Nobody Should Be Working Right Now
A love letter to taking a break.
If you’re just tuning in …
This summer, Burn It All Down is leaving “the news” to all the other letters and building a better reality through the collective pursuit of love.
✨ Higher vibes are spreading ✨
While announcing the end of edgelord domination, inimitable Substack oracle Mo_Diggs cosigned summer of love:
It would be a revolution because the powers-that-be would rather us be angry and alone on our phones than experiencing collective ecstasy together because collective ecstasy can always turn to collective rage, but frustrated lonely anger is the arable soil of authoritarianism.
Shout out to my beautiful friend Alix and her friend Helen and all the other gals in the renamed “collective effervescence” group chat:
And we must recognize these two, who scaled the Empire State Building on Wednesday, got engaged, and then unfurled this loving decree before their arrest. May we all find true love or a partner in crime who shamelessly pursues the same amount of attention:
Hi friends!
You’d think, by now, having lived through 40 years of my life, that the delectable and unrelenting absurdity of being me would lose its shock value. But, no, my mind is still quite regularly blown.
On Sunday afternoon, I took a lovely walk to Skylight Books, my neighborhood bookstore, to buy a new journal since I finally finished the last one, which I should now destroy lest my ancestors see fit to publish it posthumously. I also picked up a copy of I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson’s gorgeous new book, stopped for a passionfruit iced tea, and returned home to my couch to consume my bounty.
There I was, enjoying my refreshment, vibing out on Sarah’s brilliance and all the data and wisdom she has so masterfully woven together, when I got to the section on liminality:
I am so rarely speechless, but this intellectual company tickled me so deeply that I still cannot wrap my head around it. My dear friend Jessie suggested I frame the page, and I think I shall take it to the good place in Chinatown because it deserves to be properly memorialized.
Sarah, thank you for including me, for carving a path through this collapsing world, and for sharing yourself and your vision with us. This is a book for anyone who quietly (or loudly) wonders how the business of life keeps marching on while so many things (and so many of us) are clearly not OK. And I love the way it is structured — in fragments, with marginalia, bringing in many voices and ideas, and even providing a blank page to stare at if it all gets to be a bit too much.
I don’t need the blank page — I’m breezing through this book because Sarah is materializing so many things that I feel intuitively. But I guess that’s why I get to go with Gramsci? His iconic quote is very important to me, I even included a version of it in the original draft of the Age of Unhingement™ book proposal that I wrote over the winter of 2024 in a very intense burst at my neighborhood Coffee Bean:
I feel so seen.
This will keep me going even though I need to remove my brain from my head and send it off for specialized dry cleaning.
The only way out is through, and the better way through is on my mailing list:
I hit a wall at the beginning of June, when my incredible months-long run of being too distracted to spiral my favorite spiral came to an end. My favorite spiral is, of course, that Daddy Algo still has me chained to his radiator, and after 15 years of working in social media, I will never be free from his endless appetite for content.
My spiral’s return, a sign of my return to robust health, really, can be traced to when I started a new Instagram account in 2026 and was suddenly inundated with so much content about optimizing content that I considered throwing my phone down the mysterious vortex at the end of my street.
Wait. What?
Yes, last month, a seemingly bottomless hole appeared right next to the sidewalk at the north end of my block.
In this town (Los Angeles), it doesn’t take long for a charismatic hole to get some attention, and this was no ordinary opening. The hole’s narrow aperture belied a phenomenal depth that suggested it was either an old well that was never properly filled or the portal to another dimension.
My next door neighbor, Amy, was the first to show me the hole when she sent me this reel, filmed by another neighbor named Brandon, who I’ve never met but now know through his great work in spreading the hole to the internet. Sadly, I missed the transcendently insane vigil that was organized by my neighbor Nicole Levin. She saw the abyss and felt called to gather the community around it.
As exemplified by the above work of art, I am well aware that late-stage Instagram posts have the potential to reach a giant audience regardless of how many followers an account has; that’s why I finally pulled the trigger on starting an account for this newsletter, even though I spiritually shudder at the mere thought of making more Instagram content. But I didn’t realize that the app is now operating like a slot machine for idiots selling courses. One woman (I should never have encountered) posted up a storm about a “$1.2 Million launch” for her “yap challenge,” designed to help aspiring creators learn how to make better videos so they can also sell courses.
Everyone’s talking about social media bans for kids, but who’s gonna ban it for all the poor schmucks who paid that lady $297 to learn how to “yap”?
After Daddy Algo fed me a buffet of new creators laid off from their corporate jobs, now pivoting their life’s work to making optimized Instagram content, I began to despair not only how dreadfully boring that is, but that too many innocent people who haven’t yet survived three pivots to video are in for a lot of disappointment.
Then, I got word that the global media company I work with included a bunch of my recent viral Instagram hits in a big internal review as a standard for growth and engagement. In some ways, I guess, Daddy Algo is MY bitch because I know how to please him. But if you think that global validation for a job well done extinguished my existential angst, no, it certainly did not. It did end my spiral, though, when I told everyone I was taking a week off because I clearly deserve a vacation.
This weekend, I’m heading to the Berkshires for a yoga retreat where I will ground myself in nature and movement and reconnect to serenity while I read a book under a tree and only check my phone once a day to make sure that no one’s dead. Then, since I’m just a little train ride away, I’m going to New York for a few days to meet my friend Vicky’s baby, Nina, who was born at the end of May and is perfect and has a magnificent head of hair. And then, because I already had it planned and love a four-legged journey, I am going back to LA for a hot minute before I go to Utah to visit my friend, Ricky, who moved to the mountains as one does when they work remotely in tech. He’s going to take me hiking and has promised me a trip to one of those depraved Mormon soda establishments. I truly can’t wait to report back.
Yes, social media is the devil’s vocation, nobody’s gonna argue against that, but much of the angst I was experiencing was from pressure I was putting on myself: to be productive, to create more, and to figure out a plan.
In this heat?
In this world?
Wasting my precious energy worrying about what I should do next makes no fucking sense.
I can’t take the whole summer off, sadly, but I did negotiate one phoneless week during which I will surrender repeatedly on my yoga mat. And because the great gift of my work life is flexibility, I am planning to do the bare minimum for the two weeks after that. We need to take good care of ourselves right now and eat only the juiciest fruit of the season and keep vibing higher as best we can.
The Unhingement journey will continue after this much-needed break. I’ll be back the last week of July. And if you need something to read in the meantime:
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz