I have hardly eaten in a week. I am almost as much myself as always, only it is effort to stay standing, even to stay sitting upright. In seeking the most natural state, I end up on the floor, flat on my back. My lips tingle, occasionally; my hands tremble ever so slightly. My limbs, when I attend to them, feel heavy and cold.

I am not so concerned. This has happened before; worse and more mysterious things have happened before, and they always pass. I always survive.

I only want to be myself. That is what always nags at me, at times like these. Not that my body might die — for I am not so paranoid anymore that I think this is killing me — but that a subtler death will take me, where I become unable to be the person I want to be.

I am almost as much myself as always, but I know that doesn’t last forever.

2023. I am watching myself lie on the daybed in my old apartment, doing nothing but listen to audiobooks for days on end. I kept embroidery on the bed to my left, a jigsaw puzzle on the table to my right, but I often couldn’t hold my head and arms up long enough to work on them. The weeks, months, on that daybed, I would look out the French doors into the garden, like a Victorian invalid. The garden was beautiful, green and lush, and the sun would shine down on me through the skylights, but it was static. The world was silent, unless the cat came to scratch at the door.

2019. I am watching myself tucked into bed in my old house, my laptop open on my lap, writing for a job I didn’t even realize I was too mentally fatigued to do properly. I watch myself try to walk to the station to catch the train to the office, because I desperately wanted to go, to be normal again. I watch myself sit down on the sidewalk a block away from home, defeated.

No art came from those times, no beauty. I hardly remember them, months of my life at a time just washed away into nothing. Same walls, same ceiling; same position, same silent, empty life.

I watch myself being pushed in a wheelchair and hating it. Trying not to cry only because it would make me look more pathetic.

I do not want pity because I do not want to be a person who needs pity. I want to be strong and self-sufficient, whole and hale. I want to be upright and kind. I want to have bounty to give, because the person I want to be is one who makes the lives of others better. She helps her friends raise their children and organize their homes, she listens carefully and thinks deeply and says what they need to hear. All of those things require energy.

The me who cannot lift her arms, who cannot write, who slurs her words for lack of energy, she is in some important sense not me. She terrifies me. I do not want to be her.

I am not her right now. I can still stand, still move, still laugh — I have not yet so depleted my reserves that I cannot reach for those things. I know this will pass, and in the meantime I am keeping myself upright.

I am not her right now. Right now, I am almost as much myself as always. But I am closer to her than I want to be.

I sit with you at dinner the first night, happy to see you again. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen you; I’ve forgotten what the first time was like. You are simply, somehow, a fixture in my life.

I become ill in the second week, weak and unable to move. You let me lean against your chest, tucked under your arm. Surrounded by other friends, we stay up past midnight, the kind of late night conversation that fuzzes the world around the edges.

You look up at the wall beside us and see potential there, and what you create on it the next day brings everyone together. You are always seeing potential in empty spaces that no one else sees. You are always bringing people together, in ways we didn’t know we needed.

“What is bitterness?” my friend asks me. I talk at him for two hours, a tangled mass of black thread. Bitterness, I decide, is when you give something, and you reasonably expect something in return, and then you don’t get it. The thing you expect might be resources, money, but I am mostly talking about love, about care.

That night, I am on a couch in building A, alone but not wanting to go home, while you and my friend talk just behind me. What is bitterness?, he has asked you. You have been talking for a while.

“Imagine,” he says now, “that all your friends suddenly turn on you. What would you do?”

He’s drawn the example from his conversation with me, though you don’t know it. It is the biggest knot in my thread, the blackness in me.

“Well,” you say, in a tone that borders on derision, “it would be pretty fucking surprising if all those people had just been pretending to be friends with me for all these years, for some weird reason. But I guess I’d just say fuck them, and move on.”

Your conversation moves on, but I stay on those words, on your confidence, on how ridiculous you found the entire question. Could I be like you? Is it that simple, to not be like this?

I float in that uncertainty, until twenty-four hours later I am laid out on my back. Someone has reached into the space opened by that uncertainty, and she has unceremoniously ripped away a part of me I was clinging to because I thought I still needed it.

Sound is unbearable, voices, lights — until there is a guitar in my hands and I pluck out a song for you. Gentle and cradling.

I spend all of November being friends with everyone, happy to pass my time with more or less anyone. But on the last night, after I have sung my song, everything narrows. We have only hours left, and I want to spend them with the people who matter, who will keep mattering.

I find you and our other friend, and the three of us talk until midnight. Just us, really, though others come and go at the periphery. You are what matters, and I’m glad I remembered before it was too late.

A few days later, you come to my door in the winter dark to say goodbye, white boots with black laces. I hug you, but I know I will see you again. I always see you again. Maybe that makes me take you for granted.

February

You are in town for less than a day, barely any time. You tell almost no one you are there, but you ask to see me.

I almost say no — I am having a terrible day, a terrible week, stressed to physical illness, and I almost say no because I don’t know if I can face speaking to someone. On the walk to the Rose Garden I feel like crying, like a person already dead. This must be a mistake.

I am tangled at first, tense, but you get me to talk about it. You say everything I’ve needed to hear, supporting me not with platitudes, but with the conviction of experience. I realize that whatever happens, I will be alright.

Then you tell me about your city, the one you’re moving back to, and it sounds somehow right. Like a thing I want to move towards. With you among the tiers of rose bushes, I spin a little dream of a life there: you and me, my family, everyone else I love.

By the time we part, I am unburdened. I have seen a future open up before me, where I had for some reason believed that none was possible. We talked for hardly more than two hours, and yet I am transformed.

That night, you fly away.

June

I am in your home, surrounded by people I love and people I might learn to love. We have been laughing all night, between the songs we’ve sung, often even during them.

Now it is midnight, and you come sit next to me on the couch again. I stroke my friend’s hair and look across her, at you.

“Surely life can’t be like this,” I say. What I mean is that a day like this can’t be a normal part of a person’s life. Today is everything I want.

“Well, it’s Friday,” you say. “Five days of the week can’t be like this, but I think every weekend can.”

It’s like our two conversations about bitterness, again: you hearing something different than I meant, because my sad, helpless perspective is so foreign to you.

Today is everything I want. To you, perhaps, today is nothing special. What a life.

At your office, a man sits down beside me. He tells me he knows almost nothing about me, but he’s heard I deserve no small amount of credit for what you’re currently doing with your life.

How laughable, I think. You are so self-assured. You take what you want. All I did was accept your application to an event, four years ago. You would have found your way, with or without me.

Without you, though? I’m not sure where I’d be.

I certainly wouldn’t be here.

