“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.

Read more

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’s 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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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 didn’t 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.

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A couple of specifics that came up:

• David Perell on turning tree sap into syrup, which is a metaphor for creative compression.

• Rick Rubin on cultivating a sensitive antennae, from his book The Creative Act: “The best artists are the ones with the most sensitive antenna. Material for our work surrounds us at every turn. It’s woven into conversation, nature, chance encounters, and existing works of art. We receive these types of messages all the time, if we remain open to them. […] These transmissions are subtle: they are ever-present, but they’re easy to miss. If we aren’t looking for clues, they’ll pass us without us ever knowing.”

• Don Draper’s unparalleled writing advice: “Peggy, just think about it. Deeply. Then forget i…

Read more

It’s a rare day when I send out a post only for paying subscribers, and today is that day. I was truly delighted by how many of you showed your support with last month’s offer. Thank you. As promised, this email has the details of how to join the Out of Your Head Workshop, which will be held next week for paying subscribers only. Mark your calendar for:

Tuesday, September 9 at 11:30am PST // 2:30pm EST // and 7:30pm GMT.

Apologies for the slight delay in sending out this date. I spent last week in Mallorca, child-free, trying very hard to remember how not to do much. I had a few errant laptop tasks I needed to do, such as sending this email. It’s not proper work, but it’s not totally unplugging either. This middle ground — as well as missing and worrying about my toddler more than I expected to — meant I was beating myself up a bit. I’m failing at relaxing! I should be better at this!

At some point I realized this whole internal monologue was monumentally dumb, and so I let myself off …

Read more

Earlier this year, I offered rapid-fire creative consulting sessions for readers of this newsletter. I had no idea if anyone would take me up on the offer, so I was thrilled when about ten of you did. What’s more, I ended up finding the sessions as interesting and enlightening as (I hope) the people who were actually paying for them.

A few themes emerged from these sessions, and making those connections gave me that buzzy brain sensation that arises when you connect the dots between seemingly unrelated things. And so, I’m putting together a Substack Live / workshop / session / informal online gathering around what came up, which I’m calling:

“How to get your big, swirling ideas out of your head and onto the page”

I’ll be talking about the small habits, brain tricks, guardrails, and creative rules I’ve been developing for years. Much of this stuff started when I was a freelance, and then staff, journalist who was perpetually on deadline. But in these recent sessions with readers, the act of articulating my own creative process made me see how it’s strengthened and evolved in the five years since I left journalism. Turns out in the absence of anyone asking me for copy, I’ve gotten better at making and meeting my own deadlines.

Even though this session is primarily intended for fellow writers, I can’t say it’s strictly writing advice. It’s more a method of paying attention to the world around you to make sure you don’t miss the good stuff. When I send pieces like this, this, this, and this, readers often say to me: “I was just thinking about this!” It’s like you’re in my head!” So this is my attempt at explaining how I do that. How I make connections amongst the chaos of all of the things I read, do, think, and talk about and formulate something coherent and resonant.

Of course, it’s completely unscientific, not necessarily replicable, and results are in no way guaranteed! But I find it to be an interesting, useful, and dare I say fun way to move through life. It’s also a way to build trust in yourself and how you see the world. That’s why I want to share it with you.

August discount

This bit is relevant to how you can join the workshop, so stay with me…

For the last few years, I’ve made this newsletter half price in August. It’s the cheapest way to support my work: a $15 annual subscription for the entire year (or equivalent in your local currency). I’m doing that again for the rest of this month.

Get 50% off for 1 year

As you know, I do not paywall any of the writing in this newsletter. So it is amazing to me that hundreds of you willingly pay for it despite not getting anything extra in return. I keep the cost low for two reasons: One, I make no promises about how often I publish and two, I know there are millions of ways you could be spending your money, so I’m humbled by the idea that you might give any of it to me so I can devote some time to my writing.

If you can’t upgrade today, thank you anyway for being a reader. (15,004 of you and counting!) I always marvel at the kind, respectful, and thoughtful conversations and messages that come from this audience. Seriously, just look at the comments section of my last post — you all are so self-actualized!

