How Tanmoy Goswami of Sanity by Tanmoy builds products for his mental health journalism startup
We're putting together some of the best sessions from Splice Beta 2023. This episode features Tanmoy Goswami of Sanity by Tanmoy. Tanmoy talks to a large crowd about how — and why — he builds products for his mental health journalism startup.
He also discusses his unique approach to success metrics, emphasising the importance of consistency and recognising that people support the creator rather than the product
Overall, Tanmoy's entrepreneurial journey serves as an inspiring narrative of resilience, innovation, and the impactful intersection of mental health and storytelling.
Tanmoy Goswami on LinkedIn
Sanity by Tanmoy
Splice Beta 2023
The transcript
This audio recording from Splice Beta 2023 was transcribed by OpenAI’s Whisper and turned into paragraphs by OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5. These tools can make mistakes, especially when adjusting for and paraphrasing spoken words. Check important information against the actual podcast.
Okay, shall we do the almost unthinkable thing of starting on time? Awesome. I am very disappointed that in spite of express instructions from Alan and Rishad, not enough people have come in shorts, so I thought I'll sort of remedy that a little bit.
Alright, since the theme of this year's Beta is audience or Ellie, I thought I'll start with a few gems that I've received from my Ellies all over the world. Please feel free to come on up and occupy the front row seats. Yeah, as you guys as well, if you want to come and just sit here, that's totally cool. So I'll quickly take you through some of the pearls, gems that I've got from my audience.
This is a person that I've never met, will likely never meet because we live several thousand miles away and I just got this message from him one day and he said he wanted to run a marathon to raise money for my work. I forbid him from doing it. This is a mother with an 18-year-old daughter and this is one of many such emails that I get from the people in the community. Yeah, this happens. Somebody got a raise at work bonus and then sent me 300 euros because they said the reason, part of the reason I got this bonus was because I learned a lot from your work and it only felt right to share that with you.
And then this, please cancel my subscription. There are typically two reasons. A, can't afford it anymore, lost my job. B, you know I'm in a good place in life, you write about a lot of dark shit and I don't want to re-traumatize myself all over again and that latter email always makes me happy. I feel so happy. I feel like, go child, go forth into the world. Welcome to my life.
This is who I am. I'm a cishet, middle class, upper caste, majority community, English speaking man. Only thing I'm not is white, otherwise I would have ticked all the boxes of privilege. No offense to the white people in the room. You will mandatorily get a copy of my business card after this meeting because nobody cares, so you are all going to get one. I have lived with mental illnesses for the vast majority of my life. I am a suicide prevention advocate. You can read the rest if you can understand my handwriting.
Right there at the back, my wife and son, hello. Thanks guys for coming. Okay, so Sanity by Tanmoy. Rewinding to that horrible time, December 2020, I was working at a startup, a European media startup, Sharts Down. I had just pivoted from being a business journalist to writing full-time on mental health. My father is in the ICU, I lost my job, pandemic is beginning. And that resulted in a glorious oh shit moment. So of course I did what any sane person would do, I started a sub-stack and I called it Sanity by Tanmoy because Sanity was the name of the beat that I had created out of nothing in my previous job.
This is what it looked like in the early days. That was the logo that I created at around one in the morning because I felt like that's what the inside of my head looked like at that time. December 15, 2020, the first newsletter goes out on sub-stack with paying subscribers, probably the first Indian sub-stack with paying subscribers at that point. And this is what a friend said, Sanity by Tanmoy, sounds like a perfume brand. So I said, you know what, that's just as well because mainstream media is doing such a stinking job of reporting on mental health, it is stigmatizing, shallow, sensationalistic and completely dominated by the West.
I benefited from some good bad timing, some of you would know the COVID bump was real for independent creators, unprecedented public interest in mental health. That is a graph, that is a chart that I created as part of a fellowship, I'll talk about that a little later, where I analyzed the spike in mental health coverage in English language media globally as well as in India. And if you see that red line, that is global coverage, the blue line is Indian coverage, and right about March, April, 2021, we had an almost 3X spike in mental health news stories in the mainstream media.
