🎶 Winter Wonderland - Kaskade​
I can't believe we're midway through December already. This year has truly flown by! After Ultra and Coachella (both of which were 2020 ticket purchases LOL), I've been so worried about my book and my future more generally that I didn't want to plan any vacations. Just grind it out, I told myself, Q2 will be relaxation and research, Q3 will be the book proposal, Q4 will be a content sprint, and then you can relax. Last night, Nathaniel and I sat down to try to plan a vacation now that I finally have some clarity on next year, and I got so overwhelmed by the idea of vacation in January instead of setting up interviews, reading, and researching for my book and online content that I... pushed our vacation to March.
I don't want to be one of those workaholic Americans yet constantly find myself to be exactly like the other workaholic Americans. In other words, I'm adding "go back to therapy" to my new year's resolutions.
you won't win life by hacking it.
Often times, I wish I could abdicate responsibility for my own life. I am excellent at following instructions--I am less comfortable with deciding things for myself, probably because for so many years, I never decided anything for myself. I was told when and where to go for school, shuttered between mandatory classes, and picked extracurriculars from the pre-selected activities that my parents felt were "suitable."
And even when I did feel like I was deciding something for myself--those Limited Too jeans in sixth grade, trying out for high school dance team, dating a supposed "bad boy"--those weren't, in fact, my choices at all. It's not like I dreamt of those desires in a vacuum and woke up one day wanting those things. Instead, I filtered the dreams, hopes, desires of those around me into myself through various mediums: TV, magazines, overheard conversations. Without the stated preferences of other people, I had absolutely no preferences of my own.​
This is a tough realization. Even now, I'm trying to unpack the implications. Did I even want to attend Yale in the first place, or did I want to go because so many others (including Rory Gilmore and Blair Waldorf) wanted that? Did I ever want to be a lawyer, or did I just want money and to be respected and spoken highly of, the way that I saw people speak of lawyers (when they weren't making lawyer jokes)? What parts of my life are truly my own, and what parts are mere figments of other people's desires?
Unfortunately, my online presence is also a hodgepodge of other people's desires, for the most part. I'm no aesthetic genius, and I certainly do not have an innate eye for filming and editing. To figure out what I should post, I watched popular videos and tried to synthesize the common elements--showing food, talking about money and spending and consumption, cute animals. I focused on making videos with those elements, sometimes all at once in the form of vlogs. I even had an internal checklist of which events should go into a vlog to maximize its chances of "success" (AKA views). (In case you're curious, it included: a nice view; working out; brief description of work (emphasis on brief); a perk at work; and after-work event such as drinks, dinner, or a concert. It was the Bend and Snap of TikTok vlogs. I still find these elements present in many popular vlogs, particularly the law/tech/banking/consulting girlies. I had a separate checklist for the "chaotic vlog," which focuses more on overwhelming the viewer.)
The problem with any type of hacking--growth hacking, life hacking, study hacking--is that at the end of the day, you are working within the existing system. Hacking assumes the existence of rules and order, or else it would have nothing to disrupt. You can't hack nothing. And while I love a good cheat code (looking at you, rosebud; ;) as much as the next person, I've come to understand that a life preoccupied with hacking will never reflect interests and desires outside of the existing structures. I didn't want to feed into the content mill's obsession with consumption and glamorizing capitalistic endeavors, but by trying to hack TikTok views, I ended up doing just that.
A few weeks ago, I had dinner with another content creator who made a lot of videos about her job, and we both had the same question on our minds: What do we want to put out into the world? In a lot of ways, this is the same tension that we had to negotiate at our jobs--being enough "of the machine" to fit in while not erasing ourselves because we, as women, were never meant to be part of the machine in these traditional corporate environments in the first place. It's a challenging balance to navigate and one to which I was curiously attuned when speaking with female law firm partners. It took me a good five years in biglaw to figure it out for biglaw, and now that I'm in the great unknown, the question arises anew: how much of me is acceptable, and how much of them do I need to emulate in order to survive?
🔖 open tabs
I've been lining up books for January, when I'm doing a major re-evaluation of my projects and reading a ton as research for my book! On the reading list is:
​Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis*
​Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener*
​Brotopia by Emily Chang*
​She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey*
​Chasing the Truth: A Young Journalist's Guide to Investigative Reporting, based on She Said and adapted by Ruby Shamir*
​How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan*
I found this Politico profile about Eric Leandri fascinating. He co-founded a search engine company in 2011 that was supposed to be a Google competitor, with greater sensitivity to privacy concerns. He left that company in disgrace in 2020--only to launch a new venture that specializes in cybersurveillance, probably the opposite of privacy.
I tried out Lensa's AI portrait feature to disappointing results. According to the MIT Technology Review, Lensa's avatars are generated from Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that uses an open-source data set compiled by scraping images off the internet. Which means that if the images online are racist or sexist or pornographic, then... that's what Lensa's going to replicate.
* This newsletter may contain affiliate links, which are denoted with a *, which means I earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase.