what it is.

So what do we do about it? I think you know the answer, deep down. It’s the same kind of stuff I’ve been writing about for the last few years, and will continue to. It is to be radically and unapologetically human. It is to go out of your way to model and make that path more accessible to others. It is to build the kind of resilience and interdependence that can’t be expressed through data or on a laptop screen. That is, I believe, the only sane move we have left.

Update: Since I hit publish, a few people have asked (actually demanded) that I be more specific: How do we do that? Well, I have a book coming out, titled How To Build a Village, in April 2027 to answer that very question. But in the meantime, here are some posts that are my various attempts in the last two years to answer that question.

How To Build a Village

Everyone I know is Worried About Work

A Project Will Save You

On Not Doing Stuff to My Face

How I Became Collapse Aware

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work.

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You know that feeling when you’re walking to a bus stop, and you can see your bus coming from a distance. You quickly calculate that, if you continue walking at your current pace, you will definitely miss the bus. However if you run, you just might make it. The only way to find out is to start running, and not stop until you’re standing in front of the doors. You have to believe you’ll make it the whole way through, or you don’t stand a chance.

That’s the best way I can think to describe how I’ve felt during the last 14 months of writing my book, How To Build a Village: Relying On Each Other in an Unreliable World. On Monday, I turned in my third and final major revision, and it will now go into the process of copyedit and production, inching its way closer to being a physical thing in the world.

From my observation as a first-time author, getting a non-fiction book from mere idea to physical object has three main stages: First, there is writing the proposal and getting the book deal, a process which can take months or years. (I covered that here with fellow debut author , whose book is out in January!)

Then there’s part two, which I just finished: actually reporting, writing, and then editing the damn thing. Again, this can take years depending on the project and curveballs thrown at you by life and the literary gods. The third stage is the one I’m about to begin, and you’ll hear a lot about over the coming months: all the marketing, promo, PR, content creation, and admin it takes to get people to hopefully buy the book you spent so long writing.

Throughout stage two of this process, particularly since January, I have essentially had two states of being: dwelling entirely in the draft, where I’m either actively working on it or intensely thinking about it. Or I’ve been arranging the circumstances of my life—parenting/childcare, other paid work, life admin, my mental state—so that I get back to that first mode. While I am normally a huge proponent of the idea that you can make great progress as a writer even if you can only write in the margins of life, writing a book doesn’t work like that. (At least it didn’t for me.)

But therein lies the beauty of the whole exercise. Writing a book requires deep, sustained focus of a kind that is genuinely rare in our current culture. And maybe I’m a little bit nuts, but I’ve kind of loved how hard it is to write a book. I love that it asks so much of you, and then asks some more. I love that it is the antithesis of the instant gratification and dopamine cycle of writing viral essays online.

In some very strange, slightly masochistic way, I think I’m going to miss the “fully in” mode that I described above. There was a simplicity and intensity to it that I hope to revisit one day. So I’m writing this post for a few reasons: It’s a way for me to remember how I actually did this in case I ever get to do it again. It’s a useful list of routines, tools, and psychological trickery that you might be able to put to use in your own long-term writing or creative projects. But it’s also something else, something I never imagined I’d have to capture when I started this process: Proof that I actually fucking did it.

One of the most disorienting things about the last nine months or so has been watching so many writers use AI in their work, get caught, and then claim they simply don’t know how that happened. (There are many examples, but this one in particular is mystifying to me.) As the months have gone by, I’ve had the sinking feeling that anyone, anywhere could make that same accusation about my work. That every writer now lives with this monkey on their back—foisted upon them by the same people who stole their work without their consent to train the machines that took their livelihoods.

I fear I sound paranoid. I’m not, because I have copious receipts. (Here’s a great post by on that topic.) But I am angry that I have to even bear this in mind while writing a book. I’m pissed off at the technology itself, the people who get rich off of it, and the writers who unthinkingly use it in stupid, lazy, and dishonest ways. They not only make the job harder for the rest of us, but also make a mockery of something that I consider sacred: the creative process.

So my goal with this post isn’t to tell you how to write a book, but to elevate the merits of taking the long, slow, painstaking way. To explain why you might still commit to the anguish of a long-term project in a world obsessed with short term gain.

As Joshua Rothman wrote in the New Yorker, “making a pilgrimage to some writer’s space, we might want answers to practical questions about their process. But we also want, more abstractly, to gain insight into ‘the route of creativity’ […] from inspiration to text.”

Here’s the particular route I took to write my book.

The timeline

I came up with the title and idea for my book in August 2024. I got my book deal in June 2025 (more on that process here). I turned in my first full manuscript at the very beginning of April 2026. After receiving feedback from my wonderful and very involved editors in both US and UK, I turned in my first revision/edit at the beginning of July, and then the third and final one at the beginning of this week.

I was told it’s standard for first-time authors to take about a year from book deal to deliver their first full manuscript. And it’s very normal for writers to need more time than they first asked for. So by that metric I did work a bit fast, at 10 months from deal to first full manuscript. The primary thing that enabled that was quite simple: money. In other words, the advance I was paid enabled me to exclusively work on the book from about October 2025 until April 2026. (Since then, I’ve been doing my usual freelance work alongside the editing process).

The economics of book publishing are arcane and would require an entire post to explain—but needless to say, I am aware this is something many authors do not get. As a freelancer of nearly two decades, always spinning a zillion plates, having six or seven months to focus on one single project and not think about how to earn money was the biggest creative luxury I’ve ever had. I’m aware it might never happen to me again.

Something else helped, too: This book, from day one, has had a momentum and energy that I did not feel was entirely mine. A big part of the reason for that is this audience on Substack and the writing I did here prior to selling it. I just know this book needs to exist. My goal all the way through has been to get it on the page as urgently and responsibly as possible, so it can be in the world. The whole time, I’ve just been running after that bus.

Analog tools

The first thing I did after I got my book deal was drag my husband’s big cork noticeboard, which he used to diagram his novel, down from the loft. Using the chapter outline I laid out in my book proposal, I broke it into chapters with garden twine. Each time I came across something—a personal anecdote, an idea from another book I was reading, a source I wanted to interview, a concept—I’d write on a post-it and tack it where I suspected it might belong in the book.

This was a really effective tool for me at the beginning of the project. The tangibility of The Board helped me stay grounded before the manuscript was a thing I could conceptualize. And when it came time to write the first draft of each chapter, The Board was my starting point. I’d take all the post-its down, arrange them in a semi-logical order of how I wanted the chapter to go and just…start writing. It was a crude outlining technique to arrive at a shitty first draft, but it worked every time. The structure of the finished book remained very close to what I first outlined in the proposal and mapped out on The Board, though the contents of each chapter changed a lot over time.

I also read loads of books, and tried to read them in pleasant locations away from a desk. I heavily annotated of all of them, and a half dozen or so honestly feel something like close friends at this point. One of the great joys of writing a book is how many books you get to read in the process.

All these tools illustrate a truth about writing a book: It can take a lot of time to get to the point where you’re ready to write. That can sometimes feel like avoidance or procrastination, but I realized it’s not. Figuring out these tools and systems took me a few months to nail down, but once I had them, I stuck to them and the writing process sped up considerably.

Tech tools

You can probably guess this from the aforementioned post-its, but I am a pretty low-tech gal. I bought and tried using two types of fancy writing software: Scrivener and Ulysses. Both of them felt like driving a Formula One car when all I really needed was a Honda Civic. Plus, all book publishing professionals still steadfastly use Microsoft Word, so eventually, I gave up and bought myself a Microsoft Office subscription. It worked just fine. In addition to that, the other helpful yet basic tech tools I used were:

• Premium Zoom subscription: To record all my reporting calls. SO much easier than the way I used to record when I was a journalist, so I guess technology is sometimes a good thing.

• Otter subscription: I downloaded the audio files from Zoom, and uploaded them to Otter transcription service, which is the only use-case of AI I am enthusiastic about. This saved me hours of work. (FWIW, I think Otter’s transcription is better than Zoom’s similar function.)

• Dropbox: Each chapter got a folder for downloaded PDFs of cited sources, and all audio recordings and transcripts were saved in their own dedicated folders as well. As were my working drafts. There are much fancier ways to arrange research, but this system never once failed me; in fact, my lovely fact checker Julie said my material was “supremely organized,” a compliment I will bask in the glow of forever.

• Zotero Bib: Shout out to Hanna for introducing me to this. It saved me hours of time. It’s a tool which automatically generates your endnotes and citations from URLs or DOI numbers. It’s far from perfect; you still have to check everything and do a bunch of cleaning up. But it’s a solid start.

• A Brother Laser printer: A printer that actually works every time? And isn’t over-engineered with a bunch of shit you don’t need? And the ink lasts for months? This thing is legitimately the best £125 I have ever spent. If you print a lot of words, buy a black and white laser printer. If Brother wants to sponsor this newsletter, I will 100% say yes.

You might be wondering: Did I use LLMs at all? My feeling on using AI as a reporter and researcher is that it’s basically as good as Wikipedia or Google: It can serve as a starting point for research and sourcing, but then you have to do all the legwork yourself: reading primary texts, interviewing human beings, sense-checking your main arguments with several smart people or experts, observing the zeitgeist/discourse. If you’re sidestepping those time-consuming tasks with an LLM, then you are skipping the thinking part, which is the whole fucking point of writing a book. I also think LLMs are completely useless for fact checking for a lot of reasons, but here’s a main one: if it’s wrong some of the time, it might as well be wrong all of the time! You’re going to have to just check it all again.

As a writer, I’m black and white about it: I never, ever feed my own writing into it and the thought of doing so fills me with acute dread.

How I created focus and discipline

Here’s something inconvenient: It’s constitutionally impossible for me to write well at my own house. I wrote my entire book in one of four places: the shitty Starbucks near my house where I am very much considered a regular, or one of three branches of the Leeds Libraries system.

Once I had done the bulk of the research and reporting and needed to make serious progress in the draft, I realized I needed a minimum of four consecutive hours each work day sitting in the library. That is just enough time to settle in, make some progress, and then tidy up so you don’t leave yourself a mess in the draft the next day. That may not sound like a lot, but if you have kids you know that eight hours of childcare does not translate to eight hours of available time to work. I had to become religious about the hours of 11am to 3pm the four days per week my son was in childcare.

Rituals help: get the same coffee on the way to the library, listen to the same playlist, sit in the same spot. I also learned to stop scheduling calls in the middle of the day, which helped a lot. But at certain points in the process, even those four hours performed religiously were not enough. That’s where I came up with my greatest innovation of this entire project: The working mom’s writing retreat.

Here’s how it worked: I booked a very mediocre hotel room 20 minutes from my house, for one or two nights. The lack of travel time was intentional, as was the boring, cheap hotel—nothing else to do but write. I then had access to the pockets of time that parents never get to use: an early morning laptop session in bed and then working through pickup/dinnertime/bedtime. Add to that the usual four hour chunk during the day at the library, and I could easily get week’s worth of work done in 48 hours.

I did this about six times in the last 12 months, usually from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday pick-up time, and I wouldn’t have finished the book without it. These retreats made space for the deep focus and problem-solving that just cannot happen in four hours. Shout out to my husband who did all the caregiving to make these retreats happen.

Lastly, when deadlines loomed, I located other secret pockets of productivity in the week beyond the usual times mid-day four hours. For me, those were Wednesday nights when the library stays open until 8pm. And Saturday mornings from about 8-10am at the dreaded Starbucks. I found these times really productive, as there weren’t any other things competing for my attention and I could tick off discrete writing or editing tasks I’d laid out in my longer chunks of time. Again, my husband made every single one possible. He deserves a lot of credit.

How I tried to stay sane (or stop myself going actively insane)

I truly believe this: writing a book has to make you a little loopy, especially towards the end. About halfway through, I got pretty good at noticing the repeating unhelpful storylines creeping up in my brain, and learned to talk them down so I could stop getting in my own way.

• Don’t trust how you feel when you first sit down. Whether it’s paralyzed, fed up, anxious, or just bored. Sit with the discomfort, just start working on something, anything. Many times, I thought a section or chapter was irredeemable and then found, actually, I just needed to sit there and tangle with it for another hour or two. It sucked every single time, but it also worked.

• Learn to let things slide. In the crunch-time, say, two to three weeks before each deadline, I had to get really good at letting other things in my life fall into ruin: emails and future clients, house cleaning, non-essential life admin, even my own health. I hated this, but I just told myself: This is what it takes. You’ll clean it all up when the deadline has passed. Mostly, I did.

• Mondays are terrible writing days. You’ve been out of the draft, and it can take time to get back in it. Don’t judge your whole project on a Monday. Work on something lower lift until you regain momentum.

• Don’t make major changes or restructures at the end of the day. If you suddenly hate a section or convince yourself it’s a logical mess, write yourself some notes about why and then close your laptop and start again tomorrow.

My biggest mental challenge through this whole process was the internet discourse of it all. I am, after all, a writer of the internet. How am I supposed to write a book in 2025-26, that you all will read in 2027? This really affected me at times, especially as the discourse around “the village” has taken off online. Ultimately, I think this is a positive indicator for my book, but creatively, I had to choose what was going to get my top tier creative energy: the book or the newsletter. I obviously chose the book.

Eventually, I realized that the book has the potential to do something that all those essays and Reels and TikToks cannot: withstand the test of time. Even if I could have written this book in three months, and had it come out three months later, I now wouldn’t want to. Because that book, written over a shorter timeline, simply wouldn’t be as good.

Here’s what I didn’t know at the start: The process of reporting and writing the book would change me. Those changes are then reflected back into text throughout the months-long editing process. You can’t hack that, scale it, or speed it up. It just takes time.

And now that it’s fully taken shape, I see it: The thing has a texture, a pulse, a certitude that internet writing just cannot replicate. That transformation I experienced is something (I hope) the reader can feel. In the end, the time it takes to do it is what makes the whole thing worthwhile. In addition to being a phenomenal amount of work, it also feels like a kind of magic. It’s been a deep pleasure to get to experience it.

Thanks for reading, and supporting this process of writing a book. Every August, I run a discount: 50% off an annual subscription, just $15. Annual subscriptions are the cheapest way to support my work. I don’t make promises about how often I publish, and you rarely get anything extra in return—except for my deep gratitude in this funny little energetic exchange. This is available for one more week.

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We bought a new car recently. It was a major downgrade from our old one, which we gave back at the end of our agreement term. The “new” one is a 2012 Ford Focus station wagon in a color we thought was red, but turned out to be a lot closer to orange when we saw it in person.

It has great AC and you can connect your phone via bluetooth, but that’s about it as modern tech goes. The parking break is one of those levers that makes a mechanical clicking sound when you engage it — very nineties chic.

