No, I'm Not Saying That...

on resisting the urge to write like you're stupid

I’ve been writing on Substack for almost five years now, and there’s a particular kind of response I’ve learned to expect.

Not disagreement—I like disagreement, most of the time.

If you read something I wrote, understood it, and still think I’m wrong about what I actually said I’m all ears.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the maddening, predictable genre of response where people engage with a version of my argument I didn’t actually make.

Or they raise objections so self-evident, so insultingly remedial, that preemptively including a rebuttal would’ve felt like writing for toddlers.

Or for badly coded bots.

“No, I’m not saying gravity is optional. Yes, I’m aware that running without legs is hard.”

My friend

Josh Slocum

has a brilliant phrase for this kind of thing. He says: “Supply your own not-alls.”

It’s exactly right. It acknowledges the nuance—yes, of course not all—but it sets a boundary. He’s not going to caveat every sentence with a clumsy exemption just because some reader, somewhere, might be looking for a reason to feel wounded.

And when it comes to identity groups, I actually do get the impulse. I’ve personally met people who believe vile, ridiculous things about literally every single black person, or every gay person, or every immigrant or woman or whatever category you want to name.

I’ve seen the damage that sweeping, stupid generalizations can do. So even though I find the ritual of “not all [x]” tedious at times, I understand why some people reflexively reach for it.

It’s armor. There are in fact people who hurl weapons at literally all members of certain identity groups. Not many, but they do exist. So it makes sense on that level.

But here’s what I don’t understand.

I don’t understand how anyone could read an essay about how the concept of “talent” is mostly socially constructed and often harmful, and respond with, “So you’re saying anyone can be Mozart if they just try hard enough?”

I don’t understand the people who see a piece about skill development and immediately rush in with some version of “But my friend lost his legs in Iraq and wanted to be a runner—checkmate” or “But you’re deaf; you could never be a great singer, ergo your thesis is stupid.”

I especially don’t understand the people who cited their childhoods. These weren’t Olympians or Fields Medal winners referring to having shown early promise in the fields where they eventually became world-record-holders. These were ordinary people citing their childhoods—you know, the time of life when development is all over the place and predictably unpredictable—as if reading on an (age + 4) reading level thirty years ago, or being faster than the other kids at reciting multiplication tables is indicative of special, God-given “giftedness”.

Sometimes I think that a childhood that saddled me with deeply entrenched negative views of myself might’ve been, in an incredibly fucked-up way, unironically a gift.

At least I’m not self-defined by a second-grade reading score and a lingering sense of cosmic injustice that “the world isn’t really set up for brains to be an asset.” For. Fuck’s. Sake.

No, this kind of thing isn’t disagreement. It’s something else.

And it happens all the time.

I Want to Respect You, I Really Do

Here’s the dilemma: I don’t want to write like I think my readers are stupid.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve kept writing here for five years—because I assume you’re not.

I assume you know what nuance is.

I assume you can handle an argument that doesn’t pause every three sentences to offer disclaimers, footnotes, and emotional support animals for the exceptionally literal-minded.

But the consistency with which certain people miss the point? It’s enough to make me consider a recurring section at the end of each essay called DO NOT REACT THIS WAY. Bullet points. Black background. White text. Giant bold letters.

• No, I don’t think everyone can be Mozart.

• No, I’m not saying paraplegics should just hustle harder.

• No, I’m not attacking your identity as a gifted child.

• No, I’m not saying talent is fake and meaningless.

• No, I’m not unaware that context, access, trauma, and luck all matter.

• Yes, I meant what I said.

• No, I did not mean the thing you imagined in a panic halfway through the second paragraph.

But I don’t do that. Because writing like that—feels like writing for someone I don’t respect.

It feels like writing for the exact reader who will not give me the same courtesy I’m trying to extend to them.

So I resist.

And then, predictably, I watch the same thing unfold in my email box, in the comments, in the Notes replies, in the paid subscriber DMs: the entire conversation gets derailed by responses to arguments I didn’t make, usually in defense of worldviews I was never attacking.

And I have to ask—are people just not reading carefully?

Like, are we really at the point where I need to bold and italicize the sentence that already says exactly what I meant?

