Anyone else feeling there’s a glut of words being written right now? Text renaissance turned text bubble. At all lengths and qualities, far exceeding interest and demand.
I feel my writing motivation dropping and finding I’m cutting way more ideas and draft starts much earlier. Stuff I’d have finished and posted 5 years ago and would probably have done well now feels not worth doing.
It’s not my rising standards though. My standards are actually falling not rising. A function of sharply less desire to challenge myself further in genres I’m already good at.
It’s more about the sense that it’s not a time for words but action in the world right now.
There’s less demand, more supply, weakened global attunement to textual modes of culture and a weaker historical-philosophical case for primarily textual ways of being human.
Ie words are being devalued both financially and philosophically and deserve to be.
Perhaps a necessary corrective to decades of elite overproduction. And I don’t mean we should switch to image-based or oral culture. That’s just textuality++. I mean just talking less in every way and doing more.
Not necessarily anything as ideological as “building” but simply being in more basic ways. Both individually and collectively. A less talkative species 🤔
Even if it means people like me getting downgraded 😆
I still want to write, but in ways that are in some sense more intense, and auxiliary. Like I really enjoy writing my threads on maker projects where the writing is a supporting role not the main act.
Same with storytelling. I enjoy it because it’s pre-communicative. Writing down a story feels like an auxiliary step to “making” it. And you could substitute drawing it animation or oral telling… stories precede the telling in some weird way.
Relatedly, for the narrower role for writing I see all around, I’m vaguely attracted to poetry again after decades, since it’s a way to make words instruments of seeing rather than ends in themselves. Each word a microscope. 100x fewer words, each doing 100x more 🤔
I’m sitting in a cafe doing some long overdue planning (planning is another textual activity I have lowered desire for) and trying to apply my “10 year commitment or no deal” rule to all my activities, and asking: do I want to commit to writing in the next decade at all?
Good or bad news depending on whether or not you like my writing: I still want to write through the 2020s for sure. It’s far from the cutoff risk zone. And it’s still an important part of the portfolio. But no longer #1 activity. #2 at best.
And when I do feel the writing itch as a primary thing, it’s more stuff that comes out looking like psyche-scanning automatic writing… more primal and way more rough. With no clearly executed rhetorical intent. Feels like prefab concrete blocks rather than finished structures.
Wonder if there's cycles to these things. Periods when textuality is very high strategic leverage in the pragmatic wider world which leads to a lot of people building lives around producing it and tapping into various shallow and deep inner motivations for producing it.
It's only in the downcycle that your true relationship to words and texts becomes clearer. When the world doesn't value it highly so it's IRR or nothing.
I kinda feel bad for the people flooding in right now, especially young people with a deeper connection to words than me, and more talent for it, and in an environment where the tech for it has never been better. The bubble/looming trough is entirely cultural/political/economic.
But hey, if you survive entering the world of words in a downmarket, you'll be a force to reckon with when you've sailed past your first few 100ks of words.
I had the privilege of starting out in the middle of the longest bull run of word-equity in living memory, and enjoying 2 boom decades... enough to store up momentum and motivation to carry me through what I suspect will be at least a decade long slump
I wrote this on Feb 24, 2020, like a week before personally going into lockdown/pandemic prepper mode, a few months after getting into Roam, and doing threadapalooza. Genuinely felt like a renaissance at the time.
The pandemic and the associated sheer savagery of election-year extreme noble-lying around it is what has driven us into a bubble/looming recession situation. Left to itself, it would have taken 4-5 Golden Age years, esp if Trump had lost w/o pandemic. A stillborn renaissance.