Note on the notebook: Monday Notes are a weekly writing routine: part journal, part forced writing practice.

Alongside Monday Notes I publish essays on society, culture, technology, creativity, and parenthood.

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The resort unfolds downwards, towards the beach. It’s a sequence of grey stone terraces, thatched roofs, and blooming Bouganvilleas that melt over each available edge like Neopolitan ice-cream.

It’s evening, and the sun has just dunked itself into the ocean under a twinkling necklace of fishing boats on the horizon. The resort itself is lit by small stone lamps, and the occasional, quick flash from the restaurant below. Phone cameras gobbling up the first bite of each perfectly presented meal.

There are hungry cameras everywhere. Some selfie sticks and GoPros, but it’s mostly tourists posing in pools and and bars, carefully curating the evidence of how good a time they had. It’s almost a ritual - and passersby are respectful enough to stop mid-stride and wait, or duck under the firing line of another impromptu photoshoot.

I’m in Bali, at a resort in Ubud. It’s stunning. In that way that these sorts of resorts are: an orchestrated, manicured, and artificial experience full of extremely friendly and warm people. It’s also the kind of place that loves kids, which is exactly the reason we’re here at this Disneyland for exhausted parents.

I can’t help but wonder what this will look like in a few years, though. If Meta has their way, it’ll be swarmed with people in thick-rimmed black glasses, recording everything in sight like a convention of spies. Meta glasses are intended to be the next big thing and for a world obsessed with capturing everything - I post, therefore I am - this might just work.

On the other hand, we’re entering an age of exhaustion with artificiality. We might end up seeing a rejection of this kind of sharing culture. Less posing in pools, more handwritten notes on the experience, collages, and collected ephemera to show you went - but without the need to suck in bellies.

On my bedside table

Remains of the Day - almost done.

I could only fit this in my travel bag though, so I’ll need to find something else to read here. I hope the gift shop has books…

Field notes

This is an Indonesian tree snail.

What’s unusual about Indonesian tree snails is that they grow shells to either left or right. Most snail species, apparently, are lefties or righties. But these snails are both.

I had no idea snails grew shells to one side. I had no need to know this. I probably will never need to know this.

But, out on a pram walk with my baby son, I spotted this banana yellow shell attached to the tree and snapped a photo. An image search later led me to learn that this was indeed a snail, and its chirality. Which is apparently the word used to refer to shell direction - dextral (right-handed) or sinistral (left-handed).

I almost didn’t stop to take the photo. But I did and now I know this.

I’m not sure this enriches my life in any measureable way, but it probably does enrich it. What is the point of life if not to experience unexpected things and learn facts about snail shells?

Good things

I’ve discovered on Substack. While I’m not a pretty girl I do enjoy food and love good writing. This has both.

This note in particular won me over. But if you want food history and great wordage - this is the go.

-WSS

Happy Monday.

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Note on the notebook: Monday Notes are a weekly writing routine: part journal, part forced writing practice.

Alongside Monday Notes I publish essays on society, culture, technology, creativity, and parenthood.

Subscribe to get these delivered and support my work.

Subscribe now

Over the weekend I posted a very long article on AI writing.

The crux of my thoughts are - I don’t think that AI writing is going to go anywhere. In that, I think it’s now here to stay. But I’m also not bullish that it’s going to get much better.

What I didn’t get to (or really have the capacity to go into as the article was already 4,400 words long) was the context of AI writing matters a lot.

If I need a recipe to make cacio e pepe - I’m kind of fine with this being quickly pushed to me through an AI summary.

But, if I’m reading a recipe that talks about how cacio e pepe was something they ate at their nonna’s house and it brings up such sweet memories but the whole thing has the air, style, and structure of AI - I’m going to hate it.

Authenticity is eroded any time it is touched by AI. Because I have literally zero way of knowing how much AI was involved. I also end up feeling like I’m talking to a robot, rather than a unique human being with real experiences.

This is particularly egregious for writing that is innately personal or sensuous like travel and food writing. Telling me about the unique experiences you had somewhere while travelling, or what you ate and what it smelled like, and then putting that through an AI filter is such a shame.

Can you imagine what Anthony Bourdain’s would think of AI writing?

Bedside table

Almost done with Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day but this week has been terrible for finding time to read.

