We discussed the origins of our books, how a pitch and idea became a reality, our writing process and where our ideas are taking us next.

And in case you missed either of our limited edition books when they were on sale, JP is kindly re-opening the chance to purchase copies again — which is a real treat. Because they are otherwise totally unavailable to buy anymore.

Just drop him an email at [email protected] if you’d like a copy.

All three of us would love to hear what you thought about this conversation!

For those who are new around here

Let me tell you a bit about my two-part debut book Pathways, that sold out in just three weeks back in June 2025.

After spending my entire life living in London — the only city I had ever called home — I began to feel the pull towards a radically different life.

Modern living makes us anxious, exhausted and physically unwell. I craved something my bones knew deeply: to grow my own food, to live in harmony with Nature, and to be guided by the sun and seasons. As opposed to strip lighting and spreadsheets.

So, my husband and I spent years searching for land, until we found it — a 3 acre plot in the Portuguese countryside, 40 minutes north of Lisbon.

We moved to the region in August 2025 and are currently living in rented accommodation. We will soon start building our eco-house in the footprint of an existing ruin and cultivating the land to produce much of our own food.

It’s a long game. And whilst we’re still right at the start of this journey, so much has happened since the book came out.

Book 1, Pathways: To The Land

Consider any aspect of the current human experience and there’s a very good reason for doing things differently.

This book is an honest look at the absurdities of modern life and why I quit the only way of living I’ve known, to pursue a very different one in rural Portugal.

Book 2, Pathways: To Purposeful Living

A series of mini essays and thought exercises to help us face a simple question: how can we cut through the noise to identify the things that make us feel good and fulfilled?

I’m Leyla. I write about becoming aware of the systems that do not serve you and reclaiming your energy, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 9000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

Subscribe now

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I first published a version of this essay in November 2023 and I’ve decided to update it and add to it. Because my argument has become more relevant today than I expected it to.

In the time since, the world has got more insane and the noise around it has got louder and more determined to pull you into its spiral. The case for exiting The Machine is stronger now than when I first made it.

Once upon a time, the first things I would look at in the morning whilst eating my breakfast were the online news channels.

BBC News, The Guardian, Sky News — the daily drip-feed of everything from fashion tips to weather updates to terrorist attacks would begin alongside my granola.

I’d scan over the details of stories about mass shootings, tsunamis, all the different wars. Reports on bombings, stabbings, inflation, recessions, motorway pile-ups, poverty, racism, the climate crisis, and everything else.

Transitory thoughts of ‘urgh’ or ‘that’s so sad’ would enter and then leave my mind as quickly as when someone tells me their name for the first time. Then I’d click off and carry on with my day.

I did this for years. I thought it was normal. I thought it was what responsible adults did.

Then the pandemic happened and something switched in me.

When the national pastime became doom scrolling, daily death toll briefings and voyeuristic curiosity about what celebrities were getting up to locked away in their mansions — I was pushed in the opposite direction.

I wanted to retreat from media and technology entirely.

No screens, no Zooms, no death toll numbers, no graphs, no banana bread recipes. All I really wanted was to sit in my garden and watch the bees.

It was around March 2020 that I stopped consuming the news. TV, websites, newspapers, radio — all of it. I haven’t really gone back.

And I haven’t missed any of it, at all.

I want to share why I left, what it’s been like on the other side and why I think the most important thing you can do for your sense of reality is to stop letting the news define it.

We are swallowing horror like bitter pills

You can find first-person-shooter footage of Ukrainian troops fighting off enemy forces on newspaper YouTube channels.

Like a scene from Call of Duty, you are transported to a forest with bullets firing all around and wounded soldiers dropping to the ground.

But not before you have to watch a series of adverts. Adverts that are making someone money.

I was recently in a taxi and the driver had a talk radio station on. The first thing I heard when I got in the car: ‘The following comes with a warning and is very distressing to hear, but we have received reports that babies are being decapitated...’

I mean, what actual appropriate reaction is there to any of these things other than getting out of the car, falling to your knees, turning yourself inside out and stopping the world from turning?

But these are neither doable nor practical. And so we swallow this information — these words, these videos — like bitter pills and just carry on driving.

Is this normal? Are we — OK?

As research for this piece, I looked at two mainstream news websites for the first time in years. Here were some of the front page headlines:

‘Courageous teen beaten to death by mob after standing up for bullied friend.’

‘Man without hands or legs is left without carers.’

‘Gaza hospitals caught on front line of war.’

How do those words make you feel?

They make me feel quite terrible.

I simply do not possess the ability to digest this kind of information without it affecting me for hours, days, weeks.

I have never watched Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List and I never will. I couldn’t even handle Titanic — after watching it as a kid I cried in the bath for at least a week.

Our brains were not designed for this.

We evolved to process threats in our immediate environment — the rustle in the bushes, the stranger at the village edge. We did not evolve to absorb the cumulated suffering of eight billion people, delivered in high definition, before breakfast.

Ruby Wax puts it brilliantly:

She’s being funny. But she’s also completely right.

Fear is the most efficient fuel for engagement

The news is not just a public service that happens to be upsetting. It is also an attention harvesting machine that runs on fear.

I’m not saying shadowy figures are pulling the strings. But fear is the most efficient fuel for engagement and engagement is what sells advertising. And we all already know this.

The business model is simple. The more alarmed you are, the longer you stay. The longer you stay, the more data you generate. The more data you generate, the richer someone else gets.

And here’s what people don’t seem to realise: a person in a constant state of low grade fear is a person who does not raise their head. They do not ask what the actual holy f is going on. They do not ask what they want their life to look like.

They do not question the systems they are inside.

Instead, they scroll, they consume and they comply. Simply because they are too drained from all of this waves hands in the general direction of everything to do anything else.

There’s science behind this.

Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report found that 53% of professionals now cite social media scrolling as their primary way to switch off after work.

This is because their Executive Function — the part of the brain responsible for long term planning and self-reflection — has literally gone offline by 6pm to save energy.

The news and social media don’t just make you sad, depressed and anxious. They burn through the cognitive resources you need to think about… anything else. To think about your life.

This is why you might be able to recall every detail of the latest breaking global shit show but you cannot tell me how you would spend tomorrow if your boss randomly gave it to you off work.

This is not your fault; it is simply a system working exactly as designed.

Being aware of every dickhead makes it seem like there are only dickheads

This is the part that bothers me most.

Yes, terrible things happen to people. They always have. But being aware of every dickhead on the planet makes it seem like there are only dickheads on the planet. And this is neither useful nor true.

It is why we as a society are segregated, discriminate and live in an age of fear.

Mass media doesn’t report good news because it doesn’t sell. When Russia’s news site City Reporter only published positive stories for an entire day back in 2014, it lost two thirds of its normal readership.

There is an old newsroom adage: ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ Negative events are more memorable and emotionally impactful than positive ones — this is called negativity bias — and the media gives the people what they want.

So we get a relentless, curated stream of the worst humanity has to offer. And then — as a disingenuous tick-box exercise — they end with a cute story about a British parrot that went missing for four years and finally returned to its owner speaking Spanish.

(True story.)

The only outcome of knowing the intricacies of every terrible thing is falling into a black pit of ‘what is the point?’ despair and believing that this beautiful planet — and everything and everyone on it — is in fact awful, corrupt, destructive and evil.

I choose the other path. I choose to not believe this.

I choose to believe that people are fundamentally good, even if the media does its very best to erode any remnants of confidence we may still have about this.

But don’t I have a duty to stay informed?

This is the pushback I always get. And it’s fair.

Yes, we do have a duty — to an extent. But I also have a duty to myself and to those in my sphere to not go insane.

I do need to know the US and Israel have launched a war on Iran. I do need to know the cost of living crisis is squeezing millions of families. I do need to know our climate is in the toilet.

And I can support these issues in different ways.

But do I need to know the minutiae beyond these headlines? Do I have the emotional and mental strength to deal with the detail? Will my doing so benefit anyone in any way, or result in any positive effect?

Almost never.

As writer Shalom Auslander puts it:

There is a difference between being informed and being immersed. Between knowing what’s happening in the world and literally marinating in its darkest details every morning before you’ve even finished your coffee.

I have nothing but respect for those involved in reporting the news, from the front line to behind a desk. The dangers they put themselves in to get information out to the world.

These people possess an almost superhuman ability to know the worst things humans are capable of and still manage to fall asleep at the end of the day. It’s a job I could never do.

But just because they can do it doesn’t mean the rest of us should.

What life looks like on the other side

I have not consumed news regularly coming up to six years.

When I tell people this, the usual first response is: so how do you know what’s going on?

This always makes me lol because — have you left the house recently?

It is basically impossible to exist in the modern world without knowing what’s going on in every corner of it (trust me, I’ve tried). And I alas don’t live on the Moon.

People mention things. Headlines appear on screens in cafés. Someone brings it up at dinner. The information is shoved into my face at any and every opportunity — I do not need to go hunting for it on a news channel; it will find me regardless.

I have also found that some people assume that by me choosing to not consume the news, that I have ‘checked out’. That I’m burying my head in the sand and I’m lalala-ing my way through life with my fingers in my ears while the world burns.

This is not the case.

What I’m saying is, instead of spending twenty minutes every morning absorbing atrocities beyond our human capacity to comprehend and that you also have no power to change, what if you spent those twenty minutes helping a neighbour?

Or growing something in your garden? Or checking in on someone who lives alone?

Basically, tending to your immediate surroundings and community — the places where you can have an actual real, tangible and meaningful effect?

I mean, just imagine it.

If everyone channelled their finite time and energy into bettering their little corner of the world — rather than into their screens of doom only to be paralysed by the enormity of problems they cannot shift — imagine what on-the-ground transformation could occur.

And how quickly it could happen.

Since I stopped watching the news, this is what has actually happened:

• I am more at peace

• I am less afraid

• I have more mental space for the things and people that mean a lot to me

• My sense of humanity has been restored

• I am excited about the future

• I believe in people again — because I’m meeting them in real life instead of reading about the worst of them on a screen

And all of this means I am more useful to the people around me, not less.

There is so much good happening in the world, everywhere, every day — all. the. freakin. time.

Stories with the potential to restore faith in humanity that rarely get told. If you want evidence of this, look at platforms like Good News Network.

The good news isn’t in short supply. The broadcasting of it is.

How to start exiting The Machine

Not everyone needs to quit totally. Some people can witness the worst of the world and sill sleep like a baby — my Dad is one of these people.

But even if the news doesn’t make you feel abject despondence, it is still claiming your attention.

Every minute spent absorbing a crisis is a minute not spent on a hobby, a conversation, learning something new, a walk, a plan for your own life.

It’s a simple numbers game: the longer you’re on a screen, the less time you have for everything else. And as we’ve established, that attention is being harvested whether you feel it or not.

So if you’ve noticed that you feel worse after consuming the news, consider these a starting point.

And even if you feel fine, you might be surprised by what opens up when you claw some of your focus back.

Delete the news apps

If the only way to check the news is a clunky web browser, you’ll check it less.

Set a news window

If you’re not ready to quit entirely, contain it. Give yourself fifteen minutes, once a day, at a time that isn’t first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Headlines only, no rabbit holes, no video. When the timer goes off, close it.

Replace the habit

The news fills a slot in your day — usually breakfast or commute. Replace it deliberately with something positive, something you’re curious about. A book, a podcast, music, silence. The garden. The bees!

Whatever it is, make it something that adds to your appreciation of the world rather than eroding it.

Notice how you feel after a week

This is the most convincing step. After seven days of reduced or zero news consumption, check in with yourself. Are you less anxious? Do you feel more hopeful about the world? Do you still know everything you actually need to know?

The answer to all three, in my experience, is yes.

Use the 3-question filter

Before engaging with any piece of news ask yourself: will this benefit my wellbeing or my community in any way? Do I have any agency here — can I take a direct, meaningful action? Will I feel restored or depleted afterwards?

If the answer to all three is no, then you have grounds to seriously reconsider.

Almost six years without the news and my understanding of the world has not collapsed and my empathy has not disappeared.

What has disappeared is the background hum of dread and feeling of being powerless. The creeping sense that everything is terrible and there’s nothing to be done.

Being aware of every dickhead on the planet makes it seem like there are only dickheads on the planet. But there aren’t. There are far more good people than bad, far more kindness than cruelty and there’s a hell of a lot of beauty out there.

It’s just hard to see any of it through the news.

Exit the Machine. Go sit in the garden. Get some sun, watch the bees. The world — and everything in it — is much more magnificent than they’re trying to lead you to believe.

What’s your relationship with the news — and have you ever tried stepping back from it? Tell me in the comments.

I’m Leyla. I write about becoming aware of the systems that do not serve you and reclaiming your energy, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 9000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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Working hard is keeping you poor in everything that actually matters.

You spend most of your day slumped at a desk pushing emails and having meetings about meetings. None of it is about anything you care about.

The activities that are meaningful to you – things that bring you joy, creating and making, spending time with loved ones – are forced into the margins of your life.

Which is approximately pre 7am and post 8pm on a weekday, plus the meagre pickings left over from a 48 hour weekend, once you’ve done the chores, called family, met the demands of those who depend on you, and slept.

Time warps in an office, in both directions.

Days full of bitty bittiness - jumping from one task to another - are over before you’ve achieved anything. Flow states and deep work are things you haven’t experienced for years.

Or, the minutes stretch into hours and you wonder how it can possibly only be half past three when you’ve been sitting in that chair for what feels like an eternity. And you still need to factor in the commute home.

There is no day of the week that is not preceded or followed by a day back in the office.

Just when you feel like your mind, body and spirit is coming back to you - right around Sunday afternoon - you realise it all starts again tomorrow morning.

And you’ve barely had a chance to put a wash on.

I knew this life, intimately

For nearly a decade, I was a London corporate worker with the shiny BMW on the driveway, spending sunny days indoors staring at a computer screen surrounded by various iterations of plastic.

I developed a nagging suspicion that my role was irrelevant and futile, so I decided to conduct an experiment: I resolved to stop doing any work.

Half an hour before my weekly one-to-ones, I’d spend 15 minutes knocking up a page of something, sending a couple of emails, delivering my updates in a convincing tone.

‘I’m making great progress... the stakeholders are on board…’

My manager would nod.

‘That all sounds great! Carry on.’

What I actually spent my time doing? Meticulously planning ten months of travel on a spreadsheet.

I did no work for an entire year. The experiment ended not because anyone exposed my idling, but because I finally left.

My theory had been proven: my job was a farce. Which meant a big portion of my life was too.

But it wasn’t an entirely wasted year, because the experiment taught me a valuable lesson about the nature of modern work:

And why would you want to play the game in the first place?

Because winning means spending more time on things that actually make you feel alive.

Below are the 6 steps to win at The Game of Modern Work.

But before we dive in, let me be clear about something.

The purpose of this piece isn’t to make you feel bad about having a bullshit job, if that’s where you find yourself.

That’s not my objective.

My objective is to help you:

1. realise your situation

2. see it as an untapped opportunity

Perhaps you’ve been dutifully trying to fill your time at your desk with more tasks because you’re being paid for it, so you feel like you should be doing more.

What I’m saying is: reframe the whole situation.

Don’t try to find more things to do. Don’t try to make your existing tasks fill the entire week.

Go in the opposite direction.

Do only what’s required. So it well, do it fast, and spend the rest of your time on your own stuff.

This is the first step in engineering change - it starts with your mindset and how you view the situation.

See it as an opportunity, not something to ignore or pretend isn’t your reality.

1. Admit your job is bullshit

The first step of affecting any situation for a more positive outcome is becoming aware of the situation in the first place.

The late anthropologist David Graeber coined the term ‘bullshit job’ in his 2013 essay that went viral with over 1 million views.

These aren’t nurses, teachers, or refuse workers doing essential work.

They’re HR consultants, corporate lawyers, administrators, marketing coordinators – roles where if the position were eliminated tomorrow, it would make no discernible difference in the world.

I think some people have a deep-down sense that their job fits this description, but they don’t want to admit it.

Totally understandable.

Because all sorts of existential questions come up when you do, like: what have I just spent the past 20 years of my life actually doing?

But that doesn’t mean the topic can be avoided.

The alternative is continuing to pretend from a place of ignorance. Whereas what you want to do is still pretend, but from a place of knowledge.

Now the situation has tipped in your favour.

If you’re worried you’re the only one who thinks this about their work, you most definitely are not.

A YouGov poll found 37% of British workers thought their jobs didn’t contribute meaningfully to the world. Graeber estimated 20-50% of all jobs are ‘bullshit jobs’.

Apply the test: if your job were eliminated tomorrow, would anyone notice or care?

If not, acknowledge it. Own it.

There’s no shame – and everything becomes easier after the initial discomfort.

2. Understand the rules of play

Once you’ve accepted your job has no purpose, understand that this knowledge means you’ve now entered the game.

Which is a good thing, because games have winners and losers.

And games also have rules. If you know the rules, you’re far more likely to win.

Winning, in this case, means spending less of your precious and finite time on this glorious planet doing pointless busy work and more of it on things that bring you joy, help you grow, or benefit your community.

Your perceived performance stays high because you’ve completed what was asked of you. But do not go above and beyond. There is no sense and no reward in handing over more of yourself than is requested.

Do what’s required, do it well, and let your superiors believe it took the full allocated time – even if it only took you 1/20th of it.

Think of a parallel system, the education system.

Many students learn how to pass exams more than they learn the actual content in a course. I recall memorising a physics formula at university I understood absolutely nothing about, simply because I knew it would appear in the exam.

I passed.

The game rewards performers, not hard workers.

Nurses and teachers work extremely hard and are undervalued. And yet office workers who understand perceived performance, but in reality produce less meaningful output, get the higher salaries.

3. Put on a good performance

What does performing look like? It’s theatre. You’re acting the role of believing your job is important and that you think everyone else’s is too.

Your objective is simple: make your line manager feel like they don’t even have to think about you because you’re just getting on with stuff. You want to make their lives as easy as possible.

This is key.

If they believe you’re working on whatever project they think you’re working on, and you support this with evidence of having met the deliverables, they’ll most likely be relieved they can just let you get on with it.

Figure out what it is they need to see to relax.

A well-prepared set of notes? A 6-page PowerPoint about a conference you attended? Whatever it is that makes them think ‘brilliant, John Smith is working great on their own, I don’t have to check in’ — deliver that.

