Dear Diary: Should I Give Up On Minor Dissent?
trying to decide if this blog is worth continuing
I’ve been working on Minor Dissent basically full time for a little over a year now. I’ve written 62 poasts. At an average of probably 3,000 words per poast that is 186,000 total words written. For 2021 I logged 272 hours in Toggl (time tracking software). And so far have logged 110 for 2022. If I keep this pace up for the next three quarters, I will write 400 hours this year.
And I’m just not really sure what I have to show for it.
I am skeptical of everything. Including my own intuition. But when the dataset is large enough eventually you must capitulate. And with 80%—if not 90%—proficiency on hundreds of small predictions and dozens of large ones over the last decade or two, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not completely retarded. And my intuition about Minor Dissent has always been that there just literally aren’t enough people in the world who could even theoretically care about it for it to ever be something more than a hobby. And the last year of data has certainly not contradicted this thesis.
It's not just my poor writing skills. Even if I actually learned to write well: it’s just too broad. I gained a bunch of subscribers over the Red/Burgundy Pill stuff but basically none of them read the other content. They care about women, not my feelings or fixing society or Meyers Briggs or whatever other crap I’m on about.
If I wanted to niche only about women and post-TRP thinking, I could probably build something that got a decent following and influence and make some kind of meager profession from it. If I wanted to niche only about self-improvement stuff, I might have an even higher chance of success (basically reinstate Actualization Hub). Honestly could maybe even succeed if I just focused on the Yarvin-esque civilization engineering stuff. If I wanted to niche about any one of the dozens of things I care, learn, or think about, I could probably make it a decent little niche business.
But there is a reason I stopped working on Actualization Hub. And this same reason would cause me to stop working on any other “niche” before it started to really gain traction: it’s just so boring and soulless and stupid.
If I’m going to “sell out”—if I’m going to become some inauthentic nichefag, “building a brand” and “always staying on brand”—I might as well do it for something that can actually give me a comfortable income. If I spent these last 380 hours becoming an actually good programmer (or the probably 500 that preceded them with AH), I’d be much better off financially I can assure you!
It’s not like I didn’t know this was a dumb idea as far as a “business” goes. No one writes to get wealthy and famous. Maybe we all hope it will happen but no one who’s not an idiot actually thinks it will. And this is even more true for a blog.
I just thought that maybe writing this blog is the only thing I could ever actually become exceptional at. And being exceptional at something with a tiny market will always work out better than being mediocre at something with a huge one.
But thus far, I still suck.
I have always been good at thinking. Maybe even exceptional. But creating something others can consume that is even a tenth of what I can model in my mind has always been the hard part. Big engine. Lots of torque. But the tires are bald. No, the tires are missing entirely. Just rims, grinding on the pavement.
Why am I being such a defeatist bitch? A factor is how hard I worked on that Libertarianism post. It took me more than ten hours to write. That piece alone “cost” like half of my productive energy for the entire week.
(by the way, if you think you do more than twenty hours a week of high leverage work, you don’t. You literally can’t. Unless you’ve built a multi-million-dollar company, I can assure you all your so called “productivity” beyond this is low value busywork you’d be better off ditching entirely.)
I spent as much time and energy on it as I could bear. And what do I have to show for it? It’s not even good. There are some important and novel ideas in there. But I haven’t articulated them well enough for them to truly shine. And it has less likes than some throwaway diary whining about doctors.
I guess it has twice the total engagement. But that’s probably just because I gave it a provocative title.
That post is not an exception. It’s just the straw that broke the camels back. This has been basically every week for the last fifty. And it’s time to reflect.
So what do I have to show for it? One weirdo is willing to pay me $5 a month. And honestly, I’m not even certain it was on purpose. He read one article and then subscribed paid. Maybe he didn’t even know free was an option.
I wrote eight posts in March. Two in Feb. Four in Jan. No matter how you square it, after more than a year of daily grinding, I’m earning a maximum of cents per hour. I’m not trying to be some huge baller with a Ferrari here. Just to make progress that is actually measurable. And maybe even a few bucks an hour (hey a guy can dream!).
I’m not saying, “people should pay me”. I mean maybe more should and they just need to be convinced of it, I don’t know, but that’s another question. Mostly what I’m saying is “I don’t make something worth paying for.” So am I sure it’s worth continuing?
“It takes time”.
Sure. Yes. Obviously. But the question is: When should you invest more time and when should you find something more worthwhile to do?
