We’ll be launching the column this month. Send your questions to onely AT onely dot org.

To sweeten the deal we’re sponsoring a contest for the first question askers. Send a question to the Onely ladies and let me know you have done so by leaving a comment on this post “I asked a question for the new quirkyalone advice column.” Leave your comment by Thursday, July 16. I’ll choose one of you at random; you’ll get a signed copy of Quirkyalone.

We’re ready and waiting to pore over your problems, so bring them on!

Related posts:

1. Quirkyalone Media Empire About to Expand: Want to Join Us?
2. Wanted: Your To-Do Lists for a New Book!
3. A Sweet Quirkytogether Vows Column in the New York Times

It’s strange to be a nonfiction writer who has always specialized in writing about culture through the prism of my own life now that everyone is sharing tidbits of their lives online. I’m suspicious of the belief that we should all be transparent. I know how carefully I and other nonfiction writers and memoirists consider which stories and details to share. We don’t tell them in real-time. It’s impossible to predict how careless sharing will haunt us in the future, whether in the workplace or a relationship.

But now I feel blocked, I decided to give the whole transparency thing a try. What’s the worst thing that can happen?  If there’s anything I’m passionate about, it’s honest communication.

I have decided that it might be interesting to be more transparent at this moment about my tangle of ambivalence  regarding quirkyalone ten years after originally writing an essay defining the term (and five years after publishing my book).

In December 2008 I came up with the idea of redesigning this site to turn it into a group blog and magazine with daily, fresh content. The quirkyalone outlook can be applied to politics, travel, marriage, relationships, friendship, community, (online) dating, pop culture, and more. When I put out the call, smart bloggers responded that they wanted to contribute. It took five months to execute on the redesign–and now it’s time to start. But I am stymied and unmotivated. Why is that? My way to get unblocked is often to write. Often by writing things become more clear.

So here goes.

I am afraid that by continuing to put my energy into a website about singleness that I am writing myself into a future of eternal singlehood.  Let me be clear. One of my worst fears in life is to be misunderstood, especially on gut issues like the ones raised by Quirkyalone about love and relationships. I do not want to be single forever. I want to be in a long-term relationship. Why do I feel the need to say this?

Around New Year’s I ran into an old college friend whom I saw for the first time in seven years. He introduced me to his friends as the lady behind the quirkyalone movement, but he apparently hadn’t really absorbed the full definition. He asked me if I have to tell new boyfriends about quirkyalone as if I am telling them I have herpes, as if it’s something that needs to be disclosed at the beginning of a relationship. He thought being quirkyalone meant I wanted only flings.  I was speechless.

For months, I worried that other people might think the same thing. Have I been sabotaging myself all these years by unknowingly putting forward the impression that I only want to be single?

Does putting all this energy into building a website and community of self-respecting and proud single people mean that I will only attract singleness myself? Am I telling the universe I only want to be single in some horribly Secret-ish way? Does Quirkyalone intimidate men? Do they not ask me out assuming I prefer to be single?

There is no shocking revelation here: no polyamory, no deviance. Wow, I want a long-term partner, how crazy is that? But somehow it’s very important for me to be clear.

But now that I’m in my mid-thirties, it’s unacceptable to me for my career and my creative work to even potentially be at cross-purposes with my hopes for my personal life. The differences between quirkyalone at 25 (when I first conceived this idea) and at 35 now are a rich topic that I want to explore in a separate piece, but it’s abundantly clear that this is a decade when I need and want to be entirely clear-eyed and clear with others about what I want out of my life. That includes a husband (or long-term relationship), a child (I think!),  continued creative vitality, strong friendships, a feeling of civic community, and closeness with my family. That’s my abstract list.

You notice I put husband first. In some way, I have been afraid to articulate that wish: to myself (because I feared, well, what if it doesn’t happen, you don’t want to be disappointed) and to my quirkyalone readers: because I was afraid of making you feel less empowered or even betrayed. I felt an obligation to put on a publicly content face about being single. It’s messed up, when I think about it with any depth. I was willing to sacrifice honesty and even my potential success at finding love (by not being honest) because I was afraid of betraying to my single readers? WTF?

I can’t wave the flag for something that I don’t believe in. Or in an idea that doesn’t serve me personally. Which means, I need to redefine quirkyalone now, ten years later.

