Oliver Bateman Does the WorkVerified account

Many “journalism” careers consist entirely of articles ripping into various people via the “take” format: “Bernie is cancelled...LeBron is done...fuck Coachella...The big problem with IKEA...this guy is garbage...P!nk is over...why all cars are awful...the sun sucks...”

I’m a fairly cynical guy who knows everyone has some angle or ulterior motive, but discovering a cache of 30,000 words of this kind of thumbsucking “marketplace of ideas” pessimism is still really something

Even if you’re just hustling this shit for the quick $100 hits (good for a cup of coffee in NYC) or that one viral Teen Vogue byline (I had one, not worth it), just dwelling in such a cesspool—even in a world that has always been the worst of all possible worlds—has to be rough

It’s not even very sincere pessimism—every theological system has had a built-in “everything is suffering, life is a vale of tears” mode since we invented wizards and shamans—but rather this kind of “here’s one more specific bad thing in an endless inductive now of bad things”