At the moment I’m also reading a lot about Meta, AI, and the attention economy for a piece I’ll be publishing next month.

Field notes

The Abbey Medieval Festival has been running for 35 years.

I went as a kid and remember it fondly because I was, at the time, obsessed with archery.

It’s pretty amazing to think this thing has been running almost as long as I’ve been alive. It probably turns a nice little profit, but I suspect it’s mostly in existence because people love it. There are dozens of stalls and exhibits that are just everyday people showing you what they love - whether its Viking blacksmithing or leather working, or making mead.

Most everything these days is heavily monetised, or for a purpose other than just the sake of it. There isn’t enough of this kind of passion in the world.

Good things

It’s been pretty wild to go through my childhood notebooks. You can see my brain on the page as it develops in real time.

I just refilled my adult notebook - a Grand Voyageur from Paper Republic - with some new string and paper.

I’ve had a notebook on me for years now. At first, it was aspirational. I thought if I carried it, I’d start making notes. It actually took a few years before this stuck and was helped along by the advent of AI when I began to worry I might never write with a pen again.

Eventually, it became second nature to write on paper. Thoughts, ideas, brilliant strikes of genius. There’s even evidence that handwriting is way better for congnition.

-WSS

I publish two longform essays a month and notes every Monday.

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Note on the notebook: Monday Notes are a weekly writing routine: part journal, part forced writing practice.

Alongside Monday Notes I publish essays on society, culture, technology, creativity, and parenthood.

Subscribe to get these delivered and support my work.

Subscribe now

I have never been this sick, this often, in my entire life.

Before we had kids, other parents would warn us about the first few years of familyhood - everyone will be sick all the time. And its kind of hard to understand how true that is, until you are. But by then the it is too late: you have ceased being a person and have started your new life as a sentient bag of phlegm.

It is partly the lack of sleep. Even now, with a 2.5 year old and a 10 month old, sleep is a luxury good that arrives on intermittent and unpredictable shipments. It’s also partly that kids, by their nature, have no concept of germs or that the food they just threw on the floor of a Sushi Train probably is fine to stay there, actually. Or that the heaving germ factory we call daycare is a just very expensive way to stress test your own immune system.

For the past two months I’ve been ill with something. Or rather, multiple things. It hasn’t helped that a broken skylight in the kids room led to an infestation of mould and the added burden of insurance claims, relocations, repairs, and blood tests to confirm - ah, yes, I am allergic to mould.

And yet, during one weekend that I awoke feeling particularly hearty, I managed to start clearing out the corners of our house that have been dominated and deleted by an over abundance of kids stuff. The laundry countertop, for the first time since we moved into the house, is actually empty. I discovered multiple cupboards that been taken over by baby paraphernalia - bottle teats, muslin cloths, santisiers et al - that we just didn’t need anymore.

Bit by bit, over that weekend, the house started to empty. It opened up. It felt like it could breathe again. That all this stuff was in some way the necessary inflammation of life during a period of intense stress and work and change and that now it could start to let that go.

And that’s the funny thing about being sick, or going through a period of difficult change, is that we are only able to see it in stop motion. One frame at a time that seems to stretch on forever until it just… ends.

And then we begin to forget what it was like at all.

On my bedside table

I am half way through Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

And I gotta say, I didn’t love it at first. I found it very slow to get going and I don’t love diaristic style novels. But, Stevens has won me over and some of his asides have been beautifully written. Ishiguro is fantastic at dropping something in then finding a way back to it that suddenly has a whole extra level of meaning.

Matter of fact, I had a copy of The Buried Giant somewhere in the house but it had gone missing. (My younger son finds a real sense of joy in pulling books off the living room bookshelf. Which then get replaced over and over again.) Just yesterday I found this tucked away in the back of the bookshelf. I’m thinking I might speed through the remainder of Remains and read this next.

Field notes

There are more than 150 registered Street Libraries in my city.

Street Libraries are just that - little honesty boxes of books put out my local residents. Take a book, leave a book, donate books.

In a world of algorithms, outrage, disconnection, and a decline in reading, these feel something like little lighthouses. Yes, the sea is rough and sometimes dark, but hey there’s still hope. There’s still people putting stuff like this out into the world just because they can.

Good things

Way back in August 2017 I boarded a plane with the promise that I wasn’t being lured by an organ trafficking scam.