380 hours is a lot of hours. And that’s just the like deep work high leverage productive writing time. If I included all the time I spent pre-gaming ideas or posts on Twitter, etc it’s at bare minimum 1000 hours. If I included all the thinking and conversation that preceeded the poasts it would be easily 5000!
“But this is your passion”.
Well one, I kind of hate it. It feels more like my duty. I don’t do it because I love it I do it because I’m so annoyed no one else has already done it.
Well if that’s true why then do I get mad when I find out someone else independently came to one of “my ideas” and then already told everyone about it? Such as the idea of human groups as meta organisms in Tim Urban’s The Story of Us. Or of “adaptive fictions” in Yarvin’s Democracy As an Adaptive Fiction.
I guess I just feel like “why did I spend so much time working this out myself if someone else already did it?” “Why the fuck did it take me literally a decade of searching for eight hours a day to learn about this critical and basic truth about reality?” “I could have been doing something better with my time than repeating someone elses work!” I don’t mind that other people have good ideas or better ideas than me. I don’t mind being a moron. I mind that I wasted all my time trying to build something that was already built, and just no one else thought it was important enough to learn or communicate to me.
Do you know how much pointless trash I was “taught” in my 6,000 hours of “public education”? Of course you do. Because you were “taught” it too. At least 5,000 of them were a complete waste of time.
I spent half a decade of my life like suicidally depressed just ripping myself to shreds from the inside out because I was useless because no one ever taught me anything worth knowing. And most of my friends from that time are still doing nothing just getting high and wishing they were dead. The number of intelligent, creative people, who just rot because literally no one ever told them “hey there are things worth knowing and ways of being that are valuable beyond ‘ISTJ worker bee’” is too damn high! Imagine if you could unlock all that creative potential. Imagine if rather than destroying themselves or the forest which they feel abandoned them they actually were given the tools and skills that would allow them to build.
Tangent. For another time. Back to “my passion”.
Let’s say this is “my passion”. Is now the time for that? It was close enough that I got impatient and went for it. “I have a whole year I will figure it out” I said. But monopoly computer lizard man was not wrong.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” – monopoly computer lizard man
Some of you are probably like “oh you don’t need money. You are a millionaire.” I mean technically yes. But if you think you can just cash in and coom for sixty years on that, you are sorely mistaken.
One, I will owe at least a quarter of it to the government. Two, life is expensive. A full time stay-at-home wife and two children is not cheap. Especially in California. if I converted all my assets to cash right now it would only pay for fifteen or twenty years at our current expense rate. And in reality it’d be more like ten. Because you can’t house two almost-pubescent teenage boys in a 700 sq foot one bedroom. And that’s assuming inflation isn’t double digits every year of the next decade which it probably will be!
I’ve already used one of my ten years. It takes years to build something great. If this can never be great, at what point will that be evident? And how many more chances will I get to try something else before I have to go back to waging to live? And how long would I have to wage miserably before I could try something important again? I could probably find another huge asymmetric bet like Bitcoin. But it’s not like they’re just lying around with a bunch of neon signs saying “1,000x here!”.
I want to provide my family a comfortable life. And I want to be able to eventually do fun shit. And for those I need a real income.
I’ve been living like a student, saving half my income for over a decade. I don’t party. I don’t go on vacation. I don’t eat nice food. I don’t buy new clothes. I’ve been wearing the same ones since I was fifteen, which themselves were hand me downs from my trendy hipster friends. I have been driving the same car since I learned how to drive.
Meanwhile I worked 60 hours a week for most of my twenties. This was of course before I learned that hard work is for poor people—that 80% of your efforts are a waste and you will make way more money if you only work 20 hours doing things that are actually really valuable. Well and also before I learned that in business, you are always expendable. If you won’t learn to Te, you are fucked. But this was a hard-won lesson after more than half a decade of doing clutch-dump burnouts on my tire-less hotrod all day long and still getting passed by people with like half the horse power.
While they were out going to bars and music festivals and banging chicks I was cooped up in my room spending another 40 hours a week trying to learn how the world works. I read 224 books in the last ten years. At least 150 of which were directly related to becoming more effective or put-together or capable. I journaled over ten thousand pages in this time. well over a million words. Spent close to fifty grand on therapy, coaching, counseling, etc. Listened to at least ten thousand hours of long form audio, probably a fifth of which was directly educational or improvement oriented.
And the stuff that wasn’t directly applicable was core conceptual stuff about economics and philosophy and science and technology. Thousands of hours which culminated in being able to understand the significance of Bitcoin when I saw it, buy it, and then have the conviction to not only never sell but continue buying despite that everyone thought it was dead and I was an idiot. And then the same with a few other cryptos.
