The Work of the Way We Live Now

A heartfelt dispatch from the end of everything, where it's always already over and we're always already so back

She is doing the work of building your future best fren (and it’s good, actually)

I have spent the past two weeks "updating" George W.S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context. This is an absurd statement because one does not update a singular voice like Trow’s. Yet here we are, in the time of updates. Everything must be patched and updated. Your phone’s operating system. Your relationship status. Your based and/or social justice hot takes. You favorite dead New Yorker writer from 1980.

Let me level with you: to update is to admit obsolescence.¹ Windows 95 needed updating because it was Windows 95. But Trow wrote about television establishing the context of no-context. He wrote about the "grid of two hundred million" and the "grid of intimacy." He wrote about "the death of the middle distance." These concepts are more, not less, important in 2025 than they were in that November 17, 1980 New Yorker issue in which they first appeared.

The Work of Content

As all of you know, I have been doing "the work" at Oliver Bateman Does the Work. The quotation marks are necessary. "The work" is what everyone says they are doing now. Going to therapy is "doing the work." Reading self-help books is "doing the work." Posting about doing the work is "doing the work." The work has replaced work.

Content. This is what we all make now. Not essays. Not stories. Not thoughts. Content. Content fills containers. Content satisfies algorithms. Content engages users. Content generates revenue for someone or something, at least in theory.

In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee demanded "emotional content" from his student. He meant peace of mind. He meant truth. He meant the thing itself, not the performance of the thing. But we have taken the word "content" and drained it of its content.

Now "content" refers almost exclusively to what makes you scroll. Content is what makes you want more content. Content is the itch that scratches itself.

Our digital third places serve as containers for this content. Instagram is a container. Substack is a container. X is a container. Your body is a container — for supplements, for workouts, for documentation of supplements and workouts on Instagram, Substack, X, and anywhere else your Post Hand can post them.

The container has become more important than what it contains. The platform has become more important than what is said on the platform, which might as well be lorem ipsum. The format has become more important than what is formatted.

Back to the beginning: Can Trow be repurposed and updated? The question answers itself. To repurpose Trow would be to make him into content. To update Trow would be to destroy what made Trow necessary.

Trow was not producing content. Trow was diagnosing the disease of content and warning us about the context we were destroying.

The Writer in the Age of No-Context

What does it mean to write now? It means to fill the containers, to "slop" the "feeds" that provide empty calories to the "paypigs." It means to satisfy the algorithms in order to build one's brand. It means to do "the work" of self-promotion in the guise of doing "the work" of self-discovery.

The writer has become a content creator. The content creator has become an influencer. The influencer has become a brand. The brand has become a person. The person has become content.

So I am updating Trow by showing that Trow cannot be updated. I am repurposing Trow by showing that Trow saw the end of purpose. I am creating content about the man who announced that content creators were all terminal cases.

What is "the work" that I cover here on the Substack? It is the work of performing work. It is the work of documenting work. It is the work of discussing work. It is everything except work.

Real work would be to stop. Real work would be to refuse. Real work would be to build a context. But building a context would make us incompatible with the platforms. Building a context would make us invisible to the algorithms. Building a context would make us content that cannot be contained.

Consider this Trow’s last update. I certainly think it is. Not because the work is finished. The work can never be finished because the work does not exist. This is the last update because to update further would be to pretend that updating accomplishes something.

What context remains? Only this: the context of knowing that context has collapsed. The context of seeing the grid, as Trow put it then. The context of refusing to pretend that content is contentment, as I am putting it now.

This is not much of a context. But it is what we have. And it is more than most of our fellow humanzees have, which is no context at all.

A Note to Readers

You have all subscribed to my Substack, and I want to thank you for this. This is a container. I am filling it with content, "slopping" your "feed" as I just noted. You are consuming it. We are both pretending this means something.

But perhaps, in reading Trow through this (or through his work linked in the footnote below), in seeing the grid through Trow, we can achieve something like clarity. Not contentment. Not connection. Just clarity.

That is all I can offer. That is all anyone can offer in the context of no-context. That is "the work," the real work, which is to see clearly what we have become.

Read on past the paywall for what the radio personality Paul Harvey, with a voice that sounded like it was always delivering a benediction, used to call the "rest of the story."²