CT No.36: No sense of an ending
Accepting cognitive dissonance in a time with no narrative structure
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It’s not business as usual, even if you’re still working remote. I’m thrilled to have the distraction of great projects to work on and cool clients to work with, but it’s foolish to pretend that it just like how it used to be, but remote. It’s not.
Routine is helpful, but it’s not everything. I have about six of solid work in me on a good day. I pace myself during those hours. I have an endless pile of tasks for “my career” outside of those six hours. Those are on hold. I can’t even fathom writing about creating a strategy brief for a newsletter during a week when 3.3m people in the U.S. filed for unemployment.
I apologize for breaking my content promise. Briefs! They will happen. I will write more on best practices someday soon, even if it’s only to distract myself, although to be fair: digital strategy relies on fairly predictable behavior, and all of our behavior is changing drastically and rapidly. I can no longer tell you how people will behave online in six months.
Outside of my work hours I welcome any and all frivolous entertainments. We watched Jupiter Ascending, a marvelously expensive and beautiful film with an ehh plot and bad facial hair for Channing Tatum. Jupiter Ascending’s failure to recoup its budget at the box office discouraged execs from investing in further new or original stories in the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which is a shame. I would like to see more Jupiter Ascendings, just with a little more attention paid to the complexity and humanity of the script.
Jupiter Ascending was every bit as gorgeous as Mila Kunis in this scene.
My career’s been built in the age of storyteller marketing, where we reduce all human narratives to clear heroes and villains with minimal B-plots. This approach gives men a reason to talk about Star Wars in meetings, a way to shape the narrative without allowing for much complexity. (Also, not shaming anyone who subscribed to this theory! It’s fun and it works!)
I’ve heard variations of “be the hero of your marketing story” and hero’s journey comparisons for fifteen years. It’s a helpful framework to:
Get businesses to think about how their customers perceive them, rather than about behavior they want to impose on customers. It’s important to get business owners to think of people other than themselves, since it doesn’t happen all that often.
Create a basic marketing strategy with boundaries that clients can easily understand, which is good for a scalable approach to business from an agency perspective.
Once I read a marketing strategy deck for a major hotel chain that claimed there were only so many types of characters in a story, and the hotel chain gave every guest the chance to be the hero of their story. I looked at the list of alternative characters, and I wanted to know what their stories were, especially the jester and the lover, but the marketing deck didn’t tell those stories.
When I book hotels, I choose based on amenities, location, cleanliness and price. I’m not a hero, just a rapscallion working on the bed (verboten at home) and watching a Fast/Furious film.
(Hotels! What a thought. Hotels!)
Those basic hero-and-villain frameworks shape advertising, news, tv narrative, and most magazine writing. They are bestsellers, blockbusters, stories intended to be universal. They shaped the mass media of the twentieth century, provided the I-beams for the systems of late capitalism, of optimizing toward one objective. The narrative theory behind it remains the same: hero vs. villain. Establish characters and conflicts, rising action, climax, then denouement. Then back to normal. It’s narrative that can be packaged easily and sold.
In both college and grad school, I studied narrative theory. One of the core theories, and I forget where it originated, was that humans understand a story better when we have an end. I wrote a paper about how news narratives of 9/11 prematurely assigned blame and wrapped an ending to a complex story, because as humans we seek the comfort of an ending to understand what happened. And that’s how we got the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay. The thesis of the paper itself is a reductive argument, but I still think about how endings falsely iron our cognitive dissonance away.
What I didn’t include in my paper — because it had no space in the narrative I was building — was how those news stories felt nothing like the fog of being in New York during or immediately after the event. I read that people who lived outside the city remember “everyone was nicer,” but my memory of being an 18-year-old in Manhattan is “everyone was terrified and traumatized and nothing except walking made any sense. One foot in front of the other.”
It’s clearer than ever that we’re a more complex story with no defined directions, with villains of various degrees making decisions and heroes who work to stay afloat, rather than taking any part in the rising action.
