There was a time I was scared shitless to confront the unpalatable parts of my story.

Decisions I wished I could take back, regrets carried around in my body like cement and aggregates hardening into concrete, meant the easier path to take (rather, the well-trodden one) included keeping the stuff in the basement of my inner being hidden, tucked away like forgotten toys into plastic containers and used furniture wedged against the corners of shadowy rooms where spiders cobwebbed them into oblivion. “Some rooms don’t need visited,” I’d think, or, “I’ll deal with that later. Sometime before lying on my deathbed.”

Turns out, the parts of your story that are unresolved may be the most interesting bits you have to offer. But they require you to exercise small acts of courage to carry them from the basement of your inner being into the light of the world around you.

When I started the Porch Sit Revolution three months ago, it was partly done to form a small reading group and leaf through the pages of The Urgency of Slowing, my forthcoming book, and gather feedback. I had no idea who would come or how many. Since January, about twelve people—most of whom I hadn’t met before—have joined me every other Tuesday and with genuine interest. Together, we take our time, practice unhurried conversation, occasionally sit in periods of silence without rushing to fill the space, share unrehearsed stories, and make a practice of giving our attention to self and one another.

But my secret endeavor in forming this group was to make my life visible.

The Urgency of Slowing is a blend of memoir and research, what might be commonly referred to as autoethnography, where a researcher uses their story to analyze and understand cultural and social experiences. What started out as pure fascination on how hurry was affecting individuals, families, organizations, and civilization, quickly turned personal when my life went up in smoke a few years ago. If you’ve ever suffered great loss, gone through a divorce, or mucked up a situation, then you can relate. You know what it feels like when the ground is ripped out from beneath you and you’re looking for answers and the people you used to turn to and the religion of your youth can no longer give you what you need and the only answer is the deafening silence that remains long after the strain of your voice. Through this magical suffering I have learned that if you do not befriend the silence, you will be prone to panic.

The first day of the reading group, I sat with my laptop open on a small desk in my shoebox apartment in New York City where I was living at the time, and shared the prologue of my book with a room of faces I barely knew. My voice cracked in a couple places. I let it. I shared about my divorce, the dark night of the soul, standing at the window with a glass of Woodbridge trying to grasp onto something. About the silence that followed and the strange sensation that crawled over me when I stopped demanding answers.

No one rushed to fill the pause afterward. That was the first gift.

The next was subtler. Someone shared a story of their own. Then another. Each one unrehearsed, a little raw, the kind of thing you’d normally smooth over at a dinner party or bury in a journal entry.

I’ve facilitated groups for years across six continents, with executives and engineers and teenagers and transplant specialists. I know what a room feels like when people are performing. I also know what it feels like when they stop. The air changes. Something loosens in the chest. You can almost hear the masks being set down on the table, gently, like placing a glass you’ve been gripping too long.

That’s what the Porch Sit Revolution, at its best, is. A place where masks rest.

Michael Margolis once asked a question that turned something over in me: “What if your greatest source of power is the part of your story that is unreconciled?” I carried that question for a long time before I understood it in my body. Power is a strange word for it. It doesn’t feel powerful to admit you had built a mask factory so convincing even you forgot which face was yours. It feels like standing half-naked on a mossy rock in Spain with the clouds rolling in and no one around to tell you it’s okay.

But the moment you say the thing you’ve been hiding, it loses a portion of its hold on you. The basement door creaks open. Light finds the corners and the spiders scatter. And what you thought would destroy you turns out to be, somehow, beautiful, and if not beautiful, bearable. Always. Always bearable.

Lao Tzu expressed that in the act of genuine creation, “the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed1.” There is a version of living where you are always managing yourself, curating, positioning, trying to control how others see your story. And there is another version where you forget yourself entirely, where the telling and the living become the same motion, where you are no longer the author standing outside the narrative and have become a character who is surprised by what happens next.

The first version is exhausting.

The second option is terrifying. Yet, I am choosing it, more and more. I keep being terrified, and somehow that combination is producing the most poignant work of my life.

I am watching this happen with others too. A person I coached recently told me she had started writing letters to her estranged father. She hadn’t sent them yet. She wasn’t sure she would. But the act of putting words to what she’d kept in her basement for years made her feel, for the first time in a long time, like the author of her own life rather than a character trapped in someone else’s.

Slowing doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t resolve the tension between who you are and who you wish you were. It is not a practice you undertake to reduce your many masks to one. We will always have masks. But slowing does give you a chair, on a proverbial porch, and asks you to sit, to sit for longer than you want, long enough to hear your own voice say something true, not something new, but the sound you make when no one is listening, which turns out to be the same sound the trees make, the rustling of leaves and creaking of branches, the groan of your being, being yourself.

Wendell Berry once wrote that “the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home2.”

One inch. That’s it.

It takes a lifetime.

