A Year in Reading: Restraint as Wisdom
December 12, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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My New Year’s resolutions are rarely the “go to the gym” variety. I ask complicated questions, especially since becoming a parent: How do I raise a child in today’s world? Can I live sustainably and ethically in a culture of excess? Sara Michas-Martin’s Orion essay “Mother Load,” one of the first pieces I recommended in 2025, set the tone for my year. She writes about the wilderness of motherhood on a polluted planet, where we consume, both knowingly and unknowingly, human-made hazards and microplastics. I came away from the piece heavy with anxiety, contemplating the broken boundary between our bodies and our toxic world, and how easily we overlook what enters our homes, our routines, and ourselves.
I kept returning this year to stories that explore the violation of limits. Stephanie Krzywonos’s “Museum of Color,” for Emergence Magazine, describes the invasive processes used to make pigments like bone black and Tyrian purple. Each vignette traces stories of violence and exploitation, revealing how color has a cost, and how we routinely treat the earth, and beings on it, as bottomless resources. Since toxic practices still linger in the colors we use, eat, and wear, her piece made me reconsider my own consumption, especially in the small decisions I make each day.
Both Michas-Martin and Krzywonos show what happens when we treat bodies and landscapes as if they have no limits. One intimate, one historical, these pieces sit in quiet conversation, reminding me how deeply destruction is woven into daily life.
I’ll balance these heavier reads with an Atmos interview that brought me new perspective. In “Why One Geologist Thinks We Should All Pay More Attention to Rocks,” Marcia Bjornerud invites us to contextualize our existence within geological time, a span of billions of years. Human-made systems run on speed and growth, and “technologies keep us trapped in the moment in a consumptive cycle,” she says. But Earth operates on a drastically different clock, and if we are able to think about its present and future across a longer timescale, we might combat the shortsightedness that drives many of today’s crises. Deep time itself is a lesson in limits. “People have no depth of field,” says Bjornerud, “no understanding of how long ago different historical and natural events happened, and no idea of how long phenomena like the mass extinctions of the past took—and how long it took to recover from them.” The wisdom held within ancient rocks urges us to listen to Earth and accept its boundaries instead of manipulating them.
After thinking about limits at this scale, I eventually turned inward. I wanted to pay better attention to the natural world this year, but the reality is that I’ve been emotionally exhausted. I don’t have the bandwidth to do what I need to do at work and at home. And rarely do I allow myself to do less. Every external signal tells me that’s not acceptable.
This is why Elena Mary’s Aeon essay, “‘I Awoke at ½ Past 7,’” struck a nerve. We live in an age of over-optimization, and it might seem like smartphones and social media ushered us into this period of endless noise and expectation. But, as Mary writes, this impulse to optimize isn’t new: Victorian diarists practiced meticulous self-monitoring and performative self-improvement, responding to the rapid progress of the 19th century. Mary draws astute parallels to our heavily tracked, anxiety-filled modern lives. Today’s technologies have only intensified the pressure to perform, stretching our attention past reasonable limits. As I researched dumbphones and more ethical apps this year, I wondered: Is it possible to escape algorithmic feeds and constant surveillance? Is it okay to stop optimizing?
I often feel paralyzed when I consider how I can meaningfully contribute to this world. I’ve slowed down, paid more attention, widened my perspective. But I’ve also wondered what might happen if I narrow my lens: apply constraints to my days, focus on the choices that actually shape my world. If Bjornerud offered a change in perspective, Nylah Iqbal Muhammad, in “An Optimistic Quest in Apocalyptic Times” for The Bitter Southerner, offered a shift in practice. Muhammad reflects on hunting and reconnecting to the land. I was moved by her hunger for knowledge and her quest for survival and rebirth into a new world not dominated by capitalism and a white patriarchy. She writes about ecological collapse and understanding both the earth’s and her own limits. “Even as this world burns,” she writes, “there are people learning how to build the next one.” Her approach to hunting, grounded in communion rather than conquest, feels like a model for living within limits instead of pushing past them. I’m not a hunter, but the piece stayed with me, and even nudged me to reconnect with the land in my own small way: to build raised beds in my backyard so I can grow my own food again.
Muhammad’s reflections pair well with Ash Sanders’s Believer essay, “The Last Resort,” about Bombay Beach, a community at the edge of California’s Salton Sea that has already reached its limit. The town, Sanders writes, “lives at the terminus of all our logic, caught inside everything we’ve ever done and all that has ever happened.” She visits during the annual Biennale, when eclectic artists converge and transform the town into performance art. Bombay Beach is a portrait of environmental ruin, yet within these constraints, people gather to philosophize and dream, creating freely in the face of devastation—or, as one artist puts it, “commiserating with collapse.” It’s an account of what happens when a place hits its breaking point and what might emerge from the wreckage. This piece, like Muhammad’s, feels like standing at the edge of civilization, seeing the past and future of our fragile world at once.
Together, these essays on time, collapse, and resilience whisper the same truth: Earth is finite. I am finite. They give me permission to say, It’s okay to do less, to work with what I have, to care for myself first. And I can apply this restraint online, too. In “The Last Days of Social Media” for Noēma, James O’Sullivan explains that today’s apps and platforms, “optimized for attention rather than meaning,” have pushed past the limits of genuine human connection. Much like society’s expectations of us IRL, we are first and foremost consumers online, designed to engage with an infinite scroll. But he proposes that the death of social media could lead to a better internet: smaller and slower platforms, private spaces with real people. A rewilding of the web, transforming it into a more diverse, healthy, and resilient ecosystem.
If O’Sullivan hints at the limits of online life, Frank Chimero’s “Beyond the Machine” explores the limits of artificial intelligence. Reading his piece on AI and creative agency— originally a talk given at a Brooklyn web conference—felt like a light at the end of a challenging year. Chimero considers the use of AI in terms of spatial relationships and compares the work of professionals across creative industries, from music producer Rick Rubin to filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. In a discussion of Spirited Away, “a film that wrestles with identity and imitation, appetite and satisfaction,” he focuses on No Face, an insatiable spirit that eats everything. Even after it consumes something, it’s still hungry and wants more. Chimero ultimately suggests that we can collaborate with the machine mindfully, rather than surrender to its infiniteness. “AI needs boundaries, and so do we,” he argues. His insights crystallized the idea that limits aren’t constraints but guide rails, especially in a culture obsessed with more.
Limits can guide how I engage with the world, especially my immediate, physical one. We can do less, but do it more fully. These eight longreads remind me that resisting the dominant mode of more and faster is not failure, but wisdom.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/12/restraint-as-wisdom/
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