Thanks For All the Fish (End of Osmosis P3/3)

The following is part three of three parts in an email series in which I said goodbye to a list of subscribers from my “other life” as a marketing consultant

You’re still here! If you’re reading this, it means you’ve read over 3,700 of my words in the last 48 hours. Thank you, I guess. This is almost a form of torture. That’s why I welcome you to click here to unsubscribe since I’m shutting down this ConvertKit account. But if you’d like to read another couple thousand words of my thoughts based on my last eight months of absence and reflection, keep reading.

So a few weeks ago, I was digging up some old 2013 journal entries. At that time, I was on my last leg with MentorX, and he had me writing these super-long, super-thorough journal entries to him for accountability. This meant I was answering at least ten different questions for each and every client and project. Like I said, thorough. MentorX wanted to help me see all my blindspots (of which, I’m very aware, I still have many today). But the point of this story isn’t the thoroughness of these journal entries but how many fucking clients I had and projects I was doing at any one given time ten years ago.

In one entry, I had five ongoing projects spread out across three different clients. I was coaching five junior copywriters… separately. Not a group coaching, one-on-one private coaching. And, and… I was attempting to launch a publishing thing (the first attempt of multiple failed attempts). Looking at my schedule a decade ago, it occurred to me how inhumane it was to juggle so many things week-in, week-out. This gave me several insights, but the most important one is: I was blessed with an excess of energy and good health in my twenties and thirties. But that overabundance of energy was also a curse. Because I was juggling so many things, because I thought I could “do it all”, because I believed I was invincible… it was also the beginning of the end for me. Because by the end of 2013, I was absolutely burnt out. I was miserable, and I crashed. And from 2014-2017, I was in this “desert” where I hacked my career to do as little as possible so that I could pursue creative endeavors like filmmaking, fiction writing, podcasting, playing board games and TTRPGs, RPG design, painting miniatures, the latter few of which were basically hobbies I couldn’t afford when I was a child, and now in my mid-thirties, I was overcompensating for by buying it all up. It was, in a way, my first “midlife crisis”.

I think I’ve cycled into this again. 2018-2023 were years which I pushed really hard in my business. But even as early as 2022, I was beginning to see cracks in this constant pressure. This was the year that I started to explore creative pursuits again. I did improv, I wrote sketches, I did standup. The pandemic certainly didn’t help. It just put everyone on the anxiety train. Either you were completely out of work and freaking out about bills, or if you were in a luckier position like me, where you had more work and you couldn’t say no to it (because I mean, everyone else is suffering, so you should take on more work because you’re lucky enough to even have work). That was a wonderful vicious cycle to be in. So in the middle of the pandemic, I cofounded Plural Inc., we launched Osmosis, we built Plural Healthcare, we took on way too many copy clients and consulting gigs. I mean, who the fuck builds multiple startups in the most chaotic time of the last century anyway? We did. We just felt like we had to do more.

I think a lot of why this was happening was because most of the partners in Plural had just or were close to turning 40. Forty is an interesting age. They’ve done studies on this decade, this life-stage, and what they’ve found is that the forty-something slump is very real. The ages of 40-50 is interesting because you’re old enough to regret what you have or haven’t done in your life and you’re still young enough to do something about it. That’s why most businesses are started by people in their forties. It’s why midlife crises happen. It’s literally your “last chance” to push hard at something. Once you turn fifty, you’re well past the midpoint, and you start accepting things more. You recognize that you’ve “made your bed” and you’re OK with it. In fact, after 56, your “happiness curve” starts swinging upwards again regardless of your situation. (Mostly).

However – I think the pandemic accelerated, exacerbated, and catalyzed that 40-something slump. I’ve spoken to a lot of Osmosis readers who are in the same cohort as me (born 1975-1984) about this. They all agreed that the pandemic just made us all even more hyper-aware of what was going on in our lives.

But I’m writing all this as a roundabout way to get to another point. Over the last three years, I’ve read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks three times. I’ll probably read this book again. When I summarized it in Osmosis August of 2022, it was one of the most well-received issues of Osmosis I had ever written. I got replies from the most diverse range of readers, all saying how much it affected them. The one line summary of the book is: The average human lifespan is only 4000 weeks, it’s not a lot of time, and yet, in order to feel like we’re in control, we engage in multiple avoidant activities. (This, by the way, includes taking on so many projects, clients, and side hustles that you don’t give yourself any time to actually think things through.)

And what I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last eight months, what I’ve been experiencing in fact as I hyper-analyzed and dissected my own life was that… I have A LOT of avoidant activities. One of which was “hobbies-that-aren’t-actually-hobbies”. For the longest time, I’ve identified as a geek. I like my science fiction and fantasy, I play Dungeons & Dragons, I play snooty European designer board games, I read comics, I know my pop culture trivia. And I thought all these activities were taking up my time, and if I dropped them, I would free up more time.

But then something strange happened.

Here’s the deal: at the end of the day, what I really want, what I answered immediately to “Ian’s Question” without hesitation, what I’ve wanted since my early twenties is to be a published novelist. It’s a craft that requires energy, time, and lots of blood (as per Hemingway). But I kept putting it off. In my twenties, I made an excuse that I didn’t have enough “human experience” yet, so I wrote one novelette, submitted it, got rejected, and gave up. This was also the same time when I had just gotten married and was starting my family. In the mid-2010s when I tried again, I fell into the education trap, which is to say I read every fucking book on storytelling, took multiple courses on script-writing, etc. etc. but never really executed.

