I happen to know that you're extremely well-read; you put me to shame in that regard. I also happen to know that you have an incredible, highly curated collection of books, and that you're a voracious reader.
I will also show a bit of vulnerability and admit that I needed this essay. I needed it from somewhere; I'm grateful it's from you. I needed it as someone who is told over and over, not directly but through implication, that I'm simultaneously a great writer who writes things that people don't really want. My pieces are too conceptually dense, too complex, too long, not emotionally resonant enough, not personal enough, and in general, just not suitable for the modern audience.
In a world where people claim to want truth, to value authenticity, and to admire intelligence, the gap between what people say, what they claim, and what they gobble up is at best dissonant, and at worst, either delusional or deceptive.
The truth is that the essays you mention here are performative RAGE; not because the authors aren't sincere, but because they adhere to format and formula; they're designed to signal, not to stir; to blend, not to uncover; to accommodate the lowest-common-denominator in the service of algorithmic fulfillment and audience prerequisite. They're designed to move the feed, not the discourse.
They are designed to exploit rage, but themselves aren't a genuine expression of rage.
The reason is simple: each piece is an audition, because as writers, we are auditioning to thousands of individuals, hats in hand, begging for a "like", or a "subscribe", not because we're attention whores, but because accruing all of those small gestures is the only path to building a platform.
Without the platform, you have nothing, because people don't care about the content of your pieces, only the social proof you can demonstrate. They will follow when they see thousands or millions of others following, and they will enthusiastically support and share work that they probably aren't reading. And they do it because, above all else, they want to belong. But you have to be "someone", otherwise they'll never belong to you, and so you have to keep auditioning, keep catering, keep compromising.
The great irony is that the people who make it on your bookshelf are the ones who subvert all of this. They're the ones who go against the algorithms of their time, and in doing so compromise their own interests. It's not that everyone who resists makes it to the bookshelf; most don't. But everyone on the bookshelf resists.
I'm extremely grateful for this, Tamara. You've taken a risk few will appreciate, but you're also one step closer to carving a space on that bookshelf. This is a gift to all of us who are trying to write beyond ourselves.
The audition metaphor is the most honest description of the platform economy I’ve encountered, and I’ve read a lot of euphemistic attempts to describe it. Hat in hand is exactly right. Writer are not servile by nature but the system has no other entry point. You perform legibility before you’ve earned the right to be difficult, and by the time you’ve earned it, the performance has shaped you in ways you can’t fully undo.
What you’re identifying about yourself (too dense, too complex, too long) is not a diagnosis of failure but a description of someone writing at a register the market hasn’t caught up to yet, and may not. That’s a genuinely hard place to stand. I won’t dress it up…….
The bookshelf observation is the one I find the most structurally true and the most devastating… not that résistance guarantees anything, but that everyone who lasts resisted something essential. The selection isn’t fair and it isn’t complete, most who resist disappear anyway. But the ones who survived the market by capitulating to it don’t tend to survive time. The shelf is brutally patient in that way.
The gap between what people claim to value and what they actually consume is not dissonance or deception. It’s also fear. Genuinely complex work asks the reader to be uncertain, to be implicated, to finish a piece less resolved than they began. Most readers will say they want that. Very few will choose it when the alternative is the essay that arrives pre-digested and leaves them feeling righteous. Courage in the writer requires a corresponding courage in the reader, and that’s a much harder thing to cultivate.
Your writing deserves readers who are its equal. They exist. There are simply fewer of them, and the current infrastructure is not designed to find them for you.
The fact that you keep writing anyway is actually the whole thing.
You are one of the writers I admire and I voraciously read, Andrew.
You’ve identified the silent scandal, outrage has become a productivity hack for the conscience. It lets readers feel mobilised while remaining perfectly still. The scroll replaces the street. The subscription replaces the stake.
But let’s be harsher! The real fatigue isn’t from rage. It is from spectatorship disguised as virtue. People read these essays the way Romans attended executions, morally animated, personally untouched. They annotate injustice, forward it, discuss it over wine and call that engagement. Pure theatre with footnotes. And pathetic I would say.
And the writers? Too many are mining catastrophe like a renewable resource. Tragedy becomes a content calendar. The prose swells, the references glitter, the structure tightens and yet nothing is risked except perhaps a few unsubscribes. It is astonishing how lucrative moral clarity can be when it costs nothing to the person selling it.
You’re right about catharsis without implication. We now have literacy without liability. Everyone can diagnose power, almost no one will inconvenience themselves to resist it in material terms. Reading about systems feels like dismantling them. It isn’t.
The cruel irony is that the most “aware” cohort in history may also be the most inert, overeducated in critique, undertrained in courage.
If writing about injustice doesn’t endanger your reputation, your income, your friendships, or your comfort at least once in a while, it may not be writing. It may be choreography.
You’ve done something rarer than rage, you’ve questioned the economy that feeds on it. That alone costs more than most essays dare to pay.
You took an enormous risk writing this essay, Tamara, and I admire you for that.
The Romans-at-executions image is one I won’t easily shake since it has something anatomically correct about it. Moral animation as spectator sport, the crowd leaning forward to feel the intervention vicariously. And you’re right that the footnotes make it worse, not better. Scholarship as alibi.
I’m not sure “pathetic” is quite the word, and I don’t want to be gentle, but pathetic implies weakness, and what you’re describing is more like a structural adaptation. People have been trained, very efficiently, to mistake the feeling of understanding for the act of changing. That’s not stupidity or cowardice in the ordinary sense but a learned response to a system that rewards the performance and never calls the debt. The pathos is real, but the mechanism is almost elegant in how completely it forecloses the thing it mimics.
Yes…. writers mining catastrophe as a content calendar, and the market actively selects for it. Editors, algorithms, subscriber counts all pull toward the essay that delivers legible outrage on a reliable schedule. The writer who sits with something unresolved for 18 months and produces something genuinely uncomfortable is operating against every economic incentive available to them. That doesn’t excuse it. But it does mean the corruption runs deeper than individual cynicism.
The risk you name is real. I felt it writing this. Still feel it, honestly. Thank you, Clara, for understanding me!
Tamara, what’s remarkable here is the courage of your self-implication. You didn’t stand outside the machine and point but you admitted you’ve helped oil it. That move, confessing the gap between emotional legibility and emotional honesty, is rarer than any citation of Byung-Chul Han or invocation of Franz Kafka. You named the ritual without pretending you were immune to it. That intellectual integrity is the essay’s extraordinary trait.
Maybe rage fatigue is about outsourced responsibility. The outrage essay doesn’t only process emotion into content, it processes agency into authorship too. We read, we feel, and we subconsciously assign the burden of action to the writer who articulated it so well. The better the essay, the more complete the transfer. What if the form itself trained us not just to consume anger, but to delegate it? That would explain the flatness, not burnout, but abdication. And your refusal to close the loop with catharsis feels to me like handing that responsibility back.
You are the only writer I know who will always go against the current and the trends only to dig deeper into the human subconscious. I read your essays with the same curiosity, pleasure, intensity and obsession as I read Montaigne or Orwell.
The delegation mechanism is the most precise extension of what I was trying to say that I’ve encountered in these responses. And it reframes something interesting… the better the essay performs the emotion, the more completely it relieves the reader of it. Eloquence as absolution. The writer processes the outrage, and absorbs the reader’s obligation to do anything with it. Which means the most affecting pieces in this genre may be, paradoxically, the most disabling. They don’t fail because they are bad. They succeed so completely at the wrong thing.
The abdication framing is sharper than burnout because burnout implies you were once doing something and ran out of capacity. Abdication implies the transfer happened before the doing ever began. The reader arrives already looking to hand something over, and the essay is designed, whether consciously or not, to receive it.
Refusing the cathartic close was the hardest formal decision in writing this. It felt, and still feels, like a kind of discourtesy toward the reader. But courtesy that leaves the reader empty-handed is its own small betrayal.
Montaigne and Orwell are writers who stayed inside the discomfort until something true emerged that they hadn’t planned on finding. That’s the standard I hold and regularly fail to meet. I am immensely moved and grateful you read me like that, Céline.
You name a phenomenon that many people privately sense but almost no one articulates with this level of precision. What stands out the most is not simply the critique of outrage writing but the intellectual honesty required to implicate the writer, the reader, and the medium simultaneously. That requires courage. It also requires discernment.
Your essay carefully distinguishes between the seriousness of the underlying injustices and the cultural form through which those injustices are now processed. Most commentary collapses those two layers. You refuse to. That refusal is the essay’s central strength.
The most important contribution is diagnostic. I like that you identify that the fatigue people feel is not moral exhaustion but structural exhaustion. The audience is not overwhelmed by the quantity of injustice. It is overwhelmed by the predictability of the interpretive format. Once a reader recognizes the template, cognition disengages. The brain stops processing the substance and begins anticipating the rhetorical moves. In other words, the essay ceases to function as inquiry and becomes a recognisable script. At that point the moral charge becomes procedural.
This has consequences that go beyond literary style. A predictable moral script produces a predictable reader response. The reader performs recognition rather than thinking. They register agreement, experience a momentary alignment with the author’s stance, and move on. The cognitive work ends where the emotional signal peaks. The system rewards this dynamic because recognition scales well, it travels easily through feeds, platforms, and social networks. But the same property that makes it scalable also makes it intellectually sterile.
Outrage essays often substitute moral positioning for institutional analysis. They excel at identifying villains and victims, but they rarely examine the operational mechanisms that allow systems to persist. A villain can be condemned and removed without altering the structure that produced him. A structure requires analysis of incentives, networks, and dependencies. That analysis is slower, less emotionally satisfying, and more likely to implicate actors who do not fit neatly into moral categories.
Your example of elite intellectual networks funded through compromised money points in precisely this direction. The uncomfortable question is not merely who behaved badly, but how reputational ecosystems normalize proximity to power. Consider how philanthropic funding operates in universities, think tanks, and research labs. Money rarely arrives in isolation. It arrives attached to prestige, access, and the expectation of mutual reinforcement. Once embedded, it becomes part of the intellectual infrastructure. Removing a single donor does not dismantle the system because the incentive structure remains intact. Writing about this requires following networks rather than personalities. It also requires acknowledging that many respected figures benefited from the arrangement without seeing themselves as participants in wrongdoing.
Your essay also raises an important question about attention economics. Outrage is one of the few emotions that reliably produces engagement metrics. Platforms reward it because it increases time spent reading and interacting. Writers are not immune to that feedback loop. Even when their motives are sincere, the environment gradually shapes their style toward what performs well. Over time a genre emerges whose features are not consciously designed but algorithmically selected. The calibrated anger you describe is an adaptive behavior within an attention market.
If the structure of attention incentivizes outrage performance, then genuine inquiry will almost always appear inefficient by comparison. A difficult essay that leaves questions unresolved spreads slowly. It requires readers willing to tolerate uncertainty. But precisely because it resists closure, it can produce a deeper form of engagement, readers must continue the reasoning themselves. That is cognitively demanding but intellectually productive.
There is also a political implication. Public discourse that revolves around moral exposure tends to prioritize moments of revelation rather than processes of reform. Exposure feels decisive because it generates a clear narrative climax. Yet institutions rarely change through revelation alone. They change through procedural adjustments: legal frameworks, funding rules, governance structures, professional norms. These are mundane mechanisms, not dramatic ones. An essay that tracks them will never generate the same emotional arc as an essay that reveals wrongdoing, but it will often be closer to explaining how power actually operates.
Your call for essays that remain open rather than delivering a verdict is therefore a methodological proposal. An open essay treats writing as investigation rather than adjudication. Instead of guiding the reader toward a predetermined emotional resolution, it maps the terrain of the problem and leaves parts of it unresolved. That approach risks dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction can be productive if it forces readers to confront the limits of simplified narratives.
Finally, the self-implication you introduce near the end is essential. Critiques of media forms often fail because they position the critic outside the system. You avoid that temptation. By acknowledging the performative dimension in your own work, you demonstrate that the problem is structural rather than individual. Writers respond to incentives, audiences respond to familiar patterns, and platforms amplify what travels efficiently. No participant is entirely innocent, but none is individually responsible for the whole.
That honesty is rare. It is also the reason your essay matters. Many writers are capable of producing outrage. Very few are willing to examine the cultural machinery that converts outrage into a routine product. Doing so risks alienating readers, colleagues, and sometimes oneself. The fact that you chose to write this anyway reflects exactly the quality you ask for at the end of the piece: writing that costs something.
This essay does that. And precisely because it does, it opens a conversation that most of the current discourse has avoided.
Alexander, the distinction you draw between institutional analysis and moral positioning is inspiring because I think it explains something about why the villain-and-victim structure is so durable. It’s not just emotionally satisfying; it’s epistemically easier. A person can be condemned, removed, replaced. A system of mutual reinforcement between prestige, money, and intellectual legitimacy requires you to implicate the very sources you’ve been trained to cite as authority. That’s uncomfortable, destabilising in a way that most writing, including serious writing, refuses.
Your point about algorithmic selection producing genre without anyone designing it is something I find more disturbing than deliberate cynicism would be. Cynicism has an agent. What you’re describing is emergence, a literary form shaped by feedback loops that no individual writer chose but that every writer who wants to be read has had to navigate. The calibrated anger is adaptation. Which makes it harder to resist, not easier.
I think the open essay you’re describing, the one that maps terrain without verdict, requires a different compact with the reader. It asks them to tolerate uncertainty and the possibility that the essay will end having made them less confident than when they began. That’s a difficult thing to offer in an attention economy that rewards resolution. The readers who want it exist, but they have to be cultivated rather than captured, which is a slower, less scalable project entirely.
