Capsule #98 ft. Preen

Hello!

This week’s issue is all about advice: from Jemima Kirke’s iconic AMAs, to advice columns, and what our response to them tells us about ourselves.

As ever, there’s also a round up of the news you may have missed this week, recs for your weekend ahead, and a Hot & Not from the band Preen.

Hope you enjoy! And have a great weekend ahead,

Holly x

At the start of this week, a specific cohort of women (aged 25-35 depending on whether they watched Girls the first time around or the second, have some sort of ongoing psychological issues, like collecting trinkets) received their quarterly internet treat: a new Jemima Kirke AMA. Her ad-hoc Instagram office hours gained cult status a couple of years ago, after one specific answer went viral (and has been recirculated weekly ever since). The questioner asks what advice Jemima would give to young women, and she answers: “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

I have genuinely found this piece of advice to be useful, and have offered it up when friends share their stories and struggles. There is a nice way of saying you’ve had too much time to think about this, and I’m always struck by the University of Liverpool study that found that people who ruminate on bad things “remember more negative things that happened to them in the past, they interpret situations in their current lives more negatively, and they are more hopeless about the future.” Noted!

Back to this week’s AMA. There was one piece of advice I immediately screenshotted, of someone asking what they should do with their 20s. You assume the person is at the beginning of the decade, although it’s a question we ask ourselves over and over again, even when we’re nearing 30. (And then it starts again when you crossover the threshold into the next era.)

Jemima’s words are worth paying attention to. “Stop asking people what you should do,” she says “they have no idea and you weren’t gonna do it anyway.” This is of course true, but it can take a long time to actually enact the behaviour. I remember a period in my life (very much in the early to middle of my twenties) where I sought advice a lot. I always asked people “what would you do if you were me” (an impossible question) and felt much more confident with decision making when it came affirmed with votes of confidence from people I trusted. The catch-22 of this situation is that, despite reaching some conclusions I felt pleased with (read: approved by others) at the time, I was not at my happiest during that period. Pretty far from it. Regularly seeking advice was a byproduct of not feeling confident in myself, suppressing certain needs and opinions, and being afraid of genuinely enacting things I was feeling. It’s an obvious point but an important one: inviting multiple viewpoints into a situation makes it much harder to decipher what you actually feel, and value.

Jemima continues onto a second slide: “Your biggest regrets will be the things you did to please or be like others.” This is kind of the whole crux of being in your twenties; you’re free to become your own adult but how you figure that out comes with a lot of trying on other people’s interests, values, and general ways of seeing the world for size. That’s not a bad thing, it’s great to be exposed to new experiences, but there will be some kind of innate feeling you get in response that’s worth paying attention to, even if you don’t act on it right away.

I’ve been thinking about asking for advice and the content surrounding it a lot lately. I’m 28, and most of my friends are in that 28-30 bracket, the time when people begin to diverge a little after coalescing as a group for the best part of a decade. Some people move away, others move in together, some people decide a career path isn’t all that, others double down into work. I have one friend cycling around the world on his own on a literal pedal bike. This age! It is tempting to watch other people do something and immediately wonder whether you should be doing that yourself. Maybe you should! But tuning into your own (forgive me) soul is, as Jemima would argue, something you owe to yourself.

Yet despite knowing that we’re all different and that there’s no real blueprint for living, I’m an avid consumer of advice content. Dolly Alderton’s Dear Dolly for the Sunday Times. Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly Substack. Haley Nahman’s Dear Danny podcast. The dilemma segment of If I Speak. Help Me Hera, Hera Lindsay Bird’s advice column for The Spinoff. Countless Reddit threads. I used to take a real sense of comfort from consuming this sort of content, especially from Dolly Alderton and Heather Havrilesky. It felt extremely valuable to hear from an older woman who had been there before (or had close friends who had), their words providing a script for scenarios that might happen to me in the future. I’d store quotes in my head for a rainy day, and share relevant articles with friends who were facing similar issues.