The car switch was part of a broader effort to de-leverage our lifestyle. As I wrote earlier this year, after two redundancies in twelve months, a truly inspired career pivot to carpentry by my husband, and AI’s ongoing hoovering up of the economy (and writing work), we are now an exclusively self-employed household.

Right now, we have lots of projects and ideas, our marriage feels way more equitable than it did when I was the only one with a flexible schedule, and we try not to work too hard (or at all) on Fridays. But what we do not have is a guaranteed paycheck that arrives on the same day every month. So we’re looking for ways to lower our fixed monthly costs, and getting rid of a monthly car payment seemed like a great idea.

Of course, I’ve been through belt-tightening, budget-conscious times before, as everyone has. But this one feels a little different — it doesn’t feel like a temporary measure. It feels like a new way of orienting to the world, a shift in my attitude towards the very ideas of success and wealth accumulation. It feels like giving up on the expectation that surely everything is just going to get better — from the state of the world to the state of our finances — and finding a way to build a rich, interesting life anyway.

It’s delicate to write about money in this way, because many people are struggling to cover the basics each month. This is a failure of policy, yes, but also a symptom of an extractive economic system that is reaching an upper limit. (The Daily’s account of why grocery prices are so astoundingly high was sobering in that respect.) We are fortunate that, thanks in part to this de-leveraging, we’re not struggling to pay our bills each month. But beyond that, I find myself searching for a different kind of personal finance advice. One that doesn’t assume I want to earn (and spend) ever more money until I stop working. One that asks: What if I accepted that keeping all this, right here, is enough? What then?

That’s what I meant earlier this year when I wrote about decoupling your lifestyle from your income, so you don’t set yourself up to endlessly strive. (I think you can do that in salaried work too, by the way). Currently, we have many different people who give us money: individual clients, corporate clients, not to mention the readers of this newsletter! But none of them give us enough money to tell us what to do with our lives day-to-day. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally realized this is a luxury that I’m unwilling to give up.

What all of this requires is a new posture, a new way of moving through the world. It’s one I’ve been developing for years, but I’ll admit it’s only recently that I’ve stopped secretly hoping that one day, magically, I will get rich. Every day I still have to reckon with a consumer culture obsessed with growth, improvement, and progress. I still constantly wonder how everyone is affording so many nice things all the time. I still have to make plans with friends who don’t really get it when you say “we’d love to see you, but we’d rather not go somewhere that has a £50 family entry fee before you even buy coffee or ice cream.”

However — and this is the elegant part — this posture is way more in line with the future that our planet is begging us to have: less carbon, less cars, less trips, less mindless crap to distract us from what actually makes life feel good. Which is probably why driving an orange 2012 Ford Focus in 2026 doesn’t really feel sad or depressing to me. It actually feels pretty damn good.

In my wonderful conversation with earlier this month (please watch it!) she described asking the question: How can I be useless to capitalism today? That’s precisely the kind of wealth I’m interested in accumulating. Creating a life with more moments that sit outside the framework of extractive capitalism, even if I can’t escape it completely.

Money is essential for meeting our basic needs of security, health, and nourishment, but it actually does a pretty bad job of delivering us the connection and belonging we crave beyond that. In fact, it can very often work against it. So here’s a recent list of things that make me feel rich without costing much money at all. I’d love to hear some of yours in the comments section below.

Eating the food I grew

I wrote about my allotment project last summer, and in my second season on the plot, things are ticking along. I’ve had less time to be nervous about messing it all up this year, and my main goal has been to preserve more of the food I’m growing.

We bought a £20 chest freezer off of Facebook Marketplace (true suburban luxury!) where I’m stashing bags of pre-cut/washed kale and rainbow chard, pasta sauce, and whatever else I can figure out how freeze for the autumn and winter. Calorically speaking, this isn’t much. But if you zoom out, a lot is happening.

Growing (even some) of your own food is a systems-level change. It’s not just about the calories you add into your family’s diet. It’s about the produce you give to friends and the trades you make with your neighbors. It’s about the pollinators, microbes, and worms you work in collaboration with. It’s the time you spend not shopping, scrolling, comparing — and the “waste” you divert into rich, nourishing compost. It’s the frustration, the friction, the discomfort you learn to tolerate. The awareness you build of the seasons, the land, and your place in it. The food is just the end-product.

In a hyper-individualized world, I think learning to see yourself as part of a system is a radical and deeply reassuring act. Which is why going home with a basket of vegetables I grew makes me feel richer than pretty much anything else.

Getting strong

At the beginning of the year, I was thinking about hiring a personal trainer. I had lingering hip pain since pregnancy, and the consensus was that the entire left side of my body was weak and out of whack. I thought perhaps paying money to someone would make me more consistent about the haphazard strength training I was already doing.

But then my frugal brain said ‘no, we do not have the money for that.’ Instead, I started going to the strength classes at my local no-frills gym. The classes are filled with a rag tag-bunch: retired guys who have a lot of opinions, tired moms with not a minute to spare, and post-menopausal women who I’m sure are stronger than all of us combined.

What I love so much about it is that every single time, despite the odd discordance of the group, everyone helps everyone else set up and tidy up the weights and equipment. The retired guys often start setting up my spot before I can even put my phone and keys down. An unlikely act of care!

And the payoff to my quality of life has been huge: being able to carry my four year old up a hill without paying for it in back pain later is a triumph. Lugging five loads of wood chips or manure in a wheelbarrow to my allotment plot makes me feel like a badass. Sleeping on my left side again without hip pain feels like freedom. Getting stronger has made me feel capable, powerful, and grateful for my day-to-day existence in a way that money can’t buy. The price was moderate consistency (and a £34 a month gym membership.)

Not going anywhere

A few months ago, someone asked me if I was going to book a foreign holiday after I met my book deadline. I told them no, we have a mortgage and childcare and, pointedly, did I mention my husband lost his job for the second time in a year? She countered: What about a cheap holiday? I’m not sure what financial reality she lives in, but where I live, there is no longer such a thing as a cheap foreign holiday anymore.

In my socioeconomic milieu, going on a summer holiday in the UK is kind of a thing. And to give you an indication of my privilege: this is the first summer in about 15 years of living here that I won’t be getting on a plane. Instead, we went camping in the Lake District, and we’re going again in August (this time with another family because that is a far superior way to go camping).

Look, do I want to go on holiday somewhere nice? Yes, I very much do. I had a moment of weakness in June and started looking at where we could possibly go in August, but then I thought better of it. I am ultimately way too cheap to spend minimum £3,000 on a holiday with a four year old that will almost certainly result in less sleep and rest than I could get at home.

Instead, the paddling pool is basically always out, the ice cream policy is liberal, and we eat a lot of dinners on the grass outside our house. Sometimes I wonder: we didn’t spend £3,000 to be here, and we’re not at constant risk of being too overstimulated to have a nice time. Maybe, for now, this is kind of enough?

Reading in the sun

If there is a single metric by which I want to measure the success of my life, it is this: How much time per week to I get to spend reading a book in the sun. This, honestly, is all I want out of life. It’s when I feel most calm and at ease. You could take me on the most high-end holiday in the world, and I’d simply ask: So when do I get to read in the sun with a glass of rosé? (I’ll admit that I am a snob about the kind of rosé I drink, both at home and abroad.) Granted, it’s only available to me some months of the year, but I’ve noticed how I’ve created a life where I there is not a lot stopping me from doing this most days of the week — I can even consider it “work” in some loosely-defined way. I don’t really think I can ask for much more than that.

The rich husband question

I was at an outdoor sauna on an urban farm with my friend Marina when she visited recently, and she asked me: If you could do anything in the world without worrying about money — basically if you had a rich husband funding your whole life — what would you do? I thought for a moment and, somewhat surprisingly, told her: Pretty much exactly what I’m doing.

Of course, day-to-day, my life is filled with things I don’t want to do. But if I removed all that, the work I do primarily to earn money, the strife and inconvenience and drudgery, what on earth would I have to write about? When I really think about it, a rich husband would probably be pretty terrible for the state of my copy.

What I keep coming back to is this: The goal, for me, is not the book deal or the follower count or the bestselling newsletter or earning loads of money from the things I make. It’s certainly not to have a bigger and bigger house with nicer and nicer cars — all of which really just creates ever more bullshit to deal with, doesn’t it?

The goal is to live a fully embodied creative life. One where I get to spend enough time away from a laptop to feel like I am in relationship with the world around me. That I am engaged in a feedback loop of curiosity and creation. A life where I keep a record of my days, my failures, my epiphanies with the things I create, the ripples (both small and big) they form, and the conversations they spur. That’s the goal. It’s a feeling, a way of being, not an outcome. None of it requires a great deal of money. Which is why, by that metric, I feel wealthy beyond measure.

An August discount

I keep everything I write in this newsletter free to read — it just feels better for me that way. But I also happily receive the support of paying subscribers who give me the luxury of time to write it. In fact, being paid any amount of money to write this thing is one of the great pleasures of my life.

Every August, I run a discount: 50% off an annual subscription. Annual subscriptions are the cheapest way to support my work, and for the next four or five weeks, it’s just $15 (or the equivalent in your currency). I don’t make promises about how often I publish, and you rarely get anything extra in return — except for my deep gratitude in this funny little energetic exchange. Thank you for reading. 🍓

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Please buy Sarah’s gorgeous book, I Eat the Stars: How to Live Beautifully in a Collapsing World and subscribe to her Substack This Is Precious. Here’s her post about the Paris heatwave I quoted.

I don’t really give a shit about football. At times in my life, I’ve thought the whole thing is kind of stupid, a way for British men to access deep emotions in absence of any other socially acceptable means.

Alas, I am now married to one of those British men. Despite checking the score of his chosen Premier League team (Liverpool) week to week, he doesn’t actually watch the games. Too much strife. However, he has a policy that I now also adhere to: We pay attention to the Euros and the World Cup.

All of this is to explain how I ended up lying in bed on Monday morning watching the 12 minute highlights of the England vs. Mexico game, which took place at 2am our time. I have never, in my entire life, cared enough to do such a thing. We actually had a terrible night prior — up multiple times dealing with bad dreams and accidents, you know the drill — so the news of a win, served alongside tea, was a balm. In the spirit of deeply-ingrained self defeatism that everyone in England must share, I had resigned myself to the idea that there was no possible way we were going to beat Mexico on Mexico’s high-altitude turf.

But beat them we did. And though football certainly has its beautiful moments of athleticism, it’s not actually the game I’m interested in — but rather, the paroxysms of celebration that follow. I just cannot get over the unhinged joy of a bunch of blokes belting Wonderwall together in a stadium halfway across the world. Or chanting Hey Jude to lionize Jude Bellingham at 4am in a pub. The joy and belonging contained in that act. The hope and the triumph. At this particular moment in time, it feels, to me, like an antidote to everything that’s bad. I could watch it all day.

This, after all, is who we are. As I learned reporting my book, some evolutionary anthropologists call this the “social toolkit,” a range of behaviors build trust and cooperation with lots of people at once, because they feel very good when we do them: chanting, singing, dancing, cheering among them. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim had a similar term for this, “collective effervescence,” or that buzzy feeling you get when united with a crowd in a shared aim.

In addition to being fun, it’s a huge evolutionary advantage, and part of the reason we are so profoundly pro-social, and therefore so demographically successful as a species. There’s there’s a catch, though: it only works if we do it in person. There are scientific reasons for that, but for now suffice it to say: We are not just made of brains, but also bodies and spirits.

The author has been posting on similar lines on his Instagram recently: videos of people chanting, singing, emoting together in shared collective space. (Here’s one of a spontaneous Star Spangled Banner sing-along on the NYC subway. I dare you not to smile.) Last Friday, there was a music festival at the large park near our house. I met a friend at the pub with our kids for dinner and, ahead of Pitbull’s set, everyone was walking around our corner of north Leeds in bald caps and suits and ties. It was so dumb! So silly! People were so amped for Mr. Worldwide! I didn’t go to the gig, but I felt effervescent all the same.

This is the type of stuff that many of us are missing from our lives: shared experience in a defined space. We used to get it from church or temple, from seasonal rituals, from dancing at the village fête. And we used to do it often enough that most of us still inhabited the same baseline reality about the state of the world.

The feeling these kinds of experiences provoke is one that doesn’t serve those in power. We’re incentivized to give it up because we generate more value at home on our devices, asking inane questions to an LLM, outsourcing all tasks, mistrusting our neighbors, needing one another less and less so we buy more and more.

FIFA is making a boatload of money from the World Cup, to be sure, but the emotion that the game stirs up, the shared history and identity that it denotes, feels, in England at least, like it touches somewhere deeper than profit. And I think the reason it is so delightful to watch is because the enormous spectacle of it reminds us that that is available to us.

I can say with some authority — because I’m very nearly done writing an entire book about it — that we have to work a bit harder to both seek out and create the experiences that give us that feeling now. But they’re still there, I promise you. We don’t need data or peer reviewed studies to prove it. We just have to leave the house.

And sure, you could reasonably argue that this football hooliganism often goes too far, and that the extreme version of what I’m romanticizing here looks like ugly forms of nationalism or tribalism or whatever. But I just don’t have it in me to problematize or overthink it this week. It just feels good. So I’m going to sing along. Come on England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 💪

Sarah Wilson on collapse and how to live now

I’m so excited that will be joining me on Substack Live this Thursday July 9 at 1pm UK time (that’s 8am EST and 2pm CET). We’re going to be discussing her book I Eat the Stars, about how to live beautifully in a collapsing world.

I’ve admired Sarah’s work for a long time — even in the days before Substack, in fact! So I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Her recent dispatch from the heatwave in Europe is a great example of how Sarah understands exactly where we are, and is courageous enough to tell the truth about it.

To join, look out for an email in your inbox just before the event starts. Or simply open Substack in your browser or app at the start time — you’ll be prodded in your notifications tab or in the app to join. If you miss it, or your time zone doesn’t allow, I’ll post a link to the recording in the few days after.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work.

A few months ago, someone asked me to provide a photo to accompany a short Q&A interview I’d done. I sent a selfie I’d taken more than a year before, of me sitting on the bench outside of my house, squinting into the sun.

When the piece came out, a caption had been added to the photo. It complimented my refreshingly natural face and complexion. In other words, the face of a person who plainly does not look like she’s in her early 20s anymore.

I have no doubt that the person who wrote the caption meant it as a compliment. With some focused mental effort, I managed to take it as one. But this fleeting piece of internet content represented a shift for me: One where I realized that my decision to not inject things into my face isn’t just a personal preference anymore, or the default state of being a human. My face is now a stance that other people can see I am taking, without me saying so.