I also benefited from being a rare brown guy talking about mental health with the audacity to ask people for money for it. So I benefited from all of these things, but when I started out, the lady from sub-stack was kind enough to hand hold me through the process, I was like, listen, why is anybody going to pay for this? And she said, you aren't asking people for money, you're giving them a chance to go with you on your journey. And I said, that is some empowering stuff, man, like, okay, I'm actually, like people are paying me because, like, what, like for the pleasure of going on a journey with me. Yeah, it's a little woo-woo and esoteric, but it really changed my thinking and I'm very grateful because what happened after that was bonkers.
In the first 100 days, it becomes one of the top six paid health-related newsletters on sub-stack, the only non-Western title on the list. I think the guy before me, number five on that list, was somebody who ran for mayor of some big American city. So clearly, like, you know, I felt very proud. But I treated myself to an extra brownie that night. The only non-Western title on the list, and then that was followed by a place at the entrepreneurial journalism program at CUNY, which is something that I can't recommend strongly enough to everyone who wants to embrace the creator life.
That program sort of pushed me to start thinking about doing something outside of sub-stack. For various reasons, sub-stack wasn't a good fit for me. One of the key reasons was that I was ferociously privacy-minded. I did not want to collect any data on my users. And sub-stack, out of the goodness of their heart, would force a lot of data on me. And I didn't know what to do with that data, and I didn't want to collect data on a bunch of really, really wounded, hurting people who were gravitating towards me because they found a part of them in me. So I moved to Ghost, and 2020, on August, the new site launches. And some incredibly generous things have been said about it. I have published 130-plus original stories. So far, the actual number, the total volume of stories, probably closer to 200. But 70 of those stories are repurposed, and I want to talk about that later.
So what is it? It is India's first mental health storytelling platform, completely independent, reader-funded, and I basically cover four intersections, mental health, ex-politics, economics, culture, and tech. I do not offer any advice. I'm not a mental health professional. My credo is that mental health is a ping-pong game between your biology and your environment. It is not just about chemicals in your head. No hard paywall, three tiers, people can voluntarily support for as long as they want to. No questions asked.
Paying supporters don't get anything extra. You get what you see. And I'm very proud of this illustration. So please take screenshots and make it famous.
Why do we need sanity? 330 million people will go through mental illness in their lifetime, and those are just diagnosed numbers. Diagnosis is a function of intense privilege. A lot of people just can't access diagnosis. One suicide every 40 seconds. Low- and middle-income countries, the part of the world that I come from, 80% of the world's population, we get 20% of the resources to deal with mental health challenges, because the media does not recognize lived experience experts.
I have worked in newsrooms for 15 years, I've led newsrooms. I've worked at Fortune, I've worked at Economic Times, India's largest business paper. And we have this dialer code culture for every story, whether it is a story on textiles or whether it is a story on the automobile or whether it is a story on LGBTQIA, we have some numbers on our speed dials and we call the same experts again and again for quotes, because they're supposed to be wiser than the actual people who live through stuff in their own lives. And finally, because I was tired of this, whether you're a rich person, you're a poor person, whatever your background is, there's always some uncles with an unwanted opinion about depression. And I wanted to sort of show a certain finger to those uncles, not making that any more explicit because my child's in the room.
The offering, very simple. I do theme-based seasons. So typically, a season runs between one and two months, depending on how quickly I run out of steam. That really is the criterion that I apply. When I feel like I've had enough of this topic, I just stop. I choose the seasons based on my own interest and community demand through surveys. I'll talk about that later if you wish me to. I do weekly long-form newsletters. I generally don't use the word newsletters for reasons that I will hopefully explain. I send out voice letters. These are sort of behind-the-scenes snippets on what got me to talk about a particular topic, typically a 90-second, 220-second clip, completely unscripted, usually really badly produced, either from my terrace, lots of background noise, works like a dream. People love it.
