Reframe the... Email Newsletter?

(Re)introducing my semi-weekly email newsletter, Reframe Your Inbox

Happy Super Tuesday to those who celebrate (??) such things. I’ll be voting in the Democrats Abroad Global Presidential Primary this afternoon. For the Americans on this list who currently live somewhere other than America, head to votefromabroad.org to get registered since, you know, there’s an election coming up.

Now, to business. After sending out last week’s email update, I got to thinking about what might make this newsletter more interesting. I thought about it so much, in fact, that over the subsequent days the idea regularly interrupted my meditation practice. (Erin can surely confirm for you: brainstorming about email newsletters while meditating is a pretty accurate reflection of where I am at this stage in life.)

Anyway, welcome to my slightly revamped newsletter, Reframe Your Inbox. Every so often—sometimes every couple days, other times every couple weeks—I’ll be sharing a few updates with you. I’m aiming for five-ish things in each edition. (This week it’s four.) These “things” will include new articles I’ve written, updates about the book, links to interesting content and ideas I’ve come across, random (but undoubtedly inspirational) thoughts, and so on. I’d welcome your submissions, too, whether it’s something you wrote/ created/ hosted/ are promoting, or just something you came across that you think is worth sharing.

One other update: Reframe the Day is, at long last, complete. Look out for a pre-order link soon.

With all of that said, here are four things for you this week.

FIRST THING:

I published the second article in what I’m calling my “Radical Rethink” series on Medium: The Trade-Offs and Tough Choices of the Serious and Responsible People. Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t think I realized it at the time, but as a young Hill staffer who’d studied computer science in college and feared I might never fit in as a politics and government guy, I really wanted to think of myself as a serious and responsible person in Washington. I was progressive, sure, but I trusted that the system was moving inexorably toward achieving the goals I believed in, from expanding access to health care to fighting climate change. The system had never let me down, after all. I equated trust in the system that had worked for me with faith that it could work for anybody else. […]

Over decades, the perspectives of serious and responsible people have been honed, shaped, skewed, and replicated by a range of forces and interest groups, from corporate lobbies and anti-government ideologues to conservative economists and well-off individuals seeking to retroactively justify their successes and others’ failures. These relentless efforts have served the interests of their lead proponents extremely well. But they have also dramatically narrowed our collective understanding of what society can be and shrunk our expectations of what government can achieve.

SECOND THING:

I also published the third article in the “Radical Rethink” series: It’s Not Just the 1 Percent. The Meritocratic Class Helps Keep “The System” in Place. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s another systemic trend that’s easily overlooked in the conversation about the soaring incomes of America’s wealthiest individuals. While we often point to those at the head of the income pack as the source of the problem, we spend significantly less time talking about the next tier of people for whom the system is also working well—perhaps not quite as well as the top fraction, but still very, very well. […]

We genuinely care about bigger, community- and society-level challenges, but we usually don’t see that the little things we do every day—even the well-meaning ones that any person might do, like helping a friend’s friend get their resume to the right person, or moving to a different neighborhood with higher property values and better public schools—perpetuate and prop up the thoroughly broken system that created those challenges in the first place.

We don’t notice how, over time, the myth of meritocracy clouds our thinking and narrows our understanding of the world. Because we work hard and the system works for us, we become convinced that there’s a causal link between the two. We begin to believe that the system works for us because we work hard. If it worked for us, it can work for anyone. And once we accept that the fundamentals of the system are sound, it’s easy to accept all the other aspects of the system that sustain it—the zero-sum thinking, the false choices, the wisdom of the serious and responsible people.

These aren’t conscious decisions. They just happen. That’s how systems work.

The fourth article in the series will be online by tomorrow morning. (If you missed part one, check it out here.) If Medium’s not your thing, you can read them all on my website as they’re published.

THIRD THING:

Shortly after deciding to publish my collection of “really long blog posts about life” as the book that became Reframe the Day, I realized that there were certain genres of books I needed to stop reading. Why? Because if I kept reading these books, I would keep finding more material I wanted to include in my own book and, therefore, would never actually finish writing it.

At the top of the after-I-finish-my-book list was Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Newport’s previous book, Deep Work, revolutionized my thinking (and inspired an entire chapter of Reframe the Day). A couple weeks ago I finally read Digital Minimalism. The book makes a ton of interesting and important points. (The substantial volume of highlighting I did suggests I was right to hold off earlier.) But I want to note one point here.