You want them to report to their own manager that you’re meeting all your deliverables without them having to worry.

Confidence is key. Looking busy is the universal language in offices; use this to your advantage.

A spreadsheet is a great ruse – I planned ten months of travel on one mammoth spreadsheet and everyone thought it was work-related. Leave a paper trail: send a few emails during the week to show you’ve reached out to people.

As long as you look busy and make your line manager’s life easier, you’re winning.

4. Tactical slacking (reclaim the rest of your time)

Now you’ve completed your deliverables efficiently and your manager thinks you’re working away diligently - what do you actually do with all that reclaimed time?

It’s your duty as a living and breathing human being to use this time well.

And by that I mean spend it on things that bring you joy, help you feel fulfilled, make you feel like you’ve actually done something meaningful with your 7-8 hours.

Perhaps you’ve helped someone else, grown personally, learned a new skill, done research on something that matters to you.

I have a friend with a remote bullshit job who coaches football during work hours because that’s his passion. An airport kiosk worker I met was learning a new language on their computer between the rare customers. I had my travel spreadsheet behemoth.

If you’re office-based surrounded by others, your activities need to work at a computer. If you’re remote, you have more freedom - physical projects, skill-building, anything.

Use this time to figure out an exit strategy if you want one. Research starting a business or finding a different role. Work on creative projects — reading, writing, learning.

Some people wouldn’t know how to spend tomorrow if given it off work. This lack of meaning is the greatest global epidemic no one is talking about; one for another essay.

But it’s also exactly why you need this reclaimed time — to finally discover what ignites you.

5. Follow nature’s example of the path of least resistance

I’m a firm believer that life shouldn’t feel that hard. When it does, it’s often because we’re pushing against the natural flow of things rather than letting go and aligning with what actually wants to happen.

Nature never wastes energy. It does exactly what’s needed, nothing more.

Water always finds the easiest route back to the sea — it doesn’t force itself uphill. If you have a fire approaching both a eucalyptus tree and a cork oak, the eucalyptus ignites because that’s the path of least resistance. Nature doesn’t waste energy trying to force the cork oak to burn.

Think about your garden.

You can spend enormous energy coddling high-maintenance plants that need constant attention, or you can welcome the weeds — plants that flourish with zero intervention.

Many are edible, medicinal, beautiful. And they’re highly efficient.

The thing you need to remember is you are a part of Nature. You might not yet know your purpose in life, but one thing is for certain: it isn’t to have meetings, pay off debts, then die.

Don’t waste energy on work that resists your soul.

Your soul knows this work is futile. The natural state is to do the minimum needed for survival (your deliverables) and let the rest of your energy flow where it actually wants to go, towards what makes you come alive.

That’s not cheating the system. That’s being intelligent enough to follow how the universe actually works.

‘But isn’t this deceitful?’

I can hear some of you objecting: isn’t it deceitful to let your employer pay you for doing stuff that has nothing to do with their work?

Here’s my response: if you went to your line manager tomorrow and said ‘Hey there Graham! I’ve completed everything you’ve given me in a tenth of the time, do you have any more work for me?’ - you’d stress them out.

The truth is, most of the time they won’t have anything else for you to do. You might think you’re helping, but you’re actually making their lives more difficult.

Now they’re obliged to figure out what the hell else to do with you.

If they can’t, the worst-case scenario is you’re forcing them to acknowledge that your role is meaningless - which you already know, but they likely don’t want to lay you off.

Too much admin.

You’ve given them the very difficult task of having to justify your role even though you’ve just proven you completed it in a fraction of the time.

So if you’re considering other people’s feelings and lives, it’s for everyone’s benefit if you continue with the charade and keep playing the role. It’s not deceitful for them to be paying you when you’re not working on their stuff.

You’re actually helping the system work.

It’s not your fault if you’re efficient. It’s not your fault if the role shouldn’t actually exist.

‘But I’m drowning in work’

Some of you aren’t exactly sitting idle in your bullshit job — you’re doing the work of three people because enlightened colleagues keep quitting, aren’t being replaced and you’re absorbing their tasks.

You’re working evenings and weekends and spending less time with your family, simply to meet the demands of the extra bullshit.

This is a different problem: lots of busy work - meetings about meetings, firefighting, sending emails - but nothing of real substance or meaning.

It feels like a lot of work, but you’re not actually achieving anything.

If this is you, the efficiency principles still apply where possible.

But honestly, this might be your sign that it’s time to get the hell out.

A bullshit job with capacity to slack is one thing. A bullshit job that’s stealing your life and health? That’s unsustainable.

This essay is for those of you with hours to fill at a desk, not those drowning. If you’re drowning, that’s a different conversation entirely.

Your focus needs to be an exit strategy.

Final thoughts

The key to surviving an unfulfilling job (other than leaving it) isn’t working harder - it’s understanding that modern work is just a game.

Once you know the core rule - that perceived performance is valued more than actual hard work - everything changes.

You can reclaim hours of your week. Not by quitting or setting it all alight, but by working efficiently in order to spend the majority of your ‘office time’ on things that bring you joy and help you realise the life you actually want.

I did no work for a year and nobody noticed.

That taught me the rules. Now I work late into the night on projects I care about because I want to, not because I have to. I experience flow states daily.

I’ve built a life I don’t need to escape from.

You’re not being deceitful. You’re being intelligent. You’re following nature’s principle: don’t waste energy where it doesn’t matter.

Stop grinding, start playing. If I can do it, you can do it too.

What's your experience with bullshit jobs, ever had one? Have you tried tactical slacking? Let me know!

I’m Leyla. I write about building a life you don't need to escape from, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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Eight years ago I read a book with a title that promised to change my life. It wasn’t about where to find happiness or how to pursue a more fulfilling existence.

It was a book about tidying up.

And it did change my life. It transformed both my internal and external landscapes to such an extent that I don’t recognise the person I was before I read it.

But to understand why a book about decluttering hit me so hard, you need to understand where I come from.

The domestic clean gene

I come from a lineage of intensely house-proud people who are fastidiously clean and tidy, whether visitors are expected or not. I have inherited this domestic clean gene but give thanks for some level of dilution over the generations.

My 92-year-old Grandma used to wrap her sofa in plastic to keep it from getting dirty, so sitting on it with any exposed skin would cause friction burns.

My Mum disinfects units daily and after cooking a multi-course meal for six people, her spotless kitchen looks as though it’s been transplanted from a show home.

My Dad’s idea of a weekend well spent might include scrubbing the inside of the oven, pulling the fridge out to get a mop under it, or wiping the tops of all the wardrobes in the house. Things he’ll do multiple times a year.

And me? When I was a kid, ‘play’ would often involve polishing my Mum’s brass, cleaning mirrors with scrunched-up newspaper, or a spot of ironing.

This was in no way forced upon me. I enjoyed it. I got immense satisfaction from shiny surfaces, folding creaseless t-shirts and making my Mum happy.

My ideal room would consist of something comfortable to recline on and no more than four or five other items. It would be 85% empty space and clear surfaces.

So naturally, I married my domesticity nemesis.

The nemesis

Let me try to say this with as much love as possible. Because in every other respect, my husband is the most wonderful human I am privileged to have in my life.

He is infinitely kind and considerate, patient and funny, always thinking about others before himself — and he’s an excellent cook. He is the absolute best.

But when it comes to domestic cleanliness and tidiness, he is the direct inverse of me.

Where his clothes come off, they will remain on the floor — for days. If he didn’t live with me he wouldn’t make the bed or open any curtains or blinds. He stacks the dishwasher with what I can only assume are his eyes closed.

He collects and displays dusty bottles of empty toiletries like a perverse exhibition curation. His office has been such an abject tip that my feet haven’t been able to get a purchase on any clear floor space.

His presence in our household is a perpetual state of we’ve just moved in or we’re just about to move out or we’ve just been burgled.

Painting over rust

But as much as I liked to think I was the epitome of balance and harmony, it was mostly superficial.

My home might have looked uncluttered on the surface. But the insides of cupboards, drawers and wardrobes belied the true disarray of both my external and internal landscapes.

I wanted the discord out of my mind, so I put it out of sight.

Shove it all behind a door or in a drawer. Pretend none of it is really there.

I was painting over rust.

Then on a trip to visit my husband’s family in the United States in 2017, his uncle told me about a book he had recently finished. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

‘You read a book about — tidying up?’

‘Yes. But it’s not just about tidying up,’ he said.

‘It’s about a way of thinking. How to approach the tyranny of stuff, the detritus of life. How to learn to deeply appreciate what you hold dear and have the courage to bid thank you and fond farewell to the rest. So you’re left with much less — and with what actually matters.’

I’m a believer in books finding you when you need them most. This book found me when I needed it. I read it cover to cover and then I did the work.

The mountain in the garden

Marie Kondo’s method is specific: you work through categories, not rooms. You start with clothes. You gather every single item from every corner of the house into one pile. And you hold each thing and ask whether it sparks joy.

I turned the house over — including the loft — for every single thing that could be worn upon my body and piled them into one wretched, dusty mountain of mostly fast fashion tat in the garden.

It had the same effect as those TV shows that aim to improve people’s diets. Only when confronted with a week’s worth of three-litre Coke bottles and sausage rolls piled up in one stomach-churning display do they realise: something has to be done.

Then I moved on — papers, kitchen items, books, garden things, memories. Group by group, over snatched weekends spanning several months, I worked through every single item I owned. And I embraced the ruthlessness of it all.

‘This seashell trinket box does not make me soar on the wings of joy and so I thank you for your service and memories, but you are out.’

What remained was treasure

What was left were only the things that either served an integral purpose or sparked deep and meaningful joy.

What remained was real treasure — mindfully stored with reverence and treated with respect, from socks and spatulas to suitcases and secateurs.

Where there was once a gathering of half-empty bottles of crusty nail polish, there was now a verdant house plant. Where there was once a drawer stuffed with tightly balled socks straining the fabric, there were now ordered rows of gently folded pairs.

From then on, the clear spaces my eyes landed upon within my home emptied my mind of noise and filled my heart with a sort of bliss. Everything had an identity, a place to exist and be thoughtfully used and appreciated.

I’d come downstairs in the morning and retire to bed in the evening enveloped by a sense of peace and clarity. No longer jarred by a constant reel of visual commotion, all around me and within me was calm and quiet.

I felt as though I’d scoured out the rust before applying a fresh and bright coat of paint.

And I desired more of this feeling. Because it felt so good.

Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto writes:

That is exactly what happened to me.

From possessions to everything

Once I cleared the chaos, I found I was applying the same principles to everything I consumed.

What started with Marie Kondo’s practices applied to articles I owned evolved into a slow, gradual path of endeavouring to tread more lightly on the land.

Since then, anything new I’ve brought into my home and my life — from a piece of furniture to a multi-surface cleaner — has not only had to serve its purpose, but also make me feel good about using it.

I take into account how it was made and how doing so impacts societies, our health and the environment. This is known as true cost economics.

This is an ongoing journey with no destination. It is neither easy nor convenient and I’m far from perfect. But as my husband’s uncle suggested it might, that book really did change my life.

Decluttering isn’t really about having a tidy house. It’s about clearing the visual and mental noise so you can hear yourself think. It’s about making space — physical space, psychological space — for the things that actually matter.

Less stuff. More room. And inside that room, a version of you that can finally breathe.

How to start

You don’t need to Marie Kondo your entire life this weekend. But you could start with one of these.

Pick one drawer

Just one, and pull everything out. Hold each item. If it doesn’t serve a purpose or spark genuine joy, let it go. When you’re done, notice how it feels to open that drawer. That feeling is the point.

Confront one category

Not a room — a category. All your shoes. All your mugs. All your toiletries. Gather them into one pile and look at what you actually have. The pile itself is the wake-up call.

Apply the ‘painting over rust’ test

Walk through your home and ask: where am I hiding disorder behind closed doors? Which cupboard, wardrobe or drawer am I avoiding because I know what’s in there? That’s your rust. Start there.

Extend it beyond possessions

Once your physical space feels clearer, notice where else the principle applies. The subscriptions you never use, the commitments that drain you, the habits that no longer serve. Less is a life philosophy.

What's your relationship with the space you live in? Are you more me or more my husband? And what's the one drawer, cupboard or corner of your home you've been avoiding? Tell me in the comments.

I’m Leyla. I write about clearing the noise — in your home, your head and your life — so you can hear what actually matters. Amongst other things. I send this once a week to 9000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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The before-and-after photos from 2018 are below. Eight years later, I can confidently say the contents of these drawers, wardrobes and cupboards still — pretty much — look like the ‘after’ pictures.

(The same cannot be said for my husband’s. For my sanity, and probably his too, all his stuff lives in different cupboards, wardrobes and drawers to mine.)

Before — the mountain of fast fashion tat and all my footwear, the majority of which I very rarely wore.

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There is a voice in your head that talks to you all day long.

It narrates your commute, your meetings, your meals, your mistakes. It tells you what you should have said. It reminds you what you haven’t done. It compares you to people who seem to have their stuff more figured out.

Most of us never chose this voice. It is assembled from fragments — parents, teachers, advertising, social media, the general ambient noise of being alive in a world that profits from your dissatisfaction.

And because we never chose it, we assume it’s us. We assume the running commentary is truth rather than an opinion.

But what if you could choose?

What if, every single night, you could sit down and deliberately write the script your subconscious runs on the next day?

Not affirmations as the wellness gurus sell them — vague and stuck to a vision board that’s shoved under your bed.

But precise and intentional sentences that describe the person you are working to become, written as if they have already come to pass?

This is what I’ve been doing for years. And it is quietly one of the most powerful things in my life.

How this works in practice

One of my most consistent daily practices is my gratitude journal. I fill a page in an A5 notebook just before I sleep — with herbal tea, in bed, almost without exception, even when it’s really late and I’m really tired.

On this page I write: what I’m grateful for, what happened today that was amazing (99% of these are marvellously mundane), and what I could do tomorrow to make it great.

And at the top of every page, I write an affirmation.

I collect these like a magpie collects shiny trinkets — from books, conversations, advertisements, things I’ve overheard. When I come across one that vibrates on my wavelength, I note it down and add it to the mix.

Part of my ritual includes re-reading the journal entry on this exact date last year. So I always have two notebooks by my bedside — the current one and last year’s.

When choosing an affirmation for today, I open the old journal to a random page. If I’m vibing with it, I write it down. If not, I flick forwards or back until I find one that strikes the right chord.

This means the affirmations rotate — repeated every few days or weeks, at random, over months and years. They seep in slowly. Not through force, but through repetition.

William James, the father of modern psychology, wrote that the greatest discovery of his generation was that human beings could alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. He believed that thought patterns, deliberately chosen and consistently repeated, could reshape not just mood but identity itself.

That was in the 1890s.

Affirmations are not new and they are not woowoo. They are one of the oldest technologies for self-authorship that exists.

The ones I return to most

Not all affirmations are created equal. Some are too vague to land and some sound nice but don’t really change anything.

Over the years, certain ones have risen to the surface again and again — the ones I find myself writing out most often, the ones that feel like they’re doing real work on my inner architecture.

Here are the ones I live by. Take from them what speaks to you.

I am a cultivator of joy.

I say YES when my life is asking to grow.

I replace vague yearnings with exciting vision.

I start all challenges from the point of victory.

I compare myself only to my own potential.

Happiness is here and now, not if and when.

I choose how to react to things — and I choose happiness and joy.

As everything changes, I remain at ease.

I am wonderful and worthy of the deepest respect. So is everybody else.

I have something to contribute, time to be creative and I am in love with everything.

I take risks without needing to know what will happen next.

I cast off the transient and shallow. I reveal what is most true and profound in me.

Every moment is precious and I am grateful for every moment I am alive.

I deeply trust the Universe to give me just what I need, just when I need it.

I find it in my heart to treasure at least one thing about every person I meet.

How to start this tonight

You don’t need a practice that looks like mine — A5 notebook or herbal tea or two journals by your bed. But you do need to start choosing the voice in your head instead of inheriting it.

Pick one sentence

Just one. From the list above, from a book you love, from something someone once said that lodged in you. Write it down tonight before you sleep. Write it as if it’s already true.

Say it out loud

This feels weird the first time but do it anyway; it can be a whisper. But it must be uttered. There is a difference between reading a sentence silently and hearing yourself speak it. Your own voice saying ‘I am a cultivator of joy’ does something that just reading it cannot.

Repeat it until it stops feeling borrowed

The first few times, an affirmation feels like someone else’s words in your mouth. Keep going. Somewhere around the tenth repetition, it starts to feel like yours. Somewhere around the 50th, it starts to feel like truth.

Rotate, don’t force

If an affirmation doesn’t land today, move on to another. Come back to it in a week. The ones that matter will keep surfacing. Trust the magpie process.

An affirmation is not a destination. You don’t ever really arrive, and I’m not sure you’re meant to.

We are all a constant and magnificent work in progress.

But the direction you’re heading is shaped by the words you say to yourself when no one is listening. Most people let that voice run on autopilot — assembled from a lifetime of noise they never chose.

You can choose.

Tonight, before you sleep, write one sentence that describes the person you are becoming. Say it out loud. Mean it. And then say it again tomorrow.

That’s how you start rewriting the script.

What’s the one affirmation or sentence you’d write at the top of your journal tonight? Share it in the comments — you might give someone else the exact words they need.

I’m Leyla. I write about choosing your own voice in a world that’s very keen to choose it for you. Amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8,000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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I am a late riser. I spend the first two hours of every day doing nothing. And yet, more often than not, I manage to get most of my to do list done.

A colleague recently couldn’t fathom this.

‘So what do you do in the evenings?’ he asked, baffled, when I told him I don’t watch TV. Ironically, this conversation happened on set whilst filming MasterChef.

But the real confusion wasn’t about TV. It was about nothing. The idea that a person would deliberately protect two hours every morning for just… being. Not meditating, journaling or anything else.

Really just doing not very much at all — and slowly — before my day begins.

Most people hear ‘productivity’ and think do more and do it faster. Earn more. Output more.

I hear ‘productivity’ and think: how do I shave 30 minutes off this task so I can go outside and watch the bees?

That might sound unserious. But it’s one of the most serious things I do.

Because my main motivation for increasing productivity is not to maximise, optimise or any of the other ises associated with ‘success.’

It’s to free up more time for just being.

And I think most productivity advice is backwards because it never tells you this. It teaches you to do more with your time.

