59: I Miss Being Bored

as well as the recommendations

In this week’s edition, I’ve got the weekly recommendations as well as a mini-essay about being nostalgic for boredom BUT FIRST…

---

💡Group Chat💡

If you missed last week’s group chat, make sure to check it out as we discussed the best piece of advice or quote we’d ever heard.

Some REAL bangers of wisdom in the comments if you are in need of some inspiration.

---

🎉 The Recommendations 🎉

---

🍿 Sinners

WHERE: The movie theatre

I was a season tickets holder for Ryan Coogler and MBJ even before this movie and INTENSELY SO now that I’ve seen it. Sinners is an incredible, virtuosic cinematic experience about shame, justice, and what happens when your past gets a vote in your present.

And because it’s Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, the story doesn’t just unfold; it rolls around purposefully before complete and utter detonation.

You get morally compromised protagonists, righteous anger, and the kind of cinematography that makes you want to rewatch it just to see what choices were made and why.

Michael B. Jordan is, as always, incredible, but low-key, Hailee Steinfeld and Jack O’Connell were tremendous, as was all the music. I know the musicality might not work for everyone, but it very much did for me.

---

---

📚 Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein

WHERE: Amazon / Audible

This book is part economic manifesto, part philosophical pep talk, and part group therapy for everyone who feels like society is stuck in a loop of “we could fix this but we won’t.”

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein make the case for why things like housing, clean energy, and healthcare could actually be… abundant. Not scarce. Not exclusive. But common, accessible, and, dare I say it, normal. It’s optimistic but grounded. Visionary without feeling like someone’s trying to sell you solar panels out of a trunk.

---

📺 Rogue Heroes

WHERE: MGM+ via Amazon

If Peaky Blinders went camping with a crate of explosives and a bloodlust for Nazis, you’d get Rogue Heroes. It’s loud, chaotic, and 100% certified historical fiction.

Created by Steven Knight (yes, the same guy who made Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby iconic), Rogue Heroes is a war drama about the formation of the SAS but somehow manages to feel like it’s scored by Rage Against the Machine and styled by vintage GQ.

It’s the kind of show that’s technically based on real events but also feels like it dares you to google it.

This show is entirely about my adulation for Jack O’Connell, who plays Paddy Mayne, an insane Irishman with a thirst for blood and the heart of a poet.

---

---

✍️ Essay: I Miss Being Bored

---

I miss being bored.

I was reminded of this last week at my youngest daughter’s school, where an event took place in which all the kids in her class dressed up and presented themselves as famous people in the world. She’d chosen Kate Middleton, so Ashley and I were there to hear her execute on what had been months of hard work. She even committed to a full British accent, which she absolutely nailed, though, yes, it did lean a little cockney at times. Like, “Kate Middleton, but she moonlights as a chimney sweep” levels of commitment.

After listening to our daughter’s performance, I was ready to go, but it was then that I realized not only would I not be going, but I would also have to listen to 19 other presentations from children who were not mine. Meaning presentations, I was not paternally, emotionally, or intellectually interested in.

All the kids did a wonderful job. Truly. But that was the most vivid head-on collision with boredom I’ve had since the three different times I tried to make it through The Irishman.

It reminded me of the profound boredom that can be a state of being in the summer as a kid. The kind that stretches across an afternoon like a heatwave and makes you wonder what the ants are up to or what the deal was with those wavy mirage lines hovering above the asphalt.