Chronically Online Doesn't Mean Chronically Unproductive
The Postscript Press: A Weekly Newsletter for Cool Girl Creatives
A Pop Culture Newsletter for Cool Girl Creatives
With underconsumption trending and content creators remaining at the apex of the social hierarchy, it can be hard to balance creating and distributing content. To create, we must unplug, but to distribute what we create, we must plug in. It’s unfair and impossible to navigate in a way that yields a sustainable business model.
That’s where this newsletter comes in.
Each week, we’ll examine trending pop culture content, podcasts, books, and more to learn how to dissect stories from trends and use them to inspire our creative journey. We'll highlight storytelling strategies present in the content and provide creative exercises derived from them because being chronically online doesn’t mean being chronically unproductive.
Let’s Take a Dip in the Cool Pool
Cool girls are chronically online. They’re also chronically productive. And, to top it all off, they leverage their binge-induced brain rot to develop culturally relevant stories.
We’ve done just that for you this week, my sweet friends.
Her First $100K: Your Money Attachment Style (and How to Change it) with Thais Gibson
In this week’s episode of Her First $100k, the Financial Feminist Tori Dunlap meets with Thais Gibson to discuss how your attachment style impacts your relationship with money. The two cover everything from attachment styles in relationships, careers, and finances to healing the subconscious beliefs you hold based on your attachment style.
Beside being enlightening from a psychological and holistic wellness standpoint, this episode unlocks a new perspective about how we form the stories we tell about ourself, and how those stories can influence not only what we create, but that way that we create it.
Weekly Trash with Josie Van Dyke: Life Changes with Aspyn Ovard
In this episode of Weekly Trash, Josie Van Dyke meets with Aspyn Ovard to dive into all of the juicy life changes that come from birthing a child, getting divorced, spending 14 years as a high profile content creator and more.
The episode turns a critical eye to what it looks like to have your privacy invaded online, how the brain (and life) fundamentally changes as you age through, and what it looks like for those changes to be documented so intimately in video format.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
In this hit TV series a production team documents the lives of 8 TikTokers. The series was met with extreme backlash when originally announced, causing Mormons across the country to criticize the women, suggest their ex-communication from the church, and cyber bully them in order to attempt to cancel the production of the show.
Upon airing, the show took the internet by storm. Viewers across the world shared that their timeline was flooded with the 8 women, clips of the series, and other content from the group known online as “MomTok”.
Justine Doiron (aka Justine Snacks)
Justine Doiron (aka Justine Snacks) is a content creator who started on TikTok in 2020. She creates food content, shares original recipes, and talks about her lifestyle as it relates to food, drink, and all things yummy.
Recently, Doiron has announced the publishing of her book Justine Cooks (coming October 29, 2024). As the publishing date nears, she is cooking through the recipes featured in her book on her YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram accounts.
The Chronically Online to Chronically Productive Pipeline: Learning From Our Binges
Just because you’re chronically online doesn’t mean that you have to be chronically unproductive. A lesson (dare I say a story?) can be found in anything if you take a few minutes to be inquisitive about it.
To exist online is to either be the world’s creative muse or to use the world as your creative muse, showcasing that both what we consume and how we consume it plays a pivotal role in the artist we become and the content that we develop.
Lessons Creativity & Self
In this week’s Her First $100k episode, we put a magnifying glass to the threads that attachment style sews through our lives. From impacting career progression, to finances, and relationship dynamics, attachment styles are the foundation from which our very selves stand upon.
Activity: Listen to the episode and write down the core belief associated with each attachment style. Which ones ring true for you? Identify your attachment style based on the core beliefs and assess how those beliefs show up in your creative work.
We also explored the ways that self exploration fuels content creation, as seen through both Justine Doiron’s content and Aspyn Ovard’s Weekly Trash episode.
Activity: As you consume content personal to someone’s life (like Aspyn’s vlogs or Justine’s recipe development sagas) consider what pieces of themselves they are using to fuel their creative vision. How can you apply this to your own content?
Lessons in Storytelling
As we’ve established, our attachment styles have a profound impact on the sense of self we develop through our adult lives. By learning core beliefs through your specific attachment style, you can observe a great deal about both the stories you tell yourself and the stories that you gravitate toward reading.
Activity: Choose an attachment style different than the one you have identified for yourself. Study the core beliefs of that attachment style and brainstorm a piece of content that could derive from those core beliefs. If you’re feeling up for a challenge, develop a piece of content that you yourself would post on your page (even though you have a different attachment style, and likely a different style of storytelling).
We also can explore the impact of storytelling (and the impact of omission) by surveying the storytelling techniques used in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Over the course of the show we follow the lives of 8 TikTokers and the relationships they’ve built with one another through a subsect of the platform known as “MomTok”.
The show itself is not only binge-worthy, but it also calls for viewers to do research of their own on the aforementioned mom gang. From a few clicks, it’s not hard to realize that many of the true stories in the women’s lives were left untold.
The storyline of the season focuses on creating a villain, Whitney Levitt, for the sake of reality TV entertainment. As you can derive from the popularity of the series, the producers chose the most gossip-worthy storyline to increase viewership and gain internet buzz.
But, when you take a closer took at the women’s individual content, it’s easy to tell that the real stories lie with Jen Affleck, whose story includes coming up from a life of homelessness, poverty, and foster care, and Mayci Neeley, whose story includes leaving an abusive relationship, losing a spouse, having a child and finding love again through her current partner.
Activity: Listen to Weekly Trash’s episode with Jen Affleck and read Mayci Neeley’s blog. Once you’re familiar with their stories, run a content analysis. Why does a subpar villain arc gain the attention of the internet over stories of real, raw women who have overcome adversity? How can we create binge-worthy storylines that show personal development, and how does omission play into the narrative arcs of each of the characters on the show? In what ways can you apply this to your own creative work?
i LOVE this!!! genius idea