Lauren and Rachael talk ethics, personal values, and what it can look like to honor those ideals in your creative business. They discuss how outside forces can challenge one’s adherence to a self-imposed ethical framework and OF COURSE the importance of holding the nuance through it all. This discussion blossoms into an exploration of how the mutual support of a loving community can help us grow and thrive; plus, a reminder on the importance of checking in with yourself and having the courage to change course when your current path no longer suits you.
Lauren and Rachael talk ethics, personal values, and what it can look like to honor those ideals in your creative business. They discuss how outside forces can challenge one’s adherence to a self-imposed ethical framework and OF COURSE the importance of holding the nuance through it all. This discussion blossoms into an exploration of how the mutual support of a loving community can help us grow and thrive; plus, a reminder on the importance of checking in with yourself and having the courage to change course when your current path no longer suits you.
Episode Mentions:
The transcript for this episode can be found here!
Rachael Renae: Welcome back to Chaotic Creatives, a show about embracing the chaos that comes from living a creative life.
Lauren Hom: We are your hosts to self-proclaimed Chaotic Creatives. I am Hom Sweet Hom. F***, I was going to say I'm Lauren better known as Hom Sweet Hom.
You know what? Keep rolling. I'm Lauren Hom better known as Hom Sweet Hom on the internet. It's been a long day.
Rachael Renae: I'm Rachael Renae. I'm having a great day. I'm your internet hype gal here to help encourage you to live a creative and playful and fulfilling life.
Lauren Hom: And I'm a designer.
Rachael Renae: I feel like Lauren's, maybe attitude is a perfect sort of segue into what we're talking about today. We've been having a lot of conversations offline about a lot of different things, ethics and morals and values.
We talk about that stuff anyway just in all aspects of our lives. We have specifically been talking about the decision-making process, the hemming and hawing between when to accept a client, when perhaps your values don't perfectly align, and when we feel comfortable maybe making concessions and when we don't
Lauren Hom: In client work in all aspects of business. I think oftentimes in the last week or two, we've been talking a lot about just the tension of being a creative business owner, infusing your values into every decision you make. Oftentimes those decisions never being 100% perfect and having to be okay with that.
Listen, maybe in full-time work too, that happens. I find myself and my full-time, creative, self-employed friends, just going through it a lot of times. Recently, I have been managing my own business 100%. I don't have an agent anymore and I've just been doing things myself and it's really allowed me to be up close and personal. I'm the one fielding the emails.
I'm the one doing all the vetting. I recently had a couple projects where, thank you for letting me talk your ear off about like, "Okay, it's a lot of money and right now I need money." For the first time in let's say six years, money has been tighter because work has been slower and some other things that I will not name specifically right now.
Oftentimes it sucks because when you need money to pay payroll, rent, all these things, you have to make imperfect decisions. Also, my morals and values get a little squishier when I have less resources or fewer resources. I think about when I was starting out and I was just a young scrappy 23-year-old freelancer, one, I didn't really think too deeply about the kinds of projects I was saying yes to.
If I'm being completely candid, one of the biggest projects I took when I was just starting out was for Poland Springs Bottled Water. It was doing lettering for a billboard in Times Square. I took a picture with it. I posted that shit. I was so jazzed and I just didn't know any better. Bless any 23-year-olds who are socially conscious and thinking critically.
I think I'd like to think that social media and the internet has raised the consciousness of everybody.
Rachael Renae: I agree.
Lauren Hom: Especially the youth. I wasn't quite there yet at 23, if I'm being completely honest.
Rachael Renae: The internet when we were 23 was not what it is today.
Lauren Hom: No.
Rachael Renae: We didn't have the same level of access, I think to be able, had we been socially conscious youths, probably we could have found that information, but the landscape was different over 10 years ago.
Lauren Hom: I went to ad and design school in New York, and I don't have super politically progressive parents. That wasn't really brought into my sphere. I just didn't know any better. I remember getting a comment on that Instagram post because I posted the picture of it being like, "New work." Someone was like, "Oh, is that the evil water company?"
I was like, "Are they bad?" Yeah, they're bad. I say all this to say... now, 12 years into doing this, I find myself back at a place where I'm starting to think, "Okay, well here are some projects. I need the money. In another life or let's say four years ago, it would've been easier to say no because I just went to culinary school, I spent down a lot of my savings.
I thought I would just come back and get my business right back on track, no big deal. Things took a weird turn and business has been slower with some other things. Now I'm just like, "Okay, it's not perfect, but I ended up taking some of the projects." We'll see how that pans out and I will just have to live with that.
Rachael Renae: I also think that it's interesting because in addition to the necessity, the need for more income, your morals and values are getting stronger and stronger because we're learning more. You're actually holding yourself to a higher regard than you would have ever been anytime in the past. I think we have more access to information.
We have the luxury of being able to make decisions based on what we know is going on in the world and how that's impacting us and other people surrounding us. I think, you're holding yourself to a higher standard, so you're having a harder time making the decision of yes or no because you're like, "Okay, well, I have developed these morals up to this point." Lauren to be clear, I know the details of what she's talking about and she's not working, doing something terrible.
Lauren Hom: That's true. Also, caveat, these are for clients that I've worked with in the past and had no problem with. I just didn't really think too much about it and now we know more, right?
Rachael Renae: We know more and it's we're being more critical thinking about things. It's like the thinking about where you're spending your money, for example, as a consumer. Do I want to buy the pasture-raised locally, regenerative farming, eggs, meat, dairy? Do I just buy whatever's cheapest? It's like there are so many different layers to that.
