I’ve started to think of the internet as a house party.
The old school kind, where you show up and there are drinks in the kitchen and something different happening in every room, people you don’t know mingling with people you do. Someone’s talking too loud, someone’s laughing, someone in the den is playing vinyl and arguing over which bootleg is better.
I’m not a fan of the big-picture evolution of the internet; it went from this cool thing that let you meet strangers and make friends to isolated bubbles of people talking to people just like them about all the same things.
Watching this magical human creation turn into a vehicle for sameness made me sad for so many years. I decided it was past time to say fuck it and start thinking of it differently, along with pretty much everything else in my life – and here we are.
My new internet will be a house party, and I’ll be the host.
There are all these wild and random groups of people I’ve met here: writers and poets, blockchain builders, code guys and gardeners, women and farmers.
I want them all in the same house, talking to each other. I want to make introductions, and jokes, and good drinks that meet loose descriptions like ‘not too sweet and kinda bubbly.’
I want to bring all you beautiful humans into circles that overlap, instead of staying in the old lanes that the new internet runs on.
That’s why we’re here. I closed down goodtech because it felt too limiting for a creative space, and because all the people I met through that project were people I wanted to talk to about using tech for good but also about real things, you know, like life. And parenting, and keeping up, and letting go, and solo travel, and personal finance, and building businesses, and crappy things that happen that shouldn’t, and recipes and ideas and content creators we love.
Are you on Be Real? Have you noticed how often that feed is just people, at work, pretending to like it, suffering through their day, because all we do, everywhere, all over the world, is work?
It doesn’t matter what your time zone is, what you do at work, where you are – we’re all just miserably getting through our adult days and wondering if this is, after all, what life is supposed to be about.
Think of this newsletter space as the antithesis of those dead faces pretending to smile.
It’s a place where you’re allowed to ask yourself whether this is all there is – and if your answer is hell no, to get ideas for how to get closer to that real life you want.
Here we are - welcome to the internet house party! I can’t wait to see what we build together.
This is a storytelling platform about changing the way we think, talk to ourselves, live in the world, and build a life worth living.
That means you can expect newsletters that touch on all kinds of things: personal development (although I hate that term and I think we need a new one - ideas?), money, finding jobs and living situations and relationships that are right for us, better philosophy, more art, more curiosity.
Essentially, I hope this will be a house party full of people who are slowly, despite all the odds, building a real life.
A real life that’s both on and offline.
A real life that isn’t just about how much you can accomplish or make or do. A real life that’s also about how you find joy and cultivate it, how you give back to those around you, and how you can create an ethical life in a world that’s hell-bent on making that impossible to do.
Everyone deserves a real life. It’s up to us to build them.
Here’s why I think building a real life is the only goal most of us should really have.
I grew up relatively poor in a tiny, tucked away corner of Appalachia that, to this day, still feels like a whole different country than the rest of the US. I moved out at 15 and started working to pay my bills while I finished high school.
When I was 19, I got pregnant, and had a kid, and suddenly instead of leaving forever for Columbia or Cornell or Harvard, faraway places out of storybooks where I got in, but didn’t get enough funding to go, I was alone, in a town I hated, trying to buy diapers and keep the lights on and working twenty-hour days to keep us alive.
Ever since I was 19, every year of my life that passed cemented those toxic ideas about work and worth and productivity. Even as I improved in all the ways society said I should (finished my bachelor’s after ten years of trying, got a master’s degree, took every job that came my way), all it meant was that there was more work to do, more ladders to climb, more projects to produce.
I worked and worked and worked my way up. My kid grew up, which means they needed fewer things that were even more expensive than diapers and electricity. So I kept growing up too.
I adulted and adulted and adulted until - this year - I turned 38, realized my kid was heading off to college, and deeply understood, for the first time, just how little of a life I’ve ever had.
Trying to build a life as a grownup is hard.
If you’ve been doing what you’re told—working, going to school, building a career, and trying to keep your money straight in a world of war, recession, and inflation—you didn’t have time to create real hobbies, or interests, or a style.
You brought along things you used to like, but you haven’t had much time to see what the grownup version of you really wants.
You don’t have any frameworks for how to work less, put less pressure on yourself, let go of old dreams, or find new ones.
You don’t even know the things you like, because all you’ve ever done is what other people liked, so you could get jobs and keep them. It’s like being a teenager all over again.
What this experience is teaching me right now is that it resonates with almost everyone I meet. (I always thought all of you just had it together with your hobbies and your outfits and your online persona and your work lives.)
It turns out that almost everyone I know is still looking for their real life – the one where they get to explore, and be curious, and try new things, and find a way to live in the world that’s based in hope and not in fear.
So let’s do this together. Come on in to this house party and meet some other folks who are new to this having a life thing.
Let’s tackle life like teenagers, with all the wild imaginable identities we can create, but let’s do it as grownups, smart enough to know better and still young enough to try.
Note from Emily: Each newsletter will hold a few of these short ideas. I want to share and create conversations that help us find the next right thing, one thing at a time; to make one good decision every day; to give one fewer fuck, every day.
I want to do it in a way that fits into your life, because I know how hard it is to make even small changes when you’re doing your best to keep your head above water, pay your bills, take care of your people, drink enough water, and get enough sleep. Feedback on these is encouraged and I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas here, too <3
⭐ Try something new, it might surprise you
One small new thing, implemented well
I’ve started doing three minutes of mandala coloring at the end of the workday.
Would I rather have the time for an extra half hour of working out or walking or reading or writing? Yes. But I don’t have those thirty extra minutes, and I needed a way to shift from work to life at home.
Enter the kids’ cheap mandala coloring book. I stole a few pages and each day, when I close down my desk, I spend 2-3 minutes coloring in a section of the mandala.
The end results are very bad. They’re a great demonstration of my utter lack of understanding of color theory and the fact that I’ve not done art since grade school, and I don’t care at all.
It resets my brain, lets me get centered in a physical space instead of a mental one. The smell of the markers and paper, the sound of a very fine tipped pen carefully coloring, all of this helps me shift gears. Best of all, it’s a different kind of art and creativity, one that I’d never explore if my goal was “I want to learn to paint this year.”
What’s a small artistic thing you can do, that’s outside your comfort zone, that takes three minutes a day? Think about that, and then go do it this week. Put it in a transition point in your schedule and see if it helps.
Have a tip to share with us? What’s working for you? Send it to hello@emilyadair.com and we’ll share it!
💭 One real philosophy idea
Philosophy wasn’t developed so you could find better ways to be more productive
I wrote about this here, but the TL;DR is that real philosophy should help you be a better human, not a better worker. Each week I’ll share one idea I’ve loved and been drawn back to as the world becomes a more complicated place.
Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.
💖 Words to try living by
A downloadable and shareable reminder, every issue
That’s it for this newsletter; I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I hope I don’t have to reiterate that I’d really love your ideas and feedback and replies while I’m building 💖
Thank you for being here, and I can’t wait to invite you to the next house party. Bring a friend!
Emily