Hollywood’s Burning? Let it.

The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. “I’m not looking for a dude,” the actor said. “And even if I was, you’re not him.” In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn’t comply I would try to make sure he wouldn’t get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, “Let’s roll.” I couldn’t tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night.

— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

In the eighties, we had the Cold War. I was in high school. Alexandra, my perpetually sullen, perpetually goth lunch companion—rebel enough to be seen eating with me five days a week but not rebel enough to date me—liked to dwell on the prospect of imminent nuclear armageddon. It’s what she talked about more than anything else.

There was something cleansing about it for her, imagining what would happen nationally, locally, and biologically as nuclear winter enveloped the globe and fallout slowly poisoned everything. Alexandra might have been unhappy, might have had eggplant-purple hair and a certain amount of fishnet on her at all times, but she also had a great imagination and a gift for describing the creeping symptoms of radiation sickness.

She could quote made-up facts and bullshit statistics on the inevitability of the Soviets nuking us within five years. She did so loudly in our American Government class when the hicks on the football team said anything remotely respectful or patriotic about the country. Alexandra loved the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis’ faces melt off and, of course, she’d tell everyone this was bound to happen, since we lived in San Diego and there was a major Naval base and training center there. Boom. And our faces would just melt off. You think the Russians care? They’re targeting our subs. They don’t care about your stupid family.

I went along with it everyday at lunch because of course I did. It was self-consciously morbid meets hypersensive and lonely at 12:30 on the bleachers of the upper field. And it was a time before the internet, before smart phones, and before elaborate plagiarism software that can almost pass the Turing test. We seemed to bullshit each other more and draw less prepackaged bullshit from the inexhaustible media sewage-flow we enjoy today. And the bullshit wasn’t so monetized.

It was a time when zombies were starting to move out of niche horror and into the mainstream as a purgative for middle-class anxiety. It was the era of The Terminator, Rambo, and Rocky IV. Sensitivity was not an issue. Feeling victorious was. Dolph Lundgren was supposed to catch a beating by Sylvester Stallone like the Soviet Union was supposed to eventually catch a beating from the west; though, it’s worth noting that Lundgren actually put Stallone into real-life intensive care as a result of his in-scene punches.

We all felt, at least from our teenage high school perspective, that the USSR was mostly genocidal scientists, hulking super-soldiers, and spies. Those were the movies we saw. If we thought critically about them, it was about how the films were put together, whether they were unbelievable or dumb or boring. We never said, you know, I think the Russians might not all be evil, sadistic, and obsessed with world domination. Why are we constantly being shown this? Dolph Lundgren was born in Stockholm, dude.

This was because the movie industry existed behind its own iron curtain. Or maybe a better metaphor would be Macbeth’s Birnam Wood. One moment you’re looking in the arts section of the paper for when Red Dawn is playing at Cinema 21 in the mall. Then you’re coordinating with your friends (or in my case, just getting in the car and going by myself). Then you’re sitting in the dark, eating your bucket of oversalted popcorn, waiting for the movie to start. And then, all of a sudden, Birnam’s come to Dunsinane and Colorado is being occupied by a commie invasion force: In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now. God bless the USA. It could happen right here.

You didn’t know how they came up with such a propagandistic idea or really anything about how movies are born, live, and die. You didn’t know much about Red Dawn other than the poster outside made it look like some kind of action film and maybe someone you know saw a trailer of Patrick Swayze holding an assault rifle and screaming about wolverines. It was six years before IMDB. All you had was Siskel and Ebert’s At the Movies or selected reviews in the paper.

You definitely didn’t know Hollywood was, is, and always would be terrified of being on the wrong side or maybe terrified of being unpopular or maybe just terrified of losing money. And in 1984, that meant the Soviets had to be evil, ruthless, baby-eating devils. They’d replaced the evil, ruthless, baby-eating Nazis dispatched from central casting since the end of WWII. Though rooting out Nazis and crypto-Nazis would make a comeback in 2016, we didn’t notice any of this in the 1980s the way we do now.

Alexandra, for example, had no idea that her fears and desires, a good part of her teenage pain, even her style of speech and choice of wardrobe were mediated almost completely by Ally Sheedy’s image in The Breakfast Club and a growing fascination with Robert Smith’s depressed-electrocuted-kabuki look in The Cure’s post-1982 goth phase. At lunch, we didn’t talk about the subtle influence of pop-culture or the movie industry because its machinery was invisible to us. We talked about our faces melting and whether we’d resort to cannibalism to prolong our lives after 90% of the country turned to irradiated ash.