How to join the workshop

This workshop will take place in early September, it will be hosted on Substack Live, and it will be available only to paid subscribers. If you can’t join, I will send out the recording to the entire paid list after with some additional reading / supportive links. (I will most likely delete that recording about a month later.)

So, if you’d like to join, please upgrade your subscription any time in the next month. If you’re already a paid sub, you don’t have to do anything. Just look out for the workshop details, which I’ll send to the paid list later in August.

Get 50% off for 1 year

You might be thinking: Is this a ploy to get more paid subscribers? It’s actually more banal than that. I feel inspired by the idea of this workshop, but I do not feel inspired by figuring out a booking/payment/hosting platform because my life is complicated enough. So this felt like the path of least resistance. Also, I think $15 is a pretty good deal. And if you want to cancel your sub afterwards, I won’t notice because I never check the unsubscribes.

Six fun summer reads 🌞

Finally, for no reason whatsoever, here are six (mostly) fun, engrossing, and/or laid back reads for the rest of summer. I hope you enjoy them by a pool somewhere with a margarita.

• I recently went to Ikea which made me think of ’ super fun 2011 exploration into the enormous cultural force that is Ikea. Did you know one in ten Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed? [New Yorker]

• I find re-reading old New Yorker pieces deeply soothing, so here’s another one about the botanical and evolutionary wonder of figs. [New Yorker]

• One for the parents: Welcome permission to chill out just a little bit about screen time. I really endorse the distinction made in this smart piece: letting your kid consume algorithmic YouTube slop is not the same thing as watching films with a proper story arc and moral universe. [Vulture]

• My husband alerts me each time Texas Monthly publishes a new true crime piece. They rarely disappoint. [Texas Monthly]

• In a world of Oura rings, oppressive morning routines, and sober curiosity, cigarettes are making a cultural comeback as a form of nihilistic “embodied pleasure.” This does not surprise me one bit. [NY Times]

• An English professor asks his students to vote on whether or not AI should replace him at the end of the semester. This was great fun to read, and heartening too. What a great teacher. [LitHub]

Typically, when I read fiction, I prefer it to bear little relation to the themes that are dominating my writing life. So recently, when my very well-read friend sent me a novel I had to read, I had no idea that this slim and self-assured book would collide so fantastically with much of what I’m currently thinking about.

Perfection, by Vincenzo Latronico, depicts an aging millennial couple, Anna and Tom. We’re never told what their nationality is beyond “southern European,” but we meet them in Berlin, where they have settled to forge a new aspirational creative life. They are graphic designers who live in an apartment that features every interior design element that has dominated your Instagram feed for the last ten years. Their friends are exclusively writers, artists, designers, developers, and journalists. They do not know any nurses, teachers, or tradesmen. They have strong opinions about typography.

Their life on the page feels vivid and real, without verging into satire. But it also feels incredibly dull and tired. I can imagine the exact bowls and soap they use, the newsletters they subscribe to, and the chore jackets in their wardrobe. If writer Kyle Chayka’s 2016 coinage of the “airspace aesthetic” marked the high water mark of this millennial lifestyle fantasy, then I think Perfection is a kind of obituary for it. I’ll never be able to look at a monstera plant the same way again.

I was so taken by the hyperreal depiction of Anna and Tom’s life because I used to live a version of it. For a period of my twenties, about ten years ago now, I didn’t live anywhere. I was a freelance journalist who needed nothing but a laptop powered by the full suite of Apple charging adapters.

I had a boyfriend in Paris; “permanent addresses” in the US and UK at my parents and aunt and uncle’s houses, respectively; and I spent months-long stints in southeast Asia, Europe, Cape Town, and California. I not only lived as that now-reviled term “digital nomad,” I was one of the first journalists who wrote about it in mainstream publications. Later, I covered the rise of “live like a local” travel in Lisbon (where Anna and Tom also visit in their story), which I think you could argue was a direct descendant of early digital nomad culture.