Every other Tuesday, a small group of people and I practice moving that inch together. We read and share. We sit. We let silence have the last word. And sometimes, when none of us is the wiser, the doer vanishes into the deed, and what remains is a circle of ordinary humans, being ordinarily human, which may be the most revolutionary act available to us in a world addicted to speed.

Pull up a chair.

If you would like to join the Porch Sit Revolution, you can apply below. No expertise required. Let’s have an unhurried chat first.

Join the reading group

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we're building toward and what we're willing to march for. If you'd like to support this work, consider joining my Patronage Circle.

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Unhurried Design is a life-centered approach to design created by Jordan Soliday and Johnnie Moore. We prioritize relationships and reflection, going the right pace at the right time, to yield resilient solutions with less material waste. This blog is now organized into four sections:

Jordan is lost. Often slowing down and getting lost. Stories on the stubborn art of giving attention in a world skimming along the surface.

Johnnie is still walking. Often walking and talking. Reflections from decades of working unhurriedly with humans around the world.

Just the two of us. Conversations, collaborations, and the things we only find when neither of us is leading.

Porch Sit Revolution. A global practice of reading slowly, sitting together, and letting silence have the last word. Pull up a chair.

You can support our work by becoming a paid subscriber. Founding practitioners receive a complimentary session to unhurriedly design whatever matters most to them right now.

Support our work

Would you like to join my book-reading team for The Urgency of Slowing?

Starting in January, we’ll meet twice per month for 75 minutes and discuss a few chapters at a time. I’m looking for a small group who will show up consistently, read in advance, and give thoughtful, rigorous feedback. There are 37 chapters (as of now), so we’ll likely meet through June.

The Urgency of Slowing argues that slowing is not laziness or aesthetic self-care. It’s a practice of social and inner rewilding—returning attention to what’s real so we can build saner systems. Through it, we recover human capacities that hurry quietly erodes, such as wisdom, tenderness, and courage.

Modern life rewards speed over wisdom. Taylorist workplaces. Always-on feeds. Fake news. Fast AI. We skim our lives, fracture our identities, and burn out. The result is shallow decisions, brittle teams, estranged inner lives, and damaged societies.

Until a few years ago, I lived at a pace that kept my interior from being more fully unexamined. When conflict swelled, I reached for busyness and distraction. Then I burned out and my marriage ended. With my life stripped to the studs, I moved to a small village in Spain where the Wi-Fi never arrived and the bell tower told time every fifteen minutes. Without the usual noise, I had to face what was left.

Myself.

This book is a field guide from that wilderness, candid memoir braided with intellectual history, systems thinking, and spiritual practice. Its premise is simple: the shape of a society reflects the shape of its attention, and slowing is how we take ours back. When we slow down, we come back into contact with reality. We recover attention, wisdom, and presence others can feel, the kind that steadies rooms and helps cultures make regenerative choices.

I’m calling this reading team the Porch Sit Revolution.

A porch sit is an example of slowing: a simple, distraction-free pause. Coffee in hand, body present, senses awake. No performance. No stimulation. Just sitting long enough to return to yourself and the ordinary glory of what’s real. For this reading team, it means we do not skim, speed-read, or offer polite applause disguised as feedback. We read in advance, show up, and help shape the book into something evocative and useful.

The revolution is quiet resistance. In an age trained to react, we stop donating our attention to the loudest, most impatient forces that profit from our distraction. We learn to withhold our ear from what’s trending and give it back to what endures.

If you’re willing to sit with each chapter, name the strongest lines, point out the fuzzy logic, and say what you felt and why, you belong here.

If you want to join the team, please apply below.

Hope to see you there.

Join the team

How did the universe originate?

Are quantum fields conscious?

What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

Where is our current political situation taking us?

Where should we focus our attention in an age of technofeudalism1?

Everyone likely has different answers to these questions. Is any of us unequivocally right?

Earlier this week I hosted an online class with students I work with as part of the MIT xPRO Post Graduate Certificate in Technology Leadership and Innovation course.

One student asked me: How do we identify ‘unknown unknowns’ when making decisions, to mitigate unwanted outcomes?

Feeling as though I should have answers, I suggested a couple ideas. We can build argument diagrams to test assumptions and surface unstated premises, or assemble a design structure matrix to gain a systems’ understanding of the sensitivity and connectivity of components within a product, process, or organization to predict emergency emergence. There are many tools or frameworks we could employ—sure.

But, as I’ve reflected since our class, there are sometimes questions we don’t and can’t know the answer to. We might research and compile data and run predictive models. Yet the more we learn, the more new questions form.

If we lust after enlightenment, after the Answer, we might be practicing a wrong attitude. The process of questioning and building our capacity to be with uncertainty might prove at least as valuable as any answers we discover along the way.

I’ve noticed at least two issues emerge when groups are facing uncertainty. One, how the person with the most power in the room can become impatient and force their idea. Two, groups remain endlessly mired in conversation, resistant to prototyping an idea because they don’t believe they know everything they need to know before getting started.

