What Are You Feeding Your Mind?

Formerly known as: Robots Writing For Sixth Graders

Hello, are you reading this?

You are, aren’t you?

It’s because my sentences are short and you want to scan.

And you can.

When I write like this.

It’s like a waterfall, if you’d like to be poetic about it. Your eyes flow, carried down the page so that you may read even as you itch to scroll.

This is how you read now. You, stranger on the internet, aren’t reading like we were taught to, each word aloud, one by one. You scan, like a robot does, robots invented by us to embody the highest form of efficiency.

And they’re here, no longer the stuff of science fiction, in stories that seem to say “be careful what we wish for”. Now, instead of a genie granting wishes, it’s our own ingenuity parlayed through a different kind of magic, science and technology, that we’re warning against.

We always need a villain. Robots, our desire to be efficient manifested in metal and gears, are it. In these stories—I, Robot, Terminator, WestWorld—we pit robots against humans, beings once objects of servitude turned rebels against our will. But it was our will that designed robots to be efficient, and it was us who changed our habits to match our imagined ideals.

In that imagination we scan text for meaning because it’s efficient and fast and we can instantly turn complexity into insight, a soundbite, a tangible whiff of wisdom—Except! this is not contained within our imagination. It’s real, and you’re doing it right now. Count me lucky if you’re reading this sentence, tucked so far at the end of a long and winding paragraph that you may miss this: yes, a pig just flew by.

I may have lost you already. You’re too well trained. Your habits are so ingrained that they may as well be algorithmic, signalling to you that if it’s not useful or wildly exciting it’s time to move on before you’ve even registered what you’re seeing. That ten second pause to get to the point? Even that’s too much. Swipe. And by now, even the wildly exciting has started to lose its appeal after years of clickbait ruined it all, kind of. Kind of because sometimes we know but we can’t help it anyway: need. to. click. Can’t turn away. But of course, they’re/we’re always one step ahead, UX designers disguising addictive mechanisms as user delight when in fact they’re designing our slow and steady descent into modern madness. Don’t blame them/us: we’re all just trying to make it.

You don’t even read in order anymore. Without blinking, your eyes jump around. This is nonlinear called reading. See also: scanning.

The great thing about being a robot is that you get to save time so that perhaps, ultimately, you can spend more of it. But unlike money, which is infinite, time, at least yours, will come to an end sooner than a flash in the pan of the universe. (All the more reason to act like a robot.) Productivity, the beacon of human achievement spanning all geographies, vocations, classes, is at an all-time high because you’ve adapted the likenesses of the robot. Proof? You’re so good at scanning you’ve stopped blinking. This is what my optometrist has told me, and why I now buy and use eyedrops like drugs. If time goes by in the blink of an eye, we’re designed not to let it pass even if our biology hasn’t yet kept up. No matter. Science and eyedrops are here!

The not-so-great part about being a robot is that it’s hard to turn off. Everything is quantified, measured, decided no longer with the heart nor the mind but with a displaced third party entity known as data.

I can’t tell you when it started but recently I’ve been finding myself glazing over most things I intend to read, scanning instead for the TL;DR, the morsel of insight that will, if not in truth then in intent, mark a piece as read. Messages and everything on read, that’s the default. No action needed, just mark it done. These articles reinforce a feedback loop that show me I don’t need to read everything because most of it is SEO’d junk. I’m not missing out, even though the fear of it makes me do strange things like desire things I don’t even want, click things I don’t even care about. But it’s fine as long as I’m saving time. In fact, I’ve gained so much time I’ve read the entire internet and have now moved onto TikTok where I shall be entertained by jingles and dances served to me by a new and improved algorithm, anything to get away from the onslaught of bots masquerading as people on Instagram and into a land powered by bots who don’t even need to masquerade as people because why would they when here we are, turning ourselves into memes and giving them, giving us, exactly what we want. It’s a bot eat bot world.

Stop.

You’re getting ahead of me already. You’ve probably already scanned for how long it’ll take you to read this entire thing and what you’ll gain from it. To save you the trouble: if you’re the average person, it’ll take you about 32 minutes to get to the end. As far as what you’ll learn, nothing maybe. But my hope is that instead of learning something that you can mark as done, something that may be true for six months and then not, you’ll spark an inkling of adventure and possibility, and this inkling will lead to many great things for you to come. So quit and go back to whatever you were looking at or venture forward. You were warned that this isn’t a step-by-step how-to guide on how to write better, how to read more, or how to discover the secret to happiness. I prefer not to make false promises, though perhaps I will lead a trail of breadcrumbs for you to go find out those things for yourself. So decide right now: is this worth 32 minutes of your life, just over two percent of your entire day, this day and this moment which you will never get back?

If you haven’t yet closed this tab whether by intent or curiosity or pure laziness, allow me to introduce myself. I’ve been writing on the internet since dial-up or “web 1” as the folks on this side of the internet like to call it. What is this side? If you have to ask, then somehow you’ve found yourself here in the land of blockchain and NFTs. It doesn’t matter how you got here but that’s where you are, if you didn’t know.

A brief history of me as a writer: Let’s skip the beginning because back then I wasn’t really writing. Let’s call it journalling. I guess I was okay at it. Journalling online was how I caught the attention of my high school boyfriend. He must’ve enjoyed my account of angsty teenage moments set to Usher lyrics. (This same boyfriend slid into my DMs a couple years ago to tell me some things: lingering resentments and dreams of marriage, and in between, that there’s something special about my writing. He is not linguistically inclined so I took it as an extra special compliment.)

As the years went by, who we listened to in the world changed from mass media to social media. It’s a hilarious twist of events when you consider, if you were old enough to be there like I was, that once upon a time mass media was belittling, denouncing, and trying to assert its dominance against “people who aren’t trained”, “don’t know what they’re talking about”, “people who have no business being here”—and now on the rare occasion in the passing peripherals of my life, where I happen to see the news on tv, all I see is mass media reporting on things happening on, recorded via, or conversing on social media.