Do you have the luxury of buying the nicer thing? Do you even know about it? Now you know about it and you have the money to buy those things, and you've set yourself up with this standard of buying all of the quote unquote best quality, best for the earth, best for the animals products, and then your income takes a hit.
What do you do? Do you continue to buy those things? Do you have to adjust your morals and values to be able to fit into the lifestyle? Does this analogy make sense?
Lauren Hom: Absolutely. It's interesting thinking about it from the consumer angle. I didn't really spin it that way either because we're talking about it from a production angle, but yeah, absolutely. All of us, no matter how good of a year you had as a freelancer or years in my case or how many raises you get as an employee, none of our livelihoods are secure. I think that's what we're all recognizing. We might have to change our budgets and spending accordingly.
Rachael Renae: I think thinking about it from the perspective of you do have clients and work that you absolutely would say no to. It's just finding the line, which is a big gray area. We always live in the gray area and certain circumstances, every decision that we're making is a variety of factors that are contributing to that decision.
Lauren Hom: Yes. You and I have talked about this in the past as well, being the face of our solopreneurs, I guess I play solo-ish-preneur, but I guess being the public-facing part of your business, it does hold you accountable in a sense that every project you take, you put your name behind. Especially if it's influencer work or it needs to be published, or you put it in your portfolio that is you and your name going on that thing.
In a way that if you work behind the scenes or I used to work in an advertising agency and I didn't really have a say in what clients I worked on. Granted, I was only there for nine months, so I don't know if I had really to cross that bridge when I got there. If there was a client, an account that they put me on that I was like, "No, I don't want to work on that."
Rachael Renae: I have friends that work at agencies that have these giant clients and it's like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to work for this company, not the agency, but the company, that's the client." Are you willing to quit your job over it? A lot of times we're not because we need money to survive.
Lauren Hom: I would never begrudge anyone for not quitting their job over that because you got to eat.
Rachael Renae: I think it's interesting adding the face to it, as you were saying that, and I know we've had this conversation before, but it reminded me in this moment of a job that I turned down, not a job, a client that I turned down because of them having access to the photos of me for a certain amount of time for their parent company.
I was working with them or planning to work with them on a creative thing. The photos that they were going to take of me in my space were going to be able to be accessed by the parent company, and they had the ownership of those images they were using their photographer, and I just had this icky feeling.
Everyone I talked to in the interview stages and talking about this project and prior to signing the contract were great. I was really excited about it and I just had this gut feeling, kind of like the gut feeling we talked about in the last episode of when you know that something's not quite right, I had this feeling.
I was like, "What if somebody, Donald Trump gets ownership over this parent company and then has access to my images, and all of a sudden my face in my studio is on an anti-abortion billboard or something?" That is so extreme and wouldn't happen likely, but I didn't have control over those images anymore. I did not feel comfortable not knowing what my likeness would be looked like or used for rather.
Ultimately, I know that probably wouldn't have happened, but based on the ownership of the company, it wasn't like that example was extreme, but it could have been used for some other types of marketing that I maybe wouldn't have stood for. I said no. I was like, "Hey, I can't do this. Sorry." I felt I feel good about that decision.
There have also been companies that I've done work for, and then someone messages me and said as an influencer, small scale, someone is like, "They treat their employees really poorly, or, Hey, did you actually know that they're greenwashing?" Then you learn and you're like, "Thank you so much for sharing this information."
I now have more information and can make a better informed decision next time. Sometimes the allure of, "Yes, I need to pay this bill and this opportunity seems like a good one."
Lauren Hom: If I'm speaking super candidly, I think any Fortune's 500 company or big company publicly traded, let's say, is likely going to have some labor issues in a capitalist economy.
Rachael Renae: Totally, there's probably going to be a misalignment with your personal values and their values as a company, which are to make money.
Lauren Hom: I think again, doing things with our eyes open, knowing more so we can make more informed decisions, we might still end up working with those companies in one way or another, especially with the parent company stuff too, it's wild. The same handful of very, very wealthy people profit from a small group of these companies doing well.
I've talked with Kristle about this before too. A lot of times too, we're all very online. I think people who listen to this podcast are likely also very online. A lot of what people might come for you in the comments should you do a partnership or post work that you did for a client, if you're a designer or creative, if that company is catching heat in the media right now for doing something shitty, which is entirely possible.
Companies do shitty things, then you're going to catch that smoke too, most likely. A lot of times my thoughts are like, "For any big company, they're just not in the media cycle right now." They didn't do something bad and it got reported on, but they're doing bad stuff behind the scenes. There's a designer Kyle, Hey Kyle. Their Instagram handle is Hey Kyle. I'm so sorry that I did not look up how to pronounce your last name before this.
I didn't think I was going to be referencing this. They presented at a type conference either this year or last year in drag. It was lovely. I saw photos, but I saw a screenshot from the presentation, and it was a really great quote that they had in there. I think they might've written it themselves about graphic design is how capitalism gets dressed in the morning.
Rachael Renae: Whoa.
Lauren Hom: I thought it was just very honest. We as visual creatives, photographers, illustrators, designers, image makers, we partner with people with money, which are the brands and help to sometimes we help to get their messaging across.
Rachael Renae: We are so ingrained in this culture of capitalism that is what our art is often used for. We are creative people that are using that skill and that passion to make money to survive. The culture that we live in, it's encouraged for us to use that creativity and if we get any sort of spark or ember of growth to skyrocket into follow the line, what did you call it earlier? The escalator of capitalism or the elevator or something.