With regard to impatience leading to premature convergence, I liken it to an experience that can be had during breathwork. Yoga practitioner, Dylan Werner, says when we hold our breath for an extended time, we are tempted to break our posture early and inhale because we feel we do not have enough oxygen. When, in truth, we have plenty of oxygen2. What we are experiencing while holding our breath is a buildup of CO₂ in our bloodstream. If we are seeking to lengthen our breath holds, we are really creating more CO₂ tolerance.

Experiencing uncertainty might similarly feel as if we’re holding our breath and CO₂ is accumulating in our bloodstream. Physically, whenever we do not know, our nervous system does tend to produce stress hormones until our brain detects predictability3. I wonder, then: How much capacity can we create to tolerate uncertainty? What if we waited longer than we wanted for answers, to see what might really want to happen?

Lately, as part of my morning rituals, I’ve been speaking aloud various ‘I AM’ statements to frame myself to live more abundantly while not knowing. One of them is:

I am being. I am like a fisherman. Daily, I cast my line into the universe. I tune my antennae to the energetic material around and within me. I notice and observe, and am waiting longer than I want, to see what wants to come back.

Conversely, and to deal with the issue of resistance to trying out an idea, I have an I AM statement that forms a paradox with the previous one.

I am doing. I am like an artist. I prototype and experiment with the raw, colorful, energetic materials of the universe. I am designing in short stages. Living from nudge to nudge, I am bringing all of myself to make the finest work I can.

Whenever teams get stuck in muddy deliberation, I like to remind them, “You can’t know everything before you start.” If we hold an idea lightly enough, we can always create a low-resolution prototype, test it, make changes, or explore a different idea if the learnings coming back are coalescing in a more invigorating direction.

If we commit to being and doing while acknowledging we really “don’t know,” we train our muscles to embrace ambiguity. We gradually come alive, and so much else becomes possible.

Johnnie and I have updated our website to include ‘design coaching’ and our ‘annual group workshop’. You can take a closer look at our new offerings here. If you wish to becoming a ‘founding practitioner’ of unhurried design, you can select that option in your subscription to our Substack. You’ll be eligible to receive design coaching each year until you decide you don’t want it.

Subscribe now

A few weeks ago I came to Pennsylvania to visit some family in my childhood hometown of Bedford.

While there I went out for a run through a local neighborhood, and along the way bumped into a family member I hadn't seen in a while.

Within minutes he attempted to convince me the earth is flat, elites are planning a large-scale purge of the lower and middle classes, 'evidenced' by mass burial sites that have been dug outside many major cities in America, and somehow that all has to do with the Book of Enoch. His conclusion was I needed to vote for a certain political candidate as a result.

Regardless of your political leanings, I am reminded that perhaps nothing is of more importance in our world right now than learning to cultivate a non-anxious, grounded presence.

This family member of mine has not only become extremely paranoid but incredibly rigid—completely disinterested in hearing any views that even slightly contradict his own.

Lately Johnnie and I have been wondering about the differences between rigidity and spinefulness and their implications.

We, along with other interested participants, have been exploring questions like these as part of our Unhurried Practice Group.

Our next conversation will center around the theme of, you guessed it, spinefulness, and take place on November 14th at 12.00 EST (17.00 GMT) over Zoom.

If you would like to join, tickets are available for $10 and can be purchased here.

We (Jordan and Johnnie) have been exploring ‘what is possible’ for Unhurried Design and in our work together. We’ve landed on some ideas we’d like to share with you.

Unhurried Practice Group

We’re developing an Unhurried Practice Group, which is for people who want to bring greater presence to their work - as leaders, designers, partners, parents, or friends. We believe the modern world often steals our attention and leaves us feeling fragmented, chasing short term goals and rewards, tempted by the next fragment of dopamine.

We are wondering: What if we learned to support each other in a way that creates an abundance, rather than a scarcity, of attention? Can we grow our ability to maintain a grounded presence, so that we experience a greater sense of aliveness and engagement with life around us? You can learn more here and register interest for the practice group by responding to this email.

Unhurried Design projects

With Unhurried Design, we’re now focusing on consulting with people who want to lead projects on challenges/opportunities they might be facing in their organizations and communities.

Across our combined 40+ years of experience, we have helped engineers, physicians, executives, teachers, and other practitioners unhurriedly design products, processes, and services. In addition to what’s actually created, we will seek to support you in developing a non-anxious presence for yourself, too, so you can share it with others, which we believe can have a powerful effect in creating a calm company where things don’t have to be crazy at work.

If you’d like to explore starting a project with us, we would like to get to know you and the challenge you are facing, and allow that to surface what’s needed, as opposed to bringing you a fixed framework or plug-and-play solution. If this sounds interesting, let’s talk about the challenge/opportunity that’s on your mind.

