It’s Sunday morning in winter so naturally I am alone. The Eldest teaches skiing and The Youngest still takes Snowboarding lessons which leaves me in the house my myself. Mr. Tucker is up-and-at-‘em at O’dark early to get The Eldest to her bus and then has a brief respite before dragging The Youngest up to a mountain for her lesson. It’s a super busy time of year but if you don’t keep yourself busy and active, you will just languish in the dark and cold.
The condo and work
I remembered recently that I hadn’t really updated since July’s big drama. The TL;DR of it all is: we did lower the interest rate and we managed to rent out the condo to a lovely young couple. So that is going well at least. Rest assured we are making zero profit from this & I know that makes me shitty at being a landlord but I am ok with that. Mr. Tucker continues to be employed by the same company and his workload is more manageable than he originally thought. Because they cut so deep though, he did toss in his hat to do some on call for another colleague who was managing on her own 24/7. Thankfully, there are rarely after hours issues that need to be actioned.
Mr. Tucker has made the decision to just stay put for the foreseeable future and let the chips fall where they may. Part of it is sheer curiosity of what will happen in 2025 and part of it is that work is more manageable than he originally thought it would be when it all went down last July. Some of the people who were laid off have discovered that a lot of tech work – especially work-from-home tech work – has dried up and pays a lot less than it did previously. He realizes that he has it good with his well-paying WFH gig and a job he is great at, so he will ride it out until the bitter end.
Also, the future all seems so uncertain right now (does it ever feel certain?) and for context, I am writing this a week after Trump’s inauguration, and he is currently scatter gunning commentary and threatening takeovers and tariffs all over the place. I suspect that at some point Mr. Tucker’s job will get caught up in the crossfire as we live in Canada and his company is in the US. There are already rumblings about profitability and if another layer of complications comes down the pipe, we may see them just throw in the towel on international hires.
Personal Renaissance (formerly known as the mid-life crisis)
Last year when I had my hysterectomy I had to have a blood transfusion. After years and years of being severely anemic, a transfusion was like being on uppers for the first time! Despite the fact I was recovering from an intense abdominal surgery that went a bit sideways, I had a lot more energy than I had experienced in a decade. It was incredible! Then, in the summer, we quit drinking alcohol and my quality of life increased dramatically. Gone were the lethargic days, heartburn and fuzzy-headedness.
Given these things, I decided to change up my meds at the end of Rocktober and WOWEE I am not kidding when I say it changed my life. I suddenly had a lot more energy, my PLS symptoms got better and I wanted to do more things for myself such as work out and have a decent skin care routine. So I did!
I learned how to make my skin feel and look better with budget products (thank you to the budget videos by Dr. Idress!). I signed myself back up for physiotherapy and massage[1] in an attempt to build strength and decrease spasticity and so far it is working really well. I also started spending a little extra money on getting my hair and nails done professionally. For someone who has NEVER really spent much money on beauty products it has been a super large leap for me to actually care about those things[2] ! So far I have zero regrets: I look better, I feel better and I am generally more confident and feel less frumpy.
We have added a few extras back into our budget and it feels good to splurge a bit more. We don’t eat out at all but instead have a lovely fancy dinner once every couple of months. It’s really worked out in terms of value because there is a lot of space around these splurgy events so they stand out and are truly enjoyed.
I also am currently taking an art class through the city. It reaffirms that I am definitely not an artist but it’s been a great, soothing way to spend Mondays during the indoor months. It’s lovely to be in a room of folks all similarly concentrated on their small art projects and most of them on my level: enjoying the process but aren’t lying to themselves about their artistic abilities. I think doing things is fun even when you aren’t good at them. Maybe even ESPECIALLY if you aren’t good at them because the pressure to perform is off.
Budgety 2025
I mentioned previously that we had met all of our financial goals. The house is paid off. We have a solid income via my disability to support our family (and life insurance should the worst happen). Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts are definitely coasting – and by that I mean that when my disability income replacement ends in 16 years, it will have increased enough via compound interest to support a pretty darn good lifestyle when combined with CPP/OAS – even if we never put another cent in.
Still, our cash savings is lower than I’d like it to be given that should Mr. Tucker lose his job AND we lose our renters, it would just kill our budget. So this year is about getting those cash reserves up in 2025 so that we can carry everything we need to in an emergency. I think we will be laser focused on getting cash into our TFSAs this year.
Another win for us is that we have fully funded The Eldest’s RESP! By that I mean, we have caught up to the point where we no longer get the 20% matching (up to $7200) from the feds. So now we only have 2025-2026 to get the full matching for The Youngest.
