I've Got to Be Honest with Everyone

I'm disturbed about the direction this newsletter is taking. It's one thing to object to Trump's murderous rampages. It's something else to celebrate a regime like Iran. What's next? Is Jessica going to start denying genocides?

--A deeply concerned subscriber

Whew, boy. I have a response to that.

But first...

I'm splitting this post up into sections, because I'm sure some of you don't care about composting toilets. But I have some important things to cover regarding the state of the newsletter, and I need to vent for a few minutes.

I'll give you some raccoon pictures to make it go down easier.

Let's start with something practical:

Composting Toilets

If you don't care about composting toilets, you can skip this section. Please scroll on down to the section where I talk about the newsletter.

I've been back to work on the illustrated survival guide for a couple of weeks now. As we move into the second phase, I'm changing my approach. For the first few months, it felt extremely important to post new pages at least twice a week, and often more frequently. Now, it feels more important to slow down.

I'm working at a different pace because I'm approaching even more difficult topics that require more troubleshooting. I'll give you an example:

In the last version of the guide, I wrote about emergency toilets and the basics of waste disposal. Now I'm really digging into composting toilets for longterm solutions, and it runs into more challenges. Sure, it sounds easy to just install a composting toilet in a cabin. It's easy if you don't care about cutting a hole in your wall that goes through your siding. It's not so easy when you have to think about doing that in an apartment. It's not so easy when you have to think about doing that in a home you might be selling down the line, to buyers who don't like your composting toilet.

How do you install a composting toilet in a suburban home that you might have to sell in five or ten years? How do you install a composting toilet in an apartment where you have to convince a landlord why it's a good idea?

That's the challenge.

One expert we talked to said it wouldn't be a problem to simply route the exhaust pipe from a composting toilet into our existing bathroom duct. That sounds simple, but elsewhere I've read that routing a composting toilet through your bathroom ductwork is a very, very bad idea, something to avoid. You don't want to send fumes from a composting toilet through your ducts. You want to expel it as soon as possible. Hence why most composting toilets go through a wall.

Other experts have insisted you don't even need an exhaust system for a composting toilet. Well, that clearly doesn't work for everyone. If you're going to permanently replace a toilet in your own home with a composting toilet, I think it's smart to go ahead and assume you need a way to vent fumes.

Maybe in the end, I'll talk about all three options...

So, I'm having to call yet more composting toilet companies to get their take on solutions before we move forward.

This is not a project I can just set up in the corner of our garage. We're either going to install a permanent composting toilet, or we're not.

These aren't easy questions to answer, but that's the point of this guide. My job is to go beyond the cookie-cutter "install a composting toilet" advice you get on YouTube, and to think through how you'd actually do that in different situations. The same goes for many of the other topics I'm covering.

Now, for a different topic:

This newsletter is struggling

On a positive note, this newsletter has made it almost four years now, thanks to support from a core group of readers who appreciate my work. Many of us support the same handful of writers and publications that make life bearable. Some of them talk about the climate crisis. Some of them cover politics. What's their value?

They keep us informed.

They keep us sane.

They provide a breather from the garbage at mainstream publications. Just today, The New York Times tried to pitch me: "Someone Has to Be Happy. Why not Lauren Sanchez Bezos?" Yeah, that's a real story. I mean, if someone has to be happy, why not... you?

You deserve more happiness than the Bride of Bezos.

Don't you?

The word "propaganda" gets slapped on those lego videos coming out of Iran. But what do you call that? It's not journalism.

I digress.

According to many of you, I should be proud of what we've accomplished. You've told me this newsletter has saved lives. It convinced people to keep masking when newspapers like the NYT were pressuring everyone to "get back to normal." It taught people about HOCl. It alerted them to threats like bird flu, a threat that remains with us, despite the current regime's efforts to silence the CDC. It reminded you that you, and not just Lauren Sanchez Bezos, deserve a little happiness in this world.

This newsletter has validated people's emotions. It has made them feel less alone. It has grounded them. It has kept them sane.

It's certainly done that for me.

We've spoken out against genocide. We've spoken out against Trump and the fascists, but we've also urged the public to hold presidents like Biden accountable. We've demanded better of ourselves rather than taking the easy way out, and simply using our opponents as an excuse to do less with our own lives. We've demanded clean air, over and over.

On that note, this newsletter has lost hundreds of paid subscribers this year. I've tried not to talk about it, because I've been focused on the guide.

As you've seen recently, I'm re-balancing my content. Going forward, I'll be posting more about politics, psychology, philosophy, and so on. I'll be doing that while posting updates to the guide on a more regular schedule.

