White labels, 'more' lies and the pursuit of simplification
When I joined Substack, my intention was to write more regularly. I initially defined some ‘rules of writing’ for myself which I kept at the top of all my article files. As I went on putting ideas to words, I hardly ever looked at them. But for the purpose of this article, these are the unedited initial rules I set: “< 2000 words, reducted, barest essential, concise, clean, neat, no fillers, no vagueness, bullet proof, think like a lawyer, make a point, should be able to answer: what’s the point? So what? Why am I writing this? Ask myself: how else can I write it?”
After publishing my latest article The drama theatres we won’t enter, I contemplated what were the recurring themes of the moment. That’s how topics transpire. They present themselves organically in a short span, through crossovers of conversations, thoughts, notes, podcasts and books. No planning or content strategy.
The day I opened my draft document for this article, I already had a few notes waiting. The very first bullet points read as: “Filtered. Just the essentials. Clear, concise, decluttered”. Undeniably these were close to my ‘rules of writing’. In the way I see the world, simplifying and good writing are both individually important and also related.
What AI teaches us about good writing is an article by Laura Hartenberger, a writer and lecturer for the University of California, Los Angeles Writing Programs. Her long-form piece is one of the most engaging I have read recently and the following paragraph particularly resonated with me:
Anyone who’s published knows that readership is a rare gift. Reading is work — valuable work — but like writing, it requires exertion and takes time away from other tasks. Many of us already feel saturated with content; we consume so much information through screens that our daily attention spans feel fragile and limited. There’s a certain respect we hold for writers who are careful not to publish too much, who honour their readers enough to self-censor and share only what’s really worth our attention.
Onto Simplifying.
Admittedly, a lot has already been said and written about the benefits of simplifying therefore I decided to begin with the other end of the spectrum mainly because this is how the topic came up.
On two occasions, clients of mine described their houses as being “full of shit”. For one of them, it is an ongoing issue. It’s not enough of a problem that it is prioritised and dealt with, but it is annoying enough that a mention of it is made on and off since our very first session. Never in such crude terms, until now.
In a private Facebook group made up of therapists, real ones and self-proclaimed ones, a new member introduced herself as “a Home Tidying Therapist, a Home Organiser”. The title, the post itself and how badly written it was, were cringe worthy. I was tempted to comment and ask for her qualifications - but for obvious imposed diplomatic reasons, I didn’t.
A young man with autism I know (not a client) calls himself a ‘collector’. He often messages me to share updates on how many games, cards and consoles he owns to date and also to let me know how low he feels, how terrible the world is, how sad he is that he hasn’t yet purchased or been gifted ‘such and such’ desired gaming items. Recently, he told me how worried he was about who will inherit his collection when he dies. I just want to reassure you that he is well, loved, cared for and not on the fringe of suicide.
On a visit to some friends’ parents' home, I found myself amazed by the amount of stuff there was everywhere. Forget about style and taste, the mum collects rooster and chicken artefacts; it was the volume, the fullness of every corner, every wall.
What I find interesting and worth exploring is what (and whom) we surround ourselves with and how it is working out for us. These four stories above intersect around the notion of excess, a concept that defines and encompasses many aspects of today’s culture and society.
I have just finished the book Dopamine Nation by the American psychiatrist Anna Lembke. One of her first remarks is that we live in a world of abundance with an increase of accessibility to what we can become addicted to, which is pretty much anything. In his famous book Atomic Habits, James Clear raises the importance of our environment to foster any kind of habits. The convergence point between the two is that what surrounds us matters and influences us, whichever way.
Here is an excerpt from James Clear’s book:
Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world others have created for them. But you can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones. Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
Outside of our home, we indeed have limited leverage or control over what surrounds us, and in these outer spaces, including online, we’re over-exposed to an excessive and continuous promotion of ‘more’ equated with the idea of ‘better’.
That is simply one of the many lies we’ve come to live with, if not accept or worse, buy into. More doesn’t mean better or even happier; Anna Lembke explains the phenomenon clearly in her book and intuitively, if we may know this to be true or have a sense of it, our western culture and society convey by every possible means and media the opposite message. It does everything in its power to encourage overconsumption, over-anything and more-of, as long as it’s financially profitable to the offering party.
This is ingrained to such an extent that it takes conscious efforts to remind ourselves that we don’t need ‘all this’. By ‘all this’ I mean everything that we never thought we needed or desired in the first place until it was ingeniously presented to us in a way that we are now under the impression or consideration that it may hold some value in our lives.
As far as materialism and consumerism are concerned, there is and will always be more; for as long as we can afford it. And for as long as we can afford it, or even if we are broke and indebted; there will be something for sale. Just like a good reliable drug dealer.
