The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes
Plus, Gen Z is resisting the workplace emergency
Happy Halloween! I’m keeping this one short and sweet, as it’s the spookiest day of the year, and we’ve got costumes to create and candy to eat.
If you only have time to read one story today, let it be the breath-holding profile below by Sean Williams, edited by yours truly. <3
What I’m Reading
Šobat surfacing with a nose clip visible after a dive in Blue Hole, Dahab, in 2020. Freedivers use nose clips to maintain air pressure in the nasal passage and prevent water from entering the nose. (Photo: Livio Fakeye)
The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes
After his daughter’s diagnosis, Budimir Šobat gave up drinking and devoted himself to her care. Years later, he found a new obsession: holding his breath longer than anyone in history.
By Sean Williams
Budimir Šobat had been lying face down in a swimming pool for around a quarter of an hour on March 27, 2021, when something strange happened: he fell asleep.
Šobat, a 56-year-old professional freediver from Zagreb, Croatia, was aiming to break the world record for the longest breath ever held. He guessed he was approaching 17 minutes—roughly the point at which the body’s third, final, and most painful stage of oxygen deprivation began, when carbon dioxide would fill the body and the diaphragm would spasm violently, like a thunder sheet.
This approaching wall of agony might understandably have stressed out Šobat. But he had spent six years training his mind for this exact moment, developing the ability to enter a quasi-sleep state to conserve as much energy-sapping thought as possible.
Šobat wasn’t supposed to relax enough to actually drift off, though. Moments later, a bubble floated from his now-open mouth and brushed his eye, jogging him awake.
‘It’s PR, Not the ER’: Gen Z Is Resisting the Workplace Emergency
As the workforce evolves, younger generations are rejecting a frenetic approach to work that can create undue stress and cross work-life balance boundaries.
By Rainesford Stauffer
Whether it’s a last-minute task requiring work outside business hours or do-or-die stress over a slide deck, some Gen Z workers are questioning the false sense of urgency ingrained in many workplaces. It might pop up as quips like “there’s no such thing as a marketing emergency” or “we’re saving PDFs, not lives.” While every workplace has situations that are considered urgent, with anxiety over job loss upping the stakes, pushing back on the everything-is-an-emergency approach ties into larger conversations about the role work plays in our lives.
Katrina A. Burch, associate professor of psychological sciences at Western Kentucky University, attributes some changes to the start of the pandemic. “It’s been very much emphasized in the U.S. that in order to be successful, you should be both willing and able to flex the boundary to allow work to interfere into other spheres of your life,” she explains. Early 2020 marked a cultural shift: “I don’t need to wear busyness as a badge of honor.”
The Goopification of Ketamine Therapy
A miracle off-label treatment cured my depression. I didn’t want to see it next to Botox and adaptogenic lattes.
By Taylor Prewitt
When you know what ketamine can really do, it can be hard to see this and not wince. The line between health care and more ephemeral wellness has never been fuzzier, and these clinics are on the blurry front lines. Ketamine therapy is a game-changing treatment. It’s also questionable, to say the least, that accessing it should be as uncomplicated and easy as booking a 30-minute massage. What’s happened in my life since I first began ketamine treatment, and what I saw in these spas, suggests a country that’s not quite ready to decide what to do with a drug that people are turning to in ever-increasing numbers.
Last but Not Least
“Frankenstein is actually a book about women. I would say it’s a dystopian novel about a world without mothers and a world without strong women. Unchecked male ambition, says Mary Shelley, is going to wreak havoc on the world.” —Biographer Charlotte Gordon of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and Shelley’s gothic novel
(As quoted from My Favorite Murder’s recent episode)
Happy Halloween 👻