Draft Four: Finish things

On building through the chaos.

The Sunday I sent my last letter, a huge protest took over the streets of Bucharest, a march stretching from Piața Universității to Piața Victoriei. It was gloves-needed-cold as I stood on a street corner for 45 minutes, watching it go by. It was organized by the conservative nationalistic party AUR (it’s four pillars are: faith, liberty, family, nation), and people were grouped by county, the names on large placards: Dolj, Mehedinți, my home state of Mureș, Bistrița Năsăud, Vaslui etc.

We’re talking tens of thousands of people, waving flags, blowing into red-yellow-blue vuvuzelas, and chanting “freedom”. It took me a while to shake-off the feeling these protesters were appropriating speech that only recently belonged to the pro-EU camp, to the tens of thousands I was often amidst and who took to the streets all through the 2010s against government corruption, neglect and impunity; fighting – or so the story went – against the trend of illiberal or even autocratic democracies. (Kind of like what’s happening in Serbia and Slovakia today.)

And now, here we were, just a few years later. The protest chants tackled rule of law, ending corruption, cleaning up the political class, but the protagonists and the framing had changed. Some want Romania to be great again. Some want to feel pride. Some are tired of feeling like second class citizens. Some feel cheated. Some have had enough of us woke snowflakes. And some of them are angry.

Sure: you had your party apparatchiks, your pay-to-play protesters, your political opportunists riding a populist wave for their personal gain, your dangerous far-right elements streaming their way through an open Overton window – but you also had families pushing strollers, elderly folks in need of a salvation narrative, Romanians living abroad clinging to a dream of a prosperous country they could one day return to.

Sitting on that street corner I couldn’t help thinking of the region’s illiberal autocrats enjoying Romania’s chaos, or the new oligarchs of Silicon Valley pushing the Trumpian agenda of punishing dissenters under the guise of upholding free speech. Part of me is scared – not of the people that passed me by (or not yet), nor of those who zig-zagged through the crowds selling flags and patriotic vuvuzelas, but of the amoral self-anointed saviors – politicians, technologists, profiteers – who traffic in persuasion at scale. Just so we don’t forget: Călin Georgescu remains a frontrunner for the May elections.

If Facebook now says it’s OK to call gay people freaks and immigrants filthy pieces of shit, if non-binary Messenger themes are a threat, that means we are not just asking for “freedom” and “to be seen” – we are also allowing a process of othering.

Polarization needs enemies, and they are multiplying in the Romanian imagination, too: gays and trans people, the “woke”, mainstream politicians, but why not the migrants taking our jobs, journalists (harassment at protests is now common) or, come to think of it, anyone not-Romanian enough.

This is the worse-case scenario, I know. But sit with it.

There is this this bitter joke in Transylvania, where I come from, that was brilliantly captured a decade ago by playwright Csaba Székely in a play called MaRó (which also stands for Magyar and Romanian): an ethnic Hungarian attends a football match between the two national teams. He gets roughed up by the Romanians because he is Hungarian (never mind the Romanian citizenship), and then he gets roughed up by the Hungarians because he is a Romanian citizen (never mind the ethnicity).

As a white middle class guy with some Hungarian blood I’m still low on the list of potential enemies, but you can see why fear is a natural response to an angry wave of reactionary populists. Their leaders always need the next Other.

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Everything is on fire, says a recent cartoon by The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman). It references the recent wildfires around LA, the most devastating in California history, with 28 people killed and thousands of homes in ashes. But it also stands a metaphor for this feeling that the world is deeply unsafe, the temperature at a boiling point, the Doomsday clock ticking. (It was 90 seconds to midnight last year. We’ll know Tuesday if it got worse.)

But then, the poem the cartoon illustrates shifts tone:

But everyone I love is doing beautiful things,

And trying to make life worth living,

And I know I don’t have to believe in everything

But I believe in that.

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I started the year writing about embodiment as my chosen word for 2025. I was grasping for a way to articulate my intention to spend the year bringing to life things or projects that don’t exist. It’s tempting to let go of it in the face of the world burning, or of your country falling into chaos. (“I have terrible news: the world is about to collapse, and Instagram is no longer square”, says another recent cartoon).

For me, making things, or helping others make things, is an antidote to fear and nihilism. I’m not making world-changing things, just working to make sure the projects I like and need in my life survive the fire. It’s imperfect construction, and it’s certainly imperfect salvation.

Over this past month, my intention needed a cheerleader, and the best I found was Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, which I’m reading as prescribed: one chapter a day, for a month. It’s an ode to imperfectionism, an acknowledgement our time is finite, our capacity for control is finite, and our ability to do things is finite. It is because and not in spite of this finitude that we should act in the world.

There are many simple ideas in Oliver’s book that he gently guides you through, but here are three:

• You can’t care about everything. Take it from a former news junkie: pretending to care about everything is a recipe for burnout;

• Finish things. Especially small things. A chapter a day. That email you are postponing. The next small task in your project. That doctor’s appointment. You can do anything for 15 minutes.

• Allow other people their problems. Or as a popular self-help mantra goes these days: Let them. That doesn’t mean ignoring people’s feelings or being callous, it simply means giving up the idea you can influence and control how others react.

(These letters try to embody these ideas: I wrote the first draft of everything to this point – 970 words – with a 45-minute browser timer on. I would deal with improving the quality later. First, I wanted to put ass in chair and just write instead of ruminating.)

