And we are shooting ourselves in the foot because of it.

The result is that because of this, people straight up lie about their privilege. They don’t acknowledge it. They fall back on the myth of meritocracy, and attribute their success to their own “hard work.” And much of the time, they don’t even realize they’re doing it.

The thing about privilege is that it’s nuanced. It’s not just private school + mansion. It’s being able to speak English. It’s having a US passport. It’s having a safe couch to crash on if you end up homeless. It’s not having young or elderly family members to financially support. It’s having a healthy body free from chronic pain.

I cannot tell you how many influencers, business owners, and otherwise impressive people I’ve met that have been blind to their own privilege. They swore up and down they were entirely self-made, without acknowledging the many helping hands that lifted them along the way: parents that helped pay for their education, growing up in a safe suburb sheltered from violence, even hand me down macbooks from their older siblings from which they launched their first side hustle.

I am not saying this to negate their achievements. For the most part, they were wildly ambitious, creative, driven people in their own right. But by virtue of their advantageous birth, they were beginning their careers a few meters past the starting line. And when you’re given a head start, you should factor that in to your success story.

And maybe I’m biased, but I think wealthy people have a lot of value to share. We should greet them with curiosity, not judgment. There is a MASSIVE difference between a billionaire and a self made millionaire, but internet brainrot discourse cannot make the distinction or nuance, and “nepo baby” has become a witch hunt.

The result is that people simply stop speaking about their upbringings, give themselves all the credit instead, happily reap the compliments. They tell themselves, and others, stories about their success that don’t capture the full picture. And you are left with people from more modest backgrounds, a family to support, comparing themselves to someone that was born with a gold or silver or even pewter spoon in their mouth…

On another note, I find nepo baby as an insult a bit ridiculous because, isn’t that all anyone ever wants? To make it? To provide fabulously for their families and next of kin? I digress…

I was blessed beyond measure to have been born to wealthy parents that valued education, ambition, curiosity, & resilience. Everything I have is because of them. My father was the embodiment of the American Dream, born poor and clawed his way up an unfair system. And I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him and his wealthy friends, the communities and conversations I was privy to… by not sharing what they’ve taught us, we are furthering the divide between haves and have nots.

this piece is available for paid subscribers only

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

This piece is for paid subscribers. For the price of an iced latte:

I write about the real numbers behind building a life and a business on your own terms - what things actually cost, what I actually make as a creative (and how), and what I’ve learned the hard way so you don’t have to.

Paid subscribers get radical transparency, a downloadable resource with every post, and 25% off a 30-minute strategy session with me.

Previous guides:

• all the remote jobs I’ve worked and how I got them,

• social media brand deals and dirty secrets

• my messy failures and setbacks.

• how to become a paid content creator

Read more

He didn’t believe in deodorant. The rare times he did brush his teeth, the sink would run red with blood. After working all day in the organic garden he managed, he would fall into bed, sleeping in his sweat stained clothes. I called him nomadic, those less charitable would’ve call him homeless: he’d travel seasonally, exchanging work for accomodation. He was kind of an asshole most of the time, and bizarre the rest.

I was utterly obsessed.

Let’s call him… Liam.

The lack of adherence to social norms didn’t repulse me. Instead, it attracted me, somehow - not exactly a moth to a flame - a fly to an overripe fruit, perhaps. I wanted to consume him entirely. When I described Liam to people, I couldn’t leave out his quirks, his transient rudeness. Friends and strangers alike fixated on our odd union, regarding with a mixture of curiosity and mild repulsion. They could not understand why I, a (at that time) bleach blonde, extroverted, part time influencer with a full time corporate job and American money (and teeth) was… well… “slumming it” (their words) with a man who had dirt perpetually caked under his nails, bad hand poke tattoos snaking his grimy body, didn’t treat me particularly well, and qualified for social welfare. But I would shake my head. They just didn’t understand - and I never saw it that way.

He was my swamp captain.

At this point, I should throat clear, politely clarify, and say something like: I’m certain Lana’s man is perfectly respectable and smells great.

Because it’s probably not true. And it doesn’t remotely matter.

Here’s the part that doesn’t translate: Liam was completely unique. He was a gifted community organizer, cooking the most incredible, transcendent, mouth watering vegan meals, sourced entirely from his farm and whatever wild nature surrounded us. He didn’t need his own home, because his community opened up theirs to him: he’d serve us meals in sprawling haciendas, Italian chateaus out of your dizziest cottagecore dreams, seaside cabins perched upon rugged coasts - guests would come for the night and stay for weeks, so magnetic and welcoming was this man’s pull, the orbit of his followers.

He had an arresting gaze, tormented blue eyes blazing out from under a dark cliff of brow. And his hands. He had the most beautiful hands I’d ever seen. Roped with veins, long fingers. Strong enough to haul twice his weight, soft enough to place the most delicate spring bloom atop the handmade desserts he’d present to me from behind his back, smiling shyly. He spoke slowly and softly, choosing his words with a precision. Where sentences would tumble out of me, his were contemplative, considered. He laughed rarely, but when he did, he’d throw back his head, filling the room with it. I, perpetually filming, once caught it on video. I played it back dozens of times, tears in my eyes near the end of us.

The part I couldn’t articulate was that it was about permission. I can acknowledge I am conventionally attractive. I’m conventionally successful. With that comes the eternal burden of performance. I am never viewing myself, I am viewing myself through the lens of the man in my head, put there by the patriarchy. I remember in my early twenties, my teens even - carefully selecting lingerie, as if it even mattered, as if any man actually cared - all they saw was a willing body, lace clad, be damned. Self tanning, eyelash extending, hair bleaching - all to fit better into those norms, be more fuckable, more universally approved. I often felt as though I was beside myself, viewing myself from above. There was me, and then there was this flesh puppet that represented me - me, but also wholly separate, a thing apart. I was objectifying myself.

With him, the performance stopped. He’s one of the few people - er, men - that looked at me and saw me, past the meat, the avatar. He rejected social norms so completely that polite society found him vaguely repulsive. Yet within the strange moral universe he inhabited, everyone seemed equal. Beauty conferred no status. Femininity was an energy, not a performance. There were no scripts to follow, no points awarded for being desirable. And while he had his faults, his contradictions, he did, for the most part, embody his beliefs.

He once invited me to an energy release and meditation at a fire circle at the home of his childhood friend. Beforehand, I scrutinized myself in the mirror. I put on a body chain, layered a linen dress over it. I did my makeup. Afterward, in the glow of the campfire, I was struck by the utter absurdity of it all. I was surrounded by adults rocking, crying, laughing. We were white folk, stereotyped into oblivion, trying to transcend ourselves in the glow of the full moon. And there was I, choosing my outfit to sit in the pitch dark. I was struck by the utter absurdity of it all.

With him, I loosened the grip I had on myself. I began to exist, instead of perform. I became softer, grungier, looser. And ultimately, more myself. Or maybe he was simply a mirror, and I saw what I wanted to see. I can’t help but wonder if Lana could relate.

10 years ago, I was doing internal IT control audits for a Big 4 consulting firm. I was living in Chicago, and sometimes I had clients that necessitated me working from the suburbs. I would drive out there, dreading my day, sobbing my eyes out the entire, gridlocked way.

These days, I work completely remotely. I make money from a few avenues: paid brand deals, UGC work, consulting calls, and creative ad hoc projects in digital marketing & social media strategy.

I could never have dreamed of working remotely, let alone working as a creative. My path to this point has been far from linear, and the pivot into creative work has not been easy, or quick.

My goal with these guides is to help shave years off your journey. I am writing directly to my younger self, and sharing candidly everything I wish I had known.

Part One went over the mindset / getting back into the habit of creating & how to unlock your creativity and get over the fear of being cringe before you ever think about strategy.

Part Two of this series is the execution phase: your niche, a 30-day action plan, and the exact starting point if you've got nothing built yet.

I am in the phase of my life where I am treating content creation like a business. I want creative work to be my main source of income, because I love it, find it fulfilling, and most of all… it’s really fucking fun. For me, it’s play.

There are two types of creators.

The ones who start as a creative outlet and figure out the money later - that was me.

And the ones who start with a monetization strategy and build the content around it.

Neither is wrong... But one of them costs you years.

When I started, I was creating for the joy of it. No strategy, no goal, no plan. Which is beautiful, and also how you end up five years in with a following and no reliable income, constantly reinventing your revenue model, chasing brand deals reactively instead of building something that pays you whether or not a brand emails you that weeks. I would post for a few months, then take a huge chunk of time off, tanking my engagement and inbounds. And ultimately… I shot myself in the foot, because when I wanted to quit my 9 to 5 for good, I didn’t have reliable enough revenue streams to justify it.

The question I wish someone had asked me on day one isn’t “what’s your niche.”

