The art of starting over; or, the return of the shameless enthusiast
I've never taken this much time off in my adult life. Here's some of what I've been up to.
Ed. note: I impatiently wrote and am posting this here, but I would love to leave Substack — please send any recommendations.
It’s a sunny Saturday here in Los Angeles and I feel words coming back into reach. I’ve been writing — wildly different kinds of fumbles in the dark toward ideas new and old — but it’s been slow, felt superficial at times. I’ve taken on one massive assignment that’s as good a kickstart as any while mostly insisting I’m doing no work at all. Today the wires crackle.
I have been spending more time of late on LinkedIn, which is — sorry, it’s absolutely fucking terrible. There are few (if any?) UX options for how to limit or curate my own main feed, which means that I’m stuck reading self-important corporate updates or Deep Thoughts from not just my own second- and third-degree contacts but those liked or commented on by people I may or may not actually remember ever having met or worked with. It’s worse than Facebook, and I only still have a Facebook because I occasionally found it a good place to either recruit for new hires or to confirm whether someone I once knew is now dead or divorced or just deleted their profile because they work at the Pentagon.
And yet the pressure on LinkedIn is to constantly enlarge your network, increase your interactions, establish your brand. (Not going down that particular rabbithole, don’t worry. Of course you and I have brands. And also, speaking for myself here as a person who has made a lot of money for other brands, of course we should also be the biggest broadcasters of our own.) I have had a few unexpected reconnections that have almost made the rest of that slog more like an anthropological field trip than anything else, but I’m so weary and wary of how much time I’d have to put in there/here to make the experience worthwhile.
For years I have tried to preach to my own staffs and interview candidates and anyone else who asked me about “networking” that getting the actually valuable endorsement for a job you want has literally nothing to do with who you meet at some happy hour and everything to do with working hard now and being a person who — even for those from drastically different departments or companies, many years down the road — at least foggily remembers you as “worth saying a good thing about” rather than “oh god no I wouldn’t want to work with them.” For better or worse — I am despite current circumstances actually quite sure it’s the former — I am a person who is often remembered as brilliant, exceptionally hard-working, and — or “but,” depending I suppose on your perspective — one who doesn’t suffer fools. I think I am more diplomatic and constructive than the first time I had a boss tell me that in a performance review (I said “thank you?”), and if instead you start by telling me, “we have to solve this problem,” I will go to the end of the earth trying to figure out how we can do so together. But — and — I am too fucking old and too good at what I’m best at to think learning to suffer fools is either a good idea for me or the marketplace. Thank you.
I know this isn’t how you’re supposed to talk about your career on LinkedIn. But I’m a person who’s been writing about myself and my feelings on the internet where anyone who can google can read about it since the 1990s, and it is how I move myself through any major life transition with my head held high and my sense of humor relatively intact. I’m no shit-poster — I have never deliberately started a twitter war in my life, and in general back quickly away when I can see it heading in that direction. I abhor debating for the sake of it. But I believe deeply that telling the truth — about myself first and foremost — is how we free ourselves from other people’s diminished expectations. So here’s what’s been going on with me.
I wasn’t brave or rich enough to voluntarily join the Big Quit, the Great Resignation, the fuck-around-and-find-out trend of the moment that has seen millions of workers, all allegedly lucky just to be employed, walk away from any number of less than ideal situations rather than simply show up for more of the same. In the last 15 years I’ve had a series of alleged dream jobs that were absolutely, incandescently, swooningly everything I’d spent my career working towards. And they were. Sometimes. In some ways. For some values of “dream” and “job.”
Everyone has things they like and things they loathe about a job — that’s so commonplace and should be normalized that I would include a question asking employees for both as part of regular check-ins or reviews. If you could never do one part of this role again, what would it be? No promises, of course, but I wanted to know how to help move them away from that if possible.
I’m a great boss, I think, even when I’m plagued by the fear that I’m not at all. (I’ve been told merely making that mental inquiry puts me in at least above-average territory.) I’m a great strategist, and producer, and editor, and writer, and passionate cheerleader for my teams and projects.
But it’s of course easier to keep doing the same, even bigger and bigger versions of same, than it is to ask if it’s what you really want. And then act accordingly.
So instead of recusing myself from an almost absurdly glossy, celebrity-packed trolley problem, somehow managing to jump off the train before squarely finding myself in the midst of a tragically typical mid-life crisis, mid-career burnout, I kept going. I was so proud of so much I was doing, and so cripplingly baffled by the parts that weren’t enough.
