13 Chill Things We Love to Help Get You Through Your Day

The times, they are decidedly not chill. We are in the midst of a global pandemic. Our government and healthcare infrastructure are woefully unprepared for the novel coronavirus outbreak. The stock markets are plummeting. The NBA has suspended its season, Broadway has gone dark, and Disneyland is closed. OJ Simpson is posting coronavirus memes. Should those examples not fully illustrate the extent of our dystopian present, Tom Hanks has fallen ill and his son, Chet Haze, reacted to the news with a video announcing "wassup everyone, yeah, it’s true, my parents got coronavirus, it’s crazy.”

For those of us who are privileged enough to be able to do our jobs at home, this means a lot of time spent alone soaking dried beans and spiraling at the prospect of imminent societal collapse. Many have also found this to be an opportune time to rewatch movies like Contagion and Outbreak. As an antidote, may I suggest: not doing that. Instead, bathe your brain in the chillest media possible.

I myself am a generally neurotic person, but I wish I wasn’t. Specifically, I aspire to be exactly like the @chillsitch Twitter account—so that’s where I started in my quest for recommendations. “Anytime I feel that familiar knot of clenching panic rising between my shoulder blades, I make a plan to watch my favorite sedative, Norway’s National Firewood Night,” Taylor Moore, the brains behind @chillsitch, told me. “It’s eight hours of perfectly barked and split firewood, well-meaning musical performances, and glacially paced conversations between Nords, all with that unique, glowing calmness of a people who still have Winter and have grown up in the loving embrace of socialized healthcare. It’s nice watching someone else get it right.”

Yes. Wonderful. That’s what I’m talking about. And in that spirit, read on for more chill suggestions from the GQ staff.

This Video About a French Surfer Who Moved to Norway

I find myself returning, time and time again, to this beautiful Patagonia short about a surfer named Léa Brassy, who moved from southern France to frigid Norway in order to surf. The video is very meditative: Brassy has few possessions, spends days at a time living out of a camper van, bakes some bread, and gets all these gentle rolling waves all to herself while surrounded by these pristine white mountains. It’s the dreamiest kind of social isolation. — Chris Gayomali

This New Age Music Compilation

New age as an adjective generally signifies a gauzy sort of hokeyness. Spa music. Elevator music. Yoga music. Music that doesn't exist, basically. Music for getting a bad $13 hot stone pedicure to. Chill music that makes people like me have an adverse reaction. The new age music on the compilation I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950 - 1990 is something else. It's garage new age music—handmade sonic meditations and elevations by psychedelic freaks and basement weirdos who weren't so much trying to chill as they were trying to expand human consciousness and transcend this mortal coil itself. One of the most interesting characters on the compilation is a multi-instrumentalist and Eastern mystic from Philadelphia named Laaraji, who Brian Eno first encountered busking on the zither in Washington Square Park. (Since the album came out, Laraaji's career has had a renaissance. I recently saw him play a show in New York City alongside Solange, hosted by the British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner.) Anyway, the music here is a departure—in every sense of the word. Doesn't that sound good right about now? — Will Welch

This 12-Hour Fantasy Audiobook

When I urgently need to unwind, I escape to the Undying Lands to chill with the Silmarils. The Silmarillion is the bedrock of J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe, and where you’ll learn all the background on your favorite people, places, and mystic artifacts in the Lord of the Rings. It’s best enjoyed via audiobook, and you can stream nearly 12 hours of fantasy right on YouTube, narrated by the soothing, sophisticated English voice of actor Martin Shaw. — Colin Groundwater

These Steven Soderbergh Movies That Are Not Contagion

I don’t understand the psychos of this world who sit down in the midst of a global pandemic to reread Station Eleven, or rewatch Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. Are you trying to give yourself a panic attack? Do you want to feel even more like you’re going to die? I find it doubly odd, too, because Soderbergh, in particular—when he’s not scaring the hell out of you with an eerily prescient movie—is a brilliantly stylish and escapist filmmaker. In my household, we’ve been living on his lighter films in lieu of going outside: Ocean’s 11-13 (movie stars doing movie star stuff in glamorous locales), Magic Mike (let Ginuwine and the Florida sunshine soothe you), Logan Lucky (Adam Driver saying the word “cauliflower”), Haywire (hypnotic punching), Out of Sight (it’s fucking Out of Sight). It’s jazz, it’s repartee, it’s a world away from the terrible one in which we currently live. — Zach Baron

