100 lessons from 100 posts
What I’ve learned about workaholism, antiwork, creativity, goals, and much more
Wow my friends, your friendly neighborhood antiwork blog has reached the 100 post mark!
I’d say it feels unbelievable if I hadn’t seen so many others do it much more quickly (starting years after me, in fact) and with way less fanfare.
But since I move slowly and you never know when things can suddenly end, I’m taking this as a time to reflect on this journey and celebrate the learning and people that have come with it.
I present you with 100 lessons I’ve picked up along the way to 100 posts: some from my own written pieces, others from the process of making said pieces, many more from others who have influenced my writing, and more than a few from simply goofing off (because even if you just sit around, you’re bound to learn a thing or two in five years).
I’ve even categorized them for easier browsing. Very workhumper of me.
Enjoy!
On generally living a good life
When long stretches without big “milestones” or accomplishments feel enjoyable, you might be onto a happy life.
If you have dreams of making a ton of money, ask yourself what you would do once you had the money and freedom from working it implies. Whatever the answer is, start doing it now, as much as you can, before the money, even if in small pockets. Watch your joy multiply even if your finances don’t.
The desire to be famous is often a sign of dissatisfaction with home, an attempt to make up for it with love from the entire world. But there are enough cases of self-loathing celebrities that we know the world’s love isn’t the real thing. Self-confident people may not be famous in their fields, but they’re “famous to their family,” as a friend’s nephew once brilliantly put it.
It also helps, if you’re feeling like a loser, to remember that this era’s expectations of success are wildly, absurdly, laughably fantastical.
Plus, those who make it to “the top” experience more stressful lives and bleaker old age. Seems better to be near the top, but a bit of an also-ran.
It’s never too late to live a “full life.” One year of living present in your truth makes all the other 99 worth it. Especially true once you disentangle actualization from career accomplishment.
Struggling with what’s the best way to spend your time? As cliché as it sounds, bringing mortality into the equation clarifies things quickly. If you knew you’d die in a year, what would you do with that time? Three things popped up for me: time with family and my cats, making the slacker film, and making a rap album. Now I make sure to touch each of those areas each day, if only for 2 minutes.
And no one said you have to do any of it well. BAD ART MAKES THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL!
Bad doodles-turned-failed-memes are an especially rich source of joy for me.
In fact, if you pressed me on the “secret” to success and happiness, I’d say it’s being willing to do things badly and look like an idiot.
On antiwork, workaholism, work culture, and firing the inner boss
Getting paid for an activity doesn’t make it inherently more virtuous or character-building. I don’t buy that a teenager is automatically better served spending a summer stocking soda for minimum wage than spending it reading in the yard.
Our definition of what counts as “work” is myopic and limited only to what you get currency for. Parenting is work. Emotional growth and therapy is work. It’s useful to start differentiating between jobs, work, and labor, for better specificity that doesn’t devalue the latter.
The need to seem “impressive” gets in the way of the permission to simply be happy in way more people than we realize. People who come to identify as disabled often end up facing this inner tension explicitly as part of their flourishing.
The biggest obstacle to letting go of being “impressive” is not befriending the “nobody self” below your adopted professional identity.
You know what helps in befriending your nobody self? “Broadening your portfolio of meaning.”
There’s no report card at the end of life. What you achieve or don’t before you die doesn’t matter as much as making your life (and others’) joyful while you’re here. Legacy is an idiotic construct for egomaniacs and puff-piece journalists on a deadline.
There’s also no freedom “nirvana” waiting for any of us, no pot of gold at the end of rainbow. As Emilie Townes says, “Liberation is a process. Freedom is a temporary state of being. Liberation is dynamic. It never ends.” You gotta be free and happy now, while you’re in the muck.
There’s thrilling liberation in letting go of old identities. And when you donate old books that reinforce those identities, you’re giving others who may be a better fit a chance to try them on.
Liberating yourself from the bullshit isn’t just an intellectual task, either. It’s a full-body somatic one that mass-produced goods routinely undermine.
