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We are in the middle of a ferocious heatwave, and though I have always loved the heat more than the cold, it has begun to alter the logic of things. Nothing feels right against the skin, so I have been moving through the house half-dressed, hungry and drowsy all at once, summer undoing every ordinary arrangement.
This week, I came across an essay I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It was on the lives we make through our choices, or perhaps more accurately, through both the choices we make and the choices we defer. Intellectually, I’ve always understood that one does not really ‘find’ oneself. We become ourselves gradually, through action, repetition, refusal; through what we say yes to and what we decline. But I don’t think I had ever fully grasped the weight of that idea until I read this:
It means the life you’re living right now is the life you’ve chosen, even if you chose it passively, even if you chose it by not choosing, even if you spent the entire time telling yourself you had no other option when really you just couldn’t stomach the discomfort of claiming what you actually wanted.
The essay lingered because it forced me to consider something I would rather avoid: not whether I have made the right choices, but whether I have been conscious of making them at all. Most of us imagine choice as a dramatic act, a leap, a declaration, a decisive turn. But lives are also shaped by smaller things: by what we postpone, what we tolerate, the conversations we never have, and the desires we never quite admit, even to ourselves. A path does not only emerge from what we pursue; it emerges from what we repeatedly decline to confront.
When I look back, I can think of only a handful of decisions that truly altered the course of my life – they were deliberate choices, made intentionally, and they changed everything. The rest feels less clear, not because I wasn’t making choices, but because so many of them arrived disguised as circumstances, a door left unopened, an opportunity not pursued, or a question deferred until the answer seemed to arrive on its own.
Perhaps the reason is this:
To choose is to collapse infinite possibility into one path, to kill all the other versions of yourself that could have existed, and we’d rather stay in the fantasy of infinite potential than step into the reality of finite existence, because at least in the fantasy we can still be anyone, do anything, or become whatever we want without having to sacrifice any of the alternatives.
More often than I care to admit, I let the shape of things emerge around me without realising I was inadvertently participating in their creation. And I keep returning to the same uncomfortable question: what if, all this time, I have been choosing by default, and not on purpose?
I know it’s a lot to think about on a hot summer’s day, so I present you with this week’s letter, which includes: the tyranny of choice and the fantasy of all the selves we might still become; manifestation stripped of its incense and made dangerous once again; creativity as evidence that we exist; the glamour of letting people misunderstand you; oysters, Frida, Paris menswear, Bond Street, yacht culture and the sandwich as emotional transport; summer objects for a more beautiful life at home; and, somewhere near the end, the brain rewriting itself after a single encounter.
LAST TIME /at hyperreality
The Calmest Version of You is the Most Powerful
How to stop living on high alert, why taste feels compromised, what Jung knew about fate, and the undeniable elegance of keeping a life for yourself.
This week’s letter includes: calm as the new power move; why urgency can start to feel like instinct; Jung on the unconscious patterns we mistake for fate; personal taste in the age of algorithms; fashion, AI, Hermès on Bond Street, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, polished summer dressing, longer reads on endurance and self-knowledge, and another little Life Lately, because while I don’t post many personal photos on Instagram anymore, I still take them: small private records of days I want to remember.
Below, for Paid Subscribers: on manifestation without mysticism, creativity as a way of becoming, and the freedom of no longer needing to be understood by everyone; plus longer reads and lazy days to make the summer last just a little while longer…
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