I am so bored with books. I tried calling it burn-out. I tried blaming it on the pandemic. I tried blaming it on aging (after 32 I definitely felt the zeitgeist moving on). I thought maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I need a snack. Have I taken my meds? Do I have ADHD? (I do not, not even remotely.) I tried and I tried and now I’m ready to say it with my whole chest.
Everything is so fucking boring.
I keep reading books that I should love. Everything is there that I love—all the elements, the story, the prose. And yet, I’m bored. My attention wanders. I have trouble finishing. It feels like we are all going through the motions of the story. I want to feel obsessed again. I want to feel pop rocks brain. And I do—when I pick up older works.
This isn’t to say these books I’m reading are bad. In fact nothing is bad! I would love to see something actively bad. Twilight was bad! But great! Like crack. We used to talk about that with books—like crack. Where are they now? Maybe Colleen Hoover? (I haven’t read them, the content doesn’t interest me). But overall, nothing is bad. Everything is just fine.1
Over the years, I kept expecting it to go away, things to move on, or to finally understand what was wrong with me. I love to blame everything on myself, because then I can fix it! (Toxic eldest Christian daughter, ftw).
But it isn’t me. Or rather, it isn’t just me. And here’s why.
Algorithms
A year and a half ago, I started to suspect that the algorithm was impacting my creativity. I had a vague memory of being more creative, having bigger or weirder ideas. Whenever I was confronted with photography from my twenties, I was surprised to notice there was a perceivable difference in what I had created before I knew what an algorithm was.
My first author photos, my old photos of my children, these self portraits—they were influenced by the style of the time and the prevalence of “mommy blogs” where you could read 10-15 difference stories, complete with pictures. There were trends (vintage filters, bokeh, sunflares). There was definitely a popular, ruling style (The Pioneer Woman and Dooce). But at that time, there was still space for creative and, shit, there was a ton of voice. I remember it, but it almost feels like it had happened in a different lifetime.
Now, no matter how much I tried to be creative, I only seemed to come up with the same thing as everyone else. Light filled. Beige. Curated. I wasn’t telling stories anymore, I was delivering arranged aesthetics.
It’s not just my photography. My story ideas were less messy, tangled ideas and more a set of comps—like x meets y. We all used to be bad at high concept pitches, now that’s all there is.
When I first took a break from social media to see if maybe that helped, I managed a few pithy attempts at something different, but they weren’t even bad. They were boring. I was so reined in by the algorithm I couldn’t even suck anymore. It made me realize I was no longer bothering to ask myself “do I like it?”, so much as I asked myself. “Could this sell? Will it be seen? Is this good?”
In 2018, I was going through a tough divorce, had lost everything, was working two shitty jobs, and still trying to be the same artist on the internet. My struggling, my poverty, my undoing, all made the majority of my peers and followers uncomfortable and turn away. I became obsessed with the idea of “good content”, and the philosophical concept of beauty. It felt less terrible to become intellectually curious about what “beauty” was instead of confronting my feelings about becoming irrelevant and ugly to culture. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
When we talk about something being good, I think we are talking about beauty. Beauty as a value, not an emotion you might feel reading my books or looking at my photographs. It’s not “it made me feel good” after reading a book, but “it was good.” That’s beauty. It’s something Important-in-itself or significant because it exists.
With a beer in my hand on the back porch, I’d go on and on about beauty being a divine, transcendent, sublime core in something. But beauty can also be trash. I think Twilight is bad but beautiful in this sense. Less a sublime core and more like sticky, kind of gross, cringey core. The point is that there is something there, at the center of it, holding the work together. A significance. An “importance-in-itself”. An artistic core.
I’ve been good at an algorithm and I’ve been bad at it. My day job in marketing requires me to always be knowledgeable about the algorithm and it’s changes on a variety of platforms. The one thing all the different algorithms of the internet share, all of the time, is that they run on attention. Attention feeds the algorithm and the algorithm rewards attention. It’s why bigger accounts have an easier time, there’s already established attention feedback. In the last several years, our perception of things that are significant have become muddier than a creek after a heavy rain, thanks to the algorithms. Like addicted lab mice we got used to the dopamine hit of attention and now, subconsciously think every opinion shitted out on twitter deserves to be seen, every book that is published deserves to be a lead title, every manuscript that is submitted deserves to be sold.