These books are being published faster than I can read them, and at this point, I have surfeited with honey and begun to loathe the taste of sweetness. I pick them up and toss them down nearly as quickly. I already know there is nothing for me there. If these books are preaching to me, I am not just the choir, I am the priest himself.1

Every time I open one of these books, I feel bad. Not just because there’s nothing for me there, not just because I feel overwhelmed with the sheer number of them that I know I’ll never get through, not even because the average book is such crap that it depresses me.

I feel bad because all of the books are saying, There Is A Problem. Things Are Bad. The World Is Bad, And You Feel Bad.

I don’t want to write another book that says that.

It can be useful to move away from things that are bad for you. Necessary, even. It has often been good for me. But moving away from misery is uncertain; it is stumbling blind into the mist and hoping there is something better on the other side. I don’t want to lead my readers into uncertain mists.

I want people, when they read my book, to feel the way I feel when I read Mary Oliver. Not Things are unrelentingly terrible, but there may be a glimmer of hope, but simply, I have seen something beautiful.

I want my book to be beautiful. There is a tension, there, because I also want to guide people, concretely, through the steps they need to take to change their life. That’s the dry meat of any self-help book. I want it to actually work.

But perhaps in order to work, it needs to be beautiful. It needs to work on people emotionally, not just mechanically.

I spent two years writing a romance novel about digital minimalism. A person lonely and adrift after the pandemic meets another person, lonely and stuck. The main character is addicted to their phone, has little else in their life, but through digital minimalism, they rediscover the world around them, and human connection.

It is unfinished and I will never publish it, at least not where any of you can see it. It was something I mostly wrote for my own emotional needs, not because I thought it would change anything. But I think there’s something important in the idea.

Perhaps my book should be a narrative. I don’t know what the narrative is of. I fear that my own story would be too intense: such abject misery to start with, and such monumental, destabilizing change as a result.2 I also think it’s importantly not relatable: the privilege of having nothing but unstructured time to fill, and essentially zero computer-based obligations.

So, I am still mulling.

I don’t think writing a book is about putting words to the page. When I write a story, I don’t decide how the story goes. I think about the characters, turning them over in my head for months or years, until I understand what they want, what they will do. Then I write it down.

I don’t think I have years, this time. But it has only been 18 days. I have written thousands of words of notes, but mostly I have been thinking about Mary Oliver and about how to find meaning in a post-scarcity world.

I think it is getting me somewhere. We’ll see where that is.

I woke the next morning and looked out our little bedroom window at the tidal beach below, the mountains rising shallowly in the distance. I drank it in in disbelief, like slaking thirst.

We stayed a week. Every sight stayed as beautiful as the last: the rocky beach at Ashaig, the waterfall at the bend in the road, the golden haze of ice sublimating in the morning sun. The mountains stayed immense and unmoved.

The world stayed unbelievably beautiful, but I could not sustain the feeling of disbelief.

By the final day, as we drove up to Staffin, I found myself accustomed to the sights. I tried to reach for that awe that had felt boundless, only to find it quieted. I was not unmoved — I still saw the beauty, still loved it — but it had become a part of the world I expected.

Only on the ride home from the airport, with the sky closed in on all sides by glass towers and concrete overpasses, did Skye’s beauty become real to me again. Once I had left it behind.

A year ago, some hours of conversation with an old friend, a chance meeting, were enough to tilt my world on its axis. I was so unused to being known, to being spoken to as a whole person who meant something to someone, that it broke me open.

Last November, I spent a month being known, bombarded by it on all sides. At least a dozen different people who looked at me, and then looked into me, and said something simple that changed me. The first time felt impossible, world-altering, like the mountains rising around me on all sides, when I’d only ever lived in flat farmland. But I kept waking up every morning, and it kept being there. I kept discovering new beauty around each corner, in each person. She cares for me. He sees me. He’s choosing to spend time with me. She wants a better life for me. It stayed hard to believe, but it got a little easier each time.

April dealt my disbelief its final blow. Friendship came fast and easy, yet deep and real. By the time my old friend came back to town a few weeks ago, an afternoon with him was nothing special. Conversations with people who knew me had become a part of the world I expected.

At the end of November, one of my friends texted me that the month felt “more like a North Star of what I want than like a loss”. This week, I followed that North Star. It took me north, and east.

Two days ago, standing beside a fire we’d built, looking out across the water at the sun setting on the longest day of the year, my friend laughed, shaking her head, and said, “This moment is so perfect it’s unbelievable.”

I knew she was right: I could see the clouds and buildings glowing bright pink in the sunset, hear the rush of the waves and the roar of a crowd on the mainland; I was surrounded by friends, warmed by laughter and by the fire we all made together.

But I couldn’t find the bottomless well of awe inside me, the ‘unbelievable’ part of what my friend said.

I was only happy, not disbelieving.

Only happy is a wonderful thing to be.

In my first job, I had one coworker I really liked. We had both just moved to the city and we worked the same job; she was older and much more self-possessed than I. She would invite me over to her house and let me stay up late talking in her bedroom. She’d take me on walks and guide my hand to touch the fuzzy leaves of plants I’d never seen. She hugged me, gave me little gifts, helped me without a second thought.

When we’d known each other for about four months, I was sitting on her lap at an event and she was hugging me, and she pressed her smile against my shoulder and said, “I love you.” Then she let go and took it back: “No, wait, it’s too soon. But I really like you!”

I respect that and still love her today. But also, screw that.

Let yourself love your friends. Let yourself tell them that you love them, if it won’t send them running for the hills, and/or incorrectly make them think that you’re romantically interested in them. If we’re always pushing the message that you should love everyone, even strangers, even people who are awful to you, then why hold back, why keep it inside, when you find someone who treats you well, who gets you, who likes spending time with you? Why stamp down the excitement of connection with another person?

Modern friendship is a constant uphill battle. Almost everyone by default retreats to their own place, living in the comfort of their own cocoon. A lot of advice I hear on friendship is like “have people you do activities with and you’ll be socially fulfilled” or “you can’t expect that much from a friendship”. Fuck that. My bible on friendship is The Other Significant Others, a beautiful book on the value of non-romantic partnerships, by a woman who had a platonic best friend who was so important to her that it reshaped her entire life. She would go on walks holding hands with her husband on one side and her best friend on the other. She writes about friends who raise children together, who live together platonically til they die of old age.

She says that if you don’t have any friends who can come over when your house is messy, you probably don’t have any real friends. In 2022 someone came over to my house and said it looked more like a museum than a home. I was offended. He was right.

