The great Un-joining

Why I have trouble unsubscribing

My generation gets abeled as the “Joiners”. I get that; I’m the Boomer poster child for cheerful joiners.We’re the ones who are keeping organized religion and places of worship going - along with the Great Generation (a label that annoys me a bit. Boomer means there are a lot of us. The baby BOOM. Mic drop.

Do you remember the “quiet quitting” movement that was part of the response to COVID-19-influenced employee disengagement? I don’t think I knew anyone doing quiet quitting at that time. If my Boomer colleagues and I left someplace, we were loud about it. We had events if we were happy about it. We wrote about it. And if I’m honest, some of us probably didn’t leave until we were asked to please go. And then we were loud about that. Maybe not all of us, but the true joiners. True joiners are people who would think about joining a cool study on stopping nicotine use, and then remember they didn’t use any nicotine. True story.

I’m also a joiner because of my own FOMO, fear of missing out. I paid to join the Audubon Society, (those pictures!), of course, ACT BLUE to make it easy to watch and give to political candidates, Live/Snap/Love to take better pictures, to PBS, to Friends of the Library, the Cable Natural History Museum, book clubs, a NAMI committee, (because, mental health), One Million Cups (entrepreneurs) , OVME and to Lifetime Fitness because it’s practically free now. I’m on a LinkedAdvisory group, a global communications organization, and the list goes on. This list doesn’t include any of my subscriptions. I have to clean them out every 2 or 3 months, and then find they’re still growing. Wild Alaskan Seafood? I did that? Ipsy? Who’s Ipsy?

My friend Christine calls me “a marketer’s dream”. That’s fair. Two nights ago I became a season ticket holder because the orchestra played Shostakovich’ Festive Overture and it brought tears to my eyes. I was over the moon. Now I’m over my spending limit. I think I ordered five concerts, but it could have been four. Or six. They’ll let me know.

And Substacks? Don’t get me started. Well, it’s too late to get me started; I’m already oversubscribed. There is something I love about each one of the substacks where I’ve subscribed, some paid, some waiting and watching and checking out the community there in comment discussions. I wish I could read more, pay for more. But I can’t find my work emails among them and if I don’t, I’ll run out of money to do it. A conundrum.

How do you know when it is just too much?

When you can’t find anything. Example: I registered and paid for a nine-month program but couldn’t find any confirmation because I used an email address that went defunct in 2014. Henry Schafer Partners. Maybe because I was talking to the former partner, Schafer, when I was registering, hard to say. But it’s another sign. Mindlessness.

I am trying to shift how I spend my time - and my money - to better reflect my values. So OVME had to go. I want to be OV-Others, not ov(of) myself. I am not making it to the entrepreneurs’ early morning meeting, because I don’t think I’m a burgeoning entrepreneur anymore. If I ever was. Why was it so hard to give that up? Only a year ago I was preparing for and hosting those meetings, connecting with all the incoming speakers, the ones with the new businesses. I’m letting go of the Wall Street Journal and local business journal and keeping GrantWatch because my main work now is helping needy nonprofits get more funding. And they’re all needy, but I am keeping a tighter focus. There are so many places I wish I could give more - and that means reining in my spending, and also likely continuing to work for a couple of more years. International Association of Business Communicators? I was leading a global committee through the COVID years. That feels light years and the 7 time zones I coordinated from my priorities right now. But I loved that work, being in the vortex, it was so stimulating, so expanding to talk to those bright minds of different aged communications in Jamaica, Singapore, New Zealand, Germany, and throughout the US.

Why is it so hard to let all that go?

My last media relations event was last November. It was for a non-profit, but still all the stress of asking/begging media to come to an event that felt a little more about the sponsor and a little less about the kids we were serving. That’s inside PR (public relations) talk, but I decided at the end of the year to give that up and just take new fee assignments in advocacy and fundraising/development.

At night, I still wake up from dreams of PR media scenarios that went wrong. One was a client getting creamed in an interview and getting ready to blame me for his being quoted using the very words they’ve said over and over to me? Yes, that happens. There’s denial they ever said it when I could repeat their private comments word-for-word. Or an empty room when we expected a crowd.

I miss the adrenaline rush of solving problems, big problems with time urgency. I specialized in crisis communications. It was a good fit for a long time. Now I’m trying to prevent incredibly important nonprofits from running out of money so the vulnerable people they serve won’t be left out in the cold. I mean that literally as one organization I’m trying to help serve chronically under-housed people. That’s a new word for me. It means they aren’t always homeless, nor were they, but where they put their head at night is not secure. And they could lose what little they have in a heartbeat. One thing they count on is a community, hot food for lunch, and sometimes, a free sandwich or some donated bread to take with them when the place I volunteer closes at 2 pm.

I realized today that I won’t find enough time to truy help unless I clear out some emails, and reduce the noise in my schedule and especially in my head. Those dreams have to stop some time. People I know who have recently retired tell me how much they love the lack of commitments and deadlines. I feel like I’ve been overcommitted my whole life. Gulp.

I’ve overcommitted to people too, and networks of people in particular - trying to keep up with people from all the pieces of my past lives and trying to keep ‘mentoring’ when nothing is coming back, or maybe going in either. It’s also true that some people don’t want you to change. They want you to be the person they’ve defined as it relates to their own identity. We label each other as a shortcut, but when the labels don’t fit anymore, sometimes it takes some un-joining to be open to something new.

In other unjoining, I want to unjoin the vast Temu/Amazon/Costco driven consumer market. I want to own less. I need to own less. And that goes for memberships too. I need to be in fewer places to feel grounded in any one of them.

To whittle it all down, I’ve started with emails and the simple act of unsubscribing. It shouldn’t be this difficult. I’m going to accept that I’m not going to be executive director of anything but myself. So delete that weekly Glassdoor alert. Or is it daily now? Anyway, gone. And since it’s looking less likely I’ll open a Bed and Breakfast, the entrpreneurs’ weekly group should go on pause. Okay, I should exit. .

What I need to do is great un-joining.

Will you help me? I think I’m going to need a support group. :-)