I lost my creativity over the years because I stopped pursuing what was good or interesting or significant to me, and began to—slowly—pursue what those algorithms rewarded. Like with lead poisoning, you get sick but you don’t suspect the paint on the walls. It wasn’t until I left the room—when I found myself so far outside what anyone wanted to give their attention to during my divorce—that I could even start to sense it’s control over my imagination.
Uti & Frui
Saint Augustine defines the difference between “important-in-itself” and “all that is merely subjectively satisfying” with two different verbs—uti and frui. Frui is entering into something for it’s own sake. Uti means using it only as a means for obtaining some other good.
When I sit down to write a book or even these essays, it is an act of frui—entered into for its own sake. When I post on social media, even the posts that don’t have anything to do with my writing, it is a work of uti, entered into as a means for obtaining visibility, telling the algorithm “hey don’t forget I write!” (or more like, hey don’t forget me!!)
But over the years of my own work and also when I’m scrolling or leafing through other writer’s work. It seems we are getting it flipped. More and more we are writing for visibility—uti—and use social media for its own sake, frui. What used to be a somewhat contemptuous insult (“they don’t want to write, they want to be famous”), is now a logical response to the culture. An algorithm immediately, decisively, assigns a value judgement to my post, while there’s nothing but my consciousness of beauty to reward me for writing.
I thought I was getting old, or somehow less revolutionary, when I started being appalled at the entitlement oozing out of new writers. On twitter, I catch these demands of being read and being seen and their victimization when they are not rewarded for their labor and I think, “what is happening? You are all so boring but you expect to be published and you feel it’s an act of injustice against you when you are not?”2
I have felt entitled to being published, that’s normal, but that used to be an ugly feeling we all hid and maybe tried to explain to our therapists. Now they say it with their whole chest?
But then I realized this is the natural effect of beauty defined by the algorithm. The only thing that is important-in-itself in the world of the algorithm, is whatever the algorithm defines. But because we can understand, more or less, the components of an algorithm, we can make art to its specifications. Which feels a hell of a lot easier than trying to understand the complexities and conflicts of human taste.
More and more, art exists only inside these concrete parameters of an attention algorithm. Like getting a present off someone’s wish list, we expect them to be grateful for it! If you create something within those parameters, following those rules, and the algorithm (or an agent, for example) doesn’t reward you—well, then, the only answer must be that it is a grave injustice.3
Compounding this, we imagine that algorithms are inherently more objective and just than subjective taste of beauty. Black creators know this isn’t true, but culturally, we haven’t really listened. Our imagined objective algorithm is now what we expect from subjective tastemakers gatekeepers, and it’s why we are seeing more and more this entitled disgust and rejection of the subjectivity of gatekeepers.
Subjectivity is part of art. Judgement is intrinsic to the nature of taste. Gatekeepers are humans with a developed sense of taste, they can never be as straightforward as an algorithm (otherwise you’d have thousands of YouTube videos about how to hack them).
I saw a conversation (on the bird app, of course) about how Rick Rubin was actually just a fraud because he never created anything himself, only worked with what “real artists” made, and I had to go outside and light a cigarette just to process the audacity.4
Look, I can always tell the exact point a writer is no longer edited. Maybe if Sarah J. Maas was edited, I could have made it through Crescent City.
Gatekeepers, tastemakers, patrons, producers, editors, agents, whatever they’ve been called, them (and their inherent friction) have always been important to art. Algorithms know nothing of those things. It really knows nothing of art.
The Aesthetic Novel
In 2015, all we wanted to do was write a novel based on *vibes*. We’d complain to each other at dinners about having to have plots, couldn’t we just write the mood, the banter, the atmosphere? I think back and curse us all for what we manifested. We got what we wanted. We are in the age of the aesthetic novel.
Aesthetics are the elements, the principles, the structures around that core of beauty in a work of art. Tropes, for example, are a part of aesthetics—the principles of structure that might be inside a work of art, but are not, by themselves anything meaningful at all.
