I'm not the only one who settled this once. In 2015 an art director named Matilda Kahl wrote in Harper's Bazaar about a Monday morning spent trying on outfits before an important meeting, and what she did about it: 15 silk white shirts, a few black trousers, and a custom black leather rosette at the neck. Steve Jobs had Issey Miyake make him, in his words, "like a hundred" black turtlenecks.

The idea underneath all of it has a name. Decision fatigue says every choice you make draws from the same limited supply, so the more you decide, the worse you decide. It came with some of the best-known studies in psychology.

Then researchers put the idea to a much bigger test, in two large efforts across 23 labs and then 36.

Below: where the idea came from, what the bigger tests found, where it does seem to show up, why defaults work, and a prompt to find the decisions worth making only once.

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The goal had been simple. I wanted to work for executive leadership as early in my career as possible, because at the time I wanted to be the CEO of a luxury brand one day. I thought the closer I was to C-level leadership, the closer I'd be to getting there myself.

The first time I got there was at 26, when the CIO of a New York fashion brand hired me to work for him. The second was at a global luxury brand, where I moved up to report to the CIO for a short stretch, then to the deputy CIO. Two CIOs before 32. On paper it was exactly the plan.

What actually changed was very little. I was doing the same work I'd done for the company before, and more of it, now with more visibility. Nothing else came with it, so it felt like nothing had changed at all. I kept going anyway.

I didn't have language for that then. I found some this week, in the research I wrote about on Wednesday. In a 2002 paper, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham point out that the people with the hardest goals tend to perform the best and feel the least satisfied, and their explanation is blunt: "People with high goals produce more because they are dissatisfied with less." A hard goal works by keeping you hungry; it doesn't stop just because you got there.

That's only part of it, though. I was chasing the visibility of who I worked for, and I wasn't asking whether I enjoyed the work itself. You can have a high level of visibility and work for executives every day, and if you don't enjoy most of what you're doing day to day, that's where it falls flat. The title of the person you report to doesn't change what's on your calendar on a Tuesday.

I still want to be a CEO — that hasn't changed. However, I'm going to get there happier and more fulfilled in my day to day, doing work that matters and makes a real difference in the lives of others. (more to come on this!)

On Wednesday I wrote about what the goal-setting research actually says, including which kinds of goals make people happier when they hit them: What the Goal-Setting Research Actually Says.

So this year, before writing any, I went back to the original papers, the same way I did with Sardinia.

The short version is that goals work, more reliably than almost anything else in the self-improvement aisle. In 2002, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, the two psychologists most of the field is built on, summarized 35 years of their research in American Psychologist. Specific, difficult goals beat "do your best" on "well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants in at least eight countries."

The longer version is less tidy. The same paper admits that the people with the hardest goals tend to be the least satisfied. Picturing the finish line, the thing every vision board asks you to do, can drain the energy you need to get there. Goals can push people to cut corners, sometimes badly. And hitting a goal doesn't reliably make you happier; it depends on what kind of goal it was.

Below: what holds up, what backfires, which goals pay off when you hit them, the five questions I'm putting every one of next year's goals through, and a prompt to run them with AI.

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When I was a kid, I followed my parents through what looked like an alleyway in the West Village. We were going to dinner. The path wound around houses, there was no sign anywhere, I had no idea where we were, and I was fairly sure they had lost their minds. I was slightly afraid, but they had never led me astray before, so I just followed. Then someone opened a door and the room behind it was bustling, a whole restaurant tucked behind a courtyard off Barrow Street. It was Chumley's, a speakeasy since 1922, and it still had no sign out front.

That experience made me understand New York better. I remember thinking how cool it was that the city had so many hidden gems, places you'd only find if you did a serious amount of research or if you were a local. I remember thinking, I want to live here one day.

I was born in the West Village, I grew up in Bernardsville, a small town in New Jersey, and I went to North Carolina for college. At 22 I moved back to the West Village for my first job out of school, at IBM. That was August 2012, and I've lived downtown ever since; fourteen years now, most of my adult life.

A lot has changed. When I moved back, Uber had technically arrived the year before, but it wasn't widespread yet; we still stood on the corner and hailed yellow cabs. The bigger change is the people. The West Village used to feel very local, and now it feels more touristy than I would like. SoHo was galleries and local shops, and now it's mostly stores you can walk into in any city in the world. I miss the downtown I grew up knowing, the one that made me want to live here in the first place. It's more commercial than it used to be, which is unfortunate.

Chumley's is gone too. It closed in 2007 when a chimney collapsed, came back as a reservations-only restaurant in 2016, and closed for good in 2020. A steakhouse opened in the space last fall, but the door that started all of this doesn't open the way it used to. I truly miss places like that in the city, and I wish they were still around.

What hasn't changed is the energy. Downtown still has more to do and more to see than anyone could get through, and that still feels the same as the night my parents opened that door.

