#232: A reading list for summer cope

Hey everyone,

This summer I’ve been working with a creative producer (Elise!) to organize my archive of 637 newsletters. The primary aim of this project is, obviously, to make my newsletters more searchable by type and topic, but a secondary aim is to find surprising ways to group and reshare my work—either for the purpose of revisiting (or reinterpreting) resonant ideas or, for new subscribers, discovering them for the first time. Although the archive isn’t ready to publish yet, today I’m going to share my first archival dig around the theme of time anxiety. I picked this topic because we’ve passed the midpoint of summer, which means the more neurotic among us are beginning to see the season as a dwindling resource. For me, the cavernous quality of summer is rapturous at first, but has a way of destabilizing me after a while.

Every year, around mid-to-late August, I start feeling mildly depressed. Typically it takes me a week or three of blindly diagnosing what’s going on before I realize it’s been exactly one year since the last time this happened, and that what I’m feeling is my annual summer slump. The slump is an incomprehensible combination of regret (that I haven’t made the most of it), anxiety (that nothing’s changing), and disillusionment (summer isn’t “my season,” so I start to forget who I am). This year’s slump hasn’t hit me yet, but one of the many upsides of getting older is learning to anticipate how you’ll feel when predictable things happen—if not to soften the landing then at least to bypass the disorientating element of surprise.

If you happen to relate to any of the above, or have your own flavor of summer scaries (fear of winter?), maybe this newsletter can help. Today’s archive scrape includes 18 essays that concern our relationship with time—its passing, its lack of passing, its beauty and its constraints. I’ve grouped them into four sections depending on your crisis of choice. Maybe you think time is moving too fast, or summer has fallen short of your expectations, or you’re overthinking everything that’s coming up, or throwing yourself into plans to compensate for some lurking inner void.

In the spirit of summer, these are fairly harmless problems, but problems nonetheless, so if you’re in the mood to read, some questions and answers for you below, interspersed with a few of Avi’s summery film photos from this year:

Where did the time go?

#17: Xanax for the human condition - on the perils and pleasures of nostalgia-tripping
#78: In defense of burdens - on the beauty of limits and constraints
#108: The fear of forgetting - on the futility of trying to capture moments for later consumption
#166: The upside of aging out - on getting older and the pleasure of losing touch with the zeitgeist
#175: Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy! - on how being present doesn’t have to mean feeling good all the time
#220: When forgetting is good - on how forgetting the past is a gift that helps us move forward

“I do not need to be widely known, admired, or understood, nor does my world need to expand infinitely into the metaverse; rather, it needs to contract.”
From #78: In defense of burdens

Was my summer good enough?

#46: The greatest drug in the world - on the perils and pleasures of future-tripping
#103: Season of envy - on overcoming summer-induced envy
#179: Beyond routines - on how an over-synchronized life is overrated
#225: Making bad decisions on purpose - on appreciating flawed coping mechanisms for their short-term utility

“Unlike winter, when I can blame everything on the elements, summer inverts those conditions, leaving me with nobody to blame but myself. The enemy comes indoors.”
From #103: Season of envy

Am I doing enough?

#80: The acid DMs - on the value of revisiting the same problems over and over from new angles
#110: The trick of the epiphany - on how patterns over time are more valuable than epiphanies in the moment
#116: Emma Chamberlain’s “deeply personal” Los Angeles home - on the importance of time as a factor of taste, style, and design that lends them depth and interest
#208: What is rotting, if not rest? - on discerning between rest and avoidance (and what it looks like to “waste time,” if such a thing is possible)

“I realized the missing ingredient in the current conception of a great or cool place is time. When I realized my apartment would come together over years, that it didn’t need a mood board, that it didn’t need to present itself to others like a designer’s statement—and that in fact those things could sap my home of its humanity—I felt liberated.”
From #116: Emma Chamberlain’s “deeply personal” Los Angeles home

How can I fix this feeling?

#84: Good behavior - on the charm and value of short-term habits
#88: Your lowest potential - on tending to what’s close, tangible, and urgent versus far-off, abstract, and hypothetical
#213: Reaching no-plan nirvana - on freeing yourself from over-planning your life
#229: Living to please your future self - on the trap of predicting the future and living accordingly

“I’ve become fixated on turning away from big dreams in pursuit of the best, most alive version of my simplest self, which I guess is a way of saying I’m aiming low. It’s not that I don’t value big dreams, I just think it’s easy to over-invest in their possibilities, and easy to under-estimate the promise of more humble goals.”
From #88: Your lowest potential

Last Friday’s 15 things was a guest column by the inimitable Crystal Anderson. It went up on the later side, so if you missed it and have a sweatsuit rec, please share!

Also, sorry for quoting myself above. And a special thank you to my paid subscribers for paying me to keep writing essays like the ones above. I want to tightly squeeze you all.

Haley