the urge to feel elsewhere

      This is an excerpt from the Substack of The Archivists, along with Stephanie Valente. You can read the full post at their site, here.

      Modern life has become compressed. Our days are siloed with density where the hours are filled with performance and surveillance. Our notifications stack. The objects accumulate. Content and communication proliferate. It’s a world where every desire is immediately answerable, every pause quickly filled. Under these conditions, the idea of escape begins to feel exhausting in itself.

      Which means…

      …what if we could let go at any time?

      …what if escape didn’t require distance?

      …what if it wasn’t dependent on scale?

      Tiny escapes (aka, moments of deliberate elsewhere) are refusals of spectacle and the myth of optimization. Tiny escapes refute the belief that relief must be earned through effort, expense or reinvention.

      They operate quietly and because of that, they’re easy to overlook.

      In a culture that equates meaning with magnitude, smallness can feel insufficient. We’re encouraged to think bigger, do more, maximize the return. After all, go big or go home, right? Even rest is treated as something to optimize: it’s tracked, packaged, perfected with supplements, apps and TikTok playlists.

      Tiny escapes resist this logic because they don’t promise transformation nor do they carry a sense of “scalability.” Instead, they create pockets of interior space in moments that belong entirely to the person experiencing them. A museum visit taken alone. A walk without documentation. A book opened mid-afternoon, without guilt. Listening to a vinyl record by yourself.

      The relief they offer isn’t spectacular, but it’s real and it accumulates. …

      Walter Benjamin wrote about the flâneur, the figure who wanders not to arrive, but to notice. Susan Sontag argued that experience deepens when we allow it to remain partially uninterpreted. Even the Romantics believed that intensity of perception mattered more than novelty of circumstance.

      Tiny escapes belong to this lineage. They don’t remove you from your life, instead they tilt your relationship to it.

      Elsewhere can become a bench in a quiet room. Or a café you enter without an agenda. Perhaps it’s a page you read slowly, even though you could read faster.

      [So] enter a space without an intention or expectation. Let one afternoon be unproductive. Walk with no destination in mind, only duration. Treat a recurring place as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Think of these moments as softening your relationship with reality, or rebuilding it.