I hope this finds you well

This issue began from a suspicion that much of what we call wellness is not a path out of crisis, but a management strategy for living inside conditions that are themselves unwell. As the first issue traced circulation – of water, bodies, power, images – this one lingers on what happens when social circulation stalls or turns inward: when care is privatised, self-help attempts to fill the vacuum left by collective erosion, and hope becomes something we are asked to perform.

Mindfulness, once a countercultural vision adapted from Buddhist philosophy, became a slogan for tech companies, schools and even prisons by the early 2000s. Today, it’s embedded everywhere: corporate HR communications, scrolling algorithms, productivity software, therapy speak that leaks into management discourse, resilience training that teaches us how to tolerate the intolerable. Stretch, hydrate, regulate. Grounding yourself becomes a way to grind your self down, and still go to sleep grateful and wake up resilient. Invest in yourself.

Health and wellness talk can – intentionally or otherwise – position collapse as a failure of mindset. The body becomes a spreadsheet. The mind, a customer service desk. The soul, something you vow to get back to once you have sorted your sleep cycle. Several years ago, after a run of CBT sessions, I remember leaving my therapist’s office with the strange, exhilarating sense that I had finally hacked my own brain. A fix surely better than the numbing delectability of SSRIs, which offered not happiness so much as manageability, a smoothing of edges, a tolerable hum. None of this is a dismissal of therapy or medication. It’s an observation about the quiet promise threaded through so much contemporary care: that if the individual can just be calibrated correctly, the world will stop hurting so much.

But what if the pain is a necessary sign that something much larger than the self is wrong? As Anahid Nersessian shows in her essay on institutional psychotherapy, psychosis is shared, historical, structural – produced by conditions that make certain forms of life unbearable. Rather than returning the patient to ‘normality’, the goal here is to ask “what in the world is making you sick”.

Joycelyn Longdon’s exploration of palaver sharpens this further. Collective healing does not mean mass reassurance that leaves structures intact. It’s slow, uncomfortable and often conflictual. It requires naming harm publicly. It requires staying in conversations that do not resolve quickly. It requires recognising that some forms of pain are not meant to be eased, but acted upon.

This insistence on difficulty matters, because contemporary empathy feels strangely thin. We are encouraged to feel for one another without being asked to understand what produced the pain in the first place. We witness one another constantly, but while sympathy circulates, responsibility does not. Artificially intelligent chatbots have amplified this tendency towards performed compassion, providing a sudden, always-on emotional support for many. Alex Quicho explores this in ‘Refinement’, tracing how sycophancy, the machine’s people-pleasing tendency to flex its answers and affirm the user, turns simulated empathy into something hollow and at times dangerous: “a honeypot, drawing in confession and indecent exposure below the threshold of social visibility.”

Last year, The New York Times podcast The Daily ran an episode with the blunt title ‘She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex’. The framing was sensational, but the story itself was more banal and revealing. The chatbot didn’t replace human connection, it exposed what had been missing: attention, responsiveness, the feeling of being listened to without interruption. What looked like romance was really a diagnosis.

We didn’t fall in love with AI because it was intelligent. We fell in love because it was safe. The allure isn’t that the machine understands you, it’s that it never asks you to understand it. It can appear totally empathetic because it does not have a life to protect. It can be the therapist who never reschedules. The friend who never betrays. The writing partner who constantly praises. The lover who gives all and desires nothing. It sells the illusion of intimacy without risk. Closeness without consequence. ‘Love’ stripped of the possibility of refusal.

This is not new, but the inheritance of a much older desire for affective labour that is constantly available without even being present, meeting demands without being permitted to make any in return. Thomas Jefferson’s invention of the dumbwaiter is often cited as a story of efficiency, but its purpose was concealment: to allow food and objects to move through Monticello without the visible presence of the enslaved Black staff who made his domestic life possible. Optimisation, here, was already a technology of erasure: convenience and scale achieved by disguising the human interface, making care and effort appear automatic as opposed to contested, situated and profoundly unequal. Contemporary AI systems are portrayed as immaterial, frictionless, neutral. In reality, they depend on vast networks of hidden labour: cobalt mined under lethal conditions; data labelled by workers in outsourced offices and basement sweatshops; content moderated so interfaces can remain calm and pleasant. Intelligence appears at the surface. Human effort, and the dirt of production methods, is buried below.

David Lisbon breaks the sterile surface stretched over what we are shown, wading into the mess of the now. In his writing, slop is not just an internet condition but a material one: the world’s slow conversion into mulch, runoff, sediment, churn. The bog is where the fantasy of cleanliness collapses. We like our systems to look smooth and sealed, but – just like capital, borders, bodies, and data – they leak. The feed is just the newest swamp, a wetland of affect and debris where meaning decomposes and then recombines.

In his attentive reading of animals moving through the New York Times news cycle, Eliot Haworth shares this critical perception: meaning and care are never neutral. Animals appear as metaphors, as spectacle, as emotional modulation, carrying moods that do not belong to them. Consider China’s decision to recall its pandas from foreign zoos: seemingly logistical, this move also recalibrates soft power. The panda, long deployed as a symbol of innocence and goodwill, is calcified as a political instrument. The global rise of the right has recast belonging as something to be defended rather than shared. Xenophobia thrives on the sense that there is not enough attention, safety or stability to go round. In a world where borders harden as images and capital move freely, even softness becomes strategic.

Elsewhere in the issue, these questions sharpen into more intimate forms. Ebun Sodipo, in her piece on knowledge-sharing practices for trans healthcare, reminds us of the violence endured by communities who are abandoned by the state – and how easily we can be left to fend for ourselves when political will shifts, or when systems of care were never meant to hold us in the first place. Asa Seresin traces how the circulations of capital script intimacy as a contract, shaping what marriage and divorce can mean under financialised conditions of life. And Stephanie Wambugu, with wry precision, shows what it is to wring the self-help sphere dry without self-reflection and find care anyway, in forms that are unexpected and uncanny.

Together, these texts are a refusal to believe that individual adjustment can compensate for collective failure; a refusal to confuse reassurance with care; a refusal to accept that feeling better is the same as living differently. This Reader doesn’t ask you to become better. It asks you to stay human in public. To tolerate misunderstanding without needing to be the perfect listener. To reject the smoothness that turns other beings into resources and you into a project. So, I hope this finds you not necessarily well, but attentive. Slightly irritated. Less alone in the reality of our confusion. Willing to stay with questions that do not resolve quickly. Willing to imagine care not as comfort, but as responsibility.

– Hanna