Following Along

Late nights obsessing over how to make money online without destroying yourself. Facebook, Google, Tumblr, pixel advertising, cereal schemes—none of it ever works out. It’s a stupid game, and I got tired of playing it.

Then Pinterest. Or rather, everyone decided Pinterest had happened. Some pseudo-experts explained it was the mandatory next thing, and if you weren’t there immediately, you’d wasted all your time on everything else. Everything was prologue to this moment.

So I joined. Set up folders, dumped images in, added dumb captions. No strategy, no idea what I was actually doing there. Just going through the motions because that’s what you do when something has enough momentum to make you look stupid for being absent.

Now I’m on Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and Tumblr and Last.fm and Formspring and Pinterest. An endless rotation of platforms, each one convinced it’s the last, each one replaced every few months by something that tells you the previous five were just warmups. I stopped asking why. This is what it costs to stay visible, to be one of the cool kids online, which sounds absurd when you actually think about it.

Whether any of it means anything is unclear. I’m there though, pinning along, genuinely confused about the point, just holding onto the vague hope that maybe this one will stick. Probably won’t. But you do it anyway.