Success Porn and Me
I’m sick to death of fake writing
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Success porn. What is it? Take a look around. It’s everywhere. People bragging about how they did something and it paid something. If you pay attention, it almost immediately falls to pieces, but, nevertheless, it causes a lot of harm.
Why?
When we read about someone else doing something stupid and suddenly blowing the doors off, two things happen.
We feel dumb that we didn’t think of it or do it.
Then we try to duplicate it.
We are setting ourselves up to fail because some idiot told us a story about something that probably never happened.
These days it was probably written by a bot.
Bad poker players have tells, things that signal to better players that they are bluffing. A twitch, a habit, a look. That’s why so many wear sunglasses when playing.
The people who write this stuff are going beyond tells. Their total lack of originality screams fake. But they keep writing the same thing over and over.
I read something this morning about a writer who has started a Substack newsletter and claims to have 1000 paying subscribers, a bigger achievement than you might think if you have not tried it.
(I have one and getting to 100 paid subs was hard.)
But there were two screaming tells in her success porn article. Actually three.
First, her follower count was in the hundreds. Not bad, but not money. Believe me, I know and I have a few more than that.
Second, she never linked to her newsletter. That’s just plain weird, but maybe it was just a mistake. But it is one no professional porn producer would make.
The third tell was this: she never actually told how she did this, what her subject is, or details, specs, etc. Just a claim in the headline.
And headlines with absurd claims followed by no actual numbers are a true sign of success porn.
So is writing articles where all the sentences constitute their own paragraphs, like this.
You know what the writer is doing when they do what I’m doing in the previous sentence…
