One of the most popular topics to post about via Substack is Substack itself. I wrote about Substack way back in 2021 for The Hedgehog Review, and the view I express there hasn’t really changed. (What is that view? Click, and consider subscribing, to find out!)
Now I’m seeing a lot of soul-searching among people on the platform — people asking what it means that Substack has liberated writers (liberated them from what?), asking why so many posts seem to be diary entries and lists, asking why so many newsletters are devolving into indistinguishable lifestyle brands.
I have asked myself what I’m doing with this platform, too. Because I don’t have a great answer, I haven’t posted much this year.
I think of my main work — the work that helps pay the mortgage — as writing essays in traditional, edited venues. I’m still earning money from sales of my most recent book, The End of Burnout. I give talks about burnout and other topics (again, see below). And I teach part-time.
This newsletter is meant to support those primary activities. It puts me in touch with you, dear readers, who might read the essays and buy the book and invite me to give a talk (have I mentioned, see below?).
I don’t want Substack to become a main source of income because I don’t think I could do it — I doubt I could post enough quality work to be much value to readers.
The problem is that to produce a good newsletter, you need a lot of ideas you can process quickly — and I don’t. I think slowly. I don’t like writing quick reactions to breaking news, because I’m not good at it. My brain doesn’t work fast enough.
My slowness is not altogether bad. I tell my students that their biggest weaknesses as writers are also strengths. Because I develop ideas slowly, I can’t publish a lot of pieces, which limits my earning power. But it also means I’m really patient with ideas. I don’t give up on them easily. And, I like to think, I’m good at taking the long view of things.
In an episode of the great-but-forgotten HBO series “Bored to Death,” Jason Schwartzman, playing novelist / unlicensed private detective Jonathan Ames, gives notes on a Jim Jarmusch script, but he had lost the script in the office of a psychiatrist who wears a cardigan over top of another cardigan (and who punches him in the gut at the end of their session), so he was late delivering the notes. In that time, Jarmusch got Charlie Kaufman to revise the script. Schwartzman is understandably disappointed.
“But, you know, I’ll keep you in mind if something comes up,” Jarmusch tells him. “I do make a new film like every four years or so.”
I’m no Jim Jarmusch, but I do relate to the idea of producing work on a slow schedule. I have published about 12 essays a year since I quit full-time teaching in 2016. That’s a steady pace, but it’s not fast. This year, I have only published two pieces so far. There should be at least four or five more coming this fall (starting in a couple weeks). But it’s just going to be a down year.
Why am I saying this? I guess to convince you (and me) that I haven’t given up, that I’m not out of the game entirely, despite appearances, and despite my lack of effective branding in this newsletter.
The poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert wrote on Twitter not long ago, “It's easy to write something great, just think about anything for five to ten years.”
This may be why I feel unsure about what I’m doing. I thought pretty intensively about the problem with work for five years before I published the first word about it. It then was another five years before I finished the burnout book. And after it was published in 2022, I wrote essays on topics that hadn’t come up in the book or that responded to new concerns — the long but nevertheles diminishing tail of the thinking I had begun in 2010. And because that tail has gotten thinner and thinner, “Burnout Culture” is probably no longer the right name for this newsletter.
I have begun writing a proposal for a book on the moral imagination. That sounds boring, I know, but the book will not be. Here are a few words I wrote on this topic in an Atlantic article last year:
Some of the biggest ethical challenges facing residents of rich countries in this century have to do with how we act toward people we can only imagine: climate refugees who (for now) mostly live far away, future people who will inhabit post-Anthropocene Earth, artificial intelligences, and animals whom we see as having a growing scope of rights.
Now that we are beginning to reckon with the harm we have done to the climate and are trying to reverse it, we need every bit of the empathetic imagination that mass literacy fosters.
My earliest notes on this project date from 2019, five years ago. So maybe I’m approaching the window when I’ve thought about this topic enough to say more about it. If you stick with this newsletter, whatever it ends up being called, you’ll be the first to know what that will be.
Can I speak to you?
An important way I supplement my freelance writing and adjunct teaching income is through speaking to academic, business, civic, and religious audiences. Here’s a list of places I’ve spoken over the years. I have also spoken (twice) to executives and managers of a Fortune 500 company.
Most of the more recent talks have been about burnout, but I’ve also spoken about liberal learning in higher education, academic writing for the public, and the Catholic intellectual tradition. The things I write about are also the things I’m competent to speak about.
To get a sense for what I’m like as a speaker for a large group, here’s a video of my closing plenary talk at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Institute for Chief Academic Officers in 2023. It shows how I use slides and audience discussion, how I speak away from the podium (from the 11:00 mark), and how I handle Q&A.1
I have room in my schedule in October/November for one more talk that would involve overnight travel. I can do more Zoom talks than that, of course. My schedule in the spring is pretty open. If you’re interested in working something out, please get in touch (you can just reply to this message).
Thanks for your interest in and support of this enterprise!
It also shows me flub a word in an extended story told without notes. The executive director of the organization caught the error and corrected me in real time. I probably won’t make that mistake again.