But Hollywood was constantly whispering. It was obsessed with us. It wanted our attention. It wanted to hold our hand through our nightmares. It wanted to be the object of our desires, the interpreter of our dreams, the focus of our worship. Above all, it wanted us to love it more than anything or anyone else. And it was willing to make certain demands. Like a lingering house demon in some proto-Ugric folktale, it started off only wanting to help churn the butter. But we couldn’t give it enough affection. And so it killed little Vanya in the shed out of spite. That was almost four decades ago. It’s been mutating in the dark ever since.

The movie industry—at least since the eighties but probably since the rise of talkies—has always been a cruel, neurotic presence, glorifying consumerism, ridiculing the life of the mind, punishing promiscuousness while transforming our sisters and daughters into horror fetish objects, and holding up the impedimenta of suburban life as the ultimate in personal achievement. Feminism never made a dent. Early diversity and inclusion efforts gave us lame racial tokenism for 30 years before metastasizing into the story-wrecking virtue signaling we have today. And the vague materialism of Alex P. Keaton stayed with us, though whispered by ever-stealthier avatars in ever more camouflaged forms.

TV started as a way to sell Buicks but has become a way to sell a certain range of political opinions. Money is still the point. At the beginning of our new, not so roaring 2020s, 39 years had gone by since Red Dawn suggested Russian paratroopers could occupy the mall where Cinema 21 used to tell us how to think and feel. We got where we are today by lingering at a three-way crossroads: Donald Trump unrest, a weaponized bat virus from China, and a highly publicized moment of police brutality in Minnesota. Then everything started to burn. And so did the propaganda machine.

The mall had already died. Cinema 21 was already disrecognized space. Someone threw a brick through the Overton Window and certain conversations became impossible in public. So Hollywood had to change once again to stay on the right side of profitability. But the new woke lip service is already falling apart along with revenue and, possibly, the entire streaming model, which Steven Soderbergh has rightly called “the crypto of the entertainment business.” Watch the wreck catch fire and sink. It’s already well underway.

Now the most important audience demographics are the investors in corporate streaming and, ironically, the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, said corporations would love to utterly replace creative labor with AI, which isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better. Said creatives are striking, which also isn’t going to make shitty Hollywood writing any better. Ted Hope, “a producer on over 70 films, studio exec on over 60, [who] launched Amazon’s foray into feature film production,” argues in “The Coming Cinema Apocalypse (is Here)” that we’re completely controlled by “surveillance capitalism” and “AI is a real threat to all film people’s jobs.” And he should know. Beijing certainly does.

Current Hollywood remains a vile changeling, still willing to say anything, fixated on being cool enough to keep getting paid above all else. It’s Dorothy Thompson’s “Mr. B” from her acidly satirical 1941 essay, “Who Goes Nazi?”:

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, he fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Whatever pattern is successful, whatever needs to be said, whatever constitutes a growth mindset—no matter how moronic or destructive—is what Hollywood will voice and therefore transmit as cultural propaganda. The problem is that attitudes (and economics) are transforming faster than the movie industry can effectively track. As the medium and message of the movies becomes ever more ephemeral, abstract, supercilious, and politically homogenous, the industry is beginning to seem more volatile than Chinese Ethereum.

So is Hollywood burning? Yes. Should it? Certainly. At least in its present state. As Vecna puts it in the season four finale of Stranger Things, “There is nothing—nothing you can do to stop it now. Hawkins will fall, then the rest of this senseless, broken world . . . and I will remake this world into something beautiful.” It’s the clichéd mission statement of every two-bit canned Hollywood warlord, commie, evil wizard, and garden variety baby-eater since movies began. Burn it down so we can rebuild. It’s Ming the Merciless for modern audiences. And unfortunately it’s the most optimistic sentiment available to us at the moment.

Given Russia’s war with Ukraine, we might still get nuked, rendering such criticism as relevant as brass sconces on the Titanic. But I don’t think most teens these days are as afraid of nuclear war. It’s not as real to them as it was to us because the messaging, the propaganda, is different. Gen-Z, in particular, doesn’t seem to be very worried about foreign paratroopers landing at the capitol building. What’s a “capitol building”? They haven’t gone outside in six months.

