Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hello Everyone,

Last week my partner, Erik, and I were at a party. One of those ones at some friends’ house where you think you’re going to meet a bunch of new people but then end up getting in deep with just one person.

We got talking to a guy — I’ll call him Marco — who was in the middle of a divorce and already in his next relationship. He was managing both with a kind of baffled energy, the way you do when life has moved faster than your feelings. His divorce was coming at the end of 20 years together with the woman who would soon be his ex-wife. There were arguments there of course. But also with his new partner that he’d left his wife for.

What really touched us is that he said he often only had the chance to talk openly about his feelings with his gay friends. And Erik and I both believe that when someone crosses your path and clearly needs an ear, you offer it.

He was curious about how we solved conflicts between us. How we came back from or settled arguments. Which is when we told him, we don’t fight. We never have. We disagree sometimes of course. But since neither of us feels the urgent need to make the other one see that we’re right, it never gets into harsh and loud words.

He looked at us like we’d told him we ran our apartment on solar power generated from our own goodwill.

What never? he kept asking. How can you not fight?

It’s not the first time we’ve had to explain this to people. Even I used to think that when I met people who didn’t fight, that they weren’t trying hard enough. Or that they were in some weird cult.

Many people I’ve known thought that fighting was a major part of what kept a relationship spicy and interesting.

We tried to explain it. That we’d both been through our own version of a hard journey alone. Different stories, same bottom line. And that somewhere in those journeys, we’d each figured out that we were enough on our own. And when you’ve found that, when you’ve really found it and not just said it to yourself in the mirror until you pretended you believed it, something changes in what you need from a partner.

You stop needing them to fix you. And when you stop needing to be fixed, there’s an awful lot less to fight about. And this was the first relationship for both of us where it worked in this fight-free way.

Marco absorbed this in the way people absorb something they can’t locate in their own experience yet. He nodded. He went to get a drink. And he didn’t come back.

But it got me thinking about this whole topic again. As many of you know I wrote a book about my divorce called How To Burn A Rainbow. The subtitle though, was almost the whole title “My Gay Marriage Didn’t Make Me Whole, My Divorce Did.”

I went on a very specific journey - to not be the same guy coming out of this as going in. That I was going to get to the bottom of why I’d dated the same guy five times in a row and married the last one.

So the thoughts in this piece are mine. Based on my lived experience. But I believe these things to be true. Take from it whatever lands with you.

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, especially a friend who be in a relationship that you can see isn’t serving them, you can share it with them here:

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Why did fighting become proof?

The belief that fighting is proof of something — proof of passion, proof of caring, proof that the relationship is real — is one of the most durable myths in our shared emotional vocabulary.

We absorbed it early. The on-again off-again couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. The lovers who fight and then fall into bed and it’s the best sex they’ve ever had. The idea that there’s something a little too cold, a little too settled, a little too dead, a little sad even, about two people who don’t combust.

“You need to fight to keep things spicy.” Marco’s words. And the words of about four other couples I’ve explained our relationship to. It’s also the premise of approximately every romantic film made since forever. I should know. I spent seven years in Hollywood as a screenwriter, perpetuating this very myth. One that I was living.

What this idea actually is, stripped back: the belief that emotional intensity equals emotional health. That the heat of conflict is indistinguishable from the heat of love. That if nothing is catching fire, nothing is burning. And that there is a happy ever after where these two cure each other of everything that caused the conflicts.

The problem is it’s not true. And a lot of people are living very unhappily inside that story about love. I know I was.

Where did this passion myth come from?

Part of it is that we have very few cultural scripts for relationships that are peaceful and also passionate. Books, films, songs - the stories that we understand our lives through - almost universally map love into longing, conflict, and reconciliation. The couple who communicate well and trust each other and deal with disagreements quietly don’t make for great drama. So they’re not in the drama. What’s in the drama, is the fight.

John Gottman, the psychologist who has spent fifty years studying couples in his “Love Lab” at the University of Washington, found that the number one predictor of a relationship failing isn’t the presence of conflict. It’s contempt.

The eye-roll. The dismissal. The subtle (or not so subtle) signal that you think you’re better than your partner. Couples who fight, but who fight without contempt, can do fine. Couples who stop fighting but quietly stop respecting each other are in trouble.

His research also found that roughly 69% of conflicts in relationships are perpetual problems. Issues that never get fully resolved. They just get managed. The couples who survive this don’t necessarily find the magic answer to the argument. They find a way to hold the disagreement with some lightness, some humor, some fundamental acceptance that this person is not going to become a different person.

This is useful to know. Because it means the goal was never to eliminate disagreement. It was to stop fighting about the disagreement in a way that eats the relationship alive.

But somewhere in our cultural transmission, “some conflict is normal” became “fighting is healthy” became “fighting is love.”

Which brings me to the heart of the issue I was facing: I fought about the things my partner didn’t give me, because I couldn’t give them to myself.

The dark thing underneath the thing

My ex-husband said something to me once, in the middle of our divorce, that was meant as a cheap shot but turned out to be one of the truest things anyone has ever said to me.

After a huge fight in the house one night where I thought I’d get an Oscar nomination for the much-rehearsed speech I delivered, he killed me with one line.

Motioning to the house and all the things in it, “I’m sorry you thought you needed to do all of this so that I’d love you.”

That was a bullseye on my flex in relationships. And my shield behind which I hid all the things that I hated about myself.

I had spent years taking care of men financially — paying for things, propping things up, making myself useful — because I was trying to buy something that money was never actually going to buy. I would find men I thought were strong, men who might, if I was generous enough and indispensable enough, make the dark feelings of not being enough go away. Money was my way of making myself worth keeping.

And then surprise, surprise, we’d fight about money.

But the fights were never really about money. The fights were about issues that lay somewhere in the spectrum of: I pay for everything to make myself indispensable to you, you take it all for granted, you don’t make all my self-hatred go away, you just make me feel worse. But I stay, because the idea of being out there again and single is more painful than the idea of making this work in the only way I know how.

And that was basically me from ages 18-48.

In my book How To Burn A Rainbow, I write about the period after my divorce when I was in Berlin, broke, injured, legally in freefall, and completely unable to repeat the old pattern. There was no one to take care of. There was no money. There was just me, a broken knee, an emotions diary, and a warehouse of material I’d been running from for years.

And so I sat with it. All of it. The fear, the self-loathing, the old terrified teenage Karl who’d built his whole adult life as an elaborate escape from how he felt in high school. I cried under a tree in a park in Berlin every day for two months until there was nothing left to cry about.

And then something lifted.

What I found at the bottom, after all the years, all the relationships, all the money, all the fights - was that I had been enough all along. Not the person I was performing. Just, me. The actual me.

It’s a cliché. I know it’s a cliché. But some things are clichés because they are true and because the work required to actually feel them rather than just say them is so enormous that most people never get there. If I had had even the slightest crack to pry open and escape from this self-analysis, believe me I would have taken it.

But if I hadn’t gone through all that I would never have gotten to the line from the end of the book: I didn’t need a rainbow. I was the pot of gold.

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How this changes the architecture of love

So what does life look like after that? And post the story of the book? Well I can tell you that most love songs don’t sound that interesting anymore. I mean, who wants to listen to Billie Eilish sing about how great life is all the time? And what good shape her heart is in?

When you have genuinely found the bottom of your own dark stuff and sat with it until it stopped being so terrifying, something structural changes in what you need from a relationship.

You stop showing up with a list of things you need the other person to be. Or more precisely, the list changes.

My old list was very long. Things that a guy had to be, that were really a camouflaged set of attributes that I thought would save me. So our fights weren’t relationship problems. They were self-problems that I was trying desperately to outsource.

When you’ve dealt with the self-problems yourself — or at least made a real dent in them — what’s left is something simpler. You get to love the actual person in front of you, not love them based on how well they’re doing the job you never told them they were being hired to do.

And that changes your dealbreakers. Old me wouldn’t have dated Erik. I wouldn’t have known how. This me, can look at those things that used to bother me, and think, you know what, I could just love those parts of him as well.

Which in turn has changed my entire idea of what love is, because it’s a lot more fun to love 100% of someone rather than whatever the percentage was based on how well they’d performed on my latest round of tests.

The thing was, that my ex-husband was running some version of this scenario too. By bizarre co-incidence, I met the man my ex was married to before me. It was at a friend’s party, just before I left America. We compared notes. And discovered that we were pretty similar. And so were the ends of our relationships with him.

Even the line about, “I’m sorry you thought you had to do all this so that I’d love you.” Same line. Different relationships. Maybe, every relationship he’d ever had.

Those fights were never about me and him. They were about my patterns. And his.

Back To Marco. And Emotional Food.

I’ve been thinking about what fighting gives Marco. What it gives a lot of people. What it used to give me.

The sense if I’m fighting I’m doing it right, that the passion is real because it produces friction. But the other thing — and this is the one I keep coming back to — is that the fight is familiar emotional food.

Even when it hurts. Because this rhythm of the eternally unresolved conflicts tastes familiar, therefore it tastes good.

This is what happens when we grow up around conflict-as-love. Or when we’ve only ever been in relationships where the only heat was harm. The nervous system learns the pattern. The fight doesn’t just feel bad, it feels recognisable. And recognisable, for a nervous system that’s been through a lot, can feel an awful lot like safe.

So is fighting bad? Wrong question.

The question isn’t whether fighting is good or bad. The question I had to unearth was, what was I actually asking for when a fight started? Then later, could I learn to ask for that thing directly?

This is why Erik and I don’t fight, because we figure these things out with each other, or with ourselves and then report it to the other person. Here’s how we talk things through, or talk it through with ourselves, or the Emotions Diary. So they never actually become fights.

Start with the fights/issues you keep having. Pick the one that comes back. The same argument, different trigger, same underneath.

Start with asking yourself: what am I actually asking for here? Not what I said I was fighting about. What I was hoping to feel when it was over, when I’d been heard, when they’d understood.

That feeling you were chasing is yours to deal with. Not because your partner has no role in your emotional life. Of course they do. But because if the feeling is one that has been with you since before they existed, they were never going to be the ones to fix it. I am so guilty of this, I was serving multiple life sentences.

The second thing: let the dealbreaker list evolve. Not because you should accept treatment you don’t deserve. Hell, no. But because some of the things on that list aren’t about them — they’re about what those things historically meant to you. Is it possible to look at this person and see them clearly, rather than through the lens of what you needed in the past to believe you were loved?

Third: notice what kind of emotional food you’re eating. If conflict is the main thing that makes the relationship feel real, that’s worth paying attention to. Not judging, just noticing.

My emotional food was: I don’t get the respect I deserve after I give them everything, till one day I leave them when I’m emotionally and financially bankrupt.

And I would complain to all my friends about what bastards these guys were, and they would all agree and that was the high I was chasing, because I couldn’t get my partners to see that.

So, I changed my diet with myself. Which changed my diet when I was with Erik.

And last: do the inner work. This is the one nobody wants to hear because it’s not quick and it’s not comfortable. But if you’re fighting the same fights with the same person or different people over many years, there is something underneath that is yours to find.

I was never fighting with all my exes, I was fighting with me.

You don’t have to do it through a divorce to figure this out, like I did. I thank every power in the sky and the earth that The Emotions Diary came into my life. I figured out so much about me in there. Which is why I share the practice here for free. I believe that much in it.

To wrap up…

Marco moved on at the party, glass in hand, maybe looking for easier conversation. Fair enough.

But I think about him when I’m trying to put this into words, because there was something in his unasked question, doesn’t that mean you don’t care enough? That points at something a lot of us believe without knowing we believe it.

That peace in a relationship, is the absence of something important. And I couldn’t disagree more.

I have never cared more about a person than I care about Erik. I have never felt more known or more myself in a relationship than I do in this one.

And I have never fought less. In fact we don’t fall in and out of love, we fall slowly more and more into it.

Of course we make mistakes, we screw up, we are humans. But we don’t fight about it.

What I found when I sat with all my dark stuff — at the bottom of the crying tree in Berlin, in the financially broke year, in the many, long, solo nights — was that the thing I had been looking for in other people had been in me the whole time. And once I found it there, I stopped needing them to prove it to me. Stopped testing for it. Stopped fighting when I didn’t get it.

You don’t have to go through a divorce to get there. But you do have to go through something. You have to go through you.

Because the point of my life wasn’t to meet Erik and fall in love. It was to meet me, and fall in love with myself first.

And I wish the same for everyone. Largely because I think the biggest way we can undivide this world, is by undividing ourselves.

But mostly because I wouldn’t swap how I feel about myself today, for anything. And I wish that for everyone.

If this one landed, share it with someone who you think needs to hear this.

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Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

Where the heck was I last week? Down a freelance rabbit hole.

I skipped Undividing, the gym, meet-ups with friends, and why? Because I had a job and for reasons that really bothered me, I let it take up every single inch of space in my life.

But why, why, why? Well I discovered in T.E.D. that there is another very old story that decided to play out again last week, “the scarcity story.”

