Thousands of hours of all-hands-on-deck to make something simple, clear, fast—usable. When we have infinite ways of articulating something it will feel like we have none. The only worthy story is the one that is true. And the only worthy way to tell it is the way that is fun.

In part one of this three part series, we explore how figuring out how to 🚀 in a sublime way became the 🚀 itself. Welcome Sublime 2.0, we’ve been waiting for you. From our founder Sari’s angle, as told by Allegra, our other co-founder Gabriel's wife.

2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0

A velvety red theater curtain lifts to reveal another curtain. And then another, and another, and another, until the audience tires. Most have left the theater when the last curtain finally lifts to reveal an astronaut.

The astronaut floats alone, wondering:

If a spaceship launches into the stratosphere and no one writes a Substack think piece about it, did the spaceship really launch?

Last year the creators of Sublime paid 8k to make this explainer video—complete with lonely astronaut, hyperspeed time lapse depictions of blooming flower, and shots of the essential parts of Sublime.

With the hope that it could make Sublime easy enough to understand that you might try it before merciless thumbs could swipe it into routine oblivion.

The creators of Sublime have spent the last three years obsessively refining this tool that helps people collect what inspires them, connect ideas, and create. Their confidence in its commercial viability contains almost no detectable trace of delusion.

And yet, they describe Sublime so obliquely, so allergic to the mainstream and anything that sounds like a pitch, that the people who’d most love it don’t even know it exists.

If its not evident yet, the creators of Sublime have a complex.

Which is why they sought a third person point of view.

The third person in the room is Allegra—Gabriel’s Aquarian wife who has a love for words, a degree in dance, and a tendency to psychoanalyze.

She would overhear the daily Sublime affairs—including Gabriel’s frustrations with the company’s communication habits, the engineer’s challenges with crazy architecture, and Sari’s compulsive need to turn everything into an opportunity to *sell Sublime memberships.

(*Is now a good time?)

Allegra got to work proposing possible 🚀 concepts, some of which included:

☼ Stage a fake 🚀 that purposefully flops and make a mockumentary about it that ends up going viral and becomes the real 🚀. ☼ Pretend that the band Sublime sues Sublime.app and use the attention to 🚀. ☼ Sari and Gabriel eat a magic mushroom with the intention to get ideas for the Sublime 🚀—the whole thing is recorded like an episode for a Vice show. ☼ Sari’s kids interview Sublime or Sublime interviews Sari’s kids. ☼ Roast startup 🚀 videos for using every possible buzzword to describe who they are, then write a spiritually unenlightened essay about how everything you claim you are you really aren’t, and how Sublime is nothing so hahaha its everything. ☼ Create a fable-like animated children’s story that expresses rather than explains Sublime through one big metaphor. ☼ Ten-day-long performance art livestream of Sublime engineers working behind the scenes to convey that people are tinkering away at this while the rest of us don’t care. ☼ Delete Sublime, see who reacts, 🚀. ☼

(Sources say they are actually using one of these as part of the 🚀. Guess which! Winners get a discountedsublimelifetimemembership!)

But every clever idea risked becoming the thing it was trying to escape: more noise, more launch circus.

After many hours of irl tea, group calls, and brain dumps…

…they all agreed that the only way to go was meta—that the journey of answering the question ‘how to launch?’ would itself be the 🚀.

They set some rules:

• Tell the truth while it’s happening.

• Don’t assume the audience is stupid.

• Be a real, living thing on a dead internet.

• Lighten up.

• Embrace the sublime.

One question hung over their head:
WHO CARES?

Allegra asked Sari to film herself being candid about why she cares. The chocolate consumed:to care conveyed ratio was a bit off, but it was a start…

A few months ago, in her interview with Robert Greene, Sari shared,

“I grew up in a small city in Colombia called Barranquilla, and I remember discovering TED talks and the internet when I was about twelve. If you had told me then that one day I’d carry a device in my pocket that could answer any question and connect me with anyone, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

The small town was Barranquilla, the midnight train was the internet. And it is that innocent, original awe of how magnificent the web can be that keeps Sari believing (building Sublime).

Even though, as she puts it, “You have to be a little delusional to get into consumer subscription software.”

(YOU however are not delusional for subscribing. Membership, anyone?!?)

When Sari told Allegra the story of how Sublime got started, Allegra realized that Sari is not so much delusional as she is relentless and borderline magical:

What began as Startupy—curated folders of ideas, people, and inspiration that Sari would collect across the web for founders she worked with in VC who were too heads-down to find themselves—eventually evolved into Sublime.

When personal zone of genius aligns with something the world is missing, the industry calls it product-market fit.

We think of it more like letting the soft body of your animal love what it loves and trusting that the world will also love it.

Allegra starts to synthesize the vision for Sublime. She can feel the distance between the ambition and what the world sees. She struggles to put it all into words, which is her one job…

Until one night, when Allegra hears something deep in a dream.

She wakes up and says to her husband:

On one hand, who cares? On the other hand, anything in the world can be saved on Sublime. Sublime saves the world?!

Sublime doesn’t contain any ads. There are no vanity metrics. It doesn’t feed off of distraction—it’s not even meant to be used every day.

The friction is baked in because every time you click that “save” button, you ask yourself, “do I actually want to keep this?”

Slowly, the true essence of your world gets saved on your Sublime.

Allegra lights her deadline candle and sifts through the Sublime collection she curated for this project:

The pieces are there and yet, Allegra fixates on the words thinking,
“…It must be worthy of a launch, it must be worthy of a launch…”

Before the apathy phantom threatens to consume any excitement left in her endeavor, Allegra calls Sari once again.

Sari says, “Sublime is growing up.”

Allegra is not so sure that’s the whole picture.

But she knows that parallel to building Sublime, Sari has been mothering three boys—now ages 10, 7, and 4.

Three boys and a tech startup isn’t the usual recipe for a personal revolution, but it is Sari’s.

Three boys and a tech startup had her confront limits, humility, ambition, devotion, and creation.

Three boys and a tech startup is what made Sari care. Care from the core even when it’s inconvenient, inefficient, exhausting.

She’s raising three boys and a tech startup, as they’re raising her.

Now they’re all growing up.

…

The curtain rises one last time:

INT. DARK THEATER
A single spotlight shines towards the edge of the stage.

Sari pulls up a chair, close to the audience, where they can see her eyes and she can see theirs.

She takes a seat and begins her soliloquy.

SARI

Sublime began because I needed a place where inspiration could lead to ideas and ideas could become creation.

The first people that invested in lifetime memberships bought a dream — a philosophy.

A slower, realer, richer internet.

Now Sublime is growing up—the team, too—we’ve been humbled, we’ve matured. Recognizing our gifts, owning what Sublime is, and rising to the occasion with really good software.

The ‘cool’ essence remains—without the obscurity and vagueness—usable, like the apps and sites that become second nature to us.

Sari rises. She walks towards a small stand and opens a laptop. The screen projects on the wall behind her. We watch her open and close tabs, scrolling through meaninglessness.

She stops scrolling.

SARI (CONT’D)

I am not here because I am the most qualified person in the room.

I am here because I know what it’s like to not care.

I know how easy it is for the world to feel dull and how convincing the voice in my head can be when it says nothing is interesting.

The mundanity of domestic life gets suffocating, and the internet can either double down or be the antidote…

From underneath the laptop Sari pulls out a children’s book.

“If you give a Mouse a Cookie” by Laura Numeroff.

She closes the laptop, takes a seat, and begins as if she is reading her children a bedtime story.

SARI (CONT’D)

“If you give a mouse a cookie...
He is going to ask for a glass of milk.

When you give him the milk,
he will probably ask you for a straw.

When he’s finished he’ll ask for a napkin.

Then he’ll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk moustache.

When he looks into the mirror he might notice his hair needs a trim...”

Sari looks up from the book and out at the audience.

SARI (CONT’D)

It continues like this, a chaotic at-home-saga of the boy tending to the mouse’s ever-growing requests.

Until the mouse grows tired, gets thirsty, and comes around wanting milk and a cookie.

She closes the book and sets it down on her lap.

SARI (CONT’D)

This is how I see the internet.

We tried this cookie—a tool that could facilitate, connect, and create beyond belief.

One thing led to the next, and we started requesting things that soon became demands.

So much so, we lost track of why we tried the cookie in the first place.

The lights dim.
Sari stands up one last time.

SARI (CONT’D)

When our privacy settings have exploded into exhibitionism, when the algorithmic aesthetic has melted into one indistinguishable beige, when the cloud storage comes storming down…

…the internet swallows itself like an ouroboros, and everything seems so dark we can’t find the light…

Like the mouse and the cookie…chances are we will want to go where the internet began.

With an idea.
A spark of life.
And a wish to connect.

The stage goes dark.
A single spotlight shines on Sari.

SARI (CONT’D)

If you give a human the unlimited web, chances are they will burn out.

And if they burn out, they will need to dance.
And chances are,
if they dance…

…they will want the link to their favorite song to dance to…

…and with Sublime…
they will know exactly where they saved it.

Hit it!

2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0 !! 2.0

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your first intermission. The performance will resume in approximately two weeks. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy Sublime’s redesign. Remember, Sublime memberships are available at various plans through this link. Part two will invite you into Gabriel’s world, as a love story across virtual space. We hope you will return to your seats when it comes time. Thank you, endlessly.

For your leisure and entertainment, a theatrical reading of this piece. Here’s to embracing launch disasters and turning mistakes into opportunities.

…Before the launch becomes an essay, and the essay becomes content, and the content becomes one more thing your thumb swipes into oblivion…

…We invite you to the Premiere of Act One before it arrives in your inbox.

꩜ When: TODAY, Thursday, June 11 at 1:00 PM ET
꩜ Duration: 30 minutes
꩜ Where: Zoom

Get your free ticket → here

Take your seat

❦ Lifetime and Premium+ members, this would not be possible without you. Look for your name in the closing credits! ❦

With care <3
The Sublime crew

In April, I convinced Allegra, the wife of my Sublime co-founder Gabriel, to help us figure out what to do for the launch of Sublime 2.0. On paper, Allegra is a dance and yoga teacher. But what I saw in her is a 99th percentile writer and someone …

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We’re having fun. We’re doing weird, sublime-y things. And for the first time, I have absolutely no expectations for the launch.

We’ve never …

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Ted Gioia wrote about it. In our conversation in March, Robert Greene talked about how in periods of intense rationalism and darkness humanity bends towards rebirth and possibility. The Black Plague was followed by the Renaissance. The scientific revolution paved the way to the Enlightenment. The Vietnam War gave us Woodstock, etc. etc.

The new romanticism won’t look like the world joining hands and singing kumbaya. It will look, at first, like a yearning for ways of being/thinking/seeing that feel alive, creative, strange, personal, and free (followed, naturally, by a moment of profound spiritual clarity where you get a Sublime membership wink-wink).

Today we’re sharing a voice-y, historically literate, fun piece by about the impulse to seek the sublime in periods of technological upheaval. You can follow Sithara’s work here.

Around here, we sit in the Venn diagram of love tech and hate tech. Which is why I was relieved that Sithara’s essay doesn’t end with “throw your phone into the sea.” We are not that pure. We love the internet.

Enjoy ;)

P.S. For premium members, below the paywall, a recording from yesterday’s fab session with and on BECOMING IRREPLACEABLE.

Romanticism in the digital age

Every industrial revolution has produced some form of Romantic backlash, where people run away from tech and towards the human, the medieval, the handmade, the… sublime.

By Sithara Ranasinghe

At this precise moment, I’m cheating on three separate friend groups who each believe that I will be joining their hypothetical countryside communes. After a slew of years defined by tech fatigue, it’s not too strange that so many of my friends have independently reached the conclusion that they need to return to the soil. Every industrial revolution¹ has produced some form of Romantic backlash, where people run away from tech and towards the human, the medieval, the handmade, the… sublime. (Sorry.)

We’re currently living through a Fourth Industrial Revolution — artificial intelligence, algorithmic platforms, the total dominion of daily life by a handful of big tech companies. None of these communes are ever going to progress past the stage of googling “is farming hard?”, but my new state as a commune Casanova only hints at a tiny sliver of our current Romantic backlash. People are quitting social media, going back to handcrafts and ‘analogue living’.

Yet a lot of this romantic longing is tied with distinctly digital aesthetics. Gen Z’s current yearning from the past is often expressed through visuals of old tech, or nostalgic visions of the future. Even our popular medieval aesthetics have a distinctly hard, shiny tech feel, centred less on princesses and more on knights — faceless metal humanoids who, at a stretch, might resemble a robot. If we take a journey though the Romantic backlashes to the past 3 industrial revolutions, perhaps we can understand why this one’s different.

My friends aren’t the first people to get the idea to run away to the countryside. The First Industrial Revolution replaced weavers with power looms, spawning factories all over cities. Poet William Blake described them as “dark Satanic mills” which, upon my first read, felt like it carried a really similar energy to when I was 14 and I’d call my mum a fascist. But unlike me (sorry ma), Blake had a point.

Instead of working from or near home, workers moved close to factories. As more and more workers packed into cities, they became crowded and polluted — a living symbol of everything that was wrong with technological progress. In response, the Romantics escaped to “England’s pleasant pastures”. The countryside was more serene, but also more representative of the medieval times the Romantics valorised.

