If you haven’t read last week’s interview by
with the novelist Lore Segal, head over to , where will also share new work later today.A Conversation with James Richardson
Joshua Doležal: Welcome back to my interview series with former academics who have pivoted to careers in industry and entrepreneurship. I’m Joshua Doležal, and my guest today is James Richardson.
James Richardson: I've actually told people in interviews, because they've asked me what should young entrepreneurs do in school, and I'm like, in school, you don't study entrepreneurship. I would tell them if they want to become solo business owners and take on all that stress and loneliness and everything and all that risk, the first thing you should do is do something really risky while you’re young. Your passion doesn't tell me anything.
Joshua Doležal: James is a cultural anthropologist by training – first at Harvard, where he completed his bachelor’s degree, and later at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Ph.D. But near the end of his doctoral program, James hit the wall that so many academics have: the life of purpose that he imagined, and that he had lived as a field researcher in South Asia, did not match the future he foresaw in higher ed.
In what he calls last-ditch adaptation to American culture, James reinvented himself as a consultant for consumer packaged goods, accumulating new research skills while working for several firms. In 2017 he founded Premium Growth Solutions, where he now enjoys ultimate autonomy as a solopreneur. James is the author of the bestselling book Ramping Your Brand (2019) – written primarily for business owners in consumer packaged goods, and he writes the Substack series
, where you can read excerpts of his forthcoming book Our Worst Strength: American Individualism and Its Hidden Discontents.Given my dim view of branding, particularly the damage that corporate branding is doing to higher education and the vexed notion of personal branding that seems rampant on LinkedIn and Substack, you might reasonably wonder why I’d want to talk to James. In fact, I press him frequently throughout our conversation on what strikes me as a paradox. In his own words, James makes a living by feeding the beast of growth. But his forthcoming book is largely an indictment of American individualism and the alienation that capitalism breeds. See what you think of how James reconciles these two strains of his work and intellectual life.
James lives with Asperberger’s, which makes him brutally honest. I am drawn to radical truth-tellers, and I appreciate James’s insight into why I felt so alone, even in my own family, during my transition out of academe. In fact, James understands more than almost anyone I know what it means to grieve the loss of that identity.
Joshua Doležal: I thought we might start with the crisis of confidence that built near the end of your time at the University of Wisconsin. Maybe tell me a little more about your training and, why you felt that an academic career was just not possible.
James Richardson: I was a cultural anthropology doctoral student and by the time I was done, ironically, I was very happy with the fieldwork, the dissertation – and the challenge that I had found myself in was that I had so overcommitted to my career personally and overdedicated my entire self to it to the point of not even forging relationships with other people.
And I have Asperger's so that it's very difficult for me to do that to begin with. So when I want to do that, I really have to focus. But I didn't allow myself any of that. I was very tunnel vision.
I wound up with no plan B in a situation where there are no jobs. And my mental health was not good at all. I had a diploma, living alone. No job, no job prospects. I did a little pro and con thing on, on whether I should continue and chase the 10 year track in my field. And although the mental health situation was really a wake-up call for me that I just have to settle down. I basically had to get a life. One of the inspirations for my book is the noncommittal nature of American urban life is such that it's almost impossible to build deep relationships with anyone, because that process takes years.
It doesn't happen in 30 minute chunks on Saturday. You have to throw hundreds and hundreds of hours at it.
So I had spent no time doing that. And I just had to prioritize getting my shh, as they say, one’s shit together. That's what we say in America. How long did it take you to get your shit together? And we all laugh. Because this is a normal urban thing, but in my next book, I basically spend 400 pages deconstructing that, from the perspective of most other traditional cultures, this is pathological insanity.
It's completely nuts. And we live in a culture where we deal with the consequences of that primal orientation to autonomy. My fucked up academic career is a great example of believing way too much in your own autonomy and putting way too much faith in it.
Joshua Doležal: Can I ask about India?
Because you were studying in India for a time and that was the totalizing nature of your research was that you threw yourself entirely into that project.
