The Excessive Demands of the Media Industry

My own story.

This is going to be more of a personal entry inspired by Katherout’s “I no longer aspire to have a career” YouTube video in which she talks about the intoxicating features of Silicon Valley’s obsession with work and productivity, and although not explicitly related to the tech industry in any meaningful way, there were enough parallels to warrant talking about my own struggles with work as a concept, and the amount I’m expected to put in if I have even the smallest shot of making it into journalism as a long-term, financially-viable professional pursuit.

Before I made the jump to Substack in April earlier this year, I had blogged on Medium for about four years, the latter part of which were particularly intense because of a conception in my mind — one that didn’t take long to shatter — about how to attain a gig in the media industry, one that ascribed to the highly erroneous notion of meritocracy. I distinctly remember listening to a Q&A session on Kotaku Splitscreen where a certain notable journalistic figure by the name of Jason Schreier had suggested to a reader inquiring about how to get into the press to just produce “good clips” and have the pieces fall where they may afterwards. I — perhaps naively — took that advice to heart and went ballistics on content on the blog, reaching its maximum output at an entry every two days in April of 2019, a period during which I felt incredibly energized to fast-track the most laborious part of industry qualifications because I simply couldn’t…