Giving Up Is the New Locking In
Finally, some good news.
Hi friends!
Oxford has announced rage bait as their Word of the Year and Burn It All Down has officially selected giving up as ours.
Three contenders were shortlisted — giving up, kill me now, and you cannot be fucking serious — that reflect our collective feelings and experiences over 2025.
I was already leaning toward giving up due to recent circumstances that we’ll get to shortly, and then, over Thanksgiving, a friend, who is objectively successful in an impossible industry and is currently in the midst of a job shift, told me she relayed my I’m giving up mantra to her therapist, who loved it and said it was wise. I wasn’t surprised, because right now, if you can pay your bills, there are bigger things to crash out about than the state of your “career.”
So, if you’re also feeling like shit about the work you do in, uh, any industry that was never easy to make it in but has now been made exponentially worse by end-stage tech villainry, corporate psychosis, capitulation to fascism, malignant stupidity, and AI licking its chops to replace the last vestiges of decently funded human expression and inquiry, I invite you to join me in giving up during this much-needed holiday season. Let’s free ourselves from the bondage of trying, the shackles of caring, and the shapeshifting terror of what the future might hold.
It’s time to let go and let giving up wrap itself around you, tuck you in gently, and seal the deal with a little forehead kiss goodnight.
No one gives up in a vacuum, and my journey to giving up began on November 5, 2024, the dark and demented eve of my thirty-ninth birthday, which happened to be the very same night that Donald Trump was reelected (allegedly). Or, maybe it began that July, when I met the literary agents I fondly called “the book sharks” on one of the most harrowing and memorable Zooms of my life. But election night was when my journey to giving up really began to accelerate.
I was in Toronto visiting my family and about to go to dinner when I got an email full of notes on the new pages of my book proposal that I sent to the sharks about a week prior. The baby shark loved my marketing plan but hated my sample chapter — entitled “AI Can Have My Job, Just Let Me Live” — an airtight argument as to why AI is now better suited to make social media content than a tired millennial woman. My thesis was that social platforms are no longer a place for human beings. Her top-line feedback was that she wasn’t sure offering AI my job was the best way for me to present myself, that my perspective on my own creativity being mangled by algorithms didn’t feel original enough to her, and that I should really be focused on building a TikTok following.
A year later, it tickles me that the hot social media take du jour is “having no followers is cool.” I mean, duh, having a social media following has always been grotesque, but it helps to have one if you’re trying to get an agent or sell anything in this mediated world that’s built on algorithmic mind control. While I, more than anyone, fantasize about a different version of reality in which “brand strategists” don’t chase clout and career opportunities by making optimized vertical videos forecasting “chronically offline” as the trend to watch for next year, that’s the world we actually live in. Like, put down your phone then?
Anyhoo …
I left for dinner and suppressed my rage with vodka and olive juice. Then, a few hours later, with a swiftness I don’t think any of us were expecting, a dark cloud descended over MSNBC, and it was pretty clear Trump was about to reclaim the presidency. So, I bought a pack of my favorite childhood cigarettes and enjoyed some eerily warm Canadian weather while I chain smoked alone in the backyard and had a big think about everything.
I’ve been saying that AI can have my dumb job for years. I even said it in an early newsletter of mine back in 2023. It’s my truth and it’s more relevant than ever. My sample chapter wasn’t a zeitgeisty extrapolation on AI or how algorithms are impacting culture; it was rooted in my own life experience. I was only getting notes on a book proposal because I started writing regularly back in 2023 in an effort to reclaim my creativity from the brain-rotting work I do for money. But in the context of election night, I knew that the Age of Unhingement™ was about to get a lot worse. If I was going to write a book on how to deal with it, and contend with various shark-like opinions on my work in progress, I had to figure out exactly what my message was and how I wanted to share it.
I was heading to New York at the end of the week, so I wrote the baby shark back and asked if she wanted to meet in person to discuss. We met in a conference room that was painted black and had a banquette full of pillows with Lizzo’s face printed on them. It was a lovely meeting, really, we talked for an hour about my greater Unhingement philosophy, and when I told her a bunch of stories from my career, she asked me, with the awe of a Gen Z whippersnapper, how I’ve done so many things.
“I’m older than I look,” I told her.