There are a million essays justifying why women do or do not choose to inject things into their faces, and I’ve resisted the urge to add to this particular genre. It’s too often cloaked in feminist language that, at this point, means absolutely nothing to me. It’s also a topic rife with contradictions and hypocrisy. I spend roughly four minutes putting make-up on my face most days and I use retinol — why am I drawing the ethical line at neurotoxin?

But there is a creeping feeling in life these days that if you don’t acquiesce to how fast everything’s changing, if you don’t sign up whole-heartedly to the myth that everything can get better and faster and greater and younger forever, then you are a fucking loser. Reese Witherspoon is in my algorithm telling me in her chirpy feminist lilt that ladies like me better learn to use AI, lest we get left behind by the big powerful rich guys. Using AI is feminist now, actually! Just like botox!

The writer and conservationist Wendell Berry once wrote1 that “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” He wrote those words in 2000, and they remain a crude yet helpful rubric with which to assess the many choices we’re faced with a quarter century later.

I have spent much of the last year or so with a sense of disorientation — some days it veers into an acute feeling of grief— when I observe how few people seem to realize what they are giving up when they choose the machine over the creature. I watch people go along with this or that, without giving one single thought to the value systems, incentive structures, and trade-offs that accompany it.

I’ve spent a staggering amount of time thinking about where this leaves me. Who am I now? Am I too sensitive? Am I actually the crazy one? Why do I sometimes feel like the only person who doesn’t want to go the way of the machine? And how did this happen so quickly?

By the standards of optimizing aesthetics to help succeed in the machine, botox is, at this point, incredibly passé. We’re living in the “age of the needle,” as The Atlantic recently put it. You can get injectables in a strip mall on your lunch break now. “Baby botox” is marketed to 20 year olds as preventative. And now that the masses can afford to smooth their foreheads and delete their eleven lines, the rich have moved on to deep plane facelifts. The result of the latter being the ubiquitous “forever 35 face” that makes people look very hot, yes, but also vaguely anaesthetized.

Which is why I write this now: Whereas once a woman may have written an essay defending her right to botox, it now feels more urgent, at least in my social milieu, to do the opposite: Defend one’s choice not to.

***

Most of the people I see in the world as I walk around each day have not injected things into their faces. The writer wrote a great piece where she did some back-of-the-napkin math to put forward the encouraging idea that “96% of adult women in America are not getting Botox.”

And yet, the faces (real and AI-generated) that we’re relentlessly served in the algorithm, the advertisements and sponsored content paid for by pharmaceutical and beauty companies, the articles in the increasingly billionaire-owned media, the celebrities and influencers who sit atop our visual and popular culture tell us otherwise: Everyone is doing it.

In her piece, Nahman calls this the botox psyop: “Our impression of what ‘everyone is doing’ shapes our view of society at large, and by extension, our place in it.” she writes. The perception is that the choice has been made for us. Witherspoon was using the same tactic in her now-viral (and much maligned) AI video: use it, or risk irrelevancy.

The truth is I sent that year-old selfie to accompany the Q&A because I didn’t have many other options to choose from. Once I had my son at 32, and realized that exhaustion is not just a newborn phase thing but a baseline norm of modern parenthood, I basically stopped taking pictures of myself unless my son is also in them.

My camera roll has loads of these — his ebullient youth right next to my face, justifying my exhaustion. I wonder how much of my gradual reluctance to show my face online over the last half decade is because of the psyop itself. Because my natural age, at just 36, has already parted ways with what the machine wants. And even though I am committed to the side of creature, I have still internalized the idea that actually looking like one means I should hide myself away.

In pieces like this one, there is usually a disclosure that good feminists (meaning ones who presumably don’t want to get cancelled) include. They say something along the lines of: While this is my choice, everyone has the right to choose what they want to do with their own body. In other words: Don’t worry! I’m not judging you!

So sure, everyone has the right to do what they want with their own body. But I’m done pretending that the choice to participate in all of this is neutral, that it doesn’t extend beyond the individual. Nor do I think it’s remotely intellectually honest to frame the choice as somehow feminist.

Botox can be a useful adaptation2 to a patriarchal system that harms women (and men) by saying the former is only valuable when they are young and hot. I do understand why some women choose to make that bargain — it’s hard maintaining one’s principles in this economy. But we have to acknowledge that by doing so, we have, in about a decade or so, shifted botox from something that 45 year old women consider doing to something that 25 year olds do.

This direction of travel is not, as Tressie McMillan Cottom put it, a “positive societal indicator.” It’s the psyop working exactly as it was intended to.

***

Writing the first third or so of my book — about how we lost the ancient piece of human infrastructure that is the village — made me think a lot about the opportunity costs of modernity. Capitalism has taught us we can have it all. If we take the pill, or buy the thing, or move across the world for an opportunity, we can inexorably improve our existence with no discernible downside. It’s a fairly banal point, but it’s remarkable how infrequently we say it out loud: By investing in one pursuit, one set of values, one path, we do so at the exclusion of another. We cannot actually have it all.

I don’t deny that I would look better with botox. I would love to notice my forehead and smile lines less on Zoom calls (I actually got bangs cut in a year ago to help with this.) But despite that, I’m acutely aware of what I will give up the moment I sign onto injecting things into my face to look younger, presumably for the rest of my life: money, time, headspace — all those things, yes. But also the belief in my own inherent goodness. A sense of freedom. And above all, my deep, embodied sense that I am connected to everything and everyone, in a elegant cycle of life and death, growth and decay, expansion and contraction.

What I am seeking is not success in the machine, but liberation from it. I’ll admit that it is hard to eke out, even in small pockets, and there are all kinds of ways that I still lose the battle. But injecting something into my face, which constrains my ability to fully express myself, and has no other discernible benefit but to make me more attractive to an extractive system that profits off my own feelings of inadequacy? I just can’t find a way to justify it to myself.

I fear it’s cliche at this point to say I want my face, my body, my very being to be a record of the life I’ve lived, the wisdom I’ve attained, the fucks I no longer have the energy to give. But it’s true. I want my nature as a creature to remain legible and visible to other people, if only faintly so, as a kind of permission slip. Because one day, maybe long after I’m gone, the machine will run out of fuel. And people will have to go looking, to remember how to exist in another way. And I think the creature will still be there, doing what it’s always done, sustained all along by its irrepressible, renewable nature.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work — it gives me the time, childcare, and headspace to write essays like this one.

“Writing a book proposal is a gamble. So then you might say, okay, well then why the hell would you do this? Why would you submit yourself to this painstaking, long process? I think that’s a really good question to ask yourself and put front of mind during your writing process. And I would argue the process of writing a proposal about an idea you believe in is fruitful for your creative life whether or not you sell it.”

Check out ’s Substack, The Book Project, for lots of in-depth writing about book proposals. The three posts that we referenced in our conversation are below:

You don’t just need a topic, your book needs to have an argument.
How to approach those maddening chapter summaries.
Hanna’s incredibly persistent journey to find the right agent.

As always thank you for supporting my work and book-writing process. Let us know what you found most insightful in the comments below.

I turned in the first draft of my book manuscript right after Easter, and after a few weeks of catching my breath and sitting in the sunshine, I’m about to embark on the edit and fact check. Before I do, I’m sending this grab-bag of things that I’ve been meaning to share, highlight, and promote. It also includes a hearty list of recommended reading, the likes of which I haven’t sent in ages. (If you’re just here for the links, scroll to the bottom and enjoy.)

As usual, this newsletter audience continues to amaze me with its grace, generosity, willingness to tolerate nuance. My last piece, A Project Will Save You, is now in my top three posts of all time. (It also brought quite a few new subscribers here — welcome.) I wrote it with people who had recently been laid off from full-time employment in mind, or people who might face that fate soon. But I noticed it also landed as a kind of call-of-arms to my fellow creative freelancers, who in reading it seemed to recognize habits and mindsets they’ve perhaps unknowingly been implementing for years.

No matter what camp you fall into, I think it just feels good to know we’re not alone in our valiant commitment to our shared human-ness. Spend some time in the warm and enlightening comments section if you need further proof of that.

One commenter asked a question that I wished I had addressed more directly in the piece. He asked (I think in good faith) what would be the point of creative careers in the event that everyone loses their laptop jobs? If everyone’s cutting back to survive, who’s going to be paying for the products of our creative labor?

Good question. If everything really goes to shit, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be around than the scrappy and frugal people I call creative collaborators. Because we’re going to need people who are practiced at ground-level networking, at using their hands, at organizing and figuring out creative solutions to problems without a performance review and quarterly budget to back and motivate them. We’re going to need villages — physical networks of in-person support that are well-established and can function outside of the market. Look at the creative and effective resistance to ICE in Minneapolis — which Adam Serwer dubbed “neighborism” — for a recent example of what’s possible when that’s firmly in place.

Many artists, creatives, caregivers, and ordinary folks who live outside of the framework of full-time employment are already doing all of those things right now, today. Those skills will directly translate to whatever comes next. I’m arguing that more of us should join them before we’re forced to.

And on top of all that, to quote Bertolt Brecht: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”

Want to write a non-fiction book proposal?

I’m going to be sharing more about my book-writing process in the coming months, about which I have lots to say! The first part of attempting to get a book deal is writing a non-fiction proposal. When I was writing mine (the second time), I reconnected with a former reporter colleague , who had just sold her debut non-fiction proposal and was documenting the process on her Substack, The Book Project. (Two of her posts in particular, this one and this one, really unlocked my process when I was stuck.)

Since then, we’ve been in a never-ending Whatsapp exchange of commiseration, encouragement, and the occasional primal scream via voice-note. Now that we’ve both turned in our manuscripts, we decided to take this conversation online in the form of a Substack Live. We’ll be talking about what we learned writing our book proposals, what worked, what didn’t, what was way harder than expected, and what motivated us to finally get it done.

It’s going to take place next week on Wednesday May 6 at 7:30pm UK time (that’s 11:30am PST and 2:30pm EST). If you have specific questions — about agents, formats, the process, how long it took etc. — we’d love to hear them in advance. Please comment below or hit respond to this email. I will send out a link to a recording of our conversation in a future newsletter edition.

Want to work with me?

With some headspace opening up on the horizon, I’m re-launching my consulting practice. This work has evolved organically in the last few years since I quit journalism, and now falls into two distinct categories:

Creative consulting calls for individuals

These calls are available to members of this audience. They are one-time, 90 minute sessions where we can talk about whatever you need help with. Past clients have discussed growing or starting their Substack, getting un-stuck in their creative practice, developing book ideas, getting feedback on a piece of writing, pitching advice, and developing a semi-cohesive personal brand online.

I love these sessions — I feel like I often learn as much as my clients do. They cost £125 or $150, and take place on Zoom. This rate is only available to individuals, not companies. Email me to book: rosiespinks [at] gmail [dot] com.

Editorial strategy for brands and companies under Novelist Studio

I quietly launched Novelist Studio with my husband in January. We’re both former journalists turned copywriters, editorial strategists, and published authors who help brands stand out in the attention economy with human-led storytelling and content that builds genuine connections.

So, if you’re one of the few founders, CEOs, or CMOs that hasn’t turned over your entire content operation to LLMs, get in touch. Call us crazy, but we still believe human beings want to hear stories told by actual humans, and we have combined decades of experience doing just that.

Things I enjoyed reading

• When my husband told me I had to read this New Yorker piece about a man breaking into jail, I thought “okay whatever.” When I finally did, I couldn’t stop audibly gasping. A truly incredible story. [New Yorker]

• If you’re old enough in internet years to miss longform.org, allow me to suggest it’s less polished 2020s offspring: the r/longreads subreddit. It’s worth checking weekly, as most high-quality longform pieces from across the internet get posted there. This thread in particular resurfaced a bunch of classic longreads I remember being assigned during my student newspaper days, like this one by the great Gene Weingarten which (I warn you) will haunt you for the rest of your days.

• Falling in love with someone from another country in your twenties and early thirties? Fun! Sexy! Exciting! Doing the same in your late 30s, 40s, and beyond? Usually pretty fucking complicated. A great piece by Elle Hunt, whose byline I always make sure to follow. [Guardian]

• “The more mobile we become, moving across borders and among cities, the more we hunger for the identity that once came from being rooted in place.” [NYT gift link]

• What does extreme wealth do to the brain? Nothing good, it sounds like. [NY Mag]

• “Around the world, different cultures view [mental illness] in utterly different ways, sometimes with better consequences.” [The Guardian]

• absolutely nails something that’s been bothering me forever: The increasingly thin, vacant, and smoothed out celebrities on the red carpet are so uncomfortable to look at because, despite all their privilege and access, they don’t look free. They look the opposite. [Fully Alive]

• If AI “tools cause atrophy of thought in adults, then we can scarcely overestimate the potential effects on a brain that has not developed those cognitive muscles in the first place.” Get AI out of schools. [New Yorker]

One last thing:

Friend of this newsletter has a new book coming out in May called How to Not Know. I love the book’s idea that increasing our tolerance for uncertainty actually makes us more resilient in today’s world than trying to guess all the answers right. You can read a free chapter of the book here, from Simo’s newsletter The Article Book Club.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work — it means a lot.

Subscribe now

One year ago, I wrote a post entitled “Everyone I know is worried about work.” Unfortunately, it has aged very well. In the last few months, more and more people with white collar jobs — or perhaps it’s more accurate to just say laptop jobs — feel insecure in their positions, unsure of their value to our economy and what the future holds.

I had to do a double take the other day when I read a headline about software company Oracle’s last round of layoffs. “Three thousand people,” I thought, “that’s brutal.” But then I got halfway through the story and realized it was 30,000 people. All laid off with an email.

Amidst all this, I keep having the same thought: Those of us who have built non-traditional, creative, network-based, portfolio-style careers are — despite our financial precarity — paradoxically well-prepared for this moment. While it might look like we’re being left behind by AI, I suspect we might actually be ahead of the game.

Because to be self employed in some kind of creative career for the past two decades (and probably before that) has been to hear a repeating message: The market does not value your labor. In my 17 years as a professional writer alone, it’s been the tail-end of the pivot from print to online, the pivot to algorithmic social media, the pivot to video, the pivot to the creator economy. With every pivot, the ability to make a living gets more difficult. This latest iteration, AI, is not news to us. What is new is that the logic of extraction that drives it has accelerated. Now, it’s coming for all the safe jobs at places like Oracle, too.

It doesn’t feel like too big an imaginative leap to say that we’re entering an era where the idea of stable, full-time, salaried employment that has historically sustained a decent life is not going to be a given anymore. One possible response to this — which I first offered last year and build upon below — is simple: Stop trying to outrun it. It won’t work. The logic of extraction will come for you anyway. Build something better, more grounded, more networked, and resilient. Some will say that makes you a luddite. I’m here to offer the idea that it might actually make you a leader.

