Hi buddies. We’ve somehow made it to September (well, a week ago), and while I feel like I’ve lived five years in one, it also feels like it was just January or that summer just started, and I can’t decide if this is good or if this is bad.
Yesterday, I started to tell a friend “I can’t parse this moment…” and she interrupted me to say there is no parsing of the moment to be done; there is no making something of it. At least not for me and not yet and maybe not for a long time or ever. All I know is that I’m in Los Angeles for the first time since January, or rather anywhere outside my little bubble since January, and I can’t integrate into it.
Yesterday I listened to a talk Pema gave in the late 2000s (I’ve been keeping her talks on in the background right now which I highly recommend). In it, she suggests we are an evolving species and perhaps even a transitional species, and goes on to say that it is a “very, very exciting time on the planet” and that spiritual consciousness evolves more quickly under pressure: “It’s happened through the ages, and it seems to be happening now. More and more people are passionately wanting to wake up.”
A part of me keeps wondering, When am I going to passionately want to wake up? as if I’m just fucking around until I get serious. As if I’m responding incorrectly, as if I should be feeling something other than I am, or doing something different than I am, or being someone different than I am. While another part thinks that the fact that I’m even thinking these things is the proof that it’s happening exactly as it should and that I’m not off my path fucking around but perhaps winding my way toward something. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I have a tendency to look for the lesson I’d rather be learning than the one on offer to me—that I preternaturally resist the conditions. Until at some point I realize, it’s the conditions I don’t want that always bring me closer to what it is I do. (I wrote about this a lot more eloquently in this essay, “What to do with the things you don’t want.”)
Below are a lot of links I collected over the past month—things I watched, read, listened to, consumed, as well as things I’m practicing and thinking about.
Recovering Round-up, August 2025
📚 Nowhere Girl (loved it v. v. much; recommend for late in life ADHD diagnosis; Carla is an upcoming guest on co-regulation); Love in a F*cked-Up World (one of the most practical and thoughtful books on relationships I’ve ever read); Fawning by Ingrid Clayton (NYC friends you can catch Ingrid and
at the 92nd Street Y this coming Friday); The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (a short book that blew my mind); The Glass Eye (same). Currently reading way too many books🎥 On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is the best thing I’ve watched all year.
7 other 🎥 Some of my favorite from the last few months: Nine Days (the ending!); Life & Beth (rewatch); The Curse (rewatch); Too Much; Sinners; Martha; Rage.
New mental disorder just dropped
Opulomania is an addiction to buying luxury items
Related: Wealth can change your psychology I keep thinking about this one because I don’t think we understand the extent to which this happens, and how wealthy most of the people we follow on the internet actually are
Related: Most Americans think they’ll become wealthy one day (while only 10% of Americans will become a millionaire (which does not mean “wealthy”) and only .01% will become billionaires. In Dean Spade’s new book he points out this disparity and the fact that we often prioritize empathy for the ultra wealthy because we think we’ll be them one day. In other words, we are not critical enough of wealth and its implications, which are massive and all around us. We think it’s Elon Musk shit, but I think it’s far more ordinary than that.
Cody Cook-Parrot deleted their Instagram forever and then talked with me about it in this episode of co-regulation called “Your Phone or Your Life?”
Related: The average American will spend 12 years of their life looking at their phone. The stats range from 12-20 years, and some stats suggest that we’ll spend 40 years looking at screens. I have no idea why tf I didn’t know this stat but it 100% made me use my phone less
“Most Americans still don’t know that alcohol can cause cancer” and now they’re even less likely to, after RFK Jr. buried a pivotal government study showing the link between drinking and cancer. In 2024 more than 100 members of Congress—those either paid by the lobby or from states with big alc interests, voted to suppress the same study—citing an ‘anti-alcohol bias’ LOLS instead of the anti-human bias. This follows a June decision to remove dietary guidelines to limit alcohol consumption (also under RFKJ); alcohol stocks rose after the announcement. “The upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines will instead be influenced by a competing study, favored by industry, which found that moderate alcohol consumption was healthy.”