I have always preferred complex narratives for trying to understand human behavior and events. My favorite movie is Robert Altman’s Nashville, an ensemble cast film about country music and the bicentennial where no one star gets more than about 20 minutes of screen time and one of the main characters is a van. It’s also an immensely confusing three-hour movie, a critical darling but hardly the type of film you bring up in a business meeting.
(I like simple narratives too. My other favorite movie is Party Girl, which is as basic as it gets with no b-plot, in case you’re wondering.)
With my love of complex narratives, I prefer digital storytelling, the articles that grow every day with new details and links, the videos, the one-off thoughts that thread and build. I’m glad that we’ve developed alternative channels of communication and easy ways to publish besides the print/tv news and more official because seriously where the fuck would we be right now otherwise? I fundamentally believe that fewer people would be listening to epidemiologists and doctors and nurses experts if the health experts weren’t able to give us their own status updates.
So when I say I find “business as usual but at home” content disingenuous, I mean that the narrative of work-make money-feed economy-be better is crumbling, rapidly. We’re all the heroes of getting through a single day, but there’s no rising action. We can’t see a climax.
It’s time to make room for different types of storytelling, not just those that can be easily sold.
So many families with young children are struggling to maintain any kind of work from home and sanity. Anyone with an at-risk family member — which, we’re finding out, is everyone — is finding it hard to concentrate. We are advised to stay away from the people we love the most. It’s heartbreaking.
No one should feel compelled to stay productive for productivity’s sake. Let’s take a breath and take care of ourselves. Make time for the jester and the lover. Make time for the distraction and the tangent. Or don’t make time for anything at all and take it as it comes. Everyone is heartbroken right now. Let’s adjust our levels of “productivity” to reflect that. We need to adjust for extra breath.
So we learn to live with cognitive discomfort, the lack of an ending. Despite the narratives of the people clinging to power, we are no longer in the twentieth century. It’s time to find new ways of telling stories, of allowing for emotional norms that aren’t “usual.” Heartbreak was normal before — it happened all the time — but at most we got three days of bereavement and then. Back to work.
Individuals were always expected to make contingency plans for dramatic times, but businesses somehow were not. Let’s hold our businesses and our governments accountable for taking care of us, for ensuring our right to a future.
No, I don’t know what’s next. If you still have a job, I hope your bosses let you breathe and take care, while still giving you a paycheck. You’ve given them a lot. And if you don’t, my unemployment advice: put a time limit on job searching each day, and then stop. Your mental and physical health is the most important thing right now.
We’ll get through this, even when the ending isn’t clear.
Content tech links of the week etc.
If you want a list of resources, here’s some motley links, delivered with no judgment.
If you want to do some training, here are some suggestions:
Today, March 26 at 4pm EST, friends at Monicat Data is hosting a webinar on Creative Project Management. Sure to be awesome.
When I feel like making and learning something new, I have been learning Figma.
Moz’s courses are free right now with the promo code “wegottthis”. (H/T to Valerie Dennis Craven, who tipped me off to that one.)
Google’s educational resources remain free and very helpful.
This year’s Confab will be going online with reduced pricing — I’m sure it’ll be awesome.
Optimizely always had great training courses, especially on experimentation theory.
Articles and digital reading
I have been thinking a lot of Susan Sontag, and I’m glad Paul Elie wrote “(Against) Virus as Metaphor”
I like this section of Protocol that summarizes recent patents filed by tech companies.
2020 Tech Trends, created before the pandemic, for SXSW. If that’s your thing. TBH I haven’t dived in yet.
My partner, Will Dinski, created an illustrated digital version of this 1950s pamphlet on relaxation, and it’s pretty cool. Relax!
For cultural diversions:
For literary folks, I highly recommend The Tournament of Books at The Morning News. I read it every year, and I’m saving all of this year’s for this weekend…
If you’re going to order book delivery, I recommend perusing Bookshop.org.
I’ve been enjoying the Instagrams of Miranda July and John Cameron Mitchell.
A bunch of my favorite movies are on Netflix! I recommend The Master, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Under the Skin, Moon, 20th Century Women, Burning, Frances Ha, Her and Drive.
Websites like The Believer help me out in times like this.
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