Aug 20

Aug 20 Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit

Author: Julio Vincent Gambuto
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

When the pandemic essentially brought the world to a standstill, author Julio Gambuto came to understand a powerful in the pre-pandemic world, Americans were exhausted, lonely, unhappy, wildly overworked and overbooked, drowning in sea of constantly being on the go and needing to buy more, more, more. But when that pressure disappeared, people rediscovered what was important to them. They quit jobs that made them unhappy and moved their families to suburbs. Simple things like outdoor walks replaced gym memberships; home cooking and backyard gardens replaced takeout; less commuting meant more time for family and creative projects; and for perhaps the first time in a long time, people were being honest . Honest about what they wanted, what they believed in. Honest about the problems they were facing within their families, friend groups, workplaces, towns, and society overall.

That honesty, he noticed, had the potential to make the ground shift. It created a capacity for change. But he also knew that it likely wouldn’t last, because the most powerful forces running our world would not allow it to. They wanted control over our clicks, our conversations, our dollars, our work, our votes—our lives . The only way that we could beat those systems, would be to resist the calls to keep moving, and to “go back to normal.” In order to change, we had to unsubscribe.

Now, in Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!, Gambuto gives us a radical blueprint for the ways we can take a deep breath, renew and commit to a life that we really want, individually and collectively, from unsubscribing to emails and automated subscriptions to reevaluating the presence of people and ideas and habits that no longer serve us or make us happy. Infused with the practical advice in James Clear’s Atomic Habits and the humor of Sarah Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k , Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! helps us focus on where we find joy in our lives and encourages us to toss out what doesn’t bring us joy in this modern world.

TL;DR Review

Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! is full of useful, actionable tips plus astute economic and cultural commentary — and it’s very funny! Highly recommend it as a way to find your post-COVID normal.

For you if: You feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day.

Full Review

Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! came to me just when I needed it. I’d been feeling overextended, mostly thanks to my own drive and desire. I knew I needed to do something about it, but I just couldn’t see myself cutting back on any of the things on my plate.

Julio Gambuto is a filmmaker who wrote a viral essay called “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting” at the start of the pandemic. He looked around, saw that things didn’t fully need to go back to the way they were before, and called BS on the hypercapitalist high-speed treadmill that was about to start back up again. He unsubscribed from everything — and I mean everything: emails, paid subscriptions, airline memberships, toxic relationships, assumptions about himself and his life. Then he added back the things that actually made him happy, a little at a time. In this book, he gives advice about how we can do the same.

I appreciated that he recognized that his nuclear option wasn’t going to be for everyone and offered levels of “unsubscribing” that might be right for each of us. I personally unsubscribed from a TON of email lists and newsletters and reexamined a few of those self-driven “subscriptions” that were making me feel overextended. And it absolutely took the edge off, the way I’d been hoping.

But that’s not the only meat of this book. Gambuto’s research and explanation of the economic and sociopolitical forces that have gotten us onto this treadmill (on purpose) is astute and deeply thought-provoking. This is the part that’s going to stick with me the most, for sure. Plus, it’s EXTREMELY funny (the audio read by the author was great!).

This is a quick read, and I recommend it. We’re all looking for the post-COVID normal that feels right for us. Let Gambuto show you what worked for him, because some (or all) of it might work for you, too.