A few weeks ago, my wife sent me an Instagram reel taken from a recording of the podcast Bruins on Queue in which students from Belmont University touched upon the topic of parasocial relationships:

…our generation [Gen Z] will be the first generation to die with more memories of other people’s lives than our own lives because of social media.

They went on to suggest that they write a song on this topic called Someone Else’s Memories, which one of the hosts called “low-key brutal,” and I, in turn, felt one hundred years old.

Now, as anyone with halfway passable eyesight will tell you, I am not Gen Z. But as a perfectly median Millennial, I have sensed that as my time online has increased over the years, so has my number of parasocial relationships.

There are podcasters, YouTubers, Instagrammers, and more that I have followed for years, in a number of cases for a decade or more, that I clearly have parasocial relationships with. I feel like these people are my friends—or at the very least, they would be my friends, if only they knew that I existed.

Coined by psychologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956, Psychology Today states that parasocial relationships “…refer to one-sided relationships in which a person develops a strong sense of connection, intimacy, or familiarity with someone they don’t know, most often celebrities or media personalities. These relationships exist only in the mind of the individual, who experiences a bond despite the lack of reciprocity.”

When Horton and Wohl came up with the term, they did so with TV in mind, as they noticed people beginning to develop an illusion of intimacy with on-screen characters. It’s hard to imagine what they would think of the current media landscape, in which you can walk through the world in quite literally another world as you listen to your favorite actor, influencer, or political commentator in your ears.

This got me wondering, can we also have parasocial relationships with characters in books?

A Moveable Feast

I’m currently re-reading Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast, which details his time as a struggling writer and journalist in Paris during the 1920s.

During this period, Hemingway was a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly and was working on The Sun Also Rises, which was published in 1926. Forget the bearded Hem of our imagination—during his time in Paris, he was in his mid-twenties and looked much closer to his image on the cover of A Moveable Feast, which depicts his passport photo in 1923, than the lumberjack-esque version of himself that we’ve come to know and love.

In the book, Hemingway details his dalliances around Paris and France more generally, which makes it an exciting re-read given my recent move. In much of the book, Hem is going around with The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In one chapter, Hem and Fitz go to Lyon to pick up the latter’s car, only for Fitz to spend the entire evening in a hotel room in Chalon-sur-Saône convinced he is dying (“I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.”). In another, Hem finds himself at Shakespeare and Company speaking with the proprietor, Sylvia Beach, about another regular, Ulysses author James Joyce.

My point in all of this is I’m clearly having a parasocial relationship with Ernest Hemingway, and to a lesser extent F. Scott Fitzgerald, as I’m reading the book! The same was true with Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, and Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye. They may not be talking about the politics of the moment, or what happened at last night’s Grammys, but I am lapping up every word with bated breath, excited to come back to them the next day.

We’ve all been experiencing parasocial relationships for some time—long before podcasts and Instagram reels came onto the scene. Some are richer than others. And maybe, so long as we’re creating our own memories alongside consuming everyone else’s, there’s nothing wrong with occasionally spending an evening in 1920s Paris.

What characters (real or fictional) have you had a parasocial relationship with?

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I’m excited to share that after living in the United States for the last ten years, I have relocated to France!

When my wife first seriously suggested moving to France about two years ago, I said, “I’m not sure that I’m done with Corporate America,” a sentence that we’ve laughed and laughed about ever since.

Growing up in a small town in the south-west of England, the idea that I would go on to work in marketing in New York City, on Madison Avenue no less, was quite something—and I wasn’t ready to give it up.

Despite my initial skepticism, Corporate America did much of the convincing for me. The more time I spent rising through the “ranks” of my company—helped largely by regular layoffs every 3-4 months—the more I came to resent it. The more time I spent looking at spreadsheets and budgets instead of actually doing the work, the more I wanted to get out.

By that point, I had gained both my US and Irish citizenships (thanks Brexit), making a move to Europe not only possible but, most importantly, reversible should we need it to be.

So, I started applying to jobs in Europe. But I soon realized that I didn’t actually want one.