I had applied to the inaugural UNLEASH Innovation Lab to take place in Denmark. A ten day innovation sprint for the United Nations SDGs that would cover the costs of airfare, meals, and accommodation.

It honestly sounded too good to be true. And, as the first, there were no photos for evidence that this was legit.

But, being free of responsibility and up for an adventure, I went.

And yeah, it was legit. Funded by multiple sponsors including one of Denmark’s biggest beer companies, the Lab brought 1000 ‘talents’ from more than 100 countries to a giant hackathon for social progress. I met lifelong friends, stayed in a Danish folk school, worked on a solution for refugee camp mental health, developed a stronger sense of who I am, and partied in a Aarhus warehouse.

I went back in the following years as a coach in Singapore and Shenzhen, and briefly attempted to bring it to Australia.

The UNLEASH Lab has reduced in scope for now, but its still an amazing program for people in the beginning of their career in strategic design and social innovation.

The European Lab is currently on now and its something to watch if you’re at all inclined to questions like ‘How do you design for a better world?’

-WSS

Note on the notebook: I need more routine. I thrive on routine. And, lately I feel a little too adrift. It’s easy to work on a more complicated essay and spend weeks letting it marinade into something good, while neglecting the important act of actually just writing. So, moving forward, I’ll be posting a short page like this one, every Monday. I suppose it’s part writing practice, part journal.

If you want to follow along, you can subscribe.

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My wife and I grew up in similarly overstuffed houses.

We both had plenty of siblings (she was one of four, I was one of six) but also had at least one parent that liked to hold on to stuff.

On my wife’s side, it was the strategy of migrants who arrived here with very little - better to hang on to stuff in case you need it.

But the house my mum kept was often bulging with an accumulation of material detritus so that it felt less like a house of hallways and rooms and more like a series of clotted arteries.

My wife and I have polarised reactions to this childhood education on the keeping of things. She finds it very difficult to let go of anything, because you never know. But I find myself maintaining a mental inventory of how much stuff we have in the house and, as that tally grows, my sense of unease and itchiness grows with it.

There are few things for me more satisfying, or more calming, than an afternoon spent clearing out rooms of the house and jettisoning things we haven’t touched in forever.

But, at the same time, I leave crumbs everywhere. My desk is usually incomplete without a few forgotten coffee mugs. I rarely wear a white shirt without getting sauce on it.

I have no idea what that paradox is about. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be trying to understand it the rest of my life.

On my bedside table

Sometime in the second half of last year I made a conscious effort to actually read. This was harder than I expected. There’s a lot of reasons to not read. Modern life, technology, the speed of news, work, and schedules with the kids, to name a few.

But the longing to rekindle a love of reading, to carve out time for reading, was enough to make me find some way to do it.

What worked for me was just making sure I had a book with me at all times. And I’ve been cracking along pretty well, breaking the backs of some great works like The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis, Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green, Abercrombie’s The Devils (which was sort of like reading a really long popcorn movie) and most recently Orbital - an incredibly beautifully written novella about astronauts and planet Earth and humanity. Even if it did meander a little.

My stack for July: The Last of Earth, The Remains of the Day, and A Rising of the Lights.

Wish me luck in making the time.

Field notes

I recently started working with the LEGO Group, which is a bucket list item I never knew I had. I’m helping to pilot their new digital literacy tool for kids and parents here in Australia, and so right behind my office desk is five giant boxes of LEGO. There are few distractions as palpable as this.

I’m also in the weeds of the young male radicalisation project funded by eSafety Commission, of which a short documentary will be coming out later this year. I plan on writing an essay about what we’ve learnt so far, through some exciting research, on what’s driving the pipeline of young men into online extremism. Spoiler: it is, like so many things, a need for connection and hope.

Good things

I have long adored - along with thousands of others - the work of . Former surgeon, now fashion and design guru and creator of my favourite label, Front Office. (Which is an odd thing for me to say as someone who wears pretty much the basic same tee shirt in different colours every day, with about four different pairs of pants on rotation.)

I own one piece from Front Office, a denim chore coat that is my favourite thing to wear and honestly makes me feel so… artsy? Literary? Ready to make notes and tut and stare thoughtfully off into the distance.

Ken is launching The Eye, his new Substack publication, and I’m really excited by what he’s outlined it going to be.

Can’t wait.

-WSS