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034 Newsletter, Sept 5, 2026

Sebastian Antony

• 7 min read
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034 Newsletter, Sept 5, 2026

The short version (TL;DR): I spent my first properly free week doing something nobody asked for - four to five hours a day building one long video on my own machine - and burned $25 of Google API credits doing it. The same week, the Guardian ran a piece about 27-year-olds leaving white-collar careers to become apprentice bookbinders, 728 of them chasing a single place at the National Theatre. I retired into the thing they're walking out for - and then an artist whose sketch I'd stopped to admire pointed out that I'd badly overestimated the entry fee.

Videos this week, so this one is better read in the browser — the embeds won't come through in email.

The costume parade

Somebody on YouTube called it a costume parade this week and I had to put the coffee down.

The video is titled I retired at 57, and it found me in the first stretch of mornings where the calendar was properly my own. His argument is that the suits and the titles and the rungs are a parade you march in, and the ticket price is the one thing that never comes back: your hours. He calls the corner office a golden cage. He's Gen X, latchkey, raised largely by himself between three-thirty and six — and he thinks that's precisely why so many of his generation are quietly stepping out of the parade rather than climbing further up it.

  • The costume parade (6:21–8:15). Status symbols as a uniform you rent, paid for in the only non-renewable asset you have.
  • The sandwich squeeze (8:15–9:12). Childcare on one side, eldercare on the other. For a lot of people that pressure is the thing that forces the re-think.
  • The internal citadel (12:43–15:43). Marcus Aurelius's phrase for the bit of you nobody gets to bill. Reclaiming it, he argues, is the real flex - not the promotion.

None of that was news to me exactly. But there's a difference between agreeing with an idea while you're still inside the parade and hearing it the week after you've left.

The book that was supposed to explain it

So the hours are mine now. Which raises the very obvious question of what to do with them.

Tim Ferriss (4 hour workweek fame) has been gushing about Awareness by Anthony de Mello - I got it on Kindle on the strength of it.

I'm a fair way in and it's underwhelming me. Not badly written, not wrong - just not landing. I think that's allowed. Each person's journey is different, and mine apparently doesn't run through this particular book, or at least not yet. Books have a habit of waiting.

I then came across a ten-minute video summarising de Mello's entire teaching, and got more out of that than out of the chapters I'd actually read. He was a Jesuit priest from India who spent his life on a single line:

most people are asleep, and they don't know it.

Four to five hours a day, on purpose

Every day this week I've spent at least four or five hours building a longer Minimax H3 video locally for the daily art challenge, heavily driven by Claude. Not a clip. A proper one - the sort where the world has to hold still between shots and the characters have to remain the same people from one scene to the next.

It is, by any sensible measure, a ridiculous way to spend a Tuesday.

All the imagery went through Google's NanoBanana over the API, and somehow this week I got through $25 in Google API credits doing it. Next week I'm switching to OpenArt, which I'm already paying for anyway, so I may as well use it - and I suspect it'll help with world consistency too, which is the part that keeps biting me.

I put it badly in an email this week and then realised it was the truest thing I'd written all month:

I'm doing full-length music videos precisely because they're difficult right now - expensive in time, expensive in the hardware they demand.

The difficulty is the whole point. It's what stops the result from being something anyone can produce before lunch.

I thought that was an idiosyncrasy. Then Friday's paper turned up.

Everyone else is doing it with glue and a foil press

Lauren Almeida's piece is about young Britons walking away from the screen entirely.

Now, I am aware of the irony sitting in the middle of this newsletter. Those apprentices are running away from the machine, and I'm running four-hour render jobs on mine. But I don't think the article is really about wood and thread. It's about the satisfaction of having spent your hours on something that resisted you - and on that, a 27-year-old with a foil-blocking press in Shropshire and a 65-year-old with a GPU in Florida are, I'd argue, in the same trade.

The entry fee is five minutes

Then it stopped being an argument in a newspaper and turned into a person.

Brian W. Sykes - who is somewhere in the middle of a three-year drive around America with his wife, looking for the one place they'll finally settle - posted a sketch he made on the way out of Knoxville. A derelict building at the Botanical Gardens with an old truck parked out front, ink lines first, watercolour washed over the top. He does them with a few Micron pens, a small palette and Pentel water-filled brushes, and the whole kit fits in a bag. That's deliberate. It has to survive car trips and plane rides.

The old truck against the raised beds is, he says, Knoxville itself: holding on to what's past while something new grows around it.

But the line I keep going back to is the one about the sketch itself. Is it perfect? No - and he's fine with that, because it's as complete as he's going to take it.

Knowing when you've reached a level of complete you can be satisfied with is, he says, something he's still learning at almost 52.

I left a comment saying bravo, and admitted that I haven't touched ink and watercolour in over four decades — not since architecture college.

He replied, and he did not let me off:

No time like the present Sebastian!

Five minutes a day. After a week, make it ten. Before the month is out, he reckons the hand-eye comes back, you get used to what your own line looks like, and you have enough confidence to keep going. Worst case, he says, you've spent a month doing something you used to enjoy and found a way to shed some stress.

The bit I wasn't watching

While all that was going on, something I'd forgotten about was quietly working.

I finally looked at Google Analytics for the site and got a complete surprise. My most-visited page isn't an essay. It isn't a newsletter. It's the Ghibli ASMR videos page - several hundred views, most of them from Singapore, nearly all arriving through Google search. People I have never met, in a country I have never lived in, quietly finding a page I made because I felt like making it.

So I made another one for one of the daily art challenges, partly to see whether the same door opens twice.

Three-minute Studio Ghibli-style music video
The short version (TL;DR): three-minute Studio Ghibli-style music video called “Acorns Are Made From” was made in a single morning - five hours, one person, a handful of AI tools and almost none of those five hours went where you would expect. This is how it was really
Sebastian AntonySebastian Antony

( Which is, I notice, the precise opposite of everything above ☹️ The Ludlow bookbinders are not binding books for the search traffic. )

Have a look and tell me if it lands - and if you've got a slow pastime thing of your own, I'd genuinely like to hear what it is. Reply to this and I'll read every one.

The End

I left the parade to get the hours back, and then spent the first free ones on something slow, expensive and entirely unasked for.

Somebody in Singapore found the last one anyway, months later, while I wasn't looking.

And a man with three pens and a pocket palette tells me the entry fee was never the afternoon.

You don't get to pick which of your hours pay off. You only get to pick the ones you'd spend again — and it turns out you can start with five of them.

Sources