"Who the hell are you?"
And other questions you had but were probably too polite to ask.
If you’re wondering how the name “Stephanie K. Lee” ended up in your inbox, rest assured: I anticipated this. This page of questions exists to console the confusion.
Wait, who are you again?
Okay, so you probably signed up for my newsletter, signal versus self, which lives here on Substack and on YouTube under the same name, after reading or watching something I made. (Or maybe you vaguely remember me from an earlier incarnation, in which case I’m frankly impressed.)
I get where the confusion comes from, truly.
You’ve probably seen “Stephanie K. Lee” periodically emerge from the shadows to drop several thousand words — without any explanation — before disappearing again like the hero of an action movie dramatically walking away from a slow-motion explosion scene.
“Who the hell is this woman? Why is this happening?” are questions any reasonable person might ask.
Well, I am signal versus self.
And signal versus self is me, the human behind it, Stephanie K. Lee.
Hello again!
OK, remind me what *I* get out of being here?
I can’t promise you’ll walk away with solutions, frameworks, takeaways, or a highly efficient…well, anything.
What I can tell you is that the people who stick around tend to have a habit of wandering. They’re not lost, merely searching. For what, they couldn’t tell you. But they’ll know it when they see it.
They like stumbling onto stories they didn’t know they wanted to read. Like walking into a bookstore not looking for anything in particular, but secretly hoping something will find them.
They click into endless rabbit holes and, three hours later, they look up and go, “Oops, I should really get back to what I was doing.”
And we know they don’t.
Er ok, then. What kinda rabbit holes exactly…?
Sometimes they’re from my life: experiences I’ve lived through, TV shows I’ve watched, books I’ve read, nuggets from conversations I’ve had.
Almost always they’re questions that strike me in the middle of a shower or workout. Examples:
What happens after getting the thing you thought you wanted doesn’t make you happy?
How do you live knowing that time itself doesn’t care how you spend it?
Why does being online now feel like everything exists to make yourself feel like a never-ending project?
What does a 90s show reveal about our modern landscape of mental health?
Why does a TV character trying to iron his pants make me sad?
Currently, I make entire essays around questions like these, both in written and video form.
Usually they’re much longer than most people (even I) expect.
Is this all leading somewhere?
I believe so.
At the very least, I’m building a body of work that reflects who I am now.
And if I’m being optimistic, I’m trying to invoke something I miss about being on the internet.
I’m not merely talking about nostalgia or the “good ol’ days.” More a feeling I once had. This feeling of stumbling onto something totally unexpected yet wonderful, not because you set out to find that thing, but because you were perfectly happy not knowing what you’d come across or what you’d get out of it. I never had to ask myself, “Was this worth my time?” because usually it was.
These days, when I am online, I find that the act of even being here feels simply administrative. It feels too efficient.
A little dead even.
What is there left to discover that isn’t already engineered to find me first?
So perhaps this is my attempt to recapture that lost feeling of serendipitous discovery, and if it all goes to plan, make things feel more alive again.
Fine, but...who ARE you?
It all depends on when you met me.
You may remember me from health and fitness writing. Or travel videos from living across nine countries. Or maybe from the years I disappeared behind other people’s businesses, helping them tell stories while I stayed off-camera.
You might’ve unknowingly followed something that had my fingerprints all over it — without ever knowing my name.
Before all of that, I spent the early internet writing strategy guides and reviews for some of your favorite video games.
Now this is me.
The accumulated me.
I’ve lived through so many versions of myself that signal versus self is part return, part culmination of everything that I’ve done, everyone that I’ve been.
It started as a promise to myself to return to the kinds of things I used to make, before I was taught to justify every little thing by how useful or valuable it could be.
So for the first time since 2001, when I published my very first piece of online writing on GameFAQs, the work belongs entirely to me.
Why are the topics all over the place?
I get why you’d ask that because when you zoom out, you see:
Fitness! Identity death! Modern creativity! Mortality! Productivity but not! A man setting his living room on fire!
Unlike most newsletters, signal versus self doesn’t operate as a “newsletter about X.”
More like: a certain way of paying attention in the world.
You see, I’m a very obsessive person. Things consume me. Not all things, of course, just the things my brain latches onto. My business used to do that. Deciding whether I should deadlift on Mondays or Fridays used to do that. Now it’s the questions that power these essays.
Which essay I decide to work on next depends on how entangled I get with the question that started it in the first place.
And that’s how a newsletter that begins with starting all over talks about fitness transformations, then talks about insomnia and even goes on to explore whether a fictional 90s radio psychiatrist could thrive in the modern influencer economy.
Why don’t your essays give solutions or prescriptions?
Mostly because I’ve done enough of that, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun wondering why we keep running into the same problems in the first place.
I’m no longer convinced that life’s biggest questions can be slotted into a five-step framework, a 13-minute video, or a $997 course.
Makes me think the interesting part isn’t always the answer. Nor the easy conclusions.
Perhaps it’s the question underneath the question.
Or the questions we choose to keep paying attention to.
At least, that’s how I’d like to explain why I spend so much time mentally munching on things most reasonable people would’ve moved on from ages ago.
You don’t really “get to the point” either…
Personally, I’m not particularly drawn to books or essays that tell me everything I need to know in the first paragraph.
Same with movies and shows.
And truth be told, I learn what the work wants to become as I write it.
Its unfolding is part of the fun — and the discovery.
My god, your essays contain thousands of words. Where does one even begin?
That’s what happens when 20-plus years of writing and total free rein collide, baby.
I suppose the best place to begin is, like with everything else, in the beginning.
This is the piece that started it all.
Much like this page.