The World as I See It
I haven’t posted on here in the past two weeks. Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t. My mom reads this occasionally and so does my deeply Christian client (who I love), so they probably noticed. But, most of all, I noticed.
I noticed because for the past two Sundays, my Writing Day, I stared at my computer screen with a blank Word Doc and couldn’t get a word out. Actually, that’s not totally true. I could get a word out sometimes. Last Sunday I wrote 1,000 words on salsa dancing. And I simply couldn’t finish it. I was even really excited to write that piece to. However, instead of educating the weak men that refuse to learn how to move their body in a way that will test their homophobic nature, I texted my wife “Do you want to see the Odyssey at 3:45??”
I’ve been trying to escape this computer screen in front of me. I love to write, so I’ve told myself. But for the past two weeks I have done nothing but stare at a blank screen, walk away, and either watch police bodycam footage on YouTube or Matt Damon not have sex with Charlize Theron instead.
But then yesterday, it clicked. I realized why I haven’t been able to write recently. I was reading the Substack of this guy Worst Boyfriend Ever, who is this homeless guy who drives around in his van and writes about the women he hooks up with. I’m not sure if his stories are true or not, but they’re good. He writes with a passionate disregard for politeness. If his stories are true, he hides behind his anonymity. This probably helps him talk about the immoral details of his existence like how he tried to seduce a 16-year-old who ended up being a grown man who was trying to dox him. Now, I’m not anonymous, so I’m not going to tell you all of the dirty details of my wild and monogamous sex life, but I can be freer than I have been. And I realized through reading his writing, then a few others (like Dave Barry), that my writing has been deeply constrained lately.
There are a few reasons I have found myself wrapped in a straitjacket. One reason is because I started using ChatGPT awhile ago to help me edit. On top of good grammatical feedback, it kept telling me, “Hey man, if you keep swearing like this, nobody is going to believe your thesis on ballooning PE Ratios.” And then I thought to myself, Well I’d really like people to believe my thesis on this whole PE Ratio thing. So, after ChatGPT and my Christian sweetheart of a client accosted me for swearing, I stopped swearing in person and in my writing. I’ll admit, I feel better about myself since giving up swearing. But the sentence “PE ratios in 2026 are greatly inflated compared to historical trends, pointing towards a potential correction in the market in proportion to the Dot Com correction in the early 2000s,” is much less fun to read then “What the fuck is going on with PE ratios lately!? This whole economy is fucked!!” But, because I now don’t swear, I won’t say that or write it ever again.
However, I think I can live without swearing. Cursing is a crutch you use when you can’t find a real word to express yourself. Not swearing makes you more intentional. And there are certainly ways to be funny without it.
If I’m honest with myself, the lack of curse words in my writing were not the only thing holding me back. Another one of my clients who read my piece on retirement (and how I think the whole concept is entirely stupid and ruining everything) told me she had a hard time reading it to the end because she was about to retire and the article was offensive to her. And I don’t particularly like offending people. Hearing her take my writing personally made me take a little edge off the things I say into these Word Docs. My goal is to express my opinions and convince people I’m right (which is not the goal I would tell people out loud, but it is the goal nonetheless.) Offending people will just push them away and not convince them of anything. So, I stopped being so offensive too.
Then ChatGPT told me to stop using parentheses so much (so, I stopped doing that too.) And I really miss them (a lot.)
But the hits to my writing kept coming. After I wrote my piece on my last suicide attempt, I had my parents read it in front of me. I thought it was really funny. I wrote a lot of jokes in there that I still think are kind of bangers, honestly. They didn’t laugh once. When I asked them why they didn’t laugh my dad said “Well, it’s kind of hard to laugh at a story you’ve never heard about your son wanting to kill himself.” And I said, “But I don’t feel like that anymore.” And he said that’s okay, it still sucks. And then I realized that my writing, when too honest, could hurt the people I love.
Part of the problem is that I kept asking people for advice who are not professional writers. I had a client tell me that all the so’s and but thens and the generally conversational way that I write wasn’t Good Writing. So I shoved a stick up my butt and began writing in a style reminiscent of a textbook on the Revolutionary War, knowing deep down that we all left textbooks back at school for a reason (they suck, a lot.)
For thirty minutes I read a Dave Barry article on How to Be a Billionaire which had me rolling around laughing. It feels like he couldn’t care less what his third-grade teacher told him about grammar and just puts words down on the page. He and other writers like him make me realize that Good Writing doesn’t care about the rules. Sure, it might know them. But it knows where they are allowed to be broken. And occasionally, breaking them means beginning a sentence with “and,” because it just feels so right.
The straitjacket was pulled tighter. I moved onto easier topics over time. I wrote about Morality and how to be a Good Person. Firstly, because I actually care about those things. And secondly, because it’s hard to offend people when I write to them about the Four Keys to Meaning or whatever instead of how I think America is a collapsing empire specifically because of the greed of the generation two above me.
This transition away from the hard things has worried me. If you were to meet me in person, I don’t think you would recognize me if you had only read my writing over the past three months. You would be stunned by my brashness. I’d find a way to offend you pretty quickly. I literally just told an 82-year-old woman who had her leg amputated that it’s actually good because she was trying to lose weight anyway.
I’m kind of a jerk. It’s my thing. And I like it. I’ve been told I wouldn’t make it 30 days in the corporate world by a guy who does Private Equity “investing.” Good. I don’t want to work in the corporate world. I don’t want a boss. A guy complained to me the other day that he can’t get better at salsa dancing because he doesn’t have a dance partner. I told him that’s a lame excuse and that he could find one if he just tried. I didn’t sugarcoat my words or soften my tone. My honesty made him look at me like I just shot his dog. I then walked out of the dance studio like it didn’t happen because I honestly didn’t care. Don’t come to me with your problems and not expect me to give you a solution. I didn’t even know the guy’s name. It’s not in my nature to filter myself with strangers. So why was I doing it in my writing that gets read by strangers but more often by the people that know me?
I’m not actually a jerk all the time. I feed the cats behind my gym, and my soft little Venezuelan wife loves me so that must mean I’m good sometimes. But I’m honest. And my words hurt people occasionally. And that’s okay because the truth sucks and I like to tell it. I’m bald and have a dent in my head and people stare at it sometimes and then I have to make jokes that my mom dropped me when I was a baby and it gets a laugh every time. I like telling the truth and I like hearing it. For the past three months, I was pulling punches because AI and people’s opinions shaped the words I was publishing. The writing didn’t feel like me. And it got hard to do.
But I think from now on, I just want to write like John. Like the John who if you met me after only reading my writing, you would be like Oh yeah that’s him. Like if I read my writing at an event in a bar and then you came up to meet me afterwards you would feel like you’re talking to the guy who just read that thing he wrote. I want it to be a seamless transition from the words out of my mouth to the ones on this page but with slightly better grammar and punctuation.
Hopefully, one day I will have a bunch of people who like my writing and then that means they would like me and that would feel good because everyone wants to be liked. And then maybe I would offend my parents or my wife sometimes or someone I know or someone I don’t and then I would have to deal with that and that would be okay. It would be okay too because that means people are actually reading what I have to say mostly because they feel like they are reading from a human that interests them, instead of the tortured textbook author who will soon be replaced by AI with a stick shoved up his butt that stares at his computer screen and procrastinates with YouTube because he is afraid to tell you how he really feels.
So, buckle up, because it will only be the world as I see it from now on. And that might mean that I’m going to tell you you’re wrong and that your ideas suck. But you’ll enjoy it because you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you that anyway.