But what does that look like? How do you structure a day, a week, a year when no one is telling you what to do? What do you aim for when salary progression is no longer an obvious goal? How do you figure out your lifestyle when you don’t get paid the same amount on the same day every month? What do you do when you realize, as I wrote last year, that no job is coming to save you?

I offer some ideas below, based on nearly two decades of (mostly) self employment during which I’ve answered these questions for myself over and over. I don’t intend to suggest that this will be easy or like some kind of lifestyle enhancement. I also won’t deny that the future may come with a fair amount of economic hardship for many people. I should stress that I think it fucking sucks that we are all facing this, and it represents a profound failure of all the systems our world is built on.

It’s imperative to remind yourself, over and over, that the problem is not you. We’re living through an “uneven ending” of the systems that have historically brought success and stability, and we can’t yet see what’s going to replace them. But we do have some agency in shaping what comes next. And we can use all of our human capacities — not just intelligence — to do so. I think a slightly more hopeful picture emerges when we start to embody that.

The trifecta that makes a life

My career experience has taught me that a good life is made of three components: The way you make money, the way you find meaning or purpose, and the lifestyle all that unfolds in.

When you have a stable career path with a set progression, all three of those elements are sorted for you. Even if your job doesn’t bring you any meaning or fulfillment, it usually keeps you busy enough that you don’t have much time to think about all that stuff. If nothing else, it gives you something to get up and do everyday. It also provides your income. And based on that income, your lifestyle is decided for you.

In the absence of a career like that, all those three things become suddenly disentangled. Part of the terror I sense people feel in this moment is confronting that realization. There is now a lot more to figure out than just how you’re going to get paid.

Your life obviously needs all three of these parts. However, no one says they have to come from a single source. Your meaning can come from acts of service, care, or creative work you do in your free-time. Your income can come from a patchwork of jobs or part time gigs that mean little to you beyond money, or from something you did not study or even imagine yourself doing. Your lifestyle may need to adapt to this new reality, rather than to the size of your compensation.

The important thing is this: when you disentangle these three components, your potential sources of meaning, your possible contribution to the world, no longer needs to fit into a for-profit company’s objectives. If nothing else, that fact should be genuinely exciting to a lot more of us.

A project will save you

In December, my husband got made redundant from a role the company had created for him six months before. It was his second redundancy in the space of 12 months. It was a huge existential blow, and another massive injection of stress for our family. Like many of us, he falls under what smartly pegged the “too young to retire, too old to get hired” category.

In the days immediately following, my husband instinctively did something I now see as kind of miraculous: He went to the garage and started woodworking. Carpentry is something he learned informally from his dad, and he did it for money during the pandemic (the last time the writing work dried up) but he hadn’t really touched it for a few years.

In between a futile job search, he spent all of January making a beautiful record cabinet out of some leftover walnut wood he’d been hanging onto for four years. It was only once he’d finished it, with Abbey Road spinning in our living room, that I realized what he’d really done: He found a reason to get up everyday in the midst of all the other bullshit we were dealing with.

“A project will save you” is actually his line1. It’s something he’s said to me over the years about writing. If you have something to come back to, something that’s yours, you can put up with a lot of other bullshit. He wrote his novel, Johnny Ruin, in 600 word increments every evening when he had a full time job working at Buzzfeed. I wrote two book proposals (one that failed, one that succeeded) on Saturday mornings at Starbucks and in tiny increments in between paid work during childcare hours. There was no guarantee these projects would ever see the light of day. But we did them anyway. Why? Because a project will save you.

That impulse to go to the garage and just start something is what differentiates us humans from machines. We need to feel we are making our way through the world, not just existing in it. We need to feel a sense of autonomy and progress that orientates us in time and space. And here’s the thing that all those people who are using AI to write their books and Substacks don’t seem to understand: The act of doing, creating, and plodding along is actually more important than the finished outcome. If you skip that part, you’ve just skipped the whole damn point.

Form a new relationship with time

If you’re un or underemployed, life kind of sucks. You can’t afford to do a lot of things. But what you do have is time. You do not need to spend all of your waking hours hunched over a laptop pretending to work, just because that is what you did in full-time employment. Use it to fully be in the world, and don’t feel guilty about it.

I’ll admit it took me years to do pleasant things within normal business hours and not feel like I should be doing something else. But I promise these moments are generative. They bind you to your own rhythm and nervous system. They help you access creative ideas and find solutions to problems that would never occur to you at a desk. So step away from your laptop for an hour or two. Sit in the sun. Move your body. Read a goddamn book. Tend to a project. Connect with friends. Lift heavy things. Grow a garden. Build your village. All of those acts will interact with and buttress everything else on this list. None of them cost money.

Do the next right thing

Creative freelancers don’t plan for promotions or five year plans. We put ourselves in the path of opportunity. We nurture relationships over time. We make connections, do good work, and see what happens. Some years are great. Some aren’t. But we know not to think too far in advance — the hinge points of our careers were often things we didn’t see coming.

If you’re staring down the abyss, it’s wise to actively stop yourself from looking too far ahead. Think about the next six to nine months, tops. Get a project to keep you sane. Make money however you can, even if it’s humbling. Write a list each week and do the next right thing each day. Stay tethered to the present and just keep going.

I can use myself as an example here. The truth is, I do not know if I will be making money as a writer or author in two, five, ten year’s time. (I do know, with great certainty, that I will still be writing.) But I know that the skills and outlook I amassed in the last two decades will be useful in other ways. At the present moment, I can see how the next 12 to 18 months of our family’s life and finances will play out. I can’t really worry about much more beyond that, and so I don’t.

Get out of the doom loop

There is an unseen opportunity cost of spending all day on the internet fruitlessly looking for a job: You don’t see the opportunity that exists elsewhere. I think a lot of people are in this space, and it gets even worse when the tenor of LinkedIn (at least in my algorithm) seems to get more and more desperate each day. Enter the doom loop.

Freelancers know the doom loop well. Nothing is happening. Everything is a rejection. People keep ghosting. When this happens, there is only one thing you can do: Shift the energy.

This is hard to explain if you’ve only ever been in full time employment. When nothing is happening, you have to make something happen somewhere else. Turn to new or off-the-wall ideas, new revenue streams, do cold-outreach to someone who has a problem you think you can solve. These opportunities or ideas can be unexpected, random, or humbling — selling stuff, walking dogs, the gig economy — but in the short term, that doesn’t matter.

These shifts in energy are truly palpable when you work for yourself. The amount of times I’ve manufactured some small amount of income elsewhere in my life, only to find all my original work offers move forward (and end up with way too much work at once) has been far more than I can count.

My husband is still technically unemployed. Except he’s not. He’s working with a local carpenter who he reached out to on Instagram. The hourly rate might be low compared to his other skillset, but he’s out of the house and off his laptop, meeting people, making connections, learning. This is not what he started the year thinking he’d be doing, and it’s been a scary transition at times. But he’s no longer looking for a job to be a perfect replacement for the one he lost because that’s not where the opportunity seems to be.

Build things that cannot scale

We’ve been trained by the modern economy to think place doesn’t matter. Only scale does.

I think we’re set to see a reversal of that in the coming years. More and more of us are going to divert our efforts to things that are constrained by place, rather than those that are promised to scale. And the perfect example of that, of course, is the topic of my book: the village.

Many of the lessons of the village are surprisingly helpful for your work life, too. In fact, the number one piece of advice in this emerging economy is simple: invest in your relationships, not companies. Leverage the people you know and the place you live in. It is the surest kind of resilience and sustainability.

And even outside of the way you earn money, look for ways to collaborate. Make something! Help someone for free! The reason to do these things may not be financial, but they provide another kind of security. Consider that so many of the things we work jobs to pay for these days — childcare, food, entertainment, therapy, single-family homes — exist because we lost the village along the way.

Get used to spending less money

You may be thinking: this all sounds nice but how are you going to pay the bills? This brings us back to the lifestyle part of the trifecta. Central to everything here is that you have to get used to spending less money.

Most people in a consumer economy spend money in a speculative way, assuming that the money they earned this month will be there next month, next year, next decade at a predictably increasing rate. If you’re convinced by the viewpoint I lay out in this piece, then you also have to stop living at the margins of what you can afford and save money whenever you can. Life is expensive and there will be many people reading this that have already done that. My advice is geared towards those who perhaps feel stuck in a pattern of spending that they feel panic about maintaining. The answer is: Stop trying to.

I find there is a weird joy in de-leveraging my lifestyle in this way. You may also find you need less money than you used to. You may not need the boutique fitness studio. The de-stress of manicures and facials. The expensive dinners with friends you haven’t had time to see in months. The excessive travel that is both carbon and energy intensive. We crave the convenience, immediacy, and novelty of these things when we are ground down, overworked, and disconnected from our purpose. It’s truly remarkable how expensive it is to participate in capitalism at its highest levels.

Make sitting with uncertainty a practice

I’ll finish by saying that I know how profoundly difficult it is to live with this level of uncertainty. Some days, the most practical thing I can do to prevent myself spinning out is to go to a free 15 minute lunchtime meditation offered by local Buddhist monks. Building that muscle — that ability to sit with how difficult this all feels — is a big part of this work. Remembering that I can surrender to it all, even for a few minutes, especially in the presence of other humans, has the strange effect of giving me a tiny bit of agency back to do the next right thing.

I think this is a conversation that more of us need to be having. Beyond the doom and uncertainty, how do we practically respond to this moment well using all of our human capacities. So fellow freelancers, polymaths, creatives, and scrappy folk — please add your ideas in the comments.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work — it gives me the time, childcare, and headspace to write essays like this one.

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While in London for work last week, I ate a kale chicken caesar salad that cost £13 and suspiciously claimed to have 50 grams of protein in it. This kind of “meal size” salad is something that, as an American in the UK, I’ve historically complained was not available. In fact, the place I bought it from was exactly like the kind of place you might find in San Francisco: high concept biodegradable packaging, a minimalist brand identity with an AI-generated name, and vast shelving space from which underpaid delivery drivers can pick up these large salads. The salad was healthy and filling but also made me feel oddly melancholic while I sat outside and ate it.

After the salad, I walked up Tottenham Court Road and turned right on Euston Road to head to Kings Cross to catch my train home. As I walked, I noticed the homeless encampment across from the big hospital. I had already clocked an uptick in the last year or so in the amount of unhoused people in London, but a fully-established encampment like this is something you never used to see here. Just like that salad, it reminded me of something you might see in San Francisco. Huh.

There are so many fucked up things happening in our world right now, I find it near paralyzing to figure out which one to write about — or indeed whether to write at all. But I’ve increasingly been thinking about everything that’s happening through a unifying framework, one that seems to be rapidly accelerating before our eyes: the logic of extraction.

Extraction isn’t my idea; it’s the operating logic of private equity which, by some estimates, controls as much as 20% of the US economy.1 The general gist is that everything in our world is driven by the impulse to extract power and wealth from one set of people or resources and move it further up the chain. The higher up the chain it goes, the more detached from reality it becomes. The further down, the sadder and more desperate.

Take that salad: At the bottom of the chain are the delivery drivers who are summoned via app to fetch the salad for a person like me, who for some reason believes they need to consume 50g of protein at lunch to work a laptop job. My £13 goes to the (also probably) underpaid person assembling my salad, then eventually up to the founders of the scalable salad brand. They are, of course, at the whim of their venture capital investors2, who have provided millions of pounds of investment in order for the salads to one day be available in every borough of London, and then, presumably, across Europe. So you can get a San Francisco-style salad in Paris instead of eating carbs.

Eventually, once sufficient scale has been reached, the investors will want more value out of the whole chain, and the logic of extraction will start to become visible to you and me. Because quality, nutrition, or a salad as a part of a ruthlessly optimized lifestyle was never really the point here. Extraction at scale was. The quality and protein content will drop, the salads will get more expensive, the workers more pissed off at entitled people like me, and the delivery drivers even more squeezed. Everyone, at some point in the chain, is extracting marginally decreasing value from one another.

No wonder I felt vaguely sad while eating it.

***

Extraction is all pretty straightforward when you’re thinking about consumer-facing brands that cater to millennials and Gen-Z. Or indeed, tech platforms — see Cory Doctorow’s similar theory of enshittification. But I’m beginning to see this logic everywhere I look: the homeless encampments, forced regime change in oil-rich countries, elite sex trafficking rings, ICE raids, the hyper-manipulated bodies and faces of female celebrities who appear on red carpets looking almost tranquillized.

To pick one of those examples: the widespread vile behaviour detailed in the Epstein files. I think this story has demonstrated such staying power because it’s hard to deny that it reveals a feature of how power works, not a bug. Because a lot of people saw a relationship with Epstein as a way to extract value, wealth, and/or access to power for their own ends. They extracted it at the expense of vulnerable girls and women — either by directly participating in their abuse and exploitation or by tolerating the plainly intolerable. Epstein moved up the chain and got ever richer as well as more insulated from accountability; his chums got whatever it was they wanted — funding, sex, invitations to weird private islands, connections to other rich people; and the women got abused.

As detailed in Andrew Lownie’s forensically-reported book, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s entire raison d’etre has has been figuring out ever more inventive ways to extract value out of a system — funded by the UK taxpayer — seemingly to deal with the trauma of his childhood and having no real purpose in an outdated monarchy. That monarchy, of course, is an OG model of extraction on a global scale. From the scale of the family to the scale of empire, it’s extraction all the way down.

I sense we’re at a point where the logic of extraction has gone so far, so off the rails, that it’s actually embedded into a lot of people’s consciousness. And it’s making everyday life feel bizarre and upside down in that uncanny £13 salads and homeless encampments kind of way.

I first wrote about my own collapse awareness in 2024, and that’s exactly what this is symptomatic of. It’s not the end of humankind, it’s the long tail of a system of extraction that most of us have been living under, even if we didn’t realize it. But in the last year, things have sped up to a dizzying velocity, which is why it’s feeling harder to sustain the fiction of our normal day-to-day lives. It’s harder to pretend that we can course correct from all this and be still living in a world that’s recognizable.

As wrote in a post that explains extraction very well: “[The] pyramid simply grew too top heavy to support itself. There’s only so much you can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down.”

Sitting at the tippy top of the top-heavy system is the conversation around AI. On my train home from London, I read a viral piece on Substack called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” which lays out a hyperreal and totally believable scenario for what might play out in the global economy in the next two to three years3. It felt so real, in fact, that it moved markets and spurred a selloff of tech stocks last week. Funnily enough, it talked a lot about the kinds of delivery apps that are integral to the business model of the place I bought that salad.

Pretty soon, the authors imagined, using AI becomes cheaper and more efficient than employing a white collar workforce. They estimated that workforce represents 50% of employment in the US, and in turn, 75% of discretionary consumer spending. That presents a problem: “The businesses and jobs that AI was chewing up were not tangential to the US economy, they were the US economy.”