In the midst of the most unstable combination of unstable industries — media publishing and the entertainment industry, all of which are fundamentally and inextricably linked to much more macroeconomics of advertising and user behavior and market supply and demand, during a pandemic no less — I had somehow up until last month managed to escape being the casualty of yet another acquisition or absorption or pivot.
First order of unemployed business — a straightforward and belated gift for having been plucked off that trolley track on someone else’s timetable, in the form of some time off. A meaningful amount of time. I’d never taken more than two consecutive weeks off in my adult life, not counting a third when recovering from surgery, which should not count. Staring down the calendar from mid-February was a neatly time-boxed experiment, or so I would have said in a meeting with executives if I needed to appeal for funding. (I don’t! All mine to figure out now.) My wife was graduating from culinary school at the end of March, and we’d already planned to spend the first half of April in Mexico City, where my brother is teaching this semester.
So while I have had a number of long lunches and a handful of half-serious conversations about what’s next — I’m genuinely thrilled to hear anyone else’s idea of what that should be for me! — I have mostly been doing not much. Catching up with friends that because of aforementioned career compulsiveness and COVID I haven’t had much time with in a couple-few years. Lounging around. Reading books. Watching tv. Staring soulfully into my dog’s eyes. Hanging out with my wife. If you’d asked me six months ago how long I would be able to sustain such an unambitious schedule I would have laughed in your face and assumed we both knew the answer was not fucking long, but actually it turns out not working is also amazing.
As I am not independently wealthy, the limit of not-working I can do in future years is subject to any number of factors, including the existing climate crisis, possibility of an imminent world war, the exponential attacks on my personhood and that of my queer/trans and BIPOC family and friends… Those actually present a fairly compelling argument against also not jumping back into the rat race but rather extending this period of experimental self-assessment and contemplation as long as reasonably possible. In the immediate future, I think that probably looks like more travel, more writing for myself and perhaps also for others, and probably some other work that can be done more flexibly and for those who actually will pay quite a bit for my opinion and inability to suffer fools.
What I am really missing right now is how for most of the last couple decades, whether obvious or not, my career and my most common love language largely overlapped: my enthusiasm for great entertainment, where great might equal good and/or enjoyable, and my ability to tell lots of other people why they could/would/should love something that much, too. Sometimes this meant I interviewed actors or singers and asked every question I knew the die-hard fans wanted answers to. Sometimes it was the power of being the guiding hand behind a brand — greenlighting a big story, a video series, a cover package. This was never so much about criticism, per se, an art unto itself that I much admire and into which I’ll happily wade. Really it was the feminine* (read: fandom) urge to use a lot of exclamation points until other people try the same thing you are so you can talk about it together.
This passion play both predates and will obviously outlast any specific job I have. My tombstone is going to say She Died On That Hill (also have you watched The Americans?). My business cards from back in my last freelancing days — we’re talking about the mid-2000s, people — identified me as a writer, producer and shameless enthusiast. So as I challenge myself to get back on a regular horse of newsletter memoir-ish writing (what we used to call…blogging), I’m also determined to carve out at least one regular feature to keep doing just what I always have, only now branded.
THE ENTHUSIAST*
*okay, maybe more of a branding-in-progress. The Enthusiast, a quick google search today showed, is also: a digital magazine about the Harley-Davidson brand. It’s the common name for Enneagram Type 7s. It’s a discontinued NYT franchise about books. It’s probably not worth paying a lot of money to a shitty company like GoDaddy for a related domain so maybe once I find a new newsletter host I’ll just subdomain there.
Some things I hope you might enjoy as much as I did:
MOVIES:
Everything Everywhere All At Once: I have now seen this modern mindfuck of a masterpiece twice and am maybe less good at articulating what’s so great about it than I was after the first time, when I described it as kind of The Matrix meets Palm Springs. Michelle motherfucking Yeoh can do, quite literally, everything. All at once. It’s out in a few cities this weekend and coming to more and I’m sure eventually somewhere you can stream but — there are so few truly weird indie movies let alone ones starring legends who tell a very specific story about a Chinese immigrant family (with a queer daughter) but also a very universal one about nihilism and depression and hope. Go if you feel safe, see it whenever you can at some point.