But it's hard.

I was doing that, and a lot of people still didn't seem satisfied. Among the hundreds of readers who've pulled their support, only some of them did it for financial reasons. Many others were extremely clear why they were canceling. They wanted me to write less about Covid and more about climate change. They wanted me to write less about prepping and more about psychology or politics. Or vice versa. They wanted to leave long, condescending comments without any pushback from the author. They wanted to complain loudly about aspects of the site or the interface that I have no control over, just for its own sake. Or they found something in a 2,000-word post to get upset about, even if it was just part of a sentence.

Strangely enough, they left because I was "too negative."

One reader even chastized me after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. When I wrote a post saying that I did mourn the loss of Charlie Kirk, not just his death, but the entire loss of his human potential the moment he devoted himself to bigotry, someone I knew relatively well just had to say it: "Why are you mourning him? He was a fascist!" And just like that, it was clear they hadn't actually read the post.

This kind of thing happens all the time now, every day. I can ignore it, but when it eats into your bottom line, maybe you shouldn't.

And so, this newsletter no longer pays my bills.

Funding I get makes up the difference, but the point of that money was to afford research for the guide. Instead, I split it. They've said it's fine for me to do that. So, I budget. I write. I make plans for a future after this newsletter, not because I want to, but because that's the situation I'm in.

Does it have to be like that?

I don't know.

Do I complain too much?

Many of the people who cancel can't tolerate a couple of posts about black widows or the larger points I make when I write about them in our house.

Or:

Many of them conflate emotional openness and vulnerability with whining and complaining. They can't grasp that, often, I'm not sobbing over my own circumstances. Instead, I'm intentionally channeling the emotions that I know many of you feel, and that's the whole point.

I take my own observations and experiences, and I use them as narrative springboards into our larger problems.

Isn't that what a good writer is supposed to do?

Maybe my gender plays a role here. When I mention my own life, as an entry point into a larger meditation about our culture or politics, so often, some dude, or sometimes an aspiring fairy godmother, takes that to mean I'm asking for advice. They think I can't manage my life.

They judge me, and they unsubscribe.

You remember Umair Haque? Well, one of his biggest fans once stopped by my newsletter to tell me that I emote too much. "Maybe you should confine your most emotional thoughts to a diary," she suggested.

Telling a woman to start a diary.

How Victorian of her.

I'll be honest, sometimes I get so many complaints, so many harsh comments, that I'm scared to write the next article. I'm scared to bother people on a weekend. I think to myself: What right do I have to get up on this soapbox? What do I really know about the world? What am I going to say that someone else hasn't said, or half the world doesn't already know? I'm scared to remind people that the world has problems. But I make myself do it, for the readers who still appreciate my work, the ones who even say they need it. I'm sure they would be okay without me, but it's nice to hear.

Do I complain too much? Do you? Or does the world mishear your voice?

I think it's Item B.

What's going on with Substack?

I've gotten this question a lot recently.

As many of you know, I pretty much called it quits on Substack last year. But I never deleted my account, and I posted there sporadically. When you're a struggling writer, you don't really get to choose your platforms. They've all got problems. But recently, I've been doing better there. For example:

It's been quite a while since I've gotten that much traffic, and I don't think I've ever gotten 20K likes on anything, much less a post that speaks such a hard truth. And look, we could qualify that statement all day long. But that's not the point, and you know it. The point is rhetorical, and it's about an overall sense. Does it feel like Iran has stood up to Trump more than we've seen all of our politicians do over the last ten years? It certainly does. It's worth saying that in order to convey the larger meaning.

Is it true on a literal, quantifiable level?

That's not the point.

Sometimes you have to say something audacious, not for attention, not for clicks, but to cut through the noise and get people to notice a truth.

In a world where I'm competing against advice bros and "neuroscientists" with life hacks 24 hours a day, I have to get a little punchy.

Otherwise, nobody hears me.

Anyway: With these shorter posts getting hundreds and thousands of likes on a regular basis, I'm obliged to give Substack another shot. I'm especially obliged because no other platform offers anywhere close to the engagement, not Ghost, not anybody, not for me.

I'm posting on Substack again for that reason, to reach a new audience, and I have zero intention of leaving Ghost. I've done my absolute best to manually cull my subscriber lists so you're all not getting duplicate posts, or dealing with duplicate subscriptions, but I'm human, and these platforms have truly horrendous subscriber management tools. So, some of you are going to end up in that situation.

If that happens, please don't leave comments on my stories suggesting I'm just haphazardly bouncing between platforms, that I'm being careless or reckless, or running some kind of scam. I'm not. I'm trying to survive. You can use my contact pages to reach out to me. They're not hard to find.

