To Rise Above By Sinking Below

Many people aspire to rise above their circumstances. In most cases it’s actually more helpful to sink below them. You might as well move in the direction of gravity. The techillionaire class think they can defy gravity, and they might for a time, but earth remains the point of origin for all of us, and she will be the final arbiter. For those of us who wish to stay in earth orbit, the gravity of our collective situation can be our friend. Those who continue to chase rocket fantasies of going to the moon and mars may just be suffering from a severe case of premature blastoffs. I think these space colonialist enterprises are rather untenable. Outer Space is a dangerous place to live and a major hail Mary isn’t likely to come from going to the stars.

Yet for all that, the desire to drive cybertrucks, crisscross the globe on jet setter vacations, get the bigger better house, eat performatively at fancy restaurants, show off designer clothes and fashion, and post about it all constantly on shallow media remains entrenched. As does the desire to gentrify a neighborhood by real estate sharks, turning profits by flipping shoddily remodeled homes, and pricing people out of the very places where they grew up. Seeing neighbors reach retirement, pay off their house, but then wonder how they will be able to afford the hike in property taxes and start to contemplate selling their house back to the real estate sharks who instigated the process and profit from it in the first place is very disconcerting.

I don’t think that means people shouldn’t aspire to better themselves; yet there has always been a difference between bettering one self and doing what you can to improve your circumstances, and the kind of social ladder climbing, and keeping up with the Jones family, whoever they are, that gets promoted by the overculture. One involves moving in the direction of personal growth and mastery, the slow but steady establishment of a healthy lifestyle by putting down strong roots, growing up sturdy shoots, and sharing the fruits of the harvest. The other is more like the game of accumulation and hoarding with the end purpose of declaring “he who has the most toys wins.”
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Dropping out of the rat race has always been an option too. Getting left behind in the race is another thing that tends to happen, especially when a good chunk of the people doing the racing are optimizing their psychotic performance with a slew of hacks, drugs and schemes to keep their foothold on the rung above so that they have an easier time kicking down at the people on the rung below. Since that is so often the case, it seems to me that there are better things to do and other options than climbing up that ladder.

Even getting a foothold in terms of a living wage that allows a person the kind of slack necessary to put some away for rainy days is getting more difficult. For those who have been working for some time, their wages may have gone up over time, but so has everything else. For others, it’s a constant scramble and shuffling between many different jobs. Loyalty to an institution or business over the long is often gone, but the worker is not to be blamed, when the institutions and businesses haven’t upheld their own half of the loyalty.

I do think small is beautiful, but shrinkflation means the bag of chips you used to get for two bucks now costs five. I’m not sure if that is what E. F. Schumacher was talking about. One hundred bucks or so at the grocery store in the year 2001 used to fill up an entire grocery cart with juice, vegetables, beer, wine, and enough paycheck leftover to even buy some weed, go out to a couple local shows and drink it up with some friends, while still getting the bills paid. That was my lifestyle when I became a shelver at the library at age 21. I was not really bringing home a lot on my paycheck, but it went much further. Now all these years later that same amount of money will barely fill up two ripped plastic bags from Kroger. Most of the food we buy isn’t even for us, but for our lazy lay-about pets.

Speaking of pets, have you been to the vet lately? It really seems like the cost of having a pet has skyrocketed. It used to be you could just go to the vet and buy your annual doses of flea medicine without taking the pet in to be seen. Now, they have realized they can get some more money out of you by making you take the pet for an eighty-dollar checkup (minimum) so they can get that charge before selling you something that could easily have gotten without the extra visit. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t take pets in for check-ups, especially as they age, but all the added costs and hidden fees have made it very expensive to be a responsible pet owner. And owning a pet is one of the main joys people get out of life. For people who otherwise live alone, or who have had any kind of trauma or PTSD, dogs and cats are lifelines to emotional well-being. Who hasn’t undergone some kind of trauma? Paying your dues to life with harsh experience is par for the course, but its often made harsher by the exploitative arrangements put in place by insufferable elites. I remember when there were more affordable pet clinics in the area, and they didn’t try to rip you off by making you join some shady “Care Club” plan that really just extracted money from your bank account each month without offering too many more services than you would have paid if you paid as you went for each needful service.

The same is true for certain kinds of self-care. For over a decade my wife and I took Pilates together. I really like Pilates, and we had one of the best teachers in the city (and she remains one of the best). What I write is not a criticism of her. As friends we always got a deal, for which we remain grateful. As her business took off, the price was raised here and there, but we were always appreciative of her willingness to be grandfathered on the lower price tier. Eventually as our lives changed, we decided to mix things up and join a gym for the same price the two of us were paying to do one Pilates class a week together. At the healthplex we can go as much as we want, and to be honest, the hot tub and sauna were big selling points for us. My parents go there, and some of my friends from my ham radio club too, so the place has some friendly faces we see, and we’re starting to make some other friends in that third place.