Lauren Hom: It's like an escalator of commerce where if you just let it do its thing, all of the carrots on the stick, like the incentives will lead you to growing your business bigger, trying to make more money. I think it's probably obvious hearing us talk that we have progressive politics more left-leaning. Regardless of anyone who's listening to politics, I think it's important to learn about and understand how our economy works.
So you understand the incentives and understand what will be required of you and the challenges you might face when entering the market as a soft creative soul.
Rachael Renae: We are encouraged in capitalism to take advantage of other people so that we can make more money or resources.
Lauren Hom: The kicker there is to take advantage of other people? Again, paying as little as possible, no benefits, but also to mine ourselves as resources. We are the ultimate resource of just an infinite wellspring of creativity when we know that's not true. Oftentimes, my friend Andre and I have talked about this before, we were on the phone one day.
We were talking about how I have this theory that as an entrepreneur, it's fucked up because you are the employer and the employee. Oftentimes, again, when we're talking about ethics and values, you think about how if you had a team, how you would want to treat them, the working conditions, the not working overtime.
Making sure everyone was compensated fairly, paying well, the way that we would treat other employees is not how we treat ourselves.
Rachael Renae: Man, I'm just giggling because both you Kristle and me all worked this weekend on stuff and we all are bad bosses to ourselves.
Lauren Hom: Bad bosses. Think about if you are self-employed, think about how bad of a boss you've been to yourself lately if you're feeling burnt out. This is just an invitation to reflect on what are some ways that we always treat other people and give other people more benefit of the doubt. Treat them a little more generously than we do ourselves. I think it's normal and natural. However, it's nice to take a step back and reflect on, "Could I be better to myself?"
Rachael Renae: I mean, that is all about what I teach. Literally making play a priority because we don't. I think that when we can do that, and Kristle and I were talking about this right before we started recording about, yes, we can bully ourselves into getting the work done, but we can also give ourselves grace. For me it was, yes, I got a bunch of tours done, I got my pitches and proposal done that I needed to do.
Then also I allowed myself to rot on the couch and look at a quilt book and make a plan while I watched a rom-com, and that felt really good. That was my version of play, was noodling on a quilt design. Kristle was playing the bass. We need those moments of play to be able to refresh our brain and we need to be nice to ourselves and that is what I teach in Prioritize Play.
I think back to your comment about being our own bad bosses, that's such a good point. I think we're encouraged to do that as much as possible so that we can make money and be quote unquote "successful." Then if we do have growth, it's encouraged for us to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.
Lauren Hom: You want to capitalize on the capitalization.
Rachael Renae: You had something that really took off. Let's capitalize on that and now make a bunch of money and make as much as you can. I actively fight against that like when someone comments and is like, "Are you going to sell those ceramics? Are you going to sell?" Someone commented this weekend, I had a pair of patchwork pants that I made and they were like, "Oh my gosh, where'd you get these?"
I was like, "I made them." They said, I would love to buy a pair. I said, "I don't sell my sewing, that's just for me." Then they said, "Well, if you change your mind, I would like to buy some." I was like, "No, I don't sell it." It's very sweet and encouraging, but I feel like as creatives, especially when we're just starting out so many, well-meaning people say stuff like that, "I would love to buy that. Can you make that? I would like to see you make it in this way or sign me up to buy it."
Then you make it in the way that they expect and they don't buy. It's like going back to things we've talked about in season one, making things for yourself, but when you do have something that hits big and then you have the opportunity for growth, capitalism can really take the creativity out of your experience.
Lauren Hom: To your point about prioritizing play, and it's so important because oftentimes we forget to, I think we were talking in the car the other day on the way to dinner, I, as someone who does this full-time for a living, when I wake up in the morning and I have my small business owner list of things to do...
Rachael Renae: Lauren puts on her little small business owner hat.
Lauren Hom: You know I don't wear hats.
Rachael Renae: Your chef hat.
Lauren Hom: If you see me voluntarily in a hat in everyday life-
Rachael Renae: Something is wrong.
Lauren Hom: Something has gone wrong. Same with a T-shirt, if you ever see me in just a ball cap and a T-shirt-
Rachael Renae: You're cosplaying me.
Lauren Hom: I'm about to rob a bank or something.
Rachael Renae: She's going into witness protection.
Lauren Hom: Yes, clearly.
Rachael Renae: Meanwhile, I'm mostly wearing a hat. You're catching me on a rare day if you're watching the video.
Lauren Hom: Yes, exactly. What was this thing? On the way to dinner, I think having fun or playing gets knocked down the list of priorities because there's quote unquote in the short-term, "more important things." Like running payroll and making sure emails get responded to and sending invoices that if that goes on for a week, two weeks, couple months, it can be years that you forget to prioritize any kind of play, any kind of fun, any kind of space for daydreaming or whimsy in your regimented small business owner life.
I like to joke that oftentimes it feels like you have your inner art kid on one shoulder and then your little CEO on the other shoulder just fighting all the time. The CEO oftentimes wins out because we live in a society where we have to pay so much money to exist. If you let the little business person drive all the time, you will burn out.
We've talked about this too, where I want people to know if they're feeling burnt out or they have burnt out or they haven't prioritized play and you're feeling guilty, it's not your fault. Again, our economy incentivizes, "Hey, that thing that you got a little bit of money for, why don't you make some more money from it?
