Data, Data Everywhere

Chip suggested that we write about saving $1,000 a month in your 20s as the ultimate retirement hack.1 In addition to being chump change to a guy like him, it was a no-brainer of a Great Idea to pass along. He had data. Alas, all measures of the economy are incomplete: stock market indices measure the wealth of companies, not people. Median and mean income say nothing about affordability, living expenses, or how many people are trying to live off of that wage. The GDP doesn’t measure unpaid work—the domestic economy—which includes the things that people need to do to survive.

The brain has two main needs: conserve energy (including its own usage!) and accomplish its goals. Given these biological constraints, thinking is costly; uncertainty is uncomfortable; rewards and relief matter. At some point, we need to stop refining the model and get on with things.2

So, consider this: even on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis, our brain is lazy. We like information that’s easy to process—things that feel true and sound right—and are less skeptical of what confirms our beliefs. Confirmation bias isn’t just motivated reasoning—it’s energy-efficient, and affects our attention and perception.3

Disconfirming evidence requires more work—it threatens our coherent view of ourselves and the world—so we avoid it.

We say things like “There’s no way of randomly sampling all of society and objectively measuring its deviance over time. The data we don’t have might contradict the data we do have. But it would have to be a lot of data, and it would all have to point in the opposite direction.”

It’s easier to ignore a single piece of information than it is to turn our world upside down.

Our brain processes ideas that align with our existing beliefs, social identity, or self-concept more fluently—and that makes them feel more credible. And don’t forget, we’re the über-social animal whose brain evolved to live in caves and eat berries with our tribe, which is why other people’s input is what makes something objective.4

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Tenure creates a predictable information ecosystem & worldview

Back to the save $1,000 hack: Chip wasn’t just looking at data, he was getting his information from lived experience—and yes, he knew a lot of people from different backgrounds… but they had all ended up at Stanford. Bestselling authors. Professors. Heads of tech companies. People who were honored to be in his presence, and therefore affable. Affluent neighbors.

Tenured professors are very far removed from the lived experience of what it’s like to be an “average” American: they have a sense of economic stability, strong ties to an untold number of well-connected people, and are held in high regard by the general population—even if their internal monologue still squeaks “NERD!!!” on occasion.

Humans are amazingly adaptable, our brains ever-shifting in response to conditions and experiences, and my life has probably shaped my brain into the opposite of a tenured professor: I understand what it’s like to have a fundamental sense of instability, to have one’s worldview shaped by a parent with mental illness, to be isolated, ignored, and told that I should “aim lower.” (I was deeply in debt and living with two roommates in Queens when we began working together.)

I felt like I had to code-switch, while working with Chip, whose worldview and information were all coming from data.

To him, a white guy with tenure born in 1963, there was nothing wrong with all of the data. But median and mean income don’t take expenses into consideration. Qualitative information matters; polls matter. But economic data—like all data that most professors deem up-to-snuff—reflects the system of measurement. That apparatus was built decades ago, by universities, government agencies, demographers, and sociologists—mostly male, mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly WEIRD (in the anthropological sense). They measured what they thought mattered. They measured what they could measure.

Epistemic Blindness: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

“How would someone in their 20s actually save $1,000 a month?” I asked, before making a spreadsheet to deduct taxes and tally rent, health care, prescriptions, water, electricity/gas, internet, fuel, phone, car payments, car insurance, parking, food, random household items, subscriptions, etc., etc. Chip also hadn’t factored in how much student loan payments would be for the recently-graduated—the very tuition that paid his salary. His estimates were off for everything.

I did the math. I looked up the price of all the things. I showed my work.

And it made him so uncomfortable that he stopped me.

The “save $1,000 a month, it’s easy” story is prelude for what Adam Mastroianni got wrong in his viral “The Decline of Deviance” essay. Lookie at this subtitle:

Experimental History

The Decline of Deviance

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline…

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6 months ago · 8316 likes · 607 comments · Adam Mastroianni

1. Data is Necessarily Incomplete

Data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane.

As someone who was chronically offline for the past few years, THERE ARE PLENTY OF WEIRD DEVIANTS EVERYWHERE. Data is not divine. I say this after a few years of doing workshops on data storytelling and consulting—as someone who wrote a book on data—and reading amazing books like Invisible Women and all about the cultural history of numbers and the scientific process. We think that wisdom is connecting the dots of data:

And yet! The best magic trick that data plays—and frequently—is to convince us of a piece of information’s superiority and objectivity. But the very act of collecting data is an act of omission and curation, of boiling life down to something that can be counted. What we deem worthy of measuring says a lot more about the perspectives and incentives of those doing the measuring than reality itself. Reality contains an overwhelming amount of data, and we overemphasize the aspects of it that are easily measurable or quantifiable:

2. You can’t use longitudinal data to measure CURRENT weirdness

When you only write about data that has been tracked by legacy institutions over decades, you automatically focus on aspects of life that were measured by those not-representative-of-most-people-people decades ago: mostly WEIRD. Mostly men in government or academic jobs. We don’t have cults today, but we have the Flat Earth movement and the Manosphere and MLMs. Serial killers? Down, yes, sure. Doxxing, identity theft, revenge porn—all up from zero.

3. Accessibility Can Look Like Conformity

“The internet ain’t interesting anymore,” says Adam. For my first book, I interviewed Derek Sivers, who sold his company CD Baby for $25 million.

In 1993, when Sivers’ roommate—a multimedia studies major at New York University—mentioned the Internet, Sivers’ curiosity flared up yet again. “But of course right away I wanted to figure out how to make ‘World Wide Web’ pages of my own... there wasn’t much to it. Even though I had no computer experience at the time, making basic HTML tags was really no harder than making a Word document,” he says.

Sivers was a pioneer in the internet’s early halcyon days, when its relative difficulty of use required you to be a bit of a genuine nerd to be online at all; there were no spambots or marketing Ponzi schemes to sully the entire notion of leaving links, just a bunch of well-intentioned nerds with stuff to share.

The early-days internet seemed more interesting because websites were individual passion projects by the technologically-minded; today, the act of publishing a website has been relatively democratized: all you need is a template!

To reach as broad of an audience as possible, companies need to follow inclusive design principles, since people with accessibility needs need to reach the same information. Think: low-bandwidth (mobile-friendly; non-speedy internet-friendly); reader-accessible (vision-impaired); easy to navigate (neurodivergent); easy to translate.

4. Mostly, it’s about money & bandwidth

Mostly, the post reminded me of the difference that having money makes on one’s worldview—and how much tenure blinds you to the reality of most people.

Why aren’t people doing drugs? Maybe young people aren’t drinking or doing drugs as much today—it’s expensive, they’re poor, and there’s a real lack of third spaces. They’re more aware of the health effects because of parental drug abuse. I’m a former 12-stepper currently in Oregon, where psilocybin mushrooms are legal-ish5, so likely have a weird view of it all.

Weirdness on LinkedIn? We don’t want to post something that would get us fired. Weirdness on Instagram? It’s there, but it’s not on the popular feeds. That’s the point.

People are staying put? People aren’t moving because it’s expensive. [And since when did “moving” become deviant? ]

No one would ever be able to replicate this, says Adam. “The sculptor Arturo di Modica ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own studio—including two sub-basements—by hand, becoming an underground artist in the literal sense. He refused to work with an art dealer until 2012, when he was in his 70s.

How much do dilapidated buildings in lower Manhattan cost these days? Does Mastroianni know how hard it is to get a job today? What are the odds that a female artist would be able to have this career?

Culture isn’t Flattening—Just Big Budget Culture

He cites an essay in the New York Times Magazine about the flattening of culture. As my friend says: if you want to learn what editors think, read the article; if you want to learn what readers think, read the comments.

Here’s the top comment from that article:

This seems to be ignoring the elephant in the room. What the majority of people experience as art is dictated by institutions (like MOMA) that gatekeep and tend to focus on what they already know will bring people in or is already popular. Having trouble finding artistic innovation there? Try visiting local galleries across the country. Not pleased with a lack of innovation in writing? Remember that agents and publishers tend to pick up what will make them money. Start reading publications by indie presses. The innovation is out there, it is just not supported by the economic side of the arts.

Culture is stagnating

Is culture stagnating? We are seeing a splintering of attention, and consolidation in who controls that diminishing slice of pie that gets dubbed “pop culture.” The Marvel-ization of cinema is because of money. Ergo, we get Netflix shelling out $300 million dollars for drivel because they’re trying to use data to make safe cultural bets.

Algorithms recommend things that are safe and popular. I first studied this in 2006, while a staff writer at Seattle Weekly, researching a cover story on music algorithms. Algorithms want you to click and buy; most of the time it’s better to show you the new Taylor Swift album than a new artist with a 5% chance of you loving it.

We accuse others of confirmation bias, but it happens to us all—and it starts at attention, not just perception. The more we see something (people are making plenty of money; the world is boring), the more likely we are to believe that it’s true, provided we don’t have anyone hitting us in the face with counterfactuals.

Adam writes: “There’s no way of randomly sampling all of society and objectively measuring its deviance over time. The data we don’t have might contradict the data we do have.” Then instantly says: “But it would have to be a lot of data, and it would all have to point in the opposite direction.”

So: counter me, but only if you can produce the impossible?

Don’t just look at the data—look at what the data isn’t counting. (Hint: it’s a lot.)

Don’t just look at what’s on your feed—look at what other people are actually consuming and interacting with.

Here’s what didn’t reach Chip Heath or Adam Mastroianni’s feeds: the world is weird. People are poor. Instead of discovering a huge thing about reality that no one else noticed, you just pointed out your blind spots.

Thanks for reading! The best way to show love is to send this to someone who’d like it. Don’t be shy—click the heart button, or leave a comment. You can also buy me a coffee or follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn, or TikTok. This post may contain affiliate links.

I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) at [email protected]. I also give workshops for businesses on my pillar topics.

Karla Starr (@karlastarr) is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company book of the year. She also writes The Starr Report, which you are reading the very end of.

I didn’t come from an athletic family, and used my first book as an excuse to learn a better mindset. When researching Can You Learn to Be Lucky?, I extended my deadline and added an extra chapter on sports expertise (Why Gold Medalists are Inherently Lucky) and turned myself into a guinea pig in order to put the research to the test. Good "sports genes" don't really apply to CrossFit — the sport encompasses everything from strength training to complex gymnastics skills to endurance — making it an especially fun ground zero for performance psychology.

Dear readers, it worked.

Ilia Malinin, undefeated for two years, fell apart after popping a quadruple axel attempt, as intrusive thoughts flooded in. Epstein’s framing draws on solid research: skills “deautomize” under pressure. Your brain’s explicit attention system hijacks what your body already knows how to do, and overthinking a jump instead of just doing it causes choking and the “yips.”

Epstein’s advice is reasonable: keep your conscious mind busy so it can’t interfere, but impossible when your routine is long enough to require conscious thought (i.e., when you’re not simply swinging a golf club). Build a diversified identity — don’t make skating your whole self. Expect things to go wrong.

Good advice. Accurate advice.

Advice written on neutral ice.

Yesterday, I watched as Amber Glenn — three-time reigning U.S. champion, oldest American woman to qualify for an Olympic figure skating singles event since 1928, openly queer, openly bisexual, outspoken about her anxiety and depression and ADHD — landed a clean triple axel, one of only two women in the entire competition to do so. She held it together through the hard stuff before losing focus on the last jump. A double loop where a triple was required meant zero points for the element, dropping her to 13th place.

Afterward, she said:

“I just lost focus, wasn’t feeling good.

“When… you were coming off the ice, we heard you say ‘I had it.’”

“Yeah, I did the hard stuff, so I was just in shock.”

Doing the Hard Stuff and Then Losing Focus

Performance psychology’s choking literature tends to assume that pressure is situational. Identity is background. The performer is a neutral body that stress occasionally disrupts.

But Amber Glenn didn’t walk onto that ice as a neutral body: she walked on as a queer woman in a historically heteronormative aesthetic sport, at 26 in a discipline that gives women’s bodies a shorter lifespan, making her Olympic debut after a decade of near-misses and team selection controversies, days after publicly criticizing the Trump administration’s treatment of the LGBTQ community at a pre-Olympic press conference, wearing a Madonna-approved dress, carrying the symbolic weight of being the first openly LGBTQ women’s singles skater on Team USA.

She also had to land a triple axel.

In Epstein and Malinin’s story, performance fails when execution shifts from automatic to monitored — when you start watching yourself instead of doing the thing. But Glenn didn’t choke on the triple axel; she choked on the exhale. It’s not surprising, given how much mental bandwidth had been running in the background.

Stereotype threat, the idea popularized by psychologist Claude Steele, is when performance suffers because of a conflict between identity and performance. Olympic sports are still male-dominated; women made up 47% of the athletes at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games, the most gender-balanced Winter Olympics to date. (From 1900 to 1924, any female Olympian hopeful had a short list of sports to choose from: golf, tennis, archery, swimming, figure skating, and fencing.)

From a stress perspective, this is chronic background activation — a constant hum of vigilance. Over time, that raises baseline stress levels, which makes acute pressure moments (like a test, presentation, or competition) more likely to tip into choking.

Being a sexual minority adds another layer:: the added pressure of representing the LGBTQIA+ community, of being someone who “revolutionizes the sport,” simply by being there. It’s like trying to land a triple toe loop while carrying a backpack full of social history that you have to forget about so you can focus—while you have ADHD, which Glenn has also openly struggled with.

Having ADHD makes it that much harder to “simply focus.” After colliding with another skater, Glenn suffered from a concussion and has since had regular training with a neurotherapist. Other athletes benefit from mental training—but having ADHD (which I also have) means adding yet another layer of difficulty to achieve the same kind of focus that comes naturally to others. Given the amount of repetition, focus, and long-term commitment required to become an Olympic-level athlete, making it there when you have ADHD is once again adding another 15 pounds of rocks to an already-heavy backpack.

This isn’t about mental weakness. It’s about carrying more of a cognitive load while having less bandwidth.

The press mentions her resilience admiringly, with good reason: coaching changes, selection controversies, a concussion, a decade of near-misses, a 2021 team selection where she finished second at nationals and still didn’t make the World Championships team. The New York Times called hers “A Story of Perseverance.” Whereas Malinin was raised by two Olympians who knew the entire elite athletic landscape, Glenn’s parents worked extra shifts and took extra jobs.

But resilience at this level isn’t a trait. It means that she had a bumpier road—having to self-advocate through systems that weren’t built in her native language. Self-advocacy, practiced over years, can shape your mental landscape into something resembling hyper-vigilance from the inside: an increased mental load from scarcity, where your family’s livelihood is on the line. Always calibrating for signs of being an outsider. Always aware that your position is constructed and hard-fought, not inherited. Even when you’ve embraced yourself, your body and mind keep the score.

Vigilance is adaptive, but it’s also a cognitive tax. One that compounds under pressure.

Epstein’s other suggestion is to imagine things going wrong beforehand, and mentally rehearse failure so it loses its power when it arrives. Good advice if failure is something you have to consciously conjure.

If you’re a queer outsider from Texas with ADHD who’s battled mental health issues, whose family fought to be there, performing in a body that’s doubly objectified, and the narrative is you’re 26 and past your prime—you probably don’t have to imagine failure.

