I Suffer Therefore I Engage

Disclosure Porn & Commoditized Pain

This is only my third post on Substack. Before that, the only social media I could bring myself to use bar the odd, perfunctory photo on Insta-sham was Twitter/X. Even then my offerings were sporadic.

Not so in the early days, of course, when Twitter held the allure of being somewhere to genuinely connect & exchange ideas with fellow minded people. Even just writing that now seems laughably naive. We all know what happened as - even before a megalomaniac billionaire turned it into his personal fart box, thereby sparking ‘the great X-odus’ - AI bots, algorithmic infiltration & toxic culture rendered it unrecognisable.

In fact, much of what passed for interaction on X seemed to be little other than people grandstanding, or an overt rush to weaponize anger, fear & oblique perspective.

The very ingredients of cancel culture.

Sam Harris, whose Making Sense podcast I have long subscribed to, has spoken at length about his decision to delete the app & the positive effect it had on his mental health.

In the last year or so as I struggled to finish two novels I’d been writing, I thought I’d use the visibility of professionals & likeminded authors on the platform to keep abreast of the industry, learn how to get down, maybe even pester an agent or two.

So, I returned.

But very quickly I started to notice a trend; if it wasn’t writers telling the world they’d got an agent, the only people who ever seemed to get much interaction were those who had bared their soul – anxieties, failures, fears, depression, disorders, suicides you name it. There was seemingly nothing too personal, intimate or graphic for public consumption.

At first, I could do nothing but sympathise with my fellow writers, after all, as anyone who has ever attempted to write a novel knows, even when you get past the mind-boggling levels of persistence, attention to detail, world-building & sheer bloody-mindedness needed to counteract the daily grind of failing upwards (you hope), the real enemy is your self-doubt stalking you in the chthonic dark as you labour away in solitude.

But the confessionals kept coming. In fact, I saw very little else that got anything like the same number of hits. Even though so much of it made me wince - because these weren’t innocent pleas for help, but rather an escalating form of, well… disclosure porn.

And I started asking myself: At what point does sincere public revelation degenerate into this kind of grotesque, emotional pageantry?

And moreover: What were these people getting out of it?

Then I began to see (or be shown) a welter of - seemingly - empathic rejoinders, in the kind of weaponised, glib staccato befitting the most prolific content providers.

And I realized the extent to which our emotions have now been commoditized, under the banner of engagement, which is taking on the full-blooded dastardliness of its metaphorical twin: a virus.

I’ll get to the principles of engagement soon, but first, it’s well known that exposing your vulnerabilities & telling the truth draws people in.

In real life this is often the precursor to a bond, regulated by the neurotransmitter oxytocin. Nicknamed the ‘love hormone’, oxytocin is involved in social bonding, sexual reproduction & childbirth. It's released during hugging, touching & orgasm, fostering feelings of trust & attachment.

But you can’t get a hug online.

Nor are you likely to get the benefits of another neurotransmitter that you likely would if you processed your problems - old school style - during a chat with a family member, friend or partner: Endorphins. These are the body's natural painkillers, helping relieve pain & inducing feelings of pleasure or euphoria. They’re released during activities like exercise, eating & laughter.

Sure, having a series of messages from well-wishers & supportive people on the internet might make you feel good, displays of genuine empathy can do that, but no matter original intentions, the feeling is destined to be stealthily supplanted & landscaped by another neurotransmitter:

Dopamine.

And dopamine – which regulates our reward systems - is at the heart of all addiction. Even online interaction.

Addiction is broadly defined by Dr Anna Lembke in her book Dopamine Nation as “the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behaviour despite its harm to self and/or others.”

She goes on to say:

Any behaviour that leads to an increase in dopamine has the potential to be exploited. What I’m referring to is a kind of ‘disclosure porn’ that has become prevalent in modern culture, where revealing intimate aspects of our lives becomes a way to manipulate others for a certain type of selfish gratification rather than to foster intimacy through a moment of shared humanity.

Addictive behaviours thrive in the dark - it’s far easier to lead a double life online, & once that desire for empathy has metastasized to a craving for likes & interaction, it might thwart your motivation to ever bother developing relationships in the real world.

Lembke also talks about sham confessions that are really a facade for the ego:

There is a well known phenomenon in AA called ‘drunkalogues’ referring to tales of intoxicated exploits that are shared to entertain and show off rather than teach and learn… The link between honest self-disclosure and a manipulative drunkalogue is a fine one, including subtle differences in content, tone, cadence and affect, but you know it when you see it.

I think the same is true of much modern content.

But even if you notice this online, in all seriousness, who would ever call someone out on it? It’s disarming by its very nature. In his Incerto, Nicholas Naseem Taleb came up with the neoligism Pedophrasty, which he defined as an:

Argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenceless and suspend all scepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting. Often done with the aid of pictures.

Disclosure porn is very similar – not only do you feel guilt if you dare question the validity of someone else’s suffering, but you also open yourself up to cancel culture. Mental health has become an easy way to invoke public sympathy & slam the door shut on criticism.