This completely irrational assessment of my good fortune is an old story running underneath everything. And TED had a bunch to say about it:

• Abundance triggers panic not peace

• Everything else gets dropped in the face of an imaginary threat

• I’ve learned to earn but not to have, so receiving feels dangerous

Like the You Didn’t Inherit A Fate, You Inherited A Filter T.E.D. this week has also unlocked something very deep, but I was ready for this. And I’m enjoying the work of getting to know myself even more.

Watch the whole video below for the whole story.

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There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

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If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

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You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

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Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hello Everyone,

It’s late May in Berlin. Which means the city is doing that thing where it offers you everything great all at once; long lit days, warm evenings, tables outside, strangers in good moods. And after the winter we all just have to survive every year, it’s the most welcome of changes.

I’ve often thought that this city is bipolar - you can’t believe it’s the same place and people that are grey, sad, and withdrawn from October to March. What I’ve become aware of this year is that underneath all of this joyous summer revelry, there’s a faint thread of something you can’t quite name. A kind of sweetness that aches. The feeling of holding something beautiful while already knowing it won’t last.

Summer in Berlin is spectacular, and spectacularly short. By August you can smell autumn on the way in. We locals know this; so we live outside with a kind of concentrated urgency that honestly confused me when I first arrived. Now I understand it. Every warm evening in Berlin comes with an invisible expiry date.

I never found the English word for this feeling. “Bittersweet” is close but too symmetrical; it implies equal parts, a clean split. “Melancholy” gets the sadness but loses the beauty. “Nostalgia” is for something already gone. This feeling is for something still here, still beautiful, that you know is going away. English doesn’t have a word for it.

Japanese does.

Mono no aware (物の哀れ) (which I’ll come to properly in a moment) is the name for exactly this. The bittersweet awareness that everything is impermanent. The gentle ache of a beautiful thing fading. When I first came across it, something in me found a place to land. Not just because the word captured the feeling, but also because the word told me this: this feeling is real. Real enough, and common enough, that a whole culture decided it needed a name.

That’s what I want to explore today. Twenty words from twenty languages — emotions, sensations, entire ways of being — that exist in other tongues but not in English. And the thing that strikes me about each one: a culture names what it values. A word in a language is a small piece of evidence that something human was happening often enough, and mattering enough, that people agreed to mark it. Which means every word on this list is also evidence about you. You’ve almost certainly felt these things. You just didn’t have a word for it.

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, especially a friend who speaks a different language, you can share it with them here:

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Now, let’s get Undividing…

What actually is this?

In 2016, psychologist Tim Lomas at University College London set out to catalogue what he called “positive lexicography” - a compendium of untranslatable words from languages around the world that describe human experiences English has no name for. He expected to find a few dozen. He eventually catalogued over a thousand, drawn from more than eighty languages.

Imagine that. A thousand feelings English missed.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which is one of linguistics’ most debated ideas posits that language doesn’t just describe our experience; it shapes it. The words we have determine, at least in part, what we’re able to perceive and articulate. You can feel something for which you have no word, but it tends to stay murky, hard to hold, harder to communicate. Give it a name and now it’s something you can point to.

There’s a reason Schadenfreude (the German word for the pleasure you take in someone else’s misfortune) has spread into English and into languages everywhere. Once people heard it, they recognised it immediately. The word unlocked something we’d all been experiencing privately, slightly guiltily, and brought it into the light.

As a writer, I’m a bit of a word nerd. I collect these. This article has twenty more of my favourites. I’ve grouped them into themes because the groupings reveal what different cultures decided to look at closely, what they agreed was worth the trouble of naming.

A note on the words: I’ve tried to represent each word accurately and in the spirit it’s used in its culture. Some of these, particularly words like ubuntu, mono no aware, saudade, and hygge, all have rich bodies of writing around them. I’ve simplified, but hopefully not oversimplified. If your language or culture is represented here and I’ve got something wrong, please tell me. Getting it right matters more to me than looking like I know things.

The ache of time and loss

Every culture has a relationship with impermanence. I love how these words explore the different flavours of that.

Mono no aware (Japanese) — The bittersweet awareness of impermanence. The gentle, achingly specific sadness of watching something beautiful fade; cherry blossoms, a season turning, a light changing. Not grief, exactly. Something more tender than that. The awareness that the beauty and the passing are one thing.

Hiraeth (Welsh) — A longing for home that goes beyond homesickness, because the home you’re longing for may not exist anymore, or may never have existed quite the way you’re remembering it. Part nostalgia, part grief, part love for something that can no longer hold you back.

Saudade (Portuguese) — A deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something absent. For a person, a place, a version of life. The Portuguese say you can feel saudade for something while it’s still present eg for someone who is still alive, a city you haven’t yet left. A kind of pre-emptive grief.

Toska (Russian) — Nabokov, whose Russian and English were both impeccable, described it as “a longing with nothing to long for.” At its deepest, a spiritual anguish; at its lightest, a vague restlessness, a grey ache of the soul with no identifiable cause. The feeling of wanting you-don’t-know-what.

Hüzün (Turkish) — Orhan Pamuk, writing about Istanbul, gave this one its fullest description: a collective melancholy shared by a whole city, a whole culture. Not individual sadness but a communal mood of the weight of history, beauty, and loss absorbed into the air itself. A sadness that belongs to everyone, and to no one.

What we are to each other

Perhaps the most striking thing about this category is how many languages went out of their way to name specific acts of closeness.

Ubuntu (Zulu / Nguni Bantu) — The philosophical principle that “I am because we are.” Your personhood is woven from your relationships with others. To diminish another person is to diminish yourself. To help another person is to enlarge yourself. It is both a word and a complete ethics.

Long time Undividing readers may remember Ubuntu from Undividing #22 - 15 Ways To Make Peace From Around The World. Ubuntu is more than a word, it’s a philosophy.

Ya’aburnee (Arabic, يا قبرني) — Literally: “may you bury me.” Said to someone you love so deeply that you can’t imagine surviving them. So you wish, as a gift to yourself, to go first. It’s an extreme declaration of love. It’s also, when you sit with it, one of the most honest things anyone can say to another person.

Sobremesa (Spanish) — The time after a meal when the table hasn’t been cleared yet, the plates are pushed aside, and the conversation goes on. Not the meal. The after. The lingering. The hour when the table holds you all together a little longer.

Talkoot (Finnish) — The act of gathering as a community to help someone with a large task: building a barn, bringing in a harvest, moving house. No one is paid. No one needs to be asked twice. The community simply shows up. There is a word for this in Finnish because it happened enough, and mattered enough, to be named.

Hygge (Danish) — The warmth and ease of being together in a cozy space. Not just comfort, but a specific quality of togetherness. The lit candle, the people you love, the feeling that here, right now, nothing bad can reach you. Just enough warmth and enough people.

The silent electricity between people

What happens in the space between two people, what is said without words is so rich a territory that it’s been named from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic. Apparently we all love to feel this.

Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego) — A look exchanged between two people who both want the same thing and neither wants to be the first to initiate it. The entire negotiation, the desire and the hesitation and the unspoken question, conducted entirely through eye contact.

Nunchi (Korean, 눈치) — The subtle, almost instinctive ability to read any room. To sense what other people are feeling without being told. To know when to speak and when to be quiet, when to stay and when to leave, what someone needs before they know they need it. In Korean culture, good nunchi is a social superpower; bad nunchi is considered a character fault.

Iktsuarpok (Inuktitut / Inuit) — The restless anticipation that makes you keep going to the window or door to check whether someone is coming. The impatient, hopeful, slightly anxious state of waiting for a person. You have definitely felt this. The Inuit named it.

Forelsket (Norwegian) — The overwhelming euphoria of the early stage of falling in love. Not love itself which hopefully comes later. This is the before: the electricity, the absurd happiness, the way everything looks different. The Norwegians decided this specific, fleeting, unmistakeable experience deserved its own word.

Yuán fèn (Mandarin Chinese, 缘分) — The fate or invisible thread that connects people who were meant to meet. When you encounter someone and the connection feels inexplicably immediate like a stranger who becomes a friend in an afternoon, or a person who arrives exactly when you needed them. That is yuán fèn at work. The universe’s matchmaking.

The interior weather

What we feel on the inside as private, specific, and sometimes absurd. Not everything important is big. Some feelings are small or even ridiculous, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be owned with a name.

Meraki (Greek, μεράκι) — Doing something with such soul and love that a piece of yourself goes into it. The quality of complete creative investment in a meal, a painting, a conversation, a gesture. When someone has made something with meraki, you can feel it. It is the opposite of phoning it in.

Fernweh (German) — Farsickness: the ache to be somewhere far away. The opposite of homesickness. A longing not for where you’ve been, but for somewhere you’ve never been. Somewhere distant and unknown that pulls at you. The feeling, standing at a window, that your life is happening in the wrong place.

Litost (Czech) — A state of torment created by the sudden sight of your own misery. The sting that happens when something small like a throwaway comment, a comparison, or a glimpse in a mirror shows you yourself in a way you just can’t bear. Part shame, part self-pity, part rage at being made to see it.

Gigil (Tagalog / Filipino) — The overwhelming, almost uncontrollable urge to squeeze or pinch something because it is so unbelievably cute. A baby, a puppy, a small sleeping thing. The Filipino language named the physical compulsion that cuteness produces. It’s the urge your hands have, independent of your brain, to grab and hold what is adorable.

Abbiocco (Italian) — The drowsy, heavy-lidded sleepiness that descends specifically after a big meal. Not tiredness though, this is a targeted, insistent, entirely pleasant drowsiness. The body’s eloquent, immediate response to being properly fed. The Italians named the nap the food calls you towards.

Where did these come from?

Words exist because experiences are common enough to name. Communities notice things, agree they keep happening, and eventually someone says: we need a word for this.

Which is, when you think about it, a profoundly Undividing idea. The things that make us feel most alone — the particular grief you can’t explain, the specific joy you can’t quite hold, the feeling that something is ending before it ends — are not private failings. They are feelings so widely shared that cultures on the other side of the world, sometimes even thousands of years ago, decided they needed a word for it.

You are not the only one who feels the bittersweet weight of a summer evening. You are not the only one who sits at a table not wanting to leave. You are not the only one who has looked at someone and wanted them to bury you, in the Arabic sense — loved them so much you’d rather go first.

We’ve all been in good universal company all along.

What can we actually do about it

Something a little different this week, and I’ll keep it short.

Use one. Pick one word from this list that names something you’ve been feeling without a name. Use it this week. Say it to someone. Put it in a text. Write it down. The act of naming makes the experience real. It tells your nervous system: yes, that happened, it counts.

Look at what the word reveals about the culture. Talkoot exists in Finnish because Finnish communities had a practice of collective labour. Nunchi exists in Korean because Korean culture has a particular sensitivity to social harmony. Ubuntu exists in Zulu because Zulu philosophy placed community at the centre of personhood. The word is a window into a way of seeing the world. And it’s a window any of us can borrow and look at our own lives through.

Talk to the people in your life who speak other languages about what their language has that yours doesn’t. This is, I promise, one of the best conversations you can have. Almost everyone who speaks more than one language has a word they mourn when they have to switch. Ask them what it is.

So many of the ones you’ve read here today came up in conversations I had with native speakers. And by the end of each talk, I understood them in a more complex way than I ever had.

And this is where I need your help.

I have twenty words here, from twenty languages. But there are over seven thousand languages in the world. And I’m working from the ones that linguists and translators have already written about in English. I am absolutely certain that your language has a word that English doesn’t. A word for a feeling that your grandmother used, or that your community uses, or that you’ve known as a concept your whole life.

Leave a comment and tell us what it is.

The word, the language, what it means, and if you’re willing a sentence or two about when you feel it. I and probably a lot of readers will go through all of these. Because I love knowing more about who we all are.

To wrap up…

There is a version of this story where untranslatable words are just a charming internet listicle. Twenty-word slideshows. Things you forward to people. Nice to know, quickly forgotten.

I think they’re far more than that.

I think they are evidence. That the feelings we’ve been embarrassed about, or couldn’t explain, or thought were particular to us are shared. Have been noticed and named by people who never met us, in places we may never go, in languages we don’t speak.

You have not been alone in any of this. You have just been in a language that didn’t have that feeling named.

Which means all of us are bigger than our culture, bigger than the languages we grew up with, bigger than all the things that separate us into boxes.

We feel this world, together.

If this one landed, share it with someone whose language is different from yours. This one was made to travel.

And please — leave your word in the comments. Tell me what your language knows that English doesn’t.

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Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

Quick update on last T.E.D. #59 “You Didn’t Inherit A Fate, You Inherited A Filter” - click through if you’d like to see that one. That realisation about my mother and my way of seeing the world has profoundly changed how I’m looking at life these days.

It’s been the topic of a lot of my meditations and may even become it’s own Undividing article, the layers of how it’s affected my world view keep revealing themselves. I hope it’s done the same for some of you too. It was a profound one for me.

Sometimes T.E.D. unlocks something very deep, but I was ready for this. And I’m enjoying the work of getting to know myself even more.

This week, I’m just back to Berlin after ten days in the countryside here, helping my partner care for his parents. There was a fall, everyone’s fine. But in this time there, I realised I’m only 15 years younger than his folks (they had him young btw)

It gave me a feeling I couldn’t name. Not panic, not sadness, but nameless. So into T.E.D. I went to try and figure this one out. And of course, it had a lot to say.