Glenn had been skating with the heavy, hypervigilant backpack of you don’t belong here, this isn’t your path reminders for years—that’s the unsung tax of resilience, running in the background. When that is your default, letting your guard down is the dream, the unique utopian horizon—which is exactly what Glenn did after she “did the hard stuff” and “lost focus.”

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The Complexity of Identity Complexity

Epstein cites psychologist Sian Beilock’s research on identity diversification as a buffer against choking. The logic: athletes with multiple identities — skater and parent, competitor and artist — are less devastated by any single failure because the self isn’t all in one place. You have other eggs in other baskets to cushion a failure.

But when it comes time to focus, self-complexity can backfire. Patricia Linville’s self-complexity research — the actual theoretical backbone here — found that multiple identities buffer stress when they’re independent. The protection comes from compartmentalization: a bad day at work doesn’t contaminate your sense of yourself as a parent. Identities can insulate each other, if they point in a coherent direction.

For Malinin, “athletic excellence” harmonizes with his other identities. Family, national pride, masculine archetype, media framing — they all pull in the same direction: a win is a win; a fall is a fall.

But self-complexity becomes destabilizing when identities are pointed in different directions, publicly salient, politically charged, and under simultaneous threat. Lifting weights is harder when you have to suppress the non-gym guys who will feel threatened and laugh at you for “looking like a bro,” or the women who tell you that you don’t look very feminine—there’s more noise to silence; having a book-to-be-published to look forward to might make it easier to fail a lift, but lifting is also harder when a coauthor scolds you for spending 45 minutes away from the manuscript.

When a bad skate doesn’t just threaten the athlete identity — it activates the queer representation identity, the gendered stereotype threat, the media narrative, the personal consistency story. All at once. Under Olympic spotlight, more identities means more evaluators in the room. More internal and external monitoring. More meaning assigned to each moment — which is exactly the wrong cognitive state for a sport requiring narrowed, automatic execution.1

Choking emerges when attention shifts from action to self-evaluation. Epstein knows this. What his model doesn’t account for is how many evaluators some athletes or performers walk in carrying before the music even starts.

Ilia Malinin is Not Universal

Malinin choked. His explanation was vivid and honest: traumatic memories flooding in, negative thoughts he couldn’t manage. That’s real. That’s a choking event. But Malinin walks into competition as the son of elite skaters, embedded in figure skating’s lineage, in a sport that rewards the masculine-coded technical aggression he’s built his career on. His belonging feels structural. His age reads as runway. His misses get framed as ambition and risk, the fault is externalized: too much media attention.

Epstein’s interventions — external focus cues, pre-planned contingencies, diversified identity — aren’t wrong. They’re just not the whole story. The most interesting thing Epstein’s piece does — without knowing it — is use Malinin as the universal case study for choking. Not as a choice, just as a default. The research is about human performance, and Malinin is the human performance that happened to be available.

That’s how epistemological blind spots work: not planned or malicious bias, but an invisible assumption that the default example is neutral, its lessons universal.

For everyone else, they’re advice written for a body that isn’t theirs, on ice that was never quite neutral to begin with.

Amber Glenn nailed the triple axel. She did the hard stuff.

The last jump landed somewhere between fatigue and history.

Both things can be true.

So how do you avoid choking?

Here’s the thing with writing about those with marginalized, complex identities: any concrete advice will be necessarily be incomplete. And data-driven advice falters for others whose lives aren’t even measured in the first place. Because of that, here’s what worked for me:

• Mastering the art of self-regulation. With complex identities and overly-confident thought leaders and coaches, you are bound to receive conflicting advice. But only you know what you need on a moment-to-moment basis—don’t discount that.

• Surround yourself with reminders of your awesomeness. Engage in constant acts of self-compassion. In a world that profits off of our misery, rewards the performance of constant perfection, with algorithms that seem to magnify the angriest voices and bloodiest news, what you think of as extra self-compassion is probably just enough. One framework calls this adaptive perfectionism: going after the good thing because you want to,being kind to yourself when you come up short, and immediately reframing everything as a learning experience. It’s not “soft” or “weak.” It’s simply the mindset that’s most adaptive to preventing burnout, and staying on the road to your goals in the long run.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to show love is to send this to someone who’d like it. Don’t be shy—click the heart button, or leave a comment. You can also buy me a coffee or follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn, or TikTok. This post may contain affiliate links.

I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) at [email protected]. I also give workshops for businesses on my pillar topics.

Karla Starr (@karlastarr) is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company book of the year. She also writes The Starr Report, which you are reading the very end of.

I had no money to travel, just enough money to stay put. Every day for five months, without fail, I’d planted myself in a chair in the room I rented from Mossy Kilcher, whose kitchen and living room were covered with photos of her niece, the singer-songwriter Jewel, who grew up on that very farm. I took long walks on the black sand beach at noon—absorbing as many hours of daylight as I could—but was otherwise tied to my laptop, writing a novel.

Jordan hopped out at the airport’s unloading zone, grabbing his black duffel bag and camera equipment from the bed of his silver Toyota pickup. He left the engine running and gestured for me to slide over into the driver’s seat.

“Don’t forget to feed the puppy,” he said.

“You said you were going to leave me food for the two weeks. And pay for gas for the truck. It’s on empty.” I unearthed my wallet to show him the $5 bill and lack of a credit card.

“Yeah, about that,” he said, his eyes shifting towards the terminal. “Listen, my plane is about to leave.” He gave me a pair of twenties for gas to get home. My nostrils flared.

I drove south. The sky was cornflower blue, crisp, and cloudless. I had hours left alone in the truck. I thought about spending the next two weeks in Jordan’s cabin taking care of his puppy and editing the novel I’d finished writing the week before. The road was clean and clear, smooth and gray. Pine trees bordered the lakes symmetrically. Alaska, if you’ve never been, is either an architectural nightmare (industrial and functional-forward), wobbly houses, New Money, or OH MY GOD THIS PLACE IS GORGEOUS—a national park disguised as a state.

It was sunny. I was in heaven.

The road veered right around a corner and then down a hill and onto a section that was left untouched by the sun that day—covered in shadows and shade, the asphalt morphed into a sea of black ice.

I’d been driving the speed limit, about 50 miles per hour, when the back of the pickup started fishtailing. I grew up and learned how to drive in Buffalo and had plenty of experience driving on ice, but this time was different. Something felt wrong.

Time stood still; the truck did not.

I remember feeling like the world was spinning around me, inside the truck, as random spots in the door and windshield dented inward, around me. The horizon pirouetted without end. Shattered glass appeared out of nowhere, rotating alongside me in the cabin.

I tried bracing myself by holding my left hand in front of me, but at some point the bones in my wrist popped out of the skin. The truck rolled over five times before coming to rest on its side in a large snowbank off the side of the road, between two small towns in the middle of nowhere, in Alaska.

At some point, a man named Cameron spotted the truck and dialed 911, but the road to the nearest hospital was so icy that help didn’t arrive for over a half hour.

I spent well over 30 minutes on the side of a road, with broken bones, covered in snow, trapped by a truck, trying to ignore the bones sticking out of my left wrist. Blood trickled down the right side of my face, spotting the snow red. My head ached. Things were blurry. “WE’VE GOT TO GET HER OUT OF THERE,” I eventually heard someone yell. I remember throwing up in a helicopter. After the tiny hospital, I’d been airlifted right back to Anchorage, where an orthopedic surgeon quickly went to work on my wrist.

One large pin stuck out of my left wrist for months afterwards to line up the hardware inside. The orthopedic surgeon used the word “shattered” quite a bit, estimating that I’d broken it in over 13 places before he fused it with a plate and six screws.

My head was aching because I’d fractured my skull. A huge black mass kept appearing on the CAT scans, half of my brain covered in blood. After waiting for two days to see if it would go away on its own, surgeons removed a subdural hematoma, a coagulated blood clot that was putting substantial pressure on the inside of my skull. They’d drilled holes in my skull to suction out the blood, which didn’t work because my blood had thickened to “the consistency of raspberry preserves,” so they cut out a part of my skull, removed the blood, and fused my skull back together with more metal.

Without health insurance—I was stupid, young, on a budget, and didn’t even know how that would have worked—I quickly accumulated over $200,000 of medical bills.

After brain surgery, I couldn’t spend more than a few minutes reading without getting a headache. My attention span vanished. I couldn’t even read a page of the book I’d just finished writing. Both the hand I used for writing and the brain I used for thinking were suddenly rendered inoperable. I couldn’t think or write, the very things that made me me.

I was always tired and everything was loud. I spent the next few months watching Conan O’Brien on Vicodin on my mother’s couch in California. Leaving home invited stares from strangers taking in my bandaged, shaved head. My mother, a nurse, tried to comfort me by saying that I was fine compared to her patients and that my problems were in my head. I was desperate to see a doctor, but couldn’t make an appointment to see anyone because in the pre-Obama Care world, my wrist/skull/brain injuries were deemed pre-existing conditions that allowed insurance companies to reject my applications.

My mother suggested that I could check myself into a psychiatric ward if I really wanted to see a doctor. So I did. Meanwhile, my friend Jordan kept calling and asking me to pay the deductible for his car insurance.

Two months after making a brief, unexpected appearance at the hospital in Anchorage, my father called. He spent the first fifteen minutes discussing his job and girlfriend before asking: “so, how did that whole accident thing turn out?”

“Not great. I have to declare bankruptcy, but I don’t even know how I’m going to afford a lawyer.”

“Wow… that sucks,” he said, five minutes before hanging up; we wouldn’t speak again for 18 years.

And then he didn’t try to get in touch for over a year. And that, my friends, is one of the stories I tell when breaking in a new therapist.

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Things You Learn When Shit Hits the Fan

• You never truly know what other people have been through. Or are going through.

• Life can change—and drastically!—at any moment. And it’s not because we make mistakes or put ourselves into dangerous situations, but due to the million life variables beyond our control; simply waking up means inviting entropy into our lives. Cue my recent post-insurance $900 bill for a mammogram.

• Tomorrow is guaranteed to no one. You will not be the same person tomorrow. wake up as the same version of yourself—always be compassionate to the “today” version.

• People deal with shitty situations in remarkably different and unpredictable ways. Those closest to you may throw tantrums, angry that the world they knew changed. Angry that you’ve changed. Angry that the world didn’t keep their people safe. They might disappear when they deem a situation to be beyond their control and feel helpless; their hiding is not a reflection of you, but a glimpse into their own personal narrative of shame, self-preservation, and revealed limits.

  • It’s not you, it’s them.

• No one owes you anything. The universe gave you a back (maybe!) but doesn’t owe you a back rub. Wealthy lawyers and doctors are not obligated to offer their services for free. Parents are not obligated to develop emotional maturity. People are where they are, with their own rich lives that you know nothing about.

  • Kindness is a blessing when it arrives. No expectations; just gratitude.

• Value your time. It is precious. Other people will think nothing of using it up unless you advocate for yourself in the moment.

• The world is made for dominant groups and the able-bodied. We are all temporarily abled, guaranteed to experience one limiting illness or disability in our lives. Living in L.A. with a shaved, bandaged head and cast on my arm meant I was the recipient of the stares. It’s made me understand how much a moment of kindness, of not staring, of treating someone like a human being, means to those dealing with more while having less energy and resources to do so. Hold the door open, don’t stare, and remember: it’s none of your business.

• No matter what happens, just remember: it’ll make a good story someday. Bankruptcy is temporary; good times, too.

• Everything in life has a tradeoff. After brain surgery, I often told people that the accident aged me 20 years, overnight, because I couldn’t do mental math as quickly and began to forget words, mid-sentence. Those negatives came a newfound appreciation and gratitude for life—but now that it’s been 20 years, I can safely say that being 40 does not automatically grant you an appreciation for life.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Would you be lying alone in a snow-covered ditch with a skull fracture? For well over 30 minutes? You’d survive. You’d have a good story. It might fuck things up in the short-term, but it wouldn’t define you forever.

Which is why I’ve made January 31st my special day to slow down and savor. To reflect and appreciate the miracle of simply being alive.

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Finding catharsis for anger & fear

It’s easy to have perspective after 20 years. In the meantime, what the fuck do you do when shit hits the fan? This year, my personal journey is about resilience and rebuilding: after systems fail you; after an accident; after a major disappointment; after someone you considered to be a friend stops returning messages when you’re no longer useful; after you get dumped; when your body still feels the effects of a toxic boss; when a mentor of many years dumps you because of a single email you sent to his brother out of concern (!); when you don’t have health insurance and find yourself scrambling to navigate through the nightmare of our health care system and legal system after having brain surgery; when life continues to reveal itself as unfair.

Because life is both fair and unfair. It’s nonlinear and unpredictable. Sometimes you work the day of your grandmother’s funeral for someone, and then get dumped because of a single email. Maybe you emailed that person years later when you were severely depressed and wanted a reference letter for graduate school and they don’t bother responding. Maybe, just for shits and giggles, you volunteer to help a friend with a huge passion project for months, only to get tossed out of the group because you are too overwhelmed with life and miss a few meetings. Maybe you asked for five minutes of help in return for your countless hours of help—and instead of that, you get a very long email detailing your errors.

You can’t “positive vibes only!” your way out of trauma or anger. But you can reframe, find community, and find a healthy outlet for that energy. BECAUSE FUCK THEM.

The Devil Uses PowerPoint

I’m going to be writing a short, satirical novel, that is in no way based on my experiences—The Devil Uses PowerPoint—and would love to have others join me! I’ll be hosting weekly coworking sessions for members, decided by a poll. It’ll be small, unrecorded, and lawyers can’t touch me. It will be for paid members only, which means that it will be cozy and gossipy and I’m really excited.

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AND IT’LL BE FUNNY.

“There’s no better survival instinct,” Catherine O’Hara told Parade. “You’re so lucky if you’re raised with it. It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, because life is full of the dark and the light. You gotta look for the light.”

Thank you for being here during 2026, the year of rebuilding!

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Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee or follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

Leave a comment; if you enjoyed it, please spread the word! ****Or just click the heart button, that’s always very appreciated! Don’t be shy! I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) [email protected]

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Karla Starr (@karlastarr) is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company book of the year. She also writes The Starr Report, which you are reading the very end of.

I spent the last two years in house hell, a time during which I spent all of my money on a big house in need of TLC → found a bunch of housemates → discovered, among other things, that rebuffing the advances of one man can reverberate for years throughout a shared living space.1

Lesson #57:

Far too many people’s lives are unknowingly shaped by the emotional demands of men who desperately need therapy.

Before I get into the various emotional baggage of Alfred (emotionally distant father) and Griffin C. (insecure; accepted everything that Alfred said at face value → stopped and stared whenever I did housework and proclaimed ROSIE THE RIVETER, OVER HERE!, I will heretofore discuss what happens when life shoves an un-passable blimp-sized something in your way, splintering your attention and cognitive bandwidth.