I aged out of that peripatetic existence when I realized that not living anywhere was, at least in my case, the perfect fuel for an anxious mind. However, I didn’t entirely leave the mindset behind.

For years I operated under the illusion that the next place, the next job, the next flat, the next Big Change was going to be the thing that made my life finally make sense. After leaving London in 2020, and then moving once again to be closer to my husband’s family in the spring of 2024, I wrote about being worried I was falling for the fresh start fallacy all over again.

Back in my twenties, like Anna and Tom, I could live anywhere, do anything. But in effect I was rooted nowhere, because I was always waiting for perfection to arrive just over the horizon.

Friction Lite

Ultimately, what Anna and Tom seem to be pursuing above all else is a life free of friction. They want work they can do from the comfort of their home, on their own terms. They have a friendship group of people who come and go with the whims of illegal sublets and remote job opportunities. These people seem to elevate their professional and creative personas by proximity, but never require any reciprocal, day-to-day obligations or challenging emotional dynamics.

They prefer their apartment to appear staged like an Airbnb listing at all hours of the day. Even though they live in western Europe, they expect authentic Thai or Peruvian food to be delivered to their door when they don’t feel like cooking, which is often. They pity the provincial mindset of the people in the nameless place where they grew up, and they seem to never interact with anyone who isn’t between the ages of 22 and 38.

And yet, despite levels of cultural access and economic opportunity that their ancestors would have found inconceivable, we see that they are profoundly dissatisfied with their lives.

This idea of friction is fast becoming the obsession of our moment. From my own viral essay about it in 2023, to the more recent piece from which looks at it from an economic lens.

Scanlon outlines that we now have three states of being: The digital world now promises to be mostly friction-free — you don’t even need to hire humans anymore, if you can’t be bothered to. The real world is full of annoying friction like a flight delay or finding a doctor when your kid inevitably gets sick on Friday afternoon. There’s also a third state — one that comes with enough money and the right class status — where you can move through the physical world with the privilege of Friction Lite. Scanlon uses the example of Manhattan’s West Village, which has had a controversial renaissance as the ground zero of Gen Z youth culture.

“West Village is an NYC neighborhood that serves as a production set for an optimized lifestyle. You can live your entire life within a five-block radius: Pilates, three-drinker dinners, charm bars, espresso martinis, run clubs, spritzes, connection. It’s great.

This isn’t unique to West Village. There are all sorts of spots that do this strange, careful curation of friction. The boutiques are selling the appearance of effort without its substance. Hand-crafted aesthetics at mass-production prices. Rustic cafés with lighting fast WiFi. This illusion of locality with the convenience of globalization (pre-tariffs, at least).”

This Friction Lite space is the world I used to inhabit — back when millennials, not Gen Z, were the young buzzy generation — and I dotted around cities like it was my job. (Or was it my job?) Though I knew I was privileged to move through the world in this way, I also saw this lack of friction as a good thing, a sign of how far the world had come. It massively helped my career, and it gave me a network of people all over the world just like Anna and Tom. And yet, back then, I couldn’t yet see what I was giving up in exchange for it.

Coming and going

One reason that Perfection lands so well in this moment is that I detect a real anxiety of people trying to find their perfect place in the world. It’s understandable, given the abhorrent state of US politics, that so many Americans are trying to leave the country for saner places. But Europeans are doing it too. When I posted Perfection to my Instagram story, multiple British connections told me they were reading it as they prepared for a move to Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin.

I have moved so many times in the last 15 years — including leaving the US when I was 21 — that it would be flagrantly hypocritical of me to say that where you live doesn’t matter. Finding a place that matches your priorities and preferences obviously does have some bearing on your quality of life. My most recent move has proven to me that sometimes the energetics of a place really do matter, even if they are maddeningly hard to define. (So does having more help.)

