The Depth Complaint

A friend named Chrissy—a food blogger, a genuinely good one—told me this journal had gone shallow. Not exactly in those words. What she wrote was that since the relaunch I’d been fixated on tits, dicks, and half-baked stories instead of giving her the dark, personal, soul-excavation content she’d grown used to. She missed the melancholy. She missed the actual interiority.

The maddening part is that she might be right. The redesign brought in more readers, more engagement, more of everything the numbers measure—and somewhere in that process the writing became more like curation. Links to interesting things. Photos that land. A surface sheen of personality rather than actual exposure. It’s seductive, that shift. It’s easier. You can produce volume and receive approval and feel like you’re doing the work without ever having to say something true.

But I also think Chrissy’s reading is selective. Tits and darkness aren’t mutually exclusive. You can write about sex and still mean something. Some of the most honest things I’ve ever put on a page were also the crudest. The mistake isn’t being horny or shallow—the mistake is being horny or shallow without intention, without a self underneath the content. I’m not sure which one she was actually objecting to. I’m not entirely sure which one I’ve been doing.