Always be cutting

Except when you're bulking!

Listen: Lonely at the top by Asake, H.E.R. Remix

At the top of the original video for this song, you see Asake lying in bed, musing. “Isn’t it crazy how you can have all the success in the world and still feel lonely?” Then you hear a woman’s voice. “You’re not alone in feeling that way… Success deserves to be celebrated.” Oh yes, good reframe. “Would you like me to throw you a party?” she asks. The camera cuts to the source of the voice: a smart speaker.

LOL.

Yes, Asake is doing the standard thing of being suddenly rich and mourning a life where his friends can identify with his life. But you know what makes it feel better? If you project that loneliness onto all the execs axing workers to placate their shareholders right now. See, music heals.

About those cuts

This week, we lost 1,500 jobs at Spotify and “about 225” at Etsy. After writing about the more than 400,000 people the tech sector has laid off in the last two years, Wired itself is laying people off as Condé Nast looks to cut costs.

And now on to the full closures. Popular Science is closing its digital magazine, after ceasing print in 2021. The Nation is going monthly. Rather than to feel surprised any more, I’m just aggressively composting while I listen to all the too-big-to-fail podcasts that were nonetheless cancelled this year (Death, Sex & Money? Really?).

While we bid farewell to all we hold dear, let’s try and take solace in the dialog. LinkedIn is flooded with layoff posts, which I hope are both helping people find jobs and reminding execs that workers are human. And the Brooklyn Public Library’s notice on municipal budget cuts was both factual and quietly scathing? Who knows what’s ahead for everything that’s getting dinged, but whatever it is, it’s not going to be worse for the transparency.

Where there is emptiness

I would love to be all Braiding Sweetgrass about this and say that new things spring up in the wake of loss. This next thing is the worst possible version of that: Nestle is spinning up “companion products” to fill the nutritional gaps people develop on Ozempic.

Per Forbes, the Nestle CEO Mark Schneider “said there is an opening for products like supplements to support weight loss and ensure people get the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients they need but may no longer be getting from food” — a genuinely nutty sentence to ingest, assuming our bodies are still capable of processing things at all.

It’s not hard to imagine the boardroom conversation: those inclined to delegate body image to a pill* might also outsource nutrient maintenance. However. Much of what makes human existence worthwhile is the ability to make choices such as what to put in our mouths at any given moment, and once people remember this, the autopilot situation is likely to fail. In the meantime, at least the Nestle people still have jobs.

*obviously we are not referring here to people for whom this medication is medically necessary

New Yorkers, petitions for you: try and save compost, libraries, and parks.

Margot