Hi Friends-
This is the last newsletter before I go on summer break for about six weeks. So you won't see me in your inbox again until August.
Around that time, I'll also be gearing up to re-open registration for my RESET course in September. If you're interested in giving your workday a "cosmic tune-up," you can sign up for the RESET list here to get details.
I would also like to send a great, big metaphysical hug out to all of you who sent me kind words of encouragement after I shared my thinking about the future of the podcast in the last newsletter.
Happy PRIDE, and I'll see you on the flipside!
Much love,
Jocelyn
| | LINKS TO LOVE
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America's job listings have gone off the deep end. A worthwhile piece from The Atlantic on the "expectation creep" that's been slowly unfolding in the way we write job descriptions: "More than ever, it seems, hiring managers are looking for extremists: You can't just be willing to do the job. You must evince an all-consuming horniness for menial corporate tasks." 😂
Mindfulness and the "mood economy." An excellent longread on how the rise of mindfulness makes us more docile, compliant workers — and blinds us to more radical engagement. From The Guardian: "Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticised stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loans, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful."
Life advice from your toothbrush? I'm feeling skeptical about the thinking behind this new range of products that would aggressively monitor your habits. From Fortune: "The Oral-B Sense is an upcoming WiFi-enabled 'smart toothbrush' that provides personalized feedback to consumers on their brushing habits. Thrive's central role across the P&G portfolio will be providing what the company calls behavioral 'microsteps' in order to 'habit-stack' – i.e, build a positive, affirming mental habit into something consumers may already do every day. That could include anything from urging people to give themselves a life-affirming message when putting on deodorant in the morning to singing a song to their babies while changing their diapers."
The benefits of naiveté. I thoroughly enjoyed this interview in The Believer magazine with the filmmaker Agnes Varda, who really just does her own thing: "Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn't have dared start. I started very — not innocent, but naïve in a way. So that's a big freedom, you know? I didn't go to school. I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom. I see all these students, and I admire them—they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was — that's the way I was — autodidact."
On beauty and silence. A thought-provoking piece from Granta on high heels and how pain relates to our construct of feminine beauty: "In fairy tales, women and girls are often asked to pay a price of pain, or silence, or both. In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry explains that one of the primary functions of pain is as a destroyer of language. Physical pain of all kinds defies meaningful description in its aftermath, and while it is happening, in extremis, it functions to dismantle speech into the kind of pre-linguistic sounds that can scarcely be deemed voluntary."
| | SHOUT-OUTS:
The artwork is from: Patrick Sluiter, who is based in New York City.
Much appreciation for link ideas to: Anne Helen Petersen and Marcus Coetzee.
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Hi, I'm Jocelyn, the human behind this newsletter. I created the online course RESET, a cosmic tune-up for your workday, and I host Hurry Slowly — a podcast about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient by slowing down. | | | | |
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