• Just because an emotion has no word in your language doesn’t mean it’s not important.

• I’m entering a new ear or partnership with time - first time I’ve felt something like this.

Watch the whole video to hear about this and more…

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email.

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hello Everyone,

A few weeks ago my partner and I went to a silkscreening course in a community space here in Berlin. The radiators clanked. The coffee was free and black, the end. And the person teaching it seemed like she had other places to be.

However, all of us assembled there were having a fantastic time, making things with our hands. Straight away, I noticed an older guy there, probably in his late 60s. You couldn’t miss his really; tall, a thinning but bright pink mohawk and a surplus army jacket with a Misfits patch on the back.

He wasn’t there as a costume. He was there as the same person he had been at seventeen, doing what he had always done — making something with his hands. And being a punk.

Walking home that night, my partner and I started counting. When was the last time we’d seen a punk on the street? A mod? A rocker? A goth not on the way to a specific event? Ravers in daylight? We kept arriving at the same answer: not for a long time. The only subculture we still see, regularly, in public, are the skaters. Everyone else has moved indoors, or online, or on.

So, like I do, I started poking around. Something quite specific has happened to subcultures in the last twenty years. And what we replaced them with is, despite first appearances, not the same thing. It’s thinner. It’s lonelier. And I think we ought to notice.

A subculture had five ingredients: music, fashion, language, place, ideology. And underneath all five, the bit no Pinterest board has ever managed to ship: community. Other people. Doing the same thing as you. Physically together.

A subculture wasn’t an outfit. It was a family you chose. But what is it now?

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, you can share it with them here:

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

What actually was a subculture?

In 1979 a British academic called Dick Hebdige published a small, electric book called Subculture: The Meaning of Style. He was trying to explain the strangest cultural fact of post-war Britain — that the children of bus drivers and dock workers were inventing entire civilisations of style on their own. Teddy boys. Mods. Skinheads. Punks. Each with its own music, dress, slang, politics.

Hebdige argued none of this was decoration. It was a language. Safety pins meant something. Mohawks meant something. He called the process “bricolage” - kids cobbling together a coherent identity from the broken bits of a mainstream culture they didn’t want.

When I went to school, all the above and more were wildly on display. And in university, we really committed and doubled down on the subcultures and the scenes that we were passionate about; we defined them as they defined us. But it was all of us together.

But a good question, is why did these even exist?

Where did subcultures come from?

The textbook explanation is that subcultures emerge whenever a generation looks at the identity its society has assigned it and decides: no thank you, we’ll build our own. The Birmingham School called this “symbolic resistance”. You couldn’t fix the economy or the class system. But you could grow your hair, find your people, and refuse to be invisible together.

This was one of the great undividing technologies of the twentieth century. A working-class goth in Manchester and a middle-class goth in Ohio could recognise each other instantly. A hip-hop kid in the Bronx and a hip-hop kid in Tokyo had everything in common before they’d swapped a word. Subcultures cut across the lines society used to divide us — class, geography, family, language — and re-sorted us by lines we’d chosen ourselves. The lonely kid in the wrong town finally had somewhere to go.

I was a rave kid in Sydney in the 80s and 90s. The community was built around parties every weekend where you saw the same people. Music, fashion, drugs, events, clubs, politics — that was the infrastructure we found each other in. I didn’t have to explain myself there. I just had to show up and be part of it.

That’s what I think in a large part has gone. Not the clothes, not the music. The infrastructure.

The great thinning

Walk through any city in Europe today and try to spot a subculture, and you will mostly fail. This is not because people aren’t being interesting. It’s because the infrastructure that made interesting visible and durable has been taken apart.

In the UK, the Music Venue Trust reported one grassroots music venue closed every fortnight in 2024. Roughly 800 late-night venues are gone in five years. A report this month found 48% of venues that opened in 2025 had already closed. You cannot have a scene without a room. The rooms are disappearing.

This is something that’s been rife in Berlin and probably your town since COVID.

In their place arrived a different model of identity. It is called, depending on who you ask, an aesthetic or a core. Cottagecore. Dark academia. Coquette. Mob wife. Indie sleaze. Gorpcore. The Aesthetics Wiki which is a real and surprisingly thorough website, catalogues hundreds.

Some look like subcultures. They have a vocabulary, a visual identity, moodboards. But I noticed what they don’t have. No place, ie you can’t go to the cottagecore club. No music (in the sense of subculture’s devotion to bands) only a playlist. Language to some degree I think. No ideology that I could see. Just a vibe.

And critically, and this is the big one, no community. You don’t have coquette friends. There’s no cottagecore show you all went to. The whole thing happens inside your phone, between you and an algorithm. The other “members” are theoretical. They are people who like the same Pins.

Subcultures used to be something you lived. Aesthetics are something you perform. The Aesthetics Wiki is the perfect monument to this — a Wikipedia of looks.

The cost was the point

A subculture asked things of you. Time. Money. Risk. The disapproval of your parents. The wrong haircut for the wrong job interview. A jacket you had to make yourself. A vocabulary you had to earn. That was the entry fee that we gladly paid for the bonds that gave us so much belonging.

Aesthetics removed the cost. Anyone with Wi-Fi and an Amazon account can be a “cottagecore girl” on Tuesday and a “mob wife” by Friday. Which sounds democratic until you notice what zero entry cost produces: zero community.

Most aesthetics now last about as long as yoghurt. Indie sleaze went viral in 2022 and was declared dead by late 2023. Mob wife had a life-cycle measured in weeks. A subculture you joined in 1982 you were probably still part of in 2002. An aesthetic you joined last March is over by the time you’ve washed the outfit twice.

The loneliest generation has the most aesthetics

I want to state here that I am a man of a certain age, whose friends have raised kids out of the house. So I might have this a million percent wrong. I’ve also seen first hand in the children of my friends, the communities and friends that they have found online who are every bit as real to them as the DCM Club in Sydney was to me. But…

Eight in ten 18 - 25 year old respondents report being lonely in the last twelve months. Ninety-one percent say there is no longer a mainstream pop culture. The consensus seems to be that we have killed the shared centre and lost the edges where the misfits used to find each other.

I think these facts are connected.

We used to send the lonely kid out into the world and the world had places for them to go. A record shop where someone would put a record on and watch their eyes. A gig where they found four other lonely kids in the same band t-shirt. We now send the lonely kid into a phone with an aesthetic. But the likes offer nothing.

In Undividing #59 A Gen Z buyer of vinyl recently put it perfectly: “I don’t want to rent my personality.” Subcultures, for all their flaws, were owned by the people in them. Aesthetics are rented.

The good news - where Subcultures are thriving

The subcultures that kept the cost in haven’t died. They have just become harder to see. But in some cases more alive than ever. The examples I’m citing here are in my backyard here in Germany since these are the things that I can see.

In March 2024, Berlin’s techno culture was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage register. A government officially declared that a youth music scene built in abandoned bunkers by sweaty strangers was a thing worth protecting. The reason techno survived long enough to be honoured is that nobody could ever do it cheaply or quickly. The cost was the culture.

In Leipzig, the Wave-Gotik-Treffen held its 32nd edition in June 2025 with roughly 20,000 goths. In Whitby, the Goth Weekend has run twice a year since 1994 and still pulls thousands. Skateboarding survived being made an Olympic sport - the culture is on the podium, and still at the skatepark at six in the evening. Punk Island in New York held its 17th DIY festival in 2025.

Different continents. Same pattern. Wherever subculture costs something, it is alive. Wherever it costs nothing, it is over within the fortnight.

Why this matters for an undivided world

There is a specific kind of division only a subculture knew how to undo. It is the division between the lonely kid and the world — the kid who doesn’t fit the family they were born into, the school they were assigned, the gender they were given. That kid used to be findable. That kid used to find others.

Aesthetics cannot do this. By design, they deliver you a perfectly personalised, perfectly private feed of yourself reflected back.

Subcultures undivided us across the lines society had drawn. I think aesthetics re-divide us - we’ve gone from find your tribe to curate your brand. And on the same trajectory, from a generation with strong bonds to a generation with the highest loneliness scores on record.

What can we actually do?

Go to a venue this month. Pay the cover. Stand next to a stranger. Buy a ticket to something where you don’t know any of the band names. The venues are dying because no one’s going.

My hack here; if I see a band on Instagram advertising a Berlin gig and I like the sound, I’ll risk the 30 Euros and check it out.

Go to a record store. This was always my jumping off point in every city I lived in. You see the gig posters, talk to the staff, get recommendations.

Pick one thing and stay with it for a year. Not a core, a commitment. One night, one scene, one choir, one dance class, one bouldering wall, one record shop. The point is repetition. The point is that the others there know your name by end of summer.

Make something physical. A patch. A zine. A mix CD. A silkscreened t-shirt. The making is the membership. I loved the silkscreening so much I think I’m going to start and make posters. Because I want to meet more folks like the punk guy.

To Wrap Up…

In a world that sorts us into ever-smaller boxes from above, choosing your own family from below is one of the most undividing things a person can do.

We replaced that act with a download. We replaced the family with an outfit. And we wondered why a generation born into infinite connection turned out to be the loneliest one we’ve measured.

The good news is the older punks are still out there. The skaters are still on the corner. The techno kids in Berlin still go home at noon on Monday. None of it is over. It’s just quieter, and you have to walk a bit further to find it.

So walk further. Pay the cover. Wear the jacket. Find your fellow nerds.

Karl

And in the comments I’d love to hear what subcultures are still alive where you are. Tokyo, Lagos, Mexico City, Glasgow, your town. Tell us how it was and how it is, and what you’re doing.

Sources:

• Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style — Wikipedia

• Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? — Andy Bennett (PDF, MIT)

• Commodification — Subcultures and Sociology, Ross Haenfler

• Have TikTok Aesthetics Replaced Subcultures? — default.blog

• Aesthetics Wiki — Microtrend

• Identity for Sale: Gen Z’s Obsession with Pre-Packaged Aesthetics — Flat Hat Magazine

• How Gen Z Breaks Marketing’s Cultural Mold (91% stat) — Marketing Dive

• Gen Z Loneliness Data — Pedestrian

• UK Lost a Grassroots Music Venue Every Fortnight in 2024 — Mixmag

• UK Music Venues in Decline — STNDBY

• 48% of UK Venues Launched in 2025 Have Already Closed — WeRaveYou

• Berlin Techno Now UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — Rave The Planet

• 32nd Wave-Gotik-Treffen, Leipzig, June 2025 — Shout Online

• Whitby Goth Festival 2025 — The Blogging Goth

• Skateboarding Between Subculture and the Olympics — Columbia University Press

• Punk Island Festival 2025 — Vinyl Me, Please

• Berlin Breakout Hardcore-Punk Festival — Urban Spree

Share

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 60 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

So I went to a therapist yesterday. First time in almost ten years. And what come up was a theme I had in my life - always let down by people. And I had a laundry list of where this had “come true.”

My career in the States, my marriage, my TV shows, my book, my DEI career and so on and so on. It was a deep and old hurt. And one I had spent decades nursing.

But really was this true? I asked T.E.D. was it real, imagined, or self-created. Turns out it was inherited:

• The things that happen to you are real. But you decide what they mean.

• I inherited one from my mother. But it’s not my fate, it’s optional.

• Afterwards I wondered how many good things had I missed by taking this on. And worse, how had I set up scenarios to prove this theme true.

I’ll be doing a lot more work on this in the coming weeks. It’s something that I can see is the next place my inner hiking needs to go.

Watch the whole video to hear about this and more… if you’re finding it hard to follow your instincts like I seem to be, there’s gems in there.

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email.

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hello Everyone,

Berlin has this fantastic culture of “zu verschenken” literally “to give away.”

In the foyers of most apartment blocks, someone will put a cardboard box down there with “zu verschenken” scrawled on the side, and it’s full of things that are up for grabs.

There must have been some rich woman in my building in my early years there. She would drop COS clothes (think €250 for a dress, €60 for a t-shirt) that I swear she’d worn three times. I kept waiting for her husband to do the same.

But I’ve scored glass jars, curtain rods, an iron… and given away plenty besides. BTW if the person who got that denim jacket is reading this, I’d like it back. I was a little too earnest last spring.

Anyway, last October someone left a CD mini-hifi in the foyer of my building in Berlin. It was just sitting there with no speakers, but had a note that said, “It works! Really well. Sorry it’s filthy, we have kids. Don’t judge!”

Seized by an instinct I couldn’t name, I snatched it up and thought, wow this really is sticky. But I pulled all the knobs off, cleaned every component, reassembled it, plugged it into my hifi, scrounged up a Eurythmics Greatest Hits CD from the bottom of a drawer (honestly, no idea how that even got there), and pressed play.

Oh my goodness, the sound. The. Sound.

I’d forgotten how good CDs sounded. Not vinyl. But pretty damn close.

I found a second-hand shop nearby and spent a Saturday going through a crate of discs that were one to three euros. Albums I’d loved and half-forgotten, others that I streamed often. I bought twelve of them, and felt oddly, disproportionately happy the whole way home.

