ugh, not another "cultural critique on substack kinda sucks" take (ish)
internet cultural critique continues to fall flat sometimes + important writing updates
Scrolling on Substack is Becoming Less Fun
Like many writers these days, I enjoy scrolling on social media when procrastinating the completion of my projects. Whenever I attempt to write according to a disciplined schedule rather than inspiration, inevitably I find myself catatonic in front of a blank screen before ultimately “taking a Substack break” from which I never return. Lately, however, I skim through and disregard more bookmarked material than I complete.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I generally dislike most internet cultural critique I stumble across for almost as long as I’ve half-heartedly attempted it. Unsurprisingly, the answer changes every year, according to the development of a new pattern.
Since mid-2025 (maybe earlier), it’s been this: a lot of critique about new trends—specifically ones that complement or birth new online identities—consolidates them with its adjacents to the extent that they’re all generalized out of what individuates each. This is sometimes even before the trend has brought about observable impact or asserted its orientation within the cultural landscape thoroughly enough to produce insight that reflects more than just generic truths about capitalism or patriarchy that apply to virtually everything else incarcerated within them.
I think it can be difficult to argue the importance of remedying this without seeming petty or pedantic. The comparatively minor consequences of neglecting certain nuances in how audience reception differed across each trend is often overshadowed by the fact that at least one underlying mutual cause is correctly identified. In many cases, this is usually treated, by both writers and readers alike, as the only expectation worth rigorously adhering to. I look forward to the day we begin to offer something different.
On The Essay That’s Taking Me a Year to Write…
Last summer, I began an essay about what it was like to find myself surrendering to intimacy I thought I would remain guarded against indefinitely while actively contending with the effects of a 5-day cross-country Greyhound journey that resulted in starving, stranding, hallucination, and temporary destituition. It’s taking me longer than I ever could’ve anticipated to complete, but the finish line is in sight!
Transparently, this will be the first thing I’ve written for Substack that isn’t concerned with algorithmic legibility. One of the main reasons why I’m so dissatisfied with what I’ve published in the past is because I’m immediately reminded of sections that I should’ve cut or expanded upon, but allowed concerns with metrics to discourage me from doing.
Nevertheless, here are a few (nonconsecutive and unedited) excerpts from the work-in-progress:
“I have often dreamed of being a sugar baby. Predictably when eyeing exotic fruits at the grocery store. When witnessing every archetypal variation of post-grad employment, which didn’t suggest upward mobility these days. But most regularly when I was in bed with G, who had exhibited a degree of sexual selfishness that couldn’t be explained by age alone. I fantasized about meeting up with a sugar daddy a week later with whom I would have more or less physical chemistry—decent manners, doughy body, too taciturn to initiate more than small talk, and with one of those pleasantly nondescript faces that seemed familiar t1o everyone. Aggressively average, my mind had made him, to compensate for the foreignness of relationship structure. He did not deflect from the transactionality of our encounter, but—and this is the other common default—neither did he generalize everything outside of it as equivalent in some haughty, unintentionally self-flagellating attempt to deny whatever had persuaded him of sugaring. I’d try to replicate everything I’d said, every way I’d moved during my time with G in hopes that memory would allow the latter experience to gradually overwrite it. Notably, however, the disorientation that hallmarked most of such time had stalked me into the fantasy. What I thought an accidental bleed of reality, like the voice of someone attempting to wake another ventriloquized through a character in their dream, proved in fact a central motif throughout my journey to and stay in Utah, unrecognized even after the hallucinations.”
“But the only ease I’d ever known came as a result of being a young woman. More devastating than the moral injury incurred was the idea that I was losing irretrievable years of societal advantage to situations of no benefit. That I was neither learning anything new about myself in repeating lessons; nor securing anything of longevity, which might gradually grow inaccessible. Above all, it seemed most unfair that the truths these repetitions brought never matched the perceived drama or complexity of the hell it took to reach them. […] The simplicity of the need they suggested always humiliated the specificity of its history.”
“I wondered, during the brief moments we ejected one another from embrace to reposition ourselves, if I was as startled by the urgency as I thought, had attributed my reserve to; or if it was just the sense that there was little justifying the pace beyond the expectations moments like those carried. The ease with which I reciprocated later left me feeling as if I’d instead been cosplaying a more experienced version of myself, however intuitively I’d moved. One who had routinely been drawn out of solitude into more formative versions of the intensity that might’ve better prepared me for this kind—boundless not despite but because of its unnameability back then, in that way a city always seems larger when you have no idea what you’d be traveling through to get to your destination within it.”
“Sorting through the events that took place during each connection and assigning to them a proportionate amount of weight has been unexpectedly difficult work. Though all of them had felt extraordinary in the moment, some were merely typical in retrospect, seen elsewhere yet self-indulgently elevated to spectacle or catastrophe by the novelty of their context. I didn’t then consider my insomnia any more disorienting than the sheer fact of my solo travel, but I frequently remarked on severity I’d yet to suffer as if to will it in a more extreme direction. Nonetheless, it was difficult for me to recognize when it’d taken over my actions given that it induced a familiar alertness and I often confused compensatory defenses for continued vigilance.
Amongst those who don’t experience it, I feel the word “insomniac” recalls prisoners kept in white rooms where the lights never dim and morbid stories of manic, improperly handled test subjects dying after several days of sleeplessness. Whenever I tell someone that my “rough nights” (they’d thought they merely were) qualify as insomnia, there’s a sudden urgency in the delivery of their advice, as if they figured they were talking to me in my last moments before such descent. But during the first two days of the trip, it was nothing like this at all. In fact, it was almost pleasant, which was never true of even the tamer insomnia I experienced back home.”
“Inevitably there came a point within every discussion, even the brisk ones, when I was asked where I was headed, in the same tone a movie detainee asked what a new arrival was ‘in for’ moments after a cop had tossed them into a communal cell. I’d say Utah. Their eyes would widen. They’d comment on far away it was, always remarkably so—they said this even as I grew closer to the state. ‘How long have you been riding?’ they’d ask. ‘A few days’, I said, ‘it’ll take me a total of five to get there.’ And here there’d gape. “You’re gonna be on a bus for five whole days?’ Or, ‘Are you insane?’ ‘Was this really your choice?’ ‘Are you smuggling drugs or smoking them?’ I said yes, I was really going to be on a bus for five days—well, not a bus, six buses—and no I couldn’t have flown, this was my only option, but not because I’m a drug mule.”
As you can see, I have quite a lot to edit, and even more to write! But I’ll be back soon. I’m propelled forward by the power of caffeine and monomania.
ATTN: Do you know any active or former fundamentalists?
I’m currently writing a novel whose main character is seduced by the psychological dynamics of two fundamentalist communities. If you or someone you know ever identified as, was reared by, or came into contact with a fundamentalist, please reach out! I would love to hear more about your experience.
Feel free to DM me here or send an email to phimariewriter[at]gmail.com.
It really does feel so much less fun these days!! Trying to focus on the writing, but all the other stuff has a way of taking over. Can't wait this greyhound trip essay!!
I'm excited for the greyhound essay!