*Dialectic Episode 4: Ava - Alive in Writing and in Love - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aUEIpGhMkjybyohwXDI3H?si=f797fbf47c284871) and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/qAZlQ5UI4yM?si=XHFUMMwlMCvTMuve).* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/3aUEIpGhMkjybyohwXDI3H?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-ava-alive-in-writing-and-in-love/id1780282402?i=1000679705838"></iframe> # Description Ava ([X](https://x.com/noampomsky)) is one of my favorite writers. She writes full-time for her Substack, [Bookbear Express](https://www.avabear.xyz/), and focuses on love, friendship, emotions, culture, and psychology. I'm not sure there's anyone I've more consistently recommended to friends and loved ones in recent years, and it seems like the world agrees: Ava now has over 30,000 subscribers. One of my favorite parts of this episode was reading excerpts from Ava's essays over the years back to her. We cover a ton of ground, including writing, consistency, commitment, friendship, authenticity, self-respect, taste, beauty, and much more. # Timestamps - (1:09): What makes for good writing & what Ava writes about - (5:49): Flow, Writing Practice, Consistency, Commitment, and Maintenance - (14:08): Audience Consideration, Vulnerability, Sincerity, and Ava's Readership - (26:30): Feedback Loops, Getting Better at Writing - (28:51): Distribution and Growth; Writing Online vs. Making a Living with Writing - (34:39): Social Psychology and Seeing People More Clearly - (36:21): Do People Change? - (42:44): Relationships & Helping Others Find Love - (44:32): The Friendship Theory of Everything - (1:00:35): Consistency, Self-Respect, and Self-Trust - (1:03:45): Frames: Consistency in Our Relationships with Others - (1:08:21): Authenticity and Honesty - (1:15:12): Taste & Interiority - (1:24:14): Two Core Interests: Relationships and Technology - (1:26:12): San Francisco - (1:29:48): Writing in the Second Person - (1:31:52): Substack Recommendations and a Novel - (1:33:07): Motivation & Energy - (1:33:50): 10 Years Back, 10 Years Ahead - (1:35:46): Uselessness - (1:39:06): Beauty # Links Ava's Writing: - [protecting flow](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/protecting-flow) - [on maintaining attention](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/on-maintaining-attention) - [is everything copy?](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/is-everything-copy) - [what's up with modern love?](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/whats-up-with-modern-love) - [the friendship theory of everything](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/the-friendship-theory-of-everything) - [everything I know about love](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/everything-i-know-about-love) - [frames](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/frames) - [the girl the internet made me](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/the-girl-the-internet-made-me) (Authenticity) - [taste](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/taste) - [what we talk about when we talk about taste](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about) - [in praise of uselessness](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/in-praise-of-uselessness) Others: - [The Elif Life | Elif Batuman](https://eliflife.substack.com/) - [Out of It | Mary Gaitskill](https://marygaitskill.substack.com/) Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow Dialectic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript **Jackson** 00:00:00 Ava is one of my favorite writers. She writes full-time for her Substack, Bookbear Express. I'm not sure there's anyone I've more consistently recommended to friends and loved ones in recent years, and it seems like the world agrees. Ava now has over 30,000 subscribers. One of my favorite parts of this episode was reading excerpts from Ava's essays over the years back to her. We cover a ton of ground, including writing, consistency, commitment, friendship, authenticity, self-respect, taste, beauty, and much more. Please enjoy. And if you've liked the episodes thus far, please follow and rate them on Spotify or Apple. Here's Ava. We're here. **Ava** 00:00:44 We are. **Jackson** 00:00:45 The queen of Bookbear Express herself. Live in San Francisco. Not live, well, I guess we're live. It's wonderful to be with you. How are you doing? **Ava** 00:00:52 I'm doing well. I'm excited to have you here, spending more time in San Francisco. **Jackson** 00:00:58 This is all part of your ploy. **Ava** 00:00:59 I'm hoping that on this podcast, you'll make a commitment to moving to San Francisco. **Jackson** 00:01:04 Oh, wow. All right, we have to get through a few things before we get to that. Okay, I did a little digging for the viewers' context, or the listeners' context, not the viewer. I met you on Twitter because I read your writing, and I reached out. I wanted to go back and see what was inside of that, what was that message? I'm going to read your cold DM to me. I'm going to read my cold DM and a quote from something you wrote that, maybe, I think in some ways really sets the stage for what I think makes you as a person special and makes your writing so special. So I had said, "Hi, dropping a note to share how much I've enjoyed your writing. I discovered it only recently. Your perspective on the ordinary and seemingly mundane is particularly wonderful. So I really love today's essay. I like this bit in particular." This is you. "Maybe to you, something like this isn't worth getting excited over, but I find that people who tend to reserve specialness for very particular things tend to be disappointed by those things. Anyway, I'd rather be easily excited by everything I like." **Ava** 00:02:10 You. **Jackson** 00:02:11 For people who don't know you, you're primarily a writer. **Ava** 00:02:15 Yes. **Jackson** 00:02:15 Singularly, not singular, you contain multitudes. But you are professionally a writer and also doing a lot of writing in your kind of life broadly. What makes for good writing? **Ava** 00:02:28 Starting with the easy ones. **Jackson** 00:02:30 Or at least what makes for the type of writing that you really enjoy? **Ava** 00:02:34 I'm definitely a sucker for a great prose style. I don't think I could define what good writing is, but definitely great prose, clarity of thought, attentiveness. I really like writers who have this particular attentiveness with which they perceive the world and get down on the page. **Jackson** 00:02:58 I think that checks out. You've been writing now in some form on Substack for four years. **Ava** 00:03:03 Four years, yeah. The anniversary of four years was in September. **Jackson** 00:03:07 Whoa. **Ava** 00:03:08 Yeah, big one. **Jackson** 00:03:09 Okay. I'm curious, looking back, both what you think the holistic themes have been or that you continue to come back to, and also if there's any notable way you've observed that they have changed over the course of four years. **Ava** 00:03:23 I think I started out writing my Substack thinking it'd be a bit more about mindfulness. 2020 had been a year where I'd started to get a lot more interested in psychedelics and meditation. Some of my earliest posts were born out of a desire to share more about that. But I quickly found—I think a lot of people, I think Sasha Chapin had just recently wrote a great piece about this—it's actually very hard to write about mindfulness, or I personally find it very hard. And so I think it kind of started in that place and became more holistically about just the things I'm interested in, which I would define as personality, emotions, psychology, culture, relationships. **Jackson** 00:04:11 You obviously have some cool psychedelic stuff, but I didn't know it was that mindful. It also checks out, I guess, for September 2020. **Ava** 00:04:17 It was definitely a big focus at the time, and something that's still—meditation and mindfulness are definitely something I think more about and maybe talk to friends more about than I write about. I think it's very accurately perceived that sort of, like, talking about your dreams is only really interesting to people who are in the know, and then it is sort of boring to everyone else. Or at least I just have not gained the requisite level of skill needed to write compellingly about it. But I like to think of it as one of the undergirding themes of my work more than something that I explicitly address so often. **Jackson** 00:04:52 Yeah, that makes sense. And you primarily write about yourself and your life. Has that part of it changed materially? **Ava** 00:05:00 I would say that I've never written about myself very explicitly, and that's always kind of been the case. But centering the Substack around my life and my emotional experience has always been true from the start. I think that was always sort of the lens through which I found it easy to write. It's been really good as a theme or a perspective for me because you can always sort of write about your first-person experience. So, I didn't want to pick a topic that I might run out of steam on, and I certainly didn't. **Jackson** 00:05:39 Yeah, to be clear, you don't write about the plot of your life necessarily. **Ava** 00:05:45 Yeah. **Jackson** 00:05:45 But you are very inside of your writing: your feelings, all these things. One thing, in kind of getting more a little into the actual process of writing, you wrote something, maybe last year, about flow and maintaining flow and protecting flow. And there's a line in there that I think about all the time, which is that your life can be mostly flow. I don't know how—that's obviously, I think, more aspirational than anything. But can you talk a little bit about that and your maybe your writing practice and how writing fits into your life? **Ava** 00:06:14 For sure. For context, I was reflecting on this recently since I've been writing the Substack for four years. I feel like I actually started the Substack at a time where I had a lot of questions about my own ability to commit. So, background context for the listener: I dropped out of college when I was 19 and worked on a startup for a couple of years, and that didn't work out. I sort of bounced around trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I very much had the sense in my early twenties where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, maybe I'm just too ADHD. I have all these things I find interesting in the world, and I've taken a stab at a couple of them, but obviously, I haven't fully committed to any. Am I just going to become this person who has a lot of potential but doesn't really actualize all of it? Am I doomed to this kind of fragmented existence, never mastering anything?" That was something I was very afraid of. And I think in that sense, starting to write, which was something I totally fell into—it wasn't really, I mean, it had been always something that was a passion of mine, but I did not even start doing it consistently, thinking it'd be a career. But just writing consistently and then committing to it was a big turning point in my life where I actually started committing to a lot of things. And so in 2021, that was a couple of years into what would become quite a long-term relationship at that point. I had started my writing practice. I'd started kind of really getting into mindfulness. I'd gone much more serious about yoga in the past year at that time, which is still a big part of my life today. And so I really look back at that time. It was really a turning point for me, where in that year, 2020-2021, I started doing a lot of things that are still a huge part of my life today. And I think through that, it changed my life in two ways. One, I was able to kind of shed what was just a fear. What I feared was kind of like my whole identity. But I was able to kind of be like, "Okay, I don't need to conceive of myself as someone who's always bouncing around but never able to commit to things." I truly just had not found the right thing to commit to yet. And so I could kind of let go of some of my anxiety around, like, am I this person who's interested in things but can't do things? And second of all, I think this flow state thing you talk about, I do think the number one argument for commitment is you can find flow in doing something repetitively that you just cannot find when you're doing a million different things. I think at this point, whether it's yoga or writing or just living in my home, I have a particular setup, and I do it pretty much every single day. I do frequently find myself in flow states when engaged in these activities, which can be as simple as walking to the dog park, getting