Art and the algorithm | social media influencer

Hannah Louise Poston
I think if I had been more conservative about my identity, I wouldn't have allowed myself to become an influencer. I would have judged myself preemptively and not gone there. But I love it.

Dave Weich
Hi, I'm Dave Weich, and you're listening to Work-Shaped Life. 

Hannah Louise Poston’s poems have been published in Ploughshares and featured on Poetry Daily. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times.

But after earning a Masters degree in Poetry at University of Michigan, she realized that she didn't want to teach. 

And that doesn't leave a lot of remunerative options for a poet.

What follows then is a story at the intersection of creativity, identity and technology; about the waning days of print journalism, the decentralization of publishing and the evolution of advertising; about digital communication channels and the fickle corporate interests that control them.

Hannah is a poet in her heart—and also an entrepreneur, it turns out, in business with her husband, broadcasting beauty and fashion advice to hundreds of thousands of followers around the world from a studio in their home, applying practical interests and skills to forge a newfangled career.   

Dave [1:35]
I want to start by asking a more general question, which is to say if someone asks you what do you do for a living, what is your answer? Because I feel like the answer is more complicated than most people I talk to.

Hannah Louise Poston
I am a professional social media influencer. I am a professional influencer. That's my job title.

A lot of people don't know what that actually means, what it entails. But most people at this point know what it is. However, I've been doing it long enough that for years that wouldn't have made sense to a lot of people if I had just said that. So I had to come up with something else. 

My bigger concern these days is that it comes with a lot of preconceived notions. People have curiosity, a lot of judgment, and sort of a morbid curiosity in some cases about what it is like to be an influencer, what how you make money, what the job actually is. And sometimes I don't want to open that can of worms at all with people. And it can also sound kind of pretentious, isn't it, like, well, I'm an influencer. And also I'm 41 years old, so people don't expect it. 

So in many cases, I say, “I work in social media.” That's the mildest answer. Sometimes I'll say I make social media content. Sometimes I say I work in the beauty space. You know, I have all of these kind of sideways answers when I don't want to become the topic of the conversation.

Dave
Right.

Hannah Louise Poston [3:10]
But you know, sometimes when I'm meeting people, I really want to put forward the part of my identity that is literary. And so I'll say, I make my living making social media content but I'm also a writer and it's a great day job because it allows me to do my writing on my own terms instead of having to pull from that same well for my job. I'll often give that answer when I would rather discuss poetry than social media.

Dave 
How did you get here? Was there a moment where you were like: “influencer”? I'm imagining that it was not nearly that straightforward.

Hannah Louise Poston
It absolutely was not. It was the opposite of straightforward. Partly because one of the weird things about social media content creation is that it is changing all the time. The rules are changing all the time. There's no playbook. Maybe at this point you can take some classes in college that are related to some aspects of it, but to my knowledge you can't get a degree in it. And there aren't really mentors yet, maybe a little bit, but it's like this microgenerational mentorship where you started three years ago and you're mentoring someone who's just starting. 

All of that is just to say that when I started in 2018, there were people doing it already. There was like the first wave of people who had become successful. But it was only just at that time that people were starting to become aware of it as a job that had a title that was valid. Because there was this interesting phase of social media influencing during which nobody really knew how much money people were making. And then at some point everyone cottoned on, and then people realized it was a job. Could be a job-job. 

So I started right when that pivot was happening. And that meant that it felt weird for anyone to stand up and say, yeah, this is my job. So that's part of why it wasn't straightforward, because I started doing it when it barely existed. 

But also I never planned for it to be my career. And by career I mean what pays my bills. And it is also at this point my husband's career. That was never the plan. I started it as a hobby and it took five plus years for it to have momentum that even gave me hope. 

Dave [5:57]
What was driving you then? So you started as a hobby. There must have been some personal gratification in doing so, but five years is a long time to stick with something unless you're really, really getting something out of it. And it doesn't have to be money at all, but something.