I will always refund someone if they're truly not happy with the work I'm doing, or if an auto-renewal catches them by surprise and they just can't afford it. You don't have to open a dispute with me through your bank. You don't have to boss me around. You don't have to yell at me. You just have to treat me like a human being.

It's literally in the top menu of my homepage.

Okay?

Am I going to start denying genocides?

It's been one helluva few years. Every time I post, someone who's been a reader for years comes forward to accuse me of something.

A Holocaust denier, that's a new one...

About this comment:

I'm disturbed about the direction this newsletter is taking. It's one thing to object to Trump's murderous rampages. It's something else to celebrate a regime like Iran. What's next? Is Jessica going to start denying genocides?

That person canceled their subscription.

Because I dared to "praise" Iran.

You know what's interesting?

We just witnessed a genocide, and it was people like that doing all the denying as it happened on our phones. Virtually every human rights organization on the planet called Israel's actions in Gaza genocide, and they didn't shed a tear. So, who is denying genocides here?

It's not me.

Yes, I understand that Iranian leaders have questioned The Holocaust, but more specifically, they've questioned why a genocide that happened in Europe entitles a bunch of colonizers to occupy land in the Middle East and commit a second genocide. Does Israel have a right to exist? Does Gaza have a right to exist? It's not my question to answer, and using my tax money to carpet bomb an entire region into submission hasn't helped.

This comment isn't a one-off. It's fairly representative of the hundreds of people who've canceled their subscriptions this year. I write post after post calling for nuance, for better listening, for historical context, and then the people who claim to want that will leave a comment asking if I'm about to start denying genocides.

For what it's worth, I haven't taken any sudden turn. One of the very first articles I ever wrote in academia, almost 20 years ago now, was about Iran. In that paper, I used communications theory to argue that the American approach to dealing with that country was all wrong, that if we adopted a different strategy with different theoretical principles, we would quickly find something of a friend in Iran, a country on its own journey and dealing with its own problems, but not a country that wanted to go to war with anyone. Do you know what happened to that paper?

It was rejected.

The journal made a soft threat to ban me if I ever sent them anything like that ever again. When I asked my professors for advice, they told me to be extremely careful and change the direction of my research.

So, this is always who I've been. There's no turn.

Only a return.

One last thing

I apologize for using cute photos of raccoons to manipulate your emotions. But earlier today, another writer celebrated two years on their newsletter. They have almost 200,000 readers, and they're asking me to become a paid subscriber so they can reach the next level. And you know what?

I'm going to do it.

I'm going to upgrade my subscription, because I know how hard it is to reach that level. I want them to succeed. They're a good writer, and a net positive in the world.

But also:

I'm human. I look at my four years in newsletters since I got bullied off Medium, where I had 100,000 readers. I see the hate pieces about me, still up, still in clear violation of that platform's own code of conduct. I shrug.

I can't go back there. Even if I wanted...

I'm not welcome.

I look at my subscribers here. 14,000 now. Down from 19,000 last year. Substack says I have 38k, but that's an algorithmic lie.

Why are people leaving?

I think we've covered that, but:

I've taken all the difficult stances, and I've dealt with all the truths nobody else wants to touch. Sometimes, I think I have to remind people why I'm such a difficult person. It's because the truth is difficult. Honest people are difficult to be around, because they don't ever let you dine out on a lie.

If my recent content has bored you, or bothered you: I don't write about prepping because I'm privileged or paranoid.

I write about prepping because I genuinely want to offer up some kind of solution, some kind of way to endure all the problems I talk about. That's what I used to be criticized for, never offering a solution. Well, we solved that problem and then some.

I want you to know about composting toilets, even if you don't care about them, because one day you might find yourself living next to a data center, and one day you might use the bathroom, and there's no running water. I want you to know how to cook food without electricity, because one day you're going to be in that situation, and it might be permanent.

In short, I give a shit about you.

If anything, I might be talking too much about the solutions now. So, as I said, I'm rebalancing my content. You're going to get it all. But you have to be open to it all. I think most of you are.

You should take a spin through my head sometime. It's hard truths all day long up in here, and it's exhausting. I'm a Vulcan at heart. If anything, I've held back. You have no idea. But I would rather be exhausted by dealing with all these hard truths than eating lies, and paying for it later. Because you always pay for it, eventually...

So do the people you care about. And even strangers you'll never met, halfway around the world, they also pay the price for our comforting lies.

There's only one way for me to be. I've tried everything else, and it doesn't work.

So, thanks for being here.

I give a shit about you.

I hope you stay.