At the end of Inkhaven 2 I hadn’t cleaned my house in about a month, and two of my friends came over with no notice. My floor was covered in halfway-folded laundry that they had to step over, and my kitchen was a horror of coffee shop prep: towers of dirty dishes, batter spilled on the chair seats, and the air purifier, somehow, full of cooked beans. My friends didn’t mind, and I didn’t mind them seeing it.

Everyone has to do their laundry. If you can’t let your friends see that, there’s probably a lot else you’re not willing to let them see.

Not every friendship will work out. Not every friendship that works out will be a major part of your life forever. But things don’t have to be perfect, or last forever, to be worth investing in wholeheartedly.

Modern life is so lonely. When you find someone who makes sense to you, who makes you happy, lean into it. Let yourself be enthusiastic about them, even irrationally so. Let them see your whole self, laundry and all. Let yourself fall in love.

I learn the names of the white terns flying frantic overhead, and of the black cormorants, solid and silent upon the water’s surface. The cumulus clouds lie in strata above the horizon, soft and welcoming. The horizon ripples in the distance.

My grandmother asked me to read a Mary Oliver poem at her funeral. We were not close; poetry was the only thing we shared. I gave her a creaking spiral-bound notebook for Christmas one year, full of poems I had copied out by hand. She gave it back to me the summer before she died, Mary Oliver handwritten in the back: When death comes. She was ready.

I am reading Mary Oliver now, my feet bare in the grass. In the beginning, she writes, I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

We sit with our backs against a tree, books on our knees. We look up at the treetops, the shapes in the clouds, the birds whose names we are learning.

Sometimes I think the worst thing about going barefoot is how much I look down. I miss the clouds, the birds, the water. Today I walk a dirt path with my sandals dangling from my fingers. Ants crawl over an empty snail shell. The cottonwoods gather in corners, catch in spider webs. A snake darts across the path. I am looking down.

I walked on sand earlier, soft and fine, swallowing my toes. A pleasure that made me hum, sweet even as it began to burn.

Now, as tree swallows wheel above the lake, the sound of the water lapping at the shore changes. I peer over the low wall to see a rock jutting above the surface, the water parting around it.

I keep expecting happiness to feel like a tidal wave, like overwhelm, crushing my lungs. These days, perhaps these years, it is only the gentle waves against the shore, easy and right, changing but constant. It is not a sunburst of incandescent joy; it is the sun rising every day, casting its predictable shadows, waking the world.

I used to grasp so tightly at moments, when I knew they would end. I still know they will end. I am no longer grasping.

Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. It’s there, and you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.

And then it crashes on the shore, and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while.

I am on a train out of Chicago at the end of the workday, seated on the upper level, where I can see all the passengers below. The city goes by outside the windows of the train, brick buildings giving way to warehouse parking lots, which give way to the sprawling Chicago suburbs, an alternation between sparse woodlands and rows of identical manicured lawns. Below me, no one is looking at anything but their screens. Mostly phones — I can see them playing Candy Crush, scrolling Instagram, swiping on TikTok. One man has his laptop on his knees, his phone in his hand, and a can of alcohol in his lap. Anything to numb the experience. Anything to not be here.

I am on an airplane, taxiing on the tarmac, a middle seat in economy class. The woman to my left, a kindly abuela, is swiping on her shortform videos, and they are all of Hispanic women baking pan dulces. It feels a little wholesome, but she keeps swiping and swiping, until I feel glutted with more pan dulces than anyone could ever make or eat. To my right, a white woman in her forties is doing the same, only her videos are all of car crashes. I hate it, but it's hard to look away. They lose signal when the plane takes off, so the abuela on my left watches a movie, and the woman on my right pays for internet and works on emails. Below us, the Rocky Mountains spread out, breathtaking, endless and snow-capped, but no one is looking.

I am at my window, and all the young people on the sidewalk have their phones in their hands, AirPods in their ears. They look down at their screens as they walk and as they cross the street and as they bike and as they drive their cars. The only person without a phone is an old man, walking through a cloud of his own smoke. He drops his cigarette on the ground, walks twenty paces, then stops to light another.

Fifty years ago, you could smoke anywhere: indoors, around children. It was just the way things were. I've been to places in Europe where you can still just smoke at cafés or in your apartment building, and it seems so strange to me, such a norm violation, rude and disgusting. It used to be much worse than that here, much more ubiquitous, but now it's nearly disappeared. The old man chain smoking is an aberration, a relic.

Maybe there's hope.

You have a job that you don’t really like, but you’re not unhappy enough to quit, to face the uncertainty of finding something new that you might like even less. Jobs are how people make money, and everyone needs money to live, so everyone works jobs they don’t really like. Sure it takes up half the waking hours of your life. Sure you have dreams of leaving this all behind and working on a farm, but you know that’s unrealistic. This is just what it is to live in the modern world.

You sit all day at work, so a couple times a week you drive to a place where you can work out, yoga or climbing or lifting weights at the gym. You put in the hour of exercise that the scientific studies say you need, and then you’re free to go home and sit more. At the gym, you’re surrounded by other people doing the same thing as you, but you don’t feel the desire to talk to them. Sometimes you think of something you might say, but it would be too much effort, too scary, to actually go through with it.

You have some friends, in the sense of people you see sometimes who like you well enough, but you can’t just dump your feelings on people who didn’t sign up for that, so you pay a therapist to talk through your problems. They listen to you, but it is not reciprocal; you know nothing about them and owe them nothing except your money. You might know them for ten, twenty years, but you would never invite them to your home, to your wedding. The relationship is circumscribed, and you know that would be outside its bounds.

Your body hurts from stress and from sitting hunched over your laptop all day, so you pay a massage therapist, and during the hour you’re on the table, silent, your nervous system calms just from the feeling of another human’s skin touching yours. You exchange a couple short words with the massage therapist, thanking them as you pay, and then it’s back to your car.

You sit in the parking lot, swiping on the apps, because a hookup might be an even better way to get that feeling of skin on skin, and it wouldn’t even cost you money. You find someone nearby and willing, and you chase endorphins together. It’s fine, you get the endorphins, but you part ways immediately after it ends, and you never learn the person’s real name. Oh well.

At a party that weekend, you drink alcohol to make you less afraid, and then you join a cuddle pile, some people whose names you sort of know and some you’ve never met. You’d certainly never touch your normal friends, not beyond a perfunctory hug hello or goodbye. That would be weird. But here, the alcohol and the hand stroking your hair and the press of an anonymous body all up against your left side make you feel warm, accepted. It’s almost close enough to feeling loved. You go home and your cat sleeps on your chest while you scroll messages on your phone and familiar voices play from your TV, and it feels almost like that, too.

