You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m sharing what I’ve read this month (including the rare novel, which I loved!), and what’s inspiring my latest attempts to resist the compulsion to overwork. I’m also sharing my takes on some things that are happening now in the media landscape: changes that YouTube has made, ways we measure our value, what this means for how we create meaning, the next cycle that’s going to crash, and how to avoid getting totally mucked up by algorithmic forces.

All Together Now by Julie Buxbaum

Labor by Mary Fariba Afsari

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Ahead of All Parting by Barry Michels

True and False Magic by Phil Stutz and Elise Loehnen

On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen

Podcast Episode: “Do You Need to Put Yourself In Order”

Podcast Episode: “How this Hamster Wheel Stops”

ELISE:

I'm sitting here. I just want to apologize at the outset. If you hear my stomach going crazy, I wish I could tell you that it would be different if I recorded this in an hour or tomorrow, but as part of the second stage surgery of my reconstruction, they gave me lipo, which is still so funny to me. It gives me the convulsive giggles. And as a result, I am in this lipofoam and stomach binder. I don't know why anyone would choose to do this electively, but here we are. It's essentially a guess.

I think the premise is that you're less likely to get scar tissue or I'm not sure what can happen, but you have to wear this thick foam. And man, it's been hot in LA. It's not comfortable, but it also just makes my stomach, I think by virtue of the fact that it's essentially like wearing a corset, it makes my stomach go crazy. Anyhow, to that end, I'm on the other side of surgery number two. I am almost finished. I am skipping to the finish line and everything went great as far as I can tell. I had very little scar tissue. I want to say that's a credit to Tina San, who I had to do some lymphatic massage after my first surgery and after every fill. And she didn't need to come that many times. I think I saw her over the span of six months, maybe three times or four times.

She's wonderful. She does house calls. If you are getting a surgery like this, highly recommend. Or if you have a friend who's getting this and you would like to do something, you can send a high protein smoothie for recovery. You could get together with friends and send a lymphatic massage. Just saying. But yeah, so my second surgery went great and I went home that day and tried, of course, to do way too much because I didn't have the same restrictions as I did after the mastectomy when honestly I had drains coming out of my body. So who was I kidding? But I ultimately needed to chill out and get in bed. But it's funny. I'm sure some of you guys can relate. It's very difficult for my nervous system to recalibrate to doing nothing. I just am not very good at it and I get very anxious and it stirs something in me.

That need to be busy, I think keeps other harder feelings at bay. And so what do you know? Last weekend I read four books. I read an amazing novel, Julie Buxbaum All Together Now. It was so fun, so novel, so hilarious, so devastating. That's coming out in March. I read Labor by my friend, Dr. Mary Fariba Absari, who is coming on the podcast. It's short memoir. She's an OB -GYN who is in Portland and she operates in a mobile clinic and she is Iranian. The book is about what happened to her grandmother. It's about her. It's gorgeous. You will fly through it. It's about what's happening in terms of the restriction of reproductive rights in this country and its impact on doctors, it's case studies. It's just beautifully written where it's like, I'm really glad that Mary is an OBGYN and also she could have just been a writer.

She could make the copy on the back of a toilet paper roll beautiful. And I'm very fond of Mary and we will talk about this when we pod together, but she was a month or so ahead of me in breast cancer. And so she was my mentor friend and held my hand throughout and told me what to expect. And she's just rad. She's super cool person. Anyway, those are two of the books that I read, then two that were, let's just say, less fun. I realized I read so few novels and I used to only read novels. I did a hard turn when I turned about 30 into nonfiction and I rarely, rarely read novels because I just don't have time. And man, it's so much more fun. I say this as someone who writes nonfiction, which makes me laugh, but I read a lot of hard, hard nonfiction that does not go down a treat.