And all the while that was doing nothing just sitting there, I was pushing myself every day, grinding my rims down to the axle. And then when I grinded completely through them and was now sitting stationary on the floor, I would just rot for a few weeks until I got disgusted enough with myself that I got back up and tried again. At least twenty times of this over the last decade to get to 2021 where I finally said “okay, I think I have enough padding to take a breather for a little bit. Let’s try writing and see how it goes”.
For what it’s worth: I’m not trying to paint myself as some paragon of conscientiousness and bootstraps and hard work. In fact, my point is that’s exactly what I’m not. I had to force myself to be like this. Every day for literally like 3,000 in a row.
I didn’t do all of this because I enjoyed it. I did all this because I am Ni dominant. Because I live perpetually in the future. The present and past basically don’t exist to me. I may be more neurotic than 95% of people but I am more autistic than 99%. So, while it was always a grueling battle, my “logic” always won in the end. And in this case, it said “you’re going to be miserable until you try to do something useful” or “you’re going to be miserable anyway so you might as well do something useful”. So, it was either kill myself or become useful. And I was too scared to kill myself. So it wasn’t much of a choice.
In retrospect, both of these ideas were right. Now that I am vaguely useful and have some relative level of freedom, I am probably 75% less miserable. Though still more prone to negative emotion than the median person.
Both will probably continue to be right. As I become more useful, I will become even less miserable. But I will never be satisfied. Not until I rid the world of all entropy and disorder!
Which is impossible. But even if it weren’t, I would just get bored and blow it all up so I’d have something interesting to do again anyway.
Maybe I just need to stop trying. Start thinking. Assume I have a real job doing something useful and this is just a blog where I go to think. Don’t try to “convince” anyone. Don’t try to build a reputation or money. It corrupts the message. And it makes it take an order of magnitude more energy. This poast is easy. I could do this all day. The effort poasts are hard, and they aren’t intrinsically rewarding.
On the other hand, without a profit motive there is no incentive to improve. Or at least much less. This is one of the main reasons governments and nonprofits suck. If you are not subject to the brutal selection pressures of acquiring money (aka distilled, durable, verifiable, fungible power) because you get to print it or shoot the people who won’t give you theirs (governments) or can operate at cost indefinitely (nonprofit) then there is nothing to sharpen you. Nothing to make you good. Nothing to make you provide value to people. So of course, you won’t improve. It would just be a waste of energy.
I need to put my energy toward something useful. This is not useful. Or at least not useful enough for the amount of energy it requires. If it’s only going to ever be a little niche blog where I whine about my feelings, then I should dedicate a maximum of a fifth of my energy to it, and pivot the rest toward something with much more value generating potential.
“Stop being resentful.”
Im not really. I certainly used to be in my teens and maybe early twenties. Now I’m mostly just peeved. And that is only occasionally. It’s just that anytime I am ever peeved, you’re hearing about it.
Pro tip: when you’re angry you must scapegoat the outgroup. You never harm ingroup. Only the subhuman enemy. All errors and flaws of ingroup are actually just the evil satanic enemy reflecting off the perfect porcelain purity of your beautiful angelic tribe!
The problem is that to me there is no outgroup. Everyone is ingroup. And therefore, everyone is outgroup? Probably more accurately, there is no group. Only individuals. This is not a philosophical conclusion. It is a temperamental one. I am an individualist by temperament, only a fascist by trade.
But this is the worst possible strategy. An individualistic society and tribal people work pretty well. Individualistic people get rekt in a tribal society though. Put your average white lady in Africa and let me know how that goes!
And while less than Africa, The West is still mostly tribal. Let’s say a standard deviation less. But I am at least a standard deviation less than the average Westerner. And probably two or three. Even our so called “libertarian individualists” are too tribal for me. Just look at all the Bitcoin Maxis who gather in Twitter mobs to set fire to anyone who suggests even the possibility that another blockchain may be anything besides an incarnation of Satan himself.
Obviously, they do this because they, like most humans, are not suicidal idiots. They unconsciously understand full integrity is a death sentence. You must believe you have integrity; you must believe you are “aligned with truth”. Be certain of it in fact. But your behavior must never perfectly reflect your beliefs. Human hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug. To point this out is the bug. I am the bug.
Distributing my frustration evenly across all groups has the benefit of allowing me to be tolerated by all of them. I have no enemies. But I also have no friends. I mean I have plenty of friends literally. But that took a lot of work. And I’m talking figuratively. I ascribe to no institution, no tribe, no ingroup. If I ever feel like I’m favoring one tribe over another, if I even start feeling like a label describes me, I have this compulsive desire to deconstruct it.
