Economist Writing Every Day

I’ve thought it over and decided not to write a post this week. It’s not that I have writer’s block. I am writing plenty in the dimensions of my profession that dominate my time (and actually pay me). And I have a back catalog of “bigger” pieces I might write later. But there is nothing I am compelled to write today. Which is what I want to write about.

We all share editorials and thinkpieces with each other, whizzing around social media and email, getting discussed over meals and beverages. This content is produced in mass and at breakneck speed. Some people are very good at it. Others less so. Some people, over time, rise to a level of recognition that they are offered plum spots at major outlets, lavished with salaries greater than I will certainly ever enjoy. Their names acquire significant fame, their opinions serving as the substrate for millions of conversations.

And then we savage them.

Sometimes we savage their works because they are signaling the wrong politics and identities. That’s just life. Sometimes we savage their writing because they’re rich and famous, which is annoying, but that’s just the tax a person pays for being eminent (see Swift, Jonathan). But often, more often than they would likely want to admit, we savage their writing as poor and ill-conceived because it is poor and ill-conceived.

Let’s be clear: these people are largely critical thinkers and phenomenonal writers. But they are also on a deadline. Opinions, unlike news, do not appear in our minds fully formed and their subsequent development does not always adhere to a regular schedule. My writings here are essentially an unpaid hobby. I haven’t missed many weeks this last 3 years, but I’ve missed a few. Some weeks I totally mail it in and just write a few paragraphs about a research paper I read that I thought was cool. The New York Times editorial page does not indulge such academic capriciousness.

Would I invest a lot more time in these posts if the NYT was paying me a hefty salary? Of course. I would have stockpiles of evergreen columns, folders of half-written ideas, a corkboard littered with post-its cataloging my every idea that might support a column. But even then I can’t help but suspect that I might occasionally find myself staring down a deadline with nothing I want to say, or with a drafted piece that I know isn’t very good.

And that’s why I think we get the so many big-name editorials that social media descends on like gleeful hyenas, merrily yanking and ripping until the every vacuous subject and failed predicate has yielded it’s final LOL. Why do columnists collectively produce so much dreck? Because they write too much. Scratch that. Because they publish too much.

Which is why I’m not writing a post this week.

(To be clear out of an abundance of caution, this observation does not pertain to those glorious blogs and substacks that mostly produce data-driven analysis and subject-matter deep dives, rather than bloated opinions designed to foment clicks. You are god’s perfect children, never change.)