Why is it that it seems like no amount of work, accolades, or achievement is enough? Why do we keep signing up for more, even as our capacity becomes ever more depleted? Why do we settle for mediocrity when we yearn for excellence?

In today's episode, I revisit an idea from my book—the validation spiral—and provide a framework for understanding why we become stuck in it and how we can break free. Add to that a healthy dose of Audre Lorde's feminist theory, and you've got a satisfying mental model for rethinking your commitments.

Summer Seminar starts Monday, June 9! Learn more about this flexible, brain-tickling program that combines speculative fiction with systems thinking: click here!

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this essay (with visuals!)
• "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" by Audre Lorde from Sister Outsider
• What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way You Approach Goal-Setting by Tara McMullin
• Melissa Febos on The Feminist Present

If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them. You can always support with a like or a share, of course. But generally, the support they’re looking for is financial.

And for good reason, life is expensive. Jobs with good pay and decent benefit packages can be hard to find—especially in the culture industry.

But I gotta tell you, I’ve always been a little irked by the word “support.” It’s not inaccurate. Not unethical. Not even gauche. I just think it’s the wrong word. 

Today's episode is in 3 parts: The first examines an article in the New York Times from May 10 about how much money we’re paying for newsletters. The second part considers a manifesto of sorts about the future of media organizations written by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in April. And the third part will draw on a new English translation of Mythocracy by Yves Citton to make sense of it all. 

Whether or not you identify as a “creator,” whether or not you buy from creators, whether or not you even follow creators on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram, I promise this will be relevant to you. Because, regardless of your personal or professional relationship with Substack and the so-called creator economy, their very existence and continued growth reveal a great deal about how we all work and consume in the 21st century.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of today's episode.
• "How Much Are We Paying For Newsletters? $50, $100... How About $3,000 Per Year." by Logan Sachon in The New York Times (gift link)
• Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
• "U.S. newsroom employment has fallen by 26% since 2008" from Pew Research Center
• "A Simple Vision for the Future of Media Organizations" by Hamish McKenzie
• Mythocracy by Yves Citton

Let's (re)think systems this summer!

Join me for Summer Seminar, a 7-week program that combines speculative fiction with curiosity about our own lives and work. This year, we're reading Sofia Samatar's The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain and venturing through 6 explorations of systems thinking. Learn more and register with choose-your-own pricing.

No matter how fastidious you are about creating and executing a plan, working toward any big goal will require adjustments. No matter how diligent you are about documentation and maintenance, any process will break down over time. The work we do is always changing—whether because of the people we work with, the market we operate in, or the cultural context our work is received in. Even when it seems like smooth sailing is just one standard operating procedure away, things will shift.

That can feel like failure, or at least like you're not doing quite as well as you should be. But really, it's an opportunity. You can embrace the confusion, the entropy, the breakdown... and learn.

Today, I've unlocked and revised an episode I put out in February 2024 for premium subscribers. If you like it, you'll love Summer Seminar, a 7-week program that combines speculative fiction with curiosity about our own lives and work. This year, we're reading Sofia Samatar's The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain and venturing through 6 explorations of systems thinking. Learn more and register with choose-your-own pricing.

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this episode.
• Learn more about Summer Seminar.
• Learn more about YellowHouse.Media (we currently have openings for new podcasts).
• "The Many Functions of Should" by Tara McMullin
• The Donella Meadows Project
• Small Arcs of Larger Circles by Nora Bateson
• Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

• (00:00) - Process Entropy & Evolution

Is an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, a search engine? Does it scour the internet for helpful information so that it can respond to user queries?

These questions were at the heart of a small kerfuffle on Bluesky last week between decorated speculative fiction writer Ann Leckie and a few prominent tech thinkers. Honestly, it bummed me out. But I found that the next morning, I had a lot to say about it. So I enlisted my dear husband, Sean, and I talked him through it.

This episode is different than the last 6 months or so of episodes. If you have the same taste in podcasts that I do, you'll recognize the format. I've been wanting to try it for a long time, and this was the perfect topic to give it a go. It's far more casual than the last 15+ episodes, but just as rigorous. If you like it, reach out on Bluesky, and let me know! Sean is already asking when we can do it again.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• Ann Leckie's original post
• Casey Newton's post
• Anil Dash's post (in response to someone agreeing with Leckie)
• Courtney Milan's post about the "card catalog effect"
• The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan with Quentin Fiore
• "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" by Emily W. Bender and Timnit Gebru

JOIN ME FOR SUMMER SEMINAR!

Summer Seminar is an intellectual oasis for creative thinkers and curious adventurers.

It combines speculative fiction, big questions, and practical application. For Summer 2025, we’re reading Sofia Samatar’s critically acclaimed novella The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain.

We’ll pair it with adventures in systems thinking and cultural analysis. And we’ll apply what we discover by reflecting on the systems we create and encounter in our own lives and work.

Summer Seminar is designed to fit into any schedule and explores critical thinking skills you can apply to any goal or challenge.

To learn more, visit whatworks.fyi/summer

"I have so many thoughts and not enough time to think them," I recently blurted out to my husband. For me, "thinking thoughts" means scribbling notes or writing messy paragraphs about whatever is on my mind. Of course, no one wants to read my scribbles or suffer through my unrefined musings. So once I've spent some time thinking thoughts, I have to figure out how to organize them. To structure them. To narrate them.

