From Pulp To Paper

Running a business in Ottawa is weirdly isolating these days in ways I don’t think anyone really warns you about.

On paper, it sounds great: beautiful city, smart people, tech money floating around, a million federal departments, coffee shops on every corner. In reality? Half the time it feels like I’m running a business in an empty office park at 9 p.m. on a long weekend.

Everyone working from home is part of the problem. And I say that as someone who also works from home.

Before everything shifted, you could at least feel the city breathing during the day. You’d see people on Bank Street grabbing lunch, bump into someone you knew in the Market, run into a client on Sparks.

Now, a lot of days, it’s you, your laptop, and endless Google searches.

The isolation hits in a lot of small, stupid ways.

There are moments where I wish I could lean back in my chair and ask an actual person, “Does this idea make sense?” or “Am I overcomplicating this?” Instead, I’m pacing around my living room or talking to my friends about it.

In a normal office, you have built-in sanity checks. In Ottawa right now, so many of us are in these little pockets around the city, working in condos near Lansdowne, townhouses in Riverside South, whatever, trying to build something sizeable while also not bothering the neighbours with one more Zoom call.

The decision fatigue gets loud.

Should I raise prices? Offer this service? Rent a coworking space downtown and hope people actually show up to meetings in person? Is it worth driving across town to meet one client, or do we default to another video call where everyone is slightly blurry and pretending the audio is fine?

Each question is small on its own, but together they’re heavy. By mid-afternoon it’s less “I don’t know what I’m doing” and more “I’m out of brain.” I would pay good money some days for a coworker to pick between two options and say, “Do that one. It’s fine.”

And then there’s the whole “how am I really doing?” question.

If you worked in a regular office in downtown Ottawa, you’d get feedback in a hundred tiny ways: a quick “nice work on that” from a manager, a nod in a meeting, someone asking you to help on a cool project because they trust you. You’d see people’s reactions in real time.

When you’re running a small business from your spare room in Nepean, you ship something and then… silence. Maybe an email comes in later. Maybe it doesn’t. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is full of people humble-bragging about their “record-breaking quarter,” and you’re over here proud because you finally updated your Google Business profile.

One thing that’s actually helped more than I expected is joining online groups where people in Ottawa are talking honestly about this stuff. Not the glossy “crushing it” threads, but the messy ones: Slack channels, small mastermind groups, Discord servers, little private Facebook groups where people admit they’re tired, lonely, second-guessing their pricing, or debating whether to get a tiny office downtown just to see other humans. It sounds backwards—fighting isolation with more internet—but trading real stories with other business owners who get it takes the edge off. It reminds you that you’re not the only one building something from a spare bedroom and trying to stay sane.

Running a business is hard. Running a business in a city where everyone you work with lives 25 minutes away and rarely leaves their house? That adds a layer.

If you’re sitting in a home office somewhere in Ottawa, wondering if you’re the only one refreshing email too often and overthinking every decision: you’re not. You’re building something in a city full of people doing the same thing, mostly behind closed doors.

Maybe the next step isn’t another online course or another productivity hack. Maybe it’s one coffee in real life with someone who gets it.

It’s a stroke of software design genius.

For years, Nintendo generally marketed its products to a single, predictable demographic: 10- to 30-year-old men.

It explains the popularity of early games like Super Mario Bros., where a pudgy, pasta-eating plumber attempts to rescue a princess from a corrupt dragon and his legion of goombas.

But after being edged out of the 21st century video games arms race by companies like Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo had some time to retool and eventually decided to think outside of the box after the miserable failure of its Gamecube console.

Specifically, whether intentionally or not, Nintendo finally went after a market never before targeted by videogame makers: seniors.

It’s an interesting group to target: the kind of crowd who have never suffered thumb cramping and have yet to master the select/start button concept.

The Nintendo Wii is incredibly easy-to-use and it offers a variety of easy-to-understand games. I say this as a casual video gamer who endured years of increasingly difficult video game advancements.

Though there aren’t any games about bridge or Murder She Wrote, seniors across North America have caught onto the Nintendo Wii craze.

It’s a great way to stay in shape, since it requires so much physical mobility, and an even better way to socialize.

I caught a glimpse of Wii potential at a retirement residence in Kanata last weekend.