And so, you get a situation where a few very rich men at the top have extracted most of the value out of our economy and into their portfolios, while the white collar folks have no jobs, and thus can’t pay for the mortgages and restaurant meals and home improvements and cleaners that the rest of the economy is built on. As goes the US economy, so goes the world.

I’m sorry if I sound alarmist. This is just a thought experiment and there are all kinds of variables that could prove it off base. But I find it notable that these authors caused such a ruckus simply by plainly articulating what the logical end point of this extractive system is. This really isn’t some big plot twist. If you’ve worked in any creative industry for the last two decades, this dynamic has probably already happened to you several times over. Now it’s just threatening to happen to everyone else.

But how could they do this, you ask? Won’t someone stop them? Maybe, but I mean, have you taken a look at the state of Congress recently? And if you only think through the frame of extraction, as the men in power in our world do, following things to this (il)logical end point makes perfect sense.

As Sam Kriss wrote in this incredibly well observed snapshot of the “high agency” men of Silicon Valley, the end goal is the only goal. They are not founding companies because they have a great idea or want to change the world anymore. They are founding companies to extract value. There is nothing — government regulations, morality, consequences, self control — to stop them, so why on earth would they stop? Creating a nourishing salad (or a liveable world) was never really the goal anyway.

Of course, if you believe in the reality of other things like the joy of process, the dignity of all human beings (not just high agency ones), and an embodied experience of being alive, then this logic makes NO sense. Why would you pursue an end goal if it causes so much suffering and misery when it’s finally achieved? And that is, I think, why we all feel so insane and unmoored in this moment. Forget the governments we vote for every few years — our world is actually run by the logic of extraction, which is great at generating monetary value and channeling it to the top of the chain, but terrible for human flourishing.

***

After my two days in London, I came home and told my husband I felt like the crazy board guy meme. (Perhaps I sound like him too.) Everything is connected, everything is fucked, what the fuck am I supposed to do?

My intense and sensitive brain does this periodically, and the deep focus required to write a book doesn’t help. I know when I start thinking this way, I need to stop thinking at all. Laptop off limits. Apps deleted from phone. Luckily, a weekend with my 3.5 year old leaves scant time for thinking or scrolling.

So I took my son to a playdate at his friend’s house, where we had lunch and I made small talk with his friend’s mom. Later that day, I had my friend’s two kids over in the afternoon because she desperately needed to rest. I told her that she was categorically banned from doing anything for anyone but herself while her kids were at my house.

I organized a very informal seed swap using my neighbourhood group chat, and my son and I sowed some kale and chard seeds that germinated on my windowsill five days later. We talked about the daffodils and the almond tree blossoming in front of our house. The next morning he ran to the back window to report a “very exciting thing outside”: Another daffodil had bloomed. Yes, I told him, it’s March 1 now. Spring is finally here.

At some point towards the end of the weekend, I thought about how, should the AI 2028 scenario come to pass, my weekend could have looked largely the same. (Maybe minus watching Love is Blind.) That’s because I spent the weekend doing a bunch of things that mostly exist outside of this system of extraction. Of course, most of them had to do with care, because that’s the one thing the economy steadfastly refuses to see any real value in.

You might balk at the idea of my pleasant-sounding weekend being framed in this semi-radical way, but I’m increasingly unapologetic about seeing it that way. Several news cycles ago, when we were all talking about the ICE raids in Minneapolis instead of the escalating war in Iran, I was struck by a line from a Minneapolis resident in this deeply reported New York Times Magazine piece: “I’ve been telling people, if you want to really be prepared for stuff like this that’s going on in Minneapolis right now, you need to know your neighbors.”

In other words, these horizontal networks and patterns of mutuality don’t pop up out of nowhere. You have to build the groundwork before you actually need them. You have to stop believing in the logic of extraction for long enough in your week to invest your time and energy into building something else.

When it all gets too much, I think about stuff like this: When someone plants a packet of those seeds in the coming weeks, the flowers will bloom and sustain the pollinators over the growing season. Or, they might eat the vegetables they grow and buy less stuff from the grocery store as a result. Then, if that person chooses to save the seeds from the spent plants at the end of the season, they’ll be able to grow another year of plants without spending any money at all, or trade them with a neighbor to grow something else. That right there is the opposite of extraction. It’s regeneration. It sounds poetic and kind of cliche, but it’s also entirely literal. We cannot lose sight of the fact that this is the way things are designed to work.

This is the work of our moment, I believe. Not saving seeds, but to find ways to circumvent this logic even while we still have to exist under it. This has been the message I’ve been writing about, in various ways, for several years now. It’s what my book is about. No one is going to do it for us, though. The top of the chain doesn’t even believe an alternative exists. But I do.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, the cheapest way is to do that is to upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. Thanks to those of you who already pay to support my work — it gives me the time, childcare, and headspace to write essays like this one.

We had a technical issue at the beginning (no audio) so I had to restart. Skip to about 7:45 in the video above to get to the part where you can actually hear me.

The conversation covered:

• How to think about the balance of power, prestige, and team when reaching out for interviews and other creative collaborations

• The mechanics of reaching out to someone. How to do it, how not to do it etc.

• How to format a cold email to someone, including what to include, maximum length, and making your ask clear

• Why everything you want is on the other side of following up

• The importance of manners, diligence, and respecting other people’s time

• On taking big swings and backing yourself

Let me know in the comments if you found this useful. And for those of you who are newer paid subscribers, here’s the last workshop I did.

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Hello paying subscribers,

Just a reminder of the workshop I’m offering this Thursday, February 19 at 7pm GMT. You should have received an invitation to add it to your calendar in a separate, automated Substack email right around the time you received this one. If you can’t join us live, don’t worry: I will be sending the replay out to the paid list on Friday along with some accompanying notes.

I wanted to just take a moment to articulate why I’m offering this particular workshop at this particular time. In working on my book, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting. What that means is reaching out to people who are, by all accounts, more important, educated, prestigious, and in-demand than I am. It’s been more than five years since I was a reporter who was doing this kind of thing day in, day out, so it’s been a muscle memory I’ve had to get back into. Finding the rhythm of it, not getting discouraged by the rejections or silence, finding the right blend …

Read more

I have planned for some time to send an update of my book-writing process. All being well, I’ll be turning in a full manuscript just as this long, cold winter turns to spring, having written the first draft in just shy of 10 months.

Each time I think about what I want to share about this process, I worry it will sound like I am writing on a mountaintop, in perfect creative flow, bringing my vision to life without being totally torn up by what’s going on down on the ground. I worry I will sound like those insufferable people who post their enviable morning routines, all soaked chia seeds and ceremonial matcha, rather than my personal reality of being woken up at 5:50 am every single day by a three year old committing some act of destruction.

Here’s what I’ve learned: A book isn’t something you write so much as you live. The project has to be metabolized alongside your life, shaping you as much as you shape it. There are countless disruptions and frustrations that block your progress, especially if you are a caregiver. And then there are the unrelenting heartbreaks of our era, and the looming question of what the world will look like when the book you are writing is actually released into it. In many ways, I am writing a book called How To Build a Village because that project is literally the only sane response I can think of to the devastating reality we live in. It’s the only thing I can get behind.

One of the questions that I keep asking myself, and feel compelled to articulate in writing, is this: Given the rapidly-changing state of our world, what is the point of writing a book in 2026? Not my book, but any book.

There are a lot of potential answers to this, which would vary based on the writer, the deal they got, and their overall career picture. But money, institutional prestige, brand-building, and reputation might be the leading assumptions. In fact, I find it very curious that people who don’t write (or even necessarily read) still seem very impressed when you tell them you are writing a book that will be released by a major publishing house. For whatever reason, in our relentlessly digital world, the physicality of a book still holds a lot of psychic weight for people.

While the tangible and durable nature of a physical book does appeal to me, these aforementioned things really aren’t my primary motivators. There are, after all, a lot less painstaking and unpredictable ways to earn a living, and if I cared about prestige I probably shouldn’t have quit my full-time journalism job six years ago to write on Substack.

So why else do it? Why not publish my book in parts on Substack? Or just enjoy my life and do work that doesn’t require me to sit at a laptop for way too many hours and to hasten by eyesight’s precipitous decline. This question becomes particularly urgent in the AI slopscape, where some days, the very idea of being a writer at all starts to feel silly at best and precarious at worst. When people can barely watch a two minute video and agree what they see anymore, let alone parse an author’s argument through 80,000 words of text.

This also weighs on me because the topic of building a village, of that exact term, has kind of exploded in the discourse since I got my book deal back in June. This is both thrilling and terrifying for me. Of course, this idea is not mine and mine alone! But every day I see Reels, and TikToks, op-eds, and Substack posts that are knocking on my book’s door — some of them using strikingly similar language to things I wrote several years ago, probably because AI helped write them. I would be lying if I said these bite-size pieces of content, in aggregate, don’t cause me stress. How will I make sure my book both transcends and folds in all this discourse? Will anyone still care?

There was a great piece doing the rounds on Substack last week entitled Text Is King. I entered into it cautiously, feeling a little too buried to be willing to have my mind changed by counter-intuitive interpretations of graphs and statistics.

But the author, , convinced me. He writes:

Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.”

You should read the full piece, because he presents the argument of why nothing can replace text in various compelling ways. (A+ for the Devil Wears Prada reference.) But the image of brain folds stretching and souls expanding captured why I’m doing this.

It sounds grandiose, and in a way writing a book is just that. You need a kind of delusional belief in your ability to present an argument in a way that’s compelling enough to hold a reader through many hours of their life. You have to sustain an intense level of focus while you live your whole life, in all its maddeningly complexity, with all of the world’s heartbreak happening around you. You have to believe in it that much.

I realized last week that what I’m arguing in my book — that it’s worth it to double down on the friction of other people, because we’re designed to do it, it’s how we thrive, and it gives life a meaning and purpose that is vital to surviving this moment — has a corollary in the act of actually writing the book. I have to convince myself, over and over, that it’s worth it to double down on the tedium of trying to capture my own personal transformation in the form of book — rather than a TikTok or Substack or podcast — because the particular work of doing that stretches and expands me in ways that are surprising and challenging to myself.

And to Mastroianni’s point, there is something that happens in that years-long process of expansion — in the thinking, the reporting, the writing, the editing, and indeed the living — that cannot be replicated in another more convenient or instantaneous medium. The long period of gestation isn’t an inconvenience to the finished project, it is the very reason the finish project may have an impact. Ultimately, I hope that reading about my own transformation will feel pleasantly stretching for you, that it will metabolize alongside your own experience, and perhaps catalyze a similar transformation in your own life. That is the reason I read books, and I’m finding, it’s the same reason to write one.

So that’s it for now. Far from being on top of a mountain, I am deep, deep in the hole, and I will be here for a while longer. I’ll let you know when I make my way out.

How we got here

Some of you are new(er) here, so I thought it might be a good idea to re-up some of the pieces that led to the book I’m writing. Reading them in order is kind of interesting, because you can see my own internal progression as I figure out what I’m trying to say.

I’m hiring a fact checker

I’m very excited to be able to hire a fact checker to help refine the book in early spring. I hoping to find someone with with prior fact-checking and/or editorial research experience who is ace at navigating academic articles, specifically in the behavioral sciences (anthropology, psychology, sociology). You won’t be checking the entire manuscript, but sections and portions I need particular help getting right. Of course, it’s paid — not by the publisher, but by me. You should know that I am a former magazine fact-checker, and wildly pedantic when the occasion calls for it, so you definitely need to share these obsessive qualities.

If this sounds like you (or someone you know) please email me with “fact checker” in the subject line so we can talk. rosiespinks [at] gmail [dot] com

Workshop

There are a lot more people who are dipping their toe into freelance work, side hustles, creative portfolio careers etc. Back in November, I mused on Substack Notes about offering another workshop for paid subscribers surrounding the “soft skills” that are becoming even more important in the AI era.

It’s going to take place on Substack Live on Thursday, February 19 at 7pm GMT. I’ll offer my own best practice when it comes to outreach, reporting, asking for interviews, collaborations, following up etc. In other words, how to attain the right blend of politeness, flattery, persistence, authenticity, and organization to ultimately get what you want (an interview, a yes, an answered email, a collaboration) without looking like a maniac.

I honed these skills as a reporter, and they prove useful to me every single day. They are the stuff AI really can’t teach you — and I notice a lot of people need them. The workshop will be very granular and specific, so you’ll come away with all my secrets from 15 years of working for myself.

It will be recorded and sent to paid subscribers (along with my accompanying notes) after the Live. If you want access, all you have to do is upgrade to a paying subscriber any time before February 19th. If you upgrade, you will also get access to my workshop from last summer: How to get your words out of your head and onto the page.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, you can upgrade to an annual paid subscription here.

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I don’t know about you, but I am decidedly not bounding into 2026. The last time I wrote, the year was wrapping up nicely. But then, more curveballs came, more uncertainties, more difficulties presented to our family in a way that, I have to admit, starts to feel a little bit personal. What have I done to you, universe?

I was holding it all together, but then, I just couldn’t anymore. I was done being resilient, positive, hyper-functional. I spent most of the “break” (lol it’s not a break when you have a toddler and childcare is closed for two weeks) being a version of myself that I don’t particularly like: Sunny to people I saw on the outside, and a live wire inside the walls of our home.

You don’t even need to know the particulars, because I’m sure you’re facing stuff like this in your life, too. Financial stuff, job stuff, the inadequacies of systems and bureaucracies that in theory are functional, but in practice, really aren’t. (Fortunately, and I stress this, we’re not dealing with health stuff.)

When you map the dramas of one life onto the state of the world — the way systems are collapsing, norms seemingly no longer exist, and the version of adulthood my parents enjoyed recedes a little more each day — it can start to feel really hopeless. I have written about this stuff in the last few years in an intellectual sense — collapse, the changing nature of work — but that doesn’t mean the emotional toll of it doesn’t sometimes land again anew, with full force. At 36, one of the defining experiences of this decade so far has been experiencing waves of grief for the world I’m living in, as I live in it.

We are a two writer household, and it’s a daily struggle for both my husband and I to quell the sense of doom that pervades our profession. And of course, it’s not just a profession for us, it’s what we do in our core. We tell stories. We believe they matter. We believe human to human connection is the most important component of that — the place where the entire enterprise rests. Beyond the low-grade panic of watching your profession recede, it’s also deeply wounding on a spiritual level to watch the most powerful, well-funded corporate entities in the world tear that apart. That they’re allowed to do that. That they don’t see what they’re destroying in the process. That so many people acquiesce. It’s yet another thing to grieve.

