Every single night of last week, I farted around too much before bed and accrued a serious, unpayable sleep debt. This is very easy to do when you regularly wake up at 5:07 in the morning to oversee dough balls as they metamorphosize into cookies.

During my Thursday shift at the bakery, I smashed three plates and got ceramic shards lodged in my fingertips. I did not feel like lifting 50 lb bags of flour. I basically refused to speak unless spoken to.

At every possible opportunity, I whipped off my butter-smeared apron and skulked to the bathroom with an ostensibly reasonable excuse: to respond to timely work emails. By the time I’d finish peeing, though, I was antagonizing Depop sellers with absolute lowballs and watching aspirational lifestyle videos on Instagram.

I don’t even know how I ended up so deep in the void. And that imperceptible chokehold is precisely where most tech companies want us, writes Kathryn Jezer-Morton in The Cut:

They’re “succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary.”

Baking, on a bad day, feels monotonous. You make scones only to watch them disappear from the pastry case. You clean the bench only to dirty it again. You refill the Cambro with flour more times than seems necessary.

The activities that make us feel most alive ask something of us. Feeding people, creating, and loving our friends requires effort, uncertainty, and a willingness to be inconvenienced. The more we outsource those demands to our devices — using AI to write emails, DMing memes instead of calling someone, ordering delivery — the less seasoned we become at meeting them. Like a neglected bicep, our tolerance for everyday exertion atrophies. As Jezer-Morton writes:

“The dullness and labor of embodied existence is unbearable.”

Most days, I prefer baking treats for flesh-and-blood humans rather than pawing at glowing pixels until my thumb hurts. But the more I double-tapped away from my to-do list on the whiteboard, the harder it was to return to the tortoise-sized mixer full of cookie dough that still needed me to roll up my sleeves and get scooping.

That juxtaposition seems like the most salient risk in this era of VC-backed escapism. Our digital sojourns convince us that life should be easier than it is, then deposit us back into reality resentful of its unavoidable demands.

If you’re feeling a little hopeless right now, Jezer-Morton suggests a slew of tangible ways we can all up-titrate friction:

“Stop using ChatGPT completely. No, it does not have good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s…Invite people over to your house without cleaning it all the way up. Babysit for someone who needs a night out…”

I’m starting right now. Even days after that bakery shift, I feel dumb and heavy, which is making it harder to write coherently about feeling dumb and heavy. But at least I’m here, willingly turning my face towards the headwinds.

Anyway! Your turn:

• What part of your life are you trying hardest to avoid?

• Which daily tasks do you typically outsource to the machine?

• When do you most find yourself reaching for your phone?

I am writing this newsletter from one of the most palatial rooms I have ever stayed in — an inn, nestled in the rolling green hills of a Virginian country club built in the 1830s, where my brother-in-law will marry his supremely rad fiancée tomorrow. It’s the first time I haven’t had 65 things on my to-do list in weeks. And so, because my husband is involved in the rehearsal and I don’t know how to chill or whatever, I am doing this.

The fact that I am overcommitted is an incredibly boring discovery. Most Americans are too busy. So busy that many claim it’s making life miserable. As one Reddit user depressingly headlined a post, “The cruel irony: Either too busy to enjoy, or too broke to enjoy.” Humans have a Goldilocks relationship with time, in that we need enough activity to not allow too much existential dread to float to the surface like the gloopy wax in a lava lamp, but not so much that we’re constantly stressed and anxious.

Despite knowing I am a feral squirrel of a person, and wincing when I see this same propensity in others, I cannot seem to say “yes” or “no” the correct amount. (It’s because I cannot seem to say “no.”) Arthur C. Brooks psychoanalyzed me personally in a 2024 Atlantic article about this very topic. The author and Harvard professor explains that, if we don’t know how to use the free time we have, it can become idleness, which activates a set of brain structures known as the Default Mode Network, where dark thoughts thrive:

“The pattern of thought when that network is involved can be merely trivial (How did my fingernails get so dirty?) or speculatively terrifying (What could my teenager be up to?). To avoid activating this unproductively ruminative state, we look for ways to force ourselves to be busy, such as scrolling through social media and staying busy with some goal-oriented task.”

