Two internet things that made my life better

+ Links that made me look & linger

OFF THE SOCIALS. I have mostly quit social media without really ever deciding to leave. I didn’t wake up one morning to a voice saying my affair with the socials was over. I didn’t promptly delete every app from my devices and never return. Instead, I slow-quit in a more conflicted and tortured way, beginning with Facebook, which made me feel like I was dying inside, like a heavy, dark, metallic grey cloud filled the entire trunk of my body including my throat. Instagram gave off pretty much the same feeling but was harder to let go of because I had co-created artistic community there that fed my soul and helped me expand my business.

Life off of the socials is spacious yet lonely at first. I’d have moments of wondering what others were doing and not knowing what to do with myself. The discomfort and confusion over having extra time has turned out to be a hidden treasure--a pure, open portent that I didn’t know I possessed--a living, breathing, shapeshifting world that I’m still filling, unfilling and refilling. There is less crisis-and-reaction. My creativity serves its own purposes and is no longer grist I produce and immediately feed to a hungry social media content mill.

OFF THE ADS. Another fabulous gift that I’ve recently re-given myself is ad-free internet use. Many years ago, I downloaded and installed Firefox’s ad-blocking tool after a more tech-savvy friend told me about it. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. Literally not a single ad could sneak through its iron-clad internet gates. I loved opening a browser window to search, read and do whatever I came online to do, then log off without having gotten distracted and/or having spent money on things the algorithms made me believe I needed.

I eventually stopped using Firefox for reasons I no longer remember, the ad-blocker eventually expired and I was again lost in the internet ad abyss. It was even more crowded, noisy and nefarious than before.

Earlier this year I came back to my senses and sauntered back into to a quieter, more roomy, airy ad-free internet. I’m not getting any kind of kickback or benefit from recommending the ad-blocker. I just think ad-free internet browsing offers a very “Foster & Flourish” way of exploring.

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LINKS THAT MADE ME LOOK & LINGER

• Walking Distance is Lizzy Stewart's illustrated essay available in book form about the experience of being a woman walking through cities. It’s also a meditation on gender politics, social commentary, and eighties movies interlaced with autobiography and watercolor illustrations. This excerpt captures something I’ve always felt but could never find the words for: “I love shots of women walking through cities in films. I like that they are alone and alive and, usually, wearing a nice coat. I like that even though they are a part of a bigger story, something grand or trivial, for those seconds they are removed of their storyline, the knots and tangles, and they are simply people, immersing themselves in the city, disappearing for a moment and allowing the noise of the world to eclipse the noise of their lives.” I love walking through cities. I love Lizzy Stewart loving women walking in cities. (Now I hope to stumble upon a great description of women walking through the natural landscapes, which feels like a similar yet very different experience as both walker and watcher.)

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• Just for fun. For the love of dance. A man. A 22-ton John Deere excavator. (15 second Tik Tok video)

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• This 5 minute film about the Indigenous #landback movement lit my fire in a beautiful way. Partly because I’ve always loved projection of words onto buildings as a form of protest art.

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• Interview with Susan Murphy Roshi: “The fundamental koan is the Earth, which is also inseparable from the fundamental human koan of what is this self? They are the same koan in a way. They heal into each other, like medicine and sickness do.” Listen or read or both.

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• Transmasculine artist Edie Fake created a room that’s basically the lovechild of an interactive art museum and an amusement park. Here’s a video of Edie talking about his process. Thanks to

  Wendy MacNaughton

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• Honoring Gaetano Pesce for his willingness to continually reawaken the cultural creative body through his art, architecture and design. His work is so daring and fearless without a trace of over-seriousness, and yet not at all frivolous. Underneath the color, humor and experimentation is always a deeper message, often a social-political one about including others and staying connected to the non-human world. His 1996 “Organic Building” is one of the first places I sought out when visiting Osaka, Japan. The experience of gazing up at the enormous Organic Building bright red in the sun and oozing plant life didn’t dwarf me at all, but activated a big, bursting, bold piece of my heart. Looking at Pesce’s smaller works in museums--on the wall or standing next to more functional pieces such as chairs--is to half-expect them to come to life and start talking or suddenly break into dance. Pesce’s every wink and nod is a reminder that every piece of art is a living body unto itself and that art awakens the numbed-out spaces in us. If I could afford a large, art-filled house, at least one piece of Pesce’s work would enliven every room. “Grazie mille, Gaetano Pesce.”

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• For the next several months in Wandering Around Vagus (my newsletter on the vagus nerve & Polyvagal Theory) we’ll explore three experiential responses/states of: Play, Intimacy and Freeze. This month’s edition (April) introduces these three states. Then, over the following three months (May-July) we’ll focus on each state individually. Find out more or join here.

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• Television Delivers People, a 7-minute video by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman about pop culture as a control tactic and social construct.

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• “Gen Z is pretty wise to what’s going on. We just need to give them a way out,” says Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist in this interview (gift link, NY Times). I often mention my Gen Z fandom and how I feel they deserve much more from older generations. I’ll be reading his new book “The Anxious Generation” which delves into what Haidt calls "The Great Rewiring," a period marked by increased social media and smartphone use that led to an "overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world" that impacted the mental health of those born after 1995.

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• Let People Eat by Chef Jose Andres (Gift article, New York Times)

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That’s it. Enjoy.

With Love + Links,