I found myself writing in “web 2”, a.k.a. blogging and web copywriting. Of course, back then no one knew it was web 2 (that’s just something we made up after), but now that we have the gift of hindsight, we can make up ways to categorize the webs, and so we have. No one talks about language when we examine the changes, but language, reading, storytelling, even the concept of “taste” shifted dramatically in web 2. Change needed to happen to make room for the grand echo chamber of the social web where all are welcome to speak, write, make-believe, not just a looping select few. We were (re-)inventing the rules as we went along, so in this new web, all of us were pulled to write shorter and shorter sentences and in easier and easier language because “that’s how people read”.

We saw the rise of the influencer—single people (singular, not un-coupled) with more power and sway than entire strategically-designed, well-funded, well-storied organizations—and by its maturation, the influencer was passé and we all became content creators, every last one of us except those who do not exist. Keyword stuffing was in and then it, too, was passé though arguably still useful and not arguably quite lucrative. By the end, we were figured out and algorithms got so smart they no longer needed a formula other than “write for people”. And write for people became “write for a sixth grader”. It worked. It’s like Hemingway on steroids, if Hemingway lived on the internet instead of Cuba and drank marketing Koolaid instead of Mojitos.

Since then, I’ve made my living over the past decade writing, though not always as a “writer”. Maybe you can tell. I grew up in web 1 and 2, where I’ve developed the predisposition to put things out on the internet as if I own the place—and well, now I know well that I didn’t. When I was building companies and looking for help with no money and no connections, still I found a treasure trove (or was it a minefield?) of knowledge: “how to write”, “how to convert”, “how to drive sales” articles, and then books. I ate them up like breakfast, pages and pages of them. I followed the advice and became known for making it rain, as my bosses once said. Anytime they needed an injection of capital to fund the next season of cloud and hedgehog onesies, it was hi Ana, let’s go. (Disclaimer: they were much nicer than dramatic effect will allow.) I worked my way up to driving $43 million in revenue in three months with my words, headhunted by a recruiter to write for one of the world’s “most innovative companies”, a title they actually hold and not just my humble opinion. It’s a long way from trying to sell one dress a week, what I calculated when I was 21 it would take to sustain myself and my creative dreams.

Now, as a debatably “real writer”, real in the sense that this is what people pay me to do, I can’t shake my “must sell things” roots, which turns out is great for the kind of writing that I do which aims to sell things. But even in that fairly narrow context amidst all the possible kinds of writing that exist, I’ve written from an editorial perspective as well as from a copywriting perspective and even then, the style, approach, methodology differs wildly. Sure, you think about many of the same things: tone, voice, social proof, the art of the headline. But they’re not the same. Good copywriters do not make good journalists do not make good fiction writers do not make good essayists do not make good editors do not make good content writers—usually. That makes sense given how vastly different each is as a discipline, the only real commonality that words are used and things are communicated.

When I work with “real” writers turned copywriters, they sometimes physically cringe at the formulas and standards that data has shown us works, the data that took years for me to learn and test, affirming that yes, indeed, if you can get past the spam filters, “free” nearly always performs better than anything else. People really like free stuff.

I know a lot about the words that work because it mattered to me that they did when I was selling things and not just trying to say pretty things. I did whatever I could to make it and luckily fell into the palms of the tech startup world, employee number 1343 of a unicorn that taught me what it meant to 10x everything. There, I learned what it meant to be data-informed and not data-driven, the latter being the calling card of many a startup who’ve lost their hearts and minds and given it up to data. I learned to write not as a copywriter would but as a world-class, award-winning customer support team does. I then went on to coach my team on how to write like people talk, as fast as you can, as accurately as you can, as kind as is humanly possible under the pressure cooker of PR storms and the fury and nonsense of social media.

When I was in tech support and how I was writing things mattered to explain concepts from marketing tactics to how to add a code snippet, was that called “good writing”? Was it better writing if I reduced the number of exchanges because they understood what I saying and that meant I was saving the company money? How do you measure good writing when writing is used in so many ways now that the internet has made us all more connected and more measurable?

Taste, when it comes to good writing, just like taste with all things, is truly subjective. But the way that the world is set up with money and power at the helm make it seem as if taste is a very real thing with a hierarchy. The only hierarchy is the hierarchy of broken systems, many of which have already fallen or are on their way, paving the path for taste of a very different kind run by numbers: views, followers, and money (still). Taste today looks like ugly-ass goblins (I think the goblins would take that as a compliment) and million dollar apes and not even real ones, just pictures of apes. Kim Kardashian may not have been “deeply tasteful” back in 2014, but she is the ultimate tastemaker of today, to the tune of millions of followers and billions of dollars. Taste is not only subjective; it requires consensus between people. You have no taste until other people say so, or now, until the numbers prove it.

I actively try train my taste to encompass a spectrum of sensibilities from the “deeply tasteful” (straight from Anna Wintour) to “low-brow” things that can only be considered taste because I like what at least a few other people like. I picked this up in fashion, my actual training ground: for maximum appeal combine high and low, embrace change, make an impact, and above all, “make it work” from the gospel of 2000s era Tim Gunn. You do what you have to to get the job done.

In writing, that includes but is not limited to psychological trickery, the clever use of numbers, and perfecting the art of the headline to drive clicks, even if it’s a stretch, even if it’s not the truth at all, even if it’s formulaic and boring to a writer’s eyes. There are a lot of false truths out there, ideas with the right facts but the wrong frame, words that sound human but are written by bots, wondrous art made by AI. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction, the lines of the uni/meta/multi-verse are blurring, words that meant one thing five years ago now mean something else.

