In and around the Devils Tower Lodge back in 2014, there was not much cell reception, and the satellite internet was kind of unpredictable. My friend Forest and I were there to shoot a short film, and Max Lowe was there working on a different video project. One afternoon, I walked into the living room at the lodge to check my messages and social media on my phone, and jokingly said something like, “Ooh I better check Instagram, how many likes did I get?”
Max deadpanned: “Never enough, Brendan. Never enough.”
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Maybe you’re familiar with the story of Tom Anderson from MySpace. If not, here’s a timeline of his past 22 years:
You might say, “Well, of course! If I had $580 million, I’d retire too!” Which is probably accurate. But it’s not the story we hear about most people with that much money and influence.
Tom started a social media company when it was fun, sold it when it got big, got out when it was fading, and didn’t try to start another social media company to make even more money. From my perspective, it seems like he skipped out on the part after social media descended into … well, whatever it is now.
He said: Nah, I’m good. This is enough.
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I see all kinds of content in my inbox and feeds about growth: grow your newsletter, grow your social media following, convert followers into customers, how such-and-such writer built a $25,000/month newsletter, et cetera. I try to pay a little bit of attention to it, since I want to keep making a living doing what I do, but I have to keep myself from getting too sucked into it and believing that I, too, must focus on maximizing my following/potential/income or I’ll be left behind, or be a failure, or … actually, I don’t know, I guess it’s assumed that growth is good, no matter what?
I mean, money is great, and sure, I’d like some more of it (wouldn’t we all?). And my mom probably thinks my newsletter is worth $25,000 a month, but to paraphrase our late, great rap legend Christopher Wallace,
I’m lucky to earn just enough money that it’s not my No. 1 worry every day (occasionally when I wake up 3 a.m., yes, but not every day). And I feel fortunate to have enough people who want to read/enjoy my work that I can call it a “job.” But I also feel fortunate to remain at a level at which I can answer almost all the correspondence I get from people wanting to connect. So when I get those emails and see those articles about growth, growth, growth, I sometimes have to pump the brakes and say, “Hold on, we’re doing OK, this is enough.”
This is a skill I’m trying to develop: Recognizing that more does not necessarily equal happiness or meaning or fulfillment, and sometimes it actually lowers the quality of everything.
Have you ever been out to dinner with two or three friends, realized you’re having a wonderful time, and thought to yourself, “This is great, but it’d be even better if there were 12 of us”? Me neither. It just means you’re barely going to get to talk to five or six people at the far end of the table.
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To be an adult human nowadays—or actually, maybe to be human old enough to have homework—is to feel like there’s always something else you could be doing, whether that thing is “productive” or not. Even if we don’t have emails to answer or work/homework tasks to be completed, there’s always news to catch up on, new social media posts we haven’t seen yet, and a thousand other things we might be procrastinating for whatever reason. It’s enough to make you feel a little insane—which, honestly, IT FUCKING IS. It’s insane.
We all find ourselves somewhere on a productivity spectrum, from the most high-functioning CEO/LinkedIn influencer prototypes who crush every single moment of their waking lives, to the biggest slacker we’ve ever met, who seems to never do anything and is content to seemingly watch life pass them by (but maybe live longer in the process?):
Not to rain on anyone’s optimization parade, but what’s the end product of MAXIMIZING MY PRODUCTIVITY? If it’s getting shit done so I can eat dinner with my family and not be thinking about emails, great. If it’s making more money, OK, great, but is that what we really want? I mean, sure, nice stuff is nice. I can respect a luxurious new car as much as the next person, but no matter how much money you spend on a car, it can’t prevent me from having to sit in traffic in it. I’d love to be a guy who drives a “nice car,” but maybe I’m more of a “nice blender” kind of guy.
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I have a long track record of not being 100 percent present in the moment. I always find myself thinking about stuff on my to-do list, or emails I haven’t answered, or projects I need to finish. Then I got lucky, and we had a baby. Now, I would never try to sell anyone on being a parent (I was a tough sell on it myself), but I would say that keeping a child alive for 2½ years has done wonders for my ability to be present. For sure, there have been many hours of tedium being invited to “play” by a toddler who doesn’t necessarily want me to participate, but to be present next to him as he builds structures out of Duplo blocks or Magna Tiles.
We are only planning to have one kid, so this is our only time to have these experiences, and I’m aware that it’s all going to fly by (I know this because people have told me it will—and it already is). So eventually he’s not going to drag me by the finger into the living room to play, and eventually he won’t need me to read books to him, and one day it’ll be way more difficult to get him to laugh or smile, so I try to truly be there when it’s happening, instead of letting my brain go somewhere else, to my to-do list, or deadline, or whatever’s happening in the news, or the five million things I could be doing if I pulled my phone out of my pocket.
I try to tell myself that being here on the floor with my little guy is enough. Because what could be happening on my phone that could possibly be more important than watching this little amateur human being mispronouncing “construction” as we’re sitting on the floor for a few minutes before he heads off to day care? For now, this is enough.
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