I do annual community meetups with speakers from within the community. I have started a second newsletter recently, which is more literary. Then I had started a podcast and very quickly dropped it because it wasn't worth it. My readers, my subscribers, my supporters were furious. They were like, who asked you to do this shit? We don't care. We don't want this. I was like, I want to give you something extra because you're paying. They were like, did we ask you for it? Quickly stopped. That's what my community meetups look like, the invites. I have some phenomenal people in the community. They are lived experience experts, policymakers, grant makers, funders, philanthropists, mental health professionals, the whole shebang. I'm just incredibly lucky to have some of them come and speak at these events. This is all online. I'm told that the audience that we get at these meetups can be twice thrice as big as, suppose if the Times of India would organize, please don't tweet this because I did use to work for them at some point.
That's the second newsletter. It's called user manual for the self. The motto is a field guide for living with too much feeling. That's the offering. This is a section that I'm very proud of. This is completely run by the community. So far, I've had nine people from six different countries write, and I always pay them even if they are paying supporters of sanity. I still pay them and honor them. Some are very kind and they refuse it.
My editorial DNA, I think it was in the previous session, somebody was talking about combining personalness with journalistic ethos and I thought this show might be helpful in showing you my approach. So, each of those stories is usually negotiated through the twin lenses of the soul of lived experience and the rigor of research. I'm going to put that on a T-shirt soon so you heard it first here. And once you read these stories, hopefully you will see what I mean by it. My stories are unabashedly first person based and I use that vantage to then ask probing questions. I take my own expertise very seriously. I take the expertise of people in my community very seriously and I make no apologies for being first person oriented.
But there is a lot of research and somebody from the audience asked a very important question about do you miss speaking truth to power? And I have a very, very big problem with the assumption that creators and storytellers do not speak enough truth to power. Sometimes our very existence raises questions that the people in power are very uncomfortable about. So, I don't think that journalists have some kind of exclusive license to speak truth to power.
Okay, I have at last count, I think the number is probably closer to 60 but definitely 50 plus across six continents and 60% of them are women. That number is probably actually a little higher. Anybody's guess why there are more women than men in the community? In this case, I wish I could have more men actually in the community. But I'm very lucky for all these wonderful women. I'm trying very consciously to make that a 50-50 split but it's hard. If you attended the morning session with the GNI people, the Google people, they were asking us about our minimum sort of, you know, what is the floor that you set for yourself beneath which you will not go, that's mine. I've survived three years.
This stuff pays my rent, pays for groceries, and pays my child's fees. That's my minimum sort of expectation from this product. I have no plans of world domination. I do not want to scale. I do not want to make an empire. I just want this to survive for as long as I can with dignity without having to dip into my savings. For starters, and everything else that happens is really a bonus, including being at places like this.
Yeah, so I do wonder. I sometimes, yeah, this is how my brain functions. If I want to buy something a little expensive, like a consumer durable, okay, that's probably like four annual subscriptions worth of it. All right. Yeah, I think I can do that. But all of this is bonkers because here's some data. I don't think we talk about this enough. Yeah, 23% of creators in Brazil, that's a fifth, are unable to make any money, like zero. Brazil is fairly comparable to India, right? The average earnings, less than $100 a month, like just sit with that for a while.
The fact that we are here 36 months on, and I honestly haven't felt that I am just being emotional about my product and I should have closed it down a long time ago and I'm just pushing a dead horse, I really genuinely feel that we have achieved, I have achieved some kind of sustainability and for me, that is good enough. But there's more. It earned me a fellowship at Oxford. I'm a first-generation university goer. My parents barely had one meal a day when they were growing up. When I was at Oxford, I was like, listen, the next destination for me can't be anything less than NASA, right? So I better stop when I'm at the peak of my powers. So I withdrew from the race, we moved from Delhi to a small mountain town in the south. And yeah, some more vanity achievements. I still can't get over the fact that I was cited as an expert in Forbes. I used to be in that space, I used to be a business journalist with Forbes as number one competitor, Fortune, and then somebody there was writing a piece on public health and quoted me and I was like, this is weird. 21 lessons. I'm not going to go through all of them. I will put the presentation in that folder, the shared folder, I think that Alan and Rishad have set up. But the highlighted ones are ones that I think merit your attention.