I do know one thing, this thing I’ve known since I was very little: I want to write good things, things that affect people. But I’ve been hearing a lot about how people don’t read anymore. I’ve been hearing and seeing it for myself, becoming it myself: we are all turning into robots, desperate to be done, desperate to do more, desperate to absorb it all as quickly as possible. The irony is that in the midst of this numbing desperation, we are most desperate of all to feel.

Sometimes we fall into things we don’t quite expect. Copywriting made sense for me: all those business books I ate for breakfast led me somewhere and I meandered my way in and out and back into writing as my job. And even if it wasn’t what I expected, it makes sense. I’ve always loved to write. Not that I particularly love the act of writing. There is sometimes nothing tougher than facing a blank page. Even tougher, editing something that is nearly done but not quite. But, I’ve always felt strongest when writing, stronger after having written. We don’t usually talk about women as having power, but I to me, that’s what it feels like: a kind of power that can be held in solitude even with no readers.

One of my earliest memories of the power that I held was being pulled to the office because Ms. Robertson, my seventh grade teacher, loved a story I had written so much she passed it around to everyone with a beaming smile: the principal, secretaries, anyone who was passing through. The only other time I was pulled to the office was when my youngest sister got into a fistfight with a boy.

The memory is vague (the story involved a mammoth and that’s about all I can remember) but the signal strong: this, good writing, is more powerful than acing a test or even getting straight As.

So here I am, a writer and a real one now. And the more time I spend as a writer, I’ve also started to wonder, what else do I want to write?

Part of this was the pandemic, a wake-up call in between the groundhog day-like year we spent in our homes in front of our screens. Part of it is curiosity. Formally, I’ve never been taught to write well other than mandatory K-12 grade education and one community college class to make the basic English graduation requirement for fashion school. But here I was, a good writer by standards not of academics but of a) my clients who are smart people (subjectively in my opinion and objectively), who surely would’ve seen through my foil had I been mediocre after all and b) random strangers on the internet who send me hearts over Instagram because they feel something and I know now the toughest thing of all is to stop someone enough to make them feel, or make them feel enough to stop.

I started to write things other than websites and ads. It started last year. I wrote 50 micro-”stories” about colours, then posted them on Instagram. I wrote essays about things that influenced me as a creative, from Elle Woods to advice columns. This year, I went even further. I wrote a few short stories. I submitted a story to an anthology. I entered a writing contest and placed as a finalist in the first round (next round results pending). And now, I’m writing poetry and am about to release my first book. Now, as my days blur between writing about software and storytelling, my reliance on an online thesaurus at breakneck pace (I use them just as much as a software engineer uses google, I’m sure), I wonder even more about “good writing”.

I, the writer, whether real or an imposter, wonder who’s right about good writing: the internet breed who write in broken up paragraphs, or the pedigreed who abhor the lack of proper paragraph structure? What am I willing to give up to be one or the other? I, believer in shaping your own destiny and choosing your own adventure, wonder which adventure I should embark on.

I wonder: what kind of writer will I be?

Well, I used to. In the weeks that it took me, on and off, to write this meandering strange piece of writing somewhere between essay, diary entry, blog post, and guide, I’ve gone from wondering to decided. In my last and hopefully final edit, I’ve made a revision to say this:

I decided to choose a brand new path, one that evolved out of everything I’ve discovered to be true and things I’ve yet to discover. It’s hard to decide not to choose when we are so used to seeing things in binary, in pitting thing against thing, as if everything else is a lie when in fact everything is a small piece of the truth pointing toward a larger one: we are all just trying to make it.

I’ve moved on from trying to define myself as real or fake, good or bad, marketer or poet, from caring about what taste is to not caring at all, and instead seek to decide for myself what I will bring to people through the raw and magical material that we call words on a screen.

The end. / The beginning.

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There once were two places in the world that, for me, were absolute magic: the mall, where I could see all the costumes and objects I could wear and buy to tell the world this is who I want to be for today, and the library, where I could learn anything I could want to and slip into another world for even a moment. I used to wander down the book aisles content to get lost, and once one library had been conquered, we moved on to others in neighbouring municipalities. My family used to spend afternoons, evenings, weekends at libraries (and apparently missed out on learning how to ride bikes). First, it was all of us, and then as we grew older and more independent, it was just me and my dad.

The only vacation we ever took as a family was a road trip down the Pacific highways to Disneyland in 1997. I didn’t really travel again until I was in my 20s, which was my first time on an airplane. I’ve since increased my travel interval slowly yet steadily from once every twenty years to once every five years to now where I’m lucky enough to be able to travel a few times a year. And each time I do, I’m reminded of the exact same feeling as when I was at the library all those years ago, wandering the aisles getting lost and immersing myself in new worlds. They don’t feel all that separate to me; among my favorite things to do in any new city is to visit bookstores. It’s one of the very first things I put on my itinerary, to explore new worlds within new worlds like a Russian Matryoshka doll.

There’s something about being in a bookstore that makes you feel infinite. —Source: Max Joseph, YouTube

Instead of going somewhere, you’re going inside someone’s mind, letting them take you to places they feel are worth taking you to, enough to spend time and all the other things that go into writing a book: labour, doubt, grit, research, imagination, love. When it comes to you, you’re right there at the beginning of your journey into the world they have made for you. And when you get to the last page and step away, the book has ended but the possibilities may have only just started to awaken in your imagination.

I discovered things through the creation of safe, solitary spaces that reading affords, and in those spaces I never felt awkward (correction: mostly not awkward; I hesitated buying 50 Shades of Grey in person, opting instead to buy the ebook). With books, I never felt out of place for wanting to know something new or to immerse myself in something different.