In some subtle and yet fundamental way, I want to redefine quirkyalone with yet another layer. This has never been a simple or easily explainable idea. It’s not like “metrosexual”: it has ambivalence and paradox baked right into it, the comfort in being single combined with the aching yearning to find the right partner.

More and more quirkyalone is about connection for me, the idea that it’s impossible to be connected to others without being comfortable alone. It’s about being connected in a time when our attention is growing more fragmented, as we multitask, twitter, glance at our phones and our video streams. It’s about being comfortable with your aloneness and connected to your deepest self, whether you’re single or partnered. For many of us, I think being quirkyalone is a prerequisite to being in a healthy relationship. It’s about confidence and presence, so you can be fully present for someone else and appreciate them for who they are without judgment or squeezing them into a predefined box or list. Solitude can be experienced alone or with others. With others: it’s just about focusing on the world which you inhabit together.

I am not saying that being in a relationship is better than being single. I’m saying that there are ways you can only grow when you are single, and ways you can only grow when you are partnered. Perpetual, lifelong singlehood is not optimal because it shuts off the possibility of certain kinds of growth. I have spent enough time being single, and it’s time for me to learn and grow in a new way by being partnered with someone. For others, it’s time to grow by being single.

It makes me feel happy to be honest. In a way, writing this post reminds me of the blissful exhalation I felt when I shared my original quirkyalone essay with a roommate 10 years ago before it was published. Writing feels like thought exhalation to me. I slept deeply that night because I exhaled something that was hard to articulate, but true, and it was a great relief to see that she got it. I look forward to more writings about all these messy complexities.

Expect more transparent truths about me and quirkyalone, and more transparent truths from the writers who are going to join this blog soon.

I’ll be introducing them one by one over the coming weeks.

No related posts.

The new site has been designed to showcase popular content so that when you land on the blog, there are easy ways to click and find more of what interests you. The changes include:
- Daily fresh content on the blog. Soon we’ll be adding new contributors writing on the single life, quirkytogether marriages, politics, pop culture, travel, and more.
- Top tabs surfacing the most popular and featured blog posts along with contributors and archives
- Sample chapters from the book
- Cool new galleries to display images, like those in the IQD party pack
- Threaded comments (now you can reply to someone else’s comment on a post)

Thank you to Randy Jones from Aquatoad Design for working with me on every last detail. Thanks also to Sara Cambridge, Matt Albiniak, and Bonni Evenson.

Please take a whirl around and leave comments with any bugs you find. I was eager to launch before I head to New York for a sure-to-be wacky and surreal Twitter event: the 140 characters conference, where I will be a “character.” In all the last-minute madness, I haven’t had time to do full QA on QA–so eager to hear about any bugs you find! Looking forward to your comments, feedback, and ideas and the continuing evolution of quirkyalone.net. xo Sasha

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I have tended to quirkyalone now, amazingly, for ten years. It’s been ten years since I first uttered “quirkyalone” to friends, and nine years since I first pushed it out to the world in an essay in To-Do List magazine. (Five years since the book was published and this website launched.)

The fact that ten years have passed and I’m still so compelled (as well as at times, totally bored with and over) quirkyalone fascinates me. Usually a concept doesn’t have that kind of staying power. To try to understand why, and in time for the redesign of quirkyalone.net, I’m working on an essay considering quirkyalone ten years later. Think of it in the vein of the 7up series. I want to write about how the concept has and hasn’t changed for me personally along the planes of being twentysomething vs. a thirtysomething, and about how the concept resonates now in a world where there are so many more pop culture validations of singlehood (even Beyonce now feels the urge to take on a single alter ego) and demographically, households headed by married couples are now a minority.

The piece will also describe the impact quirkyalone has had on readers. I’m also curious about how quirkyalone has affected your life. How has it changed your sense of yourself? Has it helped you to meet people (whether friends or lovers)? Or to communicate with a partner better about your needs? People who have met on the forums have even traveled the world to meet each other. Please post your story about how quirkyalone has affected your life, or how your concept of quirkyalone has changed over time, in the comments for this post. If you prefer, you can email them to me at info AT quirkyalone.net.

I look forward to publishing the piece on this site and probably elsewhere too. Viva quirkyalone!