In September 2014 I moved to Tribeca, and I've been there ever since. In the West Village I lived on the sixth floor of a six-floor walk-up in a hundred-year-old building, and I wanted a little more space and a doorman. I'd always loved Tribeca for how cool and calm it is. It feels more local, more like a place you have to know about to really visit, and I thought it would be a great place to live.

Fall is when it feels most like mine. You know it's arrived when the air turns light and crisp and slightly chilly, and you can walk around the city without sweating the way you do all summer. Everyone is out. People walk briskly with a coffee or a drink in hand, in and out of coffee shops and stores, exploring the city, and the whole of downtown seems to be in a happy, light mood. My mornings change with it. Most days are still a matcha latte, but in the fall I mix in a couple of chai lattes, or a pumpkin chai if I can find one.

I don't have a set Sunday routine, but there's one thing I love. After Soto Method, I go to Frenchette Bakery in Tribeca, in the arcade at 220 Church Street, get a matcha or a chai and something from the bakery, and sit in the building for a while and people watch.

To me, that is still the city I wanted as a kid behind the door off Barrow Street. The hidden rooms are harder to find now, and most of them aren't rooms at all; they're a seat you like, an hour that works, a habit you'd only know about if you were a local.

The hidden places always get found eventually. On Wednesday I wrote about what happened after the world found a few mountain villages in Sardinia: The Blue Zone, Before Anyone Was Selling It.

The first time I went to Sardinia was in July 2018, on a RyanAir flight from Ciampino, the small airport outside Rome, down to Cagliari, with one of my best friends, Chrissy Toner, who writes The Year I Got Dressed. I remember being so excited to see what the island was all about. We explored Cagliari, Carloforte and Bosa, and we never made it up into the mountains, because I didn't know yet that the villages longevity researchers had been studying for more than a decade were up there.

You can skip Rome entirely now. When Delta announced its nonstop from New York to Sardinia, which started flying this May, the press release called the island "one of the world's five official Blue Zones," which tells you how far a piece of demographic research can travel in twenty years. The phrase "blue zone" now sells books, a Netflix series and real estate; the company that owns the brand sold in 2020 for a reported $78 million.

So I went back to the original papers, the ones written before anyone was selling anything.

In 2004 two demographers, Michel Poulain and Giovanni Pes, published a study in Experimental Gerontology on a cluster of villages in the mountains of central-eastern Sardinia, in Ogliastra and Barbagia, around La Marmora, the island's highest peak. They did the unglamorous part first. Every centenarian's age was checked against civil records going back to 1866, church records from the 1600s, and the birth dates of brothers and sisters, so nobody could be living on a dead sibling's papers. At least one supposed supercentenarian didn't survive the check and was taken out of the data.

What they found was unusual in a specific way. Almost everywhere, women outlive men, and the gap is widest at 100. In those villages, the men nearly kept up.

Why is the interesting part, and it's less tidy than the marketing. Below: the shepherds, the food, the family, the genes, the fraud critique, and what I've kept from my Italian side in New York.

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What rarely made it onto that calendar was anything that belonged only to me. The workout I meant to get to, the thing I wanted to write or build or learn because I was curious and not because someone was waiting on it. Those hours didn't lose to the meetings in any dramatic way. They hardly ever had a slot to lose. When a day ran long, and they all ran long, my own health and my own projects were the first things cut, almost every time, because nobody was sitting on the other side of them waiting for me to show up.

That is the main reason I started allora ora. I wanted the career and the rest of it too, and I had spent too many years watching the rest of it go first.

So last weekend I audited my own calendar, thirteen weeks of it, fully expecting to find I'd fixed the problem. It turns out, I had fixed half of it.

Health and wellness was the biggest thing on my calendar last quarter. Most of it was classes, booked through an app, with a spot held under my name and an instructor expecting me. The time that used to get cut first now mostly gets protected first, and the booking does as much of that work as my discipline does.

Mostly is the honest word. Just recently a student booked a meeting right on top of a class I was supposed to be at, and I moved the class without a second thought. Two slots were being held for me at the same hour, and I gave mine to the person who would be sitting there waiting.

The personal project is another story. allora ora is the thing I started so my own work would stop getting cut, and last quarter I published 17 essays here. The writing behind them had zero hours booked on any calendar. It happened anyway, in the gaps, late, squeezed between things other people were holding. The project I built to protect my own time is the one thing I still don't protect.

Once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it. Ambitious people are excellent at promises with a witness. We show up for the meeting, the client, the class, the 7:30 reservation, because someone is there. A promise to yourself has no witness, so it gets moved, and moved again, and it never feels like a decision because there's nobody to tell that you cancelled. Nothing in my corporate years trained me for that. They trained me for the opposite; to be the person who never misses the meeting.

To me, that's the other side of ambition in one sentence: the things you want most for yourself are the easiest things to cancel.

I've started booking my own work the way the class gets booked. A named block, a start time, a finish line written into the title, and a rule that a block can move but it can't disappear. Nobody is on the other end of those blocks yet. For now the calendar is the witness, and I'll know in January whether that's enough. I also went through what decades of goal-setting research says about which goals hold up and which ones backfire.

