Substack Notes: The Madness Machine

Thinking Through the Wound

Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash

We’ve been living abroad for almost 16 months now. Britney has gone home to California twice; I have not yet returned to America. Sometimes I feel like a voluntary exile, like James Joyce fleeing Ireland for Italy, Switzerland, Paris; or Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Eliot doing the same in Paris. Not in a bad way but in an interesting way.

The ghost of past lives always taunts me a little; tickles me might be the word. Recollections of past romances, past relationships, past life hurdles finally overcome, grade school, high school, my seven colleges over 11 years which at last landed me a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. The zigzagging, wayward path my life has taken.

Recently I finished writing a very basic tell-all memoir. As of now I have titled it, “How to Survive a Life.” It covers some childhood and then mainly The Drinking Years, age 17-27 (2000-2010). I was inspired to work on it after reading Obsidian Blackbird.’s memoir. Like his story, mine is equally a horror-show. I don’t know if I’ll attempt to do anything with it or if I just wrote it for myself. It felt good putting it all down on paper, I can say that.

Usually I write “auto-fiction” which some people falsely think is really just disguised memoir…which it both is and very much isn’t. It is in the sense that maybe 80-85% of what I put down in these auto-novels more or less in some blurry form “happened,” but also memory is slippery and confused and I was blacking out all the time in the drinking years and much time has now passed, etc etc. But also, with auto-fiction, I work with “truth” in some sense…until a moment occurs wherein unreality feels more appealing, and then I veer off the trail at will.

But with this book it’s an actual “memoir.” Much fewer dramatic scenes. Much more “telling” than “showing. I am just simply putting down what happened chapter by chapter. It’s a short thing, just 40K words.

Anyway, I am also working on a novel that is very different from this and from most of my work. “Beyond the Mountain” is the current working title. I am 46K words into it. I fancy I have maybe 25-35K remaining. I’ve been working on it for roughly two months now. A 19-year-old kid from the working-class makes it big as a novelist and becomes minorly famous. All is OK…until he falls for the most unlikely specimen: A 45-year-old married woman who, it turns out, has serious mental health issues. Let your mind wander from there. It’s a fun work so far. I am proud of it. Third-person point of view. Emotional depth and heft, lots of backstory, a swiftly-moving plot, a range of characters. It takes place in the Bay Area.

I had an idea that maybe when I’m done with this novel I might seek out say 3-5 beta readers possibly picked out from paid subscribers. We’ll see. So far it’s just an idea. But at some point I will need honest, open feedback. I’ll keep you updated on this idea.

I’ve been frustrated with Substack lately, which is another way of saying I’ve been frustrated with life as it is, which is another way of saying I’ve been frustrated with myself. It always comes back down to The Self, doesn’t it? The frustration centers around this unfortunate fact: In order to succeed on Substack you have to, in the end, be online 24/7. You have to use social media to your advantage. And the truth is I hate social media.

And yet: Look at the irony here. I use Substack Notes obsessively. (I am currently on a break.) For a while a few years back when Notes was new I was one of many who lied to myself and convinced myself that SS Notes wasn’t “really social media.” Because it’s not the shit show that is X, TikTok, Instagram, etc. And that’s technically true, though broadly-speaking it does seem to be slowly getting worse and more corrosive as the platform becomes more and more successful and popular, filled with AI bots, celebrities and rage-politics.

After some time I did accept that it was social media but I flattered myself and the platform and we writers that it was ok because it was “social media for writers.” Aka: Smart social media. Not dumb, angry, tribal vanity and insanity such as we see on X, etc. This seems still to be more or less generally true.

Yet, what I have realized is that, specifically for me—not speaking for anyone else—social media is social media is social media is social media. Dumb or smart, with an extraneous aesthetic touch or not, in the end it has the same negative effect on me. What is the effect? Addiction. Resentment. The eternal dopamine-hits. It’s like shooting up quality heroin. I hate within myself the sentimental, goopy need for “likes” and “restacks” and “comments.” But the biggest draw, of course, is new subscribers. New Subscribers, aka cocaine, aka heroin, aka Nirvana, bliss, satiety, spiritual ecstasy.

But it’s all bullshit.

Substack Notes and new subscribers really have no tenable connection to WRITING, to ART, to peace of mind, joy, happiness, love or acceptance. It’s like sex with random people when you’re in your early twenties: It’s fun in the moment but then you feel that shame and sadness and alienation because you know deep down it is meaningless and purposeless and what you really want is genuine connection, love, a relationship that promises to blossom into something real.

I once knew that hollowness very well.

I know social media doesn’t have this effect on everyone, though clearly it does on many people. Especially among Gen Z this has become a well-discoursed anthropological quagmire, perhaps The Quagmire of our time, minus AI. People are living more and more online as opposed to here in real time. Connection with real blood and guts human beings seems to be harder and harder these days.