As most of us know all too well, the business models of many big tech firms rest on monopolizing and monetizing our time, attention, and sense of autonomy. These companies are very good at doing this. That’s why Newport says it’s a lot easier to reclaim that time, attention, and autonomy if we take some of the hours we spend using social media and being distracted by technology, and redirect them toward the practice of what he calls “high-quality leisure.”

In the book, Newport goes deep into what does and does not constitute “high-quality leisure.” One key characteristic of these activities is that they “support rich social interactions.” Even though we call Facebook a social network, mindlessly scrolling through the news feed does not support rich social interactions. Playing a board game with friends, on the other hand, does. Newport writes:

The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to spend time with other people in person. … The second trait is that the activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal.

Since we moved to the UK, Erin and I have spent quite a few hours (and quite a few pounds sterling) attending high-intensity interval training classes. These are hour-ish-long fitness classes that involve a lot of running, jumping, lifting, and sweating, almost always in a dark room with crazy lighting and painfully loud music. I really enjoy these classes. Sometimes they make me feel miserable, but I really enjoy them nonetheless. I’ve been wondering: Why, exactly, do I enjoy them so much?

Physical fitness is obviously part of it. I feel better when I exercise regularly, and I exercise more effectively when I’m with other people and have someone yelling at me to pick up the pace (and when I need to justify paying £17 a session). Mentally, I feel better, too. These classes are like a reset button for my headspace. For 45-60 minutes, I’m forced away from everything else in life that’s constantly conspiring to distract me and stress me out—emails I need to respond to, overdue obligations and to-dos piling up, calendar commitments I wish I hadn’t said “yes” to, awkward things I said/did, and so forth. The workouts are usually too difficult for me to think about anything else, especially work or writing, which forces my brain into the present moment.

So, yes, physical and mental fitness are a huge part of these classes’ appeal. What Digital Minimalism made me realize is that there’s another reason I find them so fulfilling. Newport again:

Another interesting intersection of leisure and interaction is emerging in the world of health and exercise. Arguably one of the biggest trends in this sector is the “social fitness” phenomenon, in which, as one sports industry analyst describes it, “fitness has shifted from a private activity at the gym to a social interaction in the studio or on the street.”

Why do Erin and I keep returning to these intense, mildly cult-like workout classes? They’re physically challenging. They serve as a mental reset, directing our minds into the present moment and away from all sorts of anxieties and uncertainties and worries about the past and the future that we can’t control. And, Newport suggests, they “promote intense social experiences.” The social element, it seems, is key. We’re with a bunch of other people who rarely need to say anything to each other—that’s part of what keeps this introvert going back—but are still engaged in a shared social experience.

“A life well lived,” Newport writes, “requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.” For whatever reason, we human beings seem wired to derive immense fulfillment from activities that check all of these boxes.

When we lived in DC, playing rec-league softball (Go Cutthroats) and coaching a little league tee-ball team were two of the activities that I found similarly fulfilling. They were inherently social. They required physical activity (or at least more physical activity than sitting in front of a computer screen). And, for a few short hours, they didn’t give me extra mental bandwidth to spend worrying about anything else. That complete (if momentary) separation from many of life’s worries can be enormously invigorating.

Where in your life can you carve out space for a little high-quality leisure?

FOURTH THING:

“Things are unexpectedly amazing.” That’s how the writer Craig Mod recently described “the state of newsletters and email” in an essay for WIRED. As Claire Landsbaum wrote in Vanity Fair last summer, “We’re at Peak Newsletter, and I Feel Fine.” Agreed. Given the theme of this email, it feels appropriate to share a few of my favorites:

  • Scott Galloway’s No Mercy / No Malice, in which the NYU business professor offers blunt and mind-expanding assessments of tech, capitalism, and life. (Shout out to my friend Alex for pointing me toward Galloway’s work. And no, there’s no relation to another Galloway I know.)

  • Anne Helen Petersen’s the collected ahp, in which the BuzzFeed News writer (and author of an article you almost certainly read or heard about last year) deconstructs America’s burnout culture, among many other important and timely topics.

  • Jamelle Bouie’s The Newsletter, in which the New York Times columnist shares his work and thoughts on politics, history, and culture. Bouie’s writing always offers clarity not just about the America of the present, but also about how the America of the past informs everything happening to us today.

If you’re looking for more email-based content (besides Reframe Your Inbox, of course), each of these newsletters is well worth your time.

THAT’S IT.

Got thoughts or feedback for me? Want to share your work, or other stuff you came across? Send it my way, please! And if you know someone who should sign up for Reframe Your Inbox, point them here.

As always, thanks for reading.

—Adam