Instead of doom scrolling | LISB

Hey y’all.

The world is a lot right now. Several times the last few weeks I have had to go on news and social media fasts because it all seems overwhelming. Yesterday I opened Facebook, and my first 12 posts on my feed were accounts I do not follow or ads. Most of them were obviously written by AI, or had obvious AI images.

On the other hand, when my wife’s grandfather died, we inherited a 1930’s era Singer sewing machine. It is made of cast aluminum, and it has engraved fillagree borders, and the manual that came with it told you how to replace the belt, how to lubricate it, and even showed you how to use it. It’s as if the makers assumed you would be using it 90 years later.

I know it does not seem like there is a direct correlation between my Facebook feed and a 90 year old sewing machine, but the worldview of the creators of those two things – how they see what they are making, how they think about the users of the thing they made, and how they think about the future of the thing they made, could not be more different.

I think about this stuff a lot, I know. I don’t think the issue is the technology. It’s the worldview of the builders, and how they see the people they are building for.

Writing this newsletter is good for me and my mental health. I have talked about that often over the years – that the requirement to search for beautiful things to share with you forces me to hunt for beautiful things, when I would rather lay on the couch and sob.

But at the end of the day, if I did not think about you, the reader, constantly, as I create every issue, I would not bother at all. I want this newsletter to be useful to you, helpful to you, and even hopeful to you - the sort of thing you are eager to share with someone else. There are so many people telling you that things are bad. I want to be one of the people showing you the other trail, the one less spoken of, where beauty exists and shows us all the things that are still worth fighting for.

I have spent nearly thirty hours this month working on changing the tech that underpins this newsletter, in the hopes it can be more useful, more beautiful, more shareable by you, the readers and users of this project.

The new site, admittedly still in progress, is my act of care in the world, an offering to you.

Thank you so much for reading it.

Program notes for the new site:

There is a new website, and new issues will be uploaded to the public archive automatically. Back issues unfortunately must be updated manually, an excruciating task. It will happen slowly, but it IS a priority.

The web version of every issue allows comments for subscribers. The robust website will also make it easy for readers to share links to individual episodes, makes it much easier to read in browsers and on your phone, and allows me to easily find and link to past issues, putting future me in conversation with past me.

Note that comments are only for subscribers, a feature designed to reduce spam and to promote goodness in the comment section. That does mean you may be asked to go through a verification process to make sure you are a subscriber, but it’s not an onerous one.

Sadly, the emails will come from a new email address: [email protected]. Note that this is a send-only address – the best way to reach me is still to reply to any issue, or directly at [email protected]. Best practice is to add the new address to your address book, and you might have to train Google to not send it to your promotions tab by dragging it to your inbox. (If this issue did not come to you from that email address, it will – there is a process called warming which gradually migrates you to the new address, so inboxes don’t freak out.)

If you are an RSS person, the newsletter now has a full RSS feed, if that is how you prefer to read things. The RSS feed is found here. You will probably have to add it manually to your feed reader. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, RSS is how you get your podcasts, and how many of us prefer to read the internet. There is a great explainer here.)

The New York Times gives you a list of 118 things you can do instead of doomscrolling. (just @ me next time, guys!)

A thread, with more than 4,000 comments, of low-effort ways to show your partner you care. These are, as the original poster said, ‘ “we’re tired and have responsibilities” realistic’. These are mostly wholesome and sweet.

And here is a list of 357 things that are good to do.

I did not know there was an infrared map of The Milky Way galaxy. It was “compiled from 200,000 images taken over 420 observation nights across 13 years (2010–2023)” and is so large, we can’t display it as one image. You can see some of them here.

This is an old one, but I don’t think I have shared it before: From the extremely prolific Maria Popova, a video with the words of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman contemplating the wonder of life itself, accompanied by the music of Yo-Yo Ma and the animation of Kelli Anderson. Have your audio on for this one.

The most clicked link in the last issue was to the never before publicly displayed Monet about to be auctioned.

There were two new pieces on my blog this week:

When morning comes: the joy of surviving the night as a person with depression

The dead hedge: an ode to the ever-evolving organic sculpture I built in our backyard, for the wildlife and for us.

If you would like to get an email when I post something to my blog, you can sign up for that on this page.

This renovation, and all the work and money that went into it, was made possible by the paying members who keep this project (and me!) going.

Last Saturday, paying members got their monthly Members Only email from me, where I laid out some of my plans for this release, talked about what the rest of the year is looking like, and shared my plans for our upcoming wedding anniversary.

Membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, a monthly newsletter, and generous discounts, among other perks.

Thank You!

Ideas from links this week came from Maria Popova and Jason Kottke.

Thanks for your reading, sharing, and all the ways you work to keep going.

Till next time,

HH

P.S. If you like this newsletter and want to support it, there are 3 WAYS THIS WEEK! PICK ONE right now before you forget: