Cursed By the Medium Gods

How making money continues to elude you

Writing used to excite you. It was something you cultivated, an art you confidently played with.

When you read how many writers boasted of making hundreds and thousands of dollars per month on Medium a year ago, you thought you finally found a forum for your talent and hard work.

You soon found out this was just another dirty mirage, a cynical lie, a hustling technique employed by those who were selling false hopes and dreams. And, the world being the way it was, it worked. Such whoppers always had a way of selling all by themselves.

But you didn’t sell whoppers. You were a writer.

Then, more recently, The Boost was introduced. One writer boasted of getting boosted and making over $2,000 dollars in a single month, just on the back of one boost.

Then the incredible happened: you had three consecutive poems for three different publications get boosted. Could this finally be your moment? You waited for the money to finally come and provide you some financial relief.

Each poem racked up over 500 views. One poem got over 100 fans, while the other two poems reached 77 fans a piece. All three were two-minute reads.

A week passed, two weeks. You made only $20 dollars total between all three poems. Were the gods playing more cruel jokes on you? Was there a conspiracy?

What’s worse, is you had a total of 50k views for the month of March. 37k of those views were on a 5-minute open letter satire you wrote. But you were only paid $5 dollars for that piece, as 99% of the views were external.

You wrote another 3-minute satire that had 3.2k views and a 60% read ratio, and all of the views for this one were internal. What did you make for this piece? $5 dollars.

You thought there must be a mistake so you write to Medium. The Medium Help Desk informed you that of the 3.2k internal views with a 60% read ratio only 1% of those were members.

You’ve got a tiny place in the city with no cross-air flow. The size of the apartment is so small they are now illegal to build as it does not meet the minimum requirement of livable standards.

You work a job you can’t stand and always feel like a ruthless Darwinian survivor just to make it to Friday alive.

It was enough that you bought wholesale the meritocratic fantasy that two college degrees would advance your career and ensure you a decent job with a living wage.

To add insult to injury, you bought the dream that all of your hard work cultivating your writing craft would finally pay dividends on a platform like Medium. You thought Malcolm Gladwell’s seemingly rational theory of ‘ten thousand hours of practice producing success’ might be actually true.

You are among the generation to get hit the hardest with US student loan debt. You live from paycheck to paycheck and know you will in fact never be able to retire, if you live that long.

You never plan when your depression comes on, how deep its contours are, and how long it will last.

You sit under it like a descending mist from the sky. You let it penetrate the skin, the blood, the humor.

You respect the Buddhists for calling a spade a spade, and pointing out time and again that this world is an agonizing hairshirt of suffering and misery.

You then wonder, like certain philosophers, what the freedom of pure invisibility would taste like. Not to have a body, an ego, a soul, or a personality.

But you are far from such weightless fantasies. Your body weighs like a coffin, your soul is lead. Your mood is a dirty lake. And you’ve got bills to pay.

So you sit in front of your computer after a full day at work and write another piece, as the Medium gods trickle down cruel scraps.

© Carlo Zeno 2023

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Thank you for reading. And if you are one of the editors who boosted me and are reading this, thank you so much for the lift. I still hold out the hope that one day I will make a more respectable amount of money writing.

Cheers to Jason Provencio for continuing to provide this space🙏

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