Please don't quit your job because you're passionate, just don't do it. This is bad, this is torture, okay? A lot of young people come to me and say, you know, I want to start a newsletter, a podcast, I'm like, wait, wait, wait, how much money do you have in inheritance? And if you don't, then please passion can wait, don't quit your job. This is a treadmill. Once you've turned it on, you can't step off. It's very hard to stop a newsletter, especially one that people are paying for, especially one that people are paying a year ahead. You can't just stop. Yeah, there are always questions about measuring success, right? What do you measure? Open rates, subscriber growth. I realized that these are all legacy metrics. Many of us have left that field precisely because we did not fit in and we are still playing by the same old legacy, you know, measures of success. So it could mean very different things for different people. I do not track, like I said, I do not track any data. I have, I sometimes look at open rates and such. I will talk about what I do track.
Being very clear about your motivation. And usually, if your answer is, I want to do this to help others, that's a lie. Or you've not thought through deeply enough. Because that can be a byproduct of other stuff. But if that is your primary motivation, please think again. Unless you have a lot of privilege, helping others should not be your primary motivation.
People are backing you, not the product. I think Alan was talking about it, Anubha was talking about it in the morning. A lot of my supporters, I think the last time, like I know at least five people who are like recurring supporters for the last three years, who have not read a single newsletter. They never show up for the community meetups. But they keep sending me money. Works for me. And when I asked them why they do that, they said, we don't care. If you stopped, we will still send you money. I said, don't do that. That's messed up. But they do because they feel that this stuff needs to exist for others who don't have access to anything like this. And it is so absurd that it takes a lot of getting used to. That people will pay you for nothing, literally. But for you to get to that point, of course, you have to show up at the dance week after week after week so that they take you seriously. And only then will you be worthy enough of that kind of support. And even then, that number is not going to be in the 10,000 true fans, total garbage. For most people who look like me, complete garbage. You cannot have 10,000 paying supporters working on a niche newsletter in India. It's not possible. So 100 is a good number. 500 is an amazing number. 4,000 is get out of here. So but that also stings a little bit because in my case, I talk a lot about my own experiences. And sometimes you feel a little yuck because you are constantly performing your pain and you're monetizing your own stories.
There was a slide there which talked about how I live-streamed a panic attack on Instagram. I did that as a thought experiment, but then I was like six people paid for that. I was like, this is really messed up. But it is what it is. Another very important learning. So every now and then, I feel like the stuff that gets the most amount of love, I'm not very proud of that stuff because that's like touchy-feely stuff. I want to be known for earth-shattering, reporting. So I did a piece on how Zoom invested in mental health. I broke that story. And I thought, yes, this is going to get me a few award nominations. Nobody even noticed that story. I think the guys at Zoom read it. But apart from that, nobody even noticed that story. And I learned that personal pieces will always get more love than reported pieces. And it makes sense because have we not been lamenting about the fact that people are leaving mainstream media because they don't see more of themselves in that dystopian space? It makes more sense. Very important learning. Your brand will always grow faster than your revenue. What do I mean by that? I have been at amazing places in the past 18 months, places that were unthinkable for me. The International Journalism Festival, again thanks to Alan and Rishad, the Fellowship at Oxford. Now at Splice Beta, all of this adds up to some kind of personal brand building, I suppose. What is this going to lead to 2000? I mean, I'd encourage all of you to pay and become supporters. But I know maybe three of you will.
So the business never grows as fast as the brand. And you have to make peace with that. Because if you're constantly thinking, oh my God, my work is getting so much love, appreciation, respect, admiration, why am I not getting more money out of this? That's the name of the game. That is how it's always going to be.
Also, another important thing to remember for people who work in the social justice or sort of like adjacent spaces is that most of your readers and even people who randomly come across your work are just going to be super nice to you. They're just going to be nice to you. No one's going to come to a mental health creator and say, you're shit. So just like a lot of it is just people being nice. It doesn't really mean anything business-wise, right?
Community. At the CUNY program, Jeff Jarvis, who was one of our instructors, was like, how many of you want to build a community? And all of us were like, yay, that's me. And he's like, you're so arrogant. You think you're going to go and build a community? You think your community didn't exist before you? You know? Like just find the community and just pray that in some small way you can help them out a little bit. That's all you can do.
