My Instagram algorithm has been getting funky lately, shifting on a seemingly daily – sometimes hourly – basis. Part of it, I think, is due to the fact that I’ve been spending more time than usual on the app, mindlessly scrolling while I walk on my treadmill and/or decompressing in the evenings before bed. [I know, I know, it’s a terrible habit. The thing is, after spending a whole day engaged in higher-level cognitive activity, either at work or writing, I need a mindless diversion to give my brain a rest.] Naturally, the algorithm has caught on to my new habit, and is now working very hard to keep me glued to my screen at all times. Which means offering up a variety of rabbit holes for me to explore. For a while, it was clips of old Friends episodes and video diaries of British people talking about their spending habits, then it changed to highlights from Modern Family (a show, coincidentally, I’d never watched before), talking heads from people showing off their vintage jewelry, and snippets of podcasts predicting the next financial Doomsday.

Listen, you watch one 30-second Reel, and the next thing you know, the algorithm is serving you several dozens more of the same flavour.

Anyway, I don’t generally mind this too much because I’ve figured out how to train the algorithm to switch topics if I don’t like what I’m seeing, and because every now and then, it does throw new and interesting (to me) topics into the mix. I’ve started taking notes of some of the things I’m watching because … well, sometimes I feel like responding to a particular idea or opinion, but I am not someone who likes to wade into the comment section of popular content creators. My default assumption is that, regardless of the creator’s own ideological bent, their public comment section is going to be a cesspit and I’d rather pour bleach into my eyes than argue with strangers on the internet. But you know what? I can give my opinions an airing here. One, because this corner of the internet attracts very little foot traffic and, two, because I have faith in this (small) community’s ability to engage in nuanced discussion.

Holy long preamble, Batman!

Today’s post was inspired by a couple of Reels I watched almost back to back (because that’s how the algorithm works, duh). One of them was a snippet of an interview with (I think) Elizabeth Gilbert. Listen, I know she’s problematic (I definitely rubber-necked the internet furore over her latest book, sorrynotsorry) but what she was saying in this clip caught my attention – in a thought-provoking way. The second Reel was a talking head from a new-to-me content creator, Tiffany J. Marie. Both were addressing the monetization of passion/creativity, coming at it from slightly different angles. This is a topic I, myself, have thought about a lot over the years, and I found that the ways in which it was framed in these videos facilitated that ongoing internal reflection/discussion. And I decided to bring some of that reflection here.

What Gilbert said, and I’m paraphrasing here, was something to the effect of: it’s my job to support my creativity, not the other way around. To put it in corporate speak: one’s creativity should be a cost center, not a profit center. One should work to make money to pour in one’s creative pursuits, not rely on their creative pursuits to generate money to support their lifestyle.

The other creator began the video talking about how it is possible to do everything. Now, if you read my last post, you might assume that I’d be inclined to disagree with this statement – and you would be correct. Naturally, I was intrigued and kept watching. And the creator went on to discuss Sylvia Plath’s metaphor of the fig tree from The Bell Jar. The figs on the many branches of the fig tree represent different future possibilities. In the story, the narrator feels unable to choose any one fig, fearing that would mean losing all the others. She picks none, and the figs rot and fall to the ground. In the video, the creator said that, if those figs represent passions or creative pursuits, it would be possible to pick several figs at once and enjoy them all. The key? Not monetizing those figs.

Let me explain.

Basically, it comes down to this: to monetize one of our passions (aka a fig), we have to devote an extraordinary amount of time and effort (and money) to it. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that you can half-ass something and make lots of money from it. They’re either lying about how much work they’ve put into it, or about how much money they’re making from it. If you’re devoting all your time and effort to one passion, trying to make it pay off – then no, you won’t get to try or enjoy others. On the other hand, if your end goal isn’t to make money off your passion, then you can ‘dabble’ and sample any number of different ones.

OK, so here we have two different takes on the issue of monetization of creativity. And when I say “different”, I don’t mean that they’re necessarily incompatible, only that they look at the issue from different angles. Or, rather, they offer two different reasons in favour of the non-monetization of creative pursuits. And I happen to agree with both.