Hannah Louise Poston 
I started my YouTube channel as a hobby the year after I graduated from my master's degree program, got my MFA in poetry. And at the beginning of that program, I did want to be a professor. I remember sitting down in my first class in my MFA, five minutes into the first class on the first day, I had full body chills, elevated heart rate, and I was like looking at my professor and thinking, I want her job. This is where I'm meant to be. This is my future. There's nowhere else I would rather be. This is my total identity, the pinnacle. I am a poet more than anything. And this is my calling. I just felt such pure belonging. And I have done so many different kinds of creative work. At that time, I was also running a business making tango clothes. I was a tango teacher. I've spread myself around. I love the arts. But poetry's always been the one. I was so sure. By the end of those three years in academia, I was like, get me out of here. I don't want to live here. I hate it here. I just was like, I didn't want to be an academic. 

And I do want to be a poet more than anything. That's always been true and it continues to be true. Poetry is an interesting vocation, writing, creative writing of any kind, but poetry specifically, because in fiction, in theory, you could make it big and you could sell your script, you know, and you can make it can be your paid job. No, that is not true for any living poet, pretty much. And so it is this you always know. Poets always know that they have to find another way to make a living. And so, nothing about my MFA program changed my passion for poetry itself. And so I left that program with this goal or this path that I didn't necessarily expect, which was that I needed to find a way to make a living that would still allow me to foster my writing self. 

And so we moved to LA. I was running this clothing business with my husband, and it was doing well enough to pay our bills, but only that well. We weren't saving anything. It was very stressful. And the business was hand to mouth, month to month. You know, we only ever made enough to make it work. And it was always a nail biter. And we worked so hard. And I made all the clothes myself. Handmade, one piece at a time, kind of like an Etsy business that had outgrown Etsy. Very niche. And it was during that time that I started the YouTube channel as a hobby.

And the reason I did it… Your original question was why continue to do it if you didn't expect it to become a job, right? The answer to that question is that I enjoyed it. And it also felt, it was unfettered, you know, and it and it was so it was this interesting combination of shallow and not shallow, which has continued to allure me. That's an aspect of social media content creation that has continued to allure me, especially because I make beauty and fashion content, which is to some people's minds, the shallowest thing. But in other ways, it’s some of the most pervasive art, maybe the most pervasive, because everybody gets dressed. Almost everybody. You know, everybody engages. Fashion is the lived art form with which everyone is forced to engage. Also, when you start to gain a following on social media, you're connected to thousands of people, which is very powerful. It’s deep, you know. It makes you feel a sense of humanity.

So it was that, it was that combination. The frivolity made it easy to do instead of hard. And so much work is hard. But there was a real resonance, a real resonant depth to the experience of it and to the content that kept me going.

Dave [10:53]
Yeah, it's interesting because like I found myself when I was younger recognizing at a certain point that I was very interested in architectural design and not interested in the same way in abstract art because the application of the design was what fascinated me and what I always wanted to try to figure out. How does it work? That was what was interesting to me. Because, yes, everybody, whether you think really deeply about what you wear or how you look or not, you do have to choose what to wear before you leave the house.

Hannah Louise Poston
Even if you decide that you don't care what you wear and you end up looking like you don't care what you wear, you've you've made a statement even if it was passive. And depending on who you are and the world in which you move, choosing not to wear makeup can be an incredibly radical statement. And choosing to wear it can be radical as well. So yeah, it's deeply intertwined with the lived experience of the human being. And that really keeps me going. I think the comparison to architecture is phenomenal. I think about that a lot actually, architecture as opposed to art.

And I just got interested in this architectural concept, firmitas, utilitas, venus venustas, I want to say it is. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately because it applies to fashion and it also applies to poetry. 

Dave 
In a nutshell, what is that? What do you mean? And what is the part that's spinning in your head about it? 

