You'll never be done

Ask me anything - Volume II

A few weeks ago, I asked paying subscribers and folks in the Substack chat if they had any questions for an AMA (ask me anything). Unsurprisingly, I ended up spoiled for choice. The questions below cover AI, the mental load, work, childcare, culture shock, writing, and more. I had a really hard time whittling this list down and not allowing this post to get absurdly long, so I’ve included an audio version if you prefer that.

As you know, I don’t paywall any of my writing, and I try to be fairly low-key about pushing paid subscriptions in this newsletter. But that means paying supporters don’t get a lot of perks or recognition in return. So just allow me to extend my gratitude here: The time that paying subscribers grant me to think about these topics really feels like a luxury in my life. And I’m thrilled that it gets to spark a conversation with a wider audience as a result. (Speaking of, don’t miss the comments section on my last post — so many great ideas.)

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions, too. Even those I wasn’t able to include help shape how I think the newsletter and this audience. If you’d like to read the AMA I did last year, it’s here. If you’re a free subscriber and want to join the lovely paid crew for $30 a year (or equivalent in your currency) you can do so here.

Onto your questions…

I’m constantly struggling with not falling into the trap of more, better, faster (especially when I hit a financial milestone but there is just that allure to work more now that I have a minute of time!) Do you have any practices or advice on how to (try) to avoid falling into that trap or at least reducing the speed of the daily life’s treadmill? —Edward Jayce Darling

I love your question because it shows you’re on the cusp of change. How do I know that? Because you’re noticing your thoughts. The next step in that process is to notice that you and your thoughts are not the same thing. That means you can actively choose new ones.

So you need to introduce a new, terrifying yet liberating thought: You’ll never be done! Ever! The treadmill will not cease, you will never feel satisfied, and life’s demands will just keep stacking up. Once you really accept that, I’ve found that there is only one rational response: start enjoying life right here, right now, in all of its imperfections.

If you’re anything like me, the thought of jumping off the treadmill even for a little bit will be terrifying and uncomfortable — that discomfort is the thing you need to get curious about: Why is it so hard for you to stop making progress, even temporarily. Where did you learn that you don’t deserve to rest? What do you fear will happen if you stop pursuing more money, success, milestones? Finding out the answers to some of these questions will change your life way more than the next financial milestone will.

I still have to approach this as an active, moment to moment practice. Whenever the impulse to do more, faster, better settles upon me, I notice it, and try to interrupt it. I take a big belly breath, try to soften my whole body around it, and tell myself a different story: “You’ll never be done. You might as well stop for a minute so you can enjoy some aspect of this day.” It really helps. I also recommend reading Oliver Burkeman’s work on this. (Start here and here.)

What about the news?

With all the recent political events happening in the US sometimes the easiest thing to do is just to tune it all out. However, this feels very much like complacency. How does one go about trying to make a change while acknowledging there is only so much one person can do? —Edward

I could say so much about this, but there have been lots of great pieces about this recently. The three below capture most of how I’m feeling. I may write something longer that intersects this soon.

“I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care.” Hell yes. by

Douglas Rushkoff

“The news cycle […] sets us down a path of anxiety in the most part without a clear way to action or shape these events. Unlike within our immediate sphere of influence, we’re left simply with the work of worrying.” by

Chloe George

Is tuning out self care? by

Holly Whitaker

(This is paywalled, but go ahead and subscribe because all of Holly’s writing is an immediate read for me.)

AI versus humanity

My job has me constantly interacting with and thinking about AI. I’m deeply ambivalent: it’s coming whether I use it or not, I might as well learn as much as I can about it. On the other hand, I have significant worries about the pace of advancement and how the tech will impact humanity over the next few years and beyond. How will this impact my young children?) How are you thinking about AI today? —Sarah

I too have to engage with AI a bit for my work with clients (don’t worry, never for this newsletter), and I personally don’t lose too much sleep on that. It’s definitely capitalism’s Big Shiny Object right now. It’s where all the investment is flowing, and I have to play that game to earn an income. I think of it as a very “There” thing, to use the framing of my piece on collapse.

On a deeper level, I think there is a kind of spiritual and emotional poverty to big AI believers. One definition of Gen AI I’ve heard is a system that can do any cognitive task a human can do. But there is a lot more to human creation and ouput than cognitive tasks. (I wrote more about that there a couple of years ago.) Humans bring their entire selves to their decision-making and creative output, and it gives the stuff we make a palpable feeling of aliveness that AI-output really obviously lacks. I don’t know about you, but I feel a little bit sad for people who can’t tell the difference.

