Pathless Path: From Antimeme to Meme | #301

June 23rd, 2023: Greetings from Chiang Mai! I’m hosting a casual get-together with Will Mannon here next week. Please RSVP if you happen to be in Chiang Mai.

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I just finished Nadia Asparouhova’s new book "Antimemetics," and it's given me a different model of thinking, not only about how ideas spread but also how my writing, especially my book The Pathless Path, has spread over the last few years. It’s one of the most interesting idea books I’ve read in a while, and I highly recommend it.

Her book explores what she calls “antimemes,” or ideas that resist transmission. These ideas are the opposite of the most viral ideas that we see everywhere. They are things like “taboos and uncomfortable truths” that might still spread, but slowly in private conversations, group chats, and silent understanding.

When Ideas Won’t Spread

While I now have a decent number of followers, much of this growth has been the result of slow and steady increases over the years. I’ve never gone out of my way to ride the most obvious slipstreams to fame or attention, and have rejected many of the popular growth tactics like paying for subscribers, getting leverage through content teams or other financial investments, shenanigans like secret bulk orders of books, and so on. While early on, part of this was my insecurity about being “seen” in public, over time, it became intentional. My intuition was that, for the way I think and write, and how I want to show up on this creative path, “going viral” in an artificial way would be a bad thing. I think I was mostly right.

I first wrote about the idea of a “pathless path” in 2018 after discovering the term in David Whyte’s book The Three Marriages. The term was powerful. It seemed to name something I was experiencing that I struggled to put into words. I started using the term in private conversations, and it seemed to light up a certain kind of person as soon as I said the phrase.

Despite this, there was a gap between private excitement and public virality. When I shared the phrase in various pieces of writing, like in this essay in 2019 about navigating life without a map, most people didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t spread. I used the phrase in a few other essays, and in an early course I created, but there was never any indication that the term was anything more than a phrase a handful of friends and I loved. I was still thinking “reject the default path” might catch on, but ultimately I abandoned it because I found it too negative.¹ More broadly, almost no one in my offline networks wanted to talk about this stuff either.

But I loved thinking and writing about it, so I kept going. Through my writing, I started having weekly no-agenda curiosity conversations with strangers from around the world. Almost everyone seemed to have deep existential challenges with their relationship to work, which isn’t interesting in and of itself. The interesting part was that a large number of these people would confess that they had never shared some of the feelings they were sharing with me with anyone else.

In other words, they didn’t want this information to spread, at least not to the people who knew them. And so, slowly, over time, I was being influenced by this antimemetic information and refactoring it into my view of the world.

The Case Against Going Viral

If you want your idea to take off at all costs, there are ways. If you are serious about ideas, however, you likely want to know how to avoid this.

The most obvious way to go viral is to pay attention to what’s already popular and morph your ideas into that idea ecosystem.

Nadia offers this helpful 2x2:

To get your ideas to spread ASAP, you should focus on existing supermemes and memes. When I started writing, many little memeplexes were somewhere on the right-hand side of this 2x2:

• LinkedIn Success: Using terms like "more human at work," "employee experience," "meaningful work," or "purpose" to tap into the corporate-LinkedIn idea complex

• Grievances: Airing grievances through an anti-capitalism and politically leftist lens: "Blame capitalism," and "Millennials can't afford houses because the system is rigged," and so on, to attract other agrieved folks.

• Be Your Best: Using “achivement porn,” that reminds people how how little they have achieved so far and how much they could if they tried. See also: bootstrapper ethos, indie hacker, etc…

• Do More/Be More Efficient: Positioning yourself with the productivity optimization crowd: "Try this new tool/mindset to unlock your potential," or even “Meditate to be more productive.”

These memes are strong because they are usually aligned with what we are already primed to think. Nadia gives the example of the memes of marriage or working a salaried office job. “They don’t require much energy to process, because most of us were socialized into these norms and don’t question their underlying premises. The meme itself doesn’t consume much of our attention.”

This is why ideas that use the template of “you aren’t good enough, you just need to try harder” or “embrace the struggle” spread like crazy. They tap into existing beliefs we are primed to believe from living in an achievement culture that values success and achieving more above all else.