Hannah Louise Poston [12:28]
I fear that if anyone's listening, I'll get it wrong. But my understanding is that the three pillars are… one of them is stability, structural integrity. One of them is usefulness, the fact that it functions in the way that you need it to function. And delight is the third. So beauty, aesthetic balance. And the idea is that a building or a space in which one lives absolutely has to have all three, and ideally all three are working together. They're intertwined, working in balance. 

When I came across it, it first piqued my interest because it was a good way to think about the way in which my husband and I often butt heads when we're trying to decide how to organize our home or even what to buy, right? It's like we need to buy a new pair of kitchen scissors. For me, they really need to be beautiful and they really need to be sturdy. I really want something to last. And then if they're little finicky, that's kind of fine. I'll put up with it. 

But Joe, it really needs to work well. But he actually doesn't care as much as I do about something's longevity. He'll buy a cheap thing as long as it works really well. And he doesn't even notice if it's beautiful or not. So we are often battling because we have different levels of investment in these three different qualities.

Dave [14:06]
So how you mentioned that you were working together in LA on a completely different—you know, making clothes—but I was just listening to Episode 40 of “Your Rose and Thorn.” 

Hannah Louise Poston
Oh, my God, Dave.

Dave
You're out there in the world, Hannah. I don't know, there's no way to really hide.

Hannah Louise Poston 
In my mind, it's just my mom listening to my podcast and no one else. I think of her as our sole listener.

Dave 
Yeah, she's got two 200,000 burner accounts. 

So this is a direct quote from Joe. It’s probably not a radical thing he's saying, but: “We are a married couple and business partners struggling to find a balance between our careers, parenting, and creative pursuits.” 

Hannah Louise Poston
Yes. 

Dave
I mean it sounds like that's been the case for a long time and it's gone through phases.

Hannah Louise Poston 
Yes. Yes, so we've been together for almost twenty years. We were together for a long time before we got married. And then we only had a kid two and a half years ago. So struggling to find a balance between our careers and creative pursuits, that's been going on for twenty years. The married couple and the parenting part has come along much more recently.

Dave [15:17]
What would it be to not work together? Is that something that you can envision: to still be together and not work together?

Hannah Louise Poston 
Wow. I can certainly envision it because I have an imagination. You know what I mean? Like I can imagine it as a thought exercise. And sometimes I think about it like, what if everything goes belly up suddenly? You know what I mean? If we were to have to really just pull the emergency hatch string on the work that we do now and go to a Plan B that's very far removed, it would be applying for jobs. You know what I mean? It would be going a more traditional route. Then we wouldn't work together anymore. 

Or sometimes I fantasize about becoming a professor, you know, when I reenter the academic sphere briefly. Last year, I was one of the writers in the New Voices Festival at Ithaca College. So I went for like five days and I was part of this festival and I got to sit on panels and discuss poetry and discuss the creative process and I got to give a reading, and I was there with these other writers who had just published their first book, and while I was there I was like, I love it here! Once again I love it here. And what a dream job it would be to be a writing professor, you know, so when I think about that, that would be doing a different job, not working with Joe. 

But it is hard to fathom. It is kind of hard to fathom. 

Dave 
Do you know a lot of people who have been working with their partner for twenty years?

Hannah Louise Poston 
No, and I think, the truth is that I think it would probably benefit aspects of our relationship to do separate jobs and then just come home at the end of the day and be like, “Honey, I'm home.” It absolutely would. Because what happens is we're both introverts, we get sick of each other. And it's actually shocking that we don't get more sick of each other than we do because we are together all the time. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the opposite is also kind of true—which is not to say that I'm not fond of Joe. I love him, and I love working with him, and that's the only reason that it does work. 

But we often get to the end of the day and I'm just like, “Leave me alone.” I don't want to talk. I don't want to hang out. People are like, you should get a babysitter so that you can go out to dinner together. And I'm like, we talk. We spend all day every day together! You know, we are so in each other's pockets. It's beautiful because we've developed such an intimate knowledge of how we work as a team. We each know how the other one works, and we have ironed out so many really difficult wrinkles. 

