PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE, THANKS!

Atomic Habits meets The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k in a life-changing guide to freeing yourself from the automated behaviors, values, and relationships that keep you from being happy.

In 2020, Julio Gambuto was like many Americans: home, alone, watching the world change in a way that no one had ever expected. People were working and children were learning in any available home space. Restaurants were closed. Retail was cratering. Everything, it seemed, was at a complete standstill.

The moment of pause helped Gambuto to realize a powerful truth: in the pre-pandemic world, Americans were exhausted, lonely, unhappy, wildly overworked and overbooked, drowning in a largely manufactured need to "go-go-go and buy-buy-buy." But now, that pressure had, to some extent, disappeared. People were reconnecting with themselves and rediscovering what was important to them. Simple things like outdoor walks replaced gym memberships; home cooking and backyard gardens replaced takeout; less commuting meant more time for family and creative projects; and for perhaps the first time in a long time, they were being honest. Honest about what they wanted. Honest about what they believed in. Honest about the problems they were facing within their families, friend groups, workplaces, towns, cities, and society.

That honesty, he noticed, had the potential to make the ground shift. It created a capacity for change. But he also knew that it likely wouldn't last, because the most powerful forces running our world--the systems that define us, that take advantage of us, that rely on our output--would not allow it to. They wanted control over our clicks, our conversations, our dollars, our work, our votes--our lives. The only way that we could beat those systems, he could now see, would be to resist the calls to be resilient, to keep moving, and to "go back to normal."
In order to change, we had to unsubscribe.

Now, in Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! Gambuto lays out a radical blueprint for the ways we can take a real deep breath and renew and commit to a life that we really want, individually and collectively, from unsubscribing to email lists and automated subscriptions to re-evaluating the presence of people and ideas and habits that no longer serve us or make us happy. Infused with the practicality of James Clear's Atomic Habits and the humor of Sarah Knight's The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k, Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! helps us think about where we find joy in our society and frees us to toss out what doesn't bring us joy in this modern world.

Julio Gambuto grew up in a large Italian family on New York's Staten Island, where aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered often around Mom's seafoam-green formica kitchen table for "cake and coffee" - always an Entenmann's crumb cake - to tell stories, argue about the Mets, and play cards with the neighbors. After seven years on merit scholarship at Staten Island Academy, Julio left the borough for Harvard, where he graduated with a BA in English and American Literature and Language, with honors. He completed his training as a film director at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he was honored as an Annenberg Fellow. He is the author of "Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting" - a super-viral essay series on Medium - which to date has been read by over 21 million people around the world. He is working on a book based on the series and is now a weekly contributor for Medium. Julio is also a filmmaker, and has written and produced film and television content for Nickelodeon, PBS, E! Entertainment, Stone & Company Entertainment, Kerner Entertainment, and James Franco's Rabbit Bandini. He lives in New York City.