Unhurried Design - a definition and principles

Here’s a summary of how we think of Unhurried Design.

Definition

Unhurried Design. A life-centered alternative to design thinking that prioritizes relationships and reflection, going the right pace at the right time, to yield resilient solutions with less material waste.

Principles

Practice, practice. Design theory has its use, but we’re actually more interested in the practice: the experimenting, playing, and exploring that creates connections and lets something useful emerge. So we share stories, practice being half-a-shade braver, play with doubt and uncertainty and take the risk of sharing more of our feelings.

Context matters. We want design to contribute to a sustainable future. We embrace nature: we design in nature, noticing its patterns and rhythms. Allowing its biodiversity and vitality to enhance our experience. Taking into account context also includes designing alongside our local communities.

The body is intelligent. We move: we do work that involves our bodies, helps us notice our feelings and sensations as we do. In a society that prizes head-heaviness, we recognize that our bodies house most of our intelligence and are our greatest storytelling tool.

Leveling the playing field. Too often, design feels like it’s an expert skill for the select few, who then take on a role of designing for, rather than with, others. We believe everyone is creative and can be involved in the process of design, with an emphasis on those belonging to traditionally subordinated groups.

More than a process. We want to see humans design with greater calmness and presence, and find more meaning and relationship in their work. We invite people to tend their interior condition when designing, which we believe has an outsized effect on what’s created.

Avoiding the rush. Design often feels driven by anxiety. Often people and organizations rush the design process. A conventional approach to design incentivizes speed and efficiency as the pathway to success but these can end up leading to messier, less effective products and processes. We end up circling back to fix what was missed or ignored due to the pressures and demands of an urgent culture and race to be first, which burns people out along the way.

Thanks for reading, fellow traveler. Until next time.

J&J

We are made of muscles. We are made of moods.

Every human has a physical, assertive, adult self, where we do our decision-making and initiative-taking. We wear this self like a lion.

Each of us also has a childlike, affective self. Where we are emotional, intimate, and vulnerable. Some of us tend to hide this self, but it is there like a lamb.

Depending on the context we find ourselves in, we might choose to align with one self more than the other. In society, assertion has often been presented as masculine and affection as feminine, but I believe this is a sad splitting of who humans are meant to be.

As the late Catholic priest Henri Nouwen once observed, “When you need only your lion, you will find yourself overextended and exhausted. When you take notice only of your lamb, you will easily become a victim of your need for other people’s attention.” 

To be split between our lion and lamb selves is to become either domineering or a doormat. Neither is the final destination of a human being. Neither brings the fountain of life to self or others.

But the human that is finally becoming mature is one that neglects neither lion nor lamb but allows those selves to “freely and fearlessly lie down together” (Nouwen). This is, for those of you who had a Christian upbringing, perhaps calling to mind a picture of heaven. 

Regardless of our beliefs and backgrounds, this imagery can be useful to consider in the here-and-now challenges we face on earth. The lion and the lamb lying down together ought not be understood as an esoteric place where there is no flaw, rather a very real and courageous vision where we are experiencing more integration across the whole spectrum of human life - becoming child and adult, vulnerable and assertive, feminine and masculine, following and leading, held and the one doing the holding.

Or put another way, a mature human being.

Johnnie and I have been discussing what kind of traits leaders are in need of as our world spins increasingly into more noise and profound uncertainty. We think what’s needed is more heartfelt connection, skillful giving of attention, and intelligence; or becoming more lion and lamb. This summer we’re thinking of running a course and coaching group on this topic and calling it, ‘Leading Unhurriedly’. If this sounds interesting to you, reply to this email expressing your interest and we can arrange a call to chat more.

Two months ago I (Jordan) decided to take a serious plunge into designing a lighter life for myself.

I bought a Punkt. phone, which strips out most of the attention seeking features of smartphones and ditched my iPhone.

The result? I've rediscovered on average five hours of attention per day that has been diverted - for years, since I first purchased the iPhone back in 2007.

So what am I doing with the attention I've gained?

Deep work.

Which I believe is less about filling my time with other things to do, and more about experiencing the present moment differently.

With more aliveness, or as the Punkt. founders have described it, more 'intimacy'.

This was way easier than I thought it would be, and more fun.

Sure, there have been some bumps along the way. Texting is harder. I can't call an Uber or use my navigation apps on my smartphone, but I've devised some workarounds.

Small inconveniences to manage. The reward?

More 'me'.

What might a more sober use of tech give us?

Recently, inspired by Jordan, I (Johnnie) began rationing my time with technology, stepping away from devices for a day, or least purposely choosing when to dip back into the world of ‘online’ and back out.

In an age where it seems we all have a screen at our fingertips, the two of us are wondering: What is the cost of our individual and collective digital addiction? And what might a more sober approach to technology feel like?