But fast forward a few years later, and my response is a little different. Advice columns and podcasts are still a recurring chunk of my media diet, which I enjoy, but my response to the answers often varies. There is a lot I agree with and feel enlightened by. Yet I have noticed myself disagreeing more - not aggressively, but with nuanced little additions on why I might see something differently or choose to tread with caution. Advice content for example often leans towards encouraging people to “have a proper conversation,” but I think there are some circumstances where talking around in circles doesn’t do masses. Discovering this newfound ability to disagree, even with people I respect or admire, has brought with it a sense of feeling grounded. It’s proof that I can think for myself, something that did not feel so easy even just a few years ago.

I think this is also close to what Lorde is talking about on her new single, ‘What Was That’:

Lorde is talking about leaving a long-term relationship and coming up for air, like wtf just happened. Of course she is also 28, this ripe age for realisation, and I hope the rest of her new album brings with it all the learnings. If Solar Power’s single ‘Mood Ring’ says “I can’t feel a thing / I keep lookin’ at my mood ring / Tell me how I’m feelin,’“ I’m excited for the new album to realise what was inside all along.

The one advice snippet I do return to again and again, is similar to Jemima Kirke’s quote in that it asks you to think for yourself. I’ve shared it here in Capsule before; I’m sure I’ll keep sharing it for as long as I am writing. Presented to us from author Cory Muscara after spending six months with a Buddhist monk, byway of Haley Nahman’s newsletter:

For anyone wondering how to spend their 20s (or 30s or 40s or 50s), I think this is a good companion to Jemima’s advice. As she warns, the things you do to be like or please others are surely expressions of the ego, and those still, desires of the soul, are locked inside you, just waiting to be listened to.

📧 Share your thoughts by hitting reply.

And finally…

• The best look of the week

• For some it’s breakup season, for others it’s hard launch season (Kylie & Timmy, Gigi & Bradley)

• Pray for the stylists: Cannes Film Festival banned naked dresses, voluminous gowns, and dramatic trains a day before the event began. One victim…

• Conner Ives won the British Fashion Council x Vogue Designer Fashion Fund award

• Vinted is officially the biggest clothing retailer in this country

• Jade finally announced her debut album

• Another brand using groceries to sell luxury!

• Bella Hadid looking like a London girl in her TNs

• What a good advert 🥲

• This woman is a class act

• High School Musical lives on

• And the next iteration of Brat is…a Magnum

This week, Preen popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Preen are a band formed in London. Three voices together in harmony – those of Robin Finetto, David Lawton and Evie Tarr – form Preen's sound, not only in recordings and live shows but also at the heart of their songwriting process. The band live together with a borrowed piano in London, bonded by writing songs fuelled by Diet Cokes.

📺 Watching: Dying for Sex on Disney+, Emma Chamberlain’s Met Gala vlog (the last six minutes are particularly cool to see for those of us who watch it all unfold on Instagram), Katie Gavin’s tiny desk, and the ‘party 4 u’ video, here five years after How I’m Feeling Now was released.

📖 Reading: The Lorde profile for Rolling Stone (it’s behind a paywall but so worth it… but I have pulled some great quotes for you in the post below), and this Refinery29 article about sunscreen anxiety, which I contributed to after my SPF anxiety Capsule essay a few weeks ago!

🎧 Listening to: Fancy That, the new PinkPantheress album (worth it just to spot all the samples), Sincerely, the new Kali Uchis album, and ‘History,’ the new Aminé song with Waxahatchee.

Todd wants to know if you’re ready for the next big trainer trend: football boots (or “soccer cleats” in the US). The Instagram account @style.analytics did some analysis after spotting that the #bootsonlysummer hashtag was on the rise…

If you’d like to adopt Todd or one of his friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺

See you next week 💋

In some of the products we recommend, we may earn a small affiliate commission. We only ever recommend things we genuinely like and would buy, and this small revenue driver goes directly towards keeping Capsule going. Thank you for the support. 🫶