I don’t usually publish things when I am in this place. I sound too negative, and I’ve learned from experience to not write from the wound. But for days, I’ve been searching in vain for some kind of mental posture to enter the year with. Something other than the visualizations, resolutions, and manifestations I see on Substack Notes. One that is realistic about the state of things, the challenges ahead, and the fact that you can do all the right things and still find yourself in front of a mountain of shit.

I have a really powerful brain, by which I mean whatever I decide to direct my mental energy to, gets a lot of energy. Too much, you might say. And in the past few weeks, I’ve been directing my mental energy on the chasm that lies between how I want the world (both personal and collective) to be and how the world actually is. Call it The Gap. A Buddhist might tell me that, by dwelling here, I’m inflicting an optional amount of suffering (my own resistance) on top of the compulsory suffering that comes with being alive.

One thing I can tell you about the The Gap is the more time you spend there, the more you miss out on. If your brain is like mine, you can actually create a life that is only suffering and anguish, nothing else, in spite of the facts on the ground. Your capacity for joy completely disappears. Ask me how I know.

I bought my son a book of poems for Christmas. Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends, which I have vivid memories of being read by my parents as a child. It was one of those presents that was more for me than him; I knew I’d enjoy revisiting poems like Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out, but assumed he probably wouldn’t be into it yet. Turns out, he loves it. He keeps saying, “Mummy I want you to read me five poems.” That he is so interested in a black and white book of oddball line drawings and quirky poems published in 1974 — that it can handily compete with Spidey and His Amazing Friends, Paw Patrol, and all the rest — seems like some kind of miracle to me. The sheer wonder of that is precisely the kind of thing I’m liable to miss when I spend too much time in The Gap.

My husband and I went for a drink a couple nights ago when our child was at his nana’s house, and had the first substantive conversation we’ve had in a solid month. (That is an entirely true sentence only parents of small children will believe.) As we were talking about the year ahead, and our various problems that don’t seem to want to resolve, I admitted to him, and to myself out loud, that I’d spent the entire Christmas break in The Gap. He said he could tell. And then he responded with the most disappointing and reassuring thing he could have said: “You know, we have to enjoy this, too.”

That’s the mental posture I’ve been looking for. (I didn’t marry for money, clearly, but I married for wisdom.) I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely know how I’m going to do this yet. I know a lot of it has to do with maintaining good “top-line habits,” as they call them in 12 Step recovery. This seems apt, because The Gap does become a kind of addiction if you have a brain like mine. It also has to do with having small things to look forward to. And with figuring out a way to stop thinking of myself as so special, gifted, organized, or cosmically lucky that I too shouldn’t have to perpetually deal with hard things. I obviously have some work to do on that front.

But just having the reframe helps. It helps me be honest about what the job is. Things might actually not get better. More things will replace the ones that resolve. The suffering will continue to be mandatory. And yet, we have to find a way to enjoy this, too.

Thank you for reading. All of my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work further, you can upgrade to an annual paid subscription here.

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What makes a year? When I was younger, I would’ve told you it was all the big stuff: trips taken, countries visited, impressive people I met, goals achieved. Now, in the back half of my thirties, my aspirations are much, much lower.

Let’s be honest: There are a lot of elements of adulthood that are profoundly disappointing. But one of the truths about being a grown-up that I have been happy to learn is that consistency and repetition is at least 90% of the game. I’m thoroughly convinced this is life’s best-kept secret, probably because it’s too boring to be compelling. You can forget every piece of performance or productivity advice you’ve ever read — all you have to do is quietly show up on most days and do a little bit of what matters to you. This is true about so many things, but in my opinion, it is the only piece of writing advice that counts for anything.

put it well, as usual: “The central moment-to-moment challenge isn’t one of building habits, modifying your personality, or realizing your potential. Instead it’s a matter of coming back and back and back to the question of what you could do right now that would constitute living the way you aspire to live.”

When it comes to this newsletter, I published 21 posts this year. Just like last year, I did not achieve my goal of 24 posts, or two per month. Perhaps next year I’ll go for a three-year streak of underachieving. However, I did send a fair amount of words I’m proud of, a few of which I’ve revisited below; announced a book deal which this audience played a huge role in; and became more sure of what I want to achieve here versus what I definitely do not.

As 2025 winds down, I’m going to log out of Substack for a month-long break. Before I do that, I wanted to sign off with a list of things that added up for me this year. As you will see, none of these are high stakes. But in aggregate, they shaped my year.

Books

In January, I wrote about rebuilding the habit of reading in my life. More than any number, my goal was to make reading feel easy and natural again, for it to be the thing I reach for when I have an unexpected pocket of free time. On on that count, I succeeded. I rediscovered the unparalleled joy of ten pages of a novel before bed. I took my book with me to the pub for a cheeky half-pint on the walk to pick up my son on Thursdays — a routine that’s impossible to say no to! I engaged in the creative hunt of reserving my next book at the library, and trying to finish the book before it was due. (Thank you to various readers who offered up this tip — you understand my psyche well.)

Below are the 24 books I managed to read for pleasure this year. I didn’t include audiobooks, and I excluded a lot of the books I’ve read while researching my own book, because I have the distinct luxury of reading those during childcare/working hours. By the standards of people who track the books they read (which I guess now includes me) this list isn’t impressive. But by the standards of a working mom with a toddler who is exhausted by 9pm every single day and has very little free time? I’ll take it.

Creating containers

One of my more popular posts this year was a formula for getting more low-effort, repeating social events in your life. How to “keep coming back,” as I put it. (Don’t miss the comments section on that one!) At the onset on spring and summer, I wanted to create something like the low-key pizza and wine nights that were suggested in the piece. While I did this a couple of times, I found that hosting on a regular schedule proved too much for me.

However, what wasn’t too much for me was moving the social container elsewhere. So in the warmer months, the local sports club (which I wrote about here) became the place. Most Sunday afternoons over late spring and summer were spent here with fellow toddler parents, and all it took from me was a small amount of effort to make the suggestion. In the past, I would have seen this kind of admin — sending a text to the group chat: “Sports club at 4pm?” — as another thing on the long list of things taking up my mental real estate. But now that I see the importance of it, and how much can build from that small act of initiation, I don’t mind being the organizer at all. In fact, I’m counting down the days until spring when I can start doing it again.

A Sunday ritual

My husband trained for and finished two marathons this year. (Side note, he writes rather beautifully about running here.) Though he makes a concerted effort to ensure his very long runs aren’t too disruptive to the family routine, the fact remains he leaves the house for several hours on Saturday mornings. About halfway through the year, I realized perhaps I too needed a non-negotiable weekend routine to break up the early morning toddler shift.

In the past, I didn’t do this because I convinced myself that I could make my workouts more efficient, or I didn’t love the class offered at the right time. (A tip for my fellow moms: Stop making your hobbies and workouts efficient.) But I finally committed to a hot vinyasa class every Sunday at 8:45am. It’s actually not really my taste — lots of fancy transitions and intense postures — but the very athletic instructor says he doesn’t care if you spend the whole practice lying down, and I actually believe him.

In fact, the thing I love most about this class isn’t the sequence he offers, it’s the way I decide to respond to it. Depending on how I’m feeling, I make it easier and adapt it to my mood or energy that day. It’s a good reminder I can do that in life, too. I don’t have to do everything on my to-do list, I can shave 10 or 15% off to make it feel better and more nourishing. The whole thing has become a ritual I look forward to every week.

Watching time

I started wearing a watch again this year, after largely giving up on it during the pandemic. That, combined with charging my phone outside of my bedroom, and having analog clocks throughout our house, means that I drastically reduce the amount of time I have to look at my phone to figure out what time it is. This is such a small change, but it makes a huge difference. Each time I look at my watch is one time I avoid being pulled into a Whatsapp notification or other interruption I didn’t ask for. Plus, my husband bought me a tangerine orange Casio watch as a gift that is a jolt of dopamine when worn with my usual uniform of black/white/grey etc.

The £40 house project

One thing I observe on Instagram that I’m always mystified by is people who move into a brand new house and then start renovating it to their exact liking. Like, didn’t you just buy a goddamn house?! Where is all this money coming from? Because house projects have been largely out of the budget for us this year, every couple months we do what my husband calls “quality of life upgrades,” or small house projects that cost less £40 (or are free) and just require an hour or two on a weekend.

Changing the too-bright kitchen lights to warm dimmable bulbs. Getting a cabinet to organize all the detritus that collects by the back door. Putting WD-40 on the squeaky doors that always threaten to wake up our kid. Power washing our patio. Taking down the eyesore of a baby gate we don’t even need anymore. Putting some wood chips down around the bare patch of soil in our back patio that doesn’t get enough sunlight. And wow, the way these small things can improve your entire life. Sure, it’s not a kitchen remodel, but if you make a list of these things and cross one off each time you have a free Sunday, it makes a big difference.

Creative generosity

We went through a rough patch in late spring this year. My husband suddenly lost his job, then had to have surgery right before starting a new job. Freelance work was slow for me, and my book contract was still but a dream. It all started to feel very scarce. Around the time I was working on my popular essay — Everyone I know is worried about work — I felt like I needed to replace the feeling of scarcity with something else. So I decided to actively look for ways to be creatively generous again.

That meant saying yes to calls, even if they didn’t have a clear purpose. Going out of my way to send people positive feedback. Introducing people who might benefit from knowing one another. Offering feedback or advice for free if someone asked. In my twenties, when I was furiously building my career, I was great at this. I met people for coffees all over town, started unpaid creative projects with friends, and met contacts of contacts for no apparent reason. But I knew it did have a reason.

Creativity loves it when you’re open and receptive in this way — to other people, ideas, and possibilities — even when the return on investment isn’t immediately clear. By doing this, you are taking part in an energetic exchange that doesn’t have a ledger of transactions, but always pays dividends in some way. You start to embody a posture of receptivity that is essential to new ideas, mindset shifts, and, yes, very often paid work. Restarting this over the last year felt like receiving a piece of career advice from my younger self, and I’m so glad I listened.

Getting rid of the gimmies

Around the same time when money felt scarce, we also started getting rid of things, clearing out the garage, giving things to neighbors, selling things on Vinted, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace — just creating literal and metaphysical space. It not only shifted the energy, but helped us cover some unexpected bills. I find this also works if I get a case of what the children’s book series Berenstain Bears memorably called the “gimmees,” or a time where I am obsessed with buying lots of new, shiny stuff. The antidote? Go through your old shit instead! Give it away to your neighbors! Sell it! Fix it! Make space in your life! It’s just as satisfying and is a lot better for you, your bank account, and the collective.

Embodied pleasure

Sometimes I like to do things that aren’t good for me. Like, say, an afternoon can of Diet Coke straight from the fridge. (“Fridge cigarette” is undoubtedly my favorite phrase of 2025.) At a drinks party last week in London, I was reminded that the smoking section — the one with real cigarettes — is reliably where the best chat of any social gathering is, especially when you don’t know many people there. The fact that these things aren’t great for me is part of the appeal. I hadn’t really clocked this until this delightfully subversive essay reframed these moments of embodied pleasure as “a celebration of being alive by way of chipping away at it, treating the body casually in service of a life fully enjoyed.”

And it’s true, these embodied moments do hit differently in a time when everything is so fucking flat, denuded, and optimized all the damn time. They’re a contained physical experience in an era where the algorithmic expanse never ends, a recognition that our time is finite and therefore pleasure in this physical form is, by definition, worthwhile. Look, I’m not suggesting we all take up smoking, but this year, whenever I’ve found myself in such a rare moment — enjoying something that, by definition, can’t exist anywhere else but right now — I try to dwell in it, and let the sensation stretch out a little longer. Because why else are we all here, right?

In the comments, I know we’d all love to hear what small thing(s) you did this year that added up to a lot.

Whether you’re new here, or have been around for a while, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work in 2025. This newsletter is also the ultimate practice in little and often, and my relationship with readers here is a genuine source of meaning in my life. All my writing here is offered free to all readers, but if you want to support my work, you can upgrade to an annual paid subscription here. I’ll see you all next year.

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A year ago I hit send on a piece about becoming collapse aware. At around 4,000 words, it is the longest piece I’ve ever written in this newsletter and, I worried at the time, perhaps the most unhinged.

The piece went on to reach an audience much larger than my own, and I know it brought many of you here. A year on, I wanted to revisit it, in part to reflect on the remarkable and terrible things that have happened in the year since, and also to share how my feelings on the matter have evolved.

What follows is less an essay — and certainly not one I spent as much time on as that original piece — and more of an addendum. So if you haven’t already, I recommend you go back and read (or listen) to the original piece, because what follows will lean heavily on the framing and ideas I explored there. There are also loads of links from different thinkers embedded below, and so I encourage you to engage with their work as you think this through, as well.

The first, most obvious point I have to make is a sobering one: I think the idea of collapse is far more prominent in the mainstream consciousness than it was a year ago. And I don’t mean in the corporate sanitized language of management consultants talking about the polycrisis or whatever. I mean the average person more readily accepts that many of the systems that underpin modern life aren’t really fit for purpose anymore. More people plainly see that extractive capitalism is, in fact, going to reach an upper limit. The idea that we might be saved by the electoral politics that have defined our lives seems, even to writers in prestige publications like the The Atlantic or New York Times1, shakier than ever.

In my original essay, I tried to emphasize that the concept of collapse has a long list of thinkers who have brought to the fore. I tried to braid together some of the inputs that brought the idea of collapse to my attention slowly when I quit my journalism job during the first year of the pandemic, and then seemingly all at once last year.

Chief among those thinkers, of course, is . I was stunned (and thrilled for Sarah) when I learned Penguin, a so-called “Big Five” US publisher, had picked up her serialized book on collapse, which she wrote here on Substack. (It comes out in 2026, and I’m hoping Sarah and I will talk about it on here early next year.) It shows not only that Sarah made the topic real and resonant for so many people, including me, but also that it’s mainstream enough for publishers to see a commercial case for. This is no small thing. Sarah’s more recent Ted Talk was also recently featured on the Ted page and has deservedly racked up half a million views.

I’ve also hugely resonated with ’s writing on the “insulation equation” and the other ideas in his newsletter. There’s also ’s newsletter The Golden Hour; she’s also writing a book about “caring for others on a rapidly changing planet.” I recommend you give all of the above a follow if you’re watching this topic evolve.

So that’s where I think we are. If I were hitting send on that piece today, I would have felt a lot less nervous about it. I’m not saying that’s a good thing because none of this is great. But it is the moment we find ourselves in. Here’s what I’ve been doing with it all.

Learning to sit with hard feelings

When my son turned two, I remember rattling off to my husband all the milestones we needed to accomplish by his next birthday: ditch the dummy/pacifier, potty train, transition from a crib to a bed. When he turned three this summer, I joked that by four, our only hope can be that he has gained some small measure of empathy and patience. It remains a work in progress.