Having been in the idea business in consulting, it was very obvious to me that if I tweaked my ideas to map onto existing ideas or beliefs people already had, I could reach a lot more people more quickly. That’s actually what we did in consulting when writing marketing pieces and reports. We paid attention to the latest buzzwords that executives used and always made sure we were repackaging our ideas to match the latest meta.

A selection of McKinsey’s recent articles. I’ll leave it up to you to decode this

I knew that if I did a similar thing with my writing, writing “Five Surprising Truths About Employee Experience,” I might attract the right people on LinkedIn who hire speakers to share these ideas at corporate retreats. Or if I dropped an essay with the title “Life under capitalism is so exhausting,” I might attract the attention of some New York journalists or left-leaning anti-capitalists.

But to me, this always felt like a trap, and it was part of why I wanted to leave consulting. Plus, what’s the point of doing something creative if you aren’t at least attempting to generate something weird and original?

I certainly went through phases of airing grievances about work, and also wrote stuff that overlapped with popular memes. However, when I started attracting too many people who loved simple answers and were a bit too “amped up” about a certain way of seeing the world, I would try to muddy the waters. It’s why I wrote a “I’m not writing for you” essay as a reminder to myself and others early on. And why I have articles questioning work and praising the upsides of a corporate job at the same time. I want to annoy readers who wanted confirmation bias and attract readers who appreciated nuance and contradiction instead.

In other words, I tried to stay in antimeme world:

A portfolio of antimemes

Through reading Nadia’s book, I started to realize my entire web of ideas is a portfolio of antimemes.

An example of doing this in practice is avoiding jumping on the work meme bandwagon. When everyone was talking about "the great resignation," I could have made a big fuss about it and fit it into my thinking, but a basic look at the data convinced me it wasn’t a real phenomenon. I even tried to coin an antimeme, “The Great Contemplation,” which shortly went viral via a share from Tim Ferriss, but quickly died off and was never mentioned by others again. It didn’t spread.

Similarly, when "quiet quitting" dominated headlines, I never used the phrase, and instead used one silly article about the topic to write a more nuanced exploration that turned into the “Don’t Mistake A Good Job For Good Work” chapter in Good Work. I also avoided jumping on the trend because it was aligned with the anti-work/leftist crowd that is a bit too grievance-y for me.

There’s probably a principle here. Something like, for every viral idea, there is a more interesting antimemetic idea worth exploring. Here are some examples:

• Meme: “Grind now, shine later” / Antimeme: “Embrace enough.”

• Meme: “Always be optimizing” / Antimeme: “Try doing less. Embrace mediocrity.”

• Meme: “Escape the 9–5” / Antimeme: “Consider working in corporate for a few years. Save diligently. Take some time contemplating your deeper assumptions. Potentially take a break. Maybe go back to your job or not.”

• Meme: “Fail fast, fail often” / Antimeme: “Embrace the journey, some things take a long time to unfold.”

So ask yourself, what viral idea do I find offensive? How might I use that to explore a more interesting frame?

For someone who enjoys ideas and wants to explore them over a long period, this is often where the good stuff is:

From the beginning, I’ve been drawn to the shadow side of work memes, the parts people don’t want to talk about or don’t know how to talk about. This also helps explain why my ideas didn’t spread, and still, rarely go viral. As Nadia writes, “ideas that emphasize competition or harsh realities often ‘suck the energy out of the room’ and struggle to spread.”

The ideas that made it into The Pathless Path require energy and effort to make sense of. To many people who never think about work too much, my ideas are annoying as hell. They are mood killers. I am the guy who asks big questions. A lot of people hate this. So my ideas won’t spread with those people. But to a certain kind of person already asking the questions I am asking, the packaging of the phrase “the pathless path” and an optimistic framing of embracing an unconventional path did spread.

This is why books are probably the most interesting way to eventually spread antimemetic ideas. They are one of the few media where people will consciously agree to engage with your ideas for a long time and in a nuanced way. People hear about the meme “the pathless path” and then decide to give my ideas a chance, reading them for 5-10 hours.

I find this pretty fascinating, and it’s convinced me that for people who do enjoy longform and deeper explorations of topics, writing a book is likely the best way to eventually spread your ideas in today’s world.²

Antimemetic Strategies

I naturally tend toward the antimemetic. I like being an underdog. I like avoiding mass attention. I don’t take advantage of every opportunity to expand my reach. I lean away from people who are single-mindedly focused on scale or money.