Those Times in Your Life When You’re Desperately Trying to Get Anything in Order

I don’t have kids, but I do have a newfound understanding of what happens when you have no concept of personal time, clean clothes, or cognitive bandwidth—just a bunch of hands grasping at you, needing something now, demanding everything all the time because that is your job. Meanwhile, the bills are piling up and someone is pissed off that you didn’t respond to an email immediately, which you now interpret as within two weeks.

Essays or book proposals were not forthcoming—the demands of the day had whittled the intellectual components of my life down to bite-sized tidbits, scarfed down in odd moments when, somehow, there were no fires in need of putting out.

When your life is in chaos, you need something—anything—to feel stable.

In retrospect, I now recognize that I needed to feel order in some way. And so, I started to organize. Because, for the love of god, I just wanted one thing in my life under control.

Infrastructure Building and the Appeal of a Structured World

“People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control over their lives. Consequently, they respond to events and cognitions that reduce control with compensatory strategies for restoring perceived control to baseline levels.”

Our brains are action-oriented prediction processors, and citing any kind of loss to our ability to control the environment, we cling to anything resembling order. I imagine, on some level, that this makes people who are completely stuck in a maelstrom of shit—stay-at-home mothers of newborns, anyone who’s unemployed and watching the news right now, anyone who’s alive and sentient—more susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories, militant organization structures, MLMs, or whatever ChatGPT tells them.

This idea is called compensatory control: compensating for a loss of control in one area of our lives (crazy parents; horrific classmates) by exerting whatever control you have in others (bullying; self-harm). You can’t un-see this phenomenon: it’s the “CAN I JUST HAVE ONE THING THAT MAKES SENSE” in all of us.

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ChatGPT: the Cause of, and Solution to, Most of Life’s Problems

ChatGPT is one of the best and worst things to happen to my ADHD-riddled brain. I uploaded my Substack essays; my books; blog posts on my personal website. I uploaded everything I wanted to get in order.

I asked it about protocols and apps—workflows, repeating themes. I designed entire worlds of content that never saw the light of day:

As time passed, my last post felt like it was fading from view. It would be weird if I returned without absolutely everything being in order, right? I scoured other abandoned projects online. Hilariously, my last essay ( “Honey, you’re just a spring chicken”) had a pretty clear “IT’S NEVER TOO LATE” message—but that didn’t change the fact that my situation felt different.

Substack felt like it changed; online bros appeared. I waited and invented new personas: I could write about AI! Because no one has ever written about AI before!!!

I’ll write about how Chip Heath asked me to work the day of my grandmother’s funeral because he was on vacation in Greece!2

I felt like I was missing just one little thing to take action and move forward. I needed to build the perfect system. The perfect content strategy. Redesign my website, perfectly. Figure out ConvertKit and posting routines and cross-posting to LinkedIn. Perfect my Notion dashboard; have the optimal workflow. I needed to honor my intelligence, my ambition, my way with words.

AND YET IT FELT LIKE IT WAS TOO LATE

I started feeling like “I was too late to start” when I was 16, when my friends Leah and Scott had a band and I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. But then I started reading about guitar legends who started early. And I thought about the prospect of playing with friends and not knowing what chords there were playing. And they already have a band! What would be the point of learning how to play the guitar at the ripe old age of 16? I thought. I’d already have to be great if I were going to be any kind of success.

But what definition of ‘musical success’ depends on such a brutal timeline? What about the soft and human enjoyment of playing guitar, simply because music is lovely and magical?

Alas, it’s a part of getting older: there’s more time behind you to muse about what could have been. You feel like you have less time in front of you to muse about what could be. The potential for anger at your former self builds, alongside the sorrow of never achieving whatever mighty life you once imagined could have been—the sorrow of the life unlived.

Ignoring the Mental Chatter of “What If I’d Started Sooner/Not Stopped” Regret

In the brilliant Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert maps out a great explanation for one reason why we do a great job of making ourselves miserable—the regret of the alternate forking path: if only I had ________, I’d currently be __________.

We’re turning our imaginations against ourselves, investing a story that one change would have sent us down a different journey, entirely—it’s the Sliding Doors of it all, and the older we get, the more sliding doors-type moments there are to look upon, wistfully and regretfully:

• If I hadn’t been waitlisted at BIG NAME SCHOOL I’d be more successful

• If they hadn’t caught me doing that stupid thing

• If I hadn’t followed those people…

• Why did I put my money into Bitcoin?

• I shouldn’t have ordered the tuna salad

• What if I hadn’t taken time off to attend to the kid/house/nervous breakdown/sick relative

Each changed scenario ends with our lives in a vastly improved outcome—one with toned thighs, an endlessly ample bank account, and a network of friends willing to jet you off to Santorini and take care of your domestic life in the interim. The solution is humility: to accept the fact that we don’t actually know how life would have turned out in a different set of conditions. All we can do is learn and use those lessons moving forward. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Overthinking can have no limits

My the anxiety to do the perfect thing increased. But the longer you wait, the less time you feel like you have to do THE PERFECT THING, and the more pressure builds.

It’s a beautiful system, really. Self-maintaining. Self-reinforcing. The kind of trap that keeps smart people stuck. Behind the scenes of this post, I’ve been building systems to escape my broken system of procrastination.

My gut check for preparing vs. procrastinating

How do I tell the difference between “readiness theater” and actually preparing? Ask yourself this simple question:

It’s fine and human to take breaks, but pure anguish to tell yourself that you’re making progress when you’re actually just building a pretty cage of systems, especially when no one else is privy to the entangled jungle of thoughts in your own head.

From the outside, building systems and creating content calendars looks productive. I taught myself web design and designed my own website this year. It feels productive. But it’s also the perfect procrastination—because you can spend forever building the infrastructure for the thing you’re afraid to do.

Researching behavior and systems does not prevent someone from practicing what they tell others not to do. I know how systems maintain themselves. I know that depression is the opposite of luck—it narrows your aperture, makes you less likely to take the risks that generate serendipity.

Knowing doesn’t save you. That’s the humbling part.

So here’s what I’m doing instead: I’m starting before I’m ready.

I’m publishing this essay even though it’s not perfect, it doesn’t tie in to a master content strategy that culminates with my TED talk.3 Even though I haven’t figured out the optimal content strategy or mastered ConvertKit or built the perfect Notion dashboard.

I’m starting because the courage to start again is the soft skill I need to practice right now.

What pattern are you caught in? What cage are you building while calling it preparation?

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee or follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

If you enjoyed it, please spread the word! Or just click the heart button, that’s always very appreciated! Don’t be shy! I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) at [email protected].

Karla Starr (@karlastarr) is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company book of the year. She also gives workshops and writes The Starr Report, which you are reading the very end of.

You’re here because you know me (author x2) or signed up based on something I wrote in a past life. If you’re tired of hustle culture and like to laugh, keep reading:

Where I’ve been.

Two years and two months ago, I made the mistake of purchasing property. I even wrote about my new big house. I was excited for the idea of building community and equity IRL—of getting a big, beautiful house that needed work, finding some housemates, and watching something emerge that couldn’t be planned. I’d host dinner parties, art parties, entertain out-of-town guests using the downstairs bedroom as an AirBnb, make neighborhood friends, learn woodworking. I had plans—dreams, even.

What ensued was a period of 750+ days in which the universe decided that my finite time on earth was best spent standing in line at Home Depot, playing house mom to a bunch of 30- and 40-somethings, responding to ads on Craigslist, and memorizing nuances of real estate law in Multnomah County, Oregon.

I learned how group dynamics, over the course of years, can be spoiled by one person— even after they’re long gone; how quickly a toxic environment can make you crazy; that sometimes there simply is not enough ketamine or gin in the world; that people who avoid therapy after emotional trauma have a tendency to become controlling and lack self-awareness about their role in re-creating said trauma. How crazy were the past two years, you ask?

Last year, I was sued for entering my own kitchen.

No, I’m not exaggerating or making this up. As it turns out, dominant personalities have an outsized sway in group dynamics—a trend that trickles upwards and outwards in every network in life you can think of:

• A class bully or loudmouth who teaches classmates to edit themselves

• A nosy or impatient family member who demands info that’s not their business

• An insistent friend

• Someone going through a divorce who is angry and cuts down treasured plants in your yard for no reason, after asked to not cut anything down

• An insecure boss or coworker, scared that you’re going to spill the beans1

• A confident, domineering person who treats cooperative living situations like status games, becomes paranoid that she’s going to get kicked out, and starts telling people that everything the landlady does is illegal, confusing her desires with legal reality

Our lives are unknowingly, yet constantly swayed by these individual personalities—their quirks of information processing, their avoidant behavior, and failure to see that they make up a part of the system that they’re criticizing. If there’s one lesson I learned, it’s that people severely underestimate how much influence they have.

Alas—this includes me!

All of this is to say that I did not intentionally decide to take a break from Substack, just as I did not intentionally decide to step back from work, because work is how you make money, the stuff you need to do things like stay alive, and now I have a little thing called debt.

So here I am—The Starr Report is back!

Because I have had a year, this year’s theme is Resilience: rebuilding smarter; finding joy in unexpected places; knowing we’re not alone in the constant gaslighting era; and how to figure out what works for you. You can expect:

• Funny stories with useful frameworks. To wit, this month I’m discussing pruning (why cutting is just as important as adding; when to leave a situation; what to let go of)

• Honoring the mental growth inherent in following curiosity (deep-dives and rabbit holes, in keeping with the required weirdness of living in 2026; coming up: the randomness of how academic subjects were formed; why numbers are not to be trusted; mycology)

• A series on how I’m writing my third book. Not many midlist writers get to partner with bestselling authors, learn how to sell workshops to companies, or learn all of the non-writing ways to make money as a writer, which I got from spending four years with Chip Heath writing The Hilton Effect and Making Numbers Count.

• Variety. It’s the spice of life, motherfucker.

Here’s what I won’t have:

• ENDLESS COMPLAINTS. Sure, I’ll complain. But with a point.2

• AI to do any of my writing

• An interview with Michelle Obama (sadly)

By now, mid-January, we’ve all technically given up on our New Year’s resolutions. Or we’re hedging: I don’t have that much time; etc. But if you look at complex systems—nature, sustainable networks, and the like—you cannot endlessly add because we are not infinite beings. Adding a goal is just one step in the proces:.

Winter is for pruning

If you’ve been online during the past month, you’ve undoubtedly seen everyone’s goal-setting workbook. I downloaded many, including Dan Pink’s “These 26 minutes could transform your 2026.”

Sadly, these workbooks are all useless for large swaths of the populace: people who are already drowning, busy, tired, or swimming in chaos, as I was for the past two years.

Chances are that you need to delete before you can add. I’ve designed the 2026 Winter Pruning Workbook, available as a PDF download here.

We can’t add anything without setting boundaries, saying no, and letting go of things we no longer need. Don’t dismiss the psychological effect of crossing something off of your list (even if you never get around to it). Anyone who has kids, a house, a job, a chronic illness, a birthdate that takes a minute to scroll to in a dropdown menu, etc., etc.—odds are that you’ve accumulated a lot of mental scripts and responsibilities over the years.

Taking this lesson, I evicted myself from my own house a few months ago. Life is not linear; things don’t always compound and add up neatly. Sometimes, moving “up” or getting what you thought you wanted comes with an unforeseen addition that seems designed to drive you crazy. There’s no shame is changing your mind. Do what you have to do to stay sane.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee or follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

Leave a comment; if you enjoyed it, please spread the word! ****Or just click the heart button, that’s always very appreciated! Don’t be shy! I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) [email protected]

Karla Starr (@karlastarr) is the coauthor of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers. Her first book, Can You Learn to Be Lucky? Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than Others, was a Fast Company book of the year. She also writes The Starr Report, which you are reading the very end of.

The mental anguish of nursing seems to revolve around errata like getting attached to dying people, paperwork, being interrupted by irate families while passing out copious amounts of morphine, and those patients who’ve been abusing their bodies, overeating, smoking, and whatnot for 40 years before proceeding to get remarkably upset when someone else can’t undo the damage overnight.

But this night, when my mom was tidying the room where a patient in her 80s was resting, she was muttering about those physical nurse things: the back hurts from hunching over beds. And the feet! My god, you’re always on your feet.

And so my mom, then a tired woman in her 50s on her feet at 3am, muttered:

“I’m getting too old for this shit.”

And who here among us can safely say that we’ve never felt like we’re too old for this shit?

No one.

We don’t want roommates/acne/financial stresses/bickering/traffic/lines: we thought we’d be done with that by now! We don’t want to apply for jobs: we should be fielding requests! And shouldn’t robots be helping us?

Alas, the elderly woman chuckled and turned towards my mother:

“Honey, you’re just a spring chicken. I’d give anything to be your age again.”

Why am I writing this? I got married 14 years ago yesterday. And, today, I found a computer file with a journal that I kept from my divorce, 10 years ago, when I was just out of a relationship, newly single and in New York, energetic and optimistic and overly confident that I was going to be a Big Deal. Today.

Today. TODAY ALL THE EMOTIONS.

TODAY THERE ARE TOO MANY EMOTIONS.

The “Me” of 10 years ago had lots of plans: I was going to travel the world after I finished writing my first book and start a business as a digital nomad. I was going to move to Chicago and join Second City, or stay in NYC and try my hand at stand-up. I was going to get a cushy corporate job and spend a year in Singapore or Hong Kong, because apparently I thought that was just the sort of thing that happened, easily, when I was younger and dumber.

The problem, of course, is that all of these things still sound like fun. But now I’ve got a mortgage in Portland and feel like I can’t do those things.

But… why not?

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Part of this is the preference for potential, or the allure of the next big thing. I even wrote about this 10 years ago for Slate. It’s super easy to look at someone young and think “they have their whole life ahead of them!”

But don’t we all have our whole lives ahead of us? When you’re younger, you are spared the memories of failures. Breakups. Disappointments. You are spared seeing the alternate paths of friends who have gone on to do great things, while you sit and have another glass of wine without taking any big life risks. While you sit on your couch and think about the risks that did not quite go the way you wanted.

In other words, you’re spared a brain that is weighed down by history. You still get to think that you might, you just might, go on to be that .1% of people. The ability to forget distressing memories is actually a key trait of resilient people. Letting go and not allowing yourself to be defined by whatever brings you pain, or weighs you down, is not doing your past a disservice: it is a gift to your present and future self.

It’s this preference for potential that creates an unhealthy obsession with youth, leading to those obnoxious lists.

You know what’s really impressive?

Someone who is 65 and still optimistic.

Someone who is 52 and trying again.

Someone who is 73 and taking up a new skill.

Someone who is 41 and changing careers.

Someone who is 77 and on a first date.

Someone who is 56 and finally moving to the city.

Someone who is 49 and pausing things to take that trip around the world.

Someone who is 61 and sleeping on a futon because they’re on tour.

Courage is impressive and contagious and what we need more of—not age shaming. Not lifespan-event shaming. Not telling people what arbitrary stages of life they should be at.

You’re not too old to do that thing.

Read that again. And again and again.

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There’s something beautiful about the naiveté and wasted energy of youth1, and it’s very easy—and tempting—to blame our woes on our age. But when we were younger, we didn’t know better.

So now that we’re older, instead of saying “I should have,” let’s look at our past patterns and try again, smarter. Or maybe try for the first time.