Writing fiction, like any craft, requires you to face the upsetting reality that you’re not very good at it and that you will suck at it for a long time until you get good at it and then, and then, even then… when you submit it to magazines and publishers, you will still face hundreds, even thousands of rejection notices before you get published. (Please don’t write me about self-publishing on Kindle, I do not want that path).

Anyway – last December, a Hugo-award winning author offered to mentor a small cohort of writers for three months. I applied. I got in. I was exhilarated. And I was like, OK, this is it. I’m 43, I’m going to make a serious go at this. In fact, I was telling people, this is my final attempt. I’m not going to give up this time. I’m also going to be smart about it this time. I’m going to balance my work so I don’t blow up my career and income like the last time I did this 2015-2017. I will find a way to keep my copy/consulting income at a good level while pursuing this dream that will probably never be worth anything financially. I’m going to write at least one fucking novel and get it published by a real publisher. That’s it. And in order to balance everything (the income, the time to write, my family)… I’m going to drop all my other hobbies. This is going to work.

And then – January rolls around and I’m fighting, I’m struggling to stay above water, to find time to write fiction. Wait. What? What the fuck is going on? I dropped all my stupid hobbies. Why isn’t this working? And that’s when I found out I had “hobbies-that-aren’t-actually-hobbies”.

Once I started to hyper-analyze everything, you know what I realized? I wasn’t really spending much (or any) time playing board games, TTRPGs, or whatever. Instead, what I was actually doing was spending all my “spare time” in-between meetings, in-between writing copy, in-between obligations… shopping for, ranking, collecting, reading about, and socializing about said hobbies. Put another way – I wasn’t doing hobbies so much as thinking about them in a non-committal way that ate up a lot of my mental bandwidth… but not actual time. It was pure escapism. It was a form of “control” as Burkeman would say. It was “I hate my work so much that I’ll shop for this hobby for five minutes here and there and pretend that I might have time to play all these games in some made-up distant future”. It was a drug to numb the misery I was going through. And that numbing works great to delay facing reality. When I look at my collection of these games, each and every one is staring back and saying “one day”, but I know that “one day” will probably never come because they already served their purpose. They numbed me for a brief while when I hunted for and bought them. It gave me a brief moment of feeling that I was in control of my future. This is something Burkeman talks about in depth in his book.

These “hobbies-that-aren’t-actually-hobbies” are, in many cases, like the “how to get rich” and other self-help books and courses that line the shelves of so many customers in my industry. They’re all escapist “one days” that in actuality, already did their job. They gave you a brief hit of dopamine. It made you feel like you made progress on your journey, when in fact, you haven’t done a single damn thing. They give you a false sense of control if only briefly. And if I had to tie all this back to what I’ve written in the last few days… it’s that I’m realizing that chasing “building an audience” with Osmosis has also been a two year journey of… “one day”. One day, I’ll monetize this and it will be great. But in actuality… as you read the last two days, I don’t really want to bleed for this. I did the bare minimum and that was enough of a dopamine hit to think “one day” it will be more. Truth is, I started Osmosis for the wrong reasons, in fact, vague and ambiguous gnomes-stealing-socks reasons. What I really should’ve done if I wanted a clear, direct path to monetizing a publishing business was do what every other biz-op guru does: attract a large crowd of “how to make money” folks and sell them stuff on “how to make money”… but I had an internal struggle against that. I could never bring myself to actually bleed for that.

So what do I actually want to bleed for? Given that I have income and business and family obligations? Given I only have 1754 weeks left out of 4000? What did I answer to “Ian’s Question” while I was flying over the Atlantic ocean to England last year? Write novels. That’s it. That’s all I ever really wanted since I was 25. This is something I’m willing to bleed for. And I think that’s really the biggest revelation I’ve struggled with over the last eight months. I kept holding on to Osmosis thinking I’ll come back to it. “One day”. And I kept re-jiggering the landing page. I fooled around with related websites like crashcopy.com. I kept thinking… “one day” I’ll also add a publishing arm to Plural.

But I now know I’m fooling myself. I’m just adding more “avoidant activities” to my plate. I’m leaving my options open and keeping doors open when really, I know I’ll never want to bleed for a guru-driven-slash-creator business. I just don’t have it in me. A lot of what I’ve been doing over the last eight months is face reality in a sober fashion. And shutting down this email list is one of those difficult but sensible steps I’m taking.

Now, if you’ve read this far, it probably means you like my writing enough that you’d like to see where I go next. I have set up a separate email list for my fiction writing. It is under my literary pen name: Jinn Zhong. You can subscribe to that list here You won’t get many updates from me, I am focused on actually doing the craft this time around. I am doing my best to avoid “circling” it like my “hobbies-that-aren’t-actually-hobbies”. But whenever I make any progress, like finishing a story, getting a rejection, or talking to a publisher, you’ll be informed. PLEASE NOTE: This ConvertKit account will shut down. If you actually want to hear from me, you will need to subscribe to that new list. I’m not transferring the list over.

If you’ve read this far, I’m also going to assume you’ve been a fan of Osmosis. I want to thank you for joining me on this two-year experiment in “building an audience”. I hope you’ve gotten tons of value from my newsletter over the last few years.

Finally, some of you may have never gotten the chance to read Osmosis #0070, the issue where I summarized Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. I want you to know that I’ve preserved that one issue on my fiction site here.

Thank you again. Farewell to those of you who have no interest in my fiction writing. And for those following me, I look forward to my stories making you cry, infuriating you, making your heart pound, making you feel all the emotions.