I’m getting this Substack off the ground again, relaunched as Gabenotes. Tell a friend!
For the past few months, I've been thinking about pushing myself to start writing casually again. After some deliberation, I've decided to embark on that quest. And as I set out on this long journey, I’ll rely on your watchful, beady little eyes peering out at me from the bushes, menacing me with judgement if I stop for too long.
However, it took me awhile to be confident about trying to write again. I’ll summarize those internal deliberations of mine below.
I’m perhaps overly-aware that public writing on most subjects has to be accompanied with an air of self-assuredness. That I assume at least some of you will give me your valuable time going forward is a given for anything I publish here. This fact alone always gave me a little pause over resuming this short-lived blog.
To put it another way, it’s clear to me that some part of my desire to use a platform like Substack comes from a feeling that’s common to the overeducated twenty-something: wanting to be seen as insightful and creative, as possessing valuable insight about The Discourse, as having an acknowledged identity as an intellectual or creative mind. I mean, most of you are on Twitter, you get it.
These creative or intellectual identities are much sexier than the ones many of us end up cultivating by economic necessity, that of the pampered corporate office-peon or bored non-profit drone. But they’re very difficult identities to actually obtain.
Freddie DeBoer has a solid essay entitled Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers, talking about the concept of “elite overproduction,” and how it relates to the modern young person’s creative plight. It’s easy to pick up a creative hobby in the modern era, with the internet providing accessible instruction on the basics, and platforms like Twitter, Substack, Etsy, Onlyfans, Patreon, and Instagram providing easy ways to promote, publicize, and possibly profit from one’s work. The ease we all enjoy of starting and sharing a creative pursuit means that, not only is the actual job market for creative employment as difficult as ever, but the attention-market is equally-saturated. Personal investment in skills that are geared towards generating sought-after creative or intellectual identities now produce less of a return for our egos than they might’ve 50 years ago. Freddie explains:
The problem now is that, if you say “I make movies,” the person you’re talking to will usually hear the unspoken part, “just like everyone else.” When being an aspiring filmmaker meant carting around an expensive film camera, hiring a sound guy, and paying to get the film developed, there was a higher barrier to entry; that status required actual investment in time and money. Now, when everyone carries an excellent camera in their pocket at all times, and anyone can access thousands of free videos describing how best to use it, there’s no more exclusivity in making videos and thus no more cachet.
Literacy rates in medieval Europe are estimated to have been around 20%. Good paper was expensive and difficult to make, too. It would’ve been so cool to write back then. I bet you didn’t even need to be that good…
So, I’ve never been an aspiring creative in a serious professional sense, but as someone who’s staring down the barrel of a professional-class career in an white-collar office setting, I’ve thought a lot lately about 1) the desire to have some form of creative outlet that defines me in more colorful terms than daily life allows and 2) the difficulty in satisfying that urge by blathering opinions onto a Substack page.
All this is to say, I’m mildly self-conscious about my motivations here, and will not take having an audience (such as it is, but there are a hundred or so of you right now) for granted.
I still feel, however, that forcing myself to do this could have some real benefits for me that I can detach from external validation. These include, but are not limited to:
Take-posterity. I have a few published articles floating around out there from years ago, in Jacobin and in Current Affairs. Some I still like a lot, others induce cringing embarrassment in me now. I think this is probably healthy; my opinions shouldn’t be ephemeral. If I’m owned, I should be owned. The record should prove it, and you should be able to easily mock my hubris with a quick link. This is healthy for a man.
Self-discipline. I waste a lot of time replaying old video games, rewatching old shows, and scrolling social media. No, I’m not “doing self-care,” I’m just wasting my life. This seems like an improvement in how I might spend my time, whatever else is true.
Intellectual self-assuredness. Fuck it, maybe I won’t drop any real bangers. Maybe at best you’ll give these a polite pity-click when they appear in your inbox, so it looks like people are reading them. That’d really be fine by me, or at least it should be. At 27 years of age, I should have the ability to do something just for the sake of hoping to grow more skilled at it, and enjoying myself along the way whether or not that actually happens.
I have no set vision for what I’ll do here. I could imagine newsletters, long-form essays, movie reviews, or most likely, rants about silly political and cultural controversies on Twitter.
Regardless, thank you for being here. On your end, if you want to reply or leave comments/question at any point, hey, that might give me something easy to write about.
Let’s get moving, we have a long way to go and no clear destination.