You still don’t feel quite right, so you get a prescription for antidepressants. There’s no shame in it, you know. Lots of people are on antidepressants. It’s good to take care of your mental health.

Your therapist tells you that group singing helps humans feel connected to each other, so you pay to join a choir. Your therapist tells you that meditation helps with stress, so you start doing that too, sitting alone and silent in an empty room trying to become a person who can cope with your perfectly fine life without drowning.

Your therapist tells you it’s good to go for walks, so you put in your AirPods to listen to a podcast and set off down the street.

When you were a kid, your parents told you that it’s healthier for the feet to go barefoot, that all the support and structure in modern shoes makes your muscles weak so that you can’t support yourself without the shoes, that being shoved into unnatural confinement for decades fucks up the shape of your feet permanently.

But now, as you walk, there’s a solid inch of foam cushion between you and the ground. Maybe going barefoot is healthier if you’re walking on soft earth, grass, a blanket of moss on the forest floor. But you’ve tried going barefoot on the sidewalk a couple times, and you know how hard and unforgiving it is.

Look around, mom and dad, you think, would you really want me to go barefoot here? There is no soft earth to walk on, not anymore. As far as the eye can see in any direction, there’s only concrete.

If I want a book that’s right, I need to write it myself.

All the existing books are inadequate

Most people are wrong and dumb

I have read like 17 books about this, many of which claim to have actionable tips for cultivating healthier device use. Barely any of this advice has even the slightest chance of actually working; it seems to be written by people who understand nothing at all about how behavior change works.

Everyone wants to sell you easy fixes, but the truth of the situation is that the pull of modern devices is extremely powerful, and only drastic action will get you out of your current equilibrium. Only Cal Newport gets this right, but no one wants to admit it,1 because his thirty-day declutter strategy requires a lot of actual effort.

The pandemic matters, and so does AI

While the rate of books on this topic has been increasing, most were still written before 2020. That includes Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (2019), Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), and the much-touted How to Break Up With Your Phone (2018). Two of those are great books, but seven years is a long time in this fast-changing landscape, and things have only gotten much, much worse since they were writing.

It’s time for a book that both reckons with the pandemic, LLMs, and the accompanying breakdown of the social fabric, and can still give people hope even in our new, much more adverse environment.

Why you?

Other books are like “Oh, I’m a therapist or addiction counselor and I’ve watched things get out of hand” or “I’ve been studying digital tool use or how people communicate for twenty years”. “That’s why you can trust me, because of credentials and studies and stuff!” Fuck that. You know why you can trust me? Because:

I’m a real live young person

I made a spreadsheet of 22 books on this topic2 and confirmed my hunch that the authors are old as shit. The average age of the author at the time of publication is 45. The youngest person who has ever authored one of these books, as far as I can tell, is fully a decade older than me.

The book market doesn’t need another Gen Xer citing a bunch of studies about how device use stresses people out, or (god forbid) another Boomer lamenting how things used to be better back in their day. What the book market needs is a Zillennial like me to talk about what it’s actually like to grow up / live in this world, instead of just doing academic studies on it.

Would it be better if I was even younger? Sure. But then I would have had less time to flesh out my ideology, plus I probably wouldn’t be able to focus long enough to write a book because my brain would be soup.

I’m as much of an expert as we’re going to get

I’ve read a ton of books about device use, I think and talk to people about it constantly, and most importantly, I used to be addicted to my devices and then I put in a ton of effort and now I’m not. I got my life back. But I’m still fighting the fight every day.

Oh right and I have a blog that’s halfway about digital intentionality, and I’ve done a little bit of coaching (with uncertain results). I even made up the term ‘digital intentionality’! Who else is better positioned than I?!

I’m a good writer

The authors of the other device use books were professional mental health people or academics or art historians or whatever. But I’m a professional writer! So surely writing a book will go well for me. I mean, I’ve never written a book but how hard can it be? (………..)

What’s your angle?

I’m not sure. I’m not a person who sees device use through the lens of mental health or workplace fatigue or communication or productivity. I’m a person who sees the world through the lens of device use. I have probably quite a lot too much to say, and it’s not yet clear to me how to organize it or tie it all together.

There’s also the issue that I think Digital Minimalism is basically just correct. He has the right prescription for what to do, and if you pick up the book and read it, it’s not uncommon to be moved to immediately adopt it yourself. When it comes to his recommendations, all I have to add are a few nitpicks.

The place where Digital Minimalism falls short, I think, is that prior to writing the book. Cal Newport never had a problem with device addiction himself. That ground has been covered in newer books — the best example is probably Please Unsubscribe, Thanks (2022) — but those books have their own flaws.

Given my current strengths as a writer, and my position as maybe the only ‘digital native’ to write this book, I’m thinking that maybe the move is to go Feelings on it. I already said I don’t want to do the whole data-driven thing that everyone else has done to death. People don’t need studies to tell them about how their screens make them feel. We are all living it, every single day.

So the angle is…basically Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, but with 1000% more feelings? Maybe it’s part-memoir, somehow? I only decided two days ago that I needed to write this book, so forgive me for not having it fully formed in my mind yet.

But today it has been six months since my Inkhaven ended, so I am now allowed to write about how Inkhaven changed my life.

On October 30th, two days before Inkhaven started, I ran into a woman I knew but had hardly ever spoken to. I approached tentatively.

“Hi. You’re doing Inkhaven, right?”

“I am,” she said. “But like, what even is it, really? Is it even going to be good?”

“I have no idea.”

I’d been flip-flopping between apprehension and excitement. When I asked one of the organizers if I should do Inkhaven, I was specifically worried that I’d “hate the people and the vibes”. But I also applied, explicitly, because I was lonely.

Excerpt from my Inkhaven application:

My biggest problem (in writing and in life) is a lack of direction. […] I don’t know if Inkhaven will help with my lack of direction or not, but at least I’ll be forced to do something, rather than sitting at home looking at the seven instruments I might play and playing none of them (it’s a metaphor but also true).

I also think just being around other people who share a common project would be huge for me. I have not had a single coworker since 2021, and haven’t worked in person with a team since 2019. It’s lonely.

I started the month off weak, so sick by the time opening session started that I lay in the back, far away from everyone else, dozing on and off. I spent the first three days holed up in one of the art cabins, working lying down because I was too sick to sit up, torturing myself for ten hours to get each post perfect, writing and scrapping thousands of words every day.

And then I emerged. And I learned that Inkhaven was not about writing. And my life changed.

The first Inkhaven was, in an important way, the first time I tried living in the world again after the pandemic. Every previous foray had been tentative, limited, a time-boxed few hours at a party or meetup or conference before I could retreat back to my safely silent apartment. Beyond my boyfriend, I did not have any meaningful ongoing relationships.