Basically, we tend to prefer laboring until our bones turn to dust than hanging out with the creepy little guy in the cockpit. I’ve been swearing that I will just do less since I finished my first manuscript (and lost my personality) late last year. Working as a pastry chef has been a welcome mental reprieve, but I have otherwise been failing at this mission — coming home exhausted, dusted in flour, and nonetheless compelled to type furiously on my laptop.

My hot and supportive husband has been paying all of our bills to give me time to rest. Last night, though, he told me that watching me continue to sprint on the treadmill in mind while pretending I’m not puffed makes him feel like “an enabler.” And that is honestly very fair. Luckily, Brooks has an idea that will hopefully placate my sweetie pie (and my nervous system):

“One remedy is to create a list of discretionary tasks that are creative and attractive to you but do not involve a deadline. For me, this means sketching out book ideas in a notebook I carry around with me. When I have unfilled time, I pull out the notebook and start brainstorming. This inevitably induces a pleasurable “flow state,” which gives me energy and refreshes me — and creates an incentive to block out more discretionary time.”

Participating in capitalism has always asked us to eat shit, but it also seems that the cult of busyness comes from a murkier place. It’s so embedded into our programming that we need to create to-do lists of fun to convince our lizard brains that it’s safe to recreate. So yeah, here I am in this absurdly beautiful room, with nothing urgent to do and nowhere I need to be for a bit, and I’m writing my little demons to sleep.

Anyway! Over to you:

• When was the last time you had a free hour? What did you do with it?

• If you never had to earn another dollar, which activities would disappear from your calendar?

• What activities reliably coax you into a flow state?

I spent my bakery shift yesterday so fixated on a miso brown butter cookie that I could no longer tell the two of us apart. Kind of like when you take mushrooms and your face reflected in the bathroom mirror becomes the most interesting thing in the world. (You are me?) We’re going to launch an ice cream sandwich at the cafe soon, and the “bread” needs to be chewy, salty, and structurally integral enough to stand up to a hefty plop of the good stuff.

My first attempt tasted like burnt toast drenched in maple syrup (complimentary), but lacked miso’s characteristic funk. The second was more assertive, yet reminiscent of a vinyl record — too large and somehow also too thin. Finally, after I added 15 grams of flour and another 10 grams of malted milk powder, we had a winner. The diameter of my fist. Crispy edges with a pliable center that won’t break teeth when frozen. A salted caramel milkshake type of thing.

Later that night, my husband and I had an argument (even though I brought him the three best cookies from my experiments). Nothing wild. Nothing we haven’t bickered over before. Nothing, certainly, unfixable. And despite loving him with every cell in my body, the chaotic little demon voice inside my skull wondered, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to start fresh?”

I have a propensity toward this sort of irrational thinking. The moment something reveals a flaw — or, perhaps, reveals one in me — I start fantasizing about its replacement. A different country. A new career. A version of myself who hasn’t spent the last 35 years weaving a mortifying daisy-chain of mishaps.

This impulse to reinvent is entirely unexceptional. Whole-ass industries peddling yearly planners and motivational cross-stitch patterns have been built around it — flotsam of capitalism fueled by the seductive belief that starting over grants us the chance to become the people we’ve always wanted to be. A task, apparently, impossible without sipping your morning coffee from a mug purchased to remind you that “EVERY DAY IS A NEW BEGINNING.”

The same idea has permeated our virtual worlds, too. As Celia Mattison argues in The Ann Friedman Weekly, her obsession with playing Animal Crossing is a way to “build the perfect farm, the perfect civilization, the perfect cult.” To mess up and be granted infinite clean slates.

In the kitchen, I’ll happily extend patience to a miso cookie, finagling a sticky lump of dough into its best self. I expect iteration. I trust the cookie has potential. And I keep at it because I am not personally devastated by its insistence to spread to the size of dinner plate.

I have the opposite reaction in my own life, transmuting everyday imperfections into failures. A tough conversation with my husband, a grueling stretch at work, a body on the fritz. These moments don’t just feel mildly frustrating; they feel diagnostic. They land in my nervous system as verdicts on my own worth. And so I dream of tossing out the metaphorical dough to spare myself the ego-shattering work of tweaking the recipe.

