The dungeon of niche
Umair Haque Needs to Eat an Ice Cream and Ride a Roller Coaster
When negativity becomes your niche, your view of reality can get skewed
I like Umair and his writing. I think he is an intelligent guy with some beneficial information.
However, it seems like the poor bastard has taken Tim Denning or someone’s advice to see which stories work statistically and keep writing them.
The result?
He fell into the depressing news niche.
Now, if Umair hears a story about a puppy getting saved or a bunch of children who raised money for charity and feels inspired to write about it, he can’t because he will lose followers.
It would be like if someone went to a Marilyn Manson concert and Marilyn started singing show tunes.
Umair has no choice but to wake up and force himself to cry into his cornflakes and then purposely go out and find dark shit to write about.
And look, I don’t think that’s a problem. It’s not like there isn’t plenty of dark shit in the world that needs fixing, and to bring awareness to it is god damn useful.
Also, I’m not saying he should start writing restaurant reviews.
I’m just feeling sorry for the guy.
It’s that old trap of falling into a niche — particularly one that you probably get sick of sometimes.
And yes, I hear ya when you say it’s his job.
Especially with 176k followers on Medium, no doubt he is in the 8% that make over $100 a month.
But there is writing, and there is working.
We need to acknowledge that the positive shit is just as important as the negative shit in this world. We have to acknowledge the sponge-like absorbance of human energy and understand we become whatever we surround ourselves with.
Sure, maybe that’s not Umair’s job to write about the sun and unicorns and 1997 Britney Spears. But, for me, if I want freedom as a writer, I need to be able to write about anything.
I can’t afford to give a flying fuck about what my readers want to read because starting with that kind of notion will always create a fabricated piece of work.
Sometimes I wonder if Umair has an alter ego.
Maybe he does write recipes or articles about looking after cats or motorcycle maintenance. Maybe he craves to do one of those dogshit happy dances on Tiktok and start a Youtube channel about his secret model train collection.
But then I think, how would he have the time since all his articles are so long and even have a few source links to give them ‘authority’.
Woohoo.
Our brains are lazy. We have shortcut mechanisms. You read a story by Umair, and it resonates — so, you read another. After that, your brain assumes all of his work is amazing. You become powerless to doubt it.
That’s why people defend Umair so staunchly, hanging on his every word like he is some political oracle. He isn’t.
He is just a man with a grudge against a shit system like many of us, and he is expressing his opinions. Sure, he quotes a few sources, but anyone with some knowledge can curate articles to make a piece seem authoritative.
Let’s not deny that we all love a bit of bad news.
It excites us.
That’s why we like apocalypse movies. Because deep down, beyond the trappings of ego, that kind of shit is exciting — way more exciting than playing croquet on a lawn and sipping on a cold, lemony Tom Collins.
We like the quiet life because it’s safe, and someone like Umair triggers that part of us that is turned on by the shite.
Scroll back through Umair’s stories and try and find a positive one. Then tell me that he isn’t in the negativity niche.
Sure, what he is saying is true a lot of the time, but at other times it is polished bollocks created from fulfilling the needs of his darkness loving audience.
The world is balanced. It’s + and –
I never watch mainstream news because of its insistence on focusing on the negative.
Mainstream media has always focused on the negative because the negative gets our hearts racing.
- It’s what keeps people reading.
- It’s what sells products.
- It’s the old trick of the media that never fails.
People might say I’m an apologist for the system because I critique Umair.
Such is the degree to which we casually deify writers that we agree with.
Those people are wrong. I write about the problems with our world all of the time. It’s just not my only niche.
It is lazy and wrong to stop critiquing writers just because we agree with them. And besides, this story is not about Umair Haque. It’s about the long-term dangers of committing to a niche.
Sure, I have about four hundred followers and not much to lose, while Umair has 176k dark mofo followers and a hell of a lot to lose.
So I do understand.
With the kind of ROI that 176k followers might bring through writing in the negative worldview niche, how many of us would have the guts to risk it all by singing a show tune here and there?
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