All technologies today are prone to planned obsolescence whether designed or accidental. Books were never meant to be designed this way. They tend to be things we treasure forever, their utility never diminishing as the world around us changes, their worth parallel to how we view collectibles: priceless and tied intimately to our identities. In fact, some get lucky and find that books increase in value with age, if not in monetary value then perhaps in other ways as static devices of imagination and memory. I was never worried that books would become obsolete. If you thought the endless stream of content was going to make them so, I’m not sure about that: I’ve found that internet has now become my trusty companion, leading to most of my favorite books and extending my favorite book experiences in the form of google searches often leading me to rabbit-holes much more interesting than those my algorithm has decided to feed me.

So, I haven’t stopped reading, though the forms and ways in which I read have become much more diverse—which works out really well for me as a writer. I feel much better equipped to do what I do today with the internet by my side.

Actually, most of what I do now as a writer is read. I can usually scrounge up some words pulled from my brain to put on a page, but to finish something, to make it make sense, to make it meaningful, useful, memorable, I need to read it over and over again. Read one sentence, then rewrite it. Read the next, rewrite it. Read the paragraph, then the next. Then go back and do it over and over again. You’d think I was carving David but I’m just writing on the superfluous internet, my words both permanent and fleeting, a blip hard to erase but so easily forgotten.

Sometimes I write things and then read them, astounded by my own lack of coherence: wait until they find out what my writing is really like, before I read it over and over and over again. The better something reads to you, the more likely it is that I’ve spent more time reading it and rewriting it rather than being a reflection of anything else, like how good or bad a writer I am.

Other times, I am struck to see on screen a thought crystallized into pure magic. Then, disheartened to see one piece of magic in a piece that is so far still incoherent, like this piece right now as I’m writing this sentence. If you’re reading this, congratulations to me; I read it enough to publish. And that’s what writing’s like, a big giant mess until it’s not. Shoutout to editors, who take messes and turn them into magic, for taking ideas sometime stirring for so long they should be rotting in my brain*, but instead they get polished enough to sparkle so that sometimes I can pretend that I know things, when in fact, I am writing often to discover things. (On my wish list: a personal editor.)

*Let’s talk about brain rot a bit more. The consistent fear of rotting brains echos our consistent fascination with zombies throughout history and across cultures—and we’ve long feared the concept of brain rot well before the internet, before television, before radio. The printing press was invented around 1440 and as its popularity grew, a man named Conrad Gessner proclaimed the new abundance of books “confusing and harmful” to the mind, calling out for regulation to prevent information overload in an era when hardly anyone even had access to education. Socrates the great philosopher refused to write because he believed that writing was harmful to memory. The printing press inspired great paranoia from the Catholic Church since scientists had a means to publish their ideas and research for the first time, ironic given that the first major book printed by the Gutenberg press was the bible. Of course, books also inspired fear and criticism among mostly men who believed that novels corrupted women so much that they could not distinguish between fiction and real life—and look at us now, purposefully creating worlds that are fictional to mirror real life. The easiest way to control a population in the 20th century wasn’t to enslave them, but to censor books, burn them even, as the Nazis did in 1933, as the Chinese Communist Party did in the 1950s, and as a future America did in 2049 in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

In the grand scheme of human invention, books have become omnipresent, surpassing most technologies in lifespan. The criticisms once reserved for books are now directed towards the internet, and now, the metaverse. Unlike the internet and the metaverse, books have a beginning, a middle, and an end—an adventure like a life: finite.

But what are books, really? They’re just words bound into pages, each varying in length but measured by its ability to encapsulate in a singular unit an idea, a concept, a story. Without these units, words are blobs just like we would be, floating through time without concepts like hours, days, years to guide us. Without these units, these words could be anything.

Last year, I decided that I would read 100 books. 100 contained blobs. 100 chances to learn 100 contained things, to have 100 contained, solitary experiences in solidarity.

Why? Well, I wanted to. Also, maybe I needed to. What can you during a pandemic anyway? By this point we were about seven months in and I’d binge-watched, video-gamed, VR-ed my way through. It helped a bit and then it didn’t, and when everyone was losing their jobs, I was so burned out that I quit mine. The initial apocalyptic shock eventually wore off and we became a collective socially distanced ball of stir-crazy. If we couldn’t travel to other continents or cities, and even travelling to the grocery store was a whole big thing that required suiting up, masks, and strategy, where else could I go?

I followed suit of middle-class women in the 1800s who were among the first large cohort in history to read for leisure, and decided to read more. It didn’t come of nowhere. I had travelled many times through books all those times I had gone to the library as a kid, then stopped travelling when I started reading books for utility as an adult, my Kindle history a mashup between startup bro and Oprah superfan. My mind was filled with business advice and self-help and these were the books I always reached for even though I had a list of topics I wanted to learn about, some that had been on the list for years that I “never had time for”. I wrote down “economics” because I still didn’t understand what it was, what even the concept of it meant. (Strangely, none of the business or finance books I read ever talked about economics—the closest I got was Freakonomics.)

I finally saw that, barring my elderly years should I be lucky enough to reach that milestone, this right now may be the most time I will ever have.

So I read. And what a world that opened up for me.

A brief interlude on how to read 100 books a year

Basically, spend less time on social media. I’m not an extremist and I don’t believing in going cold turkey if you don’t want to and especially if social media brings some form of joy and connection to your life, which it does for most people, myself included.

When I took part in my first ever writer’s workshop this year, a fellow workshopper mentioned that she loved my use of numbers in the fairy tale I was writing. Why, thank you, but that’s just because I’ve had it hounded into me: stats, facts, analytics! (Years working in tech, all those business books coming back to haunt me.) Anyway, here are some stats, facts, analytics! The average person spends about two hours a day on social media (actually 142 minutes, which is two hours and 22 minutes, but let’s round down because almost everyone thinks they’re better than the norm so let’s assume you are and the person next to you is worse). That doesn’t seem like much, maybe, especially if you justify it by saying you’re usually doing something else at the same time. But two hours a day (and remember, we’re rounding down) is one entire month in your year. If you didn’t sleep. If you were on social media 24/7. So put another way (the same way, but in a different order): in your entire year, one entire month is spent on social media.

