It is 2am and a Tuesday night and I am still at my laptop, clanking out headlines.
I’m an online content writer, and if the news never sleeps, why should I?
Another celebrity scandal erupts.
I type as fast as my fingers will allow and wring every last delicious ounce of tabloid gossip.
"You Won't Believe What [Celebrity] Did This Time!"
Then I hit publish and watch the hits roll in.
The more they roll, the more my pulse quickens and adrenaline floods my veins. The readers I duped follow my absurdly clickable headline through the funnel right into my post.
God, I’m pooped.
My eyeballs hurt and my back’s sore from hunching at this gogglebox all night.
But I can’t blow it now.
I’m binging.
Just one more blood-spattered headline, one more heroes-turned-jackass compilation, one more deliciously stupid listicle. One more jacked-up stats-count.
I finish my third coffee, see my bed but pound away at the keyboard: if I don’t leave the computer I can amass another 100,000 page views … another two months’ rent.
Again.
Again.
Again …
I chase clicks and traffic…
Fuck my love life or my sanity.
This is the only thing that counts. However, at some point I’d had enough of life as a digital wage slave. I resigned myself to working a three-day week and took an internship at another magazine.
The day before my first day, I exchanged emails with Simon, my boss and Facebook’s former relationships ‘guru’. With the one-eyed vision of the converted and a degree in the ‘Science of Happiness’ (I wrote some articles in Business Insider to earn my BA), he launched Re*****t***.com, an ‘evidence-based’ site.
He answered my questions in detail, providing quirky data and feeding my fascination with the quantified self.
We met for a coffee, and I explained that I might dub myself your ‘creature’ and use you to capture the magical intersection where branding and psychological research meet.
Tech startups would then excrete fiction.
Simon smiled.
Another breaking news alert.
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