Have you noticed that everything seems like a scam lately?
I don’t think I’m just paranoid. I’ve had plenty of firsthand experiences and compared plenty of notes. My brand new clothes fall apart. Fabrics seem flimsier. New boots from previously trusted brands are full of faulty stitches and lower quality materials and produced in new, cheaper, places. Recently, the Atlantic published a damning piece about the quality of knitwear (in the toilet). Anecdotally, fans of luxury handbags have been decrying for years a perceived decline in quality from such hallowed and devastatingly expensive brands as Chanel, YSL, and Louis Vuitton.
But it’s not just physical stuff that seems like a pile of scams from Scamsville, it’s everything else, too. It’s the way too many people do business, the way too many people seem to position themselves and present online.
My social media feeds have undergone a change that really made this evident in the past few months. Ever since I updated my LinkedIn profile to list “Founder” of my consulting business as my “current job,” things online have gotten weird.
Things online are already weird as a default state, but there was a marked switch this year as The Algorithms caught up to the fact that I was focused on my own business. Now, I am being inundated with content about business coaching, growing your business, coaching to grow your coaching business, endless coaches, all trying to sell other would-be coaches on the idea of successful coaching businesses. An ouroboros, if you will, of business bullshit.
Instagram seems to be ground zero for this type of thing — reels and reels of it, often in the form of a 20-something white guy with a closely cropped beard and a fancy microphone earnestly exclaiming that he is willing to share the Actual Tools and Techniques that he used to grow his six figure business. Of course, he’s only offering this coveted knowledge for a limited time so definitely click the link and send money now.
In case it bears saying out loud, I definitely recommend being skeptical of someone claiming to sell you tactics for being a successful business owner when the only business they seem to have run is based on “teaching” other business owners. In a bright enough light, this starts to look like a pyramid scheme.
Pyramid schemes aren’t new, but they have never felt so pervasive. They are illegal under state and federal laws in many countries, including the U.S., but most of these coach-of-coaches type businesses operate in a gray area, free of legal inquiry, leaving desperate, naive, and overly optimistic wannabe entrepreneurs vulnerable to being fleeced, or at least massively disappointed when the Ten True Tricks to Grow Your Dream Business don’t seem to work.
I don’t consider myself to be any of those things: desperate, naive, or overly optimistic. Yet too much doomscrolling and accidental overconsumption of this type of content does real damage to my confidence and sense of self. It’s an act of self love to turn it off.
It’s one thing to understand that building anything real takes time and steady effort, one client, one project, one goal at a time. It’s quite another thing to maintain a sense of reality when we are constantly being gaslit from all sides: told by millions of strangers on the internet and in the media that everyone is more successful than us, and that our biggest concerns should be shopping for new stuff, and watching the Super Bowl.
The gaslighting in American media never stops. I find it difficult to focus on routine tasks at times, knowing that I am an American woman and many in power in my country believe that a tiny collection of cells has more rights that I do.
A friend of mine posts on social media every day, begging anyone who will listen to care more about the thousands of children dying horribly, preventably, in Gaza. His posts show up in my feed interspersed with those of Instagram business coaches who want me to pay them for the secrets to “10x revenue immediately.” Human brains weren’t designed for this level of daily dissonance. I can hear my internal gears grinding.
I feel guilty, a lot of the time. Sometimes I also feel insecure, sure. I go to bed with those feelings and I wake up with them, often. Sometimes I need to write my way out of them before I can do anything else. Making art, writing an article, building something, pitching new business — really any contained project requires some willful deafness to all the noise around, competing for our brain space.
The most positive thing I’ve done lately has been to book time with other entrepreneurs and creative people, to talk one on one, and be real about how we’re doing: how business is going, how we’re feeling, what we’re working on, what’s inspiring or exciting that day. Every one of those conversations is worthwhile and uplifting and we should create more of those together.
—IKM
Creative juice
Artist Karina Bania’s flourishing colors
I’ve been having a real Baader-Meinhof phenomenon kind of moment with the paintings of California-based artist Karina Bania. I encountered her work at an art fair in San Francisco several months back — it astonished me as I came around a corner into the booth, the painting six feet tall and flooded with blue on canvas. I noted her name. Later I was skimming an art newsletter email and immediately gravitated to another work, abstract with bold, dreamy swashes of green, and I saved it, realizing later it was this same artist.
This happened one or two more times on my internet travels. Every time I see one of her paintings, I’m drawn to it; the work invites me to take a moment and consider the organization of elements in space, the harmony of the colors and marks. They feel intuitive, at once light and free and grounded, like clear water seeping into a forest floor. She works with pigments and translucent washes of color on raw canvas.
If you’re in San Francisco, you can see her work at Maybaum Gallery until Feb 29.
The unbearable darkness of Night Country
This month I have actually been living for True Detective: Night Country. It’s grim, depressing, full of horrible people and grotesque deaths. As a lifelong fan of Alien and The X-Files, I love it. I especially love Jodie Foster, playing a tough, complex, and deeply unlikeable police chief character.
It’s just an unmitigated joy to see such a deeply talented, confident actress at 61 years old commanding every shot. As I age, perhaps unsurprisingly, I get more enjoyment out of seeing complex older female characters. Recent films have given me a feast. Yes, of course, Michelle Yeoh (also 61) in Everything, Everywhere All At Once. Cate Blanchett (age 54) in TÁR.
These characters are so compelling for their complexity, agency, contradictions. Female characters in film or TV often lack these things, so when I find them, I get excited. Not just any actor can pull it off; sometimes the character is just hateful and you don’t feel like spending 2 hours or more with them. Foster more than accomplishes the task. After many years without seeing her in anything it’s like a sigh of relief to have her back in not only this project but in Nyad, which was also excellent due entirely to the strong performances. I would watch 12 episodes of Night Country if they existed but I’ll make do with 6.
Side quest
This little essay on Flaming Hydra about AI-generated art and the intellectual bankruptcy behind its loudest cheerleaders is behind a paywall but it’s only $3 and it’s worth way more than that. The Ghost in the Vending Machine: The shareholders' dream of no artists at all.
Some excerpts:
“The intellectual-property industry has labored tirelessly to convince the public, which loves storytelling and painting and film as much as it ever has, that art is never individual, and that artists are not real, or no longer real. The reconfiguration of art—just generating a clause about art—is now to be reckoned the same as the entire creative process. Anything people really like, in this construction, was just the collective work of semi-skilled craftspeople interpreting the audience’s own brilliant whims, those whims having been carefully winnowed by a wise and benevolent overclass of creative executives.”
“Don’t people understand how hard it is to make anything, let alone Ran or The Picture of Dorian Gray or Remain in Light? I suppose the answer is that there can be money in refusing to understand this.”
I guess there is a deep masochistic and contrarian streak within me that has inspired me to devote hours every week to painting little watercolor paintings on paper in 2024, instead of, say, optimizing my facility with “prompt engineering” and I would also say this is one of the things I am proudest of, and if you don’t get it then I don’t know what to tell ya.
That’s enough words for today. If you read all that, thanks for being here.