RDSP contributions are also done. The Disability Savings Program is so strange in the fact that you can only get grant matching until December 31st of the year you turn 49. Whomp whomp: I turned 49 in December. I can’t be mad at the 100% return on the RDSP grant though.
This brings me to another finale in our childrearing years: now that The Eldest is 16, the last big thing we will pay for is her driving classes and her driver’s license. I am signing up for her classes this week so that she can take her G2 exit exam as soon as possible & then next year she can get her full G. Combined with the money we have invested to help her get her jobs (ski instructor in winter, wading pool attendant in the summer), her driver’s license, and money for education, she is all ready to be an adult out in the world! Two more years and her sister will follow suit!
This is The Youngest’s last year of snowboarding lessons and next year she will take her snowboarding instructor course. This summer will be her last year of sailing lessons where she will hopefully be able to get her CanSail 4. We will get her CPR/SFA and her motorboat license and hope that next year she can come back to be a sailing camp instructor. The we will get her driving lessons and pay for her license and she is off as well!
It is crazy to think that we are almost out of summer camps and kid activities. It’s been a long and expensive road but I truly believe it is worth it. I have zero regrets about having kids and the expense of children generally. My kids are amazing and while I recognize that parenting isn’t for everyone, it has definitely been a worthwhile wonderful adventure for us and I genuinely like my children as people[3].
You have to kick at the darkness…
I have been trying not to mainline news but the news is still mainlining me. Even Youtube feels like a game of whack-a-mole and chicken all at the same time. I click “not interested” and like a Hydra, a new political video pops up in its place. It seems that everywhere I go it’s just one crappy headline after another. The fact that we are in the coldest and darkest days here in Canada definitely doesn’t help. Then of course, tax season is coming down the pipe so it is almost time to round up all of our paperwork for that. Until then, we are trying to stuff our tax-advantaged accounts as much as possible to reduce our taxable income (because I *always* owe because they don’t tax CPP-D at the source).
But there are still glimmers of light! Since divesting from social media many friends have reached out via Signal, email or text. The evenings have been spent sitting in front of the fireplace with tea and books. Mr. Tucker and I start our days with coffee in the dining room where we have fresh flowers to remind us that spring does eventually come (it never feels like that in January and February). I even paid our veggie CSA this week, so that is also a harbinger of a new year. In the mornings, we light a beeswax candle and start our days softly chatting instead of picking up our phones. Mr. Tucker has even spent some of his down time picking oil painting back up again.
I guess that is just it, when it comes down to it: you have to just keep focusing on the little joys day-to-day & trudging forward with your goals and dreams.
[1] Our benefits partially cover some of these expenses
[2] I know some people will feel that vain but so be it: we all have different splurges and that’s ok
[3] So far! I hope it stays that way!
I am reading Dataclysm. Although I’m only in the Intro, I suspect that in the 11 years since its been written, much has changed and his optimism was misguided.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
I ordered bi-weekly flower delivery from a local florist. Before it let me check out I *had* to put something in the notes section so I flippantly wrote the above. I had no idea they’d actually hand write a card! 🤦♀️
Mr. Tucker has watched a Youtube channel called Punk Rock MBA periodically for a few years now. I watched a few videos myself but since it really isn’t music I dig, I never subscribed. In September 2024, he announced that he was leaving, posted one last video and then grabbed his toys and went home.
Ok, sure. That’s fair. Shit gets old. He’s onto other things now.
But when Mr. Tucker went to read the comments on the last video, he discovered some very, very, angry people. I guess an interview with the Punk Rock MBA guy dropped, gained traction and pissed a LOT of people off. This is the interview:
The TL;DR of it all is: he was only in it for the money. He was good at marketing, figured out what drew people in to watch, like and subscribe to his channel and when he met his financial goals, he peaced out. Some people were very understandably pissed off.
Although I’ve never been emotionally invested in his content, I can understand why people are. The key here is that our entire cultural communities are based on parasocial relationships. We get attached to communities and invested in like-minded people in a way that we feel some kind of ownership over them. So when they do things we find shocking, we feel angry and betrayed. Social media has ramped the problems with parasocial relationships up to 11.
Thanks to social media, the line that has historically been drawn between famous people and the Hoi Polloi has been deep: rarely did you know something about your favourite stars outside of magazines and tv. You never had access to people whose art you enjoyed like you do today online. There was this firewall of gatekeepers who fed us scraps of information via their content. But now everyone creates content and there is no longer that barrier.