I’m not saying that Gen AI won’t fuck over a lot of industries and jobs. It has already had an impact on my income and work, for sure. But will it fundamentally alter the experience of being human? I’m pretty bullish on that remaining as is. In my parenting, I want to expose my son to the world in such a way that he will be able to notice a difference between real, alive experiences versus these sad, investment-backed simulations of them. He’ll know it because he’ll feel it.

Call me an optimist, but I think there is an “inhuman chasm” that we are reluctant to fully cross over for reasons that are quite deeply embedded into who we are. It’s why, against all odds bookstores have made a comeback, why wearing computers on our faces remains wholly unappealing (remember when VR/AR was the Big Shiny Object last year?), and it’s why there’s a growing consensus that spending all day sucked into little devices rather than connecting to real people is a shitty way to move through life. More on that below.

Not enough people

How are you thinking about the mental load currently? I'm so keen to make this more equitable with my wife, but I've unfortunately discovered almost zero support from other men. It's been an insight into so many other gender issues. It feels like women are understandably at their limit and men aren’t acknowledging it. Such a terrible place to be for everyone (I think). —Michael Rolfe

Before I had a kid I would have said it’s simple: Partner with a man who has been to therapy, learn how to communicate together about what’s actually going wrong, “do the work,” divide things exactly equally. Basically the Fair Play method that a lot of Reddit threads and online discourse on this topic recommends. I thought because I’d done all these things, I was somehow exempt from the millennia-old struggle of women everywhere. My god, did I have some harsh reality coming my way.

The first sobering truth is that having a child is an incredibly unfair endeavor. Biology really doesn’t give a damn about equality. While progressive social policies can get us pretty far in ameliorating that, they can’t eradicate the unfairness totally. That’s not necessarily a reason to not have a child, but my observation and experience is that for women who have children in their thirties or later, after experiencing lots of autonomy and independence, it comes as an identity-altering shock. I wish someone had been honest with me about this beforehand — like really honest — because the girl-boss feminism I ingested in my twenties completely left this out. Miranda July managed to sum up this whole feeling up very well in one sentence in her novel All Fours (find it in #14 on this list).

The second realization came later, after my husband and I tried insanely hard to fix this. Dan is an entirely equal and involved parent. He has handled more night wakings than I have. He has stepped up to domestic routines and tasks that don’t come easily to him, for reasons of biology or neurology or social conditioning — maybe all three? If he did anything more or tried any harder, I would genuinely worry about his health and well-being. And at the same time, I have lowered my standards. I have adjusted my expectations of cleanliness. I cook fewer meals, and even fewer from scratch. I have delegated or let things go entirely.

In other words, the two of us have really worked at this. I don’t know that we can do much more. And yet: it still feels unfair! I still feel like more things live in my head mentally. I still feel like modern motherhood asks all women to perform at a hyper-functioning level that is definitely bad for our well-being. And I still feel angry about that a lot of the time. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t.

Eventually, thanks in large part to writing this newsletter, I started to see that perhaps the problem isn’t that my husband isn’t doing enough. Maybe the problem is that … two people are not enough people for this job.

Whenever we argue about this, that is basically where we end up: How can we add some more support to this equation so both of us feel like we have a little more time to exist outside of work, parenting, and the domestic sphere? Because we both deserve that, it lowers the resentment hugely, and it stops us keeping score so we can work on the same team again. I think this wider lack of support — the village — is actually the source of most of modern motherhood’s serious problems.

I will finish with a caveat that unfortunately, the bar is in hell for men. Just scroll through the many threads online, and you will plainly see there are a lot of men out there who aren’t even trying. So my answer above assumes that a male partner is, like mine, actually interested in solving this. It also sounds like you are, so keep modeling that.

Working “part time”

What are your thoughts on work? Should we all aspire to work four day weeks or more or less? What about the full time working mum vs part time working mum vs stay at home working mum conundrum? Do you worry about retiring and providing for your children? –Natascha

Having a child meant I was put in the position of working part time because we can’t comfortably afford full time childcare. I say “part time” because my child (who is 2.5) goes to nursery three days a week, but I don’t actually mean that: I still have to earn as much, if not more, than I did before I had a child — I just have to do it in way less time, plus be a parent.

Having to compress my entire working life into three days a week because of the cost of childcare is really shitty — and goes back to my prior points about the untenability of modern motherhood. But it’s been enlightening to say the least. I’ve seen how work can fit into my life, rather than the other way round, and I’m definitely hanging onto that insight in the future. I give fewer fucks, and I get more done.

I try not to worry too much about having a cohesive career path that looks impressive on paper or on LinkedIn in 25 years time. I certainly used to, but I’m now more interested in supporting myself and my family in a way that feels sustainable, and leaves me time to pursue the non-compensated work and sources of meaning that I write about in this newsletter.