We miss the Pilates class though. All that good deep stretching and breath. There is a Pilates class offered through the gym, but it is extra on top of the membership. Pilates is great exercise, and but I don’t know why it costs as much as it does, especially for basic group mat classes. It seems to me that, if you had the space and the time as a teacher, the cost of the class could be cut by a certain amount to bring in more people. That would make up for what you lost by having less people at a higher price point, by bringing in more bodies at lower rate. Yet, if more people came in the door, the difference might not be too much, and you’d be doing a service by helping more people get healthy and stay healthy, get in touch with their bodies. This work would also contribute to preventive healthcare, which would in turn contribute to general wellbeing among many.
But for many, that is a no go if it means you have to skip going on a fancy overseas vacation, or have to drive an older used car.

The main reason the cost of Pilates and similar types of services are kept higher than they need to be is pure elitism. Pilates is generally pricier than yoga, but it appeals to a similar kind of elite mindset where the people with means can pay the money to pamper themselves with “self-care.” There is nothing in the physical movements themselves that are elite, only the way it gets marketed. Why not bring in more people to cheaper classes? This is something the Pilates teacher at the gym had talked to my wife about as well, so I know there are teachers who want to lower the cost. And they could, but the people who go to Pilates to feel smug in their self-care wouldn’t like it so much if the great unwashed started coming in to the studio to stretch out after a day of hard work.

I don’t really know how many people in whatever is left of the working classes would take Pilates anyway. I think they might if it wasn’t marked up and if it was portrayed without its elitist trappings. The physical culture enthusiast might give it a shot if it wasn’t priced above what they could afford.
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And so, it is with many other things. Including the subscription model.

​The unmitigated greed of the techillionaires is on full display with the software subscription model. Microsoft should really be paying other people to use their products than the other way around, but I won’t get into that at the moment. Subscribing to the Office suite, or to Adobe products or the like, instead of being able to just buy a copy of the software, and keep it running for as long as you can, on machines that also you keep running for as long as you can, without upgrading with each available update, unless you want to, seems to have gone by the wayside. It serves the same function as the planned obsolescence of consumer products that are built to shit with every passing iteration.

​The same factors are of course at work on the internet as well. Paywalled subslacks keep curious readers out. I’m a writer myself, in case you haven’t noticed, and I don’t have anything against being compensated for my work, because as much as I enjoy writing, it is still work, and I have to fit this work around my bill paying job, around my marriage, family and social life. I love to write, so I am very motivated to make the time.

​I also like to share my work.

For a long time though, I was resistant to setting up my own subslack publication. I had my own website after all, sothismedias.com, but to be honest, I didn’t have many regular readers, and if I did, most of them were pretty quiet. I think had to do with the fact that it was in the now old school blog format. I do have some dedicated readers over there of course (thank you!) but without the social media aspect, I didn’t have as many readers as I could have. I haven’t ever had a facebook account, and I don’t plan on signing up for anything meta, unless its metaphysics. I was only twitter for long enough to get ADHD (really quickly) and then delete that account. Mostly I’ve hung out online in blogs, forums and listservs around topics that interest me. Sometimes on reddit. Anyway, I came over to subslack first as a reader, and had one article published I was commissioned to write by a group slack called Return. That what caused me to set up my initial account. They’re gone, but I stayed, and I admit I got a bit of an addiction to Notes in the process. That was one of the things I was wary about with social media: the addictive aspect, and I can self report that it is true here too. I started by posting links to the articles I wrote for Sothis Medias site in Notes, thinking I could parasitize the platform, but with not much traffic. At the beginning of 2026, I decided to start my own subslack and cross-post my articles to both my own website and here. I am definitely getting more engaged readers on subslack and it costs me nothing except my time and effort, whereas the website actually costs me money to run. I imagine some people in the same situation might shut down the website, but I will keep my website because if this place goes through a real enshittification, as platforms are known to do, I’ll still have my other site. Plus there are a lot of articles up there, that have never come over to subslack.