James Richardson: I kind of had to destroy my identity as a South Asian expert in order to transition into a new career. That was a very painful process for me personally, because I didn't really want to do that. And I eventually later came to terms with it.
I realized part of my challenge coming back from the United States, which triggered this mental health crisis, was culture shock. I had just spent three years in a place where I would go out on the street. And I had friends. I had people I hung out with. I saw real community. I got a taste of it. I saw real family. Got a taste of that. And so when I came back, the alienation that normal people would have perceived as normal, I realized was messed up.
Joshua Doležal: So I'm struggling, James, with two dissonant threads in your story. And I want to pivot to how you reinvented yourself and, in your own words, got your shit together.
But I wonder if you kind of already did have your shit together. You'd been living in a place where the culture was more coherent. Your reasons for going to India and doing that kind of research were not flawed. And so you had to learn how to participate in a system that it sounds like you didn't really believe in or that you've come to see as even more flawed than your mindset coming back from India. So is it true that you really got your shit together or did you just have to construct a new persona that you could live with in this other capitalistic system?
James Richardson: Well, I think that's what ended up happening. I was pretty unhappy in most of my twenties. That's a long time to be unhappy. I was able to get my work done, so, in America, you don't have a mental health problem, Josh. You don't have any problem at all that matters if you're productive. Isn't that funny? I come from a pretty high achieving Anglo Saxon affluent family. So I had all the assets of privilege to give me the basic social skills to be a productive jackass in an office. Like that was never my problem.
It doesn't make you a happy person at all. When you fixate on a dream in America, and the more privileged you are, the more likely you're going to concoct some really intense dream and fantasy for your life. I hate to say it because you just have so many opportunities, the wealthier you are, right? You fixate on that dream and fantasy, and then when it blows up in your face, you have no resources. No one wants to talk to you about it.
And this is really true, I think, with men. Men do not want to be an audience to you grieving your lost academic career. I never met anybody who wanted to hear that story. You're one of the few, honestly. I certainly didn't bring it up dating! You know what I'm saying? Until I got into therapy, I didn't have someone where I could finally process the fact that I had been grieving and that I was just angry about it all.
Nobody gave a shit. They weren't indifferent in a malignant way, they just were indifferent. James, that's your personal problem, right? This is how we think about people. Your career imploded? Ah, that's a really sad personal situation. So we heal alone. You’re talking to somebody who's like, I was not capable of asking for help in life until my mid thirties. Anywhere.
And that is a neurodiversity liability in this country. So the one reason I was inspired to write this next book is that I do believe that there's certain forms of neurodivergence that really are really maladapted to an unstructured autonomy-driven, seek your own glory, culture that we live in.
People like me do much better in highly structured society, where there's actually much less choice.
Joshua Doležal: But you did work for a time in business, correct, before you shifted to your current role?
James Richardson: Yeah, I'm still a consultant. I think what happened was that therapy helped me grieve the loss of the academic dream properly and put it into perspective as, you know, that was just a phase in your life. There's no one out there who's judging you for not doing that. I mean, other than you. And even if other people are judging you for having left, you don't even talk to them.
You need somebody to just lay it out, like, to help you let go. I then had to find a way to frame consulting as interesting. And that was a challenge for me. And I also had to personally work on my verbal communication skills, which were absolutely horrible. I mean, just abysmal. And not only because of the Asperger's, but also because I'd been living literally by myself for 10 years – and anthropology is a field of loners.
Joshua Doležal: Well, so how did you get into consulting? You worked for different firms for a while?
James Richardson: Yeah, I worked at a market research firm and I kind of got tossed into it by the owner. Sometimes that just needs to happen in your life. I ended up finding out that working with executives yielded me access to smart people again. Working with executives on their business challenges, I ended up finding was just as interesting intellectually once I opened up to what the puzzle was.
I ended up learning new analytical skills that hadn't been taught in graduate school, which to this day are critical to my ability to make money.
Joshua Doležal: Like what?
James Richardson: Statistics, survey design. Demographics, demographic analysis. The kind of quantitative sociological analysis that I actually didn't get trained in in graduate schoolI ended up getting on the job from my colleagues.