I wrote up the full audit, the numbers, and the prompt I used to run it in Your Calendar as a Diagnostic, for paid subscribers.

I've run planning cycles for a living. I've built the portfolio reviews, the resourcing models, the slide that tells a leadership team where the money went versus where they said it would go. I had never once pointed that same slide at my own year. Most people who can build a model have never aimed it at themselves, and most people who write about balance have never built a model; that gap is the whole reason this newsletter exists.

So I wrote my priorities down first, before I looked at anything: allora ora, my advisory business/opportunity searching, my teaching, time with friends and family, health and wellness. Then I let the calendar answer.

The first pass was humbling in the boring way: duplicate restaurant reservations Gmail had helpfully added for me and invites I'd never accepted. Once it was clean, the number came out, and at first it looked fine: 83% of the time I could choose how to spend went to the five things I said mattered. Then I looked at what made up the 83%.

Health and wellness was 37% of it. Friends and family was 31%. My work, the two businesses and opportunity searching together, was 16%. Across thirteen weeks, the three priorities I'd describe as my actual work got 25 booked hours. Under two hours a week.

That number is wrong. I published 17 essays on this newsletter last quarter, I sought new business opportunities, I took calls, I advised clients. None of it was on a calendar. The writing alone had zero hours booked across the entire quarter.

To me, that is the finding. The priorities that made it onto my calendar were the ones someone else put there. A class booked through an app, an appointment with a confirmation email, a reservation for 7:30; every one of those had another person on the other end holding the slot. The work I do alone had nobody holding anything, so it lived in the gaps, and the gaps don't show up when you go back and count.

There was a second thing, and I almost missed it. My busiest month, September, scored the worst when I first ran the numbers: 54% on-priority, against 76% in July. September is when a paid teaching commitment picked back up, and it filled whole mornings. I'd been counting that time against myself, as if it were a choice I kept making badly. Teaching is on my list of priorities, and it belongs there. In a time audit, though, a paid commitment counts as a cost, the same way rent is a cost: agreed to, paid for, and spoken for before the week even starts. When I moved it out of the score and treated it like the fixed cost it is, September went from my worst month to my best: 93% on-priority.

Nothing about September changed. The way I was keeping score did.

Below is everything I did with it: the steps, what I changed for this quarter, and the prompt I wrote so you can run the same audit on yourself in an evening.

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That was the first thing on the list. It isn't the only one.

What I took off

I almost put my classes on it. Soto, Pilates, yoga, and I've done 200 hours of teacher training, so you'd think yoga would be at the top. I do feel better after every one of them; at Soto Method and in most yoga classes, every class ends in child's pose for a reason. But when I was honest with myself, a class is a different kind of rest. There's a booking, a time, an instructor, a room of people working hard. It's good for me, and it takes something to show up for it, although I do crave it. But for what I mean by rest, the classes come off.

What's left

Meditation, on Open. Sometimes I put on my HigherDOSE red light mask while I meditate; I absolutely love it, and it relaxes me too. HigherDOSE also writes a Substack, The Higher Life, if you want to go deeper.

CLEARSTEM's Eye Candy eye patches, which really relax me. Sometimes I put them on, lie down, and just listen to music or a meditation.

A walk around Tribeca, just wandering: Greenwich Street, Duane Street, Harrison Street, and the less traveled corners of the neighborhood. Sometimes I go up to Crosby Street in Soho, because it's a little quieter, and wander up and down it. No destination; the walk is the point. The men in Sardinia’s longevity villages walked about twelve kilometers a day to work, and I wrote about what the research in Sardinia actually found.

A really hot shower with my chill Spotify playlists on and my favorite products. Gente, the Brazilian lymphatic drainage line, for their exfoliating soap, The Ipanema Scrub, and their Tropical Rain shower gel. Ranavat's cream face wash and their exfoliator. And for my hair, either the indē wild Champi Bond Repair Duo or the Ranavat shampoo and conditioner. It's a whole routine, and I take my time with it.

When I get out, I spritz my face with a toner: Tammy Fender's Bulgarian Rose Water, her Essential C Tonic, or Palermo's rose water and witch hazel toner. When I want to use a cotton pad instead of just spraying, I reach for Santa Maria Novella's Acqua di Rose or their mint herb toner, Acqua di Erba di S. Maria. That's the only routine on the list, and it's the one I'd never give up.

A matcha latte, either at a café or my apartment. Most mornings, I make it myself. Once in a while I'll have a cappuccino if it's Italian and authentic, or a hot chocolate in New York, but both are very rare.

Reading, mostly health, wellness, neuroscience, and business books, and once in a while, fiction.

A nap.

A movie.

And under all of it, whenever I'm resting at home, I light a candle. I always do. Ranavat makes a jasmine candle I love, and it's burning as I write this. I have a few other candle brands I really like too. None of these brands send me anything. I buy them. The one exception is the Nette chai milk candle. One of my best friends, Chrissy Toner, who writes The Year I Got Dressed, gave it to me as a gift a few years ago, and I loved it so much. Sadly, it's been discontinued, but I still think about that candle, especially in the fall weather, when chai was in the air.