coffee, coming back, and writing for a couple of hours, going to a yoga class in the late afternoon. It's just because I identified things that made me feel a particular way and were very generative, and then I just kind of kept doing them. It turns out you can just keep doing that, and it just works, and there's no reason it has to stop working. **Jackson** 00:09:37 That feeds well into this other thing. I think maybe the first thing I ever read of yours that I really love, which is this post on maintenance, which is not exactly, but I think in some ways, this counter-feeling to the desire—the non-committal desire to have novelty in everything. You have a little excerpt that I wanted to read that I think hits this well, which is, "But I try to maintain what I care about most, and the act of maintenance is what helps me sculpt a cohesive self. To know you have to keep showing up forever and still choose to put in your most earnest effort each time feels Sisyphean, but on certain days, it also feels like pure relief." Is there an element of this? Obviously, you describe this kind of amazing, idealistic lifestyle of somebody who has rhythms and creative work and flow and all these things. When that isn't going as well, or when you're rubbing up against the friction of feeling like it's maintenance, or you're stuck in the messy middle of a project, or frankly, creative inspiration at all, how do you relate to that? Do you have an energy source you go to? Do you just kind of trust the process? Are you just better at returning to maintenance out of habit now? **Ava** 00:10:53 I think it's really liberating to just realize that a lot of the time you'll feel like something isn't going well. I think that's kind of the most important thing for me. When I think about writing a Substack for four years or I've been working on a novel for almost five years at this point, I'm actually with both currently in a place where I'm feeling quite like I feel like they're both going pretty well. But for large chunks of years, it's very normal for me to spend six months just being like, "I don't really like the place Substack is in. I don't feel inspired." And I think coming into that and out of that has just made me realize that is sort of what your relationship to doing the same thing again and again sort of is. In the beginning, you might be like, "Okay, I felt bad about this for three months. Maybe this is a sign to stop." **Jackson** 00:11:49 Three months is a pretty long time, all things considered. Not that long. **Ava** 00:11:51 But it's not, though. That's a good sign. It seems like a long time. But when you've done something for five years, you're like, "Okay, I've cycled in and out of feeling good and bad about this for most of that time." It's very normal. Three months is nothing. Even feeling bad about something for a year is nothing. Having the perspective that something should always feel rewarding and meaningful, but it's okay if it just doesn't feel like it's going well—that can be very discouraging. But for me, normalizing that to myself has been the biggest thing. Everyone feels this. This is a normal thing to feel about your work or your hobby or anything you're working on. Actually, feeling demotivated and frustrated with something is just part of the process. **Jackson** 00:12:44 Our mutual friend Jason, who was on episode one of this podcast, has this line that "confidence is the memory of success." And I suspect part of what you just described is knowing that there have been—yeah, if you're starting out, three months is an infinite amount of time. If you've been doing this for a long time and you have a three-month dry spell, that's a different thing. And I suspect a huge part of this was finding, getting to the point with writing in 2020 or earlier in your life or whatever it might have been, where you at least knew, one, I can find flow in this, and two, on some level, I'm good at this, I like this, or whatever. And that makes it a little easier when you feel like you're in the middle of the storm or it's really tough or whatever. **Ava** 00:13:22 I was just discussing with a friend who's also a writer that many writers have the set up that I have. They have one long-form project that maybe not a lot of people have seen, or they don't get a lot of validation on, and they have a personal blog or a Substack, or they do freelance articles or something. I think it's very common, probably not just in writing, but I imagine in many creative professions to have some way of getting feedback or getting validation, even when you're engaged in something else that's this black hole. So I find that, yeah, I think everyone needs confirmation that they're doing something right occasionally. It's very hard to continue without that. **Jackson** 00:14:08 Yes, I agree. Okay. I want to ask you some questions about audience, and specifically the professional side of what you do. Obviously, you are a writer. I think if Substack was banned and you weren't allowed to write professionally, my suspicion is you would continue to write every day. That said, especially given the nature of what you do, which is this very personal writing--not necessarily about the details of your life. I think my experience of your writing is somewhere between journaling, and a little bit more performant, like an essay. Sometimes it's self-help. Sometimes you're teaching. Sometimes you're just reflecting on your own experiences. Sometimes it's entertainment. There's all of these things swirling in there. Obviously, your audience size has also changed. Now you're at a point where there's tens of thousands of people subscribed to you, and people paying you, and all these different things. I'm curious, just how do you relate to something you love so much creatively also being work? It's a classic story: music, whatever, people. Some people are fine with that. Some people really struggle with that. Has that been challenging to navigate, or has it been pretty coherent? **Ava** 00:15:19 I think that for the most part, I really like what I write about, and I'm lucky to have a job that truly is joyful for me. I definitely think of myself as having it easy, just because I'm genuinely writing about something I find very engaging. I get to do something that's a lot more authentic, quote-unquote, to me than a lot of people find their day jobs to be. **Jackson** 00:15:43 Yeah. **Ava** 00:15:43 At the same time, actually, I ran into this very sweet reader who was asking me about whether my writing style has changed as I've spent longer on Substack. And I definitely think there's an element of, you know, you do write for your audience, or at least I am influenced by my audience. I want to write something that my readers will like, and I have some understanding of what they're interested in. You're trying to cater to what is useful or interesting or compelling to them, which is obviously different from writing on a Tumblr for yourself. I think there is sort of more of a shift over time to wanting to deliver, which I think is inevitable for anyone who basically makes money from their audience. **Jackson** 00:16:28 You've also written about this, maybe the tension between actually living and the desire or the temptation to record or capture your life. Maybe this is something that you've gotten better at over time. I think anyone who does anything creative, there's a little bit of this. I'm now recording conversations with my friends. Is that a part of that, or is that something that's gotten easier over time? **Ava** 00:16:54 I don't think I write one-to-one about life events, so I think it's sort of easy for me in that sense. People who are journalists might have assignments where you might go to this event, and you literally need to write about it. I usually don't have anything like that going on. I write more about emotions or themes. I'm lucky in that I'm never usually in a situation where I'm like, "I have to write down the dialogue I'm overhearing," or, "I have to write down notes about this hotel or something." Writing versus living... I do think that it can sort of... I will say, I think the most tiring thing about doing something like Substack is that you truly cannot take time off. I mean, you can, but most Substack writers would agree with me that, from a revenue point of view, people don't like it when writers take breaks. I don't write on a crazy schedule or anything, but I don't really feel like I can stop. There's probably a few weeks a year where I'm like, okay, you know, Christmas week, or I'm just really busy with some personal thing, I'm like, whatever, I won't write for a couple weeks. But most of the time, I really do feel like I need to stick to my writing schedule no matter what, twice a week. It can feel like, oh my God, let's say it's Thanksgiving week, and I'm just sitting around. I'm not reading anything interesting, not thinking anything interesting, not feeling any emotions that are particularly worth writing about. It can be sort of funny to be like, okay, I don't feel like a wellspring of inspiration right now, but the post must go out. I think the challenging thing is that you do have to be professional about it. And there's nothing wrong with being professional about it. I think sometimes people underestimate that. This is even outside of writing. I think the content grind is sort of just like this, right? A lot of content creators will say everyone thinks it's not real work, but once you realize you have to keep producing content all the time, all the days of your life, it actually does end up feeling kind of... it becomes just something that you hold yourself to and need to do. **Jackson** 00:19:02 Yeah, especially when you're... Well, I will say your slow Thanksgiving week post this year was really, really great. "It's called December." One of my favorites in a while. One element of that last bit, too, with the content creator stuff is, like, anything personal, you're gonna have a different... there's pros and cons. Obviously, if you're a journalist, you have to go interview people. You talked a little bit about that. But on some level, what you do is vulnerable. I think you found what seems to be a pretty good balance there in terms of how vulnerable to be and how much you write about. I am curious how you think about, or how you even experience, wide vulnerability versus narrow vulnerability, meaning the type of vulnerability that comes across writing to theoretically thousands of people online versus talking to a friend. My suspicion is most people who read you would say you're incredibly vulnerable, at least in some dimension. Again, you're not talking about people or specific events, but that's a different kind of vulnerability than talking to your friend about a relationship or whatever it might be. **Ava** 00:20:10 Yes, I find this very funny because people actually often give me the feedback in real life that they wish I were more vulnerable. **Jackson** 00:20:21 In your writing or just in your personal life? **Ava** 00:20:22 In my personal life. With close friends, for example, or in relationships. I have been told, I forgot if we talked about this, but things have gone like, "Okay, you're a little bit opaque. I feel like you're more comfortable hearing about other people's problems and talking about your own." I've definitely been accused of being afraid of vulnerability. And so I do find it kind of interesting that I sort of have a career of being, in some way, professionally vulnerable. But that's not really a label I would apply necessarily to my own. It's not necessarily like, I think to me it feels like I'm unqualified to claim my writing is vulnerable or to say something like, "Am I vulnerable or not as a person?" I think that's sort of more of an adjective that other people can place on your work, but it's not something I sit there and go, "Well, is this piece of writing particularly vulnerable?" That's not really an axis on which I think about my work for myself. I think probably maybe I think a little bit about sincerity. I think that's sort of important to me, and I think the two are linked. For me, one thing I do care about is that my writing is emotionally honest, even if I'm not disclosing the details of my life. I try to mostly write things as I experience them because that is important to me, that I'm accurately portraying something I'm going through. Maybe the sincerity is vulnerable in a way, but I think it's sort of hard from the inside to say, "Is it vulnerable? Is it not?" I find that hard to assess, actually. **Jackson** 00:22:02 Vulnerability comes in different flavors. There are probably artists out there who, if you spent time with them one-on-one, you would