I couldn't have written the book that's just coming out this spring without that training. It could not have been done. I mean, I'm sitting there writing this book, pulling raw census data, analyzing it myself, not farming it out to somebody.
Joshua Doležal: Let's talk first about your first book, Ramping Your Brand. And I'm curious how you conceived of that project and the process you went through for writing and marketing it, how it's been received so far, because it seems like this is sort of in your signature as a solo consultant, right? So how did it come to be? And if I can add one more question, how relevant was your training in cultural symbolism, as part of the process for writing this.
James Richardson: So the project began because I needed a way to stand out as a consultant in a national context in the industry that I work in, which is consumer packaged goods.
And I wasn't going to do that through networking because that's like my worst skill. And I had this content I had secured the rights to use for my own business from my prior employer, because it wasn't of value to them and their client base. It was this data set, essentially, and some findings are very, very unique. So I had this little diamond and I needed to stand out in the industry because I needed to be able to command higher fees. To be honest, the business model I use is 80 percent of my time is PR and marketing and 20 percent is actually billable work. And that's about the ratio necessary to do solo consulting and actually make money.
And the only way that works is if you charge very high fees. So I don't work with a lot of folks per year. I use the book. The book attracts them, builds confidence over years, and then they basically come call. And there's like no selling. I just send them a proposal and they pay me. I mean, it sounds like a fantasy, and I still wake up and I'm like, this can't be happening, because everyone tells you this can't happen.
It doesn't happen without the book.
What I learned was I had accidentally created a go to reference book for the industry for entrepreneurs who had no real strategy guide, no real book that teaches them a mental model on how to analyze their business ruthlessly. So that they're not literally throwing good money after bad, which is very common. Probably one key insight from the discipline of American anthropology is, it's a very simple thing, which is that not all communication is linguistic. In human societies, some of it is purely symbolic.
In other words, I flash you an iconographic symbol, or maybe a word or a phrase, and it immediately triggers an association in milliseconds. There's zero cognitive thought, there's zero conscious thought going on. And your ability to manipulate marketing symbols like on a package to be able to trigger the right associations seamlessly is not a joke. If you don't have a massive marketing budget, you actually have to get the symbolism perfect because that's the cheap thing to change. That's cheap. Anybody can change their package.
A lot of people in my industry try to over-explain their product. They want to tell you an essay about it. I'm like, you have 10 milliseconds. So what's the one or two symbols that are going to be on your front package that communicate X?
Joshua Doležal: You're reminding me of an artist that I worked with in Iowa who talked about what he called metroglyphs. He was riffing on the idea of petroglyphs, the cave paintings that tell a symbolic story, but he was saying you're driving down the interstate and you see the Arby's logo and it conjures a few things.
It could be a cowboy hat and it could be a lasso. It could be a branding iron. All of them are related to the product, roast beef, which is the name of the business, phonetically. RB for Roast Beef.
It's a distillation of meaning, as you say, that is communicated in seconds at a glance.Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?
James Richardson: Yeah. And you know, it's not fancy. But a lot of people who are new to consumer packaged goods don't understand that you have 200 categories of crap in your home that come from a grocery store.
Like you're not thinking deeply about any of this. You're on autopilot when you shop. So just to get people to think is a big ask. It ain't happening, right? So you know, a lot of the work I do with clients is simplifying their messaging, the symbolism, getting their positioning really like almost third grade, which is ironic given my academic background. And I often joke with my clients, I'm like, take it from the guy with a PhD, you're over complicating this. That usually stops them.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, getting into this solo business, I found like the perfect social positioning for me because I don't like a lot of social interaction. But when I do interact, I'm treated respectfully paid well and I get to have a lot of influence really fast with people.
There was no moment in academia where I saw that coming. It took 15 years of me grieving, adapting, therapy, and everything to get where I was. It didn't have to be that this complicated, right? I mean, America has to come to a secular Jesus, quote unquote, about some things about how, what we're asking young people to go do by themselves. In the context of this society we live in, what are we really throwing them into?