Figuring out if you have memetic or antimemetic tendencies is probably important if you want your ideas to spread.

Here are a few of the approaches I’ve taken to keep my ideas from spreading too fast:

1. Writing longer, more nuanced material is a very effective way of being antimemetic. Most viral content is short and punchy and often doesn’t have any personal storytelling. There are no stakes. It confirms surface-level hunches. It is often created to go viral. It is not a result of the creative process; it is a result of a marketing assessment of what works. My writing here (just like this) has always been a bit long and meandering. I ask questions without answers. I acknowledge tensions. This confuses and repels a lot of people. This is a good thing (for me).

2. Focusing on readers over the algorithm: While it’s clear that growing my audience is important in terms of continuing to make a living, I won’t do it at the expense of doing work I care about. So I focus my attention on the readers who genuinely engage. I respond to every thoughtful email and try to engage earnestly with people reading my stuff. The informal curiosity conversations I had with people (like this one) even started as an anti-strategy in 2018. I saw an influencer open his calendar for 15-minute calls for an absurd price tag and thought that it was a silly thing to do. I decided to open my calendar every Wednesday for unlimited “free” calls. Many of these people also became some of my biggest supporters after my book came out.

3. Filter for other antimemetic influencers: I don’t intentionally spend a lot of time prioritizing relationships with other authors or influencers, especially people I don’t already know. While someone with a big audience can “help” you, it can devolve quickly into performative friendships and implicit contracts of ongoing sharing. I don’t like avoiding things I don’t enjoy, so it’s hard for me to engage in that way. When I see other people engaging in this mode a bit too much, especially in “I want to be friends with everyone,” it usually is a counter-signal for me, knowing they’re likely just looking to spread their work, not engage more deeply. While I’ve made some attempts at trying to send my book to influential people who might like it, I’ve had almost no luck doing this cold. 100% of the success I’ve had regarding reaching bigger audiences has been through people reading my book and sharing positive thoughts before I asked them to support it. The lesson here is simple: for antimemetic ideas and a person with antimemetic tendencies, focusing on doing good work and building relationships naturally is probably the best strategy.

4. Paying attention to “costly” signals: When people do go out of their way to share my work or engage with the ideas in a serious way, I pay attention. If a random reader sends me a note and says they’ve been gifting my book to friends, this means that they have not only spent hours with my book, but they have also bought more copies, shared them with friends, and then came online to thank me. If someone tells me they are privately gifting books, I almost always ask if I can send them a stack of more free books to give away. I honestly don’t know if this is a better use of my time than trying to get my book hyped by Mr. Beast, but it feels more important to me, as my ideal reader is more likely to share with other ideal readers. Even if they don’t have an audience, they may be valuable “nodes” in their offline networks that people trust. This is also why I’ve never worried too much about the big splashy one-to-many launch weeks that so many book authors orchestrate. They seem ill-suited to the way my ideas have spread and would result in many people angrily discovering my book doesn’t offer any how-to playbooks or solutions.

I was doing some reflection on these tendencies I have and realizing it could be a fun additional chapter to add to Nadia’s book: Are you memetic or antimemetic? Some people in the online writing and creator worlds will do anything to spread their ideas. I’m not wired like that, and those people are like aliens to me. But given how many platforms have underlying memetic principles, this is something worth reflecting on.

Some thoughts I had:

• Antimemetic people are likely to be annoyed and in tension with the strong memetic algorithm of places like YouTube or TikTok (often leading to them “quitting” for a bit). Or they’ll be annoyed by people who “hack” the algorithm to go viral too much (e.g., “how to gain subscribers” posts, surface-level cliches posting on text platforms, how to make money threads, etc.)

• At the same time, the long-tail discovery of platforms like YouTube can be a good thing for antimemetic types who want to put a lot of work into something.

• Antimemetic people will be annoyed by people deploying growth hacks in text domains that are traditionally suited to the exploration of ideas, like books or longform

• Antimemetic people get frustrated when their audiences get large, because then they get taken out of context more

• Memetic people will often look down on Antimemetic people as being naive and not understanding the “game” and wasting potential.