But, as anyone who has tried a ‘digital detox’ might tell you, it’s not quite so easy any more to simply go where the machines aren’t. You can’t escape cyberspace by going to the Lake District because cyberspace is in your pocket and the Lake District has 4G signal.

In the days of Tron and Spy Kids, the internet was described as an almost physical realm where we could walk around and leave our ‘digital footprints’. There was a clear delineation between the ‘real world’ (IRL) and the ‘virtual world’ (URL?) where the laws of physics worked differently. But with the invention of the smartphone, the barriers between URL and IRL have been growing thin, like the mortal veil in an 80s ghost movie. Not only are our avatars direct mirrors of our real selves (I can see your full name and employment history on LinkedIn) but we’re flicking between worlds faster and faster. You might check your Hinge messages during dinner, or watch some TikToks on the bus. The cyber world is engulfing the real one, and there are ghosts everywhere.

So if the ‘virtual world’ is treated as a physical space, social anthropologist Dr Alexander E.R. Taylor argues that the analogue world is too. “If the rural idyll [of the Romantics] offered a vision of a time and place free from the malaise of urban life,” he suggests, “the analogue idyll offers a vision of a time and place free from the malaise of digital life.”

Instead of fleeing to nature, we’re fleeing to vinyl and zines and cyberdecks.

19th century factory owners used steam power and assembly lines to turn Britain into the “workshop of the world”. Victorian homes began to fill up with cheap, mass-produced tat — or as William Morris called it, “devilish capitalistic botch.” Much like Oliver Twist, he had a very significant relationship to Victorian slop.

Morris was one of the loudest critics of the industrial revolution. He started a protest movement known as Arts and Crafts, which he described as a battle “against the age”.

The goal was to remedy the way mass production was alienating workers from their craft and labour. Morris longed to return to the medieval cottage industry where artisans hand-build useful, beautiful items from their homes.

To emphasise the handmade origin of his products, he left defects as signs of life, leaving his furniture unfinished to show its wood grain. But, as any small business owner might sympathise with in 2026, factory owners just took his designs and mass-produced them wholesale.

Morris’ instinct to leave marks of human life (let’s call it a humanprint) is back today. Human artists (f.k.a. ‘Artists’ </3) are using defects as signs of a human auteur. You might prefer a mug with streaky glazing to a Sports Direct mug because there’s evidence it was made by an artisanal potter and not a child slave in a factory. Walter Benjamin might have called this ‘aura’, but in the AI age, we might also call it soul.

You can see humanprints everywhere in the digital world. The logo for bakery Jolene was hand-drawn by the graphic designer’s six-year-old, and it was celebrated by the design press as a conscious counterpoint to AI-generated aesthetics. But AI companies can use that visual language too — they can even generate it themselves if they want to. Think about Claude’s hand-drawn logo, rendered in warm, earthy terracotta on an ecru or charcoal background. It’s so human — a teenager’s sketch of a Lorax anus — that it bypasses any natural mistrust we might have for machines.

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The Third Industrial Revolution is generally time-marked from the 1950s to the 2000s. This spans satellites, lasers, email, GPS, touchscreen, biogenetics, drones and, most importantly to me personally, Tamagotchis.

While there was a movement in the 1960s and 70s to return to the land, and to communal, medieval values, this was a backlash against The System, not tech. So where’s our Romanticism this time?

In his 1999 book Technoromanticism, Richard Coyne argues that ideas of Romanticism are pre-baked into the way we speak about computers. He writes, “The IT world, from computer games to supposed anarchy on the net, … celebrates romantic medievalism, its tangled aesthetic, its sense of carnival, and the chaos of the marketplace.”

Instead of escaping new tech to go back to medieval times, we would go back to medieval times using tech. The internet would connect humanity into a global village, and craft — computer craft — would be valued again. Most romantically of all, we would use our new machines to return to a time of magic.²

From the very beginning, the internet described itself in the language of sorcery. Computers were quasi-magical items — the majority of people didn’t understand how they worked, and those who did were referred to as “wizards”. The 1985 textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (nicknamed the “Wizard Book” for its cover) reads, “A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit.”

This idea that tech is quasi-magical and unknowable has only embedded more and more in our current culture, with AI commonly compared to a genie. Peter Nagy and Gina Neff have made the case that modern tech companies deploy the language and tricks of magicians “to create a ‘magical aura’ around their technologies while distracting the public from being able to see through their illusions.” ³

Back in IR3, some dreamers had the utopian vision of an ‘electronic cottage’. This was the idea that computers would allow us to return to the medieval way of living, where the home was the centre of society. James Martin and Adrian R.D. Norman wrote in 1970s, “We may see a return to cottage industry, with the spinning wheel replaced by the computer terminal.” Computers would let us work, shop and do our banking from home. At last, we would be unshackled from the oppressive chains of fresh air and grass.

I think we all read that Martin & Norman quote with the same sense of irony. What was a utopia to them has stopped feeling fun any more. The medievalism we’re projecting onto tech is less of a revel and more of a feudal system.

Technofeudalism is the idea that Big Tech companies will have powers similar to medieval feudal lords. People and businesses rely on Meta the way peasants once relied on lords. Us serfs must perform free labour (content creation) in exchange for our plot of land in cyberspace. Even those of us who never post still become serf-like in that we won’t fully own anything — good luck accessing your midnight BabyBels if you miss your Smartfridge payments. Or at least, that’s the idea.

If you look at the past few Industrial Revolutions, one thing that crops up again and again is this desire to ‘return’ to a pre-industrial golden age, even if that return is mediated through computers. Something slightly different is happening with IR4.

In a recent NBC News poll, nearly half (47%) of adults aged 18-29 said if they had the option, they’d choose to live in the past, with many specifically citing the very recent past. While there’s definitely some romanticisation of certain medieval-inspired aesthetics and lifestyles, our romantic ‘return’ seems to be more focused on that IR3 early internet era where tech felt exciting instead of oppressive. People are building cyberdecks to escape algorithms, or ditching Meta to explore niche corners of the internet.

One of my favourite niche websites is Cameron’s World, a net.art collage that archives defunct GeoCities websites from the 2000s. At the top of the collection, each website is represented by a planet, and — at least from my hazy childhood memory — that’s really how it felt to browse the net back then.

I’ve always found the internet amazing, and you’ll never catch me throwing my phone under a cybertruck. What I need, though, is the restraint to use the internet on my own terms. I definitely think a step in the right direction would be to lower my reliance on the big Broligarchy-run platforms, and also to educate myself on tech to demystify the “magic” of it all. And if, in the end, I do wind up milking chickens in a commune, I only hope our farm has a computer room.

Thank you sihaam and Nick for chatting with me about this topic! <3

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Elan writes the newsletter Escape the Algorithm and teaches a course by the same name at the…

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If you want a personal or professional home for your ideas that isn’t entirely dependent on “The Feed,” may I suggest you build yourself two foundations:

1. Sublime to deepen your thinking.

2. Squarespace to present it with intention.

A workshop and a gallery, if you will ;)

I made my own personal site on Squarespace, which you can view here. It’s pretty bare bones, but Squarespace has a whole universe of features I intend to explore… you can sell products, make yourself findable with SEO tweaks, add emails flows, and more. That’s the nice thing about having your own corner of the web: you can do whatever you want with it.

Click here to try it out, and when you’re ready, use code SUBLIME to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Welcome to another edition of “What’s in the Cards?” where we share 10 things that made us go whoa:

1. Highly recommend dropping everything to go and watch this conversation between Ben Stasse and Ross Douthat on his impending death, his biggest regret, America’s dying institutions, and AI. I like what he offered on AI (full excerpt here, captured using Podcast Magic):

   For a small number of people with lots of intentionality, lots of habits, and fit communities of accountability and Sabbaths, these tools are probably going to be pretty great. For the majority of people, I think they’re going to be disastrous.

   

2. A curated collection of great book dedications.

3. I experienced a significant unlock when I heard Michael Pollan describe consciousness as “felt uncertainty” in a recent conversation with Ezra Klein.
   
   He follows, “… consciousness arises when you can't automate things. For example, you're hungry and you're tired, and you have to decide which to privilege, which takes decision-making. And what consciousness does is open up this space to resolve uncertainty.”
   
   I will be sitting with this for a long time. Full excerpt here, captured using Podcast Magic.

   

4. Inside me are two wolves

   

5. 1000000% harness the system to reward you for being who you are.

   

6. Bitching is voluntary brain damage.

   

7. is an underrated writer on all things AI. Here’s an excerpt from one of her recent essays. (h/t ).

   

Plus, in this week’s cards for Premium members:

• The brand strategy template Emmett Shine uses for agents (shared at the how to teach machines your taste event).

• An exclusive conversation with Douglas Rushkoff from Team Human. So real and moving.

• A collection of great conversations I’m loving, if you want to fall down a great new internet rabbit hole.

We appreciate and love you dearly for the support.

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These live sessions are treasure troves of wisdom and ideas, and we invite our Premium+ members to pull up a chair. Each recording also gets added to a private YouTube playlist (link behind the paywall below) for our members to rewatch any time.

Here’s a preview of some session’s we’ve hosted:

• In December, we hosted Allegra Preuss for an online yoga class to get into our bodies and out of our minds. Pure bliss.
  
  

• In January, we hosted for a session on How to write an uningnorable email. Carly might be the best cold email writer on the internet. More than one person messaged us after the session saying the examples she shared brought them to tears.
  
  

• In February, we hosted Lucas Crespo (the creative director at Every) for a session on how to build a brand identity using your taste + AI. This was one of the most mind opening hours of our year so far.
  
  

• In March, we hosted Emmett Shine, the wildly creative mind behind brands like Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, and Hims & Hers for a whatever you call the opposite of performative session. He jumped between Figma and a dozen tools, and gave us a raw window into his creative process. He described the future of work with a Pez dispenser analogy and shared his template for brand guidelines to share with agents. Insanely valuable stuff.
  

In April, we’re hosting , one of our favorite contemporary thinkers for a session on How to pull the human out of the machine. Luke is the Director of the Cluny Institute, a home for people at the intersection of Athens (arts and philosophy), Jerusalem (faith and religion), and Silicon Valley (tech and venture). Which is to say, he’s one of the few people approaching this moment with spiritual seriousness and moral imagination.

You can RSVP here, and because we really want you to get a taste of this one, you can use code PREMIUMPASS for free access ;)

P.S. If you didn’t read in between the lines, this is us continuing our patient campaign to lure you away from the great-but-ultimately-lacking-free-tier and make the case, without shame, that for $100/year Sublime is the most underpriced membership on Earth.

The recordings + assets for all past sessions are below the paywall. If you’re a Premium+ member and have trouble accessing, email us at sari@sublime.app.

Alsooo, let us know in the comments who’d you like us to host a session with and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

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Last week, Kyle Chayka published a piece in the New Yorker titled why tech bros are now obsessed with taste.

Sublime makes a brief appearance, described as: ”a bookmarking app th…

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This is the story of how those sounds made their way into Sublime.

But really, it’s about people, the things we choose to care about, and how ideas move through us.

With the next version of Sublime on the way + these sounds returning with it, it felt like a good moment to (re)tell it.

Enjoy ;)

This mechanical calculator was supposed to be a gift for Hitler. 

And that’s the least interesting thing about it.

The sounds that the calculator makes – crisp, decisive, mechanical sounds – we recorded them and used them as clicks on our website. You can hear them below:

What’s all this have to do with Sublime?
Nothing. And also everything.

1930s

It’s hard to say when the story starts.

But let’s say it begins here, with an Austrian engineer named Curt Herzstark.

Calculators at this point are huge, like the size of a cash register huge. All anyone wants is a pocket-sized tiny calculator, but no one knows how to make one. Less than 100 years ago and no one in the entire world has a calculator that fits into their pocket. 

So Curt decides that rather than looking forward in time for a solution, he’ll imagine himself into a future where the calculator’s already invented, and he’ll look backwards:

I thought to myself, I'll pretend that I have already invented everything. What does this kind of machine really have to look like, so that someone could use it?

By 1938 he has a patent. 

Then WWII begins.

Curt is sent to a concentration camp. The SS officers find out he’s got plans for a revolutionary calculator and tell him to finish making it, that it’ll be a gift for Hitler once the Germans win the war.

Hitler never got the calculator.

1949

The Curta goes on sale for $125 USD ($1,647 today).

It’s a hit with engineers, traveling accountants, pilots, even rally drivers. For twenty years the Curta sells – 150k units in total – and then everything stops.

Simpler, cheaper, easier to reproduce, the electric calculator takes over.

And just like that, the Curta was dead.

Until it wasn’t.

2022

The Curta becomes a collector’s item and now sells on eBay for $1-2k. 

That’s how the artist Shl0ms buys one. He tweets about the whole story.

Which is how a man named Gabriel Nessim Schloser in Madrid, España sees that tweet.

Gabriel, who is building Sublime, is moved. Gabriel’s great-grandparents survived the holocaust, and he thought Curt delayed the design on purpose until the war ended to save his life.

Maybe Curt did.

Gabriel goes on eBay to get one, but they’re all too expensive.

Except for one.

Owned by a guy from Turkey who’d just come into the possession of things gifted to him by his old lady neighbor, recently deceased.

Including a Curta calculator.