I’d also say that true freedom is not found in escaping social systems, but in establishing solidarity, relationships, and rest amidst them. I synthesized this lesson explicitly through arriving at it as our slacker film’s central theme. But it resonates with something Light Watkins used to stress to me: wellness retreats are nice, but it’s all pointless if we don’t defend our rest within the confines of normal life.
And if you do feel liberated (at least to a degree), don’t let that make you smug toward your fellow prisoners.
Speaking of which: there are so many more ways within our grasp than we realize to alter our consciousness and/or find rest and stillness without going on an expensive retreat or vacation. For example: stare at a painting for three hours.
We tend to equate feeling “successful” or even “moral” with having a “legible story”to tell others about what we’re doing.
On the other hand, one subtle marker of growth and maturity is giving less weight to how you’ll explain decisions to others than to pleasing your own sense of your values, morals, and joy.
Most of us are, deep down, trying to please someone whenever we do anything. Try to identify who that is, and if it makes sense to be trying to please them. It’s usually not worth living your life with a point of reference that’s outside of you.
But if you must choose someone to please, a child in your life is a very good option. Or your ancestors.
Speaking of your ancestors, you probably over-idealize their work ethic.
Our culture lionizes people who do heroic things on behalf of their job, but it looks with suspicion at those who put that heroic energy into other things, at the expense of their work.
There’s a strong, counterintuitive argument that those who have the privilege of not having to work hard take advantage of it and model an ethos that’s kinder to themselves and humanity. In that sense, among the crimes of billionaires, insisting on workhumping might be the most obnoxious.
You don’t have to literally quit your job to have Big Quit Energy and live life more on your terms. Self-acceptance can be a bigger liberator than any external change in circumstances.
The drive for status and overachievement can be actively detrimental even when you have workhumping dreams (or simply want to grow your wealth).
An antiwork mindset often RAISES your chances of succeeding at a task, because it often comes with ego-death and focuses you on the process over the possible shame or glory to your person.
“Work will never love you back, but other people will.”
Don’t ever forget that employers and bosses have been socialized to feel that it’s ok to try to own you, not just your work.
Career hack: if your boss loves to think about work through the prism of sports analogies, that’s a huge red flag. Military analogies, even worse.
And while there may be no way to be fully ethical as someone’s boss, there are ways to minimize the harm if you’re in that role.
Either way, if you want a dignified and pleasant employment experience, looking for a “cool” boss isn’t nearly as good a bet as finding places where employees have formal, codified power.
The separation of “work time” and “non-work time” into distinct blocks of time that last the same length every day is an arbitrary construct that has only really existed since the colonial era. Before then, people were fine with tasks simply taking as long as they took.
So is, by the way, tracking time abstractly in “equal units” via clocks as opposed to simply organizing your life around the natural rhythms of your environment. These two approaches commonly clash head on when new parents try to sleep train and otherwise routinize newborns.
Parenting an infant is hard, but it’s a lot harder when you try to control and structure time. Parenting an infant is an invitation to treat time more malleably, more flexibly, and let yourself melt into it. I’ll admit this is a lot easier when parenting without a job, but it’s still a mindset worth cultivating.
One restful aspect to having a young infant is the built-in nap weekend time and the excuse to fall asleep early when they go to bed. It’s kind of like having a little guide being that follows his own biological clock and encourages you to do likewise. I feel hassled and foggy in many ways, and my mornings are stressful because I don’t get anything done at night. But I gotta admit, 10-11 combined hours of sleep each day arguably makes up for it.
Though it’s hyped as a “rational” tool, money is deeply emotional. You’re not mentally or morally defective just because you struggle managing your finances.
Comfort with uncertainty is a great buffer to protect your rest and your sanity, because it makes you less coercible. As Tricia Hersey puts it, “Urgency is a myth that preys upon your fears about the future.”
Pseudonyms are incredibly helpful for practicing boundaries, or any other mindsets you want to cultivate. I adopted L Vago to hide myself (though you can piece together pretty quickly who I am), but I keep it because it helps me tap into undeveloped parts of myself and “practice” them. Mainly the parts that have a spine and stand up to the workhumpers.
On creating (online or otherwise)
Pseudonyms are also great creative tools because they give your identity a little separation from your work and make it easier to take more risks.