If we think about it, most things are sold to us under the marketing pretence that it is good for us, that it is “safe”, that it will make us feel good, if not better. In reality, what matters first and foremost isn’t for any of this to be true, it is the financial profit made out of each transaction. The lack of honesty, transparency and integrity is prevalent.
It’s important to have choice and variety to choose from, it’s a chance to be able to afford the things we desire. But I wonder if, as a society, we have reached the point where the offer is out of balance and the demand sicker, with many more people suffering from mental illness and addiction.
We could well affirm that, since it’s out of our control, we just need to be responsible and careful; buy what we need or/and can afford, do our research first and ask the right questions so that we make a wise and informed choice. That is downright wishful and oversimplified thinking. For most people, it isn’t that simple, let alone impossible to apply to kids and teens. Besides, if that was true, if critical thinking was within everyone’s reach, things would have been very different for society at large between 2020 and 2023.
So if ‘More doesn’t mean better’, why do we keep falling for it?
Possibly because as I mentioned above the overall cultural and entrepreneurial tendency is to offer more, to sell more, to add to what was and call it an upgrade, an innovation, in order to implicitly or explicitly reinforce that ‘more and newer is better’. This is amplified by social media platforms which have mastered the art of creating echo chambers and retain the most sophisticated online targeting and profiling engine. Amongst this, only a very few businesses opt for a simplified minimalist range of qualitative offering and a balanced amount of communication. Hardly no one dares to take the position of saying and practising, like the famous Dieter Rams: “Less, but better”.
The Australian skincare company MV Skintherapy is one of the rare ones which does. It has a minimalist high performance range of products made of high quality ingredients. The team doesn’t communicate often and when they do, it’s relevant. They sent out an email in April about white-label skincare that in essence stated:
Are you paying for a marketing strategy in a bottle? Beauty brands are multiplying at an astonishing rate, and the majority appear to be spending less time formulating products for healthy skin, and far more time formulating marketing strategies. White-Label Skincare. Why is it a scam?
The reason why MV alerts educates and alerts its customers about White-Label Skincare is because a white-labelled skincare product is a generic formulation that has been mass-produced by a contract manufacturer. The product is either sold as is or lightly tweaked with the latest 'super' ingredient before being packaged in a variety of containers, ready to be resold by multiple different labels. This financially-geared process now dominates a significant percentage of the skincare market. Most of the influencer or celebrity-endorsed or 'co-created' brands originate in this way, and many others which bill themselves as 'artisan'.
It’s in this context of a pervasive illusionary whirlwind and make believe betterment of life, through the latest, the newest, the expanded, that we can end up being tricked into paying for a cleverly marketed service from a Home Tidying Therapist who is going to hold our hand like a child and tell us, without upsetting us, to tidy up, declutter, clean up, and detox our home and that “our mess”, that we are so ashamed of, is in fact what “excites her” - her words.
In my ‘unregulated industry’ of complementary therapy whose Miss Home Tidying Therapist is also part of, there is a tone of well meaning people with dubious credentials, often with minimal experience if any, selling their services and products with big claims attached. They also have an art of creating an immense amount of partially interesting rehashed content which they broadcast through their social media megaphone following a step by step strategy they purchased. On social media, I personally prefer, by a factor of ten, videos of boxer puppies goofing around rather than a twenty-to-forty-something standing in front of a ring light telling me what the signs are of a dysregulated nervous system or that I might be addicted to my phone. Maybe we should start calling these templated people White-Label Therapy and get in the habit of asking for proof of qualifications and years of experience.
On the topic of therapy, it’s become a rarity to come upon a good podcast on the subject where we’re not being marketed something from courses, products, books, subscriptions, through shameless promotion often due to cross partnership agreements. It’s harder and rarer to discover quality content and not be interrupted to be sold something along the way and having to fast forward through 2 to 3 minutes of vocal advertisement by the producers themselves.
If we think about YouTube and Spotify for example. We have to pay to get rid of the ads. We have that option because they know we can’t stand the ads, it ruins the experience. Which is why the platforms aren’t optimised for an improved user experience, but for revenue. Making money is their priority, we will never be. Only sometimes we forget that without us, without the audience, there is no platform.
So what would Russel Brand say about all this? Step 1 of the 12 steps to recovery: we admit we’re fucked. Way punchier than: we admit that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
Joke aside, first, I don’t normally listen to anything Russel has to say and second, I don’t believe we’re powerless but I do believe we need to be aware of what’s going on even in the industries which tend to normally fly under the radar such as wellbeing and spirituality and notice how they influence our behaviours and our choices.
In terms of the proposed solution, I am sorry to announce that there’s no grand plan. It’s a small and simple proposition. It involves simplifying. It’s free, it’s incremental, it’s to everyone’s reach without barriers to entry.