Though freelancing has downsides, on balance I think it’s a better fit for me. I have a wide professional network thanks to many years of freelancing and most of my clients come from connections/references/people I’ve worked with before. I’m proud of that, and I honestly think it’s a better fit for the precarious world we live in.

Yes, I stress about retirement and all that. But I don’t really know any millennials that don’t. We’re living Here now, remember? The old rules don’t apply anymore.

Attention capitalism

I'm curious about whether you see any big trends in our little corner of society (whatever that is, but obviously we're just a thin slice of the big sociological cake). I think you have an exceptional sense of the Zeitgeist. If you look at the last few years, the present, and the immediate future, what do you see taking shape in the areas you like covering (village- and community-building, maintaining sanity, our relationship to tech, being a young parent...)? —Bruno

The growing sense I’m getting is that the backlash to attention capitalism is coming. And I don’t think it’s going to be a niche thing for our thin slice of the sociological cake, as you put it. It’s going to be a much broader shift.

Because nobody likes the way it feels to be inside a device all day. As the journalist James Pogue put it in this discussion about Big Tech’s role in the MAGA movement, regardless of your politics, pretty much everyone agrees “it’s a physically unpleasant way of going through life — staring at a phone, your head hunched over.” It violates what I mentioned above, that inhuman chasm, or the idea that we are naturally repulsed by things that ask us to act in repeated, gross violation of our deeply-wired human needs. We all share this impulse to self-correct.

Ezra Klein (who I quote way too much) had two good episodes recently that touched on this. The first is the conversation with Pogue, linked above. Another is this interview with Chris Hayes, who just published a book about attention capitalism. The whole conversation is great, hopeful even, but this exchange towards the end stayed with me.

Sometimes you read historical dispatches from peak industrial London, and people are like: This is the most disgusting place that has ever been put on God’s Earth. Like: It’s just sewage and coal ash in the sky [...] And it did reach a point with all of these things, particularly the worst depredations of the Industrial Revolution, where people had enough. And having enough was represented in a million different political tendencies, cultural movements, manifestations. [...] I think there is an untapped wellspring for a total rebellion against the way it feels to be inside your mind at this particular moment with this particular form of attention capitalism.

That feels right to me. And I agree with Klein’s prediction that a politician who builds a movement around that idea would do very well.

Culture shock

I know you’ve covered this topic but I’d love to hear more about the culture shock you (may have) experienced arriving in the UK from California. –Tom B

My culture shock these days definitely works in the other direction: I am always disoriented by the harshness of arriving in America, from the moment they start inevitably yelling at you in the passport line.

However, if there is one thing I still struggle a lot with culturally in the UK, it’s people’s propensity to not speak up. People will just accept being served the wrong dish, or be the recipient of contemptible or incompetent service, or be quiet about some very obvious problem that could be fixed if one person would just say what everyone else is thinking. I constitutionally cannot keep quiet about such things, which is probably why people here think I am a lot.

I wrote more about my UK/US identity in this piece if you’re interested. Another reader asked if I would ever live in the US again, and I think it also answers that question.

Success on Substack

I’d like to start giving myself the permission to just write for a purpose. Maybe share my experience, struggles, expertise and hopefully connect with others who don’t have a village. My question for you is: did you just start with Substack right away or did you experiment with other platforms like LinkedIn? What made you decide on Substack and what advice would you give to someone who may only have a few hours per week to focus on this, because of other paid jobs and child caring.

I would caution you against thinking that any one platform is the secret to success, or even making progress, as a writer in the long term. It’s pretty irrelevant, I’d argue. Yes, Substack is the platform du jour right now, but I promise you that won’t last forever. I’m old in digital media terms, so I have the authority to say that.

I was a journalist for a little over a decade. I started publishing a personal newsletter to promote my journalism work in 2015/16. In 2019, I moved it onto Substack, and in 2021 I started offering a paid option. So, yes, I arrived earlier than most to this genre, but my relative success here is largely because I’ve been writing for an audience on a lot of different platforms and publications for 15 years. I have honed the ability to build a bridge between what I’m thinking about and what readers might find useful or interesting. That’s the important bit, not the platform or publication. No one gave me permission, I just started. And that is exactly what you need to do.

I offer more detailed writing advice — including my belief you accomplish a lot in just 25 minutes a day — in this post.

Whew, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, it helps a surprising amount if you hit ❤️ or leave a comment below — or forward it to a friend. If you’d like to support me further, you can update your subscription to paid here. All content is free for all subs, but paying subscribers allow me the time and space (aka childcare) to explore these themes. It means a lot.