2026-06-15 15:37:08
When the collective mood is dark and every headline seems to pile it on, the optimists love to wheel out the charts: we’ve never been healthier, wealthier, safer, look at the data! But that comfort evaporates the moment you open the news and see that another country just joined the arms race or another month was added to the record books for heat.
My default setting leans pessimistic (like a proper German) but zooming out and putting our current anxieties in historical context can be a useful exercise, particularly now, when every piece of media wants to hijack our basic threat-response systems.
Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter issue makes a great case for keeping a healthy perspective:
“The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal. Dangerous and consequential, yes, but still normal.”
The reason this is so hard to accept, he argues, comes down to what has been labelled as ‘temporal chauvinism’:
“The feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.”
Burkeman points to centuries of failed apocalypse predictions – from astrologers to religious leaders – and notes:
“There wasn’t some little part of their brains that was thinking ‘I know I’m being superstitious here – it’ll be different in the future, when people aren’t so ignorant!’ As far as they knew, they were in possession of the facts; they surely felt just as secure in their convictions as any AI thought leader today.”
He argues that much of today’s doomerism is a coping mechanism:
“Human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others. Against this backdrop, AI doomerism starts to look like a coping mechanism for dealing with existential anxiety.”
This zooming out connects nicely with something Yuval Noah Harari points out on the Ezra Klein podcast. Harari offers a quick test for whether you’re a liberal: do you believe people should choose their own government, their own profession, their own religion, and their own spouse? If you say yes to all four, congratulations, you’re a liberal. And so are the vast majority of people across the political spectrum today, including most people who’d never call themselves that.
His point is that for most of human history, none of those four things were up for debate, let alone agreement. Today they are, and most of us land in the same place, which means the actual ideological gap is narrower than it’s ever been, even as everyone keeps telling us that we’ve never been more divided.
Optimism always comes with a risk. Lean too hard into ‘it’s all fine’ and you risk sapping the urgency that actually gets things done. Movements for change need momentum and action – they don’t just come about naturally.
But there’s an equally seductive trap on the other side – the doom spiral that feels like German seriousness but is really just another excuse to check out.
Things are bad, some of them are legitimately dangerous, and also, this is roughly what being alive has always felt like. The difficult trick is holding onto both at once: staying angry enough to act, without convincing yourself the sky is permanently falling.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-08 15:52:35
After making a case for our right to rest in public spaces last week, writer Leo Umilio got my attention with an essay that turns the whole premise on its head. Not just rest in public, but rest itself. His argument: the kind of rest our culture endorses isn’t really rest at all. It’s maintenance. It’s the oil change your employer needs you to perform so you show up on Monday, sharp and ready to perform.
Umilio draws a line between rest and idleness. Rest, he writes, “is idleness with an alibi”. It can be justified, sold, optimised. It earns its place in the economy of your time by making you better at everything that comes after.
“Rest can be sold, because rest promises a return. Buy the mattress, the app, the retreat, the supplement, and you will work better, earn more, perform at your peak. The promise is always, in the end, a promise about your output.”
Idleness, by contrast, refuses the whole framework:
“The idle hour does not exist in order to improve the hours around it. It does not recharge you for anything. It is not an investment whose return is collected later at the desk. It serves nothing, points toward nothing, produces nothing, and answers to no one, and this is not a flaw to be corrected but the entire substance of the thing.”
Which is why the wellness industry adores rest and has nothing to offer idleness. Rest can be packaged. Idleness cannot.
“You cannot monetise a man staring at rain. You can sell him a meditation app that promises the rain-staring will lower his cortisol and improve his quarterly performance, but the moment he accepts that pitch he is no longer idle. He is resting, strategically, on the advice of his wellness coach. The rain has become a tool.”
You could argue this is splitting hairs or fighting over semantics, but Umilio is pointing at our broader habit of absorbing acts of refusal and selling them back as a technique. Walking becomes a ‘wellness practice’ with a step count. Doing nothing becomes ‘niksen’, a Dutch lifestyle trend, complete with methodology and a book deal. Even boredom has been captured:
“Boredom is good for you, the articles announce, boredom boosts creativity, boredom makes you more productive when you return to work. And there it is again, the inevitable return to work, the alibi reattached to the very thing that was supposed to escape it.”
I can think of many other examples of this semantic creep. Leisure becomes ‘recreation’ and now implies a purposeful activity designed to restore you. Learning becomes ‘upskilling’ – curiosity reframed as labour-market capital. Community has gradually become ‘audience’ – people are not participants but consumers surrounding a brand or a creator.
The counterpoint, and it’s a big one, is that most of us aren’t really in a position to treat idleness as a philosophical stance. Some people rest strategically because that’s all the time they have. Umilio acknowledges this too – rest is good, rest is necessary. His argument isn’t against recovery but against the belief that recovery is the only legitimate form of stillness.