Optimism is easy when you’re young, but is more important as we get older.

No one cares how old you are. And if they are making fun of you for your age, they’re just projecting their insecurities and fears. They are shaving off the interesting parts of life. They’re compensating for an inner wound. I should know: I used to be one of them, laughing at others for not “acting their age” and using “old” as a derogatory term.

But now that I’m older, I can do better.

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Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee, or subscribe to my newsletter. I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

Leave a comment; if you enjoyed it, please spread the word! ****Or just click the heart button, that’s always very appreciated! Don’t be shy! I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) [email protected]

I’m starting the process of writing book #3—which means, first, writing a proposal. (If you want your book distributed via a legacy publisher, you need an agent; to get an agent, you need a good proposal.)

I’d love some company. Seriously. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Sign-ups are now underway for the first-ever cohort of my Nonfiction Writing Class! We will be writing—guess what—proposals! And you’ll get:

• Five live classes (and access to the recordings, ad infinitum)

• Worksheets (including seven real proposals that we’ll be analyzing)

• Access to weekly cowriting sessions for a year (paid subscribers will also get those! look for an email soon!)

• Everyone in the first cohort will get lots of hands-on help. Seriously. HELP ME HELP YOU.

When done well and thoughtfully, it’s a helpful blueprint for what you want the next few years of your life to be about.1 My next book idea:

Everything I’ve been reading lately seems to fall into one of these categories:

1. The world is ending

2. Here are some life hacks

It makes perfect sense, right? In the face of bad things that we cannot control, we need to steer clear of death and focus on what we can do. That’s the mentally healthy response, at least. And it has a name:

The Fine Art of Attention Regulation

One thing I’ve been trying to do with The Starr Report is write about against-the-grain truths, from my own perspective. Ya know, “here’s what they’re not telling you!!”, but with less of a conspiracy vibe. Now, I realize that one of the reasons people don’t write about all of this cumulative crap is the mental toll it takes. Chronic stressors, truly, are death by 1,000 cuts.

I still get emails about my essay, “The Cumulative Impact of Having the Wrong Name.”2 I appreciate them.“Thank you so much, it’s not just me!!” gives me warm fuzzies for validating someone else’s experience. (Side note: it’s never just you.) The problem with writing and researching about how much my work and time are devalued is that it’s fucking depressing and demotivating.

Here are some examples of things done well:

The healthy way to write about shittiness, imo

Kirsten Powers’ “The way we live in the United States is not normal” reminded us that expensive health care, the permanent anxiety of hustle culture, fear of gun violence, disjointed communities: these things are not normal, simply what we’re so used to that it’s hard to imagine life any other way—you learn to love the hand that feeds you, even if it’s just giving you scraps and slapping you silly.

Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the “solution” is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.

See that? Huh! That’s more of a ‘personal insight connected to larger insight about late-stage capitalism’ kind of thing. So when we tired souls take a break from hustling, we inevitably turn to pixels. Oh, the pixels. I’ve been mildly obsessed with Midjourney for a year and use ChatGPT for help organizing tasks and such.3 It’s really quite amazing at producing mediocre content.

And the inevitable result of this glut of AI-generated content is to distort our sense of reality. Uncanny valley is becoming the new normal.

Unfortunately for all 8.1 billion of us, this non-reality informs our reality. Humans brains are fucking great — but unfortunately they’re increasingly filled with mush. And then we go out and do things like vote. We decide on women’s reproductive rights and climate change. We buy guns; we educate our children.

And we wonder why despite being the most evolved species on the planet we’re also the dumbest; becoming willfully blind, ultimately creating a planet that’s so increasingly deranged we’ll have no choice but to retreat even further into the fog.

AI is churning out junk, much the opposite of this must-read essay by Erik Hoel, chronicling the eerie world of AI-generated YouTube videos to the fact that Sports Illustrated was caught publishing AI-generated stories by FAKE WRITERS. Because, you know, clicks.

The inevitable progression of a culture in which everything is designed to get our attention is a non-stop thrum: our bodies and minds are unable to rest or pay attention. It’s what happens when two people stand up at a concert, forcing the people behind them to stand up so they can see, and on and on until everyone’s standing and tired but no one has a visual advantage. It all starts with the grabbing of attention, with those people in the front standing, with a world so chaotic that wearing colors you like gets reframed as “dopamine dressing,” which Ted Gioia’s dopamine culture essay brilliantly dissects. Under the umbrella of this downwards progression, Cory Doctorow wrote about the “enshittification” of online platforms like Facebook, summarized thusly:

First, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

That is: online dating platforms used to be places where people could meet each other. Slowly, over time, they have become apps full of bots and overly-filtered glamour shots charging users micropayments for the potential to get noticed, or forcing hefty subscriptions for the privilege of potentially interacting with someone who has shown interest. They exist, but their faces are blurry! Don’t you want to see??

AI Collapse and the Mental Collapse

YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder recently posted a video on the potential of an AI collapse. The premise is roughly this: AI has unfathomable processing power, but it’s not omniscient. In fact, it’s still learning! And it’s learning all of the information that we’re feeding it. However, this data is both inevitably incomplete and lacks both the context and perspective that humans at least have the chance to learn. AI just learns. And now it’s learning shitty things. Now it’s imagining patterns that don’t really exist (hallucinations).

The more that people use AI to create new content, the higher the risk that future AIs will be fed data that they have produced themselves… the more AI eats its own output, the less variety it has. (Sabine Hossenfelder)

To wit: On the left are real photographs of elephants that were fed to an AI. On the right are photos that the AI spit out after training: a bunch of lookalikes, with the occasional dual-trunked elephant. Algorithms aimed at parsing the magic of a good elephant photo will never be able to create a truly original, groundbreaking composition, an adjacent possible: it simply doesn’t have the input to do so.

AI is turning out averages, or statistically probable sequences. It doesn’t know what a trunk “means,” just that it’s a shape near the elephant’s head, which may appear as double if two elephants are standing near each other. (Not knowing how hands actually function is why AI-generated hands are famously weird.)

So… what’s going to happen with AI? No one knows. Right now, we’re watching bad kid’s videos and multi-trunked elephants. What is this going to do to our brains, over time? Prolonged Instagram use gives us a distorted self-image: it’s not easy to keep our immediate environment in perspective and realize how vast and diverse things really are.

Prolonged AI use is going to be like prolonged porn use (which I researched for a Seattle Weekly cover story on video game testing): when you are constantly spoonfed the most extreme versions of things, the outliers and climaxes and close-up shots of elephants, you lose perspective. You don’t realize how magical it is to see one in person, far and smelly.

Writing about shitty things is exhausting

Pointing at the two-trunked elephants? Fine. Hey, this is interesting! Let’s talk! Let’s build a community! Why, yes! That’s great. But in my quest to buck the status quo, I ended up turning this newsletter into something odious: a rumination-filled bitchfest. Writing about SHITTY THINGS PERSONALLY AFFECTING ME RIGHT NOW, I now realize, is not good for my mental health. Chris Guillebeau’s Year of Mental Health has it right, as does The Art of Noticing and Culture Study.

For example: am I freaking out about money right now? YES. SO MUCH YES. But I don’t want to subject anyone else or myself to a lengthy missive about all of the woes I’ve had with work lately—being told to dress professionally for a volunteer Zoom workshop I gave a nonprofit, dropping out of a TEDx event, and being asked to work without pay for the federal government because they didn’t have a budget to work with me.

To repeat: after a year of emailing about possibly giving a workshop and helping them get their heads around numbers, even before I mentioned a concrete dollar amount, the federal government claimed to not have any money.

Such is life—but that’s not all of life. Resilience, as a process, starts with our attention:

An inability to let that shit go and writing about all of that crap—because “no one else was”—has been contributing to my personal process of Larry David-ification, and that is not the energy that I want to bring into the world, because then it’s just another piece of negativity muddying the waters.

Resilience is a process

Surviving and thriving in an unpredictable environment means that we need to control what we can. We need to take responsibility for the quality and type of information that we’re letting into our lives.

As an appreciation for you letting me into yours, and a nod to the fact that we’re all f-ing stressed and don’t need any more us vs. them crap, I am hereby relaunching The Starr Report as Soft Skills for the Apocalypse: How to Be a Human in a Post-Truth World, data and cultural commentary in the service of nourishment, delight, resilience, creation, thriving, and whimsy.

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Dear readers,

Last year, I went to Morocco for a month—you know, that thing where you don’t work for a bit. (Oh, how different our lives can look in a year.)

The walls were white and perfect and I did not feel the need to adjust any furniture or have the nagging feeling of doing laundry. I just was.

Since then, as you may recall, I went through the financial colonoscopy of obtaining a mortgage and the surreal experience of buying a house, meaning that I am now in charge of a house. A house. A fixer-upper, with housemates to fill the bedrooms, and the mental overhaul that comes with being in charge.

The Lady of the House is always in charge of more than a Landlord

Enter my period of accidental domesticity. I’ve been experiencing the thing that happens when you feel like You’re the One Responsible for a House: You notice. Everything.

What’s changed is your impression of what has to, or can, be done in an environment.

Affordances, an idea coined by psychologist James Jerome Gibson, means that our perception of the environment changed according to our possible behaviors in it: perceiving is for doing. The second you need crutches or find yourself cursing your knees, stairs become the devil; when you are about to pee your pants, everything that is not a toilet seems pointless. 

“Affordances are not something that can be simply observed or seen, as they require perception and the ability to interpret the environment to understand what's available and usable.”

Survival demands mastery of two feats with opposing demands: successfully accomplishing a plethora of goals, yet limit how much energy we spend in the process of doing so. Evolution has shaped the way we process information about the world to maximize our ability to do both at once, by selectively and subconsciously paying attention to information that can help us achieve our goals—even warping the shape of things in the world that might help us along our way.

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That Floor is Dirty > Writing

Upon entering one’s home after a period of vacation is to enter an environment that is seemingly and perpetually covered in Post-It notes, each screaming DO THIS NOW. YOU REALLY GOTTA TAKE CARE OF THIS. Oh god, wasn’t I going to call that guy to fix that thing? Turning any corner reveals a new reminder of something you need to do.

Domestic affordances are how the expectation of being domestic operations manager, and household supervisor, skullfucks women on a daily basis. There is simply no escape from the cognitive labor of impending tasks, or tending to the needs of those around you—and I say this as a single woman without children. But I did have the bad luck of being born in a place in history when 99.5% of the recorded, written messages, the signs and social cues, all pointed to the fact that this shit is your responsibility.

Cultural evolution is so slow, in part, because these relatively new ideas of egalitarianism are competing against our having come into contact with grandparents’ ideals and cumulative Disney princess narratives—all at the most impressionable ages possible. Mental imprinting is a thing that affects our “priors” for the rest of our lives.

And tracking our productivity, for women or whomever is doing the housework, it’s a losing battle. You never get the satisfaction of crossing “doing the dishes” off of the To Do list because it wasn’t there in the first place.

“Doing the dishes” is never really on the To Do list because Doing the Dishes is always on the mental list. It always needs to be done. But it never finds its way into a Getting Things Done-type productivity program. Computer files, lists of Kindle notes, Bullet journals, Post-Its to track our genius thoughts: we make sure to keep track of these Big Important Ideas.

Ali Abdaal refers to this as mindspace; I say that each new task is like an additional browser tab open in the browser of your brain. “Many browser tabs using excessive computer memory” works as a better analogy because it’s a more concrete, familiar experience to us all. More browser tabs use more memory, making the computer progressively less efficient and functional, overall. Barring a sudden shutdown from an entirely overwhelmed system, the only way to recoup any of that energy is to go around and close each browser tab, one at a time.

One of Abdaal’s revelations in Feel-Good Productivity is to find the joy in work—then it doesn’t feel like work—and limit as many mundane tasks as possible.

So easy! And if you don’t like something, then just gamify that shit.

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Focusing on What We Want to Do is a Privilege

Getting positive feedback about our performance—that we’re on our way to achieving our goals—creates what’s known as a discrepancy-reducing loop: the closer we get to successfully finishing things that are meaningful to us, the better we feel, and the more energy or vigor we’re magically able to summon in order to achieve that very thing. We need to accomplish things while being stingy about energy, which is why “positive feeling results when an action system is making rapid progress in doing what it is organized to do.”1

Video games and puzzles—card games, Sudoku, and mah-jongg—are frivolous cognitive work that doesn’t feel like work for a few reasons.

First, we freely choose them. Even pigeons prefer having a choice over not having a choice—even when that second option has the same value and comes with an additional cost: having to choose between options. Simply being able to exercise a choice is rewarding, in part, because self-efficacy, or having a sense of control over our own environment, is a biological necessity.

In addition to the fact that video games are freely chosen (which is rewarding), they also don’t feel like work (even though, cognitively, they are) because they offer additional incentives. When we finish a project at work, we get an email of acknowledgement, or perhaps a gold star; when we fold our laundry, our reward is two seconds of the calm that follows closing one of those browser tabs.

Simply knowing that we’re making progress towards our goals, that our actions have a specific value, is inherently rewarding.

And yet: the housework is never finished. The browser tabs only close in Morocco.

Be Accountable

When your environment contains lots of constraints and sudden upheavals, the best way I’ve found to make time for the things that I really want to do is what I call the act of “tethering yourself to the mast”: public accountability, a financial investment in a class, hosting a meeting, etc. Other people—and, yes, ourselves—don’t prioritize personal preferences as much as concrete tasks with sunk costs.

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20 years ago, I wrote a novel about a therapist who got sent to a small town in Alaska that had no mental health professionals by a nonprofit called Psychologically Healthy United States. (PHUS was a stand-in for Teach For America, to which I briefly belonged after college.) The Coping Bee skewered the mental health industry’s constant need to pathologize and monetize every aspect of human existence. 4 shots of Jägermeister was a cure for “Not Wanting to Dance on the Pool Table Syndrome” and Molly/ecstasy/MDMA was called an “instant antidepressant.” As it turns out, that drug does exist: it’s ketamine.

And so, here’s the last half of my 2023 in a nutshell: 

• Treatment-resistant depression

• Ketamine infusion therapy

• Depression

• Microdosing ketamine (thanks, Joyous!)

During one ketamine infusion, I had a vivid realization that I needed to change.

One of my big realizations in the ongoing UNBREAK MY BRAIN saga has been the fact that I am an Olympic-level isolator, which has been getting worse over time. What was a cute tendency at 21 can be dangerous a full-fledged hardened trait a few decades later; now, I have more neural pathways devoted to constantly priding myself in being a lone wolf who’s great at going it alone. But am I? Is anyone?

Even introverts need quality relationships. Humans can exist anywhere on earth, provided that we’re in the company of other humans, suggesting that the environment to which we’re primarily adapted is the presence of others. Social living is our baseline, and not having access to the resources that others can provide is a brutally efficient way to make life more difficult.

People need people. In order to stay one step ahead of falling into a years-long battle with depression again, I decided last year to be more mindful and intentional about how I surround myself with people, something extra important as a single, childfree, self-employed person.

And so, I decided to get a house—one that was centrally-located, where I could have others over. And live with other people.

I’m buying a house! I told some people at a party last summer.

Don’t do it! cried my friend Leah.

