This summer, I started a new project: making every day feel—at least a little—like vacation. Below is some guidance on how to do the same. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic: |
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| (Alessandra Sanguinetti / Magnum) | | |
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View in browser Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and rosé. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad. Real life is rarely as sunny and sparkly and juicy as vacation life. Right away, I found myself wishing that I could somehow preserve those delicious vacation morsels and store them in my cheeks like a chipmunk preparing for winter. Which is when I remembered something important: my own free will. What was stopping me from replicating the joy of vacation in my regular life? So began my quest to do things differently. Call it “romanticizing my life,” if you want. Or call it self-care—actually, please don’t. But soon after returning from my trip, I was living more intentionally than I had before. I was searching for things to savor. I woke up early(ish) and started my day with a slow, luxurious stretch. In the evenings, rather than melting into the couch with the remote, I turned off my phone, made a lime-and-bitters mocktail, and read physical books—only fiction allowed. Less virtuously, I bought things: a towel that promised to cradle me in soft fibers, a new Sharpie gel pen, a funny little French plate that said “Fromage” in red cursive. The effort was not a complete success. Replicating the exact feeling of holiday weightlessness is impossible; the demands of work and life always tend to interfere. But I did discover that these small changes were making my daily life, on average, a teensy bit happier. Someone once said that you should do something every day that scares you, and I’m sure those words have galvanized many powerful people to action. But regular life is frightening enough. What if we sought out daily moments of joy instead? I asked some of my colleagues how they create their own tiny moments of delight. Here are a few of their answers: - Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig wakes up and starts working the group chats, sending a “Rise n’ grind” to her girlfriends and a “Goooooood morning lads” to her passel of politics-chat guys. “It’s like starting the day by going to a party with all my friends,” she told me. “Instantly puts me in a good mood.” On the flip side, Ellen Cushing is working on texting less and calling more. She now talks with her oldest friend, who lives far away, almost every weekday—sometimes for an hour, other times for five minutes. Their conversations, which aren’t scheduled, involve two simple rules: You pick up the call if you can, and you hang up whenever you need to.
- Senior editor Vann Newkirk tends to his many indoor plants: a fiddle-leaf fig, a proliferation of spider plants, a pothos, a monstera, a couple of peace lilies, some different calatheas, an African violet, a peperomia, and a ponytail palm. “Even on no-water days, I like to check on them,” he told me, and “write little notes about how they are growing or where they grow best.”
- For a while, Shane Harris, a staff writer on the Politics team, began each day by reading a poem from David Whyte’s Everything Is Waiting for You. The purpose “was to gently wake up my mind and my imagination, before I started writing,” he told me. “It’s such a better ritual than reading the news.”
- Staff writer Annie Lowrey decompresses her spine(!) at night, which, she told me, involves bending over to hang like a rag doll, or dead-hanging from a pull-up bar: “It’s the best.” She also journals every morning about the things that she’s thankful for, and prays in gratitude for achieving difficult feats. “Maybe you accepted a vulnerability and your ability to handle it? Maybe you realized you could celebrate someone else’s success rather than wishing it were your own?” she said. It’s annoying when the “obvious advice,” such as drinking more water and getting more sleep, is right, she said. But gratitude is, unsurprisingly, good for your mood and mental health.
- Isabel Fattal, my lovely editor for this newsletter, curates playlists for her morning and evening commutes—which are based less on genre or Spotify’s suggestions than on the kind of mood she’d like to be in at that point in the day. “When I was a college intern in New York, I once managed to go seven stops in the wrong direction on the subway because I was listening to the National (I had a lot of feelings in that era),” she told me. “I’ve since improved my spatial awareness, but I maintain that the right music can elevate any experience.”
- If you have kids, you can include them in your happiness project, as many of my staff-writer friends do. Ross Andersen, for example, has enlisted his kids to make him a cappuccino every morning, which is genius and perhaps also a violation of child-labor laws. Clint Smith and his son spent a summer watching highlights from a different World Cup every day, which, he told me, was “a fun way to grow together in our joint fandom and also was a pretty fun geography lesson.” And McKay Coppins told me he loves his 2-year-old’s bedtime routine, which involves a monster-robot game, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and a good-night prayer. “Bedtime can be notoriously stressful for parents of young kids—and it often is for me too!” McKay told me. “But I always end up looking forward to this little slice of my day.”
Related: Today’s News - A shooting at a University of New Mexico dorm left one person dead and another wounded. Law enforcement is searching for the suspect.
- Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the “largesse” of the Fed’s headquarters renovations, just a day after President Donald Trump appeared to ease tensions during a visit to the Federal Reserve.
- The Trump administration will release $5.5 billion in frozen education funds to support teacher training and recruitment, English-language learners, and arts programs ahead of the new school year.
More From The Atlantic |
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Evening Read | | (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Edward Bottomley / Getty; Dario Belingheri / Getty.) | | | |
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| For fans of the Tour de France, the word extraterrestrial has a special resonance—and not a fun, Spielbergian one. In 1999 the French sports newspaper L’Équipe ran a photo of Lance Armstrong on its front page, accompanied by the headline “On Another Planet.” This was not, in fact, complimenting the American athlete for an out-of-this-world performance in cycling’s premier race, but was code for “he’s cheating.” At that point, L’Équipe’s dog-whistling accusation of doping was based on mere rumor. More than a decade passed before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency declared Armstrong guilty of doping. His remarkable streak of seven Tour wins was wiped from the record, but misgivings about extraterrestrial performances have never left the event. | |
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