Okay, now you're making a living that's not enough. Why don't you hire a team so you can focus on stuff that can make you even more money?" Listen, if you want to that I've done a little bit of that, you get to pick and choose which parts feel good, what shiny object feels like. "Okay, I want to try that out."
You can always readjust do baby steps, but it's not your fault if you haven't been prioritizing play or fun or creativity because once you start to monetize your creative work, you are now on an escalator where there's all these trap doors of how can you make as much money as possible? No one got into creative work to make as much money as possible. We would've chosen something else.
Rachael Renae: Absolutely. I think not only how we're talking about prioritizing play, I think so much of what I'm working on is getting people to see it not as a luxury, but an essential. The same level as eating and sleeping and moving your body, which I know that when I get really busy and stressed out, I don't eat as well. I'm not sleeping as much.
I have always been the type of person where I'm like, "I'm never going to pull an all-nighter in college I never did it." I was like, "Well, I'd rather fail than not get sleep because I just can't function." Sleep is not one that I often give up.
Lauren Hom: Non-negotiable.
Rachael Renae: Which it's great to know that about myself, but I will have bad eating habits or forget to eat. ADHD, hello?
Lauren Hom: Will you brush your teeth? Do you brush your teeth every night?
Rachael Renae: No.
Lauren Hom: Me either.
Rachael Renae: I was like, "Every day." I definitely do it every morning.
Lauren Hom: I'll get to it like eight hours later.
Rachael Renae: Man, every night is tough. It's a habit that I'm working on building. I do brush them every morning. I'm really good in my morning routine.
Lauren Hom: At least once every 24 hours.
Rachael Renae: Yes.
Lauren Hom: To any potential suitors, we want you to know that we brush our teeth-
Rachael Renae: We do.
Lauren Hom: ... once every 24 hours.
Rachael Renae: We're cleanish. We are gross girls but in an endearing way. I think that what I'm working toward in my creative work, in this umbrella of prioritizing play is getting people to realize that it is as essential, if not more essential than, I mean the work. We can't survive without eating and sleeping maybe for a little bit, but not in the long-term.
I feel that play is up there with those things because it's allowing yourself to decompress. It's giving your brain a chance to relax. It's like releasing endorphins and letting you access your creativity again. It's not just about being frivolous and being like, oh, “I'm going to go do hopscotch because hehe, silly".” It's getting out of your head and having a good time, which then allows connection to be made.
It allows you to process your feelings. There's so much that is important that comes from what I'm calling play, but can be your version of, I don't know, whatever your version of play is-
Lauren Hom: Absolutely, it’s a headspace you go.
Rachael Renae: …your creative practice, your yoga, whatever practices you're doing to sort of step away from the business CEO brain. Let the creative art kid on other shoulder take the lead for a little bit.
Lauren Hom: I think it gives the creative art kid a voice in the conversation when CEO is just really is the person at the table that's talking really loudly over everybody else a lot of the times because that is the carrot on the stick. That's what we are in the short term incentivized to do. One thing I talked about in the talk I recently gave in Atlanta at Minted was most of us want to do this work. This is our life's work, hopefully.
If you're in it for the long haul, you got to make it sustainable. We all love to talk about sustainability, myself included, but in practice you got to implement some of those things. It can be easy to push it to the side for a couple of months, even a year. You will feel the effects of it. It reminded me of something that you said a couple of weeks ago since we're talking about infusing your values into your business and your creative practice about community.
One thing that we were talking about in Atlanta was someone had asked, yes, I want to be able to make space for personal projects." I was talking about making sure you savor your creative process, go at a pace that feels luxurious to you have some projects that are like that. Usually, that pace that feels luxurious means free of the pressure of needing to make it go viral, needing for it to be a smashing financial success right away.
One bit of advice I got from an online course that I took years ago from Rachel Rogers, she runs a community called We Should All Be Millionaires. Which yes, I would like all of us to be millionaires, to be able to spend that money and have that breathing room. One thing that blew my mind was one of her recommendations was, in order to be able to focus on your business, a lot of the people in her community are women, particularly like femme of color.
She was saying, "Particularly for women in heterosexual marriages and partnerships, if you want to make more time and space for your business or your creative projects or the thing you say you care about that you so desperately do, but you're just too spread thin. She said, "Ask your husband for help at home."
Say, "This is actually really important to me and I need you to watch the kids or make dinner these nights of the week or do the laundry." It might be an uncomfortable conversation, but there are ways you can rely on others to help you make that space for play and creativity and slow-making.
Rachael Renae: Man, I mean this conversation about community, I have two things to say.
Lauren Hom: Yes, please.
Rachael Renae: First, I just finished the book Nightbitch.
Lauren Hom: What?
Rachael Renae: Sorry. It's about this woman who's an artist in the Midwest, she gives up her art career to have a child, and her husband travels all the time and she does everything. He comes home on the weekends and there's a lot of resentment there. The story is wild. She turns into a dog and she calls herself Nightbitch. It's really interesting. It's not fantasy.
I mean, it is because she's turning into a dog, but it could be perceived as an analogy. It's really good. Ultimately, she just starts to demand that her husband does more and then he does it and then she has time for her art. That's not totally the whole plot of the book. I would recommend it was a quick, I listened to the audiobook. A quick and good entertaining read or listen.
I think that the conversation about community too is if we can make these connections, if we're for example, playing, let's say you just went to book club. I'm in a book club. You join a bowling league, you do something that is playful. You're meeting other people that you can rely on for things. In capitalism in America specifically, we've idealized this nuclear family where it's like you don't ask people for help. You don't even ask.