Oh, but I found the perfect one.

You don’t want 4 housemates, she said.

Actually, I replied, I do. That’s the point.

Nope. Get a smaller place that you can afford all on your own. Maybe a more affordable neighborhood, further away. Living in a far-away neighborhood on my own was the exact environment that I needed to escape. Alas, I didn’t want to start blabbing about my mental health issues at the party and explain why living with people was worth paying more money for. What looked irrational to her made perfect sense to me because I was weighing the variables differently. And, quite frankly, it was none of her business.

Leah texted the day after. I’d be happy to sit down and look at the numbers with you, always up for offering financial guidance. Was she a financial advisor? Was she my financial advisor? Did I ask her for help? No, no, and no.

I’m good, thanks!

She begged me to reconsider. How about a compromise?

Compromise between what? I asked. Between what I want and what you want?

Dominant Personalities Shift Our Lives

“I’m just trying to help!” is like the “he just wants to say hi!” of dog training: an invasion of boundaries by people who lack the humility to realize that they don’t have all of the information, and the curiosity to wonder why someone is doing what they’re doing.

Leah probably had no idea how much effort it took me to point that out, to advocate for myself, and say what I really wanted. Really looking out for people includes knowing the whole story, including whether or not someone wants your opinion. And really looking out for yourself means being discerning about who you listen to and whose energy you allow into your life.

If I were younger, or hadn’t had this strong gut feeling about my decision, I’m sure I would have been swayed by her. That’s happened too many times in the past to count—mistaking confidence for competence, or someone’s strong opinion for a message from the universe.

The problem is that dominant personalities are everywhere, and they tend to pop up with unsolicited opinions during other people’s most vulnerable transition periods: contemplating a career change, when we’re pregnant, or considering it, when we’re aloft, when we want to start a business or go back to school or get married or move.

Dealing with this kind of social stress takes its toll over time; after you get poked enough times, you start to figure out how to avoid it. We mock social norm violators, criticize people who don’t behave the way we expect them to. When you’re on the receiving end of it all the time, or have accumulated a lifetime of memories where people made fun of/criticized you doing that thing, you become less confident in your ability to know what’s best for you, to try new things.

You open up, but learn that telling someone else a dream runs the risk of being mocked at a party and bullied over text. You get less likely to take a stand, have a thought, or be the bravest possible version of yourself. You learn to color inside the lines.

Poor, middle-class, non-whites, women, etc. are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. And these non-rich-white-guys of the world are more likely to be the targets of being treated as a lower status in interpersonal settings.

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The Cases for Making Big Changes

In a world that profits off of our dissatisfaction and anxieties—that constantly makes us second guess ourselves by offering a million options of everything, all the time—what’s more revolutionary than jumping in the deep end of the pool every now and again? By burning it all to the ground? By finally listening to that voice inside of you, if for no other reason than to free your future self from the tyranny of regret?

You get clarity on how something affects you

We never really know how much something is affecting us until we make a big change.

I never knew how much sugar was affecting me (ditto alcohol, processed food) until I quit it for a few months. I never knew how much negative people in my life were wearing me down until I took an extended break. I had a very complicated skin care routine when I lived in NYC and still broke out; now, living in the Pacific Northwest near tons of trees means clear skin with minimal effort.

You learn a lot about the people around you

Are they happy for you? Fearful? Confused, jealous, indifferent? The way people react to your big change often helps clarify their influence on your life.

Who do you think you are? Why would you do that? That’s not going to end well for you… that negative self-talk came from somewhere.

You get an opportunity to assess the barriers

Try acting like it’s going to happen to give yourself a clear idea of what it would actually take to follow through. My friend who wanted to move to Europe was anxious until she got out of her head and started looking at storage units. Storage units. Once she started focusing on the concrete details, she realized how possible it actually was.

Storage units: not impossible.

I felt stuck because of the narrative I was telling myself: I can’t move. I have to listen to these people. Single people can’t buy houses. I’m too old to have housemates. I can’t because I have a dog, don’t have enough guaranteed income this year, and what about those interest rates?

What changes do you want to make? Are you dipping a toe into the water? What’s holding you back? Why do you feel stuck?

Being “stuck,” in system dynamics, is referred to as a system’s attractor: a steady state caused by the repeated motion of the variables. Your stuck might be related to the beliefs of people in your immediate social environment, the most salient source of immediate feedback. Alas, because it’s the first input that your brain gets, we may interpret our aunt Betty or coworker Joe’s advice as important or correct when really they were just the first to speak.

What kind of rules, principles, relationships, or sticking points in your life might be contributing to your steady state, your “stuck”? You might not even realize why until you decide to jump…

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee, or subscribe to my newsletter. I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

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Really.

Seriously.

There’s a great overview of the whole thing on my new favorite Substack, Experimental History. Of Ariely, he writes: "he’s famous for his work on irrationality, which you could charitably summarize as “humans deviate from the rules of rationality in predictable ways,” or you could uncharitably summarize as “humans r pretty dumb lol.”

For the fabricated study in question, Ariely & coauthor Francesca Gino tweaked car 13,000 insurance forms that asked policyholders to report their mileage. Allegedly, when people signed an honesty pledge at the beginning of the form, they were more truthful than when they signed that statement at the end of the form.

It made a good story and came with a good name, so it got published; alas, the whole thing was a sham and gobs of the data were false.

So false, apparently, that they didn’t even bother to use the same font for the new faux data, the numbers necessary to further their pre-existing narrative. Let’s now start to think of most peer-reviewed scientific journals as “Instagram Feeds of Academics Sponsored by Universities,” only showing us the stuff that users have decided should be shared, all of it made pretty with just enough filters to sit at the intersection of reality and what someone wants reality to be.

But I digress.

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Let’s discuss rationality, Ariely’s main obsession. Remember, of course, that Ariely makes up a lot of stuff, which—for a scientist—might be considered irrational.

Rationality is often defined as acting in one’s best interests. So if Ariely’s main concern was to be honest, then his behavior wasn’t rational. If he was more interested in getting published at any cost, to be an academic superstar despite fraud, etc., etc., then his behavior makes perfect sense. It’s rational.

So what, then, are we to make of the way that most behavioral economists judge rationality?

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Repeat after me: the human brain is not a computer. Thinking is costly. It takes energy. We have a biological imperative to complete our tasks efficiently. Being “irrational” and falling victim to cognitive biases are the inevitable result of having a biological control center that emphasizes information in its immediate environment.

It shouldn’t be a shocker as to why: throughout 99% of evolution, this was it. Whatever was right in front of you was your world, the only information worth attending to. You weren’t comparing measurements or pricing wines or doing little optical illusions, you were simply trying your best not to die.

Getting along with people matters more than solving stupid brain teasers

If your social group hated you, you’d get kicked out and die. Other people’s opinions are what turn subjectivity into objectivity. Is something a fact really just depends on how many other people say that something is a fact. It was once a fact that the earth was the center of the universe. It was once a fact that having to wear my snow boots all day because I forgot my sneakers was the absolute worst thing to possibly happen to me. It was once a fact that I was the youngest person on earth. (And at one point, you were, too!) But the wisdom of time tells us not to seek scientific validity from the church, life lessons from 7 year-olds, and to accept the passage of time. And yet—at one time, these things were legit. What you see is all there is.

Humans differ by cultural and social norms: what everyone else around us is doing. We’re more adept at picking up social cues and following orders, things that allow for the speedy transmission of knowledge and group living. Compared to other kinds of knowledge, people show a robust bias in their ability to remember social norms, specifically norms about other people.1 Knowing how we’re supposed to act is in our bones because it helps keep us all on the same page. Group living: it's our survival mechanism. Like most standout traits, it's both our biggest asset and downfall.

Here’s a list of things I did that were irrational according to my former coworker:

1. Go to the gym

2. Go to the grocery store & cook instead of ordering takeout

3. Stop working at 10pm, when my brain was fried

4. Sleep past 8am on the weekends

5. Go on dates

The key thread here is that, in some people’s minds, it’s irrational to do “things that are not working.” This might make sense if you had a deadline in a few hours, or if you had live-in help. But “productivity” requires doing all the things that keep you sane, healthy, fed.

Rationality as social control

The concept of rationality has a long, complex history, serving as a benchmark for what is considered “normal” or “acceptable” behavior in various social contexts. Like the term hysterical, it’s been employed as a form of social control, delineating who is considered capable of making reasoned decisions and who is not. Psychiatry arose from a pseudo-science designed for social control.

Irrationality may be the insanity of our era, a way of exerting control by shaming anyone who dares to have a brain that does not mimic a computer set to maximize profit. Just as the dominant discourse on work is set by lucky workaholics, the dominant discourse on rationality is set by narcissistic capitalists: economists who insist that they know precisely how humans should behave, what people should value at any given time.

Want to drive across town to save a few bucks? Irrational, the behavioral economists say. Want to get a soda instead of putting that money into your savings account, where it will be worth $2.50 when you’re 80 and we’re all living in underground bunkers? Irrational.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, and Why It Matters, by Stephen Pinker, like most books on the topic, fails to discuss the fact that, quite simply, people value different things. We are not all tenured white male professors who can wait until next week to get $15; sometimes we need $10 RIGHT NOW.

Our brains are not machines. Sometimes it’s worth it for us to drive across town to save a few dollars because we get to leave the house. These are not faults in our mental makeup, they are merely unquantified variables. Things that aren’t accounted for.

If you only value money, you’re going to wind up lonely

Remember: other people are acting rationally from their own perspective. In runaway capitalism, if men have been socialized to equate their self-worth with their income, then it seems to make sense that they’d want to spend every minute obsessed with money. Good for you.

But it’s not making you happy, if it’s killing the planet, if it’s not treating you like a human, then maybe it’s not the absolute best system of thinking. It’s just another example of how entrenched capitalism is into our way of thinking, of how we pathologize others, of how we make fun of other people’s choices, of how we demonize in lieu of empathizing.

Maybe it’s not really rational.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, forward to someone who’d like it. You can also buy me a coffee, or subscribe to my newsletter. I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn. This post may contain affiliate links.

Leave a comment; if you enjoyed it, please spread the word! ****Or just click the heart button, that’s always very appreciated! Don’t be shy! I value feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.) [email protected]

Book tour!! On Wednesday, September 6th, I’ll be at the Cedar Hills Powell’s in Oregon at 7pm to see my friend Chris Guillebeau read his new book, Gonzo Capitalism: How to Make Money in an Economy That Hates You. He’s doing events in many other cities starting this week.

On Wednesday at 11am PST/2pm EST, my friend and AMAZING HUMAN Jeff Harry and I will be on Instagram to discuss Keeping Your Head Above Water When the Sea Levels are Literally Rising: Hope in a World That is Actively Dying.

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In 2020, I was living in an apartment located two blocks away from a hospital. In Queens. New York. City. You know, where the pandemic basically started. COVID-related mayhem hit in my neighborhood well before it was on the radar of my relatives outside of the city.

Three of my friends’ parents died, along with a acquaintance’s two-year-old; R died of multisystem inflammatory syndrome—in front of his mother. Ambulance sirens and helicopters kept me up at night.

I was stressed. My brother, on the other hand, was in Oregon.

“You’re watching too much news,” he said. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Alas, I wasn’t even watching the news. I was merely observing the deaths, grocery store lines, and unavoidable chaos right outside of my door.

In his mind, I was being paranoid; in mine, he was being an insensitive idiot. We were both right. We were both wrong.

When I finally took a vacation in Oregon a few months later, I saw how easy it was for him to think that I was paranoid—there were no mass signs of death slapping you in the face the second you walked outside. Just trees. My NYC behavioral norms, seen out of place, were interpreted as pushy and paranoid. But maybe they saved my life, y’all.

Over the next few months, I saw how people’s beliefs shifted—yesterday’s “overly paranoid/tinfoil hat” behaviors morphed into “the sensible thing to do.” I saw how easy it was for people in different situations (immunodeficient; libertarian; socialist; rural; traumatized) to pass judgment onto others. And that’s when I started using this scale:

The Relativity Theory of COVID Cautiousness

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The Relativity Theory of Everything

Recognizing that life is a sliding scale and my judgments are not Objective Fact has helped me understand people (myself included) like nothing else I know. It’s an empathy/wisdom hack that I often need to pull out when dealing with… well, people.

It helps me empathize with parents and kids whenever I witness random meltdowns, even ear-melting ones on airplanes. I laugh. I make eye contact with the parent on the plane and shrug. From their POV, not being able to have another juice box really is the absolute most awful thing they can possibly imagine. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW GOOD YOU HAVE IT, YOU LITTLE MOTHERFUCKER.

The Relativity Theory of Generalized Trust

The Relativity Theory of Motivation

The Relativity Theory of Being Informed

This is why I don’t think people should feel guilty for ignoring the news.

The Relativity Theory of Health

I’ve been on all ends of this scale, here:

The Relativity Theory of Deliberation

This week, I wanted to nap in the afternoon and briefly thought am I being lazy or is this an understandable reaction to being overwhelmed? and remembered the relativity theory of everything. I might ask people if I was being lazy, but their answer would always depend on their perspective and judgments about What People Should Do. Most of the time, we have no idea where we lie on the spectrum: we’re surrounded by people like us who are also on that end of the spectrum.

The Relativity Theory of Being a Snowflake

The real joy of the Relativity Theory is that it helps me have empathy when it’s hard.

Everyone has A Thing. Sometimes. Was I annoyed that the last 1/3 of Oppenheimer was a bunch of straight white guys arguing about security clearances? That the movie did not pass the Bechdel test? Yes, I was. My movie-going friend didn’t notice this.

Was I being a snowflake? Was I overly sensitive? Sensitive people, by definition, perceive things that others don’t. The real issue is whether or not it affects their ability to live and thrive in the world. There is no one “right” amount of sensitivity. Not noticing or being bothered by something doesn’t make you tough or a better human being—it just means that it doesn’t affect you, personally.

Because we don’t like to think that we’re snowflakes, we’re fast to avoid this charge by pointing out other areas of life where our emotions don’t get involved quite as easily. The Relativity Theory helps me understand Powerful People of insane privilege: from their perspective, not being able to talk about getting blowjobs in front of all of your grad students without any kind of recourse really is the absolute worst possible thing you have ever faced. Okay then.

For the sake of my mental health, I’ve started blocking people. Opting out of certain conversations.

When we stop calling people “snowflakes” and start to understand their perspective, life gets super interesting. When I stop calling people “assholes” and get to know them, I inevitably learn about someone who never learned about their emotional needs, who sees the world as a cold place, who sees themselves asa superior and uses terms like “snowflake” to feel better about themselves because of some deep void. And that fucking sucks.

I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum. Things are relative. I can stop calling people names and realize that name-calling comes from a desire to assert my own superiority instead of just moving on with my life.

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Currently, I’m writing to you at my Fully Jarvis standing desk. As I sip on “bulletproof” coffee, energy-promoting blue light is shining on my face. I breathe in notes of peppermint and lemon as my Vitruvi Diffuser releases focus-boosting essential oils. Humming through my Sonos One speaker is a top-secret flow-inducing playlist. Alright, I’ll let you in on the secret. I’m listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack on repeat. (I know you’re laughing, but try it. Seriously.)