Because sometimes it feels like people are skimming for offense. That we’ve arrived at a point where the purpose of reading, for most people, is now to find a trigger word and get triggered into making the writer responsible for, or at the very least expressing, their feelings.

Or maybe they’re reading with a kind of low-grade paranoia.

They see a keyword, feel a flicker of panic or ego flare-up, and then stop reading the essay I wrote and start arguing with the one they imagined I might have written if I were a worse person.

This is difficult to deal with, mostly because I am already pretty goddamn blunt about not being a particularly good person.

It’s not that they disagree.

It’s that they didn’t read.

And that makes it really hard to keep writing like the people on the other end are paying attention.

Maybe I’m Just Not That Good

Sometimes I wonder if the problem is me.

And I don’t mean that in a fishing-for-a-compliment kind of way. I mean it seriously: maybe I’m just not a good enough writer.

What I do here is weird. I know that.

I write about my own thoughts on whatever happens to be rattling around in my brain that day—drawing techniques, how our world is getting ready to normalize pedophilic evil, PTSD coping strategies, math pedagogy, Vermont travelogues, the ethics of social media, parasociality, how to not kill yourself, the collective psychological damage of the Woke world, how to keep low-level depression from turning into an Abyss that swallows you, how to understand a study even if you’re not a math nerd. Sometimes it’s a story, either fiction or real, like this one about the time I took a knife to

Josh Slocum

. Sometimes it’s a rant, about bad drivers or fraudsters or morons who refuse to see the truth about men like Glenn Greenwald. Sometimes it’s a notebook page I forgot to edit, or a riff on how ridiculous it is that we non-Woke types have a media institution that we turn to for emotional succor in our hatred of media institutions.

There aren’t a lot of writers whose genre is basically: be entertained, I hope, by my thoughts.

And maybe there’s just no way to do that well.

Maybe writing that tries to braid personal experience, cultural critique, and practical advice all together in the same piece is doomed to be misread by definition—because it asks too much.

It’s not prescriptive enough to be a how-to. It’s not detached enough to be commentary. It’s not tidy enough to be memoir. So maybe when people react to ghosts that aren’t in the essay, it’s because I accidentally conjured them through poor craft.

Maybe I left the door open by being too fuzzy, or too undisciplined, or just not good enough—yet—to do this genre justice.

I hope that’s not it. I hope this frustration doesn’t stem from having taken on something beyond my current skill level, and failing to grow into it despite a lot of effort—because if the thesis I just staked everything on is true, then I should be able to get there. Not through magic. Not through talent. But through time, and practice, and work.

And if I can’t?

Then maybe I’ve proved myself wrong. Maybe success in this genre would require more than work and patience.

But then again — I see the same thing happen to my friend Josh all the time. He’s one of the smartest, funniest, most clear-eyed writers I know, and his comment sections are always full of people reacting to some alternate-universe version of his piece that he absolutely did not write. It’s uncanny. And it gives me hope that maybe it’s not a “me” problem, but a genre problem.

But then again, Josh is also screwed up in many of the same ways I am.

So…who knows?

Maybe we’re both just doing it wrong.

I Write for Adults (Or at Least for Kids Who Can Hang)

My mental model, when I write, is often this: I imagine I’m talking to a smart kid. Not a genius, not a prodigy—just a bright, curious, thoughtful twelve-year-old who asks good questions and has the capacity to think things through if you trust them enough to let them.

And I try to write with the kind of respect I’d give that kid.

So if it’s something I would respect them too much to say—like “you need legs to be a runner” or “deaf people probably can’t sing opera professionally”—then I don’t want to insult you by spelling it out either.

It feels gross. Condescending. Like I’m preemptively assuming you need to be walked through something obvious and literal before you can engage with the real point.

Same goes for over-clarifying things that are already in the text. In the essay I wrote about skill and effort, I said that people could reach unimaginable levels of ability through patience and practice—that I, personally, had done that with drawing, and that most people underestimate what’s possible for them.

Nowhere did I say or imply that I was 2025’s answer to Leonardo da Vinci or that you could become Mozart by sheer force of will. Nowhere did I imply that anyone who tries hard enough should expect to be hanging in the MoMA.