Most people are not suicidally insane. So they feel camaraderie when I signal myself as a part of their ingroup. Usually by shitting on or trying to dismantle their outgroup. But then when I shit on or try to dismantle their group, that camaraderie disappears. Because they understand that subscribing to a metanarrative is critical infrastructure to psychological functioning. Whether that be personal or societal doesn’t really matter. One to many is easy. Zero to one is hard.
Trying to make a new metanarrative is new infrastructure. New infrastructure no one thinks they need. And which they (rightfully) see as threatening the one they definitely need functioning for them to survive. So of course, there’s no money in making the infrastructure.
While true that Neoreaction or Anarchocapitalism or Rationalism or whatever other ism had no infrastructure when their “pioneers” started, they also were all rejected by existing infrastructure and made no money off building the new rails. Whether it’s Yarvin or Siskind or Yudowksy or Rothbard or whoever you want to call pioneers in whatever metanarrative infrastructure you think is cool and smart, the only way they actually made any money was after a decade of building the base layer. They made their living on their “apps” they built on top of it, not the infrastructure itself. The only thing building the infrastructure did for them was give them first mover advantage should they ever decide to build an app.
Trying to sell an app when you have no infrastructure is retarded. Do you want to be pets dot com? Or perhaps Namecoin? No. of course you don’t.
So what does that mean? it means that even if we assume there is a meta narrative, a new ingroup, worth pioneering here—and further that I’m actually smart enough to make a significant dent in contribution to it’s instantiation (ha!)—it will take a decade. And no one besides a few random curious Ne dominant weirdo’s will pay me any money until that point (Ne dominants are my kryptonite).
So I need to act as if this blog will at absolute best not make any money until I’m forty. And I need to build something else to pay me until then. Not just financially but also emotionally. I cannot keep trying to get my meaning and self-worth and feelings of accomplishment from this blog. It is still far too early for that, if there ever will be a time for it at all.
I don’t quite know what that means for the future of MD. I’ll need to think on it more.
But at least I’ve made some progress.
love your blog. dont mind the "poor writing", just here for the ideas.
It would be a shame if you stopped. You have great ideas. But I’ll criticize you a bit below. I hope it’s ok.
The problem of minor dissent is that it’s creator is intelligent and authentic, but evidently hates marketing:) It’s like being red-pilled on religion being not real and then losing all the good things it brings (and, fundamentally, losing the potential of recognizing that it might even be more real than one thinks).
This blog is a product. We consume products because they have utility to us. When I want outrage, I go to twitter, when I feel soul-crushing guilt for wasting half a day on Twitter outrage and need to numb it down - I’ll go watch The Office on repeat, or something.
Due to your idea that you don’t want to be a “nichefag”, Minor Dissent becomes a product of unknown utility. It is about everything, which is cool in theory, but in practice you can’t sustain it.
The way you write posts requires a lot of time. Since you’re trying to nurture many audiences at the same time (like, five or so?), you just don’t have enough time and energy to do right by any single one of them. For instance, I have a pretty rare alignment of interests with yours. I’m interested in a lot of your topics. But even I have my preferences among these topics and therefore get a bit discouraged waiting for the last part of MBTI series and then getting a message - “hey, I’ve been working hard, not getting what I want, so I might as well stop”. As one of America’s early presidents used to say: “C’mon, man!”
The result of trying to serve so many audiences at once is that no one knows what to expect from the blog at any particular time. It’s hard to create a habit of consuming it if it constantly changes (and blogs are all about habit formation; if you want to create something not habit forming - write a book).
Let’s say I’m cooking dinner and I need bay leaves. I remember that I have bay leaves in a magic jar. I pick their jar from the shelf but now it says cumin. I do like cumin. Cumin is good. But I’m making Italian minestrone and it calls for bay leaves, not cumin. I decide to wait till it’s bay leaves again. The contents of the jar change and now it’s rosemary. Or nutmeg. Dill. Turmeric. Himalayan salt. Since I currently don’t need cayenne pepper, I don’t open the magic jar. The magic jar threatens to quit.
At this point I marvel at the authenticity of this unique magic jar of spices and go buy a spice rack so I can have what I need when I need it.
The gayest thing is that you want the audience to care about you before you cared enough for what we, your audience, need and for why we are reading you. We spend our time and mental energy reading your verbose poasts, and you claim that giving us what we came for - is inauthentic and you’d rather shut down.
Well, I subscribed for a year. You’ll have to refund me if you quit.