Prior to my corporate job, I had worked freelance. That’s what I wanted to get back to, but I knew that getting a CDI (permanent employment contract) in France would make our lives significantly easier when looking to rent an apartment, open a traditional bank account, and apply for my wife’s residence permit, so that’s what I pushed for.

Leaning into our uncomfort zone

Toward the end of last year, my wife and I sat down and decided what we were going to do about France.

Looking for a job in Europe while still living in New York wasn’t working. On top of that, it wasn’t even what I wanted to do—I wanted to work for myself. We feared the very real possibility that we would end up giving up on what by then had become our shared dream because it was difficult.

So we decided to just set a date and go, CDI be damned.

A few months later, I was laid off from my corporate job the day after deciding on my new company’s name. I had been planning on leaving the job a few months later to align with our move, so the timing was serendipitous. After a short but delightful stint in Philadelphia, we arrived in the south of France, dog and all, in early September.

Taking on new consulting clients

As we embrace our new life in France (more on that in a future newsletter), I am taking on new clients!

I work across countries and time zones, with a focus on the US, UK, and EU. If you own/work for a company in sustainability and you’re looking to grow through education-driven content and strategic lead generation, visit my website to learn more and get in touch.

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I don’t have any book quotes this week, but now that things have mostly calmed down, I plan to bring this newsletter back to its regular schedule. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to returning to your inbox in two weeks!

In March, I was laid off from my corporate job of a little over six years. I wasn’t shocked by the move, but I was caught off guard just three weeks before my wife and I were due to move from New York to Philadelphia.

While it’s never nice to be laid off, the timing was serendipitous. I had been planning on starting my own marketing consultancy for some time, picking back up the freedom I had earlier in my career when I could jump from one country to the next and take my work with me.

In the end, this was just the nudge I needed to do just that! (Now, allow me the briefest of plugs for my new business before we get on to the main event.)

While leading marketing and communications at my former company (in the sustainability tech sector), I saw the power of bold storytelling to build credibility and drive action. I founded Exile Marketing to help sustainability innovators do the same.

Exile Marketing is a purpose-driven marketing consultancy that helps sustainability tech leaders stand out, earn trust, and scale.

If you own or work for a company in sustainability and you’re looking to grow through education-driven content and strategic lead generation, visit my website to learn more and get in touch.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Give me a break

It would be unfair to say that I’ve been idle during the last two months—building a business and moving a couple hours south certainly required some work. But it is fair to say that I’ve not been working a full-time job.

This has been a break of sorts, and I appreciate the time it has allowed me to sit and think about what I want from life, my career, and the places I will call home.

Earlier in the year, I read The Answer Is No: A Short Story by Fredrik Backman, the Swedish author of A Man Called Ove and other novels. The book is a lot of grouchy fun. Here’s a quote from near the end:

Doctors and nurses understand very well that all the modern pills and treatments are surely great, but sometimes what people really need most of all is a prescription for a break.

In writing my business plan for Exile, I chose to prescribe myself breaks into the workweek, which is why I wrote “No late meetings on Fridays,” and “Don’t check work emails in the evening,” into the business plan itself.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I will never take a late meeting on a Friday or check email after hours, but it’s a goal to live up to.

Break up your day

Taking a break before moving on to your next project is the way to go if you have the means, but taking regular breaks throughout your day is just as important.

In Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark, the author talks at length about the power of taking short breaks from our work throughout the day.

Per Mark, “Focusing for lengthy periods of time, especially without breaks, is not natural for most people.” As I noted in an earlier post on how to improve your attention span with rote activity, what Mark is saying here is that focus isn’t the optimal state of attention—in order for us to focus properly, we need to balance periods of focus with other forms of attention that tax our resources less.

Trust the (recovery) process

Taking a break isn’t just important for our mental health; it’s equally necessary for our physical health.

In Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey MD and Eric Hagerman, the authors touch upon the physical stressors associated with not taking a break:

There are a number of scenarios in which the body fails to shut off the flow of stress hormones. The most obvious is simply unrelenting stress. If we never get a break, the recovery process never gets started.