Making money from creative work is, unfortunately, really really difficult in our capitalist system. Creativity is severely undervalued and underpaid. [Coincidentally, the algorithm also showed me a clip from an interview with Brett Easton Ellis, where he said that his best advice to aspiring writers was to marry rich.] To make a good income in any creative field, you probably have to be in the top 1% of creators in that field. [In the same video referenced above, Gilbert talked about how she didn’t quit her day job until after Eat, Pray, Love came out. And, whatever we think about that book, it was a major bestseller – the kind that a majority of writers never get.] Pursuing a creative endeavour with the expectation that it will support a comfortable lifestyle means placing an extraordinary amount of pressure on one’s creativity. And I can tell you, firsthand, that sort of pressure is not very conducive to creative expression. It can lead to burnout, not to mention disappointment.

And it does mean having to give up a lot of other things, including other passions.

I know that from personal experience too. Forget monetizing; just writing a book in the first place required me to sacrifice other hobbies. Writing several, writing constantly – which is what you have to do to become a better writer – required even greater sacrifices. And, again, that’s without the extra pressure of trying to write profitable books (which is a whole other ballgame, trust.)

But none of this is to say that you shouldn’t pursue your creative passions – or pursue one to the exclusion of others. I really like the idea of making my creative passion (writing) something in which I invest my resources, without expectation of a return beyond the enjoyment of the process itself. It feels incredibly liberating. It leaves me free to explore whatever I like, however I like. It also leaves me free to decide, at any point, that I want to pause and go and try something different, without feeling handcuffed by the need to generate income to live on. It goes without saying that there is an enormous amount of privilege in being able to invest time and money into an endeavour that doesn’t make any money. Which brings me to another reflection.

I have been a creative person (and a writer) my whole life, but it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I was able to treat my creativity like a cost center and devote significant time and energy to it. When I was younger, that simply wasn’t on the cards, for several reasons including the fact that my time and financial resources were required in other parts of my life. Actually, what happened was that I was shoring up resources, building up a “bank” which, later, I was able to start drawing down to support my creative pursuits. I’m not saying that’s the best or only way to do that; some people may be able to actively invest in their creative pursuits from the very beginning of their working lives. More power to them! But if, like me, you find that juggling act difficult or impossible in your 20s and 30s, don’t worry! It’s never too late to start. Some figs never rot. Creativity doesn’t expire. In fact, it only gets better, richer with age. Just as you can keep adding to your bank of resources, you will keep adding to your bank of experiences. And, when you’re ready, those will be available for you to invest too.

It was another Dickens of a week, but let’s focus on the positive, shall we? I had an amazing therapy session that sparked some deep reflection; in time, I feel like this will turn into valuable new insight. It’s funny, being at an age when that’s an exciting feeling. Not funny “haha”, more like funny “huh”. But, seriously, personal growth is exciting. In the current world, it feels like winning – and at a rigged game, no less. I’ll take my wins wherever I can get them.

A separate insight I had this week has to do with my purpose/mission, aka how I define and create meaning in my life. My husband and I have been talking a lot about this lately, as it’s something we are both in the process of grappling with. I’m realizing that mine is twofold (but interconnected) and it has to do with creativity (writing) and mentorship. Both involve connection and both, for me, are about helping other people access joy – through a fun book, or through conversations that spark self-reflection. In the next couple of months, I’m going to set aside time to work on my intention- and goal-setting for 2026, and I’m really looking forward to thinking about how I can weave my purpose into the work I will be doing next year. The writing part is easy (in the sense that I already know what I want to do, haha!) but it will be an interesting challenge to think of how I can create mentorship opportunities.

It was an exciting and busy week on the writing front, not least because I finished the first draft of book #5. Writing it was a sprint but super fun – it’s my most bonkers plot yet. The actual draft is very rough, I’m sure, but that’s okay. I’ve got it tentatively scheduled for publication in 2028, so there is LOTS of time to work on polishing it. Lots of developments on the publication front for A Party to Murder, but I will save that for my mailing list newsletter, which should be going out any day now. It’s not to late to join the list 😉

With writing off my plate (for now), I had time to squeeze in some reading of my own. Managed to breeze through The House of Versace – fun, gossipy read – and The Last Death of the Year, which is the new Hercule Poirot book by Sophie Hannah. That one was fun too, although I have to admit that I have complicated feelings (and a lot of thoughts, lol!) about the series as a whole.

What I’ve had almost no time for is thrifting. Actually, that’s been the case for a few months now. Not coincidentally, I’ve been buying less and less – in part because thrifting frequency directly correlates to thrifting success (aka finding good stuff) and in part because I genuinely don’t feel any desire to add to my closet. And that, I think, is mainly due to two things: 1)I am very happy with my current clothes, and 2) all of my creative self-expression has been shifted to a different channel (writing) so I feel less need/desire to experiment with my personal style. I still love clothes and love getting dressed, but it is less a creative endeavour and more a pleasurable ritual of daily life. Does that make sense? I hope it does.

