Why Satisfaction Is No Longer the Point

The attention economy doesn't like Hollywood endings because it can't afford to let us finish

I am incredibly fortunate to have come of age in fantastic high school English classes, all of which left indelible marks on my current writing operation.
I don’t think I fully realized how fortunate I was until recently.

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I was never good at the formal mechanics of writing in those formative years, and even now I still worry that whatever prose of mine isn’t utterly dense can feel overly choreographed.

There’s often a sense that the sentences want to stop before I do. As a concrete example, in college I received a C in Business Writing, a small but telling hint at my inability not only to write directly, but to think in a straightforward manner as well.

My tastes were also out of step. I preferred Maya Angelou to Toni Braxton, Conrad to Kafka, and Camus above them all. Shakespeare never enamored me, likely because I felt more alive reading Harper Lee and her colloquialisms rooted in abrupt, declarative statements than wandering verse and elevated diction. I respond more to immediacy than to ornament, yet have difficulty executing it myself.

For most of my adult life, I wanted to create a franchise—a second-world universe—in which my own pure creation could help others get lost in splendor. I imagined something expansive, immersive, and transporting. But those worlds, or at least my increasingly wizened idea of them, can never truly compete with video games, big-box retailers, and the other banal enterprises that already dominate attention so completely.

I’ll be 34 this year, and it’s an incredibly scary number. Not simply because one’s relationship to others becomes more stretched and distant the further one moves through spacetime, but because in an expanding universe one’s sense of place becomes exponentially more disfigured.

I say this because I never really wrote before the hyperscaler age. Anything I produced before 2023 reads, in hindsight, like random musings—200-word bursts spaced out over four-month intervals—usually written when I felt I couldn’t take any more of what the rat race had to give me. Though, in retrospect, I see that version of myself less as overwhelmed and more as insufficient. Not strong enough.

I still feel that way many days, when I soberly stare at my monitor, hoping the words will come.

I’m at that point in this latest novel—nearly finished—where the going turns into a slog. The momentum falters. Worse still, everything around me seems to be moving so fast. Another year gone, and it’s not so much that I worry about where the world might take me anymore. It’s more a question of whether the world will ever find me at all.

2025 will forever be known to me as the year I built a philosophical framework that treats morality as maintenance, much like a computer programmer tends to their source code. In this view, language—when shaped by forces of existence like power, memory, and desire—hardens into societies and cultures.

I feel this framework is as legitimate a worldview as any, though at present I lack the chops to defend it rigorously or explain it to others in a way that doesn’t make me sound positively spacey, or untethered from reality.

I used to believe that my shifting desires—wanting to be famous, rich, powerful, impactful—treating those shifting dreams, themselves volatile, as cause enough for action. I wholeheartedly believed that simply following one’s dreams would lead to a kind of transcendence.

But in a world where the pursuit of happiness is the closest we ever get, wanting is no longer sufficient. Despite what we think we desire, we are shaped far more by the world around us, and by everything that has come before us, than by any intrinsic motivation.

Put differently, desire functions more as a measurement than an aim—a diagnostic check to ensure that we, or the society we inhabit, are properly accounting for constants and variables.

We must realize that, across the modern condition, those in power peddle satisfaction as an idea rather than deliver it. Most are willing to perpetually defer satisfaction, or at the very least bend it to provide tension for a grand design (think nationalism, or colonizing Mars).

Sigmund Freud may have been the first to articulate, with real clarity, these conditions as the foundation for compulsion: where desire no longer ends in pleasure, but loops endlessly into continuation.

If we so desperately wish to carry life into the metaverse, ostensibly to free ourselves from the wanton desires that plagued the world before the Information Age, why then are we purchasing products from internet companies unwilling to deliver subjective fulfillment and then letting us move on with our lives?

There is no investor “satisfaction” if you stop clicking.

Put another way, a worker who is comfortable at their desk, sure of their place, content to ride out the next twenty years in their role—does that worker not stop optimizing?

This is not meant to be a scathing indictment of everything you have ever wanted. Rather, it is an inquiry into how you continually evaluate why you want things, feelings, and—most importantly—other people.

Coming full circle, there was no legitimate human reason for making Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. The system that produced it simply wanted to validate its own existence, to remain solvent and self-justifying.

J.J. Abrams was not tuned to what the world wanted—or, more importantly, I would argue, what it needed. As a result, audiences were left with an extraneous, disjointed plotline grafted onto an otherwise coherent and seminal franchise.

Sadly, in desiring a better answer to that failure, I embarked on creating a novel as a response—one not at all aligned with what I ethically desired, and not the sort of project that truly honors what my high school English teachers gave me. What they gave me was resonance. The resonance of the novel as a form capable of describing the most innate, fibrous, minute pieces of our humanity.

That’s not to say that I’m not incredibly proud of my novel, The Spiral Stair. It simply means that it was made, by my own definition, under unethical circumstances. Luckily, thanks to my high school English textbook Everything’s an Argument, language is not a compulsion. And thus, if I continue writing—whether I want to or not—it is, arguably, the right thing to do.