Besides the fact that I work hours on end everyday doing something that I really couldn't care less about, to make money to pay rents and buy things that allow me to keep doing what I really couldn't care less about, there is the matter of having one's work appreciated by one's peers, and having one's work serving some use in the world, even if one doesn't care about it.
A fairly-sized chunk of economic activity in the US especially is nonsense work, constant work to manipulate symbols of desire or power obfuscation, or mere accounting gimmicks which shift around fictional value, or support work which administrates and perfects this nonsense activity.
SEO writing is essentially semantic and syntactic finagling to manipulate search engine algorithms, funneling unassuming web surfers into the virtual stores of whomever can afford to do more finagling than others, web stores that are themselves usually expressions of manipulative, intermediary economic power, which also usually rest on suppressed labor, either within our borders or outside of our borders in places that are made stable by our military or our economic clout.
The search algorithms are always changing, and there are a bunch of tech writers out there whose jobs entail sitting around gabbing about these phantom algorithms and whether the latest techniques are working. No one really knows. When it comes down to it, the harder you sell, the better. As always. When people keep having bright shiny things waved in their face, they eventually buy the things to make the hawkers shut up.
Then there's the matter of peer appreciation. A lot of this nonsense activity can't exist on its own; it depends on expanding economies and other factors far outside its scope. So of course you find yourself amidst these nonsense efficiency maximizing regimes which are designed to make more efficient the nonsense work, setting aside actual economic conditions, and your work is judged in accordance with these regimes. For example, keyword placement, paragraph structures, repetition, images, and etc. Funnel in the visitors better. If people don't have money to buy anything, then you're not funneling hard enough!
Every new editor that is hired has a different idea of how this regime should work, and really no one knows how it should work anyways, so it usually amounts to lots of trial and error and dumb luck, which is always fleeting in the first place. So you're constantly getting work back, along with "this doesn't match our content standards, so we can't pay you full" and this and that. One could imagine these poor editors sitting in their homes or running around the office, tearing at their hair, pinching their brows, going mad from these endless contradictory signals. Most people think within the confines of their limited fiefdoms, running on the old hamster wheel twice as fast to keep things running as the greater system contracts. This is what drives some people mad.
It is a lot of imaginary problem solving, and you just sort of go along with it to keep getting paid. Maybe someone should look at search engine monopolies, or better yet, start fixing the problems that are keeping people from buying the useless junk. But that's just me.
To subsist, you just have to jump through the nonsense hoops, while doing what you think is important at the same time. It takes a little finesse, but it can be done. All of this is supposed to be dignifying of course. Stand tall, you rugged individual!
The more I think of this, the more absurd and hilarious it all seems. But these are people's lives. And mine I guess. And we're burning up a lot of precious energy, doing what exactly?
To subsist, you just have to jump through the nonsense hoops, while doing what you think is important at the same time. It takes a little finesse, but it can be done. All of this is supposed to be dignifying of course. Stand tall, you rugged individual!
The more I think of this, the more absurd and hilarious it all seems. But these are people's lives. And mine I guess. And we're burning up a lot of precious energy, doing what exactly?
