All is vanity, especially personal newsletters

There is nothing new under the sun.

I understand that some people who subscribed to this may have started wondering if they were ever going to get anything…fear not.

1. The Inherent Egotism of Publishing a Personal Brand Email Newsletter (PBEN)

Recently, someone told me that writing a book is the ultimate act of vanity. She’s right. Disseminating your point of view to the world and assuming it is meaningful is an inherently venal act. Yet there is a flip side to this vanity—we leave ourselves open to attack and feedback. The praxis of posting revolves around feeling vain and self-confident enough to assume that these reactive forces do not consume us. It is a difficult balance.

There are two great jumps in the ability to post that track along nicely with the two great economic revolutions in the entire history of homo sapiens. The Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution, in which hunter-gatherer societies became settled agricultural societies, was a boom time for posting. The congregation of people and economics led to a rise in record-keeping and then storytelling. The written word changed storytelling forever—previously the egotism of posting had been limited to whoever was in your small tribe. Writing and settled societies enabled exponentially greater audiences. Still, at the height of the Roman Empire, there were only about 100,000 readers out of an empire of millions. The same limited audience for posts applies to China, India, and Africa, even as the Chinese invented moveable type. Literature was the domain of the elite.

Of course, if you paid any attention in AP World History, you know what happens next. The next exponential rise in content comes during the early Renaissance with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. This massive explosion in information essentially birthed the modern world and eventually led to a society where your metadata is an incredibly valuable commodity. It is intrinsically wrapped up in the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions that created nearly every aspect of our lives.

Why am I telling you about any of this? Well, I’m trying to justify writing this email newsletter as not just a ridiculously vain exercise that only four people would enjoy. In my head, I’m writing this because the inherent egotism of posting is one of the main driving forces of history. It appears that, outside of basic needs, asserting one’s own existence, by any means necessary, is both a constant historical force and one of the most important outcomes of the Industrial Revolution. It may not be fun to post, but for some reason, we keep doing it. It’s almost like a drug.

So here we are at Edition No. 1 of the Content Producer’s Lament, yet another PBEN in a long line of email newsletters/PBENs, all of which are following on a long history of broadsheets, pamphlets, parchment, and cuneiform tablets. I don’t believe it’s pretentious to reflect on the chain of time that has brought the present into being. Walt Whitman writes about this feeling in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

So, after a long historical tangent to try to convince you that writing isn’t quite as vain as it would seem, I’d like to announce that I am trying to write a book, at some point. It’s as vain as it sounds. Sigh.

2. How Did I Get Here?

It recently occurred to me that I don’t have a stable biography of myself. This is a function of being 22 and having no idea what to do with my life, but from a larger perspective, I don’t even have a set background. I have written for many publications, but rarely gotten paid for any of them. I have written a number of Good Blogs, but I’ve never put together a “killer feature” story. If you were to ask me to write a short summary of my life and career for a speaking engagement, I couldn’t do it. If you have been unlucky enough to espy one of my dating profiles, you will find that the copy is embarrassingly awful for a professional writer.

For example, Bumble “About Me” section currently reads, “Obviously, the dogs are a bit of a marketing ploy (cousin’s dog and family dog). From New York (the state). I like to run, write articles, and play tennis. Down to go an adventure, like everybody else here (shrug).”

I change this once every two months. I think I should just delete it entirely.

However, since this is the first edition of this newsletter, I need to give some background on who I am. I’ve settled on the following sentences:

I am a 22-year-old ex-journalism student. I am eternally guilty of benefitting from my upper-upper middle-class status. I probably should be canceled, but instead, I write and write and write and write and write until I can’t write anymore. At times, I’ve lived next to farms, a TGI Friday’s, and Lake Michigan. Please don’t ask me to answer this again.

I’d like to spend more time thinking about this, but instead, I mostly spend my hours thinking about my next run or the impending climate crisis (I remember weeping on an airplane while watching An Inconvenient Truth when I was eight years old, and it has irrevocably terrified me). This may seem like one of my self-deprecating jokes, but I really do spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about environmental catastrophes and how every single article I write should really be about the destruction of the rainforest, carbon emissions, or the acidifications of oceans.

Needless to say, I get very distracted and evasive when trying to piece together my own story. I cannot determine whether this constant thread of disassociation, exemplified by dozens of 20th-century writers I adore, is a remnant of my background or merely a reflection of what I consume on a daily basis. Twitter, after all, is a charnel house of disassociation, an endless feed where one’s identity is sucked into oblivion. All I know is that this makes me tremendously difficult to handle in various therapy sessions, which generally devolve into me making many “campaign promises” about the nature of my personality. Like most campaign promises, these disappear after a few weeks, lost in a depersonalized, deterministic, fatalistic spiral of mood swings and anxiety that are punctuated by occasional sporting events.

