Helloooo0o0oo!
I hope you’re staying dry in this wild weather.
Here are three things I consumed this week:
You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow by Marlowe, Granados for The Baffler
I’m probably too young to be talking about age anxiety, but I do feel like I lost a few years in the pandemic, and it’s hard to reckon with the thought of wasted time.
But it wasn’t time wasted.
I listened to porch sessions on Youtube while Facetiming friends. I holidayed at home in Innes National Park and Kangaroo Island. I Zoom-ed like it was a competitive sport. I ordered takeout from local restaurants and felt like a hero. I played a ridiculous amount of Monopoly Deal. I went on picnics. I finished university. I left my favorite retail role and got my first big job.
So why does it feel like I should be turning 23 in November instead of 25?
Maybe it’s because there weren’t as many big events to mark the passing of time – the kind you take photos of and go out for dinner for – graduations, 21sts, 30ths, baby showers or weddings. Maybe it’s because we spoke almost exclusively about covid and case numbers for two whole years.
Either way, this advice felt comforting:
Every young person is beautiful, but so few of them have Character with a capital C. It’s something you build over time—and away from screens.
Developing Character is like building a house according to your personal taste: it should be an exciting venture to understand what you love, hate, and are willing to allow. Surprisingly, what you’re willing to let slide is often what defines your character the most.
My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’ by William Shatner for Variety
Shatner gives space a one star review, and honestly I’m thankful, because I am too poor and too terrified to visit. Here’s his assessment:
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture by Anne Helen Petersen for Culture Study
Do you keep your calendar full to the brim? I increasingly have to plot social outings into my iCal or I forget them.
Helen Peterson talks about the impact that ‘monochronic’ time culture has on us. It’s great food for thought:
Through the commitment to busyness and its organization, we inscribe and reinscribe a certain understanding of time onto our children, onto each other, onto ourselves. We discipline our messy, distracted, inquisitive, emotive selves into the most valuable possible forms of human capital possible. We suggest that sort of regimentation is not only possible (just organize harder!) but aspirational.
And I get it: a periodically full schedule can be exhilarating. But a consistently overflowing one is misery.
🗓 Read it here.
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