[AKN #27] Follow me and everything will be alright, too hot to handle, and dancing till the world ends
another krappy newsletter #27
Sup homies?
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Greetings. I write to you from my soulless millennial compound in Northern California.
The rains have moved in this week, officially signaling the one week of “winter” we have in California each year. Low key, I am already over it. I signed up for 365 usable outdoor days, god dammit.
On to the newsletter!
Table of contents
Removing follower count on newsletter
To hot take or not to hot take
Fun tweets to lift the depressing ass mood I probably left you in
1. Removing follower count on newsletter
I have decided to remove the number of subscribers at the top of this email because I find that number of followers is a terrible metric to track your “progress”.
If I optimize for number of followers, I will end up trotting out the same tired takes that everyone else shares. I would talk exclusively about Bitcoin, LeBron, GameStop, and self improvement hacks. I would share clever memes and puns about the most recent news story that happened that day.
This series of secondhand takes would make you giggle and I would be rewarded for this behavior with a disloyal following of demanding nihilistic millenials.
I can envision them now, screaming up from their mother’s basement: “God is dead. There is no reason for life. Feed me moar memes!”
Which would be a totally deserved outcome given my actions. Because when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
So I am going to opt out of optimizing for follower count and keep crafting these artisanal, esoteric newsletters that don’t have the cultural zeitgeist sex appeal that would make me grow faster.
2. To hot take or not to hot take?
I love drama. Tech drama. Media drama. You name the drama and I can guarantee I read an article about it. I am like TNT. I know drama.
I love reacting to drama. My favorite past time is listening to a news story and immediately getting really upset with what I just heard. I will spend the next hour talking exhaustively about it until everyone in my inner circle has heard me tell that news story with my own spin.
I love talking shit about the drama. I am a shit talking savant. I do brutal takedowns of someone’s opinion that gets me all kind of in-person kudos, internet points, and digital thumbs ups.
Basically, I love giving hot takes and the people love receiving my hot takes.
Match made in heaven, right?
Eh. Idk. As I consider all of the hours I have wasted breathlessly talking about how shitty Gavin Newsom is as a Governor or how Paul Pierce is an overrated hack, I wonder if all of that was the best use of my time.
On one hand, I ask myself a series of hard, introspective questions like:
What does paying attention to these people give me? Does this allow me to escape some uncomfortable reality of life that day?
Does this hate spiral bring me anything except more anger? What has this outrage ever truly gotten me?
Does it drive me towards an optimistic feeling for the future? Or does it just bury me in the never ending now of a media that is committed to converting every single person to learned helplessness?
These questions lead me to rethinking my consumption of drama.
On the other hand, I worry that if people like me don’t participate in this conversation or that conversation, one day I am going to look up and everyone I love is going to have a total assclown opinion about something.
Like I will be hanging out with my friends and they will say something absolutely fucking foolish like “I think the rules for what is and what is not a catch in the NFL make a lot of sense.” That person would be too far gone for intervention by sensible hot take. The Commies would have won. And I would have done nothing to stop it.
This side of the argument leads me to believe I should double down on staying on top of current events and speaking my mind about them. Be the change you want to see in the world, right?
I am not sure what the right answer is.
But I do wonder if selective ignorance could bring some bliss. Thinking my next elimination diet is with the news and pessimist Twitter accounts. These news sources have served me well. But maybe it is time to experiment with a life without them and reclaiming that attention for other things that really matter to me.
3. Fun tweets to lift the depressing ass mood I probably put you in
Stupid cabinets
Seriously these things are trash! You exclusively store weird shit up there like that water bottle you never use or grandma’s urn.
Dance dance revolution
Like the prophet Britney Spears once said:
See the sunlight
We aint stoppin'
Keep on dancing till the world ends
Closing time
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