A couple of months ago I decided to quiet quit the social network, meaning I don't scroll the site anymore and only post links to my own work. I thought I would miss it but I don't, and in general I find myself feeling a lot less anxious. I highly recommend trying the same thing.

That doesn't mean I don't feel bad for the people who work there, though. Twitter was, until recently, one of the few tech companies with a positive corporate culture—one where people with a background in the humanities were allowed to play a role. That's all gone now, as a recent Verge article highlighted so well.

I can't stop thinking about how so many people spent so much time at Twitter trying to build a positive corporate culture, only for one person with too much money to destroy it for no good reason. The lesson I'm taking from this is it's never worth it to burn yourself out trying to build a positive company culture.

I have, in several past jobs, spent way too much of my time and energy trying to help build a positive culture in the places I've worked. I've learned that, unless you're in a leadership position, it's not worth it. You probably won't be rewarded—you may even be punished—and the culture will only last as long as the owners of the company allow it. The urge to make numbers go up, left unchecked, will eventually destroy all that is good in the world. Find something to do with your life that's not based on that urge.

I am somewhat of a hot commodity in the world of content marketing in spite of my best efforts. Which means startup CEOs occasionally email me asking if I’ll work for them.

My experience in the tech industry mostly involved feeling depressed, so my current plan is to stay in media until I retire or decide to take up bartending. This puts me in the unique position of being able to tell such people how I actually feel. I have, to put it scientifically, run out of fucks to give.

So when the founder of a Y-Combinator-backed company that uses artificial intelligence to make marketing copy asked me if I’d be willing to take a “15 minutes call” to talk about working for him, I was ready. Here’s my actual response:

I believe, deeply, that I should try to leave the internet a better place than I found it. I don’t think I can work for you and live by that ethos. 

Your entire homepage is about enabling marketers to generate low-effort, low-quality SEO-oriented gibberish that would, if successful, somehow make search results even less useful than they currently are. The only thing I like about this is that the sheer amount of soulless garbage will make it easier for people like me to stand out, but that’s a small consolation. 

So I guess I’d say that there’s not really any chance I’d work for you, and that I’d encourage you to re-think what you’re doing with your life. You seem smart! There must be something constructive you could be doing. If you still want a 15 minute call after that, well, I’m fascinated. If not, I totally understand, and I wish you the best. 

Sincerely, Justin Pot (oh hey you should sign up for my newsletter probably)

Three weeks ago I, for no particular reason, decided to re-examine my relationship with Twitter. I decided that I’m done(ish).

I uninstalled the app from my phone and tablet to stop myself from reflexively opening it. Then I set up Tweetdeck, an alternative user interface for Twitter, on my computer. I deleted the Home column, so I can keep up with direct messages and replies without being tempted to scroll through other people’s tweets. I set up the notifications column to ignore likes and Retweets—I only want to see if an actual person is trying to talk to me. I call this quiet quitting Twitter and I’ve got to say: it feels really good. Calming, even.

I’ve known for a long time that website isn’t good for me. A therapist I used to see asked me multiple times if I “needed” Twitter for work. I convinced myself I did—that the time I spent scrolling the site was, in some sense, “productive.” But let’s be real: on some level I was just addicted, because the platform is designed to be addictive. I know how deep my need for dopamine is and how much I looked to Twitter for it. I also knew how, during the Trump years and the pandemic, the site constantly whipped me into a state of anxiety.

At the same time, though, Twitter has been very important to me. I’ve made a lot of friends there, including a few I hang out with regularly. And I can trace most of the jobs and freelance gigs I’ve ever had to relationships I started on that site. It was the place where I “lived” online for a long time. But the truth is that it’s been a terrible place to live for a long time, and the recent leadership change is pretty clearly going to double down on what made it so bad.

I’m reviewing cloud backup and services for work and am feeling the same way I do every time I do a bunch of reviews of software in the same category: all of these apps are slowly becoming the same. The backup applications are all adding cloud syncing features; the cloud syncing apps are all adding backup features. They’re converging.