If Alexandra and I were having lunch on the bleachers in 2023, she wouldn’t be draped in black and I wouldn’t be tolerating her in silent desperation. We’d be sitting quietly, passively, barely aware of each other, tapping on our phones, waiting for the next reboot of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, written by a computer to avoid offending anyone about anything (so as to maximize global streaming revenue, even from certain high-population totalitarian regimes).

We wouldn’t be feeling upset because we wouldn’t be feeling very much at all. But I’m too old-fashioned for that. Give me some face melting and a story that doesn’t require me to hate myself. I’ll take corny Rocky Balboa or the Terminator. At least those stories were vaguely more real than the spineless, self-consuming, fake puritanism we have now.

Player Piano

The first time I realized I didn’t have the temperament to be a concert pianist, I was sitting in an enormous practice hall at San Diego State University with my teacher, Dr. Conrad. I was 16 years old. Eight years before that, through a serendipitous confluence of family connections, happenstance, and generosity on the part of my mother, I’d started taking piano lessons from him at $10 a week.

Even in 1989, that amount seemed considerable, given that living in San Diego ate up most of my father’s middle-class teaching salary and my mom wasn’t working. So I felt rightly privileged to learn from a professor of piano and composition, who I discovered many years later, actually had a reputation as being one of the most difficult, ferocious members of the music department.

To me, he was a kind gentle person, always willing to cancel a session to talk about the lives of the composers or take me down to the recital hall to look at the harpsichords or just tell jokes. One day, we took an upright piano apart, piece by piece, to look at how it worked and produced its range of sounds. The experience had me fantasizing about becoming a professional piano tuner for years.

But really I was just in awe of Dr. Conrad, who seemed surrounded at all times by an aura of brilliance and gentility and yet had a goofy sense of humor and a love of children. I learned more from him about music, teaching, and life than anyone I can think of. He was an important person to me.

But the day he told me I just didn’t have it, I took it very hard. I knew a number of kids at my school who were into theater and music, many of whom had formal training like me, but who always seemed better, sharper, one step ahead. It kept me up at night. I wanted to be like them, as good as they were.

Having been surrounded by poets, painters, and professors throughout my short life, I thought creative artists, especially classical musicians, were a breed apart. My idol at the time was John Field, an Irish pianist who studied under Muzio Clementi. He was considered a weak student early on, but he rose to greatness later in life, praised by Beethoven, and even mentioned in War and Peace. The reasons I took him as a model should be obvious.

That improbable dream seemed to melt away the day I asked Dr. Conrad the ultimate stupid question, one that I have since been asked many times by young (and more than a few older) writing students: Do I have the talent to make this a career? It’s a horrible question, one that should never be asked by or of anyone, not even of oneself.

Unfortunately, it’s asked by everyone at least once, and it’s something every art teacher hears over and over. Do I have it? Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Will Béla Bartok let me into heaven? Will Gustav Holst discourse with me on the nature of the spheres while Mozart packs my bong? I know das Leben ist kurz, aber die Kunst ist lang, but I’m ready to go the distance.

Up to that day, I’d had no idea Dr. Conrad smoked. Besides, it was forbidden in the practice halls. But before he answered my question, he motioned me outside. The hall with about 50 grand pianos was on the second floor and, from the balcony walkway outside, we could see the women’s gymnasium, the campus tennis courts, and the great parking lot beyond, packed with cars glittering in the late afternoon.

It was windy that day. I remember Dr. Conrad setting a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, crossing his arms, looking into the distance, and thinking for a moment. He had the habit of stopping to think, as if he were listening to a voice only he could hear, and I knew not to interrupt him. But it only made the moment heavier, more dreadful, as if my entire future depended on what he was about to say.

After what seemed like a very long moment, he flicked ash over the metal railing, looked at me, and said, “Michael, you’re very creative and I have no doubt that you will find the right way, but you lack the temperament for serious musical study.”

I nodded. What could I do but nod?

Then he said, “I think we’re through for today.” Because he knew that if you’re going to tell someone what you consider to be a hard truth, you have to allow them time to mourn their lies, their comforting illusions.

