Okay so I was deep in a doomscroll at 2am when the algorithm threw me a quote that fully short-circuited my frontal lobe.
It was Annie Dillard, some line about how the way you spend your days is obviously how you spend your life.
Reader, I sat up in bed like I'd been zapped.
I'm out here celebrating when my DoorDash arrives on time.
Her book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" dropped in 1974 and it's basically the original "touch grass" manifesto, except she actually did the touching, for a whole year, by a creek in Virginia.
Here's the tea on why she's suddenly everywhere again.
A clip of her talking about watching a solar eclipse went viral, and now everyone's romanticizing their morning commute like it's a nature documentary.
Her whole vibe is that paying attention is a radical act.
A total eclipse where the sun becomes a black hole in the sky and birds go quiet.
She literally wrote about how it felt like the universe winked and she never fully recovered.
And because I know you're wondering: yes, she's still with us.
She's in her late 80s, still writing, still refusing to be normal about anything.
She once described her own childhood as a series of obsessions, which is the most relatable thing I've read all week.
What gets me is how un-influencer she is.
Just a person who decided that staring at a creek for a year was a better use of time than whatever we're all doing on our phones right now.
So here's your sign to log off, go outside, and look at one single tree like it owes you money.
Dillard would approve, probably, in a slightly feral way.
The real takeaway is that attention is the rarest currency we've got left, and most of us are broke.
Dillard spent hers like a billionaire and built something that outlasted every trend cycle since.
Final Thoughts
Maybe log off for an hour and see what you've been missing.