The guy wants 800€ for it.

Gabriel and the dude get on the phone and haggle for 45 min. Sending each other photos of IDs to prove they're good for it. But they couldn’t know for sure.

So Gabriel ends up wiring 600€.
And he waits.
And waits.
And the Curta arrives.

2023

Gabriel is working on Sublime's first website.
Designing it.
Making sure it feels real.
Immersive.

And as he’s looking at the designs, he’s playing with the calculator. Fidgeting.
TAK
He looks at the screen.
TAK CLAK
The screen looks at him.
TAK CLAK TRRRRAK

And he thinks –
What if we use this TAK sound on the website?
And in doing so, honor Curt’s memory in some absurd way.

A few weeks later

Gabriel’s at one of his local bars. It feels like an old lady's house.

There's a bartender there, a friend – Sofi. 
She likes Gabriel. She even invented a drink in his name, St. Gabriel.
A whiskey spice experimental blend thing.

And Gabriel tells her about all this.
And she says, “my boyfriend is a sound engineer.”

They rent a studio. 
A real studio where people record music. 
And they record the crisp, decisive, mechanical sounds.

Gabriel plays the sounds for his mom. She lays down on the bed, closes her eyes, and listens to each two minute recording. Over thirty recordings in total.

Over and over.
KAK. TAK. CLAK. TRRRRAK.
Until she goes… “THAT ONE!”
Rotula Resorte 2_01_clean.wav, 0:22 - 0:23.

And that was the end of the story. 

Until it wasn’t.

2024

The sounds of the Curta still live on our website sublime.app.

A few weeks ago from asks Sublime if we want to run an ad in his Internet Phone Book. 

Gabriel and I meet and discuss what it could be, and somehow the Curta sounds come up. 

And Gabriel tells me the story. 
And I say whoa.

And the sounds of the calculator born backwards in the mind of Curt Herzstack in 1930s Austria and almost given as a gift to Hitler, those crisp, decisive, mechanical sounds made by the only pocket-sized calculator people could use for about twenty years, those sounds traveled.

Those sounds traveled through the story told by Shl0ms.
And received by Gabriel.
And recorded by Sofi’s boyfriend.
And chosen by Gabriel's mom.
And added to Sublime’s website.
And shared now by me.
To you.

Those sounds traveled through us all, dancing and jiving and boogieing their way into our minds, hearts, and souls, sublime as they are.

~

A closing note

Do ideas have agency?
Do they crave to be shared?
To be reproduced, like humans? 

And if ideas have agency, do stories? 
Do we tell stories, or do stories tell us? 
Do we make sounds, or do sounds make us?

Does it matter?
Probably not.

Either way, our job is simply to listen.

And in listening, pay attention, be present, and make something wonderful.

We’ve been in a mood lately, feeling inspired by Mouthwash Studio: “everybody wants to have a village, but few are willing to be villagers.”

We’re taking it upon ourselves to create the scenes, be the inflection point, the reason interesting people find each other. Maybe one day, a Sublime cafe + library.

Until then, two events happening next week. Come through!

xx
Sari

How To Teach Machines Your Taste

with Emmett Shine

Online, Zoom

RSVP

​In this session, Emmett Shine (the creative force behind some of the most iconic brands of the past decade including Sweetgreen, Warby Parker, and Hims & Hers) will walk through a live example of what it means to move from using software to orchestrating systems of intelligence that encode taste, judgment, and principles.

​This is a rare opportunity to learn how one of the most influential brand minds is rethinking his craft in real time.

RSVP here.
Everyone who registers will receive the recording and materials afterward.

Tickets are $50.
But free for Premium+ members (code below the paywall).

Anti-Networking Miami

In-person, Miami

We are hosting an Anti-Networking night in Miami, in partnership with .

RSVP

If you cringe at networking events but you want to get out of your comfort zone, but you don’t want it to be awkward, but you still want to make amazing connections...then this is for you!

The space is incredible.
There will be light bites + drinks, on us.

As I am typing this email, there are 160+ people RSVPd and 50+ people on the waitlist. RSVP here and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.

If you’re a Premium+ member, reply to this email and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.

Read more

Today we’re publishing a beautiful conversation with Robert Greene.

Robert Greene is the bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, and several other classics read by millions of people around the world.

After suffering a stroke that made typing difficult, he spent the last seven years writing a book about the sublime by hand.

In our conversation we talk about why our minds are shrinking to the size of phones despite the sublimity around us, the mystery of consciousness, his views on AI, how to reclaim a sense of awe in modern life, and lots more.

You can read the conversation below, listen on Spotify, or watch on YouTube.

P.S.

It took two years to make this conversation happen.

I first tried reaching out to Robert through the contact form on his website back in 2024. And then again the following year.

Eventually, through a bit of persistence and some help from Billy Oppenheimer, we got connected.

What I want most is to be a vessel for the sublime that’s screaming to be revealed in the world. In talking with Robert I felt in flow with something larger than myself. I hope that reading this conversation makes you feel something, because HOLY SHITTTTT WE’RE ALIVE!

*Best enjoyed with a cup of tea and this playlist ;)

The Age of The Sublime

A conversation with Robert Greene

—

Sari Azout: I’m very excited for this conversation. We both share a love for the word “sublime,” and I’ve followed everything you’ve put out about this book since you announced it. From the outside, it seems like this book is a shift from your earlier work, which is about power, control, domination, and influence. Did something change in you?

Robert Greene: Not really. I did a book with the rapper 50 Cent, The Laws of Human Nature, and the last chapter in that book was about confronting your mortality and was called “The Law of the Sublime.” So, I’ve written about it before. I understand the power book and the seduction book don’t seem very similar to this, but people are complex. I’m complex. I have several sides to me.

I remember reading about the sublime in the late 90s, there was a very famous book by a man named Thomas Weiskel that really shook me up. I thought, “This is an insanely interesting concept.” I’ve been fascinated by it ever since. I had meant to write this book in 2006, but other projects took me off that course.

Then I had a stroke in 2018 and came very, very close to dying. My wife saved my life while we were driving here in Los Angeles. The sublime and death are very much interconnected. I didn’t have a near-death experience, but I had something similar to it. I remember in the ambulance coming home from the hospital, and the experience was so jarring, so weird, and kind of marvelous in a way that I thought, “All right, the fates or the gods are telling me that now’s the time to write this book.” But it’s always been in my system. My books reflect the different aspects of my personality.

SA: How much of your calling to write it is personal versus a broader cultural observation of the spiritual hunger people have now?

RG: It’s a mix of both. Everything a writer writes is personal in some way, unless you’re writing a technical manual. But the book has a definite sense of purpose and mission. I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality. Life is so weird and awesome, and there’s so much depth to it, but people, particularly young people, but really everybody with technology and a phone, are sleepwalking through life. It disturbs me and upsets me. I’m not judging it, because I have some of the same problems as well, but the book is filled with a sense of mission. I’m pushing myself against the trends of this culture and the times we’re living in.

On one hand, science is revealing an insane sublimity in this world. We now understand the first few minutes of the universe and the Big Bang; they’ve been able to photograph a black hole; we understand that life originated from the explosion of stars. All of these thoughts are mind-boggling, and science is revealing them. So, the paradox is that we live in a world where the sublime is exploding all around us in these discoveries, but people’s minds are getting smaller and smaller, constricting to the size of their phones. It’s personal, but I’m on a mission because I want to wake people up. I’m very disturbed by the way things are headed.

SA: If you had to name the things unique to modernity that erode our capacity to tap into the sublime, what do you think those are?

RG: There’s a kind of cynicism and disenchantment where people think the world is just the “brute facts” of life. They think anything having to do with spirituality, religion, or ancient cultures is just superstitious or irrational, which is absurd, because we’re not just here out of context. The religious aspect of life and the spirituality developed thousands of years ago is still within us. The thought patterns and the need for some kind of transcendent experience that takes you out of the banality of daily life—what used to be called the “sacred versus the profane”—is still there. We’re not suddenly “modern.” It’s still inside of us, and yet we’re denying it because we’re afraid of those animalistic, superstitious, irrational aspects embedded in our nature. We want to feel sophisticated, like we’ve come way beyond all of that. To be cynical and see the world through that disenchanted lens is now projected as being “intelligent,” which I don’t think it is at all.

SA: You said that when you had your stroke, you experienced pain but also a strange kind of happiness. I had something similar when my lung collapsed a few years ago while I was pregnant with my third child. I was in physical pain, but I felt an unexpected sense of connection to the world and to other people. It was like the physical pain made me more alive, whereas emotional pain tends to make me feel disembodied and stuck in my head. Do you think part of the “dopamine age” of living through our phones is that we’ve shifted from physical experiences of life to more cognitive ones?

RG: Yes. The last chapter of the book—which I just finished about three weeks ago after almost seven years of work—is about death. I looked into near-death experiences very deeply. It’s very common in the literature for people to say they’ve never felt so alive as in the moments they were facing death. It’s a very strange thing to say, but it struck me: it means when you’re “alive,” you’re not really living. Suffering and knowing you have only a week or two to live suddenly makes you feel more alive. The reason is that we live with this social mask that’s not very real. We’re always pretending, smiling, and saying things to please people. We’re always worried about our survival and how we’re going to make money. When that drops out, when you know it doesn’t mean anything anymore because you only have a few months to live, you suddenly feel a liberation. You’re free; you’re flying in the air. It’s wonderful. You’re rid of all that crap.

Social media is just a cesspool of those very petty things. I’m not saying it’s all that way—I have a meditation app on my phone that I love, but social media is mostly a cesspool of banality as opposed to these cosmic things. We’re conscious creatures, and we’re conscious for a reason. It’s a freak occurrence. I don’t even know if there’s anything else like it in the universe. It’s a thing you don’t want to waste. You’re only alive for several decades. You could die at any moment. That consciousness needs to be used for something beyond just what people are eating, or sex, or shopping.

SA: I have tasted transcendence through psychedelics and they’ve been very transformative experiences. But then the next day, there are still crying babies, payroll, and spreadsheets. We live inside a system. Can we simultaneously inhabit the mysticism and the spreadsheet? Is that the goal? I guess what I’m asking is: why is it so hard to integrate these ideas that we experience when we’re near death into everyday life?

RG: Well, most people who go through a near-death experience and come back say that it stays with them for the rest of their lives. They’re never the same after that, which is striking because I can’t think of any other human experience you could say that about. I’ve taken many drugs myself when I was younger, and they were amazing experiences, but they didn’t completely transform me. I don’t think therapy does, and I don’t think pharmaceuticals are going to do that. But death has that effect.

I’ve been doing Zen meditation for about 16 years—every morning, about 40 minutes of it. In Zen, there’s this idea that you reach a kind of ultimate enlightenment, and when you reach that stage, it’s complete integration with daily life. You can actually function in daily life on a higher level than when you’re so infused with the self and always insecure, thinking, “Are people thinking about me?”

When you get out of that, you actually function at a higher level. So if your baby is screaming and you have to feed it and you have all these banal chores, actually, the banal chores are part of enlightenment. You’re in the moment, you’re happy, you’re dealing with it, as opposed to worrying and being anxious and having all these recurring thoughts. This book shouldn’t be about a sharp delineation between everyday life and the sublime; it should suffuse your everyday experience and actually make you integrated on a higher level.

SA: It seems to me you don’t see exercising agency, having insane mastery over something—and dissolving the ego as contradictory things.

RG: Very much so. My fourth book was on mastery. The sixth chapter covers people who have mastered something on such a high level—usually music, the arts, or science—that it’s inside of them. It’s a mixing of the intuitive and the rational. When you reach that level where you’ve mastered the piano, for instance, the self kind of falls away and you become the keyboard; the piano is inside of you. You don’t have to think anymore.

Reaching that high level of performance in sports, culture, technology, or science means you’re not thinking anymore—you’re living. It’s inside of you and it comes out that way. It’s like you’ve spent the proverbial 10,000 or 20,000 hours working on something and it’s internalized. Your whole mental landscape has been transformed by all of this practice until you become the work itself. It’s an odd feeling, but when I’m writing, I feel like I am the words. I am the writing itself. It’s not me anymore. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

SA: It makes complete sense. And it also feels like that kind of immersion is much harder for creative people today. There’s this expectation of constant motion—optimizing for the algorithm, moving quickly, producing something all the time. You took seven years to write this book. Long-term thinking feels like a luxury now.

RG: I’m in a unique position because most writers are under extreme pressure to make a living. It’s very hard as a writer because you depend on royalties. I’ve reached a position for which I’m very blessed and grateful. I could choose this subject, spend almost seven years working on it, and not have to worry about living from paycheck to paycheck. Because of that, I was able to focus so deeply on one subject for so long that something unusual happens.

When you study great artists—and I’m not putting myself in their company by any means—but when you study a John Coltrane, a Bach, or a Picasso, their level of focus is so deep. People don’t have that luxury anymore. It’s so difficult. The levels of distraction are through the roof. You have to worry about paychecks, pleasing an audience, and making money; the pressures are extreme. I sympathize very deeply with that. I’m able to resist it because, quite frankly, I don’t care if anybody reads this book. I don’t care if it’s unpopular because I don’t need to worry about that anymore. But other people do. I think that’s a tremendous barrier that artists used to not have. I lived in New York in the early 80s when I was very young. It was a very strange time—the city was crime-infested and very dangerous—but there were artists all around. I lived in the East Village and SoHo, and people were living cheaply. They could live like that and make interesting art. You don’t have that luxury anymore. It’s very sad.

