What’s More to Your Life all about?
More to Your Life is a sometimes funny column by a self-proclaimed explorer discovering what makes life cool and people interesting. There are stories.
It’s full of anecdotes and sometimes funny thoughts about human-ing and life—work, AI, freedom, dating, money, travel, simplifying, exploration, talking with strangers, Dateline, and the occasional, non-pushy recommendation for rich living.
In a world saturated with advice and life/productivity hacks and the coming AI age, we need even more storytelling and talk about life, living, and how cool it is to be human. Don’t you think? I sure do.
Free subscribers to MTYL get 1-2 columns/per week on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Paid subscribers to MTYL get paid-only essays or audio stories 1-2x/month as well as much appreciation for supporting my writing. An example of a paid-only essay I’m considering writing for you is: “How I Wrote a Book and You Can Too”—a reflective, self-deprecating, and semi-helpful essay about self-publishing.
You’ll probably love it here if…
Whether you’re a parent, still solo like me, in the income-generating or income-enjoying years, I bet we have more in common than we don’t.
Here’s what I bet I know about you: You are a human just like me, flaws, sensitivities, talents and all. I bet you also appreciate substance over posturing, growth over comfort, and creating over consuming. You love learning and appreciate stuff that inspires and celebrates more living, more freedom, more personal responsibility, and more fun. You like stories and stuff that’s real,* and you have a good sense of humor. You might also consider yourself to be a dreamer.
About Me
I’m Emily Burnett, a middle-child and writer writing my way out of fixing and overthinking, oh, all kinds of things. Humor in every form is one of my favorite things, and sharing what I find funny or meaningful in sometimes funny ways is how I connect with others.
In 2022, I quit my comfortable tech job for an early mid-life rewrite; I planned to grow my financial coaching empire but ended up traveling my way into complicated love with uncertainty, writing, and more living. I’ve leapt, rebuilt, risked, and recovered multiple times, and this recent experience taught me in a big way that taking the leap is always worth what you discover—about yourself, about the world, about faith, about strangers, about life. And it (pivoting, living in uncertainty, improv-ing) was, like, the best training ever for the coming AI tsunami.
After traveling for all of 2023-2024, I made home-base near Salt Lake City, UT. I read avidly and widely, love Jesus, being outside, and playing pickleball. And I can’t help but be fascinated by true crime.
If what I’m writing about here at More to Your Life sounds like your cup of tea, I’d love to have you.
Let’s talk about AI, shall we?
*Speaking of real, this feels like a good time to tell you about my AI policy here at More to Your Life. We’re awash, I tell ya, in marketing messages and so much stuff written and created by AI, and it’s about to get much worse.
Here’s what you can always trust about my writing:
WORDS: I write every one of my own words. Every mistake is proudly my own. I used to use ChatGPT and Claude to review for mistakes, but I don’t anymore. Sometimes and increasingly infrequently, I will throw a post into Claude to ask if it feels gratuitously long or if my humor came through at a certain part. But it never gets to tell me how to improve or suggest edits.
PHOTOS: I always opt first for a photo I took myself or created myself for social preview images. If I don’t have one that fits, I opt for a stock photo and do minimal editing (a filter so the images have a cohesive feel across my page.)
SEO: Sometimes when I’m totally stumped for a subject line (headline), I will have Claude throw out some ideas. They always sound way too “ew…marketing-y” for me but may spark an idea of my own. I currently use it to generate an AI-optimzed SEO title and description. It doesn’t feel wrong to use the robots to optimize the SEO stuff for each other. And often I change what they provide because even thought it’s for the robots, I can’t stand the sound of “salesy” stuff.