Where does this come from? That’s what I’ve been trying to work out. Believe it or not, I’m doing much better than I was a year ago, and I’m using this newfound stability to analyze the past and find the root cause of my misfortune. It’s truly awful when you know you’ve psychologically deteriorated, in some way. I feel this whenever I reflexively grab my phone. It’s a pang in the back of my neck: you used to be better than this, your attention span was better than this, you cannot be serious right now. It’s the worst.

Anyway, the only piece of content I’ve been able to generate is this NIRCA recap.

3. The Weight of History

This is a Substack email newsletter meant to attract subscribers, which means I need to engage productively with some aspect of modern culture, lest the inane ramblings of a 21st-century Peter Abelard-wannabe disappear without a trace into the sewers of Gmail’s wondrous spam filters. We’re going to talk about HBO’s Watchmen, which was recommended to me by one of my coworkers.

Here’s a thing that happened to me: when I was entering seventh grade, the local public library had a Summer Reading Competition where we’d be assigned a set of books and then compete in a trivia competition based on these novels for an undisclosed prize. Through this, I was able to convince my parents to buy me a number of books “for the competition”. Somehow, amidst a bunch of palatable middle school books, this included The Boy With the Striped Pajamas and Watchmen.

For some reason, they thought that telling a bunch of middle schoolers to read Watchmen, a graphic novel that involves wanton violence, a detailed attempted rape scene, and a genocidal conspiracy, would be a good idea. It was an even worse idea for a 12-year-old boy who had been completely drilled into the pavement and mundanity by a Korean-American Christian upbringing.

This takes us back to storytelling, right? If society is built on the backs of self-expression, it’s also built on the audience’s reaction to that self-expression. While T.S. Eliot’s obsession with authorial intent is all well and good, my determinism cannot allow thousands of years of audience interpretation to go unanswered. Whatever the fuck Alan Moore intended to do with Watchmen, the upshot for me is that I essentially read Watchmen well before anyone should read Watchmen. Given that my parents were actively against giving me any real-world experience at all (read: "The Talk”, advice on puberty, anything…and they will proudly admit this), my formative learning experiences with sex, mental illness, political radicalism, and other things comes from Watchmen, a book written by actual crazy person Alan Moore. Thus, you can start to get a picture of where this habit of disassociation and inability to stomach the present begins.

I’ve read and reread Watchmen (the comic) many times. I was not expecting much from the television show, especially after the torturous and frustrating Zack Snyder film/shot-by-shot remake from 2009. However, the HBO show turned out to be really good. In fine television fashion, I will weave together the two previous threads into a unified narrative.

If the original Watchmen comic book is a story about the myriad of ways trauma can be inflicted, from individual pain to mass murder, the TV series is a story about how trauma lives on and is passed down from generation to generation, despite all efforts to forget. The story begins in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, when the white residents of the city looted and destroyed the richest black neighborhood in the South, killing hundreds of inhabitants in the process. I won’t spoil it, but this initial trauma just gets passed from generation, deepening like a coastal shelf. Each episode has at least one significant flashback, a screech of self-expression from past disasters. While the show does not allow context to exculpate people from their actions (as seen through the Adrian Veidt storyline), it also never lets us forget the context within which these actions occur.

The show also focuses on how the mainstream memory of the past often has no relation to what actually happened, something that historians have been trying to convince people since the end of the Peloponnesian War. Watchmen intentionally brings to light events that have been forgotten or misremembered, like the story of ordinary Vietnamese citizens caught in the Cold War or a 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. One episode features a monologue discussing “genetic trauma”, where cataclysmic events can be passed down through generations. The epigenetic basis of this theory is controversial, but, in the abstract, the effects of trauma on the experience on the mind are unavoidable.

While visiting my aunt and uncle over Thanksgiving, I saw an old photograph of my great-great-grandparents, who were born well before the Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910. No one knows how old they are or when they died because that section of the family fled south during the outbreak of the Korean War, and my ancestors simply vanished from the historical record. There is no Ancestry.com for me. Did they just pass away from natural causes? Were they executed by Communist forces like some of their children? How did it feel to have their progeny ripped away from them forever? How did those years of civil war affect the next generation, and then my grandparents, whose formative years were spent in a country where 10% of the civilian population died by famine or violence? How do 70 years of postcolonial and imperialist warfare affect people to this day? At what point do all of these disasters, all the coups, wars, assassinations, emigrations, and democides, eliminate the ability for parents to relate to their children?

It’s easy and convenient to be thankful that times are better. It’s much harder to try to understand the roots of your own story, and I appreciate that Watchmen is trying to do that (both times). In the end, the only way to explain this is to write it down, in a fit of vanity, desperately hoping someone reads this and understands what it was like. I’m glad to have the chance, even if it’s on a freakin’ email newsletter.