SA: There’s always a temptation to romanticize the past, but is there a moment in history that feels analogous to this? Where technology expanded so fast that it created a spiritual vacuum?

RG: It’s always a trade-off. There were things in the past that were very brutal and cruel, it’s not all rosy. If you read history, you understand that. Things move in waves in cultural history. It’s not a straight line where things just get worse and more banal; it goes up and down.

In the 18th century there was a reaction against religion and superstition. It was the birth of modern rationality—the Enlightenment. Writers, particularly in France like Voltaire and Diderot, were reacting against the irrationality of the Catholic Church. But then things descended into something superficial and banal, which led to an incredible reaction against the Enlightenment and this worship of human rationality.

That reaction came with Romanticism, a period when the sublime exploded. It’s the most important historical period for my book, because that’s when the sublime really became a modern concept. People discovered nature—the idea that nature itself is sublime, not just God or religion, but animals and the earth. It was a reaction against creeping banality and the worship of science. You had all this Gothic literature emerge because people wanted the mysterious and the superstitious.

My hope is that we’re coming out of something similar now. The Enlightenment wasn’t all bad—amazing things came out of it—but I hope we’re entering a moment where, in the next ten or twenty years, there will be a reaction like Romanticism or even the 1960s. Back then, people were fed up with the crushing banality of 1950s culture—Eisenhower, the “man in the gray flannel suit,” Madison Avenue. And then it exploded: hippies, flower power, psychedelics. These things move in waves. Maybe we’ll see a similar explosion again.

SA: We forget that this social media era is really just a twenty-year experiment, and the pendulums always swings. Right now, a handful of people: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, have enormous influence over how we experience the world. If they read your book and were genuinely moved by it, how do you think it might change the kinds of products and experiences they enable?

RG: I remember in the early years of the internet, in the early 2000s, there was a kind of excitement. It was new. Something very interesting was happening where, for example, I might be interested in a particular jazz artist and suddenly see a whole community of people interested in the same thing. You could connect and make friends. In the beginning, the internet wasn’t about making money or constantly manipulating people; it was about connecting and opening up the world. Billions of people were on the same level. It was fascinating.

Technology had the potential to be absolutely sublime. If you think about the internet itself, it is a completely sublime object. Look at Wikipedia—it’s sometimes inaccurate, but thousands of people are working on the same thing and discovering it together. It’s mind-blowing. The sublime, in the original concept, includes what Immanuel Kant called the “mathematical sublime”—the sense of infinity and timelessness, the idea that our consciousness can become aware of the universe. It’s a concept you can’t really put into words or analyze because it doesn’t fit into any category.

The internet is infinite. It’s an infinite space. It could be a realm for exploring and opening the mind. Instead, it has become a tool for closing the mind.

There’s an interesting mystical writer I’ve always loved named Gurdjieff, whom I use in the new book. He had this idea that when anything is created—a religion, a political idea—it has a sparkle to it. It’s fresh and connected to life. But as time passes, it loses that spark and often turns into its opposite. Christianity, for example—a religion of love with Christ as this incredible figure—turns into its opposite over time. The internet was one of those things.

SA: I’ve read a lot of the work by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, and one of the things he talks about is the the disappearance of rituals, and how transformative experiences often have boundaries, while the Internet is boundless. Right after this call, I’m hosting a fifteen-person Shabbat dinner at my home. I do it every Friday—it’s a ritual that gives my life meaning.

It makes me wonder: can technology be designed to create that kind of meaningful structure? Or is this the inevitable end state of American Capitalism and products shaped by the logic of markets and attention?

RG: Well, the thing is, I try to avoid turning the sublime into an abstract intellectual concept in the book. The sublime is an experience. It’s an experience of the world, not an idea. Because we live in all these abstractions, we’re so left-brain oriented—it’s all words and language. The sublime takes you out of that; it’s emotional.

The neuroscience of the sublime is very interesting. They’ve been able to map the sensation of awe and look at the brain as it happens. The sensation originates from the most primitive parts of the brain—emotional things you can’t really control. Then the cognitive side, the neocortex, sees that and starts analyzing it. In the combination of those two things, you have a sublime moment.

If I were to design technology like that, I’d want people to not be so passive. I’d want an app that makes you have an experience—hopefully a social one where you’re meeting people, like the internet used to do. I hope I’m not sounding too egotistical here, but if you took some of the things in my book and tried to make something where people could actually experience them, it would be powerful.

At the end of each of the twelve chapters, I have a section called “The Sublime Experience” where I give you exercises to bring this into your life. You walk around and look at the world a certain way, or you sit in a room and imagine certain things. I think I have about fifty of these exercises in the whole book. You could turn those into some kind of application. Instead of people passively consuming, I want them to have an active experience. If you could do that with technology, it would be wonderful. It’s very possible.

SA: We’ll get to some of the examples in your book, but before that I want to get into your views on AI.

RG: Everything is a tool. The internet is a tool; a hammer is a tool. A hammer can be used to build a beautiful home, or it can be used to kill somebody by clobbering them on the head. AI is a tool. I’ve used it myself—if there’s a quote I vaguely remember by some philosopher that I’d never find in the chaos of my office, I type in a few words and it comes up. It’s like magic. It’s insane.

SA: It’s sublime. I think the human-AI encounter itself—if you remove the fear of job loss and the existential anxiety around it—is sublime. It’s a miracle that we’ve made this.

RG: Yeah, but of course, like everything else, it reaches into the dark side of human psychology. And that, unfortunately, can be very frightening. I’m about to give a talk in a few days about how AI is going to completely disrupt the world economically. The people running it don’t have a great deal of responsibility; they’re under immense pressure to make money. It’s a capitalistic culture, and they’ve invested incredible sums of energy—literally energy, environmentally—so they’re under pressure to see a return. Because of that, they’re going to do things I don’t think are socially or humanly responsible. It could be dangerous.

On the other hand, the human brain is the most sublime organ of all. It’s more sublime than AI or the internet. Those things are simply reflections of the human brain. Our complexity is through the roof. Some neuroscientists have said nothing in the universe comes close to the complexity of the brain—the neurons, the connectivity, the infinite connections that can be made. Look at what we’ve done in a very short period of time, evolutionarily speaking. In 80,000 years, we’ve transformed ourselves into this.

It is the human brain that is so immense. When I talk about that intuitive mastery level, it concerns me that if young people aren’t learning to think or use their brains—if they become lazy because of AI—that is very dangerous. I don’t want to make out as if the past was always rosy, but I think of this example: My major in college was Classics, probably the least practical major you can have. I remember a crash course in Ancient Greek where we had to translate a paragraph by Thucydides. It took me a day and a half to translate that one paragraph. It was so frustrating; it drove me crazy. But it made me think. It made me develop patience. It made me realize that if I focus deeply, I’ll get there. It was a wonderful feeling. If you’re translating everything through AI and not learning a language, the brain will rot. Maybe it will develop in some other area, but I’m worried about the laziness it will infuse into our cognitive powers.

SA: Yeah, technology is neither good nor bad; it depends on what you do with it. I’ve used AI to think better, but I’ve also used it to outsource my thinking. In your view, how much of reclaiming the sublime is an individual responsibility versus requiring a collective shift?

RG: It’s up to you. No government or company is going to give you a sublime experience. It’s up to you to do that. If you take a bit of information from AI that is remarkable or miraculous and it makes you think—it makes your mind active—that’s fine. The mind can either be still or active; you can either consume “crap” passively or your mind can be tingling and moving. If you use that information to think, that is sublime. But I’m afraid that because humans are naturally lazy and tend to take the path of least resistance, it will have the opposite effect. I hope I’m wrong, but knowing human nature, the opposite could very well happen.

SA: I can imagine two possible futures. In one, we become more machine-like, and this “god” we’ve created simply raises expectations—making us busier and more disconnected from the sublime. In another, if people have the kind of intellectual freedom you have, AI could actually help them think more deeply and access that part of themselves. It feels like it could go either way.

RG: Very much so. People think too much about the technology; it’s really about the consciousness that interacts with it. If human consciousness blossoms and expands in the next few decades, it will use AI for those purposes.

As someone who reads a lot of history, I can’t say this is just a downward slide. There are moments where it goes down and then bounces back up. My hope is that young people—who drive change in this world, not dinosaurs like myself—are going to feel so bereft of experience and so bored with the culture the Boomers have fed them that they’re going to rebel. Youthful rebellion is a beautiful thing. We need it desperately right now. If that happens, there could be a new level of consciousness where people realize we need more experience and open minds.

Science is providing the tools for this. Neuroscience is fascinating; we’re delving into our own brains and uncovering things that are scary but also amazing. If we take what science is giving us, it could lead to an explosion of the sublime. I remember reading about the evolution of life—understanding that three billion years ago, there was just bacteria in the ocean. You follow the evolution, the extinctions, the moments where new creatures evolved, and you can’t believe we’re here.

If an asteroid hadn’t struck Earth at the exact angle it did 60 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be here. Because of that cataclysm, mammals could evolve and become dominant. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be talking to you; there would be pterodactyls in the sky. We live in a world suffused with this knowledge, yet it’s not affecting people. In one chapter, I mention that if we actually thought about how unlikely it is that you, Sari, exist—with all the things that happened in evolution and your parents meeting—we would be building temples and synagogues just to worship the fact that we’re here. Science might be destroying the planet on one hand, but on the other, it could be expanding our consciousness.

SA: You said something that resonated with me: technology doesn’t change the world—people do, depending on the consciousness they bring to it. It often feels that everything is available today, yet nothing feels profound.

I grew up in a small city in Colombia called Barranquilla, and I remember discovering TED talks and the internet when I was about twelve. If you had told me then that one day I’d carry a device in my pocket that could answer any question and connect me with anyone, I wouldn’t have believed you. And yet here we are, and it feels like our consciousness hasn’t caught up to the technology.

Your book feels like a spiritual wake-up call, and I appreciate that you are trying to make it practical. What are some practices people can bring into their daily lives?

RG: Some of it is as simple as taking a walk and changing how you look at the world, because the sublime is a perceptual thing. It’s how you look at the world—it’s not that the things themselves are sublime, but our brain and our consciousness are aware of them. A lot of it involves walking around and looking at things as they are, divorced from the words we associate with them.

If you look at a tree and don’t think of the word “tree,” you see this giant thing springing up out of the ground from nothing with all these leaves on top. What is this weird thing? It’s very strange. Or you look at the sky and see clouds—and you don’t think of the word “clouds,” but you just see the thing itself: these fleecy white things against a blue sky. They’re weird, they’re insane, they’re strange. There’s probably no other planet in the universe where people see clouds quite like this.

Most people don’t truly “see” the things around them. So many of the exercises are about changing perception. I’m also trying to get you to move away from these values where some things are worth looking at and others aren’t. I’m trying to get you to think that everything is equal. That’s one of the exercises: ants are as interesting as people; dog excrement on the ground is as interesting as a beautiful building. It’s all the same level. If you get rid of all your judgments and gradations of what’s “great” and just see the whole thing on the same plane, that changes everything.

SA: The first one you described is exactly how my four-year-old experiences the world. When we walk into a room, he finds everything fascinating. Meanwhile, I’m in an efficiency mindset, just trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible.

RG: Well, one of the twelve chapters is about the “Childhood Sublime.” One reason we’re aware of the sublime—and why we’re so miserable sometimes—is that we remember when we were two or three years old and our minds were different. Everything was new and exciting. We weren’t experiencing the world through words; we were seeing things as they are for the first time. In the back of our minds, we know we had that and lost it, which makes us very depressed.

In that chapter, I explain how you can reclaim it. You can re-experience your childhood—not through some magic, but by recreating how children see the world. It’s a capacity you have; great artists are capable of it. I talk about Vladimir Nabokov, who was obsessed with his childhood because he was separated from Russia and couldn’t return. He went so deep into the experience that he saw the world through the eyes of a child. Childhood is our first real experience of the sublime. Because you were pre-verbal, you experienced the world directly and immediately.

In the last chapter on death, I have an exercise that’s a little frightening where I try to make you experience your own dying. Because I’ve researched it and lived it, I know what happens to the brain and body as things start dissolving. I try to take you through that process as you lie on the floor and feel yourself dying. Then, at the point where it’s “gone,” I ask you to walk outside as if you’re a ghost—as if you’ve been granted one last walk. This is the last time I’m going to see the sky; this is the last time I’m going to see a bird. Suddenly, things look very different. I’m trying to move death away from being an abstract, boring philosophical discussion and show that it is a physical and spiritual experience. You’re conscious as you’re dying—at least some people are—and it is an awesome, amazing experience.

I talk about Carl Jung, who had a near-death experience in the 40s. He describes it in such beautiful detail. He says he experienced death from the inside, and it’s not the same as death from the outside. From the outside, it looks like you’re just dying, but from the inside, you’re being reborn. I’m trying to give you that sensation. I don’t know if I succeeded, but that was my goal with that exercise.

SA: You’ve been writing this book for seven years. How did writing it change you? More specifically, how did it change your ability to experience the sublime?

