Are You Obsessed, Baby Reindeer?
A Netflix series that raises questions about hustling your soul to get your goal
Baby Reindeer’s a story about compulsive behavior
No spoilers here, but in April of 2024 Netflix came out with a truly disturbing and weirdly engrossing show. I’m not alone in that opinion: Baby Reindeer has garnered some 60 million views.
Before I say why this show matters for the work-and-life concerns this newsletter’s always discussing, here’s a synopsis of this maybe true story.
Donny’s a Scottish barkeep and aspiring standup comic whose jokes are, in the opinion of at least one crowd member, “shite.” One day, a sad-looking middle-aged woman plumps herself down at the bar, saying she has no money left in the world. Pitying her, he gives her a cup of tea. They talk for a few minutes, like the two lost humans they are. And that seemingly harmless talk produces a series of increasingly disturbing interactions that turn the woman into a full-on stalker. Over the course of months and then years, she sends him thousands of emails and hours of voicemails. Worse, she makes upsetting appearances across his life, calling him with possessive affection “Baby Reindeer.”
And the truly disturbing thing is, he likes it.
Sure, Donny’s repulsed by the woman. But he’s also fascinated by her. Somehow, the way she looks at him, the way she speaks about his talent, speaks what feels to him like the deepest truths about him. Even when he discovers she has a history of criminality, he doesn’t want to live without her stalking him. After all, she sees him and speaks of him the way he wishes everyone would.
Baby Reindeer’s raising questions about who’s truly compulsive
I think what makes the show hard to resist is just how meta it has become. Baby’s creator, the Scottish comedian, Richard Gadd, claims that he’s telling a sort of morality tale about his own vulnerability after having suffered not only from a stalker, but from sexual abuse in his twenties. He also insists he’s hidden the identity of his stalker. Forbes quotes him as saying, “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.”
But although he claims to have felt sorry for the woman who became his stalker, he seems now to have, in effect, returned the dark favor. Her identity is no longer secret, thanks to some persistent fans who found Fiona Harvey, a middle-aged Scottish woman. They’re sure it’s her, because her readily accessible tweets are quoted verbatim in Baby Reindeer. Harvey has now addressed hundreds of thousands of viewers on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored YouTube channel, announcing plans to sue Netflix and Gadd for lying about her.
Baby Reindeer may be stranger than fiction, but its compulsively popular discourse has become stranger than the show itself.
We need stories about the compulsions of gig work
So why am I bringing up yet another Netflix show in the Mode/Switch? What does a UK miniseries have to do with healing American work culture?
Baby Reindeer matters to this work-culture newsletter, because it depicts the sometimes shadowed work that happens outside of the workplace. Perhaps apart from the intentions of its creator, the story shows dark truths about what ordinary people are willing to sacrifice for their own outsized vocational aspirations.
Gig work is very much a part of the vocational narrative of early-to-mid-career professionals. When I’ve ask research participants how they deal with the overwhelming pressures of work and life in the early 2020s, they talk about seeking meaning outside the workplace—perhaps doing a side hustle like what Baby Reindeer’s main character does. Sometimes, that sort of gig work gives them the extra cash they need. Sometimes, it gives them meaning corporate work never can.
More than one research participant has told me it’s not worth it to love your real job, because, as Sarah Jaffe puts it, Work Won’t Love You Back. And that helps explain why gig work and side hustles are so popular. But here’s where it gets dicey.
In today’s attention economy—where the greatest scarcity is being noticed—more and more professionals do side work that requires them to market and sell their own identity. They brand themselves as influencers, consultants, thought leaders, and Substackers. You’re right. That’s sort of on the nose. After all, this newsletter’s not just “The Mode/Switch”—it’s “The Mode/Switch with Craig Mattson.”
I have to concede that even what you’re reading—which I’m writing compulsively at 11 PM on a Monday night—is pushing a certain me out into the attention economy.
We also need new stories about life and work
I write this newsletter because I think the speed and fragmentations of work and life today require fresh narratives about who humans are and what humans do.
Stories that learn from pain.
Stories that enact vocational restraint.
Stories that say no to the restless attention economy.
One striking datapoint in my research about rising professionals came from a business owner who had relinquished her dream of being a professional musician. I asked her permission to share her story about one dramatic occasion when she came home from a three-week tour with her band. Here’s what she wrote:
I was in a lot of menstrual pain, and my period was two weeks late—I assumed, from the stress of tour. We were out of money (and had to borrow from my mom to get home). So I did a surreal two-day drive home from Portland to Chicago, slept for a few hours, and went to the doctor on advice from my best friend.
