ROI

I don’t wanna write copy that converts. Like, yes I understand the concept, I have eyeballs, I have bills, I know there are words that make people click a button and then beep-boop money changes hands and capitalism does a little pirouette, incredible, love that for everyone involved, fo sho. But what I actually want is to make one person feel something. The way you felt literally EVERYTHING when you were 14 and randomly left your house at 10 pm to walk the cul-de-sac under that one lonely streetlight, fully swallowed by the deafening chorus of frog-and-cricket sounds like the night had its own pulse, spiraling about life or boys or dramatic regret (despite being… 14), and the whole world was one page of an I Spy book. Or the way your chest swelled with the smell of coconut sunscreen mixed with seawater pooling on your arms as you fry in the sun and suddenly you’re hyper-aware of your own existence for the first time. Or locking eyes with your best friend across a room and combusting into laughter for absolutely no reason and also every reason or that one very specific reason. Or reading a line somewhere and feeling that heart-stoppy thing that says oh, that’s me, there, in the story or that scene or this song, which is honestly the closest thing we have to magic or immortality. Because in those moments nothing is converting, no one is optimizing, time just stops acting like time and goes all VCR pause. Past and future hover like hold music, and you’re just in it, thinking, sinking, blinking, sitting still. Just like now, I’m literally thumb-typin’ this in mah Notes app in the dark, perched on the edge of my daughter’s bed like a sleep-deprived gargoyle because if I shift my weight even slightly she will sense it and we will all return to a nightmare of broken sleep and a dog who wakes at 4 am for beef with a fox, and I am so exorbitantly tired I could make a deeply questionable life choice, and yet here I am, not moving, barely breathing, aware that this exact moment — this absurd, fragile, maddening kind of holy stillness — is something I would pay an irresponsible amount of money to get back if it disappeared. And it will. Someday. So yes, some copy makes money, but all of it costs time. And time is the only currency that does not replenish, does not care, does not negotiate. So, like, what are you spending it on? And more interestingly: what would you pay to have it back? Because once you’ve got the basics covered, the real ROI is here, this. Five minutes of actually being inside your life instead of scrolling or monetizing or trying to turn it into someone else’s. (Hi. I’m here too.) Anyway I might still write the kind of copy that converts because again — gotta pay mah automobeeeels — but if I’m choosing, I want the kind that interrupts that fleeting, slightly concerning thought of strangling your child and instead makes your eyes well up with love and you write this instead.

That’s the return.