Let darkness take you: Hygge, Superpoetry & The Causality of Unwantedness
On embracing Swedish winter darkness, three-hour workdays, and the small rituals that make life feel decent.
🪵 Hello Hygge, My Old Friend
The darkness has settled over Stockholm, and I’m leaning into it.
If you don’t manage it proactively, it can get pretty rough emotionally. But with some well-placed Innolux lamps and a trip to Spain, I’ve managed to cultivate a cozy Christmas feeling—appreciating the darkness and the lights that emerge to surround us in Sweden. Think light shows, holiday markets, and Santa lattes.
Hygge isn’t really a Swedish word—it’s Danish & Norwegian—but it feels right for this moment. It’s sort of like “cozy,” but not quite. Hygge is a big, warm hug for your soul. It’s that feeling you get when curled up under a blanket with a hot drink or laughing with friends around a table lit by soft candlelight. It’s the little things—dry socks after trudging through the snow, old friends lighting a fire, or just the perfect playlist in the background. It’s about slowing down, being present.
Hygge is about finding comfort and joy in the everyday—especially when the world outside feels cold and dark. It’s about proactively creating those small, simple moments of happiness that make you think, “Yeah, life’s pretty darn decent right now.”
On that note, I’m sitting here writing in a café in southern Stockholm. It’s run by a couple of confused kids with the weirdest playlist, but it works for me—just the right amount of noise and people, a lagom level of entropy. I’m feeling pretty darn good about 2025 at the moment. I’ve finally landed on a decisive vision for what FFF will be on a practical level, and I’m excited about the things I’ll be sharing with you soon.
This week, I’m back with another collection of bullets I’ve stumbled upon. Kind of newsy, but not really.
📕 Book: Meditations for Mortals
I was first introduced to Oliver Burkeman through Time Management for Mortals, which was included on the Waking Up app—an app otherwise focused on “pure” mindfulness content. For some reason, I decided to pick up Meditations for Mortals.. (And this is “meditations” in the Marcus Aurelius “mic drop” sense, not the “sitting quietly with closed eyes” sense.) It’s a wonderfully wise book that fills me with calm and clarity.
I strongly recommend it for starting the new year, offering a fresh, forgiving perspective on yourself and maybe even shaking up a few patterns.
I particularly liked a concept introduced by Burkeman as of “Going to the Shed” as a mental model for tackling big procrastination challenges. It’s an alternative to the usual “break it into small chunks” or “just push through” strategies I’ve historically used with spotty success. Burkeman credits this idea to Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk, presumably from his book Time Surfing. So, maybe that’s the book I’m actually recommending. 😄 Haven't gotten to reading that one yet though.
📗 Book: 'Rest'
One book cited by Burkeman that I did pick up is Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. It’s a refreshing take on rest—not as a break from the world or “self-care,” but as an essential part of the creative and production process. The book makes a serious, compelling argument for working less—not to improve quality of life, but to enhance the quality of your work and output.
Pang references numerous studies suggesting that the magic number for daily knowledge work is around three hours. The key, he argues, is preparing and cultivating space to make those three hours as productive as possible, rather than diluting your output across more hours.
🧳 Who Buys Luggage at the Airport?
My new favorite podcast is Search Engine by PJ Vogt, and their recent episode tackling this wonderfully silly question in Who Buys Luggage at the Airport? It's perfect holiday listening. It captures the oddities of airports—those strange, ritualistic spaces we all just accept—and showcases PJ’s brilliance.
If you’re unfamiliar with PJ Vogt, I highly recommend checking out his former podcast, Reply All. Maybe start with episode 69, “Disappeared,” which tells the story of how Azer Koçulu broke npm—and the internet. The super tech support series are generally incredible too.
🖋️ Superpoet Whyte
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that my trip to Granada was inspired by a poem in Consolations by David Whyte. Well, Whyte has released Consolations II and he has been doing rare interviews, including one The Tim Ferris Show: David Whyte, Poet — Spacious Ease, Irish Koans, Writing in Delirium, and Revelations from a Yak Mange
Whyte is an absolute delight to listen to, and his words are perfect for snowy, dark days.
To be honest, it’s a bit jarring to hear Ferriss’s “INTERVIEW AND DECONSTRUCT HIGH PERFORMERS” (cue techno music) intro segue into a Zen-trained poet. But that’s also the charm of our current cultural melting pot. 🤣
📊 Freakonomics: Abortion and Crime (Revisited)
In my early twenties, the abortion-and-crime study by Steven Levitt in Freakonomics had a huge impact on me. It demonstrated the power of data and narrative. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a controversial study (original here) that correlated unwantedness with violent crime rates.
Freakonomics recently revisited the study, reflecting on its creation, the debates it sparked, and updated data that validates its predictions. It’s a fascinating listen, touching on abortion, lead poisoning, and crime rates. Levitt’s no-nonsense, data-first approach always stands out, and I can’t help but chuckle at his remark about receiving more death threats from the left than the right—classic Levitt to track those stats. Podcast and transcript here.
One key takeaway: much scientific debate revolves around interpreting data rather than the data itself. Levitt makes a compelling case for shifting the focus of public discussions:
LEVITT: I think it’s really hard for a layperson to be able to watch a scientific debate, or social-scientific debate, especially one that’s being mediated through newspapers, magazines, and blogs, so much being lost in translation, and figure out what’s really true.
It’s not even easy for me as an academic. And I think there is a much more intelligent way to discuss social-scientific research than is done now. So right now, maybe the most interesting way to portray an idea is to talk about the hypothesis. And then, almost absent a lot of discussion of data, ask people to make a judgment about whether the hypothesis is true.
I actually think we should flip that discussion on its head.
If we want intelligent laypeople to be able to make good choices about what they believe and don’t believe, then the basic premise has to start not necessarily from the hypothesis, but from the data.
So, if the way that social science was reported was to say, “Here are the five facts that are true about the world.” And then what those mean are up to people to agree upon, but that’s never the way that discussions happen. Maybe because it’s not interesting, maybe because it’s a little too complicated, maybe it takes too much time. But I think there’s actually a lot less disagreement about facts than about the interpretation of the facts.
I believe that for an educated layperson, given a set of facts, they can make a better judgment about how to interpret those facts than the current way the media treats things, which is to often not talk about the facts but just to talk about the interpretations and often to focus on really extreme emphasis on minor differences.
😉 Dataviz, anyone?
🏆 Is it impossible for you to be just a little bit more Hygge this week?
Even if you’re swamped, take a moment to level up your workspace. Add some light. Replace that annoying cup. Clean your monitor. Blow the dust out of your keyboard. Throw on a blanket.
Speaking of blankets—lately, I’ve been trying to reconnect with my sense of temperature. Sounds odd, but as a lifelong “stoic productivity dude,” I’ve often ignored basic cues like hunger or cold. It’s messed up. I even used a Hidrate bottle to measure my water intake instead of just…listening to my body.
On a related note: next year, I might just learn how to build a sundial.
As always, stay curious 🧐🐒
Mattias Petter Johansson