When you are three, learning that other people’s priorities and material realities might get in the way of what you want in any given moment is nothing short of a moral outrage. If infancy is about making a child feel totally secure, attached, and loved, raising a three year old is about introducing them to the idea — in a gradual, kind, and developmentally-appropriate way — that sometimes, life won’t feel totally secure and attached and lovely. That sometimes, we feel discomfort and unhappiness but crucially, we can tolerate that feeling and get through it together.

But in this project of kindly (and I do emphasize that I am kind about it) helping my son get used to sitting with discomfort, inconvenience, and the hard feelings they cause, I realized something: I actually need a lot of help with this too.

Parenting is full of these sobering realizations. I’ve thought a lot this year about how growing up with the norms of what I called “There” in my original essay — the lack of friction, the convenience, the perpetual growth mindset, the emotional avoidance — have weakened my own ability to sit with discomfort.

It’s why I take it so personally when things don’t go my way (which continues to happen all the time! wtf!) and feel dismayed when I can’t bend the universe to my will. This is essentially the myth of perpetual progress playing out in my own silly little life. I’ve actually enjoyed reflecting on that this year, and giving myself the same pep talk I give my three year old multiple times a day: This time is hard and uncomfortable, but we can get through it.

I can only hope it’s good parenting; I’ll let you know in ten to 15 years. However I’ve started to see it as good preparation for whatever comes next in the times we live in.

What kind of world do you want to live in?

Something that was totally missing from my initial essay was any mention of AI. There are two parallel conversations to have about it, I think. There is the financial reality that, thanks to the interminable logic of There, it looks likely to be a bubble (there are loads of pieces about this at the moment, but this is the one that convinced me). And then there is the way AI is infiltrating all of our lives.

The latter is what I have something to say about, because even if the AI bubble pops and stops propping up the entire US economy, the technology itself will stick around. Which means the norms we are sleepwalking into right now are going to stay with us.

I’ve been stunned in the last year watching so many people — people I’m friends with! people I love! — uncritically adopt the use of AI and LLMs in their daily lives. Not just for boring or banal things, like proofreading, a glorified Google search, or asking it how to fix a pair of trousers if you don’t know how to sew, but for relationship advice, legal advice, therapy, and creative inspiration. People are using it less as a tool, and more as a companion.

One or two decades ago, we could all be forgiven for not foreseeing the ways that venture-backed companies who promised to “make the world more open and connected” would actually go on to hijack our attention, emotions, and feelings for their own means and profit. But these days, we should all know better.

For disclosure: I use an AI transcription service called Otter to transcribe interviews, and I use ChatGPT very cautiously, mostly as a starting point for research when Google isn’t cutting it. Repeatedly, I find it to be something that is worse than just inaccurate. As a former editor of mine Kira Bindrim put it in The Writethrough: “It gets things wrong, and it gets things wrong with confidence.”

But beyond the fact it’s confidently wrong way too often to be reliable, the idea that someone would trust it with their innermost thoughts, feelings, and dilemmas remains inconceivable to me. Is it inertia? Laziness? Have people forgotten the essence of what being human means? Have they not seen the narrative arc of this movie before? I really don’t know the answer here, but it has dominated my thoughts in the last year.

If I were tasked with interviewing a big AI guy, I would ask them one question: What kind of world do you want to live in?

Because we are getting closer to the world they want every day. And yet, no one seems to be asking them to clearly articulate how bleak it is. It’s a world where caregivers are even more buried and disrespected than they are now, where efficiency is all that matters, and you can become a passive consumer (or creator) of any kind of slop you want, with all the friction and meaning of life removed. It’s a world where human relationships become entirely optional, and so we assume most humans are awful as a result.

I don’t want to live in that world, and I don’t think you do, either. Which is why I feel so intent on drawing bold lines around what it means to be human is in these times. When we use AI in this unthinking, passive way, we are allowing these people to set the terms of the world we live in, and only because they have amassed enough capital using the ruthless, extractive logic of There to force that upon us. I can’t tell you how emphatically I reject this, and how I encourage you to do the same, loudly and proudly, in your daily life.

A lot of the work of living Here, or even of building a village (which, hey, have I mentioned I am writing a book about?) is just that. It’s an embodied form of activism in which you live out the norms you want the world to have — rather than passively accepting the ones that have the most capital backing them.

“We are going to have to live here with one another”

The primary frame through which I think about collapse and the transition from There to Here is not through electoral politics. I’m not saying I don’t vote or pay attention, but the zero sum logic of that system seems intent on edging out anyone who is not on board with the requisite radical agenda, and I find it too frustrating to engage deeply with.

I also find the world to be a more complicated place than I once did. Call me problematic, but I’m able to locate much more grace for people with problematic beliefs than I could five or ten years ago. Plus, I no longer think it’s possible to separate our political beliefs from the algorithmic platforms we form and broadcast them on. ( has a great piece on this.)

However, I do believe any political response to our moment has to be consistent with what Ezra Klein (controversially) said in the days after Charlie Kirk’s murder: “We are going to have to live here with one another.”

“There will be no fever that breaks, no permanent victory that routs or quiets those who disagree with us. I have watched many on both sides entertain the illusion that there would be, either through the power of social shame and cultural pressure or the force the state could bring to bear on those it seeks to silence. It won’t work. It can’t work. It would not be better if it did. That would not be a free country.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Sam Knight, writing in the New Yorker, made an apt point when he said “the main fault line currently running through British politics is not to do with left or right but with whether voters feel pro- or anti-system.”

A useful mental exercise I keep coming back to as I read the news is separating the algorithmic avatars of repugnant ideas (Trump, Kirk, Farage, fill in the blank) from the many people who are drawn to them. We have to get more curious about what might make someone anti-system. We have to cultivate compassion for what brought them there. Because ultimately, though you may hate their politics, they are likely being harmed by the same dynamics of There as you are. And like it or not, we are going to have to live here with one another.

In defense of mystery

Some people take issue with the word collapse to frame what we’re living through. It’s too final, too definitive, too certain. I am sympathetic to that take, because the one thing I’m certain of at this point is that nothing is certain.

In fact, I’ve found myself recently doubling down on mystery, which is perhaps a natural thing that humans do in uncertain times. I refuse to believe that as our systems crumble, everything is doomed, and our future is foretold. There is still a tremendous amount of mystery and wonder involved in being alive, and I refuse to cede one bit of it.

Reading what one might call “collapse fiction” has helped with this. I was floored by Rosa Rankin Gee’s novel Dreamland, which takes place in the coastal British town I used to live in. She paints a near-future picture of collapse that felt so hyper-realistic and specific it was chilling. I could imagine every ransacked street, every high water mark, every corrupt yet charismatic politician. But she also told an epic love story, one in which humans do all sorts of brave, mad, heartbreaking, and beautiful things because, well, they are humans. The whole book is a reminder that it doesn’t matter how bad things get, we can still do that stuff.

Douglas Rushkoff has been saying something similar in reminding us not to cede to “intentional collapse.” That is, don’t believe the billionaires who have decided all is lost and they better start building their own, privatized means to escape this planet — literally, as he documents in his book Survival of the Richest. “They’re the ones who have given up on prosperity,” he writes. “They are living the nightmare. They are the pessimistic downers, who lack faith in the regenerative capacity of people, cultures, the planet, and life itself.”

I think he’s right. The kind of world they want to live in is the nightmare. So the job is to resist adopting their mindset. How? To sit with the hard feelings and strengthen our ability to get through them together. To practice, in small quiet ways, what life might be like when we run out of rope on this particular version of it. To double down on being human, especially when it’s inconvenient, time consuming, and full of friction.

It’s how I feel when I save seeds in my allotment garden, or feel moved while writing my book, or invite someone round for dinner, or go out of my way to help someone even when I myself feel stretched. It’s what I see what I notice a man playing a beautiful piece on the piano in the public library for no reason, or hear my son invent an extraordinarily creative phrase for something he doesn’t know the name of yet, or when I take a walk in the woods without listening to anything but the trees turn from autumn to winter.

This is the kind of world I want to live in. And while I’m still here, I’m going to fucking live in it.

A quick list of things around Substack

• Here is a link to my Live conversation with from earlier in the month. We talked about honoring and respecting our creativity in the dark half of the year. Thanks to the 100+ of you who joined us!

• If you’re looking for an “antidote to the consumer frenzy that has come to define the holiday season",” Anna’s kicking off her 9th annual advent calendar of making, doing, and being. More on that here.

• interviewed me for her Substack, Coffee With Maggie, where I spouted off a bunch of opinions about all sorts of stuff, which is one of my favorite things to do. I first articulated my feelings about AI in the essay above in that interview.

Thank you for reading. I keep all my writing free for all subscribers, but paying subscribers give me time and space to write on these topics, so please join them if you can. You can also support me by liking, commenting, or re-stacking this post on Substack, or the old-fashioned way: forwarding it to a friend.

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Anna and I talked about the respective creative seasons we’re in; some references of different seasonal models that inspire us; how we resist the pressure to be creatively productive at all times; the different ways we approach the boom and bust nature of creativity; and answering the big questions like how do we stay human, and who do we want to be in these dark times?

I mentioned ’s newsletter Being and Moving, which is where I learned about the Celtic Wheel, also called the English Folk Wheel. You can read about that — and her paid offering which meets every six weeks in line with these seasonal turning points — here.

I also mentioned this beautiful depiction of the Celtic wheel from artist Danielle Barlow, which sits on my desk.

Here is Kurt Vonnegut’s “six seasons” theory, which I love.

Thanks to the 100+ people who joined us! You can subscribe to Anna’s great Substack here:

Creative Fuel with Anna Brones

A weekly newsletter dedicated to exploring the intersection of creativity and everyday life with Anna Brones.

The most American thing about me is that I love Halloween. Fourth of July and Thanksgiving? I haven’t celebrated those in years. But Halloween is one American tradition that I have kept alive in the 15 or so years I’ve lived in the UK.

For the pedants, it may not be quite right to call Halloween American. Its roots are actually in the Celtic, Gaelic, and English folk traditions surrounding Samhain, which is halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice — the cross-over point to the “dark half” of the year. Traditional celebrations involved closing out the season’s harvest, lighting bonfires, honoring ancestors, and I’d guess a fair bit of debauchery.

But nevertheless, the candy-eating, spooky-decorating, costume-wearing iteration of Halloween we’re most familiar with is definitely viewed as an American thing in the UK — often derisively so. However with each passing year, the spooky index creeps up a notch, much to my delight.

Halloween was a big deal in our house growing up. My mom was formerly a Hollywood makeup artist, so our looks were thoroughly extra, and there was often a line of other kids out the door waiting for their Halloween glam. Our neighborhood was the town’s hot spot for trick or treating, and my parents would host a proper party every year. And forget those small plastic pumpkin tubs, my friends and I used to go trick or treating with pillow cases, and then return home to sort and trade our candy like little forensic accountants.

When I grew up and moved to the UK, I couldn’t shake my love for Halloween, but I didn’t really understand why. I didn’t dress up anymore — the American college student tradition of dressing up as a sexy fill-in-the-blank never appealed to me anyway. No one really hosts Halloween parties here, certainly not like my mom did. It’s even hard to find Reeses pumpkins, which are objectively the best candy thanks to the generous peanut butter to chocolate ratio.

Nevertheless, each year, in pretty much every place I lived in, I would dutifully carve a pumpkin and buy a bag of candy from Tesco in the hope that trick or treaters would arrive at my door. Each year, they did, and in greater numbers. And unlike American kids who might meet a single small piece of candy with, “That’s it? No king size?” British children still seem utterly shocked that you can just … walk up to someone’s door and ask for candy (or sweets, rather).

Last year, when my son was approaching two and a half, I hosted a very small toddler Halloween party and took him trick or treating for the first time. Walking from door to door in our neighborhood, I started to realize what I loved and missed about Halloween in my intervening adult years. Why — even when I was a single woman in my twenties with an active social life — I used to make sure I was home from work early enough on Halloween to hand out candy to overly polite British children.

And that’s because, in our culture, Halloween is one of the only days of the year where we actively prioritize the enjoyment of kids in public space. Where adults can express a childlike silliness, mischief, and creativity for the benefit of children — even ones who aren’t their own. Where we get to briefly meet our neighbors at the threshold of their private lives, warmly lit from within. Where we experience hospitality extended outwards, with nothing asked for in return except a cute costume. Where we indulge in the idea that not everything can be proven, that life has some measure of mystery you get to feel rather than see.

Even the death and decay of it all makes more sense to me now. On the face of it, it’s pretty weird that one of my neighbors has a dismembered plastic skeleton peeking out of their front flower bed as if it’s decomposing. But as the leaves fall, the flowers die, and the natural world continues its descent underground for the winter, that skeleton serves as a reminder that at some point, we will all do that, too.

I grew my own pumpkins from seed this year, and watching their progression — from freshly germinated seedling in April to a mature fruit in late September — has felt more grounded in reality than anything I’ve read on the news in the last six months. When I throw the flesh onto the compost pile next week, the whole process will start again.

The older I get, the more unrecognizable the world gets, the less of a cynic I become about these kinds of holidays. Sure, the plastic tat that descends on the retail sector from September to December is a crime against humanity. But that is not the only way to enjoy the dark half of the year. There are plenty of non-consumerist traditions to partake in that our ancestors would have recognized and delighted in as well: the harvesting, the feasting, the trickery, the singing, the gathering, and the sound of kids shrieking in the next room. This is the stuff we’re made to do.

Next week, Halloween falls on a Friday. I’m hosting another party, and hoping it might be as fun for the adults as it will be for the now three year olds. But what I’m looking forward to most is supervising the trick or treating — experiencing that rush of warmth each time a neighbor opens their door.

Two Lives coming up

I’m doing two more Lives before the end of this year. Mostly these are an excuse to hang out with fellow Substackers I know and admire. and I will be chatting about we can harness the dark half of the year (and perhaps the dark side of life) to fuel our creativity on November 6 at 7:30pm GMT. And in early December and I will be talking about how to find time to write when you are also a caregiver — a topic she has some serious expertise in.

Things I enjoyed reading

• Why are there so many Netflix films cast with A-list actors that are utterly unwatchable? A great investigation into how so many films got so mediocre. [The Guardian]

• “With its Cheesecake Factory outlets and newfound interest in comedy, Saudi Arabia is becoming more American—just as America is becoming more Saudi.” on the comedy festival in Riyadh is the perfect marriage of writer and subject matter. [The Atlantic]

• Is AI a bubble? I have certainly had that sense for a while, but my suspicion has been based mostly on vibes. Ed Zitron breaks down the numbers, rather convincingly. Settle in for a very long read. [Where’s Your Ed At]

• After a house burns down in a fire, people often say, “it’s just stuff.” But that’s not quite true. A really human story about living in the aftermath of seemingly endless climate disaster. [New Yorker]

• Does an official diagnosis help a person feel better? The science (and individual experience) is mixed. [NY Times]

Village links

This is a new little section where I’m just tracking current media related to the topic of the book I am writing: How To Build a Village.