RG: It was an insanely arduous process. I can’t begin to describe it to you because I could not type—and I’ve been a fast typist since I was nine years old. How do you write a book without typing? I had to hand-write everything. It was really difficult. I’d have to dictate it into the computer, print it out, edit it by hand, and then dictate it again. I was trying to be inspired while dealing with all these physical limitations.

When I first thought of writing the book twenty years ago, I was going to go to the Gobi Desert, the Amazon, and swim with dolphins. I was going to have all these experiences and write about them. But now I’m writing the book and I can’t do any of that. I can’t even take a hike to clear my mind. I’m trapped in this room.

That was a blessing in disguise because it made me realize the reader also has limitations. How can you experience the sublime when you can’t travel? When you’re in Brooklyn and it’s snowing and ugly and dark? I had to experience that sitting in my office. I had to experience it watching my cat and looking into his eyes. I had to go into my backyard and just sit in a chair, looking at the nature I had right there, not up in the mountains. It changed me because to make the book exciting, I had to transform myself so I could feel the sublime in everyday things.

SA: That is very very inspiring. I can’t tell you how excited I am to read this book. It feels to me like we are re-entering the age of the sublime.

RG: Well, maybe when it comes out, we’ll revisit this. Thank you, Sari. I really enjoyed it.

Sublime Premium members make conversations like this possible. Consider upgrading?

Elan writes the newsletter Escape the Algorithm and teaches a course by the same name at the University of Pennsylvania, where he helps students explore what creativity looks like outside the gravitational pull of feeds and metrics.

We are always looking to collaborate with people who have a certain Sublime “-ness”. Elan is very much one of them.

This edition is brought to you by Squarespace.

If you want a personal or professional home for your ideas that isn’t entirely dependent on “The Algorithm,” may I suggest you build yourself two foundations:

1. Sublime to deepen your thinking.

2. Squarespace to present it with intention.

A workshop and a gallery, if you will ;)

You can view a draft of my personal site here. It’s pretty bare bones, but Squarespace has a whole universe of features I intend to explore… you can sell products, make yourself findable with SEO tweaks, add emails flows, and more. That’s the nice thing about having your own corner of the web: you can do whatever you want with it.

If you need a personal website, portfolio, or storefront, Squarespace is perfect.

Click here to try it out, and when you’re ready, use code SUBLIME to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

In today’s conversation, speaks to the writer, illustrator, and cartoonist , whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Buzzfeed. Amongst other things, she discusses the emotional rollercoaster of making art on the internet, the rise and fall of Instagram for artists, and what happens when a creative project succeeds as a vision but fails as a business.

You can find a full collection of resources mentioned and highlights from this conversation in this Sublime collection.

What would you say is your relationship with “The Algorithm?”

My first thought is resentment that teeters into begrudging acceptance, similar to my relationship with reality. It just is. There have been times I’ve benefited from the algorithm, and times it’s rendered me nearly invisible. Seeing myself in relation to it can be very frustrating — like banging your head against a wall — because I don’t want to tailor my work to an algorithm.

At times I’ve felt like I’m making work in a vacuum and having identity crises, but it’s also been a reminder to focus on the work and focus on art as communication. 2011–2015 on Instagram felt like a golden period. I was supported at a time when I was a young, fragile artist. Maybe it was the lack of an algorithm. My work got seen, I got a platform, and then around 2017–2018 it plummeted and has kept plummeting. I’m making the same work, I’m the same artist. I’ll post a drawing and twenty people will see it out of 100,000 followers.

I’ve heard you say that when you publish something, you’re frightened by your own desperation for approval. Does that still resonate, and has it dissipated or been heightened by being less visible online?

I don’t remember saying that, but it’s true. This gets complicated quickly. In 2022–2023 I stopped sharing much of my work and turned inward. It felt like silence and invisibility.

More recently I’ve come out of that through Substack: sharing work in a new place, with a new algorithm. It isn’t as simple as “I just have to believe in myself and that’s enough.” I literally made a mirror behind me that says “I believe in you.” I was trying to summon self-belief, but that doesn’t capture communication.

The desperation for approval is the frothy top layer: “I hope people like it.” Beneath that is a deep desire for communication, community, and understanding. If I were the last person on Earth, maybe I’d still make art, but it wouldn’t be the same. There’s an essential ingredient: expressing something and having it be witnessed by others, having people say, “I see that too.”

On the old Instagram, the wheel would get a full rotation: it’s out of me, it has a life, someone tells me what it meant to them or it made them laugh. That’s a huge reason I make art. It isn’t fully done without that.

I want an audience. The idea that it’s only about belief, likes, and approval is one piece of something bigger: wanting my work to be part of a wider conversation. My lesson from Instagram is to hold platforms loosely. If the audience dips, don’t let that stop you. It’s jarring to go from thousands of likes to twenty, deep into your career, but it isn’t personal.

We’ll probably leapfrog platforms forever. I’ll be shocked if Substack doesn’t enshittify. The question is how to protect your work from someone else controlling the applause button. Making work through the ups and downs of algorithms has strengthened my resolve. I turned inward for years; it all lived in sketchbooks. Then I shared again. That’s part of it.

When I emailed you about talking about something meaningful that failed in the marketplace of online attention, you immediately knew you wanted to talk about Halmart. Can you tell me how that project got started?

I believe it was 2021. I’d been running an online shop for years. I used a basic local printer; I did little projects: pet portraits, and I got an ID card printer like a gym uses and printed “artistic licenses,” little licenses to make art. The shop was a repository for ideas, and it started making enough money that I sat up and thought: I’m barely trying and it’s working. I thought what if I tried? It was easy, and I saw that as a problem. I wondered if I had other ideas I’d never realized. So I closed my shop for a year and built a new iteration: Halmart.

It was everything I dreamed, and it was really hard. I engineered physical objects. I made a “now” clock that ticks and every number says “now.” The work was enormous: talking to clock parts people in Canada, and multiplying that by every product. I made pillowcases, the mirror, found a printer for archival-quality prints. I made everything the most beautiful version it could be.

The website was a masterpiece: I worked with my friend Jesse Vaughan. I wrote and co-directed two infomercials, went to prop houses, got friends to act. I can’t describe how much work it was. I didn’t linger on the fact that the shop would launch and then I’d have to run a shop. But it was satisfying to make things real — to turn sketches into objects and share them with the world.

Other than the income, what would the shop succeeding have represented to you?

It was an online representation of myself that was glossy: the best, most colorful, fun, beautifully photographed, silly version of me. I’m amazed by people with tailored online presences. I’ve always been scrappier: my website is ten years old and I haven’t updated it. Things don’t match, I draw in different styles, I don’t have uniformity. The shop was like: “This is Halmart, I am Hallie, look how cute.”

But that isn’t me. The thing I took for granted — my old store where I’d say, “I got a gym ID printer and I’m making cards” — was more me. I’m proud of what I made with Halmart, but it was me wanting to see myself as fully realized.

You told me that when you showed people products in person, they said they’d buy them, but when you launched the shop, most of them didn’t.

I thought two things. First, the boom in 2021… we all had pandemic bonuses. It was a famously spendy time. I didn’t clock that. I thought: I have a lot of potential.

Second, I was enticed by realizing a vision. I clicked into that zone. I made choices like nicer paper, even if it cost more. I wanted to be a fancy artist lady people pay a lot for, because everyone says, “You’re worth it! Charge more!” I still see influencer videos about undercharging.

But I tried the fancy version and it didn’t work. People didn’t want the nicer thing. They wanted the $25 print they can tape to the wall. The artisanal, museum-quality thing satisfied me, but I was trying to value my work in a different way, shepherd it into an era where I’d be more valued.

Then launch happens, and suddenly I’m a girl who runs a shop. Then there’s more product. I realized how constant the promotion is. Constant.

Do these platforms position your work in a way that makes people expect cheap work or cheap prices?

I don’t think it’s necessarily my work, but I do fall into “commercial artist.”

I’ve never been in the fine art world. Even when I make drawings without words, they resonate less. I put original drawings and paintings on my site and thought: why shouldn’t this be $500? Other people do that. But essentially, I’m a commercial artist, and most things are cheap now. If someone can go to Society6 and get a $15 print from an amazing artist, why would they buy mine? They don’t care about paper or museum quality.

Expectations sometimes get set for you. You can try to steer yourself into a different category. I was exploring: can I control this, can I declare value? Someone thinks something looks like a child drew it; someone else thinks it’s an original David Shrigley worth $15,000. It’s all made up, so why couldn’t I do that?

When I priced my shop, I tried to resist undervaluing my work. I asked: if I walked into a fancy gallery and saw this, what would I pay? That painting behind me is by Esther Pearl Watson: amazing illustrator, zine-world cartoonist, makes books. She’s in galleries now. Why not me? I was pushing myself in that direction and learning lessons.

Are you saying putting your work on Instagram makes people not see you as a fine artist, or is it about how Instagram’s algorithm sees you compared to fine artists?

My impression from fine artists I follow is consistency and restraint. It doesn’t seem confessional. It isn’t a place where you post videos talking about personal stuff. I’ve talked about personal stuff.

I remember talking to a friend who went to art school for painting. She said fine art is about the art but also a lot of branding. One teacher told students to pick a haircut and stick with it so you’re recognizable.

My art doesn’t look the same; I change my hair. When I created Halmart and tried to contain myself in a beautiful box, I was valuing traits I don’t have. Looking back, what I want to take forward is that ease isn’t a problem. When you’re gifted at something, it feels easy and you take it for granted. You start thinking struggle indicates quality.

Now I try to notice where the water flows — where energy naturally pours. When I created Halmart and told myself “try so hard,” everything was a struggle. You tell yourself you’re glad you did it, because otherwise you’d explode.

What happened to the shop?

I decided to close it in summer 2023, right around the time I got pregnant with my twins. I could have kept running it. I ran it for around six months, and I felt completely run down by posting: buy this, link to this. That felt awful, and it didn’t feel like communication. I felt like I was selling to my audience. I wanted it to be worth it, wanted it to succeed, but I didn’t want to do the work to make it succeed.

How did it feel to shut it down?

Such a relief. I’m happy about how quickly I stepped aside. As soon as it clicked that I didn’t want to be a shop proprietor — that it’s a full-time job suited for a different type of artist — I was done. I felt bad because I looped in people who helped me but I had to say: I was wrong about my dream. I didn’t want it.

That’s why it isn’t simple to call it a failure. Did it sell amazingly? No. Did I also not want to do it? Yes. I like the making part. I want that to be most of my work. I didn’t fully understand that when you have a shop, your main work is selling; the rest becomes frustrating gridlock.

If there was a failure, maybe it was in the fact that you created an idea of yourself that you didn’t want to inhabit for longer than six months.

Yeah. I’m good at making art. I’m okay at sharing it and sometimes selling it. With books, the book finds its audience if there’s one there. That tells you something. The book I’ve made that’s most successful is What to Do When I’m Gone with my mom in 2018. It has had a long life. I know because I hear from people: “I give this book to everyone.” I made the work, and it just reaches people. I’m not posting every day on Instagram.

Moving forward, I want to make work that matters to me and tell stories that matter to me. The work is at my desk, giving myself space to write and draw, having conversations and sketching. That is the work.

One of the things available in Halmart was a print of your “It’s a Miracle We Ever Met” illustration. Can you tell the story of the genesis of that?

When I’ve talked about it, sometimes I say it’s about everyone I’ve ever loved. I don’t have one memory associated with it, but I remember being with my little brother Nick on his birthday one year, sitting by the ocean, thinking: I can’t believe how crazy it is that we’re from the same family that out of everything, out of a bajillion sperms and eggs, it’s the two of us, and we’re hanging out. I don’t know where the image came from. Sometimes stuff drops into your hand or sketchbook. I didn’t set out to make it; it appeared.

Sometimes I’ll make a new friend and I’ll give it to them. It does feel astonishing to connect with anyone in this world. The rarity can be taken for granted, and it felt nice to visualize that.

I’ve seen many versions of the illustration in the wild: low-resolution screenshots of screenshots. Some that are copycats, the same illustration with different captions. Knockoff illustration with the same caption. People tattooing it on themselves. How does it feel to see your work become a meme?

I don’t think anyone’s asked me in this way. It’s interesting because I just described it as something that showed up, and it’s cool to reflect on that.

For the first few years, as it started to run away from me, I was reactive. I remember around 2019, Deepak Chopra’s Instagram posted it without credit. I got upset. I’d link to them, people would pile on and shame them. I was trying to hold on to it. I’m not saying “everyone go steal it,” but there’s a point where someone will DM me saying something’s a rip-off, and I’ll say: whatever. It was so long ago; I’m making new work now.

It’s crazy that something I made resonated so much that someone got it tattooed all over their body without having any idea that I made it. Would I love credit? Sure. But spending my current moments guard-dogging old work is not the best use of my time. It’s nice when someone can connect and find my other work. My job is to focus on what I’m making. I’ve done my time pearl-clutching that the internet is a garbage heap. I’ll just make some new garbage.

I’m obsessed with the idea of this illustration as a commentary on itself: it’s a miracle that it finds anyone, given the sheer magnitude of all that exists online. There are two ways to greet that miracle: with awe at the attention and labor that went into it, or by shrugging it off as unexplainable and contextless.