We know this in our bones, and yet we push ourselves time and again to do more than we can reasonably do.

Case in point, I started the draft of this newsletter on Wednesday afternoon, knowing that if there were to be any chance of me getting it out Thursday morning I would need to work on it during the time in which I would usually be winding down for bed. While I briefly considered this, I figured that after a ten-week absence from your inboxes, it didn’t make a single bit of difference if I posted this yesterday or today. So, I allowed myself to take a break and wind down for the evening, and I finished this newsletter yesterday instead.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when you should push through—there absolutely are. But it does mean that you should choose your battles within yourself and cut yourself some slack when you can.

Have you ever given yourself a prescription for a break, such as after a job loss or the completion of a large project? What did that look like, and on a micro level, how do you build small breaks into your workday?

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I wanted to write a shorter post this week, based on a book that I first read in 2013 and, while I haven’t read it in full since then, I frequently re-read my highlights.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, author and public speaker Alain de Botton asks and answers a simple question:

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.

He elaborates on this in the below passages stripped straight from the book—I’m leaning on longer quotes than usual, but I promise they’re worth it:

Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.

Continues de Botton, emphasis mine:

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers—people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.

I love the bolded part of that passage in particular because it so vividly brings to mind Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day, which I adored as a kid.

While the question of when a job feels meaningful comes up for me often, there’s one quote from The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work that has stuck with me for the last twelve years, and which shows the importance of having not just a meaningful job, but a meaningful life:

We too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves.

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There are many reasons to do a job, and meaning isn’t always the top priority. Only you can decide what feels meaningful in your daily life. But I’m curious: When does a job feel meaningful to you?

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I don’t want to write about politics here. Barring some insane amplification of what’s already been going on, I don’t plan on writing about politics here again any time soon.

With that being said, the past few weeks have, in many ways, been worse than many of us expected. I was among the throngs of voters that switched off from all political news after Donald Trump won the presidential election for a second time. The news was too much back then, and it’s still too much—it’s all encompassing. But, as the New York Times editorial board put it this weekend: Now is not the time to tune out.

I want Endnotes to be a safe space away from the noise of our everyday lives. But I couldn’t square the circle of restarting this newsletter at this moment in time without addressing what is happening in our country right now.

Disorder

We are living through a disorder event.

In Brad Stulberg’s excellent book Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing, Including You, Stulberg describes a disorder event as:

Something that fundamentally shifts our experience of ourselves and the world we inhabit, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

According to Stulberg, the most common types of individual disorder events include starting a job, leaving a job, getting married, getting divorced, having children, losing a loved one, becoming ill, moving to a new town, graduating from school, getting a promotion, becoming an empty nester, retiring, and more.

Right now, many of us in the United States are living through a collective disorder event. In the book, Stulberg references a particularly difficult disorder event in his own life—an event which draws parallels to what many of us are feeling today:

It wasn’t just that hard things happened in this short period of time, it’s that a lot of things happened in this short period of time. It was overwhelming.

We’ve all heard the terms flood the zone and muzzle velocity ad nauseam over the last few weeks, so I won’t go into them here.1 But simply put, the feeling in the pit of your stomach is the feeling of disorder. And the only way to move through disorder is to accept the situation for what it is and move to reorder.

Reorder

After a disorder event there is no going back to the way things were. There can be no more order, only reorder. This requires rugged flexibility:

The goal of rugged flexibility is to get to a favorable reorder; to maintain a strong core identity, but at the same time, to adapt, evolve, and grow.

You cannot get to reorder without accepting the reality of your current situation. You must, says Stulberg, “Give yourself permission to stop wishing [reality] away or trying to manipulate it on your terms.”

The news of the day is all-encompassing. This is more true today than it was at the start of Trump’s first term. But we must accept the situation for what it is, and say to ourselves:

Well, this is what is happening now, so I will focus on what I can control, try not to obsess over what I can’t, and do the best I can.

This is similar to the stoic idiom “We cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond.” From calling our representatives, to donating to humanitarian relief efforts, to shining a light on all that is happening to those who may be getting their news from nontraditional platforms, we have agency in this moment, even if most days it doesn’t feel like it.