There is no way you can predict what piece you put out will “do well” or not. An early post I worked for weeks that I thought would kill turned out to be one of the flattest in BQE history. The internet is random, so don’t take it personally.
Speaking of which, Cheech and Chong is a very strong franchise: its Slacker Fest entry is this blog’s most visited article.
People care way less about your work’s imperfections or inaccuracies than you. Case in point: this is post #118, not #100. I missed the “deadline.” No one gives a shit!
Unsubscribes, like other kinds of rejection, aren’t about you as much as about what the unsubscriber doesn’t need at this moment. You can’t be on the same wavelength as everyone. Unsubs allow you to to focus on those who benefit most from what you do instead of watering yourself down for half-hearted audiences.
Scheduling your posts in advance makes you a little less likely to sit there and track reactions. Or to obsess over them being perfect.
People hate on Substack as a platform for writers, and I’m sure it’ll start sucking real soon. But: I enjoy it thoroughly as a social network. And I don’t mean the notes app, which I don’t use. The newsletters themselves are a great way to interact with friends, through lower frequency and slower pace but with more thorough, well-thought out updates.
It also doesn’t escape me that Substack as a social network feels closer to what social networks were 15 years ago, whereas as Adam Mastroianni points out, social networks have now become television you watch on your phone.
And I’ve found that podcasting (while played out as a medium to stand out) is a great way to meet new friends and catch up with old ones. It gives you a somewhat directed conversation prompt that allows you to delve into things you wouldn’t necessarily touch upon in normal conversation.
But as it turns out, podcasts are much harder work than writing. They feel laid back because it’s people chit-chatting, but they are a time commitment to record and edit. They’re also a commitment for the listeners, more than reading. As fun as they’ve been, I think I’m gonna de-emphasize them moving forward.
When you create in public, help starts to come in big and small ways. Shoutout Risa Mickenberg, Editor for suggesting Boudu Saved From Drowning, the best slacker film I’ve never heard of and what helped break the slacker script open.
On the other hand, one must ultimately only aim to please oneself above all, with the faith that there are plenty of similar people out there. As soon as you try to gauge public opinion, the “gift” disappears.
If you try to research during the first draft of your story, it gets in the way more than anything. Your first task is to tell a good story, and then researching during your rewrite can help you flesh out your world and keep it as accurate as possible. Or do light research throughout the process but avoid front-loading it (as I made the mistake of doing for most of my writing life).
When writing a story, you know you’re clicking when every character represents some aspect of you…something you struggle with, some part of your past, etc.
This is also a strong argument in favor of slow, non-AI assisted writing. Because half the benefit is how the labored process itself helps you explore your own mind and soul. And I believe audiences can feel that too.
While AI is terrible if you use it to write quickly, I’ve found it great for editing quickly, with instant feedback and suggestions that generally take days or weeks of separation to see. Writing feature films, you rarely get the immediate feedback loop that I envy in other crafts (ex. stand-up comedy). AI helps bring a little bit of that as long as you have a strong sense of your own taste.
Another upside of AI (assuming you don’t replace your thinking with it): helping you recall what you’ve thought already. Someone who has recorded their thinking can access those notes and recombine them much more quickly and dependably, whenever they have a new idea for a project. It sounds mundane but I think it’ll be very powerful for people who, like me, have scattered thoughts and notes everywhere.
The creator scene trains people to treat every act of creation as “instrumental,” ie. achieving some external change. Instrumental because instrumental work is easier to organize, monetize, and reward. But we can’t forget about what Venkatesh Rao calls “metamorphic” creation: work that’s not clearly legible externally, but that causes deep internal change.
Some writers publish consistently. They provide a valuable service to those who subscribe, which I would sum up as “I can reliably get nudged toward a perspective or way of thinking/feeling every few days when I check my email.”
Other writers write a flurry of things and disappear for months or years, then visit you again for a little while, like comets. I love both kinds, and I think there’s something serendipitous to an author “visiting” you at certain times in your life.
In summary: if you want to start writing again but haven’t in a while and feel like that takes away from your credibility as a “writer,” it doesn’t. I like it when you visit.
On goals and projects
For starters, dreams and goals should probably play a smaller role in most people’s psyche. They’re nice as a motivator, but can become tyrannical if unchecked.