When I said earlier that one lesson of Halmart is holding things lightly, letting things have ease, paying attention to resistance… have you heard of Bread and Puppet? It’s a Vermont-based activist puppet theater. I learned about it recently and saw them perform in Cincinnati. It was in a big church; tons of families; donation-based. They performed with huge puppets, a dragon filling the room. We got a $2 print of the Cheap Art Manifesto:

When I’m sitting there thinking, am I fancy enough, am I worth this or that, I’m participating in “art as business.” Any time I’ve slipped deep into the business side, it’s been miserable. That said, it’s a privilege to not be hustling for money.

But I like the Bread and Puppet ethos. That’s why I don’t charge for my Substack. I feel honored that anyone spends time with my work. What I value most right now isn’t money — it’s communication, community, shared understanding. After years of being contained in my sketchbooks because Instagram was so inhospitable, I crave communication. Even you writing to have this conversation is an example: I want to share reality together. I crave that more than anything right now.

These days, you can support Hallie’s work by subscribing to her free weekly newsletter HALMAIL, by following her on Instagram, and buying her books or prints. Also, she’s teaching a micro-memoir retreat in Spain this fall! And there are still a few spots available.

You can follow more of Elan Ullendorff’s work by subscribing to Escape the Algorithm.

If you want a personal or professional home for your ideas that isn’t entirely dependent on “The Feed,” may I suggest you build yourself two foundations:

1. Sublime to deepen your thinking.

2. Squarespace to present it with intention.

A workshop and a gallery, if you will ;)

I put together a draft of my own personal site last night, which you can view here. It’s pretty bare bones, but Squarespace has a whole universe of features I intend to explore… you can sell products, make yourself findable with SEO tweaks, add emails flows, and more. That’s the nice thing about having your own corner of the web: you can do whatever you want with it.

If you need a personal website, portfolio, or storefront, Squarespace is perfect.

Click here to try it out, and when you’re ready, use code SUBLIME to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Welcome to another edition of “What’s in the Cards?” where we share 10 things that made us go whoa:

1. This Joni Mitchell cover song, my God!! Prince also did an incredible cover of this song.

2. I like this definition of intelligence: “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” It follows then that “AI fails it instantly because an AI doesn’t want anything out of life. AI’s desires are programmed by the human controlling it.”
   
   *Moment captured using Podcast Magic. If you tried it months ago, it’s way better now. Podcast Magic is a one-time $20 payment for unlimited moments. This is early believer pricing. You can upgrade here.

   

3. Had to read this one several times to understand it, but wow, Tina is such a gifted writer. She manages to do several things in this piece: explain how modern AI training works, use that as a metaphor for different kinds of human minds, and turn it into a spiritual question about what we’re optimizing for.

   Fakepixels

   Pre, Mid, Post-Training Way of Life

   "For here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life…

   Read more

   6 months ago · 48 likes · Tina He

4. Sublime’s target audience:

   

5. The new Mumford & Sons album, which my friend described as Blockbuster bluegrass that still feels played from the front porch. You can hear the miles on his voice.

6. Option 3.: Consider the possibility that building the next phase of your career around the fear of getting left behind might be a really bad basis for producing the kind of work people will want to pay you for.

7. This but Delaware franchise taxes are due today.

8. A theory about nostalgia. Pair with this note from Tammy Winter and this one from Adam Mastroianni.

   

9. You can focus on your art. Or you can focus on the space, narrative, and marketing for your art. Don’t sleep on the latter.

10. Love a good 2x2 chart. Here’s a collection of more.

    

For Premium members below the paywall—a sneak peek + invitation to beta test a new way I’ve been thinking with my library.

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1. Last week’s event with Lucas Crespo on building a brand identity using your taste + AI absolutely delivered. Members, scroll down to get the recording + assets.

2. Gabriel and I will be at Plant the Future in Miami this coming Tuesday from 11am-2pm. If you’re around, stop by for complimentary tea, a peek at what we’re working on at Sublime, and a chance to give feedback / hang with us!

Some brief thoughts on starting a company/project in these insane times.

I kept this draft open throughout the week and every time I read the bullets from the day before I wasn’t sure I agreed anymore. It’s a confusing time to be a person. Tell me some of you also feel this way?

• Every decision is a tradeoff.
  
  The people who love Sublime love that we’re not pushy, it’s there when they need it, respects their attention, and doesn’t beg to be opened. But the people who wish they used it more say they forget it exists.
  
  Give this data to ten founders and they’ll make ten different choices. One adds streaks, push notifications, daily reminders. Another looks at the same data and says: the reason our best users love us is because we don’t do that. You can rationalize any path.
  
  I really love this from Axel Dumas, the CEO of Hermes: Strategy is accepting that you are doing something better than the other and the other is doing something better than you. You have to pick your fight.

• Small is hard. Big is hard.
  
  They’re just hard in different ways. Being small means you have to defer ideas you’re excited about. You go slower. You realize doing something well takes almost the same energy whether ten people see it or ten million. But being small also means we can do things simply because they feel right. We can make candles. Send emails like this. There’s no ego. No decisions by committee. In life and business, you don’t get no constraints. You choose your constraints.

• Self-doubt kills more ideas than competition or lack of funding ever will. If you want to make the world a better place, tell someone building something you love you believe in them.

• AI has made a lot of parts of building a company easier. It’s also made other parts harder.
  
  I can upload a CSV and get data in ten minutes that used to require a full-time data analyst. I can ramble into ChatGPT for ten minutes about a feature idea and end up with a coherent PRD in Linear. But these things are easier for everyone else too.
  
  The hard parts are still stubbornly human: deciding what is worth doing, inspiring people to care, the last mile of building high craft products, the slow work of building a community. The people-y things.

• Two conflicting perspectives I’m trying to reconcile: having a clear vision is critical, but the difference between success and failure is usually in getting a thousand unsexy details right. It’s tempting for founders to see problems as strategy problems when they’re really execution problems. I’d rather be thinking about where Sublime is going in five years than why a tweet didn’t embed right.
  
  The emotional range of going from “what is our reason for existing” to “this button is in the wrong place” is its own special kind of vertigo. I think this might be The Skill? Balancing thinking big with executing small.

• Regrettably, the founder-as-influencer thing works.
  
  I don’t know if this is true for all products, but a meaningful share of how people discover Sublime is through my podcast appearances, long-form writing, and talks.
  
  The part that frustrates me isn’t being public. What I struggle with is the cadence. The things I want to say and make take time. I don’t want to hit “send” on something and immediately cringe because it doesn’t feel like me. I don’t want more stuff that’s here today and gone tomorrow.
  
  I haven’t yet found a satisfying way to bridge the content creation demands of running a modern business with a pace that suits my sanity. I worry about “work hard on something you love” metastasizing into “work hard to keep pace with the machine.”
  
  I’ve come to accept the trade-off: slower (albeit more durable) growth in exchange for not hating what we put out into the world.

• I keep seeing some version of: why would I pay for software if I can just prompt it myself?
  
  Every hype cycle produces a lot of hot takes and confident predictions. This has the same energy as “everyone will 3D-print everything at home.” People underestimate how hard it is to build software that works reliably, handles edge cases, feels intuitive, earns trust, and carries real weight.
  
  What I think will happen is the bar for software will rise. Single purpose tools will fall out of favor. Increasingly, people will expect their software to work as a system, not a collection of disjointed tools.
  
  Nobody wants just a bookmarking tool. They want to save the things that moved them, find them again when it matters, put them to work in a creative project, and stumble upon something new and interesting along the way.
  
  Right now, people are duct taping different tools—read here, save there, think about it somewhere else, google it again three weeks later. The software that survives this era will be the one that eliminates the need for five others. The irony is that while everyone is talking about how easy it is to build software now, those actually building software are finding it harder because the bar is higher.

• Becoming comprehensible is the single biggest challenge for anyone building anything today.
  
  The limiting factor isn’t what is technically possible, but what people can absorb and understand, with the time and attention they are giving you. Being comprehensible is highly context dependent, which makes problems of comprehensibility much harder. What someone has tried before. What’s broken for them. What problems they’re carrying. What they’re ready to see. There’s no one clean, correct version of an idea that will make it click. The distilled version that sticks for you isn’t the same that sticks for me.
  
  This is also the bind: the most valuable thing you can build is a system, but the easiest thing to explain is a single-purpose tool.

  
  

• I think companies will tell you what they want to be if you listen.
  
  Sublime wants to be an independent, boutique software tool + membership for people who care about ideas, creativity and craft. The quirky mix of software, events, zines, etc… it feels very us.
  
  People who know me say this is the most me thing I could be doing. Carve out our lane and chill? It sounds funny but I think it’s a sensible business strategy? Why compete to be the best when you can be the only?
  
  Here’s Forest and Mike after this week’s event on building a brand identity using your taste + AI (no slop allowed):

  

  

If you made it this far and you’ve been orbiting Sublime for months (years?), what are you waiting for? A Sublime annual membership costs less than the two lukewarm Uber Eats sandwiches you definitely could have made at home.

For that, you get your own searchable library of every interesting thing you come across (essential if you make creative work for a living), a community-curated search engine that is not drowning in SEO garbage, and no-BS events with the most inspiring builders and creatives we know.

Just saying… this might be the most underpriced membership on the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Join here.

For members, below the paywall: the recording + assets of last week’s event with Lucas Crespo on How to Create a Brand Identity Using Your Taste + AI (No Slop Allowed).

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He reduced it to a single line:

Taste + AI = Impact

Here’s the chart I had made:

How cool it is to have someone truly listen, take in your story, and then help you simplify what it is you are really after.

Mental fog comes not from lack of insight but from an excess of it. Smart people are uniquely vulnerable to mistaking complexity for insight (… the ten page memo that could be one). Complexity drugs us with the illusion of wisdom.

Back to the formula…

Taste + AI = Impact

I think at the heart of it…that’s what I’ve been simmering on for years now.

A lot of people talk about AI as a productivity upgrade. Faster this. Faster that. But that framing has never clicked for me.

AI is powerful, but power without direction is like a hamster spinning on wheels without moving forward. Taste is how you wield these tools to create work that matters.

This is the future we are building toward.

We’ll keep building the best tool to help you curate a living library of inspiration, and actually do something with it. We’ll keep hosting events to learn how to wield AI with taste (and just as importantly, when not to use it).

At the end of the day, we still believe in aspiring to greatness. In measuring success by the quality of what we make, not the number of tasks completed.

~

For Sublime Premium members, below the paywall, the clip where Greg snaps this idea into focus.

Plus an invite to a live session with Lucas Crespo, one of the people I’m most drawn to using new tools to create aesthetics that feel alive and original. You’ll watch Lucas create a brand identity using a handful of references, and tools like Claude Code and Nanobanana.

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1. Unbelievable flow state and unbelievable sounds. I’m a happier, less anxious person after listening to this!!

   

   
   

2. is my favorite essayist on the internet right now. His essay on Text is King is great. This line was a favorite. (Bonus: I have a full curated collection on text as a medium here)

   

   
   
   

3. A provocative essay arguing that the anxiety around AI is concentrated in a specific, prestige-oriented class that values abstract, language-heavy thinking.

   

   
   

4. I agree, and would add the skills we think make us irreplaceable might not be the ones that actually do. A related essay I loved: Rizz is the new intelligence

   

5. “It has to be different, even if it’s worse” is a crazy sentence. Captured using Podcast Magic.

   

   
   
   

6. The incentives of the industry you’re in shape your mood.

   

   
   
   

7. 2026 Macro Trend Report by

   

   
   

8. An internet listening bar designed by Charlotte Taylor, and the Poolsuite team. Very cool project!

   

Plus, below the paywall, for Sublime Premium members: access to a private collection of great cold emails + an RSVP link to a session with next week on how to write an unignorable emails. We’ll write some together live!

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Today, we’re sharing an essay by longtime Sublime member and cultural strategist on resisting algorithmic sameness, excavating your own perspective, and treating research as a form of pattern disruption. While his work lives in the world of culture and trends, the ideas in this piece apply to anyone trying to think clearly about anything today.

idle gaze

Research as a form of pattern disruption

The industry of cultural futuregazing, once a niche subset of ‘coolhunters’ in the 90s, who began tracking street-born trends for brands, has evolved into a sprawling industry. This year alone, 135+ trend reports were published by tech companies, agencies and consultancies. Today, anyone with a TikTok account or Substack and a penchant for digital decod…

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5 months ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Alexi Gunner

It’s also a love letter to a slower way of thinking and to using Sublime <3.

If you’ve ever felt rushed to have an opinion before you were ready, this is for you.

Enjoy ;)

Research as a form of pattern disruption

There are more trend forecasters, futurists and TikTok oracles than ever. So why does our idea of the future still feel so devoid of nuance, inspiration and possibility?

By • JAN 15, 2026

The industry of cultural futuregazing, once a niche subset of ‘coolhunters’ in the 90s, who began tracking street-born trends for brands, has evolved into a sprawling industry. This year alone, 135+ trend reports were published by tech companies, agencies and consultancies. Today, anyone with a TikTok account or Substack and a penchant for digital decoding can become a trend forecaster. Some refer to it as a whole new class of content creators - what fashion search engine Lyst has coined ‘vibe analysts’: “info-influencers acting as digital spirit guides to the next big thing”.