To be clear, I'm not getting paid to recommend any of the products or apps in this piece. They're things I really do, use, subscribe to, and enjoy.

Laid out like that, none of it is complicated. None of it needs a reservation or a teacher. Most of it happens within a few blocks of my front door, and all of it can start in the next five minutes. That's the test I've landed on: if I have to schedule it, it might be good for me, but it isn't rest. When I audited a full quarter of my calendar, the work I care about most wasn't on it either.

Fake rest

The one thing that isn't on the list is the one that looks the most like rest: scrolling through social media, or looking anything else up on my phone. You trick your mind into thinking you're resting when you're doing that, but you're not. To me it drains my mind more than it replenishes it.

Which is why the phone needs handling.

The phone

My phone is usually with me for all of this, and I'd rather say that than pretend otherwise. But if I really want to rest, it's locked with Brick, the magnet on my fridge I wrote about in The Phone on the End Table. That's the difference between the walk that clears my head and the walk where I'm half answering emails.

Why it matters on a Saturday

I wrote on Wednesday about what buying time actually buys you: a study of more than 6,000 people that found paying someone else to take a task off your plate is linked to being happier, and the ledger of what I pay for and what I still do myself. That piece is about getting the hours back. This one is about what I do with them.

It turns out the answer isn't much. A walk, a shower, a matcha, a nap. The Italians have a phrase for it, dolce far niente, and I've written about it before.

As I write this, I'm sitting in my Tribeca apartment, looking out the window at a beautiful sunset over the city buildings. The Ranavat candle is still burning. That's as far as the plan goes.

I didn't have an official name for what I was doing until I read a 2017 study from researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia. The name is buying time, and according to the study it's one of the things money can actually do for happiness that a surprising number of people, including people with a great deal of money, don't do. I've asked what something actually buys you twice before here, about minimalism and about ambition. This one has the clearest answer of the three.

What they did

Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Paul Smeets, René Bekkers and Michael Norton surveyed more than 6,000 people in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands, including 818 Dutch millionaires. They asked whether people spent money each month paying someone else to do daily tasks they didn't enjoy, and how much. Then they asked how satisfied people were with their lives.

Then they ran an experiment. Sixty working adults in Vancouver were given $40 on two weekends in a row. One weekend they had to spend it on something that would save them time. The other weekend they had to spend it on a thing, a material purchase. At five o'clock on each of those days, someone called and asked how they felt.

What it bought

In the surveys, about 28 percent of people paid for time each month, around $148 on average. Those people were more satisfied with their lives. That held when the researchers controlled for income, and it didn't depend on income; it showed up across the samples, the millionaires included.

The finding I keep coming back to is the second one. For people who didn't buy any time, feeling rushed pulled their life satisfaction down, which is what you'd expect. For people who did, feeling rushed barely moved it. The pressure was still there. It just took less out of them. The researchers compare it to the way support from friends works on stress: the stress still arrives, it just doesn't land the same way.

The weekend experiment is the part that shows cause and not just a pattern. After the time-saving purchase, people reported a better mood, less negative mood, and less time pressure that day than after the material one, and the drop in time pressure is what explained the better mood. Forty dollars, one weekend, measurably less rushed.

The part people skip

This is what surprised the researchers, and me. Just under half of the 818 millionaires spent nothing at all paying someone to take over the things they didn't like doing. And when the team asked another 98 working adults how they'd spend a windfall of $40, only 2 percent said they'd use it to buy time.

I'd love to tell you I'm in the 2 percent. I'm not.

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I brought this home from Rome, the same way I brought home the cappuccino and the people-watching. At nineteen I sat alone at Sant'Eustachio and Giolitti because I didn't know anyone yet, and by the end of a semester with a Nokia I was doing it because I'd learned to like it. What surprises me is the direction it's gone since. Most habits from that year faded. This one grew. I eat alone in New York more now than I did in my twenties, and more this year than last; the older I get the less I need a second person to justify a table.

Where

Balthazar, in Soho, at the bar. The first time I went was in the late '90s, as a kid, not long after it opened, and it has been one of my favorites ever since; it still feels like the room the city is happening in, and a bar seat there alone is the best seat in the house because you can see all of it. Paros, in Tribeca, for the Greek food and the bar I was at on Tuesday. The bar at the Crosby Street Hotel in Soho, which is built for exactly this: a person, a drink, a book you don't open, and a room full of people who are also from somewhere else. And the Odeon, on West Broadway, for the grilled cheese or the moules frites, at the bar, on a weeknight, which is about as Tribeca as an evening gets.

The math is simple. If I'm out, and I'm already dressed, and I'm not exhausted, I would rather eat out than go home and order in. Home is where the day ends; a bar seat is where it might still turn into something. There is always the chance of meeting someone, and you truly never know who is going to sit down next to you. Some nights it's nobody and the evening is still better than the couch.

