The value of unsubscribing

I've been using Substack wrong

Cal Newport is not a people pleaser.

I had this thought when I was listening to his podcast last week. I listened to him talk and realized he writes his books, sends his newsletter, and records his podcast with the energy of someone who knows he has valuable information to impart, but not someone who worries about whether or not everyone likes him.

The three books of his I’ve read¹ have all been hugely influential to me, my creative process, and my daily schedule, but there has been a whisper of a feeling with each of them of how is Cal Newport so…free? And then I’ve thought, well, I probably have to do more deep work and more digital minimalism, and then I’ll be free, too. But really, I’ve got to break free from people pleasing.

The reason I was thinking about Cal Newport and people pleasing was because I was reading Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit by Julio Vincent Gambuto (it comes out today, I scored an advance copy). Gambuto wrote an essay that went viral in April 2020 called “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting.” The essay was born from realizing that corporations were going to urge us to get back to “normal” as soon as possible after the pandemic hit, and that, in their mind, normalcy meant continuing to spend money without thinking about it. He came to realize how much of our lives is orchestrated by “Big Forces:” Big Tech, Big Banks, Big Media, Big Brands, and Big Parties (the political parties). And he realized that, rather than living in the (fake) Reaganomics idea of “trickle-down economics,” we are living in a time of “click-up economics.” All of those “Bigs” have made it so that we can click to buy, easily, at any hour, and, when we do, that money tends to go straight up the ladder (clicking up) to the pockets of people who are already very, very rich. 

An example Gambuto gives is: if you need a toilet plunger, you can go to your local small hardware store, buy a plunger, and be done. OR, you can go to Home Depot, where they’ll ask you to sign up for their loyalty program to get points, and then you’ll get emails from them reminding you about your points, and they’ll send emails telling you what home renovations you might want to do, and they’ll remind you that you can go to Home Depot for “more doing” and suggest maybe you want to have a home renovators lifestyle, and identify as someone who makes your home look nicer because why wouldn’t you, and that’s how you spend your weekends, buying patio pavers and bathroom tile at Home Depot because you are “a doer” who makes your house look nice, until eventually you get a home equity loan to pay for all of it, or buy a new fixer upper because you have the skills now, and you can start all over again.

And all you wanted was to be able to unclog your toilet.

This example was particularly relevant to me, considering we spent every weekend working on our house from late 2003 until we finished our kitchen renovation in 2017. But Gambuto asks us (asks me) to consider renovating our house because we want to (which we did) and not doing everything Home Depot tells us we should (we also did that, I’m sure). Because it’s not just Home Depot, it’s everything.

Gambuto realized that one way all of these companies ensnare us is by getting us to subscribe to them in some way or another, mostly in the guise of helping us, making things easier and more automated, but what that means is that it is very easy for us to spend our money quickly, easily, and thoughtlessly. Maybe more importantly, we spend our time quickly, easily, and thoughtlessly. You get an email that you have a cash reward and then spend time in the store or on the website browsing for something you don’t need or want in the first place. Or you spend time deleting emails that clog your inbox. Or you get an idea that maybe you want olive green platform clogs, because you saw someone wearing them and they look cute, and you google them, and find them pretty quickly, and it’s so, so easy to just buy them, even though you definitely do not need another pair of shoes (if it weren’t for the reviews saying these shoes are not that comfortable, I swear to you I would have bought them, it was so easy). 

On the same day last week, two things happened. 1) We needed replacement parts for our camper awning (exciting, I know). I found them on the website of the place where we bought the awning. The parts totaled $45. It was so easy to click to buy. My credit card auto-filled. I had other things to do and was looking forward to checking this off the list. I was one second away from clicking “purchase” when I realized the shipping was $150. The cheapest possible option was $85. I don’t think this was the awning company being nefarious. I think it’s that their products are usually very heavy and costly to ship. But I was ordering things which would fit in a small box. I called and talked to a human and she fixed it and charged me $10 in shipping. But I came so close to paying for $150 shipping for my small box of parts, clicking without thinking because that is how I have been trained. 2) Dave (my husband) needed powdered limestone (I don’t know why, he’s a scientist, I don’t ask). He went to the local gardening store and asked around until he found someone who knew what he was talking about, and that guy said, “We make it ourselves!” and brought Dave to a room with, I guess, big chunks of limestone they were crushing to powder, and because Dave didn’t need much, he gave him a bag of it and said, “Just take it, you shop here all the time.” Which is what can happen when we step away from our computers. If he had gone to a big box store, or bought it online, he would have had to buy a 50-pound sack of it.

Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! is great. It helped me see so many systems of the world in new ways. But I want to talk about one thing in particular. 

The whole time I was reading it, I kept wondering if he was going to talk about Substack. This lovely newsletter platform, which is a newish company, and designed to be different, is based on subscriptions. How is it different from the big corporations that are trying to get users to subscribe? Gambuto never says anything specifically about Substack, but that’s ok. I figured it out. Or, at least, figured out something important about how I approach this service.

Early in the action phase of the book, Gambuto is talking about taking the first step of unsubscribing from all of the emails in his inbox. He unsubscribes from all of these companies that constantly send sale notices and updates and information about your account, and says, “I even unsubscribed from my doctor’s office’s email updates,” noting “They’re not a Big Brand, but they were behaving like one.”

I don’t want to behave like a corporation. I don’t want that for me, or for other people. I’ve always been uncomfortable around concepts like lead magnets and strategizing engagement and persuasive copywriting because it’s all saying that the only way you can be successful, even as a small business, is to act like a corporation. 

I appreciate that Substack has given me a space where I can get paid for my newsletters. But there is definitely pressure – some from Substack, but mostly from other users – to act like a corporation within the system. Get subscribers, convert them to paid, create a publishing cadence, be active on Notes. It perpetuates this idea that it works best if we mimic the habits of corporations. 

The corporations have tried to humanize and now they want the humans to corporatize.

Me, a human.

What if I use this platform and act like a human? Is it possible? Will people be disappointed and unsubscribe if I don’t publish posts on a regular schedule? 

If I am my whole human self in these newsletters, then, I hope, people will see me for who I am (not a corporation!) (not Big Julie!) and either like who I am, or not, and subscribe or unsubscribe accordingly. Let me assure you that this newsletter is not an example of click-up economics. I’m not a billionaire. Most of the time I’m not even a ten-thousand-aire. So it’s more like click-over economics. It’s a lateral, mutual, situation. 

Gambuto ended up doing a full scorched-earth unsubscribe, where he unsubscribed from everything. Emails, television, podcasts, banks, smart phones, events, people. At first, I thought it was too much. But maybe it’s the way to get a handle on what’s working or not. 

There is a T.C. Boyle short story called Filthy with Things, in which a couple with a clutter problem call in a professional declutterer, who, to their shock, takes absolutely everything out of their house. It’s all gone. Over the course of sixty days, they are allowed one thing a day from their old stuff. This is essentially the same technique Gambuto uses with unsubscribing from everything.

Remember that scene from Seinfeld when Puddy doesn’t want to do anything but stare ahead during a plane ride? I remember watching that scene and thinking it was showing how deranged Puddy is, but now I think the opposite. He is doing exactly the right thing. We are told to cram as much as possible into our lives. Fill every second with something, with content, with engagement. But why not just stare ahead at the seat in front of us for a while? Watching this clip again, Elaine is exactly everyone on the internet. She gets annoyed that he’s not doing what she’s doing, and then she tries to involve others in her outrage (the poor man next to her saying, “Please! I don’t want to get involved!”) and she takes her anger out on the innocent people around her. 

I spent years disentangling myself from social media. Many people are able to manage social media just fine. The biggest problem with it for me was that it fed my people pleasing tendencies. I could justify it as necessary – people will follow me and like me and then they’ll know about my books – but really it was a place for me to get validation. My people pleasing is really a sneaky way for me to outsource my own worth. For some reason, I have long believed that my worth is based on whether other people like me, and social media gave me such an easy way to measure that. It was bad for me.

I thought I had fixed this all by leaving social media. But without me realizing it, Substack filled a people-pleasing-shaped hole that still exists in me. It made sense (and still makes sense!) for me to move from Mailchimp to Substack. I went from paying monthly to getting paid, Substack is much easier to search, and it’s great to have comments and conversation. However, faced with this new method of being able to measure how much other people deemed me worthy, I tipped directly over into a lopsided use of my time, in order to falsely measure my worth by likes, comments, and subscriber counts. I justified it because now I’m getting paid for it, so it’s another part of my job. 