So just powering through a novel was totally delicious and maybe I should just rethink my life. Although I have this, and I didn't really take creative writing classes. I don't feel like I have the imagination for fiction. I guess this is where my imposter syndrome would show up, even though I don't really believe in imposter syndrome, particularly in the way that it's applied to women because I think that so many women are confident. We just are taught to not be confident. We're just very careful about how we express that confidence so that we don't get put back in our place. But I think that I grew up with so much reverence for books and writers that the idea of attempting to join their ranks is just, it's too much for me guys. It is too much. So I just enjoy it. I enjoy it when I can.

So anyway, back to this moment of calm when I was faced with this empty calendar, in September I was in a full sprint and very conscious of being in a full sprint. I was delivering a draft of a book. I was working on a proposal for someone else. I was doing tons of work for various clients. I just was panting in that how am I possibly going to deliver all of this without mortgaging my own work or the quality of my own work in the process? And I got to the finish line literally a day early, friends a day early, but then I went into the surgery and then I came out the other side with this completely clear calendar. And I guess what I would also offer is that, and I'm not going to tell the story of The Rainmaker again because I've done it so many times, but I have been nursing this feeling of equanimity for five months.

I have just been unflappable emotionally and just incredibly regulated as I have been keeping myself in order. And even though everything is great, this last week or so or two weeks of not really having that much to do has sent me into a tizzy. So I don't know what to say about it. I am just recognizing it and acknowledging that there is more for me to do because I can't anesthetize myself with work and I can't then call that equanimity.

One of the books that I read recently and was going back through my notes is Becker's The Denial of Death. So I'm guessing that many of you guys have read this Pulitzer Prize winning book. It's an oldie but a goodie. He also wrote Escape from Evil, which I read many years ago right before he died. And it's also very interesting, but not as fully fledged as Denial of Death. But he writes, I'm just going to share this quote because it makes me laugh. "What we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed and what we call cultural routine is a similar license. The proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges and hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent's office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jackhammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it alludes us. The craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are right for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous. Men have to be protected from reality.” Oh God, it hits you guys.

It hurts. And I wrote about this in On Our Best Behavior within the sloth chapter, but that overwork, the compulsive to doing is really a way of anesthetizing anxiety, right? If I stay engaged with everything that I have to do and I can be tethered to my physical planner where I like to write things down and cross them off, even after I've accomplished them, mind you, then I can be relieved from some larger anxiety, which I can't even bear to look at in the face. And I don't know, maybe I'm actually getting to the deeper work here for myself, which is can I be present with that and actually explore it as maybe even shadow material instead of rushing to fill it even with things like reading or watching Bravo or whatever it may be. And what's more, because this has also been coming up for me over the course of my recovery is just the anxiety that comes up when I don't feel like I've been productive and I have many days.

I've had many days in the last two weeks where I'm like, what did I do today? I'm not even really allowed to exercise. So I am slothing out and I can just, the mental sort of lacerating that I do, the sort of whipping of myself for my lack of productivity is wild. And I don't know, just to be perfectly honest, I don't know what to do about it, but I'm sure some of you guys can relate because it's pretty funny that I'm driving so hard to get to this place of rest and recovery and then I can't enjoy it, right? That's sad. And I was also thinking, is my problem that I don't have any hobbies? Maybe I am just such a loser that I don't have any hobbies besides work. And I love my work, so it's easy to go there. But yeah, when my days are not full, I feel sort of purposeless, directionless, meaningless.

I don't really know what to do about it. And I think it goes to the fact too that like many of you guys, and I think we find this communion somewhat online. And as I say this, I know it's also not true. I was just with a group of wonderful girlfriends in Montana at the end of September riding horses, which was so fun, so magical. It was like a walking miracle field. And then in these moments I'm like, "Oh my God, I've poured most of my extra energy into my family and I spend most of my free time with my kids and my husband, Rob. And do I not have a community?" Well, I don't know. I just go into these weird dark... Even though as I'm saying these things, I'm like, "That's not true, obviously." But yeah, this is a little flashlight into my head, which I'm hoping is helpful because I feel like a lot of people, and I get this feedback, are like, "You really seem to have your shit together and you get so much done." And this is all true, and yet I also have these moments of despair, but they're just not about the things that you would think.