The Bourne movies: We watched one of these a night, all five in a row. Final ranking: 1st place: (obviously) The Bourne Identity, iconic classic more of an action film than a spy movie really and only ever felt dated by the Chemical/Dust Brothers-esque techno soundtrack. Otherwise still outstanding. 3-way tie for second: The Bourne Supremacy (the best spy movie of the bunch), The Bourne Ultimatum, and in a surprise to me though I saw it when it came out, 2012’s The Bourne Legacy with Jeremy Renner (recently redeemed by Hawkeye) and Rachel Weisz, which in any fair world would have had its own string of sequels. Absolute last, absolute worst: Jason Bourne.
SERIES aka TV:
The Night Manager and also The Little Drummer Girl, two excellent Le Carré adaptations I’d somehow missed but as I am waves vaguely writing some kind of spy thing with the other half of my brain finally went back and watched. BOTH OF THEM ARE SO GOOD.
The Night Manager made me apologetically take back any shade I may have sent in Tom Hiddleston’s direction about all those Bond rumors because while I still believe it should be Idris Elba’s to decline, my only other objection to the oh-so-swoony Hiddles as 007 is that it would perhaps be a step down from this outstanding adaptation. Also Olivia Colman!! Elizabeth Debicki!! This was a novel I had not read and I must admit it’s nowhere near as good as the show turned out – it’s too long, a bit too interior and also espiocratric, it’s a tad neater in current socio-politico climes and locations. And for making Colman’s character a (pregnant!) woman alone it gets my vote as solidly better than the book.
Little Drummer Girl is maybe my favorite Le Carré novel, a real testament to how to tell “both sides” of a war story, a very compelling argument for him mostly writing from women’s POV for a change, and the miniseries treatment works so well especially because Florence Pugh (!!) and Alexander Skarsgaard (!!!). Even Michael Shannon as an Israeli somehow works here.
BOOKS:
I know a lot of people who love to read and have really struggled to in pandemic times. That was definitely me for at least the first year. I wandered into some royal romances and back to some spy and mystery novels and then I rediscovered the childlike wonder for being completely immersed in book after book after book. I’ve read more already in 2022 than probably any year in the last decade. I’m saving for future newsletters some great new favorites that aren’t actually out yet, but here are a couple that are:
Fiona and Jane, by Jean Chen Ho, is technically a collection of inter-connected short stories but honestly that didn’t register until I looked up reviews after the fact — I read and enjoyed it as a novel, sometimes out of order, sometimes deeply nostalgic and sometimes bracingly brutal. Two Taiwanese-American best friends growing up in southern California — some teenage scenes reminded me of the also-excellent Genera+ion on HBO — and then growing apart, and then back together. I’ve been thinking about it for months.
I also really enjoyed The Verifiers, by Jane Pek, another fiction debut that is a pitch-perfect update of a Nancy Drew-esque amateur detective. Claudia works as a kind of consultant data analyst for obsessive Tinder-esque daters, and she puts all that profile stalking to questionably good use as she unravels an unexpected mystery and tries to balance her demanding (and disappointed) family. I hope there are more in this series, I hope they make a CW show about Claudia, I hope you read it.
Also: the LIBRARY is amazing. Went to do a little research this week and was reminded that there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, all neatly organized and lined up and just waiting to be borrowed. FOR FREE. And a solid shout-out to both The Last Bookstore (downtown LA) and Lost Books (Glendale/Montrose) for supplying used copies of the rest of the Le Carré I’ll be reading this year.
NEWSLETTER:
My dear friend Noreen Moustafa has started a wonderful newsletter you should be reading. Also you should know she has nothing to do with the two different moving violation tickets I got last September in Florence. She is innocent; I still have an international license to drive; and her essay about her dad has a section about driving in California that truly made me cry.
MUSIC:
I am listening to a lot of Elton John again lately waving vaguely again for reasons which has led me to the conclusion that his latest collection, The Lockdown Sessions, is absolutely useless as a collected album but has at least a half-dozen standout singles that would fit nicely into any Spotify random playlist. But just in case you haven’t seen him and Years & Years’ Olly Alexander sing Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin” at last year’s Brit Awards, please enjoy:
CELEBRITY:
Chris Pine, who also loves to read, and to confront the paps taking his photos, but who also makes it that much easier to know what exactly it is he’s reading.
His TBR, courtesy the text group that promptly had to rename itself accordingly: Tender is the Flesh, Los Angeles Standards, Lady Joker and the “Icelandic Dickens.”
Enthusiastically yours,
Shana
p.s. This will be the first year in a decade I have absolutely no official professional obligation to pay attention to the Oscars. Though I might. But here’s an essay I wrote in 2019 about how I learned to love movies at large scale again — thanks to the most boring possible experiment with drugs.