That night I put one on and something happened I hadn’t expected. I listened to the whole thing. Not shuffled. Not suggested by an algorithm. Not while checking something else. The whole album, in order, the way the artist intended. When it ended, I turned the case over in my hands and read every word in the booklet, having liner note flashbacks to my high school and university days.

I hadn’t read liner notes since the early 2000s. Shortly after I bought my first iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket. Zero idea who made them.

A few weeks later my streaming subscriptions came up for renewal. For the first time, I looked at the list, did the maths, and just didn’t renew. I started buying music I actually wanted. Found sites where I bought up the 50 albums I streamed the most for about €3 a pop. I began swapping CDs with friends who were also doing the same thing. And somewhere in the middle of it, I found the phrase that explained everything I’d been feeling without being able to say it.

I was buying my life back. Not renting it.

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, you can share it with them here:

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

What The Algorithm Took (That We Didn’t Notice)

Streaming didn’t arrive with a warning but a promise… everything, everywhere, for almost nothing a month. Why wouldn’t we say yes? After years of trying to hunt things down, having albums on back order or short release. We said yes before we’d thought about what we were agreeing to. Then the same model colonised the rest of life: film, software, news, fitness, razors. Why own when you can access?

In the heady rush of the early streaming days, I didn’t realise there was fine print on the contract.

The €9.99 a month you pay isn’t a purchase. It’s a renewal of permission. And permission can be revoked.

When you own something, it is yours. When you subscribe, it is yours until it isn’t. Songs disappear overnight when licensing deals change.

The starkest wake up call I had for this was when I moved to Berlin eight years ago. I changed my address to my new German one on Amazon and Apple TV. In a flash, two thirds of my catalogue disappeared or converted over to the local versions, many of which were dubbed into German and didn’t even have English subtitles.

These were things that I’d bought, I was incensed! But when I contacted the customer service, I got the mantra of our times… terms and conditions, terms and conditions. Even buying these digital items meant I still didn’t own them.

It felt like Bezos and Tim Cook had broken into my house and stolen my library. I’m not kidding, I think I’ve bought Fight Club 10 times in various forms and still don’t own it.

Back to streaming again the other cost is this: when the algorithm decides what you like, it also decides what you are. Discover Weekly is brilliant at predicting what will keep you listening but it isn’t trying to surprise you.

It’s trying to retain you.

The algorithm narrows. It finds your groove and keeps you there. It is by design, a mirror. Not a window.

The CD in the crate that you’ve never heard of, with the cover that just looks interesting that is a window. The algorithm can’t data-fy our innate curiosity. Or a conversation at a record store. Or passing a band poster on the street.

The Quiet Revolt Nobody Predicted

In my research this week, here was the stat that surprised me the most - the generation most expected to be digital-native-forever is the one leading the charge back.

Folks born this century are the fastest-growing buyers of vinyl, second-hand iPods, and physical books. Vinyl has notched its eighteenth consecutive year of growth. Barnes & Noble opened nearly 70 new stores in 2025, with 60 more planned for 2026. Click-wheel iPods are selling on eBay for hundreds. 63% of 18-24 year olds report actively exploring a more analog lifestyle.

Asked why, they don’t reach for nostalgia. Most have no memory of the thing they’re reaching for. What they reach for instead is a word that keeps showing up across interviews and threads with a consistency that feels almost coordinated, though it isn’t.

Ownership. And the tech that allows you to.

“I wanted music that couldn’t be taken away from me,” one said. Another, widely quoted: “I don’t want to rent my personality.”

That last line had the writer in me stop and dwell on it. Because that is exactly what we’ve been doing. The algorithm doesn’t just curate our listening — it curates our taste, our identity, our self-image. And a generation that grew up watching their entire inner life processed through platforms and fed back as content has clocked something us elders missed: the rental model for music is also a rental model for the self.

The Numbers Behind the Feeling

US — The average American household now spends $273 a month on subscriptions but estimates they spend $111.

That gap isn’t a rounding error. It’s $162 a month of life people had forgotten they were renting. US households cut their paid subscriptions from 4.1 on average in 2024 to 2.8 in 2025. So there’s a trend there of correction.

UK — The average British household spends £72 a month on subscriptions. The perception gap data (what people think vs. what they actually pay) pattern holds up here too: UK researchers consistently find people underestimate by a 2:1 margin.

Global — The average subscriber worldwide has 4 active subscriptions and spends around $60 a month, or $720 a year. However, 41% of consumers globally say they experience subscription fatigue.

And yet, the subscription economy itself hit $536 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $859 billion in 2026, which tells you the industry is still growing even as the backlash builds.

Which continues to be bad news for music and film…

Music — the surprising silence

Skip the payouts - we all know that that model is awful for most artists. Here’s the one I’d never heard before: over 50 million songs on Spotify received zero streams in 2025. Not one play. Not one human ear.

They exist, catalogued in a library of now a quarter of a billion tracks, uploaded and immediately swallowed by the noise. 100,000 new tracks are added every single day and roughly 50,000 of which are AI-generated. And 88% of everything on the platform gets fewer than 1,000 plays total. Just 0.2% of all available music accounts for half of all global streaming consumption.

The algorithm didn’t just fail the artists. It failed us, the listeners. Because the promise was infinite music. What we got was infinite music and almost no way to find any of it.

Film — the 2023 SAG strike

In the film and TV worlds, streaming takes on a different flavour - the streaming residuals formula wasn’t written for streaming. It was written in the 1980s for home video. You know, VHS and DVDs. Back then, studios argued that home video was a new, risky format that needed lower rates to survive. The unions accepted it. Then that same formula, never updated, was quietly applied to Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+.

Under the old broadcast model, a hit show paid actors residuals every single time it aired in syndication potentially for decades. Friends and The Office made their casts wealthy long after filming ended because every rerun triggered a payment. Under the streaming version of the home-video formula, actors get one annual payment that decreases over time. The show can be watched by 50 million people and the residual barely moves.

In the 2023 strike, SAG-AFTRA said the industry owed them $500 million in streaming residuals. The studios offered $20 million. Twenty-five times the difference.

While both sides argued the numbers one thing became clear, the actors and writers had rented their own work to an industry that had written the lease pre-internet, and then never updated it.

The Division We Didn’t See

There’s an undividing argument buried in all this.

The subscription economy felt democratic when it arrived. For a low monthly fee, everyone could have what previously only the wealthy could afford. It felt like a great levelling and a revolution almost.

But what it actually created was a new kind of precarity. If your card gets declined, the algorithm stops knowing who you are. Your library exists only as long as the payments clear. A CD on a shelf is yours regardless of what your bank account does tomorrow. It’s yours to listen to, lend, swap, or sell.

There’s a second division, harder to see. When the algorithm feeds each of us a perfectly personalised stream, we stop having the same cultural experiences. We used to argue over what was on the radio, what to watch, what to play in the car. Those shared moments were connective tissue. They were things we had in common without trying.

A friend told me that often in his house, he, his wife, and their two kids might be streaming four different things on four different screens in four different rooms.

What We Can Actually Do

I’m not suggesting you cancel everything by Thursday. Smaller moves.

Buy one thing instead of subscribing to it. A record, a book, a film on disc, a piece of software you pay for once. Owning one thing, even one, is a different relationship to that thing. I’ve been a Kindle guy that last two years, but I’m starting to go back to physical books again.

Audit your subscriptions. Write them all down. The number will surprise you. Cancel anything you haven’t used in a month — not because of the money, though that matters, but because unused subscriptions are agreements you’ve forgotten you made. Forgetting what you’ve agreed to is a slow way of losing track of your life.

Do one month every four. I subscribe to Netflix or Apple TV once every four months for a month. The idea was to binge all the things I’d been hearing about. Which works for a week. The reality? I start watching the same films again after getting bored clicking around trying to find something watchable. DVD player time?

Swap something physical with someone. A book, a record, a DVD. The swap is the point as much as the object. You’re handing someone a piece of your taste and they’re handing you a piece of theirs. There is a person in that transaction.

Listen to an album all the way through. Not as background. The whole thing, in order. It will feel strange. That strangeness is information about how much we have changed.

To Wrap Up...

The CD player is on double duty at my place. It plays the things I like, and when friends come over they are surprised, then delighted when I say, “Pick a CD.”

Because when we subscribed to everything and gave control to the machine, the machine was very good at giving us what we already wanted.

Which is not the same as what we needed. What we needed was to choose. To hold. To hand something to another person and say, this meant something to me, I think it might mean something to you.

You can’t do that with a streaming link in any way that feels as meaningful.

The analog revival and the subscription cancellations aren’t about nostalgia, and they aren’t about rejecting progress.

They are people rediscovering something that turns out to matter: that owning a thing, even a small thing, is a form of agency. And agency, it turns out, is not something you can subscribe to.

Till next time — let’s keep moving through this world undividing, and see what this planet can do.

Karl

If this one landed, share it with someone who’s over their subscriptions. Better yet, meet up to swap some analog entertainment and chat.

Share

And if you’ve got a great CD, vinyl, book analog story, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Sources:

• Why Gen Z and young adults are embracing iPods again — Apple Insider

• Gen Z’s enthusiasm for all things touchable is resurrecting the analog economy — Fortune

• Subscription Spending Statistics 2026 — RecurStop

• 14 Subscription Fatigue Statistics to Know in 2026 — Readless

• Dupe Culture Isn’t Just Having a Moment — PR Newswire

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 60 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

So… the last TED I wrote about how a story landed - the muse had visited me with a new story to write (the first in a couple of years). But also the fear I had around writing it. Now I’ve been building it and beating it out for two weeks, and on a high the whole time - until this morning. When that fear turned into a dread that I was being reckless.

When did following your dreams, and feeling good about it, look like recklessness in other people’s eyes? Who am I kidding, in my own eyes…

But as always TED had a lot to say:

• The weirdest thing about going back to what I love: it feels reckless. The weirdest thing about the "safe" career: it never actually was.

• Recklessness is instinct in different clothes.

Watch the whole video to hear about this and more… if you’re finding it hard to follow your instincts like I seem to be, there’s gems in there.

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email.

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hello Everyone,

I wrote most of my book in a library.

Not a cute café with wobbly tables and a barista who knows my order. Not a co-working space with kombucha on tap. A library. Specifically, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin — the one from Wings of Desire, where the angels drift between the reading desks listening to the thoughts of strangers.

When I first moved to Berlin in 2018, broke, mid-divorce, and writing a memoir that I was not at all sure anyone would read, the Stabi became my office. I’d take the U-Bahn in, drop my coat in a locker, walk through a vaulted foyer that smells the way libraries smell everywhere — paper and heating and something slightly ecclesiastical — and sit down at a desk that a hundred other people had sat at that week. Students. Retired professors. A man who I’m pretty sure was just there because he had nowhere warmer to be. And me, writing a book called How To Burn A Rainbow one sentence at a time.

The biggest draw for me - it was free, warm, and quiet.

The Stabi has been open to the public since 1661. You can walk in if you’re over 14. A library card is free. The internet is free. The reading rooms are free. The silence is free. That silence held me for the best part of two years.

After not going for years, I have found myself returning with fresh eyes this year. It is one of the very few places left in my adult life where nobody expects me to buy anything, be anything, perform anything, or justify my presence in any way. I just have to not be loud.

Today we’re talking libraries. Because the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the public library is the single most radical, under-appreciated, quietly world-saving building in your city. And there is a global, synchronised, kind of astonishing reason that your local one is suddenly full.

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, you can share it with them here:

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

What actually is a library exactly?

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave us a phrase in 1989: the third place. The first place is home. The second place is work. The third place is the in-between — the pub, the barbershop, the café — where a community runs into itself. These are places of importance because here is where happenstance happens, places where random is meant to occur, it’s the whole reason why we spend time there.

Thirty-five years on, something Oldenburg didn’t quite predict has happened. Most traditional third places have been quietly monetised out of reach. A coffee shop costs six euros to sit down in. A pub costs twelve. A gym is a membership. A co-working space is a subscription. Even the park, in many cities, has got someone trying to sell you something.

This is especially so in cities that are overtouristed where locals can’t find a place to sit anymore.

However, one public space in every city has held the line - the library is the last fully free place on earth.

No cover charge. No minimum spend. No algorithm deciding who gets in. No dress code. No targeted ads for being there. You walk in. You sit down. You stay.

In March 2026, Inside Higher Ed reported on how UC Davis’s Shields Library has explicitly redesigned itself around Oldenburg’s third-place theory; deploying mental health ambassadors to the stacks, running therapy-dog sessions during midterms. And Davis is not alone. Across the world, the library is undergoing the same transformation, driven by the same underlying fact: there is nowhere else left to go.

When you think about it, a library is a pretty rad idea.

The public library is stranger than we give it credit for. Somebody, somewhere, looked at a collection of books and said: let’s just let anyone come in and use them. For free. Forever.

The modern public library is largely a nineteenth-century invention, built on the radical and then-very-controversial idea that literacy should not be rationed by wealth. Andrew Carnegie funded over 2,500. Britain passed the Public Libraries Act in 1850. Japan enshrined free access in 1950.

For about 150 years the civilised world broadly agreed: this was a floor. A dull, essential piece of public infrastructure, like sewers or streetlights.