While growth begs for diligent revision, perfectionism dreams of demolition. It wants transformation without discomfort, a blank page rather than a red-lined draft. But the desire to get everything right, without exertion, is unreasonable and self-defeating. It keeps us focused on some imagined utopian future while making it impossible to appreciate or to improve our current reality.

Besides, as Mattison writes, “Of all the lines of dialogue from Mad Men I have memorized, something Henry Francis says in season four rings in my head the most often: ‘There is no fresh start! Lives carry on!’” The hard part is learning to carry on with the one we’ve got.

Anyway! Three questions for you:

• Where in your life are you most tempted to burn it all down and start over?

• What small adjustment might be more useful than a dramatic reinvention?

• Can you think of a time when starting over really was the right call? How did you know?

After turning in my manuscript last year, I became convinced of many things. That I had gotten some sort of historically essential detail catastrophically wrong. The kind of mistake that would get my ass cancelled. I was sure that nobody who formerly loved me had remained a fan. And I just knew that it was some sort of impossible to diagnose but probably life threatening disease that was causing my newfound anxiety (not the thousands of hours of screen time).

I responded like anyone with a human brain would: I fact checked my book obsessively, I scrutinized loving texts and interactions for signs of betrayal, and I insisted my doctor run every possible test in their toolbox. Gathering as much information as possible made sense in the moment — the fixation felt like doing something. Still, this level of rumination came with a hefty price tag. Example: my dearest ones would tell me something on a walk, they’d pause appropriately for my input, and I would have no idea what they’d been yapping about.

The overthinking muscle tends to really hypertrophy while reporting a book, especially one that drags you through agricultural history, climate collapse, cultural nuance, and the bizarre politics of industrialized vegetables. It’s the kind of work that requires a near-pathological level of mental watchfulness and actually rewards you for opening thirty-seven tabs about a Himalayan cucumber shaped like a football. But here is the paradox: All that examining of yourself — Is this correct? Does it make sense? Does this sound corny? Will people like it? — eventually usurps what the self was supposed to be examining.

I am surely (surely?) not alone in this propensity toward over-analysis. Books and academia aside, modern life increasingly reframes existential safety not as the ability to outrun a tiger, but as the result of relentless self-scrutiny. The shower is a place to rehearse forthcoming difficult conversations as much as it is one for routine hair-washing. We obsessively construct online identities for faceless audiences. The morally superior social posture is to remain informed about world events at all times, lest you find yourself unprepared for an oddly contemporaneous trivia night.

What these think-y behaviors share, of course, is the fantasy of control. In the Deep Fix newsletter, argues that all this cogitation functions mechanistically like any other addiction. We experience some sort of discomfort in our bodies (say, feeling lost and vulnerable after a big career milestone); administer a temporarily soothing hit of something (in my case, a delicious dose of hypervigilance); feel worse about/because of the compulsive behavior of choice; and land right back at discomfort. As he writes:

“The object shifts from opiates to Instagram to productivity, but the move is always the same: escape the feeling and reach for the next thing that promises relief. Thinking is just a higher-status version of this.”

What our culture brands as brainy, ethical, or ambitious, Olshonsky argues, is so often just avoidance in a virtuous outfit. An immediate downside to being addicted to overthinking is that it tends to render the narratives we tell ourselves more vivid, more real, than the real life events happening in front of us. It means we’re asleep at the wheel for much of this one precious life. I felt a lot of shame in this realization; how much time have I lost? But, like any other addiction, thinking is a protective misfire out of our freaky little control centers. Over to Olshonsky:

“For many of us, staying in our heads was the safest place to be, especially early on. The nervous system learned that if you can think your way through something, you don’t have to feel it. Thinking became your protector. At the time, it was a smart strategy.”

Undoing all of this, he argues, comes not from waging war against our obdurate biological wirings but through something far more somatic and Burning Man-adjacent: learning to retrain focus on an experience over the relentless surveillance of that experience. He spells out his own process in clear, repeatable detail here. But I’ve found this sort of meditative, from-the-neck-down style of contemplation to be akin to asking a toddler (I am the toddler) to please sit still through an evening of abstract spoken word. Maybe you’ll do better!