Lauren Hom: You're a little island either as an individual or as a nuclear family.
Rachael Renae: You need to make all that money by yourself and you can't rely on your community. I think there are lots of conversations happening now about, at least I'm starting to become aware of the conversations. I'm sure that I know that there are many people that have been talking about this for a long time.
Lauren Hom: We're not smart, we're just curious.
Rachael Renae: We're learning and we're open to being wrong and learning and changing and growing. I think that's our whole thing. Literally, the wall behind Lauren says, "Keep growing." I think that if we lived in society where we did have really strong community relationships and our basic needs were taking care of, if we had housing, food and we didn't have to exchange our labor or our creativity for money to have our basic needs, we would all be artists.
We would have that leisurely pace if we lived in sort of an anarchist community where everyone was taking care of each other. I know that that is unrealistic, at least how we're living right now-
Lauren Hom: En masse too, I have no idea. I'm not as well-versed in anarchy.
Rachael Renae: I mean, I'm also not, but I am trying to learn about more just thinking from a community perspective because our government is failing us. It's like the only people we can rely on are our community in mutual aid, and that doesn't necessarily mean that we give money to disaster victims. It means asking your friends to bring you toilet paper or asking your friends to make you dinner when you're having a really hard time. That is mutual aid, that's depending on your community,
Lauren Hom: A pooling of resources.
Rachael Renae: You have to be comfortable asking and providing that. When we can start to feel that comfort with each other, and I think we can make those connections through play, through our creativity, we can have less pressure to do it all alone and make all that money to be able to buy all the things we need because we have that support. That at least relieve some of the pressure. It's like, "Okay, well tonight actually I can work on my quilt because my friend is taking my kid."
Lauren Hom: Exactly what you said, that's actually exactly what I said to the audience of mostly women at this conference with regards to creativity. Maybe you don't even need to be partnered to enact some of these things. Maybe you form a mom group or a friend group where let's say if you're all parents, one of you, one person per week will watch the kids and everyone else can focus on their art.
That's art night for everybody and you share the load. Let's say if there are no kids involved, what if you start a recipe club, and this gets creative too, where one of you is in charge of making dinner for a meal prep kind of thing where you drop off dinner for it's enough for a couple of nights or something. Then it allows, it frees up time where people don't have to cook for a night or two.
That frees up time to be able to work on the art project. It's just taking little things off of each other's plates, but in a way that everyone's getting a turn to take care of other people and be taken care of. Honestly, for me, as someone who is the eldest child in the family, and obviously I run my own business.
A big point of identity for me is being a caretaker and being the one who's got this. The friend in the group who organizes the trip and makes sure everyone's good to go, the mom.
Rachael Renae: We're the same in that regard.
Lauren Hom: The mom of the group. I think oftentimes it's to receive help and receive care.
Rachael Renae: Or ask, it's been something that I've been actively working on in the past couple of years is recognizing that I love helping my friends. If someone asked me, "Can you bring me food? I don't even like cooking, but because you're asking, I will." It might not be the best food you've ever had.
Lauren Hom: It doesn't need to be.
Rachael Renae: It doesn't need to be. It's about taking something off your plate, and I have to remind myself that other people love me and want to be able to support me in that way, so I'm going to start asking for what I need. In the past couple of years, I've been like, "Hey, can you come over and help me move this rug? Can you come help me paint my bedroom, Lauren, help me paint my bedroom because I hate painting.
Lauren Hom: I love painting. Honestly, being in community means getting to know people and knowing their likes, dislikes, their strengths, their weaknesses, and filling in each other's gaps too. I think one thing that's been really beautiful about, I mean, I'm going to come help you paint your, I was like, "I'm going to help Rachael with Halloween decorations, which sounds so fun."
Kristle and I have been having a really lovely year together as our relationship started as a business relationship where-
Rachael Renae: You were Kristle's bad boss.
Lauren Hom: Well, no, I have cool mom energy when it comes to being a boss, which is something I'm trying to work on too of, "Please like me."
Rachael Renae: "Actually, you're the employee, but I don't want you to do any work because that would be hard for you."
Lauren Hom: Yeah, you're good. One thing that's been like eye-opening for me is as we've been working together for five years now, having more candid conversations about how the way we relate to each other, because we came into this in a business sense. I know, I'm aware because of my politics, the power dynamic between an employer and an employee.
I don't want to abuse that. I want to handle that with care, but I didn't realize the ways in which I think I was closing myself off to some of the wonderful aspects of Kristle and I's relationship now only seeing myself as I'm Kristle's employer and I don't want to overstep. The only value I can provide to Kristle as a human being is paying her paycheck.
Besides that, I am useless to her. It was literally my mindset. I didn't want to overstep too, because you hear a lot of noise online, which is valid, that when companies say, "We're a family here." Toxic, right? You don't want to get too close to your employer or your coworkers even, because you're all in this weird soup of work and life.
I think I internalized a lot of that, but then hearing her talk to me about how she saw it the same way of, "The only value I can provide to Lauren is my labor, and I must be a good employee." Listen, we've talked about this. I'm a simp for work when I'm an employee. I'm just like, "What can I do, daddy boss?" It's so bad. It's so bad, which is why I could never-
Rachael Renae: You have to work for yourself.
Lauren Hom: Yeah, I have to work for myself. I have to be a simp for my own business.
