Monthly roundup: burnout, tasteslop, and the death of spontaneity

June was a big month for Your Brain on Money. I wrote four essays, got quoted in a few places, hosted a video about America’s population crisis, and traveled all over, from France to Amsterdam to Denver for a wedding. I also took a step back from some of my work and re-committed to focusing on content in the next few months (both my newsletter and on social media).

Part of this commitment is a monthly roundup of everything I wrote, everywhere I showed up, some older pieces worth revisiting, and whatever I’m reading, watching, and listening to. Let’s go.

What I wrote this month

The American Dream is to leave

I wrote about what we’re actually romanticizing when we romanticize walkable cities and café culture (spoiler: a functioning safety net), and about the summer I spent in Amsterdam convinced that moving abroad would fix my personality. It did not!

Is spontaneity a luxury good?

I live in a neighborhood where people routinely wait in line for two hours on a Saturday morning for frozen yogurt, and it annoyed me enough to write about it! This one is about line culture, algorithmic curation, the death of wandering, and why we’ve let TikTok decide where we eat.

Can you buy taste?

I wrote about tasteslop, the algorithmic content that looks like taste but feels hollow, and why not knowing what you actually like is one of the most expensive problems you can have. If you’ve ever bought something because your feed told you to and then couldn’t explain why, this one’s for you!

The burnout economy & my quest for a good night’s sleep

This started as a piece about the sleep industrial complex and turned into a reckoning with my own relationship to work and productivity. Also features the phrase “morning sheds,” which refers to people waking up and removing the masks, wraps, patches, chin straps, and pieces of tape they applied before bed. We have made rest very complicated.

Where I showed up

🎥 Dynamo: Why America’s Population Crisis Could Be the World’s Worst

I hosted a video for Dynamo about what happens when America stops growing. Three forces — falling birth rates, a shutdown of immigration, and a rising wave of Americans leaving the country — are reshaping everything from housing to retirement.

🎙️ The Time Freedom Podcast
I sat down with my friend Brian to talk about how twenty-somethings think about financial freedom, why rest is productive (something I clearly need to hear myself say more often), and why the “savings mountain” can actually paralyze people into doing nothing. We also got into comparison culture and how much of what you see on social media is aspirational marketing — or just straight-up fake.

📰 HuffPost: The Taylor Swift wedding prediction market piece
I was quoted calling the pregnancy bets “super gross,” because they are! The piece is about what happens when prediction markets stop being about elections and start being about someone’s intimate life decisions.

📰 Quartz: AI and white-collar America’s nervous breakdown
Quartz ran a long piece about the anxiety AI is causing among white-collar workers, and included some of my musings about the middle class — specifically the part about how people earning $50K–$100K are watching the things that middle-class life used to include just … slip away.

From the archive

If you’re newer here (hi, welcome, I’m glad you’re here), there’s a whole back catalog of essays about money psychology that I think are worth your time.

It’s your brain’s fault
The five cognitive biases that are probably costing you money — present bias, anchoring, loss aversion, overconfidence, and the sunk cost fallacy — and why knowing about them is the first step to not falling for them.

Why are we so bad with money?
Why do we struggle so much with money when we know, intellectually, what we’re supposed to do? It comes down to childhood, emotion, shame, and a culture that ties your net worth to your self-worth.

Broke, burned out, and anxious: Our money & our mental health
Money and mental health are a flywheel — each makes the other worse. This essay digs into the research on how financial stress leads to depression, addiction, and suicidal thoughts, and why the shame and silence around debt often does more damage than the debt itself.

Life lately

Traveling. I spent the Fourth of July in Pennsylvania shooting off fireworks and eating pulled pork and mac and cheese. I’m going to the Hamptons next weekend (my first time in … 5 years?) and down to visit my parents in August.

Reading. I’m currently juggling three books, which is either ambitious or a sign that I can’t commit to anything. Pale Fire by Nabokov (chaotic, obsessive, confusing, incredible), A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (devastating — I keep having to put it down and stare at a wall), and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (epic Irish family drama).

Watching. The World Cup. I have no real allegiances so I’m just rooting for underdogs and chaos, which is frankly the most fun way to watch any sporting event.

Listening. Is it a Michael Cera summer??? I think it might be a Michael Cera summer.

Thanks for being here, thanks for reading, thanks for telling your friends. If you’re not subscribed yet — this newsletter is free and lands in your inbox every Wednesday. And if you want access to the full archive (including the essays above), you can become a paid subscriber below.

See you next week.

Hanna