What the hosts do

They ask "just one?" every time, and I've stopped hearing anything in it. Then they smile, and they give me a good seat, and more often than not a better one than I'd have gotten as a two. I don't know if that's pity or policy and I've decided I don't need to. A woman alone in a nice dress, who knows what she wants, gets treated well in this city. That's been my experience at every one of the places above.

The phone

I try to put it away, and I want to be honest about the word "try." I watch the room first. I watch the room for most of it. And then a table leaves and the bartender's at the other end and there's a lull, and I look at it, and I know what that costs because I wrote a whole post about it last month. The bar seat is the test of that post and I pass it most of the time. Not all of it.

Rome and here

It's harder here. That's the thing I keep turning over. In Rome, or anywhere in Italy, the person at the next table talks to you inside of ten minutes; in New York people keep to themselves, they came out with the people they came out with, and a woman alone at the bar is furniture unless she makes the first move. So I do, more than I would at home, and that's where I'm not sure of my own answer. Either New Yorkers are more closed, or I'm more open when I'm abroad and I bring a version of myself to Rome that I don't bring to Greenwich Street.

I think it's some of both. I know which one I can do something about.

I wrote on Wednesday about a long weekend in Rome, and most of that piece is me at a table by myself: the counter at Sant'Eustachio, the peach room at Giolitti, a bar seat at the de Russie. Tuesday at Paros was the same habit with a shorter commute. The city changes, the seat doesn't.

I go for a week when I can and a long weekend when I can't, and I've done the long weekend enough times that it has a shape now; the shape is the point. I don't go to Rome to see Rome. I saw it, at nineteen, for a whole semester with a phone that couldn't do anything. I go back to sit in it, to enjoy it, to marvel at it, to just appreciate the culture, the art, and the people. Three or four days is exactly enough time to do that and not enough time to start making a list, which is the only way I've found to protect a trip from myself.

The first cup

The wander has a first stop, and it's always the same one. Caffè Sant'Eustachio, every single day I am in Rome. I try to go every morning, as often as I possibly can, and I mostly manage it. To me it is the best cappuccino in the world, and I have stopped pretending there's a contest. You stand at the counter, or you take one of the tables outside, and either way the rule is the same: you don't leave until the cup is done and you've watched at least one argument.

That first cup on Friday is when the trip actually starts. The nap took the flight off; the cappuccino takes New York off. I can feel the pace I arrived with, the one where every hour has a next thing attached to it, start to come loose. It's the closest thing I have to a switch.

Everything after that is a loop I walk rather than a plan I follow. Below is the loop.

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I studied in Rome that year, and I lived in a homestay, which I'll leave there. What I want to write about is what I did with the hours that weren't class, because it turns out those are the hours that mattered.

Where I went

Caffè Sant'Eustachio, standing at the counter or at one of the tables outside, with the cappuccino that everyone tells you about and that is in fact that good. Giolitti, for gelato, at whatever hour the walk brought me past it. La Buvette on Via Vittoria, a few streets from the Spanish Steps, where you can sit long enough that the waiter stops asking. And a rotation of other cafés I couldn't name now, picked for the same reason: a chair in an active room or facing the street.

I wasn't reading. I wasn't writing anything down. I was watching people. Who was meeting whom, who was late, the argument at the next table, the man who ordered the same thing every day at the same time and clearly had for thirty years. Rome is a city that performs itself in public, and at nineteen with nothing in my hand I had the best seat.

What the Nokia was actually doing

I've told the story of that semester for sixteen years as a story about Italy. The light, the food, the sweetness of doing nothing. All true. But I've started to think the phone was doing more of the work than the country was.

There was nothing to check. That sounds small and it isn't. It meant a coffee was a coffee, a wait was a wait, and an hour at a table was an hour at a table with no exit. When you can't leave a moment, you look at it. I looked at Rome for four months because I couldn't do anything else, and it went in deeper than anything I've looked at since.

The habit that came home

People-watching is the thing I still do because of Rome. Not the espresso, not the two-hour lunch, not the Italian, though I keep at all three. The sitting somewhere with a view of a street and watching strangers live. It is the one habit from that semester that survived a decade plus of corporate calendars, and I think it survived because it's the one that needs nothing. No equipment, no membership, no plan. A chair and a window.

Admittedly, I do it less than I'd like. In New York I am always running from one place to the next, and the chair facing the street gets skipped for the thing after it. The habit is still in me; the hour for it usually isn't.

What I'd tell my 19-Year-Old Self

Nothing, really. She had it right. She had a phone that couldn't do anything and a city that could, and she stood at the counter at Sant'Eustachio for as long as she wanted since there was nowhere the hour needed to be.

I wrote on Wednesday about what a phone on the table costs, even silenced, even face down. The semester I'm describing is the only stretch of my adult life when that cost was zero, and I'm only now realizing that's why I remember it the way I do.

What they did

In 2017 four researchers, Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos, brought 520 people into a lab and asked every one of them to silence their phones. Then they split them into three groups. The first group put the phone face down on the desk. The second kept it wherever they normally would, a pocket or a bag. The third left it in the lobby, in another room.