Rachael Renae: Instead you're a dom. Get it done!
Lauren Hom: It's been honestly one of the highlights of 2024 has been Kristle and I expanding our relationship outside of just work again in a non-toxic way that I would think I was worried about of like, "I don't want to..." We compartmentalize work and work relationships and then personal relationships, but doing things for each other. I knew Kristle was really busy over the summer so I meal prepped her a bunch of breakfasts, like frozen burritos. I know you love frozen burritos.
Rachael Renae: I love, I just made a bunch yesterday.
Lauren Hom: Kristle bought me a hot water kettle from my stove and I had so many horrific feelings as someone who's like, "Wait, my employee cannot buy me a gift. This feels so wrong." Money is supposed to only flow one way. Resources are supposed to flow one way, but we've been talking about reciprocity a two-way street. Being in community means giving and receiving and being okay with that. Also, asking if someone needs anything and also asking for what you need.
Rachael Renae: Asking for what we need. I've talked about this. I know in past episodes with this silly example of my birthday party, I always wanted a partner to throw me a birthday party.
Lauren Hom: Bake you a cookie.
Rachael Renae: Do nice things because a thoughtful person and so I always wanted a partner to do that, but I never asked when I was in a partnership. It's partially my fault and partially the people I dated weren't necessarily thoughtful in the same way that I am or wanted to receive that thoughtfulness. I threw myself a birthday party and I was like, "Hey, can you make cheesy potatoes? Can you do this? Can you do this?"
My friends were all like, "Yes, of course." If we can ask for, tell your people how you want to be loved, because we all love following instruction. If you tell me, "I actually really would love it if you could drive me to this place because I don't have a car." I'm like, "Yeah, I can do that unless it's the day I was supposed to bring you to the airport and then forgot, but we're going to pretend that day didn't happen."
Lauren Hom: We give each other grace. To reference that example you mentioning because I was going to the airport right after we recorded one day, and you were like, "I'll just drop you off." My natural reaction was like, "No, you don't have to do that." You were like, "But I want to." It's okay to inconvenience people the same way you and I have been doing that thing for maybe a year now, where we don't split the check when we go out. We just take turns paying because of this idea.
I don't know where we heard it, maybe on podcast about the monetary exchange is really fascinating because when you give someone money, it almost says like, "Okay, we've settled up our balance and now we can part ways." Technically, we don't owe anything to each other if we never wanted to see each other again, we don't have to.
The example I've been given in the past was like, it's for the same reason why you would never pull out a hundred bucks at Christmas dinner and give it to whoever's house you were at, being like, "Thank you so much for your time and resources and labor. I'd love for you to have this $100 as a token of my appreciation." That would be a social faux pas.
Rachael Renae: Oh my gosh.
Lauren Hom: We do it with when you're out to dinner and you're like, "Okay, you had this, you had this." I think that's not bad, I understand why we do it.
Rachael Renae: Can you imagine going to your family's Christmas dinner and they have a scale and you have to weigh your plate and then that's like-
Lauren Hom: A frozen yogurt shop? Like a Whole Foods Hot Bar.
Rachael Renae: Oh my god.
I feel like we're probably close to our time.
Lauren Hom: We are, we are.
Rachael Renae: Obviously, we didn't even talk about some of the things that we were planning to talk about, which is...
Lauren Hom: I can bring us back. I was going to say that one person we were going to mention was Lolly Lolly Ceramics both of us follow her on Instagram. I think this would be a nice note to end on. She made a post recently about scaling back her business, and I think, I could definitely relate to it. All the themes that we've been talking about throughout this episode of growth at all costs.
If you don't really stop to think twice, everything will push you towards away from creator and into a manager role. If any graphic designers are listening, there's that meme in our industry where it's that graphic of the amoeba to caveman to human, that amoeba to monkey to caveman trajectory, but then above it's supposed to be the trajectory of a graphic designer in corporate.
As you progress, as you start out all the programs, it's like all the icons of the programs you need to know. Then when you get to creative director, which is the top one, it's just a bottle of champagne. You're not even doing anything. Listen, I think a lot of people are striving towards the creative director paycheck.
I certainly was when I was in the agency world. However, in Lolly Lolly Ceramics' post, that's her Instagram handle, not her government name.
Rachael Renae: That we know of. We don't know her personally.
Lauren Hom: Love her work. She was talking about...
Rachael Renae: She had grown a ton and had, I think she said 12 employees.
Lauren Hom: A big studio.
Rachael Renae: ... made this post recently about stepping back and recognizing, actually not even her recognizing, but her partner recognizing that she was experiencing burnout and has decided to give her employees enough time to make new directions with their careers. She followed a dream that she's always had and move to New York.
Wants to go back, revert back to designing because she missed being a creative. I think that that trajectory is so common in a creative's field, especially if you find success, which I was scrolling back in her Instagram and looking at her 100 cup challenge.
Lauren Hom: I think she did the 100-Day Project, but for ceramics.
Rachael Renae: It was beautiful. I love her work, and that's when I started following, which we've talked about containers and how a challenge is a really good opportunity. She's a great example for that too, but finding success and then shifting gears from wheel throwing and hand building to slip casting and then expanding. That's such a huge amount of work and probably pressure that she had to feel. I don't know this person, but I feel very proud of her that she was like, "This isn't serving me anymore. I have to shift. I have to get back to the creativity."
