Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit

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For Peter, Lisa, Alan, and Andrew

You wouldn’t believe what’s been going on down here.

Welcome

Welcome to the 2020s. That’s the message I beamed from my laptop to the flat screen on the wall. A digital decoration to welcome the new decade. On the morning of January 1, 2020, my friends and I gathered in my compact New York City apartment for brunch—fruit, champagne, hard-boiled eggs for the clean eaters and fluffy pancakes for those who wanted to push off any resolutions that didn’t permit syrup. (The gays can be very particular.) I’m a nerd, with nerd friends, so conversation soon centered on whether 2020 was by definition the last year of the teens or the first year of the ’20s. As you can imagine, it was a spirited debate. Either way, we could feel deep in our bones that a new chapter was beginning in the world. We expected flapper dresses and endless parties, the future, full steam ahead. We toasted to that exactly: the future.

In truth, I had run out of steam by the time I raised my Crate & Barrel long-stem champagne flute. I had spent the last four years shuttling very enthusiastically between Los Angeles and New York, living the coveted bicoastal lifestyle that every up-and-coming film-and-television producer obnoxiously drops into conversation (and books, apparently) in the chic eateries of both WeHo and SoHo. It was all very high-flying, as I ping-ponged on United Airlines. I bought a memory-foam travel pillow. I asked Santa Claus (me) for a Samsonite hard-top spinner suitcase in brushed black. I signed up for CLEAR; they scanned my eyeballs. Month after month, I was mastering the airline miles game like my nephews were mastering Fortnite. My quest was made possible by real planes and rental cars and the universal American belief that you go where the work is. Like my nephews, I wanted to win. At twenty-two years old, when I first subscribed to this fantasy life, it was the epitome of winning. It was all very romantic. At forty-two, it was all very exhausting.

Then the world stopped. And life fell off a steep cliff.

Pretty soon, like billions around the world, I was bathing my produce in antiviral wash, leaving packages in the corner to decontaminate, and avoiding the breath of other humans. You remember. You were there. You saw the madness that followed. We all did. Plainly put, it was a shitshow—one that killed more than a million people in the United States.

We are all sick of talking about the pandemic. I get it. There is still so much to learn from it, though—profound lessons that apply directly to the world right now. This book isn’t about the pandemic, but it will be a very helpful reference point. So, I will call it by a new name in these pages: the circus. That’s a completely arbitrary choice. We could call it the crisis, the microwave, or the blue flamingo. I just don’t want you to have to bear the weight of the pandemic every time you read the word. Circuses are full of fun and acts that amaze. That should lighten the mood enough. They are also full of moments that you might call completely bat-shit crazy. That should keep us close enough to the truth of what it was.

It is now years after the circus brought the world to a screeching halt. Are we firmly on the other side? That’s a hard question to answer when we can still see its effects—tiny and tectonic—almost everywhere. What I know for sure is that we are all wondering just how solid the ground we stand on really is. And we’re looking ahead at the remainder of this decade and this century with much clearer eyes. Hmm, this is not the future we were promised. At the very least, this is not the future we all thought we were working so hard to create. This is a weird, alternate timeline where volatility and chaos reign, the extremes have the mic, the cynics are winning, and the robots are taking over. Um, what the fuck is this?I

This book is about breaking up. It’s about breaking out. It’s about shedding, shredding, and severing the ties and tethers that keep this version of the future alive, strong, and seemingly indomitable, so we can build a future—for ourselves, our loved ones, and our nation—that we are truly proud of, one that gets us out of bed filled with energy instead of fear, one that honors our common humanity instead of one that empowers the shameless assholes around us to continue to be their worst selves. It is time to stop feeling bad about wanting better and saying so. Very loudly.

These years—from that January morning to the circus to now—have revealed a powerful truth that will forever change us, if we would just let it: all of this is a choice. Look, I get it. It feels horrible if we stop and truly take that on. It feels like shit to accept the idea that all of us, together, as a whole, created the mess around us. It’s easier to just say they did it. Insert your version of they. But trapped at home, streets silent, the world at a standstill, we learned from the circus that society as we know it is just the direct outcome of all the choices we make when we leave our houses or turn on our screens. And of all the choices our leaders make for us. When we stop making the same choices over and over, it all transforms. Instantly. We saw it with our own eyes. If we can acknowledge this and own it, we can know our own power and choose a new and better future individually and collectively.

I refused, for decades, to choose a new and better future for myself because I completely believed that my running and going and flying and sprinting was how I would achieve happiness. Look at me! I’m successful! Like I said, I’m a nerd. I was raised to achieve, as if happiness were a degree I could earn, a trophy, an award. That was the trap I was caught in, one that ensnared me (or, that I chose into) a very long time ago. That was my personal infinite loop—a concept I will spend a lot of time unpacking for us in this book. That loop was an automated cycle of stress and anxiety, a constant need for praise and validation. It was a never-ending treadmill that found me, at forty-two, at that New Year’s brunch, surrounded by friends but lonely, clinking champagne glasses but still ashamed of being a working-class kid, merry and gay but never really proud. I was, in a word, unhappy.

But the circus kicked my ass. Like, kicked it. It was horrific. I was trapped in my apartment solo for six months. Friends fled the city in droves. Family stayed in lockdown an hour away. I had no salary to speak of. Checks bounced daily. Five family friends died. Eighteen of us in my immediate family (I’m Italian American; eighteen is just our inner circle) got Original COVID all on the same day, Christmas 2020. My stepfather was alone in the hospital on a breathing tube for weeks. I was on bed rest for six weeks, fighting intense lethargy. The man who is now my fiancé lost his brother; his brother died at forty, within five days of getting the virus. Punch, punch, punch, punch.

Around me New York City was reckoning with catastrophe at an unfathomable scale. At the height of the first wave of the circus, New York was losing a thousand people a day. We love being the center of the universe. Not this time. It was excruciating. Five weeks in, we had lost the equivalent of three 9/11s. The grand total would eventually come to fourteen. (What a horrific practice to use 9/11 as a multiplier.) For months, you could hear only ambulances in the streets. Until those same streets were flooded with protestors, riots, and workers rushing to board up the Prada store. Manhattan became unrecognizable, something out of Mad Max. Grocery stores resembled war zones; uniformed guards manned the entrances. Subway doors opened to empty platforms at Times Square. Cars, cabs, and commuters disappeared. Desolate and depressed, the city that never sleeps finally slept.

Look, it’s not a suffering contest. The whole world had it bad. I’m just sharing my experience so you understand my point of view. The circus was a worldwide disaster, but there was a certain intensity here, created by the sheer concentration of despair, that did some very bizarre things to us all. It was impossible to avoid being forever changed by it.

It took the circus coming to town to open my eyes. It took the world coming to a full stop to wake me up. But, hey, I’ll take it. It’s just how it all happened.

It’s also how I found my way to you and to this page.

A month into the crisis, nightfall couldn’t come fast enough in my shoebox apartment. As soon as the dishes were clean from dinner (uh, dish), I climbed into bed, letting the darkness of the moment come over me, weighing me right into the pillow, like a heavy hand that wouldn’t leave my back, and I surrendered to the weight of it all.

The next morning, I would wake up and have those three or four happy seconds of total amnesia before the thought would download, flood in, and hit me: this shit is still going on. Masks. Social distancing. Zoom birthday parties. Google is reporting 33,578 American deaths (a high number at that time; imagine that). Ugh. Vertical. Coffee. Inbox.

And there it sat. An email from my favorite retailer.

Sale!

It hit me at the right place at the right time in precisely the wrong way. Only weeks before, this particular men’s preppy clothier was one of the legions of brands who would politely militarize their email subscriber lists to explain to the whole country what they were doing to minimize the impending health crisis. And to teach us all how to wash our hands. Soap. Water. Left. Right.

But now, like a switch that flicked from on to off, the emails were back to business as usual; the only marker of time in them was the style of sweater you could buy for 40 percent off.

A sweater sale? Is this a joke? There is no toilet paper on the island of Manhattan. I can’t wipe my ass, but you want me to click and order a $300 cashmere cable-knit turtleneck? Oh, shipping is free, you say? Any other day, I probably would have just deleted the email, but today was different. Today, the email sparked pure rage. I needed caffeine and a keyboard.

