The problem with this article is that it allows the word 'writing' to cover so much ground it means practically nothing; butter spread over too much toast. It's like talking about the "market for painters" and never clarifying if you mean the Home Depot kind of the Van Gogh kind (or for that matter, the guy operating the enamel sprayer at the Le Cruset factory.)

When 'writing' is understood in a more limited context, this article is fine. Clickbait writing is a terrible career, precisely because of the economics the author describes. Yet this says nothing about, say, doing longform journalism --- well, that's at terrible career as well, most likely, but probably for very different reasons than the ones this article plumbs: not because "writing doesn't scale" (the author bemoans not being able to produce more than five or six articles an hour!) but because _creating truth and beauty has always been a renumeratively thankless task._

While there are eras (the heyday of rock n roll for music; the heyday of Condé-Nast-style longform journalism) and people (Leonard Cohen; Ta-Nehisi Coates) that prove there are exceptions to the rule, it remains a truism that unregulated markets, in general, are bad at nurturing minds. This is why universities and musical conservatories were created in the first place. Get thee to a faculty!

It does not surprise me that the author wound up in fintech -- that sounds like a great fit, actually, for someone who explicitly experiences 'writing' (or what the author experiences as writing) as analogous to iron mining. No shade thrown either: that's a valuable mindset! But it's not the one that produces (sparkle emoji) Writing (sparkle emoji).