Dear Reader,
I was talking to a coworker last week about mental health in the workplace, managing personal ups and downs and how that affects being able to show up the way that you want to. They were talking about wanting to pursue new opportunities but also worrying about falling flat on their face because new things mean transition which means stress which means potential mental health impact. Of course I’m eliding quite a bit, but that was kind of the core of it.
The thing is, I’m actually right in the midst of taking on a new opportunity at work, so it was a very timely subject for me. And I think I had some intelligent, or at least intelligible, things to say on the subject, from taking a page from Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are to a more prosaic “screw expectations, I’m just gonna do what I think is meaningful.” But I think there’s another piece that I overlooked in that conversation, which is opportunity cost.
Economics teaches that the opportunity cost of a choice is the set of options foreclosed by that choice. If I have an apple, and I eat it, then I can no longer sell it, nor can I put it in a pie. Those are two clear, straightforward opportunity costs of eating the apple.
If I’m considering a new venture that interests me, and I go for it and then belly-flop hard into the pavement, that is obviously not a super fun outcome. But if I don’t go for it, I’m avoiding a risk of failure at the cost of a 100% certain result of me not getting to do the thing I’m interested in. So the question isn’t really whether you’re afraid of falling on your face. It’s whether falling on your face is the worst possible outcome—whether the chance of doing something new is worth the risk of it not working out.
Thinking about the cost balance of risk, I regularly do ask myself just that: “what’s the worst that could happen here?” And I find that to be a genuinely helpful question. Because you can break it down into worst possible and worst likely.
Like, say I’m co-planning an event that’s expected to draw a large video audience. As the event approaches, I’m thinking about what I need to do to be fully prepared, so I walk through the logistics, maybe do a dry run of the expected program to test the features I want to use and check pacing. And then rather than spiraling on every possible thing that might go wrong, I jump straight into the deep end and ask, “what’s the worst that could happen?” And the worst possible thing is, oh, the presenter could literally have a heart attack on camera, and I’d have to figure out how to close down the presentation with minimal trauma to the participants and maybe how to contact emergency services for someone sitting in a remote location (assuming, worst case scenario, that the presenter was alone and completely incapacitated). But that’s pretty unlikely, right? Not impossible, but unlikely. The worst-case likely scenario is that the presenter’s video feed is bad, or that someone says something awkward or inappropriate, which would be non-ideal but deal-with-able. Anything short of a heart attack is not so bad. And the most likely thing to go wrong is that the presentation runs overlong and we’d have to cut short some portion or miss Q&A at the end. That’s not even a bad outcome at this point, right? Just a hiccup. (In fact, this is why it’s always a good idea to allot generous time for Q&A. Pro tip.)
Sort of a pivot, but not unrelated to catastrophizing and opportunity cost: I read a thing last week, 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture, which proposes an idea that is worth considering. Yet also I couldn’t help coming away with an overall impression of:
I do get the point that the author is making. I really do. But I think that you could alternatively title this “14 Warning Signs That You Personally Are Living in a Cultural Echo Chamber.” Or possibly “14 Warning Signs That You Are Hung Up on a Dream of a Counterculture That Existed in the 1970s.” As to the 14 points themselves, they’re not wrong, but also I think there’s a meaningful counterpoint for every single one.
For instance, “Indie music and alt music are marginalized”—well yeah, man, that is pretty much definitional of independent and alternative. It’s kind of there in the name. Nonetheless, today you can actually find these artists on mainstream platforms whereas 30 years ago your only chance of hearing their music would be to see them at a show and or maybe get one of their songs on a mixtape from a music-head friend. It’s different for indie musicians today, but I’m not sure it’s uniformly worse.
Or how about, “Five companies have almost complete control over the book business—where, in an earlier day, dozens of indie publishers thrived.” Sort of? This one is complicated, for sure. But it’s way more complicated than could be fit into a pithy tweet. Small press publishing is a very different animal than it once was, but so is self-publishing, and that influence has opened up avenues for marginalized people to tell their stories and for previously unmarketable subgenres to find audiences and absolutely flourish.