Lauren Hom: I admire that so much as someone who can feel like a little bit of her story, because I think everything about the way we've been socialized to think about our careers is this exponential growth upward trajectory. It's honestly really fucked me up this year as you've probably, you've had a front row seat to this.
Going to culinary school, I knew it was going to put a slight pin in what I was doing. I was comfortable with that of, again, prioritizing play, going to pursue a dream and a goal of going to cook for a year and not really having a end goal with it, and just experimenting. Truly a year of prioritizing play.
What I wasn't expecting was this kind of whirlwind of coming back from culinary school, going through my breakup. Going through a slowdown in business and this big shift of not having an agent anymore. Having to just contend with, "This doesn't feel like I put a pin in it. This feels like I'm actually reverting." That feeling so profoundly bad.
Rachael Renae: I feel like when you were starting to recognize you were putting a lot of pressure on yourself, I am a failure. Instead of recognizing that it's part of the ebb and flow, and you're navigating this with grace.
Lauren Hom: Thank you. I think I'm an optimist, but I also, again, learning how our economy works, knowing the currents of capitalism, even though I know that business is not always going to be exponential growth or an upward trajectory as a freelancer, in the back of my mind, I'm like, "But I can do it, right?"
Rachael Renae: We all want it.
Lauren Hom: Exactly, it'd be nice if that happened, but I also know how precarious, even for anyone who's looking at me as like, "She has my dream job, career goals, whatever." Yeah, I love what I do.
Rachael Renae: #girlboss.
Lauren Hom: The tiny girlboss that lives inside of me, she's still in there. She still whispers in my ear. Listen, girlboss is basically the CEO we're talking about on the shoulder.
Rachael Renae: It’s Jeff Bezos in a wig.
Lauren Hom: Jess Bezos in drag.
Rachael Renae: Oh gosh.
Lauren Hom: Yes, Jess Bezos. I'm so sorry. I don't know what I'm doing right now. Are we going to create a character for the podcast?
Rachael Renae: Jess.
Lauren Hom: Back to girlboss. If you sell any of your creative services or products in a marketplace, you do have to put your little business hat on and listen to your inner girlboss. That's what she was saying in her post of like, sorry, I can't look at you. It's so nice to now be working with clay in a way that I'm not thinking about profit with every single piece that I make.
We've talked about this in season one. This is the reason why I was loving ceramics as my play, because I'm so slow at it that I would never monetize it. One, I would feel like a clown charging $3,000 for a ceramic baguette, even though I'm sure there's one person in the world who pay for, it doesn't excite me the way that-
Rachael Renae: You're not in it to make money.
Lauren Hom: No. It's not profitable, and I have no interest in being a production ceramicist whereas I for whatever reason was fine with, and even drawn towards being a quote unquote "production hand lettering artist." It was something that I got good at that similar to what Lolly was saying about having quick success and then growing the business.
My Tumblr blew up in 2012, which we were talking about before we started recording was a different era of internet as well. That was the niche internet era where yeah, it blew up. I had 50,000 Tumblr followers, but that led to freelance work, not any notoriety necessarily, or even Tumblr, the anonymity of Tumblr.
No one knew my face in a way that now if you blow up on Instagram, you're a personal brand whether you want to be or not. You can choose to capitalize on that or not. I understand why people do. Fuck, I would still do it now. I think these conversations are important, and I'm glad people are talking about the turbulence of quick success or even just internet virality and all this stuff. It can be financially rewarding. The person that's coming to mind right now is the Hawk Tuah Girl.
Rachael Renae: I have been blessed. I don't know that internet, that part of-
Lauren Hom: I'm so glad. I listen to a lot of media analysis and people get their 15 minutes of fame, and when you capitalize on something, it's like, I think a better analogy might be like child stars that we saw growing up, where yes, you're famous, you make money. People love you. People think you're attractive, you're literally getting all the flowers from society that we're told that we should want.
It is such a doozy to be available for public consumption. Then not only your personhood, but your creativity. If you don't have a solid foundation or you haven't thought these things through the same way I didn't really think about my values and ethics when I was freelancing when I was 23, which I don't fault myself for, it can be easy to just be pulled in every which way. Now I do feel like I have more of a firm stance.
It still is difficult making tough decisions because when you have a firmer stance, I think things oftentimes feel opposed to a lot of the things that you stand for and your values. I think we wanted to end on referencing that post because it's okay to everyone I think gets the spark. If you catch any kind of wave of success, it's easy to get swept up in it.
It's actually good if you're curious about it, to try and ride it out should you want to experience that and then you can always go back. I think knowing that you can always turn around or that you're in the driver's seat and you can always reduce, scale back. It's not a failure. It's a creative decision. It's a more minimal setup.
Rachael Renae: I think it's really admirable when people do this. I think when people close businesses that have virality and have public success, a lot of people are disappointed. I think it's even braver for people to close their businesses. Not even that she's closing, I don't know.
Lauren Hom: She just scaled back.
Rachael Renae: It's different.
Lauren Hom: She said she's going to be focusing on interiors, furniture, just exploring, giving herself the gift of the space of having time to explore other interests.
Rachael Renae: I think it's so, so important for us. That's why I talk about reflection so much because we have to know if the thing that we're doing and spending all of our time and energy and stress on is providing value to our lives. If we are sacrificing our mental health or our physical health for this goal that society says that we should want, is it worth it?
Sometimes it is. It depends on what the goal is and how it's fulfilling you, if it is fulfilling you. I think it was really cool to see that and the fact that we both were thinking about it independently and then talked about it.