Also, remember that external or material goals are nice and all, but they are nothing compared to the person you are becoming through your striving. Is your goal helping you be a better person? Worth thinking about.
That said, if you do pursue a goal, you gotta start where you are. It’s a great mantra (thank you Russell Smith) for when you’re confused about what you should be doing. There’s always something small we can do to make our little corner of existence more joyful.
Beside, dissatisfaction with where you currently are can rush you to places where you end up yearning for where you were in the first place.
Russell’s love for walking also has a valuable lesson for when you’re despairing about not being “where you want to be yet”: you make your path by walking, and you can only take one step at a time. No rushing needed, just action.
To that effect, it’s also important to stop now and then and take in how far you’ve walked. With walking, progress is gradual and easy to miss. Give yourself credit for all the little steps.
Said another way: “goals follow their own timetables.”1 Do I feel a little goofy that I thought of this post when I had about 96 posts on this blog, ALMOST TWO YEARS AGO, and I’m only just limping into it now? Yes. But I also deeply believe that there’s someone out there who needed this published today and not two years ago. So today it is.
Your reading also follows its own logic. There’s so many books I meant to read and analyze for this blog that I haven’t touched, so many movies I meant to watch for Sirena that I never will. But when I do get around to reading something, it usually feels like the timing was perfect. Don’t worry too much about it. If you really need to read something, you will.
Rob Hardy has a creative flywheel concept to illustrate that any business needs repeated, seemingly futile actions before it gathers momentum and people start to notice. External success aside, I think the same applies to finding your groove. Look at how flailing the first 30-40 posts on this blog read. Embrace the awkward starts and give yourself a few reps before you truly start enjoying your projects.
One way to get through the awkward, flailing beginning is to commit to doing 100 repetitions (or 50, or 25, or 10) of a new practice before you quit.2 Don’t worry as much about frequency or scheduling, but do give yourself a set amount of reps that feels like you gave it a real try. Then allow yourself to quit if it doesn’t feel right.
Don’t underestimate the impact of lowering your goals. Ridiculously small but compounding daily actions are the non-workhumper’s way to make progress. For example, one line on a script per day. The more ambitious your goals, the more important it is to make it easy (and fun!) to chip away at them consistently. Tiny habits is where it’s at.
The transformation you go through by working on a project is much deeper and vast than what actually makes it onto the project itself. Example: so many of these learnings hit me as part of reading and researching, years ago, yet never found their way onto this blog until this list. Working on a project: just as good as therapy.3
Beware of telling yourself the story that in order to do what you really want to do you have to do X and Y first. Ex. “I have to consult and take a class and then I’ll be able to write a book” when you could just write the book now, today.4
When projects are an end in themselves, not a means to an end, delays don’t matter. The fun is in making the thing, not in having it done. This brings a lot of peace into my life.
It’s rarely a good idea to model your own path after someone else’s “greatness,” but if you do, you’re better off studying those who were “second-best” rather than those who were at the top of their field.
You can achieve a lot and still feel behind. Better to do a little and feel complete.
On society and humanity more broadly
While it’s foolish to fully ignore “the economy” and its conventions, it’s good to remember that it’s not as “real” as we are socialized into believing.
And because it’s not fully real, it renders a lot of our work pointless by its very nature. That’s OK too.
Apropos, the American economy is in its “business idiot” era, where not only are many of the jobs “bullshit jobs,” but business leaders are the biggest bullshitters. Whatever veneer of brilliance heads of companies used to enjoy has crumbled while CEOs hide behind the Steve Jobs’ of the world (the exception to the rule) and contribute nothing but buzzwords and political savvy.
For better or worse (actually, just worse), corporate culture is like being back in high school. Not the learning part. Just the part about your experience overwhelmingly being driven by the personality you project.
At the other end of the spectrum, caregiving and emotional support should be valued and paid like a job. One issue is that they’re less effective when we treat them like we do jobs (measuring them, scheduling them, etc). It’s quite a paradox that I don’t yet know how to reconcile.
It’s cool to support small businesses and all, but let’s not pretend that small business owners can’t be little exploitative tyrants too, and society’s urgency to deify them makes them feel entitled to be jerks.
