I have noticed that many friends and acquaintances in my demographic have become journalists and writers in recent times. It could be that, at our age, writing is an easier sport than more athletic ones, like cricket or sex, or that having lived on this planet for three-score and ten years, or more, these new writers have much wisdom to impart and are bursting to let fly like mansplainers, if only someone would listen.

Channels for expression have also proliferated: YouTube, blogsites, websites, social media, podcasts, newsletter platforms like Substack, Medium and their dozens of imitators – the choices keep mushrooming, flourishing, and dying. Some are even getting AI agents to write and post content under their name. And there is no more editorial judgment or curation, only likes and shares. No more do you have to write query letters to editors to sell yourself and your article, hoping to be selected. There is also no need to get one’s facts right because no one knows what the facts are anyway—even opinions can masquerade as facts these days, and the juicier the better.

Of course, the issue is – who will read your work? And why should they read you when there are thousands of others they could read in our time-strapped world? Especially the ones who have brand appeal and could be “trusted” (one of the worst assumptions today!).

For some of us, like me, writing became a compulsion, born in childhood and honed over many years of practice to become second nature. I write whether anyone publishes or reads my output, or not. But for a newbie or late-bloomer writer, this mad hobby couldn’t have been a compulsion, or they would have collapsed under a nervous breakdown long ago. Therefore, for them it must be a fad, I reckon. A status thing to say, “I am a writer,” which, IMHO is an old tape.

My plaintive cry to these wannabes is, “Don’t pick up this cross, unless it hurts you not to.” Thankfully, a majority of the newbies will pack up their tools early, after the novelty wears off and their subscriber lists peak, or never take off, or when the pressure to be always generating new content gets too much and they say, “F@ck it, I’m going back to baking or gardening, or golf.” But a few egotists will slog away until they have that nervous breakdown through rejection, ugly comments, or plain neglect from those painstakingly solicited audiences.

If they ask me why I am being such a wet blanket and dissuading others from taking up this “noble cause,” I will tell them, “Do you think that—even if anyone reads you—they will give a rat’s ass about what you have to say and change their lives?” No book has changed the world (Sorry, Harriet Beecher Stowe, your Uncle Tom’s Cabin did nothing to launch or end the American Civil War, much as many have touted!). Nor did Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Baldwin “going to tell it on the mountain,” or Tolstoy documenting the Napoleonic Wars and writing a treatise at the end of War and Peace on the forces that move people and nations. Artists can only lament, depict, and play prophets in the wilderness, at best! Their messages only resonate in hindsight, if at all, long after the calamities they warned about have come to pass, and when humanity is wiping out the fallout and pausing to say, “You know that…writer… what was his name…? He was onto something, eh?” At best!

And if you want to make money at this gig, you are better off selling your baked goods at the farmers’ market or church bazaar. Unless you win a publishing lottery, which still happens once in a blue moon with diminishing frequency.

The one thing you can achieve—if you stick at this gig long enough and become a prickly pain in the ass whom everyone will be curious about—is notoriety. Odd and Outrageous sells; Feel-Good is yesterday’s toast. Today’s most successful journalists are controversialists who reveal the most outrageous things to keep themselves in the spotlight. Ask Joe Rogan, Jeffrey Goldberg, Bob Woodward, or that guy on Truth Social. And they haven’t changed the world, either, really. And the moment you misstep with a post that is out of character for the persona you have created for yourself, you will be derided and replaced by the multitudes of wannabes waiting in line for a shot at their 15 minutes of fame (soon to be 15 seconds in social media time).

“So there,” I say, “do you, in your golden years of three-score and ten (or more), want to be remembered as a pain in the ass and still a failure to save the world?” If the impulsive answer is “yes,” then go ahead, make my day and yours, and write away. And pray that you don’t get taken out by ignorers, naysayers, or assassins. If the considered answer is “no,” then take up baking or golf. Or you could get ChatGPT to generate your articles by feeding it prompts, and flood the world with more useless content that nobody reads or needs.