doing hard things is good, actually

clickbait title: the substack feed has a slop problem

There is a Portlandia sketch circa 2012¹ — no, please, stay with me! — in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are barraged by requests from friends, mailmen, bartenders, passerby, and even their own mothers to attend their DJ night. Not much has changed, as it feels like every other day I passively tap past colorful DJ set flyers on my friend’s Instagram stories. I have never been to a DJ set. I have bangs, and I wear polka dots; I would be much more comfortable at a Rilo Kiley concert. I think about this sketch often as a perfect allegory for the Current Landscape of internet writing, which seems both ubiquitous and low-quality. I know this is hypocritical and bitchy. But when I joined Substack in 2022 I thought of it as a sort of utopia where I could keep up with all of my favorite writers in one place. I definitely should have known better! It was a great way to support people I liked whose writing I had already been following in previous publications. Now, it’s less a tool for practiced writers than an excuse for everyone to start writing.

There is a particular narcissism in believing that you can be a writer and that everyone should be interested in what you have to say. I know this well. But the integration of certain features from traditional social media into the Substack interface — The Feed — has brought the slop to the surface, and I’m sorry, but it makes me feel insane. This isn’t a hit piece. And this sort of messiness is not something I’m in the habit of doing. But lately the rearrangement of the Substack dashboard that prominently displays your ‘numbers’ has been bad for my output. I wonder passively if I should be doing more to stoke engagement, and then I remember that I didn’t start publishing on this website to engagement farm, but rather to hold myself accountable to a regular writing ritual. When I see short, unfocused diatribes with thousands of views titled something like “How [Insert Innocuous Pop Star Here] Is Destroying Feminism” I start to wonder if all of these Substackers are engaging in an MLM-style scheme to share each other’s essays with hyperbolic captions. “I SOBBED reading this!” they assert, and maybe that’s true, but then I would implore them to raise their bar for sobbing.

The reason I’m thinking about this is two-fold. For one, I recently read a great essay from Blow Up My Town that touches on this phenomenon in what I consider to be a very fair and measured way. And secondly, I’ve been slowly working my way through Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America for obvious reasons. It is making me feel both more and less crazy about Everything Going On In The World Right Now. But it’s also making me think about Internet Writing as a genre. For a while, I believed internet writing was just a vessel, but now I think it’s a mode. Even in the days of Geocities sites and Blogspot, first-person informal writing was prevalent and specific to the medium. It makes sense, then, that Substack’s ease of access has created its own genre, with none of the unfettered optimism of early internet blogs and one hundred times the cynical drive toward clicks. Boorstin writes:

The successful reporter is one who can find a story, even if there is no earthquake or assassination or civil war. If he cannot find a story, then he must make one . . . If all else fails then he must give us a “think piece”— an embroidering of well-known facts, or a speculation about startling things to come.

The Image was published in the 1960s, and yet it predicted almost perfectly the modality of the Essay as proliferated by Substack — discourse that feeds into discourse, everything simultaneously urgent and yet totally vacuous. There is no desire to write something evergreen that will stand up to time, because it’s all about getting the next viral hit piece out before the online public has stopped discussing nepo babies or industry plants or whatever happens to be circulating on Twitter that day.

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As I’ve probably said 5000 times, I was raised Catholic, so I believe that Doing The Work is important for your soul, if you believe in a soul. And even if you don’t then maybe you should pretend to, because I think that it might help. It’s good for us to try and fail at things, to read difficult books and not understand them, to forget our headphones at home and be forced to live with silence for the duration of a walk or train ride. It’s good to sweat, to wait for the bus instead of taking a taxi because the train is down, to call out someone’s rude behavior rather than ignore it. But I’ll stop before this gets too Lenten. I guess what I’m trying to say (in this hypocritically off-the-cuff essay about how we must stop writing off-the-cuff essays) is that we should be demanding more of what we read, and we should also be demanding more from what we write. I have always found that ‘thoughtful’ is one of the best descriptors to aspire to; I want to be someone (and be surrounded by people) who think deeply and often. I believe that part of developing thoughtfulness is rejecting the notion that everyone’s writing is worth reading simply because it is salacious or makes enough references to people you’ve heard of in major US cities.