The case he’s really making is for an hour that answers to nothing: “not time freed up for other tasks, but time that is genuinely free, owned by no purpose, answerable to no return.”
Worth sitting with – unproductively, if you can.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-01 15:59:30
The architects of our apartment development did something rare during planning: they convinced the council to close off the last section of the street, replacing it with greenery and seating. As a result, there are now concrete blocks to sit on, stepped-back shop fronts whose edges double as places to perch, and a handful of wooden picnic benches added later by us residents.
On a sunny weekend, the street feels alive. People linger over coffee, kids jump the rocks in the garden, neighbours running errands end up in conversation. (Here’s a short video of our street from a couple of years ago.)
That experience makes me feel the loss described in Gabrielle Bruney’s eloquent and damning essay on the disappearance of the public bench. Somehow the humble bench – low-cost, low-tech, uncommonly democratic – has become one of the most contested objects in urban design.
Bruney’s case in point is New York’s beautiful Moynihan Train Hall, where travellers sprawl on the floor and families use their luggage as furniture – not because it’s overcrowded, but because the benches are largely gone, removed by design to discourage homeless people from lingering.
“Unlike parks or homeless shelters, [benches are] small and relatively inexpensive interventions, six-foot-long microcosms of a far broader debate over whom our cities should be structured to serve and how best to do so. To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.”
I loved her observation about what we lose beyond the physical convenience of somewhere to rest. Sitting on a public bench means surrendering some control. The friction is the point:
“In interacting with civic infrastructure, we surrender a degree of control. If the book I want has been checked out, or the seat I sought is occupied, there’s not much to do but wait my turn. These collective goods offer a refresher course in a skill rarely taught after kindergarten: sharing. Public goods help us learn, as Honig writes, that ‘we are not always in charge’.”
Sadly, today the image of a park bench has become almost synonymous with homelessness – a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be shared. Bruney reminds us that benches are one of the last things in public life that doesn’t require a ticket or a purchase:
“Like the subway and public library, benches are places that people who have nowhere to go, go. Observers of the public realm have long pointed out that depriving people in distress of a place to sit down is gratuitous cruelty. … In occupying a public bench, the most marginalized members of society make a claim to visibility, which is also a claim to personhood. And not everyone finds them deserving.”
This hostility has been institutionalised through the rise of privately owned public spaces – plazas and atria that look public but are managed by developers with a commercial interest in who lingers and who doesn’t.
The same logic – public space that are increasingly hostile to anyone who isn’t actively consuming – applies just as well to the internet. Spencer Chang makes this connection in a companion essay:
“[The Internet] has been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.”
Homelessness is a layered crisis and, no, more benches won’t solve it. But designing public spaces that offer nowhere to rest doesn’t move us closer to a solution – it just makes the failure less visible. I’m aware of how privileged I am to live on a street designed with this kind of generosity, but privilege shouldn’t be a prerequisite for somewhere to sit.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-05-25 16:16:04
The rise of mental health awareness is a good thing. Fewer people suffering in silence, more shared language for experiences that used to be nameless. So I want to be careful here, because questioning mental health labels can be received as being dismissive towards people who are genuinely struggling.
Clinician and author Gavin Francis threads this needle well. Writing in The Guardian, he argues that we’ve grown too comfortable squeezing the messy, fluid reality of human suffering into rigid psychiatric categories – and that the labels we’re exporting around the world weren’t “gleaned from lab science but were decided in committee rooms by a group of western medics”.
I enjoyed reading about Francis’ first mentor as a physician, Dr M, whose approach was a kind of antidote to the tick-box GP model: “His consultations were impressive, filled with kindness, gentleness and a kind of tranquillity. He was unafraid to let silence fill the space of the consulting room.”
Dr M would ask his trainees not just to summarise a patient’s complaint, but how they felt after each consultation – a practice rooted in the idea that “your patient can’t help but transfer their emotions into you, and that you can discern a lot about someone by examining how they make you feel”. I love that.
Francis calls this ideal clinical state ”almost meditative, remaining engaged and emotionally aware without getting entangled by a paralysing excess of compassion”. Gosh, I want a GP like that. I think we all do.
His broader argument gets really interesting when it crosses cultural lines. Psychiatrists working across different contexts point out that many non-western societies treat low mood, anxiety and delusional states as spiritual, relational or religious problems rather than psychiatric ones.
“...by making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.”
He quotes a former WHO director of mental health who remarked he’d rather receive a schizophrenia diagnosis in Ethiopia or Sri Lanka than in the west, because there’s “a greater chance in those countries of making a life that continues to have meaning, of being able to make sense of your experience, of remaining connected to community”. Oof!
