You're In The Right Place, At the Right Time
Every year, usually sometime in December, I ask myself the same question: do I actually want to keep doing this? And every year the answer arrives uninvited like the guy at the party no one seems to know. Whatever I’m doing here, it’s working. Not in the Silicon Valley sense of "working", but in the more disorienting, harder-to-measure way where you suddenly realize you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. This year, more than any since I started Dead End Follies in 2009, that feeling was impossible to ignore.
At the end of 2024, I gave myself five rules for the year. They weren’t resolutions, because resolutions imply a belief in personal reinvention. These were more like guardrails,ways to keep myself from drifting into habits that feel productive but are actually just familiar.
No Marvel or Star Wars. I almost pulled it off, which probably says more about the cultural gravity of those franchises than it does about my willpower. I might've learned my lesson this time around, though.
Never dismiss something as "boring" unless I’m willing to explain exactly what I mean by this nasty little word and how I’m using it. I’m fairly certain I observed this one, mostly because "boring" is a lazy insult that disguises confusion as authority.
Let’s come back to this.
Stop paying attention instead of criticizing. This one was harder than it sounds. Ignoring something feels passive, but it’s actually an active choice and sometimes the most honest form of criticism available.
Find like-minded people and engage with what they love, especially when it falls outside my usual comfort zone. This was easily the toughest rule, and the one I failed most visibly. But it doesn't mean that I didn't progress, though.
About rule number three: slow down. Challenge yourself.
This one worked better than anything ever has in the entire history of this site, which is not a sentence I say lightly or retroactively. I’m fairly certain I’m a better critic now than I’ve ever been, not because my opinions changed, but because my methods did. I work on more pieces at once. I write over longer stretches of time. And, maybe most importantly, I now let my work move forward through trusted feedback instead of sheer momentum.
None of what you’re reading here is a first draft anymore. Not even a second. Dead End Follies takes up more time and more mental space in my life than it used to, but paradoxically, that labor almost never announces itself. Everything tends to arrive ready all at once for you to read, which can make the process seem effortless from the outside. It isn’t.
The work is better now. I know that with a confidence that doesn’t require defensiveness. And yet, it doesn’t feel radically different while I’m doing it. It still feels like I’m circling something just out of reach, suspended in that familiar state where progress registers intellectually before it ever feels emotional. I’m still on the cusp of something. I just trust the cusp more than I used to.
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Three years ago, after my grandmother died, I told my mother she needed to squash whatever unresolved conflict she had with my aunt. My reasoning felt airtight at the time: my grandmother was gone, and they were both still alive,though not necessarily for as long as we like to pretend. She didn’t respond, so I pressed her. I asked what she thought about what I’d just said.
Her answer caught me off guard. "I think these are just nice-sounding, ready-made formulas meant to make me feel better and push me toward doing something you’ve already decided is right."
Obviously, she was hurting. She and my father had carried the weight of my grandmother’s death largely on their own and I wasn’t blind to that. But she also put her finger on something uncomfortable and true: words don’t mean anything just because they sound correct. If they remain words.if they never change how you act, decide, or endure.they’re just verbal furniture. Comforting, maybe. Decorative, even.
Words only become something else when you allow them to alter your behavior. When you let them leak into the real world and rearrange how you move through it. At that point, they stop being explanations and start functioning like spells meant to change the shape of reality itself, in the way Alan Moore once claimed they could.
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So I decided something in the middle of writing this year-end editorial, which is usually where decisions like this actually get made. Dead End Follies is as successful as it can reasonably be for a project run by someone who is virtually unknown and barely even trying on social media anymore. People keep finding the site anyway—through Google, through links, through side doors I didn’t install myself. In 2025, 132,000 of you showed up.
That number is negligible in commercial terms and strangely enormous in every other way. I do feel seen. Just not consistently, and not always in the ways the internet tells you visibility is supposed to work. I still want to do cultural criticism. I just don’t want to keep doing it the same way.
So here are my five least abstract and most ambitious rules yet, for 2025:
1) Write a book. As someone I won’t name once said, there is no try. I’ve been meaning to write a book about how anger, heartbreak, and sadness interlock in modern songwriting for over a year, which is another way of saying I’ve been thinking about it instead of doing it. This time, I’m giving myself twelve months to produce a sellable draft. Thinking time is over.
2) Monetize. Dead End Follies has existed for a long time on the assumption that seriousness and money shouldn’t touch. That assumption no longer feels virtuous; it just feels limiting. The first step will be moving the newsletter from Mailchimp to Substack and reshaping it to offer something more deliberate. I’ll probably launch a very basic Patreon at some point, starting at a dollar a month. Nothing dramatic. Just a way to acknowledge that value and support don’t have to be abstract concepts.
3) Prioritize one social media platform and automate the rest. It will most likely be Instagram, because it’s familiar, flexible, and doesn’t require me to pretend I enjoy platforms I clearly don’t. If you’re looking for me, that’s where I’ll be.
4) Collaborate with other critics. This will likely start with Instagram Live conversations, because talking still feels more human than posting. Cultural criticism is supposed to be a community, or at least adjacent to one, and building that can’t always be someone else’s responsibility.
5) Embrace liminality. I exist and I don’t at the same time, and that’s fine. People can have a relationship with my work without me having a relationship with them. If you read one or two articles this year and never came back, that’s okay. I genuinely appreciate you. I also reserve the right to lure you back later.
You’re in the right place, at the right time. So am I. This is who I am, and this is where I want to be.
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