Five years of the arun.is newsletter

Three years into writing this blog, I felt a void. You were visiting and reading. You were sharing my work on social media. Yet, I yearned for dialog. I didn’t want to only put out my thoughts into the world. I wanted to hear what you thought.

But, I avoided comments. As I previously wrote, given that comments are low-friction and public, they encourage low quality and performative reactions. I wanted meaningful connection.

That left an obvious choice, the email newsletter. I started sending it out just as the pandemic swept the world.

In the five years since, I only regret not starting earlier. Not only did I make new friends, and receive thoughtful responses to my ideas. I also found an outlet where the ethereal notions floating around my head could solidify into ideas.

Numbers

Since Summer 2020, I have published 79 issues, which is on average one every 24 days. Though the cadence was a bit quicker early on, I have settled into around one issue every month — a sustainable pace.

In that time, the subscriber list has grown from around two hundred in issue one to more than two thousand today, a number terrifying to visualize.

Subscriber growth over the years

Early on, I paid attention to that number, hoping it would increase. I assumed that the number had to go up for me to feel “successful”.

Now, with five years of newsletter-writing under my belt, I can’t believe how wrong I was. First of all, it costs me more money to have more subscribers. Second, going back to my original intent, what I’m looking for is meaningful connection, not more subscribers. I’m looking for the right people, my tribe, my friends. Whether that group could fit around a dinner table or in a stadium is beside the point.

One great feature of the newsletter subscriber count is that it usually doesn’t monotonically increase the way that social media subscriber counts do. With social networks, if someone doesn’t engage with someone’s content, the platform naturally stops suggesting it, but they remain a follower. In newslettering, if someone doesn’t like my content, they usually unsubscribe.

So, between issues, my subscriber count gradually increases. Then, when I send out an issue, there is a sudden drop. The subscriber list maintains itself, ensuring that all of you who are subscribed are only the ones who want to journey along with me.

Design

As I wrote my first blog post announcing the newsletter, I searched for something to put on the header. I ended up with a stamp featuring my logo. I put that stamp at the top of the first newsletter issue, feeling that the header needed more weight than a lone title could provide. When the second issue came along, I changed the stamp a bit, inadvertently creating the stamp motif that has, for me, become an essential aesthetic ingredient of each issue.

Over the years, the formula has narrowed to where the constraints are just right to encourage creativity. The stamp provides a tiny chance to flex my illustration skills or learn a new technique. It also provides a quick way to get started if the ideas in the newsletter leave me feeling stuck.

As for the rest of the design, it started barebones, a freeing feeling. Compared to the blog, the energy required to get started is lower.

Ideas

The newsletter has functioned as a mirror for my thoughts. By externalizing them, I can see their true shape. Just like the visual design of my newsletter has provided constraints, so has the format.

I experimented at the beginning, but soon gravitated towards a three part structure — updates from the blog, a small story or topic recently on my mind, and then recommendations. This structure works so well for me because it represents all of the ideas that rarely find themselves into the blog.

They are either too timely, short or hazy. These ideas don’t fit the longer, evergreen mold of a blog post. This format also means that I don’t have to spend time thinking about the structure of each issue the way I do with blog posts.

Mirrors

As I wrote this post, I looked back through every issue. I imagined I’d find a disjoint list of topics. Instead, I found a web of interconnected ideas. When these thoughts arise, this interconnection is invisible. They seem to spontaneously appear during runs, at work, and in the shower. It’s only by writing them down and now reading them, that I understand how it all connects.

First, are the tools and objects I chat about. There’s the tape measure I chatted about with Kevin Kelly on Cool Tools, to coffee implements that I featured in my piece about the sensory experience of making coffee.

Some issues were the first drafts of blog posts, my favorite being my issue about Leica’s engraved typefaces and my search for its origin. After that issue, I continued digging away, learning as much as I could about the topic, until years later, I published my recent blog post, which goes far deeper.

Quite a few issues are about design, from understanding quality to designing through subtraction. Others are a bit more personal, covering the creative process. There’s Don’t ship junk and Approach with curiosity.

Finally cover my ideas on how to live an intentional life such as Life’s a garden and Highly processed information.

Growth

Even more surprising than the connections between ideas is the noticeable change in the way I think. For example, on the topic of living intentionally, my early posts and later posts show how much I’ve improved, from improving how disciplined I am towards the things that matter, and how I now ruthlessly avoid distractions.

In issue 048 in late 2022, I could feel a problem — I was being buffeted by the winds of change.

“Is it just me, or does the world seem more chaotic now than ever before? The war in Ukraine rages on. Twitter has a new owner and I can’t begin to understand what is happening there. The crypto world has been hit with another blow in the FTX collapse. I recently found out that a friend has cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy.”

In issue 061 in early 2024, I began to understand that the problem is with overconsumption.

“There has been plenty of ink spilled about our scrolling addiction and how the modern world is bad for our brains. Ironically, though I’ve come across many articles on the subject, I never stopped to read, instead mindlessly scrolling to the next headline. Sometimes in the shower, I would tell myself that ‘I should get my consumption under control’. I would imagine sitting down to design a plan to win back my attention, but ultimately would do nothing.”

It wasn’t until issue 077 early this year, that I found a solution that works for me.

“What I didn’t realize was that my clarity in Japan wasn’t about vacation. It was about being cut off from my usual information diet.

After our trip, I felt more awful than I usually do. Work felt difficult, running felt difficult. Writing? Forget about it.

That’s when I made the prescient decision to try out Freedom, an app that blocks distractions. Instead of the usual way where one would start a ‘session’ to activate the blocker for a short duration, I turned it on all day every day.”

The act of writing my thoughts down forced me to confront them, and as a result, I began to change my actions to fit. Regular writing forced me to confront my attention issues.

Friends

In the end, this newsletter has not just facilitated the aforementioned discoveries and realizations, but has also succeeded in my original goal — connecting with you all. It’s in this realm that the biggest surprises have arisen.

Every issue has, on average, resulted in three to four responses, almost all written with care. Of these, quite a few have resulted in video calls or meetups in the real world. It’s this last bit that I never expected.

I guessed that the newsletter would result in online friendships. I didn’t know I would also get to see some of you in person.

Friendship is what I now understand to be the most valuable thing to be found as a result of my newsletter.

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Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.