It’s this one simple question:

this piece is available for paid subscribers only

✨ Why join as a paid subscriber? ✨

the central ethos of my content is ungatekeeping: the free sharing of information, the real cost of things, and what it really means to build a life as a creative as an American in Paris.

Each week, I share personal essays and tactical guides. Paid subscribers get the full picture - the real numbers behind things like:

• all the remote jobs I’ve worked and how I got them,

• social media brand deals and dirty secrets

• my messy failures and setbacks.

Each piece comes with a downloadable freebie + discounted consulting calls.

I’m figuring out Substack in real time and want this to become a community with real value for my readers. My DMs are always open.

Read more

If a generationally wealthy person marries “down”, they are not marrying the woman who’s entire life revolves around a 9 to 5 and rotting on her phone after work. And they are most definitely not marrying the woman cosplaying old money in a houndstooth printed Shein fit while posturing at a hotel bar because a dating guru on TikTok said it was where rich hotties hang out.

They are marrying the socially mobile, upward climbing women who have more drive in their raised pinky fingers than he has in his entire blue blooded body.

If she is “below” him financially, she’s the woman that worked her way through university, maintaining a 3.75 GPA or higher as per her full ride scholarship requirements, the one that went to Wharton before founding an international charity. The daughter of immigrants who started a company, hiring her first employee before her 28th birthday. The resident physician, 170k in debt but specializing in a lucrative subspeciality, her sights set on starting her own practice.

And yet countless women are counting on “him” - that vague, faceless, generationally wealthy knight - to come and pluck her from obscurity & financial ruin so that she may float away into a cloud of old money oblivion.

Dowries, the idea of an advantageous marriage, marrying “up” - those tremulous Jane Austen era ideals of what it means to marry well - have far from gone extinct. They’ve simply changed form.

And this is a specific brand of female oppression that is particularly insidious because not only is it unacknowledged in society, it is celebrated:

The idea that someone is coming to save you.

My parents that modeled traditional gender roles - my father was the breadwinner, my mother the SAHM. In the wealthy suburb I grew up in, this was the norm, not the exception.

From day one, it was instilled in us girls that at some point, we would marry someone at our above our own level. I identify as a feminist, and as someone who’s fiercely independent - sometimes to a fault.

And yet when I turned 30, the hum of unconscious programming in my head became too loud to ignore. While I was happy, with a vibrant life, I had to accept an uncomfortable truth: my life looked nothing like I had always imagined it would. All the things I had assumed would happen to me simply for virtue of being an adult had never come to fruition. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have children. I didn’t own a sleek apartment in a capital city.

Many of my friends hit all of those milestones. They married and began to build lives with their partners. I didn’t see it then, but the fault line between singles and couples appeared, began to deepen. When one of my closest married friends purchased her fourth property, the ground began to give way.

It wasn’t the “missed” milestones that were bothering me. It was the financial reality of my singlehood. Without realizing it, I had spent the entirety of my young adulthood operating under the assumption that I would one day marry someone and join our finances. I hadn’t missed out on years of coupled bliss - I had missed out on years of financial benefits, and my bottom line showed it. While my friends were splitting rent, groceries, hotels, and getting tax breaks, I had the financial equivalent of a slow bleed. Across a lifetime, some estimates put the cost of being single at close to $1 million when you factor in taxes, housing, insurance, and retirement savings over a career.

Not only were we single folk hemorrhaging money, we but we were also subtly course correcting our own lives to align with a reality that would never be ours.

My friend MK desperately wanted to move home to be nearer to her deteriorating family, but quietly confessed she didn’t want to leave the Southern town she had moved to for fear she wouldn’t find a family oriented man if she did leave. Another friend entertained heinous behaviour from a loveable & chivalrous yet ultimately impotent fuckboy - er, fuckman, as he was pushing 40 - for years on end because he owned multiple properties, including one on a lake (can you blame her?) and seemed to be one of the few viable prospect to SAHM life in the wasteland we call heterosexual dating. On the phone, she daydreamed - he, or one of the his clones on Raya - would surely be her ticket out from the hourly grind she was chained to in the suburbs of San Jose.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her: he isn’t out there, he’s not coming.

On TikTok and Instagram, the hunt for high value men is lucrative. Faceless coaches, AI generated ones, and real women alike swap and sometimes sell tips and guidebooks, calendars, and coaching. They recommend cocktail bars and hotel lounges, suggesting outfits and funny bunny nails to best ensnare a HVM of discerning taste. The comments sections on these videos reveal my friends are not alone in recalibrating their lives in the hopes of finding a mate - from lurking outside of luxury apartment complexes to maxing out their budgets to join country clubs - it’s becoming insidious. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with changing your behaviours if your goal is to attract a partner.

The difference is passivity.

Going on dates is one thing - it’s taking an action, putting yourself in the driver’s seat. Letting your life, habits, and schedule slowly drift in the hopes they one day have a new sun to orbit? That’s a different story.

And I can’t help but wonder - what would be the financial payoff if instead of trawling Home Depot aisles, we actually got our hands dirty, poured into our own passions, molded ourselves into our own versions of rich men? Attracting - versus chasing - while making our own money and putting down our own financial roots instead of vaguely wishing?

For not only is it unlikely that the distant heir to the Monaco throne is lounging at your local Sheraton bar, it is statistically improbable that he even clears 100k. Using my dear friend Chat, I crunched some numbers, and they are staggering:

Only 0.2% of men meet the criteria most women are quietly orbiting their entire lives around. The man you are waiting for is statistically unlikely to exist. And while you wait for him, consciously or not, your fourth decade is passing, your investments are not growing, and your life is happening without you fully in it.

I am no better. In 2024, I was adrift. I moved to Chicago, and then NYC, both times to follow a different man, relationships that sparked and faltered before I could sign a gym membership. I’m not proud of it. In hindsight, I see my actions were symptoms of a societal disease. I still believed, on some level, that I could relinquish the paralyzing weight that was the agency of my own life and surrender it over to someone else. I could stop driving, exit the freeway entirely, get in line for my white picket fence.

A relationship meant I didn’t have to face the terrifying reality of my true desires: hacking away at every rope tying me to the US, packing up my life, moving to a city I that both attracted and scared me: Paris. A relationship was a convenient and noble excuse. I wasn’t a failure - I was in love. I no longer needed to go. I wouldn’t need my second full time remote job, I could quit and we’d combine forces, I could be a DINK for real. I can’t say for certain when the realization hit me - I guess somewhere around my third failed relationship, my fourth failed talking stage. It was sobering. While the men I fawned over followed their passions with laser focus, I was following them, worrying about whether or not they liked me while my friendships stagnated, my hobbies sat abandoned.

Subconsciously, I kept waiting for someone to come and save me. Now I am actively saving myself.

You’re probably reading this because some part of you is jealous of people that create for a living. I don’t say that to be condescending. I say it because I recognize it - I used to be that person too, and everything I write is written to my younger self.

I would doom scroll past creatives building international lives, getting paid to write and travel and exist on their own terms, and feel something close to grief. It seemed completely impossible from where I was standing - or rather, sitting - in an artificially lit cubicle in the Midwest, watching the clock.

My creative career began because of one conversation. I hope this can be that conversation for you.

A lot of how-to guides jump directly into strategy, brain dumps, goal setting, and defining your pillars and niche.

While this is extremely necessary and will definitely be part of the series, I think it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse. You can’t become creative if you don’t feel creative, and you certainly can’t start creating if you can’t even write a sentence. The aim of Part One of this guide will be to help you tap into your inner artist and your inner creative and to start transitioning from consumer to creator. You also can’t post if you feel awkward, hate being on camera, and cringe at the idea of people you know seeing you so this guide will also cover…

…the fear of being perceived, and how to get over cringe mountain.

The other day, my boyfriend asked me where I get my ideas from. I told him that I needed ideas, I go to the idea tree, and pluck down an idea. I told him that it also works with money: if I want $1,000, sure enough the next day there will be in my inbox. Waiting for the taking. He told me I must live in a forest. I agreed.

While simplistic, the nature metaphor holds true. Creativity, while not quite a forest, is most definitely a garden, one that must be cultivated. Creativity is a daily practice with seasonal spikes. If you were just starting your creative journey, it most likely feels like a daunting task. You see people tapping into this seemingly endless well of ideas, and start despairing. You’re stuck staring at your blinking cursor on your page, taunting you. Or worse… you open TikTok to find “inspiration” and end up doom scrolling for two hours…

The good news is that creativity can be taught. The even better news is that it’s a habit.

A big goal I have for my Substack is to encourage more people to create. I truly believe that within every one of us is a hidden creative, and that life, the circumstances of just surviving in this dystopian world, have stifled that artist. It’s our job to excavate them. I would also like to note that this is a core belief of “The Artist’s Way,” a book I found very inspiring in my own journey to get reconnected with my inner writer, a book I highly recommend to anyone beginning this journey.

