Tiny Revolutions №126: Let's Kill the Approval Economy
doubling down
After 20 years (give or take) in LA, I still subscribe to New York Magazine. I doubt this is unusual for anyone who has lived in NYC and migrated west, especially if they spent formative years there, as I did. But my interest in NY media is not because I consider it the best — if anything, leaving the city and discovering how utterly blind that milieu is to the realities of living in places that are not New York has taken it down a number of pegs in my estimation — it’s because I consider it a comforting throwback to a time when things just made sense.
I can open up The Cut or The Strategist and discover the right issues to be up in arms about, the right reaction to them, the right sneakers to buy, the right way to style them. I can find the right books to read, the bands everyone is talking about, the movies that are doing numbers, the hot fashion designers to wear to signify you’re in the know. 20 minutes there can make me feel cool and informed and erudite, like I’ve got the drop on what’s happening and can go about my day thus assured. Covered!
It was always a fantasy, of course, but it sure did make me feel good. When I go to scroll those places now I’m aware of what I’m doing. It’s not so much that I’m looking to be informed (though of course I’m making a note of stuff that seems interesting) as that I’m revisiting a time in my life when I thought those kinds of answers could be found in places like a magazine. LOL! The phrase that comes to mind here is “was anyone ever so young?” A simpler time, it was.
What is unfortunate though, is that I took enough of this stuff seriously to form an opinion on what was acceptable. Because I was a person who was always trying to find a way to belong, I picked up lots of arbitrary external standards for how to do it right. Which is fine, I think most of us do that, but when it came down to it a lot of the stuff I unthinkingly adopted as gospel did not suit me. Once again, nothing new here. I think getting older is about realizing a lot of the shit you signed up for is not your deal, and then working your way out of the knots that hold you to them.
But it is curious to me that I still return to these sources of information, especially when I know that they hurt me. For all I tell you that I don’t take them seriously, that I know they are bullshit written for a person I no longer am, I still am absorbing something. Still clinging to a way of being that doesn’t serve me.
But there comes a point where you take in so much that you don’t know what you think about it, or who you are in relation to it, and that’s the kind of thing that I’m way more interested in these days. My own inner workings. What stirs me, what shuts me down, what makes me so uncomfortable that I want to avoid it entirely. That’s where the way forward is.
And the reality is, paying attention to that shit is hard. It’s way easier to pull up the Approval Matrix and see what other people are feeling. Safer, certainly. Someone else’s feelings might upset you, but at the end of the day you’re not getting judged for them.
I don’t know, I’m just sick of the fucking internet and everyone’s opinions. Sick of how the economics of the media industry have weaponized our takes against us and sorted us neatly into tribes, which, conveniently, war against each other and drum up more clicks and ad dollars for the ones purveying it.
I still scroll Twitter and NY Mag and Instagram. I’m just grossed out by it all. And more dedicated than ever to understanding my own point of view, uncertain and scary and mysterious as it is.
And if I’m gonna get philosophical for a moment, I do think the only way we get out of this mess is to get real with ourselves. It’s definitely what I’m most interested in reading — people telling the truth of their lives as they see it, not what they think will get the most approval. Fuck the Approval Matrix!
For a while last fall I was working on a long essay I had titled Authenticity is the New Currency. I still buy it as an idea but have lost confidence that anyone needs a bloviating essay about authenticity being the new currency. Just fucking do something real and tell me about it, you know?
Anyway, Happy New Year. Let’s be crankier and more confused and earnest and passionate and weird this year than ever.
😘
Sara
p.s. Share this with someone who needs it.
Fellow NYMag subscriber here! (Left the city in 2020.)
That's a great image you chose to head this post.
On the approval economy: coincidentally, I just came across an item in the NYT -- a sort of capsule profile of an erstwhile food writer, current professor of philosophy, named C. Thi Nguyen. With apologies if this triggers a reflexive "Ack! NYT view of the world!" wince, here's a gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/books/review/why-keeping-score-isnt-fun-anymore.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlA.BRQE.ehe4TrKkrj-x&smid=url-share
...which comports with my own long-held, deep-seated sensibilities about writing fiction, which might be summarized as: "It Makes No Sense But Is Worth Doing Anyway."
The assumption of so many people -- lovely people, *thinking* people -- is that if you're writing fiction, you're probably driven by a hope to be the next [enter phenomenally successful author's name here]. But that's not really true of me, nor is it true of other novelists and short-story writers I know. Sure, "success" -- APPROVAL, in the form of likes, subscriptions, restacks, etc. -- it gives me a little dopamine jolt. But what's really behind the urge to put it out there is the fun of whipping it all into an "out there" form: I write in English, so the sentences need to follow the sort of flippy-floppy rules of that language, and I post on Substack, which has certain conventions (title your piece; include some kind of image; etc.) to help draw readers to the ideas and their expression. But the most important thing for me is that *I'M* drawn to those ideas and their expression...
Well, I'm blathering. Just wanted you to know that this post of yours genuinely reached me. (There y'go: a little dopamine shot headed your way!)