In the meantime, until embodiment becomes my operational default, I have decided to give myself no option but to be where my feet are: I plunge into water so cold it seems to freeze my brain. I balance 200 cookies precariously on a sheet pan at work, forcing myself to zero-in on nothing but their safe passage to the freezer. I zoom around the park on rollerblades, despite having no clue how to stop — a fact my partner lovingly pointed out recently after I nearly ate shit in the middle of a road — which makes me keenly aware of any obstacles lurking in my direct surroundings. All of them situations far too urgent to think about.

Anyway! Three feel-y prompts for you:

• Which parts of your life are narrated, rather than really lived?

• What activities bring you back to the soft animal of your body?

• If your internal monologue shut off for a few minutes, what sensations might you notice?

In my early twenties, after my period had essentially Irish exited my body for several years, I was diagnosed with endometriosis and PCOS (now more aptly known as PMOS). Doctors performed surgery, shrugged as if I’d asked them which pizza topping they’d prefer, and handed me birth control pills that allegedly “managed” both conditions while also making me feel like I was trapped inside the nervous system of a bunny rabbit.

So naturally, with no real operating manual for my possessed little reproductive system, I took healing into my own hands. For years, this meant avoiding anything the wellness industrial complex labeled as “inflammatory” — sugar, alcohol, gluten, dairy, spontaneous whimsy. I exercised like a soldier about to depart for battle. Questionable supplements arrived in amber glass jars. I treated flax-laced sludge like a magic potion. At obscure hours of the night, I would google: “Does hypnosis help endometriosis?”

You probably saw this coming: none of that crunchy control freakism worked. I still have both of those sickies, plus a new one diagnosed last year mid-book-deadline: Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Instead of coexisting in peace, my immune system attacks my thyroid gland for sport. I’d heard about the condition via social media and assumed it was made up — until my hair started falling out in identity altering quantities, I needed a sweater in the produce section, and getting out of bed felt like climbing Kilimanjaro in a sopping wet Canadian tuxedo.

I try not to think about any of this much. For a long time, I told myself that’s because I’m overall incredibly lucky. My life is great. I’m an optimist! What would dwelling on it do, anyway? But after reading ’s short essay on her own journey with chronic illness, I’m realizing that the deeper reason I prefer not to fastidiously study the annals of my body is sadder, and far more insidious. As she writes:

“We’re told that health, like success, is something you earn through discipline, restraint, and the right behavior. If you work hard enough, comply closely enough, optimize carefully enough, improvement will follow. Chronic illness disrupts that extremely saleable, inspirational narrative. It produces people who do everything right and still don’t get better.”

That hit like a psychological clotheslining. The part I haven’t fully accepted is that I can do things that make me feel better without ever actually being better. Maybe that’s especially hard to swallow because our collective meritocratic kink insists that time and effort should always produce results. I would do almost anything to reduce the abdominal torture and mental anguish I experience monthly. And yet, none of my regimes over the years have delivered miracles. Sometimes we simply cannot brute-force a body into obedience.

I recognize in myself what De Garis describes as “internalized ableism,” and feeling biologically deficient turns out to be hella lucrative. Part of me still thinks I can girlboss my way out of chronic illness — that one day it will simply evanesce, like an exorcized Victorian ghost. I click Instagram ads peddling pills that promise to “reduce inflammation,” despite the fact that the models appear to subsist entirely on bone broth and trust funds. I buy books about wrestling my Hashimoto’s antibodies into submission. I try very hard to reduce the stress supposedly fueling my three-headed dragon, which is obviously stressful in its own right.

Mostly, I think, this impulse to fix comes from shame. If I quit micromanaging my body, then it’s my fault if I feel bad. That’s the sneaky symptom I’m trying to resist now. I want to learn how to tend to my bag of bones without swatting at it like a faulty machine. I want to find ways to make it all feel loving. To experience pain without immediately converting it into a productivity project. To admit that sometimes gentle maintenance can be its own radical act.

Anyway! Over to you:

• Which perceived personal failing have you spent an objectively unreasonable amount of money trying to fix?

• Has a focus on “wellness” ever started to feel more like illness?

