Losing The Thing Itself

On wanting to create something for no reason you can screenshot

I was impressed by her presence and by what she said in the video interview. A health coach. She was young and seemed wise. In her twenties. The kind of wise that makes you lean in. I followed the path to her Substack and clicked into an article about physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness.

Within the first two paragraphs, apropos of nothing, she mentioned she had built a six-figure business as a wellness coach.

I exited.

Soon, I thought to myself, she won’t be doing this work at all. She will just teach other wellness coaches how to earn six figures.

I’ve seen it happen so many times. A really talented calligrapher I followed for years started talking about building his six-figure business, and suddenly, he wasn’t a calligrapher any longer; he was a business coach teaching other calligraphers how to create six-figure businesses by teaching other calligraphers how to create six-figure businesses. His feed, once full of letterforms—the patient downstroke, the flourish that took ten years to look effortless— became a feed of funnels. Webinar announcements. Income screenshots. The letters disappeared. The art was gone. What was left was a formula.

And here is the part that unsettles me most: it doesn’t stop there. Wellness coaches teach other wellness coaches to teach other people to become wellness coaches to earn six figures by teaching other people to become wellness coaches, and some of those coaches will discover that this is the real money, and they will teach their clients to teach other clients to earn six figures. A songwriter hires a coach to tell her how to create a six-figure business, and the songs disappear in jargon about niches, scarcity marketing, and non-disparagement clauses. It’s turtles all the way down, except the turtles are courses about courses about courses about making six figures. An entire economy of instruction with no craft left at the bottom. Somewhere in that stack, someone was once actually well. Someone actually once wrote a letter of the alphabet by hand. Someone created songs and sang them into the world.

The internet did not invent this temptation, but it perfected the delivery system. Lead with the number, the script goes, because the number is the credential now. Not the work. The work is just the origin story you tell on your sales page.

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Once, I was offered a job leading a storytelling association. It was flattering. It was secure. It came with a respectable title, a budget, and the particular gravity that institutions exert on people who are good at holding things together. I emailed my friend Richard in New Zealand, because Richard has a gift for questions that arrive like weather.

He responded: “I think the question is whether you want to administer programs for other people to tell stories, or whether you want to tell stories yourself.”

I didn’t take the job. I opted to tell stories myself.

That email from Richard is more than 20 years old now, and I check myself against it more often than I’d like to admit. Because I am not standing safely outside this pattern, pointing in. I teach writing. I coach people who make things. The difference, I guess, is that I don’t teach those writers how to teach other writers, and I don’t coach people who make things to coach other people who make things instead of making things themselves. Still, the gravitational pull toward meta-work is not theoretical to me—it whispers, and what it whispers is this pays better, and it’s easier than facing the blank page yourself.

So I’ve had to build my own test, and it is this: the teaching has to stay downstream of the practice. I write nearly every day, the same daily practice I ask of the writers I work with, not as a credential, but because if I stopped, the teaching would hollow out within a month, and I would become the calligrapher with no letters in his feed. The question is not whether you teach. Plenty of great makers teach; teaching can be an act of love in itself. I love teaching. It is me at my most alive. The question is what you would do tomorrow if the teaching disappeared. If the answer is write, you’re still a writer. If the answer is find something else to teach, the thing itself left the building a while ago, and you are administering its estate.

We lose something when we focus on the six figures and not on the thing itself — the thing we love, the thing that chose us before we ever thought to monetize it. What we lose isn’t only the craft. It’s the part of ourselves that knows how to want something for no reason. Wanting-for-no-reason is the wellspring. Everything else, like the income, the audience, and even the teaching, is supposed to be run off.

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I don’t blame her, that young coach. She was doing what the internet teaches talented people to do. But she was wise before she was six figures, if she even is six figures, and wisdom doesn’t scale the way a funnel does. It only deepens, and deepening is slow, and slow doesn’t screenshot well.

Maybe she finds her way back. Maybe one morning she sits down to write about wellness—actual wellness, the kind that happens in a body, in a life—and remembers why she started. I hope so. There’s a calligrapher out there, too, whose hand still remembers the letters, whether or not he lets it. A songwriter with songs still in her somewhere.

As for me, Richard’s question is still in my email, a long scroll down. And every time the meta-work whispers, I go back to my orange desk to write some more.

I tell the story myself.

P.S. This may or may not have been written by my alter ego, Cranky Patti.