One edition a week. No more. Read it slowly. Read it in pieces. At whatever pace your life allows.
The Manifesto
We started The Waypoint because we were tired.
Tired of the scrolling. The tickers. The BREAKING NEWS banner screaming at you as you have your morning coffee. Tired of news designed to look urgent, feel stressful, and keep you coming back — not because you’re informed, but because you’re anxious. Tired of watching young people — our children among them — have their attention and their peace of mind monetised by corporations whose only interest is to keep them scrolling.
We remember what it felt like before this. To have access to information without being constantly stressed out about it or being begged to like and follow. To read something and be able to digest it with a critical mind, not a mind numbed with a short attention span and a lack of engagement.
Justin and I have spent years falling in love with the world via the sea. What traveling extensively teaches you — what it forces into you — is that every single place matters. Every village, every coastline, every person living quietly in a town you’ve never heard of and likely never will. Mainstream news makes the world feel distant and therefore dismissible. It feels like the whole world is imploding and the hopelessness of it all makes us shut down. We can’t care about everything, all the time. We aim to offer you information and stories about the world that don’t elevate cortisol levels.
We’ve also spent hundreds of hours underwater. No phone. No connectivity. No one’s thoughts but your own. It is profoundly calming. And every time we surface, there is that brief moment of joy talking about your dive and sharing what you’ve seen, before the slow, familiar slipping begins. Back to the screen. Checking your emails. Slipping back into shallow habits.
That slipping is what The Waypoint is about.
We live in a world of surface level interactions. Scrolling that feels like learning but isn’t. Headlines engineered to make you feel something — outrage, anxiety, inferiority — because feeling keeps you clicking. The stories that actually matter go unreported or under-felt. Some of the most worthwhile stories don’t make for great click-bait.
We are frightened that if nothing changes, the next generation will inherit a world they’ve only ever seen through a screen — and have never learned to love.
So we built The Waypoint. One edition a week. No ticker. No breaking news. No algorithm deciding what you see. An account of some of what’s happened in the world and why it matters. We also share personal anecdotes from our travels, inspiring stories from around the world, and small examples of hope that make us feel like the world isn’t entirely effed.
The world has problems. We will report them honestly. But the world also has solutions, and beauty, and human ingenuity, and quiet victories that never trend. We will report those too. Because the big picture is not only darker than the headlines suggest — it is also more hopeful.
We built this for curious people. For those exhausted by the noise. For a younger generation that deserves more than a corporation designing how they think and feel.
One edition. Per week. No agenda.
— Emerald & Justin