A vague feeling of dread makes me turn my attention to commiserating, as if blaming society will help me climb the financial ladder. It could also be that I live in a college town, where there are more degrees than jobs available.

As I scan the job listings each day, I find that the market holds either extremely lucrative jobs that require more experience or menial, physical-labor jobs that are more suited to a time when I was earning my degree, not after having taken possession of it. It’s hard to be excited for the future—a home to call our own, a garage we can both work in and no neighbors to share the most intimate experiences with—when you can’t make more than $30,000 a year.

About a year ago, I stumbled upon Gary Vaynerchuk, a man who has made quite a name for himself on social media, and found some hope. While we don’t share too much beyond the fact that we love to create, I picked up Vaynerchuk’s book “Crushing It!” to see if I could glean any further wisdom. I learned that Gary V. took a company that was doing rather well and seized upon every opportunity he could to build it into the $60 million business it is today. You’ve got to respect a guy that has accomplished that much.

I’ve realized that, as he states, we are in the age of a digital revolution. Having a presence on social media has changed in our society—it has replaced the old ways of obtaining a job and getting your foot in the door. (I’ve personally avoided sites like Facebook altogether because my family seems to drum up enough drama the way it is. Call it personal preference, but I never saw the value in social media.)

My eyes have now focused upon a new facet of social media: LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are two platforms most businesses ought to invest in. Gary V. talks a lot about the benefits of being on those social media platforms  but the true value that lies in his book “Crushing It!” comes from the emphasis on being an entrepreneur.

“Personal branding” is a hot phrase in these times, and critical to making it in the digital world. Just take a look at the number of young people who’ve made their mark on YouTube. It is a profitable and sustainable business model to create and post YouTube videos. I repeat: it is profitable and sustainable to shoot video of yourself and your friends and post it online.

Isn’t that amazing?

This is exactly the stance Gary V. takes, and it’s one I’m excited to hear. I rely on the internet to grow my own on-the-side business of being a writer and editor, and to hear that someday I could potentially quit the menial job I work—one that rots my brain instead of enhances it—and make it big doing what I love . . . it’s like hearing that you can take a vacation, and yes, pick anywhere and the whole trip is free.

An immense feeling of joy rises up and the ambition to achieve great things bubbles inside my nerves.

What really matters here is that we’re in a time of shift, a space where graduating from college and moving straight into the firm you interned for isn’t as common as it used to be. Employees don’t commit to spending two decades of their life in one career. Turn-over rates might be higher, sure, but people are finding out that having to put your head down and plow through the corporate minefield isn’t a requirement anymore. If you can find a good opportunity and work as hard as is humanly possible, those stacks of paperwork and corporate bum-kissing days are long gone.

Right now, I’m hardly making rent with my writing and editing, but someday, somehow, I’m going to support myself and my boyfriend on my ability to fill pages with swooping strokes of my pen and creative character-block landscaping. I advise you to check out Gary V.’s book the next time you’re in a bookstore or the library. To start, watch a few of his videos. The time of making yourself known online is now.

Here’s hoping I land myself a better job. I just might have to create my own space to do it.

Rebecca Henderson holds a Master’s in German and a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Best expressing herself through the written word, she enjoys the smell of burning rubber and can recite the ABC’s of the automotive world upon command. Rebecca hopes to shift your world perspective through her words, because looking out the same window every day hardly makes for an interesting life.

The post Who Do You Work For? appeared first on Newfound.

In my own behavior regarding social media, I’ve noticed a near constant need while at the keyboard to check for notifications, scroll, and generate pithy status updates. I’ve noticed it in others, too. Writer after writer—my friends—comment about the distractions that prevent them from making progress on their writing projects. As it turns out, the rewards—hearing the sound of the ping and seeing the little red number in the top right of my Facebook page—are precisely what make social media so insidious. Thanks to our biology, the pleasures of publishing can hardly compete.

Researchers have discovered that self-disclosure strengthens our urge toward instant gratification. The minute we update our status and begin waiting for the “likes” and comments to roll in, we are strengthening the pathways in our brains that cause us to seek this form of pleasure again. Victoria Sadaat writes, “An extremely psychologically intuitive business model, social networks take cues from human psychology ….”

Research now suggests that dopamine is closely associated with seeking, working in tandem with our brains’ opioid systems, which cause us to experience pleasure. The notification that we have a “like” or a comment tickles our neurotransmitters, triggering a dopamine dump in our brains, teaching us to seek pleasure in the same form. A behavioral loop is set into motion, and after awhile, it seems we can hardly get enough.

This loop is dangerous for writers. Dopamine and the opioid system are also active when a writer writes and is published. The act of publishing creates pleasure so the writer will then seek out that pleasure again and again, creating a loop in which the writer writes, publishes, writes, publishes. But this loop is often thwarted by social media because, biologically, our brains are wired to choose pleasure now rather than pleasure later, just like Pavlov’s dogs. There is no instant gratification associated with writing and publishing—the rewards are long term.

That goes for the actual act of writing, too. Writers find pleasure when they discover the perfect word or turn of phrase. Doing so takes actual work and thought. The difference is that snapping a selfie or generating a funny status update is much easier than finding the precise words and images for creative work. The pleasure of finding the beautiful word or turn of phrase is endangered by the instant gratification of public recognition.