The self-implication point is the one I wrestled with the most in writing this. It would have been so much cleaner to stay outside….
The precision you brought to this reading is its own form of the thing I was asking for. Thank you infinitely!
You continue circling the simulacra… when will you dive in and rip it apart from the inside?
We have created a world where even the most bloodthirsty, extreme emotion—rage—now feels toothless. Satisfying in the moment but it doesn’t move anyone. It scratches an itch to want to be informed but leaves the reader in a state of apathy/coma. But in the simulacra you ‘feel’ like you have contributed. But all you contribute to is the algorithms next iteration, the one that selects the next viral hit for a specific kind of incendiary outrage.
But it feels so unreal. So bereft of substance.
I wonder what the great orators of history, those famous passages from Churchill and Kennedy, MLK and Milk… would they have been able to mobilize? Or would they have been subject to the vicissitudes of the platform through which they tried to share their vision of a better world (your mileage may vary with those examples).
Now mobilization is a choreography of getting a defined filter bubble to act on the shared narrative that animates the ties that bind. Even marches and protests have this unmistakeable anemic feel to them. Not the actual bodies that run into the protests. They feel the full force of reality and the state’s power in opposition… but the power of the ideas that animate them feel… hollow.
These articles, this platform, so often feel like an approximation of what used to be the most important part of being alive—throwing your body against the wheels of the machine to affect change. Now it is click or turn up to your in-groups chosen cause and shout a slogan that is mainly performed. Perhaps because that’s what we have conditioned?
But, there are people out there trying desperately to impact reality, but they have to perform for this digital fun-house mirror we call the modern digital square. So when I read commanding writers like you, Tamara, decrying this type of outrage-as-a-content I find myself wanting to hear more about your genuine rage. Who cares what the algorithm says?
Fuck the metrics. I love when you let the rage pour out of your pen. You took a stance here and I could genuinely experience the fulminating, roiling rage that you feel as your ideas compete in this noisy marketplace. You found the shibboleth to success to be too flat and pulled back the curtain… and choose your own way of letting the world know that you understand the secret language.
Perhaps I have been spoiled, and perhaps I have been primed by other brilliant works… but I am hungry for MORE of your rage.
Let go, release into the reality that you can describe so incredibly well with your genuinely enormous skill at written stories with arcs, layers and imagery. In short. Don’t let the rage you rally against here, augment how you write—we need brave, unflattened ideas from people who haven’t twisted their words to fit the mould this simulacra has conditioned in us.
The circling charge is one I’ll accept partially and contest partially because I think it contains a buried assumption worth examining. Ripping something apart from the inside looks like what we imagine it looks like. Ferocity. Velocity. The prose equivalent of someone overturning a table. But Baudrillard didn’t rip anything apart. He described the map that had replaced the territory with such clinical precision that the description itself became a kind of detonation. The most devastating critiques of systems arrive as autopsies, and the horror accumulates imperceptibly. And I will write about it soon.
That said, yes! There is a management of temperature in my essay that I’m not entirely innocent of. A part of me that stayed architecturally sound while the argument burned around it. Whether that’s craft or self-protection is a question I don’t fully know how to answer honestly.
Your oratory question is the one I find the most genuinely vertiginous. I’ve thought about it before but not with your particular framing. Churchill and MLK and Milk were incredible speakers, but they were great speakers inside specific acoustic conditions. The irreversibility of the spoken moment in a room with bodies. The shared temperature of people who had physically chosen to be present. The fact that you couldn’t scroll away, couldn’t consume it later at double speed, couldn’t share a clip stripped of its context while feeling you’d experienced the whole. What made those words move people wasn’t only the words. It was the thermodynamics of the room they were spoken into.
The digital square has no thermodynamics. It is isothermal by design, everything arrives at the same temperature, the same distance, the same approximate emotional valence, whether it’s a declaration of war or a recipe for banana bread. That flattening is not incidental to the platform. It is the platform’s primary achievement. And into that flatness, we keep releasing words that were built for rooms, for bodies, for the irreversible moment, and then wonder why they dissipate.
The anemic protest is the logical conclusion of this. The bodies are present but the ideas arrived pre-processed, pre-hashtagged, pre-optimised for the screen that will document them rather than the change they are meant to produce. The march photographs better than it persuades.
Then there’s a version of unleashed rage that is, itself, a performance… the writer who removes the filter and calls that authenticity. Some of the most dishonest writing I’ve read was written in apparent fury. Rage can be as formatted as composure; it just uses different signals. What I think you’re actually asking for is not heat but consequence, writing that has paid a price to exist, that couldn’t have been produced without something being risked or lost. That I can promise to keep working toward. Whether it arrives as fire or as something colder and more precise depends on what the thought requires.
The shibboleth image you use is perfect. There is a secret language, and my essay was partly written in it, which is its own irony I haven’t fully resolved.
More of what costs something. That I can commit to. The form it takes… we’ll find out together.
Thank you, Adam, for reading me through your unique wise lenses! It is a privilege.
The analysis in terms of thermodynamics is fascinating, but I will remind you that you are interpreting how your conjuration burns in your system… how that equilibrium shifts to hot or cold in your reader is a matter for the reader. You might set out to map with precision, but it more likely that your words will slip the equilibrium you aim for and in a world (you masterfully outlined in your essay) where content seems so often bereft of substance and heat your incantations have an animating quality in my mind… synapses fire and new ideas form. And a quick look through the comments section on ANY essay will show you that your writing doesn’t have an autopsy-like quality, it has a necromancy-like quality!
You might have in mind a tradition of writing that you aspire to, but I’m sad to say your voice, the one that comes through your essays, is unlike anything I’ve ever read—it refuses categorization.
The salon you’ve conjured here would be interesting to experience how the thermodynamics of your ideas affect a room. Though I doubt there would be much mobilization in the streets, the greater likelihood is that participants would all be transfixed by the conversations that would materialize around your thinking.
I doubt your rage could be performative, your thinking is to well-honed, to disciplined, so just take the compliment—write with the ferocity that organically emanates from the logic and reasoning you possess. Don’t compare yourself to other luminary writers. Just write as Tamara writes and our collective thinking will be better for it.
The necromancy correction is one I’ll accept with genuine surprise. The autopsy metaphor was self-deprecating in a particular way, a preemptive acknowledgment of coldness, of clinical distance. But you’re right that what a piece actually does in a reader’s nervous system is not under the writer’s control, and the evidence in these comments suggests something warmer and stranger than dissection has been occurring. Ideas animating. Synapses firing. The dead material of the culture rising rather than being catalogued.
I love that distinction between mapping and conjuring. I set out to map and apparently produced something closer to an incantation, which is either a happy accident or evidence that the analytical and the animating aren’t as separable as I tend to assume. Perhaps the precision is what makes it catch, not despite the discipline but because of it. A spell requires exact words.
The salon image always moves me. Not the march, not the mobilisation, but the room where the thermodynamics of ideas produce conversations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. That’s a different model of what writing is for, not the production of action but the creation of conditions in which thinking of a different quality becomes possible. I find that both humbling and clarifying about what I might actually be doing here.
Refusing categorisation used to feel like a problem to solve. You’ve made it sound like the whole point.
I’ll take the compliment, Adam! And write as Tamara writes.…
Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. I agree from the root of my perineum through the totem of my solar plexus to the crown of my head, with all my heart. Your mind is Olympian, unleash the Hades of your fury and let the heat set the world on fire. Thank you, Adam, for saying out loud what the rest of us held to our chest.
The anatomical totality of that agreement is its own kind of argument, Andrew. Not intellectual assent but somatic ratification.
That Hades image is the right mythology for it. Not Apollo’s controlled light, not even Dionysus’s revelry… Hades, who governs what is buried, what refuses to stay buried, what rises anyway. The fury that has gone underground rather than been extinguished.
Adam said it with the kind of directness that cuts through all equivocation. And you’ve just demonstrated exactly what that directness produces in a reader, not a nodding agreement but a full-body “yes”.
It’s my privilege to have readers like both of you!
Hades/Pluto/Kali/Phoenix is the depths of us buried under the simulacra of who we think we are. The simulacrum are not just in the system we're a part of here, but is internalised in our socialised identity/persona, too.
Calling upon Hades here is the same as saying, to thy own self be true, stripped from that which we thought made us who we are. To beseech Tamara to do the same on the level of the global algorithmic internet system under discussion here might be a vatic cry for the kind of prophesy from the olden days to bring one's people back into the sacred, with the voice of deity speaking through one. Museguided, that's a tall order! May the archetypes be with you!
The internalised simulacrum is the harder problem, and the one most writing about the system conveniently sidesteps. It’s easier to critique the algorithm as an external force than to reckon with how thoroughly the performed self has colonised the interior, until the persona and the person have become indistinguishable not just to the audience but to the writer herself.
The Jungian shadow isn’t what the system suppresses in us. It’s what we suppressed before the system arrived, and what the system has since learned to monetise in its suppressed form.
The vatic tradition you’re invoking, the prophet as vessel rather than author, the voice that speaks through rather than from, is precisely what the personal brand economy makes structurally impossible. The algorithm needs a consistent, legible, monetisable self. The oracle had no such self. She sat over the chasm and let something else use her throat.
Museguided was chosen carefully. The muse, in the oldest understanding, is not inspiration as pleasant visitation. She is possession. Involuntary. Disruptive of the very identity she works through.
That’s the tall order, yes! And the archetypes, as you note, have their own agenda entirely.
I think what you have articulated so beautifully has been what I’ve been struggling to describe as lack of lament. I think it’s a spiritual need that when not met, it’s felt.
It’s been mentioned in the comments already about Greek poems and tragedy and I wholeheartedly agree it may be one of the few art forms that can carry the weight of what we’re feeling.
Thank you for bringing this into the discussion. ❤️
Lament as a category distinct from outrage, that’s the clarification I didn’t know I needed until you offered it. They feel adjacent but they operate completely differently. Outrage positions itself above the wound, diagnosing and indicting. Lament descends into it, stays there, makes no claim to resolution. The Psalms of lament don’t end with a policy recommendation. Lamentations doesn’t pivot to collective possibility. They hold the frequency of loss without converting it into argument, which is precisely what makes them still readable 3000 years later while most political writing from the same period has dissolved into footnotes.
The spiritual need is real and I think chronically misidentified. What people reach for in outrage content, the thing that keeps them returning despite the flatness that follows, is probably the unmet hunger for genuine lament. The outrage essay offers a simulacrum of it (the gravity, the weight, the sense of something mattering) without the actual descent. It grazes the surface of the grief without going under, which is why it leaves people feeling almost nourished but not quite. Almost held but not quite.
Greek tragedy could carry that weight because it was built for it formally, ritually, communally. The question of what contemporary form can hold it without immediately converting it into content is one I find genuinely open.
Grateful you named what was missing so precisely, Rachel. Thank you!
Talk about rage fatigue. I become exhausted just by being around a couple people (that’s going to change, soon) who are disrespectful toward me in very passive-aggressive manners. Yes, it’s wearing.
The interpersonal version is its own particular drain, possibly more depleting than the macro kind because there’s no conceptual distance between you and the source. Global outrage can be closed with a tab. The person across the room cannot.
Passive aggression is very exhausting because it demands constant interpretation. You’re never responding to what was actually said, only to what was meant, and the gap between the two requires continuous cognitive and emotional labour that the other person never has to acknowledge or account for. It’s a tax with no receipt.
The “that’s going to change, soon” is the most important part of what you wrote.
Yeah, for sure. It's interesting; just read an email from one of the more serious ones, I was absolutely loving, didn't finger point (did I already mention that, yes I believe I did). Anyway, his comment gave me stomach cramps: "Very colorful."
At this point, I don't know how to respond, accept that I wrote his response gave me stomach cramps. I mean...really.
Have you ever watched, "The Body Language Guy," Jesus Enrique Rosas?
You've got to watch him. He nails it, every. single. time.
And just today, I watched about how narcissists fuck with you and when you let them know how what they've said hurt you, they respond with, I'm sorry you feel that way, as if it's now you're fault for your feelings, not taking responsibility for what they said. And that's exactly how this person responds to me...man! Fuck that shit, honestly!
Just seeing this, somehow...it got lost...don't know how?...And I believe I understand you, as well, Tamara. And your comment about anger is...yes...watching, speaking, listening to anger brings more of it. It's the law of attraction deal...and what we focus on, grows...so true. Enough already.
I've written two entire posts in response to this, and pulled back the reins to the following:
The word I'd assign to this created, embedded and accepted reality is "Pornography". Yes, it's a bit of a bastardization of an overused word, but the Greek (pornographos) aptly points toward writing about prostitution. What we consume is that, where the prostitution is the coverage, of any and all manner of congress - be it sexual, financial, fashion, politics or even a kidnapped elder mother of a TV host.
The story is the solicitation; the event is the prostitute and we are the johns.
This was never so apparent, as during covid. Substack was literally the redlight district, riddled with display windows and doorways. And millions rushed into the forum, to find the one unique, virgin piece of information, that hadn't been written about millions of times, over the past months.
So, to my mind this is all pornography. The masses (collectively, a festering impotent golem) addictively watch and are glued to flickering screens that play mental, physical, political and most often, trivial social coitus. The masses dutifully masturbate - mentally & emotionally - to these dopamine triggers, and deftly scroll to the next listing, in order to feed their accepted impotence.