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2. Email of the Week: Essay from a Fellow QA
3. International Quirkyalone Day RoundUp

1. Meet a friend at a café. Bring post-it notes.

2. Give your friend and yourself five post-it notes each. Tell your friend to write down the five most important things in his or her life, right now, at this moment. Do it yourself. You could write anything: a person, a feeling, a place, a way of being in the world, or a value.

3. After you have both written down your five things, lay them out on the table.

4. Now, you must give one of them up. Choose the first thing you would give away if you had to. What could you live without? Then, choose the second thing you would live without. Continue discarding things one by one.

5. The final post-it note is the one thing you don’t think you could live without. This is your life purpose, or you could also say, the most important thing in your life.

Where did this exercise come from? A new friend introduced it to me. My friend has been enormously successful as a doctor, academic, and biotech CEO, but the purpose of his life wasn’t completely self-evident to him until he went through a period of dedicated inquiry. He offered to do this exercise with me (he supplied the post-its) and explained that you can do the exercise repeatedly. The answers might change over time. He says the challenge is to live your life to truly serve that final post-it note (or rather, what you wrote in it) and to constantly ask yourself whether what you are doing is aligned with that which is most important to you. He’s on something of a mission to help other people drill down into their life purposes. He often encourages other CEOs (who think he’s crazy) to go through the post-it exercise. Their default most-important-thing is often to make money (to provide for their families), but a more specific answer is more of a guide.

I won’t tell you my life purpose because it seems more interesting to let that by mysterious, but I will say, It’s been an illuminating exercise that continues to resonate. I’ve been thinking about the last post-it I left on the table a few times a week, asking myself whether the things I am actually doing, day-to-day, express what I wrote. Keeping a central theme in mind makes life feel more sacred and less random.

The next morning, I couldn’t resist sharing this exercise with my roommate. And then with friends. So I wanted to share it with a larger audience, including you.

Order a latte and whip out some post-it notes. Bon courage.

No related posts.

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine piece to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight; although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well. Not so anymore. Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation). Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too”. Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more. But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple’s conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.” Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, “It turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.” Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family. Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring. My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

But what Belkin gets to at the end of her article –- and what I think bears far more exploration — is how scientific evidence that men too have a ticking biological clock could undermine what is a commonly socially accepted timeline. For women, shelf life and expiration date with fertility are fixed, while for men, well, they can always Tony Randall it, and procreate as he did in his 77th year. (Nevermind that in this New York Times article, “He’s Not My Grandpa. He’s My Dad,” Randall’s widow, left with two children under age 10, questions if her own long-range planning was all that wise and admits she’d tell her daughter not to marry an “older man.”

While women have been tying themselves in knots over the message (given freely from everyone ranging from their OB/GYNs to their grandmothers) that they’d better not wait too long to have a child or their time will run out, most men seem to blithely assume there’s never an end point, an assumption social convention has largely supported.

One past wannabe suitor even told me he thought it was great that his retirement would coincide neatly with his imagined child’s toddler years. When I asked him how much of his child’s life he expected to experience (did he think he’d ever be a grandfather if his child waited till his 50s to reproduce as well?) he admitted that just wasn’t something he had thought much about.

Beneath the social mating dance I experienced was the baseline assumption that male biology justified when men can start families – whenever they want – and their ageist attitudes toward women’s viability in this domain also went unquestioned, a mindset that smacks of patriarchal privilege. Belkin rightly points out how if this attitude was questioned, based on science, the mating priorities of both sexes could be upended, and changing that assumption is likely a good thing.

What if, Belkin asks, the dynamic I found myself in was reversed, and women now saw men as “too old” to procreate with? Men might have to date women in their own age bracket, or, more shockingly be forced to admit that they too can be aged out of the window in which they can procreate, maybe not as much for biological reasons, as for social ones, if younger women refuse them, now using scientific evidence as to why they’re not good genetic material – a neat reversal to what men have been doing for years.

Larger than this, I think, is questioning how social structures could reform if 35-year-old men didn’t want to climb up the ladder singlemindedly anymore, because they knew their chances at fatherhood would decline if they waited – and then shear off a cliff at age 40. Would childcare finally be a priority in the workplace, or paternity leave? Some of this speaks to who’s still mainly responsible for childcare once a child is present – but if men and women were biologically on the same timetable, as science more and more strongly suggests they are – could there be a reach towards a more equitable view of balancing work and family, instead of mostly women spending many an angsty moment in their 30s wondering just how this is all going to work out.