I said that extraordinary skill is possible—not that genius is inevitable.

Did I really need to clarify that more?

God, maybe I did.

Maybe the modern reading brain needs things broken down like a standardized test passage—main idea here, vocabulary word in bold, supporting details underlined, with a little box at the end that says “Quick Review!”

But I hate writing that way.

And I wouldn’t talk to a smart kid that way, either. If I knew they were capable of grappling with ideas, I wouldn’t insult them by repeating myself fifteen times just to be sure they didn’t mistake “most people can get better than they dared imagine possible” for “everyone can be Mozart.”

So when grown-ass adults miss the point that badly—when they latch onto the dumbest possible reading and treat it like some devastating gotcha—I honestly don’t know what to do with that.

Explain more?

Or trust the readers who did get it, and keep writing for them?

That’s the tension I live in every time I sit down to write.

The Thing That Scares Me Most

This—this exact pattern—is one of the things I think about more than almost anything else.

Not just the dumb replies. Not just the people who argue with ghosts. But what it means that this happens so predictably.

What it means for all of us—including me.

Because here’s the thing: I don’t think this is just a literacy problem. Or a reading comprehension issue. Or even a tone-policing reflex, though it includes all of those. I think it’s a symptom. A deep one.

The internet is general, but social media in particular, is making people stupid. Objectively, quantifiably moronic.

That’s not a hot take—it’s just true.

And I don’t just mean “them.” I mean me too.

Getting off Twitter completely was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my brain. Within a few months, my attention span had improved so much I stopped needing Ritalin. That’s not a metaphor. I actually stopped the medication because my brain was functioning better without it.

Which makes me wonder—what else am I still doing that’s making me stupid?

What other low-grade digital poisons have I just accepted as the cost of being alive in 2025?

Because if reading Twitter could warp my brain that badly—and I was aware of it, and actively fighting it—what else am I missing?

And more importantly: if I, a person who obsesses over this, who rewrites every sentence until the rhythm feels right, who takes enormous care with every phrase I write—if I can still see my attention slipping, my patience shortening, my interpretive generosity drying up—what’s happening to people who don’t even notice it?

What’s happening to readers who spend hours a day on platforms specifically designed to make careful reading feel slow, annoying, or even suspicious?

Sometimes, when I look at the responses I get, it doesn’t feel like I’m being misunderstood.

It feels like I’m watching comprehension decay in real time.

It feels like I woke up in Idiocracy having read the script and now I’m wandering around trying to figure out how to turn the set back into the real world.

Like people are forgetting how to read—not the letters, but the subtext, the structure, the signal underneath the words. The human behind the paragraph.

And if that’s the direction we’re headed—if even thoughtful, curious readers are slowly losing the capacity to sit with a complicated idea without flattening it into outrage fuel or defensive panic—then I don’t know what happens to writing like mine.

I don’t know if there will still be a place for it.

Because I can see what the internet is doing to the people who read my work.

And the part that scares me most?

It’s doing it to me, too.

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Personal Update

I recently got both anaplasmosis and Lyme Disease from an infected tick bite. I’m fine now — Doxycycline is powerful stuff — but it also messed with my head, stomach, and ability to sleep. And I barely got any work-work done while I was on it. (I’m not complaining; both of those tickborne illnesses are potential kidney destroyers. An unproductive week is an incredibly small price to pay.)

I also have a drawing commission to complete. (You can see some of my drawings here.) Commissions are one of the more fun ways I chip away at my student loan debt — and so are you, if you're one of the kind people supporting this Substack with a paid subscription. Truly. Every time I’m able to throw a little extra at my loans because of this space we’ve built together (which sounds cheesy, but is still true) I feel a real, chest-deep wave of gratitude. Thank you for making that possible.

Even when the comment section inevitably turns into a Rorschach test for internet reading comprehension, I’m still grateful. For the readers who get it. For the ones who don’t, but try. Even for the ones who miss the point entirely but stick around anyway—because you're still here, still thinking, still engaging. And that means a lot.

So this post will be it for about a week. Over the long July 4 weekend, I’ve got two Vermont 251 travelogues to finish—one of which included a fun adventure, and the other of which I have some great photos for.

See you in a week.

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