THE CULLING

Living is an act of exorcism. I wish I had known this earlier in my life.

Our lives follow a certain path – tried, true, and predictable. Most of us accept things as they are. We go to school. We get a job. We find a partner. We commute to that job by train and/or subway and experience moments that make us uneasy. We attend meetings. We engage with colleagues, some of whom would knife us in the back and leave us for dead (these people are interesting to me, their calculations). We do what we are told to do by our bosses even when what our bosses tell us to do makes no sense at all. And so we follow on pitches, not meaning to sound desperate, yet every pitch is an act of desperation. Indeed, publishing is an act of desperation. Writing too. The conceit that there are readers for every book. We tell ourselves there are, and yet there is Bookscan. The work isn’t as rewarding as it once was. We tell ourselves it is, yet there is our reflection in the mirror every morning. The exhilaration of books making the list is diluted when they fall off a cliff week two. Publishing as a north star and noble pursuit is in question. Companies say they care about our well-being, but then they are grinding us into dust. We go to bed exhausted and wake up in the middle of the night anxious and uneasy and start reading from prophets on our phones. They tell us to breathe. To exhale. “If living is about anything,” one says, “it’s about breath.” Breathe.

This is me. This is you. This is all of us. If nothing else, it’s a reason to get off TikTok.

***

The news, for the most part, is not good. There are long wars. There is long Covid. People are dying. There is so much hate in the world. Everyone in America has a gun. You can get shot at school, in a grocery store, at a concert, in a house of worship. A person can push you in front of a train. Plane doors are falling out of the sky. I can never finish the medium Suduko. There are fires. Earthquakes. Alcohol is bad for you. Kate is sick. The people you grew up with in the industry are dead or dying. The ones that are still around seem a little desperate. Afraid to let go. There is conversation about insurrection and civil war. We wake to the same old white men running for President. A guy in Burlington, Vermont, is selling pizza for 50 bucks a pie and has not been arrested for his thievery.¹ There’s a tip jar at the butcher. Where is the tip jar for book critics and reviewers, who make next to nothing for their thoughtful work.² Cost creep is everywhere. No one can afford to eat or pay rent, so they start a Substack.

Even I have a Substack. I don’t do it for the money but instead as a prompt to write. There are complaints about it. A subscriber wrote to me recently, saying:

“What did I subscribe to? I never get anything, and it’s been two months. What am I doing wrong?”

I wrote back, “It’s never the reader doing something wrong; it’s always the writer. As in, not writing. You haven’t missed a post – I haven’t published one recently.” Doing what I advise writers to do – engaging with a reader.

The subscriber wrote back again. “Honestly, you need to stop charging people if you’re not going to write – it’s one of the reasons Substack is hobbling along.”

You are trying to live a purposeful life, and then this.