I want to teach you to buy your time back — and then spend it on nothing at all.

Here’s how I think about it and the practices that actually make it work.

The currency of copper penny minutes

If a task would ordinarily take me one hour, but I shave off 30 minutes by working more efficiently, I chalk that up as having cultivated a whole half hour of free time.

I think of these saved minutes like copper pennies.

In the same way as the change from a £10 note can easily vanish — a packet of gum here, a coffee there — these penny minutes are susceptible to disappearing into the ether.

Five minutes scrolling. Three minutes checking email. Seven minutes in a YouTube rabbit hole about composting toilets at 1am. Gone.

But if you protect the pennies and spend them mindfully in one big lump sum, that’s when you notice the gain.

You can spend them how you want.

I mostly like to cash mine in on being time, which often involves watching the bees in the sunshine. Or gazing out of a train window — I protect this time ferociously.

Sure, I could get 90 minutes of work done on a train. But I’d rather be more efficient elsewhere to protect this sacred gazing time.

Bertrand Russell argued in his 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness that the modern world had developed ‘a great deal of activity’ but very little capacity for leisure.

Work, he said, had been elevated to a moral virtue and idleness had been made to feel like sin — even though some of humanity’s greatest thinking, art, and pleasure had always come from doing nothing at all.

That was 1932. It’s got a lot worse since then.

The copper penny system is my way of fighting back. Every minute I save through efficiency is a minute I reclaim for being. The goal isn’t an empty to-do list. The goal is a full afternoon of nothing.

How to collect more pennies

Over years of trial and error, I’ve built a toolbox for this. Not all of these will work for you. But the ones that do will change the shape of your days.

Rewrite ‘I have to’ as ‘I get to’

The language you use influences you hugely. For onerous tasks, ‘I get to’ is far more motivating than ‘I have to.’

For example: ‘I am self-employed and autonomous which means there is no boss to answer to and I get to do my own taxes!’ versus ‘I have to do my taxes.’ Same task. Completely different energy.

This one sounds small. It isn’t.

Get one thing done before your day begins

What’s the first thing you do each morning? Maybe have breakfast or enjoy a hot drink. Try ticking something off your list before this. Choose something small.

I find completing something before my brain recognises the day has begun delivers an early sense of accomplishment and sets a precedent for everything after it.

Trick yourself into starting

The hardest part of any task is starting. So don’t start — just prepare. If I’m procrastinating on a workout, I put my workout clothes on. That’s it. But now my frame of mind has already shifted.

I’m not going to change back into my regular clothes now. So I might as well just do it.

Turn chores into a game

If I want to deep clean the bedroom — dust, hoover, change the sheets, wash the sheets, clean the mirrors — it has to be done within an hour. Those are the rules. I set the timer and work like a tornado.

If I manage it, I reward myself, usually with more being time. Next time, I try to beat my personal best without compromising the work.

Make up a deadline and believe it

Many of us work best under a deadline because it simply has to be done by this date. Even if there are no real deadlines, set yourself one and truly believe there is no alternative.

I did this when launching this newsletter — I arbitrarily picked June 1st and worked intensely for six weeks to meet it. Then tell someone.

Publicly declaring you will get something done within a certain time frame is a sure fire way of it actually happening. The alternative of not delivering on your word is too harrowing to bear.

Cut your options ruthlessly

Decision paralysis is one of life’s great time vacuums. I reduce my options at every opportunity — a tight set of constraints means the possibilities are not endless.

Need to decide on a colour to paint a room? Narrow it down to two palettes and choose from that. Eliminate everything else without remorse.

Check things three times a day, not thirty

Emails, notifications, messages — we check these mindlessly and repeatedly. A few seconds each time, but like drops of water they eventually fill a bucket.

Allocate these to scheduled slots: before work, at lunch, at the end of the day. Outside of those windows, they don’t exist.

Guard your being time like it’s sacred

This is the most important one. Do not compromise your being time to make room for more doing. Instead, be more efficient with your doing time to protect the being.

Those two morning hours I spend on nothing are non-negotiable. They are the whole point of everything else on this list.

I once read that the Universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts — it gives you what you demand with your actions.

I believe this completely. I am a doer. I am a big fan of action, of getting stuff done.

But the thing I am taking action to protect — the thing I am demanding with all this efficiency — is stillness. Silence. Space. The train window. The bees.

Productivity is not the destination. It never was. It’s the vehicle that gets you to the place where you can finally stop.

Collect your copper pennies. Then spend them on nothing at all.

What’s your most protected “being time” — the moment in your day you refuse to fill with doing? Tell me in the comments.

I’m Leyla. I write about doing less, better, so you can spend more time just being alive, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8,000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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Forget money. The most valuable currency in your possession right now is your attention.

The systems that power our post-modern capitalist society feed off our attention.

Like a shepherd growing fodder to feed his flock, they do this by farming our attention, then harvesting it.

(If scenes from The Matrix come to mind, this is good.)

These systems are designed specifically to capture our mental bandwidth to generate data and advertising revenue.

We are not individual people to these systems; you and I are mere data points that help the bazillionaires get richer.

In a world of infinite information, human attention is the scarcest and most valuable resource that exists.

Never mind Bitcoin; the real modern gold rush is the mining of our focus – and every shiny new thing on the planet is fighting for a piece of it.

Why this is a problem

What’s so bad about staying on top of every breaking news story?

Or, a touch of doom scrolling before bed?

Or, spending your best evening hours obsessively researching the ‘perfect’ air fryer?

The problem is this: when we just give away our focus, we become distracted.

And a distracted person will rarely raise their head, take a step back, look around and ask:

– WT holy F is actually going on around here..?

As soon as you start doing that, you are basically walking backwards out the door while wagging two fingers — on each hand — at The Man.

Say BYE, because you are taking your first steps towards owning the system, rather than allowing it to own you.

You need to stop disguising it as ‘relaxing’ if you want to break free

If your mind has been hijacked by the latest viral drama or an imaginary argument with a random on the internet, you have a measly amount of brain space left to do much else.

Such as making a healthy dinner, feeling excited about your next trip or thinking about your life.

Quite often we are actively – but completely unconsciously – seeking out these distractions.

We scroll and we consume, inwardly desperate to find the next flyby attention grabber because, quite frankly, it’s easier than having to think for ourselves.

Our brains are so exhausted from the rest of our lives that we mistakenly see these distractions as giving our brains ‘a break’, a chance to ‘switch off’.

To ‘relax’.

A chance to space out into the worlds of other people, rather than taking the time to pick up a wooden spoon or an instrument and create or do something more meaningful.

Someone call the police because we are being robbed

It is a measurable psychological burnout caused by Cognitive Load.

If you spend your day pretending to care about a spreadsheet or a meeting that does not matter, your brain is performing heavy Emotional Labour.

By 6pm, your Executive Function – the part of the brain needed for long-term planning – literally goes offline to save energy.

You are out of brain juice.

And so, you’re more susceptible to having your focus snagged by the first hook that whistles past your ear.

This is why you might be able to recall all the gory details of the latest celebrity scandal, but you cannot tell me what you want your life to look like.

These distractions are not giving you a ‘break’, they are an insidious form of theft.

Here’s a quick test – can you answer the following questions?:

1. What 5 things fill me with the most joy?

2. What does my ideal, dream day look like?

3. What makes me feel fulfilled?

4. Which direction is my life moving in?

5. Am I excited about my future?

6. Do I know who I am?

Maybe you are struggling to answer these meaningfully.

Not being able to does not mean you are boring or aimless. It means you have no bandwidth left to even begin thinking about your responses.

If this is the case, someone call the police because you are being robbed.

The day the switch flicked for me

It was during the pandemic.

Every morning, the TV featured rolling news coverage with a constantly increasing death toll number in the corner of the screen.

I mean, what a set of data to be presented with before I’d even had my breakfast.

A literal number of dead people, staring at me, while I was just trying to get through my morning.

I saw this information and it made me feel awful.

Not informed. Not relevant. Not part of the conversation. Just good old fashioned, plain awful.

I realised then that I no longer wanted to be a part of it.

It is simply not possible to consume daily servings of terror and still be expected to function as a regulated human being who does what polite society requires of us, like paying taxes.

So, I chose to opt out.

That was the day I stopped watching TV and stopped consuming any news.

The corrosive quality of acid on lime

The latest thing the world and his wife are gorging on are the Epstein files; last week it was the Beckhams, next week it will be someone else.

I’m probably the only person on the planet who has no idea what’s in these ‘files’.

And yet, I know I am missing out on absolutely nothing that is of any value to my life, or the lives of those I hold dear.

These are some of the self-reflective questions I ask myself, whenever a new specific demand on my presence crops ups:

• Will engaging with this input benefit my wellbeing or that of my community in any way?

• Do I have any agency here? Can I take a direct and meaningful action that improves the situation?

• Will this trade leave me feeling restored and energised?

If my response is ‘no’ to all of these, then more often then not, I simply do not engage.

The truth of the matter is, we consume this stuff because we do not value our attention.

And the reason we don’t value our attention is because we are not consciously aware of what flippantly handing it out to any vagrant wandering past, actually does to our souls.

Like acid rain on limestone, if it is not filling your cup, it is slowly eroding the core of you, drip by corrosive drip.

Eventually, there will be nothing left.

There is a simple and empowering way out of this tangle

Without having something specific to funnel your juice into, your mental real estate is essentially a free for all for whatever:

• advert

• unsolicited opinion

• workplace drama

• [fill in the blank]

happens to pops up when you next unlock your screen.

Here’s what you can do.

Step 1: Stop being a passive observer of your own life and start being intentional about where your energy goes

A good place to start is taking an honest and hard look at your day and working out:

• Which parts of it actually give you something back

• Which parts are just draining the battery

Guess what you need to do here?

That’s right; less of the latter.

Step 2: Ask yourself, is there somewhere else I could redirect my precious time and awareness to instead?

This is why I am the *number one fan* of having a bigger thing in your life you are working on – a project, a plan, a vision for your future.

It is infinitely beneficial and empowering.

Sure, it will hopefully lead to the end result you actually want from said endeavour. Whether that’s knitting a new jumper for your neighbour’s chihuahua or planning out your next 10 years.

But more importantly, it means you are finally the one in control of where your energy flows.

It is you making that decision — and consciously.

Reclaim your attention. Trade it only for the things that bring you closer to the life you want. Then bring that forth into reality.

Because if you don’t have a plan for yourself, you’ll end up being part of someone else’s.

Does my view on attention make sense or is it completely unrelatable? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S. I'll soon be finalising a course showing the tools and systems I used to redesign my life — twice.

Question for you:

What tools and systems of mine would you like to know more about?

Action taking?

Decision making?

Time management?

Or something else entirely?

Hit reply to this email and tell me what you’d love to see up close.

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I have a confession.

I’ve been writing this Substack newsletter for two and a half years and I have never personally paid for a single subscription.

Not even for a month. Never.

(braces for impact)

Sure, I’ve bought plenty of other digital things like courses, apps, tools. But a subscription to a Substack (or actually, any) digital publication?

Not once.

I’ve had two major revelations about online writing

The first is that your experience as a reader must always come first. To do that, the writing has to be free.

Let me explain why.

I’ve never bought a Substack subscription not because I don’t believe writers should be paid well for their work. Obviously, I very much do.

But I’ve come to the realisation that for most people, the paywall does not make them want to pay. It makes them want to do the exact opposite.

Turns out, I’m one of those people.

You cannot ask a total stranger for money

It’s the equivalent of walking up to someone on the street and asking them to hand you a fiver before you’ve even finished a sentence.

Unless I have a migraine that feels like I’m giving birth through my head and behind your wall lies a magic pill, nothing you have to say is going to make me pay you there and then. Whether it’s about your cute list of best winter hats or the meaning of life.

And yet, that is exactly what I’ve been expecting you to do. I’ve been treating our relationship like a transaction before it’s even begun.

I turned up in June 2023 with an email list of zero and had the paywall activated from the start.

I expected people to believe my words were so vital they would hand me cash before they even knew who the hell I was.

I’ve been utterly delusional.

Biggest Hypocrite of the Year goes to me 🏆

And that did work, for a while.

I would spend my time thinking of things to put behind the wall to make people convert to paid, rather than writing what I actually wanted to say. Those ideas soon ran dry because there are only so many things I can teach.

But you know what ideas never run dry? Thoughts.

Every Substack reader experiences this: you get the email, you open it, you start reading. You’re interested, you’re invested. Then suddenly, you hit the wall.

If there’s a quicker way to piss off a reader, I’m all ears.

And if I receive emails from someone that keep containing paywalls, I just stop opening them altogether.

The more you try and force me to hand over my money, the more adamant I am that I never will.

(This is such basic bitch sales 101 everyone probably already knows, yet here I am — today years old — only just realising any of this.)

Paywalls are a digital form of manipulation

No one wants to feel like they’re being manipulated.

I’m not going to follow you around prodding you with a stick chirping pay me pay me pay me.

You either actively choose to pay me for my work or you actively choose to not.

Either way, the decision should come from your own free will. Not because some dumbass (i.e. me) is purposely gatekeeping the important bit.

It’s interesting, because there have been numerous instances where writers on Substack have publicly declared they’re now doubling down and putting everything behind the wall.

‘So you better sign-up now before I raise that price!’

But I’ve never come across the reverse

A person who was previously gatekeeping who is now making all their writing free.

Maybe there’s a reason; it’s a move few sane writers would make. But I do have a habit of doing the opposite to everyone else. So let’s see how this experiment pans out.

Could backfire, might not.

I don’t write here to piss people off (at least not with paywalls). I write because I actually care about people and want to be helpful and I’m not going to achieve that if I’m putting up barriers everywhere.

And so that’s why from now on, all of my words here will be free.

Yay!

The Substack money delusion

Now let’s be real – most of us who write on Substack will never earn anything meaningful by chasing pittance £5 subs.

You’ll spend a lot of effort going nowhere fast and piss off a load of people on the way.

Sure, we see accounts with the solid orange ticks making a shit tonne of moolah and we love their work. But they are the exception. Most have been building online their entire careers.

Unless you’re also willing to put in a decade of work before seeing any real dough, the math just ain’t mathing for the rest of us starting from zero.

Substack isn’t an earner for most, in and of itself.

The subscription model is flawed and paywalls are pathetic.

But what Substack is good at is being a broadcast medium

It’s an ecosystem for getting your words read by thousands of people.

That’s kind of amazing!

That leads to building a mailing list you own, which is arguably the most valuable asset Substack offers.

I’ve even started to finally see the value in Notes after being mostly annoyed by it for months.

As long as it’s treated like any other social media platform – creation over consumption, and it supplements your main work, rather than being a distraction from it – it’s a brilliant way for readers to find you.

But ain’t no one going to pay you when they hit your paywall. Accept it, then get over it.

So that’s been revelation one.

My writing has been so fucking boring

Here’s my second revelation: I’ve been trying to be a people pleaser which has resulted in me wasting both of our time.

This epiphany is actually hilarious to me because IRL I am literally the opposite. A people displeaser would be more accurate.

Because I’ve been under the grip of the paywall, I’ve prioritised being vanilla in the hope it would lead to an upgrade.

I’ve been wearing a mask on the internet, trading my personality for the chance of a sell.

Oh, the shame.

I’ve been toning myself down

Making myself quieter. Tiptoeing over feelings so as not to make people uncomfortable. All the things I am totally against.

The irony is, I’ve been guilty of exactly what I accused others of doing - trying to be more palatable.

I haven’t been doing that by trying to be more relatable as per my last essay; I’ve been doing it by trying to be less me.

In other words, I’ve been trying to be everyone’s cup of tea.

*shudders*

And you know what that’s resulted in?

My writing has been boring.

Oh god, it’s been so boring for so long. How have any of you been reading it? I’ve literally been boring myself to tears with my own words.

Sure, we all like tea because it’s familiar, comforting. But tea is dull. Drinking tea is not exactly a thrill ride.

Sod being anyone’s cup of tea, let alone everyone’s.

Negroni or blue cheese — take it or leave it

I want to be your straight talking glass of Negroni with a twist of burnt orange: invigorating, undiluted and slightly bitter (non-alcoholic options also available).

I don’t want my writing to be as boring as tea. My brain is not boring. And you don’t deserve boring.

(before anyone @s me, I love tea – that’s not my point)

Yet, my writing has been fluffy and soft and gentle and pandering and so many other things that are not me.

I am direct. I say it like it is and I play with a straight bat. I don’t offend easily.

I don’t want to be palatable. I want to be an offensive blue cheese – you either think I’m bloody amazing or you’d rather not stand too close to me.

My last essay about the bullshit relatability tax was the first piece I’ve been proud of in a long time. It wasn’t gentle. It didn’t pussyfoot. And people resonated with it.

I received WhatsApps from friends and family saying, ‘I LOVE no-BS Leyla! Yes!’

Thanks, Tim

I attribute much of this to only just discovering Tim Denning (big fan, read all his stuff).

He says what he thinks and manages to not sound like dickhead in the process. He doesn’t care if he rubs people up the wrong way and that makes his writing interesting.

He doesn’t have over 170,000 readers for no reason.

I’ve been swallowing his essays whole and they have made me realise, who you authentically are is your defining factor.

So I’ve decided I’m bringing more of IRL Leyla into these newsletters – the Leyla you would actually meet in person.

Not everyone will like it and that’s fine; that’s actually a good thing.

It’s taken me 2.5 years here but I think I might have finally ‘found my voice’.

Why I’m betting on free

Since November 2024 my paid subscribers have been steadily and consistently declining. And frankly, it’s been completely warranted.

Paywalls plus ‘tea’ writing – what the hell else did I expect?

I would spend an entire day tapping away through the lens of gotta get them to upgrade, slap on a paywall and send it out.

All that effort to be read by just a roomful of paying members. Plus, I’d piss off my free readers – again.

Lot’s of people say they would continue to write even if no one ever read their words.

Not me.

I’m not knocking out weekly essays for jollies. I write because I want to be read. I want to be heard – I want to be seen.

I want you to see something of yourself when you peer inside my brain.

It makes both of us feel connected to eachother and the rest of humanity. Even if it means being read by just one person, our words reaching others is what counts.

So I’ve taken my own advice, looked at this thing and asked myself: what is it I actually want from this newsletter?

It’s lead to a complete overhaul — of everything

My writing here and my whole online presence in general. And it’s been exciting.

