Our minds are fickle creations. The same brain that helped us pitch a new campaign one day can run dry of ideas the next.
When it comes to fixing our minds, hordes of self-help gurus, doctors and psychologists are eager to pitch in. Exercise more, eat right, meditate, the list goes on.
In this week’s New Yorker, writer Hallie Cantor puts a hilarious spin on every creative’s daily struggle with their own brain.
ME: Hey, everyone, thanks for coming. This meeting is just to check in, get updated about what everybody’s been working on in the first quarter of the day, and see how we’re feeling about the future. Coffee, wanna kick us off?
COFFEE: Sure, thanks. So, my team’s been pretty active in Q1. We started out with our regular one cup, and, you know, we weren’t seeing immediate results. We’re attributing that to a number of factors. Our target is developing a tolerance owing to her unemployment, plus we all know there’ve been some hiccups in the new sleep schedule—
(Sleep snorts. Coffee pauses.)COFFEE: —but we’re hoping to hit the ground running in Q2 with the second-cup initiative, and build on the foundation that Antidepressants set up.
ANTIDEPRESSANTS: Yeah, thanks, Coffee. Can I get that PowerPoint I e-mailed everyone up on the screen, please? Great. Now, as you can see, our department’s not getting the full R.O.I. we once were. Forty milligrams of Cymbalta used to be enough to get her out of bed and to a coffee shop, but increasingly—especially with the overwhelming trend toward mobile—she’s just checking her e-mail on her phone and then going back to sleep.
Read the full story here.