Doctor's orders. I'm on medical leave

Why ASOMC is hibernating for a few months

You might have noticed that I haven’t produced any new pieces for a while. That’s because I been suffering from severe burnout after the completion of my book, Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets.

For those of you who haven’t experienced it, a state of severe burnout is a lot more intense that a state of mere exhaustion. It’s more akin to a full system breakdown, and comes accompanied by existential terror, scenes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and many other hardcore things that I won’t go into here. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me - my first encounter with severe burnout was actually in 2016 (and resulted in me hiding in a friend’s basement in Portland, Oregon, for 10 days) - but this has been the most serious episode I’ve ever had. For any of you who feel that you may be on the edge of burnout, please take care of yourself. It’s not something to be taken lightly.

I want to thank you all so much for signing up to this newsletter, and I wish to assure you that I will be returning with more pieces, but I need to take it easy for a few months while I prepare for the release of Cloudmoney in late May (and July in the USA).

I paused payments for paying subscribers back in December, and those remain on pause, which means if you’re a subscriber you will not be charged for anything until I unpause (also, if you’re an annual subscriber, the length of the pause is added to your subscription, so you don’t lose out). I will only unpause the paid newsletter once I have built up new material.

In the next couple months I may still release a couple free pieces if I feel up to it, but for now the newsletter is in a state of restful, and hopefully regenerative, hiatus. In the mean time, I’d encourage you to read the ASOMC back-catalog, if you haven’t already. I produced a guide to my top 10 pieces here.

Of course, I’d also like to encourage you to pre-order Cloudmoney! It’s received great endorsements from Yanis Varoufakis, Kate Raworth, Stephanie Kelton, Grace Blakeley, Lionel Barber, Nicholas Shaxson, Jason Hickel, Sarah Jaffe, Raj Patel and Ann Pettifor. If you’re in the UK or a commonwealth country, you can pre-order from Penguin here, and if you’re US or Canada-based you can pre-order from HarperCollins here. It will also be coming out in Dutch and German later in the year, and in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean and Russian in due course.

See you soon.

Brett