A Look Inside My Small Business

Original Substack newsletter here from November 13th, 2024

I’m a mess, and I can’t ever seem to organize my life.

It’s official guys. Living By Bike is becoming a business. And I’m actually starting to take it seriously.

The thing about starting your own business, especially in your twenties, is that there are too many moving parts, not enough resources, the general challenges of being an infant adult (going to therapy, scheduling all those doctor appointments, managing a constantly changing healthcare plan, maintaining new and old friendships, finding your community, healing relationships with yourself/others, going to the gym, calling the doctor about that weird knee issue, working through your trauma, teaching yourself taxes and financial literacy etc.) is that there is almost no time and focus to build what you want to build. Add on the overbearing weight of being a part of the exploited working class, reading articles on how “we are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster”, watching authoritarianism on the rise across the globe and multiple genocides take place overseas, all the while your rights being taken away domestically, and it feels near impossible to craft a dream and follow it.

I feel like I am constantly squeezing in tasks in between every minute of my day, whether it is completing a contractor assignment to build my social media portfolio for one Baltimore small business, taking notes about what I’m learning as a sales rep at Trek to apply to my own small business, creating witty, inspirational, educational but not-too-time-consuming content for my Instagram, or budgeting my $20/hr, 32 hour work week with the investments associated with hiring a website designer and more. Starting a business is never an easy task, but the hurdles today feel higher than they should be.

And oligarchy is forming in the United States where billionaires are taking more control over every single means of production. Money buys power and these people are taking it all. Elon Musk wants to defund NASA while Bezos owns Whole Foods. We are entering what seems to be a new gilded age- a time of deep political corruption where people like Jurgis became poorer with each coming day while the richer grow richer at everyone’s expense. I have a fear that our country is slowly going to turn into a place where monopolies dominate our work and we become more exploited because of it. Where people like Jeff Bezos, healthcare CEOs, RFK Jr. and Elon Musk- the ultra rich- take hold over all of the means of production, and the working class continuously has none.

The fact of the matter is that the working class has been abandoned by both the Republican and the Democrat party. Things are harder for us, and that’s a fact- we aren’t crazy for demanding better. You’ll only have to read the comments section of almost any major news outlets’ Instagram post on the recent UnitedHealth CEO killing to get a sense of just how any working class American feel these days.

I haven’t sent out a newsletter in about a month because my life has been a complete mess. I accidentally started two jobs within one week of each other. Then it was Friendsgiving and Thanksgiving and I was leading a bikepacking trip the weekend prior. My website keeps breaking, holiday season is already here, and I cannot for the life of me fix my site or Depop to sell my bicycle chain creations. I am supposed to make social media content for a business here in Baltimore and I kept forgetting what’s happening and pushing it off because I’m afraid to add fuel to the fire. When you’re stretched so thin, you don’t have the resources to do a good job at anything.

When you do everything, you can’t do anything.

For the first time I am hiring someone to do work for me to help me build and scale Living By Bike as a business. He will work on my website given that everything feels like it’s falling apart and he quite literally has a professional education in website design. And I can focus on what I do best, which is to lead bikepacking trips, and being an educator an adventurer. My business coach applauds this decision, telling me this is exactly how I should be scaling Living By Bike.

But a friend recommended that I use Chat GPT to help better design my routes when I complained about how difficult it was to plan a bikepacking trip in the south east of the United States. I feel hypocritical for asking the AI technology three questions when I’ve talked publicly at length about how it is terrible for the environment. I’ve been hard at work, squeezing in these moments of research during my lunch breaks at Trek and when I’m curled up in bed right before falling asleep. So this morning I turn to- I cave in- Chat GPT to see if my friend is right. Living By Bike’s business model is based on a socially conscious, environmentally friendly ethic, yet I have to remind myself at times that it is impossible to be perfect.

At the end of it all what I’m trying to say is that we live in a capitalistic nightmare with a spiraling black hole towards oligarchy in the US. Sometimes I think about moving abroad to countries that have better qualities of life. I dream about socialized healthcare, about 5 weeks of vacation time a year, about ample public transportation and cheap/free education. But I also want to fight the good fight, because after all, Baltimore and the US at large is my home- it is my community. What is the point of community if you don’t try and make it better?

I mentioned in an Instagram post earlier this week about how I was in a slump for persevering with this Living By Bike dream of mine. Today, I’m in the middle of that curve, feeling hopeful, but still on the verge of burnout. I want and I demand great things for my life and the lives of others. I grew up in a family that just got by, and right now I am just getting by, but I want myself, everyone I love, and the world at large, to be a better place for all.

All I can say is that I hope my perseverance pays off.