We thought it would make a good topic for our continuing series of Unhurried Design conversations. In our next workshop, we'll share experiences of feeling it, seeing it around us, and think about ways to encourage more human, analogue ways of relating when designing events, services, and products.

31 January at 4pm UK (that's 11am EST)

You can sign up at the link below. Price is $10 per ticket, or you can attend for free if you are a paid subscriber.

Reserve your place

Trees might not be sentient, but certainly behave as if they are.

While evolutionary theory has taught us that creatures are pitted against one another in a fight for survival, trees are radically devoted to cooperation.

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester who wrote The Hidden Life of Trees, provides insight into the quality of decision-making amongst trees, and their apparent personalities.

“Their root tips have highly sensitive brain-like structures that can distinguish whether the root that it encounters in the soil is its own root, the root of another species, or the roots of its own species. If it encounters its own kind…we have measured with radioactive-marked sugar molecules that there is a flow from healthy trees to sick trees so that they will have an equal measure of food and energy available.”

Instead of allowing the weaker among their species to die, trees go to extreme lengths to preserve the life of one of their own. Wohlleben continues:

“This one beech tree was cut four to 500 years ago by a charcoal maker, but the stump is still alive - we found green chlorophyll under the thick bark. The tree has no leaves to create sugars, so the only explanation is that it has been supported by neighboring trees for more than four centuries.”

Wohlleben goes on to share that trees are excellent communicators. Whenever one tree is attacked by insects, foresters have observed electrical signals passing through the bark, into the roots, and down into fungi networks in the soil that alert surrounding trees of danger.

Trees seemingly function within a system where ‘everything is connected’. A mycorrhizal network is one such example, where plants transfer water, nitrogen, and carbon in a hidden ‘woodwide web’, which was termed so by Suzanne Simard, a scientist who teaches forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Laura James is an engineering leader involved with using satellite vegetation intelligence to analyze trees and prevent wildfires and power outages. She builds on Simard’s and Wohlleben’s idea that trees are actively exchanging information to make decisions.  

“An Aspen may not be just one tree: a whole forest of Aspens can be connected underground as one organism. The largest organism on earth is Pando Populus, an interconnected Aspen grove. Each individual tree is not itself, it’s a network.”  

James further suggests that trees gather data, and make short- and long-term strategic decisions together.  

“Trees are agile enough to ask, When do the leaves open? Patterns of rain and sun and wind and pests - all of that is taken into account and informs the decision of when to open the leaves. Long-term, a tree might be 'flagging', with branches avoiding growing on the upwind side of a heavy prevailing wind direction, which can occur over hundreds of years.”

Could trees be capable of reflection, of making decisions according to what they sense?

Wohlleben observes how trees that suffer drought might consume less water the following spring to have more available in the summer months.

“A tree can learn…it can remember a drought its whole life and act on that memory by being more cautious of its water usage.”

In certain places in the world because of more CO2 in the air, trees are growing faster than they used to. But Wohlleben says that is not a good thing.

“Faster growth makes trees less healthy and more susceptible to illnesses. The wood is also of lower quality, so the price we get for it is going down. The cells of these fast growing trees actually become bigger and more susceptible to fungi. A little wound can open them to rot, which kills them.”

How often in our organizations do we make decisions to rapidly accelerate growth, to ramp up the speed of execution, only to scale back because of an overlooked ‘little wound’ that has opened us up to rot?

And what if we humans are interconnected and interdependent, not merely individuals whose decisions have no bearing on the other. What if we are one sprawling, complex, infinitely connective organism?

Over the last few months we’ve been hosting online conversations to share experiences of emotions that often don’t get talked about. Many of us can be reluctant to explore negative feelings with each other, as the pressure to conceal them can be high when the prevailing culture champions positivity and professionalism.

Several people joined us for 75 minute sessions to explore how they might work with their negative feelings more creatively, with one session for each of the following emotions - despair, anxiety, and shame.

We deliberately did not offer any kind of advice or solution - partly because our instinct is that there is more value in staying with these kinds of feelings and seeing what’s there, instead of chasing them away or even trying to ‘transform’ them into something supposedly more useful or comfortable. We didn’t want to position ourselves as teachers, just as fellow explorers.

Each of us, at different times, thought this might be a bad idea. Would anyone come? What kind of pandora’s box would we be opening? Would the tone be too somber?

Instead, what we experienced in the sessions was rich, often enjoyable conversation through which we felt a deeper connection to one another.

A willingness to “face the shark”, as one participant put it, can sometimes be the experience we most need.

What if our negative emotions are taking us toward an otherwise unreachable experience of reality?

Our next guided conversation will explore our relationship with anger and how we might design more constructively with it in life and work.

You can sign up for the workshop at the link below. Tickets are 10 USD.

Sign up for workshop

If you are interested in using Unhurried Design to approach an opportunity or challenge differently, we are open to exploring what’s possible with you. You can book a call below.

Work with us

We really enjoyed the session we ran recently on designing with despair, and our next one will look at shame.

