things I never regret

leaning into joy in a world of pain. plus: a good essay about genes and jeans, sale picks from END, and canned specialty coffee finally comes to London.

Aug 03, 2025

Good morning, and welcome to clipboard, a weekly newsletter (except for last week) about doing your best. This week: what I’m trying to bias my life towards when the world is crumbling around. As always, if you enjoy clipboard, send it to a friend! Hitting forward on this email is so easy but it means so much.

you never regret a swim

The news at the moment feels like it is uniformly bad. In some ways, it’s felt like that for five years, but 2025 seems to be a uniquely twisted outcome of the centuries of colonialism, capitalism and conflict that the human race has engaged in. Modernity has indeed failed us!

This is not a news newsletter, but the onslaught of bad news has been seeping into my ability to think of nice lifestyle-related things to write about, and to maintain any level of optimism about the world we are still, despite it all, incredibly lucky to exist in. $11 butter in dairy-farming Aotearoa, famine in Gaza, Nazi notifications on Substack, they get in the way of living one’s life and pushing towards more good things.

In times like these, I find myself racking my brain for activities that calm my mind or make me more awake to the good things going on, to recharge in order to do things that make the world a bit better.

In our last NZ summer, I had a motto that “you never regret a swim,” which is an eternal truth (and prompted a whole different piece of this newsletter a few weeks ago), but is also a feeling that can be attached to any number of activities.

Things that you never regret, that give you a consistent, reliable dopamine hit without any guilt. No hangover, no financial regret, no stress that you’ve made yourself look an idiot in public or wasted time that could be spent “productively”. Just good, wholesome pleasure. Here are a few things that do that for me.

I never regret:

A swim (obviously)
Reading a book for an afternoon
Going for a walk in the park
Drinking a fancy coffee
Watching a movie at the cinema
Buying a new type of fizzy drink at a fancy grocery store
Listening to an album front to back

clips

👖 The internet lost its mind this week about what at first glance appeared to be a pretty lazily written ad for ugly jeans featuring a celebrity that people refuse to be normal about. Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic has a fantastic piece about what it says about our collective psychosis that everyone on all sides of the political/discourse system lost their minds about it. My favourite insight is that the online discourse isn’t discourse at all, because everyone is broadcasting 1:many rather than connecting directly with anyone at all.

🧢 au Concours, the best brand that you can’t really buy (yet), has dropped two very good hats. Christopher, the man behind the brand, has been wearing his beige sample around for a while and it is simply a really good cap, which like everything he makes is designed to get much better with age. The white one has the same quality as white painter pants to me, where the point is to get it dirty, bleach it and go again.

🗞️ If you want to read something smart and funny about the news that won’t make you feel like you are the only person who recognises that everything is crazy all the time, I can’t recommend Today on Tabs enough. Previously a daily newsletter, I very much enjoy the new weekly cadence so that I can balance out the onslaught.

🐓 One of my favourite friends and thinkers, Kate McLeod, has recently relocated to Scotland and has after a number of conversations finally started a newsletter on Substack chronicling the journey. It’s called 0800chook and only has one dispatch so far, but I promise it will be one of the best things you get in your inbox when you sign up.

☕ My favourite London coffee shop, Running Late in London Fields, has started selling canned filter coffee out of a vending machine next door to the cafe. Canned coffee is an area that the London coffee scene lags behind New Zealand (primarily because of New Ground, perhaps Aotearoa’s best undersung innovation story), so I’m hoping to see this catch on elsewhere. I have a can in the fridge ready for an early tennis court booking tomorrow, so stay tuned!

💰 It is one of those times where the fashion calendar is completely out of whack with the real calendar, meaning that summer collections are on sale even though there is still quite a bit of summer to go. This is a great opportunity to buy stuff you couldn’t afford, especially from retailers whose audience have bad taste. Case in point, some picks from the END sale: good shirts from Kartik Research, mfpen and Orslow; Our Legacy Camion Mules; a lime ice cream coloured cardi from Auralee, and the Timex x New Yorker watch I didn’t realise existed.

That’s all for clipboard this week, thanks for reading! If you enjoy clipboard, forward this email to the friend of yours who somehow has a screen time of 2 hours and has a healthy brain. I’ll be back in your inbox next week, preparing for a trip to Paris that will (fingers crossed) go ahead, this time! In the meantime, get in touch in the comments or send me an email, and go do something you won’t regret. Or something you will! There’s a place for that, too.