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Onto the practical – because we actually did things. (“We” are the colleagues I collaborate with – some overlap on projects, others don’t). First of all, our team at The Power of Storytelling spent two nights at a retreat outside of Bucharest – with alpacas! We went there to connect with each other, work, and have fun. I talked conference costs in the past, and this did add 2,500 euros to the more 200K+ estimate, but I’ve always believed connection and collaboration is what you should spend on.

Captured by Mihai Ciobanu’s camera.

We were lucky to be together the morning of January 15 when, officially, the conference sold its last tickets. This was the fastest it’s happened so far, and it’s a tremendous joy, especially since we haven’t done the conference since 2019.

I do want to share some thoughts on being sold out, maybe others can relate (or use these ideas). We are planning for 550 people, the capacity of the room. We have 600 rows in our spreadsheet, to account for no-shows and the team, who will mostly be moving around. At our conference, 600 participants = 600 names, and 600 names = 600 badges that we fact-check – yes, we’ve been known to ask people if they’re sure they spelled their own name correctly when registering.

Those 600 names are a combination: speakers and staff; participants buying online; bulk tickets we sold to companies; spots we gave to sponsors. As deeply grateful as we are to sponsors for helping us do this (and we couldn’t without them), we cap the number of spots they receive because we don’t want them to go unused or not be valued by the eventual recipient.

Then, as happy as we are to sell 5-10 tickets directly to a company – which means saving on intermediary fees –, we also capped that number to about 100, for similar reasons: we believe the magic of this conference is largely about individuals buying their own seats, because they really want to be there.

This is why, when we say we’re sold out, it means all 600 seats belong to somebody – the majority to individual buyers, some to sponsor representatives, or to staff in the companies or NGOs that bought in bulk. I understand why it’s frustrating for a company to want to buy 10 seats and not be able to, because we’ve reached the limit we agreed on. I also understand why a sponsor is frustrated we can’t raise their limit, since many other organizers aren’t as stubborn.

But these are part of our values, and while the best way to organize things is a continuous work in progress, this transparency is important to because it acts as a counternarrative in a world in which some people believe “nothing is ever sold out in Romania. These are just marketing lies.” (Some have told us this over the years). They are not lies, but I also understand why some believe they are.

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The second thing we started is one I’ve been talking about for a while – a prototype to help strengthen a newsletter ecosystem and boost creator revenues. The basic idea was to run a pilot that brings together newsletter makers, offers them coaching, strategy advice, and peer-support, in order to bring them closer to their goals – readers, paying subscribers, new forms of engagement.

It’s Draft Four that helped me meet Mirona, whose background in media business, marketing and strategy was perfect for this experiment. It helps she’s also recently become a freelancer looking for meaningful projects.

So, from this week until the end of April Mirona will be guiding a crop of newsletter creators through crafting a strategy, understanding their audience, and taking chances. We’re running this experiment with five former colleagues from DoR, because it helps fast-forward through the discovery phase, and focus on concrete actions. If it delivers results, I’d love for us to broaden it to others – especially to journalists struggling with a newfound identity as a creator.

We only had an introductory meeting thus far, but the simple idea of a peer-group has already encouraged Anca Iosif to send out a first newsletter on conservation in a few months, and for Oana Sandu to restart an important project we conceived of in 2019: a newsletter on domestic violence.

I’ll keep you updated as our experiment moves forward.

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The way we’re financing the experiment above – paying Mirona’s fees, some tools and extra outside expertise – is through another thing we kicked off last year, with my colleague Carla: a fundraiser to bring in 100.000 euros into our NGO, which we could use for other pilot projects.

Our initial deadline was December 31, but we decided to extend it to January 31, because some companies make final budget decisions early in the year. The simple idea was that we’d contact 100 companies in Romania and ask each for 1.000 euros. The execution wasn’t that simple though, and we eventually ended up asking more than 250 organizations. Most said “no” (or never replied), but the thirty-ish organizations and people that did contribute took us to about 75.000 euros, a great success, nonetheless. (If you do want to bring us even closer to our goal, we still have five days – Carla says you can write to her at carla@dor.ro or read more about our plans).

I also turned on payments for Draft Four this week. It’s the newsletter ecosystem experiment that pushed to me to finally do it. Asking for money is difficult, especially when all you feel you have to offer are weekend thoughts on journalism and life.

Thank you to the 37 of you who has pledged to give, and who now have less money in your bank accounts because of me. I hope you haven’t changed your mind, and I hope you won’t.

I won’t be putting content behind a paywall, and I have no perks to offer paying readers yet, so if you support this, you do it either because Draft Four is (at least occasionally) meaningful, or because you enjoying watching people doing things and projects imperfectly, all the while the world seems to be falling apart.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. Meditations for Mortals. It deserves another mention for the joy and solace it’s brought me over the month of January. (As a bonus, listen to Oliver Burkeman in conversation with Ezra Klein).

2. Aida Economu on stage at Oamenii Dreptății Sibiu. The live shows I helped create and edit last Fall are uploading the stories to YouTube. This one is a bittersweet meditation on what it means to not be able to give birth. (In Romanian).

3. A plug for Ana Maria Ciobanu, whose audio series I have edited with great joy over the past ten years. Scroll down through this post of hers for information on an audio storytelling in-depth workshop she’ll be running beginning in mid-February.

4. Who is Mark Zuckerberg now? It’s not that you should care, but the way Search Engine answers the question is a great historical lesson about the journey social media, money, and politics have been on for the last couple of decades.

5. And finally, a challenge for you. Remember what I said about finishing things, or just doing them for an amount of time small enough to not be frightening? How about the next things you do NOW, for just 5 minutes, is to write to someone about the craziness in the world today, and what you’re doing about it. You can send it as a text to a friend, an email, or you can even send it as a reply to me.