Of course, there have always been fans who have gone too far. Keanu Reeves had his house broken into by a fan and John Lennon was murdered by a fan, to name some high profile examples. But these were before the internet had an absolute chokehold on interactions between fans and high profile people. In fact, with the advent of social media it has become a way to GET famous if you manage to get a viral post or two off the ground.
Chappell Roan enters the chat
Chappell Roan is a very interesting case. She started by playing small gigs and trying to leverage social media to gain traction for her music – like many artists who market their talents. But unlike 99.9% of artists, she had LARGEST leap to fame that I think anyone has ever had in such a short time. This does not mean she appeared out of nowhere – she was opening for Vance Joy 7 years ago and has been trying to get her music out there for a long time. But this chart has made the rounds and it is important to note just how huge she got in less than a year.
I feel like this essay by Eliza McLamb sums up a lot of it (found via Bernstein’s podcast, which is worth the watch: A Bit Fruity). What do you do with a stratospheric rise to fame? How do you manage it psychologically? In this day and age, the retort is always, “But this is what you asked for. It’s the price of fame.” But people are stalking her family at work, they’re stalking her and apparently she has even been sexually assaulted. I think we all need to figure out where the line is and unfortunately because some people are unable to even see that there is a line, the line must be very clear. Even then, as Eliza mentions in the podcast, Chappell Roan asking this of people is, “like trying to hold back the ocean” but she also says that Roan’s coming out and setting this boundary may carve a path for other artists in the future to also set boundaries for their own sanity.
The lines get blurry quickly from “big gay sleepover party” to “this is just my job” when your fanbase grows by millions and millions of people so quickly. Naturally, the parasocial relationship that drew people into her fanbase now feels like a betrayal when they learn that CR is not their friend and that the big hug they thought they were getting is now just an entertainment machine.
It’s Britney, bitch
We collectively have gone through a huge reckoning with the price of fame, most recently with the Britney Spears conservatorship. But I don’t think we have learned our lesson.
The entire world drove her insane, then we blamed her for what we did for her. The found of TMZ, Harvey Levin famously said, “Britney is gold. She is crack to our readers. Her life is a complete train-wreck, and I thank God for her every day.” This was a very normal thing to say in the Noughties but now it feels just gross, knowing what we know now. Heck, I didn’t even pay attention to her, or to magazines or tv and media in that decade and I still feel gross about being a part of the culture machine that abused her, allowed her children to be taken away by her lying ex-husband, forced birth control on her and then led to her indentured servitude where she was forced to generate money for her abusive family. If you have covid memory loss or live under a rock, Wikipedia has a great synopsis of this funhouse of horrors.
When all this came out we were horrified. #FreeBritney indeed. Freed she was from her conservatorship but fans still regularly call authorities to do wellness checks on her. I remember once I was served up a video of her dancing with a knife (her videos are mostly of her dancing!) and people were freaking out – and it was in the ramp up to Halloween! It was clearly meant to be seasonally-themed! But it’s yet another X against parasociality in the age of concern trolling. We get to directly affect her life by calling the cops to do a wellness check instead of TMZ being the intermediary of trauma…oh goody?
Blurred lines
Social media has commodified authenticity and I think for a long time there was sincerity there but it couldn’t stay that way when there was money to be made. Like the optimism in the 90s that the internet would be the great equalizer, I think people believed social media would do that as well, especially with art. Artists could build fanbases[1], get their art or music out to a worldwide audience and make a viable go at becoming somewhat famous but without the abusive intermediaries from before. I truly think it started to go downhill when these sites moved from chronological to algorithmic-based feeds. But not even the drama of the Cambridge Analytica scandal made people angry enough to leave.
But like frogs in the proverbial pot that is set to boil, these platforms demanded more and more. More reels/short videos, a more robust posting schedule, more engagement in the comments and DMs. The algorithm favours divisive posts and so the posts became more divisive. We were constantly feeding the beast and the beast devoured our time and energy but gave us less and less in return. People were complaining about shadow bans and other shady practices. Artists started complaining that they couldn’t do art and also keep up with the intense posting schedules that these platforms demanded of them just so that they would have their content served up to …the people who signed up for, and who actually want to see, their content. It boggles from a human point of view but not from an economic one: these platforms need you to keep churning out more and more free content for them so they can keep eyeballs on their apps and the advertising dollars keep rolling in. So if you aren’t creating content for them, they’re going to throttle what content you do share. So if the authentic folks are throwing in the towel, who is left?
