Specialness

I recently hit the 60K follower mark on Instagram. That’s a lot of people—more than the population of my hometown in Montana—and yet, in today’s topsy-turvy world of “influencers” and multi-million follower TikTok stars, it’s quite modest. And that’s weird. 

The words "influencer," "followers" and "personal brand" all give me the heebie jeebies. First, let’s talk about the idea of personal brands. In my conversation with School of Visual Arts professor Debbie Millman, she maintained that people should not, and cannot be brands, since brands lack consciousness: “They don't have a consciousness, they don't have a soul. They're not able to communicate without human engagement. So why would any person aspire to be a brand that's manufactured? Humans can develop their character, they can develop their reputation, and they can own brands. But to be a brand means you're a fixed entity that has no consciousness or sense of purpose on your own. And so I have real issues with, I think personal brand is an oxymoron essentially.” The idea of branding—i.e. stamping your mark on cattle, or a logo’d bag—is actually so very odd in the way that we embrace being "branded" today. And it's not something that we think about all that much. What does it mean exactly that we subscribe to brands, advertise for them, and choose to adopt their identity, using what they stand for in the world as a shortcut for our own values? (Perhaps a topic for a full newsletter as I don't think brands are inherently a bad thing—and there are many wonderful ones—but the way we think about them can become a bit thoughtless and distorted.)

Influencing is equally strange: I don’t actually want to influence anyone. The word makes me feel like a charlatan or Televangelist. I want to present information—interesting thinkers, experts, ideas—and let people determine for themselves what resonates. The idea of bending people’s minds and changing their behavior feels as toxic as the patriarchy itself.

And then, of course, there’s FOLLOWERS. As Yeshua via Carissa frequently remarks: “In my life, I had 12 followers.” (This makes me laugh, every time.) And again, where exactly are we leading people, and to what end? It sure feels like an awful lot of responsibility. 

This long preamble leads me to the episode of Pulling the Thread that comes out tomorrow, a conversation with the wonderful Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. If you haven’t read this delicious book, it’s about the human scale of time and how that always gets away from us: There's so much cultural pressure to maximize every minute, and yet we feel like we’re wasting our lives. As he writes, “This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.” With every time-maximizing hack, it squirms away even more.

One of my favorite parts of the book is a relatively off-hand comment near the end, where Oliver writes about the “egocentricity bias,” which is what theoretically makes us so inclined to leave a stamp on the planet and propagate our genes. It’s that pull that suggests our one single life—in the context of this massive, unending universe—matters. He writes:

You might imagine, moreover, that living with such an unrealistic sense of your own historical importance would make life feel more meaningful, by investing your every action with a feeling of cosmic significance, however unwarranted. But what actually happens is that this overvaluing of your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well. It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations—or at the very least that it must, in the words of the philosopher Iddo Landau, “transcend the common and the mundane.” Clearly, it can’t just be ordinary: After all, if your life is as significant in the scheme of things as you tend to believe, how could you not feel obliged to do something truly remarkable with it?

Oh man, this hits. This hits on every aspect of our strange society and this idea that scale—and other quantitative measures—are more important to a well-lived life than the nebulosity of the qualitative. Somehow, in our pursuits for influence, followers, and fame we’ve culturally diminished the power of just…being a wonderful person. A caring parent and partner, a supportive friend, someone who tends to the environment and local community. Culturally, when did this stop feeling like enough? Ultimately, living a life of service is what I find validating—not touching the most people, but making an impact, even if only for an hour, on someone’s life. Or giving them a new perspective to think about an important relationship, issue, or free-floating feeling.

All that said, it’s hard not to get caught up in the breathless pursuit of more—more impact, more audience, more, more, more. I’ve been watching this scale game in the media for a decade + now—the pursuit of audience numbers over audience loyalty and impact—and am wondering when it will end, even as it’s clear that it’s nothing but a race to the bottom. So many media sites are shadows of their former selves. Our news is a mess. (I talked about this a bit with Brooke Baldwin, her perspective as a long-time CNN anchor is fascinating.) I think we’re collectively starting to see through this, though, wanting the real thing, rather than everything.

If you make content, I want to hear your thoughts; and if you follow a lot of content creators/media sites, I really want to hear your thoughts. What do you all need? And what do you all want?