Of course, I was crushed. But there was nothing but honesty and kindness in him when he said it. And even then, I knew that when someone speaks the truth at that level, with that much transparency and, actually, compassion, you should accept it at face value. You might not agree with it, but you cannot disagree with the sincerity behind it.

A very deep part of me knew that he was right. It would take years for me to fully accept it, years spent both struggling with music and becoming fascinated with English literature and essay writing. It was me finding my true will, that path Dr. Conrad said he had no doubt I would eventually discover. But it wasn’t pleasant; it took a long time; and it demanded a lot in return—the general template for most things in my life.

I was a weak music student, but not because I didn’t practice hard. I practiced so hard that at times it affected my health. I had the obsessive nature of a musician without the bifurcated mind necessary to be both mathematician and sculptor at the same time. In retrospect, even then, I thought more like a writer, but I wouldn’t realize this about myself for almost a decade.

At the time, my dedication to piano, though misplaced, brought me a certain amount of instructive grief. I took a long time to analyze pieces; I was often deeply, inconsolably frustrated at my technical inability; and my adolescent self-doubt was only amplified by these things, rendering me morose and miserable much of the time. Add to that, my lack of social development and the fact that my heroes weren’t celebrities or pop stars but 17^th and 18^th century composers. And I had the perfect recipe for spontaneous teenage bridge jumping.

Though I came close a few times, I would not trade those grueling hours in the practice rooms or my loneliness—as much due to the other facets of my life as my musical studies—for anything. I learned discipline. I learned what it is to do everything right and still fail. I learned compassion. I learned to revere the creative life as one of invisible risks, enormous sacrifices, and sometimes rewards that make those things worthwhile. And I learned the value of telling the hard truth as I understood it to my own future students.

Dr. Conrad never told me I didn’t have talent. He always said that’s something no one can know, not even about oneself. He told me I didn’t have the temperament. And that’s why he was correct. I have the temperament of a writer, something he recognized but didn’t know well enough to name. His world was music. And because of him, I was able to exist in that world long enough to acquire some of its virtues and vices.

When I do play piano these days, it’s for my own amusement. And I can only be amused at my ability (and lack thereof). In the fullness of time, when I get my Roland out of storage, I think I’d like to start practicing again, maybe learn some Professor Longhair. If I manage it, one day I can be that grinning old man with long white hair, playing boogie woogie on his balcony.

Who’s that up there?

Just some old creep, honey. Don’t look at him. Get in the car.

Writing the Hard Thing

If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long. But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.” It means what it says.

The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other, less glamorous (or, at least, less visible) sort—a slave to the vicissitudes of the moon or some shit, the guy with 25 ongoing projects and an inability to stop working on any of them.

I know this about myself. I tell myself that it’s all part of the bigger creative process. I imagine all these incomplete pieces fermenting, cross-pollinating, mutating. Nothing lost. Everything in motion. And I take refuge in those ideas and metaphors so I can keep working. Being a writer, I tell myself a story. But it might be bullshit self-deceit.

The Romantics smoked opium to get closer to the moon and further from the Victorian head trauma of “productivity.” And when my genre writer pals do highly Victorian social media posts that go, “Sigh. Only 10 pages today,” I wonder whether they’re writing from inspiration or simply turning a lathe in some Dickensian word factory. Productivity equals commercial success, while moonbeams are their own reward. Still, I have word count envy no matter what I do.

The problems of productivity and self-deceit are at the center of trying to write the hard thing. They are the essential obstacles in making the fiction I came here to make instead of clocking in and lathing out a bunch of words to satisfy something or someone else. I don’t want to produce that which has been assigned to me by industry, necessity, or convention. I hate obeying. But am I achieving anything in my disobedience? For that matter, is achievement even the point?

When yet another publishing industry blog post comes out sounding like the vehement Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, I feel repulsed. I don’t want to spend time creating a fucking audience platform. Being an artist is not about “closing.” Just doing the actual writing takes up all my energy. I don’t want to frame pieces of my fiction as marketable units. I want to sit in a moonbeam and make something that arises from my own unique imperatives and disposition. I want the serendipity of inspiration. I live for it. And I resist the overtures of commercialism dedicated to consumption and to bullying artists into seeing themselves as part of a service industry.