I might even link this tendency to the current defense of ‘vegging’ or ‘rotting’ or ‘consuming’ ‘slop’ ‘content’ — I hope I get beamed up right now! If you dare suggest that watching TikToks on your morning commute is probably bad for your mental health (and neck health), you will be accused of elitism. Over the years I have learned to be fine with this, especially if the alternative means surrendering to an increasingly anti-intellectual environment that reduces movies/books/music to content or products on the shelves of a hyper-capitalist utopia. I believe in human intelligence. We are smarter than this, and we should be insulted every time we are expected to allow the lowest common denominator to subsume most of our (likely limited) free time. But as Gwyneth Paltrow once said, you must have your cigarettes and tofu. It’s fine to veg and relax and let your brain rest, as long as that’s not all you’re doing. It’s like, people will say they don’t have the attention span for movies, then watch five straight hours of a reality dating show that could legally be classified as torture. Or we spend hours hate-reading Substack essays to feel better about our own lives when we could be writing or reading a good book or just reading better essays².

Maybe this is unfocused, but to be candid, I have enjoyed this website less than I used to in the past. I won’t stop writing on a monthly basis because I still think it’s probably the best way to reach you all, but I have become far less invested in gaining extra income or having pieces make the rounds. I am interested in writing slightly wordy, introspective, broad essays, and that is typically not what does well here. Last summer I snapped and wrote Cut Piece 2024, which is still my most successful Substack missive to date. I find that my feelings about internet writing have really only intensified since then. I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a brat; I love to complain, but I don’t like to complain about myself. Numbers are not everything. I’ve realized that ultimately I would rather never publish a novel than publish something pre-maturely just because an editor thought My Numbers were good and my Cultural Clout was high. Luckily, I don’t think any of them feel that way! My worst nightmare is releasing a debut novel that gets horrible reviews; that’s the kind of thing that literally runs you out of town, and I like where I live.

TLDR: Bad writing might follow you for the rest of your life. Basically, if you log onto this website and immediately feel like something is severely wrong with you then you’re probably actually normal. As youth pastor-y as it sounds, if you are proud of your creative output then the external validation is simply an unexpected and unnecessary gift. Some of my favorite essays were written before my Substack ever achieved a moderate amount of followers, and I wonder if they’d even translate now. I am a mouthy broad who would probably gleefully write on the walls with my own blood if you locked me in a room with no pen or paper. Or as Lana once sang, “I've been tearing around in my fucking nightgown 24/7 Sylvia Plath / Writing in blood on the walls cause the ink in my pen don't work in my notepad.” That being said, here are some writers regularly publishing on this site whom I keep up with. They are all very thoughtful, intelligent, and often funny, and they all do different things:

Eat Your Lipstick

Twenty-First Century Demoniac

Alanaland

Desire Lines

Blow Up My Town

Internet Princess

Sublime Miscellany

Dessin

This list is not exhaustive! And some of them are my internet friends but that doesn’t make me any less objective. They are the writers who I see the most often in my inbox, and I am always glad to see them. My next post will be my winter wrap-up, and hopefully it will be far less bitchy than this. Xoxo.

1. Thank you Mariana for reminding me of my love for this sketch during a recent harrowing walk through the East Village.

2. Full disclosure I am obsessed with Gossip Girl and watched all of the Hulu show Shrill even though I thought it was a poor Girls imitation and did not understand how John Cameron Mitchell was keeping the lights on in a beautiful loft space by editing a Portland weekly. I also love F Boy Island — but that’s basically Discipline and Punish for the streaming age, and I’ll defend it with my life. Okay, confessional booth over.