People are using ChatGPT to 🍄 trip sit
Therapists are using ChatGPT to therapy
💊🍺💉🍸🌲🍄🛍️📲🧑🏻💻 lols okay; ADHD meds could reduce suicidal behaviors; people with ADHD use more pot; rehab fuels relapse; Eric Adam’s proposes involuntary addiction treatment in NYC; a pacemaker for the brain; US alcohol consumption hits 90 year low; we’re addicted to validation and “the internet is Purdue Pharma”; (←related); roadside testing cannabis; opioid settlements just buy more cops; What’s so bad about nicotine?; MAHA + MDMA; CBD helps AUD; every week there is an article about whether Gen Z drinks whyy; Miss Sobriety World; opening dispensaries reduces opioid-related deaths; ADHD + pot use; what’s contingency management; how does self-control work
Is it addiction or is it autism? “What we frequently label as addiction is often less about dysfunction or moral failing, and more about a deeply embodied attempt to regulate an overwhelming sensory existence.”
RECENT ARTICLES
Related: “I think in America you’re beginning to head in that direction. Ours started a long time ago, and one has to learn how to navigate it.” Indian author Arundhati Roy on how to write under fascism
Related: Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American
“I’m not physically repulsed by men, I’m socially and politically repulsed.”— The Cut, “This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men — and She’s Never Been Happier”
Related: “Why Sky Fusco Doesn’t Want a Boyfriend”
RECENT PODCAST EPISODES
I got to spend time with two of my favorite humans talking about some of my favorite things.
and I talk about what makes someone an artist and how to claim that title'; wanting to quit our jobs and become EMTs/develop “usable skills”; what to do with men; and changing our minds publicly.Cody Cook-Parrott and I talk about getting meds right, how good sex is with safe people, moving to rural America as a queer, protecting the trans community, and how using Instagram made us both want to die.
this poem by
Went down a rabbit hole about Gabor Mate and ADHD
“I think that’s one of the biggest things for Gen-Z girls: They’re looking for someone to say, ‘You know what, you can’t have it all, so here are your options and do what you feel is right.' —The Cut on how all the Gen-Z girls are going MAGA Tradwife because they’re tired
Related: Started Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin
Finally: I feel like I’m becoming dumber and maybe a kind of a robot and also like I don’t have the same kind of inhibition I used to have and like I’m slowly sliding into something I don’t want to become and to counter it I’m implementing some micro-practices to counter what feels like an active degradation. First, I’m using NO and active inhibition more, implementing micro-practices to strengthen my self-control muscles and my AMN (action mode network). This means consciously working on pauses before reacting, meditating regularly (i.e. using Goenka-style Vipassana which is very effortful and active; not snoozing; waking up at the same time each day; not reaching for my phone on impulse). Second, I’m training my aMCC (anterior mid cingulate cortex), or the “persistence center”, by DOING a lot of things I don’t want to do, when I don’t want to do them. This means not leaving a dish until the morning, taking the trash out when it’s full instead of days later, or changing for a workout immediately (for me, it’s always these extra steps like changing clothes or putting on sunblock or taking the trash out when I’m supposed to that get in the way of me doing things I want to be doing). Lots of tiny moments of catching when I defer to my “I don’t want to” and procrastinate, and not giving in and reaching for something more pleasant and frictionless. Finally, BORED means I’m letting myself be bored as much as I can; not always listening the radio or music or a book while driving, not taking a book to the beach but just appreciating the feel of the wet dirty wind; not using my phone in line at the store but observing and connecting with anyone around me that isn’t also just staring at their phone. In this way, I’m doing little things consistently, instead of big things in spurts, to build up a kind of resistance to what’s happening to me, which is something like what happened to the people in WALL-E.
I went on a date with a guy once in LA, and when he went to the bathroom, I was like *ok babe do not touch your phone, just look around, look at the people and not your phone so when he comes out of the bathroom, he'll see you looking all tuned in and chin up, and he'll be like wow what an interesting cool girl who doesn't look at her phone*
Then, when he came back from the bathroom, he told me he always goes to the bathroom on dates because he wants to see if the girl immediately gets on her phone.
It felt like 1) hell yeah I won the game, 2) wow were we well-suited assholes, but 3) so nice to not just pull out the phone. It changed the trajectory of my habits in a fundamental way, even if for very, very vain reasons.
Yes to it all and the micro resistance muscle is such a good call. The Wall-e of it all always kills me how close we are.