who gets to author you: your attention, your story, your self, and who's bidding to write you instead
076 | ANEWWITHHUE: A monthly Saturday listicle to spark joy, creativity, and curiosity.
We are born superhuman.
No one tells us this, so let me. ;)
Think of a wound, how it mends on its own. No instruction, no effort, no conscious help at all. You don’t decide to heal, your body simply knows how to. That’s not a metaphor. That’s everyday, in your own skin.
It’s because you are made of life: trillions of cells, symbiotically like a symphony working together alongside trillions of microbes; which you can’t survive even a day without. Every thoughts, every action, movement, all carried by an unseen cooperative working on your behalf, but without your awareness.
It’s strange to think of ourselves in this way, I know. Stay with me.
Before the world convinced us we had to do more to be more, we were born curious, creative, capable, and unafraid. Then our amygdala and prefrontal cortex starts to mature, and we become more rationale, less impulsive, and more ‘regulated’. Hopefully. Haha.
But the question isn’t how do we become, it’s how did we live before we were told we weren’t enough? What if you already are, and the work was never to add anything, but to simply return home?
What’s insidious is that the world we’ve ended up with isn’t built in your favor, so the work of sorting out what’s good for you falls on you. Not fair, I know. But when has the world actually been fair. The better news is this: you’re far more powerful than you’ve been led to believe.
Science and spirituality point to the same place: most of what you need to thrive, you already own. You can change your life at any stage. The constant is you, and what you’re willing to do.
This, willpower, matters more now than ever. As the world tilts into something history wouldn’t recognize, the most precious thing we own is our ability to think clearly about how we choose to live.
Which is why, everywhere I look this month, one question kept surfacing: who gets to author you? Your healing, your purpose, your attention, your body, your story. There’s a queue of forces who’d love to grab that pen, the art to master is: how willing are you to start writing a life that’s in favor of you?
If you’re new here, welcome. This newsletter is for those living between worlds: who we were raised to be, who we want to be, and who we’re actually becoming. A weekly look at wellbeing, creativity, and the space to embrace our hues. Start here.
Podcast. Fixable. What’s your purpose, and who decided you should’ve found it already? Anne Morriss hands the mic to Molly Graham, ex-Facebook exec, now the new host of TED’s WorkLife, who gently dismantles the myth that purpose is one shiny thing you figure out after enough journaling. The reframe: you don’t find purpose, you keep choosing it. Season by season, through every wrong or right turn that teaches you something. Because what’s working for you now, might not work for the version of you five or ten years down the line. Everything evolves and so do you is her message. The wisdom: take the leap you can’t see the bottom to yet. See things always as an adventure; the language you use also matters. Rate your activities one to ten on energy for a single week, notice what drains, and notice what energizes. The pattern will reveal a lot to you. It’s not a personality test, it’s about noticing when something fires up in you. Look for the overlap between what you love, what you’re genuinely good at, and what someone will actually pay you for. That intersection is the job. But here’s the part nobody says out loud: not knowing is the point, not a failure. Everyone is always improvising. The ones who look certain did the stumbling in background. Treat the messy feelings: the confusion, dread, and ambition, as signals not detours. Remember it’s meant to be this hard, so the permission is to stop performing certainty; and breathe.
Podcast. ZOE Science + Nutrition. Michael Pollan (one of my favorite writers of all time, prolific in my opinion) joins Tim Spector to reframe overeating as a problem of environment. That’s right! It’s not your willpower that’s malfunctioning. The thesis: if you can’t stop eating, that’s largely by design. Over the last fifty years, the food system has rewired itself. Pollan’s most glaring point: that the modern American diet (also what influences much of the rest of the world) is essentially reassembled corn. Vast monocultures (growing one type of crop) broken down in factories and repackaged into ultra-processed food, engineered around “craveability.” Tuned to light up the brain’s reward’s circuits and override the signals that tell you you’re full, the foods we’re picking up off the shelves are mostly unnatural. Even when it tries to pretend to be. In other words: you’re not weak. The chips were engineered to leave you wanting more. So the fix isn’t willpower or calorie counting. It’s cook more of your own meals. Sounds familiar ehmm. ;) Eat mostly plant. And borrow a little cultural wisdom on when to stop: hara hachi bu , the Japanese saying of eating until you’re almost full, or like the French asking “are you satisfied?” instead of “are you full?” While reframing helps, rules Pollan outlines are eat whole foods, not too much, and mostly plants. Know that it’s not you because eating well has become genuinely hard. Like a field of landmines, knowing that the field is rigged, hopefully bring a sense of relief. The game to play now is how can you create the kind of food environment that’ll help you thrive?
Podcast. Talks at Google. Neurologist Dr. Pria Anand on The Mind Electric, her debut book of the same name. Anand practices at Boston Medical Center and is an assistant professor at Boston University; who studied at Yale and Stanford, and trained in neurology at Johns Hopkins and Mass General. While with a background from respected and rigorous institutions, the thing her years by patients bedsides revealed was something medicine rarely makes room for. The brain, she’s realized, is a storyteller not a recorder. Its instinct is to create narrative order when faced with chaos, and that instinct runs so deep it outlasts even catastrophic damage. When the facts go missing, the brain doesn’t go silent. It invents. She calls it confabulation: the mind quietly filling its own gaps, spinning a story rather than admitting it doesn’t know. Clinically, it shows up in patients with strokes, tumors, dementia. But once you’ve seen it, you start to catch the same impulse everywhere; in patients, their doctors, and in the wider stories cultures tell to make sense of pain. And here’s her reframe: it’s not a glitch. Storytelling is what’s core to the nature of our operating system. It’s the most human thing we do, to make meaning even through wreckage. Fascinating!