experience them as almost like a brick wall. And yet their art is profoundly vulnerable and meaningful. I certainly relate to being someone who asks other people lots of questions and also does a performative, maybe not entirely performative, but fairly open in some ways. But there are different ways we almost pick our spots on vulnerability, and I think that's probably fine. **Ava** 00:22:33 Right. I certainly think the act of making art is very vulnerable. I think maybe saying writing is very vulnerable for me. Is my writing itself vulnerable? Is a piece vulnerable? I think that's hard to assess for me. But I think I'm comfortable saying writing is something, I think the creative act for anyone is just very vulnerable. I think that's definitely a way in which I feel very vulnerable, putting myself out there. And I think that maybe is easier to talk about than, is the Substack vulnerable? That's harder to say. **Jackson** 00:23:09 And it gets to the sincerity thing, too, which you nailed. You've obviously met people because of your writing, including this interviewer, and you've done meetups with your audience. You've done some matchmaking stuff. Has your audience become, one, it's grown also a ton, but has it taken more of a shape in your mind? Do you think about who your audience is, especially now that you've started to put more faces to it or you're starting to see people's names more? **Ava** 00:23:38 For sure. I think one thing that I was really surprised by as I started to meet more people who read my writing was how many of them are just people I want to hang out with. **Jackson** 00:23:52 It's a bad signal. **Ava** 00:23:53 And many of them, I do hang out with them. I feel incredibly comfortable at meetups or through all the things I've done through my Substack, just because I really like my readers, it turns out. And that's been a really pleasant surprise. When I started writing my Substack, I didn't really know who the reader was. It's really only in the past year or so that I really started meeting a lot of people who read my blog. And yeah, turns out I really like them. I'm a big advocate of the idea that putting out personal writing is one of the best ways in the world to meet friends, partners, people you admire, work. It's unilaterally, I think, one of the most powerful things you can be doing. **Jackson** 00:24:39 Well, you give some vulnerability, and you get a lot in return. **Ava** 00:24:44 Definitely true. **Jackson** 00:24:45 Are there any broad strokes, sweeping kind of categorizations or themes on the audience that you would, that you've noticed in terms of the type of people, the caricature of the Book Bear reader? **Ava** 00:25:00 Yes, excuse me. I think one funny thing I like to say is that people are so socially astute that at meetups, I actually have the problem of, I feel like not enough people talk to me because I feel like they're all so conscious of not swarming me that people are too considerate. **Jackson** 00:25:17 You're alone in the corner. **Ava** 00:25:18 Yeah, really considerate, really conscientious, very emotionally intelligent. I would say 20 to late 30s is most of the age range for people who at least I've met in person. There are people who are older and younger. Actually, a lot of them are Asian, which was kind of interesting to me because, I mean, I obviously am public about the fact that I'm Asian Canadian, Asian American, but I don't explicitly write about, for example, being Chinese that often on my Substack. But it's been really interesting realizing a really large proportion of my readers are, you know, for example, Asian American. So that's been really cool to see. And then there's really a mix of professions. I'd say there's a lot of people in tech because that was sort of my original Twitter following, but there's tons of people who are teachers, lawyers. There's quite the spread, actually. Location also, apparently there are people all over the world, which is really cool. And the gender balance is almost exactly 50/50. **Jackson** 00:26:27 Wow. **Ava** 00:26:27 Yeah. **Jackson** 00:26:27 That's quite rare on the internet. How do you know if you're getting better at writing? Obviously, you have a massive following, relatively quite a large following for a writer online. You have your personal relationship to writing. It's been up into the right from a growth standpoint. Is that something you're thinking about, or do you just have an internal compass that's a little bit more implicit of, "I'm looking back at the last six months or 12 months, and my sensibility," or are you not even thinking about the writing in that way? **Ava** 00:27:01 It is really complicated because I think it is natural. I want the Substack to keep growing. I want people to find my writing, and I want to feel like I'm doing a good job. At the same time, because for me, in some ways, my Substack is also an outlet as well as a, it's a small business. It's my job, but it's also my outlet. **Jackson** 00:27:22 Sorry, it's art on some. **Ava** 00:27:23 Yes. I mean, I **Ava** 00:27:23 I really struggle to balance between wanting it to feel like my original inspiration, the blogs I grew up reading, and also wanting to retain this fun, lighthearted nature to it. I didn't want to turn it into something where I felt like I had sucked all the spontaneity out of it by committing to being very exacting about my prose. I can do that somewhere else. I sort of actually did not explicitly want my Substack to be that for me. But it's also hard because I want it to be good. I think I am still trying to figure out that balance. The way that I think about it now is that I feel like I've identified, over the past few years, topics I'm really interested in writing about, such as friendship. One way I track the success of the Substack is being like, okay, if I'm writing about friendship, do people seem engaged? Do I feel like I'm going deeper into the topic? Am I writing about it from angles that are interesting to me and seem to be compelling to the reader? So I try to track it from that perspective. In terms of the things or topics I'm writing about, am I going deeper on those and still writing about them in ways that are interesting to me? That's sort of the metric right now. **Jackson** 00:28:50 That's cool. Do you think much about distribution specifically? You're past the threshold from a, obviously you can make a living doing it. You're growing organically, people are telling other people about it. But also as an artist, as a creative on the Internet, distribution is really important. **Ava** 00:29:08 Yes, I think about it a lot, actually. I feel like the thing I always say to people is I would recommend putting writing online to anyone. Everyone should be keeping some kind of personal blog. However, I would not recommend making a living as a writer online to everyone. And I think the distinction really is, do you want to think about distribution? Anyone who wants to make a living as a writer is thinking about money, frankly. Thinking about money just means thinking about things like, should I cross post part of the Substack to Twitter? How should I format it? Should I do subscription sales at certain times of the year? **Jackson** 00:29:49 Can I post the link? **Ava** 00:29:51 There are all these things that you sort of think about. How do I make sure other people hear about my writing? How do I keep my readers happy? How do I make it so that paying for my content is worth their time? Frankly, I think there are probably a lot of people who are great writers who are just like, "I hate thinking about this." And that's just not compelling to me at all. And that's okay. I think that's very valid. But I feel like for people who want to do the whole Internet writing thing, thinking about that is really important. And I do like thinking about it. It's very funny. I have talked a few times with James Clear, who wrote *Atomic Habits*. He's obviously the best at this, and he's just a really awesome person. But I remember asking him about why *Atomic Habits* has been as phenomenally successful as is, and he's like, "The thing is, I'm obsessed with all the different parts of the distribution process, and most people just don't care about that at all." In general, distribution doesn't have anything to do with the quality of writing. You can be this amazing writer who cares nothing about distribution. But I think caring about distribution is probably hugely linked with how much your writing gets read on the Internet. For better or for worse, that's sort of what is. **Jackson** 00:31:19 Yeah, not only that, but there's the effort part of it. But there's also just the form factor fit part of it. There are types of writing that isn't going to do super well with an excerpt on Twitter. Obviously, your writing isn't built for that, but it does do really well in that context, and that probably helped. I was talking to my friend Jordy recently. He started this new thing called Technology Brothers. It's like a podcast, and they have done this amazing job where they just print out tweets and read them and talk about it on Twitter. It's the perfect format for Twitter. James Clear is obviously a master of this. He has a really successful newsletter. I think some of this, too, is maybe you have different products or different outputs for different contexts. Your novel, obviously, you don't have to think about any of this. Maybe eventually you'll have to. And so maybe that's like the way you kind of find the middle ground versus a daily, or should be not a daily, a weekly or bi-weekly Substack feels a little easier to do in a way where it's short enough, it can be shared around. You can read it. I'm not going to read 20,000 words twice a week probably, but I probably will read a thousand or whatever it might be. **Ava** 00:32:27 Yeah. I think some of the art I love the most is art that does not sell. I really like poetry. Emily Nussbaum once said... She's a very successful television critic for *The New Yorker*. I don't know if she's still there, but she was for many years, and actually won a Pulitzer for it. She mentioned once that she used to be a poetry critic, and she had stopped doing it because it's so depressing to criticize writing that people work so hard on that doesn't commercially sell at all. And I love poetry. I have a lot of appreciation and love to consume art that really isn't viable as a product on the market. I don't think that art should have to be viable as a marketable thing whatsoever. But then there's kind of also the matter of how you personally, as an artist, make your living. Anyone who does creative work sort of has to reckon with it. Do you have a day job that's not related to your art or your writing and just make stuff that doesn't have to make money on the side? Or do you have one way of making money through your writing, but then you have another form of writing that doesn't have to make money? Everyone's always trying to find a balance. With my Substack, I feel comfortable saying, for now, this is my primary form of income. It is important to me that I want people to like it. I want people to subscribe, all of that. Of course, there's a part of my psyche where I'm like, "I also want to write in ways that I don't even have to show anyone." Or it doesn't have to sell a single copy. It's okay to sort of have that tension. Everyone sort of confronts that tension in creative work, and it's always just about trying to find the balance between, can I make a living? But can I also have space to do things that simply don't need to be marketable in any way? **Jackson** 00:34:23 The cool thing is if you compound a little bit and you grow, you eventually get to the point where you can say, "Hey, reader, I want you to trust me. You claim you like my taste. I'm going to take you somewhere you maybe didn't think you would normally go." I think you've done a cool job of that as you've navigated different things. One topic that you certainly write about, and I think the pie chart of our conversations not on podcasts is incredibly full of, is really like, what makes people tick? What, like, social psychology? What is it about people? How do we see people more clearly? Is there a reason you think you're so, or maybe both of us are so, intrigued by that? **Ava** 00:35:05 I think we're both people who really love people, you know? And I think in our friend group, that is also—I think we're also friends with people who like just thinking and talking about people. I think for me, it's always been a fascination of mine from childhood, and I think that's a big reason why I read novels, right? Novels fundamentally are—novels are mostly writers making observations about other people's