• I love this Reddit post from a dad who instituted a rotational movie night after realizing he had no village, and thus needed to build one. The result? “By hosting chaos in our house once per month, my wife and I now get three nights per month to go on a date.” Yep, that’s exactly how you do it. [Reddit]

• A New York Times op-ed with a headline that I’ve literally written in this newsletter: “It’s not normal to raise children like this.” [NYT]

• The documentary “The Perfect Neighbor” is harrowing to watch, but also an illustration of on the social cohesion that comes from neighborhood kids playing outside. [The New Yorker]

Things I enjoyed listening to

• This conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing launched a million takes and discourse cycles. Rather than trying to find the winner of the argument, I think it’s a really valuable example of two people treating a disagreement as the beginning of a conversation, not the end. Worth your time if you missed it. [NYT]

• Loved hearing Arundhati Roy talk about finding the emotional truth of a story. I can’t wait to read her new memoir. [The Interview]

• And in brief: How to read like Terry Gross. This brought me A LOT of joy. [Fresh Air]

Thank you for reading. I keep all my content free for all subscribers, but paying subscribers help me keep writing this thing, so please join them if you can. You can also support me by liking, commenting, or re-stacking this post on Substack, or forwarding it to a friend. Thanks for being here.

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In early September, I was drinking wine with a few of mom friends while listening to a table of old men play music on guitars. We hadn’t planned the night to unfold this way. We’d been sitting outside on some picnic tables — surely one of the last nights of the year it’d be warm enough to do so — and decided to move in after the sun went down and we’d finished our fish and chips.

Once we got inside, there was a notable tone shift, as we realized our relentless chit-chat might have to take a backseat to the scene in front of us. Because what was going on in that room was honestly something you couldn’t take your eyes off of: a group of eight or so middle-aged to old guys sitting around a long table, each with guitar, taking turns absolutely belting out songs and sinking pints of Guinness. From Irish sea shanties to Bob Dylan to nineties rock, it was all happening. I would defy anyone to stay in that room and not find themselves singing or tapping along.

If you’re a sensitive person like me, this kind of open-mic night energy can feel really precarious to watch — the vulnerability! the judgement! the second hand embarrassment! But this didn’t feel like that at all. Instead, that room was vibrating with the authenticity, electricity, and delight of a bunch of old guys (English and Northern Irish ones at that!) working through their stuff in song.

The energy was the polar opposite of AI slop and algorithmic churn — it was pure human connection. Sitting there, I was overcome with emotion. I had the sense that this is the kind of stuff humans have been doing since, well, humans have been around.

A strange convergence

It’s a disjointed feeling to be writing a book that won’t come out for a while. It’s like a high-wire act of attention: each day you have to put one foot studiously in front of the other on this incredibly long task that requires deep, committed focus. Simultaneously, you must observe an unrelenting parade of horrifying and collapse-adjacent events unfold at your feet and somehow not lose your nerve. I find the same thought surfacing again and again as I make my pilgrimage to the library: What kind of world will this book even be coming out into?

One of the great tensions of our moment, the thing I see a lot of people grappling with, is how to respond to the idea that large swathes of our fellow citizens are more or less irredeemable, that they hold views that we just cannot tolerate. Political polarization is not new, of course — it’s certainly defined the political climate of my entire adult life — but as the actions of those in power become more brazen and depraved, the idea that you can be living among people who support such things becomes almost too much to bear. It starts to feel like there is no way back.

And yet, there is a strange convergence happening, one that not many pundits acknowledge when they discuss how political actors might best respond to this moment. We’re living right at the precise moment in history when interaction with other humans face-to-face has become, to a large extent, optional. When algorithmic internet defines not only what we see and think about all day, but by extension, how we actually feel in our bodies. When there is a massive ad campaign on the NYC Subway system (reportedly the largest in history) that suggests you can replace the friction and flakiness of real friends with a $129 AI pendant you wear around your neck.

You cannot convince me these two ideas — that humans are optional and humans are awful — are not inextricably linked. Right at the moment where the stakes of our civil discourse seem genuinely existential, where we need to draw upon all of our relational skills to find a way through really complex and fractured realities, those same skills are weak and fading fast. Before we even begin to figure out how we might change other people’s politics, we might try engaging with other people again, full stop.

Proactive human connection

So back to that room with the singing and the pints of beer. The setting where this took place was a sports club that’s a short walk from my house. It’s hard to really explain what this is to Americans, because it’s exquisitely British: A kind of pokey little bar and event room attached to a big, enclosed cricket field. The interior looks exactly like something that would host a middle school dance. (I’m pretty sure it does, actually.) The bar is sticky and the rosé they serve is undrinkable. It costs £30 a year to become a member. The cricket matches on Saturday seem to last all day because they take innumerable breaks for tea and lunch.

Despite these questionable aesthetics, this sports club been the scene of a lot of my social life for the last six months. Anyone who has young kids will relate to the interminable period of time that is the Sunday afternoon stretch before dinner, when three hours can feel like seven. So at the beginning of summer, we started going to the sports club for a pint right as the 4pm hour struck most weekends. Then, we started telling our burgeoning group of toddler parent friends we were going, and it turned into a little routine.

Because as it turns out, everyone else was grasping for a way to get through the hours of 4-7pm, too. The more families that turned up with more snacks and toys, the less hands-on parenting I had to do — funny how that works. It’s fair to say this was easiest and most successfully recurring social plan I’ve been a part of since Covid. Now that winter descends, I’m already missing it. There was very little advanced coordination involved, because it hit every note of the ‘keep coming back’ formula I shared back in February: The setting was low cost; the time horizon predictable; it fulfilled a need (killing Sunday afternoon), and it was easy to get to.

All of this brings me to how this might connect with the broader idea of building a village in the time of collapse: We must replace a lot of the time and headspace we give to these algorithmic platforms with proactive human connection of all kinds.

People have a resistance to this simplicity of this idea, I think, because it sounds like I’m suggesting you burst out your front door and find your friendly neighborhood fascist to sing Kumbaya with. But it can actually be a lot more subtle than that. How many times a day do you feel annoyed by the mere existence of other people? Of the way they cut you off in traffic? Of the aggressive man having an outburst in Pret A Manger for no apparent reason? Of how long it takes to make a plan with others in a group chat? Of the elderly lady who is, not so subtly, judging your parenting?

How many times do you think: I wish everyone would just be a sensible, nice person like I am! Or at least just get out of my way! I have these thoughts all the time. But as I work on the book and think about where we’re headed, I try to stop myself and mentally lean into the friction. To question where I got the idea that life should be seamless and without complication. To think about what a life without the inconvenience of other humans might look like. To find some curiosity, and maybe even some compassion, for the many people I come across who act in ways I find incomprehensible.

I, too, revile the policies of the men who hold power and have a chokehold over our attention spans today. But I simultaneously don’t believe that everyone who supports them is worth casting off — it’s just too simple of a narrative for me to accept. And I can’t help but notice how many spiritually impoverished billionaires profit when roughly half of us assume the other half are irredeemable; that addiction to fear, hatred, rage, and reactivity on both sides translates nicely to increased time spent scrolling. Not to mention how neatly it all dovetails with the lie that the phenomenal AI bubble is relentlessly trying to sell us (with the tech media’s help): You actually don’t need other people at all. Humans are entirely optional. AGI will be here soon to smooth out and replace us.

This is so antithetical to how we are wired to exist on a cellular level, I’m writing a whole goddamn book about it. And as I further research how we got to the horrible place we’re in, I’m realizing that this really is work right now. In our current moment, it takes actual effort to prioritize relationships with other people, even people you like. It’s an instinct that has been eroded, slowly and gradually, and then seemingly all at once. And it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that as social disconnection has increased in the last half century, so too has political polarization.

We need to rebuild and practice these skills, not only because it makes life better, but also so we can use them where it really counts. We’re not going to enjoy every minute of doing this, because unlike sycophantic LLMs, real people are messy, confusing, and challenging a lot of the time. But before we even get to changing people’s politics, I think it’s a worthy place to start. (Here is a small yet mighty example.)

When I ask myself: What kind of world will this book even be coming out into? I have to believe it will be one where it still feels good to sit in a room and watch a bunch of humans, no matter who they are, play music. I’m not letting that one go.

Thank you for reading. I keep all my content free for all subscribers, but paying subscribers make essays like this one possible, so please join them if you can. You can also support me by liking, commenting, or re-stacking this post on Substack, or forwarding it to a friend. Thanks for being here.

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There is no use in burying the lede here: I’m writing a book! It’s called How To Build a Village, and it’s about how to regain the physical, in-person support and extended kinship that our ancestors had by default, but modern life has drained from our lives. It’s part first-person narrative, part reported social science, and it will be published by Flatiron Books (Macmillan) in the US, and LEAP (Bonnier Books) in the UK.

In my twenties, during Twitter’s heyday, it seemed like the viral-tweet-to-book-deal pipeline was alive and well. Perhaps because of that, in my thirties — even after I’d quit journalism and mercifully stopped tweeting — I still had some vague sense that once you had a sizeable audience and viral essay or two to show for it, book deals were the next obvious (and very attainable) goal.

The reality I experienced was laughably different to that. Getting to the point of this announcement took a few years, one proposal that did not sell, parting ways with one agent, writing an entirely new proposal based on the seed of an idea contained in the failed one, getting ghosted more than once before I found my new (excellent) agent Emily, and then several more rounds of edits with her expert guidance before we were ready to go out on submission to publishers.

On top of nearly full-time paid work and taking care of a toddler, it took many hours of unpaid labor, thousands of words that never saw the light of day, and a delusional amount of self belief that this book not only needed to exist, but I was the one to make it happen. There were many times I was sitting in a shitty Starbucks on a Saturday morning — my husband having gifted me a couple child-free weekend hours to work on it — wondering why on earth I was wasting my incredibly limited free time on a project that might, once again, never see the light of day

However, there was a really clear reason I didn’t give up, and it had nothing to do with me. It was all of you.

When you’re attempting to sell a non-fiction book via proposal, you hear over and over that you need to prove to publishers that there’s a distinct audience for your work. This is understandably frustrating for writers, and I’ll admit, there have been times when I didn’t understand this. How can new ideas and emerging writers ever enter the mainstream if you have to already have an established audience before you even get a chance?

But when I finally got to the point where I was sitting in front of interested publishers justifying why this book should exist, this constraint started to make sense to me. In those conversations, I felt incredibly confident in what I was selling, so much so that I didn’t even feel like I was selling it — I was just telling the truth. I wasn’t waiting for validation, because I already had that.

Writers who become mothers often feel like they have to make a choice: Become a writer who almost exclusively writes about motherhood and risk losing your wider audience, or carry on as before, pretending that your intellectual and creative foundations somehow survived the transition unscathed. I couldn’t abide by that binary, and so a few years ago, when I started writing about my experience of becoming a caregiver and mother, I took a conscious creative risk: I wanted to do it in a way that would be as interesting to non-parents as it would be to parents.

Taking care of other people — the friction, the repetition, the cost, and the surprising rewards of it — is strategically buried by our economy and value system. So it’s no surprise my life pre-kid was almost entirely devoid of it. The writing challenge I set for myself was essentially to reach a prior version of me. Make her see that her life could be richer if she went out of her way to include the friction of care into it, even if she never went onto have a child. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it felt interesting to me to try.

But wow, you all really met the challenge. The more I wrote about it, the more my audience grew, and continues to. Though I don’t have hard data on the parents versus non-parents that comprise this audience, I feel like I’ve heard more from the latter category since I started writing about my experience as a parent. Every comment, every email, every piece of feedback helped disrupt the limiting binary I once feared.

So when I initially had the idea for a book of this particular title almost exactly a year ago, I knew it couldn’t be a parenting book. It had to speak to everyone. Despite the cliche “it takes a village to raise a child,” the village doesn’t make logical sense (not to mention historical or evolutionary sense!) if it’s only parents involved. Plus, parents aren’t the only ones suffering for lack of a village, everyone is. Many of your comments and contributions that I’ve previously featured in this newsletter were part of the proposal — and will eventually be part of the book.

When I talk about the confidence I had in those meetings, that’s where it came from: I knew this was the book that needed to be written, because you’d all proved that people were ready to hear this. That these identity categories which keep us suffering in silence, wondering “why do I find this so hard?” were perhaps ready to give way to something more mutualistic. To both of my publishers’ great credit, they immediately got it, too.

It’s an insight that not only shapes the book I’m writing, but more importantly, it has given me a much-needed source of hope in what feels like a terminally dark world. I’m writing this book because I really believe that we can do better than this, that we all deserve more support than we currently have, and most importantly, that we don’t have to wait for crumbling systems to get more of it into our lives.

What does this mean for the newsletter?

If I’m being honest, my publishing cadence has already decreased a little bit here, and that may continue for at least the rest of this year and early next while I finish the first draft. A lot of the interviews I had planned to use for this newsletter will now be reserved for the book, because that’s just the way these things go. I have great trust you will all understand. As we talk about a lot around here: creative output is not an inexhaustible resource!

I also want to start doing some regular (maybe seasonal?) “village check-ins” where I share with you what’s been working in my life, and you all can sound off in the comments about what’s working in yours. As the seasons change, I have a post in the works about some things that worked for me in the warmer months — expect that in the next couple weeks.

In addition, I want to bring you along for the ride of writing this book and getting it out in the world. So I plan to invite you into my creative process a bit, and I may have some more bonus offerings for paid subscribers on that front. (Just like the Live workshop we did last week, which was so fun!) If there is anything specific you want to know about selling or writing a book, let me know.

Otherwise, you can expect the usual, including essays and posts that aren’t about this topic when the mood strikes me, which I’m sure it will. As usual, everything will remain free and un-paywalled.

I’ll finish by saying thank you, so much, again. To paying subscribers especially — who get very little extra in return for their money — and to every single person who has read, supported, and shared my work in the last few years. You made this topic feel alive for me, which is what enabled me to go from working on an unwieldy draft in a Starbucks to announcing a book deal in two countries.

The amount of gratitude I have for that is genuinely hard for me to put into words.❤️

Thank you for reading. I keep all my content free for all subscribers, but paying subscribers give me the time and space (aka childcare) to write on these themes—so please join them if you can! You can also support me by liking, commenting, or re-stacking this post on Substack, or forwarding it to a friend.

Subscribe now