To Your Health
Deep Read #31 with Doing Well's Daphne Javitch
I wanted to speak with today’s Deep Read guest Daphne Javitch because I find her health advice - delivered under the handle Doing Well, which is also the name of her coaching practice - to be realistic, self-aware, and refreshing. So much of the wellness space feels like Capitalism-in-a-matcha-coloured-package; a way of touting products to address the myriad health issues we’re encouraged to believe are the result of our own ‘bad’ habits, rather than the inevitable byproduct of a deeply broken system. Daphne gets this, and you can feel it in her philosophy and protocols. At a time of year when many of us seek a return to equilibrium after an indulgent festive period, a health-focused episode seemed like a fresh and fun way to kickstart the year.
2025 had other plans. Since Daphne and I spoke just before Christmas, ferocious wildfires have ravaged vast swathes of Los Angeles where she lives with her husband and two sons. Thankfully Daphne and her family remain safe, but her children’s school has burnt down and many thousands of people have lost everything. This, we are hearing, is an unprecedented natural disaster, but it feels like the kind of devastating aberration we’ve almost come to expect from this epoch of chaos. During our interview, I asked Daphne: “Is anyone really ‘doing well’ right now?” Even for those blessed with good physical health and some semblance of personal stability, it’s hard to imagine anyone immune to the immense psychic weight of our times.
I firmly believe that one of the true callings of our era is cultivating vitality, joy, and optimism for the future, despite a news cycle that could make the sunniest disposition spiral. I hope you’re doing what you need to protect your peace in these fragile first days of the year. We’re going to need to keep our strength up.
Thank you for reading,
Phoebe
LA Fire Donation Links
A few places you can donate from afar, should you be in a position to do so.
DAPHNE JAVITCH DEEP READING LIST
Daphne’s Picks
“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, Yvon Chouinard
“But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.”
Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work, Mason Currey
Further Reading
“I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes–not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected–a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance.”