Back then, I could only create if I was heartbroken or drunk, and the most ideal circumstances were when I was both. I could never imagine a world where ideas came naturally to me… where they ideas came continuously; when they came sober, when they came when I was tired, when they came when I was motivated, when they came when I wasn’t.

The reality is that that’s how it works for me now. I write daily, I create daily. I rarely take days off, not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to. I love what I do, and I hope that it always shows in the work that I create.

Here is the most essential thing you need to understand:

The people you admire are not more creative, intelligent, or qualified than you.

They are more consistent than you. That’s the only difference.

When I first started posting videos, I was terrible. I genuinely had no idea what I was doing. If you go back far enough on my feed, you can watch me learn in real time.

It’s now been 5 years. I’ve worked with small businesses, Fortune 500 companies… and everyone in between. Entirely self taught. I never paid for coaching, or an editing tool.

The only differentiator? While my peers gave up after a few months, I kept posting - through no views, dry spells, months of zero clients.

I didn’t wake up one day knowing how to edit. I put in thousands of reps and got good - not great, not amazing, but good enough.

I promise that is the only difference.

We have our “why” - let’s get down to the “how,” and the actionable steps that have helped me the most to step into my power as a creative and make money while doing it.

If you like guides that are bossy, tell you exactly what to do with actionable steps, and are a bit tough love, this ones for you. This all took me forever to learn with a lot of trial and error so just do what I say.

My tactical guides are reserved for paid subscribers. I’m obsessed with ungatekeeping things, and I write candidly about the creator economy, my remote work journey, finances, and everything in between.

Read more

In Famesick, Lena Dunham recounts her doctor’s refusal to remove her uterus. You cannot, he implored her, for it contains your soul, and you will be irrevocably damaged, no longer whole. Women change after their hysterectomies, he cautioned. We must only do this as a last resort.

Her young life and professional career had been nearly derailed by the unrelenting agony her uterus had caused her. And here was a man, saying it needed to stay, not for a medical reason, but a personal belief. I scoffed when I read this - only a man would reduce a woman’s spirit to her reproductive organs. Curious nonetheless, I turned to Reddit. Was there actually a personality change associated with a hysterectomy? The anecdotes were overwhelming. Every single women had indeed changed… for the better. Their quality of life had drastically improved.

Besides, if a soul were bound to us physically, it would be in the fat. The building blocks of our reproductive hormones. That waypoint, rising with pregnancy and good living: fat has always signaled the presence of life. Fat is literally the substrate of creation and human connection - myelin sheaths, fetal brain development, breast milk composition, oxytocin pathways.

Fat pads us out, creates our curves, our shape. It protects us, nourishes us, rises and drops with us, a physical representation of desire, stress, sickness, health.

You would think that fat would be lauded, celebrated, revered.

Yet every time I log on, I am inundated, the virtual alarm bells tolling for a new causality: Maud Apatow. Emma Stone. Olivia Wilde. Temporal wasting. Languo. Russell’s sign. The grammy winning singer that no longer has the stamina to sing.

The verbiage of eating disorder have entered our cultural lexicon with a disturbing alacrity. And it’s not just celebrities: cornerstones of my little internet world - makeup artists, chefs, photographers - they’re disappearing as well. These women I look up to, follow, support… they’re simply no longer there. I am watching them hollow out, their soul burrow further into them, until the spark finally leaves their eyes, the whole ceremony narrated in real time by a hoard of ravenous bystanders feigning concern.

The comments follow a predictable bell curve, a slow motion volley vacillating between concern and praise as a devouring public chronicles her demise. She is chided for being too fat. She’s applauded for toning up. At some point, usually when her BMI drops into the teens, the pendulum swings back: concern. Speculation. Worry.

The woman ceases to be a woman at all: she is spectacle, specimen, skewered for public display and dissection. She is as 2D as the screen on which she is observed, an avatar of who she was, and offered even less humanity.

Subscribe now

What does it mean that we have declared war on the very tissue that builds brains?

I keep seeing comments that this is just like the 90s, 00s, 70s, [insert whichever heroin chic decade]. It’s not. The difference is Ozempic. Extreme thinness is still endemic, however unlike before, it is no longer necessarily a sign of illegal drug use, mental illness, trauma, sickness, stress. In the past, it was often a visual sign of something darker, it necessitated intervention. Now, it simply shows that you know the right people: a friend of mine got her GLP from her botox injector, another got it from her manicurist.

I know I am treading into dangerous territory: we’re not supposed to comment on women’s bodies, after all. We’re supposed to blithely support them, in thick and thin, sickness and health. But this feels like the emperor’s new clothes. Because these aren’t even women’s bodies! They are Ozempic’s bodies! How are we supposed to keep pretending this is normal?

I’m struck by the utter sameness of it all. Like reanimated cadavers, these women, once so vibrant, struggle to form sentences, follow conversations. Their big Tim Burton eyes swim in the planes of bone that once had been a face, a recognizable face. They are injected, nipped and tucked, often by the same surgical team, and it shows: they are getting harder and harder to tell apart, or is it just they are harder and harder to look at?

What does it mean that we have chemically inhibited desire? What does it mean to outsource one of our most basic, elemental realities of survival to a molecule?

It’s eerie to me, so deeply spooky, that in tandem to the war on fat, is the war on creativity, the gradual stripping of soul out of their very careers as they are being outsourced to computers. There are AI actors, profiled & interviewed by the New York Times. Coca Cola holiday commercials. Extras in movies may soon be obsolete as executives theorize on the millions that could be saved, if we’d only trim some human fat, ushered them off set.

Like thinness, I keep seeing comments that this is just like before, that AI is simply a new tool that we will learn to live with, before we swing back to the norm. What norm, when we can’t write so much as a text message without an agent assist? And Ozempic; just a new tool. How will we stop, when dependency has been so thoroughly enmeshed? Ozempic is making thinness accessible to those to whom it previously was not. AI is making the pantomime of intelligence accessible to those to whom it previously was not.

I miss things things being shitty. I miss mistakes. I miss character. In a study on AI, it revealed that essays written with AI had better vocabulary, flow, and sentence structure. Those without AI, however, offered up to 8 times more new ideas. We are dismantling the infrastructure for spontaneity, for the bizarre, the unhinged. There are no more gaps in knowledge, no stone left uncovered, no more little freaks. Lingual ticks are smoothed over. Like airspace, the gentrification of interior design, our art and writing is experiencing the same slow dearth.

Everything is narrowing to one singular point. We have outsourced our desire to eat to a molecule, our brain to an algorithm.

Everything is getting thinner, thinner, thinner.

The Gen Z influencer is writhing onscreen with the conviction of an evangelical preacher. The jump cuts - clips that are 0.3 seconds to 0.7 seconds, max - are quick and staticy as she waggles her purple painted fingers in front of her face, fanning the fire of of her own frenetic energy. Zoomy transitions to matcha lattes and excel spreadsheets punch up the frenetic pace, and a Olivia Rodrigo song nearly drowns out her voiceover, but the neon text on screen is unmistakable - she has made a whopping 120k last month as a content creator.

The comments are pouring in: please, please, be my mentor, one begs. This is cap, says another. I hate you, is as frequent as I want to be you. The overwhelming majority, however, are a unified chorus of want: we need to quit our jobs. We need to pick up the phone. We need to do this. Dissenters are admonished, either by her fans or the creator herself. She is aloof, unbothered - her life is amazing, you can believe her or not, it won’t change her paychecks. She is free from the shackles of corporate, she can retire tomorrow, all thanks to a few simple clicks of a button: record, post, ca-ching!

As a content creator myself, I watch videos like this with a dubious detachment. Am I jealous? I don’t know if it’s that, exactly. The creator economy is fickle, for starters. One man’s viral video is another man’s 200 view jail. Success in this world is a perplexing blend of luck, grit, and a hearty dose of conventional attractiveness. We are ruled by a capricious god (the algorithm), policed by unknowable tools (meta). Her success does not invalidate my own. People post for years without ever getting so much as a free lunch: we are both lucky to have turned a buck in this business. And five years in, I’m still giddy with every brand deal, social media money still feels like I’m getting away with something: I’m getting paid 4k to play pretend?? While our following counts are similar, my reality has never resembled hers. She has been doing this a fraction of the time and hitting numbers in one month that I have never seen in an entire year. It’s unfathomable. Is she telling the truth? I honestly have no idea.

The video sits in the back of my mind. It wriggles, eating at my brain matter. Something about it is bothering me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I need another look. I didn’t follow her or like the video, but I remember all the vowels in her username, and that the video had been posted that same day. I go to her page, and after a few moments of searching, I’m unable to locate it. I’m puzzled. I was certain it had been posted today, yet all her recent posts are 2 or more days old. It’s not here. It had been blowing up - there’s no way she would have deleted it. I am puzzled. The worm in my skull stirs, agitated, lifts its bleary sightless face and sniffs the air.