Then everyone sat for the same two tests. One measures working memory: you solve math problems while holding a string of letters in your head. The other is the pattern-completion test people use as a proxy for fluid intelligence, the raw ability to reason through something new.

Nobody's phone rang. Nobody checked it. That's the whole design: the phone did nothing.

What it cost

The people whose phones were in the lobby did best. The people whose phones were on the desk did worst. The pocket group landed in between, and the line ran straight through all three, on both tests. Four feet of distance, silenced, face down, and it showed up in the numbers.

The second experiment is the one I keep mulling over. They ran it again with 275 people, phones face up on the desk this time, and split them by whether the phone was silenced or powered off entirely. It made no difference. Off is the same as silent. The object is the problem, not the notifications.

And then they asked everyone how often they'd been thinking about their phone during the tests. The answer was the same across all three groups. The people who were losing the most had no idea they were losing anything.

Why

The authors' explanation is one sentence, and it's the sentence I'd put on the wall: "Resources recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one's phone are made unavailable for other tasks, and performance on these tasks will suffer."

Not looking at your phone is work. The pull is automatic, the resisting is effortful, and the effort comes out of the same account you're trying to think with. You don't feel the withdrawal because there's no moment where it happens; it's a tax on every minute, deducted at source.

One more thing from the second experiment. They measured how dependent each person felt on their phone, and at low dependence the effect disappeared. The phone on the desk only drains people who'd miss it. Which is a polite way of saying it drains me.

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In August I wrote that it takes me two full days to arrive out here. In the off season it takes about four hours.

I did not get better at resting between August and September; I read the same books, I take the same routes, I bring the same habits, however one variable changed and it wasn’t me. It was everyone else.

Here is what goes away. The drive has less traffic and the trains are less crowded, reservations don’t need to be planned as far in advance, the stores start to shutter and put up “see you next year” signs. The parking that took a strategy takes nothing. And it feels like the ocean is warmer in September than it is in June; presumably the water spends the whole summer absorbing heat and hands it back for weeks after the crowd has decided the season is finished. Everything anyone claims to come here for is still here, in better condition, at a lower price, and available.

This tells you what was actually being bought in July, and it was not the beach.

I’ve written about Ferragosto, the day Italy closes on purpose and fifty-nine million people rest at the same time. Rest turns out to be a network good; it is worth more when the people around you have it too, which is why a disciplined solo week in February does not do what a crowded August in Liguria does. So I can’t call the July crowd a mistake. The crowd is the point. I felt it myself the weekend I had friends out here last month, and I would not trade that weekend for a quiet one.

The difference is what the two crowds agreed to. Italy agrees to close. The East End agrees to open harder.

Same instinct, opposite protocol. One country decided the way to get everyone off at once is to shut the whole thing down, and then spends the month doing nothing on purpose; dolce far niente is not a mood there, it’s an infrastructure decision. The East End decided the way to get everyone off at once is to build a season with a guest list. Both of them work on the network. Only one of them is restful, and it is not the one that costs more.

So the off season isn’t a lifestyle recommendation. It’s a diagnostic. If a place only works for you when nobody else is in it, either you have found the version of it you actually like, or you have found the version of it where nobody can see whether you belong.

If you’re coming out before everything closes for the winter, the weekend I wrote about in August is the one for paid subscribers: I hosted friends in the Hamptons this weekend.

It stuck with me, and it made me go back to my own sixty-page reading and notice which parts I have actually used since January 2024 and which parts I have read once and never thought about again.

The honest answer is that my type is the part I use least.

Generator is a category. It tells me I have a certain kind of energy and that seventy percent of the people reading this have it too, which is a lot of company for something that is supposed to explain me. What I use, nearly every week, is one word. Frustration. That word is doing all the work, and every type has one.

What a not-self theme actually is

In Human Design each type gets two words. One is the signature, the feeling you get when you’re running the way you’re built to run. The other is the not-self theme, the feeling that shows up when you aren’t.

Generators and Manifesting Generators get satisfaction and frustration. Manifestors get peace and anger. Projectors get success and bitterness. Reflectors get surprise and disappointment.

The signature is the nicer half and the less useful one. Everybody wants to feel satisfied or at peace, and knowing you’re supposed to tells you nothing you can act on. The not-self theme is the half that does work, because it is specific, it is unflattering, and it shows up in your body before your calendar tells you anything is wrong.

Here is the part I have to name, because it would be dishonest not to. There is a well-documented effect where people rate vague, broadly flattering personality descriptions as highly accurate about themselves. Psychologists call it the Barnum or Forer effect, and it is exactly the trap a system like this should fall into. Any of these four words will describe your last bad month if you squint.

To me, the difference is the direction of the claim. A horoscope tells you what is going to happen. A not-self theme tells you what to watch for, and then you find out within a week whether it was right. That is a much smaller claim, and it is one you can actually check. It is the same move I made when I went looking for what minimalism actually buys you, which is to keep the part that survives the checking.