psychologies. I think that's one way you could think about a lot of different novels. So, for me, I think people are just endlessly fascinating. And it's just so interesting to try to understand, like, why do people do the things they do? Why do they change sometimes and stay the same other times? Why does X date Y? Why do people fall in love and fall out of love? And I feel like you share those preoccupations, too. People are so complex, and I think there's something about their complexity that really excites me. I could be more excited about the complexity of the economy or something, but somehow we are both really excited about the complexity of people. **Jackson** 00:36:18 Yes, you mentioned change. This is also something we've talked about, and you've written a lot about. There's an excerpt of something from a while ago that I thought was interesting, where you say, "I was telling my therapist that all the writers I like are one, super self-aware and two, unable to change themselves despite being self-aware. I want to be able to write about interesting things, but I also want to be able to change myself. Is that impossible?" There's obviously personal stuff in there. But maybe more broadly, do people really change, or is that just an illusion? Are people kind of who they are? **Ava** 00:36:50 I definitely think people change. **Jackson** 00:36:53 What has that—have you always believed that? Or have there been things in your life and relationships in the last decade that have evolved that view? **Ava** 00:37:02 The story I always tell people is that my parents have changed a lot. Your parents affect you so much. And just seeing my parents change really made me believe that people can because I got the very front-seat view of it. When I was younger, my parents were very classic, sort of Asian immigrant parents: very discipline-oriented. I had a curfew of 6 p.m. until I was in college. I played piano, did math competitions, all of these things. My parents really bought into that style of parenting. And as I've gotten older, they've just mellowed out so much. Not only has their parenting style changed, but their entire demeanor, personalities—I think they've actually gone a lot more into mindfulness themselves. My mom and I talk about this, and even my dad has become so much more accepting. Just seeing that in my family makes me really believe that, on the order of decades, everyone can change. **Jackson** 00:38:04 How do you reconcile that? I think I agree. On the other hand, I kind of also believe that, at least in certain ways, we very much are who we are. In some ways, life is about finally getting to the bottom of either accepting yourself for who you are or seeing yourself for who you are. Kevin Kelly has this idea I love, which is like you're trying to become yourself by the time you get on your deathbed. And yet, also, we totally can change; we totally can grow. It's almost like there's this tension of certain things that are unchangeable that you have to just sort of accept. But also, obviously, people can grow, especially over the course of decades. **Ava** 00:38:42 Yeah, I definitely am very sympathetic to the idea of, like, we are all just becoming ourselves more fully. I think that's a really beautiful idea. And I really like the idea of, you know, we're just ultimately vessels, right? And so it's kind of like our purpose moves through us, not the other way around. But I think I'm just really wary about being too prescriptive about who you are because saying, "This is how I am, and I can't be any other way," sometimes that's liberating, but other times it can be very defeatist. **Jackson** 00:39:12 Right. **Ava** 00:39:13 And so in general, in myself and in people I love, I just try to encourage some level of, okay, well, you're saying that's just the way I am. Is that actually true? Does that feel like the shape of your soul, or does that feel like something that's convenient to say, an internalized story? **Jackson** 00:39:30 Yeah, totally. And that feels like maybe where the line is. Being able to see yourself clearly in that way is actually the root of self-awareness. But so often, we layer other narratives on ourselves: failure, success, or whatever. Speaking of James Clear, one of the sort of super simple identity things that he talks about that I love is just, don't say you're trying to be on time. Say you are someone who isn't late. That's very different. And often we have these narratives running in our heads that aren't even totally conscious. I think breaking through that to your point is an amazing way to actually have material change. **Ava** 00:40:10 Yeah, I have very complicated feelings about identity and how beliefs around identity affect who you are and your behavior. But I definitely think that one thing I try to tell myself is, be willing to be surprised by yourself. Just because I have never been a morning person doesn't mean I can't be a morning person. I mean, that sounds ridiculous, but I really try to actually be very open-minded about things like that. Something that's been really interesting to me over the past couple of years is I used to think of myself as not a group person. I always thought of myself as someone who's only comfortable in one-on-one settings. And I think through Substack and through things changing in my own friend group, I've become a lot more comfortable with group settings and even been able to really enjoy myself in them. I could definitely see a version of me where I really just had been like, "I'm never going to try this because this is not me." I think that's the kind of prescriptivism that can be bad, where you close off things that could bring joy because you just decide that's not for you. **Jackson** 00:41:16 Drawing boundaries around yourself. Are there any things that you've learned or ways that you've told other people to better see people? To be more attuned to them and what makes them tick? To model their theory of mind? To be more empathetic? Are there ways that you think you've gotten better at that? **Ava** 00:41:48 Just asking people a lot of questions. I have a lot of friends who just love to ask questions. I think we all make fun of each other, where it's like, "Oh my God, don't do that thing you do." But at the same time, I'm a huge proponent of, "If you want to know something about someone, have you tried asking them?" I actually give this advice a lot. Sometimes someone will just be like, "Oh, I wish I knew what my girlfriend thought about this." I'd be like, "Have you tried being like, 'Hey, Emily, what do you think about this?'" And often they're like, "No, I couldn't do that." Your life can change so fast if you just go around asking people about what they actually think or feel about something. Just let them answer on their own terms. **Jackson** 00:42:43 We make a lot of assumptions. You are enamored by relationships. You have now started to work on getting more people into relationships, both broadly with your writing, but certainly also very tangibly with matchmaking. Do you think that helping people get into romantic relationships is a core mission of your life? That's a very broad statement. It seems to me over time, you've been gravitating more and more towards that. If in 10 years, that is the revolving theory of your work and life and creativity, would that be surprising? **Ava** 00:43:25 No, I definitely feel comfortable saying that helping people I love be in fulfilling relationships, romantic and platonic, is a core thing I want to do with my life. As you're saying this, I'm thinking, "Why do I want to help them find friends?" Most of my friends already have these exceptional friend groups. I don't really worry about that. Romantic relationships are what is left. I think we are in an era where people are finding it quite hard to date. I think they're also finding it quite hard to make close friends. But I have a really wonderful friend group, and I've been in really wonderful romantic relationships myself. I believe in the power of relationships to make your life better in every way, and it's really meaningful for me to try to help people find those. **Jackson** 00:44:31 Speaking of friendship, I think friendship is one of the more underrated things broadly and definitely underwritten about in writing and art and media. Fortunately, not by you. You talk about it a lot and you write about it a lot. Maybe I'll kick us off with something you wrote: "The idealist in me would like to say that being ambitious about platonic love is how you start to be ambitious about everything else, including romantic love. The cynic in me points to out there are a thousand and one articles telling people that they should have better friendships and very few telling them how." Obviously, you mentioned most of your friends having really rich friendships. But I am curious, broadly, if you have any thoughts on the friendship theory of everything. How do you think about friendship, the impact it's had on your life, and if you're going to give one high-level take on the ways that people can improve either the quality of their friendships, the amount of them, or even their approach or disposition to friendship? **Ava** 00:45:34 I think friendship is the entry point to everything meaningful in life. I just gave a talk about this recently, so I'm very prepared. Basically, we come into life with social and familial constructs on what a good life is. As someone who is a Chinese-Canadian child of immigrants, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, I feel like I was told a very prestige-motivated view of what makes life good. Go to an Ivy League college, get a job in finance or become a doctor, do something that's professionally valued and stable. That's how you have a good life, if you achieve all these things. Some of that dovetailed with what actually gave me joy, but a lot of it didn't. I'm fundamentally this very autonomous, creative person who maybe didn't want to climb the career ladder. By finding a peer group that's also quite unorthodox and untraditional, I was able to find my own meaning. By seeing people who I really respected and looked up to follow their own paths, I was able to realize some of the things they're doing are things that could also make me happy. **Jackson** 00:46:50 Right. **Ava** 00:46:51 I think this applies for everyone where if you have a peer group that you really love and also admire, looking at how they live their life and the choices they make can help you make better choices for yourself. That's the number one reason why you should invest in your friendships. Not only can they make you happy through the relationships themselves, but they can model to you how you should be living your life in a meaningful way. Friendship is hugely under-theorized in our society as compared to romantic relationships because we expect romantic relationships to bear many of the things that friendship traditionally did. We want our partner to be not only a lover but also someone who's a great conversationalist, someone who shares our intellectual interests, someone who does all the same hobbies, and also someone who's great at doing domestic tasks and child-rearing with us. It's just everything. In reality, if you have a strong friend group with people who satisfy a lot of those needs and give you, it can actually help you be more appreciative of your partner because you're not trying to make your partner everything. In friendship, you have the ability to choose people who you really love hanging out with, who don't have to be everything to you. That actually allows you to really go deep on specific aspects of your passions or your interests or just things you share that maybe you couldn't actually explore with a partner. **Jackson** 00:48:26 Yeah, it's like a constellation or mosaic versus the singular. And I think, unfortunately, so much of this obviously stems from this sort of just pragmatic nature of: you, great, you have tons of friends. You have two 20s, 30, early 30-somethings talking about friendship. It's so easy, blah, blah, blah. You and I don't have kids, whatever. Over time, life gets hard. You move away. And I think one of the things that I really admire about how you've talked about it is, granted, you're not in that next phase necessarily, but you've just talked about the reasons to actually make it a higher priority than maybe the average person does. One of the kind of the most succinct, and this gets into the, you're the average of the people you spend the most time with, but you say you accept that in choosing who you spend time with, you choose who you are. And I think when you relate to friends in that way, or maybe even with a level of intention or deliberation, as