Why write for Medium?
I don’t know. Some write because they make money, I guess. I began to write and then I stopped writing, not because I didn’t make money (I didn’t), but because I didn’t want to keep writing, I felt I had nothing to impart. I couldn’t tell you how to make money online. I couldn’t tell you how to get your dream job. Or how to run a business. Or how to code. Or how to write. Not even how to read, which is something I do more of than your average person.
Why am I writing now? Desperation, maybe. Not to make money, which anyone could always use more of, not to get better at writing, not to improve myself in any manner, not to teach someone wisdom or knowledge, not to tell interesting anecdotes or provide career advice or life advice, although one always tries.
Am I here to tell you sweet nothings that everything is going to be all right? Hardly. I think WWIII is already underway, the US dollar is going to weaken astronomically as BRICSIA nations continue to fight to get out from under control of the petrodollar. I think inflation is going to double in a few years and China won’t continue to buy US debt. I think politics will only continue to heat up and relations with immigrants will become violent as the economy tanks. I think our current economic models only serve the wealthy and powerful. I think we are late Rome and the US will break up into separate political entities within a decade. I think homelessness will get out of control. I think deaths of despair will be more common. I think a lot of death will be covered up and statistics will be fabricated. I think there is little hope for younger people and I don’t think tech will recover from what’s currently going on. I think AI will be blamed for a bad economy when it will have done no such thing. I think energy and resource demand will increase and become more expensive and brownouts will become common. I have little hope for the future so I’m not here to tell you things will be okay, because they won’t, they mathematically cannot be.
So why write? Who cares what one random nobody has to say? I don’t even care what I have to say. I look at my older writings and think what an idiot. But I want to write anyway, and maybe you do too if you have subscribed to Medium. I don’t read what others’ have written either. I don’t proofread my own work, which is why words will be omitted on occasion or my grammar will be bad. You know what? I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. He did whatever he wanted with that novel. It didn’t even read like a human wrote it and yet it’s praised as some kind of masterpiece. Therefore, I will write however I want to write and my writing will develop on its own. I don’t wish to be some hack writer following a formula or removing every ‘that’, ‘just’, or whatever else good writers remove. Sometimes I want my sentences to be ponderous and unreadable. Joyce did that all the time in Ulysses.
I don’t know why you should write for Medium. I don’t know why I should write for Medium either. But I will write. I will tell you my thoughts and I will do my best to be as real as possible with you. I wrote some satire and I don’t care for it. We are facing reality together here. I’ve always hated influencers and online gurus. The somebodies of the internet. I’ve always held a secret hatred for them. Mayber it’s insecurity, maybe I felt something was off about them, maybe I don’t care to hear the thoughts of a rich well-off person telling me what a loser I am, how they are a somebody, but I want to offer some thoughts as a nobody, like reading the essays of a struggling person living through the Great Depression. I don’t want to know how the Rockefellers got through the depression, I want to know how everyone else did and what they thought and felt and how they held out hope for the future.
