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It’s a fresh and early morning and the world is still kind of asleep.

You wake up. Grab a coffee and then you do the worst thing possible…

You jump on to social media and get stuck in a scroll hole that sucks you into the outrage.

Politics. Olympics. Terrible things happening across the world. You feel your heart rate spike a little. Your day hasn’t started and now you’re annoyed. Hell, you’re about to head straight into Outrage city.

You’re primed to find everything annoying and so your day spirals into a menacing hatred for society and humans as a whole.

This was all engineered. The media is designed to make your emotions flip flop.

However, you’re better than this. You take a deep breath. You open your email and you find this waiting for you.

You get told that life isn’t too serious even when things seem terrible and the world is crumbling.

You’re safe. You’ve got a roof over your head. You’ve got friends and family nearby. You live in a safe community in relation to what’s being fed. You are blessed.

Oprah once penned: ““Gratitude can transform any situation. It alters your vibration, moving you from negative energy to positive. It’s the quickest, easiest, most powerful way to effect change in your life — this I know for sure.”

While everything in the world in on fire. An attitude of gratitude will slap you out to the meh-ness of today.

Stephen Walker

Like the sun that glowered down like a pissed-off solar bad guy, its rage focused squarely on the pale, sweaty faces of England’s unprepared folk.

Air conditioning? What’s that? Some fancy American joke?

I sat at my desk, keyboard sticky with the residue of melted semi soaked face towels and desperation. The fan wheezed pathetically, stirring the air like a geriatric butterfly with arthritis.

But there, on my screen, were the messages. The comments. The reviews.

You, the beautiful, glorious readers…

While the world outside turned into Satan’s sauna, you were still here.

Still reading my fever-dream ramblings, my tales of weirdness and woe.

I wanted to hug you all, but that would involve moving, and moving meant more sweat, and more sweat meant… well, let’s not go there.

So instead, I typed. Because if you could brave this solar apocalypse to read my words, I could damn well write them.

Even if my face melted off in the process.

Thank you, you mad, wonderful creatures for keeping up with my word shenanigans.

Now excuse me while I go stick my head in the freezer and I’ll hopefully be back with my regularly schedules programming tomorrow.

Stephen Walker

A few years ago, a buddy told me he’d cashed in a bunch of sick days to give himself a “self care week”.

His strategy:

Ordering takeout and finishing an entire MyCareer on NBA 2k.

I know I’m preaching here, but that ‘aint no mfxcking self-care.

Swapping psychological stress for neurological stress…

(ie. going on a dopamine bender via. video games, social media, binge-watching, etc)

…Is not going to de-stress you, it’s just going to stress you differently.

(as he put it afterwards — “now I need a vacation from my vacation”)

Remember:

Self-care means giving yourself what you need, not what you think you want.

It means re-building your energy through activities that build energy:

Sleep, good food, nature, friends, meditation, qigong, even exercise in some cases.

It doesn’t mean strapping yourself to the couch and beating Zelda in two weeks.

(ask me how I know…)

Anyway, I’m a big fan of self-care done right; the right type, in the right dose, at the right time.

And that is exactly what I plan to give myself.

It has been exactly zero days since the last time I enjoyed a zoom call filled with people who have made data and analytics their personality type…

Spent the whole day on and off in various zoom calls of the corporate type.

I was having flashbacks and it felt like a fever dream unfolding.

The world outside my window’s gone to shit.

Locked up tighter than a nun’s chastity belt, we’re all slaves to the glowing sadness rectangles now. Fuck me sideways if I didn’t see this coming. Every morning, I hook my brain into the Zoom-o-matic 3000, feeling those sweet, sweet oligarch electrons coursing through my synapses.

It’s a hit of digital crack, and I’m jonesing hard.

“Good morning, team!” chirps my boss, her face a pixelated mask of corporate cheer.

I want to vomit, but my fingers are too busy dancing across the keyboard, typing bullshit reports about nothing.

Days bleed into nights, weeks into months. The only difference between Tuesday and Saturday is the flavour of microwaved crap I shovel into my face-hole. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of the outside world. Trees swaying in the breeze, birds singing their carefree songs. Bastards.

Don’t they know we’re all fucked?

But then the Zoom call dings yet again, and I’m pulled back into the matrix of meaningless meetings and forced smiles. It’s almost comforting now.

God help us all.

Then the world goes back to normal and we aren’t waiting to witness an all out catastrophe.

Yet the world has changed a lot more. We’ve become hyper fixated on social media. Twitter, Tiktok and Youtube are crack and just like that. Social media has us even deeper in their grips.

And so this is where I make my case for email. These lovely little compilations of words.

It’s like we’re sitting across from each other enjoying a coffee, except we’re not. This has found its way into your inbox and hopefully you’re entertained and whisked out of the dullness that life can sometimes throw our way.

Asides from hand written and typed letters. Emails for me have always been a favourite to way to share insights into my life with others who have opt-ed in to my word shenanigans.

It’s like a blog but it’s not. We’re just having a singular moment as soon as I hit send and then it’s off until tomorrow.

Even though we’ve never met face to face. You might feel like you’ve known for since forever.

This is why I encourage everyone who is either in a creative industry or just want to get away from the toxic cesspool that is social media, to start up their own little news letter.

You’ll learn a lot more about yourself when you’re forcing yourself to write about you, your life and the things that make you tick.

It’s a hell of a lot better than spending hours scrolling through the brain rotting abyss that is social media.

Stephen Walker