My Year of Self-Deception & Delusion
Go on, lie to yourself
Hello Prox Populi –
As you know, we’re officially launching on April 22, with new episodes every other Tuesday. What you don’t know is that we’ll be publishing as a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.
Radiotopia is the legendary indie label of the podcast world. The home of some of my favorite independent creator-owned shows: Normal Gossip, Song Exploder, Ear Hustle, Articles of Interest, and more.
And here’s what’s great. Radiotopia doesn’t ask for your IP. I still own the show—a non-negotiable for me as an independent podcaster. (Still traumatized from having my livelihood taken away by some suit.) But Radiotopia will still give Proxy all kinds of marketing, ad sales, and technical support. As someone who was googling “what is an rss feed” the night before I published the trailer last year, this is huge.
BUT I WANNA BE CRYSTAL CLEAR
Proxy is STILL independent. Meaning: Radiotopia is not giving Proxy an operating budget. We still have to pay for our own production costs.
So to all the generous early adopters supporting us on Patreon: You are still an incredibly important part of this show’s success. Truly, thank you so much. Your contributions will now be amplified by the infrastructure and support of a network that will hopefully help Proxy grow and get to a sustainable place. (And if you want emotional investigative journalism™️ to exist and haven’t signed up for a paid subscription, you can do so right here.)
Which brings me to the topic of today’s episode.
THE CONDUNDRUM FOR ANYONE STARTING SOMETHING NEW
Readers, I must confess that in January, I fell into a hole.
I was bathing in this Radiotopia news, luxuriating in the warmth of some success, and then I remembered how far Proxy has to go to be in the black.
A podcast like Proxy needs something like 300,000 listeners per episode within the first month to make enough money through ads in order to be sustainable. If we’re looking at paying subscribers, the number seems closer to doable, but still far. At around 300 paying subscribers, we’re 1400 short of where we need to be to pay Proxy’s production costs.
All this to say, this is REALLY ambitious for a new show—to the point of making me feel delusional for even trying.
This brings me back to the January hole: The more I thought about how unlikely it was that we’d make it, the more motivation I lost, and the harder it was to write scripts, score episodes, make calls, and (ugh) the more hours of Southern Charm I watched—even during the work day.
I fell behind in my production schedule. Which, of course, made it actually more likely that Proxy WOULDN’T succeed.
Finally, I snapped out of it. I asked my best friend to change my password to Peacock and lock me out of endless hours of reality TV (my weakness). And I told myself that to get out of this funk, I needed to delude myself. I needed some Don Quixote energy. I needed to do my manifestations every morning—so embarrassing (but highly recommend). I needed to ignore the bleak reality of today’s podcasting environment. I needed to just pretend, in every cell of my body, that Proxy would be a goddamn hit. That it was inevitable. A matter of time.
All just so I could do the work.
But how do you know when you’ve gone too far with self-delusion? When does it become not just motivating but dangerous?
I decided to pull ye olde emotional investigative journalist move and I came across a book called Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain, written by Shankar Vedantam, host of Hidden Brain.
In the book, Shankar talks about how we tend to think of self-delusion as a bad thing. Isn’t the goal to see reality and ourselves clearly? Don’t we live in a world flooded with conspiracy theories, lies, and scams? But he found that in the 1980s, a group of psychologists started conducting studies that found that some degree of self-delusion was useful, even necessary. (Very convenient finding for my purposes!)
Below, you can find some of my favorite parts of the book. But first:
FRESH DROP
In this week’s episode, I talked to teammates at Proxy HQ to see if they think I’m being delusional and how much confidence they have in the show’s future. I made them give a number on a scale—from 0 being “I’m worried for Yowei and hope she has a plan B“ to 10 being “duh, Proxy will be a hit.”
Thank you to reporter/producer Kim Nederveen Pieterse and production fellows Anakaren Santana and Nik LeBlanc for playing along and believing in this delusion/dream.
Q: Where are you on the scale? Let us know in the comments!
SELF-DELUSION = MORE MONEY?
Finally, as promised, here’s a few highlights from Useful Delusions:
On self-delusion being a necessary ingredient for mental well-being
UCLA psychologist Shelly Taylor and her colleague Jonathan Brown did a survey looking at existing research in the fields of personality, social, developmental, and clinical psychology, and they concluded that “normal individuals possess unrealistically positive views of themselves, and exaggerated belief in their ability to control their environment, and a view of the future that maintains that their future will be far better than the average person’s … Furthermore, individuals who are moderately depressed or low in self-esteem consistently display an absence of such enhancing delusions.”
On how self-delusion can be a helpful tool in a variety of situations
Studies have found that positive illusions can lead to “higher income, higher motivation to work, more goal seeking, more pragmatic action, more daily planning, and less fatalism” and that people perform better if they see their goals as attainable rather than being beyond reach. Studies have even found that your odds of surviving cancer longer are greater, when you’re delusionally optimistic.
On the privilege of not having to delude yourself
“Believing what we want to believe and seeing what we want to see is less a state of mind or reflection of one’s intelligence and more a response to one’s circumstances,” Shankar Vedantam writes. “Foregoing self-deception isn’t merely a mark of education or enlightenment, it is a sign of privilege. Your material, cultural and social worlds are providing you with other safety nets for your psychological and physical needs.”
PROGRAMMING NOTE
We’ll be taking a break from publishing bonus episodes for March and April so that we can focus on launch. We hope you understand and we’re so excited for you to hear the new episodes. We’ll resume publishing bonus eps in May. Thank you for your patience!
Your emotional investigative journalist,
Yowei