Aristotle's Purgation and Senecca's Restraint were great choices, to contrast where we've come. Especially in these collective conscience and self-accountability wastelands.
Are we rushing to the feast to gorge, but no longer noticing or caring that the roast beast is humanity??
Do we even flinch, when that beast howls in pain, as we tear off another ragged mouthful of flesh??
Or do we refrain, asking how this has happened, what was our part and what is our responsibility in correcting it?
I share your fatigue of Epstien, in that it has become the perpetual rehash of atrocities, with no meaningful action. I personally think the list of those who went to the island should be released with a bounty attached and then allow humanity to cleanse itself...and it would. But that's not what's happening or will happen, so the incessant masturbation of the reading and watching masses continues.
The majority of curated work here on substack and elsewhere are simply empty mouthfuls. It's pushing an empty glass to the reader and the reader performatively up ending it and exclaiming "Aaahhhh!!" before slamming it down to demand, "Another one bar keep!!"
I depart a bit with you, in that I think the responsibility is on the reader. If one can read about the global abuse and molestation of children, but feel sated because of a happy, hopium ending, then they have just chewed off another chunk of flesh at the banquet, regardless of the screams and writhing.
Good writing, especially when it's about these inhumanities, should indeed inform, incense and convict the reader. I'm of the mind that a metaphorical slap across the jowls is a good thing, in a piece of writing. Readers these days are in such a hollywood stupor, that a wake up is often needed.
Sticking with Epstien...we should all ask:
- Why can we read a post about the global trafficking, abuse, rape and sodomy of children and then scroll to a favorite "soft life" writer, whose latest post is about the perfect outfit for "Ibiza in the spring"?
- Why have we accepted and bought the crafted and curated insulators, they sell? Would we easily flit and frolic to the next idiotic distraction, if it were our child being climbed on top of by Andrew or worse chained to a floor in a 3rd world shithole, with rapists and sodomizer lined up out the door? Are the circumstances any different whether it's our child or an unknown one...the rape and sodomy is the same common denominator, is it not?
- How have we allowed ourselves to watch this devolution of collective humanity, to where we read about the worst abominations imaginable, see the gleaming smiles of those committing them and then turn away - to be entertained and captured by yet another story of abomination...as we sip our favorite coffee or snack on our favorite ultra processed chip?
The literary red-light districts and prostitutes who conduct commerce there, are problematic indeed. But it is the hoards rushing in, to fondle, handle, copulate and abuse, that are the problem. And the damage is not to the prostitutes, but to humanity as a whole. With each deluded stroke, we become numb to the stench and acidity of the vomit. The craving and need escalates and we turn with a spoon to devour more. It reenforces the habit of acceptance. Not just of the horror that we have become, but in our satisfaction in doing nothing at all. And we teach that impotence generationally.
This was a consequential and needed piece Tamara, and you were the perfect writer to pen it.
The pornographos etymology earns its place here. It might sound like provocation but in the end it’s etymology doing what etymology should, which is restoring the original weight that familiarity has worn smooth. Writing about prostitution. The story as solicitation, the event as the body being traded, the reader as the john who pays, consumes, and returns home unchanged. That’s not a metaphor that flatters anyone in the transaction, including the writers, including me, which is precisely what gives it its diagnostic force.
Where I’d complicate the reader-as-primary-responsible-party argument, not to absolve the reader but to locate the mechanism more precisely… the john doesn’t create the red-light district, but he couldn’t exist without the economic and social conditions that produced it, and dismantling it requires addressing those conditions rather than simply shaming the appetite. The reader’s impotence, as you call it, is partly chosen and partly manufactured. The manufacturing is the part that interests me more because shame without structural analysis tends to produce guilt that feeds the next cycle rather than interrupting it. The reader who feels bad about scrolling past the atrocity to the Ibiza outfit is still scrolling… just with more self-awareness, which the platform has also learned to monetise.
Your Ibiza question is the one that deserves to be asked in exactly those terms, without the softening that most essays would apply to it. The juxtaposition is not incidental. It is the condition. The same interface that delivers the abuse also delivers the outfit, and the seamlessness of that transition is not a bug in the system’s design. It is the system’s design.
Outrage and distraction aren’t opposites on this platform but adjacent products serving the same attention economy, and the scroll between them is the mechanism by which both are monetised.
The generational transmission of impotence is the part that sits the heaviest. Not just that we consume and do nothing, but that the consumption-as-response becomes the model the next generation inherits as normal. The glass slammed down for another round, before anyone has noticed it was empty to begin with.
The feast image is the one I won’t shake. The beast howling as we tear off another mouthful. The question of whether we flinch is almost beside the point now. We flinch and continue eating. The flinch has been incorporated into the meal.
Reading this, I felt your surprise at the commodification of outrage to constitute, in itself, a deliberate (meta) performance. Surely this can't be a shocking discovery to you or to most people in this space? Any good writer knows that the best way to nullify an emotion is by loudly trumpeting its arrival, clearly and exhaustively justifying the grounds for its existence and -perhaps especially- by othering the monster and occupying the pure moral high ground. The element of surprise is lost, ditto any sense of agency. Only the compulsion remains. Performative rituals count as a compulsion too. [Clutches pearls...] Reminds me of porn. Arousal, masturbation, dissatisfaction. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
Compare and contrast with a set and setting that cultivate the conditions and holding ground for an emotion to emerge and grip the reader. Ishiguro's "Never let me go" springs to mind as a masterclass. Re Greek tragedy, the context by definition involves unresolvable complexity (there's no way out and every choice carries a terrible consequence; also the Rashomon effect (access to multiple perspectives)) and audience participation (I could desire/have desired this, I know what it feels like, thank goodness someone else went through (the consequences of) this so I don't have to). Having emotions acted out IRL probably didn't hurt either.
The Rashomon is what sharpens the Greek tragedy argument considerably and it’s the element most completely absent from the outrage essay’s formal DNA. Multiple perspectives, each internally coherent, each producing a different truth from the same events. That’s a more honest account of how reality actually distributes culpability.
The outrage essay requires a single camera angle because the emotional arc depends on it. The moment you introduce a second legitimate perspective, the verdict destabilises, and the catharsis has nowhere clean to land.
The pearl-clutching self-annotation is the detail I find the most interesting because it performs, in miniature, exactly the self-awareness about performance that the rest of your comment diagnoses. The compulsion acknowledged doesn’t stop being a compulsion. It just becomes a slightly more sophisticated one.
It’s a conundrum as old as the community watering hole: Water bearers gathered ‘round the well, buckets on shoulder or head, sharing stories of note to the village; Gossip, communal grief, faith, fact, and fiction all flowing through the circle as quick as grasshoppers could infest the folds of their animal skins.
How does the serious bearer get in and get out with their daily store of water without soiling themselves in wasted breath?
Anthropologists are quick to point out the evolutionary advantage of gossip circles. News bandied about keeps a community adaptable, alert, active in the affairs of the group. But it doesn’t do so without risk.
Scapegoating, over simplifying, the false sweeps inherent in the telephone game dynamics of sharing and discussing. And also the classic move of shifting blame off those present to those not present, to those past, or those more proximate to the terror without gesturing toward the mutually beneficial systems that supported the troublemakers in the first instance.
I think what you’re partially circling here is the culpability of the village itself, and the courage of the writer to call it out. Truth is, we’re all guilty. Not directly, not in proximate ways, but vaguely, like ambient nodes in a hazy word cloud. The bright nodes of the central constellations share web links each to all. Most of us, most of the time, are barely noticeable blips on the distant edge of the cloud, with 6 degrees or more of separation from the horrors. We don’t send the missiles that blow up girls’ schools, or fly with billionaires to their debauched party islands, but certainly we participate in the structural frameworks that operate as extractive growth systems that put them into place. We are through puts on the web. And we rarely want to admit how our everyday complacency contributes to its continuity and coherence.
Catharsis spread in the manner you reckon with here is a solvent for that granular guilt, for the deliberate indifference given force when personal cost convinces us to look the other way. When we consume things we know externalizes our part of the responsibility. Catharsis acts as a release valve for the inner steam of collective shame. It's a priest-less religion, but rest assured, someone else is always dying for our sins.
I wonder then if some of the blame bleeds out of the pen, if the act of writing is itself a way for some writers to process the emotion they too are experiencing, but would rather not face directly. The emotion is real, but like you say, it floats, it never truly lands; there is such a distance between the subject and the source object. The source is too far removed for the felt reaction to be anything like an active response. Analyzing, kneading the contextual variables, sitting with the energy, all this metabolizing remains necessarily symbolic. But on some level, it also feels active. Win, win.
Then the reader gets it and they in turn exercise their sense of social justice, through powerful inner flows of empathy, fear, or rage. In a sense, they ride the cathartic coattails of the writer. But it is real here too, just abstracted to another level.
The trouble is that one which is always the weakness of catharsis; it is pyrrhic. It brings relief while resolving nothing. It teases but does not test our humanity. The relief is real, the response innocuous. The suffering of someone else carries on unabated, but the witness carries the story home on their head, exonerated, purified. It objectifies a distant horror while the subject stays safely secluded from the actual tragedy. What horror she must experience she shoulders by invitation only.
If the rage registers, if there are manifestations of physical discomfort, if a moment of silence checks the throat, if a conversation pauses, if there is a brief hesitation at the register when ordering a latte, ultimately, the order is made, the conversation picks up where it left off, the noise and scrolls are quickly restored. Horror registered, indignation released, justice resolved. The earth turns.
Who are we after all? Just nodes at the cloudy extremity of the web of life. We can’t just ”Luigi Mangioni” our way through the dumpster fire. Even if we eliminated every actual culprit, we'd still fail to address the machine of which they were simply the most effective cogs. We are all guilty, and analyzing without cathartic resolution is uncomfortable because it doesn’t shelter us from that conviction.
Hell is other people, I think Sartre said. But what most forget is that means we are other people’s hell as well. The web of being is not a static event, but a living system, and what you’re asking for highlights that truth rather than atomizing it for comfort’s sake.
The watering hole is the right origin point, and what it reveals is that the pathology isn’t modern, only its velocity and scale. The telephone game dynamics, the scapegoating of the absent, the false sweep of the shared story are as old as language used socially rather than privately. What’s changed is that the village well now has two billion nodes, and the gossip circle’s evolutionary advantage, keeping a small community adaptable, becomes something closer to an evolutionary liability when the community is planetary and the adaptations required are structural rather than behavioural.
Your priest-less religion formulation is the one I find the most devastating in its precision. The confessional without consequence. Someone always dies for the sins but the architecture of the absolution has been so thoroughly secularised that we can’t even see the transaction occurring. We consume the outrage essay, feel the cathartic release, and walk away shriven… not by grace but by the simple neurological fact that the emotion has been processed and filed. The suffering that occasioned it continues unmodified. The reader is restored to baseline. The system, having successfully routed the potential energy of moral discomfort into content consumption, resets for the next cycle.
It is, as you say, pyrrhic… a victory that costs the winner exactly nothing and resolves exactly nothing for anyone else.
The writer-as-processor point cuts close. I’d be dishonest if I claimed this essay was written entirely from outside that dynamic. There is something metabolic about writing through a problem, the kneading you describe, that produces genuine cognitive and emotional relief independent of whether the writing produces anything in the world. The essay thinks the writer clear. Which is valuable, privately. The question is what happens when that private absorption gets published and the reader mistakes the writer’s processing for a call to their own. They ride the cathartic coattails, as you put it, and arrive at the same cleared state without having done the absorption themselves. The shortcut is the problem. The emotion registers as real because it is real, just abstracted to the point where it produces no traction against anything solid.
The latte hesitation is the image I’ll carry the longest from your comment. That microsecond of friction, the throat check, the pause, where the horror briefly interrupts the ordinary before the ordinary reasserts itself with its full gravitational force. That moment is real. The moral response is present in it. And it is so completely insufficient to the scale of what occasioned it that the gap between the feeling and any possible action it could motivate produces its own despair, which is itself then internalised into the next outrage cycle. The wheel is very well designed.
Sartre’s hell being other people is usually read as misanthropy, but your inversion, that we are simultaneously other people’s hell, restores its actual philosophical weight. We are not observers of a system. We are the system observing itself, which is the specific horror that the outrage essay’s villain-and-victim structure is designed to make temporarily invisible. It needs a bright node at the centre of the constellation so that the rest of us can locate ourselves at the comfortable, barely noticeable periphery. Six degrees of separation from the horror. Close enough to feel implicated enough to consume the content. Far enough to feel absolved by consuming it.
What you’re describing, finally, is not a failure of empathy or courage or intelligence but the precise, efficient functioning of a system that has learned to convert all of those things into something that sustains it. The question of what writing looks like that doesn’t feed that machine is the one neither of us has fully answered. But naming the machine this clearly is at least the beginning of not being its unconscious instrument.
The earth turns…. And yet here we both are, still pulling on the thread. Thank you so much, Andrew!
You've written about an ecosystem that feeds itself but doesn't provide nearly enough nourishment. About three or so years ago, I created a Substack about the ways our narratives--in structure and substance and effect, personal, social, cultural, political--make, tell, shape us. Or at least I tried to do that. I've kept trying to think of a way of coming back to it that isn't just intellectual commentary but that also isn't just a venting of rage to demonstrate solidarity. People want to do *something,* but the templates that proliferate keep circling around "isn't this terrible?" And the answer, of course, is "yes."