Take heart in this final quote from Stulberg, who writes that whatever darkness we may be facing “the most important piece of knowledge to hold onto, even if just barely, is that what feels like forever now will not in the future.”

The title of this post is a line from Seth Godin taken from The Practice: Shipping Creative Work.

In the book, Godin argues that when we choose to produce creative work, we’re solving a problem for the recipient. Creativity can sometimes feel self-indulgent, especially when there are so many other ways to spend our time, but per author Steven Pressfield in The War of Art:

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

I’ve thought this before about social media influencers, or YouTubers, or anyone else who is going out of their way to share their thoughts with the world. While it’s easy to roll our eyes when we see influencers in the wild, these people are putting their work out there. They are sharing what they produce.

With this in mind, I wanted to sit down and write something about my own creative process.

My creative process

After recently reviving this newsletter after a 2.5 year hiatus, I’ve needed to think deeply about what creativity means to me, and how I plan on putting out creative work every two weeks going forward.

Writing My Morning Routine: How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired was a unique writing experience in the sense that the majority of the book consisted of interviews with other people.

That said, it still required a lot of our own words, and what I found worked best for me was combining uninterrupted writing time with allowing my mind to wander freely throughout the day.

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Here’s what this looks like in practice:

Set aside uninterrupted writing time

In his 2016 book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University Cal Newport describes deep work as:

Professional activities performed in a state of ­ distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limit. Their efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep work is your most important work, and I’ve found that I can only do deep work within a structured confine. Back to Newport:

Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow (email, social media, random web surfing). This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity.

Constraints foster creativity. In The Practice, Seth Godin notes that “All creative work has constraints, because all creativity is based on using existing constraints to find new solutions.”

As part of my creative process, I set aside dedicated writing time to sit down and lay down some words. They don’t have to be very good words—they often aren’t! But I’ve found that if I write a few hundred words, then a few hundred more, then I tweak them and change them and cut half of them, I end up with something I’m comfortable putting out into the world.

Like many others, I’m inspired by Anne Lamott’s idea of writing shitty first drafts. Quoted from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

Shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.

I would love to be able to write perfect prose the first time every time, but that’s not how it works for me, and I’ll bet that’s not how it works for you, too. But shitty first drafts—shitty first drafts are easy. Just smash your fingers on the keyboard, fixing typos as you go—or not. When you come back to read your work, half the time you’ll think “Jeez, this is deranged,” but the other half you’ll realize there is something there, and that it just needs a little tidy up.

Allow my mind to wander freely

While laying down words largely has to happen when I’m in front of a screen, much of my writing—or rather my explorations on what I may or may not write—happens out in the ‘wild.’

We’ve all had those moments where we’re unable to remember something in the moment, only to have the answer come to us when we’re doing something else entirely.

The same is true, for me, of creative work. A large part of my creative process is letting my mind wander while walking my dog, washing the dishes, or folding the laundry (see my post on the benefits of rote activity). Sometimes I’ll come up with specific lines that I want to include in a post and write them down on my phone, but most of the time I’m just fleshing out thoughts and ideas. (Often many of these ideas won’t be as connected as I first thought, so I’ll move them to a “Fragments” note which I dip into whenever I need inspiration.)

knows a thing or two about making connections. In Keep Going the writer who draws lets us into his messy-by-design studio. In his studio Kleon intentionally cultivates his mess, and he encourages us to do the same:

Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by soloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.

Living in a New York City walkup, I don’t have the space to create much of a mess, but the way I allow my mind to wander freely is a similar embodiment of this ideal. I’m essentially daydreaming as part of the creative process, which is just as well because as per journalist and author Bonnie Tsui in Why We Swim, this is critical to problem solving and creativity:

Scientists now know that when our minds are wandering without any particular external focus, the brain’s “default-mode network” is active. It’s what makes fresh, unexpected connections possible.

I want to end this post not with practical advice on the creative process, but with a call-to-arms to begin racing toward it in the first place.

From Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

What is your process for producing creative work? Do you have any tips that could help others get started (or unstuck)?

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Recently, I was angry.

I was angry at the world—at the trash-filled sidewalks that I walk my dog on every day, at the slow-walkers with their heads in their phones, and at the klaxon of a buzzer in my apartment letting us know that someone was about to get a delivery.

I’m an extremely fortunate person, but at that moment with the ringing of the buzzer still in my ears, I was not feeling it.

It was around this time that my wife finished reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

It’s rare that I read a novel before Audra, and I immediately asked her for her favorite highlight from the book. (“Me first!” I shouted.) I told her that mine was the following.

Marx’s persimmons

In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Marx discovers a persimmon tree in the house that he’s about to move into with Sadie. He can’t believe his luck, proclaiming persimmons to be his “actual favorite” fruit.

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune.

The passage continues:

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?

My wife’s eyes lit up. It was, she said, also one of her highlights. This got me thinking about fortune, and what it means to have good fortune or not.

Everyday advantages

In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the storied founding father writes:

Human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.

Approximately 220 years later, in The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday tells the story of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) who could “see opportunity in every disaster, and transform that negative situation into an education, a skill set, or a fortune.”

Holiday is, of course, referring to Rockefeller turning a negative situation into a monetary fortune, but the point remains: Fortune comes to those who are willing to see it:

The greater the chaos, the calmer Rockefeller would become. You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them.

The astronomical odds

It’s difficult to be angry with the world when we are so fortunate to have been born into it at all; trash-filled sidewalks notwithstanding! To quote the poet Mark Strand, as unearthed in Keep Going by :

The thing to rejoice in is the fact that one had the good fortune to be born. The odds against being born are astronomical.

As Kleon puts it, “None of us know how many days we’ll have, so I’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”

Going forward, I resolve to better channel Marx’s persimmon tree energy and appreciate my good fortune for the gift that it is.

Where are you on the glass half full spectrum? Do you see everything as a fortuitous bounty, or is this an area you’d like to improve?

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I’ve known for years that I have a poor attention span. I procrastinate wildly—if someone or something else isn’t going to distract me, I’m likely to do it myself.

What I lack in attention span I try to make up for by reading books on productivity. At this point I’ve read dozens of them, with the gist of most of these books being that we need to focus on the work we want to do, and just… do it.

So, when I recently read Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark, I wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. But it very much surprised me.

Each different type of attention—being focused, doing rote activity, and even feeling bored—has value and purpose when it comes to maintaining a positive balance of cognitive resources throughout the day.

Mark elaborated by pointing out that this means that focus isn’t the optimal state of attention—in order for us to focus properly, we need to balance periods of focus with other forms of attention that tax our resources less, such as rote activity:

There is a reason why people are drawn to […] rote activity—in short, we found empirically in our studies that it makes people happy. We are happiest when we use our attention for easy, engaging activity that is not challenging and stressful.

Rote activity can include anything from doing the dishes while listening to a podcast, to checking Instagram for a few minutes to catch up with friends, to (in the case of illustrator and author Maira Kalman) ironing and polishing the silver.

While doing any of these activities in the middle of a period of focused work would be distracting, when you layer in moments to take breaks, these rote activities, in Mark’s words, help us “replenish our scarce cognitive resources, and with more resources, we are better able to focus and be productive.”

Mark mentioned a woman in one of her studies that told her that “The slightest urge to think about something other than the cold reality of work triggers her to look that idea up on the web.”

That cuts deep. In a world in which the cold realities of work aren’t going anywhere any time soon, I enjoyed how Mark honed in on the importance of balance:

We should […] think about how we can achieve our utmost well-being. We need to change the conversation from adjusting our lives to being maximally productive, to adjusting our lives to feeling balanced.

After finishing Attention Span, I feel that I have a greater grasp of the importance of balancing my time between focused, attention-guzzling work and rote activity—that Notre-Dame Lego set won’t build itself!—that helps to replenish my resources.

What rote activities do you do (or are you looking to start doing) to replenish your cognitive resources?

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