> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.andrewboardman.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Keeping Up, with Everything - URL: https://www.andrewboardman.com/newsletter/keeping-up-with-everything/ - Published: 2026-10-19T15:35:39.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-19T15:38:10.000Z - Description: On re-enchantment and being open to your own capacity - Author: Andrew Boardman - Tags: Newsletter Dear Designer, I’m finding that news and technology are becoming impossibly difficult to resolve in real time. We are meant to get excited about Elon Musk’s new “flying” car. We get exercised about agentic tools that carry out our daily tasks. We are horrified that the political behaviours of our leaders are outpacing the practical needs of their constituents. We await re-elections, referendums, and results. Meanwhile, we are asked to maintain altitude ethically and spiritually while these same leaders have eschewed their own personal responsibility to maximize profit and power. We find it hard to know what is real. We are expected to be okay with all of this — the loss of our present, our privacy, our capacity to think, our own energy — and remain compatible and restful. As designers, we lie in wait. The cycle accelerates but our bodies and our lives hold fast. Will one of the many platforms that we use change entirely next month? Might it or we slip into oblivion? How will a new device change our default approach? What do smaller teams mean for our craft? Where do we look for *real* inspiration, not infected by algorithms and treacle? Marshall McLuhan, the earliest of media theorists, believed that the message that a particular technology sends to us is more powerful than the content sent through that same technology. His well-known “medium is the message” argues that, while we mostly focus on the literal content of technological expression (stories and images), the real message of communications technology is how it changes us. A modest example is the modern television, which provides nightly news about new and terrible violence here and overseas. While we are taken by the coverage, the *message* is that we allow war, hurt and despair into our kitchens while doing nothing more than continuing to eat dinner. The meaning — that we may not be ignorant of others’ suffering, but we are mute in its face — is harder to digest. Is there a “healthy” attitude to receiving the news, paying attention, being a responsible person, and recognizing one’s ties to the technology that is changing us in subtle and unsubtle ways? Is there a mode of being, a way to act that is in concert with being in community and of the world? I don’t think that the commonplace of “moving to the country and living off the grid and off the land” is right – even though McLuhan may have coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out." I also don’t think it’s about going on a “news diet” and suffering through the act of being less informed or simply working less. While I’ve certainly found myself happier when I’m away from the news cycle and from technology’s grip, as McLuhan would note, I remain fully embedded in the spectacle of it all. To work today means to take part in and, as a designer, be part of the proliferation of technology. So is there an answer? I am writing this on a train heading to Toronto, where McLuhan wrote and taught most of his life. I think the answer for me, and maybe for other designers, is to learn to become re-enchanted with the real and to be open to your own capacity. How do you become re-enchanted with that which is physical? To live and work as a designer today is to engage not just with technology and those with whom you work but to pay closer and closer attention to what makes the world wonderful. Can you recognize your uncommon and true contribution as the human in the loop? Can you orient towards space, the realm(s) around you, instead of time? How do you stay open to your own capacity? By recognizing that the stories you tell yourself about what you can and cannot do may, in fact, be the stories of the technology you unconsciously uphold. Can you colour outside the lines? Do you need the systems that are in front of you — or is everything open? Yours truly, ![andrew's signature in pencil](https://www.andrewboardman.com/content/images/2026/10/ab-sign-2-1.png) Before you jet I'm taking on [new coaching clients](https://www.andrewboardman.com/coaching/#investment). If you want support in recognizing your own self-worth, colouring outside the lines, and setting new goals, please reach out to me. Also, I'll be at Design Thinkers in Toronto this week. If you're heading there, hit reply. I'd love to see you.