I gaze at my laptop’s periphery through the window. The same window through which, last Tuesday, I lost a staring contest to a black bear. I live in Vermont at 1700 feet. I’m on the side of a mountain, with long-range views—isolated from distraction. Save for my neighbor, on the other side of the mountain, who installed a private ski lift.

This all might sound like a parody of productivity. In many ways, it is. But it’s also true. These scientifically proven tactics work.

NEVER HAVE I EVER WANTED TO PUNCH SOMEONE IN THE FACE HARDER.

WITH A WEAPON.

ON STAGE.

WHILE LIVE STREAMING.

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I’m sure [redacted] is a really great guy while not fellating Tim Ferriss or Dr. Andrew Huberman, though a great guy—like most tech bros!— who is unawares of complexity science and complex systems and all of that fun stuff.

In a nutshell: complexity states that you can’t guess what cake is going to taste like by looking at flour, sugar, egg, and butter. More variables in a system mean more interactions within the system (activity, uncertainty, compounding effects, intersecting feedback loops, variability and change over time), none of which can be predicted.

When we add 2+2, we know all of the variables and can predict the outcome with 100% certainty. But as systems become more complex, they become more unpredictable—vibrant, self-organizing, evolving, chaotic. This is the stuff of real life.2

Life can’t be broken down to a formula because there are too many variables. Not all of them are quantifiable.

So while our brains love certainty and answers and the objective satisfaction of Feeling Correct that we cling to these marshmallow tests, these grit methodologies, these authors of Predictably Rational claiming monstrosities like “most people will choose to die by the light of the full moon if asked after a glass of mead, and by lethal injection if asked after shots of Jagermeister.” (Predictably Rational guy, btw, is a fraud.)

The Blue Light Doesn’t Matter

I have had the blue light, the bulletproof coffee, the optimized playlist. The view from my desk is trees. Just trees. They’re nice, but they’re like 2% of the picture. Maybe. These visible shiny things tend to be evidence—conspicuous information consumption—that a would-be influencer has listened to the latest podcast, ingested the most recent life hack recipes.

The wise person knows that the visible shiny things are not the whole picture. My grandmother, creator of 7 human beings on a shoestring budget, was more productive than any of these Yes Men ever will be.

People who get the most done don’t have time to fuck around with blue lights. They are too busy.

They are too busy wiping faces and commuting and reheating soup. They are too busy cursing Netflix for changing their password policy. They are too busy living to actually blog about it.

The blue light makes us feel like we have our shit together, like we’re in the know. But that doesn’t make us better people, or better able to do whatever it is that we want to do.

Feeling like we need the blue light, the 60 minutes of lifting before we have bulletproof coffee, etc., actually make us more fragile.

Equanimity

Equanimity is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by the experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind.

Not needing a special space to work, a system of complete control, is the real productivity hack.

Equanimity is emotional sobriety, the ability to keep going despite all of that other crap that life throws at you. Being comfortable making whatever progress you can today, wherever you are right now, is the real productivity hack.

For true equanimity, we need to rid ourselves of the illusion that everything will be perfect once we get X in place—once we pay that bill (because there will be another), once we get the right partner (because life will just be different), once we figure out a system or take that online course. That candle, that planner, that desk, that coffee can only get you so far.

It’s not the candle’s fault. It’s the need for the candle, course, and planner—and that’s the itch of internalized capitalism.

Because every one of these itches comes from somewhere—a message from someone who is selling you something.

So let’s give a round of applause for people who manage to get things done amidst chaos and don’t blog about it, who don’t create online courses and become influencers, who aren’t inundating us with the idea that there is One Neat Trick you need to Get Things Done. They are our teachers and mothers and parents and friends, our grandparents—may they rest in peace.

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Two years ago, my email address was sold to what my brilliant web guy said was likely a spam farm; I’ve since been receiving 50 emails a day, many of which still make it past my spam filter. Today, I got a notice for a limited-offer sale at a pet supply store in Wellington, New Zealand. Despite unsubscribing and filtering and clicking “this is spam!” as much as possible, my email is still out of control: crap comes through and valuable stuff goes to spam. (Same deal with my newer work email address btw.)

A few months ago, some unscrupulous entity gained access to my checking account and, over the course of a few months, spent $10,000 of my money (thanks to the nonexistent security practices at Advantis Credit Union, my now-former bank)1. These months of financial frustration—which included someone successfully using a fraudulent check with my new account number, just two days after I received this new account number, without ever having checks printed, which is shady as hell—meant that I had to change the payment information for all of my billing accounts online twice in a short span of time. My dentist The chain of dental practices associated with Kaiser did not like this. Having missed two payments in a row, the dental office stated that continuing service would require me to go to Kaiser billing, get a form signed, and have it faxed to their main office within a few days.

Alas, because of my email fiasco, I did not receive this message in a timely fashion, because I want to walk my dog and eat and stay as sane as possible, rather than spending every waking moment clicking “spam.”

Kaiser wanted the form faxed. I’m now dealing with what’s probably an overdue root canal. FUN.

Someone hacked into my Twitter account earlier this year and changed the email address associated with the account. Twitter support apparently just doesn’t exist anymore.

Last week, I got an email from Nelnet that made me confusingly reach for the margarita mix. Something about payments and money and finality.

A few hours later, I got this:

Am I in bankruptcy? Is my transfer complete? Is my student loan information not, in fact, important???2

Why is it easy to feel ugly? We weren’t meant to see so many beautiful faces. Why is it easy to feel overwhelmed by social stimulation? We weren’t meant to talk to so many people.

Why is it easy to feel exhausted all the time? We weren’t meant to deal with so many rigid and complex systems on a regular basis.

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Two weeks ago, I got a new laptop to replace the 5-year-old lion that decided to die the night before I gave a presentation. The initial joys of the speed and storage space were quickly erased by the still-ensuing fiasco between Dropbox and iCloud.

Real life is messy and tiring AF. It just is.

And anyone who tries to tell you differently is selling something.

To wit: 20-year-old psychology students without dependents or mortgages; robotic researchers/marketing-savvy writers stuck in linear thinking who devise simple answers designed to sell lots of books.

If you see clarity by zooming out, all the way out—into faxing-the-dentist-because-of-bad-bank-security territory—all we ever see is a world that requires jumping through an infinite set of moving hoops, just to tread water. Anne Helen Petersen called this fatigue the plight of the Burnout Generation, viewing it largely through the lens of capitalism and the relentlessness of work.

In my view, there’s a larger point to be made that’s generation-agnostic. What’s messy and tiring and exhausting isn’t just work and the feel of being on-call 24/7, it’s home life, paying bills and getting groceries. It’s property taxes and HOA fees and remembering that your kid’s friend has a nut allergy. It’s climate change and getting out the A/C in March, having a trip cancelled because of a hurricane, remembering your reusable bags in the car, paying $5 for celery (and spending time in produce debating if your soup really needs celery), forgetting your frequent shopper card, managing parental and child controls on electronics, and reading conflicting studies about everything you’ve ever eaten.

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The Good Place Helps Explain Why Things Are Exhausting

At the end of the series The Good Place, the characters want to know why no one has gotten into The Good Place in years:

Your Honor, I once stood in front of you and said I thought there was something wrong with the point system. I finally know what it is.

Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for The Good Place… these days, just buying a tomato at the grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming.

So here’s my update on The Good Place’s realization:

Modern life is so complicated that it’s impossible for anyone to feel like they have their shit together.

I’m not talking about what makes us moral or ethical people—I’m talking about the quotidian, menial labor required to pass as a semi-functional adult.

Case study: Health care and microstressors of the past 50 years

In January, I fell and injured my knee. After a few weeks of hopping around and praying that it would go away, I finally realized bit the bullet and went to urgent care. Four hours of waiting and an X-ray led to a diagnosis of a meniscus tear. An overworked nurse fit me with a brace that, once home and in non-sweatpants, I realized had been put on upside-down, making it little more than an ankle accessory. So I drove back, got a new brace. Made an appointment for physical therapy at a Kaiser-approved clinic 25 minutes away. Between copays and PT, the injury cost over $750, countless hours of paperwork, scheduling, and driving. It’s easy to focus on time and money, things that are easily quantifiable—but what about all of the energy spent juggling tasks, completing paperwork, begging for a new brace, dealing with the PT clinic’s login portal to access my exercises?

Meanwhile, in another era, my grandparents had the same doctor for over thirty years. They had Dr. Perna’s cellphone number—not an endless loop of waiting rooms, forms, faxing (!), apps, online portals, member ID numbers, separate billing account logins, and a copay structure as complex as the tax code.

On a purely biological/mechanical level, Kaiser probably gave me more knowledgeable treatment than what Dr. Perna would have provided.

But how much better was my treatment, overall? Wasn’t it less humane, more stressful, more taxing? How many advancements have there been in ligament/tendon rehab in the past few decades, and was the possibility that I got better treatment really worth the money, stress, waiting, driving, schedule shifts, bureaucratic logistics, and countless microstressors that I had to deal with? Was having a physical therapist who had access to more research (who always saw two patients simultaneously, while glued to their laptop to chart every movement) really worth the overall sense that I was merely the owner of an injured knee with shitty insurance, that generalized feeling of being cog #3,341,009-BTR in an inflexible machine?

Complexity creep leads to bloat that no one actually knows how to fix

The frictionless nature of much of life stems from hyperconnectivity—swipe this, subscribe to that, wave my phone in front of the self checkout station, and trade my hard-earned workshop money for a pint of ice cream without touching anything, like a goddamn witch—but any glitch can break the delicate ecosystem.

When my refrigerator glass shelf broke a few years ago, getting the proper replacement would have been over $150; it was old, and I can’t imagine the number of logistical hoops required to get the one piece of glass for this one model that came out 15 years beforehand, assembled in China. What happens when a smart fridge breaks? The systems we’re dealing with have reached peak complexity, a point where no single person actually understands how all of the pieces fit together—let alone understand how to repair things.

And yes, when something broke for my grandparents Jim & Sue, they went to their appliance guy. Their appliance guy.

A phone is no longer something that has a chord and stays in the kitchen. It’s something that requires a marriage of Apple and Verizon, good credit, a case and a charger, a million passwords, storage space, and all the apps.

Income taxes are no longer a 4-page document. Yes, the first federal income tax form was 4 pages long. Anyone earning less than $3,000—that’s $91,000 in 2023 dollars—did not pay any federal income tax. (An income of $3k-$20k [$600k in 2023] was taxed at 1%.) The form was simple. Now, the tax code is thousands of pages, requiring online portals and internet access and professionals, and the payment structure has reversed so that the poor are subsidizing the wealthy. FUN.

Because we feel like we’re barely making it by, like we’re treading water but everyone else is floating along, we buy time management books and hike our wagons to the newest productivity star, not giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt and trusting that we are all just doing the best we can. We are not lazy or doing anything wrong: we are exhausted.

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Time management is besides the point

Cal Newport’s essay on “Slow Productivity” touched on the increasing mechanisms and steps behind most white-collar professional environments. Our inability to escape a project with maddeningly complex steps, constraints, and interruptions are what lead to this global, baseline level of cognitive fatigue.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then congratulations on having other people do most of your busywork. You are in the minority.

As societal structures become more complex, how can we avoid stress? I keep as flexible a schedule as possible. I try to be honest with others about where I am. I get rid of clutter like my life depends on it. I practice comedy as self-care.

I dream about moving even further into the woods on a regular basis. I long to drop out of society before remembering that I dislike camping for long periods of time.

And so it goes.

I remember that stress is an imbalance between the demands of a situation and the resources we have to deal with them—it doesn’t matter how much time you have if the things and people in your life are constantly making more demands as a side effect of the increased complexity that accompanies “optimizing” and “productivity.”

I remember that trying to CRUSH IT and be more productive is a never-ending battle, an unwinnable war, and so I go easy on myself. I pray to find like-minded people who will pass this along to others.

But mostly, to counteract the rage I feel from the millions of inescapable microstressors that constitute modern life, I try remember:

It’s not just me.

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You’ve tried taking The Simple Advice, packing a 35 liter bag, being easy and breezy with your planning—but once arrived at a train station with a diaper blowout, sans a necessary item and unable to divide tasks with anyone.

And what happens when a single parent doesn’t have something? LOOKS. LOOKS and COMMENTS from others calling you irresponsible. “How can you call yourself a parent? Why isn’t that one in school? They need peers.” Because the easiest things to do in life are spend other people’s money and raise other people’s kids, the looks and comments are relentless.

Your life requires lots of stuff because a) kids require lots of stuff, and b) you’re tired of the comments. The constant input from the peanut gallery adds up, creating chronic social stress that others don’t even realize. Finally, you write an essay: “Why minimalist traveling advice isn’t for single parents.”

Thousands of miles away, someone on the internet responds “Is minimalist traveling advice for single parents?” Their argument boils down to this:

“It’s lazy and a huge stereotype to lump all traveling single parents together and say that this advice doesn’t work for all of them. To bolster my point that all people are different and that single parents are very diverse, here’s a study on the lack of differences between parents/childfree people on traits like extraversion and conscientiousness…”

Um, okay. Great.

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Surprise! It’s really a white guy talking about black women

Last year, Dr. Carey Yazeed published “The Dangers of Courage Culture and Why Brené Brown Isn’t For Black Folk.” Yazeed’s argument is what I write about here: advice from the privileged—blind to the details of other experiences—doesn’t always work for the rest of us.

Because immutable traits (in this case, being black) influence how our actions are interpreted by others, Brené Brown’s simple “be courageous!” message is as useful for black women as Brad Pitt’s dating advice of “just show up where there are women.” Brown’s privilege inoculates her from the nuance, complexity, and difficulty that so many other people face.

In response, Todd Kashdan wrote: “Is The Self-Help Industry for Black Folk? The Science of Racial Differences in Personality.” (link; here’s a PDF.) Kashdan’s attempt at a rebuttal to her argument—and her lived experience—was to share the results of personality studies, like the lack of racial differences in extroversion.

NOTE: THESE HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH HER ARGUMENT.

The idea that “black people are treated differently than others” isn’t something that you need data for; all you need is an open mind and a brain. Alas, we do have some studies, one of the most depressing of which is the fact that white men with felony convictions are more likely to get job interviews than black men without a criminal record.1 Black women are disproportionately more likely to be called “angry” for behaviors that would either get ignored or interpreted as “assertive” and “charmingly leadership-like,” were they to come from a white male. (It's easier for our brain to interpret events in a way that conforms to our pre-existing beliefs.)

Giving other people the benefit of the doubt

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz suggests that we tend to make three assumptions when someone else is incorrect: “the Ignorance Assumption, the Idiocy Assumption, and the Evil Assumption.” Instead of assuming any of these things about Kashdan, I’ll stick with how he uses data to try and prove someone wrong, and how to spot using data in bad faith.

A case study in using data to make a point that doesn’t exist

Only using the part of the definition that suits you

Kashdan claims that Yazeed’s argument is racist:

“The assumption that an entire racial group thinks, feels, and behaves similarly is a near perfect match with the dictionary definition of racism.”

