The Buyer

I’ve been feeling awfully paralytic as of late. There is a black hole in my head that sucks up my ambition to do anything other than scroll Instagram reels. Craven cadres of highly paid, brilliant engineers and designers on both coasts are hard at work, tirelessly extracting every ounce of engagement from the atavistic, reactionary animal within us all. Alas, since nobody in America has any new ideas, the good people at Meta, Snap, and Alphabet have all decided to absorb the same attention-sucking interaction model. 

An element of grasping has always been within the American dream, but I think the advent of the Roth IRA and RSUs have given people a more sublimated avenue toward kicking the wheels for years on end. When you get a secure gig, you grip onto that thing for dear life, damn everyone else who might want your place, and damn trying to disagree with whatever the instantaneous market moment is, however mercurial and myopic it might be. I can’t blame them for it.

The sensation of watching a line go up cannot be undersold. If I ever saw an engagement line of mine go up, I think I would ride that line far further than I might assume I would. It is the line that leads the entirety of humanity to do anything. Yet, if that’s true, why do I write this?

The Seller

In the writing and publishing world, there’s something known as “writing to market,” which is essentially a prerequisite to ascertaining any semblance of success. It makes sense—and on the face of it. Mold your writing based on what the market says it wants, and you are more likely to succeed and get your writing read. 

It’s the classic relationship between a buyer and a seller that has operated quite well for quite a while, for well-worn reasons. Indeed, having money in your pocket is one of the most powerful feelings of the human experience, surpassing even the sensation of watching a line go up. (A line going up means anything insofar as it correlates to the line in your bank account going up.) Another, almost equally captivating sensation is to own something shiny, something that makes your life easier, or something that lets you see an aspect of the world differently. 

In light of these observations, for something to succeed, it needs to be sold. I have previously rejected this notion, and a part of me still does. But there is a burgeoning, deeply tired element in me that understands that, at some point, if you never reach an audience, well, who’s the one really “kicking the wheels for years on end,” then?

I’ve lived my life saying things like “I don’t subscribe to the genre theory of things,” and “most horror movies are awful because of the prescriptive constraints inhered to the genre’s (i.e., the market’s) expectations,” and “young adult, along with almost all mass market fiction, is pap.” I’ve always had a predilection toward misanthropy.

In creative writing classes in high school, everyone wrote what I thought to be the most unreadable, uninspired stories imaginable. I couldn’t fathom why people would write how they did. They never tried to approach their work from an oblique angle. They never tried to enter a story in an experientially honest way. From that experience, I began to associate the vast majority of the art out there with garbage genre pandering and made it my mission to do everything to keep my prose fresh and my voice unique and recognizable. In my relentless cynicism and criticism, I actively avoided all-too-adventurous ideas, focusing all of my attention inward. I sought solely to write what I knew (an insular, specific subset of what most people do) because all else made me feel like a charlatan trying to conjure fake details. I have never felt comfortable selling an alien world to an audience. I’ve only found sense in writing something that rings true to my internal sense of self, even though the audience for such a thing is unsurprisingly singular.

I suppose a misanthrope shouldn’t act surprised when he fails to find mainstream success. Misanthropic thinking could be on the rise, but it will never be anything near the “color of the season” or say, the plurality opinion. I wonder why.

There is something to be said about making buyers feel better about themselves. Is that why the interaction design of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok are so ubiquitous? Swiping is like a salve for the tired soul. The algorithm is your personal liaison that curates and serves up tasty morsels on a platter during your lunch break between shifts consisting of eating shit for hours on end. Perhaps misanthropy is not in vogue, but paralysis might be—which might be why I’m writing this, even if the market won’t feed it into people’s endless feed.