However, I have also learned that as much as where you live, your relationship and attitude to it shapes your experience there. You have to really be there. The richness and meaning arises in part from choosing it at the expense of all other places you could be and things you could be doing. Accepting a place’s shortcomings, the things it lacks, and its imperfections is essential to appreciating everything it does have to offer.

Having lived as an American outside of America for a decade and a half, I’ve met a lot of people that have made lives far from home. The people that have really done it over the long haul have done so in a way that has involved so much friction. They’ve made huge sacrifices, navigated unbelievable amounts of bureaucracy, endured the pain of learning a language or gaining a new cultural fluency. They have had to change their ways by force and let their ways be changed by the humiliation of doing it wrong. They can’t easily undo it, or go back, because they are not the same person anymore. They have built a whole new life at the expense of their former one.

This feels very different from the “careful curation” of the Americans moving to Europe I see in my Instagram feed — and explored well in this piece in New York Magazine about the “Euro-mom fantasy.” I can imagine these American expat families largely interact with other American expat families, rather than the people who actually live in the country they are posting from.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, of course — sometimes you just want a year-long adventure that’s not supposed to last forever. However, as long-term transplants will tell you, the entire expat experience is one defined by transience. If you want to build a life beyond air conditioned short-term rentals and matcha cafes where everyone speaks English, you have to go deeper than befriending other new arrivals. And you have to navigate a boatload of bureaucratic friction that will make you want to cry. (Hello, IRS’s treatment of Americans abroad 😭.) That’s when the experience can become challenging — when it starts to test your willingness to stay.

As Anna and Tom’s life proves, when it’s easy to come and go, people come and go. It is now stunningly easy to imagine a whole new life from the things we see in our feeds. To skim the surface of the world’s most desirable cities with app-enabled ease. You no longer have to bumble through the language barriers, or a new taxi system, or figure out how to order a coffee without embarrassing yourself. There’s all a template, so there’s no friction.

Opportunity costs

As I progressed farther into Anna and Tom’s story, I jokingly thought to myself that they should just have a baby — it would immediately cure their existential ennui, simply because they would be too tired and too broke to think that deeply about the state of their life.

But the book’s omniscient narrator tells us that Anna and Tom have no interest in a baby, probably for some of the same reasons outlined in Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ must-read New Yorker piece on the global decline in fertility rates.

In that piece — which I read as a non-fiction companion to Perfection — Kraus interviews a sociologist who posits that the rapid decline in birth rates is in part down to “social media’s role as an accelerant of global monoculture.”

“It has never been easier to acquaint yourself with the opportunity costs of childbearing — the glamorous destinations unvisited, the faddish foods uneaten. ‘People once had only local comparisons,’” [the sociologist] said. ‘Now they see other people’s lives — in New York City and England and France — and they have a sense of relative deprivation: my life is not good enough.’”

If I could summarize the “opportunity cost” of having children in one word, it would be (you guessed it) friction. Way too much of it, in fact, if you’re doing it without the support of a village. But there is a quiet upside: the more you do it, the more you stop thinking about what else you could be doing, and focus on where you actually are.

What I’ve learned in my mid-thirties is that tangling with the friction is where the sense of belonging I’ve so long been looking for actually begins. So perhaps what Anna and Tom need is not kids, but more specifically obligations and responsibilities to something other than themselves. They are missing the friction that comes from being known and needed by a wide range of people — not just high agency creatives in the prime of their youth — because they want to preserve a life they can leave at any moment.

I think often about the fact that, had I not had the immense and evolutionarily bizarre privilege of doing whatever I wanted for a solid decade of my adult life, I may never have reached these kinds of conclusions. After all, it’s easy to say that contentment comes from staying put when you had the luxury of traveling to more than 40 countries before you hit 30. It would be dishonest for me to say I regret spending a decade of my life that way.

And so the problem that I share with Anna and Tom is that, by quirk of history, technology, and privilege, the three of us simply know too much about the world. As humans, we were never supposed to live with this much optionality embedded into our psyche. People didn't used to see the myriad obligations of their lives as opportunity costs, but rather as the unavoidable work of being alive.