A cluster of about 30 seniors gathered to bowl using white Nintendo wands in place of hefty bowling balls.

Though none of them had ever played video games, had never taken on a friend in a blood-shedding virtual street fight, everyone seemed to catch on quickly.

After a few moments of orientation, people seemed to forget that the game wasn’t real because they cheered each other on as if they were actually at a bowling alley.

In good time, they will likely use the console to bond with their grandchildren over sore shoulders.

I'm currently reading a book by Kurt Vonnegut called Timequake. It's kind of a weird mix between a biography and fictional story about a decade of consciousness on cruise control.

In one passage from the book, Vonnegut talks about two prominent styles of writing that he's observed among his friends and fellow writers - there are "swoopers" and "bashers", he says.

Swoopers throw everything down, and swoop through a story from beginning to end in a single session. Then they go back over the story, later, to re-vise and correct their mistakes. The final product is essentially made from the frame of the first swoop.

Bashers, on the other hand, painstakingly struggle with each word as they bash their way through a story from beginning to end. Bashers work at a slower pace, because writing is a struggle of perfection.

I don't agree that writers necessarily fit snuggly into either of these categories but I can still appreciate the description.

I think I am a "swasher" or a "booper" - a mix between his two offered descriptions. (The fact that I'm a journalist and not a fiction writer might account for this difference.)

When I write an article, I tend to swoop through the story from beginning to end, making sure I can carry some sort of theme or purpose through the article. It is important to have a wide-view as you write an article in order to focus on important ideas and emphasize points that need to be emphasized. However, when I've finished swooping through the article, I go back to the beginning and bash my way through sentences, inserting facts and new ideas and re-writing every single sentence.

I basically swoop through an article, to shape the skull, spine and skeleton, then I bash the fleshing onto the bones, word by word.

Even this entry is an example of my strange style. I kindof write everything down, making sure to mention the main points of what I want to talk about, and then I go back and insert all of the detaily type information to emphasize my message.

I left Toronto five weeks ago. 33 days to be exact. I could count the hours too, but that would be annoying. Having lived most of my life in the outer-Ottawa area, I thought I knew what to expect from the city when I moved there to attend Ryerson University. I expected the same things most people might expect from the city: smog, traffic, crowds, high-prices, a reliable city-run transportation system.

Most of those pre-conceptions were actually pretty accurate. I probably could have bought a house in Ottawa with the money I threw away on rent during my four year stay. But the most common thing I hear about Toronto is probably also the most untrue.

No matter what people might tell you, Torontonians are not smug.

I know most people might find that hard to believe. Torontonians must be smug. They live in an overpopulated, commercially ugly city yet still call it nice things like “diverse” and “world class”. The country’s news revolves around their boring celebrities. They are one of the most polluted cities in Canada yet their politicians continually strive for environmental protection measures. Not to mention, they root for a bad hockey team.

But honestly, the people are not smug. They are just evolutionarily dissimilar to most Canadians.
Human beings of all kinds, even ones from Toronto, have a unique ability to shape their surroundings to fit their immediate needs. There are the obvious historical examples of paved roads, roof tops and those funny looking umbrella hats.

But what happens when nature has been completely subdued and it is the created human-system that is unbearable? It means that a Torontonian’s publicly passive personality becomes part of their evolutionary attire. It’s protection. It’s a shell that keeps the emotionally stifling, disorderly public atmosphere from crushing their spirit.

Torontonians live in one of the busiest cities in the world. At all times of the day, in all parts of the city, things are moving. Things are happening.It’s the reason the sky is so bright at night and the air is so thick during the day. It’s also the reason people on the street blend into the background as part of the landscape.

It was a little troubling to eventually notice the change in myself. Getting off work, tired and irritable. Squeezing onto a subway crammed full of other tired and irritable people. You just learn to retreat within.

Of course, once you’ve left the overwhelming outdoors, you strip back down to your plain personality. But it’s usually this overcoat outlook that people encounter when they visit the city.

I believe that people in Canada are basically the same anywhere you go, at their core. While the pressures of big city life might have created an evolutionarily dissimilar breed of dwellers, deep down we are the same: self-serving, annoyed and conveniently generous.