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The Write Stuff
Why do we write, and what do we want to accomplish?
Anyone who’s spent a few minutes on Medium will likely have discovered there’s a genre in which writers discuss how to make money publishing articles here. Tips and tricks are enumerated, encouragement is given. And that’s all well and good, but it presupposed the main purpose of writing is to generate revenue.
If one is a professional writer then of course by definition the product is intended to generate revenue. After all, few of us are born into trust funds and a great many of us are barely scraping by so there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with looking for ways to make money. The problem, however, is that if on a site like Medium one’s primary goal is to generate income this will inevitably lead to creating content that has been written with full appreciation of the kinds of things that lead to mass consumption. Which means creating articles that are vapid, superficial, and likely full of misinformation or at best highly misleading claims.
Because that’s what sells best.
McSlop, Kentucky Fried Cancer, and the other purveyors of illness and slow death sell billions of dollars of obesity-creating blood-pressure-busting diabetes-inducing garbage that millions of people cram down their throats on a daily basis. Perhaps one person in five hundred thousand…