But so long as our actions are based essentially on attention, on the pursuit of eyeballs, something's going to be missing. I want to do more than get people to nod; I want my writing to eliminate distance; to be honest, I want it to hurt or at least disconcert the reader. Because if the reader is only taken to the place where they are confirmed (and comforted by that confirmation and therefore finished with what they've done), not much has happened. And the reason I haven't resurrected my Substack is because those outcomes aren't enough for me.
I honest to goodness don't fully know what I want, except that I want it to be more than clever turns of phrase. I want it to present more than the idea that I'm aware and appalled. I wonder whether it's an issue of genre, whether the writing structures we're using aren't up to the task. Are essays capable of doing less of making us feel like good people and more of demanding that we excavate ourselves as a way to demonstrate what change might look like?
What are we willing to pull from ourselves? How willing are we to remake ourselves in ways that might actually cost us something? It isn't just about seeing harm. It's about the frightening prospect of taking ourselves apart. We're implicated in the game, and if we're to willing to acknowledge that what in us would have to change. This is what I'm struggling to apply to my writing because I'm no longer interested in being the good guy who stands and says, "tsk, tsk."
I can only stand to keep on writing by struggling with my fear of, and need for real movement. I don't know what to tell others about how to do it. But I do know it starts with what I've ignored looking at in me. I'm a piece of everything that's happening now, not a bystander. What am I willing to look at and act on? I still don't know how to get there, but I think that's my task.
The question you’re sitting with, whether the essay as a form is capable of demanding excavation rather than confirmation, is one I don’t think has a clean answer, and I’m suspicious of writers who think it does. But I’d push back gently on the genre indictment, not to defend the essay but to locate the problem more precisely. The form isn’t the limitation. The relationship between writer and reader that the current distribution infrastructure produces is the limitation.
The essay has held Montaigne’s self-dissection, Woolf’s formal experiments with interiority, Baldwin’s refusal to let the white liberal reader stay comfortable. Those weren’t gentle texts. They eliminated distance, as you put it, by refusing to let the reader remain a spectator to someone else’s predicament. The form can do that. The question is whether the conditions under which we now produce and consume essays allow it to.
Your Substack about narrative structure sounds like exactly the kind of project that would find no comfortable template to inhabit, which is probably why it stalled. The templates exist because they work, not at producing change, but at producing the feeling of participation, which is what the attention economy actually rewards. A project that interrogates the templates themselves has to first refuse the metrics that would measure its success, and that’s a genuinely disorienting place to write from.
What fascinates me the most in what you’ve written is the distinction between wanting readers to nod and wanting to eliminate distance. That gap is where I think the real formal question lives. Nodding is a response to recognition, the reader sees their existing understanding reflected back with more eloquence than they could have managed. Distance elimination is something else entirely, it requires the reader to be moved from where they were to somewhere they didn’t choose and can’t entirely retreat from. That’s closer to what the Greek tragedians were doing than to what the outrage essay does. It requires, as you say, a willingness to take yourself apart in public…. not as confession, which can be its own performance, but as genuine inquiry whose outcome you don’t control before you begin.
The not knowing what to tell others is, I think, the most honest place to write from. The essay that begins with the answer already in hand is the one that ends in catharsis without implication. The essay that begins with the writer genuinely uncertain, genuinely implicated, genuinely unsure whether they’ll emerge from the argument intact, that’s the one that can ask something real of the reader. Because the reader can feel the difference between a writer who has staged their vulnerability and one who is actually exposed.
Resurrect it, Miguel, because not knowing and writing anyway is the only honest starting point left! Thank you for this!
I paused reading at the point I realized you are feeling maybe a related feeling to what I felt that drive me to break the chain of "watching the news" or "reading the paper." It caused me frustration, anger, and eventually to not care. This was a couple of decades ago. I started to curate my feed, choose my interests, find different and sometimes opposing sources. I even started changing where and when I consumed what I had chosen. Anything to break the conditioning I'd absorbed. It has helped even now.
The curation instinct you followed two decades ago is something a lot of people are only now arriving at, which says something about how long it takes for a medium to reveal its full effect on the nervous system. You felt the conditioning before most people had a word for it, and you acted on the feeling rather than waiting for a theoretical framework to validate it.
The timing element is fascinating… changing when and where you consumed, not just what. That’s more sophisticated than most digital detox advice, which focuses entirely on content while ignoring that the context of consumption shapes the reception as much as the content itself. Reading the same piece at a desk versus on a phone in bed versus in a quiet hour after breakfast produces different cognitive and emotional responses. The medium’s effect isn’t just in the format. It’s in the posture, the hour, the state of attention you bring.
The not caring you describe as an endpoint, I’d distinguish that from the flatness I was writing about. Yours sounds like a cleared field. The flatness I mean is more like compacted earth, still receiving input, registering nothing.
Decades of considered reading leaves marks. The good kind.
I do agree that writing has a sense of a formula to it, a performance of sorts, though I can't put my finger on why exactly, what is the deep reason? Why not just write from your own heart? Who cares what anyone thinks? If someone connects to your own heart then that means one heart connected to another heart: progress! Ha. My Belgian thesis supervisor gave me a great tip on writing (and I don't consider myself any sort of writer but I did score first class in my thesis - though not due to the writing definitely (!) but the data analysis which felt like building a monument). Anyway, he said - "don't ever let me, the reader, work for it, lay it out clearly, and assume absolutely nothing that the reader may have read or knows". That was so helpful, for me anyway, as it gave me a lens to be critical of my own writing. And from there I found writing to be healing which I mistakenly believe helps someone else. I reason that it doesn't, hence why I don't have many subscribers. But what matters more to me is to be honest with my writing, to speak my truth rightly or wrongly, otherwise it is another performance not worth engaging in, all of society now seems to be out-performing another person, rather than connecting. And to make some sort of argument, surely, that is the whole point of writing to begin with - but also to try to connect to my own heart. The rest I try not to care, if anyone reads it or not, but then of course I go checking who has read it and who has opened it, lol. And I'll often add to an essay or change something within it (as I did just now, having finished yours) when a thought comes or I re-think something. Also, I find that sleeping on essays is another method, lol: first the idea arrives, then something gets written, then I realize I've written crap and must not press publish on crap, then I re-work the idea to remove the crap, then I sleep on it, then another idea arrives to change another thing and then the next night, over and over...until I finally realize that I might as well press publish else I never will! When I was little, I studied a lot of poetry to perform recitals, my Dad always said to tuck the book underneath my pillow (this, including in my teens) and by morning, the poem would arrive in my brain. Some things just stay the same. So there you go...that is my story, Tamara. Paulina
Paulina, the pillow method is real, and your father understood something about how the mind processes what the will cannot force. Sleep is not passive. It’s where the material you’ve taken in gets reorganised by something that operates below intention, and what surfaces in the morning has been worked on by a part of you that doesn’t perform.
Your supervisor’s instruction is good advice for a thesis, and I followed something like it for years. But I’ve come to think it has a limit when applied to essays that are trying to do something other than transmit information cleanly. Some writing needs the reader to work. The writer is not being obscure, but the thought itself is unfinished and the reader’s effort is part of completing it.
The essay that arrives too fully resolved has often resolved the wrong thing.
The checking-who-opened-it after declaring you don’t care is not hypocrisy, that’s just being human inside a system that was designed to make you check. The dashboard exists precisely to create that pull. Indifference to audience is easier to maintain before they built a number next to your name.
I am fascinated by what you’ve shared: you write to connect to your own heart first, and you consider external connection a fortunate accident rather than the point. That’s actually the correct order of operations, and most writers never find it.
The crap-recognition instinct you describe is the most important editorial tool there is. Most people don’t have it, or ignore it.
Wow, thanks Tamara! I definitely think you should become my substack thesis writing supervisor, next!! Thank you for validating my crazy ideas, to think that they were not that crazy, after all. xx Paulina
I believe you’re writing about something very profound. I am not going to try to summarize your ideas or squeeze them into a Buddhist box, but (there’s always a but isn’t there?!) rage fatigue reminds me of what Buddhists call shenpa— our urge to craft a storyline out of painful experiences. We get hooked, and if I understand what you are saying, our state of being hooked, has developed into a grammar, a rhetorical paradigm, and sometimes an (unconscious?) type of performance. We want something to hang onto within the daily shit storm. According to my understanding, if we can remain in the fluidity of rage and uncertainty, we can learn to touch even deeper levels of despair which, in turn, deepens our compassion.
Admittedly, my effort here to make sense of what defies logic is in itself shenpa. It probably helps no one, but sometimes I think the best response is an unceasing howl that bears witness, condemns, and allows the confusion and discomfort to swirl around it while it howls nonetheless.
Shenpa is exactly the right friction to bring here as a sort of diagnosis with better resolution than most Western psychological vocabulary offers.
The hook precedes the narrative; that’s what makes it so hard to see. By the time you’re inside the storyline, the hooking already happened three emotional moves ago, and what feels like engaged response is already, partly, defensive construction.
What fascinates me about your reading is the distinction between compassion deepened by staying in the fluidity versus compassion that gets prematurely organised into position. The outrage essay, at its most formulaic, is shenpa that has learned to dress as wisdom, it takes the hook, runs it through a cycle of references and rhetoric, and delivers it back as clarity. The original wound is still there underneath, unexamined, driving the engine.
Your howl image is the one I find the most honest though. Not the essay that resolves, but the witness that doesn’t. There’s a tradition of lamentation, in the Psalms, in Lamentations itself, in Keening, that doesn’t ask the grief to become productive. It just holds the frequency. That might, in fact, be the thing the outrage content cycle most completely eliminates… the space to howl without converting the howl into content.
And yes, Julie, your observation that the effort to make sense is itself shenpa is the kind of self-awareness that redeems the attempt.
Oh wow! What an essay again. Despite how bizarre it might seem, "queasy" is the word that stuck with me. The whole Epstein affair has left us feeling queasy, and we fed this unease by reading articles and essays so devoid of essence that they provided us with no substance to help move forward and overcome our discomfort. You are slightly harsh (but that's why we love you)—not many of the angry have the courage to use that anger rather than just verbalise it. It is the illness of our society: nobody has the courage to start a revolution. The millennials are exhausted, and the next generation is absolutely numb. Superb choice of art yet again!
“Queasy” is the right word precisely because it sits between knowing and not-knowing, between having ingested something and not yet having processed it. The Epstein material produces that specific register of unease, not clean horror, which at least has a defined shape, but the formless discomfort of implication without resolution. And you’re right that the essays feeding that unease without absorbing it have made it worse, not better. More input into a system already struggling to digest what it has.
The angry don’t lack courage exactly but the current conditions have made verbal anger so immediately rewardable, so frictionlessly publishable, so enthusiastically subscribed-to, that it has become the path of least résistance rather than the preliminary to something harder. When outrage gets you followers, the incentive to move beyond outrage dissolves. The courage required now isn’t to feel the anger or even to express it but to resist the comfort of the expression being enough.
Ohhh yes, Millennials exhausted into ineffectiveness, the next generation numb before they’ve even begun. Two consecutive generations whose political energy has been successfully routed into content consumption. Whatever comes after numbness is the question nobody has answered yet.
Though the fact that you felt queasy, named it precisely, and refused the essays that offered false digestion is its own small form of résistance. Not nothing, Otilia! Thank you so much!
Superb. I have long wondered about the lives saved or wrongs righted by processing the mountains of content we have to sail through. Genuine tragedies seem to become emotional affiliate links and I suspect their conversion rate into actual help is on average, zero.
I can hear the dystopian narrative of an Adam Curtis documentary looking back on this period and closing with '...yet nobody seemed to care.'.
The emotional affiliate link is a phrase that should not work as well as it does, and yet it captures something that longer formulations keep missing. The tragedy-as-conversion-funnel. The suffering with a trackable click-through rate. And you’re right that the conversion into actual help is approximately zero because the infrastructure between feeling and doing has been so thoroughly replaced by the infrastructure between feeling and sharing that most people no longer remember there was ever a different path from one to the other.
The Adam Curtis framing is the one that unsettles me because his documentaries work precisely by revealing the gap between what people believed they were doing and what they were actually participating in. The horror of his films is always retrospective, the footage of people confidently enacting something whose consequences they couldn’t see. And yes, I can hear exactly that narration over footage of us: scrolling, sharing, feeling, forgetting. The mountains of processed content. The conversion rate of zero. The civilizational shrug.
What Curtis understands that most essayists don’t is that systems don’t have villains at the centre. They have people behaving reasonably within incentive structures that produce unreasonable outcomes in aggregate, which is precisely what makes the documentary devastating and the outrage essay inadequate, one maps the system, the other needs a face to put on it.
The particular horror of this moment…. the caring and the not-caring have become indistinguishable.… thank you for this, Nick!
Many thanks for your considered reply, Tamara. Really, I have little more than my individual shrug offered up to the collective shrug but returning to the Adam Curtis theme - he usually features the collapse of one system into another, so we might now be at peak outrage and about to begin the shift to something more meaningful. Hopefully.
I happen to know that you're extremely well-read; you put me to shame in that regard. I also happen to know that you have an incredible, highly curated collection of books, and that you're a voracious reader.
I will also show a bit of vulnerability and admit that I needed this essay. I needed it from somewhere; I'm grateful it's from you. I needed it as someone who is told over and over, not directly but through implication, that I'm simultaneously a great writer who writes things that people don't really want. My pieces are too conceptually dense, too complex, too long, not emotionally resonant enough, not personal enough, and in general, just not suitable for the modern audience.