So when we had a kid, for example, we had a lot of history working together on which to draw. I think for a lot of people, the first time they work seriously with their partner is on the job of parenting. And it can be so hard because it is really hard to do, and it's hard to do with another person. We had a big advantage when it came to parenting together. But yeah, I think… Sometimes when one of us goes away, even just for a couple days, when we are reunited, we're like, I love you so much! It's like we never get that feeling because we're together all the time.

Dave [19:21]
What does that look like? How does the business split up?

Hannah Louise Poston
Well, Joe is the producer of the content. So it's his job to make sure that there is a schedule and that every task associated with each output of the business is on the schedule. So each output gets broken down into all of its tasks. And then Joe designs systems that places all of those tasks on a schedule. He's amazing with new technological systems and equipment. He's in charge of all the equipment and the updating. And then he also does the more granular producing. 

When I'm filming, like I filmed this morning. I filmed a video. And so I got everything ready at the filming station. And then I said, “I'm ready.” And then Joe came in and turned on the camera and all the lights, made sure that everything was fully charged, made sure that I was centered in frame and that the lights were in the right place and that the sound was working. You know, he made sure that everything was ready. And then he said, “Okay, good luck.” And he's designed all of this, right? The sound blanket and everything. Closed it up, closed the door, left. I started filming. I filmed.

I finished filming and then I said, “Okay, I'm done.” And then he came back, turned everything off, took the SD card, and took the footage away to do his magic, right? And then he works with our remote editor to get that footage into shape. A lot of it's sound. On YouTube, sound is so important. A lot of people just listen. They don't watch. And so Joe has really refined that aspect of his work.

Eventually the footage gets back to me and I take a final pass at the editing. Because I'm the creative. I've come up with the idea of the video. Sometimes that final pass is intensive because if there's imagery, if there are slides, if there are diagrams or anything, video footage, B-roll footage, I'm in charge of all of that. So sometimes it takes days for me to do the final editing pass of a video. And it's a huge part of my job. I spend a lot of time editing. People can't tell. People watching, they think I don't, but I do.

Dave
I believe it, yeah.

Hannah Louise Poston
Then I then I give it back to Joe and he polishes everything up, makes sure that the levels are correct and all that stuff, and then he uploads, and then I take it from there and I do the metadata. But he also has developed a system for tagging products. He has made working at our small two person business feel like working at a company. You know, we have Air Table, a collaborative online scheduler. We have this database so that our remote editor can search for and find the monetized links and insert them into video. You know what I mean? And he's developed all of that.

Dave [22:37]
Yeah, it's a lot. 

Hannah Louise Poston
Yeah, it's a lot.

Dave
Yeah. Where is the line between life and work for you? Can you even answer that question? 

Hannah Louise Poston 
That's another thing that Joe has really helped me with. The line used to not exist. So I've been a creative professional for my whole life. That's all I've ever done is found some way, often by the seat of my pants, to monetize my creativity. Creativity is natural to me. It's my natural state. And so the goal has always been, well, How do I take this sort of power flooding out of me and make it something I can live on, you know? And it used to be that there was no end. So I would just work. If I was working on something, I'd work into the night. I had no schedule. I was all over the place, like classic artist. And Joe, in his life, has really relied on routine and benefited from routine. And at some point along the way, he convinced me to clock off at a certain time every day. This was even before we had a kid. He was like, Let's try clocking off at six.

And I was like, what? Don't rain on, don't dampen my fire! I was like, You can't change me! I tried it, and it was magical. It's so great. So now that we have a kid, we have to clock off when he gets home from school. And we actually don't work on the weekends. We thought about it for a long time, and we decided to have a traditional schedule. So our kid goes to school Monday through Friday. We don't work on the weekends unless we have to, which we sometimes do. [24:32]

And recently we switched to the four-day work week. So we don't work on Mondays either. And that has been life-changing because the kid’s in school and we have a day off. Highly recommended to anyone who can do that, especially creatives. If you think you can't afford it, think again because that day off of both parenting and work has made us both more productive, happier. And of course better rested.