If a new understanding of blending career trajectory with family hits a man at 27, rather than 47 (the magic number, I found when it seemed to dawn on unmarried men ‘hmmm better get on this wife and kids thing’), how could this change social expectations as they cross with biological imperatives? Yet, I take to heart Belkin’s comment that this might just be another thing that women will worry about – rather than men.

And I’m sure the press will never blow up this story (lonely 50something man faces the fact he’ll never have kids!) the way this narrative comes around every few years as a cautionary tale meant for younger women not to wait too long or be too picky. Also galling is the propensity to hear humorous smirking at “late fatherhood” stories but the vilification of “older women,” who conceive using donor eggs, as ridiculously selfish in starting a late-in-life family. “But it would be a satisfying start if men had to pause and see age as part of their biological equation, too,” says Belkin.

I couldn’t agree more.

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1) They met on a subway, she approached him (he was reading a philosophy book), and she shouted out her email address to keep the possibility of future communication alive as she exited the car (death to all books that say women shouldn’t make the first move!)
2) He hadn’t been in a serious relationship “since the first Gulf War”: love the honesty of just putting that out there
3) The final quote: “I see beyond the nerd in him, he sees beneath the gaudy in me,” the bride said. “For the first time in my life, Jeff makes me feel fully seen, fully accepted, fully loved.”

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1. Quirkyalone (and SingleEdition) in the New York Times!

I wondered what terms I could use to describe myself after my friend Jason forwarded me this story “Maybe the slackers had it right after all.”

The piece’s author David Scharfenbergargues that the commitment-shy, dillettantish slackers are better positioned to weather the economic gloom than traditional folks who bought homes and (gasp) had children. Interesting argument, but being a language person, I got stuck on the terminology. Scharfenberg identified “slackers” as people whose social values inform their work, like journalists and social workers. At the core, I think of slackers as people like the characters in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, who move out to the desert, and work as little as possible and give up on making money. Slackers don’t seem to be engaged in the world around them. They seem to be more engulfed in a cloud of pot smoke.

I started to play a game with myself. It’s a parlor game that you can play too. In a moment of delirious, silly afternoon thinking, I wanted a label for myself. It would just have to be a series. Here is what I came up with.

I am a quirkyalone, aspiring vagabond, new rich.

I realized that the words I chose came from books that I’ve had passionate relationships with recently. The books have changed throughout the years.

Quirkyalone: Because although I ache to be in a stable, committed, full-on relationship, I’m still just as unable to fake it and be with someone for the sake of dating or being in a relationship. I’m also committed to the quest of fully enjoying my life whether I’m single or not, and being fully present in my life for myself, my friends, and the eventual partner. Book to credit for this label: my own!

Aspiring Vagabond: Next year, I look forward to a future period of extended travel, of being open to the possibilities of experience various cultures and languages in their native element. I want to open myself up to the mystery, unpredictability, and learning that comes from long-term travel and living abroad. I say aspiring because I’m also sort of a homebody. Book to credit: Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-term World Travel.

New Rich: Even though I have been deeply skeptical of Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week as a gimmick (I’ve never seen a more hard-working self-promoter promoting the idea of working less), when I finally read the book, I found it quite useful as a primer for taking miniretirements: an approach where we don’t delay our lives until we retire. Live for the now. Dip in and out of work. The new “richness” derives from pleasure and enjoyment of stepping out of the workaday world and into unforeseen experiences. Ferriss is an entrepreneur too and his new rich vision (fantasy or not) is full of tips on how to create “passive income” streams. There’s none of that slacker disengagement with the real world’s exigencies. This particularly appeals to me as a creative person because I know that I have periods of inspiration and periods when I need to chill and let ideas bake.

So there you have it! That’s me! Take a look at your own bookshelves and come up with a unique combination of labels for yourself. Play with your friends! Post them in the comments.

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On my first day at South by Southwest, an annual geek conference dedicated to celebrating the brightest minds in emerging technology, I already felt like a speck of Internet dust because I only have 157 Twitter followers.

