This week we speak with Catherine Shannon, writer and comedian. Catherine runs a Substack that we were drawn to because much of her writing deals with questions of how to live in today’s world without in her words, numbing out. The following is a winding conversation that is less about what the Internet is and how it operates, but about what life feels like in an internet-cluttered world and how we can live in it without going mad. This interview was conducted and condensed by Noelle Forougi.
My name is Catherine Shannon. I'm a writer and a comedian. I sometimes think of myself as a satirist who is also sincere.
I write, I've done lots of standup, I've directed a short film, I've written some pilots… I've done my dabbling. Right now my main focus is actually fiction writing, which my Substack doesn’t really reflect, but it has been very fun for me and very fulfilling.
I feel like the angle of sincerity in your writing and your comedy feels different. Is it a conscious decision to weave that into your work?
Yeah. I don't know if it's really been a conscious decision necessarily at any point to try to be sincere. It may be just how I'm wired. I'm glad it feels different. Writing and comedy ultimately is about exploring or trying to discover the truth. Even in fiction writing, what I am seeking is some truth about the world and truth about myself. And that ends up being, perhaps cloyingly, a sincere pursuit.
To me it seems to be connected – maybe tangentially – to this idea of happiness or crafting the perfect life. We think we deserve to be happy all the time, to not be inconvenienced, to always be beautiful. And somehow by not dealing with sincerity, try to achieve that.
I mean happiness, I'm sure you've heard this before, it's been said many times. I don't know who originated this idea, but happiness is not the end goal. It is more about contentment or satisfaction. You have to grapple with the fact that life is very, very challenging. I don't think my goal in life is to be happy. I think my goal in life is to be fulfilled and content.
And I think that's actually quite hard for women in particular. We want it all at once and I think that's just impossible. There are phases to life. Each phase has trade-offs and hard choices that have to be made sometimes. And that's okay. That's life. There's beauty in all of those things. There's beauty in being young and single in New York and having an amazing career. And then there's also beauty in the commitment of marriage and motherhood. And there's beauty in old age. Hopefully, every woman or every person can look back and say, you know, my life was full of love. I think that's kind of the ultimate goal. And love is not always happy, it's often a sacrifice.
Yeah. I think part of why digital life seems to make us unhappy, and I feel this personally as well, is that we are consistently measuring ourselves both against each other and against different potential versions of ourselves. It’s exhausting and maybe not natural. Like, there are too many potential paths we see all the time.
Do you know that Sylvia Plath quote – not that she's maybe the best example since obviously she really struggled a lot in her life –but do you know that quote about how she was sitting under the fig tree? I think about that all the time.
I think if you are a smart person, you could probably do many things. This is where I would advocate for getting in touch with one's intuition. I think intuition is a very powerful idea that goes against the modern belief that rational choice and rational choice is the way that you discover yourself. I don't know if you find yourself through a series of rational choices and exotic experiences, which is something that millennials and Gen Z all love to have… so many experiences.
Self-respect and intuition and being comfortable saying, “I can see why that would give me maybe some sort of social capital, or I can see why that would give me this reward, but it's really not for me.” Or “I can see, or everyone my age loves this thing, but I'm not really a fan.”
That's hard to do. And it's really hard to do when you have natural talent in something that might be lucrative. It's quite challenging to turn down money in favor of the things that you genuinely enjoy.
Intuition feels, like, corrupted by brand deals in 2024. It feels on the one hand like we think about ourselves all the time, but still don’t know ourselves. Maybe because we think of ourselves as brands now – and like to project that onto others.
I want to be careful about how I say this, but it's kind of hard to be around people in New York who claim to want to do things from a pure place or just a desire to create or connect with other people or whatever. A very innate human desire. And yet the moment that clout is on the table, it all goes out the window and it's, I'll just do anything. I just find that so debasing. I find it so duplicitous and impossible to retain any sense of who I am in the face of that.
At the same time, I can't really imagine what the world would be like if everyone didn't perform a little bit. I mean, a lot of people do a lot of great things in order to be seen as great, you know? I don't think that's the worst thing in the world. I guess I don't want this to sound totally antithetical to what I just said about intuition, but I'm not sure it's the worst thing in the world to want to impress other people if that leads you towards excellence in any particular way, I think that's probably good. It helps, it helps motivate you in a way. It's hard to do it all for yourself. It's like, it's so much pressure, you know? Ultimately, I think you should be doing things for other people, people you love. That's probably more fulfilling ultimately than doing things for you, for your own life.
You have developed somewhat of a brand through your comedy on Instagram and through writing on Substack. Do you feel a separation between yourself and your online persona?