I showed up to the first Inkhaven as the person I'd believed myself to be for my entire adult life: defined by EA, though I wasn't working in it anymore; defined by my relationships to the people in the community, though I'd tried to move on. It felt like dishonesty to not disclose those relationships, my history, upfront. It felt like that was all I was, that I was still only valuable for guanxi I wasn’t even sure I still had.

As soon as I started actually meeting people at Inkhaven, that began to change. We talked about what I was writing, digital intentionality, and people wanted to hear more. We talked about old interests I'd forgotten I had, things I used to love, that made me feel like I could be a person I liked again, a person who cared about things. I played people my songs and they loved them. I made female friends with whom I could discourse about gender and male friends who treated me like one of the bros. I got to be a bunch of mes I hadn't been in years, and some I'd never been before.

The people at Inkhaven showed me new and better ways to be who I was, both by example and by directly telling me. When on day nine I became too ill to move, the people at Inkhaven took care of me, bringing me food and blankets, letting me sleep on them while they wrote.

I changed a lot, processed a lot. I ended up flat on my back on the deck one night, wrapped in my friend’s cloak and so overstimulated I couldn’t stand the sound of voices I loved, trying to reorient, after a conversation caused me to shift the whole way I looked at everything.

It shifted. It is still shifting.

Excerpt from my journal in November:

People here decide how they feel about me based on, like, who I am, how I interact, and what and how I write on my blog. It’s not relevant what orgs I used to work for or who I used to live with or be married to. I am not here to be evaluated on my Impact. Some people here don’t even care about that at all.

It’s a very new experience. To imagine that someone could like me just as a person.

I was apprehensive about Inkhaven 2, especially coming so soon on the heels of the first. It felt like we had created something special and sacred the first time, and now, what, it was going to be franchised?

More than that, could I really do it again? Open myself to dozens of new people. What were the odds that these people would be as good as the people from November, that they would see me and change me and become an important part of my life? Did I even want that? The first time was so intense.

But I knew I couldn’t stay away, with it only two miles from my house. So I went.

It was a difficult adjustment at first. It was an entirely different experience. I’m glad I did it.

At the second Inkhaven, I no longer needed to define myself by who I used to be. I had a new, more obvious role, not just as the barista, but as the alumna, the person who had done Inkhaven before. Several people knew me from my blog, the person I’d discovered in myself over the past five months. I may not have been entirely unencumbered by my past, but it was not the main thing about me. I got to just be me, whoever that was, and people liked her.

Inkhaven 1 showed me how I might be a new person. Inkhaven 2 gave me a chance to actually be her.

I'm not the only person who was at both Inkhavens for the whole month, but I think I'm the only person who was fully emotionally invested in both cohorts.

I don't know if I could do it again. I don't know what would happen to me.

Inkhaven is exhausting. Physically and emotionally obliterating. You mine your life for blog posts and exhume things that perhaps should have stayed buried. You have conversations that change the way you look at the world. You work pretty much nonstop for a month. And then you wander around in a fugue state after, trying to readjust to normal life, and the fact that everyone you just became close to is now thousands of miles away from you.

It’s not a sustainable way to live.

Besides, I think I’ve gotten what I needed. I can't keep hitting myself over the head with intense months of massive emotional growth. At some point I have to just go out and live in the world. I think that point is now.

Inkhaven taught me that I could open myself up and not get hurt, so I finally played some of the songs I’d written for an audience other than my boyfriend and mom.

Inkhaven taught me that people like my songs, so I started writing more of them.

Inkhaven taught me to be okay just sharing things I’d created, even if I hadn’t nitpicked them to perfection for a year, so yesterday I went to a recording studio and finally actually recorded two of those songs.

Inkhaven taught me that I can rely on other people, so I did not go to the studio alone.

When I say “Inkhaven taught me”, Inkhaven is nothing if not the people who were there. It was all of you, your actions, the words you wrote and the words you said to me. If my soul was healed, it was not because of some abstract concept of Inkhaven, but because of you.

I love you.

Excerpt from my Inkhaven application:

My ideal outcomes for Inkhaven, in descending order of likelihood:

1. when I have a blog post idea in the future, I just write it and post it, rather than drafting it and then agonizing about it for years and never posting it

2. I write enough about digital minimalism that people come to me for coaching

3. I discover that there’s something in the world I care about and then I pursue it

4. I find some enduring sense of community

“Babe,” he said, “what are you doing? Why are you so obsessed with the past?”

So much of my writing on this blog has been about trying to process one particular thing in my past, over and over, like Lady Macbeth scrubbing again and again at a stain that isn’t even really there. I’ve attacked it from so many different angles: frameworks for approaching conflict, musings on the societal impact of the pandemic, light-hearted interludes, and plenty of straight-up trauma dumping. I’ve kept scrubbing at that stain, picking at that scab, for the past six months.

My life since I moved here nine years ago only has one narrative. It has only been about that one thing, everything defined as before or during or after it. Which is so dumb, because I don’t even care about that thing anymore. I’ve realized I want a new narrative, one that’s about literally anything else. Preferably something positive, but more than anything, just Not That.

There’s this bit in The Time Traveler’s Wife — the main character time travels involuntarily, can’t control where he goes or when, and he is continually drawn, throughout his life, to the scene of his mother’s death. He finds himself there again and again, watching it unfold from all angles, powerless to change what he knows is going to happen.

He can, at least, wrap a blanket around his younger self, who is watching it happen for the first time. I can’t even do that.

Some of my Inkhaven friends have been trying to help me escape my focus on the past. When I was in France, one of my friends was constantly exhorting me to talk of only the present and future, and another made me switch back to French when I got too worked up about conflicts in my life, because I am not good enough at French to rant nonstop about complex emotional issues in it. Another friend expressly doesn’t want to know anything about any community gossip, and it’s shockingly refreshing to not talk about who has dated who or how any given person may have minorly slighted me five years ago. Who fucking cares! How freeing.

And then there are all the people encouraging me to get the hell out of here, where all my context has collapsed on top of me and is massively weighing me down at all times. Thanks, friends.

I’ve done a lot of emotional processing on this blog, and much of it has been helpful to me. But where’s the line between helpful emotional processing and just wallowing in the past? Wherever it is, I think I’ve crossed it.

I’ve posted a lot of what I did because I wanted someone specific to read it and to respond in a certain way. Sometimes it’s been good; it’s helped me communicate with people and feel closer to them. But I think I write so much about the thing that hurt me because I feel that the people who were there never understood, and I wanted to just hit them over the head with it until they couldn’t possibly deny it anymore. This is a stupid reason to write. Not just because it hasn’t worked, at all, even though I know they read this blog, but because it’s just ill-conceived from the start. I cannot make other people feel anything, and I just need to accept that and move on.