you were mentioning around, I want to be more like X. I want to be more like this person. The main way to do that, the best way to do that, I think you and I would agree, is to spend time with someone who is like that. In that sense, are there, and I would strongly recommend, you've written a lot about friendship. Your piece, "The Friendship Theory of Everything," is one of my very favorites, both on San Francisco and on friendship. So I'll link that. But are there any things in particular that you personally really value in friendships? **Ava** 00:49:43 I think just attentiveness is really important. I really think that, to your question earlier about, do I have any advice or tips on friendship? I think it's just you have to really invest in friendship. And I think a lot of people aren't told you should be investing in friendships the way that you invest in romantic relationships. I think I've been really lucky to find a friend group where we all give each other a ton of attention and energy and time and effort. And I think that's sort of what can make it work, right? The truth is, a friendship will fall apart if one person is just checked out. You can't hang out with someone who doesn't want to hang out with you, right? Obviously, people get busy. People go through life things. People will be unavailable for periods of time. But I think for any long-term successful friendship, it has succeeded because both people attended to each other for many, many years. I think I've been really lucky to find people who I hope I can do that with. I think I have friends now who I've been very close to for a decade. I'm hoping I can say in two more decades, here are the friends who I've been close to for 30 years. Yeah, I think it really is just about finding the people who care as much as you do. I think people are a little bit too negative in the sense of, they love to talk about the rule of why things don't work, right? Oh, book clubs, they don't work. You don't have friends after you become a parent. All these things, and it's true. The default case might be that it just doesn't work. But the thing is, people do crazy things all the time. People literally start communes and keep them going for decades. So it's not this thing where people absolutely can't make something like a rich friend group that survives parenthood or different phases of life work. It's more just like, there are a lot of examples of why things fail. But I think it's also really important to study the successful cases. For me, I'm always trying to learn from the people who I think are doing it really well, and I can't say that I'll succeed, but I want to emulate them. **Jackson** 00:51:53 And good things are hard. **Ava** 00:51:54 Yeah. **Jackson** 00:51:54 And it takes priority. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it is just, it simply stops being a priority. And obviously, you're not going to be able to have that with tons of people. But I think it's something that, yeah, I certainly aspire to. **Ava** 00:52:08 And it's not a lot of people's vision. That's the thing. And I wouldn't say that has to be, right? Some people really are like, what I need in my life is my romantic partner. And one of my friends and I were talking about how there are many people who fall in love and they're immediately like, okay, let's move to Montana and we never have to see anyone else again. And I'm not here to say that's not valid, right? Because your vision of life is your vision of life. My point is, if you're someone who's always going to really value a close friend group, but I want to live close to all my friends, you can't be befriending people who are like, I want to hang out with my romantic partner and move to Montana. **Jackson** 00:52:48 Yeah, it's a great point. **Ava** 00:52:49 You gotta find people who have that shared vision and really invest in it. Because a lot of people are gonna want something different from you, and that is okay. And they're allowed to want that totally. **Jackson** 00:52:58 But also, I think maybe I would argue that a lot of people maybe just haven't seen that vision or maybe gotten to fully experience it in part because they haven't invested. And that's the case for one other piece of friendship that I find so interesting is this sort of lack of boundary or rules around it. Unlike almost all of at least family and romantic relationships. A lot of our relationships or connections in life have very clear expectations and rule sets. And friendship is like the opposite. There's this Tim Kreider quote I love, which is, he says the same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous. It's purely voluntary. You enter into it freely without in the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing. And so there's this weird softness around it, despite everything you just said and how important it is and how much people can influence us and all these types of things. There's the added layer of the expectation setting in friendship in versus trying to change your friends is very different than with a romantic partner. How have you navigated that part, especially of maybe your closest or most intimate friendships? Acknowledging the example I always give is like, if you were dating somebody for four months and you decided to move across the country and you just told them, hey, I'm moving across the country, wanted to let you know, or same thing with your family, you'd be seen as a sociopath. But if you did that to your best friend of 10 years, it would be normal. And it explains the, which I think is one of the positive parts about friendship too, but there is this weird grayness to it. **Ava** 00:54:31 We don't come into friendship usually with a default contract the way we come into romantic relationships. In a romantic relationship, let's say two people are going to become boyfriend and girlfriend, there's usually a very socially normative understanding of what that means. Like, let's say we're going to see each other three to four times a week, maybe we'll be sexually exclusive with each other. You're going to reply to my text messages. You're not going to suddenly move across the country without telling me. We don't really have those in friendship, which means that you have the freedom to individually negotiate contracts with each of your friends. But it can also be really scary and overwhelming for a lot of people, especially if the idea of negotiating what a relationship is is really frightening, and for a good reason. That puts so much agency on it, almost. **Jackson** 00:55:29 In friendships it's less normal, so it might feel like a higher, or it would be weird to not have that conversation in a romantic relationship. But if you went to one of your friends and you're like, "Hey, I want to define things," the default would be like, "What?" **Ava** 00:55:43 One thing I talk a lot about with some of my friends is the idea of friendship scripts as a joke. People need to know that they can do these things with their friends. You're allowed to say to a friend, "You've got to move to San Francisco." You're allowed to do a two-person trip with a friend to Iceland. You're allowed to go on a long road trip with a friend. You're allowed to do all these things with your friends, and most people don't know that you can, or maybe it feels scary or weird. I have a number of conversations about this because I write about this for work and have done workshops around the topic of friendship. It's very interesting, where I think a lot of what people want to know is, "Am I allowed to say this to my friend?" A lot of friendships fail because people don't know how to answer that question. Can I say, "It really hurts my feelings that you've totally neglected me after you've gotten this new job?" Or, "Can I say I don't like your fiance?" Or, "Can I say you've been a bad friend to me for the past year?" Can I say these things? My instinct is usually towards answering yes. There's certainly a right and wrong way of having conversations, and it's important to be tactful. But only when you start opening up these questions and being like, "Well, I'm here, where are you?" that you can really start to address what you want out of a friendship. **Jackson** 00:57:15 And it doesn't mean that we have to be in the same place, by the way. We only have so much. There's this old idea I like, which is the intimacy maintenance matrix. Obviously, a romantic partner, probably your family, whatever, high in the top right of the matrix. And you only have so much bandwidth for high maintenance along with intimacy. That said, talking about it is one of the ways that you can actually map each other and hopefully be a really good friend. I think that's the other part of it. It's not taboo, but there's something about friendship that makes it a little weird to be like, "Hey, here's what I want," or, "Here's what I need," or whatever. **Ava** 00:57:48 We're all polyamorous with our friendships, and I think that actually creates a lot of freedom in a good way. One thing that's funny about friendship is, if your goal is to get married and be in a monogamous relationship, it's probably not advisable to be like, "I want to date this person. They don't want to date me, so I'm just going to sit around and wait for five years." Probably shouldn't do that. But in a friendship, I have met people before and literally thought, "We're going to be friends. We're not friends right now because we don't live in the same place. We haven't really talked. I don't have the energy, whatever. But we're going to be friends." And three years later, it's like, "Okay, I got you." You can just do that with friendship. You can just be like, "Okay, well, the timing is not right now, but it'll be better later." Or with some of my friends, they're going through a really hard time, and they just don't talk to me for six months. And because we're all in these polyamorous friendships, I don't have to be like, "You're not meeting my needs right now, so bye-bye." You can actually have the patience to be like, "Oh gosh, they're going through something really hard, but they're going to come back." Because we have this unstructured freedom, it actually allows us to be more generous and maybe more patient. But also, you can say to someone you're really close to, "I don't want you to stop talking to me." And that's something that's considered very unacceptable in friendship but underexplored. I've actually had friends say to me, "You're a bad texter. Can you get better?" I'm never going to be a great texter, but I actually welcome that. There have been times when people have said to me, "Well, I want you to be more consistently there for me," and, "It would make me feel loved if you did this for me." And these are very much what we consider part of the romantic frame. It's like, "Oh, it's weird to ask of my friend," but I don't think it's weird. I think it's okay if you're really close to someone to just be like, "Hey, you're not meeting my needs in this way. Are you interested in us having a closer and more consistent relationship?" And I think you'd be surprised sometimes at what people are willing to give you if you're willing to ask. **Jackson** 01:00:05 Totally. There's this old, I think maybe Tim Ferriss and Jerry Seinfeld interview from years ago. He said if you were to compress the human struggle down into one word, it would be "confront." And obviously, we talk about confrontation and having hard conversations, more in a romantic relationship context, for example. I think friendship is one area where, at least in my life, I've been fortunate to have friends who are willing to confront sometimes and tell me the things that I don't want to hear. I think maybe all of our friendships might be richer for having some bandwidth for that type of thing. One of the other ideas that you talk about a lot, and that I really find interesting, is your appreciation of consistency. I think you've talked about this both in a sort of individual sense and in a group sense, most recently with your essay on frames. Maybe to start with the individual piece, there's this, this is probably a year ago, you say, "Accountability is the most important thing. Someone who does what they'll say they do, who has self-respect, a relatively small delta between how you act and how you want to act. It's not that that's the only attractive quality, but I know it's the most necessary quality. Without it, everything else becomes redundant." I think you're someone who really values maybe consistency, maybe it's almost like self-alignment. Can you talk a little bit more about that? **Ava** 01:01:32 Yeah, I definitely think that it's the Joan Didion self-respect thing, right? Where if you