I finally feel like I have a clear direction.

Ditching the paywall has made me feel free again. I’m writing to be helpful to people and now that the gates are gone, I can finally get to the point — and you can read all of it

I feel invigorated by this newsletter again. I’m going all in - YEAH!

My new manifesto for A Day Well Spent is about helping you realise (in every sense) the life you actually want to live.

I’m here to shake up your thinking and tell you to stick two fingers up to societal conditioning.

Because you were not put on this earth to have meetings, pay off debts then die.

Do have a read of my new newsletter manifesto.

Final thought

My essays will now be free to the end.

I’m keeping the paywalls only for the community comments because I want to keep that space private.

If you’re an existing paid subscriber, stay put. You’re investing in the future of this project and therefore, the future of yourselves.

I’ll be increasing the pricing a fair bit soon because a paid subscription is going to become part of a wider package I’m developing ,and I’ll be adding more features. If you want to lock in the current price, you have a few days.

And to those of you who have stuck around all this time, thank you.

My Boring Era is coming to a close.

We are moving out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. And if you’ve actually quite enjoyed my writing so far, thanks for being kind.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet.

About me: I’m Leyla, the person behind this newsletter called A Day Well Spent. I’m a TV and radio presenter, journalist and writer.

I send this email weekly. If you would also like to receive it, you can join the 8000+ other smart readers who are loving it today.

Subscribe now

If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or click the ❤️ button so more people can discover it on Substack - thanks! And see you in the comments.

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Hello and welcome.

I’m Leyla Kazim. Let me explain everything you need to know about my newsletter ‘A Day Well Spent’ in a few short minutes.

Mission

I will help you to:

1. wake up to the world — awareness

2. break free from the systems that do not serve you — energy

3. redirect your reclaimed energy towards realising (in every sense) the life you actually want — freedom

But what does that mean?

My goal each week is to help you understand what it is you actually want and live a life centred around autonomy, where you spend most of that time doing what you enjoy.

It sounds radical, huh? In today’s society, it is.

To achieve this, I need to re-wire your mind’s programming that’s been screwed with for years by societal conditioning and The Systems that do not serve you.

If you spend enough time reading my words, you will:

• End the ‘wtf am I doing with my life?’ loop

• Recognise that your energy and attention is the most valuable currency

• Only trade it for things that move you closer to the life you want

• Increase your sense of self-empowerment, self-belief and confidence

• Feel inspired to shift from inertia to action

• Begin to intentionally pave your own path to your unique future

• Experience regular doses of accountability and connection

Sign up now so you can make these transitions sooner.

Subscribe now

(also, my Substack is a bestseller and read by over 9000 people in 115 countries — cool huh!)

This is the place for you if:

• You are tired of drifting through life in disengaged autopilot mode

• You recognise no one is coming to save you (so let me at least try)

• You want to learn the skills and mindset needed for a self-built life

• You want to reclaim your time, energy and agency

• You believe ‘The System’ is broken and you want to take back your power

• You understand, to some level, the interconnectedness of all things

• You understand the power of thought as your untapped potential

• You want to be less cerebral and more present in your body and nature

• You were not put on this earth to have meetings, pay off debts then die

A bit about me

In short

I went from: bullshit office job that was eroding the core of me → forging a media career in TV and radio (still what I do) → pursuing a land-based life in Portugal.

I have already implemented two seismic life re-designs 10 years apart (no doubt there will be more). And I am only 40.

It was approximately 2013 when one deceptively simple but actually notoriously difficult to answer question began to finally influence my trajectory:

What do I actually want my life to look like?

I’ve managed to figure out the answer to this (after a lot of self-reflection, questioning and work) and gone after it – twice.

I have designed a life where I spend most of my time doing what I enjoy and earning money along the way. I value freedom, being the architect of my own existence and genuinely believe the Universe opens doors for me because I allow it to.

And I also believe – deep in the marrow of these here bones – that all of this is also available to absolutely anyone else who wants it.

I play with a straight bat and I don't offend easily. I say it like it is and some people don’t like that — that’s OK; I understand it’s difficult to be forced to face your own shortcomings. But it’s the only way we grow.

And one of my absolute favourite things in the world is witnessing the moment this pretty penny drops for someone for the first time:

‘designing and living a life I actually want to inhabit is — possible for me, too.’

🧨 KER-POW

Not only is it more than just possible, you already have the main resource you need to figure out and implement that life strategy: your own agency.

You likely just need a generous dose of self-belief, a hefty sprinkling of self-empowerment – and a hand on the shoulder from someone who’s done it before (twice) to help you find your true north.

Hi!! 👋 that’s where I come in.

Details

In 2007 I walked straight out of university into a software company and felt the first niggles that spending sunny days indoors was not natural.

In 2013 I spent an entire year doing absolutely zero work (like, actually) for a corporate machine just to prove my job was a farce. No one noticed.

Life re-design #1: In 2014 I left the office forever. I spent nine months traveling the world and realised I could never work for someone else again.

In 2015 I began forging a media career in two of my passions — food and travel — eventually becoming a permanent presenter on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme in 2019.

In 2022 I became a critic on MasterChef UK and found the three acres in Portugal that would become the foundation of my next chapter.

Life re-design #2: In 2025 I turned 40 and moved my existence from London to rural Portugal to start building a home powered by the sun and a life dictated by the soil.

I navigated the traditional path for almost a decade until I finally chose to decouple myself from the social conditioning that leads to the most tragic version of squandering our brief time on this glorious planet: going through the motions.

That is when I accessed what I call: a life of my own making, on my own terms.

It’s one of joy, positivity, vitality and purpose. This kind of life isn’t for everyone (hard to believe 🤷🏽). And that’s fine.

But I’m desperate for more people to recognise that if it is what they want, the power is in their hands to create that kind of life too.

My unhinged promise to you

In this newsletter, I promise to:

• Give you every part of me — brace yourself for the unfiltered side of me and my life most don’t see

• Admit when I look stupid or weak — I will be honest about the times I still question myself and wtf am I actually doing? etc.

• Be a radiator, not a drain — I will deliver energy, hope and inspiration rather than negative clickbait or vulnerability porn

• Not sugar-coat or pussy-foot — because truths that are hard to swallow are the juiciest

• Prioritise connection — I genuinely want to know more about you; I reply to every comment in-depth (we have great chats here)

• Cheer you on like I’m on commission

Promise me this in return…

I don’t want you to respond in any particular way to the things I have to say. I simply want to make you think. Because when you give yourself time to do that — deeply — things start to change.

That mental overhaul is what enables you to become the architect of a life you literally throw yourself out of bed for.

Sign up now so you can transition to this way of life sooner.

Subscribe now

How we’ll connect

I don’t write to satisfy an algorithm. You will hear from me when I have something important to share, usually in the form of a weekly essay:

• No bs columns — honest (some might say, blunt) dispatches on life design and architecture, sovereign living and the raw reality of pursuing a land-based life in Portugal

• Space to breathe — every couple of months I take a week away from Substack to give bus both a break

So here I am. Your no bs, straight-talking, new favourite enabler who wants to see you flourish so hard, other people won’t be able to stop themselves from snarking, ‘who the hell do they think they are?’

That’s when you know you’re on the right track.

*hair flick*

I hope you're ready and strapped in. It’s going to be a thrilling and fun ride.

(Warning: I use the word bullshit quite a bit because – there’s just so much of it around?)

The best of A Day Well Spent

Here are some of my most popular Substack articles:

Why invest in premium A Day Well Spent?

Most people go for the £59 (€70) annual subscription. It is the best value.

For an investment of £59 a year, I will help you overhaul your psychology and rewire the programming that has kept you stuck where you are for all this time. The return on investment for that £59 is obscene.

Just ask my wonderful community:

If you aren’t willing to spend £59 on reclaiming the life of your future self, then I just don’t know what to tell you.

It’s back of the sofa money compared to the cost of a life full of inertia and regret. Do yourself a favour and subscribe to my premium tier right now.

Subscribe now

Stop wasting your brief time on this earth doing anything other than moving closer towards the life you want.

And if you’re really serious, join The Hearth 🔥 top tier. It includes a 30 minute 1-to-1 call with me and all I will say is.. Well actually, I’ll leave that to my members:

Thanks for reading. And don’t forget to subscribe and start paving your own path, one essay at a time.

Subscribe now

I was actually grateful for a (really bad) allergic reaction.

Let me explain.

A few months ago I announced that I would be making a wine with my local organic vineyard here in Portugal. It was an opportunity borne out of friendship that aligned with all of my values.

It happened within three months of my debut book being published and within weeks of me moving to a new country. It was very serendipitous.

It feels ridiculous admitting this, but I was conscious that this might come across as oh look, yet another thing working out for Leyla Kazim.

So, when I developed acute contact dermatitis during the first grape harvest — a nasty reaction that left me housebound for two weeks looking like a cross between Shrek and an Avatar character — a bit of me was, dare I say it, secretly relieved.

Here was the struggle I could pair alongside the happy announcement. The thing that showed I was human. The thing that would make my news more palatable.

I was actually grateful for the hardship simply so that I had something negative to write about, for once.

I fully acknowledge how 100% fucked up thinking this is, btw.

But it reveals something important. Not about me — about the unspoken rules of how we’re allowed to share our lives.

We have been conditioned to believe that for a story to be valid, it must follow a specific formula: adversity, low point, hard-won recovery.

If you skip the misery and go straight to the joy, people find it hard to connect.

I noticed this when I wrote an essay about quitting Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I knew people would enjoy it because it showed I am fallible — which I obviously am. That post got restacked and referenced by other writers in a way my celebratory posts rarely are.

The broken bits got more love than the brilliant bits. Every time.

This is the bullshit tax we pay to stay ‘relatable.’ And I want to talk about why we pay it, what it’s actually costing us and why I’ve decided to stop.

Why we only trust joy when it comes with a side of suffering

There’s actually a name for this in psychology. It’s called the Pratfall Effect.

It says that when a person is perceived as competent or successful, they become more likeable only after they show a flaw or make a mistake. The stumble humanises them. Without it, their competence triggers discomfort rather than admiration.

In other words: we have psychologically wired ourselves to only accept someone’s success once they’ve tripped up in front of us.

This is also 100% fucked up.

But it explains everything. It explains why we froth at the mouth when something goes wrong for a sleb but we barely blink at the 20-year marriage or steady career climb.

It explains why social media rewards vulnerability porn over genuine celebration. It explains why the dominant emotional register of the internet is annoyed and/or complaining.

We have decided that complaining is the only ‘authentic’ way to connect.

Hannah Gadsby nailed it in Nanette:

That landed on me like a truck.

Because here’s what the relatability trap actually costs you.

Every time you downplay something good in your life — every time you pair your joy with a qualifying struggle — you are training yourself and your audience to believe that happiness needs to be earned through pain.

You are paying a tax on your own contentment. And the tax collector is everyone else’s discomfort.

But if one person’s joy makes another uncomfortable, that is a sign for them to look at their own shadows. It is not a sign for you to dim your light just so they don’t have to squint.

What if a crisis is just a data point?

It’s not that challenging things never happen to me. I am not sipping Vinho Verdes under the sun and lolling about in tascas 24/7 without a care in the world.

I experience everyday niggles and annoyances and the bigger things as much as the next person. But I have realised that what many call a bad break, I mostly view as a simple data point — and often, an opportunity.

When my husband had to return to the UK unexpectedly two weeks after we moved to Portugal, I was left alone in a new country for four months. Totally unplanned.

A friend said on a Zoom catch-up, ‘Wow, that’s a long time. How are you coping?’

And I thought — what an interesting choice of words. Like, now I see that this would be considered a hardship to many people. Perhaps even a ‘terrible start’ to the new chapter.

But I just didn’t see it like that.

Yes, I felt a bit lonely at times. I missed my family and my husband (occasionally, haha). I had one wtf am I doing here? wobble on the balcony one evening. And I even panic downloaded Bumble For Friends at 3am.

But mostly, I saw this time on my own as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Not because I’m ‘strong.’ I just actively and consciously made the choice to think that way.

I viewed it as a chance to force myself to meet people and take in a new culture without the comfortable crutch of a partner always around.

I turned up to events on my own, spoke to others and built a new circle of friends. I wouldn’t have made those friends so quickly if I hadn’t been in Portugal alone.

The difference isn’t personality. It’s a decision. I believe most things can be figured out. And when you take a moment to zoom out and look at the sky, most things are — in the grand scheme of things — not actually that bad.

And even when they are, there are always silver linings.

Reach for the better feeling thought.

The other side looks like this

Personally, I operate in the complete opposite direction to the Pratfall Effect.

When I see someone has made loads of money, landed a massive deal, published a book or achieved a big-ass qualification, my immediate response is: Bloody GOOD FOR YOU. Bloody well done!! Bloody smash it uuuuup!!!!

I often literally say these words out loud. I love seeing people design their own lives and achieve things.

Because — why wouldn’t I?

It’s not like there is a finite amount of success in the world and other people achieving theirs leaves a little less in the pot for everyone else. Classic scarcity mindset.

Their success is all our success. They are not special. Neither am I. Neither are you. No one is more special than anyone else. Their success shows that if they can do it, anyone can. Other people’s wins show me what is possible.

I find success stories inspiring — with or without the adversity — pretty much every single time.

As I write this, Storm Ingrid is blowing sheets of rain sideways. There hasn’t been a shaft of sunshine in days and it is exceptionally cold and grey. I am wrapped up in layers just as I would be in London. And I am once again living solo for the next couple of months.

And yet, I feel good. Really good.

I feel excited because I have decided the Universe is on my side and looking out for me because I allow it to. What an absolute privilege it is to get to wake up at the start of a new day and try it all again.

That is my unfiltered truth. And I’m done apologising for it.

How to stop paying the bullshit tax

Here’s what this looks like in practice — not as a personality trait but as a set of choices anyone can make.

Stop qualifying your good news

Next time something good happens and you want to share it — a promotion, a holiday, a win, even just a really good Tuesday — share it without the caveat.

No ‘but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.’ No ‘I know I’m lucky.’ Just the joy, uncut. See what happens. The people who can’t handle it are telling you something about themselves, not about you.

Catch the Pratfall reflex in yourself

Notice when you feel a flash of comfort at someone else’s failure, or discomfort at their success. You’re not a bad person for feeling it — it’s the Pratfall Effect doing its thing. But once you see it, you can choose differently.

Try replacing the flinch with ‘bloody good for them’ and mean it. It gets easier.

Reframe your next setback as a data point

The next time something goes sideways, before you spiral, ask: what is this actually? Not what story am I telling about it — what is the fact of it?

Often the ‘crisis’ shrinks to a logistical problem with a solution. The drama was editorial, not structural.

Curate for joy, not just commiseration

Look at who you follow, what you read, what you talk about with friends. How much of it is bonding over what’s broken? How much is celebrating what’s working?

If the ratio is skewed, adjust it. Not because negativity is invalid — but because it cannot be the only frequency you tune to. You become what you give your attention to.

Your joy does not need a permission slip

It does not need to be earned through hardship, softened with a struggle or made palatable with self-deprecation.

You are allowed to be excited about your life. You are allowed to wake up thrilled about the day. You are allowed to say things are going well without whispering it.

I am choosing to not dim my light just because it might make others squint. And I think you should try it too.

It is easier to complain together than to grow together. But growing together is much more fun.

What’s one piece of good news in your life right now that you’ve been quietly downplaying? Share it in the comments — no caveats allowed.

It would be so nice if more people were able to feel this. I think we could bond over excitement and joy just as easily as we bond over the 💩.

I'm Leyla. I write about refusing to apologise for designing a life that actually excites you, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8000+ readers — join them if you'd like it in your inbox.

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Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter about intentional, slow and empowered living.

What the community received recently:

• 37 truth bombs I’m taking into 2026

• The unsung art of the convincing bluff

• Your ‘time preference’ determines the outcome of your life

This post is Part 1 of a 2-parter:

• The unexpected sequel to my debut - Part I

• So, I’m officially a winemaker now? - Part II (this post)

Pathways Practitioners! It’s time for me to update you on my our winemaking progress.

If you are new around here – and there are few of you, hello! – allow me to bring you up to speed with a quick recap about what I’m referring to:

• In June last year I published my debut book called Pathways, about my journey moving from London to rural Portugal and my philosophy for living a more intentional, slow and empowered life.
  
  (the book was a limited edition and sold out so it’s no longer available - I’m sorry if you missed it!)
  
  

• Then in October, I announced the unexpected sequel to that book: I’m making a Pet Nat wine with my local organic vineyard here in Portugal, Cas’Amaro which will be available to purchase, worldwide, in March 2026.
  
  

• The vineyard is run by my good friend Rui Costa. This is the story about how we met, how this wine collaboration came to be, and how when you stay true to yourself, the Universe will often meet you halfway
  
  (I recommend reading that story before you read the rest of this!)
  
  

• In that piece I said I’ll be sharing the different winemaking stages with you over the coming months and that I looked forward to seeing how I shape up as a real winemaker!
  
  

• ‘The Pathways Practitioners’ is the affectionate collective name I have given to our little community – the name for those of us who share the Pathways philosophy and are invested in how our (hopefully!) delicious sequel pans out too.
  
  And don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to own your copy of Pathways, you are still invited to be a Pathways Practitioner - the more the merrier!

Now that you’re all caught up, it’s time for me to share how one of the most important stages of the winemaking process went – the grape harvest.

This happened back in September and if you’ve been following my journey in Portugal so far, you’ll know what happened to me as a result of harvesting these grapes: the acute contact dermatitis reaction.

It had me housebound for 3 weeks and on a 14-day course of oral steroids!

I have already suffered for this art, guys! LOL (yeah I wasn’t laughing at the time…)

That minor (actually, quite major) blip aside, the grape harvest itself was a wonderful experience. Also, it turns out there’s quite a lot of skill involved (I’m not exactly … a natural? More on that below.)

I’ve been conducting a few video interviews over the course of the past few months at each stage of the winemaking process because I want to introduce you guys to my friends, the actual experts involved.

And I want you to hear directly from them about what we’re up to and why.

But first, a quick back to basics.

How is wine made and what is a ‘Pet Nat’ wine?

Wine has been made for millennia which proves high tech equipment is not necessary. I know this because I’ve made wine myself at home.

It’s a really quite simple process that involves a touch of ancient magic called: fermentation.

