Updates!!
— FIRSTLY! I wrote a short listicle of the Best Bay Area Nature Stories for the Bay Area Current. Check it out at the link here!!
— SECONDLY! I’m planning to print Zines once a month for paid subscribers (date TBD because I still need to purchase a nice printer to do it!). The zines will be grouping of my photos, drawing, and writing picke from here and publications. I do need to make a bit more money these days, and thought it would feel like a better transaction if I were to actually share something physical with anyone who wants to pay for a subscription. So consider subscribing below!
The more people who subscribe, the quicker I’ll be able to start making these and sending them out, so please consider subscribing! And, even if you can’t/don’t want to pay for it, please share the newsletter with your friends and fam! It really does help and I am immensely grateful when I see new people subscribing. Makes me feel like I’m doing something right (right?). Thanks!!
The days are short. The holidays are over. Tides are high as streets flood up the coast following the rains. Nicasio reservoir overflows. The earth is wet and a sense of relievi ng saturation fills the ground. In other words, the calm days of winter in the Bay Area are here, far away from so much of the news of the world.
This is the time people set resolutions, to get fit, or financially stable, or enjoy life in some specific and distinct way. I do the same, sit at my table and drum up some aspirations for the winter — an odd time, I believe, to be thinking of renewal; feels more like a spring thing. But the obsession with progress, at least as I see it online, takes this time of year reserved for reflection and resolutions to a fever pitch that makes me question the point of it all. The cult of productivity permeates our online spaces with this new year so much so that I’d rather sit defiantly inside, doing nothing much more than rewatching the same shows I’ve already watched dozens of times, idling into nothing to spite all the productivity gurus out there.
The disdain I have for this kind of online content is only matched by my own desire to get work done, for both personal and financial reasons. I loathe much of this content for the simple fact that I am easily susceptible to it. In actuality, I want to be more productive, to be more organized, my distractable self often hoping for some sort of structure to save myself from my own meandering. And that upsets me all the more. Because I understand, as I’m sure you do, the desire of both the creators of these kinds of content, and those like myself, the viewer. We want to be better, more efficient, and inspire that in others, at least initially. We want, in this cultures’ terms, a little leg up, because any sort of edge might mean the ability to pay rent comfortably. Forget purchasing a house, stability in the renter’s market is all I really want.
Money’s tight for most of us today. We know the statistics. Wages have stagnated since Reagan took office and haven’t stayed on track with inflation since then. So our pockets are tighter, and a free liberal kind of capitalism has not trickled down to those of us lower on the rung as it was promised. If you can’t see that still, I don’t know what to tell you. And so, we need to be more productive with our time in the hopes that we can continue to live comfortably, and maybe, just maybe, one day recline on a La-Z-Boy into retirement.
The hope for resolutions, just as the goal in a good amount of online productivity content, often is just to live a good life. Right? To live a good life, one of comfort and community, of care and health. And so, in spite of the fact that I work as a barista, living near check to check, I will share the most important resolution on my list for 2026: to slow down.
I want to slow down because, at this point, I am convinced that speed and efficiency are a means to have us remain constantly on edge, unable to sit for a moment, take in the world, and then think for ourselves about the goings on around us. All these desires thrown about, from gambling ads telling us we can win big right now to the constant onslaught of dire international news, seem to beckon us not to consider, but to react. There is little room for deliberation.
As the world grows more dire, pauses will inevitably grow more vital for the preservation of our selves. We are in the slop era of the internet, a back-sliding moment for democracies, highlighted by strongmen feeding off people’s fears, anxieties, and reactivities. They stoke this, across the political spectrum, to captivate our reactions, to make us react to each moment rather than consider it, be it a TikTok, or a news story. This, largely, is why I try to write the way I do, as a reminder to myself that the content of our lives is not content to be monetized, but moments to be realized, and from those realizations, to change ourselves in the process.
And yes, the world is scary today, terrifying even. It really is. But without considering why it is scary, we’ll hardly know how best to respond, for our communities and the places that we call home. And so, as the rain stops, and the light hits brightly the greening hills across the Bay, I hope, amidst the cacophony of news that is already blaring out in 2026, that I, and possibly you, will find some slowness, and room for reflection.
Thanks for reading All The Big Little Things! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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