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 the worst time ever.
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 right hand. And written in a way that won’t make you nod off to sleep.
I’m not a historian. I’m a curious non-expert who asks the questions you’d ask — and then digs until I find real answers, not textbook ones.
No mind-numbing history dissertations here. They bore me, too.
No jargon doing the work that a clear sentence should do. Just the facts, the primary sources, and the parts of the story that usually get left out because they don’t fit the neat version.
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. I do the digging so you don't have to wade through a dissertation to get to the good part — you just get the answer, clearly, and the source behind it.
Marcus Aurelius Ran an Empire. He Still Needed a Coping Strategy.
Past Passport covers more than history as an antidote to bad news.
Each month, 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.
Why's a history writer covering AI? I use it for the writing and video work behind this newsletter, and I think those details matter to other non-technical creators figuring out the same tools.
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. How I use AI to help me put together videos, too.
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:
Free:
One full history essay a week, plus two more essays a week that paygate partway through.
All subscribers see three history essays a week. I write them in plain language, no boring Ph.D. dissertations. Many uncover a moment from the past that matches something happening now. Clear answers... nothing you need an advanced degree in classics to follow.
Paid subscribers only:
One monthly bonus essay, and maybe two if I’m in the mood. Rotating between two other things we care about: a Stoic article with a practical tool for your next bad week, OR an AI article on how I use AI for writing and video production, and how you can too.
Three short AI notes a week, at the bottom of each history essay… how I use AI as a non-technical creator. Things like having Claude audit a newsletter’s structure, or building Substack Notes from a template.
A monthly Q&A in the DMs: your questions 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!