Lauren Hom: Sometimes I love how small the internet is.
Rachael Renae: Truly.
Lauren Hom: You and I, of course, would have similar algorithms.
Rachael Renae: That makes sense, absolutely. So before we wrap up, of course, I want to ask you what you're excited about? What play are you working on right now? I know you're in maybe stress mode.
Lauren Hom: It's fine. The recent play that I've done is I foraged some crab apples down the street, I made apple jelly because crab apples are high in pectin, which is the gelling agent in jams, and I made Kristle some applesauce. I know Kristle loves applesauce.
Rachael Renae: Beautiful.
Lauren Hom: I got to do that. I also went dancing last night, which felt really nice to move my body. I was on the phone with my friend Lauren years ago. This is shortly after lockdown happened. I was telling her that while journaling, I realized that I grew up dancing. You and I have talked about this. I grew up dancing. I did ballet and jazz and just all these anything at the rec center basically.
Then I would go clubbing in college for two years because 18-year-old me in New York City. Then after that, I stopped dancing just like, "Okay, now I'm an adult. Now I got to hunch over my computer." I forgot about how playful and how expressive moving your body is. it really is a release the same way that spending time working on a creative project is fun or like kneading bread dough or whatever. Dancing is, I always forget how much I love it.
Rachael Renae: I feel like it's a playful thing that also comes with the physical nature of physical release. I think I've talked about the book Burnout.
Lauren Hom: Endorphins.
Rachael Renae: Absolutely. I think I've talked about the book burnout before on the podcast, but having a physical cycle for the stress in your body to be released is really important so they recommend physical exercise. Dancing is of course one of those things like an animal in fight or flight shakes when it escapes the predator, for example because it's releasing the stress from its body.
We are societal programmed creatures to not shake or scream if our boss yells at us or if we're having a hard week or a deadline or something. If we're not moving our bodies to allow that stress cycle to complete, it's being stored at the body. Keeps score as they say.
Lauren Hom: I have heard that.
Rachael Renae: The dancing is a really good release.
Lauren Hom: I'll let you go to yours after this. I heard the same thing happens when we scroll on social media and see emotionally inflammatory posts, which is normal, but if that gets shown to you, not at your own will because you're just scrolling, seeing what you're seeing, we have the stress hormone that's released, but there's no release in terms of running or shaking like you said, and it just builds up. That's why it feels so bad to do a doom scroll.
Rachael Renae: I don't know and maybe it's because I'm a sensitive little creature, but I can't really even watch. I know you don't like gory stuff.
Lauren Hom: No.
Rachael Renae: I can't even, I watched the, there's an Alexander Skarsgård movie. It's a Viking movie.
Lauren Hom: Hot.
Rachael Renae: I thought so. It was so violent because they were depicting the way the Vikings were. I literally had to do breathing exercises in the theater because it was stressing my body out so much.
Lauren Hom: Oh, no.
Rachael Renae: I think that I read somewhere or heard on a podcast or something where it's like our brains don't know the difference of us not actually experiencing it. People that are not bothered by gory violent stuff, are you okay? Maybe they're releasing their stress some other way, but I was holding onto it.
Lauren Hom: Maybe they release each other way. I know some people who like horror film.
Rachael Renae: I mean, me too. Anyway.
Lauren Hom: What's your play? What's your fun?
Rachael Renae: My play.
Lauren Hom: Giant eyeballs.
Rachael Renae: Giant eyeballs, yes. This will come out after Halloween, but last episode I talked about being a clam with a pearl, and I have since changed my mind to be a werewolf. Lauren hates my inspiration pictures, so I can't wait to do it. Lauren's going to help me tomorrow, paint some paper lanterns into eyeballs for my front porch.
Also, I remembered that I had a bunch of old quilting books and decided to just browse through them and save some stuff for inspiration. I did a little noodling in color theory, sort of planning a quilt, and I'm really excited.
Lauren Hom: Love that.
Rachael Renae: Anything else you want to chat about?
Lauren Hom: I got my sourdough starter out of the fridge for the first time in a while because Kristle's doing her prayer hands because it's finally getting cool enough to bake.
Rachael Renae: Yay.
Lauren Hom: I've reactivated it, and you can actually sit over, it's bubbling on the counter. No, it's behind the chocolate chips.
Rachael Renae: I see, I see.
Lauren Hom: It is healthy and active. This week I'm going to bake sourdough.
Rachael Renae: Well, if you need a second person after Kristle to give any extras to-
Lauren Hom: I can make multiple loaves at once.
Rachael Renae: I would love to be a recipient of your bread.
Lauren Hom: I want to try to recreate as one more intensive project. This is very Michigan specific. Hey, Midwest listeners. There's a chocolate cherry bread from Zingerman's that's so good. Maybe it's nuts and dried cherries. It's sweet and just with a slather of salted butter. Kelly got me a loaf one year and I was just like, "What is this?"
Rachael Renae: Please make that and let me test it.
Lauren Hom: Yeah.
Rachael Renae: Wow.
Lauren Hom: I'm going to try.
Rachael Renae: Bread and butter is the ultimate.
Lauren Hom: So good.
Rachael Renae: Amazing. I am also excited about all the Halloween candy that I have just-
Lauren Hom: Rachael brought over some caramel apple pops one that she's finishing up right now. It's getting into that razor blade territory for you. Delicious.
Rachael Renae: Which means I should in fact brush my teeth. On that gross girl's note, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
Lauren Hom: Thanks for joining us. Bye.