Where did it go?

Then it hits me. I had seen a trial reel she had been running. For the uninitiated, trial reels are an instagram feature that allows you to post and show videos to non-followers only, to test the hook, the virality, before tweaking and posting on your main page. I couldn’t find it on her main page, because she hadn’t posted it there.

The issue is not that trial reel. It’s the math. Because on her page, nestled between a vlog and an undisclosed ad, is another income claim video. It’s currently sitting at a healthy 720k views, and in it, she asserts that she has made 68k in the past month. While still a wildly impressive number, it’s north of 40k shy of what she claimed to have made in her trial reel for the month of April.

The larva in my brain pupates, flies free.

Work from home. Complete flexibility. Unlimited income. All you need is an internet connection.

I have seen this play before, jumped down this rabbit hole with glee many a time. MLMs. Multi-level-marketing, pyramid schemes. LuLaRoe. Arbonne. Herbalife! They come flooding back to me like warm memories of old friends.

I love my hyper fixations, and this one (old faithful!) has sustained me since my college years: fuzzy memories of fraternity brothers piling into basements, Facebook events, their Adderall addled smiles as they tried to hit their numbers selling cans of Verve. For the sisters it was Arbonne: white Mercedes and “all expenses paid” conferences in Miami, “hey girl!” DMs from a girl you played T-ball in middle school with. Thanks to their vegan self tanners they even looked alike, with matching highlighted hair - the ecstasy, the excitement, the sisterhood of it all (as long as you hit your numbers, that is).

The scene has shifted, but the script has stayed largely the same, and the parallels are uncanny. Social media has become this: selling the idea of selling something has replaced actually selling something, the comments of the desperate masses sustaining the hamster wheel with a frenetic inertia.

Even the language is the same: the saccharine, the positivity, the ethos.

If you’re failing, it’s because you’re just not working hard enough at it.

In a traditional MLM the product is almost irrelevant. LuLaRoe nominally sold leggings but actually sold the dream of selling leggings. The leggings were just the vehicle for recruiting. The real transaction was aspiration.

The creator economy works in an eerily similar manner. The product is the life - the mind boggling numbers, the PR boxes piled to the ceiling, the jump cuts to 6 figure bank accounts, trading in Toyotas for Lambos. The content isn’t necessarily about anything - it’s evidence that the life exists. Every video is a recruiting pitch. The commenters transcend an audience: they’re a downline.

In MLMs you get paid in product discounts, rank titles, and the promise of residual income for each new member you recruit to your team. You get “free” product and trips.

In the creator economy you get paid in views, which become followers, which become brand deals, which become content about brand deals, which become more views. You get “free” product and trips.

Sometimes, creators will hedge: doe eyed, calm, they will deliberately lean away from the flash bang of traditional income reveal videos. They will speak candidly (or with the illusion of candor?), their voices measured, prop notebooks out, miming the effort of taking the tally with us. In a measured voice, they’ll reveal the sum: 49k, 23k, 72k. Always specific. Always 5 figures. Sometimes, they will calculate down to the cent. We don’t need subtitles for why, the implication is clear: how could they be lying, if they are accurate down to the penny? In the same breath, they will reassure us - it’s not to make us jealous or woefully aware of our own inadequacy, but to show us what’s possible.

I bristle. Who writes things down with an actual physical notebook? Who calculates down to the penny? Even the government doesn’t use them anymore. I admonish myself. I must just be jealous, after all.

MLMs need the math to be invisible. If everyone in your downline succeeds, there’s no one left to sell to - the model requires most people to fail. The creator economy relies on the same invisible math. If everyone quit their job to make content, the attention pool collapses. The 120K month only exists because millions of people are watching instead of posting. The audience is the product. The comments begging to be mentored are what make the mentor valuable.

It’s never success that matters. It’s the illusion of success that matters.

We’re going behind the numbers on this one. A full financial breakdown of the creator economy, from the inside (I’m a content creator with 260k+ followers across socials) - reserved for paid subscribers.

Last week’s paid post: my exact job search strategy to find remote work + free résumé download.

Read more

“Well,” he says, his benevolent smile barely masking his pity, “for what it’s worth, you don’t look 33.”

He says this with the tone of someone doing me an immense charity. He believes he is doing me a favor, offering me a last token of good pure youthful affirmation before I pack up my sorry ass and get on board the big doomed freight train chugging grimly along toward Adulthood; that post 25 dim and distant wasteland of irrelevance, invisibility, and loserdom.

Since moving to France last year, I have had variations of this conversation dozens of times. Maybe it’s because I live with 25 people - an evolving cast of international characters aged 19 to 40+ - but age has never been more of a topic of conversation in my life. Across cultures and countries, a shared language unites Gen Z: aging sucks, they don’t want to do it, and don’t you dare guess their ages correctly.

A few beats earlier in our conversation, I had made the grave mistake of guessing this fetus’ age to be 23, not 21 years old. His lip curls in disgust. He practically shudders. “I have never,” he says, “in my life, been aged up.” His expression shifts, to one of pride: “people usually think I’m 17.” His emphasis on that word makes it clear that I’m on thin ice: my indiscretion has temporarily rendered me a non-people. I’m mollified. I have a flashback to being 9, the indignation of a an adult guessing I was 7 instead.

Had I become that much of a dinosaur? I’m lost in a reverie for a moment, contemplating my own impending obsolescence.

But only for a moment. My logical brain snaps back into place. Because I’m not talking about a 7 year old, or to a 9 year old at a birthday party. I’m talking to an adult male. Old enough to join the military, proud to be mistaken for a teenager.

Last year, still deep in the trenches of establishing a friend group, I was getting dinner with a woman. It was our first real hang out, and I was giving her the broad strokes of my life: 32, had moved to Paris to begin again, content creator, learning French, art classes, yadda yadda. At the end of the elevator pitch of my own life, she reached over and touched my hand. “I am so impressed,” she nods with the hushed tone one might adopt at the bedside of someone terminal, “that at your age, you decided to start over. And that you do so many things with your time.”

Reader, this woman was 28.

I remember walking home from dinner feeling mystified. The implication was clear. Life had a timeline, and I was doubling back, jumping embarrassingly off script and making the kids cringe; like a washed up high school athlete returned to roam the halls, maybe dribble a layup or two in the ol’ stomping grounds.

There’s an inherent implication that I would want nothing more than to wake up tomorrow 23 again, that if I say anything to the contrary, I must just be lying. I read somewhere that aging is like gorging yourself sick at a buffet. Would you want to get up and go back for another round? No, absolutely not. I’m grateful for my 20s. I have zero desire to repeat them.

And maybe it’s geriatric indignation - a crotchety refusal to call curtains - but despite my advanced age, I have never felt younger in my life. Perhaps it’s a psychological parlor trick of being at the dawn of a new decade. Maybe it’s denial, self preservation. Or maybe it’s a secret third thing, which is that I’m actually pretty young.

This generation is haunted by the idea of aging. They seem to have made the sweeping and unequivocal association that there is truly nothing worse in life than getting older.

And they’re opting out – from first kisses to driver’s licenses, they are missing with alacrity every measurable milestone of adulthood. Like a toddler refusing a spoonful of dinner, they’re digging their heels in against the dying of the light.

While not endemic to one age group, I can’t help but wonder if part of it is tied to the surge of antisocial behavior, the rise of loserdom. Leaving the house is lame, bed rotting is a legitimate past time - and these days, it seems like the sole goal of the 20s it’s to preserve adolescence as much as possible. Life is a series of youth extending rituals. 10,000 steps, lymphatic drainage. Seven step skincare routines, vibration plates, preventative botox, red light therapy. They know about microplastics and endocrine disrupters. They track their sleep, for gods sake. I reflect on my own 20s. A large part of my food group had been 7/11 hotdogs, the ones on rollers. I once googled a pill I found on the ground to see if it was cool enough to take. (It wasn’t.) Did I own sunblock? I honestly can’t remember.

The few times I do log onto social media to scroll, my feed is the predictable energy pit of poreless skin, anti-aging hacks, and a new body part to hate. Hip dips, anyone? My life is full enough to know that these women have nothing to do with me. But what if it wasn’t? Who would I have become if I had access to this when I was growing up?

When I was young(er), we would age ourselves up, padding our scant years with what we perceived to be the cloak of maturity & wisdom that experience could bestow. We did not want to be perceived as children, because that meant to be discounted.

There’s a reason Millennials are known for donning business casual as club wear: we wanted to seem older, we wanted the status we perceived it to convey. We wanted to be people that knew and did things. Maybe it’s the amnesia of time, but I really don’t remember adults being losers.

