Телеграм канал «Abby Wynne»

I think I felt this already over the last few days, particularly at the weekend.

Just allow whatever you're feeling to come up and let it go. You don't need to always make sense of how you feel. Just look after yourself well in it.

Dear All,

The lunar eclipse is getting closer now, and the energy is beginning to change. We are moving out of the restructuring that followed the solar eclipse and increasingly into the emotional release point of this corridor. Over the next few days, expect waves. Tiredness, heightened sensitivity, old emotions resurfacing, vivid dreams, sudden tears, or even that peculiar feeling of loss without a story.

Do not rush to explain everything you feel. Sometimes the emotional body recognises an ending before the conscious mind understands what it is saying goodbye to. Feel first. Interpret afterwards. Tomorrow I will be releasing a new video explaining exactly what is building, the mechanics of the lunar eclipse itself, and most importantly, what happens afterwards. We are getting very close now. Big Energies.

AQ

Good morning x

Please stop calling every ordinary human behaviour a fucking hack.

Sometimes you haven’t “optimised your morning hydration protocol”.

You’ve had a glass of water.

😂

Right, Gen X and those late millennials who caught the tail end of the analogue lunatic asylum, what have I missed?

What completely ordinary bit of your childhood has now been rediscovered, renamed and returned to society as something revolutionary?

And I’m fully expecting someone to tell me that hanging washing outside is now called solar-assisted textile dehydration.

If a radio stopped working, your dad or somebody else’s dad removed fourteen screws, spread its internal organs across the kitchen table and embarked upon a repair using a screwdriver, electrical tape and levels of self-confidence that would terrify a modern health and safety inspector.

Sometimes it even worked.

Sometimes you ended up with three screws left over and a radio that now picked up Radio Moscow whenever you touched the kettle.

But you had a go.

9️⃣ SOCIALISING OFFLINE

This is genuinely becoming a thing again.

People want real-world communities. They want to meet people face-to-face. They want activities where phones aren’t the centre of everything.

Good.

We called that having mates.

Meeting somebody required considerably less administration too. You might say, “See you outside Woolworths at seven,” and that was considered sufficient logistical detail to coordinate two adult human beings.

There were no seventeen messages during the afternoon confirming whether seven still meant seven.

Nobody shared a pin.

Nobody sent a live location.

If you weren’t outside Woolworths at seven, everybody waited for a bit, called you a cunt, then went without you.

Friendships survived.

Somehow we had social lives without creating a WhatsApp group called SATURDAY NIGHT 🍺🍺🍺 that accumulated 193 messages before collapsing because Dave couldn’t make the 12th and Lisa doesn’t like Indian.

10️⃣ DOING ONE FUCKING THING AT A TIME

This one isn’t even usually called a life hack yet, but give it time. Somebody will invent “mono-tasking” and sell a £900 retreat teaching people how to eat lunch without watching a video.

I remember listening to an album and that being the activity.

You put the record or cassette on and listened to it.

I remember watching a film without simultaneously holding another screen in my hand to find out what strangers thought of the film I was currently not watching properly because I was reading what strangers thought of it.

I remember eating without photographing the food first.

Going for a walk without logging the route.

Going somewhere beautiful and looking at the beautiful fucking thing rather than spending fifteen minutes trying to prove to everybody else that I had looked at it.

Again, I’m not pretending my generation possessed some lost spiritual wisdom. Half the time we were probably smoking indoors, drinking something radioactive and wondering whether three channels really needed to be excessive.

WE BUILT HALF THIS FUCKING PROBLEM.

That’s the bit conveniently missing from a lot of Gen X nostalgia.

We spent decades wanting everything faster, easier and more convenient. We wanted instant communication, endless entertainment, shopping without leaving the house, food at the door, music without changing a record, maps that told us where to turn, cameras with unlimited photographs and the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity in our pockets.

Then we got it.

And within about fifteen years we started buying notebooks, vinyl records, dumb phones, camping gear and fucking candles because apparently what we really wanted was 1986 with better central heating.

There’s something beautifully human about that.