Unfortunately, I also can’t avoid wanting the world to read my work and maybe give me some money so I can feed and clothe myself. It’s terrifying sometimes. Years ago, at an AWP conference, talking with a publisher after I put out Gravity, my first collection of stories, I felt like Nunez in “The Country of the Blind”—faced with the choice of getting what I loved if I voluntarily blinded myself or seeing clearly and climbing out of the hidden valley forever. In the end, I chose to keep my eyes.

“If you want to get a second book out using the momentum of your first,” he said, “you need to complete the manuscript in less than a year. More than that and people forget who you are. You won’t be able to position it. You’ll be starting over.” Six years later, my second book was done. And he was correct: from the marketing, word factory standpoint, I was starting over. From a creative-process standpoint, those six years were predicated on the six that came before. I wasn’t starting over. I was writing something hard that had emerged from my ongoing creative process, something I couldn’t have written in under a year.

Finishing writing in one’s own time instead of in service to the word factory is difficult. Discovering one’s limitations as an artist and then transcending them is very difficult. Putting in the years is difficult. Doing this up to and beyond age 30 is not only difficult but scary. Nevertheless, all can be accomplished if one is willing to believe in something greater than the word count. One says, it’s all part of my creative process and tries to calm down. One decides not to read (or write) certain self-aggrandising Facebook posts.

Of course, there might not be a bigger process. Maybe there is only Random House, Amazon, AWP conference ugliness, building a platform, positioning and branding, and Best American Monotony. Maybe. Maybe we exist in a world full of cynical anti-creative money-making ventures, cautious art, and nothing else. It’s always possible. The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, especially in those blocked periods of worrying and not writing.

It’s like reading about nuclear war or the earth dying from climate change: you have no agency, no option to mitigate the damage, soulless politicians are making horrible decisions, and there is only one way this can end. Apocalypse. Tragedy. No one at the wheel. Inhuman corporations controlling everything. And death, ignominious and unnoticed, unless you get with the program and start churning out formulaic units.

Capitalism wins. It usually does. But if there is a bigger process at work in your struggle to be an artist, it can’t have anything to do with metaphors of productivity on a factory timeline. That is a reality you must not accept.

How does a writer know what’s real? Is it moonbeam or production line? Is it both? Can it be both? Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, and David Bowie say yes. For the rest of us, maybe not. For every Warhol, Hemingway, and Bowie, there are multitudes who weren’t lucky enough to have their unique artistry coincide with commercial demand.

Hugh Howey likes to write about Wool the way Elon Musk talks about launching a roadster into space: let me tell you about my unique genius and the origin of my success. But self-publishing fame and running a car company have one thing in common that never gets discussed: they exist because they are timely. So it is with any highly lucrative creative effort. And that intersection has to do with luck. Meanwhile, someone out there is no doubt making Peking opera, but they are unlikely to be buying villas on the Riviera anytime soon. Nobody cares. Their units don’t ship. And yet they also have the favor of the moon.

Writers are especially predisposed to misunderstand what is real—what is objective versus just a moonbeam. They spend a lot of time deliberately thinking in metaphors, some more useful than others. And if they’re not paying attention to their minds, they can mistake such metaphors for objective reality (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with capitalist realism). Over-absorption in a world of imaginative metaphors can become a source of anxiety when the non-make-believe world reaches out and reminds us that we can’t live totally in our imaginations. Make your Peking opera, sure, but also accept that the six years you put into it mean nothing in terms of branding and positioning.

A writer will see something and begin to imagine things about it—everyone does this, but writers seem to do it with particular intensity—and before long the writer starts to feel like he or she knows it or, even worse, is it. Then something from the world of physics and money communicates: no, you are not that. You can’t imagine yourself to fame and fortune if you’re doing original work. You might get lucky, yes, and I hope you (I hope I) do. But commerce and true creativity exist in different spaces.

So I look at my 25 open projects with a bit of trepidation as the days go by. I’m turning 46 this month. I’ve published a lot of stories in magazines and two books. These have been hard things. Are they enough? Will they ever be enough?

Don’t worry, I tell myself. There’s bigger process at work. There must be.

Solving climate change one slick magazine at a time.

Read my latest in Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/jonathan-franzen-can-t-solve-climate-change-for-anyone-who-matters

Sincerity

Recently, I had a moment where I thought someone couldn’t possibly be for real and I was about to use his face to sharpen my claws . . . and then he responded with disarming sincerity. It’s wonderful when that happens.