Beauty is from the inside-out. It is primordial. Aesthetics can never be primordial. Aesthetics are an outside-in way of trying to get at what makes something meaningful.
I can look at my shelf and see all these books I’ve read (or half-read) through the last two years and even when they’ve sold well, they are. . .soulless. It’s the aesthetics that sell them. COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES was published in 2015, before the vibes era (and while Maas was being edited), and it’s trash, lol, but memorable, and not boring. It’s also not constructed out of four aesthetics in a trench coat, which is more than I can say for better books in the last few years.
We are increasingly only able to conceptualize art through aesthetics, and in doing so we lose the meaningful heart of novels, both in our reading and our writing. Of course we are doing trope marketing, that’s all there is to talk about in an aesthetic novel! No one can say what their book is about anymore.
That’s not to say we are not effected by an aesthetic novel. Of course, an aesthetic novel may provide the settings, the twists, the banter, the tropes we enjoy. We may be amused, we may be entertained, we may have discourse. What we are not is affected.
To be affected by a novel is to be moved in your soul, to experience something in our hearts, to be drawn into the depths. It is the spirit moving over the void of the empty waters. Affected is penetration. Effected is periphery.
Instead of a story boring to our souls, we are simply bored.
Moral Value
And that’s how we’ve gotten to arguably the worst era of discourse in publishing ever. It’s not an accident. Algorithmic writing and the glut of aesthetic novels drive us straight into a wall of morality at 60mph. The wall being the expectations that our art be both moral and our aesthetic consumption reflective of our moral values.5
Think of it this way—the algorithm is the casino (the house always wins). We want to win some money, so we sit at the slot machines and know maybe we can get the right combo and win big. It’s an objective standard. So we keep hitting buttons and spinning the aesthetics to get the right combination of structure and characters and tropes. But what can you say about a combination of aesthetics? You can only talk about the aesthetics themselves, there’s nothing else to say. Moral values are the closest value judgement you can make in an aesthetic novel.
But the sum of a novel’s aesthetics is not, and never has been, the core of a novel. Aesthetic choices exist to support a novel’s reason for being written, never the reverse. But we are now inundated with books that don’t have an artistic core, only it’s aesthetics. A few years ago, you could have sold me on anything described as “morally grey” but now it’s become only an aesthetic, not a reflection of any real ethical or moral dilemma tearing a character apart with its tensions.
We’ve all noticed a lack of critical thinking with books, but I think it’s more we’ve lost the ability to think about art, period. We think we’re at the casino, that there’s nothing there but the lights and little symbols and a winner or a loser. That’s why people earnestly pass around “cancel” lists of classic literature—they can’t conceive of anything beyond its aesthetic choices. The algorithm can’t go any deeper than engaging in the moral values of aesthetics, and more and more, neither can we.
AI
I keep trying to explain why all these novels are so boring—to pin it down specifically. Across all genres, the thing they all have in common is that, for the most part, it feels like I’m just being carried through the plot and the sets and the banter. Like just ahead of me is an AI quickly churning out what I expect to see there. I feel…to catered to? No one catches my attention with something surprising, something weird, something powerful. It’s just characters, tropes and vibes in a mix of plot events until the end. It doesn’t matter how well executed it is, how cool the ideas might be, it’s ultimately just boring. Nothing really means anything beyond the page.
You might think AI is a separate topic, a product of rampant capitalism that misunderstands what humans actually want to be doing with their time, but in actuality, the only end route of the above ideas can only be AI.
When ChatGPT first became a sensation, I had a philosophical stomach ache about it. It wasn’t that I feared being replaced—even if you input all my old work into it and ask it to spit something out, it’s only going to regurgitate the bullshit I’ve done and nothing I’m going to do. I played with it for my day job (my gen x, non-writer CEO is obsessed) and it was often wrong, mostly stupid, and above all, boring.