In a world where people claim to want truth, to value authenticity, and to admire intelligence, the gap between what people say, what they claim, and what they gobble up is at best dissonant, and at worst, either delusional or deceptive.
The truth is that the essays you mention here are performative RAGE; not because the authors aren't sincere, but because they adhere to format and formula; they're designed to signal, not to stir; to blend, not to uncover; to accommodate the lowest-common-denominator in the service of algorithmic fulfillment and audience prerequisite. They're designed to move the feed, not the discourse.
They are designed to exploit rage, but themselves aren't a genuine expression of rage.
The reason is simple: each piece is an audition, because as writers, we are auditioning to thousands of individuals, hats in hand, begging for a "like", or a "subscribe", not because we're attention whores, but because accruing all of those small gestures is the only path to building a platform.
Without the platform, you have nothing, because people don't care about the content of your pieces, only the social proof you can demonstrate. They will follow when they see thousands or millions of others following, and they will enthusiastically support and share work that they probably aren't reading. And they do it because, above all else, they want to belong. But you have to be "someone", otherwise they'll never belong to you, and so you have to keep auditioning, keep catering, keep compromising.
The great irony is that the people who make it on your bookshelf are the ones who subvert all of this. They're the ones who go against the algorithms of their time, and in doing so compromise their own interests. It's not that everyone who resists makes it to the bookshelf; most don't. But everyone on the bookshelf resists.
I'm extremely grateful for this, Tamara. You've taken a risk few will appreciate, but you're also one step closer to carving a space on that bookshelf. This is a gift to all of us who are trying to write beyond ourselves.
The audition metaphor is the most honest description of the platform economy I’ve encountered, and I’ve read a lot of euphemistic attempts to describe it. Hat in hand is exactly right. Writer are not servile by nature but the system has no other entry point. You perform legibility before you’ve earned the right to be difficult, and by the time you’ve earned it, the performance has shaped you in ways you can’t fully undo.
What you’re identifying about yourself (too dense, too complex, too long) is not a diagnosis of failure but a description of someone writing at a register the market hasn’t caught up to yet, and may not. That’s a genuinely hard place to stand. I won’t dress it up…….
The bookshelf observation is the one I find the most structurally true and the most devastating… not that résistance guarantees anything, but that everyone who lasts resisted something essential. The selection isn’t fair and it isn’t complete, most who resist disappear anyway. But the ones who survived the market by capitulating to it don’t tend to survive time. The shelf is brutally patient in that way.
The gap between what people claim to value and what they actually consume is not dissonance or deception. It’s also fear. Genuinely complex work asks the reader to be uncertain, to be implicated, to finish a piece less resolved than they began. Most readers will say they want that. Very few will choose it when the alternative is the essay that arrives pre-digested and leaves them feeling righteous. Courage in the writer requires a corresponding courage in the reader, and that’s a much harder thing to cultivate.
Your writing deserves readers who are its equal. They exist. There are simply fewer of them, and the current infrastructure is not designed to find them for you.
The fact that you keep writing anyway is actually the whole thing.
You are one of the writers I admire and I voraciously read, Andrew.
Always the best comments. No rival.
I could say the same thing to you!
You’ve identified the silent scandal, outrage has become a productivity hack for the conscience. It lets readers feel mobilised while remaining perfectly still. The scroll replaces the street. The subscription replaces the stake.
But let’s be harsher! The real fatigue isn’t from rage. It is from spectatorship disguised as virtue. People read these essays the way Romans attended executions, morally animated, personally untouched. They annotate injustice, forward it, discuss it over wine and call that engagement. Pure theatre with footnotes. And pathetic I would say.
And the writers? Too many are mining catastrophe like a renewable resource. Tragedy becomes a content calendar. The prose swells, the references glitter, the structure tightens and yet nothing is risked except perhaps a few unsubscribes. It is astonishing how lucrative moral clarity can be when it costs nothing to the person selling it.
You’re right about catharsis without implication. We now have literacy without liability. Everyone can diagnose power, almost no one will inconvenience themselves to resist it in material terms. Reading about systems feels like dismantling them. It isn’t.
The cruel irony is that the most “aware” cohort in history may also be the most inert, overeducated in critique, undertrained in courage.
If writing about injustice doesn’t endanger your reputation, your income, your friendships, or your comfort at least once in a while, it may not be writing. It may be choreography.
You’ve done something rarer than rage, you’ve questioned the economy that feeds on it. That alone costs more than most essays dare to pay.
You took an enormous risk writing this essay, Tamara, and I admire you for that.
The Romans-at-executions image is one I won’t easily shake since it has something anatomically correct about it. Moral animation as spectator sport, the crowd leaning forward to feel the intervention vicariously. And you’re right that the footnotes make it worse, not better. Scholarship as alibi.
I’m not sure “pathetic” is quite the word, and I don’t want to be gentle, but pathetic implies weakness, and what you’re describing is more like a structural adaptation. People have been trained, very efficiently, to mistake the feeling of understanding for the act of changing. That’s not stupidity or cowardice in the ordinary sense but a learned response to a system that rewards the performance and never calls the debt. The pathos is real, but the mechanism is almost elegant in how completely it forecloses the thing it mimics.
Yes…. writers mining catastrophe as a content calendar, and the market actively selects for it. Editors, algorithms, subscriber counts all pull toward the essay that delivers legible outrage on a reliable schedule. The writer who sits with something unresolved for 18 months and produces something genuinely uncomfortable is operating against every economic incentive available to them. That doesn’t excuse it. But it does mean the corruption runs deeper than individual cynicism.
The risk you name is real. I felt it writing this. Still feel it, honestly. Thank you, Clara, for understanding me!
Tamara, what’s remarkable here is the courage of your self-implication. You didn’t stand outside the machine and point but you admitted you’ve helped oil it. That move, confessing the gap between emotional legibility and emotional honesty, is rarer than any citation of Byung-Chul Han or invocation of Franz Kafka. You named the ritual without pretending you were immune to it. That intellectual integrity is the essay’s extraordinary trait.
Maybe rage fatigue is about outsourced responsibility. The outrage essay doesn’t only process emotion into content, it processes agency into authorship too. We read, we feel, and we subconsciously assign the burden of action to the writer who articulated it so well. The better the essay, the more complete the transfer. What if the form itself trained us not just to consume anger, but to delegate it? That would explain the flatness, not burnout, but abdication. And your refusal to close the loop with catharsis feels to me like handing that responsibility back.
You are the only writer I know who will always go against the current and the trends only to dig deeper into the human subconscious. I read your essays with the same curiosity, pleasure, intensity and obsession as I read Montaigne or Orwell.
Chapeau!
The delegation mechanism is the most precise extension of what I was trying to say that I’ve encountered in these responses. And it reframes something interesting… the better the essay performs the emotion, the more completely it relieves the reader of it. Eloquence as absolution. The writer processes the outrage, and absorbs the reader’s obligation to do anything with it. Which means the most affecting pieces in this genre may be, paradoxically, the most disabling. They don’t fail because they are bad. They succeed so completely at the wrong thing.
The abdication framing is sharper than burnout because burnout implies you were once doing something and ran out of capacity. Abdication implies the transfer happened before the doing ever began. The reader arrives already looking to hand something over, and the essay is designed, whether consciously or not, to receive it.
Refusing the cathartic close was the hardest formal decision in writing this. It felt, and still feels, like a kind of discourtesy toward the reader. But courtesy that leaves the reader empty-handed is its own small betrayal.
Montaigne and Orwell are writers who stayed inside the discomfort until something true emerged that they hadn’t planned on finding. That’s the standard I hold and regularly fail to meet. I am immensely moved and grateful you read me like that, Céline.
Chapeau back for seeing the mechanism so cleanly!
You name a phenomenon that many people privately sense but almost no one articulates with this level of precision. What stands out the most is not simply the critique of outrage writing but the intellectual honesty required to implicate the writer, the reader, and the medium simultaneously. That requires courage. It also requires discernment.
Your essay carefully distinguishes between the seriousness of the underlying injustices and the cultural form through which those injustices are now processed. Most commentary collapses those two layers. You refuse to. That refusal is the essay’s central strength.
The most important contribution is diagnostic. I like that you identify that the fatigue people feel is not moral exhaustion but structural exhaustion. The audience is not overwhelmed by the quantity of injustice. It is overwhelmed by the predictability of the interpretive format. Once a reader recognizes the template, cognition disengages. The brain stops processing the substance and begins anticipating the rhetorical moves. In other words, the essay ceases to function as inquiry and becomes a recognisable script. At that point the moral charge becomes procedural.
This has consequences that go beyond literary style. A predictable moral script produces a predictable reader response. The reader performs recognition rather than thinking. They register agreement, experience a momentary alignment with the author’s stance, and move on. The cognitive work ends where the emotional signal peaks. The system rewards this dynamic because recognition scales well, it travels easily through feeds, platforms, and social networks. But the same property that makes it scalable also makes it intellectually sterile.
Outrage essays often substitute moral positioning for institutional analysis. They excel at identifying villains and victims, but they rarely examine the operational mechanisms that allow systems to persist. A villain can be condemned and removed without altering the structure that produced him. A structure requires analysis of incentives, networks, and dependencies. That analysis is slower, less emotionally satisfying, and more likely to implicate actors who do not fit neatly into moral categories.
Your example of elite intellectual networks funded through compromised money points in precisely this direction. The uncomfortable question is not merely who behaved badly, but how reputational ecosystems normalize proximity to power. Consider how philanthropic funding operates in universities, think tanks, and research labs. Money rarely arrives in isolation. It arrives attached to prestige, access, and the expectation of mutual reinforcement. Once embedded, it becomes part of the intellectual infrastructure. Removing a single donor does not dismantle the system because the incentive structure remains intact. Writing about this requires following networks rather than personalities. It also requires acknowledging that many respected figures benefited from the arrangement without seeing themselves as participants in wrongdoing.
Your essay also raises an important question about attention economics. Outrage is one of the few emotions that reliably produces engagement metrics. Platforms reward it because it increases time spent reading and interacting. Writers are not immune to that feedback loop. Even when their motives are sincere, the environment gradually shapes their style toward what performs well. Over time a genre emerges whose features are not consciously designed but algorithmically selected. The calibrated anger you describe is an adaptive behavior within an attention market.
If the structure of attention incentivizes outrage performance, then genuine inquiry will almost always appear inefficient by comparison. A difficult essay that leaves questions unresolved spreads slowly. It requires readers willing to tolerate uncertainty. But precisely because it resists closure, it can produce a deeper form of engagement, readers must continue the reasoning themselves. That is cognitively demanding but intellectually productive.
There is also a political implication. Public discourse that revolves around moral exposure tends to prioritize moments of revelation rather than processes of reform. Exposure feels decisive because it generates a clear narrative climax. Yet institutions rarely change through revelation alone. They change through procedural adjustments: legal frameworks, funding rules, governance structures, professional norms. These are mundane mechanisms, not dramatic ones. An essay that tracks them will never generate the same emotional arc as an essay that reveals wrongdoing, but it will often be closer to explaining how power actually operates.
Your call for essays that remain open rather than delivering a verdict is therefore a methodological proposal. An open essay treats writing as investigation rather than adjudication. Instead of guiding the reader toward a predetermined emotional resolution, it maps the terrain of the problem and leaves parts of it unresolved. That approach risks dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction can be productive if it forces readers to confront the limits of simplified narratives.
Finally, the self-implication you introduce near the end is essential. Critiques of media forms often fail because they position the critic outside the system. You avoid that temptation. By acknowledging the performative dimension in your own work, you demonstrate that the problem is structural rather than individual. Writers respond to incentives, audiences respond to familiar patterns, and platforms amplify what travels efficiently. No participant is entirely innocent, but none is individually responsible for the whole.
That honesty is rare. It is also the reason your essay matters. Many writers are capable of producing outrage. Very few are willing to examine the cultural machinery that converts outrage into a routine product. Doing so risks alienating readers, colleagues, and sometimes oneself. The fact that you chose to write this anyway reflects exactly the quality you ask for at the end of the piece: writing that costs something.
This essay does that. And precisely because it does, it opens a conversation that most of the current discourse has avoided.
BRAVO, Tamara! You’re incredible.
Alexander, the distinction you draw between institutional analysis and moral positioning is inspiring because I think it explains something about why the villain-and-victim structure is so durable. It’s not just emotionally satisfying; it’s epistemically easier. A person can be condemned, removed, replaced. A system of mutual reinforcement between prestige, money, and intellectual legitimacy requires you to implicate the very sources you’ve been trained to cite as authority. That’s uncomfortable, destabilising in a way that most writing, including serious writing, refuses.
Your point about algorithmic selection producing genre without anyone designing it is something I find more disturbing than deliberate cynicism would be. Cynicism has an agent. What you’re describing is emergence, a literary form shaped by feedback loops that no individual writer chose but that every writer who wants to be read has had to navigate. The calibrated anger is adaptation. Which makes it harder to resist, not easier.
I think the open essay you’re describing, the one that maps terrain without verdict, requires a different compact with the reader. It asks them to tolerate uncertainty and the possibility that the essay will end having made them less confident than when they began. That’s a difficult thing to offer in an attention economy that rewards resolution. The readers who want it exist, but they have to be cultivated rather than captured, which is a slower, less scalable project entirely.
The self-implication point is the one I wrestled with the most in writing this. It would have been so much cleaner to stay outside….
The precision you brought to this reading is its own form of the thing I was asking for. Thank you infinitely!