My new book has this anecdote of a trust fund kid who got his trust fund at the age of 18, goes to Ohio State, and then spends the next 10 years screwing and drinking. All of it away. And winds up in rehab. This is America.
My experience with academia was basically no promises, James, no obligation, here's the courses. It's not a community, Josh. That's not a community. Communities make promises. We have to figure out how to be in this autonomy driven, urban capitalist, lifestyle, but give people a more wise toolkit to heal themselves more efficiently. But also we need to have a – I look at it like almost a public health sensory system that says there's a friendship problem in this zip code. These people are not connected. What can we do.
Joshua Doležal: I'm looking at your shelf behind you, and you've got your first book there Ramping Your Brand. It's not Ramping Our Brand. It's not a collective. It's a very individualistic message, right? So again, I'm wrestling with these dissonant strains that on the one hand you were truly victimized by this system, and you have found a way to position yourself so that you're not at the mercy of it, and yet it seems a lot of these things that we're describing come from capitalism. And that's very much the air that you're breathing.
James Richardson: Oh yeah, that's how I pay my bills. I feed the beast of growth. This book, it's written for the founder's ego. That's how I make my living, because that's the audience I'm best suited right now to help.
And the dissonance is, I am absolutely in the fishbowl with everybody else. I'm not an alien. But I hope that readers will see that they should listen to me more because of that. I'm not actually – follow me here – I'm not actually some academic or journalist who's never lived in the real world. Never worked in a real office. Never worked in the private sector, right? I've been through this process of self-reinvention, so I know what it takes.
My career trajectory is sort of, Ooh, that's everybody's fantasy, right? They're going to go work for themselves. It sounds strange, but to me, this is just survival, right? In a way, I'm just doing this because I needed more control over my life and people like me do fine in this situation. Most people, they might dream of working for themselves, but they would last one month.
Joshua Doležal: When I follow people on Substack, there are some people who are very vocal about best practices, growth strategies, and so on. The takeaway seems to be that you have to be obsessive, you have to be relentless, you have to just double down on this being your life. I really struggle with the idea of personal branding because I have not mastered the distinction between that public face and the private self. And if you put all your eggs in the basket and you ramp your brand and all your identity is funneled into that, you could easily end up in the same situation you were in in grad school.
James Richardson: Absolutely, dude. That's why you'll never see me on the internet telling people, Hey, DM me. I'll give you my 10 PowerPoint slide deck on how to be rich and solo consultingy like me. Come learn to do it. I would never, ever, ever advise a stranger to do what I'm doing because this is last-ditch adaptation, to be honest with you. That's the way I honestly looked at it. I mean, I've worked my ass off, but I also had some opportunities that I just seized. Those don't come very often in your life.
And I think what gets lost in Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur, and all these lovely positivities, that whole personal branding machine that advises people on how to do this, is that my neurodivergence is actually a strength, and I've said this to people, including my clients, like, the reason I can sit here alone in this stupid shed and do this and have no social interaction all day and yet be just as productive, is because I'm not normal.
I don't know how else to say it. You know who can deal with being lonely? The guy with the Asperger's! I'm not good at relationships because I don't need them. I think we've got to the point in America where we’re so hyper-individualistic that people as weird as me off in a corner who actually are able to pull this off due to genetic gift, the random luck… I mean, if you go to universities and see the number of people who are taking classes in entrepreneurship and I just sit there and go, Oh my God.
I've actually told people in interviews, because they've asked me what should young entrepreneurs do in school, and I'm like, in school? You don't study entrepreneurship. I would tell them if they want to become solo business owners and take on all that stress and loneliness and everything and all that risk, the first thing you should do is do something really risky while you’re young. Your passion doesn't tell me anything.
One of the things that's made it easier for me to make these career transitions, especially to doing what I'm doing now, is that I always was able to look back on my India experience. I was like, wow, I almost got killed a couple times. I got drugged and abducted in a restaurant. And robbed. And I made it. I'm like, this can't be nearly as bad as that.