What emerged after my morning brew was a piece of writing of which I am immensely proud: Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting, a two-thousand-word essay that I posted to Medium on Friday, April 10, 2020. In forty-eight hours, that essay went around the world. To date, it has had over 21 million readers in ninety-eight countries. Perhaps you were one of them. I send my gratitude to all those who read it and shared it. Yes, I am thrilled with its reach, but more important, I am proud of its message: maybe this crisis is an opportunity for all of us to think deeply about what we actually want in our lives. It was a unique opportunity I never intended on having: to say that, at that moment, to that many people.

Going viral froze me in my tracks. I was floored, then humbled, then very heartened, then totally disturbed. When millions read something you wrote over yogurt and granola—alone, angry, and despondent in your apartment—the experience is oddly spiritual. My perspective has not been the same since.

What heartened me was that I wasn’t the only one who was questioning how our system was responding to the tragedy. I wasn’t the only one horrified by the abusive inequities that had been laid bare. I wasn’t the only one concerned that all the manipulation around us was about to get worse. Way worse. And I wasn’t the only one who wanted and needed a change. A big one. Thousands got in touch with messages of support and thanks. A few found my email address so they could tell me to go fuck myself. (You win some, you lose some. Life goes on.) But most reached out with a discreet confession, some version of: I am secretly grateful for the deep breath. I needed it. This is not working.

Throughout that weekend and all through the months of the Great Pause that followed, one singular thought kept rising to the fore: something is deeply wrong with how we’re living if we were that relieved when it all stopped. Our way of life is in trouble. Because I am human—a self-centered human—I made it about me. My life is in trouble.

So, I decided to clean house. I am immunocompromised. I wasn’t leaving my apartment or taking down my KN95 until there was enough data to prove I would survive. I had time on my hands. I was suddenly hyperaware of the gaslighting that my own essay had warned about, and one of the major theaters where The Great American Return to Normal was bound to play out was my laptop screen. So, I attacked my inbox, unsubscribing from brands, companies, gurus, influencers, groups, associations, committees, political campaigns, loyalty programs, monthly curated clothing boxes that automatically debited my checking account and sent me plaid dress shirts I didn’t need to iron or tuck into my pants, and anyone and anything that fed my inbox their junk all day long. Click. Good-bye.

Three words came rushing back to me. More than a decade earlier, I had dissolved a domestic partnership with my boyfriend of five years. There was love but no longevity. For months after I left our five-hundred-square-foot apartment, I was unmoored. Shattered. Broken. So, I threw myself into my work. I sent out an e-blast (a relatively new word at the time) to a large list of family, friends, and contacts about a project I was launching. My ex-partner, whom I had kept on the list, sent a quick and short reply: "Please unsubscribe, thanks!"

I was gutted. I knew him well, and what he meant by the pithy request was this: I am done with your bullshit. The relationship is over. I no longer want to be tethered to you. It just isn’t healthy for me. It will continue to make me miserable. I thought that signing the paperwork at the Office of the City Clerk formally ended our relationship. Nope. These three words proved way more powerful. It was really over.

Now, 2020, stuck inside, as systems around me were failing, as my personal inbox kept filling, I realized that I, too, was tired of being tethered. I needed to break up, for real, with nearly everything. Click by click. Please unsubscribe, thanks!

First, I unsubscribed from what I will call surface subscriptions or surface bullshit. Feeling so good, I expanded well beyond screen and paper. I decided to unsubscribe from people subscriptions and the bullshit the toxic ones were bringing into my life, pulling away from or ending certain friendships and working relationships. Lastly, and much deeper, I began unsubscribing from my own personal bullshit, my underlying subscriptions, certain ideas, beliefs, and notions I had about myself—some of which I had subscribed to my whole life, some that formed the very foundation of my identity and of who I was at work, with my family, with my friends, and in the world. Turns out, when you take the never-ending noise off your screen and you take some very time-consuming people out of the mix, there actually is time to process your life. And feel it. And question it. And change it.

While each of these three steps was progressively harder than the one before, I found myself happier and happier. I was onto something. I hadn’t come undone; I had become unburdened. I was freeing myself from years of pressure under which I had begun to cave. I knew there was a joyful, peaceful, calm (even fun) guy buried underneath it all. I just needed to dig him out of a life of slow quicksand—a life that I had subscribed to for decades.