Though it’s now possible to eliminate a large chunk of friction and obligations from our lives, that doesn't mean that doing so will help us thrive. As we move into this bizarre era of AI-assisted living, I’d argue that the quality and meaning of people’s lives will increasingly be determined by whether or not they realize that fact. Whether or not they recognize that while drudgery, routine, and obligation are now optional — they are also a big part of what makes life meaningful.

At the end of the book, there are hints that Anna and Tom might get it, but it’s tenuous. It still feels like their choices are dominated more by how it looks in the feed than how it feels day to day. As a reader, I’m not entirely convinced that they’ve realized something: Not making a choice is a choice. And it’s one that excludes the sense of belonging you cultivate when you engage with life in its fullest, most imperfect sense.

Thanks for reading. I keep all my writing free and available for all subscribers to read, but paying subscribers give me the time and space (aka childcare) to write longer, more ambitious pieces like this one. If you enjoyed this piece, consider upgrading to being a paid supporter today. It all adds up. And if you already pay for a subscription — Thank you. ❤️

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I didn’t check the news or social media at all last weekend, and when I went online on Monday after dropping my son off, the U.S. had apparently gone to war. By this week’s end, it feels like that same news story has somehow been eclipsed several times over.

This has to be the summer of peak hypernormalization. That feeling of straddling two places, one where everything is clearly falling apart, the other where everyone is acting like things are normal. It’s here versus there.

It gives life a bursting quality that feels totally unsustainable. But it just keeps going, doesn’t it? Summertime adds to this dynamic, with the heat and outward energy expenditure creating a head-spinning vortex that makes me want to lie face-down on cold tile.

It feels like more people are awake to this bizarre reality than ever before. This can be helpful in terms of making one feel less crazy, but it does nothing to stem the onslaught. I don’t have any answers because I don’t think there are any. But I’m fond of Margaret Wheatley’s framing of creating “islands of sanity,” which a kind reader reminded me of in the lovely comments of my last post. These islands are crucially not places of retreat, but rather of contribution — hyperlocal, small in scale, yet deeply meaningful. To remind you that you’re still here, and goodness does still matter.

Below is a list of links and recommendations. I haven’t sent one out since late March, and I’m enjoying compiling these lists less frequently as stand-alone editions, rather than tacking them onto a long essay. I need less inputs in my life, not more, and I’m sure you feel the same.

A quick poll on interviews

I have a bunch of interesting people I want to interview for this newsletter, but Q&As have historically performed worse compared to regular posts, so I’m not sure readers want more of them. Sometimes I wonder if that’s because I’m sending out written Q&As you have to read, rather than recorded conversations you can listen to. Since preparing for and facilitating these interviews is quite a lot of work, I want to ask you: What is your preferred format for consuming interviews?

Things I’ve enjoyed reading

• Even though I am met with images of it every time I open a social app, it’s impossible to metabolize the full scale of the horror and destruction in Gaza. That’s why pieces of writing like this one by Suzy Hansen are so important. If you’ve been scrolling by in a kind of self protection, I can’t say I blame you, but you should take the time to read a sober and comprehensive account of it. [NY Mag]

• “Everyone I know is trying to figure out what to do. We all want to know ‘What’s the project?’” More gorgeous writing by . [As If We Were Staying]

• with a great dissection of the generic, AI-ish essays increasingly found on Substack, featuring a “white-noise generality” and “an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over.” Yes, that’s exactly it. [Science of Storytelling]

• One of the particular joys of being married to another writer (and sharing a child with them) is reading their writing about your child. on fathers, sons, and doing what it takes to keep showing up. [Tangents]

• On what makes Call Her Daddy podcaster Alex Cooper such a compelling interviewer. [Vulture]

• “I wish this had never happened, of course. But life would feel thin without it. I understand things about myself and the world now that I can’t wish I didn’t know. All of the noise about what on earth I’m here for has melted away. I think I am a better person, if a sadder one.” Archie Bland on his son Max will stay with you. [The Guardian]

Things I’ve enjoyed listening to

• We need to grapple with the fact that the answer to the rising crisis in masculinity is compassion for men and boys, rather than continuing to cast them as the oppressor. This interview with renowned (and funny) couples therapist Terry Real speaks to that so well. [Modern Love]

• Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, on how the progressive left got ahead of public opinion, why that’s such a problem, and how to fix it. I haven’t enjoying listening to a politician speak this much in a while. [The Ezra Klein Show]

More from me, if you want

I’ve had some great conversations with fellow Substackers recently. and I talked about our experiences of the economics of caregiving. And and I spoke about collapse, care, and what we do next.