News. Olive Young is going global. South Korea’s biggest beauty retailer spent two decades as the engine behind the K-beauty wave, and it’s finally stepping out from behind the shelf. In May it opened its first store outside Korea: a Pasadena flagship that had shoppers queuing overnight, and friends, the ads have been targeting me good, in Singapore too. Signal: The tides of change are in full force.Embrace everything Asian, because it’s not K-pop anymore. And instead of letting an American retailer, Ulta or Spanish retailer Sephora, win the glory from K-beauty, OY is stepping in to go global too.
News. Peloton acquires Skōp pilates, an early innovator in connected Pilates, to take its reformer tech into R&D, instead of slapping a logo on a machine. Which signals two things: pilates is having it’s moment. Second: when a brand like Peloton buys in, that moment is or has peaked. It’s the late-mover tell, Peloton lands this deal after Frame Fitness named Dua Lipa as co-founder and Chief Creative Officer and Technogym made moves into the space too last year; signaling the trend has crossed into the mainstream. While there’s substance under the hype, as pilates has its roots in rehab, the field is crowded and highly saturated in most mature markets. The winners will be who can deliver the best programming and overall service, consistently. As always, quality and genuine community will win every time.
Product. Hume Band 2.0. The wearable sector has matured. As Hume delivers pretty much the same hardware as better known WHOOP, but the rework on the messaging and service model, as a one-time device fee (USD$249), without required subscription—only an optional premium tier, is the USP “innovation”. Surprisingly enticing, given the ballooning stack of subscriptions we’re all trying to reduce. But their main divergence is positioning. Where WHOOP cozies up to athletes and high performers, for training and sleep analytics, Hume pitches itself as a longevity companion for general wellness (smart!): metabolic health, “biological age,” stress, long-term recovery over sport-specific metrics. Like Outdoor Voices, to Lululemon and Nike. How I think of it: WHOOP is building a performance control panel, while Hume is building a health-span dashboard. Either way, my caveat is, no matter what these companies claim, these metrics are arbitrary and proprietary innovations. Our species have lived before these metrics existed.
Full disclosure: I’ve only ever used an Apple Watch and an Oura ring. I see the value in these products for competition, or for specific health targets, but I’ve opted out of wearables for now, as I’m currently more interested in reintegrating with my own intuition than outsourcing how I feel to an external metric.
Opinion. Enhanced Games. The controversial event happened in late May in Las Vegas. I assumed every athlete was enhanced. But not quite. While a handful competed clean, drawn in by the prize money that dwarfs anything in their professional sport: US$250,000 for a win and $1M for a world record. The irony is how two of the clean athletes actually won. When last place pays more than an Olympic relay medal, you understand why these athletes (some coming out of retirement) did what they did. It must’ve also helped that these athletes were treated like the rockstars they are: paid well, and properly celebrated. But strip back the spectacle and it’s hard to ignore that this is a competition owned by a publicly traded company (ENHA), backed by Peter Thiel, fyi, (the Sillicon Valley billionaire, technology entrepreneur, and venture capitalist), that sells the peptides its enhanced athletes uses. So the event is the billboard and the pharmacy is the business. My take: peptides feels like steroids 2.0. Rebranded, perhaps cleaner, with better research and therefore probably “smarter” in theory. But the reality is testosterone and anabolics were still amongst the most-used drugs at the games. So no matter what these peptides claims to do: you’re still injecting a foreign agent into your bloodstreams to push your body somewhere it wouldn’t have gone alone. Personally, I am of the camp: stick with what’s natural as best you can.
Yes, I know you’re tired of hearing about AI. But it’s hard to look away from the most significant technological shift our species has ever lived through. So, my interest isn’t only in the tech story, but in humanity’s story and how this will impact us as a species. Which is why it keeps earning space on my mind. As it’ll continue to impact every part of our lives, despite our feelings, on our wellbeing and creativity too. And these two moves below, in particular, are fascinating because they’re contrarian. Two moves, no one saw coming.
News. Midjourney goes medical. Why would an AI image generation company invest into healthcare body scanning? My guess: data. This month Midjourney; yes, the text-to-image AI tool, unveiled a full-body scanner it calls Ultrasonic CT: “the full body ultrasound” with no radiation, no magnets. Just sound, warm water and a 60 second descent through a ring with half a million tiny sensors. Allegedly. But it won’t live in a hospital. It’s made to sit in a spa. Surrounded with golden mood lighting, cold plunges, a sauna, and a dash that Silicon Valley charm, San Francisco can expect the first location in late 2027. A billion body scans a month by 2031 is the grand ambition. Which means Midjourney won’t only be generating images of objects or AI humans anymore. It’ll also be collecting the most intimate map there is: your body, inside and out, scanned and rescanned as it changes over time. The announcement reads random until you realise the dataset they’ll own is priceless.
News. Google DeepMind x A24. Why would the world’s leading AI lab take its first-ever stake in a film studio? My guess: proximity to taste and culture. This week Google DeepMind invests $75million into A24, the studio behind Everything Everywhere All At Once and Marty Supreme. It’s first stake in the new Hollywood. But this is an AI research partnership. The deal locks Google out of A24’s library; it can’t train on the catalogue. So it isn’t buying the films, it’s buying the filmmakers and their genius to help them develop new frontier tools. Because make no mistake: we are meaning-making social creatures, and in the attention economy, whoever tells the best story wins. Marketing 101, but also a truth about our species. (Think back to Dr. Pria Anand’s conclusions about her patients, above: the brain runs on story). A24 sells how it thinks and creates: it’s taste, it’s pulse on culture, and it’s instinct on how a story lands; so the real trade is collaboration for innovation. DeepMind brings the most powerful video (Veo) and image (NanoBanana) models, and A24 brings the hottest minds in the business of storytelling. Each has expertise the other can’t invent alone.