It goes something like this:

1. Obtain fruit juice: we crush the grapes to release the sugary juice.
   

2. The yeast: we introduce yeast to the liquid, either selected strains or we use the wild yeast that naturally occurs on the grape skins (Cas’Amaro do both).
   

3. The feast: the yeast ‘eat’ the natural sugars in the grape juice in an environment with no oxygen.
   
   (Fun Fact #1: if you leave that fermented juice exposed to oxygen and the right bacteria, those same outputs turn the liquid into a different fermented product — vinegar. This is why winemakers are so obsessed with keeping oxygen out of the tanks!)
   

4. The magic: The yeast turn their sugary food into two outputs: alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2) gas.

In a normal still wine – that is – without any bubbles, that gas is allowed to escape.

But with a Pet Nat (short for pétillant naturel, which is French for ‘naturally sparkling’), we bottle the wine while it’s still fermenting.

This means we trap that gas inside the bottle, which is what creates those beautiful, soft, natural bubbles you’ll find in your glass come March.

No added sugar, no laboratory yeasts – just the grapes doing their thing.

And this is actually the same process I used to make my sparkling rosehip wine back in London a couple of years ago – I had no idea at the time I was technically making a Pet Nat!

Fun Fact #2: Champagne gets its bubbles via a completely different method — a fully finished still wine is put into a bottle with a little extra sugar and yeast to force a second fermentation.

So in summary, a Pet Nat is a naturally sparkling wine and oh Deus mio this one is going to be so good…

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A bit about Cas’Amaro

I still can’t quite believe what will eventually be my front door (once we’ve built our house) is a mere 4 minute drive from Cas’Amaro, it’s just 2km away.

There are currently two main Cas’Amaro locations in the Lisboa region.

The first is their quite stunning Cas’Amaro restaurant, wine bar and winery (where the wine is actually made).

Yes THIS is what will be 4 minutes from me. I KNOW.

And their other location, a 10 minute drive away, is the Cas’Amaro wine villa with three rooms (and a pool!) nestled amongst their vineyards.

Also stunning! My friend had her wedding here.

A few reasons I 🫶🏽 Cas’Amaro

Other than the fact that they are my neighbours, my friends and really good people, these are some of the other reasons I love Cas’Amaro and what they do:

1. They are boutique, family-run and are considered a ‘microproducer’, which means they produce limited runs of wine that prioritise quality over volume.
   
   

2. Their vineyards and wines are certified organic. I have previously shared that I only buy organic - so this is important to me. And it’s not all too common in Portuguese wines.
   
   Also, it’s not easy maintaining this status — and it’s expensive.
   
   For example, their neighbours (another wine producer) spray chemicals and it was drifting over to some of the Cas’Amaro’s vines. This meant they started failing some of the organic tests.
   
   You alas can’t really ask your neighbours to stop spraying. So they had to go to the extreme of planting an entire fast-growing tree windbreaker to block the neighbour’s spray from reaching their grapes!
   
   I love that they work with the biodiversity of the land rather than fighting it with pesticides.
   
   

3. Their wines are artisanal and low-intervention which means they don’t use the chemical shortcuts you’ll find in industrial winemaking.
   
   And now I’ve actually been a part of all the stages first hand, I can attest to the fact that every stage is extremely hands-on and manual – I love this!
   
   

4. One of my favourite reasons is that they only work with indigenous grape varieties. Which means you won’t find any Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot or Chardonnay (which you can just get anywhere, right?).
   
   Instead, you’ll find varieties you’ve likely never heard of and which don’t grow anywhere else – such as Arinto, Sercial, Bastardo – which I think are so much more interesting.
   
   This also means Cas’Amaro is actively choosing to protect Portugal’s unique biodiversity by working with varieties that have spent centuries adapting to a local heatwave or misty morning.
   
   

5. Their wines taste SO GOOD.

OK, actually – there will be TWO Pet Nats

Now is probably a good time to let you know I’m actually making TWO Pet Nats with Cas’Amaro, you lucky dawgs.

The first will be an effervescent white Pet Nat, made with the indigenous Portuguese grape called Sercial.

This is the wine that will be available to purchase online – from anywhere in the world – in March, for three weeks only.

The second will be a gorgeous sparkling rosé Pet Nat made with the red native grape called Touriga Nacional.

This second wine will be available to purchase exclusively in person at Alma do Vinho 2026 – September dates not yet announced! Rui and I will have our own stand — how exciting!

If you plan on going, I look forward to seeing you there — along with the thousands of others from all over the world — for another goddamn excellent weekend (IYKYK 😏).

The grape harvest days

What I love about the whole winemaking process is that timing is everything, at every stage. Even when it comes to picking the grapes themselves.

As I learnt from Cas’Amaro winemaker Gilberto Marques, for a Pet Nat, you want to pick the grapes young, before they get too sweet. And before any big rains come.

Nature waits for no man.

When the grapes are at their peak, it’s very much a drop everything all hands on deck group endeavour. And just as well, because I am so slow at harvesting grapes that if it were just down to me, there’d be nothing to offer you come March.

During one of the harvests, I asked Rui Costa, General Manager at Cas’Amaro:

• What makes Portuguese wine so special?

• What’s different about the grapes Cas’Amaro choose to grow and make wine from?

This is what he had to say:

And here’s some evidence of my grape harvesting skills, or lack thereof.

Alongside Rui demonstrating how it should be done — once you have years of experience.

I’ll get there…

I loved how there was traditional Portuguese folk music blasting out on Spotify as a motivational backdrop to our collective harvesting endeavours.

I even managed to convince Rui to bust a few moves on camera — go Rui!:

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The Sercial grape variety in your March Pet Nat

If you’ve never heard of this indigenous Portuguese grape before, don’t worry - neither had I.

Jancis Robinson is arguably the most influential wine critic in the world and she has lauded Portugal for its ‘exponentially improved winemaking’.

She also specifically highlights that Portugal’s refusal to pull up its native vines during the ‘Chardonnay craze’ of the 90s is now its greatest global asset.

Don’t you just love how maverick that was of Portugal?

Their vineyards could have followed the rest of the world in the pursuit of money. But they instead saw the value in their age-old local varieties. And thank goodness for that.

Here’s Cas’Amaro winemaker Gilberto explaining why the Sercial grape makes such a mighty fine Pet Nat.

I also asked him: how long does it take to make a Pet Nat?

What happens after the grapes are harvested?

Now, the juice must be extracted from all those grapes.

Ever wondered what its like to be INSIDE a wine press? Wonder no more.

Here’s me and Gilberto again – turns out we’re both quite adept at fitting into tight spaces.

And that’s all for now!

Next time: you will find out how bottling went and still to come, the all important NAMING of the wine and LABEL DESIGN!

We need a name and we would love to have your input!

Which is where I’m calling upon you guys, The Pathways Practitioners!

Seeing as this is our collective Pet Nat, myself and the Cas’Amaro team would love for you to be involved in naming the wine!

And so, if you have any suggestions as to what we should name this wine, please share them below.

Leave a comment

Myself and the Cas’Amaro team will be deciding on the name imminently (I think literally within the next week or two) and we would love to feed in your ideas :)

Date for the diary: March 2026

It feels like it’s all happened quite fast and when you think about it, there are really just a few weeks left before the wine will be ready for sale.

Thrilling!

When I have the exact date, I will of course share it with you. What we do know for now is, it will be in March. And the wine will be available for worldwide delivery.

So you guys from Melbourne, Singapore, Kenya, New Zealand — who showed up to the Alma do Vinho wine and music festival in September because of my viral video — don’t worry, you too can get your hands on a bottle, or four.

I'll be sharing the further updates (including the time and date when the bottles actually go on sale) via this newsletter.

So if you want to make sure you don't miss out, ensure you're subscribed:

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And if you appreciate this piece, please let me know by tapping the ❤️ at the top or bottom, sharing it or forwarding it on — thank you.

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Living in a constant state of decision making feels like surviving more than thriving.

And most of us don’t even realise we’re doing it.

Some sources suggest the average person makes an eye-watering 35,000 remotely conscious decisions per day. Assuming most of us spend around seven hours asleep each night, that makes roughly 2,000 decisions per hour.

One decision every two seconds. The thought hurts my brain.

Whether you should open a window, cross the road, get the BOGOF, go for seconds, put on the dishwasher or carry all of those empty cups to the kitchen at once.

Whether to keep reading this essay or click away.

Whether to have the wholemeal or white.

Every single one of these micro-decisions draws from the same finite well of mental energy. And when that well runs dry — which it does, reliably, by mid-afternoon — the quality of every remaining decision nosedives.

In one study, prisoners who appeared before a judge early in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, whilst those who appeared before the same judge late in the day were paroled less than 10% of the time.

Same judge. Same types of cases. Different time of day.

Not much justice there — that’s a depleted brain on autopilot.

My Dad was a driving instructor for several years and said a similar thing about the day you take your driving test. Do it in the morning and you are more likely to get a pass than if you drove in exactly the same way at the end of the day.

For similar reasons, Mondays are better than Fridays.

We are slowly being buried alive by choice. And we’ve been told this is freedom.

250 dishes — what’s your order?

I experienced the purest distillation of this particular hell when I visited a branch of The Cheesecake Factory in New Jersey.

For those uninitiated with this American institution, whilst The Cheesecake Factory will happily sell you a fat slab of cheesecake (choose from 40 flavours topped with two peaks of squirty cream), contrary to what the name suggests, it is neither a factory nor does it solely churn out cake.

Most disappointingly of all, it has no relation to Charlie’s chocolate factory.

I was handed a tome from which to make my dining decision, the menu divided into 21 sections including:

• small plates and snacks

• appetizers

• salads

• pizzas

• lunch

• glamburgers

• sandwiches

• pasta

• specialities

• fish and seafood

• steaks

• skinnylicious

• eggs and omelettes

• weekend brunch

• kids menu

• desserts

• beverages

• side dishes

• happy hour

Our server introduced herself and without a smile, informed us we were able to ‘choose from more than 250 dishes made fresh from scratch every day’; my body quietly attempted to concertina itself into the deep-button folds of the modular, faux leather banquette.

I had previously heard of a Zen Buddhist parable describing Hell as a long dining table groaning under the weight of delicious noodle dishes with each diner having only metre-long chopsticks with which to eat,1 rendering the task impossible and the spirits destined to exist in a state of perpetual starvation for the rest of eternity.2

The Zen Buddhists are wrong.

Hell is:

1. a menu with 250 choices

2. in a restaurant masquerading as a cheesecake factory where

3. only 16% of the entries are even cake related

My hands began to turn the laminated pages of this literary work rivalling the length of some holy scriptures, eyes darting over the words — so many words — without reading any of them.

Then I went back to the start and did the same thing again. And then a third time.

Lost in a sea of included in your meal is a selection of any four of the following, I turned to my fellow diners for direction. But we were all floundering in the same boat taking on water from the deluge of options.

I would need at least 30 minutes to read through the thing. She came back to us with a notepad and pen poised in under five.

I’ll keep it simple with eggs, I thought.

“Would you like them with potatoes or tomatoes?”

“Oh, OK. Tomatoes please.”

“With toast, bagel or an English muffin?”

“Anything is fine.”

“You need to choose one of them,” she said wearily without looking up from the notepad.

“OK, toast?”

“Would you like that wholemeal or white?”

“I don’t mind.”

There was a pause. The server looked up at me this time.

“You need to…”

“Brown, I’ll have brown.”

Eyes back down, “By brown do you mean wholemeal?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like a drink with that?”

“A coffee with milk please.”

“Would you like a freshly brewed coffee, a caffe latte or a cappuccino.”

“Just a coffee with milk? I guess freshly brewed?”

“Aren’t they all freshly brewed?” I muttered under my breath but I think she heard me. Her eyes lifted again, her face an expression of are we really going to do this.

“Sorry, there are just a lot of options. We Brits are not used to this ahahaaa.”

Repeat variations of the above dialogue for 10 people and 3 hours and 47 minutes later, our orders were placed.

No shade cast on The Cheesecake Factory or the land of the free — I enjoyed my eggs. But that experience was a fitting allegory for something much bigger than brunch.

It was a snapshot of what modern life has become: a perpetual onslaught of decisions and choices we are expected to make at every waking moment.

Sleep is one of the few remaining blissfully choice-free bastions.

And here’s the thing that isn’t said enough: we’ve been told that all this choice is a gift.

That more options means more freedom.

That being able to customise every microscopic detail of our existence — from our toast to our career to our identity — is what it means to live well.

But what if the opposite is true?

What if the sheer volume of choices we face every day is not setting us free but slowly trapping us — draining the very energy we need to do anything meaningful with our lives?

I think it is. And I want to share three ideas that have fundamentally changed how I think about choice, freedom and where I take my cues from.

More choice does not mean more freedom

I came across a piece of research in the Journal of Consumer Research that stopped me in my tracks:

Read that again.

The entire framework of ‘choice equals freedom’ — the one most of us have never thought to question — is not some universal human truth. It’s a cultural construction. One that mainly serves the interests of the system selling us all those options.

250 dishes on the menu isn’t generosity. It’s a business model.

The Cheesecake Factory doesn’t have 250 items because they care deeply about your autonomy. They have 250 items because the more options you see, the more you spend.

Scale that up from a restaurant to an entire economy and you start to see the machinery behind the curtain. The thing we call consumer choice is often just consumer confusion dressed up as empowerment.

I really, really don’t like shopping. I used to think that was a quirk. Now I think it’s self-preservation.

Constraints don’t limit you — they free you

This is counterintuitive but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Let’s imagine you asked me to write an article about absolutely anything and gave me no further guidance as to what it should be about, how long it should be or who it was for.

Before deciding on a topic — which I would inevitably change my mind about — I would probably stare at a blank Google document for approximately the same amount of time it would take for a load of washing to finish.

Two hours and twenty minutes on the eco cycle.

But if you asked me to write an article with no more than 1,500 words that recommended short exercises for the body that may help with nagging aches, improve physical and mental wellbeing and that was accessible to all ages — I would at least know what direction I was moving in.

E.F. Schumacher, the economist who wrote Small is Beautiful, argued that maximum wellbeing doesn’t come from maximum consumption — it comes from the minimum amount needed to live well.

Less input, more meaning. Fewer options, deeper engagement with the ones you have.

According to Noom’s research, we spend on average three hours a day just deciding the following four things: what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear and what to watch.

Three hours. Every day. Burned on logistics.

I have a friend who gets two of their three meals a day delivered to them, readymade. I initially thought this was pure and unabashed privilege — I mean it is.

But they are time-poor new parents both with demanding full-time jobs. If removing the question of what at least one adult is eating saves them from one more draining decision, and they can afford it, all power to them.

They’ve eliminated a decision to reclaim their energy. The principle is sound even if the method is expensive.

So what happens if, instead of adding more options to your life, you deliberately removed some?

Nature already solved this — and it didn’t need a menu

This is the idea that changed things for me.

I seldom feel overwhelmed by choice when I’m in nature, and I think it’s because I don’t have to make any decisions about it.

Nature has been doing its thing since the beginning and — excluding those meddling humans — over that time has figured out the perfect balance of existence. It not only knows what to do but also how, when, where and why to do it.

It knows the best and most beautiful order of things.

In permaculture — the practice of working with nature’s patterns rather than against them — one of the foundational principles is that the system designs itself.

You don’t force a forest into a spreadsheet of options. You observe what already works and align yourself with it.

The right things grow in the right places at the right time. No menu required.

I’ve started applying the same principle to my own life. Instead of agonising over endless options, I let the natural systems around me make the decision.

When the cold virus breaches our first layers of defence, we don’t decide that our white blood cells must multiply and release chemicals to fight the infection.

When we cut our finger, we don’t decide that our platelets must release fibrin proteins that tangle together to form a clot and seal the wound.

Our bodies know what to do and just do it.

We are part of nature too, lest we forget

By taking more of my cues from nature and listening to its eternal wisdom, many of life’s everyday decisions are already taken care of.

Nature has our interests at heart and so those decisions are probably the best ones for me too.

The question of what I eat?

This is largely dictated by the organic weekly veg box delivery I receive from my local farmer. It is stuffed with vegetables that are in season and at their peak.

This may mean I have less choice each week compared to the kaleidoscope of produce available in your average supermarket all year round from all corners of the globe.

But it also means the quality of what I’m eating is superior and more nutritious compared to that of something intensively grown and flown across the Atlantic at the expense of the climate’s health.

The farm decides what’s ready. I cook what arrives. One decision eliminated.

The question of what I should watch?

The garden birds on the feeder or a spider spinning its web does more good for my soul than a mindless scroll through social media or harrowing news reports.

The question of what time should I wake up?

Ideally, with the sun.

I’m still working on that one.

The point is this: every decision you remove from your day is energy returned to you.

Energy you can spend on the things that actually matter — on creativity, on learning, on the people you love, on building the life you want rather than endlessly curating the one you have.

Here are a few things you could try this week

Let the season decide what you eat. A veg box, a farmers’ market, whatever grows near you — let the land choose. One less decision, better food.

Build a personal uniform. Not literally the same outfit every day but a rotation of pieces you love. Stop performing daily fashion decisions for an audience that doesn’t exist.

Set a default bedtime and wake time. Stick to it for seven days. See what happens when your body’s rhythm makes the decision instead of Netflix.

Cut one choice-heavy app from your phone for a week. The one you scroll through without ever actually choosing anything. You know which one it is.

We are drowning in options and calling it freedom.

But freedom is not having 250 items on a menu. Freedom is not needing the menu at all.

The next time you feel exhausted and can’t explain why, consider that you might not be tired from what you’ve done — but from the thousands of decisions you’ve made just to get through the day.

Decide less. Live more. Nature’s been doing it since the beginning.

What’s one decision you could remove from your daily life this week? I’d love to know — tell me in the comments.

I’m Leyla. I write about exiting the systems that don’t serve you and building a life that actually feels like yours. I send this once a week to 8,000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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None of us would be here if stars didn’t die.

Most of the elements in your body — carbon, calcium, iron, oxygen, magnesium, sodium, potassium — were created inside stars, before the Earth even existed.1

When those first stars eventually died and exploded, those elements were dispersed throughout the Universe. Some of them ended up inside you.

You are, quite literally, made from the death of something else.

And the cycle continues. Things must come apart and disintegrate — there must be death and disorder, there must be change — in order for new life to form.

