I'm voting to make this the soundtrack of 2025.

So far I have:

• A proper camera
• A notebook and pen
• An Android-based e-reader for all my reading

And I'm looking at DAPs (basically a fancy iPod) for music, podcasts, and meditation.

(Funny how, back in the early days, we were excited whenever phones replaced more devices. Now, it feels like many people are moving in the opposite direction.)

• Book title: Atmosphere
• Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Rating: 4.5/5

This book made me tear up a few times in public, so I have to give it high marks. It’s not the type of book I’d usually pick, but I loved it from start to end.

Notes & Highlights

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

“Or better yet, we are the universe. I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I’m breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now—the cells, the air, the bacteria—it’s not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws.

Language is what allows us to communicate. But it also limits what we can say, perhaps even how we feel. After all, how can we recognize a sentiment within ourselves that we have no word for? And perhaps, Joan thought, science is the same. Even the way we tell one another we want to live alongside them is limited by what we understand is possible in the world. What more could we say if we knew more about the universe?

Where to buy Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid:

• Bookshop

• Book title: The Anthropocene Reviewed
• Author: John Green
• Rating: 3/5

The book is ok. I like the premise. But I can’t stand how negative the author is at times. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed 3 stars.

Notes & Highlights

The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era. Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-word review is hard work for artificial intelligences, whereas star ratings are ideal for them.

Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986. It’ll be brighter in the night sky than Jupiter, or any star.

Where to buy The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green:

• Bookshop

This sparks joy.

• Book title: The Mountain in the Sea
• Author: Ray Nayler
• Rating: 4.5/5

The book explores what it means to be intelligent, while also asking: what is culture? What is consciousness? Fitting questions in the age of LLMs.

Notes & Highlights

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.

That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

A philosopher of the twentieth century, Paul Virilio, said: ‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’

Where to buy The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler:

• Bookshop

• Book title: Project Hail Mary
• Author: Andy Weir
• Rating: 6/5

I finished the whole book in three days. An absolute banger of a story. I seriously can’t wait to see what the movie will do with this plot.

Where to buy Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

I tend to over-optimize the things I do. I basically constantly ask myself how I can get the best possible outcome out of whatever I try to achieve. I see this in my gym and running routines, where I regularly test new apps to figure out if one is better than the other. I see it in other hobbies too, where I'm endlessly tweaking to make something just a little bit better.

This has never really felt limiting to me, on the contrary. Trying to find ways to improve things is usually fun for me. But at the same time, I also know that good enough is often good enough, and there is no need to aim for perfect, as it only risks limiting yourself. And I sometimes wonder if I limit myself without knowing, but instead label it as "fun" and "part of the process".

So for July, I aim to stop all over-optimization. No apps for either the gym or running. No tweaking past a certain threshold, but instead ship it as is. By doing this for a month, I hope to recalibrate my sense of "good enough." And if there is some hidden perfectionism holding me back, I want to find it and burn it down with the might of a thousand suns.

• Book title: The Emperor of Gladness
• Author: Ocean Vuong
• Rating: 6/5

Probably my favourite book of the year (so far). Absolutely beautiful prose, and Ocean Vuong is slowly turning into one of my favourite authors.

Notes & Highlights

“When did he die, your husband?” “When does anybody die?” she shrugged. “When God says Well done.”

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering.

“Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are. [...] “They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building.

Where to buy The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong:

• Bookshop
• Amazon

In case you forgot what this is all about, here are the rules I wanted to follow:

• No social networks with timelines or algorithms
• YouTube only as a search engine, or if a link is shared
• All content must come via RSS, email, or directly from a human
• No online news. If I want to know what's going on, I'll grab a newspaper (thankfully, I work for one)
• No podcasts
• No phone while doing anything else
• Daily screen time limit: two hours (Manu picked that number; I might hate him by June 30)

I think I broke all of them at least once. Very early on, I realized where this was heading and what my learnings would look like. And so I simply started adopting the changes early.

Before I started with this experiment, I wanted to figure out one thing and prove another: Would I suffer from FOMO, and could I live without my smartphone? I think the answers are no, and yesn't.

About FOMO

Unlike Manu, I didn't completely dial down all my inputs, simply because I still wanted to write the newsletter for overkill. But if there is one thing this experiment proved to me is that there is nothing to miss out on. Most of what happens online simply isn't so important that you need to stay up-to-date day by day. If something truly important happens, someone somewhere will tell you, and then you can always decide if you want to dig deeper or not. And I'd like to argue that most of that stuff isn't even worth digging deeper.

Social media, algorithms, influencers, all make it seem like whatever happens right now is the most important thing in that moment, and you definitely shouldn't miss out, but that's because their incentives force them to operate in such a way. The companies and people can't make money if you don't give them your attention. And attention is the most important currency we all have, but we spend it lavishly on some random crap.

We all should be cultivating ignorance more, but that's for another blog post.

On living without a smartphone

Before the end, I picked up YouTube again. I also listened to a podcast or two while driving for seven hours. I even posted to social media a few times (but I can say I did not consume content).

There is a time and space for all these things. If you actively decide to interact with one of these media in that exact moment, and you do so mindfully, I don't see any problems. Heck, I'd argue that this is exactly the way we are supposed to use this. The point never was to become a hermit who doesn't partake in modern society, but to live on your terms.

The issues I have with all this lie in the mindless, automatic behaviour, where you pick up one of these things to fight boredom. I used to do that a lot. I probably still do that way too often.

But now I also try to sit with the boredom for at least a little while, or alternatively, grab a thing I deem more worth my time. During June, I finished seven books. I also actively wrote stuff by hand in one of my notebooks, often to come back to it later (while it's great to have all the world's knowledge in your pocket at all times, it's also ok to not know a thing immediately). And I meditated, near daily, after a year-long hiatus.

Before all this, I thought the smartphone was the bane of my existence. Everything that bothered me about myself had its origin in my smartphone use, so the answer clearly was to try and actively fight it, or look towards a dumbed-down solution.

But what this does is give this little thing too much power. I hand over my agency to a piece of glass and metal, and throw up my hands, saying that I am fighting an unfair fight and that none of this is my fault in the first place; I am but a poor human being, and something something trillion-dollar companies.

Sorry, me, but that's bullshit. That is an excuse to not work on the true underlying issue, which is that I hate being bored, and the smartphone is the quickest fix. And I hate being bored because being bored means I have to sit with my thoughts, and I am afraid of what I might find there. Though during this experiment, I realized that there is nothing to be afraid of anyway, thanks to therapy and years of work.

Actually, I got my best ideas while being bored.

Experimental June: The End

So, where does this leave me now?

I will probably embark on more of these experiments, all to challenge my default states. All to figure out if the things I am doing, out of habit or not, are worth it in the first place. And I think I already know what the next one will be, but it's not July yet, so no spoilers.

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