Then two things happened. The internet arrived and people assumed libraries were obsolete - the exact inverse of the truth, since it turned out that a shocking number of people had no internet at home and needed somewhere to apply for jobs or do their homework. Then austerity quietly started closing them. Since 2010, around 276 static libraries have been lost in England alone. In the US, federal library funding is in genuine existential danger as I type this.

And yet. Against all this. Something unexpected.

People are coming back to them. And I noticed this myself. In my second season of “Stabi Lives” I can see that we’ve definitely had a casting change post-Covid.

Let’s open up the Atlas

This is where it gets interesting, because the modern day library renaissance is in many languages.

England. Physical visits rose 13.5% in a single year. During the 2023 energy crisis, 93% of UK public libraries opened their doors as warm banks — free heated spaces for anyone who couldn’t afford to turn their radiators on. Most did this with zero additional funding. They just did it.

Finland. Public libraries are the most popular cultural institution in the country. Fifty percent of Finns use one at least monthly. Helsinki’s flagship library, Oodi, opened in 2018 directly opposite parliament, on a piece of real estate most cities would have sold to a luxury hotel. In its first year it drew 3.1 million visitors. Only a fraction of its space is books. The rest is recording studios, sewing machines, 3D printers, cinemas, and sofas. It’s like a making factory.

South Korea. The Seoul Outdoor Library is literally deckchairs and books in public squares as a Covid measure and has drawn more than 8 million visitors since 2022. 229 Korean municipalities now run their own version.

Japan. The Ishikawa Prefectural Library drew 1.37 million visitors in 2025, up 178,000 year-on-year. Kyoto University researchers found that areas with more library access saw a 48% lower risk of functional disability in elderly residents. Can you believe that? Libraries as health interventions.

Singapore. 28 public libraries drew 41.8 million visits in a single year in a country of 5.9 million people. That’s seven visits per person. When I lived there for six years over the late 90s and early 2000s I remember being surprised how often libraries came up in conversations.

Colombia. Maybe the most extraordinary story. In the early 2000s, Medellín — then one of the most violent cities on earth — chose to build a network of Parques Biblioteca in its poorest, most dangerous neighbourhoods. Not prisons. Not more police stations. Libraries. Vast, architecturally bold libraries surrounded by green public space. Over the following two decades, Medellín’s homicide rate fell by 87%. Urban planners now cite it as one of the most successful civic interventions of the twenty-first century.

Six continents. Radically different politics, economies, languages, religions. Same pattern. The more commercialised and algorithmic the rest of life gets, the more people walk into the one building that wants nothing from them.

And nobody is making this trend happen on purpose. There is no global library lobby. No Davos panel on third-place design. This is just what people do when the rest of the public square becomes a till.

How does a library help undivide this world?

Good question.

There is a specific kind of division that comes from never standing next to somebody unlike you. Commerce sorts us into silos - business or economy class, Waitrose or Lidl, restaurants that are 20 a head and ones 100 a head. Algorithms too; your feed is not my feed. City infrastructures actively do the same; gated communities, school catchments, postcodes.

The library is one of the last buildings in most towns where a teenager doing homework, an unhoused man staying warm, a retiree reading the paper, a toddler at story-time, a PhD candidate chasing a footnote, and a tourist hiding from the rain are all using the same chairs and the same bathroom. Nobody is there as a customer. Everybody is there as a citizen.

In the Stabi, the person two desks over might be a judge. Might be a refugee. Might be a PhD student. I don’t know. And the library doesn’t know. The library has made a radical bet: that what we have in common; curiosity, warmth, a dignified place to think, do and make - that matters more than what we don’t.

Maybe this is why library funding is so aggressively political right now. A space that refuses to sort people is, in a sorted world, a threat to whoever profits from the sorting. An unsorted public is, to certain political projects, an intolerable public.

Which is exactly why libraries are worth defending.

Because when I step outside my front door and I don’t really know where to go on a particular day, where I can just hang out, read something, have a chat, do a course, the library has started to become my go-to.

What can we actually do about it

Go to yours. This week. It doesn’t matter if you have no reason. Libraries track footfall in a very real, line-item sense. In many countries, use statistics are the primary evidence councils use to justify not closing a branch. Your simple presence is a civic act.

Activate your card. Most library networks measure active members. A dormant card from ten years ago doesn’t count.

Borrow something. Circulation matters as much as visits. A book, an e-book, a board game, a cake tin, a hotspot device. You would be amazed at what they lend out these days.

Bring a child. Story-time attendance is one of the most protected lines in most budgets, because politicians find it impossible to be filmed cutting children’s reading.

Defend yours publicly if it comes under threat. Council budget consultations sound dry. They are often the single most consequential thing a local citizen gets asked about. Libraries have been saved by surprisingly small groups of residents showing up.

If you’re a writer, artist, or anyone who used a library to make your thing: say so publicly. I wrote a memoir at the Stabi. I owe it, at minimum, the acknowledgement. T be honest I regret not thanking the place in the book acknowledgements. If I make another update to the text, I’ll make that change.

But the book I’m writing now will definitely have the Stabi in the credits.

Heck, I wrote part of this Undividing at the Stabi.

To wrap up…

There is a version of the story of our time that is mostly about loss. Everything is a subscription. The public square has become a shopping mall with surveillance.

But there is one building in almost every town on earth that has not given up. That has held the line, quietly, often on a shoestring, frequently under political attack — and that is somehow, in 2026, busier than it has been in decades.

The library continues the ancient idea of the commons. It is still, in a stubborn and almost radically ordinary way, free.

And every time you walk into one, you are standing in a public space on earth that refuses to sort you into a demographic before letting you sit down. That is not a small thing. In a world whose dominant technology is sorting, an unsorted room is a breath of fresh air.

So if you feel like you don’t know where to go that isn’t home or work, check out the library again. Remind yourself what it’s like to share space with folks where there is no agenda, no sales pitch, no need to be anything.

And if you’re in Berlin - I’ll see you at the Stabi. Desk somewhere in the middle reading room. Probably writing the next one of these.

If this one landed, share it with someone who hasn’t been to a library in a while. Better yet, meet them at one.

Share

And if you’ve got a great library story, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Sources:

• Inside Higher Ed: UC Davis Library Emerges as Campus “Third Place” (March 2026)

• UK Gov: Annual Libraries Report 2024 to 2025

• Big Issue: UK Library Warm Banks

• Reasons to be Cheerful: Helsinki’s Oodi

• Helsinki Central Library Oodi — Wikipedia

• Seoul Metropolitan Government: 2025 Seoul Outdoor Library

• Unseen Japan: Ishikawa Prefectural Library

• From HK to SG: Singapore’s Public Libraries

• Medium: Medellín’s Library Parks

• ALA: IMLS Cuts Put America’s Public Libraries at Risk

• Big Issue: Battle to Save UK Libraries

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

Something happened this week. I felt the call. The call to write something. It’s when an idea for a book arrives so compellingly fully formed it’s obvious that the Muse chose you for this one.

And while the first rush was of relief that the call was back after a long absence, the next morning I woke in fear over what to do with it. Where does this fit into a busy writing life I have? And running a small business?

And what if it doesn’t work out the way I think it should? What if I invest too heavily?

But here’s what was really going on according to T.E.D.

• I don’t know - it’s how I avoid doing what I already know I must.

• Fear of wasting time is the best way to waste time.

Watch the whole video to see how T.E.D. also revealed that my instinct is actually a sibling of T.E.D. - I guess it all comes from the same place.

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email. Watch the video to see everything The Emotions Diary had to say this week:

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hey there Everyone,

It’s come up many times in the last few weeks with friends of mine young and old. We’re all experiencing a kind of loneliness.

But the part that surprised me was that it was people who I never would have thought were lonely. Or ever feel it. They have great jobs, they’re busy, they seemed fulfilled… yet they felt like they were on their own.

Even my own partner and I, who are a brilliant team and are never lonely together - we feel like a lonely unit in a big city.

It’s been a popular topic to identify a loneliness epidemic happening to younger folks, particularly young men. But the more I asked around, the more friends were both embarrassed and relieved to tell someone that they were feeling it too. Young, older, married, dating, single, mid career or mid-pivot, and in cities all over the world.

We feel a silent shame of this loneliness in large numbers it seems, so I started digging and I was amazed by what I found.

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, you can share it with them here:

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

The Loneliness Nobody Admits To (Because They’re Too Busy)

Last year I was looking for a job. And the hell that goes with that. I don’t need to tell anyone what it’s like in that market in 2025/6.

Berlin is not an easy market if your career is built in English and your German still B1 - you can follow everything, but can’t get into the conversations fast enough. 70% there isn’t quite enough. I was going to interviews. I was networking. I was, on paper, doing everything right.

In one interview they asked me the question they always ask: Why do you want this job? The person asking it, so very curious, as it looked to them like I had the dream position of global freelance.

I gave a good answer. Purposeful language, aligned values, strategic positioning — all the stuff that sounds like you mean it without actually saying what you mean. I’d been in advertising long enough to know how to sell something. Even when that something was me.

But on the bus home I sat with the real answer, the one I didn’t say: I want this job because I’m lonely.

Not because I had no one in my life. I have people. I have calls and dinners, and times with great friends here. I’m tight with my family. I had the kind of life that photographs well. What I didn’t have and what I think a lot of us don’t have, is anyone who really, fully, knows what was going on inside or us.

Of if we do, we can’t see them enough.

At my age, in my 50s, I have friends I’ve known for decades scattered all over the world. And also in Berlin. But we connect not so regularly. Everyone is so busy. When we do, it’s an emotional feast!

But it’s the times in-between where I feel weirdly invisible.

That’s the loneliness I want to talk about today. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet, socially acceptable, keeps itself quite busy kind.

High-Functioning Loneliness

The word loneliness tends to conjure a specific image: the elderly person eating alone, the teenager sitting alone at school, the person who hasn’t been touched in months. Visible, obvious, and sad.

But there’s a second type that has no picture. Psychologists sometimes call it high-functioning loneliness — and it’s defined not by who you don’t have around you, but by how fully any of those people actually know you.

You can be surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. You can have a full social calendar and still walk into your flat at night with the hollow feeling that nobody really got you today. You can have followers and still have no one to call.

The Harvard Making Caring Common Project, which has been tracking loneliness in America for years, put it this way in their 2024 report: 65% of lonely respondents reported feeling fundamentally disconnected from others. Not friendless, not isolated, just somehow unreachable. There’s a different word for that: invisible.

And the Cigna Group’s Loneliness in America survey, polling over 7,500 U.S. adults in 2024 and published in 2025, found that 57% of Americans are currently lonely. More than half. Not the fringe, not the broken, more than half the people you know.

Where did this loneliness come from?

The short answer is: we built a world optimised for achievement and then wondered why nobody felt known.

I’ve covered this already in my Undividings on Re-Selfing: the End of Performing Our Lives and RIP Self-Optimization. And I talked a lot in both about how social media turned us all into performers hell bent out out-improving each other.

What surprised me this week in the research, is that this loneliness predates social media.

Robert Putnam wrote about declining social capital in Bowling Alone back in 2000 the slow erosion of the clubs, the civic groups, the local associations that used to give people a place to simply be alongside each other, without an agenda. Twenty-five years later, Fortune revisited his thesis and found that things have not improved. The average American now spends roughly 24 more hours alone per month than they did in 2003, while time spent socialising with friends in person has dropped by about 20 hours a month.

And that’s before you account for the pandemic years.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023, comparing its health impact to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Fifteen cigarettes. We have warning labels on cigarette packets. We have nothing on the performance of constant okayness.

How it’s showing up — and who it’s hitting

Here’s what I keep seeing in the coverage of this issue: it always gets reported as a young men problem. And yes, young men are lonely. Gallup’s data shows that men aged 15–34 report some of the highest loneliness scores in the Western world, and Pew Research’s January 2025 report confirms that men turn to their networks less often for emotional support than women do.

But here’s what the young-men framing misses: this is everyone.

Women carry a different version. Women are often better than men at maintaining surface-level social connection — the group chat, the coffee, the showing up. But that same facility can become its own trap. The expectation of emotional labour means women often end up holding space for everyone else’s feelings while never being fully held themselves. The I’m fine performance is just as lonely as the man who never learned to ask for help, it’s just better dressed.

People in midlife — the Harvard report found that people between 30 and 44 were the loneliest group of all, with 29% reporting they were frequently or always lonely. Not the young, not the old — the ones in the thick of it. Building careers, raising children, managing ageing parents, trying to maintain friendships that keep getting deprioritised. Too busy to be lonely. But lonely anyway.

Older adults aren’t being left behind either. AARP’s 2025 study found that 4 in 10 adults over 45 are lonely, a significant increase from 35% in both 2010 and 2018. Empty nesters, retired workers, widowed spouses. People whose social architecture was built around roles that no longer exist. Not to mention the ageism that you feel. Friends in their 50s who are dating tell me the pain of being written off for their age, or at work how their ideas are being dismissed because “they just don’t get it.” Whether that is true or not, it’s isolating.