can't trust yourself, it's really hard to be happy with your life. And I think accountability is the way I understand as the primary way of trusting yourself, right? If you don't have accountability or consistency, it's kind of like you're this person who's totally unpredictable to yourself. You're always living in this state of fear. It's like, "Okay, who knows what's going to happen with me this week, this month, or this year?" I think there's an incredible amount of safety in knowing, "I decided I'm going to do this, so I'm going to do this." I think we talked about this earlier, but starting my Substack marked this entry into a period of my life where I was a lot more consistent. I really feel like I can say being consistent has changed my self-image and my sense of safety with myself. **Jackson** 01:02:44 Yeah. **Ava** 01:02:45 I find that a lot of times when people come to me with some kind of personal dilemma about what their job should be or not feeling good about their life, it's often, not always, but often this question that's really about self-trust. "How can I know that I'll really succeed at this? How can I know that this is the right career path for me? How can I know that I can be a good partner?" These are ostensibly about one thing, like, "Will my company fail or succeed?" But they're really about something else, which is, "Can I trust myself to show up in the way that I want to?" A lot of these questions are not actually about the result, but they're about the process, and the people don't even know they're about the process. **Jackson** 01:03:31 Yeah, to your earlier point, sometimes the thing ahead of consistency, or upstream of consistency, is commitment. It's actually reducing down the decision space and saying, "This is what I'm going to do." I think that's so poignant. The other piece of this is consistency with others. You wrote a recent piece about frames, which you defined as a set of agreements between yourself and other people, the ways that we're going to show up in a relationship. You talk specifically about male-female friendships as one instance of this. I'd love for you to expound on this idea, in particular. I think it's useful for people to maybe even have more accountability with themselves. But also, thinking this way might help all of us in our relationships and maybe even help with some of the boundaries we were talking about earlier, like expectations. **Ava** 01:04:21 Yeah, I think my therapist would refer to this as contracts, but I prefer to think of it as frames. Basically, I think of a frame between two people, which is maybe the easiest way to explain it, as an agreement about how you'll show up for each other. Someone asked me a question about male-female friendships, like, "Okay, well, if there's some amount of attraction, or if there's the natural tension of the gender difference, how do you have a successful friendship?" Some people don't believe we can do that. To me, the answer is you actually have an agreement between two people about how you'll act towards each other. That encompasses very mundane things like, "Okay, when one person texts to schedule a meetup, the other person will say, 'I'm free Thursday.'" But it's also about things like, where are you hanging out? What kind of hangouts do you do? What do you text about? How often do you reply to each other? What is your affect towards each other when you're actually in person? We have this in each of the relationships in our lives. But I think when it comes to a frame between two people, the really important thing is that both people are on the same page and committed to it. In a healthy friendship, both people are like, "Well, this is the setup that we have, and it works for me and it works for you. If there's any problems, we'll work on it together." **Jackson** 01:05:42 Or maybe we'll even talk about it explicitly, going back to the earlier thing. **Ava** 01:05:44 Yeah, or we won't talk about it, but we'll just adjust. I think the failure point, which the person was asking me about, was, "Well, I think it can't work if you want to be friends with someone, and they don't want to be friends with you." It's like, "Okay, we actually just want different things." I think everyone's probably been in a situation where it feels like, "I want the relationship between us to be this one thing, and ostensibly you agree, but it really feels like you're actually not happy." I think this applies in a variety of situations, not just male-female friendships. For anyone, it's like, "I don't enjoy hanging out with someone being like, 'Are you not having a good time? Is this relationship not...'" No one likes that feeling of the other person in the relationship having a really bad time because they're frustrated in some way. One, do you have a good frame? And two, does it actually work for both of you guys? It's just really important in any kind of relationship. You see this in romantic relationships as well, right? Where it's like, the classic, "Well, it's hard for a relationship to work if one person's like, 'We should move in,' and the other person's like, 'Let's see each other twice a week.'" **Jackson** 01:06:54 Right. **Ava** 01:06:55 And that's very normal, actually. So there is this question of, well, can they align on it, or is one person going to be unhappy forever, or are they going to break up? **Jackson** 01:07:03 Yeah, and again, maybe a theme here. I think that's a little more common for people to think about it that way in a romantic relationship. In a friendship or even a work relationship, any of our relationships, I think just applying this model more consistently or at least reflecting on it, what is this sort of default set of assumptions and expectations I have with this interaction, this thing? I think would probably one, help us be more successful, but two, hopefully make us more empathetic and a little bit more attuned to the way the other person is coming to things, versus just assuming the default view: everyone's going to see it exactly how I do. **Ava** 01:07:35 Yeah, I think thinking explicitly, especially in platonic relationships, of like, am I, is this frame working for me, is really important, right? Because I definitely see a lot of people online saying things like, you know, I feel like I'm always the one who has to reach out to my friends. They sort of neglect the relationship. I think it's actually really valuable to be like, well, why is that the case? Is it because, what is going on there? Have you set yourself up in the role where you'll always initiate? Are you hanging out with people who don't value that much? What is going on there? I think there's clearly a frame difference, but actually, why is it happening, and can you do anything about it, is sort of the important thing to look at. **Jackson** 01:08:21 Totally. One of the things you talked about briefly in the frames piece was when you notice certain people have performant bits they do. And this got me thinking about one of the topics I'm maybe the most conflicted on, which is authenticity. One of the another really early things I read of yours, you basically wrote at the time, this is a few years ago, that you didn't believe authenticity exists. I've made this case to people at different times. I'm not sure if I believe it. And it certainly has to do also with whether or not we can change. Maybe authenticity isn't totally the right word. Maybe it's originality, maybe it's self-awareness or alignment with yourself. But especially a few years later, I'm curious what your current relationship to authenticity is, especially as someone who's performing her life to some degree online. Obviously, again, there's boundaries around that. **Ava** 01:09:17 Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on how we're defining or using the word "authenticity." Like, I think if authenticity means honesty, I think honesty is something that, if anything in the past few years, I've come to value more in the sense of like, well, is our honest, am I being honest in my relationship? Am I honest as in, you know, I am sort of accurately and considerately communicating what I really experience in a way that will be understood and received by the other person? I think that is the idea of being honest in my work and in relationships is something I think about a lot. **Jackson** 01:09:56 Is that almost like a consistency of internal and external? Because a part of maybe what you were getting at in that piece years ago, it was the one about *Belle*, the anime movie, I think, that you watched, and that I've talked about a lot too, is this notion that people don't even necessarily know what when they are being authentic. Like it's this recursive thing where you don't totally realize the ways you're sometimes performing to other people, etc. Maybe the honesty piece is less about what the really core thing is, if that's unknowable, and more about, am I presenting something externally that is fairly consistent with what I'm experiencing internally, or what I perceive myself to be experiencing internally? **Ava** 01:10:38 Right. I think maybe the way that I understand it is sort of like, you know, we all perform personas for other people, and I think that there's sort of this human instinct where no one likes to feel that the persona that they're being presented with deviates really far from the emotional experience of the actual person. Right? So, I think it is very jarring, like, for some, you know, if I were to say to you, like, I love this Donna Tartt book. Let's say you said *The Secret History* is your favorite book. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I love that book too." And then you heard secondhand from someone a couple days later, like, "Wait, Ava hates that book." It's just, what was going on about, you know, I think there would be kind of the sense of, well, Ava in that case, knowingly lied to me about something in order to make me feel better, right? And I think we would consider someone inauthentic if they were literally going around doing that all the time, you know? **Jackson** 01:11:38 Sure. But that's like a pretty extreme. I think so much of this is actually more that it's in the much finer print, I guess. **Ava** 01:11:47 Yes. And I think it's really hard because I don't think anyone is like, anyone who's socially normative is not completely authentic in the way that we would be defining it, right? So I think there's sort of this philosophical dilemma of, what is the acceptable line, right? I don't remember exactly where I wrote about it, but I think probably that's why I said, like, you know, fetishizing authenticity. Like I feel like in a way we're post-authenticity, right? Where it's like, because we're on social media, the way that we kind of have to present ourselves, both in social context, but also online, at work, in a million different contexts, it is, by nature, we are so far from kind of the first-person experience of what we actually feel like, necessarily. You cannot honestly represent your inner experience across all these different mediums in an authentic way. In that way, I think we're post-authenticity. But I think maybe what you're asking is more like, is the concept of it still useful in some way? **Jackson** 01:12:47 Yeah. **Ava** 01:12:48 And I think that it is. I mean, I think, okay, maybe I'll offer my take, which is I think the feeling of authenticity is deeply linked to charisma. And I think it's hard. **Jackson** 01:13:00 This is where it gets fuzzy. Yes. **Ava** 01:13:02 Yeah, yeah. And I think that, yeah. So I think sometimes when we're talking about authenticity, we're really talking about charisma, right? **Jackson** 01:13:10 Or even an aesthetic. Like the thing that happened with the, I don't know, like indie bands and hipster people in the early 2010s was like, you would literally have people describing someone as authentic, describing an aesthetic, not describing anything about that person. It was a completely performed thing. And on top of this, obviously, that you were getting at with the internet is just like, we all have a meta-awareness of everything all the time. Which partly, not to maybe get ahead of you, but partly why I think your definition around honesty is so useful. It's a slight tweak on maybe the same thing we're describing. And again, acknowledging that on some level, yes, people who are, whatever, charismatic, seem self-evident. And so we describe them as authentic. But it's a little muddled. **Ava** 01:13:53 Yeah, I think authenticity is still powerful because it's something that we want to feel, and we need to feel in order to be compelled. But as I think we both know, most charismatic people are not particularly authentic