Lately, I’ve pulled back from social media because I’ve developed behaviors that I find unseemly: nosiness, a short attention span, and, of course, a need to check in too often when I’m at the keyboard to write. I’ve decided I’d rather save my dopamine for when I actually publish. But the decision has been hard. I’ve trained my brain over the past several years toward instant gratification, and I’ve found that pulling back has me going through a certain sort of withdrawal. I’ve had to work harder to refocus on my creative writing tasks. When I find myself stuck, trying to find the precise image or word, I often have to fight the urge to click over to my newsfeed and zone out. It’s been a battle of sorts to remain present in my creative work. When I do succumb, click over and zone out for any length of time, it’s harder to re-enter my creative work and I often find myself stymied by my inattention, unable to locate the words I want and need.

Slowly, slowly, I’m weaning myself away, but I’m addicted. And, I’ve found that my addicted brain wants to zone out rather than do the hard work of writing. I’ve begun logging out of my Facebook page rather than allowing myself to stay logged in. Logging out has allowed me to take a step back and think because it takes a bit of time to log back in. I’ve also changed my settings so the notifications’ sounds don’t interrupt my writing. When tackling particularly difficult pieces of writing, I’ve had to disconnect my wi-fi so I can’t get online.

I know what you’re thinking: why don’t you simply de-activate your account?

I’m not quite ready to go cold turkey.

Jennifer Ochstein is a writer and teacher living in Indiana. She has published book reviews with the “Brevity” and “River Teeth” blogs as well as essays with Hippocampus Magazine, The Evening Street Review and Connotation Press. Follow her at jenniferochstein.com.

The post The Writer’s Enemy appeared first on Newfound.

However well-intended and meticulously researched, the journalistic approach of this type of article lacks the essence of the discipline they are discussing. Literature and the arts are not about facts and figures, they are about what it means to be human, hence the label: the Humanities. Literature seeks to expose the truths of human existence, the shared experience, the feeling of being alive. So, in my first post for Newfound, I find myself looking for my place in all this cognitive shifting sand.

Doomsayers typically predict the downfall of the humanities by college enrollments and declared majors. There are more people studying business, medicine, and accounting, they may say. English departments are downsizing due to decreased interest. There are several problems with this argument, but let’s examine the most glaring fallacies. First, people study the subjects they think will get them jobs, e.g., business and medicine. Yet, in a bad economy, there are fewer jobs for everyone regardless of one’s area of expertise. The fact that one studies humanities does not decrease employment opportunities; the economy does that. Second, people don’t necessarily need a university education to succeed in fields such as literature, art and music. Using college majors to determine success seems unfair when you are comparing brain surgeons to painters; it’s apples and oranges.

Those bemoaning the downfall of literature often state that people are reading less—at least for fun. I would counter that people are reading more. When people spend more time staring at their phones than actually talking to people in real life, they are in fact reading. And although a tweet isn’t the same as a novel, perhaps their Twitter feed will read like one. By scrolling through someone’s Facebook, you can read the story of a person’s life, or at least the parts they share. Perhaps it isn’t highbrow literature, but you have to admit it is raw humanity. And it’s fun.

But if everyone is online, then should we study communication or marketing? Often this is the suggestion from these articles. However, these fields teach people to spin, how to be perceived, to control what is admitted. They hide the truth behind created fictions. Writing for corporate communication, marketing and advertising are very different than humanities writing. Literature seeks to reveal the truth through  fiction, to show more than what one usually perceives. There is a reach to provide the reader with an experience, not just an opinion.

Articles concerned with the decline in recreational reading generally mention benefits of reading, such as increased focus and imagination. They will discuss how reading can improve attention spans and promote empathy. This seems to be a turn, but often is no more than a pause to tease the literary reader that what they do might be worthwhile. If only the articles stopped there.

Instead, they usually conclude with more saddening news, such as this statement by Sarah Schwister in Quail Bell Magazine: “Americans are still turning away from serious fiction, and sadly the literary novel may wind up mostly forgotten, like poetry.” Statements such as this one make me furious, and cause me to wonder at the writer’s intent. In my outrage, I find my place, the solid ground on which I stand.

Poetry is not forgotten, not even somewhat forgotten. Not only is poetry still alive in its own right, but poetry is at the heart of every well-turned phrase, every novel surely, but also the clever meme or funny anecdote. The disturbing thing here is that people in the field, the writers who pen such articles,  have already given up on poetry as a form of expression. They have bought into the idea of an America that is turning away from words.

Society does not determine whether the humanities live or die. We do, we that live in the world of the humanities. Some of us work hard every day to promote reading and arts, cultural values and societal change. What is true and always has been is that the hearts and minds of a society’s poets and artists determine its direction, functioning as its moral center. Sure, we are finding new forms of expression, but that does not mean we have to kill off the existing ones. Perhaps multimedia is the future for the humanities, but that does not preclude the writing of books, or even poetry.

It is the artist who makes the difference. Let us not look at the world and have it tell us what will and will not be. Instead, let us look and tell the world what might be. And let that expression take any form. The future is as bright as we paint it. Let us not give up on ourselves just yet.
 

Reggie Carlisle finished his BA in Creative Writing at Weber State University in 2014. His first published story was in the Fall 2013 Mixitini Matrix. He currently resides in Utah with his wife and five daughters.

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