So this is the test, and it costs you nothing but attention. Take your word. Watch for it for one week. When it shows up, don’t treat it as a mood; treat it as a reading, and look at what you had said yes to in the days before it arrived.

Below: what each of the four words actually means, how it shows up at work rather than in a wellness context, and what to do when it arrives. Plus the one that is easy to mistake for the others, and the reason the rarest type gets a completely different instruction from everyone else.

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I didn’t forget. Within a month it was everywhere, that’s how it usually happens with these things. You hear a concept once that you never heard of before, and then all of a sudden it is everywhere (Priming is the mechanism underneath this but that is a topic for another time). So I did what I do with anything I’m curious about, which is a deeper dive than anyone asked for.

What Human Design actually is

Here is the part where I lose some of you, but nonetheless…

Human Design was created in 1987 by a Canadian former advertising executive named Alan Krakower, who said he had an eight-day mystical experience, and published the system in 1992. It combines Western astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah, the Hindu chakra system and a loose reading of quantum physics into a single chart generated from your exact birth time and place. Wikipedia calls it pseudoscientific in the first sentence. There are no peer-reviewed studies behind it, and the people who sell readings will tell you as much if you ask.

To my analytical mind, I know what evidence looks like. Human Design does not have any.

However to me, it still piqued my interest because of what my reading actually said.

Why I kept going further

The question I ended up asking was simpler: does looking at this make me behave better or differently, and can I check that against my actual life?

My chart says I’m a Generator. So, statistically, is roughly seventy percent of everyone reading this; Generators are the most common type by a wide margin, which is the first thing a skeptic should notice and the thing the skeptic in me noticed immediately. If the same page describes most of humanity, it’s a horoscope. Except the Generator page did not read like a horoscope to me.

Generators, in this system, have a big, reliable engine of energy and are meant to spend it on things that satisfy them. When they do, they’re magnetic and they sleep well. When they spend it on things they think they should do, the signal is frustration. Not sadness, not burnout exactly (although it can lead there); frustration, the specific low hum of being busy and getting nowhere, of doing good work on the wrong thing.

The word that landed

Frustration was the word that got me. I have always had plenty of energy to dedicate to things I love (whether they be easy or hard), but I’ve always found it harder to have energy to give to things I don’t have an interest in doing.

The other half of the Generator page is the one that gave me something to do about it. Generators aren’t meant to initiate; they’re meant to respond. You wait for something to show up, a message, an offer, a person, an idea from someone else, and you notice whether your gut lights up or goes flat, and you commit only to the things that light up. I read that and thought – what an interesting concept.

I can tell you that in the two and a half years since that retreat, the decisions I’ve made by waiting for the lit-up feeling have held, and the ones I’ve made because they looked right on paper mostly haven’t.

What it does for you, honestly

It doesn’t predict anything. It doesn’t fix anything. What it does is give you a small vocabulary for how you personally spend and lose energy, and permission to trust it.

For an ambitious person that permission is the whole thing. We are trained to override the gut. Say yes, be strategic, take the meeting, do the thing that positions you. Human Design handed me a reason to stop treating my own frustration as a character flaw and start treating it as information; when I’m frustrated, I’m off, and when I’m satisfied, I’m on, and I can check which one I’m feeling at the end of any given day without a healer or a chart.

You could get to the same place through therapy, or a good manager, or years of paying attention. I got there through a chart a stranger in LA told me to look up, and I’m not going to be precious about the route.

I got my full reading done in November of last year, and it’s a sixty-page document I keep coming back to, mostly for the parts about how I make decisions, which is a different piece of the chart from your type and the one I find most useful day to day.

If your type is Generator, you’re in good company, and the word to watch this week is frustration. If it isn’t, tell me what it is; I’m curious if your chart resonates with you as mine did for me.

The paper opens by noting that the philosophers who called ambition a virtue are "apparently outnumbered by those perceiving it as vicious." That has been the split my whole adult life. Ambition is either the thing that got me into rooms that accelerated my career, or it's the thing that had me pulling near all-nighters to make sure deliverables were done on time so I wouldn't let myself or anyone else down asking for an extension. Nobody in either camp had data. These two did.

How you measure ambition in someone born in 1910

The researchers used what Terman had already collected. In 1936 the participants wrote down their best quality and their worst fault, and the answers were coded for whether ambition showed up in either column. In 1940 they rated themselves on having a "definite purpose in life," one to eleven. And in 1940 their parents rated them too, on drive, and on whether their child was "integrated toward a definite goal."

Four items. Two from the person, two from the mother or father, averaged into one number when most of them were about thirty.

I keep thinking about the parent ratings. To me, that is the first real finding, before any of the statistics: ambition is a reputation, and the people who raised you have the earliest read on it.

What it bought them

Then they followed the number forward through careers that peaked between 1940 and 1960, and the results are about as clean as social science gets.