It’s another powerful emotion that we often feel the need to run away from, and avoid at all costs. But a recent experience in the theatre made me think a bit differently, as this video explains.

If you’d like to come to our session, it’s on Tuesday 31 October at 11am EDT which will be 3pm in the UK (NB a four hour gap while clocks are changing). Places from $5 to $40, details here.

What might happen if you choose to design a lighter life?

Nearly 100 years ago, Richard Gregg, observing a consumeristic West littered with social anxiety, said:

"The greatest characters, those who have influenced the largest numbers of people for the longest time, have been people with extremely few possessions.

"Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Kagawa, Socrates, St. Francis, Confucius."

According to Gregg, they leaned into 'voluntary simplicity'.

"Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life."

What if living heavy is an indication that one has a confused identity?

In our modern world, we tend to lead heavier lives than the aforementioned string of influencers.

If we were to imagine a successful person in the 21st century for a moment, we might picture them in a large house with seasonal properties elsewhere, driving a fancy car or two, wearing a shiny corporate title, having authored a few books, with a huge social media following, and sewn a healthy family lineage to ensure their prosperity lasts for generations.

Yet the ancient characters Gregg identified lived by an entirely different set of principles that informed their legacy.

As Western progress has accelerated, perhaps our understanding of who we are has deteriorated alongside it.

“When ordinary people do not know who they are, they get anxious,” Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said.

I believe we have ‘solved’ for that anxiety by purchasing from the capitalistic ‘heavy life’ proffered to us, with diminishing returns.

William James, the 19th century philosopher and first person to offer a psychology course in the United States, once coined the phrase ‘Americanitis’ to refer to a neurotic disease that resulted from the quantity and speed of change.

David Schuster, an associate professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, argues that Westerners have accepted this widespread neurosis as a side effect of progress.

Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic, outlined possible symptoms of Americanitis as “headaches, muscle pain, weight loss, irritability, anxiety, impotence, depression, a lack of ambition, and both insomnia and lethargy.”

In short, heaviness.

And yet the barrage of content and advertisements to purchase ‘that something new’ remain constant.

The promise that a heavy life can still save us could not be highlighted more than in Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X, with plans to make it “the everything app…the future state of unlimited interactivity…a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

Westerners still cling to the promise of the heavy life in the naïve hope that “while the world may change, our ability to continue pursuing our personal desires, plans, and patterns will not be affected,” according to Mark Sayers, systems thinker and cultural writer.

We can maintain our affluent individualistic identity.

But what if designing a lighter life is the only way to recover who we really are?

Last week we ran our August coaching workshop where we explored this question: What if we could use our anxiety, rather than running away from it?

It was a really satisfying experiment which has reinforced our enthusiasm on a couple of fronts.

First, we’ve been questioning the idea that designers are meant in some way to leave their own feelings out in order to ‘focus on’ the users. Human-centered design and design ‘best practice’ teaches that our feelings are capricious, biased, and not to be trusted. We wanted to explore what happens if we lower that particular boundary so that we’re not the rational experts fixing things for others, but human collaborators sharing a challenge. That’s the spirit in which we ran the first workshop, sharing our own fears and experiences as well as inviting participants to do so. We’re going to do more of this, as we think it creates a much richer sense of community.

Second, we want to keep going with this idea of taking supposedly ‘negative emotions’ and see if we can build them into design rather than trying to eliminate them. The intention of reducing them may be good, but we think it leads to a fantasy of a world without friction - that’s both unsustainable and actually quite dystopian.

So we’re running with a theme like Designing with Despair in September.

There are fifteen tickets available, five at $40, five at $20, and five at $5. You can pay whichever you would like, although we suggest leaving the $5 option for students and those not currently earning an income.

If you wish to join us, you can reserve your place below.

Designing with Despair workshop

In this little video, I reflect on Jon Alexander’s book Citizens. He challenges our default role in society of being consumers - where our sense of power is, crudely, that of a shopper. We decide what we want and use money to get it. The trouble is, this often puts on a hamster wheel of doing work of questionable meaning to buy what are often products with limited real value.

Instead, he suggests we think of ourselves as citizens, co-creating the future with each other, less enslaved to hype and using up the planet’s limited resources.

We’d say that unhurried design should be about creating real value, not simply making unsustainable products seem easier or more beautiful.

I made this video the other day, partly in response to the conversations Jordan and I have been sharing here. I think as planetary crises mount, we need to embrace the challenge of how we work together creatively, instead of distracting ourselves with tribal consumption, or just dumping our fears onto others.

We’re going to keep exploring this subject, and we’d love to hear your thoughts too.

Over the last year, I’ve been exploring the notion of non-anxious presence with several people and reading what various thinkers throughout human history have to say about related ideas.

One input came from a recent conversation with my friend Wes.

