I quit
Hi, friend. I did it. I quit my job. Let's chalk it up to a combination of needing to give myself a kick in the ass to be more driven in my pursuit of "real" writing, as well as desperately needing to escape a place full of sexual harassment, discriminatory practices, backstabbing, and general other low-level corporate crimes against humanity. Good riddance!
And: I'm writing to you from my first freelance gig! That's right, a company decided to pay me, little old Danny Gottleib, to write stuff for them for a while. They've set me up with a window desk, too, plus a blow-up unicorn head mounted on the wall, left by the desk's previous occupant. After a week or so of anxiety about money and future prospects once I made myself jobless, it's good to have a momentary pause to my minor existential crisis.
Once I realized I was without an actual, like, job, my mind went WILD: I can do anything! I can go anywhere! I can make cool things in my spare time that maybe other people would enjoy! I can just drink myself to death if I want! The aimlessness of my future — equally exciting and terrifying — randomly reminded me of a project I was obsessed with 11 years ago, back when the internet was fun and wild and it seemed like we could do anything. I hadn't thought about it in a decade, but it all came flooding back, and I started Googling to try to figure out what this thing I vaguely remembered loving actually was.
In early 2007, filmmaker Bill Bowles set out on a trip around the world with a gimmick: calling himself an "interactive world traveler," he used "viewers like you" as his guide rather than books or more-traditional methods. He'd go places and do things as suggested by fans, even picking his next country to visit based on whoever made their invite sound most appealing. I eagerly lapped up his near-daily video updates (or "video podcasts," as he was calling them back then, which feels very forward-thinking for the time!), seemingly whipped together in no time at all and uploaded to mynameisbill.com.
I didn't understand how he pulled it off. I still barely understand it. I have no idea when or if he slept. Occasionally, you'd catch a glimpse of his modest tools: a brick of a 2007 laptop, a couple small video cameras, and a chunky foldable solar panel to keep it all charged in the middle of nowhere. After a day of exploring and sightseeing and meeting people, he had to sit down and put together a tightly-edited 5-minute recap of the day's activities and upload it before going to sleep? I obsessively refreshed his page daily, wondering where Bill would post from next.
Nearly all the videos seem to have been deleted, but you can still watch the video from day 1. It's a great little artifact of the era: optimistic, earnest in a way that would be mercilessly ridiculed today, acting as if "the internet" is a place independent from the real world.
Near the end of his 6-month project, I moved to Cairo, Egypt, for 4 months of studying abroad. Finally, I had somewhere I could invite him to! (I knew he'd never readily accept an invite to Wisconsin.) So I wrote Bill an email asking him to make his next destination Egypt, offering up the gaudy leopard-print couch in the apartment I shared with my friend Beckett on an island in the middle of the Nile River. I felt unimaginably cosmopolitan, even moreso when he replied with some interest. We took our conversation to AIM, where it gradually fizzled out as he found more exciting pastures (or, more likely, he realized I was an idiot kid who, yes, was living in Cairo, but clearly would be a horrible tour guide unless he wanted to film several episodes about where you could black out in the city).
Midway through my time in Cairo, I came out to my friends. Not as a gay man, of course — that would happen years later. No, I came out as a Survivor fan. (Even by 2007, this was not a cool thing for a person to be.) "Oh, I know a guy on this season!" my friend Megan said. Her high school friend, it turns out, was on the season airing at the time. Just like that, I had gone from a depressed kid in Wisconsin to someone living in Cairo, tangentially connected to someone on my favorite TV show, and internet friends with someone traveling the world as part of a totally unique "web 2.0" experiment. I felt the world opening up in unexpected ways. 2007, more than any other time in my life, stands out for the realization — aided in a big way by the still-youthful internet, and these chance encounters — that the world could be as big or as small as I wanted it to be.
People actually thought I was straight back then.
One of Bill's final video updates came from Ulan Bataar, Mongolia, where he filmed the finish line of something called the Mongol Rally. I watched in fascination as teams of lunatics arrived in Mongolia in broken-down rusted cars, apparently having driven all the way there from London, as part of an event from some people calling themselves The Adventurists. I told my roommate Beckett about it, and two years later he did the Mongol Rally. Seven years later I finally did an Adventurists event: the Rickshaw Run in India. In April this year, I'll do the Monkey Run in Morocco, another Adventurists event. Through these adventures I discovered via Bill's videos, I've made friends from around the world, gained the confidence to jump into any situation and trust I can get my way out of it, and still apply to Survivor every year. Without quite being aware of it until now, this silly little proto-webseries that lasted for only 6 months shaped my entire future.