Mathematician James R. Newman defined entropy as ‘the general trend of the universe towards death and disorder.’ But what he didn’t say — what most of us miss — is that entropy is not the enemy.

Entropy is necessary for life.

Our houses fall apart. Food rots. We see signs of ageing in the mirror. And because we don’t want anything to change, we invent preservatives, ‘forever chemicals’ and plastics that never break down.

But we are misguided in our fears. Because without things falling apart, nothing new can grow.

I want to share a concept from ecology that completely changed how I think about change. And why the thing most of us are trying to avoid is actually where all the good stuff happens.

Life happens at the edge

Nature is always in flux. Just as waste doesn’t exist in Nature — there are no refuse workers in the forest — neither does stagnancy. No two moments are the same, even if the change happens so slowly we can barely perceive it.

Water carries more oxygen when it is flowing. Where there is movement, there is life.

But here’s the idea that really got me.

In ecology, the edge effect describes why a richer variety of life and healthier growth are observed at the boundaries where two different environments overlap — more so than when looking at either environment on its own.

Along outcrops of exposed rock and cliff. Where forested areas border clearings. Where estuaries meet the ocean. It’s at these edges you’ll find some of the greatest diversity and abundance of organisms on Earth.

In permaculture — a design system modelled on natural ecosystems — one of the core principles is use edges and value the marginal. The logic is simple: if the most productive part of a woodland is the edge, then design it to have a lot of edge.

Nature is always trying to increase its edge. And because we are part of Nature — not separate from it — we are no different.

Most of our living happens when we traverse a boundary. When our environment is in flux, when circumstances switch, when we embrace the change rather than tensing up against it.

Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, once said: ‘All division of the world into things is arbitrary.’

Science does not describe things — it explains relationships. And the most alive, the most fertile, the most interesting relationships are the ones at the boundary.

Why Nature breaks things into smaller pieces

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

A cell will expand to increase its surface area. Upon reaching a point of instability, it divides into two stable forms — now with a larger combined surface area.

More edge.

Resources are exchanged across these edges — nutrients taken in, waste removed. By maximising the surface area, Nature increases the efficiency of these interactions and the health of the organism as a whole.

More edge means change happens quicker.

This is why we cut a potato into smaller pieces before we roast it.

And it’s why the most transformative periods of our lives are the ones where we break apart. Where the old form becomes unstable. Where we divide — not into chaos but into new configurations with more surface area.

More openness. More contact with the world.

When we break down into smaller pieces we increase our own edge, creating more opportunities for growth and evolution.

In the online yoga tutorials I follow, at the hold of every pose, the instructor says: ‘Find your edge.’ It took me some time to appreciate what he fully meant.

Which was: go to the place where it’s uncomfortable but not painful. The boundary. The margin. The place where growth actually happens.

Not the safe middle. The productive edge.

Change is not something that happens to you — it’s where life happens

A friend recently told me she’d been made redundant, with a generous package.

I squealed with delight.

‘Oh my goodness — how exciting is that! You’ve now got the time and space to think about and genuinely pursue the change in career you’ve been dreaming of, forever!’

I don’t think she quite saw it like that.

But I’ve come to see enforced change as one of life’s great gifts. The kind of change you have little say over, where fewer options can be a good thing.

Because in these situations, what else is there to do other than welcome it?

The other day, on the way to a TV studio, a BBC Radio phone-in was playing in the taxi. An 82-year-old woman from rural Scotland was lamenting that bank branches were closing, making it difficult for elderly people to manage their finances.

I nodded in solidarity. But the taxi driver — who I roughly placed in his sixties — scoffed.

‘Things change,’ he said. ‘She needs to move with the times. We all have to adapt and evolve. If not, you become stagnant. You get left behind.’

Harsh. But he raises a point.

Buddhists have a more graceful version of this. They practise active acceptance — not resisting the moment, simply observing and being at peace with what is happening now and open to what unfolds.

This is very different to giving up or passively resigning. It’s about recognising that all things change and making space for this fact of life. It is this acceptance that can lead to peace and resilience. With some personal growth thrown in too.

The only real guarantee in life is that nothing lasts forever. If the laws of Nature state that change is inevitable — whether we like it or not — perhaps we would do well to stop fighting it and start looking for the edge.

How to find your edge

Identify where you’re clinging to the middle

What in your life are you keeping exactly the same because it feels safe, not because it’s working?

The job, the routine, the city, the relationship with someone, the way you spend your evenings. Stagnancy dressed as stability is still stagnancy.

Go where two worlds meet

The edge effect says growth happens at boundaries. In practice, this means: try the thing that sits between two identities you hold. The writer who wants to make wine. The Londoner drawn to rural Portugal. The TV presenter who stops watching TV (some of mine).

Your most fertile ground is probably where two parts of your life overlap in a way you haven’t explored.

Let something fall apart

Not dramatically. But next time something starts crumbling — a plan, a habit, a structure — before you rush to fix it, ask what might grow here instead? Entropy is not the enemy; it’s just preparing the soil.

Find your edge in one area this week

The yoga instructor’s prompt applies to everything. In a conversation, go a little deeper than comfortable. In a project, push a smidge past the point where you know exactly what you’re doing. In your daily routine, change one thing. Not the safe middle. The productive edge.

You are made from the death of stars.

Every atom in your body exists because something else fell apart.

Change is not a disruption to your life. It is your life — the most alive, most fertile, most interesting part of it.

Nature already knows this. It builds its richest ecosystems at the edges. It breaks cells apart to create more surface area. It sends water flowing because still water stagnates.

Stop clinging to the middle. Go find your edge.

What’s the change you’ve been resisting that might actually be the most fertile ground in your life right now? Tell me in the comments.

I’m Leyla. I write about finding the edges where growth actually happens — in nature, in life, in yourself — amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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We berate them. Chastise them. Hide them.

We ignore them, curse them, make fun of them, complain about them and try to forget they even exist.

We say we hate them. Our bodies are listening, you know.

We poison them with food we know isn’t food, deprive them of sleep, chain them to chairs for ten hours a day and then wonder why they break down.

And when they do break down — when they finally scream loudly enough that we can’t ignore them — we feel betrayed. As if our bodies have failed us.

But have you ever considered that your body hasn’t failed you? That it’s never failed you?

That in fact, your body has been fighting for you every single second of your life — including right now — and the only thing it has ever asked in return is that you pay attention?

I have. And it changed how I see everything.

I want to share three ideas that rewired my relationship with my body — through lichen, through a hospital screen and through the most radical act I know: saying thank you to the thing I used to take for granted.

Your body is doing the most extraordinary things right now and you didn’t even ask

This best friend of mine, my body — she knows stuff. She’s a she.

I don’t need to impart a shred of instruction or scientific knowledge for her to just get on with doing what she does best, which is being unfathomably, mind-bendingly extraordinary.

Nicked your finger? Fret not, she’ll start clumping cells together to form a clot to prevent any further blood loss.

A bit chilly? Don’t worry, she’ll make you shiver in an effort to generate heat to keep you as close to 37°C as possible.

One too many drinks last night? She’s got you. By the end of today your kidneys will have filtered your entire blood supply at least 30 times.

The human body makes 3.8 million new cells every second. Every second. And you don’t even have to ask it to do that. Your body just does it. Because it knows what’s best for you.

If that isn’t unconditional love, I don’t know what is.

Each cell in your body endures tens of thousands of DNA lesions every day.

Enzymes are constantly checking DNA strands for signs of cancer and replacing damaged parts. Which means it’s quite likely your body has already fought cancerous cells — and won — without you even knowing about it.

High five, body.

And here’s the thing that really gets me. What does my body ask for in return for such riches?

Not much. Just that I acknowledge her and care for her back. With nourishment, movement, fresh air, rest, sunshine and peace.

That’s the deal. That’s the entire terms of service. And most of us are in breach of every single clause.

Sickness is not betrayal — it’s a message you refused to hear

In times of sickness, we feel as though our bodies have let us down. We feel annoyed. How inconvenient.

But according to Ayurvedic medicine practiced for over 3000 years, health is not simply the absence of disease. It is when our mind, body and spirit are in harmony and in balance.

Whilst genetics and other predetermined factors play a role, the state of our health is largely up to us.

Every hour of every day — through the lifestyles we lead, the environments we occupy, the food we eat — we make choices that either contribute to our health or contribute to illness.

For the times we get sick, can we hand on heart say we had been looking after our bodies and making the right choices for them?

Maybe we were burning the candle at both ends. Eating crappy food. Drinking too much. Not moving. Barely going outside. Getting insufficient sleep.

If I let any one of these factors slide, I soon feel the detrimental effects on my body, which then weakens the defences of my immune system.

Should I ever be unaware of my lapse in care, my best friend will let me know about her feelings of neglect loud and clear — by getting sick.

I might feel annoyed. How inconvenient of her.

But did my body really have a choice?

It’s often only once we are bedridden that we finally stop to listen to what our bodies have probably been trying to tell us for weeks, months, years.

‘You need to treat me better.’

The last time I had a cold, it was ghastly. But during that week of sleeping upright on the sofa coughing my guts up, I couldn’t help but think — isn’t this amazing?

My body was doing everything within its power to eliminate this virus.

Working flat out — which is why I felt so tired — to fight this unwanted visitor with all the phlegm and hacking. Just getting on with the grisly task of doing it.

High five, body.

The reframe that changed things for me: sickness is not a failure of my body. It’s my body communicating the only way it can because I wasn’t listening to the quieter signals. It’s not betrayal. It’s devotion.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, writes that in indigenous traditions, the relationship between humans and the living world is one of reciprocity — a mutual exchange of care. “All flourishing is mutual,” she says.

That’s the relationship I want with my body. Not one where I extract and she tolerates. One where we flourish together.

Allow me to explain with lichen

The frilly, lacey lichen we see growing on rock faces and tree bark are not organisms in their own right. They are a combination of a fungus and an algae — lichen exist because of a symbiotic alliance between the two.

The algae photosynthesises sunlight to create sugars which feed the fungi. And the fungi capture moisture and protect the environment which allows the algae to thrive.

If one player is absent, the lichen cannot exist. Both parties benefit from the relationship.

The fungi and the algae are best buds living in each other’s pockets, helping the other to flourish. Whilst they are independent organisms, together they create a new entity greater than the sum of its parts.

The lessons we can learn from nature are many and understanding lichen has been a key one for me. Because it is through this lens of reciprocity — between the algae and the fungi — that I view the relationship between me and my body.

I am the lichen. My body and I are in a symbiotic relationship. She does her extraordinary, silent, thankless work — and I honour that by giving her what she needs.

When I hold up my end, the lichen thrives. When I don’t, it starts to crack.

My mind, my body and my spirit — I think of them as three squabbling siblings. Separate personalities, often competing for attention, but deeply inseparable.

My spirit is the eldest — doing her own thing on a different plane, a formless energy gently sweeping me in directions of good guidance. My mind is the voice you’re reading now, the I writing this.

And my body is my best friend.

For it is my body that allows me to experience this staggering world.

To hear the dawn chorus.

To pick out the backlit silvery strand of spider’s silk.

To laugh and cry and live and love.

And in the same way the lichen on the tree would simply not exist without the fungi or the algae, I would be nothing without her.

Seeing into my heart

A few years ago I went to the doctor about occasional sensations of my heart skipping a beat. They turned out to be harmless and common ectopic beats. But as part of the investigations, a radiologist took an ultrasound of my heart.

I remember lying on the bed, looking in amazement at the grainy black and white screen. I could make out the valves opening and closing, shadowy movements of the chambers filling and emptying with blood.

It was such an emotional experience that it almost brought me to tears.

Here was this organ of mine — one of so many — that had worked tirelessly from before I was even born, to keep me vital and experiencing this world. It has never stopped. Never even taken a break. Never complained.

Its work is relentless, dedicated and so often, thankless.

How could I ever knowingly subject it to any harm?

My overwhelming feeling when looking at this rhythmically pulsating miracle of a thing was of gratitude and a desire to protect it forever.

Along with my lungs that allow me to breathe. My liver that detoxifies my blood. My muscles that enable me to walk down the street with big strides on my own two feet. And every other part of me.

I am a person-shaped tapestry of endless miracles.

How to start treating your body like the ally it is

Everything I’ve described is not just a nice way to think. It’s a practice. Here’s what it looks like in daily life:

Listen before your body has to shout

Tiredness, a niggling ache, a low mood that won’t shift — these are the quiet signals. They’re your body whispering.

If you ignore them long enough, she’ll stop whispering and start shouting. And shouting looks like illness, injury or burnout. Shouting is ugly, don’t wait for it.

Talk to your body like a friend

This sounds strange. Do it anyway.

When you look in the mirror, say something kind. When you’re tired, say thank you for getting me through today. When you’re sick, say I hear you — what do you need?

You would do this for a friend without thinking. Your body has done more for you than any friend ever could.

Review the terms of service

Nourishment, movement, fresh air, rest, sunshine and peace. Run through that list right now. Which one are you most in breach of? That’s your starting point. You don’t need to overhaul your life. You need to honour one clause better this week.

Play the “isn’t it amazing?” game when you’re sick

Instead of cursing your cold, marvel at what your body is doing to fight it. The coughing, the fever, the exhaustion — that’s not failure. That’s your immune system in full battle mode.

High five it. It’s working overtime for you. The least you can do is be grateful while it does.

Your body has been your most loyal companion since before you took your first breath.

It has never once stopped doing its best for you. Never taken a day off. Never asked for recognition.

All it has ever asked is that you hold up your end of the deal. Nourishment, movement, fresh air, rest, sunshine and peace.

That’s it. That’s the whole contract.

Start honouring it. Your body already loves you unconditionally. The radical act is to love it back.

When was the last time you thanked your body for something it does for you every day without being asked? Tell me in the comments — I’d love to know.

I’m Leyla. I write about listening to what your body, your environment and your instincts have been trying to tell you. Amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8,000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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🎧 I presented this week’s episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme called ‘The Food Books of 2025’, listen via BBC Sounds.

Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter about purposeful living.

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I’ve just bought my very first car. In a country I’ve been living in for only four months. From a private seller.

And I did it completely on my own.

I’m really quite impressed with myself.

Because up until about two weeks ago, I knew literally nothing about cars.

Sure, I’ve had a driving license for 20 odd years. But I haven’t got behind the wheel in the UK, not even once, for the last 11 of those – London has excellent public transport.

But here in rural Portugal, things are different.

Our close proximity to Lisbon means the local Uber network is great. I’ve been getting taxis to The Land, taxis into the neighbouring town of Alenquer, taxis to the train station in order to get into Lisbon.

But these trips quickly add up. And without my own set of wheels, I’ve been unable to explore the nearby surrounding areas on a whim.

And there is so much to see.

There’s an organic flour mill, endless restaurants, vineyards and the magnificent Serra de Montejunto – a protected limestone massif with caves and sinkholes and biodiverse hiking trails – a mere 10 minute drive from where we’ll be building our home. And that’s just our immediate surroundings.

I have been desperate to hike this little mountain and now I can finally get myself there. I suspect it will become my foraging spot!

So finding a suitable car has been one of the highest items on my priority list since moving to Portugal four months ago.

Despite having never owned a car and not even knowing how to pop open a bonnet, in the past few weeks I have successfully purchased my very first car, completely under my own steam.

This has involved:

• Meeting the owners at a remote petrol station to check the car over and conduct a test drive, after dark

• Successfully negotiating a big chunk off the asking price

• Cross-checking all of the car’s importation and Portuguese documents

• Organising the transfer of ownership in person at a government office

• The hour’s drive getting the car home

• Sorting out car insurance and a Revisão Completa (Full Service) in a language I don’t yet speak

I thought I’d let you know how some of this went.

Because it involved me taking on a completely new and unfamiliar identity.

Firstly, it’s a super little car

Everyone who has seen it says the same. A white SEAT Mii with a small engine and three doors. She’s a pre-teen, 11 years old.

Sure, her wing mirrors are scuffed and she has a small crack in her rear bumper. But she is otherwise in superb condition with only 90,000km on the clock and drives like a dream.

I’m calling her the Wee Mii.

She’s only ever had two owners and was imported into Portugal from Germany in May 2024 by the person I bought her from.

Her service book shows she’s been looked after in both Germany and in Rome. It’s been nice figuring out the car’s backstory. And whilst she is indeed wee (ideal for narrow Portuguese roads), she feels spacious inside and the boot is deceptively big.

My criteria was a small run around to get us from A to B that we would keep for 2-3 years until the house is built. At which point, we’d upgrade to a fully electric and newer car that would run off our solar panels.

I didn’t want to spend more than around €7000 (about £6120)

This might sound like a lot for an 11-year-old car. I mean, it is a lot.

But second hand cars in Portugal are apparently some of the least affordable in Europe – price retention is strong1 (good for when you’re selling).

Plus, we were restricted to looking for an automatic drive (as this is the kind of license my husband has), which are always more spendy.

My friend Rui Costa – who runs organic winery Cas’Amaro, the wonderful people I’m making the Pet Nat with (coming in March!) – advised me to try and buy a car directly from a private seller rather than a dealership because it would work out cheaper.

I was scouring the StandVirtual website (Portugal’s main vehicle listing site) every day. The only cars that fit our age and budget criteria were endless two-seater Smart Cars or rides with massive mileage and a beat up look to match.

Then at the start of November, I spotted the SEAT Mii listing.

It looked so cute and stood out with its low mileage. I was slightly put off by the 3-door layout and it was considerably above our budget, advertised at €7950. But I thought it was worth a message.

The seller was Helena. She is Brazilian, her husband is German and the only reason she was selling – just a year and a half after she went to the trouble of importing it – was because they were moving to Germany.

She explained that she had chosen to import because, like me, she was new to Portugal, needed a car, had never owned one and knew nothing about what to look for.

She wanted a car old enough to fit her budget but still in superb condition with low mileage. ‘And,’ she added, ‘Germans tend to take really good care of their cars.’

Helena had a close and car-savvy friend in Germany who went to test drive the SEAT on her behalf when she found it online. He called her immediately after to tell her it was such a good find that if she didn’t want it, he was going to buy it for his daughter.

She bought it, loved it, and now — had to sell it.

Lucky for me.

I’m half Turkish; haggling is in my blood

From Helena’s responses, I could tell she was a genuine and helpful person and clearly not a scammer. We moved the conversation to WhatsApp where I could now see a picture of her friendly face.