High achievers are perhaps the most invisible lonely of all. Visible everywhere, known nowhere. CEOs who give inspiring speeches to thousands and go home to silence. Performers who feel most alive on stage and least alive after it. The person whose opinion everyone asks for, but who hasn’t been asked how they’re actually doing in longer than they’d like to admit.

The APA’s most recent polling found that 1 in 3 Americans reports feeling lonely every week. The Harvard team found that 62% of respondents cited people working too much or being too busy or exhausted as a primary cause of loneliness in America and European studies have found similar numbers.

We are not too busy to be lonely. We are too busy to notice we are.

And it’s in those moments of sudden loneliness, that private abyss that you find yourself facing, where you think, maybe I’m not doing OK.

The circle is already turning

You may have seen the “five year stranger theory” making the rounds on social media — the idea that most of the people in your life right now won’t be in it five years from now is a TikTok meme of the moment. It circulates because it feels true, even if it has no named author or study behind it.

The actual science underneath it belongs to Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, whose 2022 study published in Scientific Reports found something both sobering and quietly remarkable: your social network stays roughly the same size throughout your adult life, but approximately half the people in your close circle will be different people in seven years. You don’t accumulate friends indefinitely. The network has a metabolism. People cycle in, people cycle out. The circle is always renewing itself.

The viral version of this gets read as a loss — everyone leaves, nothing lasts.

When I hear that, I thought, well then what the hell is the point of trying with anyone ever again then? (Cure hands thrown in the air in frustration).

But then I remembered I write Undividing, so I got into the Emotions Diary about it. It has some interesting stuff to day. As always.

Here’s the reframe: Some of the people you feel most invisible to right now won’t be in your life in seven years anyway. New people are already on their way in — people who could know you differently, more fully, if you let them.

Which means the real question isn’t will my circle change? It will. The question is: what habits are you bringing into that new circle?

Now this I can work with. And this felt also like the red thread with the last few Undividings. If you’ve spent the last seven years performing okayness (getting skilled at the LinkedIn answer, keeping the real version of yourself just out of reach etc) you’ll bring all of that with you. The new people will get the curated version too. The loneliness will feel fresh for a while, and then familiar.

But it works the other way as well. If you start practising being known with the people you have right now, imperfectly, even just occasionally, you’ll get better at it. The muscle builds. And when the circle turns, as it will, you’ll be someone who knows how to let people in.

What can we actually do about it

A few things that are genuinely within reach to try this week:

Say the real thing at least once a week. Not the LinkedIn answer. The bus-ride-home answer. Find just one person to whom you can say the actual version of what’s going on. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be resolved. It just has to be true.

Notice the quality, not the quantity. You might not need more social time. You might need deeper social time. One honest dinner beats six networking events. Try asking something that requires an actual answer: What’s been weighing on you lately? What are you most afraid of right now? See what happens. I would love it if someone asked me this.

Stop performing okayness to the people you most want to be close to. This one is hardest, because we’ve learned that if we show the unedited version, people might not stay. But the edited version isn’t you. And being known for a version of yourself that you had to curate is its own particular loneliness.

When I was early days with Erik, I confided in my bestie that I was too scared to tell him I loved him, because I thought he would leave. He’s advice: Don’t play it cool. And I’ve never forgotten that.

Make a room for it. Join a group where the point is not performing — a grief group, a running club that actually talks, a community choir, a therapy group, a small faith community. The Harvard research found that 75% of lonely adults said that helping others would reduce their loneliness. Not being helped, but helping. There’s something in that. When we focus outward, we sometimes slip past the defences we’ve put up around ourselves.

If you’re a man reading this: please take this as a direct nudge. The research is quite clear that men have the tools to help each other, they just use them for everything except how they’re actually doing. Text a friend something real today. It will feel weird. Do it anyway.

To wrap up…

The loneliness nobody admits to is the kind that lives right in the middle of a full life. It surfaces when someone asks a routine question and you give the competent answer and spend the rest of the day wondering why you didn’t say the true one.

Here’s what I want to leave you with: this is not your permanent state. Or mine either.

Dunbar’s research tells us our circles are always renewing. Which means the version of you who is truly known, not IG, Substack, or LinkedIn known, is not some distant aspiration. It’s available in the next conversation. The next honest text. The next time someone asks how you’re doing and you resist the urge to say fine.

I’m not suggesting you overhaul everything at once. Just start practising. One true thing to one person this week. That’s enough to begin.

And when your circle turns as Dunbar tells us it no doubt will, you’ll be more like someone who knows how to let people in.

And for what it’s worth: I see you. The actually-seeing kind, not the LinkedIn kind.

If this one landed, share it with someone who might need it. The share button is right here.

Share

And if you’ve been carrying some version of this quietly, I’d genuinely love to hear about it in the comments. Sometimes that’s step one.

Sources:

• Harvard Making Caring Common: Loneliness in America 2024

• Cigna Group: Loneliness in America 2025

• U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Loneliness and Isolation (2023)

• Pew Research: Men, Women and Social Connections, January 2025

• Gallup: Younger Men Among the Loneliest in the West

• AARP: Disconnected — Loneliness Among Adults 45-Plus, 2025

• APA Poll: One in Three Americans Feels Lonely Every Week

• Fortune: 25 Years After “Bowling Alone,” the Loneliness Epidemic Is Starker Than Ever

• Dunbar et al.: Turnover in Close Friendships, Scientific Reports (2022)

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

So I had a situation this week that I’m sure a lot of you have experienced; a friend gives you a heads up that someone you’ve had a falling out with will be at a function you’re going to.

I was surprised by how much it bothered me. For someone I’ve barely thought of in ages, I suddenly was doing the head cinema on everything that might happen.

After someone pointed out that I was giving them all the power, I got really angry. So, I got into the Emotions Diary instead:

• The buttons that this situation was actually pushing

• And instead of giving power, what I could give them something else instead.

And no, it' wasn’t a piece of my mind. Watch the whole video to see how T.E.D. saved the night for me.

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email. Watch the video to see everything The Emotions Diary had to say this week:

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hey there Everyone,

In a continuance of the last couple of Undividings, we’ve been turning away from social, self optimisation and back towards real life and the real people in them.

And while that has a fridge magnet “live, laugh, love” element to it, a kind of fairytale ending of coming back to ourselves, well, of course there’s problems here as well.

Speaking personally, I am now confronted in my IRL re-entry with all the places in my life where I’ve been holding my tongue; not saying what I think, and not getting into it with the people and talking about it - instead, I used to just pick up my phone.

I started paying attention to it and then making a list of places and times where I saw myself doing this, and with who. Not in any kind of a revenge, hit-list way. But instead how often I was choosing to say nothing about things that were bothering me.

Then I started looking back in the past at where doing this had gotten me, and how this had played out before.

Silence is a killer; of relationships, happiness, and potentially lethal to ourselves.

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, you can share it with them here:

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

Before we do though, a few folks had asked me about in DMs about the business I started. It’s called “Story Engineering”. Basically, it’s what I do here in Undividing, but for companies and their branding.

I have this firm belief that we are story creatures by nature. And over 25 years in advertising, I’ve seen the companies with the best stories win over companies with better products.

So I created a system where I figure out the human change that a company is making, then express that in a short sentence. That becomes the North Star for the company, the talk that it walks - it’s the PR, policy, products and services.

As I tell my clients - the story makes the brand, and the brand makes the story true.

Check out my website here and please DM me if you think your company could use story engineering to make the direction and day to day so much clearer.

Now onto this week’s Undividing…

My spotlit silence

After a particularly gruelling shoot and flight, I landed back at LAX in 2012 and caught a taxi home. I walked into my house to see my husband at the time sitting there on the couch with an iPad in his hand.

“Hey babe,” he said as he came over to hug, kiss, and welcome me home. “I have a surprise for you.”

My immediate reaction was, oh no, what’s he done now? Brandishing the iPad he hit a button and all the lights in the house changed colour. They went from a warm white to a psychedelic array that gave every zone a different mood.

“Oh!” was about all I could get out. Taking it as approval, he hit the button a few times to show me all the moods that he’d created.

Inside, I was fuming. He’d no doubt spent a small fortune on this new tech. And it had never once been discussed or even mentioned to me. And then there’s also the thing that I hate these kinds of colour schemes done with light — it’s just not my jam.

And being something of a non-tech guy, the idea that I was going to have to now learn a whole new program just to turn the lights on.

I looked at his face as he waited for my official reaction.

And I made all the right noises.

I said something like, oh wow, it looks amazing. I touched a fixture. I nodded appreciatively. I performed delight with the quiet competence of someone who has learned, over years, that this is easier. And then I went to bed angry as hell.

I wasn’t being kind. I was being tired.

The fight that honesty would have started — about money, about consultation, about what it means to share a space with another person — I didn’t have the energy for it. Not that night. So I chose what felt like the path of least resistance. What felt like keeping the peace.

Well, the peace lasted a few weeks. And then, in a completely different argument about something I can’t even remember now, it came out. The lights. The money. The not asking. All of it.

And he looked at me and said: you never said anything. You stood there and told me it was great. And then he accused me of gaslighting him.

Which wasn’t entirely wrong.

I had let him live in a version of that night that wasn’t true. My silence hadn’t protected the relationship. It had just deferred the damage and made it harder to deal with when it finally did come up. Because by the time the real conversation arrived, it was buried under weeks of resentment, and neither of us could find our way to the actual event anymore.

Silence isn’t neutral. It’s a debt that accrues interest.

To be clear, I’m not telling this story as a marriage story. I’m telling it because we do it everywhere.

The friend who keeps cancelling and who keep saying no worries.

The colleague who takes credit for something in a meeting and you let it slide.

The neighbour whose con calls bleed through the wall on a Tuesday night as you stew alone on the sofa.

The team member who keeps missing deadlines and you absorb the extra work without a word, until you can’t anymore and you’re suddenly furious about something that looks, from the outside, like an overreaction.

We’ve built a whole vocabulary around this that makes it sound virtuous. Keeping the peace. Being the bigger person. Not making it a thing. Choosing your battles.

What it actually is, most of the time, is postponement.

When I started thinking about it, in many of the conversations I have with friends these days, it’s often them talking about an incident like the above. And the fury they convey is all about what that person did - but most importantly the justification of why they didn’t say something at the time.

The science of silence

John Gottman, the psychologist who has spent decades studying what makes relationships work and fail, found that unspoken grievances don’t dissolve. They compound.

He describes a state called “flooding” — the point at which the emotional build-up in a relationship becomes so large that rational conversation becomes almost impossible. When flooding happens, the argument that finally erupts isn’t about the thing that triggered it. It’s about everything. Every swallowed irritation, every performed smile, every night of going to bed carrying something you couldn’t find the words for.

Beyond relationships, the picture gets darker. Research on emotional suppression (the technical term for what most of us just call being “fine”) consistently shows that it doesn’t reduce emotional experience. It amplifies the body’s stress response. We think we’re keeping the peace. Our nervous systems know we aren’t. The emotion doesn’t go anywhere. It goes underground, and it charges interest.

I’m sure a lot of you have heard about a book called The Body Keeps The Score the International bestseller that was published in 2015 but somehow caught fire in the last few years. The research by Bessel Van Der Kolk and team goes into scientific detail about what happens to the body when we sit on everything we want to say instead of letting it out.

We think our silence is invisible. But the other feels it too.

This thing stopped me when I came across it… the people we stay silent around often sense it anyway.

Not the content of what we’re holding. But the distance. The slight withdrawal. The way we become, over time, a little less present, a little more managed, a little harder to reach. They feel something has shifted. They just don’t know what it is. So they fill in the blank themselves.

Usually with something worse than the truth.

The Butler & Gross study (Stanford, 2003) is remarkable. Researchers at Stanford had pairs of women discuss an upsetting topic. In some pairs, one person was secretly instructed to suppress her emotional expressions during the conversation. Interacting with a partner who suppressed was more stressful than interacting with a partner who acted naturally… measurable as increases in blood pressure in the other person.

Read that again: the person doing the suppressing made their partner’s blood pressure go up. This is the science under your intuition about the other person sensing the distance. They’re not imagining it. It’s registering in their body.

So why do we keep doing it?

I grew up learning that being easy was how you kept people close. That expressing displeasure was risky. That the relationship was a fragile thing that couldn’t hold too much truth at once.

I’m finding that I’m far from alone in this. So many of us were taught, explicitly or by example, that our discomfort wasn’t worth the disruption. That starting a conversation was starting a problem. That peace, even performed peace, was better than the alternative.

The silence wasn’t weakness. It was an old survival strategy.

The problem is we’re still running it in relationships that might actually be able to hold the truth. We just never tested them to find out.

And so we stay inside a smaller, quieter version of the connection we could have. And we tell ourselves that we’re protecting the relationship from the very thing that might deepen it.

To wrap up…

Let’s rewind for a moment back to LA in 2012 again.

I could have said something. I didn’t need to make it a fight. “Something like: I love that you wanted to do something for us, can we be a team on the big stuff?” That’s it. Not a grievance. Not an accusation. Just the truth, said in the moment while it was still manageable, before it had weeks to harden into resentment.

Maybe even in the morning when I’d had a night to sleep on it.