A decade after Bill ended his travel experiment and long after I had forgotten about it, a former Survivor contestant named Malcolm Freberg started his own audience-controlled internet travel show, "Wayfaring." I never even got through the first episode, but a quick look back at the old Kickstarter for it shows he raised $400 more than his target goal, so I guess it must have been fairly successful. The show's website, however, has been replaced by a page designed to sell you supplements to get rid of varicose veins.
"Wayfaring" should have been something that captivated me. I had dearly loved something similar to it once, and this came with the added bonus of one of the stars of my beloved Survivor. But "Wayfaring" was too slick, too produced, too consciously self-promotional. Mynameisbill.com felt raw and strange and like something that would have been happening in some corner of the internet whether or not any of us were watching.
It was fascinating because I got to watch a man figuring himself out in public. I watched him quit his job, get lost in China, get homesick for his mother in Madagascar, and gradually get more confident in his ability to get around in the world, as well as his abilities as a filmmaker. I was watching a man, essentially, going through an existential crisis. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of his audience were people like me: young men facing unsure futures, trying to figure themselves out. At the risk of sounding like an elderly citizen of the internet, it was a hell of a lot better than where those uncertain young men go now to figure themselves out (4chan, Breitbart, sending death threats to female writers on Twitter, etc.).
I was reminded of Bill and his trip after I quit my job, as I attempt to re-figure out what I want to do with the next, oh, sixty or so years of my life? I spent the majority of the week after I quit suffering massive anxiety about going freelance. It felt like a huge mistake, like impossible arrogance to assume that I could make a living just by the words I write. But here I sit, at my first freelance gig. I even had to turn down another, to take this one. I may go for months without getting another job after this one ends, but it provided the boost of confidence I needed: hey, I can make a living from writing! Even if it's merely writing website copy for terrible brands, I have to remind myself that it's absolutely wild that companies want to put money into my bank account just because I typed out some words I thought of. And if that's possible, what else can I do?
After Bill's six-month trip he returned to the U.S. and became a filmmaker for National Geographic. According to a Google excerpt of the book "The Long Hitch Home," he got that job when an executive stumbled upon his travel project and hired him. Over a decade after becoming briefly obsessed with Bill's videos and allowing them to slightly change the axis of my life, I found this conclusion to his story incredibly satisfying. This guy had a crisis, did a silly thing that made him happy but carried some risk (at least financially, but probably physically at times), and, from the looks of it, fell backwards into his dream job. More than being reminded of my younger, more-optimistic self, rediscovering mynameisbill.com reminded me that doing silly things is never actually silly, as long as you fully put yourself into it. You don't have to quit your job (in this economy??), but make sure you do a silly thing you love today. You never know where it'll take you.
DANNY RECOMMENDS!
I've written briefly about it before, but every year I get big into the Tournament of Books. In short: the editors at The Morning News pick 16 of the "best" books published last year (based on their own taste and god knows what other metrics) and pit them against each other, March Madness-style, to find the Best Book of the Year.
It's a knowingly idiotic task, putting books head-to-head until only one is left. But I love how every year I've only heard of maybe three of the books shortlisted. And the discussions each day about the books are always incredibly high-minded and thought-provoking. I usually end up remembering the books from the Tournament more than most other books I read throughout the year.
Every year I try to read as many books as I can before the Tournament starts in March. This year I faced a huge uphill battle, having only read 2 of the books before the shortlist was announced, but thankfully the majority of the books this year are mercifully short. I've now finished 6 of the contenders, and should have the 7th done in a day or two. Which means I'm right on track to be bitterly disappointed and irrationally furious when a book I loved is knocked out by a book I thought was truly horrible (I'm looking at you, The Idiot).
You don't have to have read any of the books to enjoy the writing by each judge throughout the Tournament, but it certainly helps to have some investment in who wins and, more importantly, who loses. If you'll also be following along in March, reply to this email letting me know, so we can disagree together!
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