Click. Read. Love. 7.20.25
Reclaiming our attention to find meaning, and get back to our humanity...
Yesterday we drove to the Seacoast in New Hampshire to have a day at the beach. On the drive my phone died and I didn’t have a charger, so it remained off for the rest of the day. When we arrived the beach parking lot was full, but there were spots along the road where you could climb down some rocks and sit until the tide came in.
As we set up our things, I noticed a group of young women taking photos of each other. For about an hour, they took turns taking different angles and poses. After, they went back to their chairs and towels to review the footage. I thought about the pictures they’d post and the captions they’d write. What did they hope to achieve? What were they trying to portray? I wondered what the people viewing them would think and how they would feel when they were posted on social media. To be clear, I’m not making a judgement here, I literally took photos of myself and shared them on the internet basically everyday for 10 years…And it almost destroyed me.
In an interview I did earlier this week,
asked me when and how I decided to quit influencing. My answer is always the same. There wasn’t some “aha moment” but rather a series of events that ultimately led me to realize if I was ever going to find my way back to myself, I had to walk away. Moving to Vermont was a big catalyst for this change. The proximity to nature, the strength of community, the humanness, the lack of digital prominence, it pulled me away from the digital world I had been living in and back to the real one I didn’t realize I had been missing.Maybe that’s the crux of it. It can be easy to lose our sense of reality in the digital world, because much of what we see isn’t real. And if we want to get back to the things that make us human, that give life meaning, we must break free from the dopamine machines in our pocket. We can watch the performance of life go by on apps controlled by billionaires who steal and control our attention. Or we can reclaim our lives and our humanity, and reconnect with our purpose on this planet. I’d like to believe it’s never too late for that.
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Welcome to my weekly newsletter Click. Read. Love. It has all the best recommendations I’ve sourced throughout the week. What you won’t find, a bunch of links encouraging you to buy stuff. Not doin it! Thank you for being here!
In this week’s Click. Read. Love.
How do we respond to tweens’ obsession with skincare?
The song I’m listening to on repeat
How private equity is destroying lives
A face sunscreen that doesn’t make me break out
A writer/blogger walking away from a successful newsletter
A survey, comparing yourself to the average
and more!