Fellow Canadians, please do not come for me … I do not follow baseball and wear the hats purely based on aesthetic vibes. My entire family is cheering for the Blue Jays, and will probably disown me if they see I posted this photo today. I wore this a few weeks ago and I picked the hat because the colours matched my outfit, ok? This is not, I repeat, this is NOT an endorsement!

Have a great weekend!

They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life, but that’s only half right. There might be, somewhere, a universe where taxes don’t exist; death will never not be an inescapable fact for each and every living thing. I don’t want to be a downer, nor do I want to sound glib. Death is so fundamentally alien to our living experience that it becomes an abstraction. I no longer remember the exact moment I realized, as a child, that I wasn’t going to be alive forever, but I remember how shattering and profoundly life-changing that moment was. My entire conception of the world changed in an instant. Even so, death remained an abstraction. I tried to imagine myself dead and failed, time and again. There is a bit in Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where the titular characters – lovably dim and perpetually befuddled by a world that moves them around like pawns on a chess board, without warning or explanation – discuss what it might be like to be dead, buried in a coffin. I’ve always loved that dialogue because it captures so well my own attempts to grapple with the idea of death as an “event” of life.

But, of course, death isn’t that.

It’s not a milepost in one’s life, like a birthday or a wedding. You don’t arrive at it and then depart again, on to the next thing. Death isn’t a part of life at all. It is the dark side of the moon; always there but never seen. Until one day, it is. It doesn’t come. It just is.

My understanding of death – and life – profoundly shifted again when my mom died. I had lost family members and friends before; what made her death different wasn’t simply that she was one of the most important people in my life, but how and when it happened. My mom had just turned 66 when she died, barely six weeks after she received her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which came as a thunderbolt out of blue skies. Other people in my life have battled cancer; some are still here, and some are not, but in every case, they were given options for medical treatment. We are so fortunate to live in an age when medical science is making amazing strides all the time; in many cases, no matter how scary a diagnosis might be, there is something that can be done, or at least attempted. Maybe it was mere luck that this had been my experience of life-threatening illness before my mom died, but I don’t think it’s an unusual experience for most people in the Global West, where quality of life and life expectancy are the highest they’ve ever been in the history of our species.

For my mom that didn’t matter, though. I will never forget the moment my dad called to tell me the results of her latest scans. I knew immediately that it was bad, but my mind didn’t – couldn’t – grasp at first what it meant. I remember asking my dad what the doctors said would happen next; my mom had had breast cancer years before, so I was familiar with the general treatment process – surgery, chemo, radiation, and so on. This time, there was silence on the phone. Eventually, my dad managed to speak: there was nothing to be done. The doctors hadn’t mentioned any treatment because there no treatment that could help. There would only be palliative care, when the time came. And still, my mind couldn’t – wouldn’t – understand what he was saying. I asked him over and over what he meant, what the doctors meant, what it all meant. It seemed impossible that there was nothing to be done. 

Over the next six weeks, I struggled to make sense of it. For the first time in my life, death was a fact. It could not be avoided, negotiated, put off. My mom’s diagnosis left no room for hope, the one thing that might have helped to blur the finality of the prospect of her death. This is what changed me. Up to that point, I had lived my life with the unspoken belief that most bad things in life could be, if not undone, then at least fixed; even if they changed your life, life still went on. I’d spent my life living in the land of Tomorrow Always Comes. So, perhaps, had my mom. At 66, she had no reason to think herself very old. She was a vibrant, brilliant, compassionate, generous, wonderfully multi-faceted woman; a defining presence in the lives of everyone who loved and was loved by her. She was so alive. Until she wasn’t.

Grief does a lot of funny things to us. It’s a shapeshifter. Like water, it takes the shape of whomever holds it; it penetrates even the most inaccessible parts of us; it transforms as it flows, leaving a sometimes-unrecognizable landscape in its wake. Of all the things it did to me (and for me), the one thing I will never regret is the way it changed how I understand time. 

It’s not only the young who live in the land of Tomorrow Always Comes. At 25, time stretched so far in front of me that it might as well have gone on forever, but you know what? At 35, that horizon felt like it had barely budged. Turning 40 didn’t bring it closer either; I was still living my life like there would always be another tomorrow. Another day to do all the things I wanted but didn’t have time to do today. Another day to try the things I’d always wanted to try but didn’t have time to try … not yesterday, or the day before, or all the yesterdays before that. If life did not, in the moment, feel anything like I’d hoped it would … well, that was ok, too. Some day – a day definitely still to come – it definitely would.