• When have you felt truly at home in your body, even briefly? What were you doing (or not doing)?

Anyway! is a free weekly newsletter about building a meaningful life in deeply bizarre times.

This morning I was pumped to go for a run in the sun. It’s springy as hell in Salt Lake City, and balancing creative writing with a baking job means it can be hard to find a window for dedicated workouts that is not pre-dawn and also not occurring when my feet and lower back feel thwacked with a fire extinguisher. I went to bed early (enough). I scheduled the coffee ahead of time (bless those who can raw-dog a run). I set my alarm. I actually got up when it blared.

And then I bumped into my sweet, hot, bleary-eyed husband in the hallway of our home. “I don’t feel so good, baby,” he said. “I think I’m going to go on a walk.” Obviously, I could have responded, “Aw, feel better, byeeeeeeee!” Initially, I felt a jolt of annoyance at the disruption of my well-laid plans. But I hate to see him going through it — and I’m very in love with him. So I decided to hold his hand and walk around the neighborhood sipping my coffee instead.

The point is that I’m extremely prone to seeing moments like this as interruptions — detours away from what I’m meant to be doing. Friends call when I need to binge a research paper for a project. An email about my book marked “urgent” arrives when I finally have room to meditate. My husband needs a little mental health walk when I’d planned to run. British author Oliver Burkeman sums up the perniciousness of this framing in his book, Meditations for Mortals:

“When we define some of these things as interruptions of, or distractions from, other ones, we’re adding a mental overlay to the situation, sorting events into hard categories of those which ought and ought not to happen.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that; it’s fine to have strong preferences for how you’d like your day to unfold. But at the very least, it’s a reminder not to cling so confidently to those preferences that you turn life into a constant struggle against events you’ve decided, futilely, shouldn’t be happening. Or that you close off the possibility that what looks like an interruption might in fact prove a welcome development.”

Later that same day, my work friend watched me start making a huge batch of strawberry-rhubarb jam (laced with toasted fennel seeds) for our chia puddings when I only had about 40 minutes left before I had to leave for an appointment. Then I suggested I might start making confit garlic to add to our biscuit dough. “Girl, I love to watch you bite off so much all of the time, but I do wonder if it ever gets hard to chew,” she observed from her station, pureeing oranges.

She wasn’t wrong. I am such a chronically busy person (avoidant? me?!) that I treat my Google Calendar like an endangered ecosystem that could collapse at any moment. My time feels like this thing I constantly need to be protecting, optimizing, and structuring just right. But I rarely stop to ask what, exactly, I’m guarding it from. If the check-ins from loved ones, the unexpected deadlines for projects I am deeply connected to, and the inconveniently timed strolls are what I’m pushing away — then what I am pushing away is actually my life.

My husband messaged me while I was frantically stirring the jam, hot goop smattering my arms: “Thank you for taking me for a walk today. Thank you for caring for me on such a deep, deep level.” Maybe the “interruption” wasn’t the obstacle of the day. Maybe it was the day.

Anyway! Three questions for you:

• What’s something unavoidable that you consider an interruption? How might you embrace it instead?

• When was the last time an unexpected detour ended up feeling strangely meaningful afterward? What made it so?

• What are you always trying to protect your time for? Do you actually spend the time you already have doing that thing?

This week I’ve made giant, glossy clouds of Italian meringue buttercream. I’ve scooped hundreds of rosemary-flecked, gluten-free oat cookies studded with sour zips of cranberry and shards of dark chocolate. I’ve baked tray upon tray of cheddar-scallion biscuits until their golden tops bloomed. I ate my staff meal perched on an upturned milk crate like a gargoyle: perfectly scrambled eggs, potatoes seasoned in a way you simply cannot achieve at home no matter how many times you whisper “more salt?”, and a salad squirted with strawberry-balsamic vinaigrette.

My feet hurt. My legs are permanently swollen in a way that’s giving baby elephant. My lower back throbs like someone thwacked it with a Louisville Slugger in a moment of game-time passion. My once-shellac’d fingernails have devolved into jagged little saw blades. And yet I am at ease for the first time in months.

