I had intended on posting a whole bunch of New Years posts about goal setting, and then…Omicron. It found my house despite all our most careful efforts, but the good news is that none of the medically fragile people caught it! So far everyone seems to be OK. But it definitely meant all my plans had to be thrown out the window for these new priorities.
As I’m building this new project, a lot of old ghosts from internet past rise up to me. If you create content for the internet you find yourself shoved into this “influencer” category with a never ending engagement treadmill marching you straight to burnout. The algorithms are merciless and to get your stuff seen you often have to play their hustle and grind game. The more you produce the more you get promoted and work begets work until you are panting for breath and wondering what you ever liked about any of this in the first place. I’ve spent the last five years healing from burnout (regular burnout, but the influencer life didn’t help!) so I will not go back there. Even if it means fewer people see my content. Even if it means I never scale or that I grow microscopically. This time, I’m doing it sustainably, and sometimes that means it’s gonna be the third week of the month before I get a post up and I’m gonna have to let that be.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can avoid being another internet wellness charlatan. I don’t want to be a coach or influencer, and I think people should take advantage of any access they have to a therapist. My “authority” to speak on the things I speak on comes exclusively from lived experience. I am all praxis, and that is always what I have chosen over theory and intellectual exercises. If I ever stop walking the walk, I officially have nothing to teach anyone. So I need to build Body Loyalty in a Body Loyal way.
In Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship circles they use the motto, “Move fast and break things.” They want to be disrupters and shake things up through that approach of failing fast and often and innovating on the fly. That might have some virtue in a lab, but the people who work in that lab leave to go home at night and are still human beings. And bodies do not get good results from moving fast and breaking anything.
The humans who work at those companies are the ones responsible for enacting that corporate mandate. Which means that the human individuals trying to develop our new world are living ‘move fast and break things’ lives, and what is breaking are the human beings. These corporations demand that pace from their employees, and then their competitors demand that pace in order to keep up, and this false sense of urgency builds and builds and all to make imaginary decimals in an imaginary currency in some bank account somewhere that we will never see.
Human beings are organic, biological creatures. We aren’t computers, we aren’t machines. But that’s what the workplace has been trying to convince us of since Industrialization. Since Colonialism. When a biological creature breaks, it is violent and the recovery is so slow it can barely be observed. There’s no quick parts change to get back out on the factory floor. No ‘turn it off and turn it back on again’ will repair a wounded body. Ignoring the facts of our human bodies is brutalizing.
The way to build something is to work with your biology, not against it. Humans are capable of incredible feats of healing and creativity, but only if their needs are met. To create something sustainable, in a way that is humane, means to do the very opposite of what companies have been trying to tell us to do.
It’s not ‘Move fast and break things’ that will work. It’s ‘Go Slow and Build Things.’
Every January as we’re just pummeled with ‘New Year New You’ advertising, it’s easy to get caught up in goal setting that is closer to the ‘move fast and break things’ model, but that will lead to the same cycle of shame and failure as it always has. You can’t just decide to be completely different than you’ve always been. You are the way you are because it has been adaptive for your life circumstances given the tools at your disposal. The way to enact change is to get some new tools. You can’t white knuckle that through goal setting.
You know what else they say in business circles? “You can have good, fast, or cheap. Pick two.” If we’re talking sustainable life choices, you need to aim for ‘good’, which just leaves choosing between fast or cheap. If you have enough money to hire coaches for every avenue of your life, good for you! But that’s not reality for most of us, so that means making your peace with not having things fast. Any time you set a goal that relies on being fast and cheap, it’s just not going to be a good goal. Wish it was different, but it’s just math. :shrug:
Get new tools and practice them, one at a time, until you can build some even newer tools on top of those ones. Go slow. Take the time it takes to really incorporate those new skills in your life before demanding more from yourself. You are building the life you want to live and that takes time.