And the asked me to contribute to their advice for 2025 graduates. I was incredibly honored to be included on this list with some writers I’ve admired for years.

Word Soup

“It’s never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt — to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, ‘have you read this yet?’” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

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.

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Ten months ago, I signed some paperwork and paid a £30.82 annual fee, making me the proud and slightly terrified steward of a 50 square meter plot of land. About one mile from where I live, it’s located at one of Leeds City Council’s allotment sites, which is part of the UK-wide allotment system.

Allotments have a long history in Britain, dating back as far as the Saxons, as a way for poor, non-land owning folks to have somewhere to grow food. Today, they remain as a quirky and undeniably lovely part of UK culture, even though Brits still somehow find reasons to complain about them.

I promised myself that I would wait a full 12 months before writing a post like this. I needed to be cautious, humble, and sober-minded. I needed to let the vagaries of the growing season kick my ass a little bit. But you know what? For once, I’m going to tell cool-headed sobriety to fuck off. Because in the last ten months, this project has served as a singular source of joy in my life.

If you’re not a gardener, I know that it’s not particularly interesting to read another person tell you how exciting it is to eat a sun-ripened tomato. So I’m not writing this to try and convince you to garden yourself, but rather, to invite you to think about how you might find a space like this in your own life.

Much of the work of living a meaningful life right now — and how I view my work as a writer — is reminding myself and others how to be human. I mean that in the most fundamental meaning of that term: the beauty, the heartbreak, the friction, and limitations of it. All around me, with each passing week, I see people sleepwalking away from that, happy to be carried along with the tide of investment-backed, AI-assisted living. A new normal defined by pointless convenience, aggressively mediocre entertainment, pathological avoidance, and mindless accumulation. As they drift along, these people seem unaware of what they are losing in the process.

I think our complacency and inertia in this moment — our tendency to acquiesce to the norms of a broken economy and society because it just feels easier — is one of the biggest challenges we face. To fight against this in our own lives, I think we need to do more than just think, read, and post our way out of it.

We need to feel in our bodies that an alternative exists, even in small pockets of our lives. To seek out places and experiences that are governed by the value systems that allow all living things (including us) to thrive. To remind our nervous systems what it feels like to spend time in them. It’s not an intellectual experience, but a connected, embodied one. Because of that, AI can’t touch it.

And what’s been wonderful about the allotment, is the ease with which it’s allowed me to do that. It doesn’t feel like homework, or self improvement, or any great effort — it feels like joy. And it brings a sense of confidence and steadfastness that seeps into other areas of my life, including my writing. One that reminds me why I’m here, why it’s worth it to swim against the tide, and to help others see the value in doing the same.

So as summer approaches on Plot 25Nb, I’ve written a list of qualities I’ve noticed about this allotment project. The way it invites me to think, to act, and to feel, even if only inside its gates. My hope is that you might be able to find a space like that, too.

Not a task, but a relationship

I would describe my gardening know-how ten months ago as firmly still in the beginner category. Advanced beginner, if I’m being generous. I’d volunteered in a community garden for a couple years, starting during Covid lockdowns, and had a modest container garden at home, but it really was nothing impressive or special.

More so than experience, what I needed to take this on was good old fashioned chutzpah. I needed to override the intimidation of starting a new big project I didn’t know much about. I needed to give myself permission to not be good at something right away. To experiment, to make mistakes, and to literally dig in to what is a natural antidepressant: the soil beneath me.