But the thing I kept coming back to is this: we gleefully and wholeheartedly took advantage of youth. We pushed our limits to the absolute max. The weekend started on Wednesday, sleep was an annoying side effect of being human, squeezed in between the office and the club. Youth was a consumable commodity, it had a shelf life, and we were cognizant of that.

My 20s were a big fat love letter to making as many mistakes as humanly possible, and I’m left with not much to show for: a couple million less brain cells and stories I cringe to remember. And that’s an important distinction: this was before surveillance culture. I didn’t have to worry videos of me making out on a dance floor or getting cuffed at a Macklemore concert would show up online. There wasn’t this weird culture of policing each other, and what’s more: there wasn’t a way to do it.

But the causality is increased inhibition, a stifling of the normalcy of what it means to grow up. We seem to have completely lost touch with the point: You’re supposed to fuck up. Your friends and family in theory, would intervene, tell you you’re a fuck up, and that would be the end of it. Now, any indiscretion has a potential to hover over you like a spectral figure, following you into your career, a new city, spoiling a fresh start.

The trends are the canary in the coal mine: “I’m just a baby’” “just a girl” “what I did today a 24 year old teenager…” “unc” as an insult. And don’t get me started on the trickle down, it’s heartbreaking. In December, I asked my colleague what her 11-year-old wanted for Christmas. She requested anti-wrinkle cream as a stocking stuffer.

And I want to take a moment to say that I don’t want to bash on them needlessly, I don’t want to avocado toast an entire generation. These are some of the most empathetic & lovely people I’ve ever met. They are aware of the world, to other people’s perspectives, sensitive in a way my generation never was.

No, it’s not that I’m judging them. It’s a sheer fatalism of it all that gets me. A 24-year-old tells me he’s too old to pivot careers. A 26-year-old sighs. Feeling washed up, she has resigned to never finding love. The one decade of your life for it to be socially acceptable to be an unabashedly deluded optimist, and these people are opting for realism??

No, the tragedy isn’t fear of aging. It’s the premature surrender of possibility. They pity me for aging. Well, I pity them for not living! Melodrama aside, it’s not quite that: it’s grief I feel for them. And I get it. Nihilism has a certain attraction. It’s simply easier to opt out. You can’t fail a game you’ve never played.

They’re not fantasizing about owning homes – they’re dreaming of making enough to cover rent in a shoebox studio. Groceries are becoming status symbols. Adulthood means assuming the crippling mantle of accountability & responsibility with none of the benefits.

And then it hits me, and I’m staggered by the tragedy of it: youth is the only thing of value they will ever possess.

I won’t pretend that millennials had it easy. Columbine was our coming of age, 9/11 was the death knell of our innocence. But despite the financial crisis and the Iraq war, there were bright spots too. Obama was elected when I was entering high school. Gay marriage was legalized, we got to actually enjoy Harry Potter because J.K. Rowling didn’t have Twitter yet.

We could still get behind the dream of a white picket fence, owning a home, 2.5 kids. The 90s buoyed us, carrying us through the worst of it. The internet was in its infancy, still an innocent place. I had a very limited idea of what happened beyond the confines of my own home, my own community. Our brains weren’t rewired with doom-scrolling, the fear corroding it. We were the last generation to be inoculated with hope.

And maybe there’s something deeper, more sinister at play: A.I. and the cheapening of intellectualism. AI has replaced critical thinking. Even a few lines of text are subtitled with a “smart” summary now, it’s hard not to feel like illiteracy is being actively engineered into every tool we use. You no longer need to put in reps to understand anything, depth is passé. In a generation, we’ve made experience obsolete. In the past, part of the allure adulthood conveyed was wisdom. Now, you simply need the right prompt.

We are marching toward a cultural inevitability: we will soon put less value on education. And the youth are watching the old currency get cheapened. They can’t afford anything, and now they don’t even need to know anything. Gen Z has inherited a society where adulthood has become less attainable, less rewarding, and less prestigious than it was for previous generations. Why wouldn’t they want to stay young forever? Can you blame them?

It was the phone. It was literally just the phone.

Since I’m banned from posting on Instagram for the time being anyway, I decided to extend my dopamine detox. It’s been about 2 weeks.

I haven’t heard the words “upper bleph” or “masseter slimming” in two weeks. I have no FOMO, because I have no idea what anyone is doing. I haven’t felt insecure about my hip dips or my lack of glass skin. I haven’t been fed videos of 23 year olds convincing me my face is collapsing because I sleep on my side. I haven’t seen a single AI-generated podcast clip of a fake billionaire explaining passive income. I no longer feel existential dread for not optimizing my LinkedIn.

I’m realizing a good majority of my insecurities (and the corresponding purchases to rectify them) have nothing to do with me.

I realized I will never be the eccentric, cool grandma if all I did with every free second of my life was grab my fucking phone, and that galvanized me to continue whenever I had moments of weaknesses.

I know it’s something we all “know”, and I’ve taken breaks before, but never to this extent. I can feel my brain rewiring in real time. And I feel a sense of protracted grief at this glimpse of the sliver of a life that I’ve been missing out on.

Instead of doomscrolling, here’s what I did instead:

• read in bed with my legs on the wall

• enacted a zero phone rule in bed, so now I read and giggle with Frenchie

• went phone free grocery shopping

• picnicked with the girlies

• cleaned the frathouse kitchen (I found things from 2024… no wonder we have a bug problem)

• started a morning French exchange with 2 of my other roommates

I wish I could say it was hard, but it was honestly such a relief that my next question is: how can I completely change my relationship with my phone while continuing to create content? And, do I want to even keep creating if this is the peace I have been missing out on?

With my insta ban, I’ve been forced to take a step back. With this detox, I’m considering leaving the building entirely.

Normally, the creative process looks like this:

• I get an idea.

• I open TikTok for “research.” I want to make sure “the public” likes this idea.

• I begin to second guess myself. I decide my editing sucks, and save several videos with a style I’d like to emulate.

• 40 minutes have passed. I have created nothing. With an immense effort, I open CapCut. I cobble something together, feeling vaguely uneasy.

• 50% of the time, I shelve or abandon the project. My notes app is a graveyard of ideas.

These past two weeks, my content process has looked like this:

• I brain dump into a Google doc and create a 6 week content calendar.

• I create weekly deliverables for myself - 5 short form videos, 1 substack - per week.

• I check my deliverables list. I create. I move on to the next task.

HOW TO CONSCIOUSLY UNCOUPLE FROM YOUR PHONE

If you want to use your phone less, and be less reliant on it in general, you’re going to have to get creative.

my biggest excuses + workarounds:

“I need my phone for CapCut” → The desktop version of CapCut is far superior. I’m furious at myself for not using this sooner. It’s a night and day difference.

“I get a lot of ideas at night, and I need my notes app to write them down.” → put a mini notebook and pen next to my bed. Sooo simple. Again, why did I not do this sooner.

“I need fashion inspo!” → Sit at a cafe in a trendy neighborhood and stare at people.

“I’m bored on the metro” → asked my roommates for books + started bringing my Kindle out more. If you’re not bored enough to read a book, than you’re not actually bored. It’s just a reflex. It’ll pass.

Two great substacks to support you on your journey:

• My Year Without an iPhone

• The musings of August Lamm, who gave up their laptop

I know that I want other weeks in this program to focus on gratitude, volunteering, re-finding a sense of whimsy, and potentially microdosing.

See you in week 3.

Main Character Energy started on TikTok in May 2020. The trend was (mostly) young women posting as main characters starring in the metaphorical movies of their lives. A romanticized but aesthetic form of self-empowerment, it was an internet wide permission slip to do the thing.

At first tongue in cheek, it soon became a generational rallying cry - “I am the plot.”

It was peak pandemic, peak instability, peak “I need to feel like I have agency over something.” Main character energy was a response to feeling like an NPC in your own life during lockdown. It made sense then.

It’s empowering in it’s inauthenticity - you tap into it, step into like a costume, put it on like a mask before you hit record. It’s the adrenaline hit that sustains you through a work presentation, hypes you up to hand the cute guy your napkin with your phone number on it. It’s the girl bossification of the self.

It’s “I can’t believe I just did that,” breathless and a bit awkward in the comedown, made for TV. Main Character Energy went viral on social media for a reason. MCE makes decisions for their audience, for views, for likes.

It is, ultimately, a performance. It’s spectacle, not self-introspection. It’s doing things for the sake of doing them. And it felt like the antithesis of me.

Perhaps it’s paradoxical, as someone that creates online, but there is something inherently “look at me” in MCE that I do… but don’t fully resonate with. One foot in, one foot out. I would have my MC moments, but i never embodied her. it rang hollow. I’d feel myself one moment, crippling self doubt the next. And maybe it’s my contrarian nature, but I don’t identify with the idea of making decisions with the sole purpose of other people’s entertainment.