In the media industry there’s a concept called channel drift. The basic idea is that TV channels change over time. Sometimes the change is dramatic, like when the Outdoor Life Network acquired the rights to NHL games, noticed those games got higher ratings than documentaries about fishing, and basically became a generic sports station overnight. (Today it’s called NBCSN.)

More often, though, this change is gradual. A lot of the channels that existed in the 90s (back when people actually watched TV channels) had a specific kind of content. MTV, for example, played music videos. The History Channel played history documentaries. Now both of those channels basically air only reality TV shows. This wasn’t anyone’s plan—both stations just tried a few shows, realized it made them more money for less effort, and then kept doing that until it’s impossible to tell whether the hotel-room TV is tuned to MTV or the History Channel. They drifted into the same, numerically optimized, idea.

There was a time when I thought the internet would upend this homogenization by making it easy for anyone to share their weird creations with the world. That was before the rise of social networks and widespread A/B testing. Now channel drift is everywhere. Have you noticed that every news site is running the same headlines about Elon Musk and Twitter right now? There’s a reason for that: they’re getting traffic. The numbers drive the topics, and over time everything becomes the same.

The grass is always greener on the other side. It’s a simple saying that’s supposed to teach a simple lesson—namely, that you are always going to want what you don’t currently have. But sometimes the grass actually is greener on the other side.

A year ago I worked in a marketing department. I felt guilty about that every day, which is probably why I was depressed. Then I quit and something strange happened: everything got better.

This sounds straightforward because it is, but the decision wasn’t an easy one. I agonized over it, in part because I’d internalized the grass is always greener mentality. I assumed what I had was about as good as it could get, even though I was depressed constantly, and even though I used to get a lot of satisfaction from my work before marketing. I didn’t believe that a change would make my life better.

I worked hard to be content. I made friends at my job—good friends—and there was a lot about the situation that I liked. But, again: I was depressed constantly. The more I learned about marketing, as a profession, the more I realized it was incompatible with my values, and the worse I felt about participating in it. I was spiraling constantly.

The average human lifespan in the United States is 77, according the CDC. That works out to 4015 weeks, which is obviously wrong, or 28,105 days, which is even more obviously wrong.

Queen Elizabeth, who lived to be 96, was alive for 35,204 days—at least, that’s the case if you’re the sort of person who trusts math, which I’m not because that doesn’t sound like nearly enough time. All math must be wrong. Surely we all have millions of days to play with, at a minimum, and those who live longer have billions.

Think about it: if our lives are so short why do we spend so much time doing things we don’t want to, like working, cleaning, and responding to assholes on Twitter? We wouldn’t do those things if our lives were that short, therefore our lives must not be that short. The math is wrong.

Recently I’ve noticed a pattern. People who take longer than three minutes to respond to a message invariably begin their response with some kind of apology. I appreciate where the apologies are coming from—people don’t want to inconvenience me. At the same time, though, I think we should all stop apologizing for being offline.

I deleted my time tracking software. It’s such a relief.

The idea behind using the software, for me, was that if I knew how much time I wasting each day on distractions that I’d be less likely to indulge those distractions. But you know what? I don’t need that system. I know when I’m distracted because I don’t get anything done; I know when I’ve been productive because my work is finished. That’s more than enough data. Having numbers about how distracted I was on a bad day isn’t exactly helpful—it just allows me to feel even worse about myself.

The problem with metrics is that some things are easier to measure than others. I can measure how long I keep a particular document open, for example, and that gives me some sense of how much time I spent writing. But writing is more than just typing, and I can’t really track how much of my morning run I spend brainstorming ideas for articles, or how much a quick walk in the afternoon can loosen up my brain if I’m feeling stuck.