We’ve invented all sorts of ways to act as if we have no time, even though technically we should have more time than ever given how many of our inventions were designed to help us move faster. (Most of them.) See: the transformation of transportation, microwaves, the food supply chain, email and chat, basically everything. We’re obsessed with saving time and being productive. Call us a maximizing species or Parkinson’s Law addicts, but we’re naturals at finding ways to expand our tasks to fill up the extra time we’ve created. Social media, you could say, was invented at just the right time, before we had the time to realize we had so much extra of it.

It’s a weird loop. We use social media now even to shill the things we’d like to have time for, if we weren’t on social media all the time. So of course, we shill books. Don’t you know? Celebrity book clubs are the new celebrity talk show.

No one’s shilling the act of reading itself except smart people in pockets of interviews found in the glittery tinier spaces of the internet, people like Ruth Simmons, the first Black president of an Ivy League school, who said “The busyness does not make our lives meaningful. It is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.”

Reading is the interior adventure anyone can have, anywhere, a test of will against the busyness of our exterior lives. Social media has disguised itself as part of our interior lives, when it’s really a portal into the exterior and manicured lives of everything else other than our selves, everywhere and all at once.

So here’s my recommendation: halve your social media consumption. Whatever it is right now, do 50 percent. You get two extra weeks of your life this year back. Now read a few books.

The longest book I’ve read so far was a compilation of interviews throughout HBO’s 30-year history. When I put the book on hold at the library, I didn’t realize it was the size of the bible. The shortest book I read was Margaret Atwood’s first poetry collection: The Circle Game.

I still don’t have a good answer to “What’s your favorite book?” and I probably never will. Of the 159 books I’ve read in the last year and a half, I’ve marked about 40 as favorites. Another lesson I took from the startup world: fail fast. I’m a quitter. I fail to finish about a third of all books I start. I don’t feel bad about it. The faster I quit, the faster I can get on with the next book, because though each book is finite, books themselves, while quantifiable, are infinite. People keep writing books and no one will ever come close to reading all there is to read.

On book #18 of 2022, now in my second year reading 100 books, I received a somewhat cryptic message from the universe disguised as someone who signed off as “Daddy”. A slip of paper fell out of page 222 of The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben, the book I was reading on February 22 at 10:22pm.

HiFi! This last page of the chapter said a lot to me. A book as a whole, a page as a fractal. You can’t possess reality. You have to live in it.

Of course, it wasn’t from my dad, who probably doesn’t know what a fractal is. Just a random stranger looking out for me.

Though I can hold a book in my hands and that is, technically speaking, what it means to possess a book, I wondered what it meant to live in it. All those books I had eaten for breakfast were books I possessed, not books that I had experienced. I was scanning them for knowledge, not for pleasure. I already knew what it was like to live in the experience of the book, a feeling we probably all know when a book sucks you in like gravity and all else fades away. For all the obsession we have in the digital age for user experience, we forget what it’s like to build an experience with words, we forget what it really is that pulls us in.

We look to data to tell us how to write, and in turn, we’ve turned our own worlds into landscapes only robots can survive. We’re too smart for our own good; we adapt and evolve; we feed the world with the likes, clicks, tactics that we try so hard to run away from. But we’re not getting better, more enlightened, more productive even. And wasn’t that the pinnacle of all that was promised when we set out this way?

What are we really after: to possess all the knowledge in the world or to experience the world to its fullest? As a now multi-genre, multi-vocational writer, this question sticks with me because of the strange power that I know I have not for everyone in the world but for one person: you reading this right now. It’s the power I know I have because I’ve had this power used on me, the power of good writing.

There are many ways that we, both experts and imposters and experts with imposter syndrome, have come up with to teach how to write well. Some believe that you either have it or you don’t. Some believe it’s solely about clarity. Some believe it’s about puns and fun and pizazz. All of the above are correct, and just as I’ve suspected, all of the above are also not the entire truth.

I’ve spent practically my entire life writing but nothing taught me more than when I started to read, really read, again.

It’s like Zadie Smith said in her first two rules of writing:

• When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
• When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

This isn’t just for writers, but writers especially because writers create what the rest of us read, what the rest of us put into our brains. Ideas, hunches, stories, just like energy, never come from nowhere. They come from a loop that starts with, keeps moving, and ends with something, anything.

Whilst I read, I wrote. My writing was better, not perfect, never perfect, but better. (Another startup lesson: if it’s perfect, you’re too late. I could give this one more read for all the misplaced commas I’m sure still exist, but I won’t.) I learned to recognize where I stop, so that I could learn to emulate the same feeling. I learned what grabs my attention, and even more important, what holds it. I've learned to simplify and expand. I learned through reading that I really love rhythm; static words then start to feel a bit more like music. I learned that I love contrast more than I do balance—sharp versus soft, easy-to-read versus enough complexity that it pulls you forward, out, and in. I love a little bit of fantasy, a hint of surrealism, a little bit of magic, but yes I do love it all to feel real and relevant and like a person, not the thing, robot or whatever, you think you should be. When I read David Sedaris for the first time, years after I had been recommended his writing, I did in fact LOL. What a delight, I thought, and I made a note to self: let’s try this, too, one day. I made an active decision about the kind of writing I wanted to write. I decided to honour this: that just because someone writes it, and then someone else writes it, doesn’t make it the truth, just a truth. I learned that while many disregard certain things as fluff (mostly men on things associated with women), as if it’s a threat to all that is true and real and serious, I quite enjoy fluff. Well, fluff and facts. I’m convinced actually that we need more fluff to get away from the sterile, over-minimalist, monotony of almost everything else out there. Give me a pile of fluff over “the intersection of design and technology”, over “great user experiences”. If to fluff means to “make or become fuller, softer, lighter”, I want that. I want fullness. I want softness. I want to feel light and free again. These are things I discovered about myself through reading.