At the beginning, when I was feeling daunted by the task, my friend Philippa told me not to think of this little plot of land as a responsibility I was taking on, but rather, a relationship I was entering into. To allow it to shape me as much as I shaped it. She was exactly right, and I’m proud of myself for finding the energy and boldness to start. Because once I did, the energy seemed to keep regenerating itself.

(This book has been endlessly helpful and a reliable companion on the plot.)

Unscripted interactions

If you are imagining the people on the allotment as a collection of crunchy millennials who shop at Whole Foods and create Ballerina Farm-style content for Reels, it’s not like that at all. In fact, allotments in the UK are notorious for being Old Boys Clubs, frequented by the types of dudes who might typically regard a millennial woman with an American accent with grave suspicion.

Often, these old school gardeners insist on the primacy of using pesticides and slug pellets, which are frowned upon by younger gardeners (including me). They watch newbies with the assumption that it’s only a matter of time before they will give up.

Despite this generational and philosophical mismatch, spending time on the allotment has still been a new and surprising source not of friends, but people in my life. Older people, mostly, but also people from places as far-flung as Peru and Zimbabwe, as well as lots of people who have lived in the place I now call home for their entire lives.

There’s also lots of low level gossip, which I love being party to. Sometimes Ben, the more cantankerous of my two retirement-age plot neighbors, leaves me notes scrawled on the back of envelopes about what I’m doing wrong. (I’ve been told people haven’t persisted on my plot in the past due to this kind of behavior).

Instead of reacting to this, I’ve accepted that just like me, Ben is here on the plot working through some stuff. When it gets to be too much, I put up a polite boundary in the most British way possible — “Really must be getting to it now, Ben!” — put my Airpods in, and get to work. But mostly, I ask him questions, seek his advice on this or that, and relish the moment when I get to break the news that the sweetpea seeds he insisted I sowed too early have actually germinated just fine.

The point is, the garden isn’t just a place to grow things, but to practice the art of unscripted interactions and relationships with people with whom you have nothing else in common but the land where you live. It’s the kind of place where the entire assignment is that you keep coming back.

Bending time

If I had to average the amount of time I’ve spent at the allotment each week over the last ten months, I’d say it’s no more than 90 minutes. There was a large upfront time investment clearing the plot when I first got it, and during the winter, when everything was dormant, there were weeks where I didn’t go at all.

Now, most of my visits are not hours-long work sessions, but quick visits of about 25 minutes. A bit of watering, adding to the compost pile, one planting task, pulling some weeds. It’s in and out, a few times a week.

Like every modern human alive, I seem to have too little time and too many responsibilities. So it’s been somewhat mysterious to me why this time commitment has not resulted in more stress in my overloaded life. Quite the opposite. The best reasoning I can come up with is that the time I spend there is additive — it offers me something in return.

If I go to the allotment for an hour, I then don’t have to go book an expensive exercise class, or find time for myself, or go for a walk, or take a break from a screen outside, or do some nervous system-regulating activity — because I’ve literally just done all of those things. As we progress into the growing season, I don’t even have to go to the grocery store to get greens for dinner, because I’ve just taken care of that, too. When I take my son with me for short visits, I’ve even done some exemplary parenting — we’re outdoors, with no screens, and learning about plants!

It strikes me that this is how human beings used to live by default. Their daily actions, responsibilities, and labor did not work in opposition to their wellbeing, but were in fact supportive of it. Which is perhaps why time seems to bend when I’m there, in a pleasurable and noticeable way. It’s doesn’t feel like another choking obligation I have to white-knuckle my way through, but rather a curious and welcome break from the relentless pace of life.

Interrupting capitalism’s logic

I did some crude math, and found that in the last ten months, I’ve spent about £200 on tools, seeds, plants, and other random garden ephemera like nets and organic pest control. Otherwise, I’ve used or repurposed what I already had, scavenged things from the free pile, and been given stuff by others. To be frank, I could have spent a lot less, but when I think of all the other ways I could have spent £200 pursuing some dubious goal of youth, beauty, or wellness, I’m okay with it.

