Accelerating My Journey Toward Irrelevancy (If That Is What It Takes)
coming at you from a new newsletter home!
Hello Humans of Planet Earth,
Humans made of blood and bone and breath and heat,
Humans made of dinosaurs and feelings and carbon,
Humans made of plastic and thoughts and root vegetables,
Hello.
This is an email from me, Sarah Fontaine to you, and it’s the first one I’m sending from my new newsletter home, buttondown. I’ve written about why I’m moving away from substack here in case you missed it and care. I didn’t set out to write about or think about where I’m doing my online things so much, but here we are. I keep setting out to write other things, but then I come to my computer and continue my project of getting off gmail, etc etc and it takes so much time and energy and is so related to these newsletters, because it is how I come to you, how I communicate with you, how my entire work life happens.
It feels like something worth talking about, although in the miasma of egoic hell that is flooding the USA, it’s confusing to know what to talk about and when to talk at all. Going with the feeling that there’s something in this absurd project of getting away from these big tech hellscapes as much as I can. Even if I discover it’s impossible, or irrelevant, I feel it’s leading me somewhere.
I just spent a long time trying to cancel my google workspace (biz email) account because I finally (!) figured out how to move my work email over to proton. Hilariously, every time I got through all the steps to press the cancel button, it stopped working and wouldn’t go through. So I’ll try that again later. It felt good to click “other” and type, “because you deleted Black history month and pride from your calendars,” in response to the question why are you quitting google workspace, even though I am certain a human will never read those words.
I’m writing to you from this new interface, and honestly it’s annoying. It’s so annoying to have to engage with a new user interface. It feels very inconvenient; it is slowing down my newsletter process a lot. But I am interested in how I am coming to you. I can’t control what your inbox feels like, but I can control that I am coming to you NOT in an app which feels like it is doing everything it can to become addictive like social media (substack). I can control that there’s a clarity to the container here, there’s not gimmicks or convincing, it’s just me writing to you. It’s me writing what I need to remember the most, with the prayer that there’s a bit in there that you also need to remember, and that there’s as little interference as possible from the platform.
Fear arises in doing this, it’s easy to go to the place where I lament everyone’s attention spans (including mine) and spiral into thinking no one will be interested in these things I am trying to remember because they are quiet and unglamorous and there is so much that is so loud coming into all of our lives at all times. So I sit with the fear and contemplate my mortality again. It’s so brief, the time I have left in this mysterious beautiful horrific earth school. I will risk the acceleration of my inevitable journey toward oldness and irrelevancy to do what I can to remind myself and you of what feels most alive and loving. AND, spiraling in that fear forgets all of the people who are like me! Who also see this devaluing of attention, who want to protect it, who want to live WITH each other, attending to each other - each other also including all species beyond human. There are so many of us! We are millions and very likely billions!
Perhaps this is tedious for you to hear about from me yet again - it feels tedious to me! But my premise lately is that inconvenience is sacred, it’s a pop quiz (that’s from my genius therapist) for life itself - can you remember what matters here? In this moment also, this very unglamorous eye-destroying screen time moment, can you remember what matters here too?! It’s always a loving test, and every once in a while I pass it. Writing to you about this is my way of studying for the quiz. I love you, thank you for being with me psychically in this experiment aka reading.
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Here’s my astrology readings calendar for may!
Heaps of blessings on your life today,
Sarah