It’s the classic method of misleading and undermining: 1. making false claims (Yazeed never claimed that an entire group thinks, feels, and behaves similarly). And 2. misrepresenting the outside information: the definition that Kashdan linked to includes the phrase a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.2

Her claims aren’t racist or prejudiced, but a simple truth about her world. Kashdan’s dismissal of Yazeed’s experience—the dehumanization, the failure to accept her personal experience at face value, the fact that he’s essentially mansplaining and white-splaining the experience of being a black woman—is just another example of chronic stress faced by black women. One study suggested that “U.S. blacks may be biologically older than whites of the same chronological age due to the cumulative impact of repeated exposure to and high-effort coping with stressors.”3

Data is a garnish, not the main course

When you make Big Assumptions about people and behavior based on data—not actual experiences—bad things happen.4 For one, social science data has been weaponized throughout history, having been used to “prove” the superiority of whites, of men, of certain families, anchoring their arguments in data instead of looking at the whole picture. Trying to explain a life with data is like trying to explain a movie from a few pixels. It’s scientism

And then there’s The Fallacy of Ergodicity:

Ergodicity as a theoretical assumption posits that individuals are assumed to look like the group. In reality, however, the individual may not mirror the group.5

No one actually has 2.3 kids and has an average commute/salary. The GDP per capita rises, but most people are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Having data about a group doesn’t mean anything about the individuals in that group.

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Hypocognition: Why Privileged White Male Professors Don’t Know That They’re Privileged

My dog Daisy loves to sniff the ground at the dog-friendly apartments near our home. She seems to sniff arbitrarily until it snows:

That’s when I discover that these locations have plenty of paw prints and yellow patches of snow, why they’re objectively fascinating to her. Usually, her world of information is entirely hidden from me—and without constant snow coverage, it’s easy to underestimate how different Daisy’s world is from mine.

In social psychology, a relevant idea is hypocognition—the fact that a chronic lack of experience stunts our ability to appreciate or entertain the “unknown unknowns.” From Hypocognition and the Invisibility of Social Privilege:

Lacking a rich cognitive or linguistic representation (i.e., a schema) of a concept in question. By social privilege, we refer to advantages that members of dominant social groups enjoy because of their group membership. We argue that such group members are hypocognitive of the privilege they enjoy. They have little cognitive representation of it. As a consequence, their social advantage is invisible to them.

We provide a narrative review of recent empirical work demonstrating and explaining this lack of expertise and knowledge in socially dominant groups (e.g., White People, men) about discrimination and disadvantage encountered by other groups (e.g., Black People, Asian Americans, women), relative what members of those other groups know.

This lack of expertise or knowledge is revealed by classic cognitive psychological measures. Relative to members of other groups, social dominant group members generate fewer examples of discrimination that other groups confront, remember fewer instances after being presented a list of them, and are slower to respond when classifying whether these examples are discriminatory.

Kashdan isn’t evil or an idiot—as a white man, he simply doesn’t have the arsenal of experiences required to recognize how different other people’s experiences of the world really are. It’s easy for white men who grew up in a single parent household, poor, as a minority in their town, etc., to mistake these early experiences as a lifelong social disadvantage. Regardless of how well these men have emerged from their childhood trauma, being a white male in the United States is the dominant social position. Your current experiences shield you from the ubiquity of yellow snow. How we look affects how others interpret our actions, which changes our lives, and people at the top of the totem pole are oblivious to the difficulties of others.

What’s the motivation behind this attempt to correct someone’s personal experience? It seems like he wanted to create an alt-right-friendly teachable moment: hey! We’re actually more alike than you realize. Here’s a number. But that’s ignoring the fact that not every aspect of reality has been captured by data; sometimes, you just have to listen and accept the fact that everyone’s perspective is valid and incomplete.

White men have the right to talk about the experience of black women, but it’s a surprising one considering the obvious pitfall: not having any idea how wrong they are.

Update:

Since publishing this post, Kashdan lost a court battle:

He argued in a lawsuit that it was “anti-male bias” for the school to discipline him for sexual harassment. Kashdan lost at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit after a lower court had rejected his claims against the university in 2020, saying there was no evidence of discrimination against him. The higher court came to the same conclusion.

Even if the behavior was inappropriate, Kashdan argued, there was no evidence it had a negative impact on the female students’ education.

“He can’t accept the fact that he’s caused harm,” Williams said.

Words aren’t words.

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But to be honest, I don’t feel guilty or bad or weird or anything.

I feel great.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

I spent a month traveling around Turkey (including a week spent working as a bartender on a boat). In lieu of posting all of the things on social media, I went the other way and took a break from excessive pixel usage and writing.

The work/pixel break continued after my return, where I’ve been helping clients improve their internal communications and rewatched the entirety of Parks and Recreation while cooking and baking bread. I sold a table and obsessed over news and lifted weights and hiked and bought a sweater at REI and purchased aviation snips and cut a hole in a chain link fence that needed to be cut. I’ve read and played video games. I have spent an incalculable number of hours doing absolutely nothing and loving every minute.

I’ve lived, dammit. I just haven’t posted here.

Why We’re Obsessed With Consistency

The current cultural narrative—that any kind of improvement or achievement requires regular, diehard consistency—isn’t going to die easily for a few reasons.

For starters, who on earth is as consistent in every area of life where they wish they were? The mere mention of good habits usually directs our attention to wherever we crave improvement. We all know what it’s like to feel inconsistent at something, skip a few years months days exercising, practicing, reading, studying, creating. We’ve all broken streaks, gotten busy or bored or sick or just plain forgot, only to feel guilty and beat ourselves up for—gulp!!—being human.

Because we’ve all been a) inconsistent, and b) told that unbroken streaks are the way to go, it’s oh-so easy for us to imagine the counterfactuals: I’d have an entirely different life if I just did that one thing on a more regular basis.

It’s the impossible math of Atomic Habits: a few minutes a day is 1% better everyday, so that’s 37.78 times better in a year, and since I can say that I exercised after only a few crunches a day, then soon I will magically think of myself as The Kind of Person Who Always Works Out and turn into one of those people who get up at 7am to exercise before work.

I used to be one of those people. After a lifetime of feeling bad about my body, I joined a nearby CrossFit in NYC, working out a few times a week with no major improvement. And then, David Charbonneau became the head coach. I started working out more. For some unexplainable reason.

Bit by bit, I directed more energy to CrossFit. At the end of that crazy phase, I was consistent AF; my “rest day” was 30 minutes of horrible cardio. By then, I was weighing my food, working with a nutrition coach, doing things like carb cycling, and attending CrossFit events1. I ended up winning my gym’s annual competition. I won a sports thing, people.

Consistently exercising was easy at the time because my entire life revolved around this one thing.

A few months later, an old gym member returned after a year backpacking in Asia; before the trip, she would have crushed me. That did not happen. Instead, I won and had an epiphany: “the past year, she’s seen the world. I’ve seen the inside of the gym.”

The Flipside of Consistency: You Can’t Simultaneously Be in the Middle of Something and Have Perspective of It

Very few missions on earth require such militant discipline, and the satisfaction from reaching your goals wears off. Getting your sense of self-worth from accomplishments is fragile, requiring shark-like never-ending activity just to stay afloat. Our attention is a fish-eye lens that distorts the importance of whatever’s in front of us. Researcher Daniel Kahneman called this bias the focusing illusion: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” Psychologists are keen on the idea of “self-distancing” to get perspective, but having genuinely fresh eyes only comes when we give ourselves time to fully detach from our habits, goals, relationships, and surroundings.

Fitness isn’t just CrossFit: it’s running and eating well and doing pilates and stretching and resting and mental health and yoga and sweating and hiking. At the extreme end, serial killers have a meticulously organized and structured life—replete with consistent habits, no doubt—and its ensuing low tolerance for ambiguity and the unknown. A compulsion for order breeds neuroticism and anxiety; flexibility, after all, is a core component of mental health.

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Resilience is “the degree to which a system can endure perturbations without collapsing or being carried into some new and qualitatively different state.”2 An inability to take your hands off the wheel out of fear that everything will crash and burn renders one’s goals fragile in the long run. If perturbations and disruptions are a part of life, it’s better to plan and prepare and figure out alternate routes on your way to the goal instead of pinning everything on the promise of every day. It’s important to bounce back and perhaps more important to know that you can bounce back at all. Being comfortable with change, life’s only true constant—not such a bad idea, right??

The Psychologically Rich Life

Taking a break is not the end of the world. I did not get my “professional writer” card revoked after a few months off. Having a psychologically rich life with no shortage of stories to share has made me a better, more well-rounded human.

Resting, focusing on other adventures, learning new skills, or simply being pulled away by the other duties of life is not an indictment of your motivation or passion. Having children, a job, chores and errands that eat into your time doesn’t mean that you’re less serious, just that you have other stuff going on behind the scenes. YOU MUST DO THIS EVERYDAY TO SUCCEED was written by someone who is impatient, not the default parent, and wants to sell lots of books.

A few years ago, a pair of researchers came up with a framework that describes what I’ve spent a few decades aiming for: the Psychologically Rich Life, “best characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences... [brought on by] curiosity, spontaneity, and energy.”

We argue that psychological richness should also result in wisdom, characterized in part by flexibility of thought. Consistent with this… those leading psychologically rich lives tend to have more complex reasoning styles, consider multiple causes for others’ behavior, and do not believe that a few discrete categories can explain individual differences.

All of my trips, breaks, and experiences away from the screen—seeing the complexity of real life play out in multiple contexts—have made it impossible for me to believe that we’re all One Neat Trick away from fulfilling our dreams. Life is too complex, too weird, and too vast to think that a single answer or number or routine could work for anyone.

Giving yourself the gift of guilt-free breaks lets you see if your actions are still serving your goals (vs. just doing what you think you should be doing), and lets you see what your routines are preventing you from experiencing. I just spent a week working as a bartender on a boat in the Turkish Riviera—how can that not make me a better human, a better writer in the long run? If “getting in shape” was my goal, all I needed to do was eat better and workout a few times a week; thinking of myself as THE KIND OF PERSON WHO NEVER MISSES A DAY AT THE GYM was a competitive, ego-driven, and ultimately limiting belief. Leaning into identity flexibility over time does great things for your mental health.

Breaks allow me to nourish, reflect, and prevent a kind of scorched-earth burnout by realizing that the world won’t end if I don’t post this week or next week. Patience may be the most underappreciated value, and I’m in it for the long haul.

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To Avoid Going Crazy, We Can Either Accept What Is or Change It

An organism is compelled to take action when it wants things to change:

To avoid going crazy if we don’t like how things are, we can either take action to change things or simply learn to accept the present.

Constantly working towards something else is a zero-sum game, taking time away from the ability to learn acceptance and self-compassion, that full embrace of the present moment.

Maybe you’re happy with how things are. Maybe just being human is a full-time job. Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself. Maybe we all need to practice patience and trust the process. Maybe—God forbid—you have a well-rounded life.

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What sets the sciences apart is that they claim to construct reality but not to be themselves constructed. -Emily Martin

When I turned six, my brother hijacked my birthday party by running around our backyard and getting all of my friends to chase him for what felt like forever. Imagine me, standing off to the side by myself and feeling like I was getting left behind. I got upset. My parents did nothing. My brother ruined my 6th birthday party, so went the story.

After I stopped drinking 5 years ago, I did the steps. Step 4, the lynchpin for many, helps instill insight and perspective by looking at your resentments from the opposite point of view. Instead of playing the passive victim (my parents didn’t listen; my brother ruined my birthday), you focus on your role, your unsavory character traits. “What a little alcoholic you were!”, an old-timer once told me. “You’ve always wanted it to be all about you!!”

While I accepted all of this at first the way a desperate person does, over time I noticed the difference between who entered the rooms and who stayed. Even in New York, meeting demographics inevitably favored old white guys while driving out the non-Christian, LGBTQIA, female, trans, and BIPOC members. They were the ones who had no problem with the misogynistic, racist literature. “I’ve been sober for decades,” they said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by a bunch of privileged white men in 1935 who responded well to ego deflation—they needed to be told “you were the asshole, all along” to finally see the folly of their ways.1 While volunteering at a rehab a few years ago, I asked the head if he thought intense ego deflation was good for, say, the teenagers who traded a genuinely traumatic home life for homelessness and heroin addiction.

“Kids these days are fragile—they don’t want to admit that they were little assholes. You’ve got to break them down until they run out of self-will. They’re still trying to run the show.”

-Toxic guy who worked at a rehab? Jon Haidt?

Magical things happen when you aim to understand, not pathologize

In hindsight, calling yourself a piece of shit for everything you’ve ever done is not the best way to gain clarity about self-destructive tendencies and the underlying dysfunctional dynamics. What did help me was ACA. Whereas A.A. said you were a selfish, self-centered little alcoholic, ACA says “because you expressed your hurt feelings and weren’t taken seriously, you learned to value yourself a little less, deny your own feelings, and develop a sense of guilt whenever you stand up for yourself instead of giving in to others.”

Instead of seeing yourself as full of character defects, you gain clarity on the big picture: My parents did that because they learned from their own imperfect parents; their behavior was not a reflection of my intrinsic self-worth. You see the development of your own patterns, referring to them as traits or character defenses that no longer serving you rather than character defects.

You aim to understand instead of pathologize, which takes cognitive flexibility and humility.

And it fucking works.

There are old-timers punching down at people who just hit rock bottom—telling them that abuse is normal, that feelings are to be ignored, that one’s perspective is fundamentally flawed, and a part of growing up is to learn how to take one’s lumps.

“Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” — George Saunders

Old White Guys Aren’t Fragile, Teenagers Are

Jon Haidt and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently spent an hour talking about why American teenagers are so sad and anxious. (If you want to listen to two middle-aged men analyze the mental lives of teenage girls on Instagram, have at it.)

Haidt likens what he refers to as “fragility” to peanut allergies, which he claims is entirely due to people keeping their kids away from peanuts: you need to expose them to a noxious substance to prepare their immune system! Shut up, it’s good for you!

But food allergies are on the rise for many reasons: “increased use of hygiene products and overuse of antibiotics and, secondly, a change in diet and the increased consumption of processed food with reduced exposure to naturally grown food and changed composition of the gut microbiome.” It’s a complex situation—a perfect storm of variables coming together to shift the functioning of the overall system.

It’s not one cause because it never is. It’s a perfect storm. The kids today do not need more peanuts. As David Brooks writes:

The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious.

Mental health issues are always complex, and even the most robust set of genes can’t handle a constant, unprecedented onslaught of social stressors. Chronic social stress is cumulative and defeat inhibits motivation; if the world is fucked and you’re going to get yelled at for even trying, why bother?

Defensiveness and Perfecting Adaptation to Reality

I’m constantly amused at how often defensive white male thought leaders are, and how quick they are to weaponize rationality.

Rationality by Steven Pinker; Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely; Thinking, Fast, and Slow by Daniel Kahneman—all of these types of books, apparently, foretelling the apocalypse because people don’t weigh information in the same way that those authors find acceptable.

Humans are not machines designed to maximize, say, money. Human thought puts more weight on recent information because it’s more relevant to the current situation; human thought is finely calibrated to arrive at a solution that works just fine, and then stop simply because our energy is limited. (Heuristics and biases are features, not bugs, of the brain.)

