About me and my goals

I filled out an application for a writing course recently, and it required me to write some essays about my career and goals. So I thought I’d share them with you. They were clarifying to write, and I don’t want them to go to waste (I’m probably not getting in).

Here’s the gist:

Who I am

I’m a writer. I always have been and always will be. My entire job, my entire existence really, is about becoming more right and communicating what I learn effectively. There are people who are good at incorporating new information into their worldviews. And there are people who are good at communicating complex ideas. Rarely do these two skills overlap. But I am good at both. 

We live in a country that distributes wealth upwards, ensures productivity gains only accrue to the top half of earners, provides no real social safety net, and creates laws and a legal system designed to disproportionately target minority and low-income Americans and ensure they’re never able to establish economic security. We live in a country where economic mobility is declining, and has been for decades. 

I’m fascinated by the way the culture wars distract the bottom half of earners from the macroeconomic trends that have caused them to experience intergenerational downward mobility, rising rates of “deaths of despair,” and societal alienation while the top half of earners consumes a larger and larger portion of wealth and income and experience only improving health and life expectancy. Not only do culture wars distract the bottom half of earners, but they cause them to fight each other bitterly, making them even less of a threat to the top half. 

My goal in life is to erode unearned power. I believe I can do this best by more fully understanding how and why unearned power accumulates and explaining it to people who can fight it effectively.

I’m especially interested in the way people use sex to accumulate power and control. I’m interested in the ways fear, suspicion, and superstition around sex results from and exacerbates unfair, unhelpful power differentials. 

I’m fascinated by the way legislators are able to use moral panics to justify massive violations of Americans’ civil liberties. No doubt online sex trafficking and child sex abuse are horrible crimes. But the evidence to suggest the rates at which they occur are increasing is sparse and highly suspect. Worse, the legislative cures proposed to fight them are generally totally useless to stopping them and often cause their own permanent damage. 

I want to learn how to communicate more effectively in order to more quickly fight the power structures that lock half of Americans out of economic opportunity and hamper economic growth. 

What I’m doing

I’m the Founder and CEO of Sex and the State, a newsletter that seeks to inform people about power, especially as it relates to sex and policy. My job is to inform, persuade, and activate my audience of 6,700 subscribers. It’s also to grow my audience. 

To inform, persuade, and activate my audience I need to be able to accurately determine what matters.

Too much media is focused on writing what people will click on or share. I see it as my job to decide what people should care about.

A lot of my work is about getting beyond the ingroupist thinking and fighting, past the details of any particular election or campaign, and one level deeper. Let’s examine where we want society and the economy to go. Let’s examine how power operates. And then let’s look at whether or not the policies and norms we’ve set up are likely, based on the data we have, to get us where we want to go. 

It’s also my job to know what people should do to make a difference toward eroding unearned power. It doesn’t change the world to merely inform people about injustice. You must also show them how to fight it. I enjoy examining and evaluating policies to see whether they’re working and suggesting fixes. 

To know what matters, I find and follow people doing good work in the spaces I care about, read widely, and engage substantively with subject-matter experts. Then in my newsletter I translate what I learn into a form my audience can understand and be persuaded by. 

I use social media to follow and engage with subject-matter experts and attract new people to my newsletter. I do this by connecting things that matter to what people are already talking about, engaging with smart people, and finding the humor and entertainment in serious topics. 

My long-term career goal

My long-term career goal is to spend every productive second of my life in some way directly fighting to erode unearned power. I want to spend every productive second fighting unnecessary and unscientific fear, stigma, and superstition around sex. I want to spend every productive second fighting bad policies, including policies that transfer wealth from poor to rich, lock people out of opportunity, entrench incumbents, prevent economic mobility, and deprive people of their civil liberties. 

I want to look back at my life and know I did everything I could to make this country fairer, more reasonable, kinder, and wealthier. I want to spend my days finding unfair, unproductive policies and explaining to the people who can fight to change them what they should look like instead. 

I want people to understand that sex is inherently morally neutral. I want them to understand that they don’t need to be ashamed of any consensual behavior. I want them to understand that it’s not consensual behavior that’s causing them distress. It’s the circumstances foisted upon them by their government that’s making them poor, lonely, and hopeless. I want them to understand that sex and drugs and pornography can exacerbate suffering, sure. But they don’t cause it. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy relationships with value-neutral things. People in power love to be further empowered to violate our civil liberties to prevent us from producing and enjoying all kinds of things. They want us to blame ourselves and each other for our misery and look to them for help. But the only help they offer is violence. And violence doesn’t solve the underlying problems. It only exacerbates them. 

Prohibition doesn’t work. Perpetrating violence against people for consensual behavior only creates more violence, poverty, and misery. The only effective way to fight misery is with love, help, and compassion. I have grown to understand this. I didn’t always understand it. I want everyone to understand it. My reason for living is to help people understand the things I’ve learned so they can better fight injustice and unearned power.