An adult I used to look up to and admire when I was a teenager, because he had a popular blog and wrote well and everyone loved him, recently started a Substack where he’s writing again, and it’s really depressing.
It turns out that, in the last two decades in which I wasted one decade and then hustled for the second decade to get to the spot I am in life, this guy… stagnated. He did not progress as a person in any way, his career did not progress, his lifestyle did not progress.
When I joined his Substack he was already a year into unemployment. He’s since written about getting a job that he lost in two weeks, and despite trying to write about it like it was a valuable lesson and wasn’t really his fault deep down, it was clearly his fault.
Today he wrote a post about how his car has been stolen 3 times in the last ten months, by random shady people he’s met. In one case, he suggests he picked a random guy up from the subway station for sex and that random guy stole his car. What? Why, at 50 years old, are you hooking up with random people from subway stations? Why do you have ‘sketchy acquaintances’ in your life at all?
It’s clear to me now, this guy, for various reasons (all mental health and family trauma related) was never able to grow up past his mid-20’s. He’s a perpetually dysfunctional overgrown teenager. I really worry for him, what his life is going to look like as it really starts to fall apart, and I will be along for the ride, reading his Substack.
But I’m not going to pay for his Substack, it would feel to me like I am encouraging this behavior. I should not pay him to regale me with tales of his fucked up life. Plus, it depresses me, I don’t want to throw my money in a hole.