The ask I have for all of us this week — myself very much included — is this… is there one thing you’ve been sitting on in a relationship that you could say? Not the whole difficult conversation. Not the years of accumulated unsaid things. Just the first sentence. The one you already know you need to.

You don’t need the right words. You need one sentence, said before it the emotions all go underground.

It’s funny you know, I found some old photos of that house last month on a hard drive. It was all lit up one night when we had a bunch of people over for dinner. The tones of all the lights glowing on people’s faces.

The lights, well, they actually were kind of beautiful.

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

Being sick like I have the last three weeks has given me a lot of time to think. And I started thinking about the many things I started and gave up on since COVID… I started wondering, do I give up too fast on things?

If you’re chasing a dream like I am, it’s often hard when you’re doing it all alone; trying to figure it out, trying to make it work, and trying to keep motivated. And the big one, trying to figure out whether to keep pushing it.

No surprise, TED had some really great insights about it:

• You give up when something isn’t working out at the speed you think it should.

• You give up right at the point you would tell a friend to keep going.

And stay through till the end where I have a big emotional high over T.E.D. and how much doing these videos for you all helps me.

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email. Watch the video to see everything The Emotions Diary had to say this week:

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hi Everyone,

First of all, I’m about 80% over that flu. Wow, I haven’t been sick like that in years. On the downside, well, you all know the downsides.

On the upside, I have had a lot of time to catch up with friends. So I called a mate in LA, an actor who appeared in a few things, but like so many, his career on screen just never really took off.

Until he started teaching acting. He got his break from some viral clips he did with friends from a few years ago. And in a full circle moment, he’s now teaching acting for the screen. The one in your hand.

At first I thought he meant microdramas - the vertical format series that is starting to take over the entertainment world.

But no, he meant performance. He specialises in teaching drama to influencers who are presenting “reality” versions of their lives. It’s going so well he had to hire a friend to help him.

Then this year happened and everything pivoted; he’s teaching influencers how to look like they aren’t performing. Anti-performance he calls it.

But it got me thinking how that era of the internet, and our lives on there, is going to an end.

In a kind of strange continuance to last week, performance, like self-optimisation, is going the way of the dodo. What does that look like, and who the hell are we if we’re not turning cameras on ourselves anymore?

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, you can share it with them here:

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

LinkedIn and my return to the theatre

Since starting my new branding business, I’ve found myself back on LinkedIn a lot. And I have to tell you, I don’t like it there.

It’s not just that every article you read is probably written by AI. It’s that all the comments are too. There’s even programs you can buy that do all the commenting for you.

So most of what you read feels like eating off-brand sweets; sort of tastes like an article, but doesn’t give you the rush of pleasure. But maybe if you eat another one…

And as for the comments, they are like these empty corporate haikus to nothingness. Which the author then obliges by liking it and making another AI comment to the AI comment.

It’s about the most absurd piece of theatre imaginable. Because there’s no humans putting anything of note on the page.

However more than that, the part that I’ve found the most frustrating is having to niche down into one thing that you tell the world that you are. And then perform that role better than anyone else on the platform.

And that’s become my life on LI.

Years ago, I trained as a theatre actor. And while I was constructing my LI persona, I realised I was suddenly leaning on my old toolbox. But this isn’t me I thought, it’s a weird version of me I have to play every week. And the awards are more paying customers.

That part I hate. But the part I do love is reconnecting with people I’ve worked with all over the world in the DMs. And finding out how much good will is out there for me, earned in the real world working with these folks in agencies.

The rough with the smooth.

I’m made peace with it, because LI is the only game in town when it comes to your professional life. You have to opt in to be on the radar.

But IG is feeling the effects for sure.

Instagram is losing weight

User engagement on IG has dropped across the board by 25% last year into 2026 . But Reels engagement is up 33% and top influencers report a lot more engagement in the DMs than in the feed.

It’s like we’re all over super slick pics, and want messy video that we konw isn’t AI, and even a three word response from a real human we follow.

For many Subtackers, leaving IG is a right of passage. I’m still on there. But I don’t post. I just read stuff. And when I really like something, I find I do more DMing these days to the creator. And I enjoy the messages I get in return. Even if they’re short, they feel real.

There is a difference between living and performing, and most of us lost where that line is.

Performance used to be deliberate. Like me in my theatre days you stepped on stage. You put a costume on. You projected your lines and presence and inner thoughts. Then you stepped off. The lights went down and you were yourself again. There was a boundary.

Now the boundary has dissolved.

And with it dissolved the re-entry to the real world that I’d do after every performance. We’ve been caught somewhere in the middle of being on and off stage for the last chunk of our lives.

We curate instead of express. We anticipate how something will look before we let ourselves truly feel it. We soften opinions to maintain audience, or sharpen them to build one. Even authenticity is framed carefully, as my LA friend discovered - delivering a life in digestible doses, raw enough to feel real without being chaotic.

My LI career is maintaining a professional identity. And whether consciously or not, we are performing for an invisible crowd. For the algorithm. For future employers. For people we haven’t met yet. For people we hope are watching.

Performance is what happens when being seen becomes more important than being.

And the cost of this constant performance means most of us feel like we’ve been on stage for a decade. And the audience has become more demanding, more distracted, and more damning for any difference of opinion to theirs.

No wonder we’re exhausted.

We’re tired in ways we don’t have words for

Performance is cognitively expensive. You cannot relax while monitoring yourself. You cannot fully inhabit a moment while assessing how it will land.

I was hanging out recently with a friend of a friend who lives his life almost entirely online. One of those friends who has a dozen things in their story at any time.

What I noticed was that he is intensely there with you in a moment. Then records it in a pic or video. Then posts. Then looks for another good backdrop/prop. Then engages intensely for a moment. Repeat.

Isn’t all that exhausting, I asked him. He replied, well love, it’s too late now. I’ve trained everyone to expect this.

Which I took as another way of saying I’m tired of this show.

Performance flattens us into digestible versions of ourselves. Over time, we begin to identify with the version that receives approval. We defend it and protect it online. We become brittle. I’d call this “Self-Imposter Syndrome.”

And beneath that brittleness is a quiet anxiety: if this version of me collapses, what remains? I think we need a word for this, so I’m calling it “Re-selfing.”

Because when identity is built in public, privacy becomes unfamiliar. And I think we’re in an age of reassessing our online relationship with ourselves, and rediscovering who we are again.

Re-selfing ourselves

Ever noticed how when you get out of a realtionship, you have no idea who you are? I’ve found after every breakup I don’t know what I like to eat, or wear, or what music I want to listen to, or even what hobbies I have.

Only this time it’s like a groupthink. What fascinates me is not that we are breaking up with performing. It’s that we are starting to resist it.

There is a growing hunger for rooms where nobody is branding themselves. A list of a few I’ve found here in Berlin:

The Rise of Phone-Free Spaces

• Restaurants and supper clubs hosting no-phone dinners.

• Comedy shows and live events using Yondr pouches to lock phones away.

• Wedding invitations now explicitly asking for “unplugged ceremonies.”

Craft Revival

• There’s a waitlist for the silkscreening course I want to do.

• Knitting circles and sewing workshops trending among Gen Z.

• Analog photography communities and film labs reappearing.

Micro-Third-Place Revival

• Supper clubs in private homes.

• Community gardens.

• Local book clubs with waiting lists. There’s a reading club here in Berlin called Pause that meets every Sunday.

• Repair cafés.

These aren’t anti-tech per se. They’re anti-performance zones. Manual, slow, tactile. Hard to optimise. Impossible to multitask in. Spaces where participation matters more than audience.

The defining characteristics I think are - less people, IRL, slow, intentional. Connecting to others again so we can connect with ourselves.

To Wrap Up…

The most radical thing you can be right now is unimpressive.

Not because ambition is wrong. Not because expression is dangerous. But because performance has replaced presence. And I think we all feel like actually being here again.

The future will not belong to the loudest brands. It will belong to the safest rooms, where something is happening that let’s people rediscover who they are.

Performance divides because it keeps us at a distance. It keeps us polished beyond reality. It keeps us under surveillance.

Presence undivides.

Presence allows for contradiction. For a bit of softness. For some self-evolution.

If we want to reconnect a divided world, it may not start with changing minds. It may just start with dropping the act.

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

Sorry for the delay this week, I got the flu doing the rounds in Berlin and it laid me out. Still getting over it.

But it got me examining my impatience with illness, and how I believe that it always arrives at the most inconvenient of times. I asked the Emotions Diary about that, and it had a lot to say.

• “I don’t have time to be sick,” is actually, “I don’t have time to feel.”

• Rushing means you’re abandoning yourself

• And then of course the question that poses is, “What am I trying to avoid by being busy?”

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email. Watch the video to see everything The Emotions Diary had to say this week:

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hi Everyone,

Something I’ve been noticing of late. Actually since the turn of the new year.

No one I know is triumphantly proclaiming, “this is going to be my year.” They aren’t laying out grand plans for world conquest. No one is telling me their new year’s resolutions and how those are going.

They’re still planning stuff, but talking about it more in a, “I’m playing around with some stuff,” or trying things out kind of way.

And all I can say is that I see this in myself as well. I haven’t done resolutions for a long time. I make my two lists at the end of every year like I wrote about in my between the years post last year.

But even I find myself not enthused about a routine, a list to check off, a daily goal to hit. It’s not that I’m done. I’m doing as much as ever. It’s more that I have my system and it works for me. Nothing I could ever sell as a course.

But I think the world has done a quiet quitting, collective shrug off of the self-optimising culture that’s dominated the last ten years.

Thank goodness, it was exhausting. SO what was it, what did we do with it, and what are we doing, or not doing, now? If you have a friend who’d like to get in on this conversation, share it with them.

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

But first, I have a question: Do you read Undividing, or do you listen to it?

When people write comments to me, they often say, “When you said,” or “I listened to,” and it got me wondering how people consume Undividing.

Please take a second and let me know. It’s just a click and it won’t change anything here on my Substack. Have no fear… And leave a comment at the bottom if you want to elaborate on your choice at all.

Now, onto this week!

The Death of Optimization

I was going to the pool one day and picked up my Apple Watch that I normally wear to time my swims. Then I put it back down again. That was two months ago and I haven’t touched it since.

Instead I get in the lanes now, and swim for as long as it feels good. Some days that’s longer. Some shorter. I just do whatever feels right on the day.

Then I noticed at the gym, I lift weights with my eyes closed and focus on the feeling. And I lift till I’m tired.

In both cases, I’m actually happier with my progress. Because none of it is about progress. It’s just doing. And I guess I’m getting better at it. But there’s nothing to prove to anyone, even me.

My wake up time changes every day. But I’m not setting alarms anymore. I’m letting my body sleep as long as it needs. Some days, that’s 6am. Some, it’s 8:30am.

For a long time, I imposed a routine on my life that looked good from the outside. And me looking at myself from the outside. Morning structure. Systems. Habits. Life hacks. A sense that if I just refined, and tightened the screws a little more, things would finally feel aligned.

They didn’t.

Somewhere along the way, I realised that the version of me executing that routine wasn’t actually me. It was a character I was playing. A competent, disciplined, slightly joyless Karl.

So I stopped. But not a hard stop. Just a kind of stopped picking up the Apple Watch kind of way.

I just let things get messier. I worked with a flexy starting hour, around 9 ish. I followed curiosity instead of plans. I allowed days that didn’t add up to anything.

And nothing bad happened.

If anything, I felt more intact.

That’s when it clicked that this wasn’t a personal failure. Nor was it anything to do with fears of slowing down in my middle age. It was a cultural moment.

We are watching the slow death of optimization as an ideal. Which made me wonder where it came from.

Where self-optimization came from

The idea that a good life is a well-run system didn’t appear out of nowhere.

It came from work culture first. From industrial thinking. From the belief that efficiency equals virtue. That friction is waste. That anything unmeasured is suspect.

Then technology arrived and quietly moved that logic inside us. Suddenly we had more ways to measure everything than ever before.

Once you can track something, you’re invited to improve it. Sleep, focus, mood, productivity, steps, output. I started thinking about my body as a dashboard, and my mind as a project.

Self-help didn’t invent this. It took management language and repackaged it into an idea of reward. You’re not optimizing because you’re inadequate. You’re optimizing because you deserve your best life.

Which we do. All of us. But here is where the problem lay; “best” was defined very narrowly.

More disciplined. More consistent. More intentional. More in control. The unspoken message was always the same. And if you’re struggling, you’re doing it wrong.

This wasn’t just about feeling better. Our self optimisation experiments and successes had to be broadcast across our channels. It was about signaling something.

Control has been a status symbol for a long time.

If you could master yourself, it implied you had resources. Time. Education. Stability. A life that could afford refinement.

Optimization was aspirational. But man, did it ever feel empty.

Why we’re getting so, damn over it

The optimized life didn’t feel very alive.

It felt productive. But it also felt strangely empty. I wrote about this in May last year in my Hyper-individulaization post, that all the heroes of this movement we were following were always alone in their videos, living an almost monk-like existence. Certainly it was portrayed that way.

And it looked exhausting. The low-grade, background tiredness of always managing yourself. And the realisation that no amount of self-tuning fixes a world that is fundamentally misaligned.

Trying to be perfect in an imperfect world seems like a losing battle.