You continue circling the simulacra… when will you dive in and rip it apart from the inside?
We have created a world where even the most bloodthirsty, extreme emotion—rage—now feels toothless. Satisfying in the moment but it doesn’t move anyone. It scratches an itch to want to be informed but leaves the reader in a state of apathy/coma. But in the simulacra you ‘feel’ like you have contributed. But all you contribute to is the algorithms next iteration, the one that selects the next viral hit for a specific kind of incendiary outrage.
But it feels so unreal. So bereft of substance.
I wonder what the great orators of history, those famous passages from Churchill and Kennedy, MLK and Milk… would they have been able to mobilize? Or would they have been subject to the vicissitudes of the platform through which they tried to share their vision of a better world (your mileage may vary with those examples).
Now mobilization is a choreography of getting a defined filter bubble to act on the shared narrative that animates the ties that bind. Even marches and protests have this unmistakeable anemic feel to them. Not the actual bodies that run into the protests. They feel the full force of reality and the state’s power in opposition… but the power of the ideas that animate them feel… hollow.
These articles, this platform, so often feel like an approximation of what used to be the most important part of being alive—throwing your body against the wheels of the machine to affect change. Now it is click or turn up to your in-groups chosen cause and shout a slogan that is mainly performed. Perhaps because that’s what we have conditioned?
But, there are people out there trying desperately to impact reality, but they have to perform for this digital fun-house mirror we call the modern digital square. So when I read commanding writers like you, Tamara, decrying this type of outrage-as-a-content I find myself wanting to hear more about your genuine rage. Who cares what the algorithm says?
Fuck the metrics. I love when you let the rage pour out of your pen. You took a stance here and I could genuinely experience the fulminating, roiling rage that you feel as your ideas compete in this noisy marketplace. You found the shibboleth to success to be too flat and pulled back the curtain… and choose your own way of letting the world know that you understand the secret language.
Perhaps I have been spoiled, and perhaps I have been primed by other brilliant works… but I am hungry for MORE of your rage.
Let go, release into the reality that you can describe so incredibly well with your genuinely enormous skill at written stories with arcs, layers and imagery. In short. Don’t let the rage you rally against here, augment how you write—we need brave, unflattened ideas from people who haven’t twisted their words to fit the mould this simulacra has conditioned in us.
More fire and rage please :)
The circling charge is one I’ll accept partially and contest partially because I think it contains a buried assumption worth examining. Ripping something apart from the inside looks like what we imagine it looks like. Ferocity. Velocity. The prose equivalent of someone overturning a table. But Baudrillard didn’t rip anything apart. He described the map that had replaced the territory with such clinical precision that the description itself became a kind of detonation. The most devastating critiques of systems arrive as autopsies, and the horror accumulates imperceptibly. And I will write about it soon.
That said, yes! There is a management of temperature in my essay that I’m not entirely innocent of. A part of me that stayed architecturally sound while the argument burned around it. Whether that’s craft or self-protection is a question I don’t fully know how to answer honestly.
Your oratory question is the one I find the most genuinely vertiginous. I’ve thought about it before but not with your particular framing. Churchill and MLK and Milk were incredible speakers, but they were great speakers inside specific acoustic conditions. The irreversibility of the spoken moment in a room with bodies. The shared temperature of people who had physically chosen to be present. The fact that you couldn’t scroll away, couldn’t consume it later at double speed, couldn’t share a clip stripped of its context while feeling you’d experienced the whole. What made those words move people wasn’t only the words. It was the thermodynamics of the room they were spoken into.
The digital square has no thermodynamics. It is isothermal by design, everything arrives at the same temperature, the same distance, the same approximate emotional valence, whether it’s a declaration of war or a recipe for banana bread. That flattening is not incidental to the platform. It is the platform’s primary achievement. And into that flatness, we keep releasing words that were built for rooms, for bodies, for the irreversible moment, and then wonder why they dissipate.
The anemic protest is the logical conclusion of this. The bodies are present but the ideas arrived pre-processed, pre-hashtagged, pre-optimised for the screen that will document them rather than the change they are meant to produce. The march photographs better than it persuades.
Then there’s a version of unleashed rage that is, itself, a performance… the writer who removes the filter and calls that authenticity. Some of the most dishonest writing I’ve read was written in apparent fury. Rage can be as formatted as composure; it just uses different signals. What I think you’re actually asking for is not heat but consequence, writing that has paid a price to exist, that couldn’t have been produced without something being risked or lost. That I can promise to keep working toward. Whether it arrives as fire or as something colder and more precise depends on what the thought requires.
The shibboleth image you use is perfect. There is a secret language, and my essay was partly written in it, which is its own irony I haven’t fully resolved.
More of what costs something. That I can commit to. The form it takes… we’ll find out together.
Thank you, Adam, for reading me through your unique wise lenses! It is a privilege.
The analysis in terms of thermodynamics is fascinating, but I will remind you that you are interpreting how your conjuration burns in your system… how that equilibrium shifts to hot or cold in your reader is a matter for the reader. You might set out to map with precision, but it more likely that your words will slip the equilibrium you aim for and in a world (you masterfully outlined in your essay) where content seems so often bereft of substance and heat your incantations have an animating quality in my mind… synapses fire and new ideas form. And a quick look through the comments section on ANY essay will show you that your writing doesn’t have an autopsy-like quality, it has a necromancy-like quality!
You might have in mind a tradition of writing that you aspire to, but I’m sad to say your voice, the one that comes through your essays, is unlike anything I’ve ever read—it refuses categorization.
The salon you’ve conjured here would be interesting to experience how the thermodynamics of your ideas affect a room. Though I doubt there would be much mobilization in the streets, the greater likelihood is that participants would all be transfixed by the conversations that would materialize around your thinking.
I doubt your rage could be performative, your thinking is to well-honed, to disciplined, so just take the compliment—write with the ferocity that organically emanates from the logic and reasoning you possess. Don’t compare yourself to other luminary writers. Just write as Tamara writes and our collective thinking will be better for it.
The necromancy correction is one I’ll accept with genuine surprise. The autopsy metaphor was self-deprecating in a particular way, a preemptive acknowledgment of coldness, of clinical distance. But you’re right that what a piece actually does in a reader’s nervous system is not under the writer’s control, and the evidence in these comments suggests something warmer and stranger than dissection has been occurring. Ideas animating. Synapses firing. The dead material of the culture rising rather than being catalogued.
I love that distinction between mapping and conjuring. I set out to map and apparently produced something closer to an incantation, which is either a happy accident or evidence that the analytical and the animating aren’t as separable as I tend to assume. Perhaps the precision is what makes it catch, not despite the discipline but because of it. A spell requires exact words.
The salon image always moves me. Not the march, not the mobilisation, but the room where the thermodynamics of ideas produce conversations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. That’s a different model of what writing is for, not the production of action but the creation of conditions in which thinking of a different quality becomes possible. I find that both humbling and clarifying about what I might actually be doing here.
Refusing categorisation used to feel like a problem to solve. You’ve made it sound like the whole point.
I’ll take the compliment, Adam! And write as Tamara writes.…
Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. I agree from the root of my perineum through the totem of my solar plexus to the crown of my head, with all my heart. Your mind is Olympian, unleash the Hades of your fury and let the heat set the world on fire. Thank you, Adam, for saying out loud what the rest of us held to our chest.
The anatomical totality of that agreement is its own kind of argument, Andrew. Not intellectual assent but somatic ratification.
That Hades image is the right mythology for it. Not Apollo’s controlled light, not even Dionysus’s revelry… Hades, who governs what is buried, what refuses to stay buried, what rises anyway. The fury that has gone underground rather than been extinguished.
Adam said it with the kind of directness that cuts through all equivocation. And you’ve just demonstrated exactly what that directness produces in a reader, not a nodding agreement but a full-body “yes”.
It’s my privilege to have readers like both of you!
Hades/Pluto/Kali/Phoenix is the depths of us buried under the simulacra of who we think we are. The simulacrum are not just in the system we're a part of here, but is internalised in our socialised identity/persona, too.
Calling upon Hades here is the same as saying, to thy own self be true, stripped from that which we thought made us who we are. To beseech Tamara to do the same on the level of the global algorithmic internet system under discussion here might be a vatic cry for the kind of prophesy from the olden days to bring one's people back into the sacred, with the voice of deity speaking through one. Museguided, that's a tall order! May the archetypes be with you!
The internalised simulacrum is the harder problem, and the one most writing about the system conveniently sidesteps. It’s easier to critique the algorithm as an external force than to reckon with how thoroughly the performed self has colonised the interior, until the persona and the person have become indistinguishable not just to the audience but to the writer herself.
The Jungian shadow isn’t what the system suppresses in us. It’s what we suppressed before the system arrived, and what the system has since learned to monetise in its suppressed form.
The vatic tradition you’re invoking, the prophet as vessel rather than author, the voice that speaks through rather than from, is precisely what the personal brand economy makes structurally impossible. The algorithm needs a consistent, legible, monetisable self. The oracle had no such self. She sat over the chasm and let something else use her throat.
Museguided was chosen carefully. The muse, in the oldest understanding, is not inspiration as pleasant visitation. She is possession. Involuntary. Disruptive of the very identity she works through.
That’s the tall order, yes! And the archetypes, as you note, have their own agenda entirely.
Hahahaha Andrew, I read this after I wrote her writing has a necromancy-like quality so you landing on the Hades image is a delight!
Always a delight to read you Andrew… haha I have heard solar plexus since my pro-wrestling days… brilliant!
What a splendid comment. We all want Tamara to never stop writing like that.
I think what you have articulated so beautifully has been what I’ve been struggling to describe as lack of lament. I think it’s a spiritual need that when not met, it’s felt.
It’s been mentioned in the comments already about Greek poems and tragedy and I wholeheartedly agree it may be one of the few art forms that can carry the weight of what we’re feeling.
Thank you for bringing this into the discussion. ❤️
Lament as a category distinct from outrage, that’s the clarification I didn’t know I needed until you offered it. They feel adjacent but they operate completely differently. Outrage positions itself above the wound, diagnosing and indicting. Lament descends into it, stays there, makes no claim to resolution. The Psalms of lament don’t end with a policy recommendation. Lamentations doesn’t pivot to collective possibility. They hold the frequency of loss without converting it into argument, which is precisely what makes them still readable 3000 years later while most political writing from the same period has dissolved into footnotes.
The spiritual need is real and I think chronically misidentified. What people reach for in outrage content, the thing that keeps them returning despite the flatness that follows, is probably the unmet hunger for genuine lament. The outrage essay offers a simulacrum of it (the gravity, the weight, the sense of something mattering) without the actual descent. It grazes the surface of the grief without going under, which is why it leaves people feeling almost nourished but not quite. Almost held but not quite.
Greek tragedy could carry that weight because it was built for it formally, ritually, communally. The question of what contemporary form can hold it without immediately converting it into content is one I find genuinely open.
Grateful you named what was missing so precisely, Rachel. Thank you!
Talk about rage fatigue. I become exhausted just by being around a couple people (that’s going to change, soon) who are disrespectful toward me in very passive-aggressive manners. Yes, it’s wearing.
The interpersonal version is its own particular drain, possibly more depleting than the macro kind because there’s no conceptual distance between you and the source. Global outrage can be closed with a tab. The person across the room cannot.
Passive aggression is very exhausting because it demands constant interpretation. You’re never responding to what was actually said, only to what was meant, and the gap between the two requires continuous cognitive and emotional labour that the other person never has to acknowledge or account for. It’s a tax with no receipt.
The “that’s going to change, soon” is the most important part of what you wrote.
Thank you for reading me, Ruth!
Yeah, for sure. It's interesting; just read an email from one of the more serious ones, I was absolutely loving, didn't finger point (did I already mention that, yes I believe I did). Anyway, his comment gave me stomach cramps: "Very colorful."
At this point, I don't know how to respond, accept that I wrote his response gave me stomach cramps. I mean...really.
Have you ever watched, "The Body Language Guy," Jesus Enrique Rosas?
You've got to watch him. He nails it, every. single. time.
And just today, I watched about how narcissists fuck with you and when you let them know how what they've said hurt you, they respond with, I'm sorry you feel that way, as if it's now you're fault for your feelings, not taking responsibility for what they said. And that's exactly how this person responds to me...man! Fuck that shit, honestly!
Glad to read your writing, I love it.
I do understand you, Ruth!
Just seeing this, somehow...it got lost...don't know how?...And I believe I understand you, as well, Tamara. And your comment about anger is...yes...watching, speaking, listening to anger brings more of it. It's the law of attraction deal...and what we focus on, grows...so true. Enough already.
Precisely!
I've written two entire posts in response to this, and pulled back the reins to the following:
The word I'd assign to this created, embedded and accepted reality is "Pornography". Yes, it's a bit of a bastardization of an overused word, but the Greek (pornographos) aptly points toward writing about prostitution. What we consume is that, where the prostitution is the coverage, of any and all manner of congress - be it sexual, financial, fashion, politics or even a kidnapped elder mother of a TV host.
The story is the solicitation; the event is the prostitute and we are the johns.
This was never so apparent, as during covid. Substack was literally the redlight district, riddled with display windows and doorways. And millions rushed into the forum, to find the one unique, virgin piece of information, that hadn't been written about millions of times, over the past months.
So, to my mind this is all pornography. The masses (collectively, a festering impotent golem) addictively watch and are glued to flickering screens that play mental, physical, political and most often, trivial social coitus. The masses dutifully masturbate - mentally & emotionally - to these dopamine triggers, and deftly scroll to the next listing, in order to feed their accepted impotence.
