My Reading List for 2026 and Welcome to new Readers!

Happy New Year!

Many of you are new to this newsletter, Life and Lab, thanks to the Digital Declutter Cohorts beta. So, I want to take this time to do two things. First, introduce you to the methods and topics explored in this newsletter and share how it will act as a companion to the Digital Declutters by developing a Digital Ethics together. Second, I’ll kick off that project with an introduction to my 2026 Digital Ethics reading list 😄

Digital Ethics: the ongoing cultivation of the kinds of understanding, habits, and desires that allow us to use technology in ways that support human flourishing rather than undermine it.

Life and Lab, along with my YouTube channel, is where I explore the questions: What kinds of relationships with technology lead to well-being and flourishing, and how do we cultivate those relationships? To explore these questions, I lean on philosophy (these days, heavily into virtue ethics), cognitive science - particularly the psychology of behaviour change - and, on the more technological side, practices of self-hosting, use of Free and Open Source Software, and digital privacy and media ownership more broadly.

More concretely, I want to ask questions like:

• How do we stop doomscrolling?

• Does the science support our intuitions that doomscrolling is bad for us, and to what extent?

• What does it do to the human psyche if we consistently interact with AI “friends”?

• What effects does physical media ownership have on our psyches… and what happens when we replace physical media ownership with streaming?

Alongside that, though primarily on YouTube, I develop tutorials on how to self-host services to reclaim ownership of your digital media and data, and to support your digital privacy. To that end, we explore things like:

• Replacements for streaming and online marketplace services: Jellyfin, Booklore, and related hardware (Zimaboard, Raspberry Pis, NAS)

• Free and Open Source Software alternatives: Linux… lots of Linux-y things 😄

These questions, and these technologies, support what I think to be - if not specific digital virtues - an exploration of digital ethics: how we can use technology to support human flourishing instead of undermine it.

I’m not a trained philosopher, and I have minimal formal education in psychology or cognitive science.

I was doing a PhD in “problematic smartphone use interventions” - which is to say, a PhD in “How do we stop doomscrolling?” - but I dropped out after two years (long story). During that time, I studied a fair amount of the psychology of behaviour change, as well as a specific strand of cognitive science taught at the University of Toronto. This strand focuses heavily on wisdom, meaning, and related topics - thanks largely to Professor John Vervaeke, whom I was exposed to via his… well, we can only call them disciples.

Given my lack of formal credentials, my articles here are rarely lectures where I attempt to espouse and argue for some deep truth I’ve identified. Instead, I try to develop my ever-unfinished thinking about digital ethics publicly - with you all - encouraging discourse and humility.

Expect a lot of: “I’m not really sure about , but here’s what I’ve got,” or “I haven’t yet read enough about to be confident, but here’s what I’ve learned that may apply.” If I’m doing my job right, each article ought to end with an implicit “What do you think?” Maybe we’ll think cooler things together.

As I was writing this, I initially thought I’d only include a quick aside explaining the rationale behind how I chose these books. I was wrong. It turned into a full essay connecting Aristotle, cognitive science, and fiction reading.

To avoid muddling this welcome message for new readers of Life and Lab - while still sticking to the promise I made to share my reading list - I’ll share the list below and post that essay separately (it will also contain the list).

I hope you all don’t mind!

I’ve broken the year into three trimesters (winter, summer, fall) - because, at heart, I’m still an academic. Each trimester has a loose theme, and each of the two reading streams averages about one book per month (though there are some big ones that take more time).

The list is divided into two parallel streams:

• Character — drawn largely from the Western canon, aimed at cultivating perspective, self-knowledge, and moral reasoning

• Thought — focused on psychology, cognitive science, and the mechanics of the attention economy

I think these will be mutually reinforcing: understanding how psychology and the attention economy work, while also reshaping the person who moves through it.

DISCLAIMER: I got AI to format the table of books below. That’s why all the emojis and EM dashes, lol. The list and writing is very much mine, though.

Foundations: Greeks, Romans, and Cognitive Science

I read Homer, Hesiod, and Sophocles alongside the Nicomachean Ethics last year—otherwise you’d see The Odyssey and the Ethics in here for sure. Instead, I’m picking up where I left off.

• January — Metamorphoses

• February — The Republic

• March — The Aeneid

• April — Politics

I’ve become increasingly interested in Predictive Processing, a proposed unifying theory of cognition with a lot of affordances for developing new behavioural interventions (among many other rich avenues). I’m hoping it - alongside some classics - will help me better understand what shapes and influences our behaviour and beliefs.

• January — Surfing Uncertainty

• February — Thinking, Fast and Slow

• March — The Extended Mind

• April — Nudge

The Christian Turn & the Psychology of Behavioural Addiction

This is the most deliberate and challenging part of the year for me.

I grew up a very angry atheist, and reading Christian theology is an intentional decision to challenge my old beliefs. I’m still more or less a non-theist, but I’ve come to grips with the fact that religions have formed over centuries—often with the explicit intent to think deeply about desire, attention, character, and meaning. It would be dishonest not to read this material, even if I don’t intend to convert.

For those of you who are religious, I want to state clearly that I intend to do these readings justice - to give them the respect they deserve. Not to look for faults so I can “dunk” on Christianity, but to look for generalizable wisdom.

• May — Confessions

• June — The Divine Comedy: Inferno

• July — Summa Theologiae (selected questions)

• August — The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio

• May — The Shallows

• June — Dopamine Nation

• July — Addiction by Design

• August — Irresistible

There are some heavy hitters in here, so the list is shorter. Frankly, I already think I’m practically sprinting through The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost even with two months.

The way I see it, this year is about exposure. In the future I can do deep slow reads of specific books that spoke to me. I’m treating this year (and chunks of last year) sort of like a breadth-first search through the Western Canon.

The Western Canon is so deeply self-referential that I figured reading lots of it first, regardless of the depth (though I’ll do what I can on that front) would help me read specific books more deeply in the future.

• September and October — The Divine Comedy: Paradiso (finish)

• November and December — Paradise Lost

• September — The Attention Merchants

• October — Weapons of Math Destruction

• November and December — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

• The Bible — daily reading (365-day plan)

Again, I’m not looking to be converted. But to read Christian theology without reading the Bible seems wrong. So, I’ve picked up a 365-day chronological Bible in the NIV translation, which seemed like an accessible way to learn.

That’s my list!

I’m sure I’ll deviate, falter, and fail to stick to it perfectly—but having a list is better than not having one. At least I know what I want to read.

The list is pretty malleable, too, so if you’d like to make a suggestion, please feel free! Many of you are much more well-read than I am, and I always welcome suggestions and conversation.

I’m already a fair chunk of the way through Surfing Uncertainty and Metamorphoses, and they are both delightful.

Surfing Uncertainty is nothing short of miraculous. Predictive Processing really does seem to be a unifying theory of cognition, and I’m excited to explore behavioural interventions based on it in future cohorts. Who knows—maybe it’ll reignite my interest in doing a PhD, this time in cognitive science.

Metamorphoses is just beautiful. Of all the classics I’ve read, it’s the most accessible and familiar. Reading The Odyssey(I read some of Emily Wilson’s translation and some of Robert Fagles’) was foreign and often challenging, though I eventually found a rhythm. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is so enjoyable and accessible that I’ve begun reading it aloud to my girlfriend before bed.

Anyway, that’s the game plan for 2026. I think it’ll be a fun year!

Cheers,

Nathan Laundry