Bring Back Yearning

ep 10: that's all

I read this gorgeous piece by Gloria Alamrew—“Why Healing Is Making Us Mean”—and experienced every feeling in a five-minute read: personally attacked, deeply validated, briefly enlightened, then attacked again. Good writing is both a mirror and a molotov cocktail, and this piece lit something in me.

Gloria references a Kurt Vonnegut line that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“The moral of the story is: we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

Despite all my therapy-coded words—boundaries, protecting my energy, regulating my nervous system—I could not agree more with Gloria. So this is my plea, to you and to me:

We’re living in the beige era

Let’s examine the cultural moment.

In one corner of the ring: GLP-1s and longevity bros.

The GLP-1 market is now ~$52B with projections hitting $126B in three years. We’ve built a behemoth on appetite suppression, wanting less. The Cut argued, rather colorfully, that these drugs are making life beige. (h/t Chloe).

And then you have Bryan Johnson, eating lentils and broccoli for dinner at a party with Kardashians and Huberman, all of whom were kicked out by 7:30pm so he could sleep. He might live to 150. But at what cost? (Well, $2M/year—but that’s not entirely my point.)

Then there’s the AI elephant in the room. We’re all hyper-optimized and hyper-efficient, creating bots of ourselves to attend meetings we don’t want to go to. I have an AI email plug-in that drafts hyper-realistic emails I can send in seconds, without thought or intention. Efficiency! Optimization! Humanity?? … TBD.

We’re architecting a world where the goal seems to be: feel less, crave less, want less, yearn less.

All to be safe? In control?

Beige?

But in the other corner… softness.

There’s a counter-movement rising quietly, but unmistakably.

Olivia Dean’s sweet, wholesome heartbreak songs have people everywhere—including men, which makes my heart so happy—bopping around their kitchens and feeling every feeling from love to heartbreak. Amy Poehler launches the instant hit, A Good Hang: a podcast about funny friends telling stories and just being Nice To Each Other.

People are losing their minds from the relief.

(sidenote and small plug: this is exactly why I started our Hopecore podcast. I truly do believe 2025 was a shitstorm, transformational, catalytic, heartbreak of a year for many people and we’re all craving softness and nervous system regulation. So this was our/my attempt at sharing some stories of people who inspire me.)

These two undulating waves—hyperoptimization and hyper-softness—are rising at the same time. This is not a coincidence.

My read is that this is an invitation.

Maybe the world is asking us to do the one thing AI, biohacking protocols, and optimization culture cannot and will not ever do:

YEARN.
ACHE.
CRAVE.
WANT.
LOVE.
LONG.
DREAM.

So here is my manifesto: LET’S BRING BACK YEARNING.

By:

• Loving harder. Tell your people you love them. Often. Loudly. Don’t reserve all your words for your romantic and familial love. Kiss your friends on their sweaty foreheads. (lil Fred Again reference).

• Letting heartbreak in. Not because you’re fragile, but because you love hard enough and feel fully enough to let someone or something or your job break your heart.

• Being ridiculous in public. Sing on the beach. Do a sidewalk jig to Olivia Dean. Dance like a dancing animal.

• Touching the world. For e.g. but not limited to: grass. trees. stone fruit over the sink. the dog you’ve been making eyes with across the room.

• Letting ease in. Some things can come just easy. Not everything has to be earned through suffering. So find a way to receive.

So that’s my impassioned plea. Let’s bring back yearning and rawdog life.

that’s all.