This Little Piggie
I’m a millennial marketer which is funny because I genuinely love being a millennial and also appear to be profoundly bad at capitalism — like deeply biologically incompatible with it. Like somewhere along the evolutionary timeline my ancestors branched off from the main survival chain and became the kind of creatures who stand in grocery-store aisles getting emotionally overwhelmed by pears and accidentally staring at sunlight for too long instead of taking notes while Deborah drones on about “leveraging synergies.”
And yes, the 90s were a dream. An actual goddamn dream. We had Harriet the Spy and FernGully and mall fountains full of pennies and Airheads that cost a quarter and Scholastic Book Fairs that felt like entering Narnia through a folding cafeteria door. We had songs that made fourth-graders feel mysteriously heartsick for lives they hadn’t lived yet. We sat crosslegged on bedroom carpets painting our nails colors called Electric Mermaid while listening to Bush and Goo Goo Dolls and feeling absolutely CERTAIN there was some enormous shimmering destiny waiting for us just beyond the Olive Garden and the PETsMART and the weird movie theater with the sticky floors.
We were raised on selfhood, Deb.
“Be yourself.” “Follow your dreams.” “Your voice matters.”
Whole generations of us walking around with gel-pen indentations ghosting through the next page because we pressed so hard trying to excavate the infinite sparkling world of our inner selves. And then adulthood arrived wearing a lanyard and carrying a ring light to quietly inform us that every beautiful human impulse must now become a monetizable asset at market.
And I know this sounds dramatic but I genuinely think this is why so many millennials are exhausted in the marrow of their bones — because we were raised to believe creativity and personhood were sacred and then got funneled directly into personal-brand culture where every thought immediately becomes Cher Horowitz trying on little business outfits asking “Could this be content?” “Could this scale?” Meanwhile during a deep panic about making mahself unemployable by finding my voice in public I briefly consider creating a course ABOUT FINDING YOUR VOICE and I swear to god a tiny woodland creature inside mah ribcage throws itself against the walls like NOOOOO THAT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF FINDING YOUR VOICE because the SECOND voice becomes a replicable formula for mass consumption it stops being a voice at all. It is a scream without the document attached.
Like I’M SORRY but I DO NOT dream of becoming a Forbes-Under-40 (for now) thought-leading Disruption Queen standing on a stage in a blazer-jeans combo explaining how I “scaled authenticity.” I dream of lying motionless in a sunbeam recovering from approximately nineteen consecutive unprecedented times while nobody asks me about my funnel or five-year plan ever again.
And that’s why I’m such a catastrophically bad marketer despite technically being semi-charmed-kinda-okay at promoting mah work because every time someone says “build your personal brand” my nervous system reacts like an old-timey horse hearing a gunshot in the village square. I don’t WANT to become a little content vending machine dispensing optimized relatability beneath the fatal fluorescent lighting of the cybermarketplace while invisible men deep in the algorithm mines applaud my engagement metrics. I want to write weird sparkling devastayta-truths about humanity and longing and memory and the unbearable beauty of hearing a mourning dove outside your kitchen window in May. I want my thoughts to belong to me before they become strategy. I want enough money to buy those tiny nets of avocados without briefly entering a fugue state at checkout. I want to leave people a little less alone than I found them. I want more pink sparkle in the ether. Less optimization. More actual aliveness.
Because sometimes I think half of us are still wandering around internally dressed like the cast of Ghostwriter clutching our TrapperKeepers full of impossible hopes while the adult world keeps screaming CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT through a bullhorn directly into our softest organs, and maybe that’s why I keep writing these giant rolling rantwave senties into the void like a caffeinated prophetess haunting a Claire’s Accessories. Maybe I’m still trying to claw-crawl back toward the part of mahself that existed before every thought started arriving with a little price tag pierced to its ear. Before every beautiful fleeting human moment started standing beneath harsh stagelights waiting to see whether it would be voted the next American Idol.
Because THIS LITTLE PIGGIE JUST WANTS TO STAY HOME.
I want to roll around in the muddy mess of being alive and remember it all, really see it all, hear the mourning doves and eat the avocados and write strange shimmering little truthspells without constantly feeling the hot breath of the marketplace against the back of my neck. I want to remember what it felt like before everything became legible to the internet. Before every self had to become searchable. Before the world started whispering to every human experience “yes but what could this sell for.” [Cue: What Was I Made For.]
Anyway I will now unfortunately attempt to promote this essay on LinkedIn like a sleep-deprived raccoon dragging a chandelier into the woods because despite all evidence to the contrary I would still very much like health insurance and perhaps one (1) whimsical beverage on a restaurant patio from time to time.
P.S. In the spirit of asking the marketplace to fund my escape from that same marketplace: paid subscribers get the Friday dispatches, which are generally less “essay” and more “sleepover conversation in the back corner of an abandoned-mall Hot Topic,” so if you’re into that kinda thing feel free to step into the glow for the monthly price of approximately one Taco Bell taco (thanks, inflation).