What started as a series of simple mouse movements kicked off a shitstorm (yes, that’s different from a shitshow; two highly technical terms)—a beautiful shitstorm—that has called into question every part of who I am. The seemingly meaningless clicks were the first step to reclaiming my life and living it on my own terms, honoring my authentic voice instead of hiding it. It was also the beginning of looking at the world more distinctly through the lens of we. Those three words, emailed a decade prior and once so stinging to hear, became the anthem and the mantra of the most important year of my life. And so, they are the title of this book.

This book is about that process, the journey I have been on since I decided to unsubscribe. I will call this process unsubscription. Parts of it were conscious. I knew from my marketing and branding background what was happening on my screens and in my inbox and checkbook. That’s the expertise I will share with you. Other parts of it were unconscious and could be named and identified only as I looked back. As a storyteller and moviemaker, I understood what was happening in my brain and heart. Those are the reflections I will share.

My project here is to create a framework for all of us to unsubscribe so we can truly renew our lives and create happy, meaningful, satisfying futures. It is also my radical plea—from one citizen to another—for us to put aside what divides us and work together to collectively unsubscribe, so we can build an equally meaningful future for our nation.

My unsubscription has been agonizing, fun, at moments devastating, but deeply gratifying. Now, not only do I have a clean inbox, but I also go to bed knowing the real difference between what I need and what I want. My work is ten times more fulfilling. My phone is quieter. My calendar only houses commitments that bring me joy or money. I have time for my loved ones—for their birthdays and their special moments. I have found romantic love and partnership after ten years of being single. I have a warm, kind, and comfortable home life for the first time as an adult. And what seemed a distant dream at that New Year’s brunch—a family of my own—is now in the works.

Lest you think the picture I paint is too rosy, know this: I am still unsubscribing every day. This process is an ongoing practice, one that comes with constant mental and emotional goblins. The deeper you go, the more changes you make, the harder it can get. Sometimes it’s like the best yoga class of your life. And sometimes it’s a frustrating game of Whac-A-Mole. The first order of business is letting go of the need to do this process the right way. Unsubscribing requires us to be wrong over and over and over. It asks us to stop needing to win all the time. It begs us to welcome failure in and have a coffee or cocktail with it.

A few important notes. First, I see the irony in my story. I could not have reached you with this book about unsubscribing—there would be no book—had I not been subscribed online to Facebook, Medium, and the J. Crew newsletter in the first place. This book’s publisher could not have reached you to introduce you to this book—nor to me—without so many of the digital tools that I will critique. As you will see, this is a complicated conversation.

Next, I want to acknowledge that not everyone had the luxury I had of being solo during the circus. Don’t get me wrong; it was isolating and distressing on so many levels. Like Tom Hanks called that volleyball Wilson, I now call the mid-century modern lamp in my living room Larry (he who lit up the room when shit got dark). In the end my responsibility day to day was to myself, alone. Those with families, children, aging parents, and jobs that didn’t offer the option of working from home—they all had a very different experience. Yes, that is a lot of people. Perhaps that was you. You and I may have little in common on paper. But you and I are both human beings who ultimately just want to be happy. And who want to live in a society that functions well. Like you, I am a citizen. I am a consumer. I am a customer. I am a patient. I am a voter. I am a subscriber. I, too, want to fucking scream when I call Verizon’s customer service line.

As we discuss all things we, please know that this book is not designed to be a political book, at least in the ways that we have defined political in recent years in America: hyper-partisan, fabric-tearing, and blood-shedding. I will not be able to hide on which side of the political aisle I dance, nor do I wish to. But let’s face it: we’re all exhausted. Let me assure you, if you are a human alive right now, I am in your camp. If you want a better country and world to come out of the chaos of these years, I am aligned with you. If you are tired of the noise and sick of the bullshit we are all forced to confront, process, and manage every day, I am in your tribe.

And that tribe is global. This book is not just for those of us here in the States. The American way of life, its economic system, its consumerist obsession, its democratic ideals, even Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey, and Phoebe are impossible to escape in much of the rest of the world. And so, I hope that our international friends know that there are well-meaning Americans asking important questions to try to make change in our country and in the way of life that we export. I also hope that our international friends may take from this book our unabashed American confidence. We can change our lives and our country if we muster the personal and political will to do so. You may not like how loud we are at the Louvre, but we are a bold people who know how to get what we want. We are also a good people. Our system needs massive improvement.