But empathy is not always good. In fact, it’s often misleading. In Paul Bloom’s fascinating book, Against Empathy, he says:

It would be bad enough if empathy were simply silent with problems involving large numbers, but actually it’s worse. It can sway us toward the one over the many. This perverse moral mathematics is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than events that will affect millions or billions. It is why outrage at the suffering of a few individuals can lead to actions, such as going to war, that have terrible consequences for many more.

It’s a jarring thought isn’t it? Rather than thinking about the plight of war-torn survivors from Ukraine, displacement in Syria or poverty in the South Sudan, your daily emotional bandwidth is used up on Bob137’s communal nervous breakdown.

In truth, it should be no surprise that sadness is now being commoditized. Multiple studies have shown that posts which elicit negative emotions receive far more interactions than either positive or neutral emotions.

And, as most people know, top of the list of the rules of engagement is fear. Something the media & right-wing press cottoned on to long before the advent of the internet.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H.L Mencken

This has metastasized with the advent of social media, & mixed with the second most potent emotion for engagement, anger, has become the primary MO for populists. Fear & anger have swayed elections, landscaped much of our past &, likely, our future. Online, they combine to form an unstoppable maelstrom.

But which is next?

Sadness.

And sadness is now being leveraged to maximize engagement & reach just like the others (Joy & laughter are sadly outside the medal places).

In my inaugural post for Substack, I thought it made sense to personalise my newsletter & offer something of myself, so that I might, yes, engage any would-be readers. With that in mind, I offered a quick bio of my life & career. I even used the phrase ‘something about this feels Full Monty’, because I felt somewhat exposed.

I went on to say that perhaps writing should always feel this way, because every author knows that if you do not engage emotionally with your subject, then what you’re writing will come out flat. But I may as well have been a 19th-century Victorian hiding behind a long skirt, corset & high-necked blouse compared to some of the things I’ve seen on social media platforms & beyond.

Perhaps some core frigidity I’ve yet to work through on my part has made me wary of what I see. Perhaps this is a bitterness masquerading as observation (If you stick around for the next few months, you’ll be able to judge for yourself). But what drew me to Substack in the first place, was the possibility of being able to simply write well & have people engage with ideas.

Of course, ideas need passion, too. But I truly believe there’s a difference between using emotion to fuel your art, your ideas & your narrative, than as the bedrock of a gratuitous disclosure to hack people’s attention.

I realise baring your soul can be empowering & meaningful, & I’m not trying to shit on anybody here, I’m just saying that you might save yourself a lot of time by recognising the difference between someone authentic & a hack who’s slipped under your BS radar by exploiting engagement rules – either as an exhibitionist, or someone selling the perfect remedy to your woes.

It’s a Faustian lunge for subscribers & likes.

So as well as the shameless flaunters & the dopamine addicted, beware those who post daily, in bite-size telegraphic about the pains of being a writer & how your suffering is ok.

Because they aren’t writers, or authors, they’re copywriters. And every single one is focused on the kind of relentless efficiency that makes everything seem the same, & utilises every trick of engagement to get your attention.

And that, they tell you, is the only way to write.

And oh, by the way: here’s the link to buy my 12-step plan for guaranteed success on (insert medium here).

You might think me churlish. Hustle is hustle. When the moon drops & the sun rises, put your money where the funk is & all that, after all, we all want to engage people. That’s why we’re here.

I’m no different. But if you’re the kind of person making six figures from Substack, Twitter/X or Insta posting & re-posting about hardship every day, there ends up being little to differentiate you from algorithmic spindrift.

And in this post-truth age, I’m personally yearning for something a bit more, well…. authentic.

Attention is the soul of existence, of relativity (more on this at a later date) & it’s great that in this day & age you don’t need to be employed by a company to get paid for courting it. But you can still show yourself without debasing yourself in public.

Who we are lives & breathes in everything we do, everything we say & everything we write. Writing is seduction, & seduction is a long game of insinuation & anticipation.

Here is Robert Greene:

At all cost, resist the temptation to hurry to the climax of your seduction, or to improvise. You are not being seductive but selfish. Everything in daily life is hurried and improvised, and you need to offer something different.

We are all so vulnerable to what Dr Lembke describes as a ‘vortex of compulsive overuse.’ Particularly for digital drugs like social media platforms.

And now, with the abundance of dopamine rich behaviours, we’ve simply lowered our threshold for pain. Life isn’t supposed to be easy. You’re not supposed to be giddy with happiness every day. Mankind forms best in storm & comfort is the single most enervating force to willpower. Boredom, rather than being a portal to discovery, has become a black hole.

Drama is a way of deflecting this boredom, & drama queens (or kings) want pain. They enjoy playing the victim. Pain is a source of pleasure for them.

But for the rest of us?

We’re all running from pain. Some of us take a pill. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.

And now, we’re selling it.

So: Be yourself. People might not flock in droves. But you will live an authentic life & develop in your creative endeavours.

And that’s all I’m trying to do - spread a little joy & exuberance in the world through ideas & content. Not hack people’s attention with pornographic disclosures or glib gimmickery.

Time will tell whether it works or not. But I’m fine with that. To live or die by your ability & effort, that’s all any of us should ever hope for.