How Do You Make a Nuanced Point in 2021?

You don’t. But there’s something more interesting going on anyway.

Photo by Dan Counsell on Unsplash

Look, I’m not used to people actually reading what I write. I told myself, when a few of my articles started pushing past the 1K mark recently, that I would absolutely not read the comments. But I’ve always been the kind of person who picks at scabs. Scout’s honor, I’m going to do my very best never to read them again, but what I’ve already seen was enough to make me want to stop writing forever.

It’s not the arguing, insults or ire of people I’ve never met that gets to me. It’s the lack of vision, mainly, but it’s also the whole process of how we engage with media and storytellers that makes me think my life would be better spent doing something else.

So often, we assume writers have no idea what they’re talking about because they haven’t addressed our specific question in one specific 1,500-word article about something else. So often, people don’t understand writers, have never thought of things in those terms, so they think the writer must be wrong. We engage with media as quick stand-alone articles and even quicker hot-takes, not taking these as parts of a broader set of work making a deeper, more nuanced point.