Dave [25:05] 
Yeah. You called yourself and Joe introverts earlier, and I believe that. But you share a degree of your life with strangers that is unfathomable to most people. How do those two things reconcile?

Hannah Louise Poston
Yeah, I try not to think about that very often. How weird it is. This doesn't happen very frequently anymore, but it used to be that sometimes it would all just hit me. The level of exposure and the judgment.

It would just hit me and I would, I would go into something that resembled depression, but it was really just,  it was like a freeze. My creativity and my momentum would freeze because I felt… I couldn't process the reality of being beheld on that scale. Because I think we can't. I think it's too much for the human mind to process. And so I would just stutter. And I would feel shame, like this deep sense of shame. And it would go on for a couple of days. And I would have to say to Joe, “I'm going through one of my spells again.” And sometimes it would mean delaying the release of a video, sometimes, you know, not working on it for a while. And then I would come out of it. And so I would say for maybe the first like five years of making YouTube videos, this would happen relatively frequently and sometimes be triggered by online comments. [26:45]

Eventually I just grew a thick enough skin and sort of worked my way out of it. And now I live in this… I have this cognitive dissonance, or I've just really gotten used to it. But I'm also pretty skillful at threading through what I do and don't share. You know, and now it's just second nature. I know what not to say. 

And I am a bit different in person. I'm definitely much looser in person and talk in ways and say things that I would never say on camera. But it no longer feels like an effort to do that edit in real time as I'm filming. 

Dave [27:33]
Right. What might someone who has consumed a great deal of your content be, what might that person be surprised by if they just caught you hanging out at a cafe or whatever it may be?

Hannah Louise Poston 
As did happen to me two weeks ago. If I were really to sit down and kiki with someone who had only ever seen my videos, I think they might be… 

Here's what it is: On the Internet, you know, Roxanne Gay famously said everyone is a hammer looking for a nail. So I have learned not to be that nail, not to provide that nail. And that just means softening the edges of everything ever so slightly. You can't succeed at it. I am the nail to a lot of people. 

Dave
Right. Pressing record on the video is basically opening yourself up. 

Hannah Louise Poston [28:35]
Yeah. Yeah. And then in person, I'm not tempered in that way. So I'm not hyper-aware of the way in which things could be misconstrued or strung together or used as evidence. You know what I mean? All of those little things. And there's so much that can be communicated in person, the vibe of something that is lost online, so you can be a little bit more confident that what you say is going to be received in the manner in which it was intended.

Dave 
I wondered, Where do these topics come from? Because part of I think what is kind of amazing about looking at your output is the volume. What was the video I just looked at? It was essentially, finding ways to expand your wardrobe without losing your sense of self. 

How far out in the future is it plotted? How do you build that content? 

Hannah Louise Poston [29:32]
Yeah, I'm really glad that you asked this question, Dave, because it gets at something that I do think is important to talk about: the algorithm. 

So at this point, here in 2026, with a mortgage and a kid and a two-person production studio, which is essentially what we run, and social media content as my full-time job, there is no way, no way to make it work other than starting from the knowledge of what will cause a video to do well in the algorithm.

Because if I just made content that was whatever I felt like talking about, and it didn't have any strategy, there was no strategy, no algorithm strategy built into it, it wouldn't do well enough to support our lives financially.

And this is true of every influencer who's doing well. I just want people to know that. People are looking for what are the topics, what are the keywords, what's the thumbnail, what's the title, the triangulation of the title and the thumbnail and the topic. The triangulation that is going to unlock the algorithm. 

My ideas come from everywhere. I'm constantly thinking about them and I'm constantly taking notes. On my phone, I have notes, so it's like “new video idea.” “New video idea.” But the trick is sculpting one into a shape that will make it work on YouTube.

I'm not that good at it. I could be better at it. I get too excited about the video I want to make. If I were more willing to sacrifice what I want to do on the altar of the algorithm, my content would do better. 