Nature abhors a vacuum
Grifters. Grifters like PRM.
These folks peddle an air of authenticity and meanwhile clean up in the background on topics they just don’t give a flying fuck about. Humans are designed to trust and for a long time the internet sold us this narrative that you could do what you love AND be rewarded for it. So we just trusted that the creators who made videos about the things we loved, ALSO loved those things. We craved community and like-minded people but what we got was clever marketers who are sussing out what the people want and giving it to them.
But should we be mad at PRM? Afterall, we got the entertainment we were promised. He released finely tweaked videos devoid of opinion and substance so that we could imprint whatever feelings or beliefs we wanted to onto them. You have to admire the marketing skill, to be honest.
But conversely, he knew exactly what he was capitalizing on: people feeling a parasocial connection to a creator that they could relate to. An expert who loved the same music as they did and someone who felt comforting to watch. There is a reason that he wasn’t up front about his strategy from the get-go: he knew that people weren’t just looking for videos, they were looking for a community.
It’s fundamentally a pig butchering scam but cast with a wider net and no victims except the attention and time you spent watching the ads on his videos. Oh, and the betrayal some people feel for trusting.
The same need for community that Chappell Roan and PRM leveraged had two completely different outcomes: one flew too close to the sun like Icarus and got burned, and the other little piggy went “wee, wee, wee all the way home.”
Small f famous
Of course, between BIG B Britney and BIG C Chappell & me (not famous at all) is myriad of somewhat famous people who live a life that Eliza McLamb (in her essay linked above) calls, “cross the street famous.” The folks who can mostly go about their daily lives but who have 50K-2M followers on a variety of platforms. They can do their own groceries or go to a restaurant but at a film or music festival they’d probably get swarmed. I feel like these folks are in a more precarious situation in terms of stalkers or fan demands: they can survive on their art, but they can’t really afford a security detail.
I see a lot of these in-between folks bowing out of having an online presence for the most part. They’re still posting shows and events but I feel like if they don’t have to be a part of the social media circus, they won’t be. There used to be more personal twitter accounts, tumblr blogs and Instagram accounts that had behind-the-scene content that fans loved. But a lot of it has dried up in recent years and I think that is because some fans are so unhinged that it feels invasive. Parasociality has made the comments get weirder and weirder and I don’t blame folks for retreating from posting as fans (and haters) believe that they should be able to barf up the most horrible takes for the world to see.
A great example in that category of famous-but-can-probably-still-do-groceries I would put a band like Motionless in White[2]. A pretty solid following, a bunch of albums, tons of years of grinding/touring & they’ve built a pretty loyal fan base. A band in that category of folks who are big in their own genre but unheard of by most people on the outside.
This (shaky, poor quality but yet excellent) interview highlights that when you are small f famous, you still reach a point where you get all of the craziness of fame but without the benefits of big F fame. Of course, I will point out that Chappell Roan is a petite woman and Chris Motionless is a very tall man but this nutter called HIS MOM. She found their drummer’s phone number and even when confronted did NOT STOP. I have no idea how or if this situation was resolved but the absolute audacity of this person. Worse, the realization that you are dealing with someone who may not even have the capacity to understand is a mindfuck, too: what do you do with someone who doesn’t even comprehend that their behaviour is scary AF? It’s a funny story that makes for great interview fodder but there is darkness, too:
Look, I want to say for the record that I couldn’t really tell you what most of the musicians I enjoy look like out in the world, and I don’t follow them on social media. This is not some edgy flex, I am certainly not cooler than thou (and may I remind you that I trip over my own feet with alarming regularity?) I just don’t know them & I probably don’t want to. While I love music (what kind of psycho does not?) I have just learned that the phrase “never meet your idols” is just sound advice[3]. I would rather not care to learn that people whose music/movies/books I relate to are just unpleasant people, generally, let alone discover that they are absolute monsters[4]. But I get that some people make artists and scenes their entire personalities and I get why that happens: humans need community and for a lot of people that isn’t available to them in the meat space.
I know people think CR is a monster for boosting her career via social media, encouraging parasociality and then turning around and telling people to stop talking to her. But it is absolutely not the same when you have 20 thousand followers vs. millions. To put it into context, she has 6M people following her on instagram alone. That means that if she spent 1 minute with each of them, it would take her 4166 days or 11.41 years to greet fans. Who has that kind of time?