Then, I flew back to LA, and didn’t touch my book proposal for the next seven months because I was too busy doing my job job, writing this newsletter, and trying not to end up in an insane asylum during this godforsaken year in which I never found the extra energy to experiment with yapping into a ring light about dystopian cultural trends, let alone confront all my weird feelings about posting the end result. So, in an effort to not overwhelm myself completely and actually get anything done, I decided I would deal with the TikTok of it all after I finished rewriting my book proposal. And after a moderate menty b, commemorated here for eternity or until Substack goes under, I did finish a new draft eventually.
I sent it to the baby shark in mid-September, knowing it probably wouldn’t land because I didn’t write it for her, I wrote it for me. In the many months that I spent thinking about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it as the world repeatedly set itself on fire, I realized that my message was deeply spiritual. I also realized that I needed help to develop my ideas further (still do) and knew that she couldn’t offer me that.
When, a couple weeks after I sent my draft over, she asked to get on a call, I sensed what was coming. She told me that while my proposal made her laugh out loud she had no idea how she could possibly sell it.
“Is laughter not a selling point?” I asked. She said no. And while that’s just one baby sharquita’s opinion, if true, yet another nail in the publishing industry’s coffin.
She didn’t have the balls to straight up say that a well-followed miniature horse has a much better chance of selling a nonfiction book than a writer without a sizable platform, but the subtext was there when she had no feedback to offer me that made any sense.
Editing your own writing as much as I do is a special kind of derangement, so I was a little desperado for notes and pressed her on what she thought I needed to fix. She told me she worried that what I write about is too timely for how long it takes to publish a book. I had actually worked pretty hard to address that, I thought, so I asked her if she could give me an example of what gave her pause.
“You mentioned Israel and Palestine in the Politics of Posting section and I don’t know how relevant that will be in a few years.”
I told her I loved her optimism and hoped that she was right.
I needed to end the call before I said something too real, so I thanked her for all of her help and wished her great luck in her career. Then, I ditched work for the afternoon and went to see One Battle After Another, which was a perfect decision. Seeing Leo smoke that roach in his bathrobe made me feel less alone.
Before it made me nuts, having the book sharks interested in my work was so exciting. The head shark that I originally sent my proposal to is brilliant and powerful and his feedback was encouraging and constructive and spot on. I took everything he said seriously and it made me a much better writer. Once I had his initial take, though, I had to swim along to baby girlie who couldn’t give me a workable note to save her life. But it’s OK. I learned a lot from the whole process, more than I bargained for, and it was a fabulous walkabout for my ego at a time when I really needed that.
And, in wonderful news, after telling you guys this story, I finally have something good to say about turning 40. When I was a younger broad, I was definitely not grounded enough in who I am to take an agent’s opinions with a grain of salt, honor my own energy, and allow myself the time to figure out what I actually wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I’m too old and evolved to abandon myself now. That’s extremely fucking cool.
Two months into giving up and I’m already having fun scheming about what’s next. That’s the beauty of giving up — it’s a seasonal treat and not forever. And it’s very useful for us creative, ambitious lunatics who sometimes fly too close to the sun or lose our minds for a quarter and then need a beat to get it together.
Giving up, in spiritual terms, is actually just surrender.
I’m not giving up on writing a book or on getting my ideas out there. I’m just exploring other formats that might feel less like banging my head against the wall because no one reads anymore and I’m done writing so much in isolation. My job job is remote and mostly me pitching ideas and making things alone. This newsletter is my sweet baby that I love so much — this is her 88th edition — but I also write it alone. If I’m going to work on other projects and hustle them around town because I’m canonically unhinged and can’t chill forever, I really want to collaborate with my brilliant and hilarious friends who are just as fed up with the state of affairs as I am.
Old gals just wanna have fun and creativity blossoms in collaboration.
Speaking of blossoming in collaboration …
These two nailed the hard launch on social last week in a way that has entered them into consideration for a Lifetime Achievement in Unhingement.
The above photo was first posted by the former prime minister of Japan, I will save my commentary on Ms. Katy’s fashion. And then, as if heaven sent, we got an entire carousel from the trip, including this pic:
More on these psychos soon because I’m planning to give 2025 the in-depth recap it deserves and JUSTY PERDEAU had an exceptional showing this year — both together and alone. I ship. I ship. I ship.
2025: Let’s make it out alive.
Until next time!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz