A Walk around San Francisco...

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

Glad to hear it.

For me, it’s going quite well, indeed. In fact, it’s going so well that I’m going to make a temporary change that I’d like to share with you all.

As I’ve mentioned (perhaps too many times?), I started Gobbledy as a way of doing demand gen for my messaging consulting work. I did that because I love writing. But I also did that because I am terrible at - and hate doing - any sort of selling. And so I thought, “how can I sell my services without having to sell my services?” And voila, Gobbledy was born. Also I signed up for a Substack account. I also did that.

For years I had an amazing balance of consulting work that allowed me to carve out time for this newsletter. Then in the past year, I’ve had an amazing balance of consulting work where I had so much consulting work that it’s been very difficult to carve out the amount of time this newsletter requires to create a product that meets my standards (hahahahahaha. standards.).

I’ve been thinking about how to deal with that - do I write every other week? Do I change the format of this thing to be a lighter lift in some way? Something else?

And then I remembered that the author of one of my favorite newsletters - Today in Tabs - took 3 or 4 months off from writing last year to hike the Appalachian Trail. I’m a paid subscriber of that, and I didn’t think to myself, “that buttwad took my $40 and screwed me!” I thought, “that buttwad is living his best life, and I couldn’t be happier for him.”

Longtime readers may remember (there’s no way you remember) that I’ve been running Gobbledy Classic (tm) columns in August because:

a) nobody works in August (in France); and
b) absence makes the heart grow fonder

So I put those together and thought to myself, “I’m going to pause the newsletter for July and August.” A couple of the consulting projects I have will be finished by the end of August, which will free up my time in September to focus on Gobbledy, which is, if I’m being honest, what I’d like to focus all of my time on. But here we are…

I’ll send some Gobbledy Classics (tm) in the meantime, and maybe I’ll have a column to share before September, but for now - I hope you enjoy the summer. And thanks for indulging me this break while I go help some companies with their messaging. Your support means so much.

But first…I recently had a very quick work trip to San Francisco, and I wanted to share a thought about it.

At some point in your life someone has made you aware of the author David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech. That might have been your cool friend who discovered it before you did, because they are the type of person who discovers everything before you did.

Or perhaps it was your cool uncle who bought you the very slim book version of the speech called This Is Water, when you graduated from college.

Or perhaps again, it is me making you aware of this thing. If that is the case, indulge me for a moment and allow me to tell you a bit about it.

He starts with this story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Wallace goes on to say that part of what he’s learned in his years is that knowledge is about re-centering the world so that it’s not centered on yourself, which in turn will allow you notice what is truly happening around you (the water). He says:

…there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing…

When you are in San Francisco nowadays, there is something - as someone who does not live in San Francisco - that you will notice on your first day there. This is what you will notice:

And so on and so on and so on….

Every surface is covered with AI company ads. Billboards, busses, trucks, sidewalks, buildings, coffee cups.

They are, indeed, water.

I thought a lot about what Wallace says happens when you do not stop and recognize the water - “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing…”

Does that sound familiar?

Does it sound familiar in a specific way around the ideas that these companies are selling?

Is it possible that when you recognize that specific water that you also realize that you are actually being sold the “gnawing sense of losing some infinite thing?”

If you don’t live in San Francisco, hasn’t it seemed a little strange that your day-to-day life has not involved the constant, gnawing sense of losing some infinite thing?

And when you do feel that sense, that you recognize that it’s because you read something about how humanity is going to be replaced?

And when you think about who said that, that it is often a person (or representative of a company) who is selling, not a product exactly, but “the constant gnawing sense” that you’re going to lose some infinite thing?

I thought as I walked around San Francisco that I was surrounded by a constant thrum. A constant assault of billboards. But I wasn’t.

I wasn’t assaulted. I was drowning.

Recognizing the water is the first step.

See you in September.

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