And again, this is also a function of the fact that I'm sure you guys have heard of this concept. I think it originated with Harriet Lerner and Brene Brown popularized it, but this idea of over-functioning and under-functioning, right? I'm an over-functioner. I love a crisis. I'm exactly who you want to call. I am so calm. I can work through it. I manage myself exceptionally well, and I love managing through high stress situations. I am at my best. I am an over-functioner, whereas under-functioners tend to fall apart in those situations. But I think I under-function in the opposite. It's like I just don't know how to relax. I don't know how to just chill and have a good time.

I think that's the invitation. I think I have always said to myself, "I'll never be a meditator. It's just not how I build. I do walking meditation. My mind's too fast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And I think it's just because, to me, it feels like chaos and an abyss. And I talked about this with David Whyte in an episode that's coming up that I'm treasuring and holding. I will release it. I don't know exactly when, maybe in the new year, but we talked a lot about this, the fear on the other side of the pillow. And this is a place where I am scared to go. And I think I have some hints about it too. I also just finished Ahead of All Parting, which is Barry Michael's memoir. He also will be on Pulling the Thread soon, and he is the co-author of The Tools with Phil Stutz, and I've known Barry for a really long time.

He's not my therapist, but I've done stuff with him when I was at Goop. And then obviously I worked with Phil on True and False Magic and spent a long time still see... I go and try and see Phil regularly, but I am quite immersed in their work. And Phil has Parkinson's, has had Parkinson's for decades, and he is not in good shape. And three years ago, Barry was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, which is a very ravaging, chaotic form of dementia that will theoretically end his life in the next few years. And he also has Alzheimer's. And he wrote this memoir and he's been giving interviews, and as mentioned, he'll be on Pulling the Thread. And this memoir is so beautiful. It is truly mystical. It is stunning. I should have figured this out at the beginning of this episode and known what I was talking about, but this is what I'm talking about.

What he writes about is what is waiting for you on the other side of when your personality and your persona and everything that you use to protect yourself from life fades away or you lose access to it, right? He's being evicted from his home, which is his mind. He's also an over-intellectualizer, highly cognitive person, and so he is in process of an entirely different... With an encounter with something that's on the other side of what we know to be our sense of self. I guess what I'm trying to say, maybe not that well, is for the past few weeks, it's like I'm dancing on the edge of that cliff a little bit just by virtue of having this empty calendar. Even that to me is terrifying. I'm like, "Please give me all the things to think about and to do so that I can stay away from that over there." And Barry's memoir, Ahead of All Parting, which is named after a real gay poem, is about that.

It's about what happens when that edifice cracks and falls apart. It is so beautiful and so compelling, and yet the price of it is just higher than any of us want to pay. But I think the invitation is, "Can you taste it? Can you get a little bit closer?" I think that's what I'm confronting and in a very teeny tiny kindergarten way. He's teaching a college seminar, he's teaching a PhD master's seminar, and I'm in kindergarten here, but that's, I think, the invitation for me. I don't know how to embrace it. I think that this whole breast cancer journey has been... I knew I was supposed to take a class. I just didn't know what the class is, and I think that this is the class. For me, it hasn't been the terror of facing death or anything like that. It is who are you minus all of this?

And this being the thinking and the intellectualizing and the work and the output and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that has come to represent this tower that I've built for myself of work. And we talked about it in a previous episode too, about with the rise of AI, it's like productivity no longer being a virtue and output no longer being the signatory of a life well lived, something else. I think that's something else that we're all reaching for and trying to understand and trying to figure out how to measure our value, how to measure the meaning that we create in people's lives. I think meaning that we create in people's lives is the right measurement. And right now it's like we're still in this scale game, and I find it enticing as well and have to catch myself because it is such a trap and it's wild to watch.

