Oh McSweeny’s, you’ve done it again.

Have you ever dreamed of being a “writer”? Of course, you have! Doctors don’t make as much as they used to and we no longer go into space! What choice do you have? Besides, math was never really your thing. Well then, why not become a content creator for Galaxos Online Publishing?

And:

We pay $15 per piece of content, whether it be a well-cited, thoroughly researched 5,000-word essay or ten captions under fair-use photos, so, y’know, more bang for your buck with the photos. Also no one reads essays, so win-win.

It’s really a funny read, written by a talented comic writer. It’s also true that making a living as a writer is pretty difficult. There was, according to popular mythology, a period in the mid 20th century where an apocryphal white fella (no browns or ladies, this was the 1900s) with a typewriter could earn himself a decent middle class income pounding out sports columns or 6k word adventure shorts or something. Then the Internet happened and everybody got a blog and content became cheap and now people like me are just forced to write shit for free.

However, at the beginning of this Internet thing there was a (golden?) period where people who had the tech savvy, the access, and the motivation to become bloggers could use that first-mover advantage to turn their writing into an actual living—even women and people who don’t need to slather themselves in 50spf to avoid cancer. That period took a little over a decade to pass. Some of those first-movers really ended up with long term careers, it did happen! For literally tens of people!

Don’t fret. It’s still possible to make a living while writing. You just have to be creative—and as a writer that’s what you do, right? Try any of the following:

  • Move to a cheap developing nation and write for ViceFeed or whatever. You get ten years max before it’ll be too expensive, plan accordingly: developing implies progress. Nobody said geographic arbitrage was easy.
  • Be born rich. This one works super well and has been working super well ever since that Iraqi trust fund prick wrote Gilgamesh.
  • Get a really good job for like half your adult life then take several years off to write, only returning sporadically to work, filling the gas tank for another few months at a time. Retire in poverty. (I’ll let you know how this one turns out.)

Or you could have a normal job and write in the mornings or evenings or the weekends. Like, as a hobby. You know how some weird fuckers build massive model train sets in their basements? Or knit quilts? Or raise chickens? Like that. Even cooler, you could publish your work on a blog or on your Facebook wall or in agonizingly long tweetstorms. People might even read it! Because you, like a full 21% of the world’s population, probably have a social media account filled with your friends. Friends are wonderful. They’re patient and a lot of them will read the things you write just because they like you and that’s pretty sweet.

You could also spend your time writing hottakes on clever humor pieces, intentionally missing the point like the worthless content-suckling Internet ouroboros that you are.