There’s Too Much Content

At one point during COVID lockdown—after the two-week stay-at-home order had long been extended into several months but before the murder of George Floyd turned my particular corner of Chicago into a nerve-wracking nonstop site of police noise surveillance since I lived close to the mayor—I turned off my laptop and went to my yard, leaving my phone upstairs. I don’t think I even had a book with me, just the company of Charlie (RIP to the legend). I relaxed into a fold out chair and enjoyed the silence. I spaced out. I closed my eyes and felt the late spring sun on my face, patting Charlie every now and then.

While I had spent the first part of lockdown bingeing Bravo, leading and signing up for so many virtual workshops, scheduling Zooms with friends near and far, refreshing my Twitter feed every 15 minutes, and benefitting from all the layoffs by receiving a boom of freelance gigs, I was over it. I was over living my life onscreen. I didn’t want to mediate every social interaction through links. I took lockdown super seriously and had not seen another human being, other than through a window, for months. I felt disconnected from the world, from my senses, and profoundly sad about the prospect of turning 38 without a single soul by my side.

But I was also bored: of the scrolling, the hot takes, the think pieces, the piles and piles of words that amounted first to rage or over-identification and then transformed itself into white noise, a senseless buzzing that was soothing me into submission but said nothing at the end of the day.

A few weeks ago it dawned on me that this listless feeling I’ve been experiencing lately was very familiar. It reminded me of that time in lockdown. Except now there was nothing stopping me from going to a bar, sucking face, mouth breathing my way around el Malecón. I know that. And yet, I feel that same claustrophobic, mind-numbing sensation that we’re all pouring out every single ounce of our soul to a machine for others to consume passively, like some virtual human centipede. Sorry, I’ve never seen the movie and never will so maybe the analogy doesn’t fully work, but I want to convey that so many of us are spewing crap for others as they spew crap for others.

Guys, there’s too much content.

There’s too much content and I can’t keep up and I don’t want to keep up.

I wish I had something more intelligent to say about this, some real incisive cultural analysis but I don’t. Yes this is about Substack saturation, and it’s about video taking over everything, and it’s about AI slop, but it’s also about the fact that I want to be a good literary citizen and keep up with the ACTUAL writers I like and my ACTUAL writer friends and all the other artists I like and my friends who are artists in other ways and I can’t because we’ve all been told we need to keep producing and we all feel the need to produce, including myself who is still reliant on newsletter subscriptions even as they dwindle away, because we’ve all hit subscription fatigue because

THERE IS TOO MUCH CONTENT.

I want to read and study the long list of new food publications out there, the few literary journals I admire, the many hip cultural outlets I follow because I enjoy it but also because I was naive enough to forge a career as a writer of sorts and I want to find new places to pitch/submit/apply and I’m overwhelmed because they have too much content too. And newsletters. And podcasts. And Instagram accounts, which have gone from quote graphics to staff members talking at me and I miss the quote graphics, I miss their Instagrams being an afterthought that an intern would sometimes pick at.

And the newsletters! I’ve tried it all. Downloading the app helped manage my inbox chaos for approximately 17 days. Then I went too loosey goosey on subscribing to everyone I knew who came through Substack, realizing too late that there’s no way to clear the inbox on the app. The inbox is the mountain, you are Sisyphus and the boulder is the 100th rant/rave on Yesteryear. I funneled non-Substack newsletters to another email address, but they’re sitting there, ignored. Sometimes, I sit down with a sense of responsibility that I should at least scroll through them and after 5 minutes I wonder if my time would be better spent with a book. I choose book, nine times out of ten.

Last week, I accidentally deleted the Apple Podcast app and when I downloaded it again, I noticed it had swiped every single podcast I had followed. That was the last time I tasted freedom.

The week before that, the Instagram algorithm showed me the reel of an acquaintance of mine sharing their secrets on how to make a year’s worth of rent on Substack. Their secrets are all widely known because they are the same ones Substack will tell you are best practices: Upload your mailing list, publish frequently, always leave your best stuff for free. I’ve been on this app long enough to know that those hot tips do not guarantee you a year’s worth of rent. I clicked on their newsletter and noticed their real moneymaker: their paywalled content was info on paid opportunities and part-time gigs for other content creators. No shame in the game; I too pay for newsletters with job listings. But the memory of one of my friends describing the writing industry being an MLM scheme came to mind.

I posted this:

An account with a wolf avatar for a picture, no discernible name, and some 30 followers responded pretty aggressively, as if I had personally targeted them with this note, asking at the end of their spicy comments “What, did you get scammed? Is that what happened?”

I blocked them and resisted the urge to answer, “Buddy, we’re all getting scammed. The entire world economy is a fucking scam.”

And listen, I know I’m part of this as well but I also know I’ve come to this from an honest place, a real desire to get better at my craft, to say something that people might find new, or comforting, or useful beyond a Google Search/ChatGPT search (I dunno what people are using anymore), or entertaining. But life has a way of constantly showing me that this might bring me one very loyal reader, who I’ll appreciate till the end of my life. It does not bring me a year’s worth of rent. I really need the year’s worth of rent. I curse my integrity, again.

Oh and if this is starting to come off as a precursor to me stopping the newsletter or turning off paid or whatnot, rest assured that I’ll continue to linger in this hellscape for as long as I have something to say in this format. But I’ll admit that I’ve thought about it. Maybe if I was still living in the United States, but in Peru this has become my networking event, my water cooler, and my way to update people while I’m far. Plus, I really do appreciate the emails of appreciation and kind words I receive from readers. I’m always genuinely surprised and fulfilled to no end when I hear someone likes my work.

But forget about me, because this is actually a letter of despair about you—the people I want to read and listen to. You’re being drowned out by the noise, the noise of other people’s making and the noise of your own making. And I miss spending time in your mind.

If it helps, I want less of you. I want less exclusive content. I want less daily, less weekly. I want you to go off and work on one thing for a month, six months, a year and then drop it like the precious gem it is. I want your thoughts, your stories, your critical analysis to go from half-baked to a full on, shelf-ready good. I I don’t need any more podcasts that are two guys on a mic or two girls on a mic or two folks on a mic bantering for 2 hours before they get to the one good 40 second clip they’ll put on Instagram, which people will heart without once downloading their show. I don’t need you to show up with a fuzzy mic to say anything and I definitely don’t need a single shot of you with your back turned in an exotic location. I don’t need you to say what’s kind of chic. BE FULL CHIC.

I know this essay isn’t going anywhere, it’s all crescendo and nothing that others haven’t eloquently said before. It’ll probably prompt people to unsubscribe. This used to bother me. Not anymore. Log off, babes. Go and pet a bulldog, while the sun shines on your face.