Jordan Hawk wrote a blog post this week celebrating 10 Years of Widdershins, in which he bullet-pointed all the prevailing “marketing wisdom” that clearly said this book was doomed. And instead it was successful beyond anything he could’ve expected and kicked off an 11-book series. (The whole series is fantastic. Just so good.) So, y’know, there’s a win.
I’m pretty sure people in my day-to-day life don’t typically see me and think, “Wow, what an iconoclast! I bet she’s really tuned into the counterculture.” And yet, that’s kinda where I live, not because I’m under any illusion that I’m so hip and edgy (I mean, no one even uses “hip” or “edgy” anymore, right?), but because I like queer stuff, and because I’m interested in stories that I hadn’t heard before, and because I like to go down rabbit holes of quirky recommendations by people whose art (or whose taste in art) I enjoy. And perhaps in no small part because I actually think about who I’m giving money to, for what, and whether there might be a better alternative.
So, speaking of queer stuff, it was recently my great, great pleasure to read the sapphic romance that, oh man, I have been fucking waiting for my whole life. Seriously. And it was One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston.
This was my first McQuiston. Their previous book Red, White, and Royal Blue is also sitting in my TBR pile as a recommended read, but I’ve been slow to pick it up because I may have kind of an eensy little bias against princes. (Also billionaires. Because, you know, gross.) And then here comes One Last Stop with an intriguing premise but also a cute pink cover. I mean, cute, but too cute? And here’s me with all my baggage around the pink-washing of women’s relationships and, like, cerebralization of feminine sexuality, as if women aren’t responsible for writing a huge proportion of the filthiest smut on the market.
So it was with some trepidation that I finally got around to actually opening the dang book. And within the first three pages, I was hooked. We meet August having just moved to New York, as she’s scoping out a potential apartment and roommates, and immediately we’re introduced to a tattooed psychic, an artist who works with blowtorches and frog bones, with a hint at other quirky characters to come, against the backdrop of a vividly drawn walk-up above a fried chicken joint. By the end of the first chapter, August has landed a job at a pancake place. She’s heading to her first day of new classes when she dramatically spills her coffee down her front, then meets Jane on the subway, who comes to her rescue with the gift of a scarf. And I was so charmed by August’s thought:
She can’t believe a tall butch subway angel saw her crying into her coffee tits.
August is a perpetual college student trying to find her thing, with a very unusual girl-detective upbringing. Jane is dark-haired, dark-eyed, strong-willed, outwardly badass, but also very kind with a secret marshmallow center. (Which is, uh, kind of my jam. I may have a type.) The attraction and sexual tension and pure wanting between these characters is just great. There is on-page sex which ends up being kind of euphemistically described but is nonetheless pretty clear about who’s doing what to whom and how.
There’s some suspension of disbelief required around a sketchy bit of science, but I thought it was well handled in the story. Also, a portion of the plot relies on a pretty unlikely coincidence. But listen: when I was twenty years old, I worked at the front desk of a hotel in Montana where I checked in a guest visiting from somewhere on the east coast. In small talk, I mentioned that I was from a small town in the midwest. Surprisingly, she recognized it and said, oh, I think I knew someone from there years ago, back when my husband and I were living in Austria. It turns out that twenty years earlier, this woman who was living on the other side of the world had met and become friends with my mom’s cousin while she was in Vienna. So, unlikely coincidences happen.
I also really deeply loved some of the notes on queer history from the 1970s. Just really powerful stories.
This book delighted me over and over. I killed a stack of post-it notes tagging lines that spoke to me. Not just romance-y ones but, for instance:
“More things are covered in ball sweat than you might imagine,” Niko says thoughtfully. “Ball sweat, actually, is all around us.”
I think that’s the right note to leave you on. Hope you’re well.
Lots of love,
Beas
