Side Quester of the Month: Matt Hershberger
21st Century Dadding, audiobooks count as reading, and wise words from Chumbawamba
Every month Side Quests features an interview with a creative professional on how they manage their work-life balance and how they keep their creative juices flowing.
This month, I’m featuring friend and frequent collaborator, Matt Hershberger. Matt and I met close to a decade ago while working at a digital travel publication where he worked as a Travel Editor. Since then he’s become an author, stay-at-home dad, and the writer/podcaster behind Better Strangers on Substack. You may have also seen him on TikTok where he’s become known for his anti-despair reading lists.
Matt is a deep thinker and has always been really generous with his time. Anytime I ask to collaborate with Matt, he’s always game, and has given his perspective on life in New Jersey on the Amuse-Bouche podcast, how food taboos are formed and can be broken in the Power Dining newsletter, and will even be featured in a future episode of the Power Dining podcast launching this Spring (be sure to subscribe to listen)!
In this interview, Matt gives us an inside look into balancing life as a stay-at-home dad and work as a writer, the joy he finds in bird-watching with his kids, and how his favorite band, Chumbawamba, inspires him.
You can subscribe to Matt Hershberger’s work here on Substack over at Better Strangers. You can also see more of his work on his website and follow him on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
How would you describe your job? What do you love most about your career?
My career has frankly been all over the place -- I worked for a pro-immigrant non-profit, then I was a travel writer/editor for about five years, then I was a librarian for five years. I went back to freelance a few weeks ago, partly because the cost of childcare for our two kids has made it cheaper to not have a "traditional" job so I can cover for them when they inevitably get sent home for two weeks for like, sneezing once, and partly because I've been working on a couple of books and now I want to get them published.
The first book is my anti-travel book, Down The Shore. I spent most of my 20s traveling, assuming I'd land someplace exotic, and I somehow ended up living on the Jersey Shore with my wife. I found it hard to love, but had committed to the place, so I decided to treat it like one of my trips abroad, and I walked the entire length of the Jersey coast to see if it was a place that had any room for me.
The second project has gone back to the drawing board recently, but it's focused on building hope and resiliency (especially as a parent) in what feels like the end of days. I've been testing it out with an audience on TikTok with a series I've called the "Anti-Despair Reading List."
What I love most about the job is that I get to think about big ideas and that I get to talk with cool people about stuff that matters.
What are the signs that your creative reserves are getting low? When do you know you're reaching a point of creative exhaustion?
I would've had a very different answer before kids -- back then, my creative reserves got low when I didn't balance the reliable paid work with work I was really passionate about. That was hard to do, because my paid work didn't pay enough, so if I wanted to eat, I had to do almost exclusively paid work. Burnout with that model was inevitable.
Now that I do have kids, the calculus has flipped. I have a spouse who is the main breadwinner at the moment which makes me extremely privileged as far as writers go, though we're hardly flush with cash (as I said, because of the ridiculous cost of childcare, it's actually cheaper for me to not work). But I don't have the same pressure to get like, the equivalent of a living salary, which means I don't have to take shittier paid work as much. But I do have a lot more limitations placed on my day and my ability to be creative, because parenting is a slog. So for me, this creative work serves as an outlet after days of changing diapers, dealing with tantrums, and making dinners which are then immediately rejected by picky eaters. Creative exhaustion sucks, but right now I'm mostly staving off regular exhaustion.
What are some Side Quests you like to go on to feed your creative spirit?
My main epiphany with the parenting phase of my life has been that my mental health and my physical health are one and the same. So I've spent a lot more time doing small things that make me feel nice. Going for walks has been the big one -- I live in the burbs, but pretty close to the ocean, so to keep it from getting monotonous, I've downloaded the Merlin Bird ID app, Seek, and iNaturalist as ways to make each day into a sort of scavenger hunt. I also do yoga, play Just Dance with my kids, and dip lemon biscuits in my tea. All of these things are small, but they accumulate towards my ability to be a functioning person in a big way. Beyond that, if I take care of myself, the clarity of my thinking and my creativity improve exponentially.
More specifically for fueling creativity, I read constantly. It is a priority for me, and I keep up a good pace (30,000 pages last year, my all time best!) by not being discriminate in what I read or how I read it -- audiobooks count, comics count, pulp is fair game, I don't read books people tell me I "should" read unless I want to, etc. -- and by finding little cracks in the day to cram it into. If you read at this level, you just don't run out of things to write about, because the well of human knowledge and creativity is infinite, and you have access to virtually all of it.
My favorite band, Chumbawamba (not joking), has a song where they sing, "Along with the shoes and the shirts and the ties, there's a library that's lost when an old man dies." I hope my library is one of those big and endless ones, with halls that loop back on each other, like in a Borges story or an Escher painting. I also hope that by writing lots and engaging with people, I can make that library more or less open to the public until I'm gone.
If someone takes your Side Quest, what's something you hope they get out of the experience?
Well, if it's reading, I don't need to hope anything for them, because there are an infinite number of things you can get out of the experience of entering someone else's mind and poking around. I would be a shell of a man if it weren't for my reading, it just enriches my life so much. (Book recommendation: I just finished Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, it's the funniest thing I've read in ages and it got shortlisted for the Booker Prize.)
If they choose to take care of themselves, then again, I don't need to hope anything for them! Doing nice things for yourself is its own reward. We live in a late capitalist hellscape that tries to turn us into machines that generate wealth for rich assholes, so the act of living well and enjoying life in spite of them is a sort of revolution in itself. More specifically to getting into your local nature scene, it's also really cool to be sitting in your bed in the morning and hear a bird outside without seeing it and be like, "oh cool, there's a blue jay outside." Or to go for an early morning dip and suddenly be 100 yards away from a humpback whale.
And you know, big picture, I hope that if artists and writers can find ways to take care of themselves a bit more, they realize they're worth a lot more than what they're paid, and that it serves a lot of shitty people for us to put such a low value on our work and on our lives. So I dunno, maybe we should all unionize or start a revolution or something.
I can't wait to read that Jersey Shore book!!