We don't deserve the personal essay boom

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

This is a repost of an essay I wrote back in 2024 that has not only become more relevant with the release of Adult Braces and Famesick, but also the most recent personal essay in The Cut. —Kate

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New on ICYMI: I chatted about this very topic with Leigh Stein for ICYMI. It was such a fun, increasingly unhinged convo:

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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:

Amidst of this glut of intimate information, the personal essay boom has recently rallied, thanks to outlets like The Cut and Delia Cai’s Hate Read. Some stories, like handing $50,000 in a shoe box to a stranger, require more than just a 30-second video to explain. And some opinions, like this one on the dire state of media parties, could only be made public with the promise of anonymity. Twitter, in turn, has felt like its old self again. Which makes me wonder whether its decline may have had as much to do with a dearth of fun things to talk about as it did Elon Musk. 

But is this fun? While I certainly spent the media party Hate Read day glued to Twitter for the first time in years and have read all 620 of the Blogsnark comments on the the throuple baby story, what starts exhilarating too often ends in exhaustion as the discourse stops being playful and turns inexplicably…angry.

“There is a lot of talk of people wanting the frivolity of the ‘blog era’ back that always fails to investigate the core reason why that can't happen,” Slate writer Luke Winkie tweeted. “Because you, me, and everyone you know have grown pickled, cranky, and exhaustingly Serious, well past the point of no return.”

We don’t allow ourselves to just be “annoyed” by things anymore. This fact, which has plagued the discourse for a while now, became plain with this spring’s return of the Twitter monoculture. It’s now painfully obvious that we need to legitimize and validate our feelings of disgust or even just dislike by pretending our petty annoyances are involuntary and incontestable expressions of moral outrage. It’s not, “I don’t like the Brooklyn throuple because their living situation (and baby name) is needlessly complicated,” it’s, “I don’t like the Brooklyn throuple because I think they’re bad parents” (It should be noted that the backlash to that piece is tangled up with transphobia). Here’s what one user wrote on Blogsnark:

I’m going to say it - I think a lot of you all are confusing being annoying with being bad people. They aren’t inviting you to dinner and you don’t have to be their friends. They are FAR from the only folks in the world who have had a kid when they were broke…Some weird arty people have a weird arty baby and it doesn’t seem like anyone is being harmed. Gawking is fun, I think they enjoy having people gawk, but some of the doomsaying is over the top yall.

This pattern repeats itself over and over: The Cut essay from a woman who married a rich older man went from “entertainingly out of touch” to “normalizing right-wing gender roles.” Emily Gould’s divorce retrospective had people armchair diagnosing her mental health. Readers suggested the author of the shoebox scammer essay be fired. Fired? So that if in a few years she loses her social security card after accidentally putting it into a vending machine, we wouldn’t get to read about it? Are you crazy?

We not only don’t deserve the personal essay boom, we are quickly smothering it. Instead of getting on our hands and knees to thank the writers for giving us something fun to talk about online again, we’re digging up their parents, their financial records, and whatever other information we can to make them feel unsafe and aggressively discourage whoever might write the next viral hit.

This is supposed to be fun, and you’re so outraged that you’re attacking real people for their little essays. If you behaved like this at a party in real life, you wouldn’t be invited to the next one. But as we now know, the party probably wasn’t that fun anyway.