And what’s more… I was jealous of these women that I couldn’t be. I wanted to be these women. Every time I scrolled, insecurities would rear their ugly head. I would watch these women - so confident, bubbly, grateful, charming, beautiful - and I felt diminished, like an understudy in my own life. My personality was not a string of gorgeous adjectives.

These women were magnetic. They were yapping on social media and quitting their jobs 5 months later because they were so overwhelmed with success. They were getting cheated on and finding the love of their life 3 weeks later because they took an impromptu flight to Mallorca.

They were everything I wanted to be.

MCE is kismet, chance, serendipity. It doesn’t need individual agency, because deus ex machina keeps the story line chugging along.

I finally put my finger on it: effortless. These women were effortless. And I was not effortless. I didn’t kiss strangers or dance until 5am - most men made me nervous and I had insomnia. While I did stare moodily out train windows listening to MPDG music, I wasn’t contemplating anything profound. I was just worrying. Despite the carefree person I portrayed online, I was often riddled with anxiety, felt like a failure half the time & like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing the other half. I’d flit through stories of people having more interesting lives than me, wondering where i’d gone wrong, why my life didn’t look like this. Even pretending to be a main character was too much for me when I often felt more like an extra.

I also don’t do things for the plot. I do things after agonizing about them. For days, weeks, months. I felt like a swan: beautiful on the surface, kicking like mad under the water with big dark scaly feet.

I wasn’t the main character. Most of the time, I was just happy to still be playing the game, blindly mashing buttons and wondering how the hell everyone else seemed to have gotten a user manual.

things weren’t happening to me. i was happening to life. and i was trying really fucking hard.

But I wasn’t quite an NPC, either. I was doing things. Hard things. I moved to Paris - but I was one year late. I spent 12 months standing on the edge of the pool, agonizing, wringing my hands in fear, convinced it was too cold, too deep, too scary, too too!!

Yes, I left my toxic situationship. But I went back to him like, five times.

I was thinking too much, executing too little. I needed a new rallying cry, one that fit.

Enter: Playable Character Energy.

Playable character energy is active. It’s strategic. It’s not just doing things, but doing things with intention - and it needs to know why were doing the things, goddamnit.

Playable character energy is grinding in silence with zero acknowledgment for months. PCE doesn’t fit nicely into your feed. It’s messy. it’s the imperfect middle.

But isn’t that just hustle culture?

No. it’s not. because we really, really, love the process. we’re smiling with blood in our teeth and sobbing in the airport lounge after 5 glasses of the free merlot.

The thing that separates PCE from hustle culture is joy. You're not grinding toward the objective because you have to. You're playing because you genuinely love the game.

We need to perform less. We need to play more.

I was playing with life. That’s what it came down to. I had always been someone with a lot of questions -

• what would life look like if i moved into a frat house in paris with 25 strangers?

• what if i got two full time remote jobs at the same time?

• what if i moved to NYC for a man I had known for two weeks?

Yes, I had a lot of questions. And even though I was terrified, I needed answers.* My insatiable curiosity overpowered my fear. I needed to know what was around every corner.

*(Answer: insane, insane, insane. Next question, please.)

PCE is for the people that are active participants in their own life. They don’t take themselves too seriously. They aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. And they are always thinking about the next level up.

When my life fell apart - my visa was denied, i lost 90% of my income, i got a bacterial infection, got banned from a platform i had spent years building - people kept asking me, why are you doing this? just go home. just go home.

I realized at some point i wasn’t playing to win, because i was losing, constantly. You don’t die a thousand times and keep going because you love dying. You do it because you love playing. And by god did I love playing.

Playable character energy is dying 18 times in a row and getting back in the fucking game. It’s indomitable. It’s audacity. Tenacity. Resilience. A moving target. It wants another round.

When the main character has long left the stage, the playable character is still there, lacing up their boots. Playable character energy is renewal, dogged, the courage to start again. Blood in your gums, chalk in your hands, mercury rising. It whispers let’s go. I have you. You’re not yet done.

The main character fades to black. The playable character wants another round.

I believe that jobs are tools. They should be decentered. They are a thing you do to pay for your life - nothing more, nothing less.

I haven’t always been this way.

When I started my career in consulting, work was life - literally. I was living at the client site, traveling Sunday evenings to Friday mornings. I was paying rent for an apartment I spent four Saturdays in.

At that point - mid twenties, recent grad - life was myopic. I had my bubble of other 20 somethings. We were blissfully unaware of the real world. For my younger readers, consulting pre-pandemic was a wild time. Consultants would show up to the office still drunk from the night before, chugging gatorade and furtively slamming chicken nuggets in a vain attempt to stave off a brutal comedown… senior analysts would cheat on their wives with the interns…

One of the analysts ate nothing but Jimmy John’s. He also refused to fly to the client site, preferring to drive. I later found out it was because he spent the majority of his $50 per diem on bottles of alcohol, where he would drive it back to his home in the midwest to stockpile for his future wedding, which had a theme based off his favorite screensaver. It was basically an extension of university life, bankrolled by corporate credit cards and Marriotts instead of dorm rooms. Since it was cheaper to stay in Manhattan (again… pre-pandemic. You could find hotels for under $200. Hand to god.) over the weekend than flying home, we’d spend our weekends partying in the city on the company’s dime.

Our team was led by a bald ex drill sergeant (literally) who’s sole role on the team seemed to be screaming at us on a biweekly basis about how insane our spending was. Sunday evenings, we would receive a notification for a mandatory 9am meeting. That meant David was on the warpath. We would assemble and he would scream. “You spent TWENTY FIVE HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS at a ‘HOOKAH BAR’ on the CLIENT’S DIME??????!!!!” (the ‘hookah bar’ was a strip club). We would cringe, shooting one another furtive looks. It would always be up to the managers to put the big bills on their Amex’s - we reasoned that seniority came with a certain degree of protection.

I could wax nostalgic for an entire article on my consulting days, and why I eventually quit, but this article is not about that. It’s about what happened next.

I quit, and bought a one way ticket. I started my travels with a one month retreat in Bali (also very different pre-pandemic. Millenials truly got the last chopper out). During this retreat, I was exposed, for the first time in my young life, to a truly diverse group of adults - and, outside the spheres of university & corporate, and without the social norms one most follow in those domains - we talked candidly about everything.

I met a South African tour guide who had built a tourism business, an Azerbaijani woman who did strategy consulting. A sex and wellness coach from Toronto, an accountant from Dubai.

So many ways to build a life, so many stories, and they all had one thing in common: they worked completely remotely.

I had never even known this was an option. I never realized flexibility could be compatible with work - I thought suffering was a prerequisite.

I swore to myself I would never go back to an office, at least not permanently. I swore I would make it work, no matter what. I would do anything.

So here’s how I made it work.

For paid readers: here's the exact system I used, the salaries I made at each job, and the resume template I still use today.

Note: I am not going to list the exact company names for privacy / professional reasons, but I will give industry & size.

Read more

For week one of this 12 week program, I want to establish my overall baseline so that I could begin changing it. I don’t want to make meaningful changes and then get to the end of the 3 months and think “oh, nothing actually changed” because I’ve forgotten how blah I actually was. It’s probably the last vestiges of a consultant in me, but I genuinely love data points, and tracking things. I wanted to create a version of MyFitnessPal for my mood.

The goal of week one: Reintroduce awareness. Slow down and create a baseline. Self-identify the areas of highest friction in my life and habits to create a customized target for the remaining 11 weeks.

I have a general idea of what impacts my happiness on a daily basis, and I’m sure you do too. For me, it generally looks like a mix of the following:

• hours of screentime (inversely correlated to my sense of joy and/or whimsy. Also extremely inconvenient as a content creator.)

• hours of sunlight

• human connection

• hours of sleep

• movement

• productivity

• where I am in my cycle

• alcohol (inversely correlated)

Using these, I vibe coded a simple journal I could use to track and rate my overall mood across the first week of this program.

Here’s some examples of what it looks like:

After filling out the scorecard on all the categories that are meaningful to me, it gives me an overall score for the day:

You can see below how I chose to weight the data, with “work” cited as my most common stressor.

Overall, my first week of tracking gave me an “okay” for my general mood. That more or less tracks with the self-reported 6 out of 10. It’s also worth noting that this was a peak stress weak due to my visa situation, so it was a bit lower than normal.

Obviously, you don’t need to build a website to have a better awareness of your inner state, but spending a week noting and check in with yourself is an essential first step, and this helped keep me accountable.

Throughout the day, noticing my habits (especially the automatic ones),and how they spike my anxiety helped guide me to understanding what I needed to change.

The biggest takeaway was that my relationship with my phone is completely toxic. Again, no surprises here, but it was eye opening to see the direct link between mood & screentime in a concrete, unavoidable way.

A very common cycle for me: I would open social media to do one thing, see something I wasn’t supposed to, and then spiral. If this happened in the evening, it would become near impossible for me to recover my sleep routine, and the suffering would become cumulative.