Paywall attention to the man behind the curtain
Clearly, boundaries are in order. But there are no clear boundaries when in the west we’ve watched Princess Diana get run off the road & killed in a car accident while being chased by Paparazzi. The laws are also still in flux in terms of rights to privacy. (But some scholars are arguing for better definitions)
In the CR debate, many people agreed with her in principal but disagreed that she shouldn’t expect people to not recognize her in public and talk to her. Like most things in the past 20 years, the internet has made things incredibly murky and having a social media presence where you’ve leveraged people’s connection to you, it seems very difficult to walk it back now that you’ve achieved superstardom. I think in CR’s case she had probably slogged it out in the trenches for a long time believing she may only reach small f famous so she was vastly unprepared for the Fame Slingshot ride to launch her straight into the stratosphere. It’s clear in her video that she is exhausted and angry that her life & her family to come under siege by rabid fans and unfortunately, the normal fans get swept up into the fray as well. I think that is where the disconnect is: normal people feel they shouldn’t be punished for the behaviours of a few bonkers folks but unfortunately: #yesallfans.
We have come to expect 24-7 entertainment for free, or for very little (being served up ads). We feel incredibly entitled to having everything from videos, music and art on demand when we want it (and we want it now!). So it’s not surprising that people feel entitled to creep into the DMs of, or demand hugs from, their favourite artists. It’s the culture we’ve created. It’s the kind of culture where clever marketers like PRM win, and art loses.
Since I have already simped for capitalism by having a blog marginally related to personal finance, I don’t think it will shock anyone to see that I think the only solution to this issue is: make people pay up.
I know it seems crass to reduce a fanbase to a monetary transaction, but I think it is the only fair way to manage. There are not enough hours in the day to answer every DM, meet every fan, and take every selfie with fans outside the venue. I am seeing more and more bands do fan meet-and-greets (and those usually come with other perks as well) or panels/talks at festivals and I’m not mad about it. I think KISS started it, ComicCons popularized it, and many bands are now doing it as well[5]. It always amazes me when people criticize these sorts of events for being a money grab but I ask these people: do you work for free? Yeah, probably not. A tour is work. I guarantee you when you are at work dreaming of all of the other things you could be doing, bands are also doing that except they don’t get to go home to their families after. I have many friends who love their jobs & even some who get amazing perks like travel and fine dining but even they wouldn’t do it for free.
You can love what you do. You can appreciate your fanbase. You can also recognize that there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy you have to give. It’s normal to admit that you are human and have human limits. Fans who say shit like this DM Eliza McLamb posted overstate their contribution:
You got what you paid for: a concert. What you are asking for: free overtime and emotional labour.
“You are not allowed to yell at me about this unless you pay me. That is the new rule.”
You bet I hit that subscribe button so fast!
What a delight it was to open BlueSky tonight and see this amazing exchange. I, myself, have used the line, “I don’t take homework assignments from strangers” whenever some Tech Bro wanted to have a Bad Faith argument on social media but I think this is way more effective.
Many more creators are putting their content either on Nebula, or in Patreon (and others) because of the penchant for trolls to do the most unhinged things from swatting to en masse reporting of videos, triggering demonetization. It hasn’t solved 100% of the issue – Contrapoints had to repost a video to their Patreon after a mass effort took down her unlisted GamerGate video. Fill your boots, I guess. She got it back up AND she has your $5. Win/win in the end, I suppose.
Caveat emptor
I don’t have a solution for “bad” actors like PRM, however. Trying to police authenticity online is trying to get grampa to stop talking to scammers on his landline. Grifters aren’t playing by the same rules. But if we go into it thinking that every creator is like a boy band: a fictional creation of a clever PR person, it should be ok. The Sex Pistols were, in fact, a clever creation and we still consider them a cultural touchstone…and who doesn’t love the Spice Girls?
We don’t get angry with journalists who write articles about things they don’t care about and I don’t think we need to make creators our entire personality, either. I mean sure, it is much easier to create something if you care about the topic but it isn’t a requirement. I think we have also blurred the lines between artist and creator. Nothing on PRM’s channel could actually be considered art. But people inferred art and inferred community where there was none. I actually feel sorry for people who are just trying to get a foothold in art or in even creating informative channels because the future isn’t looking very authentic. In a post-truth world, we should probably all assume that everything could just be an elaborate ruse.
Fundamentally, people are angry with PRM because they’re angry with themselves for getting sucked in. I think – especially after the last week – it’s time for us to realize that the only winners in the game of parasocial relationships are tech companies. Everything feels like it’s circling the drain and I wish I had a solution for artists and creators to get their stuff out there without all of us hopping onto the hamster wheel of selling our personal information and pulling down on the endless scrolling slot machine.