But also, part of this is a shift in what we now recognise as status.

, someone I’ve been following on IG for about a year and now has a Substack called Considered Chaos, has been writing about what he calls post-luxury status symbols. One of the most telling is this: wasteful time.

Time you are not optimizing. Not monetizing. Not improving. Time that serves no purpose other than being lived.

That idea landed with me because it names something I didn’t realise I was already craving.

The ability, no, the right to be unproductive without apology.

To be slow with zero explanation. And to let a day unfold without trying to extract every ounce of value out of it.

In a culture that spent decades telling us that time is money, choosing to slow it all up is like setting a pile of cash on fire, sitting around it with friends, and toasting marshmallows.

But is that a waste really? Or is it a glorious use of time for nothing more than just being?

What’s replacing optimization?

The other day I was talking with a couple in their twenties at the next table in a bar in the middle of town.

We got onto what we used to do for fun before smart phones and the internet. They were wrapped with my tales of having friends round to listen to a new album by a band we liked. Where we would literally sit there, listening to a whole album together, reading the liner notes, drinking coffee, and talking about it.

Or just going to a bar or club with no plans because you’ll see people you know, or make new friends. And maybe hand them a card with your home number on it, where they can leave a message if you’re not home.

And when did it stop? When I got my first smart phone.

So what’s emerging looks less like a movement and more like a withdrawal of belief. There were shades of it in the great de-teching of our lives that I noticed happening last year. That the great blind faith we had put in tech to solve our woes wasn’t paying off. In fact, in many ways, tech had made it worse.

People are still capable. Still ambitious. Still doing meaningful work. They’re just less interested in turning their entire lives into improvement projects.

You see it in how people talk now. Less about routines. More about rhythms.

You see it in how people relate to work. Fewer declarations of passion. More insistence on boundaries that don’t need to be justified.

And you see it in how people talk about time. Long dinners. Walks without destinations. Reading without speed. Conversations that wander.

These aren’t regressions. They’re corrections.

What this means for how we live

This is a question of care I think.

Redirecting care from how well we’re living according to our stats and caring more about how well we’re actually living.

Caring less about whether your life looks good from the outside. Caring more about whether it feels good from the inside.

I’ve noticed at the end of last year, that folks were expousing the virtues of boredom. That not every moment of life benefits from structure. You need some slack and drift. To actually be bored and let your mind wander. Not diagnose yourself as having an attention disorder. But just regular human, staring into the distance.

Take this swing project on IG for instance:

I want that swing! Because it’s permission to just not do anything. With friends!

When I realised this was going on in my life, the shift away from self-optimisation, I had to give up being “on top of things.”

That one is harder than it sounds. Me in motion, doing and achieving flatters the ego. It lets you believe you’re ahead. More evolved. More intentional than the people who are just muddling through.

Letting that go puts you back among everyone else. But surprise, surprise … that’s exactly where connection lives. Not just with others, but with ourselves too.

To wrap up…

I still get things done. I mean, I launched a new branding business, which I just signed my first two paying clients on. So, things are getting done.

My days don’t stack neatly. My habits come and go. My focus is full on one day, half on the next.

But I recognise myself again. And I don’t punish this me for not being that other optimised character I was playing.

And I suspect that’s what this moment is really about; rejecting the idea that being human is a flaw to be engineered away.

Because we’re remembering that that’s where all our best living is happening.

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

At the risk of feeling like I’m making the same video I did two weeks ago, this is along a similar vein. Which I guess shouldn’t surprise me, given the volume of the world in every direction.

But man, has it been killing my enthusiasm for everything. And so that’s what I got into in the Emotions Diary this week, asking the question, “How can I start something new when the world is on fire?”

And like most times with the Emotions Diary, it had a lot to say:

• Making is what we do

• In good times and bad making is where you find your peace

• Make, and see the ripples go out, so others start making too

So whatever it is that you’re making, make it with everything you’ve got. Baking, walking the dog, protesting, writing, washing the dishes, teaching, painting, reaching out to friends… whatever it is, let it hold everything that you’re feeling. Give your emotions somewhere to go.

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription.

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email. Watch the video to see everything The Emotions Diary had to say this week:

Subscribe now

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hi Everyone,

So I can tell you that the last thing I thought I’d be writing about is Davos this week. It’s not really somewhere that I pay much attention to. Not because it isn’t important. A lot of decisions about the future of our planet are made there.

I want to believe that there are people there, trying to figure out how to make this planet a fairer place to live. But I have to say, I’ve doubted that.

In fact when Dutch historian Rutger Bregman appeared at Davos in 2019 to speak, but then told the billionaires they needed to start and pay their fair share of taxes, well, let’s say it was his last appearance there.

That’s about the last time I paid any attention to it.

Until Mark Carney spoke.

It was less about the politics per se. But more about what he said. And how he said it. Because in just a few short minutes, he delivered something that the world has been waiting for.

A third way. One that is led by a vision. And he did it with three things:

• A direction

• An identity

• And a volume

If you know someone who’d like to get in on this conversation, share this with them.

Share Undividing with Karl Dunn

Now, let’s get Undividing…

The speech offered no solution, but a direction

I was eating breakfast five days ago and scrolling through my emails when I saw one from my Mum. She had sent me a transcription of Mark Carney’s speech. I thought, that’s interesting, Mum doesn’t normally send me political/finance things that she’s read.

I thought, OK, I give it a scan, write her back quick, and maybe add an emoji. But within a paragraph I was gripped.

Not because he was saying something radical, or because he had a solution to everything, but because he was doing something that has become surprisingly rare: he was offering direction without pretending to offer certainty.

That distinction matters more than we might realise, especially in 2026.

This year has felt mentally unstable in a way that’s hard to name but easy to feel. Part of this feeling comes from Emotional Homelessness that I wrote about in Undividing #51.

But also how AI has moved from novelty to threat for many people, reshaping work and creativity faster than we can emotionally keep up with. Conflicts haven’t resolved so much as hardened into the background of daily life. Industries that once felt solid are wobbling, while new ones appear faster than we can make sense of them.

About the only certainty I got from last year, was that nothing beats a Jet2 holiday.

In that 2025 environment, most communication fell into one of two traps. Either it over-promises, offering futures that feel suspiciously frictionless, or it blames some version of a “them” for all the problems that we’re facing.

What struck me about Carney’s speech was that it refused to do either. Instead he said, it’s this way. No destination, but with values as the path.

Then I saw that it had been sent to me by seven different people I knew on various platforms. This speech was catching fire.

Values-based realism isn’t a slogan

At one point, he used the phrase “values-based realism.” I paused when I heard it, not because it sounded clever, but because it didn’t.

Realism on its own has started to sound like resignation. Like a way of saying that power, markets, or geopolitics leave us with no real choices. Something that we are resigning ourselves to - “that’s just the way the world works.”

And values can always drift, propelled more and more these days by ideas of survival, and often untethered from how the world actually works. Holding the two words together though, felt like a way of saying here’s a new way to think about the way ahead. One that isn’t about giving up.

Also, Carney promised no magic pill or rainbow.

There was no attempt to pretend transitions will be painless or that trade-offs can be avoided. Instead, he named difficulties without dramatizing them, and acknowledged cost without turning it into fear.

That kind of vision doesn’t inflame, doesn’t pretend, and the part that I found interesting was that it captured how a lot of people feel.

The idea of “middle powers” gives a new identity

Another part of the speech that stayed with me was his focus on “middle powers.” Something that as soon as I heard it, I thought, oh, that’s me. I was born in one (Canada), I grew up in another (Australia) and I currently live in one (Germany).

The crazy thing is that I’d never heard the word, and yet I immediately knew what it was.

In the advertising world, we always say, it doesn’t exist until you give it a name. Even if that means you have to invent one. And when you do, it should be something people feel.

I tried to find the origin of the term “middle powers” and google offered all kinds of references from the 16th century onwards.

But with all the yelling of the last decade across news, social, and sadly more and more between us as people, something as quiet as middle powers got lost.

Till the yelling exhausted us all, and suddenly, the idea of middle powers had its moment.

Not superpowers. Not dominant players. Not the loudest. But those countries and institutions that are regionally powerful. Countries that quietly hold things together by cooperating, convening, and maintaining standards when larger forces are locked in rivalry.

Which is not to say that these middle powers are utopias. They aren’t. We are as conflicted as anywhere else. The rise of the AfD here in Germany, the Voice vote being overturned in Australia. These speak to great divisions.

But in that one term, it’s given people in these middle powers a moment to reflect on a role we could all play regardless of our internal conflicts. It gave us a new way to think about ourselves outside our own borders.

In a year obsessed with extremes - winning or losing, rising or falling, good and evil - this felt like a radical reframing. Stability, in this view, doesn’t come from domination, but from connective tissue. From actors willing to do the unglamorous work of alignment and coordination.

Calm. The power of turning the volume down.

What also struck me was the tone of the speech. Carney didn’t rush. He didn’t inflate the moment. He didn’t speak as though panic was required to command attention.

And in a year like we’ve all just had, that was a surprisingly powerful volume.

We’ve grown so used to leaders, social, and news outlets amplifying anxiety because anxiety travels faster. It gets us clicking, it gets us fighting in the comments.

Calm is often misread as weakness or detachment. But calm is also containment. It signals that complexity can be held. That a simple yelled solution isn’t the only way to be. And most importantly, that uncertainty doesn’t automatically mean collapse.

We want simple answers. I mean, even I do. Despite knowing that that’s not realistic. I want to sleep better at night.

But complexity can’t be yelled. So in that sense, the delivery itself was part of the message. And it made the sound of difficult work with no certain outcome feel not only possible, but do-able.

What I’m taking from this idea of vision

We tend to think of vision as prediction — the ability to map the future and sell it back to us with confidence. But that model is breaking down. The future is moving too fast, and pretending otherwise only deepens mistrust.

What Carney offered instead was orientation. Not “here’s exactly what will happen,” but “here’s how we move when we don’t know.” Naming trade-offs. Holding values steady. Still pointing in a direction.

That kind of vision doesn’t attack or blame, it steadies.

Undividing has never been about eliminating disagreement. It’s about staying in relationship when things are unresolved and uncomfortable.

What I saw in this speech was a way of holding complexity without weaponising it. Values and realism weren’t treated as opposites, but as things that need to stay in conversation if we’re going to avoid either fantasy or cynicism. Or worse.

There’s something quietly useful here for everyday life too. At work, in families, in the conversations we keep postponing. Being able to say:

• I don’t know how this will turn out

• But here’s what matters to me

• Here’s what it might cost

• And here’s the direction I think we should move anyway.

That doesn’t solve anything straight away. But weirdly it solves the biggest issue - there will be no easy answers.

To wrap up…

2025 has rewarded noise and extremes. What it hasn’t rewarded is steadiness.

That’s why this speech stayed with me. Not because it solved anything, but because it reminded me that connection doesn’t happen when we escalate uncertainty to be taken seriously.

And yell at each other that our imagined answer is the right and only way.

Sometimes, holding the middle is the work. It’s not a passive stance. It’s moving in a very determined direction.

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Let the Emotions Diary explain you, to you.

Hey there all,

I thought I’d start this year feeling excited about my new business. Instead, I’ve been feeling something like terror. It’s been going for weeks so today I thought I’d get to the bottom of it.

And like most times with the Emotions Diary, I wish I’d asked it earlier. Because like every time, it had a lot to say:

• Terror comes from thinking there’s a mortal ending to what you’re doing, which there isn’t.

• This is really about the fear of failing in public.

• And I’m in the testing phase still, so nothing is really at stake.

The instructions are down the bottom of every Emotions Diary email. Watch the video to see everything The Emotions Diary had to say this week:

Are you enjoying the Emotions Diary? Is it helping you make sense of the world and yourself? If so, take out a paid subscription

Subscribe now

There’s lot of ways you can support Undividing

Like it ❤️ / Comment 🗣️ / Restack it! 🔄 - all the buttons are down below.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

Buy Me A Coffee

If you’re getting a lot out of Undividing, consider a paid subscription. You’ll support the work and new offerings I want to create. Plus it pays for Undividing readers without banking, who are houseless, vets, pensioners, and people in countries who can’t do foreign transactions.

Subscribe now

You can also pick up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

HTBAR on Amazon US

Whatever you can’t figure out in your life, you can figure it out in here. The Emotions Diary is the tool for undividing yourself - understanding why you do, think, and feel the things you do.

You’ll need 4 things:

• A notebook

• A pen

• An open heart

• An open mind

And the practice is in 4 steps:

• What - Write down what’s going on in your life that you want an answer to; a persistent feeling, a bad habit, not knowing why you did something, general confusion etc.

• Ask - Let this formulate into a question. Sometimes the question itself surprises you, as in, oh yeah, that is what I want to ask. Also, you can go straight to the question if you already know what you want to ask.

• Wait - Relax. Let the universe do its work. Generally an answer starts coming within seconds for me.

• Answer - Write down what it “says.” Don’t overthink, edit it, or interpret it while comes. Receive it like you’re taking dictation. Capture the tone.

  And a final note is to dwell with the answer. Feel the layers of it land in you. See what you realize about the knowledge you’ve been given.