whatsoever. Maybe I would say, I think a lot of people who are charismatic are at least able to be like -- they have a level of kind of honesty with themselves. Which is what allows them to portray that feeling to other people. I think there's a sense of, in order to be really effective, a level of almost self-honesty that people have, and that's sort of visible in how they talk and how they present themselves. Now, are they actually being honest with someone else or being authentic? Not necessarily, right? And that's, I think, where it all kind of breaks down. Is it even possible for them to be like -- is it possible as a politician to be honest, right? I think it sort of definitionally breaks down. But I certainly think, maybe thinking about authenticity as kind of a level of self-honesty that can be perceived by other people is still meaningful and interesting. **Jackson** 01:15:09 Or at least an internal consistency. **Ava** 01:15:11 Yeah. **Jackson** 01:15:12 This gets into, in some ways, a topic of the moment. A lot of people have talked about it and written about it, maybe especially adjacent to technology in the last year. I think particularly relevant to you beyond the cliché, which is taste. And a word that you've used that I think is really right and obviously ties to the authenticity piece is interiority. One of the things you wrote recently was that one of your big learnings of the year was understanding the way someone's interior life translates to what they make. If you were going to try to describe authenticity, at least in a creative standpoint, it certainly maps there. Using that maybe as a broad frame, there are three definitions that you've talked about, or ideas you talked about relating to taste, and I thought it would be fun to go through them. The first is just, very simply, consumption is the entry point. The notion that by covering a lot of ground, that's actually how you develop taste. One of the things you said is, if there's one thing I know, it's that taste takes a lot of consumption to create. It's the trap of the former lifestyle blogger or the former style blogger who is now all aboard the minimalist anti-capitalist train. You bought so many things before you learned how to pick out the 20 perfect second-hand items for your fall wardrobe. Like how Didion learned to describe fashion and the lifestyle of the wealthy from her time writing captions at Vogue. First you acquire the vocabulary that gives you the legitimacy, then you critique it. And this notion that, basically, the people we describe as having amazing taste -- I always give the example, like maybe Rick Rubin, it's just easier for him to listen to the incremental amount of music compared to the normal person. Versus this notion that taste is this instinctive thing that you're born with, and you just know what's good. **Ava** 01:16:55 Yeah, I definitely think that for most people it dovetails to what we were talking about earlier. It takes a long time to know yourself, right? Having taste is really about self-knowledge. Maybe some people are born just with self-knowledge, but I think that's very few of us. I think most people actually have to work to know what's true to themselves. **Jackson** 01:17:18 Yeah. **Ava** 01:17:19 And we do that through consumption. **Jackson** 01:17:20 Yeah, the next one that I think dovetails right there is, maybe taste is just following your attention and having the energy at least to do that. Specifically, one idea you got at that I found really relevant is it's almost instinct versus narrative. A lot of it, I think the reason taste gets convoluted, especially if we talk about good taste and bad taste, is it's sort of this narrative running over what you think you feel about things. Versus just having a very personal, actual, sometimes even animal reaction to something. Versus, "Oh, I should like this because I'm the type of person who likes this," or, "people -- the people who I think are cool like this." Maybe I'll read again. You say, "I don't think that your taste needs to be original, but I know it needs to be personal. I love it when people choose objects that feel like them. I don't believe in paying other people to tell you what you like. I prefer it when people have opinions about shape and texture, about voices and movement. When someone tells me what specifically makes them feel good, I understand them for the first time, for real." **Ava** 01:18:31 I've put way too many of my opinions on the internet. Oh, my God. **Jackson** 01:18:36 Just bombarding you today. But talk about authenticity. I should let you speak. But I do think there's something really beautiful in this notion that it isn't even necessarily being original. That's all -- that could totally be like, "I got -- I stole this idea from somebody else," but it is personal. **Ava** 01:18:54 Yeah, I've been going on and on about this line about Miuccia Prada, the Prada designer. There was a profile on her in which the author's friend said, upon seeing a Prada show a few years ago, "Wow, that woman must have the most amazing interior life." To me, that's sort of the thing that's interesting: someone with a really interesting interior life. Sometimes you can look at someone and just be like, "Oh, my gosh, what a cool person." And you can somehow just tell from their glasses or their coat or something. They are alive in that. And I think that's actually such a hard point to get to, where you can sort of express your internal life that well. I think all of us have obviously our own interior lives, but most of us are not maybe so in touch with them. It's actually a lot of work to really get in touch with your own interiority. There's certainly not a lot of guideposts in our culture about how you would even go about doing that. **Jackson** 01:20:05 I really love "they are alive in that." That feels like the perfect encapsulation of what. When you see it in someone, it's not really explained, it's felt. **Ava** 01:20:20 Yeah, like, what does that have to do with you? It's something I often think about when I see something that to me feels like it's in bad taste or feels inauthentic. Like, what's the connection? It feels like something that you're just trying on for size and not something that's a heartfelt statement about you. **Jackson** 01:20:43 Yes. Okay, the last one that I thought was quite interesting, that I think is a lot older, so I'm curious if you remember, but you said, "When what you get is what you want, that is taste." It almost has to do again, with self-accountability, maybe. **Ava** 01:20:59 Yes, speaking to my own experience, I think I was critical. I knew what I didn't like way before I knew what I liked. I don't think I was someone with a preternatural sense of style whatsoever. In fact, I had a very bad sense of style for most of my life. The way that manifested was just that things felt wrong to me, but I couldn't really figure out how or why. Knowing myself better, for example, now when I get dressed, I feel the absence of that sense of wrongness. I think a lot of the time we're just looking for that alignment. I hear this all the time: "I have a wardrobe full of clothes and nothing to wear." That's just a way of people saying everything feels wrong. **Jackson** 01:21:49 Right. They're not feeling alive in this. **Ava** 01:21:52 But it's actually really hard to go from that to, "I do feel alive in this particular thing." **Jackson** 01:21:59 It takes a lot of consumption, a lot of following your attention, a lot of time. Has writing or words specifically, as a lover of words, been one way you've been able to attune yourself to what that is? To know it, rather than the anti — to knowing this is wrong, to knowing this is right? Because obviously, some of it is wordless or beyond words. **Ava** 01:22:22 One way that's helpful is that I always loved reading. From a pretty young age, one way in which I focused on figuring out why I liked life was through books. One of the first things I learned was what I like to read, or what I particularly find beautiful in words. Learning to do that in one format helps you do it in another. I don't think I'm as intuitive of a visual thinker as I am a verbal thinker. But because I knew I could figure out my taste in words, I had this confidence that I could do it for visual mediums as well. If you can do it for one thing, you can do it for another. **Jackson** 01:23:13 You build more. It's a little bit like the confidence of the memory of success again. You start to have more confidence in your process, your knowing, how attuned you are, and how well you know yourself. **Ava** 01:23:25 I have this one friend who is just really good at learning, and it's really annoying because he'll try something and very quickly become extremely good at it. One way of understanding that is maybe he's just unusually talented. But I think another way of understanding it is that he's found a very consistently successful way to learn. That applies to making food, physical acts like rock climbing, and work. He has found a way of learning and paying attention that translates to every kind of medium. I'm certainly not there. I don't think most of us are there, but it's a good thing to figure out how to do. **Jackson** 01:24:08 That's cool. Okay, I have a handful of grab bag miscellaneous questions for you. **Ava** 01:24:13 All right. **Jackson** 01:24:13 One is, you sort of sit between two worlds. I don't know if you relate to it that way, but you obviously worked in tech earlier, you live in San Francisco, and you have a lot of friends who are in tech. You are in your own kind of world of writing and Substack, and you write about feelings and emotions and romance. Yet you're obviously pretty attuned to the ambition, tech, AI kind of thing happening. Do you experience — in a year ago or so, roughly, you actually stopped writing only and you went and took a tech job for a little while. Do you experience FOMO? Are you, at times, seeing all this AI stuff happening? Are you totally at peace with that? Do you feel like you're sitting between the two worlds, or just these are all my interests and it's fine, and I happen to live in a city where tech's big? **Ava** 01:25:01 I really love technology. I like reading about technology. I'm very interested in technology. I think that's not the area I work in right now. It could be something I work on in the future. But for me, the way I relate to it is, maybe one way of thinking about it is two things I'm very interested in: one, relationships, and two, technology. I currently write and work more around relationships rather than tech, and that's where my interests fall right now and what makes sense for my life. I don't know if that will — that could stay the case. It could change. I don't really have any resolutions around it, but to me, it's more just like, for a long time in my life, relationships was a passion, but I didn't work doing anything. **Jackson** 01:25:51 Yeah. **Ava** 01:25:51 So it's easier for me to think of it as, you're allowed to just have things that you care about and are interested in, and maybe the professional aspect is something that I'm a little bit less prescriptive about. **Jackson** 01:26:03 Yeah, the funny thing is you actually have very similar interests to probably a lot of people you spend time with. You just have the work part flipped, which is funny. Okay, and then related: You love San Francisco. **Ava** 01:26:15 I do love San Francisco. **Jackson** 01:26:17 I promise I'm almost out of excerpts, but I have a few more to read. One of them is about San Francisco that I think maybe especially describes what I have a sense of that you clearly know very well, which is maybe something unique about the people who live here, and the good weird. You say, "When I first moved to San Francisco at 19, I thought it was for the technology industry, but I've since realized that I'm in fact just interested in the type of people who tend to be fascinated with technology, or at least some subset of them. My friends are all pretty anti-authoritarian, willful, dogged, and cheerful. As B said, 'the type of people who believe they can fix the world's problems through sheer force of will.' I think my favorite thing about them is that they're all very creative in the literal sense that many of them write and make art, but also in the sense that they're very good at solving problems in unorthodox ways." San Francisco is many things, and I think people from the outside looking in are sometimes critical of technologists. There are different ways to put it, but this is one of my favorite ways I've I think like the really wonderful optimistic vibe of people who live here. What do you love about San Francisco? What do you