And again, I'm naming this as something that I also instinctively feel, but just this willing enslavement to algorithms, to trying to capture eyeballs, even as we all know that it's largely fake, right? We are watching Ukraine bomb data centers in Russia and just people's audiences being decimated because so much of what constitutes culture right now that we think of as popular is manipulations via bots from data farms, right? And yet it crosses our wires and we start competing or catering or trying to beat the machines or worse, court the machines, right?

It's so funny. I have this thing about YouTube, but you can apply this to any other platform. You can apply it to social media. I'm constantly catching myself in this, "Oh, I should, I should, I should, and I should be posting more. I should be figuring out the algorithm. I should be creating better hooks. I should spend money and hire someone to help me with social media because I need to be posting more and blah, blah, blah." And then it's like, "Elise, to what end?" So that you can feel gratified by a larger number of followers so that you can maybe convert those people into podcast listeners or to buying your book. What are we trying to do here? And in the interim, in all this doing, which I also get caught up in, you're just enriching Meta, right? They're the ones who are using your content to get people to stay on the app for longer so they can serve them ads.

I make nothing. I don't even sell... I don't do brand partnerships on... I've never sold an integrated brand. I do ads on this podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting sponsors, but I don't do sponsored content, and so I don't make any money. There's no business to drive there for me, and so what am I doing? But this is a question I think for all of us. I think so many people are like, "If I build an Instagram audience or a Substack audience or whatever it may be, then I can sell a book or whatever it may be. But to me, it's like to what end? To what end? I don't know." And it's funny, I was laughing because I really don't do anything as of recently. I throw sort of unedited the Zoom version of the conversation for the podcast up on YouTube.

I don't understand who would watch it or who watches video podcasts just because from what I understand, our attention spans are only going down, so I'm not sure who's watching people converse when people can't even make a variety talk show work. I don't understand how a two-hour conversation is working. But again, it gets into anything that's mediated by an algorithm to me is going to be fishy. And just to go into what's happening in the media landscape, there's a little bit of an arms race happening right now. And this, I'm just going to talk about it. I'm not an expert in it, but because it has this downstream implications for why everyone gets on board with these trends, but Netflix and other streamers, their main competitor is YouTube really. And to be fair, there's a lot of YouTube consumption in my house. It's my kids, right?

I think mostly watching YouTube shorts. Max watches some science creators and whatnot, but they're not watching TV and they will watch movies, but they don't watch TV. And obviously, less so maybe for my generation, but certainly for their generation, it's a totally different game. They're not the target demo. I don't know if you guys know this, but they are not my target for pulling the thread. But what's happening is that Netflix has acquired some podcasts, is doing deals with some podcasters for Netflix exclusive video rights, and essentially these are shows where they're producing talk show caliber video, Jay Shetty, et cetera. So he has a Netflix deal, and part of that is to create a whole slate of shows. It's one of the bets that Netflix is making, and they're in this sort of detente with YouTube, particularly in the last few years as YouTube claimed to be the number one podcast platform in the world.

But as in all of these things, A, there's this major hockey stick. So you have these people who really understand YouTube, spend millions of dollars, and I've written about this, sort of the hamster wheel, Clip Farms, these hooks, et cetera. The views. If you have Diary of a CEO and Joe Rogan, it's primarily the men. So you have some people who have really cracked YouTube and then kind of everyone else. And most of the other podcasters I know just cannot make YouTube work. And partly it's that you need the first 30 seconds, you got to hook them. And this is the change that I wanted to talk about in YouTube because I think it signals just how these vanity metrics around number of followers, number of subscribers, number of views on Instagram and otherwise are like opiates for us. They become this thing and it's like, well, what's actually behind those numbers?

What's happening? Who are these people? Are they actually even people? How deeply are they engaging with your content? And again, I've watched, I've ridden so many media cycles and I've seen the same crash. People go for scale, they go for quantity over quality, and then the middle falls out. And because people are like, "I don't know where I heard that. It was just shown to me." And there's no real loyalty. There's no real engagement. They don't know where they were. They don't know who someone was, et cetera. We all know what this is like. How many creators have you seen on Instagram? You have no idea who they are and you've never seen them again, but maybe you watched one of their videos. But that creator is juiced off that viral video and they're just like, "How do I recreate that?" So that's the cycle that it's generating.

