Figuring Out What I'm Selling

I learned how the stock market works as a news writer at my first job out of grad school. My experience didn’t make me an expert or confident enough to take my own chances on Wall Street, but it taught me enough to see what sort of game was being played. The website was a marketplace where content was published. Shares of each piece of content weren’t sold, but freely distributed across social media to garner interest.

Writers used a tool called Chartbeat to gage how content was performing across the site. It showed us where pageviews were coming from, whether or not they were unique, and how many people were looking at a given moment. Chartbeat automatically ranked content by current views, giving writers an opportunity to see how content was performing across the board in real-time. What readers were most interested in heavily dictated distribution and promotional strategy.

Imagine being a stockbroker. If a stock is hot you’re going to want to keep pumping it up, because trying to sell something with less interest isn’t as profitable and a lot of otherwise great content gets buried. This is how for-profit media works and I don’t have time to bitch and moan about it. It won’t do any good and the reader has better things to do with her or his time.

The media creates information bubbles that are hard to penetrate. After I got sick and dropped off the grid, I stopped paying attention almost entirely. As my health improved and I wanted to restart my career, I found myself stuck trying to figure out what other people wanted to hear me say. Whenever I tried to write, it felt forced. My life had dramatically changed and so had my interests. I was outside the bubble and not by choice.

So I’ve been trying to burst it. I’ve come to believe that there is such an overwhelming glut of information out there that the best thing to do is take a step back and try to control what I can control. Staying glued to the screen consuming every piece of news isn’t productive. You’re not a robot and you’re not going to remember most of it. All your attention does is create more interest in somebody else’s product, and that interest strongly influences the content you’re going to be fed by algorithms.

I have never been forcefed content about living a normal life with Bipolar Disorder. That’s what I’m interested in and that’s what I’m trying to give you. I like to write, take pictures and do graphic designs while listening to music. In between, I make time to try to be a good partner, eat, stay active, and manage my mental health. I don’t have a lot of time left at the end of the day to care about what the president said, the actual stock market, celebrities, or influencers. It’s hard enough worrying about myself.