More than that, though, I feel like metrics miss a lot of the point of being alive. I can measure which articles a lot of people read, but I can’t measure which articles make a difference in someone’s life, help someone with a problem, or were worthwhile in some other way. The human brain is, so far as we know, the most complex thing in the universe. To think we can understand it using simple stats is folly.

Mira, my cat, would like to be on the table right now. She is not allowed to be on the table.

She presumably wants to be there because she wants to be in my eyeline, and my laptop is on the table. It’s not quite time for to have her food, you see, but she would like to have her food. I am clearly not providing it because I’m oblivious, so she is going to spend time specifically breaking rules. Breaking rules is how you get attention.

Thus my morning is spent getting Mira off the table and occasionally writing a few words. The worst thing is, in twenty minutes, it will be time to feed her…and this tactic will seem to have worked.

I think we are all a lot more like my cat than we would like to admit. We learn the wrong lessons, if any lesson at all, from our actions, then repeat them because they “worked”.

Streaming is the new cable, or so the common wisdom goes. It’s easy to spend more on streaming services now than the average cable bill was 20 years ago, because there are too many streaming services.

This is a change. In the early days of cord cutting—in the late 2000’s—the entire point was to save monty. This was when could pay for Netflix and watch pretty much everything, before every media conglomerate decided they wanted to take their content off Netflix and launch their own streaming service.

Here’s the thing, though: there’s still a lot more flexibility now than cable ever offered, if you take advantage. Here’s my advice for saving money on streaming while still having plenty to watch.

• Only pay for one streaming service at a time. There’s way too much content on every streaming service for you to ever watch, so there’s no reason for you to pay for more than one such service at a time. Pay for Netflix until you run out of stuff you want to watch, then cancel it and pay for something else for a couple months.
• Buy actual Blu-Rays or DVDs if you constantly re-watch a show. Peacock costs $4.99 a month, with ads. The complete The Office box set costs $40 on Amazon. You don’t have to subscribe to Peacock for the rest of your life just to watch The Office again and again (and again.)
• Get an antenna. Major networks like ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and PBS all broadcast over the air, meaning you can pick up their signals using an antenna. It always surprises me how few people realize this—you don’t need cable to watch these channels, or to record shows from these channels.
• Use Plex. This is a media management application. The idea is that you can install it on a computer in your house, add a collection of media files to it, then stream those files from any smart TV, mobile device, or computer. It’s great if you want to watch your ripped Blu-Ray collection, and it also comes with a built-in PVR. Over time it becomes a self-hosted Netflix, except your favourite shows won’t randomly disappear the next time the licensing agreement expires.
• Don’t forget about your local library. Most libraries have an extensive collection of TV shows and movies, either on hand or that you can request from other branches. Take advantage of this—if there’s a particular show you want to watch, check if the library has it before you start paying for another streaming service. Some libraries also offer free access to Kanopy, a surprisingly great streaming service.

I’m thankful for asshole commenters. That’s not a joke.

I learned to write online in the late 2000’s and early 2010s, when comment sections with loyal readers were still a thing. This meant, if I made a mistake, I would find out about it right away, not necessarily in a friendly way. It was kind of a secondary fact-checking process, for which I was grateful. I would always respond to such comments by saying “thank you,” even if the person was impolite, and I genuinely was thankful. Fixing mistakes early is better than fixing them five months later, and they helped me do that.

Other comments argued with a version of my article that I didn’t feel like I wrote. They’d turn me into a straw man, or put words into my mouth—at least, that’s how I experienced it. Some people were completely missing the point of what I was trying to say. A few of my co-workers would rant about such comments, sharing them in Slack and laughing. I’ll admit I occasionally joined in. I tried not to, though, because every time a reader seemingly misunderstood what I was trying to say was an opportunity to learn how to write more clearly.

If one person misunderstands what you’re saying, it might be their fault. If everyone misunderstands what you’re saying, it’s yours.

We all live in loops. There’s the obvious examples: the seasons, day following night. The planet you live in is traveling in a loop in space, which causes the time loops you live in. We wake up every morning, we go to bed every night. We experience summer, fall, winter, and spring every year.