So probably now about a month ago, YouTube... Okay. The way that YouTube works is they pay Google AdSense, they pay creators off of engaged views. And to get an engaged view, someone has to watch the first 30 seconds of your content. So that's why everyone makes these NCIS style trailers because they're trying to get you to stay for 30 seconds because that counts as an engaged view and then they start to get paid and it signals to the algorithm that there's engagement here and they start showing your video to more people. So that's the basics of YouTube. But when you dig deeper into what sort of counts as good, it's like a 20% completion rate of a video is considered good. So when we're talking about a two hour long podcast, 20% of that is 40 minutes of 120 minutes. I can do math guys.

So 20% of a two hour podcast conversation is 24 minutes.

And I don't know, if someone read 20% of my book, I wouldn't count that as a success, right? It's very odd. In podcasting, which is still a very on audio, still an opaque experience in terms of data, but the expectation, it was considered good if someone listened to 80 to 90% of an episode, not excellent, you wanted full completion, but somehow we've gone from that as the marker of this is successful, someone's listening, they're really engaging, they're with you to 20% being good. That's the YouTube marker. And so what happened though a month ago is in an effort to boost views, knowing that nothing inherently had changed, YouTube started showing the visible counter that you now see on people's YouTube pages is just views. Someone can watch for a second and it counts as a view now. To get to engaged views, which is the 30 second parameter under which they are still compensating you, they did not change their compensation, which is hilarious to me.

You have to go in and toggle and click another view to actually see the engaged views. They're just counting anyone who has watched similar to how it is on Instagram, even one second of your video is counted as a view now. And that's what YouTube is visibly reporting in order, I think, to make everyone look bigger, to give creators the juice of, "Oh my God, this is 100,000 people watched that." And so just to give you a benchmark, chances are if you're getting 100,000 views, you have 50,000 engaged views. And that means 50,000 people of those 100,000 have stayed for more than 30 seconds, and then it just falls off a cliff from there.

I guess I'm sharing this though just because I think this whole idea to go back to... I've kind of taken you guys on a little bit of a journey, but what is meaningful? Again, I don't think we can say what's meaningful is a video with a million five second views. What's meaningful is when you get feedback that something actually impacted someone's life in a positive way, I guess, hopefully not negative, but that your content resonates or is keeping someone company who's lonely or is giving someone a different way of understanding themselves or the world. I mean, that's always been my thesis statement and that's what keeps me doing it. And I will say, and I'm not just saying this because I literally have a hundred subscribers on YouTube, but I try and inoculate myself against vanity metrics. I think that's also why I refuse to become addicted to Instagram in that way or to enslave myself because it's not that I don't trust myself.

I have a fair amount of faith in myself at this point, but I know the game that's being played and I feel like if I tether myself to winning by those types of markers, I'm lost. I also, just having so many friends, so many friends in the industry watch the breathlessness with which they continue to chase scale, either because they already have it and they're trying to maintain it and that's what they've been selling or they feel like that's somehow the, if I get here, I'll be okay space, but it's just like another form of scarcity, right? It's just another way of creating not enoughness for ourselves and to what end? I just don't know how real any of it is. And so I guess that's also part of it. I was talking to my friend Nora McInerney, who you guys probably know from her podcast.

It used to be called Terrible Thanks for Asking. Now it's called Thanks for Asking. She also has a show that I just did again called It's Going to Be Okay. We were talking about this too, just that as someone who makes things, as someone who writes and makes a podcast and does a newsletter and books, there is this like, "Oh my God, does anyone care that's on the other side of it?" I think that when we see all these big numbers, it's, "Oh my God, we feel like it's armor. Look how many people care." But it doesn't actually scratch that itch that I was trying to point to at the beginning of this episode of who are you without all of that, which is the really terrifying question to contemplate.