So! I am hereby placing a two-month ban on myself writing about the pandemic, community conflict, or anything related to that whole thing. That means no blog posts, but also no poems or songs.

Nothing has been resolved, but it’s probably never going to be. Just drop it, just make art about something else. I’m sure there are other things a person could think about. Honeybees. Pianos. Bureaucracy. Death. Whatever.

It’s time to move on.

My immediate reaction was “What? Does it really come across that way? I don’t think I think the world is fundamentally bad!” I thought he was wrong, that he had done his best but just hadn’t seen me clearly.

Today, I think he was right.

Of course it comes across that way. Everything I write about digital intentionality feels like a reaction against the world being bad. I'm constantly bringing up how I've been hurt and failed and let down, and my experiences have led me to believe that that's the rule in human interactions. I quite like myself, in many ways, but I still haven’t managed to fully shake the fear that anyone who I let get close to me will eventually find something in me that they hate, and will abandon me.

I’ve been depressed more or less without respite since 2013. That’s a weird way of putting it, when it’s not like I’ve been in one continuous major depressive episode that whole time, but I think there’s an important truth in it.

It's easy to assume that I’m not depressed, when I don't have the acute depression feeling of utter hopelessness, when I am basically functional and not on the floor unable to move. When I am often, from day to day, happy or content or both.

But that feeling of happiness, such as I’ve been able to find it for the past few years, has been one of having carved out a little refuge from a world that hated me. Living a slow life of simple joys in defiance of what I knew I was supposed to be doing, of pressures I still felt but was ignoring. I rarely left my house, and I felt sad about that, but my house was also where I felt safe. Leave my house and go interact with people, and something could go wrong. Often did go wrong. And even if I had good interactions, it all felt fleeting; I had little sense of building lasting connections with anyone.

Still, it made sense to think I wasn’t depressed anymore, because I’d been on an upward trajectory for so long.

2020 blacking out of my life, losing everything, being psychologically tortured with no escape in sight. 2021 still feeling like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, hideous and hated and hiding under the bed til I could do everyone a mercy and just die out of sight. 2022 throwing myself at things, making memories and self-destructive decisions, traveling the world alone, exhausted, and miserable, but at least relieved to be far away from the life I hated.

2023 burned out and disillusioned, but stabilizing, falling in love, digital minimalism, moving towards something for the first time in years. 2024 moving in with my boyfriend, spending more and more time with children I loved until it was my job, starting to climb, maybe having one friend. 2025 settled but still spinning my wheels, still hiding from the world, still essentially friendless.

But god, things were so much better than they used to be! Was I really still depressed?

Well, you can look at my poetry from as recently as October 2025, which contains such lines as “god what’s the point of it all?” and “how do you cope with having no goals?” and “has our entire society entirely gone to shit?”. I have several finished songs that are completely unusable — they felt like deep truths at the time but looking at them now, they’re just embarrassing depression drivel.

My utter and intractable lack of purpose in life should also have been a pretty obvious sign. I had so many people try to debug that for me so many times, and I tried many times myself, but I was immovable. I just could not want anything.

Inkhaven 1 started to nudge me out of my old ruts, but I was so stuck, hard to budge. Inkhaven 2 kept nudging me, all the people who didn’t know who I was supposed to be and only saw who I was.

And suddenly, like a boulder blocking a stream, I tumbled, and the water started to flow again.

Suddenly I want things, and it feels normal. There are things I want to write that feel important to me. I acutely, constantly want to leave my life here behind, and I have somewhere specific that my heart quite desperately wants to go. I started working out again, suddenly, without even planning to. I've crossed the Bay to see friends twice this month, when I usually only care enough to do that once or twice a year. I started actually working on recording an album, years after writing many of the songs, and I’ve involved other people in the project, something I could never have done when I was stuck convinced that everyone will always let you down.

The past couple weeks I've felt like I was constantly on the edge of hypomania. I would wake up wanting to do things. I couldn't stop creating. I seemed to have an excess of executive function and social energy. But as it kept lasting I started to wonder... is this just what it's like to not be depressed? And I just didn't know because I have never experienced that state in all my years since high school? High school where I was kind, and open, and loved, where I believed the world could be good, where I believed in a future for myself and the world. It was easy to be that person in high school because I didn't know anything; I hadn't yet been disillusioned. But I'm starting to realize that "Over-updating on unusually bad situations" might apply to my entire adult life, not just the very worst of it.

People talk about depression as a cognitive distortion: You perceive things as worse than they actually are. From the inside it feels completely rational, like you are perceiving the world correctly and it’s everyone else who is delusional. Really, who is even dictating what the objectively correct way to perceive things is? Who’s to say that I’m incorrect to believe that people will abandon me when I’m in need, when it has in fact happened before, many times?

Still, perhaps there are more and less helpful ways to orient to the world. And maybe the distortion is when you get stuck after updating on the negatives, and can never find your way back to believing that things might be okay, no matter how much evidence you’re presented with.

For instance: I am still surprised every time someone does something nice for me. On the morning after Inkhaven 2, when I’d only slept three hours, I said it would be nice to have a banana, and a friend immediately handed me a banana he’d just gotten for himself. I was disbelieving at first, and then so touched I cried a little. It was just a fucking banana. He didn’t even have to pay for it or anything.

It’s only just occurring to me how fucked up some of my experiences have been. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, to not let yourself see how bad things are when you can’t escape them. Now that escape finally feels (maybe, just a little bit) possible, memories are surfacing like spring water.

People keep telling me that the whole world isn’t like the little bubble in which I’ve lived for the past nine years. That there are parts of the world, real, findable parts, that they’ve seen, where people treat each other with basic decency.

It’s hard to believe them.

Despite all this, I am quite happy with the way I move through the world. I feel perfectly physically competent, even if I’m not the most physically fit — a distinction I’ve never heard of, and probably just made up, but hear me out.

I may not be able to lift very heavy weights in the gym, but I can scoop a thirty-pound baby off the ground and onto my hip without hurting myself or the four-month-old in the carrier on my front.1 I can walk quite some distance with a two-year-old in my arms, if needed. I can throw kids in the air and catch them, or flip them over my shoulders and spin them around.

Thanks to bouldering, I rediscovered that I can just climb things. If I need to get up on some playground equipment to follow a kid, I can grab a bar above my head and just hop up, instead of going around and walking up the stairs like the rest of the nannies and parents. I can scramble up a large rock without thinking about it.

