(Genuine) Writing is Dying, and We Are All To Blame
5 min read
“Woman reading by a window”, Gari Melchers, 1905
I haven’t written anything in English in a long time so here’s this.
I don’t know what happened in the last few years, but the majority of mainstream content I see on Medium and other similar sites is just…garbage. OK, maybe not all of them are garbage, but it’s hard to ignore that most are thinly-veiled sales pitches about “my 500$ course” or “how to do this and that”; in other words, it’s all a huge conveyer of regurgitated platitudes of the self-help industry.
And I blame a few things for this:
1. The Algorithms. Yes, the mystical “Baba Yaga” algorithms that no one fully understands (but we have our intuitions). Due to the sheer abundance of content — and its scope is getting larger and larger, as more people have access to the tools they need to create and express themselves — , the stuff that gets pushed the most is what ticks all the boxes in order to become “viral”. Inevitably, the stuff you see in the front is what appeals to the lowest common denominator — and that is usually average content at best. And yet, it excels in pulling the strings — confirming our own biases, “motivating” us, manipulating our emotions by shocking us (i.e. clickbait).
Now, the fact that more people have access to creating and reading is a good thing. It’s good that people have opportunities to express themselves. The problem, however, is the way the algorithms implicitly force creators to conform to what the majority wants (or think they want), because if they don’t, they become irrelevant and the algorithm doesn’t push their content. I echo Felicia C. Sullivan’s thoughts here, especially when she said the following:
Everyone writes about how to do something without ever writing about the something.
Exactly. This is the problem. Can we stop consuming and producing shit content? Can we for once stop caring about the algorithms, not worry about how short or how long your article is and how to improve the stats and how to capture someone’s attention in a cheap way and blablabla. Whatever happened to genuine writing? Writing that comes from real desire, from the inevitability of wanting to express yourself — something that comes from inner turmoil. Instead of telling people what to do and how to do it, how about you share a story, or your thoughts on a novel? Whatever happened to reading fiction? All this shit about rich people reading more self-improvement books, “TOP 10 TIPS TO BE SUCCESFUL”, “THS IS WHAT SUCCESFUL PEOPLE READ”, “IF YOU DON’T DO THIS, YOU WILL REMAIN POOR”! Fuck, can we stop this? All this damn clickbait, it’s making me sick.
So you’re telling me rich people read more self-improvement books, and thus implying that if I want to be rich I need to read more self-improvement books? HAHA. Did everyone forget the difference between correlation and causation? You think they became rich because they read self-help books? LOL, maybe only if they became rich by writing books about how to become rich, thus scamming their customers and becoming rich in the process…
It’s all fucking fake, and people that write this type of content know it, but at one point they decided not to be writers anymore and instead become salesmen and motivators and all that bullshit.
No, I’m not saying it’s wrong to make money from writing, I’m just suggesting that there’s another way, a slower way for sure, but a more genuine way to write, something that comes from a good intention, something that seems inevitable because you can’t help but want to express yourself. Forget the fucking algorithms, we can’t control them. Forget the stats. Just write, if you want to, but before you write, ask yourself why you write. Is it because you have this urge to put thoughts onto a page, to make sense out of the mess in your head, or is it because you want to convince someone, deceive someone, become popular — at any cost?
2. The self-help industry. I already expressed my concerns about this field in an older article. This industry is HUGE, and it’s estimated it will grow to 13.2 billion dollars by 2022. We all contribute to this. It’s a vicious cycle: human nature is fallible and it can’t be changed, and yet we have this glimmer of hope that we can change ourselves — erasing anxieties and fears and such. The self-help industry knows this very well, so it preys upon these hopes by promising us antidotes, which come in banal platitudes and regurgitated information from one author to the next. This urge is never satiated (because we are fundamentally flawed), yet people still hope, and thus the industry continues to grow. Again, it’s a vicious cycle…for us. It’s not, however, a vicious cycle for those in the industry — it is making them fortunes.
3. Lack of patience. This is somewhat connected to the previous two reasons. It’s quite clear that we as a society have lost the art of being bored, of taking a pause, of learning to be patient. Instead, almost every value that’s promoted is about consuming, clicking, swiping, reacting etc. I don’t want to be hyperbolical, but we are approaching a light version of Brave New World — all we care about is instant pleasure, and as a result we have replaced the more long-term values with surface-level emotion driven thoughts and desires. If we want to overturn this, we have to be more conscious of how and why we consume the media: are we really choosing what we consume, or are we conditioned? Bernays and Hegel would suggest that the latter is true, and our current culture confirms that.
Taking all that into account, I have to confess I have been guilty of all these things in the past. I have written pseudo-motivational and self-help content, I have cared about the stats and the views and all that… but I want to be better, I want to change that. I want to write about novels I’ve read, and philosophers and real people and complex ideas which need more time and space than the average “5 minute articles”. Screw all this self-help shit, all this vacuous, copy/paste garbage. And I know, my writing is quite mediocre, I’m the first to admit that. But I want to be better, and I will.
Anyways, I wanted to keep this short, as it’s mostly an emotional article that nevertheless expresses some thoughts I’ve had for a while now about where online writing is headed. It’s in bad shape and we — writers and readers — are all to blame. Don’t feed the beast. Instead, think different — as the old Apple motto used to say (yes, I know, the irony).
P.S. I rarely write in English. I mostly concentrate on a philosophy project I’ve started a few years ago in my native language — Romanian. But I may come back to some more laid-back articles in English as well. Maybe I will, who knows…certainly not the algorithm, right? :)