See? Our so-called irrational thought processes make sense once you look at the big picture.

Addiction and narcissism are characterized by a low self-esteem; narcissists mask their low self-esteem with a constant need for external validation. Narcissists are never wrong, ignoring and denigrating comments that don’t match up with their rosy worldview and need to demonstrate superiority. Empathy? It ain’t happening.

Because, you know, these kids need meat on their bones.

Piaget’s view of psychological development or maturity was the ability to accurately adapt to reality:

“A [maturing] individual is constantly interacting with the environment and actively seeking correspondence between their existing organization of knowledge and new environmental experiences… striving to attain higher levels of development, which gives them a better understanding of the surrounding world.”

Consider the people you know who are failing to thrive, the ones perpetually stuck in their own muck, whose lives consist of having the same arguments, problems—they’re failing to incorporate new information into their worldview. “Defense mechanisms are mechanisms that permit us to think and act... defense mechanisms are the primary instruments for creating order in the mind.” 2

No One Thinks They’re Defensive Until They Hit Rock Bottom

We’re more likely to judge something as true if the information lines up with what we already believe; it’s easier to discard one thing than it is to rearrange our entire worldview. But what if your field has, historically, been wrong? Racist, sexist, full of privilege?

I had a moment that researcher Roy Baumeister calls a “crystallization of discontent”:

Prior to a crystallization of discontent, a person may have many complaints, but these remain separate from each other. The crystallization brings them together into a coherent body… forming associative links among a multitude of unpleasant, unsatisfactory, and otherwise negative features of one’s current life situation.

I’m finding it easier and easier to ignore old privileged white guys telling me that I’m fragile, that the world is going to hell because some people want to change their pronouns, or that it’s wrong to walk out of a toxic situation because I need more meat on my bones. (I have plenty, thank you.) It’s really not a matter of being “overly sensitive” or “insensitive,” just a matter of respecting the other person, recognizing that we never know someone else’s history or life experience. Period.

For now, I have to take my own advice: seek to understand, not pathologize. So I’m not saying that Jon Haidt, Pinker, et. al. are horrible people. I’m just saying that someday, they’re realize that the world isn’t crazy for wanting to be treated well.

But first, maybe acknowledge that the unrelenting desire to call THE ENTIRE WORLD crazy does not seem to be motivated by anything except for the need to feel superior, which comes from a lack of solid, internal validation. A failure to feel whole and worthwhile, just as you are.

That’s not evil, per se.

But it is fucking sad.

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• Cal is getting a new air conditioning system for his house’s second floor

• Carpenters are coming to build custom bookshelves for his office

• He writes between 1-4 hours a day, first thing the morning

• He has a new research assistant, Caleb

• Caleb is also helping him with a longer piece for The New Yorker, which will do “double duty” as a piece in the book

Let’s recap:

1. No chores or manual labor for Mr. Soft Hands 😉

2. Someone else as Domestic Operations Manager that allows him daily uninterrupted time in a private home office with bespoke bookshelves

3. Someone helping him with the research

4. Editors at The New Yorker helping him edit and hone his ideas

A man with a team clearing all non-writing tasks out of his way, another team helping him with all aspects of writing, and a giant book contract to compensate him handsomely for these thoughts—i.e., a man with nothing to do except write a book on productivity—IS THE ABSOLUTE LAST PERSON ON EARTH WHO SHOULD BE GIVING ANYONE PRODUCTIVITY ADVICE.

I will, as you may recall, once wrote a book for “with” one of these types of men, spent 3 years answering emails and talking 24/7 and such. After this behind-the-scenes experience, I have simpler aspirations: I want to be like my dog.

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Successful Workaholics Dominate the Discourse

Mr. King of Oversimpification and One-Man Straw Man Factory, Malcolm Gladwell, recently told people to get back to the office, despite not having worked in an office for quite some time:

“It’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is that we want you to have a feeling of belonging, and to feel necessary. And we want you to join our team. And if you’re not here, it’s really hard to do that. It’s not in your best interest to work at home. I know it’s a hassle to come to the office, but if you’re just sitting in pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live? Don’t you want to feel a part of something?”

Here’s the part where I mention the Great Resignation/Reshuffling/Reset/Remix, etc., its litany of causes and effects. And here’s where I make the bold claim that people are quite happy to not make work the center of their lives.1 Witness the widespread state of exhaustion, the daily increase in confirmed cases of the Fuck Its, the spreading realization that we are all being held hostage by the egos of billionaires and politicians, and the reality that many types of work are dehumanizing, and the fact that deferring joy until the end of one’s life is a game for those with reliably healthy planets and retirement accounts.

Not only does work not have a monopoly on fulfilling those belongingness needs, work can go fuck itself.

Steve Cadigan, the former chief HR officer at LinkedIn, recently said something similar while bemoaning The Kids These Days and Their Remote Work:

“Their sense of commitment to an organization where they haven’t met people in person, they haven’t been around, is much less than the people who are spending time together as we were before,” he said. He cites the lack of bond that younger employees feel to their organization as a “big challenge” for companies working in a remote capacity.

The horrors! The Worker Drones cannot be as easily enslaved if we continue to experience disruptions in our Stockholm Syndrome protocol. Both of these “thought leaders,” neither of whom commute from New Jersey to sit in a cubicle next to a gum-smacking nail-biter named Rita, are nevertheless doling out the kind of advice that will be affecting the lives of those who do.

What if we aimed for understanding and empathy over judgment?

All living beings are exquisitely sensitive to reward certainty; evolution requires, at all turns, a surplus of energy. As this recent theory suggests, “fatigue adaptively signals the value of rest.”

Deviations from pure engagement with an activity are, from the actor’s perspective, rational; people lean out for a reason. When we love what we’re doing, can’t imagine being elsewhere, and are being rewarded for doing that thing, we can just sit and Do That Thing forever. Motivation is easy when it’s reward-on-reward-on-reward.

But, say, our attention is needed elsewhere, the pay isn’t that great, and work hasn’t promoted us to a level that honors the basic human need for autonomy.

With the passing of time, it becomes increasingly possible that behaviors other than the one currently being performed offer opportunities for greater reward, and to which it would be more valuable to switch behavior.

At some point, you want to go or stay home because it’s more rewarding than working. You don’t just want to belong to your job.

I once thought that I was a workaholic, until I started working with someone who got upset when I wanted to stop working to get dinner. Go to the gym. Be a human being.

Being in an office worked was, at one point, great for Cadigan and Gladwell, and every other guy in a corner office who wants everyone to follow his lead. Getting promoted to that level leaves you surrounded by other workaholics, each of whom share your values and motivations. We often fail to appreciate how different our lives are from others, ergo my contribution: the Relativity Theory of Everything.2

If Gladwell et al. are telling us that our work life is pathetic because we aren’t prioritizing belonging to the company, perhaps they can stop judging long enough to understand that it’s not as glamorous an affair for others? Gladwell gives us:

Is that the work life you want to live? Don’t you want to feel a part of something?

Let’s ask him, instead, if that’s really the kind of life he wants to live.

Don’t you want to have a life outside of work?

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“You didn’t even get the PDF?” he asked.

“Nope. And I mentioned that I was writing a book for Penguin.”

“Huh. Who was this?”

John, who was just “looking around for article ideas,” had also reached out to that same Professor that week.

While I got no response, John got an interview shortly after emailing.

😑

We discussed and estimated that I had to send at least 5 emails to get a response—typically passed off to a lab assistant, grad student, or communications department for booking in the distant future—while he typically had no problems getting phone time and PDFs that week, if not the same day.

Remember Bruce Willis’s realization at the end of The Sixth Sense—when everything he’d been through became perfectly clear, horrible, and heartbreaking? That was me, at the bar and on the way home: I thought back to all of the emails I’d sent over the past several years, unanswered and dismissed after such careful crafting. All of those lingering questions. All of that time spent searching and waiting and hoping.

I thought about editors at publications I’d contacted; the additional research and pitches they requested before disappearing. I thought about John’s speedy responses from sources for interviews, phone time with editors to “bounce around some ideas,” and the grace of several rounds of edits—all before getting paid more money per article.

What would my world be like if I always got responses? If people shared and subscribed to my stuff as much as his?

How much more work do I have to do to in order to make the same amount of money as John?

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This is the part of the story when someone might use words like anecdata and exaggerate or peer-reviewed research or criticize my emailing technique. And, in response, this is the part of the story when I remind that person about my experience working alongside Voldemort everyday for three years, witnessing the alternate universe of what it’s like to have the right name. (This is the part of the story where I remind researchers that peer-reviewed research, in addition to being collected by biased individuals, fails to capture the nuance of actual life.)

Yes there are studies about sending things out into the void with the wrong name

White job applicants who had served jail time for a felony were more likely to receive a callback than black applicants with no criminal record.1 Omitting references to being black or Asian American from one’s resumé (“whitening” it) is a boon: after whitening their resumé, Asian Americans get nearly twice as many callbacks; black candidates get two and a half times as many callbacks.2 (In that study, the organization didn’t matter: “Employers claiming to be pro-diversity discriminated against resumes with racial references just as much as employers who didn’t mention diversity at all in their job ads.”)

My favorite story from the gender callback divide: Kim O’Grady got no responses whatsoever after sending out resumés for four months. Then, as he writes:

I made one change that day. I put Mr. in front of my name on my CV. It looked a little too formal for my liking but I got an interview for the very next job I applied for. And the one after that. It all happened in a fortnight, and the second job was a substantial increase in responsibility over anything I had done before.

Where I had worked previously, there was a woman manager. She was the only one of about a dozen at my level, and there were none at the next level. She had worked her way up through the company over many years and was very good at her job. She was the example everyone used to show that it could be done, but that most women just didn’t want to. It’s embarrassing to think I once believed that. It’s even more incredible to think many people still do.

Writing While Female

Emily Glassberg Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country, plays under the names Michael Walker and Mary Walker. Identical scripts written under a female name “received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s.”

Writer Catherine Nichols decided to see what kind of reactions she’d get sending out her writing under a different name. Fifty literary agents got queries from Catherine, while another fifty got the exact same query from Charles Nichols.3

Of the fifty emails sent by Catherine, 2 agents asked to see her manuscript.

Of the fifty emails sent by Charles, 17 agents asked to see it.

“He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book,” Nichols wrote.

Literary agents are people who have willingly chosen to read unpublished manuscripts for a living and get paid based on their ability to sell them, so if their salary is contingent upon selling books, they should be focused on the quality of the pages.

Alas, the brain. Our action-oriented energy-efficient prediction machine, when judging value of the unknown or ambiguous, uses whatever cues are available. We favor people we can easily imagine playing a certain role, people who look like those who’ve been successful before, without realizing how much every single interaction adds up to a cumulative advantage over time. Success in cultural markets depends on getting attention by the right eyeballs, and then making sure that those eyeballs evaluate us favorably.

We like to believe that life is a pure meritocracy, but everything in studies and real life show us that merit is not judged equally.

It wasn’t until I dated a lawyer who spelled things out for me that I began to understand the racial disparities of incarceration in the U.S. If you are black, you are more likely to get pulled over; more likely to have your car searched; if the police find drugs or catch you for a traffic violation, you’re more likely to get a citation or arrested; more likely to go to trial; more likely to be found guilty; will get a longer, harsher sentence. Being black is a liability every step of the way.4

If you’re trying to make it as a writer—or even just trying to be taken seriously as a professional human being—not being a white male is also a liability at every step. You’re more likely to get ignored or dismissed by sources; less likely to get a response or commission from an editor; get paid much less per article; less likely to be considered an expert; have your writing evaluated more negatively; less likely to get shared by readers; more likely to attract dismissive or hateful comments; less likely to get a book deal; less likely to attract attention by reviewers or readers.

As a result of this cumulative advantage, who do we see when we look at the bestseller lists?

Your work and time are valued less by everyone. This shit is unbelievably tiring. This week, I got a copy of The New Yorker with a feature written by John; meanwhile, my editor at Medium just informed me that my contract won’t be renewed because they’re “going in a new direction.”

What You Can Do

Let’s stop thinking of life as a zero-sum game. Stop thinking of everyone as competition. Stop thinking that diversity is irrelevant. Start promoting, valuing, celebrating works from people who do not look like you. Believe their stories. Take them seriously. Make introductions to editors and agents and hiring managers. If you feel like this smacks of favoritism or giving out extra credit or judging things unfairly, remember that things are already being judged unfairly.

Productivity Gurus are always drawn to the stuff that’s right in front of our face, the stuff they can control: the phone, the internet, their filing system. But for some of us, being able to keep going and get shit done also requires a superhuman level of grit, resilience, motivation, and blind optimism. I can’t find anything about the anger or fatigue or burnout that accompanies the realization that having the wrong name is a liability to your work life. But it is.

Every decision by others is a combination of factors you can and can’t control—the theme of my first book—which helps me not let success get to my head, or failures get to my heart.

I oscillate between wanting to spend the rest of my life telling others to be extra kind to themselves and wanting to burn it all to the ground.

But first, a nap.

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I gave a talk at the last-ever World Domination Summit last week and loved every minute. “How to Be Perfect” was my takedown of the Self-Help Industrial Complex, explaining why the privilege of bestselling authors and a focus on making information marketable leads to overly-simplified answers that don’t actually work in the long run. Thinking that we’re failing to succeed at walking what seems like a clear and easy path makes us feel worse.

Update! For now, the talk is available here.

We can mistake reading all of the information for doing something to work on our problem.1 Because all of the unknown variables, you’ve got to implement stuff in the real world to see what actually works for you, but it’s easy to get paralyzed looking for the one right answer/hack/process/system.

I want to give this talk again and again and again. I want to beef it up and sell it as a manifesto. I want to do things with this momentum and all the kind words I’m still receiving about the talk. And yet: have I reached out to anyone? No, no, and no. Despite the fact that I have this dang newsletter, a website, and various social media accounts, I hate self-promotion.

As Ryan Holiday writes in Perennial Seller:

Audiences can’t magically know what is inside something they haven’t seen. They have no clue that it will change their lives. You can’t be the self-conscious wallflower in the corner, hoping that people will see through the act and just know how great you are. Someone is going to have to tell them.

I’m hiring someone for my social media and marketing

I spent a lot of time talking about the importance of not feeling bad when people give you simple words of wisdom— why “Just focus!” is frustrating, and something people with ADHD hear all the time. So, finally, I can admit that I feel that same way when people say “just put it up!” while referring to Twitter/Instagram/ LinkedIn / TikTok/Facebook. In the future I might, but for now I just don’t want to with the few hours of useable time I have each day.

I’d rather make a little less money and outsource that to someone who really loves the idea of a strategy session, Notion, Hubspot, funnels, following through on spreadsheets and analytics, researching conferences and potential speaking engagements, researching potential companies to pitch for my workshops and classes on all things communication and numbers.

I’m hiring someone to help me with social media and marketing: ideally, I’ll write big content on my website, and you place it around the internet deftly, with elan. You’ll help me reach companies to do more workshops. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or complete this form.

If you’re interested but don’t feel like you have the right experience, don’t count yourself out—get in touch.

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