It’s abundantly clear that I need a complete dopamine detox. Mine will be social media, but whatever you choose, it should more or less align with your Week 1 friction data:

1. Emotional Eating: Ultra-processed, high-sugar, or junk foods.

2. Internet / Gaming: Mindless scrolling, short-form video loops, video games.

3. Gambling / Shopping: Online retail therapy, checking crypto/stocks compulsively.

4. Novelty / Pornography: Hyper-stimulating adult content.

5. Thrills / Novelty Seeking: Binge-watching highly dramatic shows or high-adrenaline media.

6. Recreational Substances: Alcohol, excessive caffeine, or nicotine.

I’m devastatingly addicted to my phone. My screentime usually looks something like this:

It makes me absolutely sick that I’m spending almost an entire day of my life on social media. It makes me so sad to see this. To know that I’m in Paris, and one day of my week is dedicated to being on my phone.

I have tried absolutely everything to curb my addiction, but only one thing has truly worked: Brick. It’s a physical device that you “tap” into (kind of like ApplePay) and after you tap, any apps on your block list are inaccessible until you “untap” your phone.

It has given me my life back. (No, this is not sponsored). It’s the only thing that works, yet I’ve grown weak at implementing it and sticking with it.

I’ll report back. See you in Week 2.

As a tween, your days were ritualized. Summer meant the bike ride past your rowing coach’s house, idly circling unattainable items in the J. Crew catalogue on the floor of your best friend’s house. You’d Limewire Dave Matthew’s songs and eat raw cookie dough - you didn’t know calories existed then (or salmonella). You’d come home to check your away messages on AOL, checking to see if your crush wrote you (he didn’t). You would duck out of your middle school class to feed the Tamagotchi in your locker.

In your teens, that window became a door. Facebook. You begged your brother for his university email so you could sign up - back then, it was reserved for actual college students. Every weekend, you’d upload albums: 50+ photos, religiously tagging everyone that appeared. Your evenings get narrower. On Mondays, you pore over the photos. It’s a glimpse into a life adjacent to yours, but entirely separate.

Subscribe now

You are 14 & cripplingly insecure; certain you’re ugly, unfixable, perpetually missing out. You find Tumblr and your weekends vanish, too - you’re Alice in Wonderland, you’re a pioneer, tumbling into a dark new world, one without parental restrictions, community guidelines, any semblance of guardrails.

But you write, a lot. Love letters to your boyfriend, 8 page essays when the teacher asked for one. You’re in DECA and synchronized swimming. Your relationship with the internet, while tenuous, is fragmented. It still lives in a room of its own, your parents can lock you out. To distract yourself in class, you resort to doodling: centaurs plucking their hearts out with pitchforks, glistening fish caught in elaborate nets. Facebook introduces “honesty box” and you receive your first hate comment: “annoying little bitch.” You stare at it, blinking, and delete the widget from your profile. You’re certain it’s true, but before, people would at least tell you it to your face.

In college, for the most part, you are too busy living to concern yourself with the online world. You scale back your online production - you’re no longer posting weekly dispatches of your life on Facebook, chronicling your breakups with relationship and status updates. Your first love cheated on you during spring break in the Dominican Republic and now he’s at a darty in Indiana with the girl but no one will ever even know - it’s embarrassing now to switch your relationship status to “it’s complicated,” after all. “Cringe” has not entered the cultural lexicon yet, you are free from it.

Besides, you’re a curator now, thanks to Instagram. You and your friends happily abuse the Valencia filter, your feed is group photos and sunsets. After a 2 week trip to Europe only one photo makes it to your page, it gets 6 likes. Photos are square - dumps won’t exist for another decade. You’re not quite sure what you do with your free time besides drinking and occasionally starving yourself - you’re never hungover, so you spend every waking minute either partying or half listening to lectures.

Barstool Smokeshows and TFM are launched - you’re inundated with gorgeous girls at state schools in the south, parties and sororities that are far cooler than the ones you seem to be getting invited to. You feel as though you’re on the fringe of your own life, engulfed by the sprawling campus. You no longer doodle in class. To distract yourself, you open Facebook on your laptop.

You have a smartphone now. The ‘others’ aren’t just university students in the south, now - they’re celebrities, bloggers, trust fund babies in Manhattan. You are blown away by the banality of your own life. It’s official, now: your hobbies are the gym, partying, and this. The word “influencer” exists, to you, for the first time ever. They are curators. You delete all your old photos, erasing evidence of your entire adolescence in a fit of insecurity. These women hike mountains in the pre-dawn darkness to capture sunrise in evening gowns without crowds. They lay on the ground, smiling, their long shining hair coiled in ringlets around them, coquettishly posing with a camera.

You have only a dim awareness that any of this might not be real. You copy them. They influence you to go to Bali and when you go, you pack a suitcase of outfits: shoes, earrings, everything matching. Before, you’d bring a carry-on; now you have to check a bag. You beg your friend to take photos of you, snapping photo after photo. Your most vivid memory of the 10 days there was posing with an acai bowl in a pineapple printed polyester set - how well the picture turned out, the smoothie lukewarm by the time you finally eat it.

Somewhere around your mid 20s, the memories stop. The window has become the door has become the room has become the entire house has become a window again. You have a portal in your pocket full of apps that are designed within an inch of their lives to take the best of you - your attention, your ability to focus, your time.

Your life is an orchestrated shuffle of technology. Your days are spent at work with the medium screen and you come home to unwind with the big screen; reflexively grabbing for the small screen every 2 to 7 minutes. Your screen time is 4 hours per day, 6 hours on the weekends, 7 if you’re hungover (you often are). It’s the midwest, after all. Fridays are for going out, Sundays are for boozy brunch. And repeat.

The feeds are more curated now, these girls are just like you, but unlike you, they are clean, gorgeous, smiling. They aren’t unattainable like the influencers of the past, gatekeeping all the time, FaceTuned, evening gowns on the mountain top. They are not selfish, these girls: they tell you exactly how they got that way, the ten step skincare routine, the walking pad. They find salvation through consumption: red light therapy, 10k steps, matcha. You dutifully take your marching orders. Tomorrow you will be them. Tomorrow you will do the thing.

You no longer think about hobbies. Your day is full, after all. Your life is a kaleidoscope of activity: fishing trips, police chases, cheating scandals. It’s neat and tidy, really - everything that’s interesting happens to you through the confines of a 4x6 rectangle. You start taking pilates because everyone else does. You hate it, and your abs never appear, and the classes cost $50 dollars a pop, but you can’t really think of what else you would do, so you go.

Growing up, you had very specific dreams: by 50 you would be a bilingual marketing executive CEO entrepreneur, wearing lingerie and weighing your oatmeal (you really, really loved the opening scene of Devil Wears Prada). You’d be settled with your gorgeous, green eyed British husband that you met while living abroad (city undefined - stylistically Paris, but on the water, and everyone’s speaking english? Your imagination has never had much use for a map), and you’d have a home (no, a penthouse apartment! No, wait, a seaside cottage, but in New York City..!) filled to the brim with tasteful knickknacks you’ve picked up during your lifetime of travels.

You can practically see it: your hobbies are varied, deepened by a lifetime of attention, practice. You throw ceramics and vacation in the French countryside; you and your husband are avid cyclers. You are able to refinish a hardwood floor, you garnish your meals (at the dinner parties you host for your gaggle of equally gorgeous and interesting friends) with microgreens from your garden. The lifelong, slow burn preoccupation with weight has faded over the decades, your body has given you two children, you are at peace. You obsess about keeping it strong now, so you can pick up your grandchildren, drag your 50 pound suitcase up the stairs of Sicily (you never did shake that overpacking habit).

But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them. You have no heirlooms; Temu doesn’t last. You never moved to Paris or quit the toxic job or booked the Spanish lesson. You were too nervous to get that tattoo, never went back to school. You were too awkward to go to the nude drawing class, you never did learn how to make dumplings. Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.

The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.

Share

There have always been two dogs in me. One is status seeking, money grubbing, bougie. And one that’s still a filthy hippie in a hostel.

It’s hard to reconcile these two sides of me. I’m desperately ambitious while weirdly lazy. I hate capitalism but love shopping. These paradoxes have led to me doing the bare minimum at two remote jobs (I love money, but hate working!) and living in a filthy (but lovable) 26 person mutant hostel / apartment and then putting on my little linen shift dress from Sézane to go to Soho House in the 9th to pretend to work remotely.

I’ve always been a resume slut. I loved that I’ve worked at Deloitte and KPMG. That I was often clearing a Parisian’s monthly salary in just one month. My life is one big love letter to my own ego, my insatiable need to impress myself.

I was a DINK - without kids, or a man - I was signing 5 figure brand deals, gaining 10k followers in week. I was working on my Talent Passport Visa to France - even my visa affirmed that I was talented, wonderful, worthy!!