Joshua Doležal: That's interesting, how many colleges and universities are making promises, their students, they are putting more resources toward predetermined outcomes, satisfying students’ and parents’ desire for a predictable return on investment. So these entrepreneurship courses are kind of framed in that way. Come study entrepreneurship, have all the tools you need. And what you're saying is the tools you need are not objective skills or knowable quantities that you learn in books or in even internships. There are some very raw survival experiences that are more analogous to that.
James Richardson: I mean, throughout history, there have been weird people who essentially are social outliers to the norms of their communities who were able to go off in the jungle, disappear, travel the world. And what's weird is that we now live in a society, Josh, where an inordinate number of people want to be like that weirdo.
I guarantee you that 500 years ago, they were considered to be insane. Not cool. This book tells you the odds. You will never scale your brand. Your brand will not ramp. That's what the data says. But if you want to ignore that, this will teach you a model which will boost your odds. If you're as crazy as James is running his business on his own, you might actually succeed. But you have to be willing to take on all that risk.
Joshua Doležal: I loved your phrase earlier – what you're doing is a kind of survival. It's sort of necessary adaptation. This is not the world you would have chosen. It's not the kind of culture that you think is healthy, but you found a way to not be ground up and spit out by it.
You've found a way to harness some of those things, but you don't believe in that system. It's just something that you're surviving in spite of. So your forthcoming book, it sounds like, is a kind of diagnosis of those cultural problems.
James Richardson: I've lived them all.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah. And how embedded they [those problems] are in our work lives, in our work identities. So is there anything in this forthcoming book that would offer a cure, or is the depth of the problem so great that there's really no hope for American culture?
James Richardson: So, I do have an epilogue. I talk about some counter trends that I see in data. It's way too early to tell because I think individualism is still peaking. I think it's going to crest in the 21st century because I think we have a global reckoning of human civilization that's happening. I think the hope lies not so much in where people like me tend to go instinctually on the left, which is a whole bunch of federal regulations. Because I'm not dumb enough as a social scientist to think that that magically solves a lot of these really subtle interpersonal issues. It doesn't. A budget doesn't solve what my book discusses. But I do think we can get a lot more constructive about preparing people for risky situations so that they know what they're getting into.
How about improving our odds of surviving as an urban individualist in this bizarre society? We need different kinds of tools. We need a massive explosion of therapy and therapeutic resources, because as Americans we're always going to put the burden of healing not on prevention, which is what a traditional society does, whereas the world we live in is about reacting to the problem.
We have gotten to the point where we I call it hanging back. In an individualistic society, everybody's hanging back around you. You get to architect your whole world, choose who you want to get intimate with, who you don't want to. There's no obligation to befriend or love anybody. Everyone's hanging back.
Then when you have a big clusterfuck, like my failed academic career, and you pick up the phone and ask for help, it's sort of, you can feel it too with parents and company relatives – it's like, they've been dying to talk to you about this for quite a long time? But the sacrality of privacy means that they can't bring it up.
So if I think you're going to start some food brand and I'm your relative and think you're completely insane, I will never bring that up. Until it fails, and then you're like, what do I do? And you have a meltdown in front of me and then I'll be there. And then the question is the people that are available to you, are they even qualified to help you heal? They are not, Josh.
Your relatives aren't academics. They can't help you understand how to leave academia. They have no idea what you're going through. All they can do is buy you a little card, a Hallmark card, send it to you. Our condolences on your lost career.
Joshua Doležal: Here's where I'll gently push back.
I regained some appreciation for my family, which is largely non-academic, almost exclusively non-academic. And so this last summer, I went back home, , took my kids back for the first time alone. And I was reflecting on some of the people that I went to school with who had all kinds of problems, who spent some time in prison for drugs or something, but have gotten sober and gotten their lives back and are living there. Maybe reunited with a high school sweetheart. Some of those people I would prefer spending time with to colleagues from graduate school. And my rural Montana community has served as a kind of antidote to a lot of what you're describing. I think of my parents who – they earned online degrees from Western Governors University in their 50s, too late for it to make much difference. Although my mother was a private school administrator for a little while using that degree. But they have a community of people that knew them as young people, as children, and that they grew up with who are there for them. They have a church community that's there for them. They have people in their lives that would, in fact, intervene in exactly the way you're describing if they saw a problem brewing.