Aristotle's Purgation and Senecca's Restraint were great choices, to contrast where we've come. Especially in these collective conscience and self-accountability wastelands.
Are we rushing to the feast to gorge, but no longer noticing or caring that the roast beast is humanity??
Do we even flinch, when that beast howls in pain, as we tear off another ragged mouthful of flesh??
Or do we refrain, asking how this has happened, what was our part and what is our responsibility in correcting it?
I share your fatigue of Epstien, in that it has become the perpetual rehash of atrocities, with no meaningful action. I personally think the list of those who went to the island should be released with a bounty attached and then allow humanity to cleanse itself...and it would. But that's not what's happening or will happen, so the incessant masturbation of the reading and watching masses continues.
The majority of curated work here on substack and elsewhere are simply empty mouthfuls. It's pushing an empty glass to the reader and the reader performatively up ending it and exclaiming "Aaahhhh!!" before slamming it down to demand, "Another one bar keep!!"
I depart a bit with you, in that I think the responsibility is on the reader. If one can read about the global abuse and molestation of children, but feel sated because of a happy, hopium ending, then they have just chewed off another chunk of flesh at the banquet, regardless of the screams and writhing.
Good writing, especially when it's about these inhumanities, should indeed inform, incense and convict the reader. I'm of the mind that a metaphorical slap across the jowls is a good thing, in a piece of writing. Readers these days are in such a hollywood stupor, that a wake up is often needed.
Sticking with Epstien...we should all ask:
- Why can we read a post about the global trafficking, abuse, rape and sodomy of children and then scroll to a favorite "soft life" writer, whose latest post is about the perfect outfit for "Ibiza in the spring"?
- Why have we accepted and bought the crafted and curated insulators, they sell? Would we easily flit and frolic to the next idiotic distraction, if it were our child being climbed on top of by Andrew or worse chained to a floor in a 3rd world shithole, with rapists and sodomizer lined up out the door? Are the circumstances any different whether it's our child or an unknown one...the rape and sodomy is the same common denominator, is it not?
- How have we allowed ourselves to watch this devolution of collective humanity, to where we read about the worst abominations imaginable, see the gleaming smiles of those committing them and then turn away - to be entertained and captured by yet another story of abomination...as we sip our favorite coffee or snack on our favorite ultra processed chip?
The literary red-light districts and prostitutes who conduct commerce there, are problematic indeed. But it is the hoards rushing in, to fondle, handle, copulate and abuse, that are the problem. And the damage is not to the prostitutes, but to humanity as a whole. With each deluded stroke, we become numb to the stench and acidity of the vomit. The craving and need escalates and we turn with a spoon to devour more. It reenforces the habit of acceptance. Not just of the horror that we have become, but in our satisfaction in doing nothing at all. And we teach that impotence generationally.
This was a consequential and needed piece Tamara, and you were the perfect writer to pen it.
The pornographos etymology earns its place here. It might sound like provocation but in the end it’s etymology doing what etymology should, which is restoring the original weight that familiarity has worn smooth. Writing about prostitution. The story as solicitation, the event as the body being traded, the reader as the john who pays, consumes, and returns home unchanged. That’s not a metaphor that flatters anyone in the transaction, including the writers, including me, which is precisely what gives it its diagnostic force.
Where I’d complicate the reader-as-primary-responsible-party argument, not to absolve the reader but to locate the mechanism more precisely… the john doesn’t create the red-light district, but he couldn’t exist without the economic and social conditions that produced it, and dismantling it requires addressing those conditions rather than simply shaming the appetite. The reader’s impotence, as you call it, is partly chosen and partly manufactured. The manufacturing is the part that interests me more because shame without structural analysis tends to produce guilt that feeds the next cycle rather than interrupting it. The reader who feels bad about scrolling past the atrocity to the Ibiza outfit is still scrolling… just with more self-awareness, which the platform has also learned to monetise.
Your Ibiza question is the one that deserves to be asked in exactly those terms, without the softening that most essays would apply to it. The juxtaposition is not incidental. It is the condition. The same interface that delivers the abuse also delivers the outfit, and the seamlessness of that transition is not a bug in the system’s design. It is the system’s design.
Outrage and distraction aren’t opposites on this platform but adjacent products serving the same attention economy, and the scroll between them is the mechanism by which both are monetised.
The generational transmission of impotence is the part that sits the heaviest. Not just that we consume and do nothing, but that the consumption-as-response becomes the model the next generation inherits as normal. The glass slammed down for another round, before anyone has noticed it was empty to begin with.
The feast image is the one I won’t shake. The beast howling as we tear off another mouthful. The question of whether we flinch is almost beside the point now. We flinch and continue eating. The flinch has been incorporated into the meal.
Thank you so much for all this!
Reading this, I felt your surprise at the commodification of outrage to constitute, in itself, a deliberate (meta) performance. Surely this can't be a shocking discovery to you or to most people in this space? Any good writer knows that the best way to nullify an emotion is by loudly trumpeting its arrival, clearly and exhaustively justifying the grounds for its existence and -perhaps especially- by othering the monster and occupying the pure moral high ground. The element of surprise is lost, ditto any sense of agency. Only the compulsion remains. Performative rituals count as a compulsion too. [Clutches pearls...] Reminds me of porn. Arousal, masturbation, dissatisfaction. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
Compare and contrast with a set and setting that cultivate the conditions and holding ground for an emotion to emerge and grip the reader. Ishiguro's "Never let me go" springs to mind as a masterclass. Re Greek tragedy, the context by definition involves unresolvable complexity (there's no way out and every choice carries a terrible consequence; also the Rashomon effect (access to multiple perspectives)) and audience participation (I could desire/have desired this, I know what it feels like, thank goodness someone else went through (the consequences of) this so I don't have to). Having emotions acted out IRL probably didn't hurt either.
The Rashomon is what sharpens the Greek tragedy argument considerably and it’s the element most completely absent from the outrage essay’s formal DNA. Multiple perspectives, each internally coherent, each producing a different truth from the same events. That’s a more honest account of how reality actually distributes culpability.
The outrage essay requires a single camera angle because the emotional arc depends on it. The moment you introduce a second legitimate perspective, the verdict destabilises, and the catharsis has nowhere clean to land.
The pearl-clutching self-annotation is the detail I find the most interesting because it performs, in miniature, exactly the self-awareness about performance that the rest of your comment diagnoses. The compulsion acknowledged doesn’t stop being a compulsion. It just becomes a slightly more sophisticated one.
Thank you again, Tina, for reading me!
It’s a conundrum as old as the community watering hole: Water bearers gathered ‘round the well, buckets on shoulder or head, sharing stories of note to the village; Gossip, communal grief, faith, fact, and fiction all flowing through the circle as quick as grasshoppers could infest the folds of their animal skins.
How does the serious bearer get in and get out with their daily store of water without soiling themselves in wasted breath?
Anthropologists are quick to point out the evolutionary advantage of gossip circles. News bandied about keeps a community adaptable, alert, active in the affairs of the group. But it doesn’t do so without risk.
Scapegoating, over simplifying, the false sweeps inherent in the telephone game dynamics of sharing and discussing. And also the classic move of shifting blame off those present to those not present, to those past, or those more proximate to the terror without gesturing toward the mutually beneficial systems that supported the troublemakers in the first instance.
I think what you’re partially circling here is the culpability of the village itself, and the courage of the writer to call it out. Truth is, we’re all guilty. Not directly, not in proximate ways, but vaguely, like ambient nodes in a hazy word cloud. The bright nodes of the central constellations share web links each to all. Most of us, most of the time, are barely noticeable blips on the distant edge of the cloud, with 6 degrees or more of separation from the horrors. We don’t send the missiles that blow up girls’ schools, or fly with billionaires to their debauched party islands, but certainly we participate in the structural frameworks that operate as extractive growth systems that put them into place. We are through puts on the web. And we rarely want to admit how our everyday complacency contributes to its continuity and coherence.
Catharsis spread in the manner you reckon with here is a solvent for that granular guilt, for the deliberate indifference given force when personal cost convinces us to look the other way. When we consume things we know externalizes our part of the responsibility. Catharsis acts as a release valve for the inner steam of collective shame. It's a priest-less religion, but rest assured, someone else is always dying for our sins.
I wonder then if some of the blame bleeds out of the pen, if the act of writing is itself a way for some writers to process the emotion they too are experiencing, but would rather not face directly. The emotion is real, but like you say, it floats, it never truly lands; there is such a distance between the subject and the source object. The source is too far removed for the felt reaction to be anything like an active response. Analyzing, kneading the contextual variables, sitting with the energy, all this metabolizing remains necessarily symbolic. But on some level, it also feels active. Win, win.
Then the reader gets it and they in turn exercise their sense of social justice, through powerful inner flows of empathy, fear, or rage. In a sense, they ride the cathartic coattails of the writer. But it is real here too, just abstracted to another level.
The trouble is that one which is always the weakness of catharsis; it is pyrrhic. It brings relief while resolving nothing. It teases but does not test our humanity. The relief is real, the response innocuous. The suffering of someone else carries on unabated, but the witness carries the story home on their head, exonerated, purified. It objectifies a distant horror while the subject stays safely secluded from the actual tragedy. What horror she must experience she shoulders by invitation only.
If the rage registers, if there are manifestations of physical discomfort, if a moment of silence checks the throat, if a conversation pauses, if there is a brief hesitation at the register when ordering a latte, ultimately, the order is made, the conversation picks up where it left off, the noise and scrolls are quickly restored. Horror registered, indignation released, justice resolved. The earth turns.
Who are we after all? Just nodes at the cloudy extremity of the web of life. We can’t just ”Luigi Mangioni” our way through the dumpster fire. Even if we eliminated every actual culprit, we'd still fail to address the machine of which they were simply the most effective cogs. We are all guilty, and analyzing without cathartic resolution is uncomfortable because it doesn’t shelter us from that conviction.
Hell is other people, I think Sartre said. But what most forget is that means we are other people’s hell as well. The web of being is not a static event, but a living system, and what you’re asking for highlights that truth rather than atomizing it for comfort’s sake.
The watering hole is the right origin point, and what it reveals is that the pathology isn’t modern, only its velocity and scale. The telephone game dynamics, the scapegoating of the absent, the false sweep of the shared story are as old as language used socially rather than privately. What’s changed is that the village well now has two billion nodes, and the gossip circle’s evolutionary advantage, keeping a small community adaptable, becomes something closer to an evolutionary liability when the community is planetary and the adaptations required are structural rather than behavioural.
Your priest-less religion formulation is the one I find the most devastating in its precision. The confessional without consequence. Someone always dies for the sins but the architecture of the absolution has been so thoroughly secularised that we can’t even see the transaction occurring. We consume the outrage essay, feel the cathartic release, and walk away shriven… not by grace but by the simple neurological fact that the emotion has been processed and filed. The suffering that occasioned it continues unmodified. The reader is restored to baseline. The system, having successfully routed the potential energy of moral discomfort into content consumption, resets for the next cycle.
It is, as you say, pyrrhic… a victory that costs the winner exactly nothing and resolves exactly nothing for anyone else.
The writer-as-processor point cuts close. I’d be dishonest if I claimed this essay was written entirely from outside that dynamic. There is something metabolic about writing through a problem, the kneading you describe, that produces genuine cognitive and emotional relief independent of whether the writing produces anything in the world. The essay thinks the writer clear. Which is valuable, privately. The question is what happens when that private absorption gets published and the reader mistakes the writer’s processing for a call to their own. They ride the cathartic coattails, as you put it, and arrive at the same cleared state without having done the absorption themselves. The shortcut is the problem. The emotion registers as real because it is real, just abstracted to the point where it produces no traction against anything solid.
The latte hesitation is the image I’ll carry the longest from your comment. That microsecond of friction, the throat check, the pause, where the horror briefly interrupts the ordinary before the ordinary reasserts itself with its full gravitational force. That moment is real. The moral response is present in it. And it is so completely insufficient to the scale of what occasioned it that the gap between the feeling and any possible action it could motivate produces its own despair, which is itself then internalised into the next outrage cycle. The wheel is very well designed.
Sartre’s hell being other people is usually read as misanthropy, but your inversion, that we are simultaneously other people’s hell, restores its actual philosophical weight. We are not observers of a system. We are the system observing itself, which is the specific horror that the outrage essay’s villain-and-victim structure is designed to make temporarily invisible. It needs a bright node at the centre of the constellation so that the rest of us can locate ourselves at the comfortable, barely noticeable periphery. Six degrees of separation from the horror. Close enough to feel implicated enough to consume the content. Far enough to feel absolved by consuming it.
What you’re describing, finally, is not a failure of empathy or courage or intelligence but the precise, efficient functioning of a system that has learned to convert all of those things into something that sustains it. The question of what writing looks like that doesn’t feed that machine is the one neither of us has fully answered. But naming the machine this clearly is at least the beginning of not being its unconscious instrument.
The earth turns…. And yet here we both are, still pulling on the thread. Thank you so much, Andrew!
You've written about an ecosystem that feeds itself but doesn't provide nearly enough nourishment. About three or so years ago, I created a Substack about the ways our narratives--in structure and substance and effect, personal, social, cultural, political--make, tell, shape us. Or at least I tried to do that. I've kept trying to think of a way of coming back to it that isn't just intellectual commentary but that also isn't just a venting of rage to demonstrate solidarity. People want to do *something,* but the templates that proliferate keep circling around "isn't this terrible?" And the answer, of course, is "yes."
But so long as our actions are based essentially on attention, on the pursuit of eyeballs, something's going to be missing. I want to do more than get people to nod; I want my writing to eliminate distance; to be honest, I want it to hurt or at least disconcert the reader. Because if the reader is only taken to the place where they are confirmed (and comforted by that confirmation and therefore finished with what they've done), not much has happened. And the reason I haven't resurrected my Substack is because those outcomes aren't enough for me.
I honest to goodness don't fully know what I want, except that I want it to be more than clever turns of phrase. I want it to present more than the idea that I'm aware and appalled. I wonder whether it's an issue of genre, whether the writing structures we're using aren't up to the task. Are essays capable of doing less of making us feel like good people and more of demanding that we excavate ourselves as a way to demonstrate what change might look like?
What are we willing to pull from ourselves? How willing are we to remake ourselves in ways that might actually cost us something? It isn't just about seeing harm. It's about the frightening prospect of taking ourselves apart. We're implicated in the game, and if we're to willing to acknowledge that what in us would have to change. This is what I'm struggling to apply to my writing because I'm no longer interested in being the good guy who stands and says, "tsk, tsk."
I can only stand to keep on writing by struggling with my fear of, and need for real movement. I don't know what to tell others about how to do it. But I do know it starts with what I've ignored looking at in me. I'm a piece of everything that's happening now, not a bystander. What am I willing to look at and act on? I still don't know how to get there, but I think that's my task.
The question you’re sitting with, whether the essay as a form is capable of demanding excavation rather than confirmation, is one I don’t think has a clean answer, and I’m suspicious of writers who think it does. But I’d push back gently on the genre indictment, not to defend the essay but to locate the problem more precisely. The form isn’t the limitation. The relationship between writer and reader that the current distribution infrastructure produces is the limitation.
The essay has held Montaigne’s self-dissection, Woolf’s formal experiments with interiority, Baldwin’s refusal to let the white liberal reader stay comfortable. Those weren’t gentle texts. They eliminated distance, as you put it, by refusing to let the reader remain a spectator to someone else’s predicament. The form can do that. The question is whether the conditions under which we now produce and consume essays allow it to.
Your Substack about narrative structure sounds like exactly the kind of project that would find no comfortable template to inhabit, which is probably why it stalled. The templates exist because they work, not at producing change, but at producing the feeling of participation, which is what the attention economy actually rewards. A project that interrogates the templates themselves has to first refuse the metrics that would measure its success, and that’s a genuinely disorienting place to write from.
What fascinates me the most in what you’ve written is the distinction between wanting readers to nod and wanting to eliminate distance. That gap is where I think the real formal question lives. Nodding is a response to recognition, the reader sees their existing understanding reflected back with more eloquence than they could have managed. Distance elimination is something else entirely, it requires the reader to be moved from where they were to somewhere they didn’t choose and can’t entirely retreat from. That’s closer to what the Greek tragedians were doing than to what the outrage essay does. It requires, as you say, a willingness to take yourself apart in public…. not as confession, which can be its own performance, but as genuine inquiry whose outcome you don’t control before you begin.
The not knowing what to tell others is, I think, the most honest place to write from. The essay that begins with the answer already in hand is the one that ends in catharsis without implication. The essay that begins with the writer genuinely uncertain, genuinely implicated, genuinely unsure whether they’ll emerge from the argument intact, that’s the one that can ask something real of the reader. Because the reader can feel the difference between a writer who has staged their vulnerability and one who is actually exposed.
Resurrect it, Miguel, because not knowing and writing anyway is the only honest starting point left! Thank you for this!
I paused reading at the point I realized you are feeling maybe a related feeling to what I felt that drive me to break the chain of "watching the news" or "reading the paper." It caused me frustration, anger, and eventually to not care. This was a couple of decades ago. I started to curate my feed, choose my interests, find different and sometimes opposing sources. I even started changing where and when I consumed what I had chosen. Anything to break the conditioning I'd absorbed. It has helped even now.
The curation instinct you followed two decades ago is something a lot of people are only now arriving at, which says something about how long it takes for a medium to reveal its full effect on the nervous system. You felt the conditioning before most people had a word for it, and you acted on the feeling rather than waiting for a theoretical framework to validate it.
The timing element is fascinating… changing when and where you consumed, not just what. That’s more sophisticated than most digital detox advice, which focuses entirely on content while ignoring that the context of consumption shapes the reception as much as the content itself. Reading the same piece at a desk versus on a phone in bed versus in a quiet hour after breakfast produces different cognitive and emotional responses. The medium’s effect isn’t just in the format. It’s in the posture, the hour, the state of attention you bring.
The not caring you describe as an endpoint, I’d distinguish that from the flatness I was writing about. Yours sounds like a cleared field. The flatness I mean is more like compacted earth, still receiving input, registering nothing.
Decades of considered reading leaves marks. The good kind.
Thank you so much, John!
I do agree that writing has a sense of a formula to it, a performance of sorts, though I can't put my finger on why exactly, what is the deep reason? Why not just write from your own heart? Who cares what anyone thinks? If someone connects to your own heart then that means one heart connected to another heart: progress! Ha. My Belgian thesis supervisor gave me a great tip on writing (and I don't consider myself any sort of writer but I did score first class in my thesis - though not due to the writing definitely (!) but the data analysis which felt like building a monument). Anyway, he said - "don't ever let me, the reader, work for it, lay it out clearly, and assume absolutely nothing that the reader may have read or knows". That was so helpful, for me anyway, as it gave me a lens to be critical of my own writing. And from there I found writing to be healing which I mistakenly believe helps someone else. I reason that it doesn't, hence why I don't have many subscribers. But what matters more to me is to be honest with my writing, to speak my truth rightly or wrongly, otherwise it is another performance not worth engaging in, all of society now seems to be out-performing another person, rather than connecting. And to make some sort of argument, surely, that is the whole point of writing to begin with - but also to try to connect to my own heart. The rest I try not to care, if anyone reads it or not, but then of course I go checking who has read it and who has opened it, lol. And I'll often add to an essay or change something within it (as I did just now, having finished yours) when a thought comes or I re-think something. Also, I find that sleeping on essays is another method, lol: first the idea arrives, then something gets written, then I realize I've written crap and must not press publish on crap, then I re-work the idea to remove the crap, then I sleep on it, then another idea arrives to change another thing and then the next night, over and over...until I finally realize that I might as well press publish else I never will! When I was little, I studied a lot of poetry to perform recitals, my Dad always said to tuck the book underneath my pillow (this, including in my teens) and by morning, the poem would arrive in my brain. Some things just stay the same. So there you go...that is my story, Tamara. Paulina
Paulina, the pillow method is real, and your father understood something about how the mind processes what the will cannot force. Sleep is not passive. It’s where the material you’ve taken in gets reorganised by something that operates below intention, and what surfaces in the morning has been worked on by a part of you that doesn’t perform.
Your supervisor’s instruction is good advice for a thesis, and I followed something like it for years. But I’ve come to think it has a limit when applied to essays that are trying to do something other than transmit information cleanly. Some writing needs the reader to work. The writer is not being obscure, but the thought itself is unfinished and the reader’s effort is part of completing it.
The essay that arrives too fully resolved has often resolved the wrong thing.
The checking-who-opened-it after declaring you don’t care is not hypocrisy, that’s just being human inside a system that was designed to make you check. The dashboard exists precisely to create that pull. Indifference to audience is easier to maintain before they built a number next to your name.
I am fascinated by what you’ve shared: you write to connect to your own heart first, and you consider external connection a fortunate accident rather than the point. That’s actually the correct order of operations, and most writers never find it.
The crap-recognition instinct you describe is the most important editorial tool there is. Most people don’t have it, or ignore it.
Glad you read me and you comment here, Paulina!
Wow, thanks Tamara! I definitely think you should become my substack thesis writing supervisor, next!! Thank you for validating my crazy ideas, to think that they were not that crazy, after all. xx Paulina
The ideas were never crazy! They were just honest, which in the current climate can look like the same thing :)))
But I love “crazy”… the sky is the limit in terms of imagination.
I believe you’re writing about something very profound. I am not going to try to summarize your ideas or squeeze them into a Buddhist box, but (there’s always a but isn’t there?!) rage fatigue reminds me of what Buddhists call shenpa— our urge to craft a storyline out of painful experiences. We get hooked, and if I understand what you are saying, our state of being hooked, has developed into a grammar, a rhetorical paradigm, and sometimes an (unconscious?) type of performance. We want something to hang onto within the daily shit storm. According to my understanding, if we can remain in the fluidity of rage and uncertainty, we can learn to touch even deeper levels of despair which, in turn, deepens our compassion.
Admittedly, my effort here to make sense of what defies logic is in itself shenpa. It probably helps no one, but sometimes I think the best response is an unceasing howl that bears witness, condemns, and allows the confusion and discomfort to swirl around it while it howls nonetheless.
Shenpa is exactly the right friction to bring here as a sort of diagnosis with better resolution than most Western psychological vocabulary offers.
The hook precedes the narrative; that’s what makes it so hard to see. By the time you’re inside the storyline, the hooking already happened three emotional moves ago, and what feels like engaged response is already, partly, defensive construction.
What fascinates me about your reading is the distinction between compassion deepened by staying in the fluidity versus compassion that gets prematurely organised into position. The outrage essay, at its most formulaic, is shenpa that has learned to dress as wisdom, it takes the hook, runs it through a cycle of references and rhetoric, and delivers it back as clarity. The original wound is still there underneath, unexamined, driving the engine.
Your howl image is the one I find the most honest though. Not the essay that resolves, but the witness that doesn’t. There’s a tradition of lamentation, in the Psalms, in Lamentations itself, in Keening, that doesn’t ask the grief to become productive. It just holds the frequency. That might, in fact, be the thing the outrage content cycle most completely eliminates… the space to howl without converting the howl into content.
And yes, Julie, your observation that the effort to make sense is itself shenpa is the kind of self-awareness that redeems the attempt.
Thank you so much for reading me!
Thank you so much for your response. I never miss one of your posts!
I am very grateful, Julie.
Oh wow! What an essay again. Despite how bizarre it might seem, "queasy" is the word that stuck with me. The whole Epstein affair has left us feeling queasy, and we fed this unease by reading articles and essays so devoid of essence that they provided us with no substance to help move forward and overcome our discomfort. You are slightly harsh (but that's why we love you)—not many of the angry have the courage to use that anger rather than just verbalise it. It is the illness of our society: nobody has the courage to start a revolution. The millennials are exhausted, and the next generation is absolutely numb. Superb choice of art yet again!
“Queasy” is the right word precisely because it sits between knowing and not-knowing, between having ingested something and not yet having processed it. The Epstein material produces that specific register of unease, not clean horror, which at least has a defined shape, but the formless discomfort of implication without resolution. And you’re right that the essays feeding that unease without absorbing it have made it worse, not better. More input into a system already struggling to digest what it has.
The angry don’t lack courage exactly but the current conditions have made verbal anger so immediately rewardable, so frictionlessly publishable, so enthusiastically subscribed-to, that it has become the path of least résistance rather than the preliminary to something harder. When outrage gets you followers, the incentive to move beyond outrage dissolves. The courage required now isn’t to feel the anger or even to express it but to resist the comfort of the expression being enough.
Ohhh yes, Millennials exhausted into ineffectiveness, the next generation numb before they’ve even begun. Two consecutive generations whose political energy has been successfully routed into content consumption. Whatever comes after numbness is the question nobody has answered yet.
Though the fact that you felt queasy, named it precisely, and refused the essays that offered false digestion is its own small form of résistance. Not nothing, Otilia! Thank you so much!
Superb. I have long wondered about the lives saved or wrongs righted by processing the mountains of content we have to sail through. Genuine tragedies seem to become emotional affiliate links and I suspect their conversion rate into actual help is on average, zero.
I can hear the dystopian narrative of an Adam Curtis documentary looking back on this period and closing with '...yet nobody seemed to care.'.
The emotional affiliate link is a phrase that should not work as well as it does, and yet it captures something that longer formulations keep missing. The tragedy-as-conversion-funnel. The suffering with a trackable click-through rate. And you’re right that the conversion into actual help is approximately zero because the infrastructure between feeling and doing has been so thoroughly replaced by the infrastructure between feeling and sharing that most people no longer remember there was ever a different path from one to the other.
The Adam Curtis framing is the one that unsettles me because his documentaries work precisely by revealing the gap between what people believed they were doing and what they were actually participating in. The horror of his films is always retrospective, the footage of people confidently enacting something whose consequences they couldn’t see. And yes, I can hear exactly that narration over footage of us: scrolling, sharing, feeling, forgetting. The mountains of processed content. The conversion rate of zero. The civilizational shrug.
What Curtis understands that most essayists don’t is that systems don’t have villains at the centre. They have people behaving reasonably within incentive structures that produce unreasonable outcomes in aggregate, which is precisely what makes the documentary devastating and the outrage essay inadequate, one maps the system, the other needs a face to put on it.
The particular horror of this moment…. the caring and the not-caring have become indistinguishable.… thank you for this, Nick!
Many thanks for your considered reply, Tamara. Really, I have little more than my individual shrug offered up to the collective shrug but returning to the Adam Curtis theme - he usually features the collapse of one system into another, so we might now be at peak outrage and about to begin the shift to something more meaningful. Hopefully.
I share your hopes, Nick!