Hey friends, 

As I sit down to write this week’s newsletter, I am acutely aware of how itchy I am. My legs and forearms are currently bespeckled with a pretty gnarly poison ivy rash. The appearance of my skin could best be described as “raw meat-like” or “potentially a leper.”

Shorts are currently a no-go for me, lest my terrifying ankles scare any children. 

While the nature of my condition is a byproduct of the seasons (and my decision to do yard work in shorts about seven or eight days ago), I still find myself grateful for and excited about the arrival of Summer. 

For one, June is Pride month, and it is my foundational belief that everyone should be a little bit gayer. Some of you need to step it up. 

But also, I am at my most human– most at peace– when I have ample time outdoors. Long walks with my dog, hikes through the woods, applying SPF 100 on the hour… they’re little moments and tiny acts when I am breathing fresh air and typically away from my computer screen. 

According to my partner, the most at ease he has ever seen me is when I returned from my sabbatical a few years ago. Having spent a month frolicking through the Swiss Alps, my entire demeanor had changed. My posture was bolder, my attitude lighter. That month, my primary source of screen time was periodically checking Kamoot to make sure I was still on the trail I intended to follow. 

It’s fascinating how the mere presence of a screen (especially a laptop) changes my state of mind. Increasingly, I find it difficult to get into a state of flow when working on a computer. Even less so if my phone is also within reach. 

(While writing the preceding paragraph, I started to ask myself how these observations tie into the broader cultural commentary about resisting burnout culture and embracing creativity. When the specific nuances I wanted to convey didn’t come to me immediately, I clicked into Slack to see if I had any new messages or emoji reactions to review. It’s a sickness! Technology has ingrained itself so deeply into my life as a means of following the path of least resistance that even after talking about how much happier I am when I limit screen-based interactions, I still started context switching out of habit without realizing what I was doing in the moment.) 

Among trees and hills, it’s not so much that I feel more creative or productive, but rather I become more aware of the futility of caring so much about productivity. The constant accrual of stress that occurs when you’re bouncing between a million tasks in an effort to create shareholder value lessens as your attention to natural order increases. 

Wendell Berry has a brilliant poem titled “The Peace of Wild Things” that comes to mind for me. He writes,

That sense he conveys of waking up “at the least sound,” brought on by the lingering anxiety of life in the modern world, feels particularly apt as I’m writing this. Climate change. The economy. Global conflict. Not being able to go more than five minutes without hearing someone talk about ar**fic**l inte**ige*ce. Wondering what childhood will be like for my niece and nephew,  who won’t know a world without tablets and smartphones. 

It’s a lot. It’s heavy. It can lead to the kind of anxiety-induced paralysis that makes you want to hide in your house and pretend everything is fine while you doom scroll and order Saag Paneer for delivery for the third time that week. (Too niche?) 

But Berry also presents us with an opportunity to hit reset and escape the “despair for the world.” His solution is to “go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water. There, he is able to “come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” 

Think about that for a moment: wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. 

If you have pets at home or have spent time around animals, one of the most amazing things about them is that they are fully present in the moment. What humans spend thousands of dollars and hours mastering at bougie mindfulness retreats and meditation centers, animals just seem to do. If my sassy little doggy is hungry, he eats. If he needs to use the bathroom, he knocks on the back door. He doesn’t have to check his GCal to see when he’s free for a meal break or to try to squeeze in trips to the bathroom between other obligations. 

What, then, does that mean for us as humans with responsibilities and obligations that make it seemingly impossible to operate with the same ease and presentness in the moment that our pets and herons and wood drakes (a duck, if you’re curious) possess? Humanity is messy, and modern life is complicated. Going out to lie in the woods by the river is a nice reset in theory, but as my current poison ivy rashes and the six ticks I’ve plucked off various parts of my anatomy this summer would suggest, it isn’t always the most feasible course of action. 

Luckily, a little deet and a change in your routine can still help. Our brains crave novelty. Variable-reward and infinite-scroll tech keep us glued to our phones and force us to dwell on our “despair for the world.” Oddly, to be in the moment and to do what is intuitive, we have to be intentional and decisive about our actions. 

The irony is that presence doesn't happen to us anymore — it has to be chosen. Berry doesn't stumble into the peace of wild things. He goes. He makes the decision. The wood drake doesn't have to decide to be present, but Berry does, and that's the distinctly human cost of living in a world that has worked very hard to keep you elsewhere.

That's the trade-off we're navigating. We can't unknow what we know, can't uninstall the habits that keep us bouncing between seventeen browser tabs at 11 pm. But we can, periodically and intentionally, put ourselves in places and situations where those habits have less to hold on to. Not an alpine sabbatical necessarily — just a walk without your phone, a yard project (if you are smarter than me about your pants choices), an evening where you don't know what you "accomplished" because accomplishment wasn't the point.

The goal isn't to become a wood drake (did you know they have corkscrew-shaped… never mind). It's just to remember, occasionally, that you don't have to be a content machine either.

L.M. Sacasas writes The Convivial Society, one of the more thoughtful newsletters operating at the intersection of technology, culture, and what it means to live well. His recent piece, "Do Not Resign From Life," takes on the demoralization that AI's ambient presence seems to be producing in people — not just those using it, but those simply living alongside it — and manages to reframe the whole conversation without being either a doomer or a cheerleader.

His argument is essentially this: AI's ambient presence in our lives bends toward demoralization, not just because we outsource meaningful work to machines, but because we've been asking the wrong question about what that means for us. We keep asking what makes humans exceptional — and then panicking when a machine can do it too. Sacasas offers a different frame: the kite doesn't fly to prove it's special. It flies because that's what kites do. We ought to think, create, and engage with the world not to defend our uniqueness, but because doing so is what makes us happy. It's a quiet rallying cry — and a useful one for anyone who's been wrestling with that low hum of digital despair.

This July, Amsterdam hosts WorldPride for the first time — a two-week celebration of LGBTQ+ visibility and rights timed to mark 25 years since the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. A quarter century later, that milestone still isn't a given everywhere, which makes Amsterdam's decision to frame the whole event around the theme of "Unity" feel less like marketing and more like a genuine statement of intent. Sometimes the most radical thing a city can do is throw a very good party and mean it.

And in April, the European Court of Justice delivered what's being called a landmark ruling: Hungary's 2021 anti-LGBTQ law — framed by the Orbán government as "child protection" legislation but widely condemned as an instrument of stigmatization — was found to breach EU law. The full court of all 27 judges found that Hungary had so seriously violated the fundamental rights of LGBTI people that the law contradicts the very identity of the Union itself. Sixteen member states joined the case. It's a slow, bureaucratic kind of victory — but a victory nonetheless. [Human Rights Watch]

Find a place outside — a yard, a park, a patch of sidewalk with a tree in it — and sit there for fifteen minutes without your phone. When you come back, write about what you noticed. Not what you thought about, not what you planned. What you noticed.

If you do this one, reply with what you noticed. Not what you thought — what you noticed. I'm going to start collecting these, and at some point, I'd like to dedicate an issue to what Non-Slop Fun readers have been paying attention to when nobody's watching.

I want to hear from you. Yes, you. Specifically. If you do the exercise from this issue or have thoughts on any of the content, please reply to this email and let me know what you think. Reader feedback may be included in upcoming issues (with your explicit permission, of course).

And if you want to submit an essay of your own, all you have to do is click this link.