When I finished writing my book (contractually obligated to plug The Curious Lives of Vegetables), I felt unmoored. We both know I don’t need to cite the data here, but in the name of journalism I will: Adults who spend more than six hours a day in front of a screen are significantly more likely to be depressed. Which is cool, because I had just spent roughly 2,000 hours doing exactly that. And when the manuscript was done, it seemed that I had no more original thoughts. I was wired but tired, like an iPhone running hot at 3% battery.

Without 65,000 words and a day job to distract me — I’d quit to meet my deadline — I finally had to face the void. Throughout my decade-plus of marketing stuff people don’t need to fund my creative work, I’d carried a niggling sense that I wasn’t in the right place. After a period spent writing full-time, the thought of returning to corporate life made my body feel like a sclerotic boulder; unable, or unwilling, to budge. Somewhere in my bones, I sensed I didn’t need a vacation (I definitely did) so much as a reorientation away from the endless cerebral wank of thinking and toward something finite and physical.

So I got a job working one day per week at my friend’s bakery in Salt Lake City, making graham crumble for banana pudding, pastry cream for cakes, and sugar cookies rolled in aggressively joyful, rainbow-dyed turbinado crystals. It was supposed to be temporary — a little palate cleanser before I returned to my regularly scheduled existential dread and she hired someone else. But the work made me calm in my chest and quiet in my head. I loved it.

My friend Zoe Denenberg, who also left the food media world to cook at a remote Alaskan wilderness lodge, put it better in a recent voice message:

“We are so disconnected from all of these menial activities. We’re trying to optimize our time so that we don’t have to labor. And I feel like we’re just missing the point. What are we doing with the time that all of this saves us? Scrolling on our phones? Cooking just feels like a way better use of my time than being on a laptop.”

It must be said that I can only afford to work part-time at a “fun” food job because my husband is covering 100 percent of our shared bills while I try to figure out what to do with this one beautiful life. And I do feel insecure, sometimes, about sort of Benjamin Button–ing my career. We are implicitly and explicitly told all our lives, after all, that “the manual trades are given little honor,” Matthew B. Crawford writes in “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” To step out of the knowledge economy and into a bakery job can look like regression — a failure of ambition rather than an antidote to the abstraction of today’s “most ghostly kinds of work.”

Though, to me, it feels like a deep sigh. I now bake four mornings per week across two different businesses, writing essays like these in the afternoons. The work offers satisfactions my digital life (“bullshit job”) often didn’t: “an experience of agency and competence,” in Crawford’s words, with effects “visible for all to see.” By 8 a.m. this morning, the pastry case at my cafe was stocked with cookies, hunks of crumbly-topped black cherry coffee cake, apricot scones drizzled with chamomile glaze, fat slices of zesty orange tea cake, and the bounciest banana-tahini muffins you’ve ever eaten. In other words, something happened today because I was there.

The answer here for every disgruntled desk worker probably isn’t to go and get a near-minimum wage job. I’m aware that it’s a privilege to make things with my hands in a way that isn’t exhausting me and that being concerned about financial security is a necessary evil, particularly in a country with flimsy-ass safety nets and medical oppression. The deeper question, I think, is whether we’ve mistaken an upward intellectual trajectory for a meaningful life — and lost sight of the kinds of labor that actually makes us feel alive in our meat sacks. Work that asks for our presence but not self-concept. Zoe cuts right to it:

“I really just don’t feel fulfilled at the end of the day after sitting behind a computer and staring at a screen, even if I’m doing something that objectively excites me. Working with actual food gives me greater satisfaction than just thinking about it in an abstract way.

And it feels like I am actually doing something for the world — in that I’m feeding people and giving them nourishment to move their bodies and keep going. It’s very tangible. Whereas, if I’m writing, like, ‘50 Pancake Recipes to Flip Your Day Off Right’ — what am I even here for?”

That’s the irony of our current economic moment. All that energy spent climbing away from the menial, only to collapse when we reach the top.

Anyway! Three questions for you:

• If everyone on Earth earned the same salary, how would you actually like to spend your days?

• Which alternate career paths have you fantasized about that your logical adult brain shut down?

• Where are you performing success (or anything, really) at the expense of feeling okay in your body?