Another day, another meltdown

+ the Substack middle class, more new models for work, the charm of being mid

So that’ll be the third “once in a lifetime” financial crisis since I turned 18. What a time to be alive.

I just got back from speaking at a project management conference in Barcelona run by the Project Management Institute (thanks for having me guys). I hosted a panel looking at the challenges of implementing sustainability in large businesses. It was a nice reminder that there are many people working in the depths of capitalism trying to make this thing 0.0000001% better. It’s not the whole answer, but good things can happen there.

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff war is going to do very bad things to lots of industries, but fashion is in a particularly hard place (Business of Fashion is already calling it a “covid level” crisis). I’m thinking a lot about all the indie brands and multi-brand retailers out there. They’re lucky just to keep going from one season to the next, and now they’ve got huge and completely unnecessary costs eating into their margins, which were never great to begin with, plus the very real prospect of everyone buying much less stuff because the economy has gone to shit. Oh, and there’s no clear path forward because the global economy is at the mercy of a guy who makes zero sense. Here’s a quote from Feed Me that really brings that last part home:

“You could make short term decisions that eviscerate your business over the long haul. Or, you could be slow to react and cripple your business.”

Last week’s newsletter on the more-with-less era feels even more relevant now that we’re staring another economic meltdown in the face. This is an idea I’m going to be coming back to a lot: how we can get more from life in an era that’s defined by contractions, slumps and crises.

This week we’ve got:

→ More new models for work

→ Miniature life hacks

→ Some of my recent(ish) work in SSENSE

→ The Substack middle class

→ Searching for my people on Bluesky

But first:

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The enviable charm of being ordinary

While we’re on the whole more-with-less thing, Madeleine Holden has a very good (and very funny) investigation into ordinariness: “What’s so bad about being mid?”

Being average is, by definition, not bad. But the most brutal burn across the ages is to tell someone they’re in the middle. Today, the preferred insult is “mid”. In the 2010s, what really stung about the “mediocre white men” slogan was, of course, the “mediocre” part. Other cousins in recent years include “basic”, “normie”, “NPC”, “local”—how embarrassing, to live in the ordinary town where you live! To be similar to other people! Look at you, you adequate dork, in the middle of an OK mass.

Maddie was one of the best/funniest writers I worked with back in the Highsnob days. I am very happy that now she’s now on Substack! You can expect very, very good prose — here’s another piece about the Chappell Roan x parenting discourse and how it connects to the time she stopped someone from getting sent to prison.

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Miniature life hacks

I’ve always got time for David Cain and his life hack content (Maddie in fact introduced his work to me a million years ago, and I used one of his pieces as the basis for the “shopping is a relationship” idea in the last chapter in my book). This one’s about the hidden potential of doing a bit more of whatever you’re doing.

The only way to know whether your usual standards are serving you is to surpass them on a regular basis and see what happens. And each of us has our accustomed standards for everything: how much sleep is enough, how much screen time is okay, how much effort at work to put in, how proactive to be in your friendships, how much or little to eat, how much news to consume, how disciplined to be with household order and cleanliness.

We’ve all settled somewhere on each of these questions and countless others, probably out of inertia rather than principle. It’s unlikely our standards have randomly landed in their respective sweet spots. For each standard you’ve adopted, there might be a significant spike in the payoff not too far beyond it. (Or perhaps you’re doing too much for little gain.)

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The Substack middle class

Chris Gayomali, the writer and massage enthusiast behind Heavies (another newsletter you should follow) has gone back into the full-time world as deputy editor of SSENSE (before going freelance he was editing GQ).

I slid into Chris’s DMs to find out what was behind the move, and here’s what I got back:

“The luxury of a more permanent gig is that I can still freelance but can take interesting assignments that are more creatively rewarding but might not pay that great…I see it all fitting into a three piece pie chart with the main steady gig, rewarding freelance work, and of course continuing to write HEAVIES, which is still growing and might one day be the big pie slice.”

There’s an interesting story here about the middle class of the creator economy. Most of the big success stories out there are writers who are either filling a lucrative niche in the business world (like Lenny Rachitsky) or mega-famous ones who brought their followings over from legacy media (think Paul Krugman).

There’s a growing second wave of culture writers who have built newsletter businesses from scratch — Emily Sundberg and Feed Me is a big one, and in fashion there’s Magasin and Blackbird Spyplane. But for every star creator with a gazillion followers there will be many more talented people juggling various jobs and paying the bills with a patchwork of revenue streams.

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Fashion’s soundtrack guy

I forgot to post this when it went online a month or so ago: I interviewed Michel Gaubert, fashion’s biggest soundtrack guy, for SSENSE. He’s had a pretty wild life — he partied with Karl Lagerfeld in the 80s, and soundtracked his shows and Chanel’s since then. Monsieur Gaubert was very nice and even asked me if I’m into Shazam (I am). Despite all the ~criticism~ I do here I still really enjoy dipping back into the fashion industry whenever there’s a place for me. Read the full piece here, and thanks to Chris Gayomali (who I literally just mentioned) for commissioning me!

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New models for work

As I wrote in last week’s newsletter, media is a helpful place to look for new ways of navigating a “disrupted” job market. The industry has been dealing with Big Tech’s bullshit for so long that new models are starting to emerge from the ashes of all the bankrupt lifestyle blogs.

Eighteen former workers at Deadspin started Defector, a sports and culture blog that’s run as a worker-owned cooperative. 404 Media is doing the same in tech — its revenue is evenly split between its four founders, who decide each month how much they’ll pay themselves (everyone gets the same amount). The collective model is catching on in media. A crew of ex-Pitchfork writers started Hearing Things and for local news in New York there’s Hellgate.

These sorts of companies are inevitably going to be small but it’s an interesting way of looking at the situation: if you’ve spent 10+ years working in an industry that’s been wiped out by tech, why not leverage all the technology out there to make something of your own?

Sure, there’s probably no offices, no first class flights on the company card and no aspirations of becoming the next Vogue. You can forget living Graydon Carter’s lifestyle, and you’re probably not going to stay at the Chateau Marmont for a week while on writing assignment.