We don't deserve the personal essay boom

This is supposed to be fun, and you are being aggressive and weird.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

This is why I keep all my spicy thoughts behind the paywall. —Kate

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My college was home to just 1,600 students. By the time senior year rolled around, I realized I knew something about the sexual history of every single person who walked through the door of the one bar on campus. What came to mind then is a phrase that’s often employed on the internet now: “We should know less about each other.”

Four years on a one-mile long campus will convince you of that. So will graduating directly into the personal essay boom, as I then did. I was able to start in journalism because I had become okay with my life being on display. But, being 23, I quickly ran out of personal stories worth sharing. Meanwhile, the public’s desire to read about other people’s experiences faded—not because we stopped being interested in them, but because social media had become basically one big Thought Catalog. There was no need to keep commissioning people’s deepest darkest secrets, because they were offering them up for free on Instagram and TikTok. 

This oversharing was rewarded by likes and engagement, and “Storytimes” became their own genre. Being “vulnerable” online and using your platform to “normalize” things by divulging personal information somehow turned “transparency” into something we unequivocally owe one another—despite the damage this can cause in reality. And that’s how we end up with things like this breakup text that went viral last week: