Beware The ‘Everything Is Awful’ Brigade
There’s plenty of money to be made by telling people exactly what they expect to hear
Are you looking for an easy way to make money on Medium? I’m about to tell you how. I’m also about to tell you why you shouldn’t. You can read the first half of this article if you’re a capitalist and the second half if you’re a socialist.
If you’re feeling particularly brave you can read both halves.
The quickest way to making money on Medium is to find a group of people who already think the same way you do — then tell them things that play into their existing world view. In many ways it’s a perfect system.
A Faustian pact akin to ‘give me your money and I’ll tell you something you already think’. The real trick to making a consistent income from Medium is doing this in a way that makes said readers believe you’re revealing something new every time.
That’s it.
I’m the Penn & Teller of monetising the information age and for the record, I’m doing it right now. You already know this is true because you’ve seen it happen a thousand times on this platform. You’ve seen me do it.
You can enjoy it even if you know how it’s done. It’s a sort of magic in its own way.
The ‘Everything Is Awful’ trick
There’s at least one Medium superstar who makes an absolute fortune peddling doom for the modern reader. His writing is compelling and he’s a master-craftsman of the complex compound sentence. He can smash you with ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘anachronistic’, then pull back and catch you with a pithy comment, right guys?
This particular writer is very skillful and had a good head of steam when I joined the platform back in 2018. He hasn’t let up at all. Every few days the world becomes awful anew.
He’s the Willy Wonka of societal despair and people LOVE it.
‘Thank god you’re here!’ they exclaim with unfettered delight. ‘This is exactly what I think about the world’. Three hundred articles later and many readers are dead from despair-fatigue. Despite the world being consistently on the cusp of ending, it never quite gets there.
Like disappointing sex, but for your brain.
Being disappointing doesn’t stop this writer though. His headline catches you and BAM, there’s another ten-minute long missive about why everything is going to hell in a handcart and how it’s your fault.
I wish I had his stamina. I really do.
He’s the cult leader who tells you on Monday the world is going to end tomorrow before popping up on Wednesday to say he meant next week all along. He‘ll be foisting that Jim Jones Home Brand strawberry kool-aid on you for the next sixty years if you’ll let him. Plenty of people do.
He found a good niche and he found it early. The human propensity for negativity at all costs is fertile soil for articles. Human brains are designed to think this way.
The collective noun for Homo Sapiens should be ‘a complaint’.
Most people have a natural negativity bias to their thinking. One that affects their ability to function. The world is a terrible place and we’re waiting for someone to tell us why
The only thing human beings can agree on is that everything is awful and it’s someone else’s fault. We’ll fight about whose fault it is, but we agree everything is awful. We’re a fickle species of hairless ape that should be kept in a hermetically sealed box for our own safety.
Conservative? The world is awful and Liberals did it. Feminist? The world is awful and men did it? Woke? The world is awful and a white man did it. Christian? The world is awful and sinners did it. Penguin reader? The world is awful and the blame should be shared equally amongst the collected idiots of the world.
What I’m saying in a roundabout way is this one of the biggest and most lucrative psychological stations you can broadcast into. I should know, I’m doing it now. I’m telling you ‘everything is awful’ is in fact, awful.
I’m having a hypocrisy sandwich with a side order of irony and you’re getting the bill.
Why is this a problem?
The digital world recommends things based on what you’ve already shown an interest in. That’s how the algorithm works. If you’ve shown an interest in doom-gloom and ‘everything is awful’, you’re likely to be shown more of the same.
That’s how the walls of echo chambers are built and maintained. When you write an ‘everything is awful’ piece, you don’t have to provide a solution or insight. You just sound off and everyone agrees with you.
I firmly believe there are some writers on this platform who have built an audience of people who agree with them on everything. When I dissent on such articles I often get ignored, sometimes I’m blocked.
You can see in the comments section such a dissenting voice rarely happens.
If you want a hassle-free money-making experience on Medium then write in this niche. Put a finger up, check which way the wind is blowing and write accordingly. You too can enjoy endless comments like ‘Preach!’ and ‘You’re so courageous’.
I’m gonna say it… there’s nothing courageous about swimming in the shallow end of the philosophy pool. Be braver.
But didn’t you say you were doing the same thing?
Well spotted… but I’d like to think I’ve got a wide base of followers scattered all over the political spectrum. I’ve got conservative god-fearing Christians and passionately polyamorous atheist liberals.
I’ve got BIPOC readers and white readers, I’ve got male, female and trans readers —LGBTQ+ readers, straight readers and one legally minded butterfly.
Chances are with every single thing I write, I’m going to be pissing someone off. I wouldn’t have it any other way. So I get alternately lauded and vilified on the sea-saw of discord but the world keeps turning.
If I penned a piece and didn’t have at least three comments telling me I’m a pseudo-intellectual asshat, I’d start to wonder if I was still being read. But I am read, and I’m eternally grateful. So why do those people read my writing?
Why do you?
Because, in a slightly snarky style, I tell you what you already think. In this instance it happens to be ‘people being told things they already think is tearing apart the fabric of society’.
You already know prejudiced articles don’t forward societal conversation in any meaningful way. You’ve reached that conclusion on your own. I’m telling you again. We need to break people out of their bubbles and so I try and maintain polite neutrality that pleases nobody and everybody in equal measure. .
I believe some of the most popular voices on Medium have zero interest in solving the problem they write about. Why would they? It’s how they make their money. Lots of them have a vested interest in their own variations of the ‘everything is awful’ story.
It’s their niche.
I’m not quite so nihilistic. I believe that the vast majority of people are good people doing their best under the circumstances life has laid at their feet. Even if they’re angry at you — there’s probably a good reason for it. You just don’t know what that is yet and so you should investigate.
I know why everyone is angry at me. They pop up to tell me so.
‘Everything is awful’ articles offer very little in the way of solution. It’s just a bath in societal malaise which you’ve been conditioned to feel is akin to progress. It isn’t. It’s a tricky web of people caught in an ideological Groundhog day.
I’d like to think you deserve better.
So do me a favour… Find another penguin follower with opposing views to your own. Follow them and read their stuff. Even if you have to hold your nose as you do so. Try to get inside their world. Try and see them as someone who has made a different sociological or political choice, then work out why.
Avoid intuitive solutions like ‘this person is a racist’ or ‘this person is clueless about the real world’ — and instead ask yourself why you think that. Do you have any evidence or is your brain trying to enforce cognitive ease to avoid further engagement.
Try and get yourself to a point of absolute neutrality and read them again.
Once you’ve done that find something (anything) in their article to agree with, no matter how small. Even if you like the style. Then dissent to their articles, politely fact check them and tell them why you disagree with their conclusion.
If they engage then work towards a consensus position free from emotion and intuitive thinking you can both agree on. Because if you do that — my mission on Medium is going well. The more people there are in the centre-ground holding conversations, the more positive solutions a pluralistic society can develop.
See? I told you a few sections ago you already know this.
Only good faith conversations held between people who disagree can reassert some semblance of decent functioning democracy. The walls of the echo chambers need to come down brick by brick. It means you doing your bit and breaking out of your comfortable reading list. So lets do that.
It’s how you make ‘everything is awful’ into ‘everything might be better’. I’ve told you something you already know, so now lets go do it.
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