The newsletter I cancelled
A small, polite, ongoing transaction I had agreed to, and what I noticed when I ended it.
I cancelled a newsletter I had been reading for years. The author was fine. The writing was fine. I had not skipped an issue in eighteen months. The cancellation took me about forty seconds and was followed by about a week of unexpected quiet.
Why I had kept reading#
I was not learning much, but the consistency of arrival had become a small structure in my week. Friday evening. Coffee. The newsletter open in a window I would scroll through and forget by morning. The ritual was load-bearing in a way I had not noticed.
What I noticed after#
The Friday evening that used to be the newsletter became something else. Some weeks I read a chapter of a book. Some weeks I started cooking earlier. One week I just sat for forty minutes, which is a thing I had not done on a Friday in years.
The newsletter had not been the value. The Friday evening had been the value. The newsletter had been the placeholder.
What I learned#
Some recurring things are real, and some are placeholders for the time they occupy. The way to tell them apart is to cancel and see what fills the slot. If something good fills it, the recurring thing was a placeholder. If you miss it, it was real.
I have done this twice more since, and missed neither.