Yet, despite this abundance of enthusiasm for cultural research, it often feels like it’s easier than ever to slip into the gravity well of banality. Cookie-cutter essays optimized for algorithmic engagement. Hot takes stripped of depth. Fleeting fads interpreted as extreme, paradigm-shifting hyperbole. We resort to dramatic binaries, either painting the future through the lens of stressful dystopias and exclusionary utopias.

The limitation of our vision is not due to insufficient data. Instead, what I think we’re missing is a sense of imagination, creativity, and genuine curiosity. Without these elements, the act of research itself has lost its potency, our findings and interpretations reduced to a shallow performance, where the same ideas are recycled and repackaged in an endless feedback loop.

In this essay, written in partnership with Sublime, my main personal knowledge management tool, I’ll share how I approach research as a form of pattern disruption, an intentional practice for breaking free from the hall of mirrors that traps so much of today’s trend forecasting. I’ll walk through how I use Sublime to collect, connect and create meaning from information in ways that resist the common shortfalls: confirmation bias, surface-level analysis, and the pressure for immediate answers. It’s an approach that embraces discomfort rather than absolute certainty, curiosity rather than conclusions. Fuelled by a desire to explore the unknown, to go down deeper rabbit holes, I believe the greatest research skill you can have is, indeed, “being a nosy b***h who wants to find out“.

Tuning in to weird signals

In the world of trend research, we are traditionally taught to be on the lookout for ‘weak signals’ - small, low-frequency indicators that hint at a potential shift in culture. And while scanning for these weak signals is a fundamental part of the process, it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of only noticing evidence that confirms our preconceived notions about the world. We develop tunnel vision, unconsciously conforming to the ideas and beliefs that dominate the zeitgeist of any given moment.

Instead, what I have trained myself to look for, more specifically, are ‘weird’ signals. Weird signals are behaviours and phenomena that feel strange or out of place. But importantly, they also tend to hint at unanticipated future cultural upheavals. As cultural futurist Jasmine Bina explains: “weird signals usually give us a glimpse into the future we can’t see yet. Every major cultural shift that changed our lives once started as a small anomaly in the system.”

It’s easy to avoid these uncomfortable anomalies, because they create cognitive dissonance. But by embracing discomfort and attuning ourselves to weird signals, we can begin to spot unexpected and alternative realities that are vastly different from our current day.

In William Gibson’s 2003 cyberpunk novel Pattern Recognition, the protagonist Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter and creative consultant, utilises her body’s visceral reaction to the world around her to detect irregularities and deviations. Like Pollard, spotting weird signals requires us to tune into our nervous system to cut through the noise to find glitches in the matrix, embracing the discomfort that comes with stumbling across the peculiar.

Glitches in the system, like punk birding groups, and luddite teenagers promoting self-liberation from social media and technology. ‘Or the rise of ‘homebars’ across China, designed to replicate the experience of living together with friends, and the emergence of study raves in Australia, helping students to focus through high-energy beats.

Weird signals can take the form of almost anything - snippets from articles and essays, images, social media content, a conversation on a podcast. Sometimes, it’s a strange meme that hints at an emerging shift in our collective mood, societal worries, and desires.

To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastination. Sometimes, it’s simply your mind telling you to follow your curiosity. Weirdness can present itself at any given moment, through any medium. When I see something, I instantly save it with the Sublime web extension. Or I use the Podcast Magic app to capture soundbites from interviews and podcasts. Like an eager digital forager, I highlight, screengrab, upload, and save with reckless abandon whenever strangeness presents itself.

Avoid algorithmic rabbit holes, because they will dull your exposure to weird signals and trap you in a bubble. To spot anomalies, you need to escape your Instagram feed and FYP page. Don’t let social media platforms shape how you see the world! A lot of work goes into manually curating my information feed. Read widely, and actively. Follow interesting researchers who publish on Substack. Lurk in the dark forest of Discord servers, where fringe conversations thrive.

When I’m foraging for signals, I don’t worry too much about organisation or classification. With Sublime, unlike other PKMs, you don’t have to incessantly tag it to find it later. With a solid AI search engine, it’s easy to find things you’ve previously saved. Instead of tags, I’ll intuitively create a collection for the signal that frames an initial hunch about whatever you’ve captured (or save it to an existing collection if an instant connection presents itself in your mind).

Spotting non-obvious connections

At regular intervals, I’ll return to my research on Sublime, to sort, reflect and connect. After all, collecting without connecting is just hoarding—a library full of signals collecting digital dust.

Traditionally, I’d use a variety of pre-defined tags to start to make sense of the signals. What sectors are involved? Psychographics? Relevant markets? Maturity level? Underlying need states?

I’ve often felt that this approach to organising research tends to guide you towards a more linear, stale way of making sense of trends. It funnels you towards drawing connections between similar signals, across interlocked domains in culture. Like uncovering a trend that encompasses food, drink and hospitality. Or identifying a new, emerging tech sector. Not wrong, or inaccurate. But perhaps a little obvious? And with so much homogeneous thinking out there on the future of culture, obvious holds little value.

With Sublime, instead of traditional tagging, I’ll curate research by specific questions or theses. Perhaps it’s a provocation, or a question I’m aiming to explore, or a shower thought about the future of culture. But it’s always based on an intention. Something specific I’m personally intrigued by, or niggling problem I’m trying to explore for a client.

What if we reintroduced more friction into society? Resolving the loneliness epidemic through third spaces. What comes after the hipster? The death of mystery.

Arranging research into these broader, more abstract themes encourages me to go non-linear, embracing expansive, freeform sense-making. Suddenly, it’s much easier to connect dots between vastly different areas of life to explore the defined intention. It invites me to find connections across a multitude of subcultures and demographics. Across both mainstream discourse and the experimental fringes of society. From highbrow and lowbrow culture (and everything in between).

There are also ways to tap into the wisdom of the crowd to find the non-obvious. ‘Save one idea, discover 100 related ones’ - Sublime’s discovery engine that shows you related cards in the Sublime database - helps me to uncover new ideas and quirky tangents related to my collections. Recently, a collection I’d built around the death and rebirth of nightlife unearthed a post exploring the rise of fluid, fragmented, and decentralized clubbing communities beyond the massive entertainment venues that have otherwise come to dominate nightlife worldwide. An idea was hand-saved by a real person, which sent me down an unexpected but wholly relevant rabbit hole.

Once I’ve gathered these disparate signals, and go from collecting to connecting, I need to work spatially, using mind-mapping tools. Usually, this is Miro or Figma, but recently it’s mostly happening in Sublime’s Canvas function, where I can automatically create boards that link to my collections. This is what makes Sublime unique compared to other typical bookmarking tools - there’s a seamless bridge between curating information and creating meaning, where I can automatically create boards from my collections, giving me space to draw arrows between information, scribble tangents, and cluster research. This way, I can make far more interesting connections and create coherent meaning from all the noise. It syncs up new cards added to the collection, so you can keep coming back to the board as the research grows.

Machines for breadth, human intuition for depth

Sean Monahan, co-founder of K-Hole and writer of the 8Ball newsletter, recently argued that, with the advent of AI, the human trend forecaster will become obsolete. I disagree. What I think will happen instead is that LLMs will raise the standards for our trend research. Machine and human sense-making operating in tandem, expanding what’s possible and helping us break free from our filter bubbles.

AI offers breadth - it aids me in cross-referencing unprecedented amounts of disparate information sources and millions of data points. With Sublime’s ‘Chat’ function, I’ll export particularly big collections to my LLM to kickstart the sense-making process, or when I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of research it contains.

Meanwhile, my own cultural intuition offers depth - it helps me to identify emotional nuance, uncovering unexpected angles to a trend. What’s the opposing force that exists in tension? What’s the uncomfortable angle that needs to be acknowledged? How would an outsider see this differently? What’s the destructive or distressing dimension?

Zoe Scaman calls this new breed of centaur analyst the ‘synthesized strategist’: “They wield AI like a sixth sense while maintaining razor-sharp human judgment. Most importantly, they’re masters of synthesis – weaving together insights from multiple domains, perspectives, and tools to forge clarity from complexity and light new paths forward.”

Resisting immediacy

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

In the art of stillness, Pico Iyer argued that in our madly accelerating world, there’s never been a greater need to slow down. There is a similar urgency for stillness in cultural research. We are living through an era where trend cycles move at hyper-speed, compressed into 24-hour cycles. Every day, there’s a new shiny fad, a new viral moment, flocks of forecasters and oracles eager to crown them with a new catchy title, in an attempt to drive engagement and visibility in the feed. Yet, these isolated spikes flatten the story and miss deeper patterns. As cultural theorist Matt Klein astutely points out, we are “conflating trends with what’s trending”.

The fact is, culture moves slowly. Sometimes, painfully so. What starts as an anomaly gradually accumulates into a pattern, eventually entering the mainstream zeitgeist itself. It’s these slower-moving undercurrents I’m interested in. The subtle drifts beneath the media hype cycle that fundamentally shape how we behave, connect, consume, and express ourselves. These currents only become visible over time, as signals accumulate and the ground beneath our feet shifts, almost imperceptibly.

A movement challenging people to go offline forever becomes part of a bigger story about the great rewilding. ‘Scream clubs’, at first seen as a quirky anomaly, shape up to become one of the many ways we fulfil a desire for collective catharsis. Purposefully dirty makeup, initially a temporary beauty fad, begins to tell a broader story about our exhaustion with the pressures of modern life.

In strategist Nikita Walia’s critique of TikTok oracles, she argues that cultural commentary today favours brevity, at the cost of depth, algorithmic performance over exploration, virality over rigor. All of which prioritize speed and instant output: “rather than a participatory culture that deepens understanding, we have one that accelerates interpretation at the expense of complexity, where discourse is less about discovery and more about domination.”

Amid this competition for algorithmic domination, where there is pressure to constantly decode and make meaning from the 24/7 internet hamster wheel, I have to remind myself to resist this manufactured immediacy. A PKM like Sublime helps me slow down and take a far more iterative, contemplative approach to cultural research by encouraging me to treat my collections as digital gardens.

When you think of your research as part of a digital garden, it’s less about solidifying and publishing thoughts across my Substack and client work as part of a linear process, in the hope of being the first to classify a cultural phenomenon. Instead, it becomes something far more slow, fluid and organic, where broader trends and undercurrents are continuously revised, and nurtured as the proof and signals grow over time. Deeper, more nuanced layers begin to reveal themselves, and a broader story takes shape.

My collections will evolve over time, as they grow. Many of them are now several years in the making, taking on new shapes and meaning. I also acknowledge that they may go through periods of rot and weeds, during which I must choose to actively prune irrelevant signals or change the direction of the collection entirely. I put time in my calendar once a month to tend to my gardens. In contrast to the usual frenzy of client work, the gardening feels mindful, quiet, reflective - a digital equivalent to touching grass.

Excavating your own perspective

There’s a quote saved in my Sublime library that I think about all the time: “research is the sacred ritual of excavating your own perspective”.

Ultimately, this is the end goal of my cultural research. It’s chipping away at all the chaos, uncertainty, and mystery, tuning into weird signals, making non-obvious and expansive connections across a multitude of domains. It’s about embracing a slower sense of reflection, until a path forward begins to illuminate itself. A vision of a new potential future that feels vastly different than our current reality. Not shaped by the echo chambers of the internet, but one that has taken shape through my own process of self-discovery.

2025 was the year everything became available, and almost nothing felt meaningful.

So I thought what better way to start the year than to ask: What did you encounter in 2025 that truly moved you?

We asked 33 of our favorite people this question.

Share yours in the comments!
Or add it to this community Sublime collection.

P.S. If Sublime has been a place you return to, I mentioned in my end-of-year video that the Founder’s pricing on the Lifetime plan is live for a few more weeks. Get 25% off with code LASTCHANCE.

What did you encounter this year that truly moved you?

Escaping Flatland

The third chair

From Ivan’s Childhood (1962) by Andrei Tarkovsky…

Read more

2 years ago · 436 likes · 24 comments · Henrik Karlsson

The third chair by . It’s a short (~400-words), beautiful story of Henrik returning to the place he long persevered—through doubt, despair, loneliness—in doing the work which brought the circumstances of his current life into existence.

It surfaced memories of my own past and, with them, a gratitude toward my previous selves I hadn’t felt before. And then the last line—it made my arm hairs stand up. It’s so good. It resists the writerly urge to overly explain or spell out the takeaway, and trusts that the reader will pick up what he’s putting down.

—Billy Oppenheimer (a researcher and writer who works closely with Rick Rubin and Ryan Holiday)

“U2 + Gospel Choir - I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”

—Nicole Ripka, Collab Fund

Rats from Rocks

Mother

Why do you want to write about your mother…

Read more

2 years ago · 219 likes · 81 comments · Mills Baker

One of my favorite essays of the year was this one from the inimitable —an homage to his late mother:

My mother could be reduced only to the scale of climate: you could not call her the sun or the rain or an ice storm or a hurricane, and nothing anyone has calculated or computed would generate accurate predictions about her. I think it’s fair to say that no one ever knew her, which made many want to. [...] ​Like me, she was very good in a crisis and very bad on a typical weekday; I believe it was she who introduced me to Walker Percy, even taking me to Covington to see where he lived, and he was well-aware of this reality: “It is easier to survive a category five hurricane than it is to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.” My mother was defeated by Wednesdays.