Ambition predicted how far they went in school, with an effect of .48, which in this kind of model is large. It predicted the prestige of their occupation, .28. It predicted income, .28. When the researchers re-ran the model letting intelligence, personality, and the parents' status predict those outcomes directly, ambition's numbers barely moved. So this isn't smart kids from good families doing well and calling it drive. The drive itself did work.

That is the part of the receipt that matches the story we tell. Want more, get more. Degrees, title, money, in that order.

What it didn't buy them

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There are two kinds. Not metaphorically, actually — a researcher named Robert Vallerand has spent twenty years building the evidence for it, and the split explains more about my thirties than anything I came up with on my own.

What Vallerand actually found

Vallerand's model starts from something almost too simple: passion isn't the amount of time or energy you give something. It's how that thing got inside you in the first place.

Harmonious passion comes in through the front door. You chose it, you still choose it, and it sits inside your identity without running the place. You can put it down. You can miss a day of it and still be yourself the next morning.

Obsessive passion comes in through pressure — a need to prove something, a fear of what happens if you stop. From the outside it can look identical to the harmonious version. Same hours, same output, same résumé line. From the inside, you don't have it. It has you.

Vallerand's own number: passionate people spend around eight and a half hours a week on the thing they're passionate about, whichever kind it is. The hours don't tell you which one you're looking at. Almost nothing external does. When I audited a full quarter of my own calendar, 83 percent of the hours looked on track until I asked who had booked them.

Same résumé, two different people

I spent six years running retail innovation for a luxury retail house. Nine apps, one of them an augmented-reality try-on that 180,000 people used during a single exhibition. On paper, that's a clean, ambitious run, and it was.

Over the years, though, the fulfillment never showed up. What did show up was the obsession to prove I was good enough, and it was that combination, not the workload, that eventually took the floor out from under me.

That's the part the résumé can't show. Two people can build the same nine apps. One of them built them and is still standing at the end, whole, with hobbies, a regulated nervous system, a Sunday, and a version of herself that existed before the job. The other built the same nine apps and can't remember who she was before the job started asking her to prove something with them.

What the research says happens next

This is where it stops being a vibe and starts being data. Vallerand followed people through the actual downstream effects, and the two passions diverge hard.

Harmonious passion predicts better wellbeing a year later, not just that week. It protects the rest of a person's life — his own language, from a study of couples, is that harmonious passion "nurtured self-growth as a person and protected the person from neglecting other aspects of their life." Obsessive passion did the opposite: it "only positively predicted neglecting other relationships and activities."

Obsessive passion also shows up in the anxiety and rumination research, in burnout studies, and — this is the one that stopped me — in behavioral addiction research. Exercise addiction, gaming, problematic substance use. The mechanism isn't the activity. It's the inability to disengage from it even when disengaging is the correct move.

Aid workers on short deployments were one of the clearer tests. The ones with harmonious passion for the work came home healthier than when they left. The ones with obsessive passion came home with more headaches (I get stress-induced migraines, so I recognize that one), more stomach pain, more of the body keeping score of what the mind wouldn't admit.

I recognized the pattern before my career even started. When I was being recruited to play field hockey in college, I'd get sick before every national or international game where a coach was there to watch me. My body deciding the stakes were too high, before I'd even stepped on the field.

What I'm actually asking mine to do

So the question was never how ambitious I am. It's what I'm asking the ambition to do for me. Whether it's something I get to have, or something I need in order to feel like a person worth having around, including to myself.

That's the same question I asked about the closet this week, writing about minimalism and what it actually buys you: the research there doesn't count your possessions either. It counts what you're asking them to do. Ambition runs on the identical mechanism. It was never about how much of it you have. It's about whether you're still the one holding it.

I don't have that fully sorted for myself yet. I'm not sure anyone does, permanently — Vallerand's own data suggests obsessive passion versus harmonious passion can shift depending on what's asking things of you that year. But I'd rather know which one I'm dealing with versus not.

The strongest research in this area does not count anybody’s possessions. It measures how much of your idea of a good life is riding on acquiring things. Which means the number of items in your apartment is close to irrelevant, and the thirty-day declutter can leave the actual variable untouched.

I sold Fashion & Jewelry for a living, so I am declaring the bias up front. I spent eight years in digital product for luxury brands, six of them running retail mobile apps and retail innovation for a jewelry house. I built nine apps there. One of them let a person try on an iconic piece of jewelry through augmented reality; 180,000 people used it during the exhibition it was built for, and nearly all of them were trying on something they would never own. I know how the wanting gets manufactured. Manufacturing it was the job.

So when a genre arrives telling ambitious people that the answer is a capsule wardrobe and a decluttering weekend, I want to see the numbers.

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What I’ve never done is share the actual class. The one I recorded and submitted to get certified in the first place.

It runs over an hour, which is longer than anything else I’ve put behind this paywall. It’s not polished. I didn’t reshoot it; I didn’t edit out the parts where I second-guess a cue or lose my place in the sequence for a second. It’s the version I was happy enough with to hand in, not the version I’d make if I were building a product.

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