Loops frame our existence, so it’s no wonder they’re so common in our culture. There’s the standard verse-chorus-verse song structure, or the comforting way most TV shows and movies bring characters back to their familiar patterns at the end of the hero’s journey. We all live in loops, so loops are what make sense to use in art.

Advertisers understand this, which is why they air the same ad again and again and again and again. It’s not just to torture you, it’s also to get your brain into a loop, to cut through the clutter. Some of the oldest print advertisements just repeated the same line, again and again, until the entire page was full. This was meant to be eye catching, and it worked. The infamous berries and cream Starburst ad is essentially this same idea in video form.

Speaking of: memes are also loops. They are, at their heart, about repetition. Every slight variation on the same image macro, phrase, or video clip makes the meme just a little more popular, which leads to more variations on it, which makes the meme just a little more popular, which leads to more variations. A truly insidious ad can become a meme (hello again Starburst.)

Here are a few tips for dealing with a Twitter mob directed at you by the comms team of a venture backed technology company, in case that sort of thing should ever happen to you.

• Don’t respond to the randoms who suddenly show up in your mentions. They are not engaging in good faith. Do not take the bait.
• The mute button is your friend. Most people you can ignore. Persistent people you can mute. If you block someone they can see you did that and declare victory. If you mute them they are yelling into the void. Make them yell into the void.
• Reach out to people who care about you. Say hi. Ask how they’re doing. Talk to people who know you, and love you, instead of people who do not and will not.
• Uninstall Twitter from your phone. You don’t need realtime updates about the shitshow when you’re away from your desk. Remove the reflex to look at your mentions constantly. There’s nothing for you there.
• Go for a walk or something. Twitter is not the real world. The real world is outside, which you should visit. Go there, grab your mail, maybe talk to your neighbors. Get some coffee, or beer, or both. Site on your porch and read a book.
• Pet your cat, or put your cat in a box. Cats love being in boxes.

• Get a friend to handle the onslaught for you, if you can’t handle it. This stuff is exhausting because it’s designed to be—the intention is to make your feel isolated. So don’t face it alone. Give someone you trust access to your Twitter account and let them do the muting, or blocking, until the storm dies down. Failing that look into tools like Block Party, which allow you to block trolls en masse.

I have COVID. I found out on Wednesday, when two lines showed up on one of the tests Joe Biden mailed me. One line means you don’t have COVID, two lines means you do have COVID. I saw two lines because (as previously established) I have COVID.

I’ve spent most of the past two years attempting to avoid catching what I called “The Thing” because I didn’t want to name The Thing that killed one million Americans. Think about that number—one million—and then look at this chart I stole from Wikipedia.

Those are some of the most horrific wars America has gone through and I wouldn’t minimize them for a second. There have been around 650,000 American combat deaths across every war America has participated in, ever, meaning COVID killed more Americans in two years than literally every war.

Slang from the 1920s fascinates me. Why are good things “the bee’s knees” or “the cat’s pajamas”? Why is a drunken bender “a toot?” The past is a world I will never be able to inhabit or understand.

It’s worth thinking about what things from our present reality will seem weird in the future. I’m not thinking of slang here, though I’m certain our internet-specific language will be particularly embarrassing in 100 years. I’m just thinking about what things we accept as normal will seem odd in the not so distant future.

I think the timeline will be one of those. The idea that the best way to keep up with people is to push out a message to everyone you know and see who responds is…well, it’s a strange choice we all made.

I remember the first time I was talking to a friend on Facebook and a relative responded and argued with them. It was a kind of context collapse that made me uncomfortable. Most people I know had a similar experience at some point—the moment they stopped posting on Facebook so openly.

"Fuck you."

That's what the notification says. Dozens more just like it follow.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and so on and so forth, all from the same handle: @fxckjustinpot. Someone spent their limited time on earth making a Twitter handle that includes my name.

