Now That’s What I Call Relatable™
On the fear of sometimes being too honest.
More people reached out to me about my last post than any other.
Ultimately, I’d love to convert those texts, WhatsApps, and email reach-outs into Substack comments because it’s helpful for everyone to see that everyone is dealing with the same handful of issues. So if you feel seen by something I write, please do reach out and let me know that—but also consider leaving a comment so others can benefit from seeing you as well.
Why did so many people reach out. My first thought was because I was writing about being lonely, and people wanted me to feel less lonely.
No.
If that were true the texts would have said some variation of, “hey, just reaching out because you’re lonely and I want you to know that you’re not alone.” They didn’t. Every single one of them said something like, “I relate.”
“The lonely extrovert” was, on purpose, a bit of a different vibe. It was more stream-of-consciousness. Less “edited.” And underneath that, it came from a place of uncertainty—versus my typical style, which comes from a place of having already moved through uncertainty and me wanting to share what cool/profound insight I’ve discovered to help you do the same. You might call that wisdom.
I churned through a ton of different names for this Substack and landed on “the look” because I wanted to (A) give you my take of what I see in the world, but I also—and more importantly—(B) wanted to give you a look into what I’m going through. A sense that oh, here I am just working away in my little workshop in my garage and the door’s open and you’re a neighbor walking by going, “oh, cool, whatcha working on?”
Raw.
Unedited.
But somewhere along the way I lost a bit of that vulnerability.
And I’d like to get back to that. And clearly so would you.
Some of the wisdom I’ve accumulated has proven to be pretty helpful, I will say. And I will continue to move through life as experiencer and consolidator of what’s worked for me and pass that along. I love sharing too much to not.
But there are those other things that I’m still figuring out. Sometimes gracefully; oftentimes, struggling. It’s funny because you’d think after this many years [holds up four hands to indicate my age] you think I’d have “it” figured out (or maybe you didn’t think I’d have it figured out, but I sure as hell did). I’m living through my own Dunning-Kruger effect in real time as the more I learn about life the more I realize I don’t know. Which, if I just calm down for one goddamn second and take a breath, I can actually find comfort in the not knowing of everything. There’s always another cave to explore—exciting!
The other night, I posted some thoughts on Instagram about how there’s nothing new that’s good on TV. There’s nothing new that’s worth watching and that’s because humans, on whole, don’t produce much “good” stuff every year. Years are a completely arbitrary container of time, anyway. But we draw that line and say “what’s your favorite movie this year”? Which puts us in the bizarre situation to look at this random chunk of time and say “within this random chunk of time I liked XYZ stuff.” We might as well say “what was your favorite movie between June 1987 and February 1992?”
Terminator 2, obviously. But the point is that if we backed up for a moment and compared “this year” with all of time itself, we’d be much happier watching older stuff (and some people do that all the time and Mike, I applaud you).
I got this idea when someone like Ryan Holiday said, “Read a book that’s over 100 years old. If it’s still around, the ideas are probably good.” You just won’t find art that changes your life every day. It’s rare. So then why are we optimizing for staying current when we could be optimizing for discovering the best of what humans have ever created?
"Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing.” —Steve Jobs, creator of the hockey puck mouse
If most new things are bad and we’re watching mostly new things, then I think we are what we eat and we’re going to make mostly bad things.
Now maybe we can do both. And maybe some people do. But my suspicion is that we lean too heavily into the new. Too heavily towards talking about the latest episode of Ring-Around-The-Thrones on Monday morning at the water cooler. Likely because we don’t quite know how to initiate deeper, more nourishing conversations.
But I’ll save that rant for another time.
Anyway, I posted this rant on Instagram and a friend reached out and was like, “Didn’t that make you nervous to post that online publicly?” To which I said, “No, not at all until you just said that.” 😅
Which was a joke, but it’s stuck with me because while I wasn’t nervous to post that, that’s weirdly become an exception. Normally I’m a bit more conservative because there are people who follow me on social media who make new things. I’m one of them, for Christ’s sake. But I was so angry that night because I was feeling lonely and in another country and all I wanted to do was watch something good and nothing new was good and there I was—at nearly midnight—yearning for the days of DVDs in the mail because literally everything that had ever been made was available AND you could sort by best ratings of all time and that’s all I wanted DAMMIT.
My point is that I do see what my friend was saying. Posting honest opinions in this way cuts both ways. I know people who L-O-V-E Letterboxd, but don’t post star ratings or reviews because they work in film and they don’t want to compromise a potential job offer by saying the second and third Avatar movies are comedically identical and neither really pushes the overall narrative forward or takes any significant risks in the storytelling, like, at all.
Not that that’s my opinion, per se 😅
Which brings me back to working with the garage door open. I do have this fear sometimes. Sometimes I reverse-fantasize that being honest about movies or TV—or even writing “too openly” about my personal life—will somehow come back to bite me. It’s not that I have the belief that playing with dollhouses will make my son gay, but I definitely hold some opinions that might be controversial depending on who’s at the dinner table tonight.
But there’s a tide that’s turning as I get older and become more confident with who I am. The fear of expressing the truth has held me back. And I’m getting exhausted of being held back. It’s like getting tired of being tired. I’m tired of it. I want to work through this fear more publicly so that my writing can pack the biggest punch it can.
Here I am worried about saying Avatar is meh, meanwhile Trump is like, “Ukraine started the war with Russia.”
The only way we’re going to get through any of this is to exchange our honest observations about what we’re witnessing, with an open heart to disagreeing with humility. Because, at the end of the day, the thing I’m after before, during, and after my retirement, is to sit around a campfire with other interesting people, and exchange fragmented observations, fully performed one-man shows, and everything in between.
Simply laughing at, learning from, and relating to the absurdity of us all dealing with the same handful of issues.
So let’s get to it.