This Movie Where Adam Driver Plays a Bus Driving Poet

We’ve reached the point where there’s an Adam Driver movie for every situation—divorce, racetrack heists, government whistleblowing, zombie uprisings, Millennial ennui, intergalactic domination, and so on. The Adam Driver for this particular situation? Clearly, Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 meditation on the art of everyday life. Driver stars as a bus driver and poet named Paterson, who lives in Paterson, New Jersey, and finds beauty in things as small as matchbooks and as sublime as waterfalls. The quiet, day-by-day way the film unfolds is a perfect sedative. The film also serves as a model for taking pleasure in routine and finding peace in impermanence. And as a bonus: There are lots of great DIY home crafting ideas. — Max Cea

This College Radio Station’s Jazz Program

WKCR is Columbia's radio station; Bird Flight is the station's signature program. Phil Schaap began working for the station as an undergraduate in 1970 and pretty much never left: he's hosted Bird Flight, dedicated in almost brutal detail to the career of bebop legend Charlie Parker, in some form or another, since 1981. I don't know much about Parker's music, which is a shame, because it is incredible, but also not a hindrance, because it only makes up about a third of the show. The rest is Schaap, and I find his wonky, endless, old-man-regales-cloud narration—of a specific session from 1948, say, and the strange eccentricities of the drummer in the room for it—deeply soothing. May it provide you some measure of elderly-relative-ASMR, too. — Sam Schube

This Urban Planning Book From the Seventies

I have impulse-bought so many meditation books that now taunt me from my nightstand, but none have ever made me feel as centered and serene as reading A Pattern Language, a radical and crunchy urban planning book that came out of Berkeley in the seventies. Now that we’re especially solitary, its focus on communal improvement—“when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it”—has taken on a new light. (I also suggest this video of a bat eating a banana to further smooth out your brain.) — Gabriella Paiella

This Dreamy Beekeeping Instagram

In this time of social distancing, allow yourself to scroll through @honey_fingers: bumble bees, flowers, honey, and poetry. An important reminder that the outdoors exist and the Earth is still orbiting. — Willa Bennett

This Classic Nature Show

I like to bring the outdoors in, with plants and flowers, a cracked window, some natural light, and BBC's Planet Earth on mute in the background. I've found Planet Earth has the perfect ratio of calm (beautifully shot videos of birds of paradise courting each other) to stimulating (a snow leopard chasing prey on a windy mountain). The footage is beautiful enough to keep you from going insane, but familiar enough to not lure your focus away from your work. Except for the tiny bat that hunts scorpions—that’s a must-watch. — Simon Abranowicz

This Precise Dot-to-Dot Puzzle Book

Anytime I’m feeling stressed out, I grab this book of extremely convoluted dot-to-dot “puzzles.” There is nothing like outlining the extremely complex spires of the Sagrada Família to make you forget that there is literally anything going on outside of your head. — Daniel Varghese

This Podcast That’s Meant to Put You to Sleep

I've been listening to the Sleep With Me podcast all morning. It's just a guy with a nasally voice telling nonsense stories that are impossible to follow—sometimes he'll make up bizarre circular narratives about visiting theme parks with his neighbor, sometimes he'll spend an hour describing his attempt at making hummus. Normally I turn it on at bedtime to pass out, but right now I'm finding it especially soothing to just have someone droning on in the background that I can fully ignore. — Yang-Yi Goh

This British Historical Drama

All the seasons (and the Christmas special!) of Downtown Abbey are on Amazon Prime, and the whole show is about every class in society reacting calmly and in very regal fashion to the slow-motion collapse of their social order! Better than a humidifier for all my pandemic anxieties. — Joel Pavelski

These Japanese Train Videos

Few experiences are as nice as a long train ride. Given our current circumstances, public transit is less than ideal but, luckily for us, there are incredibly generous people out there who have compiled hours upon hours of footage from the front cabins of trains traveling all around the world. Instead of staring out your window into the gray abyss of late winter, why not watch a video of a serene trip through the wintery Japanese countryside? And I won't tell your coworkers you're watching train videos instead of whatever else you're supposed to be doing, I swear. — Gabe Conte

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Originally Appeared on GQ