Someday, I would get around to All The Things.

I would get around to living my best life. 

One day. 

In fact, I had designed my entire life precisely around that guarantee. I had worked hard for nearly two decades – harder, at times, than I’d wanted to work, if we are being honest – and made some compromises that hadn’t always felt great, and missed out on things I still often thought about with regret, but it was okay because there would be a reward for it all at the end: the best life that I was going to start living … someday in the future. 

Here’s the thing: human beings can’t live every day as if they’re going to die tomorrow. It’s not healthy for our psyche, and it’s not healthy for our society either. A certain amount of future planning is imperative, and the only way we know how to do that is by imagining ourselves a future life. At the same time, too much living in the future can also be unhealthy. I used to be the kind of person who was always counting down to some future event: a milestone birthday, a party, a vacation – even just a shopping trip to the mall. In fact, I had to fill up my calendar with “fun things to look forward to” in order to get through the daily grind. Let me rephrase that: I needed to reward myself for simply living my daily life. Does it sound familiar to you? I know lots of people who are the same. In my case, it wasn’t the result of circumstances forced upon me. It was my choice to live like that. Let’s call it a side effect of being more future-oriented than was healthy for me. I had a skewed notion of the value of time. Today mattered less than tomorrow. Today existed to be exploited in service of tomorrow. 

But, of course, tomorrow is not guaranteed. You know how they say, one bird in the hand is worth two in the bush? I think about that a lot nowadays.

After my mom died, I didn’t start living like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t quit my job, start partying, or blow off my responsibilities. I did stop making plans for a while, though – months, in fact. Life suddenly seemed too unpredictable. What was the point of planning a vacation in six months’ time when someone could die in six weeks? And once I stopped making plans – stopped even looking at the calendar beyond the end of each week – I began to understand the meaning of living in the moment. It doesn’t mean every moment is fun or memorable, only that — good, bad or indifferent — it doesn’t pass unnoticed. Ok, maybe not every second of every minute of every day; I can get stuck in a book or an art project or a trip to the thrift store and lose hours. But you get my point. When I stopped thinking about the future all the time, the present suddenly came into focus. And in the present, I found myself.

I found other things too. Lessons, mostly.

Here’s a big one: you can’t start living your best life until you know what that looks like for you. And you won’t know that unless you get to know yourself well first. I mean really, really, LIKE FOR REAL know yourself. If your idea of the best life is (a) whatever social media tells you it is, or (b) having and doing everything under the sun that takes your fancy, you’re gonna run into trouble pretty quickly. The reality is that (a) and (b) are basically the same thing and you can’t have it. Sorry. Money is finite. Time is finite. We can’t have everything, and be everything, and do everything, all at the same time. We might be able to have and be and do anything from a very long (if not infinite) menu of options, but we have to make choices – and trade-offs. The more money, time, and effort we pour into one choice, the less we have to devote to others. The choices and the trade-offs shape our lives, for better or worse. To live your best life means to make choices that embody and create that life.

Here’s another thing I learned, living in the present: you can’t enjoy everything, all the time. And you shouldn’t try. Humans, it seems, have been hard-wired to have a happiness set-point (sometimes called the Brickman happiness baseline). Scientists have hypothesized that people have different set-points, which may be at least partially heritable and may be adjustable over a lifetime. This is relevant to our experience of pleasure in the following way: a pleasant stimulus – like getting a raise or buying a new dress – will generate a hedonic response above the person’s normal baseline (and register as happiness), while a negative stimulus will do the opposite (and register as unhappiness). But over time, the person gets used to the stimulus and returns to their happiness baseline. Nothing lasts forever: not the peaks, not the valleys. And the more we chase those peaks of happiness, the more we actually desensitize ourselves (by repeated exposure) to those stimuli that induce the experience of happiness.

Living in the moment doesn’t make me happier, but it allows me to be fully present in those moments of joy – to savour them, and then to let them go, knowing that they will come again. It also requires me to be present in those moments that feel difficult or even painful, rather than try to avoid them. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that hardships are a blessing in disguise; sometimes, they’re just really, really sh*tty and unfair. Sometimes, the difficult moments do represent opportunities to learn and grow. Even then, we don’t have to love them, but we do have to accept that – fair or not – they are part of life. And, like the highs, they too shall pass. In the meantime, there is today. And today counts.