Hi, I’m Sarah Wilson 🖐
And welcome to This is Precious. I’m a former journalist, a multi-New York Times bestselling author, activist and podcaster. You might like to follow it?
Moons ago I started the I Quit Sugar movement and did some seemingly incongruous stuff like host Masterchef Australia and edit Cosmopolitan magazine.
More recently I wrote the New York Times bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A new story about anxiety and This One Wild and Precious Life: A hopeful path forward in a fractured world which won the US Gold Nautilus Prize.
People tend to find it interesting that I lived on the road for 10 years living out of one bag and that I sold my I Quit Sugar business two years ago and gave the whole lot to charity. You can read a bit more detail on this here.
I live minimally, hike a hell of a lot, am a foster parent and currently live between Sydney and Paris.
In this newsletter I chat philosophy, art, pop culture, science and political goings-on….in an effort to get us all maximising - and saving - the one wild and precious life we have been granted 🌏 on this planet.
It goes out to 50,000 subscribers.
I also send out more intimate posts to a fast-growing membership community who pay a monthly contribution to be part of this meaningful online conversation. These posts are musings and video chats from my global roamings, often with creatives and wild minds I meet along the way, as well as Q’n’A sessions that get to the juicy granular of life. We - the paid membership community - meet in the comments section to have the kinds of mindful chats so many of us crave right now amid all the distracting noise, Chief Twit twaddle and existential loneliness. The conversation here is full of nuance, expansive ideas, lots of recommended reads and kind feedback. I reckon you’ll love it.
I also offer one-on-one virtual coffee meetings - where you can get my advice, input, and direction on whatever you like - to this community.
You can also find me over on Instagram.
The Book Serialisation project
You will notice I’m writing my next book here on Substack, publishing it each week, one chapter at a time. You will be able to read a preview of each. Go to the Table of Contents to get started if you want the full explainer of why I’m writing my book this way, here’s the explainer.
To take part in the whole experience, join in the community conversation we have after each post and to hear the audio version, you are welcome to become a paid subscriber.
One-on-one virtual sessions with me
I allocate a limited number of slots to the paid community to talk me through a project, or a challenge, to get my advice or direction on whatever topic you like.
A few previous posts to get the gist of things
My newsletters variously touch on the climate crisis, neoliberalism, fragmentation, new economic ideas and movements, pop-cultural Zeitgeisty stuff, mostly with a philosophical or perhaps spiritual spin…
💰 Like this explainer of degrowth economics and our current sadness (do you feel it too?) and this overview of how plastic is the new coal.
🦘I regularly write about sociological phenomenon, like Aussie anti-intellectualism.
🎯 Sometimes I’ll do a better-living hack rundown: How I pack for mega-minimal travel.
🧚🏻♀️ Plus some occasional clickbaity fodder, like this post about being targeted by gossip columnists for not owning a handbag. Dead. Serious.
As a rule, my aim is to start and continue conversations that explore how to live in a way that is wild, that reminds us of what matters and that enables us to cope with what is ahead.
On the back cover of This One Wild and Precious Life, I write:
“We fight to save what we love. We need to be in nature, to return to our true nature, to be held and awed by it, to love it wildly. So that we will fight for it.”
Do you have to pay?
Nope. As Seth Godin told me 12 years ago in an interview, “real artists give first”. I have always worked to this and trusted that “the rest follows”. Which means everyone gets my weekly rant.
But❣️If you are happy to pay the approximate price of an oversized coffee a fortnight, that would be nice and can be done by subscribing below.
Sarah xx