Dave [31:37]
How do you make a living at this? I know you have a Patreon. What does that look like? What are the kinds of financial considerations that you make in order to do this? 

Hannah Louise Poston 
Yeah, that's such a good question. It's the first thing people want to know when they find out what we do.

So there are a couple of strains of income. The first one is YouTube AdSense income. So when you watch a YouTube video, if you get shown an ad, that ad is not specific to the video. It's tailored to the viewer. And it's an auction system from the advertisers. So multiple advertisers are bidding on the spot for the opportunity to show you an ad. And depending on who they think you are, how likely they think you are to make a purchase essentially, the spot can be more or less competitive. And that changes depending on the time of year as well. So during the holidays, those spots are really competitive. And then an ad on YouTube will be worth several times the amount that it's worth to advertisers like in February. So advertisers bid on those spots and then they pay YouTube to advertise and then YouTube pays a content creator 55%.   

It changes dramatically over the course of the year because like dramatically, seasonally, you know, you can make more in November and December than you can make in the first half of the year, basically doing the same thing. So, you know, if you make the same video in December and everything about it is the same, it will make you three times as much money than it will make you three weeks later in the middle of January. It's so crazy. Yeah. [33:33]

And it also changes dramatically depending on the nature of the content. So beauty content does way better because lots of people click through beauty content to buy makeup. Fashion content doesn't do as well. Advertisers don't want to pay as much to advertise on fashion videos. It's just not the same. For some reason, people aren't spendy in the same way when they're watching that content. I've learned this because I kind of pivoted from beauty to fashion content. And it's different for every genre on YouTube.

It's very unpredictable, that strain. And also, for some reason, this year, AdSense is tanking. Everybody I know who is a social media influencer is like, “Why is AdSense so low this year?” Nobody knows. It's terrifying. We have no control and no knowledge. But our videos that were making us the videos are making half of what they were making last year, and nobody really knows why. So it's like some inside information is scary, but it's and it's weird. Hence the other strains. 

So sponsorship. Right, sponsorship on a video. I have a manager, and she brokers deals with sponsors and gets contracts for us. and that's where the real money is. We earn more from a single sponsored video than we do from an entire month's worth of ad revenue on YouTube right now. It didn't used to be like that. And so the better your videos do, the more the views, the better the views, the more sponsors are willing to pay for a sponsored spot. And when we transition into this model, that's when we really started b to be able to make a living on YouTube. [35:16]

The third revenue source is monetized links. So if I'm talking about my new pair of shoes in a video and I say the link is in the description box down below, and you open the description box and click on that link, and then you go to the shoe website and then you buy the shoes or anything on the site. Anything. Then I will receive a percentage of what you spent on the site. 

And then for us, the fourth strain is Patreon.

Dave
Do you think that your mom, for instance, who I now know is a consumer of your content, what does this look like to her as the person who knew you as a child enrolling in an MFA program? What does she make of this? Is this like, this was inevitable, or is it just like I still don't really understand and can't believe what my daughter is doing? 

Hannah Louise Poston [36:12]
Yeah, I mean I that is kind of opening up a whole can of worms because my parents are like, they were hippies. My family's Quaker. I think that my passion for aesthetics, especially as they relate to clothing, style, jewelry, makeup… It doesn't begin and end with femininity, frankly. I dress, I think, in a way that melds the masculine and the feminine together. But the hyper-femininity of the things that I was attracted to as a child, my parents were appalled by that.

Because they were first-wave feminists. They thought that high heels were a tool of the patriarchy. When I was three and I asked my mom, “When can I have long red fingernails?” she did not know what to say. And I think in her mind, she was like, “Never!” She was like, “No, that's bad.” You know, and so a lot of my coming into myself and as an adult has been having to learn that it's not bad. And then I think that the career that I ended up following, the person I became, sort of taught my parents that it's not bad. It allowed them to see the nuance. So it's been a journey for all of us. 