That's what today's episode is all about. Whether or not you're a writer, content creator, or other media maker, I know that thinking thoughts and figuring out how to share them is important to you—and essential to your work.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han
• Related: "Temporal Bandwidth" by Tara McMullin (EP 489)
• Related: "An Ode to Exceedingly Complex Systems" by Tara McMullin (EP 480)

NEW: The Return of Summer Seminar

Summer Seminar is an intellectual oasis for creative thinkers and curious adventurers.

It combines speculative fiction, big questions, and practical application. For Summer 2025, we’re reading Sofia Samatar’s critically acclaimed novella The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain.

We’ll pair it with adventures in systems thinking and cultural analysis. And we’ll apply what we discover by reflecting on the systems we create and encounter in our own lives and work.

Summer Seminar is designed to fit into any schedule and explores critical thinking skills you can apply to any goal or challenge.

To learn more, visit whatworks.fyi/summer

(Today's episode is a significant revision of a piece I previously wrote for premium subscribers in April 2024.)

• (00:00) - EP 494: How Structure Transforms Ideas

"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGee

I have a theory that you can measure the decline of any social media platform by the time it takes for its feed to become a firehose of unsolicited advice. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all sludge piles of advice now, but it took them years to devolve. TikTok took maybe 18 months. Substack Notes? Like 3 months. Threads? Instant.

Most of us (I think) can agree that the vapid posturing that occurs through posting advice on social media makes a platform less enjoyable. I don't open one of these apps in the hopes that I'll learn the one weird trick that can turn my frown upside down or give me six-pack abs. What we once loved about these platforms is how people shared their everyday descriptions of life, love, family, and curiosity. But much of that mutual exchange of experience has been ceded to the commercial interest of advice.

After all, we love advice. We also hate advice. We love it when someone can tell us what we should do next. And we also hate being told what we should do next. So what gives? Today, a description of why that is. But first, things are going to get awkward.

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this episode.
• Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias
• "Signs of social awkwardness and 15 ways to overcome it" via BetterUp
• Self-Help, Inc by Micki McGee
• Self-Help, LLC - a special What Works series exploring the business and culture of self-help

• (00:00) - EP 493: Why We Just Can't Quit Advice Culture

Intractable challenges are often the result of a lack of imagination. That is, our solutions are constrained by existing systems and structures that likely created the problem in the first place. To dream up novel solutions that allow us to realize higher values, we need to build structures that enable and extend our imaginations.

And sure, I'm talking about macroeconomic, climate, and political challenges.

But I'm also talking about our day-to-day work and family lives.

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this episode.
• "The WPA Federal Music Project in New Mexico" by Charles Cutter
• "The New Mexico Federal Music Project: Embodying the Regional Spirit of Roosevelt's New Deal" by Audra Bellmore and Amy S. Jackson
• Professor YouYoung Kang speaks about the Federal Music Project at Scripps College (YouTube)
• "Transcript: Mark Zuckerberg Announces Major Changes to Meta's Content Moderation Policies and Operations" by Justin Hendrix, TechPolicy.Press
• "Values Aren't Chains; They Are Wings" by Tara McMullin

Find more episodes and essays at whatworks.fyi.

Many of us (most?) have an inner voice that loves to remind us that "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean" or that "Coffee is for closers." We nag ourselves about being more productive, working more efficiently, or hustling for more money. Even if we value rest, care, and comfort, that voice can be hard to ignore.

Well, meet your Tiny Capitalist. Or rather, Tiny Capitalists: the Tiny Puritan, Tiny Manager, and Tiny Entrepreneur. Understanding the role they play helps us make better decisions about how we navigate the systems we exist in.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode
• "Is There a Tiny Puritan Living In Your Head? Tell Him to Get Lost." by Joy Marie Clarkson
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
• The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
• "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards
• Clips from The Office, Severance, Office Space, Parks and Recreation

• (00:00) - Why Your Inner Critic Sounds Like a Bad Boss

Standardization is one of those ideas that, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a mental model that can explain, at least in part, many of our social, political, and personal challenges. Whether it's the clothes we wear, the language we use, the dates we go on, or the people we vote for, our choices are often unknowingly constrained by standardization.

In this episode, an update of an essay I originally released for premium subscribers back in November 2023, I explore the role that standardization has played in our economic development, our relationships, and even our identities.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode
• "Butt Stuff" on RadioLab
• Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
• "Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith, The New York Review
• "The Bizarre History of Women's Clothing Sizes" by Laura Stampler, Time

• (00:00) - EP 490: Standardize This

This episode is about the long term—the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our "temporal bandwidth" widens. How we perceive time and our ability to do what's meaningful to us in time does have to be constrained by the urgency of now. There are ways to feel more grounded and create more possibilities at the same time.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
• On Freedom by Timothy Snyder
• Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs
• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
• "Practicing the Future" by Tara McMullin
• "Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Stuff" by Tara McMullin
• "Busyness Decoded" by Tara McMullin

Find the What Works archives and subscribe to the newsletter at whatworks.fyi.

• (00:00) - Time Flies