— , writer

Shrek Retold (2018) I’ve heard the lore, but never watched it until recently.

Shrek Retold is a full re-creation of Shrek by 200 storytellers, each recreating a snippet of the movie in their own style.

An impressive feat in itself, for me, the film put cooperation and creativity on full display. You can just do things. Especially fun things. Especially unnecessary things. And especially together.

—,

Would you laugh at me if I said Heated Rivalry? I think there was something freeing about watching something so earnest.

—, meme artist at Nostalgia Express

I'm a lifelong Paul Simon fan and saw him live for the first time last July in Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. He played his latest album, 7 Psalms, straight through. It's a lovely, meditative, seeking composition - his "death" album.

Then he played the hits. There was a special energy in the building. Paul Simon is 84 years old. Everyone including him knew we were seeing him for the last time. He was small and frail and sang like an angel.

He played a generous four song encore that ended with Sound of Silence. We gave him a standing ovation that lasted forever. We poured our love out to him, thanking him for a lifetime of music that has come to feel like an old friend.

The entire night was magical and life-affirming. (And the small serving of mushrooms didn't dampen my emotions...).

—Ben Springwater, founder of Matter and Halo

“Four Talks” by Laurie Anderson at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. A full room installation in which every surface is painted on with wisdom/provocative jokes. Monumental in terms of actual size, as well as the three-dimensional way it represents an artist’s brain. What it can/look/feel/be like when you let go into the dream. At the complete other end of the spectrum I think about “Guitar” by Mac DeMarco, an incredibly unadorned album that’s one of the realest things I’ve ever heard, and a daily listen for half the year. The songs are great and the guitar playing deliberately basic and emotive (try “Punishment” and “Nothing At All”) while Mac lays bare his heartache. The whole album has an honesty and authenticity worth aspiring to whatever your practice. — , Metalabel

In 2025 I encountered the book To See Takes Time, a collection of Georgia O’Keefe’s lesser known work, and it was extremely influential as I started my business two months postpartum. There is a shell in the book she drew hundreds of times.

Not to perfect it, but to stay close to it and get inside of it. “There is a fascination about trying,” she said. Trying as in: returning, starting over, and being dedicated enough to “keep circling the pencil until it speaks back.”

—

I loved seeing this painting in person. It used to be my desktop background in college.

—, Dirt.fyi

This year I started making a documentary about a man who lost everything—his car, his house, his family—but still takes the train every day to the library to work on his horror film script. Watching him choose creativity over despair reminded me that making something is the most defiant form of hope.

—Nate Stranzl, Director & Producer

I’m semi-obsessed with my shirts from @itsashirt.

Small batches, locally produced.

—,

Seeing Helen Pashgian at The Getty.

It’s raining in Los Angeles and I’m crying at the museum. Uncommon for me, but apparently not so uncommon for this installation. I wandered in by accident, but once I was there, I couldn’t tell you how long I stayed, in awe of what was unfolding in front of me.

A great Light and Space artwork, Pashgian’s especially, is like a visual koan. It short-circuits the logical side of your brain in the most beautiful way, freeing you from it. Your mind can’t quite grasp what it’s seeing. It’s always just around a corner, just out of reach. In that pursuit, you’re suspended in the moment with it. It's like a vacation from the ego. Temporary self-transcendence.

For me, that defines these rare moments of aliveness. Being so consumed by something that the boundary between you and the moment disappears. It reminds me of this quote by Ray Ascott: “Stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.”

—,

Scuba diving the White Wall in Fiji—a dramatic underwater cliff face of luminescent white coral. It’s a deeper dive and feels absolutely surreal, like exploring another planet.

Also: diving with manta rays at a cleaning station.

They look like slow, gentle space aliens, and I got to hover alongside them, observing their grace and movement through the water. Both experiences remain vividly etched in my brain.

—,

Things become other things by Craig Mod.

I love reading books where you can feel that the author poured their heart and soul into it.

—,

Reading about Michel Majerus painting during the first internet era.

It reminded me how alive the AI era feels when I’m making things.

— Marc, Danger Testing

In 2025 I fell in love with the techno producer Polygonia’s Dream Horizons album: wide-ranging, intensely spatial electronic music that drifts in and out of consciousnessness like a dream.

I read two novels that reaffirmed the importance of humor, lightheartedness, and sincerity in the pursuit of one’s values: Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi’s Mirages of the Mind (1990) and Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025).

Dan Wang’s Breakneck is a brilliant nonfiction book, but I also read it as a guide for how to do good work—immerse yourself in the process, make long-term plans, and execute like an engineer (but don’t forget compassion!).

—,

This is the year I learned that love and loss come together, and that our greatest pains are the path to deeper love. A couple of days before the year ended, my friend Ophelia sent me this episode of Modern Love with Andrew Garfield, in which he reads Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss.

It was bizarrely good timing, like a summary of what had been on my mind, expressed beautifully.

—Lola Wajskop, Asylum VC

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

— Reggie James

I'm an avid reader—primarily fiction; give me your high school reading curriculum and I'll devour it. I read because it takes me out of the day-to-day of running a company with 3 small children at home.

This past year, I read a book called Trust by Hernan Diaz that lives rent free in my brain. The book is magnificently written as the same story told from 3 perspectives. It captivates the reader, doesn't tire, and you can't put it down.

The ending is so powerfully unexpected, it causes me to pause and reflect every so often about the unexpected twists in my own life.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

—My friend Ellen DaSilva

I was moved by the kindness of new friends this year.

Becoming a mom, there were so many moments that touched me and reminded me of the simple grace of generosity. Practically, the meal train a girlfriend set up will move me until the day I die.

—,

Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Part nature writing, part philosophical meditation, “Tinker Creek” consists of fifteen chapters inspired by dozens of journals Dillard kept in the early 1970s to record her solo walks around a valley in deep, rural Virginia.

There is no real plot to speak of. Most chapters revolve around Dillard heading out to the creek and just waiting. For a muskrat to appear, a praying mantis egg to hatch, a morning light to cast its mountain shadow. “Tinker Creek” is, without question, one of the hardest books I’ve ever read. And also one of the most impactful, because it’s taught me the value of seeing—not just beauty, but also ugliness.

Both are unfolding around us constantly, on scales big and small, whether we sense them or not, and something started changing in me when, like Annie, I tried to be there for all of it, even the moments that were painful.

Here’s the piece I wrote in response.

— , Sana

Two things moved me to think about life this year.

One was traveling to Taiwan to see my grandmother, who is 87, for the first time in six years. Between the pandemic and having young kids, the long gap happened unintentionally, yet I still regret it. At one point she told me, plainly and without much emotion, that because the trip is so long, I shouldn’t feel pressure to come back if anything happens to her. I keep thinking about that, and whether it was her way of showing love by trying to ease a burden she could already see coming.

The other was Tatiana Schlossberg’s essay, “A Battle With My Blood.” What moved me wasn’t just her fight with cancer, but reading about someone with a full, beautiful life being forced to look at it directly… to sort through memories, habits, and days while still living them and quietly take stock of her life. Her words made the present feel exquisitely and painfully delicate in a way I can’t quite shake.

—My friend Joy Chua

What moved me in 2025 was the film Sinners.

Despite the incredible pace of change in the wider world, so many things (products, blogs, cultural artefacts) I came across last year didn’t feel original.

The starting point for Sinners isn’t, either; the myth that blues legend Robert Johnson traded his soul to the devil in exchange for his uncanny musical abilities is a universal story humans have told each other for centuries, back to Dr Faustus in the Renaissance.

Layered on top of that is a deep south Black vampire movie about gangster twins who return triumphantly to their hometown to set up a juke joint…until night falls. I watched it for the first time sitting in an old-fashioned cinema in the Mission in San Francisco and found it totally original; from the showpiece scene that speaks to the transcendence of really good music to the repeat theme of the hard trades we make to build lives we want—which spoke to me deeply.

I’ve watched Sinners twice since and it’s made me cry every time.

— Sarah Drinkwater, Common Magic

Is it strange to say a zombie movie gave me the most feels this year? In the final moments of 28 Years Later, the main protagonist says a heartbreaking goodbye.

During this emotional scene, Ralph Fiennes’s character reminds him with the words “Memento amorous,” which means “remember you must love.”

Whether in my work as a writer, or in my much more important roles as husband and father, I tend to overly focus on my task. I burn my emotional bandwidth on making sure I’m regulating myself enough to keep getting shit done. But that “memento amorous” electrified me in theaters, and reminded me that love has to be the organizing principle, the thing everything else serves.

Otherwise, what is the point? Again, I recognize that zombie slasher flick is a deeply weird way to have a profound realization about the meaning of life, but that’s the movies for ya baby.

—,

What truly moved me this year were the calls I have been doing as part of The GrownUp Table, my free mentoring program for women and new immigrants.

—, Interintellect

In A Natural History of Empty Lots Christopher Brown (of the newsletter) finds simultaneous apocalypse and rebirth in the pockets of nature that thrive in urban edgelands.

And in the way that a good metaphor can become a tender seedling in the asphalt of ideas, it also gave new language to my own work: searching for organic life in the wreckage of the internet.

How thrilling! What a gift the mixture of language and attention can be! I am certain you’ll find anything but emptiness in its lots as well.

—, Escape the Algorithm

The little kid I’m watching as I write this: crouched under his dad’s legs—a man three times his size—trying to lift him up for a piggy back ride; Lonesome Dove; that Lily Allen album; the end of a relationship, the start of another; teenagers jumping from Monhegan’s dock into the wharf to send off the ferry; watching two pigeons kiss on the subway tracks; sitting across from a trio of baby bangs on the B48 and feeling old for the first time; “Maybe happiness is the wrong measurement.”

—,

I believe I read both Watchmen and From Hell at the start of this year (time is hazy these days) and was struck by both.

Watchmen is probably one of the best novels I’ve read full-stop and, though I’d heard it was incredible, I was still really astonished by its narrative depth and psychological acuity.

From Hell has possibly stuck with me even more, though I think it’s not quite as soaringly good. Still, the way that Moore paints his grimy characters haunts a few corners of my cerebellum and I will find myself in London occasionally staring at a Hawksmoor church and thinking that work.

—,

Among 2025’s surprises was a new pope. By taking the name Leo XIV, he deliberately echoed Leo XIII—a pope who stared down industrial upheaval and tried to give ordinary people a moral compass for a changing economy.

What moved me wasn’t his grasp of this awesome technology or its accompanying high stakes, but the quiet clue he offered about how he plans to live in the midst of it.

In an interview, he mentioned a small, old book—The Practice of the Presence of God—about turning normal life into prayer, attention, and steadiness. One line keeps following me: “Blind as we are, we hinder God, and stop the current of His graces.” That’s the whole modern problem in a sentence. Per E.O. Wilson, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

In 2026, I want to practice the one thing AI can’t automate: interior attention. No matter your religious practice, the invitation lands: make room for God’s presence in our lives.

—,

2025 began with 22 friends and colleagues losing their homes in the LA fires.

After the initial shock, what stayed with me most and moved me the most was how people responded: the generosity, the creativity and then the resilience.

I watched them all make something livable, and even beautiful, out of a terrible situation and it reminded me that all we need is our health and each other.

—, Ghia

I had the chance to attend Frieze Soul, where I encountered The Language of The Enemy, an exhibition by Adrián Villar Rojas which occupied all four floors of the Art Sonje Center: “Emerging at a moment when humanity teeters at the edge of its own continuity, Villar Rojas’s work inhabits the liminal space between extinction and inheritance.”

—,

Last year I found my great grandma’s old diaries, they ranged from the moment she met my great grandpa until they got married, which was 16 years being together without a ring—from 1911 to 1927.

As you may imagine, my great grandpa wasn’t the best man, he brought much pain to her and my family, but reading about it made me infinitely grateful for the fact that I have the freedom and independence she never had.

Additionally, she was a writer—as much as she could be during that time at least—so it has been a privilege to read these entries, allowing me to connect with her and see myself within the words she wrote over 100 years ago.

—,

Last fall, I ran a half marathon through New York City with 200 strangers.

Two hundred crazies in running shorts treating the streets like our personal track. A local running club organized it the night before the NYC Marathon for everyone who didn’t get in.

We met near 125th with no course markings or finish line. Just a handful of checkpoints and the understanding that some of us would run 12.3 miles, others 13.9, depending on which way we turned.

We cut through Central Park in the dark, down Broadway through Times Square, weaving between Halloween costumes and delivery drivers who looked at us like we were insane.

No permits, sponsors, or medals — just a bunch of people who love to run.

What moved me was the simplicity of showing up for something that exists just because someone decided it should. It reminded me why I started running in the first place. And that there really is no place like New York.

—, Off Menu

And lastly my answer:

Without a doubt, my first psilocybin journey.

Since then, I’ve become deeply curious about consciousness and the sense that the everyday plane of awareness might only be a tiny sliver of what’s available to us.

That curiosity led me to reading An End to Upside Down Thinking by Mark Gober. The idea that consciousness might be non-local to the brain has held a grip on me ever since. It feels so good to have a question.

Maybe this is also I was so moved by Rosalia’s latest album, which she described as having verticality, a desire to get closer to the divine.

—