Matthew Bogart (@matthewbogart.bsky.social)

"Did you enjoy it?" I've been thinking about _this interview Conan O’Brien did with Jon Stewart_. They were talking about their early TV years — those first shows where every week’s ratings felt like life or death. The pressure made the job miserable. Stewart said that a few weeks into _The Jon Stewart Show,_ he could already tell it was doomed. "We knew this thing's going down. But I had your experience of like, this is my shot. Like, this is it. My name is on [a show]. This is a manifestation of who I am as an artist, as a person. If it gets rejected, _I_ am rejected. I wasn't sleeping. I was really miserable. I was drinking like a motherfucker. All those different things. And one night in my insomnia, 3 o'clock in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, I just remember thinking, you're going to have had your own talk show with your name on it where you could do whatever you wanted [...]. **And people are going to say, did you enjoy it?** And I would have to say,_I hated it._ And I think it nearly destroyed me. And what a dumb fucking response. And that morning I got up and was like, _I'm going to enjoy the shit out of this_. Yeah. And I don't care anymore. Yeah. And it was revelatory. And it was such a, I felt it _physically_ , like that relief." The show was canceled soon after, but it's a good reminder for anyone currently doing their dream job — how’s it going? https://www.matthewbogart.net/2025/11/12/did-you-enjoy-it/