“One way of thinking about a program like ChatGPT is that it’s much better at assessing vibes than it is at reproducing facts.” (MaxReads in his article “I cannot believe the shit that morons are getting up to with ChatGPT”)
Writers are arguing about a world where AI “replaces” them, but the jokes on us, because we’ve already been writing inside an algorithm, to a set of aesthetics, and in doing so we’ve already become our own AI. We aren’t trying to stave off the matrix, we already are the matrix.
We’re not willing to waste time making imperfect art with messy ideas and uncertain outcomes. We begin our creations with slick prompts and high concept ideas. We create inside an algorithmic method, to the parameters of aesthetic qualities. We don’t create anything new, we recycle the past. We don’t make surprising, complicated choices, we simply fill in the most likely text to follow the prompt. We may cry that AI is soulless, but isn’t much of our art already?
The tech bros idea of democratizing art is horrifying on it’s own to the artist, but it makes sense in the context of our current art culture. If the algorithm is the objective standard, and gatekeepers are subjective controllers, it makes sense the great equalizer is the prompt engineer who simply must put in the right aesthetic parameters to create something. It’s like finding a way to win against the house. Why wouldn’t they celebrate that?
But that’s why we’re so bored. Even without AI and tech bros doing it, we’ve already stripped for parts much of what makes art something more than a set of well executed prompts.
Antithesis
I don’t remember exactly why I needed to reread the novel I’m currently re/writing, but I remember I really didn’t want to.
I loved the idea! I thought the characters were exciting! There was so much atmosphere and I knew the concept was commercial, the plot moved, and the execution was well done. But I was really fucking bored.
Everything ticked along and moved just right, there was nothing wrong with it. It was good! So I ignored being bored and kept going. I assumed being bored by your own work was part of the process. It didn’t used to be that way—when I first began writing I wasn’t bored—but over 14 years into my career, of course it would get kind of boring to read. Right?
One night, just randomly, I asked JJ “Are you ever bored by your novels?” She said “no, I get sick of them, but never bored.”
I was surprised by this answer.
There are two opposites to beauty in art.6 Triviality, and boringness. (Von Hildebrand, Aesthetics). Triviality, which is not cliché (to be so used it no longer has meaning), but made for the purpose of “filling the air for a certain time, and to play a specific social role”. It is cheap, shallow but can be both unsuccessful (my novel, VALLEY GIRLS) or achieved with great verve (COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES). The boring, though, is not only a lack of beauty, but a lack of reason or purpose.7
When I went back to look at my novel, I started reading and asked myself why did I choose this? Why did I use this image? These words. Why is my character doing this thing? I discovered that my work was boring because it was all aesthetic choices with no real reason or purpose driving my choices. I was technically excellent, but artistically bankrupt.
But that’s what happens the more we live on the basis of public or algorithmic determinations. We become ever more anonymous, ever more blank, ever more devoid of raison d’ etre and ever more fucking boring.
Even as I've synthesized these thoughts over the years, and slowly made choices that answer “do I like it?” rather than “will this be seen?” (and have the low engagement rates to prove it, lol), I still struggle to tear myself away from the ever present, ever guiding hand of the all mighty algorithm.
In my novel it’s been easier, getting swept away by the reason I’m writing this story rather than swept away by the idea of the prompt. But the result is I have lost all concept of whether I can sell this or what I'll even say about it. I told JJ last week, “I have no imagination for publishing this book, only for writing it.” Which is, quite honestly, the first time I’ve ever experienced that.
As our culture remains ruled by algorithms, aesthetics and AI, I can’t help but believe it will be more and more revolutionary to create, post, write, photograph or even experience something only for the sake of itself. I know that’s what I want to see in my feeds, in my books. But that is probably terrible career advice.
there are a few exceptions. BTS obviously. Ethel Cain, personally. But overall, you know what I mean.
obviously there is historic injustice present in publishing
and of course it’s predominately white, queer, neurodivergent writers who really feel this
metaphorically, I’m still breastfeeding
I didn’t leave fundamental christianity just to do this bullshit all over again in art.
i’m excluding ugliness, the disruption of form, because it’s more complicated in art and not always its antithesis to the overall beauty
Or as JJ is right now yelling/texting “the point! What is the fucking point!”
wow I loved this