I am uncomfortable admitting how much more time I spend on Substack essays than I spend on my fiction these days. Something about this has felt off to me for a while, and this is what it is. I spend many days on each of my essays because I want them to be good. I have believed that it’s important to offer more here, because I can, and because now it’s part of my job.

No one told me to do this. No one asked me to do this. Without realizing it, I started behaving like a corporation. (“I have to post more to keep everyone satisfied to get more subscribers to get more paying subscribers.”)

Gambuto talks about subscriptions beyond literal subscriptions to corporations. He also talks about subscriptions to beliefs — that there are some long-held beliefs about the world and about ourselves that we can choose to change our minds about. And so: I am unsubscribing from the idea that my worth is based on whether or not other people like me and what I’m doing. 

Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! doesn’t mention Substack, but what he would say is this: unsubscribe from it, and then add it back in after taking many weeks off, and see how you feel about it. One thing Gambuto talks a lot about is how his mass unsubscribing led to quiet and space in his life. I want quiet! I want space! Everything feels so crammed full. Also: I want to write books. I have self-imposed deadlines that were not particularly stringent that I have blown right past, and it’s because I tell myself I’ll just post this one thing, or that I should schedule some posts because then I can work on my novel. In short, I would like to once again lead a human-paced life. 

Here’s what that means for Do the Work: I’m not deleting it. I like having a newsletter! BUT: I am no longer going to be posting the weekly posts. I’ll post videos if I have something I really want to say. But I won’t hold myself to this weekly schedule just because I have decided that everyone expects it. I will still do monthly essay posts, but maybe sometimes, if I’m deep in a book, I won’t. I won’t post the Saturday story prompts unless something hugely story-prompty presents itself. The purpose of the story prompts was to encourage you all to see that there are ideas all around us. In all of the journaling I’ve done around this issue, I suddenly had the thought: what if these story prompt images were supposed to be for me? And I was just giving them away? I have been carrying my phone with me on walks, in case something interesting shows up, so I can take a photo and post it. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t recognize what I was doing. For years I carried my phone on walks so I could post to Instagram stories, and then, when I stepped away from social media, I recognized the value of phone-less walks. And here I was again, carrying my phone in my pocket, so I could share with people. So I could make sure everyone still likes me. 

Hilariously, the morning I realized all this, and decided I would only post a story prompt if I stumbled upon it and had my phone, a road I drive down all the time was closed off, due to dinosaurs.

So consider this the last story prompt for a while, and go find some of your own in the world. 

It has been ten months since I switched to Substack, and I really do like this better as a place for newsletters. But it has been ten months of me using it like it’s social media, and not doing the fiction writing I should. Again: no one asked this of me. But I’m sharing it so you know, and also in case you also have these tendencies. I feel some shame about the “wasted” ten months, where I lost my deep work muscles and backslid into outsourcing my worth. But I’m grateful, really. I’ve learned some important things about how I react to the spaces of the internet. There are worse ways to learn that than by writing a lot of newsletter essays I’m proud of. 

Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! is a big important book, and I needed to read it. I’m obsessed with this idea of disengaging from the mindless systems that have occupied me so much the last decade or so. And I’m really looking forward to space and quiet. I’ll probably never be as removed from people pleasing as I imagine Cal Newport is, but I can start now by prioritizing myself, focusing on my creativity, and unsubscribing.

Thoughts and Links

• As of this second, I’m still planning on doing the short story project I’ve been talking about here, where we read short stories and use them for picture book inspiration. Mostly because the first post is written and I’ve read a ton of short stories to choose some. I’ll let you know if I change my mind on this.

• All of the stuff I talk about in this post has made me consider working with a coach of some kind (life coach? writing coach? take-yourself-seriously coach?). Let me know if there is someone who have worked with you recommend.

• While I tend to prefer comedy without moments of Huge Drama, I loved Creamerie. There is some huge drama for sure, but the moments of comedy (especially in season two!) are so sublimely hilarious that I absolutely recommend it.

• In case you missed it (because I forgot to include it in last week’s newsletter before I sent the email), I was interviewed by

  Caroline Cala Donofrio
  for her Five Big Questions series.

• I celebrate this newsletter by subscribing to something. Look, I’m complicated. But

  Recovering
  linked to this Ann Friedman newsletter, and every inch of it delighted me, and clearly I should have already been subscribed to it.

• We are new to the board game Dominion, and it’s great. After playing Settlers of Catan every weekend for years, we were ready for something new.

1. Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You