Reading allows us to see what’s possible so that we may write more truthfully according to what speaks to our souls, not simply what we’ve known because it was in front of us, because someone told us so. (Though, I’ve started to join writer’s workshops for the primary purpose to discover and explore the things that other people love so much they want to put it front of others; this is how I discovered that I can write any way I can imagine, just like Ntozake Shange does with choreopoems.) We all have to find our own truths, and a great place to start is to read lots, read widely, read deeply.

It’s hard, I know. It took me decades to get here, and I already liked reading to begin with. Most people aren’t reading, not for leisure anyway. We’ll read information that we’re seeking—examples: among top google searches in 2021, we were reading about true crime (Gabby Petito), a Netflix show (Squid Game), how to be more attractive and how to be happy alone (among the top “how to”s we’ve searched for). We read about the things we want to learn more about. But given the choice, many of us now prefer to watch a quick video. I know I do. My 2019 MacBook Pro can’t seem to handle text-based content with all the on-page ads mass media is now serving, but it can handle an endless stream of TikToks just fine.

And that’s fine because truth-seeking doesn’t just come from reading books. We associate reading with their end products—books and now articles—but words are building blocks of almost everything that exists. Yes, books, but also movies, TV, podcasts, documentaries. Great scripts become great movies. Comic books are words and pictures. Games have scripts and stories. There is a “book” for everyone, a world to travel to, a form invented just for you. Songs are a particularly palatable and universal form of reading. Some of my favorite lines are written by songwriters. Great ads and many bad ones are designed to associate the products of capitalism with the stories of our lives, and they often succeed because yeah, I’ve done it because Nike told me to. I include trojan horses in my writing—ideas and concepts associated with optimism, hope, joy, wonder, action, to spread the things I believe in like viruses in blog posts about project management and starting companies, in websites for jewelry companies and workout wear. Even the non-linear way that we read now, to the dissent of writers who lament that no one reads anymore, is in fact a door that opens to a nonlinear way of storytelling made possible with new technologies. Why should stories be in order, in one contained form? What if they were expansive, multi-platform? They can be and they are. The most successful IPs in the world paved the path with billion-dollar franchises that expand storytelling beyond one singular form and into many that don’t just move forward but go backwards and into multiverses. And now, in the world of “web 3”, we’ve seen glimmers expanding on the concept of what it means to tell a story and how to tell it in new ways: not just for communities but with communities. Books, as long as they have existed, are undergoing a bit of a reinvention themselves. We thought ebooks were the next stop, but it’s just one of many possible ways to think of books. Where books needed to be contained blobs with a beginning, middle, and end, and any books longer than that were then made into a series of books, now books can be written in real time, published in real time, written by multiple people in real time, as long as you want them to be, on and on forever if you want.

The future of “reading” is made up of the things we can imagine right now and will imagine in the future, all to make the act of reading more accessible to more people. Free, paid, buy, borrow, watch, listen, look at, follow. The ways to find our own truths, to discover new paths, and to get closer to who we are, are expanding.

How great is it that I can write this mega-essay on exactly what I want, exactly how I want, and that if I wanted to, I could pull screenshots or quotes that I particularly love to post on social media so that someone who will never read a 30 minute essay may still be moved by a little snippet and that alone may be enough to spark something? How wonderful is it that if you are reading this and are the type of person to enjoy a 30 minute essay with no promises, that you can own this piece as a way to tip me the writer while holding a record of it as part of your digital identity and in a way, build your own personal library of things that may be books or essays or art or other things, and that there is no advertising engine to act as intermediary between us?

No one has to do anything, but we can now do almost anything. If you want to write for scanners, you can—in fact, you can write an entire essay in 10 seconds with a bot. Just tell them your topic and they’ll spit out 1000 words alchemized from all the information they can find.

If you want to, like me, try to write in a way that bots cannot—meandering, strange, personal, unfocused—you can, too. You can, like I am here, experiment with taking people through a journey where scanning is impossible because there is nothing to scan, where the “utility” is in the details, the story, the act of reading. There are two reasons I’m writing this way. Part of it is practical in nature: bots will take over many kinds of writing on the internet, anything that requires distillation of information. We may still need human editors but that’s not what I came to do. Part of it is that it feeds me: it’s actually so much fun to make up the rules about what and how I should be writing. It’s been so much fun to use everything I know about writing (so far) to write something I think is worth reading, something I know a robot can’t write. In this world we’ve built, I see a chance to be more human.

But that chance is one that needs to be taken actively because in no way is it the easier route. Scanning is easy, reading isn’t. There’s no psychological trickery involved. Clothes come in seasons, so hi FOMO. No one would dare declare a book a seasonal affair, after all the work that goes into it, sometimes many years. (But could a magazine be a book?) That doesn’t mean we haven’t invented ways to try: glowing reviews on back covers for social proof, book clubs in which we must show up having read the book or be publicly ridiculed, apps like Goodreads in which we can show off our taste and progress, even social media with the rise of BookTok and BookTube, and Hadids carrying books like handbags.

It’s so hard now for most people to read yet still an indicator of status and intellect that we’ll even fake it: we share articles we’ve never read just to appear as if we have, or we read just the headlines, get the gist, and call it done.

So we’ve come to this: Are people not reading because what we’re writing isn’t good enough to capture their attention, or are we writing this way because we were told that this is how we should write to get people to read?

