What If You Give Up?

Lately I've figured out one strategy for flourishing is what you're willing to let go

In advertising, when we were making commercials, we used to say: it can be fast, and it can be good, and it can be cheap, but it can’t be all three. Choose two. If you want it cheap and you want it good, it won’t be fast. If you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good.

It was an excellent rule of production, logical and helped to clarify: what do you care about most, and what are you willing to give up?

I have always loved writing, but at the beginning of this year, I realized, I wasn’t loving writing this anymore. Truth is, I hadn’t really been loving it for a long time.

Writing used to be my favorite thing to do, but I found myself dreading it. I second guessed my sentences, and my stories, and my publishing schedule. When I hit publish on a post, I’d think, oh thank God, that one’s done, and then I would start worrying about the next.

(My husband, a pastor who had to preach every Sunday, calls this “the relentless return of the Sabbath,” which makes me laugh.)

When I started to share my writing, I immediately came face to face with all the ways in which I was falling short. Substack started counting my metrics, and was constantly bugging me to improve them. Monetize! Re-stack! Share! Engage! They started sending me performance notifications and constant arrows indicating whether I’m “rising” or “falling” and did I gain or lose subscribers, views, income, etc.

And I started to play along. I was raised a capitalist girlie, prone to achievement; I’m competitive, and I want to win, and after a while, it became clear: you are losing.

And I started to feel stressed, and sad, and frustrated. This started to feel like something else at which I had failed. I’m not Glennon Doyle! I’m not Brene Brown! I’m a loser!

I say this because I think while a few of us don’t have substacks, most of us have this feeling, much of the time. Most of us feel like life has set some metrics for what success looks like, and we’re not stepping up.

This is not a story about substack. It’s a story about success, and what it really looks like.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”

— Anne Lamott

Be Careful Here, Castellani

I spent most of my life following all the rules. Trying to be skinny enough and successful enough and work hard enough and pretty enough and funny enough and etc. etc. etc. In the corporate world for twenty-five years, my company kept setting higher and higher bars for revenue and profits and I kept working harder and harder to clear them, until I realized — it was all a game, and the bosses could change the rules whenever they wanted to. I watched my corporate overlords fire some of the best, smartest, most interesting people in the company, for absolutely no reason at all.

And I realized, oh. They can change the rules whenever they want.

The world is always setting very high targets of what success looks like, and the truth is, most of us can’t hit those targets most of the time. Fifty percent of Americans possess 2.4% of the country’s wealth, while the top one percent have thirty percent. If the economy were a pie, the majority of us are getting by on crumbs and slivers, and feeling bad about it.

And so I decided, ten years ago, I didn’t want to play that game anymore. And I walked away from it.

I’m not blind, or insane. I recognize that to survive in this world, at least at this moment in time, there are basic necessities, like paying your mortgage and having health care. And those basics are in doubt right now, for most of us, including me, by the way.

We’re not living in some utopia, and we can’t pretend that we are.

But. But. BUT.

I think we still have the power to give up, at least sometimes. At least a little bit.

And I have found there is immense power in that.

What If You Didn’t Care?

Writing has always been my favorite thing in the world — see the picture above. I don’t think I am particularly special, but writing has always been the thing I love the most, the way some people love baking, or science, or music, or coding. I think we all have something in our lives that brings us joy, that makes us feel whole, and writing has always been that for me.

But writing was suddenly starting to feel like a burden, like a constant beacon of failure. I kept feeling pressured, to “fix” my substack, and my life, to get bigger, to publish more often, to break through, whatever that means.

Not to mention, AI has made it clear that if I want to be really successful, the smartest thing I could do would be ask ChatGPT to write this essay; it would be faster and more reliable and it would definitely follow all the success algorithms.

It came to a head one Saturday morning. Steve and I were walking in the forest, and I said, maybe I don’t even like to write anymore.

When a computer could write this substack better than me, when I’m not going to hit the metrics the world cares about, why should I even bother?

And then I thought about how it feels when I lose myself in the flow, when I’m writing and something funny and true and interesting comes out of nowhere, and it hits me like a little zing, and I thought, I love that feeling. I don’t want to lose that feeling.

I thought, what I love about writing is how it makes me feel. And what I love about writing is when it makes other people feel good.

What if I wrote for those two reasons, and I gave up the third one?

What if I gave up on being successful?

Using the advertising model: You can have joy, and you can have meaning, and you can be a big success. Choose two.

And I thought, what if you just give up the success?

I thought, what if you just write when it makes you feel good, and you write because it makes you happy, and you write because it’s fun?

So that’s what I started doing, months and months ago. I decided this substack had only one rule:

I wasn’t allowed to stress about it.

This is a substack about flourishing, and goddamnit, we are going to flourish.

I am going to write because it is fun, and I am going to publish when I write something true that I think could be helpful. And I am going to ignore the stupid rules.

I am going to stop trying to be successful, on weird terms that hardly ever apply or pay off. I am going to go back to the basics, me at the desk, telling a story. Looking for the flow.

I’ve been doing it for months now. It has made a real difference.

The minute I start stressing about writing, I step back, and say, this is not what I’m doing here. I am here for joy, and I am here for purpose.

If you want a regular schedule and an algorithm designed to go viral, AI can do that. But that’s not what I’m aiming for any more.

The world tells us what success looks like, but we don’t have to listen to the world. It’s just a story.

You can have purpose.

You can have joy.

You can have success according to the capitalist oligarchs.

I choose two.