That Funny Feeling You Get When A Newsletter Makes You Cry

Turns out technology doesn't always have to make you feel like a jerk all alone in your jerk store apartment.

I am lucky that Substack is an online newsletter platform populated by a wonderful river of writers and not a cult. You see, I am a total Substack mark. Like if you prompted GPT-4 to describe the platonic ideal of Substack reader, it would output a description of me. On second thought, you would probably need a version of GPT-4 that was somehow reinforced by the feedback of the ghosts of Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula Le Guin, and Mitch Hedberg to output the description I want. 

So I guess just Bing Sydney. 

Seriously though, I will give a free yearly subscription to any Substack reader that pays for more subscriptions than I do. I currently pay for 15 subscriptions and spent $1,112.95 on Substack subscriptions last year. 

It is kind of ridiculous that I spend more than a grand a year on Substack. Luckily, I have a nice job, a bit of a side hustle, and live pretty frugally, so my conspicuous Substack consumption isn’t taking food off my table. I grew up poor, almost solely due to a horribly timed and life-changing family illness, so I really don’t love to just throw money away. 

And here’s the thing, when I spend this money on Substack I am definitely not throwing my money away. So, if I’m a pretty frugal person, why am I not just willing, but happy to make Substack my largest yearly expenditure outside of the necessities and an annual National Park trip I make every year with my partner? 

Because somehow, despite just being an online platform, Substack makes me feel more human. 

I can name a handful of writers that I have discovered on Substack–writers I had never heard of before–who somehow managed to traverse the neurochemical pathways of their brain, drop a tiny, but potent, bit of their mindjuice onto the page, and deliver, via Substack, a string of sentences that slightly dissolved the boundaries I previously thought existed between me and the world. 

It felt incredibly nice to receive that wisdom in such a kind and surprising way. 

I guess the only thing left for me to do is to start my own Substack. 

This post, my first, is mostly a lightly edited stream of consciousness. I’ve been kicking around more hefty ideas and hope to bring the Substack world something worthy of the medium, perhaps in the next 2 weeks. 

First on the agenda: Why the multiverse in Everything Everywhere All At Once is really the incorrect, subconscious, predictions that our neocortex makes about the world.