Universe for Sale

I’ve been selling things for a long time. I was the one rounding up my family’s junk to become another’s treasure in our first and last yard sale, the one begging mom at age twelve for $100 to buy the beeswax I needed to make and peddle lip balms, the one who, as soon as I was old enough for a credit card, signed up to sell jewelry at an online craft marketplace, the first of its a kind and a revolution at the time. I wasn’t particularly crafty; I just really liked making and selling things.

“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create,” said David Ogilvy, father of modern advertising. Point taken. Business became my training ground and I went on to sell many other things, then helped other people sell things, then helped other people helping other people sell things. Last year, I sold $43 million dollars of product in three months for one company.

I’m a copywriter. I write to sell, wielding words like honey. But once, when all that could be measured were sales at the end of a neatly compartmentalized quarter, today our honey needs to attract sales, yes, but also eyeballs, clicks, and the red zone on heat-maps—and our measures of success come in like clockwork in real time. When once our words went up the chain for approval, perhaps to a creative director, today they go through almost the entire business, left to right, bottom to top: everyone is involved in words and messaging from the CEO to the designer to the marketing team to the support team. We go through rounds of revisions until we get what we want: “yes, this is it” or at least “I like where this is going”. And we keep going, rounds and rounds later: me and my keyboard, me in the shower, me scanning emails, thesauruses, memes for inspiration. We can be ruthless: we cut things we loved, break apart words and sentences then put them back together again. But we’re never heartless: feelings, always (just make them count, up and to the right). Benefits over features. Try this formula, or that one. Don’t forget your keywords. Style guides, once our bibles but now, if they exist at all, are just loose guidelines because “it’ll change”, they say as if we’ll catch up; we never do; we just keep selling. Everyone has opinions, but you just wait: none of matters except the winners in our next A/B test when one will be crowned the winner, even if it’s nonsensical and written by AI. Even AI can’t rest easy. Someone is always looking to overthrow the winner in the name of conversion.

And it’s not just me, the writer. There’s an entire web of us trying to sell: designers looking for the button with the just-right hex code to drive the most clicks, engineers who code algorithms to turn your data and preferences into just the right ads, an entire conglomerate of the most creative people and companies dedicated to selling things, named as if to say we are independent, that we make our own choices when our entire goal is to shape the purchasing choices of everyone else. Together we manufacture scarcity, urgency, necessity like an assembly line: faster, cheaper, make it pop, more wow. Then they buy. Oh, they buy.

They chase things they didn’t even want. They try to keep up, but now they work so they can buy—things they want and things they don’t, things they can’t even flaunt and things they don’t even own. We bought the world when it wasn’t enough, then we made more. Now we’re selling things even less logical than it is to sell sugar and tooth rot as happiness, or to tie happiness to polar bears when they are so deadly that should you ever come across one in real life, you will want to run when in fact you should slowly back away.

Oh, but I’m not a cynic. Writing is fun. Writing is magic. Writing is power. How else do you explain everything that can be done with words? Empires, movements, love stories, songs that’ve gone down in memory, all the wonderful truths amidst the lies.

It’s just that we, or I at least (and maybe you), spend a lot of my mind, my time, and therefore, my life, trying to sell things. And everything we sell just like everything else, ends up as junk or less than that. The things that disappointed: words breaking promises, money-back guarantees that weren’t real, all the things tagged, unwanted and unused, everything we simply forgot about. And yes, the things that succeeded: all the products that made it, the best ideas, the most ingenious inventions. All of it is fleeting, even the most “real” of them all: the plastic that lives forever, the greatest companies in the world.

I wondered: What would you sell if you could sell anything? (You can.) Would you remind someone of the wonder they already know? (You should). Could you sell the things that we’ve stopped paying attention to? (Let’s try.)

Look up, smell the flowers, stop your scroll. The universe is here for you to have and to hold.