Burnout, BFCM & Battle Scares

I’m BACK after taking the longest hiatus in Trust Fun history (2 weeks).

Bet you didn’t know that the government shutdown also affected niché newsletters about the private sector, did u?
No backpay for me tho.

In all seriousness, it wasn’t intentional—I didn’t go to a log cabin in the woods to “disconnect to reconnect.” Nope, I’ve just been swallowed whole by Fall. Every week there’s a wedding, another trip, another weekend away, another fire to put out, another cold, etc.

And if you work in ecommerce, you know exactly what I’m talking about: we’re in the dog days of holiday shopping season. Everyone who works at a consumer brand right now is knee-deep in mud, shit, caffeine, panic, and attempting to decipher @SeanEcom’s tweets.

Most brands do 40–70% of their YEARLY REVENUE over the long weekend of Black Friday / Cyber Monday. It’s deranged. All of us as companies (and people probably), are all utterly cash-poor with a warehouse full of jeans, praying strangers on the internet haven't decided they’re “not really a denim guy right now.”

As you might imagine, this doesn’t do wonders for my mental health. I’ve said this before: my overall wellbeing is intimately tied to how many men buy stretchy pants in November and December. So please friends, buy some jeans here → MugsyJeans.com

As for the Trust Fun side of things, this is also the time of year when sponsorships dry up because SAAS ad budgets go into bunker mode. Which means if I write, I’m not making any money. Which makes it harder to write because, unfortunately, money = motivation. That’s just math. But it wasn’t always like that. And that’s the part I keep coming back to.

Welcome BACK to Trust Fun. Version 97. Almost to a hundred.

Trust Fun (this newsletter) used to be the thing I did purely for the joy of it. I made exactly zero dollars the first twelve months. I wrote because it was fun. Because it made me feel alive in a way that selling pants does not (no offense to pants, they’ve been good to me).

Now it’s… work. Good work. Meaningful work. But still work.

Here’s an anecdote for you all:

When I was a kid, skiing was the most fun I’d ever had. No stakes, no timers—just me bombing down the mountain, giggling like an idiot, perfectly willing to eat shit if it meant going faster.

Then, suddenly, it got serious.

Skiing became ski racing.
There were coaches. Time trials. Early mornings. Technique. Pressure.
I went from wearing a onsie & peeing my pants on the chair lift, to standing at the top of an icy giant slalom course in a skin-tight speed suit after driving 5 hours to ski a total of 45 seconds.

And here’s the kicker: I wasn’t that good.

Here’s a video of me popping my shoulder out of it’s socket 🙂 

The thing I loved lost its magic the second it became too serious. I didn’t quit because I hated skiing—I quit because skiing stopped being fun the moment it felt like performance instead of play.

And maybe that’s what happened with Trust Fun?

So this issue is me trying to get back to the fun part.
Back to the giggling-down-the-mountain version of writing.
Back to the thing that makes me feel like a human again instead of a stressed-out ecommerce gremlin.

Thanks for riding out the hiatus.
It feels good to be skiing again.