It has been about a month since we arrived and embarked on this experiment. My days have settled into a very unfussy routine: build features, exercise, write a substack post, figure out what to cook for dinner. Coming straight from six years in New York, the routine feels almost austere. Not that I was really living it up in NYC. My lifestyle had diverged quite a bit from all that New York offered, which is one of the reasons I felt it was time to leave.
Even with this divergence, life just is more high stimulation in New York. Anything you want is at most twenty minutes away, and the city pelts you with faces, ads, chatter, motion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I loved New York. But it also wired me to expect constant novelty as the baseline. I didn’t notice that until I left. I don’t really have that anymore here. I have the same couple of coffee shops to visit, the same stretch of beach to stare out at.
The change of pace has made my little indulgences stand out to me. They are like little sparks of excitement that dot my days. Some are harmless. Some are embarrassing. A few probably need to die. Here’s the inventory.
Pastel de nata & other sweets. This one I allow with a watchful eye. Obviously, I can’t just be having dessert every night, because then it actually gets boring. But getting a pastel de nata in the middle of the day is a little burst of dopamine I like from time to time. Blaine makes this harder because his sweet tooth is powerful and he can put away far more than I should.
he has at least one pastel de nata per day Daily Mail. Ok, this one has to go. I’ve so eradicated social media from my life that the gossip vacuum got filled by celebrity news. I do not need to know what Jennifer Gardner’s kids look like, yet I do. When we first got to Portugal, the site offered up stories about UK celebrities I didn’t recognize, and the habit broke for about 48 hours. Then I discovered I could just google Daily Mail US and reopen the portal. The only saving grace is that the site is so janky it occasionally crashes and ejects me from my own doom scroll.
Hot yoga and running. I’m so happy yoga feels like an indulgence! I actively look forward to these classes. My brain feels freshly wrung afterwards, like someone hard reset it. Running still has a little bit of starting friction — I guess I wouldn’t consider it a guilty pleasure yet. I would love to crave a run.
Reading my book before bed. I’m nearly finished with The Spectator Bird and it’s excellent. Reading is only a problem when I let it devolve into trash, but sometimes trash is the on-ramp back into real books. I consider this a fantastic indulgence.
Naps. I’m conflicted on this one. I get eight hours a night, so I don’t need a nap, but I inherited my mother’s weakness for an afternoon snooze. Say the word “nap” around me and twenty minutes later I’ll be down for one. I keep these to the weekend only.
TV. Our TV watching has cratered since moving here. In New York it felt like a little shared refuge at the end of the day; now that we work side-by-side, I don’t feel the need for it as much. We still watch something on weekend nights. At the moment it’s Pluribus and 1883 (we’re finishing the last episode tonight).
Scrolling Substack. This is my most embarrassing habit. Sometimes I end up firing off snarky replies like a middle-aged woman on Facebook. Substack Notes is drifting into the same endless scroll prison as every other platform I quit, but every so often I hit something genuinely interesting. That’s the justification I cling to at least.
And that is the roundup. See you tomorrow!