I would be friends with this girl, I thought. Always a good sign.

I was interested in viewing the car straight away. But – this wasn’t going to be possible.

Helena listed the car on November 3rd but because of a last-minute work trip, she wouldn’t be available to show anyone the car until November 27th. I booked the viewing in for that day and figured I’d keep looking in the meantime.

Whilst this at first seemed like an inconvenience and delay, this fact actually ended up working hugely in my favour.

Only one other potential car surfaced over those weeks, a 5-door Citroën — a year older but with 10,000 less km — also listed at €7950 and with an 18-month warranty.

The dealership was willing to come down to €7750 if I accepted a reduced warranty. It was his final offer.

The brown Citroën (yes, brown) was a 40-minute taxi ride away; I debated whether to go and see it.

I thought it worth me telling Helena about this new development first, to see how she reacted. If she wasn’t willing to budge on price, the Citroën was probably the better option. But if she was, the SEAT Mii would be my favourite.

So, on November 25th, two days before I was due to meet the wee Mii, I decided to test the waters. I wanted to minimise costly taxi journeys by getting an indication of the best price upfront.

What I did next can either be considered a master stroke of negotiation, a little white lie, or a bit of both.

I told her about the Citroën and its credentials (truth). I told her I had already visited it (white lie) and that it was my husband’s preference (neutral statement).

I then told her the dealership’s final offer was €6500 with a 12-month warranty (remember, it was actually €7750).

My question to her was: before I make the trip to see her car, could she tell me if she would be willing and able to match that price?

To be honest, I was expecting a flat out no or at least a counteroffer — I was prepared to meet somewhere in the middle. But to my surprise, she immediately agreed to match it.

With just one WhatsApp message and a generous dose of poetic license, I reduced her original asking price by €1500, bringing it well under the budget I had allocated for the car.

I was chuffed.

Donning the mask of a motor maestro

It’s the morning of November 27th, a Thursday. I am due to meet Helena and her husband at a petrol station that evening about half an hour from where I live, to look over the car and take it for a test drive.

Because that’s what a prospective buyer does, right? Especially when purchasing directly from an individual.

Except, I know nothing about cars. And understandably, none of my new friends are available to come with me. I am even willing to pay a mechanic to accompany me but no one has availability for this evening.

I am really left with just one option: I am going to have to learn everything I need to know about this SEAT Mii within the next few hours, to ensure I’m not about to drop €€€€ on a tin can that falls apart at the first speed bump.

And so that’s what I did.

I got ChatGPT to explain and teach me all the things I needed to physically look and listen out for. I had questions, downloaded diagrams and deciphered the endless new jargon.

I went from knowing a solid zero about the mechanics of a car to having a decent grasp of the basics, within half a day.

But, faced with the actual car in front of me – after dark – would I know what the hell to do?

I shared my live location with my husband (who was still in the UK) in case the pair were planning to kidnap me and sell one of my kidneys on the black market — safety first.

They hit traffic and eventually — at around 7pm and after waiting 45 minutes for them to arrive – I spotted the wee Mii turn into the petrol station. Helena gave me a hug and a kiss on each cheek (hi, Portugal).

And after some pleasantries, it was time to pull on the mask.

I was about to get into a character I had never played before: the world’s most self-assured, confident and knowledgeable car buyer.

If this did turn out to be a scam, I was at least going to make them sweat about it in the presence of this motor maestro (i.e. me) before defiantly telling them the car was as good as scrap.

I pulled out my flashlight, put on some gloves, asked them to pop the bonnet and began the performance.

I checked the reservoir of the brake fluid, coolant and inspected the oil level, wiping the dipstick with a rag I had brought along with me (this action alone made me feel like a real-life mechanic).

I located the engine belt (yes, I know what that is now) to look for signs of wear and tear. I inspected the battery and cross-checked the 17-digit VIN number on the chassis (yes, I know what that is now) to make sure it matched the documents.

I got on my hands and knees and dropped my cheek to the floor to shine the torch on the underside of the car, looking for any wet patches or signs of leaks. I pushed down with all my weight on each fender (the bit of car above each wheel) to assess the suspension – you want it to spring right back up with no bouncing.

I crouched down against each tire and used a coin to examine the tread depth and confirm the wear was even across all four wheels; inconsistencies would hint at a misalignment.

I noted each tire’s DOT number (indicates manufacturing details) to check they were all less than 6 years old. I shone my flashlight down the side of the car to look for any signs of damage repair and pulled up the boot lining to see what lay beneath.

Then I asked Helena to turn the car on. I confirmed the mileage on the clock and got her to cycle through all the electronics (lights, wipers, windows, AC/heating etc) as I walked laps around the vehicle.

It was time for the final act, the test drive.

I got in the driving seat with Helena in the back and her husband next to me — we went for a little drive down some quiet roads.

I accelerated smoothly and accelerated fast to scrutinise whether the automatic gearbox switched up and down smoothly.

I drove slowly whilst turning the wheel from lock to lock and did an emergency stop, letting go of the wheel at the end to see if the car tracked straight. I drove over small bumps to listen out for any rattling in the suspension.

We even managed to find a slope to test the handbrake and the Hill Start Assist (HSA), where the brakes are held for a couple of seconds after you take your foot off the pedal, before it starts to roll.

I inspected and tested that car to within an inch of its life.

And in all honesty, if I had brought someone along with me, I’m uncertain they would have done as thorough a job.

The Wee Mii passed my tests with flying colours. I loved the car.

The payoff

I told the nice couple I was happy with everything I had seen; it was pretty much a done deal. That’s when Helena shared a key detail: I was the first and only person scheduled to view the car.

‘We had loads of messages,’ she said, ‘but no one else was willing to wait to view it — you were the only one.’

Because of the very fact I was patient enough to wait, I ended up with no competition and a huge amount of leverage (a good example of the benefits of a low time preference in practice!)

As I was wrapping up by taking photos, Helena’s husband approached me with a sheepish smile. I could tell he wanted to share something.

‘So, I just looked you up and – you’re a bit famous.’2

I laughed and asked why he was Googling my name.

‘Well to be honest – and I really mean no disrespect when I say this – but it’s uncommon for a woman to know so much about cars.

I work for a big car company in Germany, so I know about cars myself; it’s not something I see often. And I thought perhaps… you were fake.’

I couldn’t help chuckling to myself quietly inside. Because his admission confirmed something: my car cramming earlier that day, along with the character role play I adopted on that petrol station forecourt, had been convincing.

He thought I knew a lot about cars.

Just 24 hours earlier, I couldn’t have told you where to find the oil cap if my life depended on it.

The bluff hadn’t just been convincing, it was bloody masterful.

Not that these two were trying to swindle me in any way; I’m pretty sure if I had indeed turned up knowing nothing, they would have been very kind and explained everything I needed to know.

But I wasn’t to know what kind of people they were ahead of time.

It was my responsibility — and mine only — to identify if this car was being sold to me as advertised. Or if they were in fact trying to offload a money pit.

Because of course, this does happen.

The revealing final detail

The car did have a few scuffs here and there and so Helena agreed to come down a little further. Then we discussed the official handover which would take a good half day; I suggested Monday.

Helena told me that would be impossible. It actually had to be the following day — Friday — because they were leaving for Germany on Sunday! She was counting on me being available the very next morning.

This was revealing. The hard deadline combined with the fact that I was the only qualified viewer meant I had all the leverage. They needed the money and the car gone within 36 hours.

She also wanted to do the ownership handover at a government office local to her in Setúbal – on the other side of the Tagus River and about 50 minutes from me – rather than at a halfway point.

Knowing their urgency and my power in the situation, I agreed, if she could come down to €6300 (£5500), my final offer — the taxi would cost me a fair bit after all.

She agreed.

The car ended up coming in €700 under our budget and €1650 less than her original asking price — not too shabby.

An early start the following morning + the journey to Setúbal + a two-hour-wait-to-be-seen in the government office + the transfer of money to her bank account + the final signing of papers… and the car was officially mine.

She said goodbye to the car she had loved so much, even leaving it with a full tank of petrol. We wished each other well on our respective new life chapters and took a fun selfie in front of the bonnet before she got into her Uber.

Then, after a much needed coffee and pastry, I drove the Wee Mii all the way home — a pretty long first drive that included Europe’s longest bridge — marvelling at the fact that for the first time in my life, at the glorious age of 40, I was now a car owner.

Everything is a lesson

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learnt from this experience and my main takeaways are these:

• Good things really do, quite often, come to those who wait.

• Confidence is a renewable resource and preparation is the key to generating it.

• Act as if.

• It’s often better to tackle a challenge without help — however far out of your comfort zone it might be — because it forces you to learn new skills.

• On the 1st October, in my Ask Answer Allow notebook (a manifesting tool I learnt from Abraham Hicks), I wrote a 2-page script about what it would feel like to own our ideal car.
  
  It included sentences like, ‘we got such a good deal for this car and it’s in perfect condition!’ and ‘the thing that makes me feel most satisfied is the amount we paid for it — LESS than our maximum budget of €6-7k!’’
  
  The SEAT Mii listing appeared a month later. Just sayin’.

• Knowing a bit about cars feels pretty cool.

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It’s interesting how a major life shift can rewire your brain

It turns out uprooting my entire existence from London to rural Portugal has sparked an intense fascination with finance and investments, topics I previously had zero interest in.

And I really do mean zero interest.

I remember at a wedding a couple of years ago, a friend asked us our current mortgage rate. Neither me nor my husband had a clue; the friend was aghast and did not stop referring to his disbelief for the rest of the night.

I suppose I always found finance — dull. People only ever seemed to talk in tiny percentages or use jargon that bounced off me.

Today, things are quite different

I know the inflation rate for both the UK and Portugal, the difference between an attributing and distributing ETF and I am four weeks into a brilliant 6-week training program for European investors (I’ll be sharing more on this!)

I think the catalyst was being forced to really look at our finances.

Moving to a new country includes navigating new tax laws, opening and closing bank accounts, staying on top of conversion rates, submitting two lots of tax returns, hiring an accountant in each country and more.

It’s been a steep learning curve. But it turns out, one I’m quite enjoying. Because learning a new skill is always empowering.

This shift began about two years ago

It was initially fuelled by reading the potentially life-changing (in the truest sense) Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez — hard recommend.

I raved about it to my brother and read chapters aloud to my husband; this book was the match that ignited this journey of financial literacy.

Right now, I’m reading The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous.

Which is less about crypto (it does eventually get to that) and more about how ‘sound money’ – characterised by its scarcity and resistance to inflation – is the foundation of human civilisation.

A bit heavy in places. But if you can stay with it, completely enlightening. The history of money (and the meddling of governments) is fascinating.

It’s whilst reading this book that I’ve come across a very interesting concept – something called time preference.

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Time preference and delayed gratification

Time preference is the ratio at which we value the present versus the future. Do you want satisfaction right now, or are you willing to wait for a greater reward later?

The idea is very well illustrated by the famous Marshmallow Experiment. A child is alone in a room with a fat and fluffy marshmallow. Their options are eat it now, or wait 15 minutes and get two.

The children who managed to wait, the ones with the lower time preference, were essentially exhibiting delayed gratification1.

Follow-up studies conducted decades later confirmed a powerful link.

Psychologist Walter Mischel found a ‘significant correlation between having a low time preference as measured with the marshmallow test and good academic achievement, high SAT score, low body mass index, and lack of addiction to drugs,’ Ammous writes.

It turns out, one of the most valuable things we possess is the ability to choose our future selves over our current urges.

And the marshmallow experiment is a powerful metaphor for how we approach every choice we face, from what to eat for dinner to how to live.

The concept resonated with me immediately because I strongly believe that investing in our future selves – be it through learning, building, or even just waiting patiently for the right thing – is the path to a more abundant and fulfilling life.

So much so that I even have a whole chapter dedicated to this topic in my book Pathways (called ‘Do it for your future self’).

It’s the constant, subtle trade-off between the now and the later.

The differences between a high and a low time preference person

Financial stress is rarely caused by poverty alone. Research shows it is mostly driven by uncertainty and the fear of not being able to handle future needs or shocks.2

This stress applies universally. And whilst we need to acknowledge that a low time preference doesn’t instantly solve systemic issues faced by someone working three jobs to make ends meet, the pursuit of a lower time preference is a crucial internal strategy for creating stability, regardless of your starting point.

⬆️ A high time preference person = ruled by the present

They prioritise immediate consumption and gratification. Think impulse buying, maxed-out credit cards, skipping the gym because the sofa is right there. The future is too uncertain or too distant to hold significant value.

⬇️ A low time preference person = the architect of their own future

They are the savers, the planners, the ones who invest time and resources into something that won’t yield a payoff for months, years or even decades. These people are proactive, not just reactive, in how they live their lives.

Many cannot even imagine a ‘low time preference’ way of living

I recently had an interesting conversation that clearly exposed these two different mindsets.

Matt and I are embarking on the very low time preference project of building our own house which is a multi-year endeavour that requires a huge amount of forward planning – and waiting (hi, Portugal).

I was talking to two new Portuguese friends, relaying to them the 2.5 year wait we had just to get our planning permission approved.

They both looked at me with wide eyes, genuinely surprised. ‘Two and a half years? I could never imagine planning for something that far in the future,’ they both concluded. The furthest they usually thought was ‘a month, two max.’

My response to their response was also one of surprise.

And it made me realise that our decision to wait, to meticulously plan, save and endure the frustrating bureaucracy for years, is the ultimate expression of our low time preference.

Convenience over quality is a daily affront

This sentiment – the preference for convenience over quality – is the bane of our modern times. It’s bloody everywhere. And it’s an expensive way to live.

Ordering an UberEats instead of cooking – the food arrives cold and bashed about.

Buying a cheap, fast-fashion item instead of saving for a high-quality piece – the clothes pill after two washes.

Relying on a car’s rear-parking alert system rather than taking the time to build spatial judgement.

I was recently talking to someone about my sourdough process, explaining it takes about 48 hours between me deciding to make bread and the baked loaves.

He scoffed, ‘Two days? I could never wait that long for bread!’

This guy’s impatience is the defining characteristic of a high time preference person: the rejection of a superior outcome simply because the immediate, inferior option is available sooner.

Imagine two primitive fishermen

As Ammous points out in his book, the shift to long-term production is the engine of civilisational advance. He offers a very good analogy: imagine two primitive fishermen.

The first is a high time preference individual. He spends all day hunting fish with his bare hands to satisfy his immediate hunger. He gets enough to survive for the day but nothing more.

The second has a low time preference. He chooses to hunt for only part of the day – making do with less food – and spends the remaining time building a fishing rod (a capital good).

‘The only reason that an individual would choose to delay his gratification to engage in risky production over a longer period of time is that these longer processes will generate more output and superior goods.’

— Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard

This initial sacrifice means that from now on, the second fisherman is more productive. He catches superior fish in less time and he can save, build a boat and invest further, compounding his productivity over years.

As Ammous explains, the long production cycle is the hallmark of a low time preference society investing in the future.

And this principle manifests everywhere.

For example, consider my two-day slow-fermented sourdough. It’s highly digestible and nutritious, compared to a mass-produced, ultra-processed supermarket loaf which is made in just a few hours using cheap fillers.

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Time preference is deeply affected by the stability of our environment

When you look at societies where the rule of law is weak or where financial uncertainty is rife, people are forced into a higher time preference. Why would you save, invest, or build something that might be taken from you, or simply lose all its value?

We’ve spent a lot of time in Buenos Aires and I’ve heard this directly from friends who live there. Inflation was so insane last year (it’s still horrific, but less so) that the items in shops didn’t even have price tags; the values changed too frequently to bother putting them on a label.

And this high inflation acted like a relentless countdown timer on their money.

My friends told me that as soon as they got paid and the essentials were covered – rent, food, wine (hi, Argentina) – they immediately blew the rest on just enjoying themselves.

They knew there was zero value in saving; whatever pesos they held onto would soon be worthless. This meant the hospitality and entertainment industries were thriving, theatres packed out at 95% capacity every day.

When money fails as a reliable store of value, people are psychologically compelled to consume it now, because the future holds only devaluation.

‘Money is just zeros on a screen, it has no meaning — next week some of the zeros will be gone,’ is what my Argentinian friend would say.

The two faces of time preference

The impacts of this trait ripple through all aspects of a life:

High Time Preference (HTP)

Characterised by immediate satisfaction, impulse and debt. The future is heavily discounted, leading to a neglect of long-term health, financial security and skill development.

It often manifests as chronic procrastination, poor diet and difficulty maintaining lasting relationships because the effort of persistence seems too high compared to the immediate and shallow gratification.

Low Time Preference (LTP)

Characterised by planning, patience and investment. The future is weighted almost equally with the present, leading to savings and health consciousness.

These people tend to build habits and acquire skills that compound (like learning an instrument or a new language) and focus on creating value that sustains over time.

It’s not about living only for the future. When you manage your future responsibly, the present becomes lower stress which allows for high quality consumption. An evening out or a weekend trip is better enjoyed when it’s saved and paid for, guilt free.3

And in fact, a low time preference person enjoys the present more deeply because it is free from the anxiety of tomorrow’s undone work.

It’s about being intentional with your present choices so they enhance your future joy, rather than stealing from it.

A practical guide to cultivating a lower time preference

So, how do we practically shift from the mindset of immediate gratification from one marshmallow now, to the rewarding investment of two later?

Like all good habits, we need to actively build it and it starts with cognitive tools and environmental design.

As psychologists and behavioural experts have shown, true self-control is less about sheer willpower and more about strategic pre-commitment and smart framing.4

Here are 4 practical ways to cultivate a lower time preference based on psychological principles I’ve spent a load of time researching.

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Just after I woke up on that first Friday, I felt something unfamiliar.

Lightness.

The metaphorical permission slip I had gifted myself to log out of the digital world meant my mind had already been emptied of its usual background hum — the low-grade anxiety of notifications, the call of the inbox, the vague sense that someone, somewhere, might need something from me.

The day felt full of possibility.

I had decided, somewhat nervously, to try something that felt radical to me: an entire day offline. No internet. No phone. No screens. From Thursday evening to Saturday morning, I would be completely unreachable.

The night before, I felt wired. Jittery, even.

Will colleagues be OK if I don’t respond? If my last WhatsApp timestamp is a day ago, will people think I’ve died? If a major world event breaks out, how will I know? What if I get an email offering a dream TV gig but I only have a few hours to accept it?