Especially because I can feel the logic of the garden rewiring my brain a bit. It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine then end of world than the end of the capitalism, but in the garden, that cynical take just doesn’t land. This entire system operates with a circular intelligence that if the tech bros found out about, they’d probably try to get VC funding to convince us they invented it themselves.

I think a lot about how, in theory, I could grow the entirety of next year’s garden from the “waste” of this one: By saving seeds at the end of the growing season, propagating existing plants or taking cuttings from neighbors, making plant protection and supports out of discarded or broken objects, and of course composting the waste from this year.

In a favorite essay of mine, the writer calls this “jenkiness,” a quality of thrifty creation which allotment sites are known for:

“Something about the delirium incited by lily blooms or the pollinators’ swooning over the bush cherry interrupts one’s relationship to commerce, perhaps,” Gay writes. “The garden makes you grab the nearest thing so you can keep crawling through it. It might be that the logics of delight interrupt the logics of capitalism.”

A few days ago I planted out the pumpkin plants I grew from seeds I saved from year’s Jack O’Lanterns. To feed the seedlings, I used the compost that resulted from hundreds of ordinary days of coffee grounds, onion skins, broccoli stalks, and banana peels. I told my son the small plants in the ground are going to turn into pumpkins soon, and he asked me if it was Halloween yet.

That simple act was so entirely antithetical to the entire culture and economy I live in. It is cyclical, regenerative, elegant, and sustainable. It makes so much sense, and participating in it heals some part of me that feels perpetually upset about the state of the world.

Why? Because when I’m at the allotment, crouched down on the soil, using my hands and letting the sun beat down on my soon-to-be-even-more-wrinkled face, I realize that this world really does still exists. Right here, underneath my feet, in between my fingers. I am part of it, too. All I have to do is spend time here to remember how it works.

Don’t bring your to do list

In my professional and home life, I am a pretty regimented person. I like lists, organization, and order. However, at the allotment, I’ve noticed that I am not like this. And crucially, I don’t have to make any effort not to be. My tool storage box is a mess, and I just can’t seem to find the energy to care about it.

Things are never done here. When you finish dealing with the weeds, your reward is more weeds. The compost pile is in a perpetual state of needing to be added and subtracted from. There is no inbox zero. The unending cycle is the entire point.

And it’s all un-optimizable. The plants don’t care about my timing. Progress happens non-linearly, seedlings seem to be languishing and then suddenly, they are ready, and shoot upwards. Some things will work, some things will die or be eaten or never germinate at all. It’s really not up to me.

Even though I keep a note on my phone of what I need or want to do each month, I usually end up ignoring it. Because at the allotment things just kind of … tell me when they need to be done. If that sounds mystical, that’s because it is. There’s an emergent creativity and welcome lack of urgency that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in my life. It comes as a huge relief.

Be a good neighbor

As a plot holder you are supposed to mow the grass paths in between plots, and use the strimmer to get the edges. This actually stresses me out, because the communal, diesel-operated machines are loud and I’m scared of breaking them.

Which leads me to a confession: I have only cut the grass once. And the reason? Jerry, my other plot neighbor, keeps doing it for me.

A prior version of me might’ve taken offense to this. That this old white man assumes I can’t cut my own grass because I’m a woman! But the truth is, I am absolutely thrilled about it. I take little pleasure in cutting the grass, and it would eat up a lot of time that I could be spending on more gratifying tasks. Jerry is also much better at it, because he’s been doing it for years.

Once spring hit and the grass started growing again with abandon, I started to feel guilty. I brought it up with Jerry, and told him he really didn’t have to do it for me. He said, “Listen, I cut their grass over there, because they are very old, and it really doesn't take me much time to do yours too. You seem like a good neighbor, you show up and keep things tidy, and good neighbors are a good thing to have here.”

“That’s very kind, and I really appreciate it,” I said.

I’ve never meant anything more.

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