Blame not the freeloader but the endless subscription grind

Under the paving stones, the paywall

Dilemmas

“Writing’s a mug’s game.” Roland Camberton’s words regularly come to my mind. And today they come to my mind, and to an otherwise blank page, as I struggle to think of an interesting idea.

An interesting idea for what, you might ask. Well, an interesting idea for this newsletter, thanks for asking. It’s sunny outside, and I’d rather be in the sun, enjoying it while it lasts; but it turns out that churning out an essay week in, week out, is quite a commitment. So right now I need to come up with an idea for something I can write on the fly, without succumbing to laziness, but also without sacrificing the rest of my afternoon. They tell you — “they” being the tedious tech ghouls who run this website — that you need to write regularly, for whatever number of readers you have, whether five or five thousand. What they don’t tell you is that writing regularly for a readership closer to the lower end becomes unsustainable sooner or later. To make matters worse, the Substack hoi pol…