I generally wake up grateful that I have been spared another night. Perhaps if I’m feeling spry I’ll get out of bed immediately and put on my gym stuff and cycle there for an hour of building my constantly failing potential. If not, I’ll make a cup of tea for my wife and sit downstairs staring at my laptop.
Usually I’ll do a trawl of the social media. I’m on BlueSky and LinkedIn. BlueSky because I like the humour and politics of it, it’s like a lefty Twitter and it works for my writerly ambitions. I also have a quick scan of LinkedIn to see if there are any revelations – which means did any of my posts do well (no) and did anyone get in touch about a job (also no). Sometimes I’ll interact with a post. Hopefully it’s not a post about Software Engineering, I have a few writer friends on there now and I like to support people whose work I believe in. All of the tech people posting on LinkedIn are grifters of some kind, and I include myself among them but I’m trying to be better.
I have come to realise, although I always knew it, that I am a bad salesperson because I often have a moral conflict in the middle of the pitch. I don’t believe this solution or that solution will save your world, so how can I lie to you? I have built products and landing pages and email campaigns and then just thrown them all away because I don’t want to do that anymore. I have built software products which mostly have been quite cool but I give up when it comes to serving the actual customer.
I’m not built for deception. Just plain truths, plainly spoken. So my grift is thin, my blogs are random and vapourous things, my takes on any platform have no noticeable through-line. I am not a good economic producer – I cannot scale. I cannot and will not provide what you need.
Such self awarness is not shown on a particular channel whose name I won’t mention here. It’s a private channel and I like to be there because it serves my need for attention while showing me the exact side of humanity I’m trying to avoid. So in some ways it’s a little like aversion therapy. It’s also a little like therapy generally, as it’s peopled by a lot of rich Americans who can afford to have healthcare, and mental support, and eat the right foods and still come out on top. It’s a terrible place in so many ways showing all the worst aspects of human nature but also some of the better ones. So, you might say, it’s pseudo-representative but incredibly elite. It likes to think that it’s morally clear but all it comes across as is ambiguous.
And that fits me, to be honest.
I am rather quite good at making you feel the uncomfortable truth that you didn’t know even existed. I am very good at making you doubt yourself or making you think twice before making the choice. You’ll make it anyway but I like to be the one who has a silent, and unspoken, told-you-so waiting for you. But then, I would never say that. I’m nice. But I’m not nice enough to do all the work for you. I’ll let you do the work to get to where you need to be and I’ll just be hear trying to make sense of it all.
Good morning. Today is the start of another week.