It's November of 2015 and I'm supposed to be working. I moved to Oregon four months ago, which isn't a great amount of time to be in a new place. It feels like I should have friends here already. I don't, and it's starting to feel like I never will. I'm spending too much of my time online. I work from home, which doesn't help in terms of meeting people. Twitter is the main place where I hang out with friends in any meaningful sense.

This newsletter is brought to you by the feeling of relief you get by uninstalling Instagram, even if you’re just uninstalling it temporarily. Uninstalling: because we don’t have to live in an endorphin-fueled hellscape forever if we don’t want to.

Keep your employees from quitting with this one weird trick

Lately I’m trying to replace the algorithms in my life with human curators. I’m starting with music.

Spotify is very good at noticing what music you’re listening to and recommending more music just like it. This is my main complaint about algorithms: they know who you’ve been in the past, not who you might want to imagine yourself becoming or who you might become. In my case this meant I got stuck in the rut of depressing indie songs I carved for myself during the pandemic.

I love those songs but also I like being exposed to more than that—jazz, blues, pop-punk, and just chaotic curation in general. So I gave myself a mission to find a few online radio stations that I liked, DJed by actual human people—ideally human people who live nearby.

I found quite a few. An early favourite is Shady Pines Radio here in Oregon, a volunteer-run station that could not be more chaotic. I’m hearing a bluegrass set as I write this. Today someone played a The Weakerthans album in its entirety and read folk stories for five minutes to round out his hour. Last week I discovered the joyful instrumentalists Bi-Curious during an hour of metal music. I learned that local Portland singer Maiah Wynne worked with Rush lead guitarist Alex Lifeson on a project called Envy of None, which is incredible. Maybe the best part: you can say hi to the DJs in the chat room and they almost always write back. It’s so much more human than a Spotify station.

This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale is the actual title of a paper published in Psychological Reports back in late 2020, written by Caitlin Ferreira and four co-authors. The title alone makes me very happy.

I feel like workers everywhere have an intuitive sense of what’s bullshit. Say, for example, that I text you the words “that’s bullshit” during a meeting after the boss says some bullshit. I know I can expect that you will know exactly what I mean, and that you will write back something along the lines of “lol yes” (because you’re cool which is why we’re friends). There’s a shared, unspoken understanding of the word “bullshit.”

This paper is fun for many reasons, but what I love is that it provides an actual definition of the word bullshit: “acts of communication that have no grounding in truth.”

I love that. It’s short but precise and rings completely true. Bullshitting isn’t lying. From the paper:

Tech companies, and tech people, spend a lot of time trying to project an idea that they are Not The Man. That they are, in some meaningful way, underdogs.

It’s nonsense. If you are making millions you are, by definition, The Man. That’s just reality. Every revolutionary becomes a conservative the day after the revolution, and for tech the revolution was decades ago.

Tech won. They’re in charge now.

I don’t think tech got the memo, though. Think about companies that earn hundreds of millions of dollars annually—more than the vast majority of companies on earth will ever make—still calling themselves “startups.” Think of Elon Musk, literally the richest person on the planet, talking as though he isn’t being treated fairly. How warped does your worldview needs to be in order to believe that?

This week I witnessed Kathy, my wife, watch a webinar on her laptop while simultaneously listening to a meeting on her phone. She can do that sort of thing—simultaneously process several different conversations. She does this at parties sometimes—it's a pretty neat trick. I don't understand how she does it, and can't even imagine what doing that would feel like.

Some people can't listen to music while they're working because it's too distracting. I'm the opposite—I can't write without music. My mind is constantly going off on tangents, spiraling in different directions. Music takes up just enough of my attention that I can focus on the task at hand.

It's amazing, isn't it? How different peoples' minds are? I will never know what it's like in your head, and you will never know what it's like in mine.

That, I think, is why I write. It's a chance to invite others into my brain and host a kind of get together. So welcome. Let me show you around.