So Usenet or Blogrolls, anyone?
[1]Not just art, there have been a lot of people made famous by social media and Tim Ferriss talks about almost being kidnapped when he was still low on the famous totem pole. He wrote 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous in response to his experiences.
[2]So some background here: Metal isn’t a genre I know ANYTHING about. It’s Mr. Tucker’s thing and he enjoys different styles of the genre (why are there so many!?). I grew up with the Punk/Goth/Industrial kids and the Eldest was born in 2008 so I missed all of the fun metalmusic stuff that came out of that era. But I came across Shonalika’s video on how Goth is White which led to Gender, Power and Heavy Metal…and now all I’ve been listening to is In This Moment and Motionless in White for a month now. Kinda a genre made for refugees of those scenes, tbqh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[4]As I write this, Neil Gaiman is currently being exposed for being an absolute shitbag and quite frankly I am grateful to have never really resonated with his work as a teen. Gen X friends are positively beside themselves this week.
[5]I am not going to touch the state of the music industry here with its 360 contracts, nor will I address how promoters are offering VIP packages sans-band-meet.
(I honestly wish I remembered the HTML for footnotes but I don’t. I am having a hard enough time remembering that HTML writes “centre” the American way & it’s my #1 code mistake)
One of the things I have done this past December is cut down on the amount of Personal Finance blogs/Substacks, videos and podcasts that I consume. At the end of the day, most of the content out there is just splitting hairs for nerds or a rehashing of the same advice. I still enjoy it but honestly, I am well past the point where I GAF* about whether or not, for example, people should buy XEQT or VEQT and save cents on the dollar when we live in a world where most people struggle to even save $100. That isn’t the bottleneck for most people, the basics are. This isn’t shade to those creators – some people love those debates and love reading and writing about them. But I am done with the made-up hand-wringing of nothingburger questions.
Part of this is because we’ve made it: we’ve achieved our goals and quite frankly this content hasn’t been enjoyable for a while, so I am going to just stop. It used to be that I enjoyed reading that content because it felt nice to read people’s individual struggles when I was going through my own. But the other part is that the core tenets of personal finance haven’t changed in a really long time. Sure, the methodology and access to investments has changed but the basics of how to manage money has not really moved the needle since OG DJ Chuck D said, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery.”
Another part of this is that I am just so sick and tired of the constant ads, amazon affiliate links, pop-ups and course offerings shilled by every website. Again, no shade to those creators at ALL: the bills must be paid and somewhere along the way we have collectively decided that user-hostile websites & affiliate links was the way we would pay for content. I actually prefer when creators write books because it feels satisfying to hold a book in my hot little hands (I have also bought books for my kindle, so that works, too). I think I just enjoy having all of the info in one place, offline. But it’s become off-putting when I hit a website where it’s pop-ups and ads skewing the window and there are so many affiliate links, calls to action and mediocre course offerings/coaching** that consists of someone just editing a mish mash of content you can find for free online and giving it a fancy new name, “It’s not a budget! We hates budgets, don’t we Precious! It’s Personal Accountability Tool!”
This is also just discussing people who I actually do give out good advice – established, intelligent folks who give advice that I may not agree with but is generally well thought out and competent. On the flip side, we have these TikTok Finluencers who have the most unhinged hot takes (enragement is engagement!) whose existence I generally try and ignore.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier: I am spending more time in the meat space. What happens when you achieve your goals? As it turns out, for me, the answer is to live a bigger life learning new things, doing more art, hanging out with more friends and trying new things. I no longer HAVE to sit in front of a computer for work so I don’t have the need to take short breaks to read posts or to listen to podcasts while I work. I think I kept up with a lot of websites and podcasts because it was good to have a few things in my back pocket to keep my brain busy when I was stuck in place. Then I just didn’t cull when I retired.
I eventually did start to scale back the content I was mainlining and worked on my social media use as well. Now, I have nothing but facebook now (marketplace and local communities keep me hooked and it’s just basically an address book now) which I only access by desktop.
I suspect I should write up what I believe are the core tenets of personal finance. So maybe that will be next. Or maybe my absolute frustration with Substack and the complete lack of viable business models for content. Or maybe authenticity vs. income.
Oh, and if you’ve read this far – Happy New Year!
*Give a fuck – shout out to my Oldhomies
**As an aside, I know a disproportionate amount of people who lost their jobs and became life coaches