We remove every bit of friction from life and then discover that some of the friction was doing something useful.

Waiting gave you patience. Boredom made you invent something to do. Walking moved your body. Being unreachable meant your brain occasionally got left alone. Repairing something taught you how things worked. Having fewer photographs often made the ones you had matter more.

And perhaps that’s why I find the whole “life hack” thing funny rather than genuinely annoying.

Because beneath all the ridiculous terminology, a younger generation is rediscovering some pretty decent stuff.

Walk more.

Get outside.

Eat proper food.

Talk to actual humans.

Put the bloody phone away.

Learn how to be bored.

Fix things.

Make things.

Spend some time without everybody on Earth being able to contact you.

That’s not a bad list.

Just do this 58-year-old Welsh bloke one favour.

Nobody turned the plate around three times under a ring light and explained that carrots contain fibre.

Leftovers weren’t called meal prep either. They were called, “There’s some fucking stew in the fridge.”

And it wasn’t portioned into seven identical glass containers with the macros written on the lid. The entire thing was in yesterday’s saucepan, usually covered by a dinner plate because the correct lid had entered the same parallel universe as odd socks and Tupperware tops.

We weren’t necessarily nutritional geniuses. We ate plenty of crap as well. But you could generally look at dinner and identify what had died or grown to make it.

I’m not convinced that’s a terrible starting point.

5️⃣ SWITCHING YOUR PHONE OFF

This might be the greatest reinvention of all.

A “digital detox”.

The delicious luxury of being unreachable.

A deliberate period where you disconnect from your device and allow yourself to exist without notifications.

We managed this for entire fucking decades.

The phone lived in the hallway, usually on a little table specifically designed for the phone, because furniture had evolved around the fact that the bastard was attached to the wall.

If you went upstairs, you were offline.

If you went to the park, you were offline.

If you went to the pub, you were offline.

If you drove 200 miles away, your precise location wasn’t being continuously transmitted to six relatives, three technology companies and an advertising algorithm that had noticed you once looked at walking boots.

You could simply vanish for a bit.

And nobody assumed you’d been murdered because your WhatsApp ticks hadn’t turned blue.

6️⃣ BEING BORED

I’m particularly delighted that boredom is apparently good for us now because my generation did enough of it to qualify for retrospective Olympic medals.

There were vast stretches of childhood where absolutely fuck all happened.

Sunday afternoon could begin at about quarter past twelve and, judging by how long it felt, finish somewhere around the following Thursday.

The shops were shut. Television was often shit. Nobody had anything new to tell you because you’d seen everyone yesterday and there hadn’t been enough time for fresh gossip to develop.

Eventually you got bored enough to use your imagination.

You built something. Broke something. Climbed something. Drew something. Rode your bike somewhere. Took an electrical appliance apart and discovered, usually too late, that understanding how an object comes apart bears almost no relationship whatsoever to understanding how it goes back together.

You could also just sit there thinking.

No input. No feed. No algorithm hurriedly shovelling another piece of content into your brain because it had detected three seconds of dangerous mental silence.

Looking back, boredom probably did us quite a few favours.

7️⃣ MAKING YOUR OWN COFFEE

Every few months I see another financial “hack” explaining how much money you can save by making coffee at home.

Fucking hell.

Next week: SAVE THOUSANDS BY NOT HIRING A TAXI TO TAKE YOU TO THE TOILET.

Coffee at home wasn’t a financial strategy. It was where coffee came from.

You boiled a kettle, put coffee in something, poured water on it and drank the result. Depending on the decade and the household, it could range from perfectly respectable to something resembling hot brown gravel, but nobody charged you £5.40 for it or asked your name.

There was also no size discussion.

You owned a mug.

That was the size.

8️⃣ REPAIRING SOMETHING INSTEAD OF THROWING IT AWAY

Apparently we’re rediscovering repair culture, which is one of the better things to come back because the idea of throwing away a perfectly usable object because one tiny piece has broken has always struck me as fucking insane.

We repaired stuff largely because new stuff cost money.

If trousers ripped, they got stitched. If furniture wobbled, somebody investigated why.