And so I've gained a lot of respect for that and thinking about my own future, how can I be a community member in a way like that? So I kind of have to construct this network in a place where I didn't really know anyone two years ago. There's a challenge there. But I'm part of a Quaker gathering. I have begun building some connections that I think are genuine there. And so I guess I don't agree that people in my life who don't understand my academic journey have nothing to offer me, because what they offer me is their humanity. And that's what I need. I'm glad for people like you who understand acuteness of my grief but I don't want to just be in a kind of AA group for former academics, you know?
James Richardson: That's a transitional tool at most. So I think you're doing the right thing. And I talk about this at the end of my book, which is the, more important thing is to force yourself into relationships of reciprocal obligation, wherever you can do that. And unfortunately that's going to, in our society, it means you're going to have to stick your neck out and give your time and labor and wait for a, kind of like fishing, wait to catch a bite.
I don't enjoy this process I just described. I really hate it because I'm neurodivergent. But as an analyst, it's very clear. And there's a lot of research on what builds relationships and community, and it starts with obligation, not preference.
Joshua Doležal: What would an example be of voluntary but reciprocal obligation, a concrete example?
James Richardson: This came out in my life history research because I did it on older Americans. So that allowed me to get glimpses, I get whispers of a much older past, before World War II, where a lot of what I'm critiquing in the book was not actually going on in our country. So an example is, before World War II, home renovation was done by your friends.
Because almost all American men had basic carpentry and hand tools skills. What more basic thing to build a relationship around than exchanging labor in home renovation, building an addition, a deck, you know? Now, some people still do this, but they're probably professional contractors.
This is the problem, we've gotten so, bureaucratized in our product and service mix that even the middle class doesn't need anybody. You don't need anybody. You just need cash. What's happened with friends is that we don't really do anything for them. We receive entertainment from them like a television screen. What happens is you tend to learn to pick friends based on how interesting they are, right? I have a weird sense of humor. So that would attract people, but then I would annoy them very soon after that. So then that’s the problem with being on the spectrum.
But that is not what a relationship is. A relationship is what I saw in India where people would drop everything if you had to go to the hospital overnight, your friends would just literally parade into the room and they wouldn't just say, hi, hand you a card and leave. They would camp out there. These are not even relatives, but all your relatives would come too, right? So the community would react like a normal community to the wounding of an individual member because that's a wound to the group.
In India there's so much corruption in retail in terms of pricing and lack of price transparency that you have to network in to buy durable goods or you're going to get taken. So the way you do it is you have a large urban network. So it's like, Hey I think we need to get a new dishwasher. So you tap your network and out of your network of 50 friends, one is gonna raise their hand. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah – my cousin's nephew, he runs a store. He'll get you a good deal. I mean, nobody does that anymore here.
Joshua Doležal: And that is why I really believe that my rural Montana hometown, it's that way. People do home raisings there. I witnessed one of my uncles build a house that way with a group. The garage that I grew up in was built that way in a single day with notch and groove construction. So somebody was an expert in that in the area, and I don't know what kind of barter took place with, a freezer full of elk meat or something, to compensate for that. Reciprocal obligation lies at the heart of rural communities. And so for an urban space to be taking a page from rural America would be a real revolution.
James Richardson: A flaw in research design is that we don't really, there isn't a good statistical way to access rural America beyond certain government obsessed topics, like drug use, drug addiction, alcoholism, these really nasty topics. We have a lot of information there, but in terms of things like… It's just not where the research is done. Academic social scientists don't do it there. They're either doing national studies or they're doing urban studies. And so my book has probably the same bias towards that 85 percent of America who lives within 10 miles of an urban center.
But this lost world, it's imputed to be gone in my book. You're actually pretty rare because you have this kinship connection. I'm like multiple generations removed from that. So you didn't have to go to India to taste the other kind of way, the other way of being.