If you’re like me, you’ll appreciate a ‘how to’ guide so let’s just start by acknowledging that within the areas of our lives we have control over, where it’s simplified, it’s usually clear, peaceful, tranquil and holding some kind of balance which has the benefit of having us not worry about it. This can be as trivial or as elaborate as we want, so long as it works. That’s because we each have our very own version of simplifying.
The idea is to simplify in areas where things aren’t the way we’d like them to be, where things are messy, literally or metaphorically, and we’re aware of it. As we go through figuring out how to simplify and detangle our mess, we’re going to take an inventory of what’s present, what needs to go, what needs to stay, what needs to be shuffled or repositioned and what’s missing. That itself is going to clarify what’s important to us.
Let’s bottom line this: if we don’t care, if we don’t take responsibility for it, we won’t make the effort. It’s simple as that. We value what we spend our time and money (and therefore energy) on.
Getting on with simplifying doesn’t need to be grandiose and done in a bulldozer kind of way. I strongly recommend against this type of approach, it’s often damaging and destructive. We can allow ourselves to be gracious and go about this bit by bit, step by step.
Simplifying irrevocably calls for changes, doesn’t matter how subtle. So moving slowly and steadily allows us to take the time we need to assess whether the adjustments we’re making are working for us or not and to readjust if necessary.
It isn’t an exact science nor is it an easy process to go through. We can be called to simplify any areas of our lives we have agency over but it takes courage, honesty, discernment and maturity to look at our relationships, media consumption, diet, finances, self care, health, professional life, and so on, especially when these aren’t going well.
However, if simplifying can do one thing for us, it makes space for what we truly want and value, it makes space to see and perceive more accurately, and to gain clarity.
The caveat is that we’re never totally done with it. As we move forward, there will always be a little something we can simplify, but overtime it becomes easier and part of our process of balancing life the best we can.
Now, this is a technicality but if our objective is to clean up our home, we don’t need a therapist for it. For the rest, possibly yes.
So why is the home tidying topic an interesting one? Because consciously or not we very much see what’s around us as a reflection of what’s within, an inside out projection of some sort. For many of us, if there is chaos around, we usually can’t think straight, if our desk is in a shambles, we can’t work properly. Personally, if I want my energy to feel clean, clear and spacious, living in a space that itself is clean, clear and spacious becomes, if not a condition, a necessity.
In my personal experience, there is nothing like moving to a new place to go through your belongings and decide what to keep or not, what’s truly valuable or not. But without being that radical, I regularly go through things and ask myself: do I need/use this? If not, who can I give it to? If it’s not worth giving, then I bin it. Can it be fixed? If not, I get rid of it. I don’t have the patience to sell clothes I don’t wear so I donate them. I truly believe the energy of excess is detrimental and draining while the action of clearing feels cleansing.
Simplifying implies assessing what’s essential and worth being in our world. What gives to us versus what takes from us. We don’t always think of the aggregated amount of things we own and accumulate has ‘taking from us’ but it comes to a point where directly or indirectly it makes us feel less than great and can occupy our mind with some variations of “the house is full of shit”, and that’s when it is taking from us. At least energetically, mentally and emotionally.
Finally and before we wrap this up, I want to talk about Anthony Bourdain who was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian. His success ignited from the acclaimed publication of his book Kitchen Confidential. In 2021, a Netflix documentary was made about his life: Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. Tony Bourdain was a character, he was also an addict and I believe that he may have been on the spectrum too. He was a person of great need for structure and routine. He functioned best within these parameters - he actually knew this about himself. Two things struck me when I saw the documentary. It was obvious that when Tony moved away from his routine and structure that came with being a chef, things became harder for him. Secondly, it was evident that this man needed professional assistance, be it in the form of therapy or other. His downfall and suicide were both predictable and therefore avoidable. It’s unclear why no one, that we as the public know of, stepped in and intervened to help him. I believe we all have a personal responsibility to speak up and step up when someone is in need of urgent support.
Where am I heading? Exactly to the fact that to some, routine, structure, order, sobriety, self-restraint concur to our wellbeing in a greater way than the pursuit of ‘more’. This is another point well developed by Anna Lembke in Dopamine Nation. She approaches it from a psychiatrist perspective who helps addicts and she is adamant about the necessity in addiction cases for abstinence. What’s worth noting is that some people, through abstinence, come to realise that they actually feel better when they’re off what they were originally doing or taking to feel better.
This idea of limitation and self-discipline to rebalance life and experience joy is one that many spiritual traditions and some branches of philosophy (Epicureanism) have fostered for centuries if not millenia. It’s not because our current cultural and societal frameworks push for the opposite that we should forget about ancient wisdom.
In her immense body of work, Caroline Myss often reinforces this idea which I find fascinating and will leave you with: “In mysticism, the nature of God is law and order. Ourselves are creatures of law and order. A miracle is when God bends the laws of the universe just for you”.
Thank you for reading.
Mahé