Then: what am I going to do with myself? What if I need to find something out? What if I need to tell my husband to pick up some lemons on the way home?

That was six years ago.

I have done this almost every Friday since. And it has, without question, changed a lot.

On that first Saturday morning, I took a deep breath, turned everything back on and started checking my apps. I didn’t have a single WhatsApp message. No emails that couldn’t wait until next week. The dream TV gig had not materialised.

The universe had continued to operate quite competently without my participation.

It turns out I wasn’t the centre of it — what a revelation. What a relief.

I want to share how this practice began, what it’s given me and why I think the single most radical thing you can do for your potential is to regularly make yourself unreachable.

How a stranger in Somerset House changed my Fridays forever

Back in January 2020 (just before Covid hit), I visited an exhibition called 24/7 at Somerset House — billed as ‘a wake-up call for our non-stop world.’

The part that changed the course of my week-to-week living forever was Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s project, 6 Months Without.

She spent six whole months living and working from Somerset House Studios without any internet at all. No email, no phone calls, no browsing. She communicated by handwritten letter.

My immediate reaction was: that is simply impossible.

How will she arrange to meet people? How will she find things out? Navigate? Buy things? Manage her bank accounts?

But as I read the arrangement of handwritten letters she had sent and received and watched snippets of her video journal, I felt something shift.

If she can do that for six months and not just survive but thrive, I can surely incorporate a small slice of that into my own life.

I started the following Friday.

In agriculture, there’s a practice called fallowing — deliberately leaving a field unplanted for a season so the soil can rest and restore itself. You are investing in its future productivity by giving it time to regenerate.

That’s what my Offline Day is, a weekly fallow. An intentional and deliberate break for my mind. Because the richest growth comes from ground that’s been given space to breathe.

Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, argues that our relentless connectivity isn’t neutral — it actively degrades our ability to think, create and notice the world around us.

What feels like staying connected is actually a slow disconnection from ourselves. ‘Nothing,’ she writes, ‘is harder to do than nothing.’

The Offline Day is my way of practising that nothing, every week.

What 24 hours offline actually gives you

People spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on their phones. That’s roughly a third of our waking hours.

These are tiny insidious drops — the quick scroll, the reply, the click, the browse — that soon fill the bucket without you even realising. And every drop pulls you out of whatever you were actually doing.

When I eliminate the internet for a set period — so it doesn’t even enter my periphery — something very cool happens. Time expands.

It’s not that I suddenly have more hours, it’s that the hours I have are uninterrupted. I can get into flow states without the drag of knowing I’ll pick up my phone at some point and react to whatever I see.

I can follow a thought to its end. I can be bored — and boredom, it turns out, is where most of my best ideas live.

It is this reclaimed time and attention that has allowed me to explore and pursue the big bag of interests I have that people often seem to be perplexed by.

Making wine, growing produce, baking sourdough, learning a language, upcycling furniture, foraging, observing nature, trying to learn to handstand. None of these are extraordinary. They’re just what becomes possible when you stop giving your day to a screen.

And the ripple effects bleed into the rest of the week. Before I started this, I ate breakfast in front of my laptop. On Fridays, I have breakfast sitting in or looking at the garden, which has now extended to most of the other days.

I now tend to start my mornings looking at greenery rather than a screen.

Whilst many people are unwinding in front of a screen on any given evening, you might find me decompressing by sowing vegetable seeds in the kitchen, writing my gratitude journal, or feeding my sourdough starter.

It turns out you’re not as essential as you think

This is the part nobody wants to hear.

The world does not need you to be online every waking hour. Your availability is not as important as you believe. The emails can wait. The messages can wait. The group chat will survive.

Most people for most of the time are going more than 24 hours without thinking about you. And this knowledge is liberating.

Every single week, I am given fresh proof of this. The phone comes out of the drawer on Saturday morning and nothing has burned down.

Do I lapse? For sure.

Usually it’s emails that get me — still waiting for that dream TV gig.

And I don’t do it if work travel falls on a Friday. But for the vast majority of weeks, I manage to stay fully offline. And when I do lapse, I feel the effects quickly enough to reset.

The strongest benefit is what this ‘extra time’ reveals. When the distractions disappear, you find out what you actually want to do with a day — not what your inbox wants, not what the algorithm suggests, but what genuinely excites you.

And the people who guard their attention most fiercely are the ones who actually have something to give when they do show up for others.

How to try your first Offline Day

You can start with a smaller stretch than 24 hours, but try to work up to a full day. Here’s how to make it work.

Let people know in advance

Particularly those used to having easy access to you. We are increasingly accepting of the need to disconnect for mental health — people may be more understanding than you think.

Clear the decks the night before

Reply to outstanding messages so you don’t spend the day worrying about whether someone is waiting for a response.

Phone in a drawer

This is the single most important step. Not on the shelf. Not face-down on the table. It must be out of sight completely. Then it really is out of mind.

Prep what you need

If you want to go somewhere or do something specific, look it up the day before. Directions, opening times, ingredients for a recipe — whatever it is, get it sorted so your day is truly free.

Make plans the old-fashioned way

If you’re meeting someone, agree on a time and place in advance. Then just turn up and hope they do too. It’s a fun experiment in itself.

Have a route for genuine emergencies

People can still call me — I don’t use airplane mode because I don’t really make or receive calls. But having an emergency channel removes the last excuse not to try.

Four years of Offline Fridays have taught me this: the practice of making yourself unreachable is not about rejecting technology, it’s about remembering who you are without it.

When the background hum goes silent, what’s left is just you. Your curiosity, your creativity — your actual thoughts, not just reactions to someone else’s.

It turns out there is an extraordinary amount of yourself you might have lost touch with, waiting for you on the other side of a closed drawer.

When was the last time you spent a period of time without the internet — deliberately? And what did you do with it? Tell me in the comments!

I’m Leyla. I write about logging off, looking up and building a life you don’t need to scroll away from, amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8,000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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When the world plunged into lockdown in March 2020 and the national pastime became social media doom scrolling, there was one tweet I spotted that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

It wasn’t lamenting the loss of our liberty, channelling our collective fear for humanity or ruminating over an existential crisis.

It was a woman freaking out about not being able to visit her local salon to get her eyebrows done.

Fair enough, I thought. A global pandemic is no reason to let things slide. The subject in itself wasn’t the problem for me.

It was the immediate conclusion she had drawn that jarred — that the only way for her to keep her eyebrows in check was for her to get to the salon.

It took everything in my power to stop myself replying with: can you not just pick up a pair of tweezers and do it yourself?

That tweet has stayed with me because it’s not really about eyebrows. It’s about something much bigger.

It’s about the quiet, creeping belief — one that most of us have absorbed without realising — that left to our own devices, we are largely incapable of looking after ourselves.

Modern society leads us to believe that without machines or the services of others, we would spend the rest of our days wandering around in a dazed and bushy-eyebrowed stupor, unable to even feed ourselves.

And so we outsource. We get something or someone else to: clean our house, make our daily bread, dispose of our waste, mind our children, walk the dog, make our clothes, put up shelves, grow our food, fix the car, iron five shirts for £20.

We are taught to believe that spending our money on services will make our lives easier. That we will be freer.

And yet as a society, we are more unavailable and unfulfilled than ever before.

Here’s the question no one’s asking: what is it that’s so important that we prioritise before doing things for ourselves?

Generally, work.

We spend our supposedly ‘liberated’ time working longer hours to further feed the capitalist machine, so we can continue to buy more bogus dreams and deepen the chasm of emptiness and longing.

This is not convenience. This is dependency.

And I think it’s time we talked about the difference — and what happens when you start doing things for yourself again.

The system needs you to feel helpless

A 2016 survey found that a third of British 25-34 year olds couldn’t boil an egg.

I’ll just let that hang for a moment.

I can’t imagine this was the case fifty years prior. Something has gone seriously wrong somewhere down the line.

I don’t blame us as individuals for lacking many of the basic life skills needed to look after ourselves. Why should we bother learning them when we live in an age where our every whim can be fulfilled with almost immediate effect?

Hungry? Order a Deliveroo. Can’t sleep? Download an app to read you a story. Something’s broken? Buy another one from Amazon with next-day delivery.

But here’s the cost no one mentions.

Western society is in a co-dependent relationship with globalised systems. Empty supermarket shelves during the pandemic proved that if you throw a crisis into the works, the global systems we depend on for food, fuel and a lot more are in fact very fragile.

This means our comfortable day-to-day existence is inextricably linked with forces outside of our control.

I don’t know about you, but I find that quite disconcerting.

As Tom Hodgkinson puts it in How to Be Free:

Instead we got Deliveroo, doom scrolling and a generation without boiled eggs.

The more we rely on external markers of gratification, the more they make us feel inadequate, powerless and with little agency over our own lives.

And that’s not a bug in the system. It’s the feature. A person who believes they can’t do anything for themselves is a person who keeps buying.

Outsourcing your life isn’t freedom. It’s a slow erosion of your agency dressed up as convenience.

I freaking made these

When we moved into our house twelve years ago, the two windows in the bedroom needed curtains. We went to a department store and gave the measurements.

I questioned if they had misheard ‘curtains’ for ‘kidney’ — I could not believe the price they were quoting.

My immediate thought was, with absolutely no sewing experience whatsoever: I’m pretty sure I could just do this myself.

And so I did. I found a YouTube video, bought metres of material, borrowed my Mum’s sewing machine and cleared a couple of weekends.

Many (many) hours later, not only had I acquired a new life skill but I had made two fully lined, floor-length curtains that looked great and still hang on those curtain rails to this day.

Sure, I could have spent hundreds of pounds for someone else to make them. And it would have been much quicker. But I wouldn’t feel the huge sense of pride and satisfaction every time I walk past them, still quietly exclaiming to myself over a decade later: I freaking made these.

It’s hard to put a price on that feeling. And it compounds.

Because every time you do something for yourself — make sourdough, put up a shed, upcycle a coffee table with power tools, make country wine — you are banking evidence that you are capable.

And that evidence changes how you see everything else.

Whenever I’ve shared something I’ve learnt on social media, I often receive the same comment: ‘Wow, is there anything you can’t do?’

My honest response is: probably not a lot. And I’m repeatedly surprised to learn others don’t think the same way about themselves.

It’s not because I’m special or particularly gifted. I just believe in myself and my capabilities. I know that with a bit of guidance, a willingness to learn, to get things wrong and try again, I am probably capable of most things.

So is everyone else. That’s the point.

Self-reliance is not isolation

I want to be clear about something. Doing more for yourself does not mean doing everything alone.

One of the most important things I’ve learnt — particularly since moving to Portugal — is that self-reliance and community are not opposites. They’re partners.

The goal isn’t to need nobody, we’re not robots. The goal is to stop depending on impersonal systems that do not give a toss about you and start building real relationships of mutual support with people who do.

My neighbour Rui helps me navigate Portuguese bureaucracy. I help promote his vineyard to the world. A friend lends me her tree pruners. I teach her to ferment a carrot. This is reciprocity — the oldest human technology there is.

The problem was never asking for help. The problem is outsourcing your entire existence to corporations and calling it a life.

As Hodgkinson says:

Freedom lies in self-sufficiency. Not in paying someone else to live your life for you.

Where to start this week

You don’t need to go into full homesteader mode (unless you want to? join me!). You just need to start closing the gap between what you think you can’t do and what you actually can.

Do one thing you normally pay someone else to do

Fix the leaky tap. Hem the trousers. Bake a loaf of bread. It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is the moment afterwards — the moment you look at the thing and think, I did that.

That feeling is the antidote to every message the system has fed you about your own incapability.

YouTube before you outsource

Next time something breaks or needs doing and your first instinct is to call someone or buy a replacement, search for a tutorial first.

Give yourself thirty minutes to learn. You will be amazed how often the answer is simpler than you assumed.

Ask what you’re really buying

When you outsource a task, you’re not just buying convenience. You’re buying the belief that your time is better spent elsewhere. Sometimes that’s true. But often, the ‘elsewhere’ is just scrolling, or working to earn the money to pay for the outsourcing. Catch the loop.

Teach someone what you already know

The fastest way to value your own skills is to watch someone else benefit from them. Cook a meal with a friend. Show a neighbour how to fix something. The reciprocity is the point.

You are not as incapable as you’ve been led to believe.

Not even close.

Every skill you reclaim is a small act of defiance against a system that profits from your helplessness. Every time you pick up the tools instead of the phone, you are telling the machine: I don’t need you for this.

Start small. Start with the tweezers.

What’s one thing you currently outsource that you’d secretly love to learn how to do yourself? Tell me in the comments.

I’m Leyla. I write about reclaiming the skills, the time and the agency that modern life quietly stole from you. Amongst other things. I send this once a week to 8000+ readers — join them if you’d like it in your inbox.

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Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter about purposeful living.

Let’s do a little quiz.

For each one of the below statements that apply to you (or someone you know), give yourself one point:

• You feel anxious, exhausted and fraying at the seams from modern life and need the inspiration and motivation to believe a fundamental change is possible.

• You are wrestling with a nagging suspicion that your work is irrelevant and futile and you need the conviction to transform your life’s priorities.

• You feel like you’re constantly being told by society to grow bigger bigger bigger and earn more more more but you suspect true wealth lies in things money can’t buy.

• You are a city person compelled to flee to the land despite having no experience and you need to believe that listening to that ancestral calling is real and true.
  🔺

• You are ready to stop catastrophising and need a framework for consciously holding equal space for the best case scenario.

• You struggle to take a break because you carry guilt or have convinced yourself you ‘don’t have time’ but you desperately need to shake things up and reset your creativity.

• You feel disconnected from nature and your own body and want to learn how to live in a reciprocal partnership with the world.

• You keep telling yourself ‘I could never do that’ and need to unlock the truth that you are capable of most things.
  🔺

• You feel constantly bombarded by the stress of scarcity and want to reclaim your role as a producer rather than a consumer alone.

• You are seeking the courage to push beyond your comfort zone because you know deep down the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

• You feel like you are being swept along a path assigned at birth by societal conditioning and are desperate for an antidote.

• You need motivation to take good care of your physical self so you can be healthy, strong and mobile for as long as possible.

How many points did you come up with? Perhaps zero. Perhaps a few.

There is no right answer.

But if you resonated with even one of the above statements, I have something specifically for you.

My personal story

Have you ever felt a persistent niggle that life should be more fulfilling than it is? That suspicion that you’re following a default script that was handed to you and that it’s preventing you from fulfilling your full potential?

I used to be well acquainted with that niggle.

That’s why I wrote Pathways. It’s my two-part, limited edition debut book. It's also an invitation to you to cut through the noise and consciously create a life you genuinely relish.

Pathways launched in June; it sold out in three weeks.

For one last time, it is making a very brief return for a final print run.

It’s on sale now for just 7 days:

23rd — 30th November 2025.

This will be your last ever chance to own a copy.

(it would also make a pretty great Christmas gift…)

order Pathways

Book 1: Pathways — To the Land

This is the raw and personal story of how my husband and I gave up our urban London life for a three-acre plot in the Portuguese countryside.

It’s a journey that started some time ago with me having an existential crisis in my bullshit job and hearing a calling to live in reciprocal partnership with nature that grew louder as the years rolled on.

The pull became undeniable after I had a profound experience at Findhorn Ecovillage in remote northeast Scotland, where seeing a flourishing apple tree and connecting with something in an earth lodge cracked my world wide open, showing me that a different way is possible.

This book is my account of taking action to change my situation.

Book 2: Pathways — To Purposeful Living

This is where we tackle the inner hurdles and the fear that stops us from acting. I wrote this as an antidote to existing in a state of feeling powerless and incapable.

In book two I share the set of mini essays and thought exercises that helped pave the way for me by answering a simple question: Is what I am doing today moving me towards the life I want?

We challenge the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck, explore the wisdom of trusting our body and we dismantle the modern lie that spending money makes us freer. We talk about the empowering benefits of learning practical skills and how to cultivate ‘treasures of the heart’, which can never be destroyed.

My hope is that Pathways will help inspire people to take the leap to change their own situation and accept the idea that they are fundamentally capable of big change, no matter where they are starting from.

And that’s all I’m going to say about the books

Since we made the big move to Portugal three months ago and people have been following my journey so far online, I’ve had so many asking me a lot of questions — why, where, how, what happened?

I’ve mostly been redirecting them to this newsletter, A Day Well Spent. But the full backstory — the why, where, how and what happened — can’t be found here.

That’s what’s in Pathways.

And I’m just so delighted that there is now one last chance for people to own this limited edition, first-edition work I published with indie publisher The Pound Project — before the story is retired forever.

So for the next 7 days, I’m redirecting people here instead!

I’ll put a few links at the end of this piece to the columns I wrote, the interviews I took part in and the press I received during the book’s launch earlier this year, should you fancy some extra reading (or need any extra convincing that you and everyone you know must have this book).

But otherwise, I’m going to give the last word to my readers.

Those people who bought the book back in June and who have been sending me messages and emails ever since — even beautiful handmade cards! — generously sharing with me what they thought about Pathways and how it impacted them.

You’ll find a few of these messages below.

What a surreal and wonderful feeling it is to know thousands of people — from all over the world — have these two little terracotta books in their possession. Perhaps hidden on a bookshelf or tucked into a bedside table drawer. They’ve been slid into laptop cases, handbags and hand luggage.

THANK YOU — from the deep well of gratitude I have — to every single person who purchased a copy for themselves or as gifts for loved ones. For believing that Pathways was worth reading in the first place and for taking the time to do just that.

(this stunning handmade and handwritten card comes with a beautiful backstory)

Extra Pathways reading, listening and watching

• I’ve written my debut book. In secret.

• Why I’m leaving the only life I’ve known (Substack live)

• ‘I don’t have a book in me’

• 9 books that literally changed my life

• We are completely responsible for our own lives

• When the Land Calls, the Only Answer Is Yes (interview)

• Leyla Kazim: Pathways (Cooking the Books podcast interview)

• BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live (also with David Baddiel, Mikey Please and Suzi Ruffell)

If you appreciate this piece or know someone who would love Pathways, please let me know by tapping the ❤️ at the top or bottom, sharing it or forwarding it on — thank you.

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Please do share, are you living the life you want?

And if you’ve already read Pathways, I would absolutely love to hear what you think too!

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