And then it all fell apart :)

Read more

I’m healthy, I have great friendships. I live in a chaotic, loving, maddening, 26 person community in Paris (!!). For all intents and purposes, my life is pretty great.

So why can’t I feel it?

Other than a general tendency towards anxiety, there’s no chemical reason for me to be unhappy.

I recently turned 33, and it feels like every year I’m alive, things keep getting heavier and heavier.

I’m either paralyzed with anxiety about the future, or wistfully nostalgic about the past. Even though I know it’s not true, I’m convinced I was happier 5 years ago.

And I’m not quite unhappy… It’s more that I’m not… joyful. Or grateful. And I have a sneaking suspicion that I should be.

I’ve lost 10 lbs. Last year, I over doubled my income. I’ve gotten botox and 6 step routines. I left my toxic ex and chased my dreams to Paris. I’m in a beautiful relationship with a new man who adores me. I’m healthy, my friends and family are, too.

I’ve ticked every single box that society promised would finally make me happy. (And god knows I’ve made every single accompanying purchase…)

And yet here I am, happiness solidly at a 6, the same as ever.

I’ve had to accept the boring truth: it’s my habits.

The call is coming from inside the house!! Fixing this will not come with the serotonin spike of buying something.

So I’m running a 12-week experiment on myself, and writing all of it down. I want to know if happiness is actually a habit, if I can meaningfully reestablish a baseline that supports and cultivates gratitude and appreciation.

You’re welcome to find out with me.

I love reddit. I wanted to make more money. And I was in freefall.

I talk a lot about chill remote jobs. I love them. I will always advocate for them. But work / life balance comes with a professional trade off, and it often looks like little to no salary or career progression. They should be looked at as tools to build your dream life with your increased mental capacity / free time, and I did exactly that - I used my job to fund my travels, which snowballed into a social media career. I visited over 30 countries, fell in love a few times, built my business, learned two languages…

But when I entered my 30s, the allure of the travel lifestyle, and the reality of it, began to take its toll. There’s a dark side to the digital nomad lifestyle.

I could write pages on that topic alone, but the short of it is that I felt disillusioned. My friends and contemporaries were entering new phases of their lives. They were leveling up their careers, having babies. I felt like I was in an extended adolescence - a lot of these communities I was visiting were engineering artificial connection, and I would leave feeling lonelier than ever. At the end of the day, it was a lifestyle, one that I felt I had outgrown.

Except my identify and business was based on traveling. What would it mean if I stopped?

I was traveling full time for over 5 years. I built my business on sharing travel tips and my experiences as a digital nomad. It was my identity. It was the entirety of my social circle. It was my purpose. It was my life. And it no longer fit.

The lost year.

I’m not proud of how I spent my first year recalibrating my life. Three things were abundantly clear to me:

1. I wanted to stop traveling.

2. I wanted to move to Paris.

3. I was terrified to move to Paris.

I was floundering. I was paralyzed by the idea of moving to Paris, but equally consumed by the fear of continuing on my current path. I began to self sabotage. I sought to the fill the void. And I found exactly that - in the form of two very toxic, very chaotic relationships.

In tandem, my social media money and my community all but dried up. I went from living off my social media income to not making a single cent.

I had the sense that I had lost all agency. I was adrift. I wanted a project, I wanted more money. I wanted to feel like a member of society again, someone moving forward. I found myself drawn to the /Overemployed sub Reddit.

It was an intoxicating kaleidoscope of corporate gluttony. People were posting about having 4, 5, 6 full time jobs. The posts oscillated wildly between extremes - people paying off houses in 4 years, eradicating student debt by doubling down on 6 figure jobs. Sandwiched between posts about burnout, layoffs, and logistical tips about having dual meetings.

I got a second full time job.

Subscribe now

Within a few weeks of idly searching, I landed a job. At a (very) reputable company. Fully remote. It was a contract job, so I could make my own hours and work nights and weekends if needed. It felt serendipitous, like it was meant to be. I took the interview from a vacation home in Florida before traveling to Puerto Rico. I remember I desperately wanted to stay in PR, but I couldn’t - the company needed to ship my laptop.

It meant my income would more than double.

I felt like “someone” again. Someone important, with meetings, tasks, an alarm set for the first time in years, and a rapidly growing bank account.

The double life.

For a country that supposedly loves hustling so much, it’s surprising how much backlash I got for doing what I was doing. My ex told me he was embarrassed of me, bemoaned that he “couldn’t tell his family what I actually did for work.” He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to - he was ashamed of me.

I struggled to articulate what it was I was doing, and why. I had one great job. Why did I need two? Was it greedy?

The why I gave when people asked:

1. I wanted to make more money to “build a better future.” (pro tip: define what this actually means to you. Assign a number to it. Stop when you hit that number. DO NOT EXCEED THIS NUMBER.)

2. I wanted to make more money to pay for my move. (In hindsight, you do not need to make 20k a month to afford a move.)

The real why:

1. I was seeking purpose, fulfillment, and actualization in corporate America. A very bad place to look.

There’s a misconception about remote work. It doesn’t mean total freedom. This job… was, well, a job. My calendar was packed with meetings. We were monitored. There was a weird company culture, too - people kept tabs on each others dot, whether it was green or not, tattled on each other if their status lapsed to “away”. It was clunky, corporate, rigid. And I hated it. I had lost my free time, my life - and I spent ferociously to overcompensate.

As my bank account grew, my creativity and spirit shrank in proportion. It’s one of those things you only see in hindsight - but at the time, it was awesome.

I pretended my second job was my sugar daddy, my rich boyfriend. His card never declined. He was generous. No impulse was left unheeded, “no” evaporated from my vocabulary.

My expenses ballooned. I went from barely spending $2k a month to regularly hitting $10k+. Suddenly, my second job wasn’t fun money. It was a necessity. I could seemingly no longer afford my own life on one salary.

Instead of architecting the scaffolding of my financial freedom, it became the tightest set of golden handcuffs.

Eventually, my spending slowed. I began to find more balance in my strange new full tilt reality. But I was uneasy. Not particularly happy. And I resented it, deeply. I was aware it was a problem, but I had became weirdly myopic. It was my new reality. One I complained about relentlessly, but still - I was making real money, adult money. I could build something incredible. That was my mantra. Though my spending was still elevated, I was still solidly investing, albeit at a constricted rate.

And I became… dear reader… disillusioned once again. I had run full speed into adulthood, I was done traveling, I was putting down roots, I had all this adult money! Why was I so empty?? Emptier than even before, in fact. At least before I had cool videos, stories to tell. I was listless, irritable.

At the time, I couldn’t put my finger on what I was feeling, but now I can identify it as grief. I was desperately mourning my old self, my twenties, the simplicity of what I had had. What I had given up gladly, without a second glance.I was obsessing over my past life, my old life, and yet I literally could not let go of my second job.

As underwater as I was, I felt weirdly buoyed by the money. I felt a smug superiority in what I was doing - gaming the system, creating my own rules, hustling.

A decade ago, I started my career in consulting, subsequently burnt out, & started traveling. I fell in love with travel and spent the subsequent years preaching freedom, built a brand on it. I designed my life around flexibility, curiosity, movement. And somehow I had rebuilt the exact cage I had worked so hard to escape. My life had become a weird echo chamber of my past, a loop. Just with a bigger paycheck.

The irony wasn’t lost on me - I had left the traditional career ladder because it felt like a trap… and then I recreated it in my bedroom. Two laptops. Two calendars. Two Teams accounts. Double the income, for half the life.

I told myself it was temporary, and yet the goalposts kept moving. My move was in the spring - winter was now half over. I said I’d stop at the one year mark - my anniversary came and went in January.

But the truth was simpler - I was afraid.

Afraid of failing. Afraid my social media career had been a fluke, and that it was finished, for good! That I’d never have a good idea again, let alone a viral one. Afraid that if I stopped hustling, I would fall even further behind.

The second job wasn’t about money. It was about control. And eventually, even that stopped working.

I had spent years trying to escape a life I didn’t want, and I here I had recreated it - brick for brick.

I had money. Stability. Structure.

And I hated it.

So I quit.

The truth about overemployment is that it works. The math is undeniable. If you can tolerate the stress, the logistics, the constant context switching, you can make an incredible amount of money very quickly.

But it also has a way of quietly replacing the life you were trying to fund in the first place.

I’m grateful for that year. I learned a tremendous amount about myself, my values, my priorities. I cannot tell you a single item I bought. But I can tell you in vivid detail about my life before it took this weird left turn - the communities I visited, the people I met. It forced me to confront something I had been avoiding for a long time.

Money is a tool.

It can buy freedom. It can buy options. But it cannot buy time.

And it can’t tell you what to do with any of them.

That part is still on you. And for the first time in a long time, I’m finally figuring that out.