Human nature is worth being optimistic about. We are self-starters. We are passionate and curious. Laziness does not exist. We can self-organize much better than mass media or illuminati theory suggest.
Modern humans seem to have boundless imagination for breaking scientific paradigms, but we still have work to do in learning to reimagine societal norms, lest we make space utopias simply amplified versions of today’s misery.
(Speaking of utopias, our futurist sci-fi and fiction defaults way too negative these days. We need more positive manifestation!)
It’s important to be mindful of the structural ways that we’re isolated from each other. For example, Americans live in a society that subtly segregates parents from non-parents.
A lot of Western childhood education involves putting kids at war with their bodies to satisfy an externally-dictated rhythm (sleep training, holding in pee during class, etc.). I’m not saying this is “bad” per-se: people need to be able to navigate the society they live in. But it’s a fact we should remember when we feel punitive against ourselves and others, children or adults.
The adage that “everyone has access to the same 24 hours in the day” is not true. Financial inequality is apparent, but it’s easy to miss how social hierarchies make it so that some people have to organize their time around others, and experience time as much less flexible, predictable, or abundant. Even Aristotle believed that the point of having slaves was to free up time for the wealthy.
Societies are rich when they have a culture of amateurism, the very thing that careerism and capitalism erode.
Art imitates life, sure. But in modernity, life imitates art way more. The defining trait of modern humans might be the extent to which they interact with the world exclusively through media, how much (often fictional) narratives color their perception of reality. Don Quixote type of stuff.
And I’ve found that the media narrative around many things is scarier than their actual experience. Examples: unemployment, other countries, and parenthood.
You know what gets especially hosed by our common cultural narratives? Anarchism. Before starting this blog, I equated anarchism with chaos and violence. Readers of this platform and other internet friends have made me realize that it’s actually a highly positive and peaceful political philosophy.
Though the threat to people’s livelihoods from AI is real, if society could get it together to distribute the rewards intelligently, humans completely losing “market value” and focusing on other kinds of value would be a great thing.
On Gratitude
They say gratitude is the best pick-me-up, so I want to end with how grateful I am for all the cool people, thinking, and corners of the internet this blog has exposed me to. Many of them you’ll see linked here (some embarrassingly repeatedly).
I am especially grateful for those who not only read and influenced BQE throughout the years but who I consider friends. Some I’ve actually met, others I only know through their comments and blogs of their own, but at some point or another I’ve been deeply touched by what they have to say: Maegan E. Ortiz, Lorena Sassman, Elle Griffin, Keith Hayden, Risa Mickenberg, Editor, Heather Sundell, 🐉 Percy Sullivan 🐉, Adria French, mk zariel, vicky marquez, Jess, China Martens, Lisa Brunette, and Rick Foerster.
And a final shoutout to those who belong in the above list BUT ALSO in the early days
forcedencouraged me to start this thing and were there reading or at least pretending to when they were literally the only subscribers, and who in other ways have displayed a meaningful amount of support that I can never repay: Rob Hardy (who helped name it!) Elspeth Michaels, Sean Durkin, Russell Smith and Gregory Hedin.
Thank you for continuing to let Big Quit Energy land in your inbox. It means a lot, and I hope it has made you a little less obedient to both your outer and inner bosses.
Let’s do this again at post 200! Or after. We don’t respect deadlines here.
Simon Sarris said this but I couldn’t find where. Sorry!
Same as above footnote, but for Paul Millerd. Sorry again!
Not at all, actually. Therapy’s awesome. Ideally do both and let them supercharge each other.
Again, Paul Millerd but for the life of me I can’t find any of the passages from his work that I took notes on.
Thanks for including me. I’m curious: Which of my posts connected with you?
Interesting roundup of arguments here, many new to me, many I agree with, some, not so much. Best of luck with your projects!
Great list. I especially paused on this one:
"When writing a story, you know you’re clicking when every character represents some aspect of you…something you struggle with, some part of your past, etc."
Very true. Writing fiction allowed me to construct whole characters out of parts of my personality, starting with one "base" to amplify: the funny self, the brooding self, the totally fractured self, etc.