Because I have a site where there has never been a fee to read, I thought here I would never put up a paywall on subslack. I am still committed to that. As a writer I suffer from obscurity, being a needle in the haystack, a signal lost in noise, much more than I would suffer from missing out on money I couldn’t account for anyway.
Also, and to main point of this entire rant, everything is so fucking expensive. I don’t want to charge people who can’t afford to read me. I work at library, and the library has always offered free internet services for those left behind in our ladder climbing so that they can access the services that are more online, that more and more they make it hard to do without a smartphone. From the beginning I have been concerned about the subscription model of internet content. In the library you can read all kinds of material for free. The creators of things still get something from that, because the library purchases them, but I don’t know yet of libraries that purchase subslack subscriptions so their patrons can read them. They do purchase group Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other kinds of subs that can be accessed through the library gateway. What a deal! Lamestream media, being as lowly regarded as it is, means though, that often the best articles are somewhere on a place like subslack. It’s a shame when a writer won’t be discovered by a potential reader when their work is behind that wall.

My main goal in my own writing is to put out things that I enjoy writing and others will enjoy reading anyway. That there are people willing to follow me through of my own particular obsessions and quirks, is still quite amazing. Thank you all who have joined me. When I set up my subslack, I wanted to set all the prices as cheap as possible in case their were people who wanted to support my work, even though I offer it for free. I was hoping I could set the monthly price to a dollar, but the lowest it can be set is to five dollars, and so I left it at that, with a steep discount for anyone who wanted to contribute to my bohemian lifestyle by taking out a yearly subscription. Yet, just last week I saw a post from Michelle Songy of The Ritualist. She shares some of the same concerns I have about this platform and subscription model. She made a post on Notes about setting subscriptions to a dollar and got the info she needed from subslacker David J. Frost on how to actually do so. So she set up her subslack to take $1 a month and she has reported that her own paid subscription base have also really gone up.

I thought I would apply that model myself, now that I know how. (If you set the percentage to 80% on a normal $5 subscription, that brings the total to $1.)

There are plenty of writers and creators I’d like to support here on subslack, but those six-to-eight dollar a month subscriptions really do add up fast, especially when gas, food, and other bills have to be paid. With that said, I think the $1 dollar subscription model is a real win-win for everybody. I subscribed to Michelle just on the principle that she was writing about this and did it herself.
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So, sisters and brothers, can you spare a dollar? One dollar a month into my coffee coffer is only twelve bucks a year.

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If I make any money doing this I can assure you that it will be spent wisely on quality coffee and the good pipe tobacco necessary to self-medicate my undiagnosed ADHD and that also help to keep the words flowing. (I don’t even smoke on a daily or weekly basis anyway… but I do drink coffee every single day, probably too much, and life is too short to brew bad beans!) It won’t go to weed. Despite what I said in my post last Wednesday, I don’t smoke pot anymore. I’d also use it to defer the cost of my website, and keep that available for searchers looking for words on the kinds of things I write about. Anything else I’d use to buy more used books, records and music, as well as recirculating it to the various subslackers I subscribe to, and musicians I support via patreon or bandcamp clubs. Maybe some new headphones, maybe maintenance on my 2002 Toyota Camry that is my daily driver. Maybe I’d subscribe to more… I certainly would if more people took up this cheaper model.

My wife works at a school and I work at a public library. We aren’t doing bad. I can assure you I have no interest in climbing the ladder in order to buy a cybertruck, nicer phones and super fancy vacations that stretch me beyond my means. I don’t so much want to rise above as I wish to sink below. So I have made the $1 tier available for those who’d like to support my work. 

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Even more, I’d just like to see this model spread across subslack, which is why I am implementing it myself. Either way these will never be pay walled, as I have always intended to do, and if you want to just keep reading for free, that’s fine by me too. Thanks for valuing my work with your attention.

I guess the experiment is this… can you make more money potentially by letting in a lot more people with a very cheap ticket, then by setting an arbitrarily higher price based on peoples inflated notions of value as a writer?

​Fugazi only ever charged $5 for their shows, adjusted slightly higher in places like NYC or LA as needed. But they always made it so their fans, including the youngest who might not even be working yet, could come to their shows. Quite the opposite of the outrageous amount for going to a concert by a lamestream act today, where the point is price people out rather than to price people in. The same is sadly true even for artists in the underground, with shows anywhere from $20 to $50. 

I imagine some writers might look askance at this, as potentially devaluing the work. I’m not knocking how hard it is to make a living in this vocation. I won’t be retiring to do this full time any time soon. That’s not the goal of setting this up and sharing how to do it anyhow. My idea is to instead model a different way of doing things, and instead of trying to rise above to reach a place in a social and economic class I will never realistically fit into anyway, I will just do something else instead and to try to sink below my means and live a rich life as a bottom feeder. There’s some really good trash down here, and some even greater treasure.

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