When I see someone holding a baby awkwardly, as if they're about to drop it, or struggling to maneuver on the playground, I feel bad for them. What a gift it is to feel a sense of mastery when confronted with these things: the physical skills I actually need in my day-to-day life.

I said I can't swim, but I can keep myself afloat in the water and move around it mostly as I wish. I said I can't run, but I can sprint when I need to, even if I’m holding a kid, and I can walk for hours and hours. Moving heavy things is not trivial for me, with my size and strength, but I can get a mattress up a flight of stairs by myself if I have to. I can flip my bike upside down if the chain slips and I need to reattach it. I built my bike myself, out of a box.

I'm went to the gym this morning to lift my pathetically small weights, and I felt a little self-conscious about it. But I'm not unhappy with what my body can do. It would be nice to be physically fit, but I find it indispensable to be physically competent.

It bothers me so much when people treat bullying like a conflict where the people involved need to sit down and talk it out. That’s like saying, “Oh, Ukraine and Russia are in conflict; they really need to figure things out.” Like, no! Russia just needs to stop attacking Ukraine!

— a friend at Inkhaven

Let’s start with the shameful part: For two years in middle school1, I was the bully. I had three or four victims — a lot considering there were only thirty people in my grade — and I made their lives hell with unkind words.

There’s this narrative that people are only bullies because they feel powerless elsewhere in life and are expressing the pain inside, but I don’t think that’s accurate. It didn’t apply to me: I had a positive and stable home life, and from the inside, it just didn’t feel like I was expressing pain.

How it felt from the inside was that I didn’t like these other kids, so I was mean to them. Pretty simple.

But being mean to someone isn’t always bullying. I think there are two things that transmute meanness into bullying.

First, bullying can only happen if the recipient is vulnerable. They have to feel hurt by the behavior. If you horribly insult someone but they don’t care at all, that isn’t bullying.2

Second, there must be some kind of power differential. My bad behavior was totally on me. But something I was less conscious of, and had less control over, was that I had more social power than my victims. The kids I didn’t like were the kids that nobody liked, and so there was no one to stand up to me on their behalf, no friend group for them to retreat to that would bolster them after I’d torn them down. Meanwhile I had a lot of friends, and while I may have been the only full-fledged bully, most of the rest of my grade would laugh along with me or talk shit about the unpopular kids behind their backs.

So then, on to the other side of the story, or the story where I am on the other side.

I was 21 when we met, and she was 26. We lived together for three years. She had the social power — it was her friends we lived with, her little kingdom. She was confident and assertive where I was wilting; I had trouble voicing my preferences to anyone and always backed down, sometimes in tears. I was insecure, always looking to others for approval, and I was in a totally new social environment. In short, I was easy to hurt.

Sometimes, it felt like she was coming from a place of good intentions, and I was just receiving it poorly. She did nice things for me sometimes, so I understood us to be friends.

It took three years for me to see that her cruelty towards me was not an accident, not excusable. After an incident where she abandoned all subtlety and sent everyone else away so she could scold me like a child in private, I finally realized that my constant latent feelings of being mocked and belittled were not just me being sensitive, but something she was doing to me systematically.

It took three more years after that to give the pattern a name, when I described some of the incidents to my boyfriend and said “I know it sounds like nothing, when I say it out loud,” and he said, “No it doesn’t; I know what bullying looks like.”

I know a lot of people who model all bad behavior as coming from a place of pain. They think no one, not even Putin, really wants people to suffer. That people who do bad things are just pursuing their goals in misguided ways.

I think this is naïve, or at least wrong. It’s the typical mind fallacy: because you don’t wish harm upon others, you can’t imagine that anyone truly does.

I could tell a story about how me bullying those other kids filled some need inside me. But I think it’s more the case that I just didn’t like them, and I saw that I could get away with the way I was treating them, and so I kept doing it. It was petty and callous.

I think the woman who bullied me did it because she could. Because I was vulnerable to it, and after she tested the waters, she saw that she would face no consequences. I was not her only victim; I don’t know how many there have been, but I know it’s at least four. I know that this pattern of behavior existed before she met me and continues to this day.

When I grew up a little bit3 and was able to really internalize that I was hurting real people, I stopped. I made amends with my victims, where I could. I felt remorse.

But what about when it’s an adult doing the bullying? If they were going to grow up and realize that bullying is wrong, wouldn’t they have done it already?

Cate Hall writes:

The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.

Summers seemed to stretch on forever, three months with no school. Summer was catching frogs in the backyard with my sister, splashing barefoot in the street during a downpour, hiding in the basement from tornado sirens. Oppressive humidity that hardly abated when the sun went down, mosquitoes in the cool grass despite the smell of citronella, fireflies alighting on our fingers. Pink and orange sunsets over the lake, eating ice cream on the steps, walking to the beach to swim every day. Nights on my grandma's screen porch, playing cards on her uncomfortable wicker furniture. Even when I was an adult: lying in the driveway holding hands with my sister and watching heat lightning in the clouds, or wading into a flash flood with my mom to try to clear the storm drains with a rake. The sounds of frogs and crickets and cicadas all night.

I loved autumn. I always liked going back to school, and how the trees turned riotous colors, the maple leaves in our front yard yellow and as big as my head, cool to the touch. We'd rake them into piles and jump in. On Saturdays, we'd go to the farmer's market, dried flowers and colorful gourds, and when we got home, the wind would carry the sound of the crowd at the football stadium, the announcements echoing over miles of flat land. The sky on those days would be a blue so clear and vibrant it seemed unreal. I loved Halloween, carving intricate jack-o-lanterns that were quickly eaten by the fat squirrels, going trick-or-treating in the heat or rain or snow and coming home to watch the same terrible movie every year until we could recite it.

Then, winter. Couldn't shower in the morning or my hair would freeze when I left for school. Sometimes I'd spend all day inside, pitch dark when I got to school, pitch dark when I left. I liked the cold clear nights, biking home when it was safe to bike, seeing Orion over the dark still lake. When blizzards came, I loved helping strangers shovel their cars out, or wading through the waist deep drifts to beat heavy snow off of the neighbor's trees so the branches wouldn't crack under the weight. When it hadn't snowed, walking over to the park, lacing up my figure skates in the warming house and clomping awkwardly down the boards onto the frozen lagoon. Dodging the boys playing hockey, skating to the edge of where it was safe and I could see open water under the bridge. Going over bumps in the ice and falling gracefully. Going home to hot chocolate. Sitting on the radiator in my grandma's kitchen, my nose freezing and my legs on fire. Twelve-foot-tall Christmas trees and carols, the whole family together.