Turns out, I was having a miscarriage. I was devastated. My husband and I were living the Musician Life and didn’t want to do anything that would tie us down. No home, no dog, no kids.
But I actually wanted kids. The doctor told me the tour wasn’t to blame for the miscarriage but I felt like I sacrificed a child to this pursuit now. And it was kind of the last straw. I didn’t touch my piano for 6 months, and I canceled shows in order to wrestle with how much more I was willing to sacrifice to get my music heard.
Now, 12 years later I’m divorced and remarried—my ex is still a pro musician—but I’m a mom of an almost 8-year-old and I’m happy, living a calm but wondrous life.
Like so many impassioned artists, this aspiring musician suffered a breakdown at the intersection of the gig economy and the attention economy. The gig economy goaded her to pursue individual success. The attention economy provoked her to seek an ever-larger audience. The only way out was to give up on both.
Today, she tells her a new sort of story about living kindly and humanely. Sure, her business keeps life moving pretty fast. But, she says, “I’m grateful to a younger me who reflected on, and rejected, the push to be special.”
Baby Reindeer obliges attention to signs of compulsion
Richard Gadd’s Netflix story inadvertently raises questions about when exactly your gig work has stopped saving your life and has instead sucked your into a damaging product. Let’s think through some red flags.
You should rethink your gig, if…
…you can’t do what you do without addictive coping mechanisms. A lot of self-help books will warn against making your work your identity. But when your identity is your work—when the product you’re pushing is somehow you—it can feel depleting. To cope with the self-exhaustion, some people turn to alcohol or food or porn or prescription drugs. I’ve talked about my own drug of choice here. But we should all watch out for coping mechanisms that become excessive.
…you can’t do what you do without lying. The ethicist Sissela Bok has noted that some jobs require you to tell some untruths. Police interviewers. Social science experimenters. Undercover agents. Politicians. Their lies can be justifiable, she argues. But she adds that, if you have to tell lies day after day, year after year, it’s going to be hard on your moral wellbeing. Some roles in the gig economy require digital performance. A certain amount of self-presentation is unavoidable when all the world’s a stage. But to state the nearly obvious, we should keep a close eye on the accumulated effects of these performances.
…you can’t do what you do without pay volatility. If your gig work alternates between feast and famine, your hustle’s probably bad for your health. Social scientist Gordon M. Sayre, researching what he calls “The Costs of Insecurity,” notes that ups and downs in your pay correlate with steep costs to your health, including insomnia. Sayre suggests that “volatility in pay is associated with greater psychological threat and worse health for employees.”
…you can’t do what you do without hurting people. There’s a sense in which everybody’s work takes somebody’s pound of flesh. I’m mindful that I’m writing this letter while relying on a gig worker to do my graphic design. But if your work constantly hurts the people you love best, if your work requires you to exploit the people around you, if your work obliges you to step on other people’s wellbeing, you should probably pull the gig plug.
A mode/switch worth making
The poet William Martin has written, “Do not ask your children / to strive for extraordinary lives.” For me, those lines that celebrates the goodness of ordinary life call us to change our attention economics:
Resist the impulse to reduce your wondrous self to a consumable good.
To say that your identity is produced isn’t entirely wrong. You are a product, if only in the sense that you’re always collaborating with the people around you to make your own self. But one of the most important questions ever raised runs like this: What can you give in exchange for your soul? And by soul, the questioner’s asking not about some secret internal part of you, but rather about the whole of who you are. What can you give in exchange for your being?
One answer: your life’s not so much a product to be pitched as a gift to be shared.
I couldn’t have written this week’s newsletter without text-conversations and google-docking with my friend and advisor Andrea Munday, whose recommendation of Baby Reindeer, and whose story of letting-go an artistic goal for stable vocational & maternal identities, informed this essay & pointed out warning signs #1 & #4 above.
LWYW
I’ve already confessed that Hannah’s doing the communication design for this newsletter as a side hustle. But her sketch above for Baby Reindeer and her playlist below are good stuff—the visual and audio equivalents maybe of the coffee she’s slinging most weekday mornings. If you’re looking for music to accompany not only your work, but also your thoughts about your work, try out the tunes below.