Joshua Doležal: True.
James Richardson: And I do think that might be a way to frame it. But the real problem is you have to be willing to have your privacy invaded.
You have to let your guard down and Americans have a real problem. There's an anecdote in my book – a nurse whose sister had a nice white-collar job as a principal, then became an alcoholic, was fired for being drunk on the job by her school district, and then became a opioid addict and died in a park from an overdose. This all happened in two years – from functional to dead. She got a call at work that her sister's dead body had been found. And there was a superficial reaction of concern, but the administration at her hospital, they did not have any plan to give this person paid grieving leave. They had no policy. She's back at work. Obviously, she's not in normal…she's not behaving properly as a nurse, right? Pissing people off, angry, having outbursts. And it's her problem, Josh. It's her personal problem. No, it's not! This is a community problem. So what's the communal reaction? It's to ignore it and then blame herSo she gets drawn to HR for being a bad griever.
It makes no sense, because these are things where simple policy and regulatory changes could make that go away, right? But she has to also let her guard down. She has to lift the veil of privacy and say, look, my sister is my best friend and she just, she became a drug addict and died in two years. I can't work right now. And then the community has to say, don't! We'll pay you. We'll give you six months paid leave. Heal yourself.
That didn't happen. That conversation doesn't happen. Except maybe in very small family run companies. But most of us don't have access to that. To me, that's a perfect example of callous indifference that our urban society just throws at people who are really hurting. We're not trying to get paid grieving leave for someone whose 93 year old mother passed after a 20-year illness. We're smart enough to distinguish between that grief and what this woman was…they're not the same. Can we just make some distinctions? Durkheim wrote about this in the 19th century – a modern bureaucracy is the antithesis of a loving kinship community, in which your many mistakes and flaws are forgiven all the time. There's no forgiveness. You are expunged.
I think the reciprocal obligation thing is tougher because we've got to actually… I talk in the book kind of almost as a joke, it's like, stop going with your wife to do all the errands. Ask a friend to do an errand. Like we've become over committed to our romantic partner, socially. I mean, people like me, we're like, that's my only friend. That's messed up! It doesn't make any sense. It's way too much to ask of one person, right? I should be calling a friend, hey, let's go shop cars, right?
Joshua Doležal: Who is your, audience? Who do you hope to reach, and why should someone buy this book ?
James Richardson: My audience is actually younger women, believe it or not, Gen Z and Millennial women. They're in the workforce. These are the people you see on the internet, the most pissed off about every single topic in my book. They feel the most stress between marriage, work, kids, and they talk about it.
Also, newer immigrants who are, I would say middle class or educated, who are trying to figure out their messed up American colleagues. I have European fans on Substack who just find my depictions of American life to be fascinatingly accurate. Cause they just don't get it. So that's another group.
And then I would say the other third audience is people like myself who've been through some fairly big romantic or career trauma, where the plan was A and it blew up. That includes a lot of people. You know, my little failed career in the beginning was statistically weird because it was a doctoral program, but the structure of it you could reproduce in corporate America. Abdication of responsibility. The apprentice with no master. No clear rules. Survival of the fittest.
Joshua Doležal: Well, so people who've been through what Bruce Feiler calls a lifequake would find both some clarity in your book and then also possibly some remedial actions.
James Richardson: When I sat down to write the book, I didn't want to have a bunch of sort of hokey solutions be the center of the book. My belief is that we can all become more self-aware of how embedded this lifestyle is in almost every aspect of our daily life. What I learned in therapy is self-awareness is how change starts. And I think that's true with society, too. This is a public health problem and hopefully this book contributes to a better understanding of what is going on. There's actually a substrate – it goes much deeper.
Joshua Doležal: James’s forthcoming book, Our Worst Strength, is available for preorder now at Amazon. I encourage you to explore his Substack
and his podcast Startup Confidential, which James describes as a “zero B.S. look into the realities of running a consumer startup in today’s market.”Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join me on Friday for a discussion thread to unpack today’s interview.
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