Sincerity—not honesty but the good-faith attempt to be honest, which seems far more powerful and important—is like a force of nature. It’s a technique of relating to other people and to oneself that supersedes all the usual forms of vanity, deceit, coercion, and betrayal we regularly inflict on each other just to make it through the day.

It’s something I tend to forget, since the vast majority of people I deal with are usually cynical, conniving, lost souls. My economic survival often means, as a freelancer, staying one step ahead of them and being prepared for the worst they have to offer. I’ve been burned in most ways you might imagine and in some ways you might not. And, because it is necessary to be a student of human nature, I usually walk away, saying, “Fool me once . . . ”

But people can surprise you. When they do, it’s worth noting—not only because it’s rare, but because sincerity is like water in the desert. You don’t know when you’ll see it again but, for the moment, it’s a relief.

Workaholism and Learning How to Relax

Being a self-employed workaholic and knowing how to effectively relax is one of the biggest professional conundrums I’ve faced as an adult. And by “effective relaxation,” I mean not chemically induced relaxation or pseudo-relaxation that is just another form of work in disguise. Accepting the necessity of down time is really hard when you’re the one in charge of your schedule.

Add cyclical insomnia, a lot of repressed anger, and an emotionally abusive work ethic instilled from childhood and you get a large part of why I was a difficult person to be around in my 20s and early 30s. But I think I’ve learned a few things by now. Here are some ideas if you happen to be someone who shares these or similar issues (and I can think of a number of my friends who probably do).

(1) The most important thing is to be honest about being Type-A, especially if you use work to avoid other unpleasant thoughts, situations, or confrontations. The first and deepest honesty is with yourself. Then comes the need to practice outward-facing honesty by releasing the burden of holding these unflattering realizations about your obsessiveness in all the time. Speaking to others about it releases its hold on you. If you are afraid of judgment, consider that those who criticize you might feel threatened because they don’t want you to change or don’t want to face their own “stuff.” Honesty and transparency can renew you completely. And you probably need that kind of renewal.

(2) Understand your rhythms. Everything flows in evolving patterns, including everything in you—in your body and mind. If you can roughly predict when you will feel the urge to obliterate yourself by working to exhaustion, you can avoid that. Go home early. Make a nice dinner. Take a shower and get in bed. Avoid replacing one addiction with another: chemically induced relaxation will compound your problems. Avoid the bar. Instead, shut everything down for the moment. Even allow yourself to fail sometimes. Missing a deadline or taking an evening off in the interest of self-care will not result in the end of the world. Stop trying to control everything, especially when you feel that you’re going to fall apart unless you double down and pull an all-nighter. Because that’s what this is about: feeling like you need absolute control at all times. Workaholism is like any other addiction. It’s an ersatz mode of control. Getting over it means learning to relinquish control. It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely necessary if you want to progress.

(3) Be kind to yourself. This sort of self-torture has deep roots in those who suffer from it. You will slip up when you’re trying to lead a healthier life. You will have to deal with the unpleasantness of giving up your lousy self-destructive coping strategy. That cruel inner voice that says you need to prove your worthiness by striving for some unattainable and, frankly, mentally ill standard of perfection and productivity is not your friend. It’s a part of you that got misaligned early in your development and that is probably sustained by the culture around you. Learning to be kind to yourself is a good first step toward re-alignment. A humble and wide perspective also helps, realizing that you will never be at your best if you’re in a constant state of turmoil and burnout. Also accept that even when you are completely centered, well-rested, and healthy, you’re still fallible. You’re not always going to be on top of your game. Maybe never. So what? The overall quality of your life is more important. When you’re dead, hell won’t give you credit for “time already served” up at your desk.

And (4) avoid the game of childish posturing. In every workplace (and on the internet), you’ll meet a certain percentage of people who get off on how much they can overwork, as if that defines them as superior beings. They are looking to others for cheap validation because they feel empty. I know because I have been that person. Don’t make my stupid mistakes, kid. Working hard is good. But setting limits adds value to everything. Facing the reasons why you overwork might be painful, but it’s again about self-honesty. You have a limited amount of time. You should be using at least some of it to frolic in the dandelions and give biscuits to puppies. I say this as the badass motherfucker you know and love: puppies. Frolic. Get to it.

It goes without saying that, by writing this, I am actually practicing these things in my own way.