The Insider - January 2026

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the January edition of the Insider. Do you know someone who would enjoy the Insider? Forward this email to them, and they can subscribe here.

Are we paying attention?

In the last week, there’s been a return to the If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention energy that dominated 2020 and 2021. The idea is that any sort of non-anger is a failure to comprehend the severity of the situation. And any sort of continuation of business as usual is an abdication of responsibility—a willful ignorance of the injustices being perpetrated here, there, or everywhere.

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it,” Marilynne Robinson wrote in her novel Gilead. Will giving our full attention to the world inevitably make us angry? Or will we be able to laugh amidst the sorrow? Plan joyful surprises amidst the rubble and injustice? Choose to lose track of time offline as the world loses its mind online? To be constantly fixated on the emergency, the occupation, or the authoritarianism is to choose a very narrow band of attention—an attention that willfully ignores so much of what makes life textured and dissonant, where beautiful and horrible things can happen at the same time. Perhaps the real wisdom is in the idea’s exact opposite: If you’re always angry, you’re not paying attention.

On not writing for ten years

One day a young man approached Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia’s most acclaimed 20th-century poets, and asked him how to develop his craft as a poet. The story goes that Mandelstam was very clear: do not write anything for ten years. Instead, he counseled, it is better to go out into the world: work in the fields, have your heart broken, take the overnight train, cultivate patience and moral seriousness. And then the writing will find you.

Nearly a century later, in 2022, Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of The New York Times, offered a similar charge to his journalists, chiding them for relying “too much on Twitter as a reporting or feedback tool.” In other words, stop scrolling and start reporting out in the world.

Today’s online incentives do not reward long, ten-year silences. It’s far better, when appealing to the algorithms, to post early and often, and with a flair for the sensational. And yet, there is a hidden price for dabbling in such mediocrity: we lose our taste for the audacious. Our patience dries up. We choose what's obvious over what's hidden, what's dancing at the top of the feed over what's lying still at the bottom of the pile.

May we pursue fewer, better stories. After all, to hunt for and tell the messy, poignant stories—or, if you’re daring, to live one yourself—is its own reward.

On the virtues of maintenance

There is little incentive anymore to prioritize maintenance—let alone to consider it a virtue. In the last 25 years, there has been a yawning divide between the decreasing cost of physical things (toys, TVs, etc.) and the increasing cost of labor-driven things like healthcare and education. Labor costs are outpacing material costs, making it cheaper to replace something than to pay for someone to repair it (or to learn how to do it yourself). Free returns, complex electronics, and fast shipping for replacements have all contributed to the collective atrophying of knowing how to maintain and repair. 

I, myself, am not a terribly handy person. I seize up when facing basic everyday maintenance tasks. Which one is the intake valve? Is it a pee-trap or a P-trap? Should I use caulk or grout? Besides learning basic vocabulary and watching more YouTube videos, I admire people who have a natural disposition to maintain, repair, and tend to something. In its most philosophical and virtuous interpretation, maintenance is an ongoing relationship—a series of small acts that add up to a commitment to care for and steward the important things in our lives. As journalist Alex Vuocolo describes, maintenance is “a way of parsing and knowing a thing and deciding, over and over, what it’s worth.”

Should we work together?

In the last year, I’ve spoken to many companies that have let their newsletter fall by the wayside. They know it’s important, but it’s either a last-minute scramble or something that falls to the bottom of the list.

The impact might not be obvious at first, but trust compounds slowly over time. It is upstream of new clients, new opportunities, and new hires. Today, we don’t operate in the attention economy; we operate in the trust economy. 

A human-written, authentic newsletter can be one of the most efficient and powerful ways to compound trust with the people that matter.

This is why Future Forest exists. We help teams send newsletters that stand out. The kind where people forward your newsletter to colleagues. Where future clients begin to see you as credible. Where your newsletter becomes part of how people talk about you.

We handle everything—strategy, writing, design, the fiddly formatting work, so you can spend 30 minutes a month approving content instead of stressing about it.

If you’re ready to restart your newsletter, I’d love to hear from you. Or if you know of a company that might be interested, we pay generous referral bonuses for clients who sign up.

What I am reading

• My favorite article in the last month was this one: The Decline of Deviance - Where Has All the Weirdness Gone? The title speaks for itself. I’d love to hear your thoughts. (Experimental History).
• What does it mean to be a patriot in today’s America? I loved how this article explored an enduring, faltering, and hopeful faith in American democracy. (The Atlantic).
• Is Anthropic an ethical leader of the AI transformation? Or is all their philosophy and soulfulness around AI just marketing? They’ve been raising the alarm about the dangers of AI, while they continue to sprint to release the most advanced frontiers. Should we believe them? (Dario Amodei’s blog and The Atlantic).
• What is actually behind the return to office mandates? Productivity, company culture, control? I’m of two minds about RTO requirements and was intrigued by this perspective. (The Walrus).
• This was a delightful article about the backcountry rescue squad at America’s busiest national park. As federal funding dries up, a strike team of volunteers is filling the gap, saving lives, and building a brotherhood. (The New Yorker).

And I loved this tweet.

Something personal

Sometimes, on my birthday when I growing up, my parents would hand me a box wrapped in beautiful paper. It was too square to be a shoebox and too heavy to be boring clothes. It had a weight that suggested something expensive and interesting. What could it be?

I would rip open the paper to find a box of engraved stationery with my name printed across the top. “For notes and thank-you cards,” my parents would say. “Oh... thanks,” I would attempt, my disappointment visible. After someone sent us a gift, my parents would sit my brother and me down at the dining room table, and we would write our thank-you notes. My penmanship looked like a crime scene on such elegant, thick cardstock. Sometimes I’d lose track of the subject-verb agreement in a sentence, first crossing out words before just scrapping the whole note and starting again.

In the years since, I’ve lost practice in writing hand-written notes. It’s easier to send an email or shoot a text. Our gratitude, if we take the time to express it at all, is most often instantaneous.

My mom sent me this article last year, and it inspired me to dust off one of those perfectly weighted boxes of engraved stationery. At first, my attempts were a reminder of how slow and annoying it is to write by hand. But then I found my groove, and soon I had a stack of notes, licked and stamped and ready for their journey by way of post.

Sending a handwritten note in the mail is a zig to the zag of everything becoming faster, cheaper, and more automated. Perhaps such an effort will make a lasting impression on the note's recipient, but slowing down the practice of gratitude has also made an impression on me. I somehow found that as I puzzled over what to say, waiting for my pen to catch up to my head, I was more sincere, more grateful, more connected to the radiating lineage of ancestors who, for centuries, sat down with pen and paper and chose to say something from the heart.

~~~~~

Digitally,

Banks