How much BS are we responsible for?

It’s Wednesday, April 17th, and today we’re asking a big question about where responsibility meets impact.

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Quick announcement: I’m launching a private membership for solopreneurs and founders of small teams ready to make community their next competitive advantage. Founder applications are open.

Two things have happened this week that I can’t stop thinking about. They’ve left me repeating a question in my head:

Just how much bullshit am I perpetuating in the world?

Context

One of my favorite companies is 1440. They send an email six days a week summarizing the biggest headlines across multiple categories.

There are a lot of news curation emails to choose from. What made me a die-hard fan is their refreshing, one might say even morally imperative approach: “Facts without motives.”

It is the most objective media source I’ve found. At a time where outrage and internet fights are bringing out the worst in us, their story is a standout:

I never miss my 1440 email.

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking to the founder, Tim Huelskamp, and was inspired by his choice to double down on principles that most of the media world seems quite comfortable to ignore.

A week before my call with Tim, I was catching up on the Search Engine podcast, specifically, an episode titled “Is there a sane way to use the internet?”

In other words: How do I get information about the things I care about without getting sucked into a vortex of opinion, unearned certainty, and yelling?

Ezra Klein was the guest and several times, his words stopped me in my (shower) tracks, the first being a lurid visual about media consumption:

Later, he makes a stark comment about Twitter:

“…they're not just using Twitter, they're becoming Twitter… it has somehow colonized the way they think. They think in Twitter, they talk like Twitter, they look at the world and are looking for little 280-character quips to make about all the time.

And it's true for everything, right? When you go to a place and instead of looking at it, you are looking for what would be a good photo to take of it.”

I’ve always found Klein to be a brilliant man. And it took me a good half of the episode to really understand the crux of the problem.

Personal responsibility.

As we consume more and more media, we begin to cross into a world where we’re making choices that we’re not even conscious of. Choices that may be adding longevity to the parts of the world we most despise.

The media has turned everything into entertainment, and as a result, we’ve become intolerant to boring.

Yet we continue to show up in spaces we disdain because we see pieces of good in them.

• This news outlet sucks but we still need to know.

• This social media platform leaves me feeling crappy but I want to keep up with friends.

• Twitter feels like a mindless echo chamber but there are still a few smart people here.

I guarantee we are all participating in at least one space that we genuinely don’t like.

And this is so much more dangerous than it appears.

Because as a whole, we’ve somehow decided that we are passive consumers of media, not active participants pushing it forward.

Think of every platform you participate in as a Flintstone car where you slip into the driver’s seat, progressing it forward.

You’re not a passenger—you’re part of what sustains it, what keeps it going. I found this convicting.

And it is these two words: inspiring and convicting that have resulted in my asking: just how much bullshit am I perpetuating in the world?

Impact Bias

Buried inside of this question is a really important second question around entrepreneurship.

Wondry matters so much to me because each time a community is launched, hundreds, if not thousands, of people find a new space for belonging. It's the ultimate ripple effect. In fact, when I first journaled about launching, I created this masterpiece:

But so much of my plans for impact have revolved around what I make: a business, a new piece of choreography, a book.

It’s what I have started calling leading from the front. It’s important, and we need lots of people to do it.

But what about my responsibility to lead from the back? To not click, not participate, not consume?

It’s really easy to say, but as my screen time would reveal, quite difficult to do.

I’m not proud to say this, but I’ve never been gung ho about ethically-sourced clothing brands. I see the importance of it (and I certainly don't shop at Shein or Forever 21), but there are just so many things to care about. I cannot actively advocate for dogs, elderly people, fashion, the ozone layer, microbiomes, and and and and and and.

But the depth of my own existence, the dent I leave in the world; I don’t think it’s going to come from my forward charging advocacy as much as it will the tiny day-to-day choices in which I am teaching the world around me what I will accept, support, and believe in.

Community empires are being built around media brands. Millions of people are immersing themselves in conflicting ideologies and confirming each other’s bias.

Where I choose to allocate my resources is a marker I’ll leave behind.

April was here.

I hope it was somewhere I’d be proud of.

If you want to subscribe to 1440, click here.

I also highly recommend you listen to the mentioned podcast episode here.

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