And that's when I realized that I'm actually working for a market of one and that's myself. I have no control over what other people might or might not like. I don't have the resources to do extensive surveys, market research. I just write what I feel like writing. And people coalesce around that authenticity and vulnerability. If you try to do, that's just my experience. In my experience, if I try to tailor my content too much to what my community might want from me, it sounds super fake and people see right through it.
So yeah, I was awarded a GNI, I don't know what to call it, funding from GNI last year. I respectfully declined. I had a lot of soul-searching. And I realized that for somebody who probably gets 12 or 15 good days every month, I don't want all that responsibility of taking money and then even if they're not asking me for anything in return, I feel like with money comes the sort of implicit responsibility to build bigger, grow, scale, hire someone. I cannot do any of those things. I'm very, very aware of my limits. And I want to stay intentionally small. I want to stay as small as possible because when I have my community meetups and 150 people show up on Zoom, I know all those 150 people. And that means something to me. And I don't want to lose that.
And like I said, I genuinely can't see myself building a big empire. And when I put out an update, this is the kind of stuff that people said. A lot of people immediately send me money. They always do this. Most of them, I think about 60% of my paying supporters are in the West. So I take back what I said about the white people earlier.
Build in public. This is important. This is something that gets thrown around a lot. I do build in public, but that's because I'm freaking lonely. I don't do it because it's cool. I do it because that's my way to sort of really establish some kind of connection with the world around me. So I publish an annual report every year. And I put out all my numbers. It's on my website. I encourage you to go have a look. Financial numbers, editorial numbers, what worked, what didn't, the works. This year, I might not publish the money figures because it's embarrassing.
Yeah, I talked about this. Own your I. I realized at some point last year, the year before, I was constantly referring to sanity and myself using the royal we. Who's this we? There's nobody else. It's just me doing everything. Sometimes people would write to me saying, you know, I've been trying to reach Tanmoy's team to sort of like update my card details and I'd be like, hello, Tanmoy's team here. So I decided to drop. I never used the word we anymore. I figured that I used to lapse into we because it sounds more formal, professional, whatever. And I said, no, there's no we. So own your I. That's another lesson that I've learned. And then finally, another very, very critical lesson we learned at CUNY. Really diversify.
Certainly, here's the text organized into paragraphs:
---
Try and create as many revenue streams as possible. Use your primary platform, which is, in my case, the newsletter as the funnel head, and then sort of try and see how many little properties you can create.
Now, I've started that on a platform called TopMate. So now I do calls every month, about 10 days a month. I have blocked out a couple of hours to do paid consulting calls for people who work in workplace mental health, who are interested in working with lived experience experts. I do a lot of pro bono calls with students and psychology grads who want some guidance on careers, etc. But I do paid calls with everyone else.
I recently did a whole series of very, very well-produced videos with a corporate client on workplace mental health. So that was another way to diversify. And then when I really, really want to do some reporting, I reach out to people. I reach out to like-minded friends in the grant space. And I wanted to do this series. I'm very proud of the series. I did a five-part series on suicide prevention initiatives in the global south. And the good people at Mariwala Health Initiative gave me a little grant to do that. And this is probably the one editorial property that I'm the proudest of. So another way to diversify.
This is not me, by the way. This is just a screen grab from Dan Oshinsky's incredible resource called the Inbox Collective. And that's something that is in the works now for me. I want to get into eBooks. And this is where I want to sort of join the dots and talk about repurposing your content. Many of us, this is a very common thing. We put the story out. We go hammer and tongs when Twitter was still a thing, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, publicize it, market it for like two days, and then drop it. Forget all about it. No. People don't see your stuff when you put it out. You might feel like, why am I rehashing the same old shit 10 days later? But people haven't seen it the first time around. So you've got to find ways to keep things, you know, floating up. Especially the stuff that you're very proud of. High-effort things.