But yeah, they're not surprised based on how I was as a kid that I ended up the way that I am. 

But I think they were surprised from the very beginning. They were like, where did this child come from? I was like, “When can I have long red fingernails?” and also carrying around a volume of Emily Dickinson and reading it. And so yeah, none of it has surprised them.

Dave 
I mean, so that sounds perfect. That sounds like you essentially were just waiting for this job to be created.

Hannah Louise Poston 
Exactly. Yeah. 

Dave [38:11]
Who do you go to, or where do you go for advice yourself? 

Hannah Louise Poston
What kind of advice?

Dave 
I don't know. I guess one way at this would be: What kind of advice do you seek?

Hannah Louise Poston
Yeah, this is a good question. In the realm of poetry, whether it's logistical, like publishing, creative, like you know, thinking about the concepts or craft based, you know, a good friend or two from over the years. I have a good friend or two from over the years, also poets who I go to a lot to kind of ask questions about that. And my mentor from grad school. [38:52]

And in the realm of my work, like social media work, it's so weird because like I was saying, nobody knows anything. So I have some peers, other YouTubers who I've met at events and you know, or just made friends with. And we will text each other. You know, I'll text my friend Kelly or my friend, you know, she'll text me like three thumbnails, and we'll be which one of these should we use for my video? You know, have you ever worked with this brand? What did they pay you? You know, that kind of thing. 

I also have a therapist who I'll often ask questions of. I'll file things away and ask her. And I have this wonderful mentor named Julia Frodahl. She's like a guide to the inner life. Really amazing at teaching Eastern concepts for a Western for someone raised in the West. So she is probably my ultimate person who I'd go for for advice. When I'm really lost, I will have a call with Julia and she's like the pinnacle. 

Dave [40:06]
Is there anything that we haven't talked about that I've just plain missed?

Hannah Louise Poston 
I don’t think there's anything we've just plain missed. I feel like the thing that we sort of teased and then didn't go that far into is this reality of my life, which is that my vocation as an artist, which is poetry, is separate from my career. The work that I do that pays the bills. And I just wanna shine a light on that in case anyone's listening who is a creative in this sort of passionate but unhinged way and looking for a path. I think there's a lot of pressure if you are a creative and you're talented and you can kind of make it work in any of many ways, there's a lot of pressure to pick the thing that is your main thing and make it make money for you. I'm so grateful that I didn't cave to that pressure because this life in which I have this challenging but fun work that is unexpected, and I think if I had been more conservative about my identity, I wouldn't have allowed myself to do it. I wouldn't have allowed myself to become an influencer. I would have judged myself preemptively and not gone there. But I love it. I love my work and I'm and I sort of have endless energy for it because of the level on which it rests.

And then poetry, reading, writing, the life of the mind is all mine. And it can kind of unfold in the way that's the most organic to me because it's not being pressured by the logistics of a career.

And I wish I had had more models for that. I didn't really have models for that. It comforts me to think about the fact that T.S. Elliott was a banker and Wallace Stevens was an insurance agent. And you know, William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Because those are like careers that are very demanding. And yet they were able to be the greats that they were. 

Dave 
Yeah. Well, thank you. 

Hannah Louise Poston
Thank you so much, Dave.

Dave 
Yeah, I've enjoyed our conversation. It was awesome. 

[42:53] On the next episode of Work-Shaped Life:

Sarah Kurtz
I had zero friends when I moved here. Because I moved from Denver to Portland to help open a Core Power and teach all the teachers to teach. I knew no one. Zero. And I had like seventy five people at my fortieth birthday party that are my dearest, dearest friends, and it's all because of yoga. Right? So my work is my life.

Dave
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In the meantime, check out Work-Shaped Life on Substack.

Work-Shaped Life is produced by Sheepscot Creative. It’s hosted by me, Dave Weich, edited by Bailey Cain and Michael Nipper, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lukas and Kate Sokoloff.

We’ll be back in two weeks with Sarah Kurtz. Thanks for listening.