love about the people here? **Ava** 01:27:39 The excerpt has captured this pretty well. I really love my friends. My friends are very thoughtful, kind, anti-authoritarian, self-motivated, and deeply care about their loved ones as well as the world around them. They're very alive to not just living in the world, but what they can do and how they can contribute. I really love that as a personality type or as an orientation towards the world. I'm sure people like that exist in all sorts of industries, but I feel very lucky to have found one pocket of the world where there's such an extreme concentration of that type of people. **Jackson** 01:28:28 High agency too. **Ava** 01:28:30 Really high agency. Maybe at one point tech was the underdog, but it certainly isn't now. Tech is where much of the power of the world is concentrated. Because of that, tech is really maligned. It's this powerful, scary force, and we don't necessarily have a lot of sympathy for the people who work in it. **Jackson** 01:28:57 "We think we're smarter than you at everything. We're taking over the government," and all that. **Ava** 01:29:00 I'm not saying that we should feel sorry for people who work in tech. They're not misunderstood at all. But because of how successful the tech industry has become, it is really easy to caricature all the people who work in tech as one type of guy who sucks. I just happened to move here at a particular age and fell in with a bunch of people who work in tech in a bunch of different ways. I can say firsthand, obviously, my friends are not all this one type of guy who sucks. That's something I feel very comfortable attesting to beyond anything else. **Jackson** 01:29:36 Maybe it's changed, but that's kind of the sense of the novel, too. It's a novel set in this time in San Francisco. We all look forward to that. One writing question. You occasionally use the second person, and I like both of your writing. There's that chapter in "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" and different pockets. What goes into choosing to write in the second person? Is there a reason you think it's so powerful? **Ava** 01:30:08 I have no idea. I've been trying to play around a lot more with choices like first person and third person, especially in fiction and sometimes in my own writing for Substack. There's all this theory around it, and I've read some of that. But for my own creativity, when I get to, "Why am I making this choice?" it freezes me up. I recently changed one project from first person to third person. There were ostensible reasons for the change. For example, I wanted a little bit more distance from the narrator. But I also had this awareness of, "Oh my gosh, don't get too into this being the reason why I'm making the change." When I get too technical about it, at least for me, it interferes with the part of my subconscious that is creative. I was talking to a friend recently about learning how to write plot. I used to really overthink it a lot. Then I realized that there are all these writers who actually just write plots on a sentence-by-sentence basis. They're just writing, and they let things happen chapter by chapter as they unfold. My brain is a little bit more like that. I need to just let my subconscious do a lot of it. If I let my conscious mind do it, I trip myself up. **Jackson** 01:31:48 All right, well, that doesn't help the rest of us, but we'll have to trust the process. Who do you read that most consistently challenges you or introduces new ideas or learnings or beliefs? **Ava** 01:32:01 I don't know if there's one author I could choose. Should we say living or dead? **Jackson** 01:32:09 I was almost thinking a little more like modern Substack type thing, but maybe that's the wrong way to go about it. **Ava** 01:32:17 I really like Elif Batuman's Substack. She wrote "The Idiot," which is this very successful novel, and I really like her Substack. I also really like Mary Gaitskill's Substack. She also wrote one of my favorite story collections of all time, "Bad Behavior." I feel like I'm cheating because these are not native internet writers, but they're just writers I really like. **Jackson** 01:32:40 Different question. What's the one thing pre-1950 that you would recommend people read? **Ava** 01:32:47 I really love "Anna Karenina." It's a must-read for everyone. You should not die without reading some Tolstoy. **Jackson** 01:32:58 You've only recommended it to me like six times, so I've got some homework. **Ava** 01:33:01 I don't even remember that, but I'm always going on about it. **Jackson** 01:33:04 I think you have good company in that recommendation. We talked a little bit about energy earlier. Do you have a clear answer for what you think you're motivated by? **Ava** 01:33:17 Maybe that thing we were talking about earlier about being myself as a vessel and just wanting to be a good expression of whatever life force I'm lucky enough to possess. Post-psychedelics, I've become a lot more comfortable with the idea of—for me, and again, I'm much more a subconscious-driven person—I don't necessarily need to know where I'm going, as long as I know that I'm proceeding in a way that I'm proud of. **Jackson** 01:33:46 In a congruent way. What do you think 10 years ago you would be most surprised about your life now or who you are now? **Ava** 01:34:01 Ten years ago, I would have actually made many predictions for my life that line up with how I'm currently living. I always wanted to be a writer from when I was a little girl. **Jackson** 01:34:16 Sometimes we know these things. **Ava** 01:34:17 Yeah, I always wanted to have this amazing friend group. But I definitely had this fantasy about living in New York. So maybe I would be surprised that I moved to New York and then moved back to San Francisco. What is it about the West Coast? **Jackson** 01:34:27 You got it pretty right. **Ava** 01:34:29 I think that's a good moral for this podcast. **Jackson** 01:34:31 We will get you back to New York, maybe. I don't know. **Ava** 01:34:33 The West Coast really has an uncanny grip on you. Maybe one day, **Jackson** will be back. **Jackson** 01:34:43 What do you most want to hold on to in 10 years from now? **Ava** 01:34:48 I hope that I'll still be writing. I think that's really important to me. I really hope that I'll be writing for the rest of my life. And a lot of the things we talked about today around having a really strong friend group. I have been really thinking in the past month, especially, that a lot of my friends live within 10 minutes walking distance from me now. I've been really appreciating it, especially just in the holiday season. It feels so meaningful to me. Like you said, we can't know the future, but it'd be really meaningful to me if I can say in 10 years, "Okay, I still have hopefully the same people that I really love." And they're all in California still, or a lot of them are, and they're not all having moved to Ohio. **Jackson** 01:35:35 I suspect all the youngish parents listening, especially while we were talking about friendship, as long as you are all laughing at us. But that's what you have to aspire to. Okay, just a few more things. One is you've written about uselessness. **Ava** 01:35:49 Mm-hmm. **Jackson** 01:35:50 As this sort of way to describe the things that don't seem obviously relevant or efficient or effective or important or purposeful. You say artists are inherently vulnerable because they pay attention to things other people don't. The things that you are explicitly told you shouldn't because they are impractical and lead to little or no material gain. How do you feel about uselessness these days? **Ava** 01:36:20 Well, sometimes I feel like my Substack can be accurately described as -- I don't know if I'd say useless, but I write about emotions and relationships. I don't write about them in an academic context or anything. You know, it's seen as acceptable to get a PhD on psychiatric stuff or to work as a therapist. But I just like writing about emotions and relationships. I just do that for fun because I want to. And I don't think that's a job path that anyone prescribes to their kid, nor was it a job that I knew even existed. But it just happens to be something that I want to do. My work literally exists because I'm kind of like, "Well, I want to do this thing." And it seems implausible to me that I could ever be something that supports me, nor could it be useful to anyone in any way. But I'm just going to go ahead and do it because that's what's fun for me. I can really advocate for doing things that just don't have clear, tangible value. Some of the things that are truest to you are probably going to be things that you find it very difficult to translate in a way that's like, "I can easily get a job doing this." And that's why they're worth doing, in fact. Because you can't do that translation, and a lot of times, why they'll be interesting to other people is because of that kind of incoherence. I just want to do this thing, and I don't necessarily think it's going to work, and I don't know if it's going to be interesting to other people, but I just really want to do it. That's one of the most important sentiments that can exist in you. I find it really sad because I think a lot of people stifle that in themselves. I know so many people who are extremely gifted who sort of sublimate what they actually want to do into something else. It's like, "Okay, I love reading, so I'm going to become a lawyer." It's okay to become a lawyer. But there are a lot of people who don't like what they do, who do it because it's the only acceptable route that's sort of close to what they actually want to do. **Jackson** 01:38:27 It's almost like they're not willing to take themselves at face value. **Ava** 01:38:33 Right. Everyone has to make money. Not everyone is privileged enough to go off and try to make something that doesn't make money their full-time job. But there is this level of even letting yourself do it for you. **Jackson** 01:38:47 Yeah. **Ava** 01:38:48 That feels really important. I certainly would not encourage everyone to go off and try to become an artist, because I think a lot of people might really hate that lifestyle. But I feel very comfortable encouraging everyone to do the creative thing as a meaningful path. **Jackson** 01:39:06 One piece of this, at least to me, is about beauty. I think maybe at least in the worlds that you and I inhabit, there are all kinds of people trying to do great things, ambitious things, important things, effective, useful things. And there have been people who pursue beauty, but maybe that's a little less common. I thought this was particularly beautiful. You say, "I don't believe that anyone is dead to beauty." And then you quote Martin Shaw, "Beauty kick-starts our attention, the real sublime. To behold it is almost scary because we suddenly have a longing to stand for something. Beauty, not as generic but specific, troubling in what it may call forth in us." Then you again, "Beauty literally demands replication." As Elaine Scarry points out, we wish to procreate with those we find beautiful, continue their genetic lineage. Beauty inspires the desire to confess. **Ava** 01:40:08 Yeah, I'm a big fan of beauty. **Jackson** 01:40:11 I think two more of that. My last -- I'm going to read one more quote of yours. You don't have to even say anything else if you don't want to. There's an interview with Ezra Koenig being interviewed by Rick Rubin I listened to last year. He's playing a song called "This Life" that I really love. He has this line, and Rick says that what it captured for him, you get a chill up his spine, is this beautiful composition that you see in so many wonderful, beautiful things, which is heavy and light together. I think that's one of my favorite things about your writing is the fact that you simultaneously write about things that are deeply, deeply important, maybe the most important. And yet, you can also do it in this way that you could read on a Tuesday morning on the train, or whatever it might be. So I'll quote you now. "I read a book on resolving addiction through mindfulness. When you feel like you want something, need it, you're supposed to breathe in and ask, 'Is this image me? Is this feeling me? Is any of this me?' Then you're supposed to realize none of it is you. Okay, so if I'm not the things I want, the things I love, then who am I? If I'm pure presence, then how am I supposed to live? Lightly, apparently. But I don't want to live lightly. I want to live heavily. That is why I write." **Ava** 01:41:32 That's a very nice ending quote, **Jackson**. Thanks. **Jackson** 01:41:38 This was really fun. Thank you for doing it. **Ava** 01:41:41 Thank you.