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
2026-05-04 15:43:40
Extended travel a few weeks ago finally gave me a chance to burrow into my podcast backlog. I was on a train listening to this 2025 conversation between legendary Australian journalist Peter Greste and novelist Omar El Akkad, whose book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This I included in DD344. Towards the end of the interview I found myself wiping tears off my cheeks.
The whole conversation is meaty and devastating. Greste and El Akkad go deep on the gap between Western liberal values and the reality of Gaza, the cynicism of ‘lesser evil’ politics and the theatre of performative progressivism.
There is a barely contained exhaustion in El Akkad’s voice. Here is a writer being asked, yet again, to explain to a Western audience why opposing a genocidal war is the only morally defensible position. He does it anyway, with astounding clarity.
Near the end, an audience member – a new parent – asks El Akkad how to raise a child to be ethical and truthful in a world so obviously marked by hypocrisy and violence. His answer is the part that got me on that train. I’m going to just let him speak, because no paraphrase would come close, but do yourself a favour and listen to the whole thing.
“My son’s too young for any of this. My daughter isn’t. She’s getting to an age where eventually my natural desire to sort of bubble wrap her is gonna have to give away. And I’ve been trying to think of how to explain this to the two most kind-hearted decent human beings I’ve ever met in my life. And I don’t know. I have no idea. None.
I have instead been trying to sort of work my way around in this very circuitous way of talking about how to be in this world. How to exist, how to be a decent human being in a world that is so indecent so much of the time, not because most people are indecent, but because we’ve handed the reins of control to profoundly indecent human beings.
I found myself coming back to one of the many things that have affected me profoundly over the last two years: I don’t know how many of you know of Aaron Bushnell, the person who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in DC. I would never ask any of you to go watch that video. It’s horrific. But if you have, you know that towards the end of that video, the security apparatus shows up, and you’ve got one guy asking for a fire extinguisher and another guy pointing his gun at the flames.
And insofar as I’m going to talk to my kids at some point about how to be in the world, I will try to explain that throughout their lives, going forward, there are going to be so many benefits to being the kind of person who points their gun at the flame, or more to the point, allows someone else to hold the gun to the flame on their behalf. And that despite all of those benefits, the best thing they can do to be a force for some kind of positive change in the world is to try and be the person who’s reaching for the fucking fire extinguisher.
That is the closest I have come to trying to figure out what I want to tell them about how to be in the world. But that is also coming from a place of profound embarrassment, because it should not be the case that I have to tell them any of this. We screwed up, and that’s why this is happening.”
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-04-27 15:17:23
One of the more bizarre features of this era is that even people who are doing objectively well by any reasonable measure can’t seem to shake the feeling that they’re falling behind.
Financial journalist Hanna Horvath has written a very clarifying essay on why this might be happening. She traces how ‘middle class’ stopped being an economic category and became a psychological one – a story about the kind of life you think you deserve. Which means when the story doesn’t match the reality, the gap hits hard:
“‘Middle class’ has become a psychological container that absorbs all of this anxiety – the gap between self-concept and lived experience, between what you were trained to expect and what the economy actually delivers. The term ‘middle class’ holds a feeling. And right now, the feeling is dissonance. ‘I have what I was told would be enough, and it isn’t, and I don’t know who to be angry at.’”
Horvath argues that there are two distinct experiences at play. Some of us feel ‘material precarity’ – when the basics genuinely slip out of reach – and others feel ‘positional precarity’ – when you earn well but the life that income was supposed to buy keeps receding.
What unites both groups is structural. Neither is accumulating capital. Both live off income perpetually – although at different levels. The resentment from not being able to get off the treadmill – rather than flowing upward toward those who are hoarding vast amounts of capital and/or shaping policies – tends to travel sideways (hatred of ‘elites’) or down (hatred of immigrants).
“The family earning $75K and the family earning $350K have more in common with each other – structurally, in terms of their relationship to capital – than either has with the family whose wealth generates its own income without labor. Both are running on the treadmill. One is running slower, but neither is able to get off.”
When the big goals feel permanently out of reach, doom spending becomes rational: if the future you want isn’t coming anyway, you might as well buy the thing that makes today bearable. Meanwhile, “they’re dealing with an entire consumer economy that’s been redesigned around making the base tier uncomfortable enough to push you toward a premium tier you can’t afford.”
The result is a growing share of our society who did everything right and yet are one bad quarter away from a financial crisis. The psychological result is the same across both groups: “the inability to plan, to imagine a future, to trust that effort connects to outcomes”.
The misdirected anger isn’t an accident, Horvath writes. Rather than recognising their shared position, the two groups tend to organise against each other:
“The fallen working class turns atavistic – nostalgic for a past economy that included them. The educated-but-blocked class turns progressive – demanding systemic reform. Both are responding to the same structural forces. But instead of recognising that shared position, they organise against each other. The resentment becomes horizontal instead of vertical.”
I really appreciate that Horvath doesn’t just leave it at diagnosis. A phrase that stood out to me was ‘manufactured dissatisfaction’ – the idea that some of what we feel is structural and real, but some of it is the consumer economy doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping us in a state of aspirational lack so we keep spending, upgrading, chasing the next tier. Understanding this and separating the two is where agency begins.
Her most useful and immediately practical suggestion is really simple: name which precarity is yours.
“Money anxiety feels similar at every income level, but the mechanics are often different. If you’re in material precarity, the work is protecting the floor – building a buffer, reducing exposure to the extraction economy, making the system work for you where it can. If you’re in positional precarity, the work is harder to see because it’s quite psychological: separating what you need from what you were trained to expect.”
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-04-20 15:23:09
Camilo Moreno-Salamanca shared something recently that I has stayed with me. He describes the pull between two speeds: the race to be at the technological vanguard on one side – keeping up with prompts, agents and chatbots – and on the other, the slow, the analogue: books, friends, the mundane. He arrives somewhere I recognise: “I’m not sure if humans are designed to operate in this mode.”
I’ve been sitting with this post, trying to untangle the different aspects of this discomfort.
One is moral. When I use AI tools, I’m aware that I’m participating in something I haven’t fully consented to – underwriting a set of values, a concentration of power, a particular vision of the future that I didn’t choose and wouldn’t vote for. It’s a reality constructed for us by platforms and capital. Engagement with it feels like complicity, but complete disengagement seems ever more futile. Stepping back and saying ‘I’ll watch from the sidelines’ or even downing the tools entirely (i.e. changing careers) is a privileged option only available to some.
Another aspect is about the life I want. I’m deeply convinced that the good life is found in real connection, in being present in the physical and the local rather than being constantly yanked into a world mediated by screens and platforms. And yet that version of the good life feels more and more like nostalgia. My appetite for slowness has intensified, and I distrust that a little. Getting older has a way of making retreat feel like principle, instead of what it often is: habit or fear.
And then there’s identity. Since my teenage years, technology and the web have shaped my life in ways I’m genuinely grateful for – education, connections, work I benefitted from immensely. But I find it increasingly hard to be part of an industry that is building a future I fear is becoming deeply anti-human. The person with seventeen browser tabs and a Claude Code subscription and the person who considers human creativity and the arts indispensable – they both feel like me. I’m just not sure they can fully coexist anymore. The tension is real.
Participating in capitalism has always asked us to make a kind of peace with dissonance – between what we value and how we actually live, between the world we want and the systems we help perpetuate. But what I’m being asked to accept – and overlook – keeps expanding.
Like Moreno-Salamanca, I arrive without answers. Underneath all the discomfort, the same question keeps popping up: are we really supposed to live like this? I’m not sure we need to answer it. The discomfort is already doing that.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