This says so much about what we mean by ‘normal functioning’. In most western contexts, it tends to mean: able to work, able to produce, able to participate in the economy without too much friction. The question of whether someone is mentally well is now almost inseparable from the question of whether they’re pulling their weight.
Francis doesn’t end with clean answers, and I appreciate that.
“If we were able to hold the mental health labels more lightly, aware of the human tendencies they oversimplify, would we be able to create a society more accepting of difference? Might it be less stigmatising, and also more hopeful, and more open to recovery?”
I take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ve seen what a clear diagnosis can do: it can give people a new frame for their experience – a way to say ‘this isn’t a personal failing, it’s a thing, and here’s how to work with it’. That can be life changing.
But I’m also inclined to listen to the observations of thoughtful GPs who spend their days in conversations with patients, watching what labels do to people. If you want to dive deeper, check out Francis’ new book further below.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-05-18 15:51:22
Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of emails that follow a recognisable rhythm: a long-time reader of DD, appreciative of how the newsletter navigates technology and culture, reaching out because I once covered a topic related to their project.
AI is now very good at describing DD back to me using fragments scraped from the web. The connection to my work feels just specific enough. The flattery is calibrated.
Robin Sloan wrote about this recent uptake in fake personal pitches – a new flavour of AI-assisted outreach: someone runs a prompt to find people or publications who might promote their project, then generates a ‘personalised’ email for each one.
“I don’t understand how anyone could think it’s okay to run the prompt above. I am here to tell you: it’s not okay! Besides being plainly rude and dishonest, these messages ‘pee in the pool’ of internet communication, making it more difficult for sincere creators to send authentic emails about their projects, simply by raising the ‘noise floor’ of simulation and bullshit.”
I’m not categorically against using AI to help out with tedious work. But there’s a difference between using a tool to say something you actually mean, and using a tool to manufacture the appearance of meaning something.
I know it’s a bit naïve to appeal to common decency when the same technology is busy guiding weapons systems, but please don’t outsource sincerity. Don’t pretend to care about someone or something just to get their attention.
The damage isn’t just annoyance. It’s suspicion that gets attached to genuine messages. Emails I would have read warmly now carry an asterisk. Did a person write this? Does this person actually care about my work, or is this just another prompt in the dark?
Some of my favourite emails are pitches – someone making something creative and replying to tell me about it, personally, thoughtfully. I love those. They feel like the newsletter working the way it’s supposed to.
The AI-generated version wears that same face. And now, every time I see it, I have to decide whether I’m reading a person or a performance. And that adds up – a tiny erosion of trust, email by email, into something that feels like a much bigger loss.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-05-11 16:05:02
We already know play is good for us, the same way we know sleep matters and vegetables exist. Knowing hasn’t made us do it more. In The most radical act in an age of outrage is to play, Zander Phelps argues that our collective retreat from play isn’t accidental but an outcome of systems that keep us anxious and distracted – and that playful curiosity might be one of the last ways to stay human and hard to manipulate.
I almost skipped this piece, because – well – there are genuinely terrible things happening in the world right now, and ‘go play more’ can feel like advice from someone who hasn’t checked the news lately. But Phelps earns his argument. He’s not offering a wellness tip. He’s making a structural point about why disengagement from play serves certain interests rather well.
“Unused faculties atrophy. And when faculties atrophy, systems built on compliance thrive. They reward predictability. Anger and fear make us predictable. Creativity, curiosity, and divergent thinking make us harder to steer. Emotional manipulation becomes simpler when imagination shrinks.”
Which is to say: our collective anxiety isn’t just a side effect. It’s the point. The antidote Phelps proposes isn’t a digital detox or a meditation retreat.
“Where does sovereignty begin? Not in Washington or Silicon Valley. It begins with self-regulation. I cannot control the global news cycle, but I can control my nervous system. I can decide whether I will outsource my emotional state to the latest headline or cultivate internal stability. For me, that cultivation happens through play.”
The mechanism is simple: “Play expands our adaptive capacity. Fear contracts it.” What that means in practice:
“Real-world play, such as tossing a ball, learning to juggle, or building something with friends, reintroduces novelty, problem-solving, and collaboration. It broadens capacity in ways no algorithm can replicate.”
Getting a dog forced me to reckon with this in a way I hadn’t expected. Twice a day, I’m outside, training and playing, watching something be purely, absurdly delighted by movement. It’s not exactly the kind of play Phelps talks about but something in that hour genuinely resets me. I don’t touch my phone. I’m just there in nature with a hectic furball, hands covered in dirt and saliva. It’s uncomplicated, unproductive presence, and I didn’t know how much I needed it.
“[Play] builds resilience, flexibility, and social connection. It restores a sense of agency because the reward is internal. You are not waiting for a notification to feel validated. You are generating joy through participation.”
Which sounds obvious. Until you notice how rarely you actually do it.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