He shared he finds his foundation, his sense of presence, in surrounding himself with genuine people, people who are willing to be honest with themselves in a pursuit of meaning.

This reminded me of the late priest and writer Henri Nouwen, who suggested that our community is what holds us, likened to a rope tethered around our waist, keeping us connected to a safe space no matter where we go, so that we can meet high-pressure situations with a differentiated presence. Our community might serve to tug the rope whenever needed.

As we continued to talk, Wes then shared about a recent split in his friend group. People he counted as dear decided to move on for their own reasons.

Even a genuine community is temporary.

What if becoming a non-anxious presence has something to do with not overly attaching or fixating one’s identity to relationships with people?

People come and go, which begs the question, how will we release them?

And who will we be after we release them?

Questions like these kept the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche up at night.

After five of his six siblings passed away before he turned twenty-five, Kierkegaard was riddled with a crippling anxiety. “Angst,” he called it. Not an anxiety disorder, but an underpinning condition which he believed plagued all of humanity.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” he wrote.

However, Kierkegaard sought to make sense of and use anxiety. He did not believe it was a bad thing, rather a necessary part of life.

He suggested that our response to anxiety might make the difference between a life of freedom and a life of despair.

To respond well, Kierkegaard proposed a human must pursue what he called “passion.”

When Nietzsche was but a boy, his father was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease and died at the young age of thirty-five. The following year, Nietzsche’s brother also died.

Nietzsche then endured a mostly serious and lonely childhood.

As he lived out his days often receiving medical treatment, he found a kind of freedom in thinking and writing. In time, he suggested that what humans really needed was to pursue a growth cycle of self-dissatisfaction, self-improvement, and self-re-discovery.

For Nietzsche, this process transmuted “the suffering of life into something worthwhile and personally redeemable; a sort of alchemy of the spirit.”

More recently, the pallative nurse and Australian writer Bronnie Ware reflected upon her experiences consoling those on their deathbeds, and wrote, “Loneliness isn’t a lack of people. It is a lack of understanding and acceptance.”

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, in his groundbreaking novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, penned the words, “There are two possibilities: Either we are all alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Here is a third: We are not alone, yet we feel loneliness.

How we learn to hold ourselves will make all the difference.

What if we could use our anxiety, rather than running away from it?

Could we change our relationship to it, and even see it as a source of aliveness, instead of as a barrier to overcome?

What if we can allow anxiety to give us strength or to be more creative?

We (Johnnie and Jordan) have been exploring this idea for a while now - how to hold one’s own anxiety, to hold others in theirs, and create with what’s found there.

We think a great deal of unnecessary hurry is created by our rush to get away from anxiety instead of treating it as a potential source of energy and ideas.

The writers at The School of Life reflect, “[Anxiety] is no sign that that our lives have gone wrong; merely that we are alive. It is mostly a reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty, and riskiness of existence”.

Maybe we do not need to be anxious about being anxious.

Starting in August, we are going to offer a monthly online workshop, and our first one will explore this theme of anxiety as aliveness.

Each month, we’ll use this gathering to explore ideas and activities and bring the wisdom of Unhurried Design to life.

The workshop will have two consecutive sessions of around 75 minutes on separate days in the same week. The sessions will be hosted by us and highly participatory in nature.

Monday, August 21st, 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK
Wednesday, August 23rd, 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK

The cost to attend per month is 200 USD, which gives you access to both sessions. If you happen to be a student, we are willing to offer a 50% discount.

There will be six spots available in the first month.

If you want to be a part of this, you can reserve your place with the button below, or call us if you’d like to chat about it.

J&J

Reserve your spot

Since the invention of the telegraph in 1855 - the ‘Victorian Internet’ - as British journalist Tom Standage would label it more than a century later - humans have been suffering from a contagious social anxiety.

In its infancy, optimists imagined that the Victorian Internet, and later the World Wide Web, would bring peace and prosperity because of the infinitude of ways it might connect humans and their growing knowledge.

And while constant connection has certainly enabled us to do a lot of good, the late rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman observed it spread a troubling condition throughout society.

Friedman’s work with families and organizations in NYC and then Washington, DC between the 1950s-90s led him to theorize neurosis had become so ubiquitous throughout America that it was perceived as normal behavior.

Today, as the futurist David Zach puts it, Westerners have developed a series of maladaptive coping mechanisms that are connected to a state of ‘hyperliving’, where we “skim along the surface of life.”

I suggest this skimming might lead us to bounce between a polarity of disengagement on one end (ex. drug/alcohol use) and rigidity (ex. fundamentalism) on the other.

Friedman was suspicious of the quick fixes and demand for instant results we resort to as leaders for the complex challenges we face. 

Instead, he argued that a ‘non-anxious presence’ was needed to affect sustainable change.

This interior condition was about more than a feeling, it was an approach that put people first.

I might add on that I have found non-anxious presence to not be about the absence of anxiety or fear or unpleasantness, rather how we hold those emotions.