It's natural to mark the time in seasons. Since I moved to California nine years ago, I haven't been able to. All my memories of here take place in the same, hardly differentiated environment: palm trees against a whited-out sky, wildflowers blooming in little packed-dirt front yards, walking barefoot. I remember doing the same hike with my ex on the fourth of July and on Christmas Eve. I suppose in December we were wearing coats, and in July we weren't, but that’s the only difference.

There are a few markers of the seasons — the different birds, the roses blooming in spring — but you have to search for them. Some of the deciduous trees around here lose their leaves, but not dramatically, and not all at the same time. When the university students all arrive, or the campus is empty, or everyone is wearing prom dresses and graduation robes, I have to think for a minute to figure out what time of year it is, what's going on. Is this spring break or winter break or the end of the school year? The darkness or light is the strongest visual cue of the seasons.

I've lived nine years in this undifferentiated haze, this perpetual summer. I haven’t known how to mark the passage of time. Today looks the same as almost any day in the past decade of my life. Have I even gotten older? In November, a man guessed my age as 23.

I know the weather here is idyllic, that it's a joy to be able to walk outdoors any day of the year with no shoes and no plan. But I never minded the seasons, when I lived in them. They made it feel like the world around me mattered, like nature was bigger than me.

I know California is idyllic. But I miss living in the real world.

Then in 2017, when I graduated from college, I surrounded myself with people who cared and believed a lot more strongly than I did. One of my housemates ate little besides microwave taquitos and other horrifying microwave-based foods. "Shouldn't you take better care of yourself?" I asked him. "It doesn't matter," he said. "In twenty years we'll all have robot bodies anyway!" People talked about what they wanted to do in the GTF, short for the 'glorious transhumanist future'. One person wanted to fight the sun.

Not all of it was silly like this, though. A lot of it grounded out in practical actions. No one in this community saves for retirement: even if you think we'll still be alive in forty years (unusually long timelines around here, though not unheard of ten years ago), no one thinks we'll still have jobs or money in the same way. Or at least, no one is willing to count on it. Better to have access to your money now.

In 2017, when things didn't feel so urgent, the commonly pushed path was to get a graduate degree in machine learning. We were all focused on AI, at a time when no one else gave it much thought at all. We carefully followed developments in game-playing AIs. One time, I was in an Uber with my friend and he tried to explain the risk of extinction from AI to the Uber driver. The driver said, "Naw, man, we can't go extinct. We're too cosmic." Didn't address the AI part at all. Hard to imagine that interaction going the same way now.

When I got to the community, almost no one had kids — I could count them on one hand. This was mostly because the community was small and most of us were quite young. As people have paired off over the years and made the decision to have kids, people always ask "But what about timelines? Your kids are unlikely to grow to adulthood.” And “Is it really worth the hit in your productivity, with you doing such important work on AI safety?” These questions are common and meant with genuine concern, and every couple has an answer ready to go: "I decided I couldn't live in a world where I didn't get to have kids" or "I think I'm raising children with net positive lives, regardless of whether they live to adulthood".

In 2022, I stood on a rooftop in London with someone who told me that his timelines were one to two years. I tried to think what I should do if that was true, but I had nothing. He stood so close to the edge of the roof, a four story drop. He took up smoking. What did it matter?

Lately I think more seriously about two-year timelines. I haven't worked in EA in years, likely won't again. So when I think about this world only having two years left to it, I return to the mundane things I've always wanted, underneath all the apocalyptic madness. I want to spend time with people I love, who make me feel loved. I want to make them happy, make their lives better, help them. I want to try having a life, just once, outside of the only adult life I've ever had. I want to go places with my boyfriend. I want to walk outside barefoot and look at birds and roses and the golden sunlight casting blue shadows on the bark of the sycamore.

Believing in AI doom has been a strange way to grow up. I know mine is not the first community, nor the first generation, to live with the threat of sudden world-ending catastrophe hanging over our heads at all times, but still. The default is to imagine that you will live out your life in a basically normal world, and I’ve never been able to do that.

I can't say what it would be like if I hadn't spent my entire adulthood as a doomer. I don't know if it would have been better or worse. I guess it doesn't matter. It's what I have, and in this moment, I'm grateful for the clarity it's brought me.

The best books to read are the ones your friends recommend to you. Your friends know what’s inside of you. For my birthday I asked for book recommendations, and my friend from Inkhaven gave me The Joys of Beekeeping1, a book I would never have looked at twice in a bookshop. But he recognized a piece of me in it, and reading it is a delight I never would have had if not for him.

It's also good to read books your friends have read because then you can talk about the book with them, and talking to your friends is good. And because if you don't like the book, you'll know that your friend doesn't truly understand you and you should cut them off forever.

The best books to read are ones you actually want to read. It's okay if you want to have read them. It's better if you are drawn to the experience of reading them. Especially when you’re just remembering how to read books again, try for the latter.

Don’t read books just because you think you’re supposed to, when you are actively having a terrible time the whole time. Last year I read a 700,000-word series and hated every minute of it. Life is too short for that.

The best books to read are the ones that give you something beyond the ephemeral — things that are more than just a pleasure to read, whose contents you won't immediately forget. The lasting thing could be a better understanding of history or politics or the economy, something that will enrich your worldview, even if you forget the details. It could be a newfound appreciation of honeybees, something I've never given much thought to before, and will think about differently forevermore. In the case of fiction, it is usually a nameless feeling in my heart when I think of the book, a smattering of images, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

The best books to read are the ones that change you. It is impossible to know ahead of time which these will be. But here are some books that have changed me:

• How to Do Nothing, the reason I go outside in the mornings, the reason I can recognize the birds around me. Picked up in a store because of the title and the cover. I flipped it open, saw the writing style, and thought I would hate it. I was wrong.

• Le jour oú le bus est reparti sans elle, which taught me not to worry so much about where I’m going. Recommandé par un ami, après que je l’ai dit que je ne savais pas quoi faire avec ma vie.

• Digital Minimalism, the foundation of my current life. Taken off my boyfriend’s shelf when we first started dating.

• Blood Over Bright Haven, which made me want to take responsibility in a way I’d forgotten I cared about. Written by my sister.

• Space Opera, a book I did not entirely enjoy reading and yet left me with some deep sense of the beauty of humanity. Recommended in a fanfiction I was reading.

• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, whose techniques I use every day. Found in a used bookstore.

• The Anthropocene, Reviewed, the memoir that taught me that memoir is my favorite type of book, for it gives a truer and nearer glimpse into what it’s like to be another human than any other genre. Found in a Little Free Library in the Chicago suburbs.