2026 is a Golden Age For Writers

God bless us, everyone.

I think it’s Friday, but I can’t be sure because some fucking wombat fuck stole my watch earlier and now I’m without time.

And I’m ghostwriting three articles for an unnamed Substacker, and he keeps asking if I use AI. Thing is, I tell him, you already use AI and you’re supremely unhappy with the work. And not because it’s poor writing. The problem is that it’s good writing. The sentences are grammatically perfect. Everything flows as it should per Shrunk & Dexter or whatever that fucking book is.

And it’s boring as fuck.

Thing about AI is, it learns your patterns and mimics them. So if you’re fucking boring, AI can’t fix that, it can only mimic it. Hence, you still need to hire someone whose writing is funny and unusual and uncharacteristically human, flawed and filled with made-up words and grammar.

Anyway, he just got back to me with three more articles, the chump.

So now I just find myself writing anonymously about Bitcoin and Epstein and the new Forrest Gump film: Lieutenant Dan grows new fucking legs with stem cells. And yeah, the money’s alright. It’s sort of local brothel-level money, not Seven-Eleven herpes prostitution.

But still, I’m not overly chuffed and grateful about being in the ‘golden age for writing’.

To me, it’s more like the golden shower age. And its not a well hydrated one either. It’s the age of post-salty lunch, deep copper piss from a man called Eugene in the bath of a crusty motel somewhere outside Wagga Wagga.

Sure, it’s easier to type on the page and ‘get your work out there.’ But the pay off of being out there is to drown like Brian Jones in a giant swimming pool of mediocrity.

Substack lets any fucker become a writer no matter how shit they are, which means there’s thirty million ‘writers’ because now anyone can do it. And at least a portion of that is ‘AI-assisted’, whatever that means. It’s like getting a handjob off a hooker and telling your wife you had some assistance. Just because you didn’t fuck doesn’t mean your wife should be happy about it.

And no, don’t start with me with all your positive-thinking shite about how writers are good marketers and they’re resilient and disciplined and all that. I don’t want to hear it.

A few months ago, some goose contacted me through Substack messages and goes,

Hey, Frank. Wanna put each other in our recommended lists?

And on further investigation I noticed the person had 25k followers, and that greedy albino marmot in my head goes,

Fuck, ya could be rich. Ya could be lying on a beach in Marbella sipping on a Dubai chocolate smoothie from a local hooker’s colon while you write your weekly Substack article and live freely. All you have to do is recommend this dingbat.

The trouble was, his writing was fucking turd. It was worse than turd. It was that 2026 traditionalist male, bible reading, seagull shitshake swigging, grenade launcher in the basement fucking voice. And that voice was #5 in humour.

And I wondered if his 25k followers had come from thousands of messages like this to unsuspecting gonads.

So I politely declined.

This is just one of the depressing scenarios that you have to deal with in 2026.

Substack is meant to make things better for writers, but instead it elevates people who can’t write into writers based on their marketing skills. And those that can write end up fucking drowning in a sea of mediocre writing.

And yeah, you could always sell your soul and write about extreme politics. People love that. Or worse, you could teach people how to write and get famous on Substack, and in the process you might get famous on Substack. But what if you don’t want to do that? What if you want to keep producing content that you’re proud to put out there?

Well, you’re absolutely fucked then.

Sure, it’s a platform where you can write shit and have people read it. Sure, there’s another cock-rocket, bald bastard Doctor Evil platform where you can ‘self-publish’ and sell fuck-all books and have people go,

Hey, congratulations on the book. You’ve already gone further than most people.

But again, and especially with AI helping you, any fucker can go ahead, get ChatGPT to write their book, and publish it and collect their golden award at the golden awards dinner for writers who have already gone further than most people.

This is not the golden age of writing. It’s the worst time in history for writers.

And on paper it shouldn’t be. But it’s a time where anyone can fucking write, and that means you have to somehow find your place in a field of sixteen million ‘writers’. You know what I mean? And no, we aren’t talking about AI anymore. I’m sick of going on about it.

Let’s talk about my new TV instead.

We’re in this store called ‘Harvey Norman’, looking at massive TVs since we lent ours out in one of my spontaneous charitable gestures, which my wife calls moments of charitable insanity. To be fair, it wasn’t big enough anyway. It was only forty-two inches. And in these times of grease and excess, we need at least sixty inches of television.

“That’s ten average white cocks,” I say a little too loud as the salesman rumbles over.

He looks like the ghost of JFK but with bleached hair, and an overly generous moustache. He looks like the kind of guy that rides a skateboard in his forties with his socks pulled up too high and a neck tattoo that looks like a ballsack with a monocle.

“I’d say it’s probably closer to eight,” he says, holding out his hand to shake. It takes me by surprise. I’d never expect such subtle and quick humour from a TV salesman who looks like he played drums in a band called Everhard in 2005.

“Mike,” he says as I shake his cold, bony, tattooed wrist. I always judge people on how they shake hands. If they squeeze too hard, they are proving their manhood because they have a tiny manhood or their daddy told them that’s how a man shakes hands before he beat them with his polar bear leather belt.

Mike’s handshake is bony and cold, which I’m sure is from spending his days around electrical items, but it’s neither too soft nor too hard. It’s just a normal handshake, and combined with his swift humour, I subconsciously let him in emotionally.

“Frank,” I say. I turn around to introduce my wife but she’s taken off in pursuit of a soft-close microwave. And now I’m left to deal with this goon by myself.

“What do you do, Frank?” he says casually, like it’s his business because we’re standing in front of a large television with an over-the-top price tag.

I particularly hate the fucking question, and now I have to fucking talk. In a microsecond I assess that he must be in his forties and I judge him for his skater look, while viewing my own clothes in another all-black TV screen. For some reason I’m wearing a black polo shirt, woodland green trousers of some description, and generic farmer’s boots. And it’s a moment of realisation for me. I want to bypass his question and launch into a tirade about how he needs to grow up and start dressing conservatively like me. But instead I say something like,

“I’m a driver, Travis. That’s us now, isn’t it? The drum and bass youth, the ones who used to chew on pills in the days before pill testers and spit them up each other’s arses like psychedelic mother birds, are now wearing polo shirts and pullovers and driving vans and gradually losing themselves.”

“My name’s Mike,” he says with a look of concern in his eyes. “Erm, what kind of TV have you got now?”

I realised I called him Travis for some reason and I look around for my wife. She normally pulls me out of these things before they get out of hand, but she is nowhere.

“Look, Mike,” I say. “I gave our TV away while my wife was at work because my cousin was on the wrong medication and he took the coffee machine to his before throwing it off his balcony. But to be honest, I don’t watch much TV. I’m a writer, you see. I’ve written four books.”

Mike makes a face like he wants to exit the interaction as soon as possible. And it’s confirmed by his feet. One of the skills of a good salesman is to notice what people are doing with their feet. His are facing backwards.

“Oh, that’s great,” he says, feigning joy even though I see his neck vein bulging from the ballsack’s ballsack. “What kind of stuff do you write?”

And now we both want to exit the interaction, but it’s not that easy. I could just walk away mid-conversation. I’ve done it before many times. But it would be an offence to the guy’s humour. So I stay.

“Well, not kids’ books, that’s for sure,” I say. “Blyton is dead. She also got cancelled for that scene she wrote where Moon-Face was autoerotically asphyxiating himself from a branch of the Faraway Tree. And now Dick and Fanny have been renamed Derek and Patricia after two solicitors who live together in a broom cupboard in an exclusive part of London. Do you know what I mean?”

I can tell from his face that he doesn’t. And now I realise I’ve mentioned average white cocks and autoerotic asphyxiation into this guy’s tattooed ears, and he must think I’m some kind of deranged fiend.

“I’ll take it,” I say suddenly. It’s a stress reaction. And this television is $1800. But he isn’t laughing at my Blyton stuff and I just don’t know how else to get out of the situation.

And to you, $1800 might be fuck-all for a TV. You might spend that on a box of cigars and a bottle of 1941 pre-Nazi-era Penfolds Grange every Wednesday when the boys come over to watch Stacey Solomon’s ‘Fix It, You Fat Cunt’. But to me it’s a fuckton of cash. It’s my monthly rent.

So now I’m fucking broke again and I have to write more articles for this Substack ghost motherfucker.

He sent me an email yesterday saying how he wants to write about the downfall of Kevin Spacey, and I’m like, well, I dunno if I can do that because I fucking love Spacey and I like to separate artists from what they do in their private lives instead of cancelling them all like a fucking moron, because if I did I’d end up with absolutely fuck-all to watch or listen to. It’s all a bit selective too, like how just about every fucking band in the nineties was fucking fourteen-year-olds and you didn’t even have to go to some island to see it happening.

Anyway, the point is, I don’t want to write for this cunt but I need the cash. I’m no different to that one-eyed hooker behind Seven Eleven really, except I don’t have syphilis, I only have herpes, and it’s late stage so it only makes an appearance every four years like the World Cup.

And I’d show you these dark articles I’m writing but I can’t, because when you’re a phantom you just gotta let it go, then watch from a hole in the cupboard as people pour praise on the writer about how their writing is unique and insightful and funny, and meanwhile I’m looking at my own shit and going…

Well, let’s just leave it there, shall we?

It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.

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