This book is a mix of how-to process, social commentary, history, economics, philosophy, and practical and tactical strategies for individual and collective happiness. So, before we dive in, I want you to know where that all mixes, for me. My sense is that those all overlap in similar ways for many of us.

I grew up in the boroughs of New York City, the son of a school bus driver and a secretary, on Staten Island. Back in the ’90s, on the borough’s South Shore, collars were blue, politics were red, and the people were white, mostly Italian and Jewish. My parents were the children of immigrants. We had no money. We grew up on credit cards, macaroni, and love.

Mom and Dad worked tirelessly at multiple jobs to make ends meet in our eighteen-foot redwood condo. My father shuttled daily from his full-time gig (the bus) to his part-time one (as an Italian bread baker) to his third one (this one changed frequently). After commuting, working, and commuting again, my mother would lug her boss’s heavy Smith Corona out of the trunk of her Pontiac and into the house so she could do overtime work at the kitchen table after dinner. But the mounting economic pressure of the ’80s and ’90s was too much. Three kids in braces broke the bank. After four small businesses, a crushing bankruptcy, a son’s coming-out, a terrifying cancer scare, and more operatic domestic disputes than I care to remember (all stories for another time), the house of cards folded, along with their marriage. My grandfather came here from a dairy-farming town in Italy in 1946. Our family’s life was supposed to be the American Dream. By 1997, it was an American Nightmare.

What got me (and all of us) through and to the other side was a ceaseless focus on the future. The future was when it would all be okay, when it would all be worth it. In the future, I would be happy. And safe. Oh, and rich. I didn’t know at the time that that’s what was driving me, but I was a child of the Clinton years. Becoming a millionaire was the goal—it was the success—especially when your parents went to battle nightly over the checkbook.

Despite the challenges of that time—and with the help and support of a team of family, teachers, mentors, and friends—I was a late-’70s WIC baby (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) who made my way to Harvard, where I was educated with the über-rich—tuxedoes, polos, and all. (I still can’t golf.) My life now looks nothing like the life my sisters and I had growing up.

That social mobility has been a privilege. It has given me the opportunity to see life at each end of a very wide America. Plainly put, it ain’t all pretty. I have experienced the darkness of wealth, how it carves out a space to do good in the world but asks you to beg for it, how it gives but hoards, how it turns up its nose inevitably when it’s forced to consider those who have not, how it simply cannot—and sometimes will not—fathom the everyday needs and desires of the everyman.

I have also seen its grace and its generosity, its ability to think big, act with full vigor, and deliver. I have seen its vision and untiring energy. I have known well its kindness and unyielding support. I have learned from the wealthy that with great privilege comes great responsibility. Also: that the word summer is a verb.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, I have seen the ebullient charm of immigrants and working people, as well as their roughest edges, how they wish to include, elevate, celebrate but will rob you and themselves of great pride should you forget where you came from. I have seen their grit, their determination, and their sweat firsthand. I have known well their boundless love, the open arms of their endless support and faith, and their selfless dedication to community, to a social network that is meant to offer strength without asking for a penny in return.

I have also seen their fear, their hope, and their longing for more, for respect and a simple seat at the table.

From custodians to congressmen and back, in all the communities I have had the privilege of being part and at all the dinner tables I have sat, there are good actors and bad, the good eggs and the rotten ones.

I am also gay, which adds an entirely different lens to my point of view.

At my highest high, I earned my master’s and raised capital to start an independent film company, a dream come true. At my lowest low, just two years later, I had $2.17 in my personal bank account when the circus effectively pulled the rug out from under me. This roller coaster has been nauseating. I’ve spent thirty years trying to win. I’m done. There has got to be a better way.

I take the time and space here to share all that with you so you have fuller context for much of what I will say in this book about how the experiences of our lives predispose us and fuel our willingness to subscribe to specific ideas, people, and systems big and small. I also share it with you because I know there are far more of you who suffer through economic strife than our nation and its public conversation acknowledges. What most at the very top do not understand is that economic turmoil eventually becomes emotional suffering, physical pain, and spiritual anguish. Our families and our