Paying to Get Paid
2025-10-03
I crashed and burned like crazy yesterday. I think I ended up going to bed at around 6:30 PM or so. I came home from Starbucks and immediately wanted to fall asleep. On the short drive home, I was extremely frustrated at how tired I was. I have been meaning to get back on the CPAP, but still resisting it despite adjusting the settings and keeping it next to my bed. Last night, though, I was so tired and cranky that all I wanted to do was lay down and not have to worry about it. But my sleep last night was so horrible. I woke up several times in the middle of the night. My dreams were shit. The whole thing was extremely frustrating. But I woke up at about 8:30 AM this morning, which landed me almost 10 hours of sleep last night. I feel decently well-rested, but still massively frustrated with the state of my health.
Today is a new day, though, and there's still plenty of potential to keep moving the dial forward, as it were. I've been doing well with maintaining regular output here and working on IOKTIKN pieces in tandem. At this point I can average about 700 words per day with my writing, which is a good amount for me. This average is always changing, but it has been steadily going up. That's good news for me, especially considering how much I've been working on building my endurance. Being prolific is extremely important to me because after a certain point, the progress becomes undeniable—regardless of the words written. But still, I feel that I am at the beginning stages of taking writing seriously. I started taking it seriously around late 2023 and there were many setbacks, bumps in the road, you name it.
Freelance writing as an industry is essentially in shambles. Most people who did SEO-based content don't do that anymore. Copywriters are essentially gone—there was this one copywriter I spoke with last year who expressly told me to get out of freelance writing as soon as I could because he lost basically all of his clients and had to switch over to professional resume editing. I had some decent one-offs when I was 'freelancing', mostly just idiots who responded to my Craigslist ads—yeah, it was that bad. I realized around the middle of last year that I didn't want to write for other people; I wanted to write for myself. Unfortunately, writing for one's self doesn't pay any bills of any kind, though.
I have come to realize that writing full-time isn't something that comes immediately but takes an extremely long time. It's agonizing, thankless, and seems to bear little weight on the world that keeps on spinning regardless of whether or not you got your word-count in that day. While it would be nice to get money for writing, that's something that I have absolutely no control over. I've had to keep coping with the fact that I am essentially an unemployed leech. I can rationalize it all I want—talk about the 'Bullshit Jobs' phenomenon, say that the economy is fake (it is), tell myself that most people with jobs are leeches too—but it still doesn't change the fact that my value proposition is questionable at best.
This medium is mostly for me. Even professional artists know that even though they get paid, the work is ultimately for them and not for us. Frank Ocean said it best in Futura Free:
Play these songs, it's therapy, mama
They payin' me, mama
I should be payin' them
I should be payin' y'all, honest to God
Frank is absolutely right. I should be paying you, my dear reader. But alas, that's not the way we made this system, did we?
I hope that there's some form of reciprocity here. One day, anyway.