It’s The Chase, like 20,000 years ago a man with spear chasing a buffalo for food: Now we chase subscribers, random strangers online who will (many of us think) somehow validate us on the inside. But of course we all know that’s not how real life works. External validation always fails. Some of the least happy people I’ve ever known have been the most externally successful and wealthy. As they say in AA, self-love is an “inside job.”

For a long time my substack was slowly but steadily growing. Until some months ago—Four? Five? Six?—when I suddenly seemed to peak out at 2.8K. I just could not for the life of me get beyond this number. And then finally I did, several days ago, I crossed into 2.9K…only to see it a day later drop once more back into 2.8K. Yes, it feels pathetic to care this much. Yes, I am partially ashamed. I also know I am far from alone. It’s a sort of Madness Machine, this whole process, this machinery.

Most people from my perspective don’t really grow much on Substack. There are the celebrities and the big authors who arrive on the platform already carrying huge social gravitas and/or massive audiences. Then there are writers like me, small time but having grown big enough that we’re probably still in the top 10-15% range of stacks as far as numbers, at least when you factor out the big ones who arrive already fully funded with subscribers. The vast majority seem to sit in the 50-400 subscriber range, often with zero or very few paid subscribers, and this goes on for years in many cases. And finally there are the rare freak cases, and I see this sometimes but not often: Someone unfamous with no internal massive audience who has some specific niche (AI, politics, finance, sports, literature from a specific POV) who starts small, works the social media levers, and actually sees real but slow growth. It happens. But not often, it seems to me.

All of this is beside the point anyway. The real “point” is that I, myself, require nearly 100% freedom when it comes to both life and my work. I refuse to become a niche. That sounds absurdly boring. Focusing on one thing for the rest of my life? No way! There are some on here who do this elegantly and beautifully; and hat’s off to them. It’s just not for me. And I’m willing, clearly, to do social media…but only to a degree.

I have always been a strange ball of wild inner opposites, a body full of heterogenous contours, shapes, characters, ideas, feelings, sensations, drives. I want to “be known” and gain a huge following…but I also want to hide from everyone. I am ambitious and I want to spread the word…and yet I also want to care only about The Writing itself on its own unique merit. I am a consummate, serious artist…but I am also a cheap car salesmen. I want both. All. At the same time. And I also want to write about whatever I want whenever I want. I want people to see my value as a writer and thinker and artist…but without having to beg for the attention.

But that’s the sad core truth today: If you’re a serious, driven artist AND you badly want conventional “success” you’re sort of in a terrible bind. You can do one or the other or you can do some of both, or focus more on one with a little of the other…but you can’t really do both full-bore balls to the wall. At least EYE can’t; this I have discovered about myself.

It always comes back full circle…of course to the very most personal sense of ME, Michael Mohr. It’s not about Substack. It’s not about people subscribing or not subscribing. I know better than to take any of it personally. It’s an impersonal world out there. There is so much white noise, competition, so many writers and readers and voices, so many specific niches and writing rushing into the world every single day, and obviously not just on Substack but everywhere it seems now. And with AI articles are being put out even more often, both in mainstream and indie publications.

In the end I of course DO know the answer. Because the answer is simple and always the same, whether about writing or about life: Turn it over to “God” (Higher Power, The Universe, Things As They Are, whatever you want to call “it” meaning The Unknown), aka Let Go, accept things as they are. Expectations are little insidious, odious psychological murderers and always have been. Much of life simply IS the art of accepting disappointment. Others disappoint us and we disappoint others. We all have our armors and self-protective defense mechanisms and our secret things and our ways of hiding and our surreptitious drives and ambitions and our hopes, fears and expectations.

Life will always let you down, eventually. And this isn’t even morbid. It’s neither good nor bad but simply just is. Humans, if you have a secular philosophy like me, are a random, shocking accident of the universe. Evolution has brought our brains to the point where they are now and have been for, we think, roughly 300,000 years, deep self-awareness machines, meta-cognitive minds, which are beautiful and dangerously painful because they allow us to empathize and hope and expect…and it means we can understand our own sure death, but not how or when or why. Only we know that we do die, that the physical and thus conscious mental life ends, ceases at some point.

And so this leaves us (many of us, anyway) in a kind of sordid existential dread, not because of death so much as because we are aware of it and we cannot change it even if we wanted to. (This may one day be possible.)

I don’t know why I write these essays. I suppose every now and again a deep, spiritual wolf-howl emerges from me like some kind of feral, raucous need, and the need is propped up by the desire to be vulnerable and brutally honest.

Such is the nature of we beasts called human.

We forget we are animals, self-awareness aside.

But we are.