We were taught how to get as many readers as possible (we don’t call them readers, but the detached and gory “eyeballs” ie. we need more eyeballs on this!), how to sell to as many people as possible, how to use just the right word to sell one percent more. These things work, but for a limited time before the singular event becomes an environment, one that grows and grows until we all start to understand the rules and play the game, too. We keep pushing as they pull away, then we push harder until we look up and see a world in which we’ll never catch up because we’ve trained everyone to expect the bare minimum. Welcome to the lowest common denominator world, where “good writing” means robots writing for sixth graders.

Not that there’s anything wrong with robots (or sixth graders, for that matter). They are all the ways we wish to be efficient for all the things we wish to be efficient about: crunching numbers, automating mundane tasks, cleaning floors. But the thing about robots is that they aren’t sentient; they’re taught to do exactly what they’re programmed to do. The thing about you is you’re not a robot, so why are you acting as if you are? Why are you living for efficiency when you could discover so much else? Literally, literally, anything else in the world and beyond.

Blame your brain: on the one hand gloriously capable, on the other a squishy sack that can’t even tell black and blue from white and gold. We are easily distracted, easily tricked, easily manipulated. They were probably right about women and novels, except it’s not women and novels after all but people and everything.

Alright, fine. It’s an uphill battle. Everything’s working against us. This is the moment in any superhero movie where the protagonist is in a crunch against the enemy and they’re losing the fight, but you just know that something’s going to come along and save them because there’s always a happy ending and there’s no way the hero’s going to die. Sometimes a side character comes along and provides a much needed distraction to briefly untangle from enemy, but the thing that always has to happen is the hero has to find something in themselves, usually from a memory and always from a feeling, that scrambles the logical rules of the universe so that they can, for a brief moment, turn the tables in a make or break moment.

You are the main character. I am a passing side character in your life. I just came by and hopefully served as enough of a distraction to stop the enemy’s ascent for a brief moment. Now it’s up to you.

If you’ve ever read something so beautifully immersive, so fascinating, so captivating that truly, you did read each word, one by one, and sometimes read it back again to experience a moment of magic once again, and even just to make sure that you did not miss anything—if that’s you, then you may already have your thing.

Choosing to read teaches us to be active in our pursuit of wonder, helps us pay attention to what matters, shows us what the opposite of noise feels like. When you read something good, you know because it stops you. Your human instincts take over and the urge to scan is gone. This is what it’s like to read for leisure. We undo our descent into the dystopian imagination and into a fantastical one. I use the word “reading” here loosely; you can just about apply it to anything you consume that requires the act of paying attention. Just remember to choose what you pay attention to. The enemy is both noisy and silent, invisible and everywhere.

This pursuit needs to be enforced and protected, and it can’t be positioned as a way to become smarter. (Yes, this is me the copywriter trying to give reading a bit of a brand refresh.) When we think of someone who is a reader, especially as children, we make an assumption that maybe they’re smart. Instead, I think someone who likes to read should be assumed to be adventurous. Just think of what could happen if we reposition reading so that it appeals to all the people who believe that things like intellect and IQ and genius are static and that they are not good enough or that it is too late for them to be any of these things, and instead position reading as an adventure anyone can have at any age.

After all, most of us aren’t aiming for the crown of know-it-all-ism. Most of us just want to live a good and full life. When I die, I’m not hoping that I’ll know the most I could possibly put into my brain. I don’t think that’s the point. And if it is, sorry, I missed it.

The point of reading, its true magic, is expansion. Reading opens doors, windows, portals. It’s exactly as Einstein famously said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge".

Expansion acts in mysterious ways. It can be cumulative, or it can hit you hard like a eureka moment.

Would I ever admit that, alone in my mid-twenties, reading Cheryl Strayed was what sparked the idea that it was okay to leave? Well, I just did. That, too, was a kind of imagination not related to fairies and spells or space travel held in the container of fantasy or science fiction, but it’s the kind of imagination so many of us need. I’m not picky: imagination, perspective, and expansion can manifest in any way and form. Fiction or nonfiction, long form or short form, literary or genre. Cereal boxes and newspapers were childhood fodder, something for a curious mind to latch onto, to find a hook in the marketing lingo of rice crispies vs fruit loops. I read ads at the bus stop, looked at signage in store windows.

We’re here at an all-time high of “content” and there is more to read than ever. As reading has become more accessible, so, too, obviously has writing. Technology has enabled us to pay writers directly by collecting their work instead of paying them with clicks and shares and goodwill, though those things, entrenched in the web 2 layer we’ll never escape from, are still appreciated. Good writing comes in so many forms and now it can expand to so many more forms. The end of a book or an article can be the conclusion of an idea but the seed of another somewhere else, the way ideas have always travelled. Just now, it’s so much faster, cheaper, more convenient. We should celebrate that, not waste all the time we’ve saved trying to become more like robots.

There are no answers to what good writing is because good writing depends on the reader. That’s what I discovered when I read 100 books a year and now as I continue to read 100 books a year. I’ve quit books that were bestsellers. But I tried genres and authors and topics that were brand new to me, and in the process, experienced the kind of tingles and longings we all ache for: to be stricken wholly, fully, entirely by wonder.

In the first issue of Science Wonder Stories published in June 1929, editor Hugo Gernsback writes in his editor’s letter:

Taste in reading matter changes with each generation. What was acceptable to your grandparents was hopelessly out of style for your parents.

Taste, as it turns out, is a sign of the times and not of absolute truth. And so when we try our best to answer this question, we have to look at the times we are in. Like the famous line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, it is right now both the worst of times but also the best of times. Progress makes it so that at any point in time, this is almost always guaranteed to be the case. But what makes this particular point in time special is access to all information and all the new ways to consume it. The biggest choice now that you have all the choice is perhaps just to choose for yourself what you will feed your mind, your heart, and your soul, what it hungers for regardless of how we have decided to shape our world around a self-invented, never-satiated hunger for ease, speed, convenience.

