I don’t wanna write a Substack this week
How to ‘job’ in the midst of upheaval and violence
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Wishing you a great week!
Last night I missed a protest against ICE because of client calls.
I’m an American living in Paris, and between the large American expat community here and the general social conscience of the French, there’s a lot of solidarity on this side of the pond for what Americans are going through right now.
The protest was down on the banks of the Seine, a 35-minute metro ride from my apartment. It started at 6:30pm, and I had work meetings scheduled until 7:00pm. But this is France, and protesting is the national pastime, and I thought surely when I got there at 7:30-something they’d still be going strong.
I was on the metro at 7:20pm when my friend texted: “It’s ending now.”
Turns out it wasn’t a march, as I’d been expecting, but more of a gathering with a set program of speakers.
I turned around and went home, feeling stupid. Steeping in the absurdity of prioritizing my inconsequential little desk job as my home country slides into literal fascism, while the government is making a habit of executing people in the streets for daring to get in the way of an untrained police force hunting down, kidnapping, and disappearing people without even a facade of due process.
It’s hard to concentrate, it’s hard to stay engaged, and it’s increasingly hard to tell myself a story about how what I do, as a professional marketer, is purposeful and meaningful against the backdrop of upheaval, brutality, and so much naked bigotry. To be an honest human and not a responsible business owner for a second: That content strategy my client is waiting for seems pretty damn stupid right now. The CAC of LTV of the YoY ROI? Get a fucking life.
And maybe you’re feeling that way, too.
Marketing doesn’t matter. Not really, not in any way that anyone will be thinking about on their birthdays or death beds. All this white collar knowledge work is more or less a parlor trick at the Party of Modern Life, and knowing tricks is a great way to keep getting invited to the party. (Until the robots definitively take over.)
But it’s the people that matter. Their lives matter. You matter. Your relationships and quality of life matter. Almost everything else is a distraction that is, unfortunately, necessary to move through society…but probably a lot less necessary than we think, and definitely a lot less necessary than the Powers That Be want us to think.
Besides, if you’re keeping your eyes even halfway open, this is the state of the world all the time, isn’t it? Much has been said about cognitive overload, the human brain’s inability to process the deluge of information almost all of us are getting beamed directly into our cerebral cortexes on an hourly basis.
Given that, I know that the answer cannot be for humanity to take a time out until we all collectively learn our lesson. We can’t unplug civilization, wait 30 days, and then plug it back in again. We do have to keep going, earning money to pay bills and feed our families and even enjoy ourselves once in a while. Money to give to the causes we support. The answer isn’t despair, isn’t nihilism. And the answer also isn’t, universally, to quit our silly little white collar knowledge work jobs and hit the streets. The answer isn’t to bury our heads in the sand and retreat into whatever insulating privilege we have, but it’s also not to burn out on the bad news and fry our nervous systems because “always informed” seems like the only reasonable and responsible way to be.
The exhausting wrestling match is how to exist in the constant compromise between willful ignorance and paralytic knowledge. It’s how to continue to make meaning when the institutions that once readily supplied it are falling or being revealed as facades. It’s how to care enough about the stupid screen-mediated bullshit work to get it done without giving up a part of yourself.
While writing this, I looked up some of our subscriber stats. I was surprised to see that only 37% of you lovely folks are American, like me and Kevan, though that’s our largest single demographic group reading this newsletter. Second largest demographic is India (13%), followed by the U.K. (7%), Canada (4%), and then Brazil (2%).
The remaining 37% of you are reading this from all over the world, across 6 continents, living in countries with wildly different cultures and under a range of government systems and regimes, some fully democratic, some authoritarian, some dictatorial, some in messy stages of transition from one to the other.
I looked all this up because I’m self-conscious that what I’m saying here may sound obvious and played out to our readers in Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. It might seem naive to those reading this in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and Palestine. And it also might smack of white privilege to my Black and brown fellow Americans. Yes, there is worse political instability and more extreme violence than what’s happening in the United States right now. But I’m also aware that relativizing pain and struggle is a race to the bottom.
The people in power in these oppressive regimes all over the world, the broken people hellbent on inflicting pain on others because they mistakenly believe it will make them feel important and safe, they really want you to care about your job. They want you to be terrified of losing it. They want you to participate, obediently, in the traditional economic and social structures that got them where they are today, and that includes a quasi-religious devotion to the primacy of business interests as an unquestionable good.
They don’t want you to realize what it seems like many of us are anyway: The work isn’t real, and it was never real, not compared to the suffering and the injustice.
But it’s also not real compared to the outcry, the beautiful ways people are showing up for their communities, the resistance.
There’s not a real moral here. I don’t actually have any tips, which means there’s the part of my brain that says: “Delete this. You’ve offered nothing of value.” Maybe the only thing I can say is to resist the pull to the extremes. Resist ignorant dissociation, but also resist crushing resignation. Whatever you can do to remain functional, to contribute in little ways to the causes you care about, to zoom out and stay calm in the midst of polycrisis, to show up for your family and your neighbors—whatever that takes is what you gotta do. Less guilt, less shame, less despair. Do the bare minimum at work and wherever you can to preserve your energy for mirco-agitations, mini steps forward, speaking out on the fringes of where it’s totally comfortable to do so, and bearing up.
Over to you…
If you’re resonating with this, just know you’re not alone. Feel free to hit us up in the replies or comments if you want to chat.
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Thank you for writing this ❤️ I feel as disheartened very often these days. Talking about it with friends, colleagues and communities helps me get through it. That’s my two cent tip.