Yeah, I was wondering, who is supporting you in building this further? Because do you have kind of like a board of directors or a mentor or no? Would you like to be on my board of directors, Sana? There, you're hired. I do have about 20 people who are my earliest and longest-running supporters. I do actually call them my board of directors because every time I make a critical decision like moving from subtract to ghost, I run it by them. But apart from that, there is nobody. I had one intern briefly last year. Again, the community paid for her stipend. And I had hired her to help me with product development and business development. But I'm such an incorrigible editor that I ended up making her write for me. So, and I ended up paying her just to write. So no, I haven't taken on anyone. There is no plan to take on anyone in the near future. There are guest contributors and that's the extent of external support. And then there is the community that I reach out to every now and then to wine and vent. Which is a very valuable service. Anyone else?
Yeah. Hi. So I just wanted to hear a little bit more about the community events that you mentioned that's part of what you offer your community. What is that experience like? What do you guys do together? Subscribe and come for the next one. These are open to all. This is not just for paying supporters. Everyone can attend. Gosh, what is it like?
Sometimes it goes on for like four hours, and I get tired, and then I check out and this is still going at it like people will start singing, reading poetry. People have legit met each other even though they live one block away from each other. Like I have people who are supporters in the Netherlands, and they've found each other on during a meetup and now they've gone on coffee dates and such. So I present like the annual report. I invite guests from within the community to talk about their areas of expertise like those three wonderful women. And then it is freestyle, essentially. Does that answer your question? But do come for the next one. I'll look out for you. No, it's all on Zoom. Yeah. Correct. Yes. I'm never invited for those things. Yeah. Anybody else?
Hi. I'm curious as to how much you know about your audience or about your subscribers. So are most of them based in India or elsewhere? What is sort of their average age group? Like what is their sort of income bracket like when I started, I think for the first year and a half, it was about 70% non-Indian and 30% Indian. And that's because a lot of them are following me from my previous job where I also had a newsletter. Now, I think currently it's closer to 50, 50, 50% Indians, 50% overseas. What else do I know about them? Like I said, most of them are women. The vast majority of them are women. I don't know much about there. I don't know anything about their income levels actually. I have no idea. I've never asked. Don't want to ask. Apart from that, most of them come to this platform because it's sort of old cliche in mental health because there is just a frightening amount of loneliness out there. A lot of them are dealing with, you know, they have children, they're caregivers. They don't have the language to relate to that. They don't know how to break down that sort of wall between them and their children. I've had people like that. A lot of people are interested in the tech policy landscape because I write a lot about mental health apps and how they're a complete nightmare, privacy nightmare. So a lot of people, a lot of the investors read this because they want to know what's going on in that space. A lot of philanthropists and funders read it because they want to see what the gap areas are. And that's about all that I know about my audience. I know all of them. I'm actually great friends with them, but there's certain things that I've never asked them. Not with all, you know, whatever number, all 5,000 of them. But like I said, the core community, I personally know them, but I never really asked because, yeah, I feel like the more I know about them, it just complicates my life. Because then I feel like I have to do something with this information. And I don't have the bandwidth to do too much with that information, so, yeah. Who else?
We're just starting. So good to have you. So what's stopping males from accessing mental health, interfacing with content? You said most of your subscribers are female. So could you pinpoint some of the reasons we males are lagging on this? So yeah, the question was why are men so reticent or why do we have mostly women? Who are interested in this? This is like a PhD thesis question, right? There was, I don't know if you missed it, but there was, there's a story that I did on why men open up about the mental health to their barbers. I encourage you to read that story to answer your questions. Men would sooner talk to their barbers about their mental health problems than go to a therapist or a psychiatrist. And it is just good old patriarchy, my friend. A lot of them would not be caught dead reading this on their mobile phones when they're traveling on the metro. So, but I think things are changing. And also we have to understand that, you know, mental health, the way I look at it is very intersectional. It is not just a clinical thing, right? It is not just that if you have depression diagnosis, then you should read this. It's a lot about, you know, social currents that don't necessarily fit into just clinical categories. So maybe a lot of men just don't see their experiences reflected in this because, you know, they haven't had the, they don't even have the language. Most men don't even have the language, the license, the permission to, you know, talk about this stuff. So it's patriarchy mostly, really. And also there is this other, for the same reasons, we have so few male therapists, therapists who are men. A, because it pays shit, so obviously women are going to do that job in greater numbers. Families don't want their, their male children to take up therapy as a profession. Psychiatry is a different thing because then you're a doctor and then that's socially sanctioned. But therapist is a feminine thing. It's a feminine identity.
So very few men become therapists. That, in turn, shuts the door on the face of other men who want to be in therapy but are very uncomfortable going to a woman therapist. So it's a vicious cycle that keeps perpetuating itself. There is a story on why there are so few male therapists also on the side. So have a look.
Rishad, you have relinquished all moral claim to asking me to close soon because you showed up two minutes before the end. I've come late too, so guilty as charged. But I was coming from a session downstairs on funding, right? One of the speakers there said that a couple of years ago some of the things that they would never touch with a barge pole would be issues like mental health, etc. And now it is cool and kosher and looked upon brightly. Because I know you a little bit personally, I know you have sort of an antiseptic aspect to looking at it. And I'm wondering, this is such vital work. In India, I don't see men doing this vital work. What would it convince you to do more and more of it? And how are you looking at it over the next two years, three years? I don't want to say five years because who knows.
Yeah, thanks, Anubha. What will it take for me to keep doing this work? I have several times decided to give up. In the past three years, there have been at least half a dozen times when I'm like, I'm done with this. I can't do this. Like I said, this is heavy stuff. It's not fun. Nobody gets up on the morning and decides to write about suicide. It's not fun. But every time I've decided, an email has popped up in my inbox with stuff like that. How do you stop when a mother in Florida tells you that they've given up on their child or somebody sitting in church, an American veteran sitting in a church says I was about to give up and then your article popped up on my feed on LinkedIn. And I read that, and I was like, at least there's one guy who understands, so please do this. Please continue. You can't give up. Now, this is all very bad if you are business-minded. You can't be emotional about this stuff, right? But as long as I keep getting feedback like that, I will continue, even if it means scaling it down, paring it down, and finding my sustenance elsewhere, sanity is not going anywhere. Secondly, thank you, thank you. In terms of money, I have done some work to de-risk it a little bit this year. Like I said, I diversified a fair bit by building all these little attachments. And I'm hoping to do a lot more of that next year. But like I said, the bottom line is that this work will exist as long as, especially given the macro environment that we live in, there's so much shit. You can't control anything, apart from that one person who feels that your work has made a difference to their lives. I think we can squeeze in one last question. Yes, sir. Please.
Hi. Actually, I was the one who asked about the personal-ness, impersonal-ness of journalism and content creation. But for you, I want to ask, how do you deal or negotiate with the pressure that you might be building your life's work as a writer or as a creator? How do you go over that pressure every time you write? This goes on into your records. This could be read maybe into your time. So look back at something that you said. How do you get through that pressure? Yeah, thanks for asking. I think, so two things, you know, first, a few days ago, somebody commented under one of my stories saying, you do realize you're making history here. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, step back. History, making history. Like, yeah, this stuff hasn't happened. So I don't take myself very seriously. I have a very, very strong and wonderful imposter syndrome that keeps me really grounded. I often think about how that one at the back who's five now, when he's 18 and he reads this, what is he going to think about it? That's one question I ask myself every day. And as long as, I mean, I really don't know what he will make of it when he grows up, but I do think about it a lot because I do a lot of work on children's mental health, on young people's mental health, cover that quite a lot. And I feel that five years on, if a few of them would sort of just look, read this stuff and say, if a 40-year-old dude can talk about this, you know, surely it's okay, we can talk about it too. I don't take myself too seriously, that's the only. But I'm very paranoid, like, clinically paranoid. So yeah, it's not all roses and feathers, it does get thorny from time to time. But yeah, this is just, go back to that point in that slide where I talked about how if you are doing this, if you think you're doing this to help others, you are lying. I started doing this for survival, I needed to say stuff, and that's how it started. And I still do it for that reason.
So thank you all very, very much. Thank you