Who cares if they hate what you like

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I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

it was hard! very hard! which isn’t meant to discourage anyone - if anything, it means that you shouldn’t let rejections bother you.

first off was finding an agent, which meant making a list of every literary agency I could find that accepted books in English (using sites like querytracker and manuscriptwishlist), and combing through them to see if they had any agents currently accepting queries in my genre. I had really shit luck with Canadian agencies, because they skew heavily toward literary fiction, and my book was genre fiction. but eventually, I had a list of 120 agents I stood a reasonably good chance with.

then, the applications! it’s good to do it in batches, because the occasional personalized rejection will give you something to work on. like I completely rewrote the 10 book pages I was submitting, and redid my query letter about fifteen times. I paid editors online to critique my query letter, I won a contest where the reward was commentary on my query letter…..that query letter was my magnum opus. I put everything into it, and it still kinda sucked. one thing I learned along the way is that people really don’t care about your social media following, UNLESS it’s on Twitter or TikTok. if you say “I have a blog on tumblr :)” people will just be like “I thought that site got shut down.”

anyway, after 70+ written rejections (and many more silent rejections), I got an acceptance! a literary agent was interested in representing my book - if I made some changes to it. so I did (added more romance and ‘cozy’ scenes), and sent it back to him, and then he began shopping it around to publishers.

it took about six months to find an interested publisher. we didn’t have great luck with Americans, but British publishers seemed to really click with the humour, and suddenly we had multiple places interested at once! we went with Titan Books (technically an indie, but with a distribution partnership with penguin), and then…….back into editing hell because the book still needed more romance.

from start to finish, it took four years from the book being written to it being released! it’s a lengthy frustrating process, and so many people give up because the constant rejection wears you down, but you just have to be incredibly stubborn and have a delusional level of belief in your own work.

"But!" she said:

People who see a clean, trash-free river are more likely support laws to curb more harmful "systemic" forms of pollution. People who participate in river cleanups take pride in their work--their river!--and become evangelists for protecting it.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Something big happened that most of us could do very little about. The world became openly unstable in ways people could no longer politely ignore. Institutions failed. Safety nets frayed. The future got harder to imagine. So a lot of people started reaching for control wherever they could find it: morning routines, dopamine detoxes, habit stacks, sleep scores, screen-time limits, supplement protocols, productivity systems, “nervous system regulation,” whatever the app-store priesthood was selling that week.

I get it. I really do.

But I’m going to pull a phrase people love to use when they want to sound emotionally mature: trauma explains behavior; it does not excuse it.

Because at some point, “I am trying to regain a sense of agency in a chaotic world” turned into “everyone who doesn’t live like me is undisciplined, addicted, immature, morally weak, spiritually degraded, or secretly begging to be rescued from themselves.”

And that’s where I get off the ride.

I’m not saying optimization is bad for everyone. Some people genuinely benefit from tweaking parts of their lives. Some people like routines. Some people feel better with stricter sleep schedules or less social media or more deliberate habits. Great. Wonderful. I’m sincerely glad when people find something that makes their life easier.

The problem is the culture around it.

The culture is ableist because it treats “functioning” as a moral achievement and assumes everyone has the same body, brain, energy, pain level, sensory needs, executive function, and recovery capacity.

It is classist because so much of it quietly depends on flexible schedules, disposable income, safe housing, nutritious food access, leisure time, privacy, and the ability to refuse exploitative work conditions without immediately risking survival.

And it is Puritanical because underneath all the soft wellness language is the same old suspicion of pleasure: too much comfort will rot you, too much rest will weaken you, too much fun will corrupt you, too much convenience will make you less human. You are always supposed to be renouncing something. You are always supposed to be proving that you can suffer correctly.

That’s the part that bothers me.

Not “I tried changing this habit and it helped me.”

Not “I personally feel better when I do less of that.”

But the constant creep from personal preference into moral hierarchy. The assumption that a “better” life is always a more controlled life. The belief that every impulse must be interrogated, every pleasure audited, every habit optimized, every moment made legible to some invisible performance review.

And honestly, I think a lot of people would rather accuse everyone else of being addicted, lazy, dysregulated, or broken than admit how scared they are of being alive in a world where control is often partial, fragile, and unevenly distributed.