The Human Frequency: Issue #2

August 12, 2026

Hello, friends, and welcome to The Human Frequency, my weekly newsletter highlighting research, stories, thinkers, and entertainment that show how tuning into the human frequency - the glories, small pleasures, values, hilarity, and messiness of being human - builds a life worth living.

✥✥✥

✥✥✥

This week I’ve been immersed in The Small Stuff. Not the stuff we’re told to stop sweating, but the excellent new book by writer, designer, and professor Ian Bogost.

Bogost argues that optimizing for purpose, productivity, and happiness have gone too far. It’s getting in the way of an essential foundation for the good life: everyday gratifications and pleasures.

“The more you allow yourself to accept the weird, wonderful gifts that ordinary life constantly offers, the more their offerings will feel desirable, even transformative.”

It’s the swishy-swash of wide linen pantlegs brushing against each other, the satisfying shwwk-whirr of dialing an old rotary phone, and the clicky-clack of high heeled shoes. Bogost delights in onomatopoeia! It’s carefully and slowly folding a towel, feeling the paper between your fingers as you turn the page of a book, or savoring the moment at which that drain you’ve been working on finally gets unplugged - glug! Bogost champions these small physical gratifications, the “sensory enchantment of everyday life” and argues that they’re an anti-dote to our overly optimized lives.

Always optimizing for productivity, efficiency, and happiness enfeebles our ability to enjoy the bottomless treasure trove of daily sensory enchantments. They seem unimportant, even indulgent. We end up asking, what are they for? Aren’t they just a waste of time? We cut off the delight and vitality that flows from the small stuff.

“The sensory world, the world we share with things of all kinds, living and human-made, has been withdrawing from our contact for years, and for lots of reasons. That loss feels bad—and you probably didn’t even notice it happening, because it happened so slowly.”

As I read the book, I kept thinking about how much we de-value the simple feeling of being alive. When we’re clinically depressed, we feel numb to the pleasures of life. The world seems literally and figuratively grey. When we struggle with anxiety, we’re vigilant, our minds and bodies on alert, too amped up to rest or find contentment in the slow pace of creaturely pleasures and sensations. Practicing more gratification and delight can literally be therapeutic for depression and anxiety. For even more of us, I think it can help us feel steadier, much better in a world that can sometimes feel inhuman, overwhelming, and hard to bear.

Bogost is not a scold. He never tells us, “Get out of your head,” or “Stop being obsessed about being productive.” Instead, he explains how and why we’ve tuned out of human experience - automation, computation, the regulation of our public lives, shifting work and home life. The world has changed around us. Dematerialization, as he calls it, is here to stay, and it’s not our fault.

Nostalgia, he argues, however, is not the answer. We can be in the modern world AND re-learn how to feel the sand between our toes. He celebrates attempts to reclaim the material world and sees examples all around, from the ASMR influencers providing their millions of viewers satisfying tingles from sounds and sights to those embarking on their own home improvement projects or taking up a hobby like knitting.

In other words, Bogost’s way out is a series of illustrations and suggestions about how to return to what we’re already born to do - “build a relationship with everything.” It’s about enjoying the innumerable opportunities to feel alive. These small, delightful moments are living, and everyday pleasures and gratifications are just as surely a foundation of a good life as are happiness, satisfaction, and greater purpose.

This is a book full of small, sweet stories: the time he helped his friend figure out how to paint his basement with masonry paint, with its satisfying shwak-chlupf; and how he made the ultimate sacrifice by letting his wife peel off the transparent manufacturer tape from the shiny surface of a kitchen appliance. He also takes us down more academic paths - from the differences among gratification, happiness, and satisfaction (happiness and satisfaction involve more effort, goals, and achievement, whereas gratification is automatic and effortless) to his bête noire, the famous Marshmallow Test experiment, which he believes Is Bunk. Yet, he never deviates from his celebration of the sensory enchantment of everyday life.

✥✥✥

There’s a lot to like about this wise little book. I think Bogost has put his finger on something fundamental. He gives name to the omnipresent pressures - from psychological research and the wellness industry to influencers and optimization culture - to believe that we must struggle to become happier; must constantly work at our careers and marriages; and must have a life that is constantly guided by goals and purpose. He doesn’t deny the importance of hard work and purpose - after all, he’s a highly accomplished fellow. But he looks askance at the rigidity and dominance of this optimization mindset. He leaves us thinking, maybe everyday gratification and delight don’t have to be hard, and maybe they can matter. Maybe we can just tune into being human.

I’ve been spending time this month in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. It’s a city of canals, historic buildings, trees, and church bells. Yes, church bells. Every day, I hear the chimes and songs of the carillon of harmonically tuned bells: Oudekerk and Nieuwekerk (the Old Church and the New Church), along with Westerkerk, Zuiderkerk, and Noorderkerk in the west, south, and north of the city. This soundtrack to my Amsterdammer life is deeply gratifying. I stand or stop to sit on a bench to listen attentively for a few moments, or a few minutes. I’m always transfixed. If I’m really lucky, the bells start up while I’m sitting in a canal-side cafe, and I can combine multiple gratifications.

Listening to the chimes and music of the Amsterdam churches makes me realize that I might be happiest and most alive when I literally tune into the human frequency.

✥✥✥

You can listen to Ian Bogost’s convo with Charlie Werzel, The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything, on Galaxy Brain. That’s how I discovered him. It was “the cost of optimizing everything” in the title that grabbed my attention.