And I don't even want to say and who cares because I don't think that's the point. I think the point is, can you get to the other side of your ego? Can you get to the other side of all of this armoring around your personality that shouts at the world like, "I'm okay. My work matters. How many people think that I matter?" Can you get to the other side of that? Particularly if what fills your days with meaning is making work that you hope finds an audience and connects with people and impacts them in some way. Kind of a rub, and I think it goes back to this core question of why are you doing what you're doing? Are you doing it because it does touch that part of you that's on the other side?

Or are you doing it for affirmation and likes and attention? Are you doing it because it's the only way you know how to make a living? Are you doing it because you feel like if eyes are on you, then you feel like you exist? This is the core question I'm wrestling with. Why do we do the things that we do? Why is this the work that I do? Would I do it if no one were watching? Would I do it if no one were compensating me? Would I do it if it weren't a way to keep existential anxiety at bay? I mean, I know the answer for me is yes. This is the guiding impulse of my life that pulls me forward. This is all I've ever wanted in my life is to understand, to sort of know, to know, even though my Instagram bio is that my mantra is I don't know because damn, the more I know, the more I'm like, oh shit, I know nothing.

I felt that way after reading Barry's book Ahead of All Parting where I was like, oh man, again, I'm on the starting block here. I'm gesturing towards the moon, but it's really far away. I guess this gets into the whole conversation around purpose and I hate that word and I don't think that we have a purpose. And when I say that, it's not that I'm saying that life isn't incredibly meaningful and that our lives aren't incredibly meaningful.

I do not think that we are guided by one single purpose and that we'll reach that purpose and feel better. I think that we are given this GPS system, which is our bodies, which is our way of contacting and being in touch with the world and the universe and higher forces and whatever it is. And it's guiding us towards something, but I don't think that the something... I don't even think that the doing is what matters. I just don't think that God, whatever you want to say, I don't think they care. I don't think that God's like, "Good job, Elise. Great book. Great newsletter." I just think it's all about the application of life force energy, going to Stutz and Barry. It's all about string of pearls. It's all about staying in motion and in flow with the universe and continuing to evolve and grow and get a little bit older and a little bit more mature and a little wiser.

And that's sort of the best that we can do. And I think the only way for your compass to not get all mucked up by these external algorithmic forces that are maybe true and maybe largely fake is to keep that GPS to yourself and to turn down all of those signals. I know there are a lot of people who listen to the show who are also creative people who are making things, and I know it's easy to say you can't do it for affirmation or audience or attention and you really can't, particularly in today's world. It's just that is a losing battle. You just have to make what feels true and feels resonant and feels aligned with as far as you can see into the dark, which might be only a few steps, but that's kind of it.

I think that might be why I feel so terrified when I don't have anything to do because being in constant motion, even as it might be an antidote to anxiety, is how I stay in touch with myself. But I do think there's a bigger invitation here of what's the deeper self, right? Even thinking about it fills me with a little bit of anxiety, which means there's some real meat on the bone. All right friends, I have been hammering on. I hope you can track this. As always, I want to be in conversation with you guys. My new website is up. I finally realized I had disabled comments. Comments are on. It's eliseloehnen.com and there is a whole community function in there where we can talk to each other and I'm figuring out how to actually get it going. I have someone helping me who started two days ago.

So give us a minute, but I'm jazzed about this. All I want to do is talk to you guys. So eliseloehnen.com, it's in the top nav, community. And if you've listened this far, I have more things coming up. I'm figuring out... I'm sort of creating the contours for this whole world, pulling the thread, the podcast, the newsletter, workshops, Zoom, et etera. I'm doing these quarterly office hours with Uta Opitz that are amazing, also on Zoom, upcoming eaching workshop, which I do every year with Satya Doyle Byock. That's always so fun. We do it, I think it's on January 2nd this year, but I'll be posting that shortly. So there's lots more, so come hang. All right friends, I'll see you next time. I have a really special episode coming on Thursday too, so get ready.

If you got something out of today's episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow Pulling the Thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That's how we grow this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you.