In Friedman’s practice with families, he would identify the person in the group who already exhibited non-anxious presence and worked with them to spread their lack of anxiety throughout the family structure. 

Interestingly (perhaps not surprisingly), he found it was children who showed a greater potential for non-anxious presence than their parents. 

The families would make real progress, coming to him fewer and fewer times. After ten years or so, some families would return, as the child who Friedman had trained would grow up and move out of the home. 

Friedman would then identify someone else to function as a non-anxious presence in the group.

Mark Sayers, writer and researcher on Western philosophy and religion, draws comparisons between non-anxious presence and social change throughout human history. 

A single individual practicing non-anxious presence (ex. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, the Apostle Paul) might become a socially contagious ‘cell for renewal’ and their very interior condition then spreads into their communities and sparks group presence or ‘revival’.

What implications might this have for our own lives and work?

What if the hardest work we can sometimes do might be counted as a ‘waste of time’ or even ‘lazy’ by our fast-paced society - work that invites us to dip beneath the surface and sit with our thoughts, analyze our feelings and sensations, and notice the stories we believe about ourselves and others?

Such emotional work is difficult, and while we cannot predict the impact of our efforts, history tells us that practicing a non-anxious presence can lead to meaningful change for ourselves first, and then others.

I packed my life into four bags.

And moved to Spain.

For a few months.

Who knows what comes next after that.

I am working remotely from here while Johnnie and I invite people to our Unhurried Design project.

Taking in the sights and sounds and culture from my apartment in Arenas de San Pedro.

Truly this is an unhurried place.

I am still waiting for my WiFi to get hooked up.

The technician cannot be bothered.

In the meantime, I’ll use my personal hotspot from my phone.

And spend more time offline.

The other day I bought a backpack and hiking boots.

Trekked up the side of a steep green mountain.

Sat upon a huge rock overlooking a river.

Contemplated while it flowed into a dark valley.

A few days later, I went for another hike.

Got lost in a forest on the way back. Couldn’t find the path I had taken as dusk fell.

Sometimes life can feel less like a rock, and more like rushing water, with its sudden turns and surging currents into the unknown.

Sometimes life can feel like a murky forest, where the paths around us run out.

What if when beset with such uncertainty, we lean in, instead?

Rather than despairing, or vilifying, or resorting to what’s familiar (the path of least resistance)?

Perhaps there’s some richness amidst what feels like darkness.

Lately I find myself drawn to a practice the Romantic poet John Keats referred to as ‘negative capability’ - where we no longer irritably reach after fact or reason.

Instead, learn to let go.

Swim with the current.

Dance with its unexpected turns.

And then, as we steep into forests that seem cloaked in darkness, slowly we find ourselves.

Being framed.

As a portrait of light.

Essentially, researchers use an algorithm that generates multiple variations of simple graphics. Participants select one of these and the program then evolves some new variations of that. Participants select again, and so it continues. Remarkably over time, people end up with pictures of sophisticated images of things we can recognise from the real world.

Thing is, people choose only on gut feel, and they don’t know where their choices will lead, but they do lead somewhere. Look at the final results and you’d assume (at least before AI became so trendy) that someone must have designed them.

The philosopher Patricia Churchland (quoted in Roger Lewin’s book on complexity) studied neurobiology and observed:

Nature is not an intelligent engineer… It doesn’t start from scratch each time it wants to build a new system, but has to work with what’s already there… the result is a system no human engineer would ever design, but it is wonderfully powerful, energy efficient and computationally brilliant.

She paints a picture of the brain as a kind of brilliantly effective mess. Its many parallel processes don’t remotely conform to the popular notion of brain-as-computer. 

And what may be true for our individual brains may also apply to communities of brains. Our conflicts and confusions may be part of a bigger, more impressive kind of intelligence. What we do together collectively is built not on some linear consensus, but emerges from our diversity.

From this perspective, what we call design is the serendipitous result of many thousands of choices, experiences, and conversations. If we take that view, what would change about the way we work?

Humans get attached to heroic narratives of rescuing and achievement. This often shows up as designing for someone else rather than with. Design thinking has been shown to unconsciously recycle white supremacy. Many alternatives to design thinking exist, but they easily fall into the same trap.

What might be possible beyond our tendency to bend people and things to our will? Can we instead participate in what’s already there?

Designers could become a little less like heroes and more like winemakers. Our role wouldn’t be pioneering a sexy new solution (a lust after the grape to disrupt all grapes) but positioning ourselves to notice and cooperate with nature - with less concern for who gets credit. What might be needed from us is more tending and pruning.

With our project on Unhurried Design, we want to explore the power of more social, understated human conversations as a field from which more satisfying design may emerge: an experiment in being more patient and curious about differences and disagreement, less judgemental about what is, and more open to life as it unfolds moment-by-moment. 

We might be tapping into a weirder but richer intelligence.