So go forth and read, whether you are a writer or not, but especially if you are. Without readers, there are no writers. Writers need readers and writers need to be readers. If writing is how so much of the world is built, then the infinite adventure that is reading is what we will use to build it.

If you’ve read this far and this long, I have some good news for you. You discovered something about yourself just by reading. Why did you keep reading even though I promised you nothing except that I’d rob 32 minutes of your life? Take whatever you learned and go find more of it. See what it’s like to lose yourself in a book, then feel the wonder it is to find yourself again.

And to end, you’re rewarded with a TL;DR:

• Read widely: expand who you read from, what you read about, how you read, where you read from.
• Quit whenever: there’s too little time, too much to read. If you don’t like it, drop it and find something else. There’s much more out there.
• Have fun!

Appendix

How do I find books to read?

Okay, so once you’ve cut down just a bit of your social media usage, the next question is: well, what do you read? Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Google "[someone I admire in any field]” and “favorite books”. I’ve also used this to read books loved by well-known public figures like Marilyn Monroe and Bill Gates. Along the same lines, anytime you hear someone you admire talk about a book, note it.
2. Lists of books at your library, bestseller lists, GoodReads, BookTube. Google “top books of 20xx” and see what comes up.
3. Ask people what their favorite books are. Bonus: you can learn a lot about people by learning what their favorite books are. It’s them admitting this is what my mind is made of.
4. For non-fiction, bibliographies contain original sources so if you liked the book you just read, you might like these too.
5. Walk into bookstores and go ahead, judge books by their covers.

How do I read more widely?

Ray Bradbury has a very simple “program” for writers. At night, read three things: a poem, a short story, and a nonfiction essay. You can find any of these anywhere, in books or online. Use Google in a playful way and see what comes up when you search for [obscure topic you’re interested in] + “short stories” or “poems”.

Once you start reading more widely, it becomes easier. That initial hump is the hardest to get over, because it’s you disrupting your own patterns. Then, you kind of need to reset yourself on purpose once in a while after that, because it’s also easy to slip into the rabbit holes we like once we get into them.

Buying books is expensive!

Do you have a local library? I hadn’t gone to the library for years as an adult, but when I calculated the cost of reading 100 books, I decided that I needed to go to the library to make it work. I still buy a few books a year, especially from indie authors, but most books I read are from the library and I go about once every ten days. I just recently discovered that my city’s library has a program where they’ll suggest books for you based on a short survey, for free.

Just a note: borrowing books from the library does help authors. When there’s demand in holds and loans, the library orders more copies to meet that demand and most books purchased by libraries are licensed for a certain number of “uses” before the book needs to be repurchased. What this means: if you borrow books from the library you get to read the book for free and it helps the author’s sales, which helps to support authors.

There are also other ways to read for free: public domain books are free, which you can find in places like the Library of Congress and the Open Library.

Why should I read if I can watch a movie?

Many books and television shows are adapted from books and short stories. Three of my favorite movies are adapted from books: Arrival is adapted from Ted Chiang’s short story, Stories of Your Life; Stardust is adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novel; and Legally Blonde is adapted from an ebook by Amanda Brown.

But making a film or show requires a lot of work from a lot of different people, and a lot of money. Books do, too, but a lot less than movies. Seeking out books to read gives you a lot more choice to dive into the imaginations and ideas of more people, many of whom will never have their stories be made into other media. That being said, I love movies and TV. I also watch a lot of those too and if I weren’t a) a writer and b) extremely introverted, I’d love to be a director. I’m not particularly selective or snobby about what I consume. So yeah, go ahead and watch movies. Just read books, too.

No, really. How do I read more books?

If you got this far then I guess you really want to know and “spend less time on social media” isn’t enough. Here are my tactical tips for reading more. Grab a book instead of your phone. Make a list of things, however random, you’ve always wanted to learn about and let your curiosity lead the way. Put books in the places you frequent: on your couch, in the washroom, on your nightstand, even at your computer desk if you’re the type to mindlessly reach over to your phone while working anytime you need a mental break. Make it harder to reach your phone. Then, go deeper. If you’re reading ebooks, put them on the homescreen of your phone and remove social media apps from same said homescreen. Basically, design the user experience of your life to make reading easier and more convenient.

Okay, I’m reading. How do I write better?

Read, write, share, repeat. Here are some resources and tips:

• This class from the University of Michigan, which you can take for free by auditing the course, but it’s so valuable that it’s definitely worth the cost if you can afford it. Especially recommended for anyone who wants to start with a good general writing foundation before getting into more creative forms of writing.
• These books: On Writing by Stephen King, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.
• Zadie Smith’s Rules for Writers
• Writer’s workshops. I like the breadth at Catapult but there are great workshops probably from everywhere. I also took a Fairy Tale Writing class from Atlas Obscura so don’t count out classes from non-traditional places. There are also many free workshops available on YouTube if you want to participate without feedback.
• Keep a record of great lines and great copy, kind of like how you’d make a mood board on Pinterest. As Austin Kleon best put it: Steal like an artist.
• Find mentors. If you want to be a better copywriter, go work at a larger company. You’ll get the rigorous feedback you need to grow as a writer, which you won’t get working at a smaller startup as its only writer.
• Write about topics you care about and put them out on the internet, like I’m doing now and have been doing for almost two decades. Bonus: you may build a career for yourself this way, also like I have.
• Use writing challenges to push yourself. Examples: pick a theme and write poems for 30 days on that theme, participate in NYC Midnight, write a novel during NaNoWriMo.
• Whatever you write, spend a lot of time writing titles and headlines. Test these if you can.
• Keep the pen moving.