Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern

A couple weekends ago, I had the honor and privilege of being on a panel with a few of my favorite (pretend) retirees from the Cool Gamer Retirement Home community.

I talked about content creation (what else??) and the pressure we all feel as creators on the internet to make stuff that people want to interact with — the pressure to get as much interaction as possible.

I talked about how I view myself as the queen of side hustles, and how that gig mentality was ingrained in me early on in life. When you go to school for writing and you don’t want to teach, the other option is to hustle. Freelance writing, freelance editing, content creation, working for a content mill. Any gig you can get, you have to take — because if you’re not working, you’re starving. As I have picked up hobbies, there is a real struggle not to immediately shift my brain into “you could monetize that!” territory, especially when everyone around me is saying that anyway.

I talked about my struggle to tamp down that mindset despite the fact that I’m in a financially stable place and don’t need to embody the “work or starve” vibe anymore.

Throughout our discussion, we kind of organically came to refer to our stories as “chapters” for guiding viewers through our journey. There were four chapters:

1. Take care of yourself and have boundaries
2. Find community that will nurture you and care about you as a person rather than you as a cog in whatever machine we’re living in (this was me!)
3. Find hobbies that fulfill you in your downtime
4. Find active enjoyment in something and set aside time to intentionally enjoy your hobbies (passive enjoyment doesn’t heal you in the same way as active)

It was a great discussion and I enjoyed having the space to pass on whatever wisdom or knowledge I’ve gathered from being a person who makes content on the internet. My part starts at around 50 minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch/listen just to get the different perspectives of four streaming friends.