The December Solstice Newsletter.

Looking back at this year.

What is the best way to beg for money during the holiday season? There are a few options:

• Silly. Amos Wollen is good at this, and it caused me to pay him $40, so the empirical evidence favors this approach.

• Desperate. I have a passive-aggressive desire to assault my audience with complaining, so my instincts push me toward this option.

• Professional. “Begging” is not professional. Maybe I could be the generous one, and offer a special holiday massive 50% discount instead.

• Quantitative. I could lay out a pedantic quasi-utilitarian case, using the Labor Theory of Value, for why I deserve your financial support, by demonstrating in meticulous detail how many hundreds of hours I have sunk into this blog.

Maybe a combination of all four, just to hedge my bets.

The Quantitative Case

Normally I paywall all my data and statistics, but if I need to make a quantitative case for why the Labor Theory of Value demands your support, I will have to unveil my secret numbers to the public:

Since I started keeping track on January 21st, I have published 728,208 words. That’s a lot of words.

Two years ago, I started a writing project with a friend in Telegram. We wrote 1,000 words a day, every day, for 30 days. It took at least 30 hours of work. Considering that I had a job at the time which paid me $70k a year, and since I really only worked 20 hours a week (that’s a stretch), I was earning around $67.31 an hour. At the time, that writing project was worth $2,019.30 to me.

Unfortunately, Telegram has an option where you can delete the conversion for the other person. My $2,000 dollars of writing disappeared! I held a grumpy grudge about this for a long time (a year).

Since I decided to become a writer, I published 728,208 words this year. That dwarfs my old grudge by a factor of 24x. This Substack, accordingly, is worth $48,463 (at least to me).

Here’s every single paycheck I’ve received from Substack since January 21st:

Here’s what that looks like in cumulative terms:

Here’s what that comes out to as an “average earned per day”:

This is my 240th article on Substack. I’m earning about $10.03 per article, or $3.31 for every 1,000 words.

I could earn more, at minimum wage, by doing 1 hour of work a day at McDonalds.

According to some random article I googled on LinkedIn (the foundation of all certain knowledge), the lowest pay rate for writers is $0.03 per word, or $30 for 1,000 words. I am currently at 10% of the bottom of the barrel. You can tell that I get a sick satisfaction out of this!

I am making slightly less than the average Nicaraguan. Although the cost of living is probably much lower in Nicaragua than America.

My original goal was to hit $10k this year off writing. Once I realized this goal was impossible to meet, I learned to stop worrying, and Love the Bomb.

When you have duties and responsibilities to other people, not earning money has negative externalities. But if my writing turns out to be meaningful, it will be worth the economic hit to my livelihood and personal relationships.

be generous, as life is short.

I was Christmas shopping, and wanted to buy a friend a present for $400. My credit card declined four times, because my bank marked the purchase as “suspicious,” so now I don’t think the gift will ship in time. It was as if my bank knew, “hey, you aren't normally this generous to people. Did you get hacked or something?”

Yes, I am not normally that generous, but this year, I decided to adopt the motto, “this might be your last year on Earth.” If I were to die in a few months in a car crash, and my soul were to float around, haunting the halls of purgatory or Hades or Sheol, how would I feel about my frugality?

“That $400 sure came in useful here in purgatory! Definitely a wise choice to not be generous!”

No, of course not. I would kick myself (if my ghost had the legs to kick) for not being generous to a friend who was generous toward me. And this would bring a tear to my eye (if my ghost eyes had tear ducts).

Friends, let us be generous toward one another.

What’s behind the paywall?

Every month on the 21st I go over my:

• monthly word count

  • whether it went up or down and why

• how much money i make

• paid subscribers

• total subscribers

• my best article

• monthly traffic

• which states and countries are poppin’

• which blogs have the most audience overlap with me

• my 3 goals for April 18th

  • how far I’ve come, how close I am, whether I’m on track or not

• a broad overview of my personal journal

If that all sounds exceedingly boring to you, don’t worry. I post paywalled articles on the 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, and 25th of every month. None of those are statistical; some are fictional. Plus, in addition to the promise of new paywalled content, you get all my old paywalled content too.

Let’s jump in!