• Memetic people don’t like it when antimemetic people want to challenge their ideas. They care about the metrics, not the evolution of ideas.

• Antimemetic people will love books and one-on-one in-person conversations with ideas. They also love obscure or weird ideas.

Antimemetic World Is A Fun Place to Explore Ideas

I want to keep writing books. I want to keep showing up here. I want to keep exploring ideas. Nadia’s book has helped me develop a more coherent understanding of what I enjoy about ideas. I enjoy ideas that people don’t like talking about. I like the uncomfortable truths. I like the scary questions.

Exploring these kinds of ideas is sort of dangerous in the sense that they will inspire strong counter-reactions in the wrong hands. So, exploring these in public takes some care and intention. I need to avoid getting hijacked by the wrong attention to continue to give myself the space to think, and to protect my thinking, creating, and tinkering time. I need to occasionally post things that are weird, meandering, or different to avoid surface-level audience capture.

The Pathless Path’s popularity is still kind of weird. I didn’t expect it to spread as much as it did, and I still find it a bit jarring. But the good thing is that if people do make it through the book and like it, they are usually open to the way I think and write. While I never had a splashy launch for Good Work, and it doesn’t seem to spread like The Pathless Path, it’s safely in my antimemetic world of ideas, for now.

This isn’t surprising. Good Work had a different vibe than The Pathless Path. Fewer references, more prose. Slightly less energized and enthusiastic. It’s 30% shorter, has a bunch of quote sections, and has a fiction chapter toward the end. I made it weird on purpose because I wanted to take some risks and ship something that made it feel like I could keep evolving with writing. The fact that it hasn’t spread or been a massive success is fine because my goal wasn’t maximum reach; it’s maximum aliveness on my path. If I were aiming to be memetic, I would have just run back the same “formula,” which may have worked but have killed some of my energy to keep going. Not worth it.

Next month, my book’s Chinese version is being launched in Taiwan by a big publisher. They are putting PR and marketing budget behind the launch. It’s my first “top-down” approach using traditional memetic strategies. I suspect it might draw some harsh reactions. It will be interesting to see. I don’t know what to expect. It’s not only going to be pushed to a mass audience, it’s going to be in another language and culture.

Over the years, my ideas have "broken containment" and gone viral on Twitter. Almost every time, by the second day, the reactions were outrageous. People would get angry, hallucinate all sorts of beliefs that I don’t hold, and project all sorts of harsh ideas onto me about my intentions. It almost always sucks. You get “engagement,” but it rarely helps spread antimemetic thinking. People take you out of context. They project ideas onto your work. They get angry at you. They pressure you to keep writing about things you don’t want to explore.

I think that as the era of social media 2.0 continues to fragment, thinking about antimemetic strategies will become a lot more common. I think they are underrated.

Nadia released her book through

Metalabel

, a platform for small creative projects started by

Yancey Strickler

, who has been musing on this recently too: “The modern rush toward immediacy causes us to forget an obvious truth: real things grow slowly.” It is not “easy” to find the book, but this just means that almost everyone who bought the book is probably a superfan of Nadia’s work or is at least open to that potential.

I’m going to wrap up this long antimemetic musing and just leave you with this quote from the book, which I loved:

I don’t just want to stand still; I don’t want to be the naysayer in a sea of people who are doing and building things. There will always be a place for critics and whistleblowers, but if everyone did the same, the world would not be better in the long run. We can’t hunker down indefinitely in cozyweb. Our public narratives and civilizational histories still need to be nurtured. We will always crave the wide, expansive feeling of awe–a supermeme to devote our lives to. There is no wishing away the existence of the public online web. If we don’t like what we see, we simply have to learn how to engage with it more deeply and meaningfully. We must pick up a paintbrush, find a blank canvas, and paint the world as we wish it to be. Instead of hiding in our safe and quiet communities, we need to summon the courage to step forward and attempt to do great things.

Thanks for reading!

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Don’t buy her book either.

1. In the last two years, a few more grindset types have embraced this phrase. I do find this entertaining.

2. This has also been interesting in the sense of seeing “Antimemes” develop to the public meme of The Pathless Path. I accidentally overheard someone dismiss my book as “another get-rich-quick scheme book.” They were reacting to The Pathless Path, the meme, not the actual ideas in my book.