I'd be so curious to know what you think of the persona. I'm like, how do I come off? <laughs> Please tell me.
I don't think anyone can know you unless they love you. No one is going to know me through what I write, unless they're a very, very close friend. And the number of people who truly love me is probably pretty small. I wouldn't say that there's a conscious brand to what I do.
Do you think you have to disconnect to find an original, authentic voice or perspective in your writing? I am particularly curious about how you approach your fiction writing.
Well, the only thing harder and less lucrative than standup is fiction. And I find a lot of fiction to be extremely boring. Or it’s just sad and depressing. I’m a big book quitter. If you don’t have me in the first 40 pages, I’m out. I think what I’m trying to do with fiction, given my background in comedy, I guess, is write something that’s funny, something that’s a bit of a ride, something that just rips. Fiction is amazing because you can take all your jokes, all your critiques of the world, all your characters, and all your life experiences and render it into a fictional world that hopefully entertains and teaches the reader. It’s pure expression. Your characters can do anything. Anything could happen. You create something out of nothing and all you need is yourself. It’s a lot of fun.
Yeah, you mentioned this idea of “experience” earlier. I have been thinking a lot about this essay from Mark Grace.
He writes, “Face-to-face with the shortcomings of more respectable goals, we have turned large tracts of our method of life over to experience—unwittingly. Even where life appears to be lived for happiness, it is lived by and through experience. We see our lives as a collection of experiences: “the day I met those people at that party”; “the night I lost my virginity”; “the feeling I had as a tourist in Paris”; or “when I stood at the lake in the woods.” These snow globes and beach rocks can be held onto, compared, and appraised for quality.”
It feels like a very pathological way of living – counting our steps, the books we read, what we see, etc. It feels like, enhanced by the internet probably, there is an impulse to collect and post and prove your life to yourself and to others. To make it all feel worth it or well lived, I guess.
I'm almost like the opposite. I have a horrible addiction to, like, goals and dreams. Which is maybe different, but I definitely have my own way of coping with the finite nature of life.
But, I know what you mean. It's funny, I feel that when I entered my thirties, I had some of that drop away, which has been nice. There is this immense cultural pressure to have the best time of your life in your twenties. The twenties are the trenches. It's hard. You don't really know yourself very well. I like to joke that every woman in their twenties goes through what I call “the red lipstick phase” where it's like, “Maybe this is the thing that will change it all, maybe this is the thing that will define me.” It's a stupid aesthetic example, but you are constantly hunting for some “thing.” There is a desire to have something different and something anchoring about your life. It's such a chaotic time. Some of my colleagues are young women who are in their early twenties, and I just often look at them and think, “Yeah, you're going through it.”
In talking to them, do you feel a difference in concerns or in thinking?
Not them specifically, but Gen Z has an unbelievable obsession with beauty and youth. There's been a strange shift where materialism and consumerism are seen now as just awesome. Like, selling out is fine. Maybe it has always been this way, but it seems to me that there was a little more of a “stick it to the man” energy with older generations. Gen Z is like, “No, I love it.” “Plastic surgery is empowering and making money is amazing because that's all that matters.” It really is the young girls who are scared about aging or something. On the one hand, beauty standards are bad, but Botox is empowering. It’s completely incoherent. There’s a crazy confident nihilism or something that's happening that I find very disturbing. It's dark.
It just feels like we're all succumbing to the idea that power lies solely in beauty and youth. It is certainly one type of power; you can definitely gain things from it. It's just so bleak, I guess, that we're still buying into the same narrative that this is the only form of power or capital women have.
Yeah. It's fascinating. It's actually a subject that I'm really interested in and I've been writing a little bit about in my fiction work. Putting all of your self-worth into your youth or your beauty is the worst idea ever. It's going to decline over time, regardless. You're going to get older. The only alternative to aging is death, and I wouldn't recommend that. <laughs> It's a privilege to get older. It's sad to see how young women are embracing it. There is power in being a young woman, but there are other phases of life beyond just pure youth and beauty. Honestly, to try to make the most of youth ... I get the instinct, but it's almost like a futile kind of exercise. It's so fleeting. You're only going to be considered young culturally for like 10 years. Like, I mean, from 18, let's say, to 30, when do people think women expire?
Online they seem to say 30 <laughs>.
Well, I'm past my expiration date and I don't know, life's pretty good on this side of things. Life is so long. There's nothing to be afraid of. And I think it's such a bummer that people are so horrified.
Life is so weird in that all you know is youth, until you don't. And you panic about losing this thing, but like, mostly … once people get there, it seems fine. It’s just life.
That's exactly right.