Why Subscribe to Past Passport?
History keeps surviving the end of the world.
Open your newsfeed. Count the headlines saying the world is ending.
I’ll wait.
Doom sells clicks. Scroll long enough, and you might believe you’re living through history’s worst chapter.
You aren’t.
Things have been much worse, and people survived anyway.
A 2023 review of more than 1,000 adults found that doomscrolling was associated with poorer mental well-being and lower life satisfaction. Even unrelated worries feel worse after consuming a steady diet of bad news.
Past Passport is the antidote to the daily doom in your hand.
1918 Nearly Broke Us. 1920 We Danced
Every generation believes its problems are unprecedented. Almost none are.
In 1918, a flu pandemic killed roughly 50 million people worldwide. About 675,000 Americans died in a country of only 103 million. No antibiotics existed yet. World War I had already killed about 16 million worldwide.
Two years later, the freewheeling Roaring Twenties began.
Three times a week, I find the historical version of today’s anxiety and show how people lived through something similar centuries ago. The past was often brutal. Human beings made it, anyway.
You Never Reach the Bottom of History
History looks like solid ground until you dig. Then another layer. Then another. The more you learn, the more you realize there’s always another layer waiting, ready to teach us something new about today.
Marcus Aurelius Ran an Empire. He Still Needed a Coping Strategy.
Past Passport covers more than history as an antidote to bad news.
Each week I also write about Stoicism, the ancient philosophy built for bad moments. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire and still needed something to keep perspective at night. His problems weren’t emails and traffic. They were plague, betrayal, and burying his own children while holding a war together on the frontier.
The Stoics built tools for dealing with that kind of pain, and those same tools work just as well on a bad Tuesday. Zooming out was a big strategy: your problem is real, but it isn’t as bad as you think it is at 2 AM.
Stoic philosophy helped me manage my pain when Mom died. It doesn't erase the pain, but it helped me keep it in perspective.
Every Generation Gets a New Technology to Panic About
And because we’re living through another major technological change, I write about AI from the perspective of a non-technical creator who uses it every day.
Every generation has feared a new technology would change everything. AI is part of that story. I’ll show you how I use Claude and ChatGPT to write essays, what they’re good at, and where they cannot be relied on.
History answers hard moments by looking backward. Stoicism answers by looking inward. AI lets us test whether those old lessons still work in this newest chapter.
What Past Passport subscribers are saying this month:
Founding subscriber Andrew Calvert says: “Love it (the newsletter)! Happy to support great work!”
Subscriber Sean Paul Kelley: “Joseph, a great essay. One of those essays that makes another writer jealous in a good way, wishing that he had written it himself. Thank you very much.”
What You’ll Receive When You Subscribe
For only $5 per month, you get 13 essays per month - most Substacks only give you eight! That’s a great value for the $5 Substack minimum.
You get:
Three history essays a week, each uncovering a moment from the past that rhymes with something happening now. The goal isn't to erase your problems. It's to give them their proper size. Most newsletters give you two a week.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY on Aug 1, 2026: One weekly Stoic essay with practical ideas for your next bad week. A recent Stoic piece covered how I used Stoic tools to deal with Mom’s death. Stoic philosophy can help us manage grief, anger, anxiety, and the small daily frustrations that gobble up more energy than they deserve.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY on Aug. 1, 2026: Three short AI updates per week on the bottom of the history newsletters about how I use AI as a non-technical creator. You'll learn how to make Claude analyze your newsletter for structural flaws, how to use AI to build effective Substack notes with templates, and a lot more.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY on Aug. 1, 2026: One dedicated monthly AI newsletter with more tips to improve your writing and a Substack newsletter. These are effective strategies I am using for growth, picked up from six-figure Substacks. Others I figured out myself. Example: Use AI to improve your newsletter’s read-through rates. I boosted mine from 52% to over 95% since June 2026.
A monthly subscriber Q&A in the DMs where your questions get explored through history and Stoicism, not generic self-help.
A growing community of historical optimists who’d rather challenge their assumptions than doomscroll through someone else’s.
If your news feed keeps insisting civilization is collapsing, spend a few minutes with people who know civilizations have survived far worse.
History has been here before. And humanity kept going.
Subscribe today!