Six months and a lifetime

A quick look back at a project that started in a bull market and continues in a crisis

This weekend marks six months since this project began.

In November 2019, the world was going one way.

In May 2020, it’s going another.

On the one hand, that kind of statement is probably always going to be true. On the other hand, not like this.

But through this change this space has still managed, mostly, to serve the same purpose — as an outlet to write about what’s been happening in the background of whatever it is we’re calling “news of the day.”

Some posts have worked okay. Others have been less successful.

Like everyone else, I’ve found myself working under a kind of pressure I certainly didn’t foresee when they rang in a new decade in Times Square.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what things we’ll leave behind in the 2010s bull market — ESG investing? Fake meat? The “sharing economy”? Skinny jeans? — and I’m proud that this newsletter has so far not been a casualty of this transition. There is still time for side projects during a pandemic.

This weekend, we left the city for the first time. For me, everything felt immediately less dangerous, less urgent, calmer. Of course, that’s not how this virus works, not how any virus works. We’re still only 20 miles outside Manhattan. At a national level, this slight tweak in our location barely registers: this is still the epicenter of the crisis by any definition. And yet driving around in a car without anyone else, I felt like I understood, for the first time, the frustrations it seems so many Americans are feeling about why we’re still doing what we’re doing.

Re-opening means something different for everyone. In this part of the country it means, more or less, opening your door for the first time. “Re-opening” is taken almost literally. Elsewhere, it means back to normal. This national variation in “next phase” experiences is also repeated on regional, state, county, neighborhood levels.

My dad was telling us about the tensions between his office here in North Jersey and the folks at his company’s HQ — in a state hit far less hard and in a part of that state hit even less hard by this pandemic — and how it seems sometimes like HQ teams just don’t quite get it. People around here aren’t looking at the summer as a time to get back to the office.

A few weeks back I wrote that if 2020 was a year where it felt for a bit like we were all in this thing together, by 2021 it’d be every man for himself. I was only off by about six months — it’s not yet June and “make your own decisions” is the official national response to the pandemic.

The pandemic has felt like a funnel. Every piece of COVID-related information is fed in at the top while each of us lives as the bottom of our own pressurized feed. Right now, re-opening rules and regulations are the biggest top-of-funnel input. The challenge for each of us the months ahead will be figuring out how these do and don’t alter our own lived experience of this crisis. And it seems increasingly like we’re going to be on our own to decide.

Polling suggests the vast majority of Americans still think we need to re-open slowly. Just 21% of respondents to a Quinnipiac poll last week said they think the country needs to re-open quickly even if it makes the spread of the virus worse; 75% think a slow re-opening, even if it hurts the economy, is warranted.

I’m sure many readers will disagree with my use of “just” to describe a situation in which a fifth of people think a virus that has killed more than 95,000 Americans in two months shouldn’t warrant continued caution.

But in a country where 52-48 splits are seen as huge margins, a 3-to-1 ratio of caution-to-reckless abandon is pretty encouraging. And if this holds it seems that maybe, just maybe, the next six months can be better than the last.

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When drafting this post I looked back at the letters that had done best and those that fell flatter with readership.

The most read letter I’ve written so far was published in January — “There’s one way to do this” — a post about passive investing, the three-point line, and how strategies converge toward an efficient frontier the more brainpower you throw at a problem.

It’s the kind of post I wanted to write when I started this whole thing. And I think it did well because it had charts and graphics. Maybe we can do more of this. People love pictures.

And speaking of popularity, Substack’s metrics are a bit of a puzzle. Or at least the incentive structures around their metrics are very internet 2.0, or something like that.

In January I asked every reader to press the “like” button at the top of a post about Chase’s Sapphire Reserve credit card rewards getting worse. And so a bunch of you did and Substack thinks this is my most popular post. Pageviews on that one, however, are middle of the pack. Meanwhile, the rewards on my credit card are even worse in a post-corona world that will crush the travel industry for years to come.

On a subscriber-adjusted basis, coronavirus-related posts have done fine. Maybe a bit better than fine. Certainly well enough to keep me writing letters that amount to personal essays about the pandemic. It’s unclear how many more of these, however, my own mental health can tolerate.

The reality of modern media operations is that the feedback loops to reader/viewer/listener interest in any piece of content have gotten significantly tighter over time. As I wrote in “An evergreen forest for the trees”:

The internet’s feedback loop to editorial products that succeed is so fast and so tight and leadership teams leap at any idea or story that worked once (“Flood the zone!”) with such enthusiasm that what readers are left with on a long enough timeline is, well, the same. The consequences we’ve all suffered in the last five years are obvious. The current president is basically the political equivalent of The Dress.

[…]

“The internet” is, of course, just a reflection of its users. It is not “the internet” but readers that are telling publishers that what they want is the same as what every other outlet is churning out. And as more money moves into online publishing, the cues taken from current and future management teams will be (and have been) to accelerate their own push towards an evergreen equilibrium. Towards a place where more content can be produced more cheaply because the traffic increases enough to satisfy advertisers and so on. (I suspect Maya Kosoff will be able to write a version of her story on media layoffs every year for a while.) (ed. note: This is significantly more depressing against the backdrop of a pandemic recession that has ravaged the media business even at this early point in the proceedings.)

And so the vastness the internet offers publishers should in theory allow for experimentation, failure, oddball coverage, etc., etc. This is the pitch for any media brand, the pitch to any new reporter, editor, and acquirer of a business. “The internet allows us to do endlessly unique things.”

In practice, however, the internet’s scale has narrowed the scope of what is viable. 

When I started this project, I wanted to work on something that existed outside of this reality. Back in January, I was thinking about making a publishing schedule for this newsletter, an outline of when I would write about what. It’s unclear if I really have the skillset for that kind of endeavor. No such schedule exists.

But at that time, just a few months into this, the strategy of starting to panic every Tuesday about what I’d write for Sunday and when I’d get around to writing it didn’t seem sustainable. The biggest crisis of any of our lifetimes upended all of that. And so little about that process has changed.

Each week, I’ve asked readers to reach out with their thoughts, concerns, complaints, points of contention with the week’s latest newsletter. Uptake on this has been limited, but if I think about how often I respond to these sorts of calls to action, perhaps it’s not a surprise.

And I do want to hear from more of you more often. But building a community takes patience and time and I know we’re all very busy. Respond to this or any newsletter with any feedback at all, or find me on Twitter @MylesUdland. My DMs are open.

And thank you, as always, for subscribing and reading.