I took drastic measures and pulled out my iPhone for an old-fashioned phone call. My confidante was my former business partner Adam. I knew he would immediately understand. In that moment, I officially hated the Internets.

Just a day before, I was giddy about attending South by Southwest (SxSW) for the first time. Billed as the center of digital creativity, and not to be confused with the film or music festival that immediately follows it, “South by” attracts entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, advertisers, and venture capitalists. By day, thousands of us roamed the Austin Convention Center to go to panels like “Mad Men on Twitter” (now even Peggy Olsen has a Twitter account), “Love in the Cloud: Online-Only Marriages,” and “What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed?” At night, shoulder-to-shoulder parties raged.

As much as I wanted to have the random, stimulating conversations in the hallway that everyone says defines the event, something felt very wrong. In fact, my first tweet was: “I feel contrarian urge coming on in first day of #sxsw never seen more distracted sea of people.”

SxSW felt like a flashback to high school, but all the kids are former debate and math team nerds. Summoning all their repressed teenage angst, my fellow conference participants seemed to be taking a new shot at the yearbook superlatives. I quickly realized I was living in the vortex of a geek popularity contest.

The Pressure to Tweet

The more than 5,000 people who attend SxSW interactive are a future-looking crowd. Think of them as a subculture that may forecast the culture at large.

SxSW’s early adopters sometimes go nuts for Internet services that go nowhere, but they have been spot on with Twitter. The broadcast-your-brain service launched two years ago at SxSW and geeks went wild for it. Now John McCain, Ashton Kutcher and P Diddy love it too. The rules of fame are being rewritten. Andy Warhol would be pleased. Forget fifteen minutes of fame, now you can create a cult of yourself on Twitter and be in constant conversation with every fan.

SxSW was supposed to be about community. A full-page house ad in the conference schedule instructed people to “Put away your laptop and talk to your neighbor!” And yet, I had never seen more people tuning each other out.

At any given time, at least 50% of the audience in any panel had their laptops open so they could tweet their reactions to “the cloud,” aka Twitter. The norm was to type, text, and read while people were giving their presentations. A twenty-something man who works at cars.com in Chicago confessed, “I am doing things here that I would consider so rude if I were at home or at work.”

At a normal conference, you have to impress dozens of strangers in “meatspace” (geeks’ word for the physical world). But at SxSW, you also have to make an impression on Twitter, and prolifically. During those five days in Austin, I felt like I was living in on another planet where the pressure to tweet was constant!

People gain followers by broadcasting every observation. The more tweets you post, the more likely people might be to see them, and thus, to follow you. The more followers you have, the more status you gain. Thus it is important to pump out as many tweets as possible. “I’m at the party.” “Now I’m two steps to the right.” “Now I’m too steps to the left.” “Great beer!”

How frequently did SxSW’s most prolific tweeters tweet? Tara Hunt, a marketing expert who writes about how companies can benefit by getting involved with their customer communities through social media, spent three years accruing 25,000+ followers. She tweeted 66 times in a 24-hour period on March 14, day two of SxSW. Assuming six hours of sleep, that’s about 3.67 every hour, or once every 16 minutes.

Internet marketing guru Guy Kawasaki manages alltop.com, “an Internet magazine rack.” He topped Tara by tweeting 95 times on March 15, but half of his tweets may have been “ghost-tweeted” by paid staff. He says he writes all his own personal replies.

On my most prolific day, March 16, I tweeted seven times. I wrote these things not so much out of a desire to communicate, but to be discovered by the small gods of SXSW. I am not proud of this. In fact, I am embarrassed to have been caught up in the avalanche of nothingness. I am just honest about being swept up in the vibe.

And to Power-Tweet

But just tweeting prolifically isn’t enough. You really need to power-tweet.

Imagine two celebs on the red carpet. Brangelina, for example, shines brighter than Jennifer Aniston alone. Using Twitter, you can combine (or align with) celebrities, forming your own power-couple.

Dave Morin, a Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, has more than 300,000 followers. On his way out of SxSW, he power-tweeted: “In a cab between the two women building the next Oprah. @juliaallison and @meghanasha!” Julia and Meghan are founders of nonsociety.com, a “lifecasting ‘magazine’ geared towards today’s savvy young women.” They are definitely micro-celebs with the mostly male crowd at SxSW.

Morin also power-tweeted, “Just had an EPIC conversation with @Garyvee.” Gary Vaynerchuk is another micro-celeb unknown outside the Twitter bubble. A Belarusian-born wine retailer and blogger from New Jersey with a rabid Twitter fan base, Vaynerchuk recently signed a seven-figure, ten-book deal with Harper Studio. The topic will be self-help business advice. He’s a wine blogger, but his claim to micro-fame seems to be his success at becoming micro-famous. One has to wonder, will these be micro-books?

My only real micro-celebrity friend is Penelope Trunk, a career-advice blogger who has 10,000 followers. Much like a Jessica Simpson spotting at LAX, the Twitterazzi tweeted when she arrived at the airport. We had coffee during the conference, and it felt like one of the only focused conversations that lasted more than 30 minutes and wasn’t punctuated with a rapid exchange of business cards. She told me, “I confess that I am getting extremely anxious that I am not getting Twitter followers fast enough. I feel like a 20-year- old.”

Who’s keeping track? Wefollow.com, a site created by Kevin Rose, the founder of digg.com, launched at SxSW. Wefollow ranks people with the top follower count in the categories of celebrity, actor, music, and of course, blogger, social media, and tech. Rose has 428,268 followers and Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter has 437,273. For now, they are not far behind Barack Obama (581,185) and Britney Spears (688,797). To be sure, Britney Spears sells more copies of USWeekly than Kevin Rose. But still, a cult of 400,000 is not to be lightly dismissed.

Micro-revenue for Micro-celebrities?

What’s driving the followers arms race? Just think: Even MySpace celebrity-turned-model-turned-friend-of-Lindsay-Lohan Cory Kennedy only had 20,000 friends. The longer I spent inside this (questionably) futuristic social media bubble, the more I thought the popularity anxieties were not just repressed high school angst. They’re also economic, perfectly coinciding with our melting economy. The median age of a Twitter user is 31. Most of these aspiring micro-celebrities are established in their careers.

On my last day at SxSW, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, gave a keynote that started to put the follower madness into context. His new book Free will come out in July (will it also be free?) and has a thesis that couldn’t be more on point for people who work in the Internet. Anderson argues that consumers will perceive anything delivered via the Internet as free. This presents a thorny problem for the creators of software, music, and all forms of content. Price to consumer: zero. Price to create is obviously not zero. What’s the solution?

Micro-celebrity! Chris gave this advice to content creators: “Create microcelebrity and then monetize it. . . Each one of us has to figure out our own way to convert our reputation into money.” His sole example: a Cantonese pop singer who accepted piracy of her music but made money through paid engagements, store openings, and product endorsement.

According to Anderson, we must all suck people in as our followers, and then, somehow convert them into monetization opportunities: endorsements, PR, consulting, paid engagements, and better-paying jobs. The underlying assumption is that everyone would want to create micro-celebrity. There’s no world of just writing, creating film or art, or paid-for software, anymore. But wait, aren’t most writers naturally introspective, MFAs, not MBAs?

Will micro-celebrity deliver more than micro-revenue? Maybe the formula works for Chris, Malcolm Gladwell, and other business authors who command large speaking fees for speaking to business audiences.

But for most this advice seems preposterous. It leads to a world much like Hollywood: a few well-paid actors and actresses, an army of wait staff futilely chasing a dream. Even if everyone who cultivates their “micro-celebrity” identifies an audience that would be valuable to paying advertisers or sponsors, it’s a simple problem of supply and demand. There will be too many micro-celebrities to generate anything more than nano-revenue.

Anderson explained to me later in an email dialogue that his definition of “content creator” includes engineers who contribute to bulletin boards. The world of Internet content is flat to him–content is anything that consumes our attention, whether it’s a movie review on the New York Times or a tweet from Major Nelson, the director of programming for the Xbox.

Sure, if you are a programmer, creating a cult around yourself on Twitter may help you get better jobs. But in this model, traditional “content creators” (who want to be paid for their content) may be out of luck. According to Anderson, “the good ones will find a way to prosper and society will evolve, regardless. It’s just change.” The good ones, presumably, will have an army of followers.

Until Twitter Collapses Into a Meta Black Hole

If there was one “takeaway” from this SxSW, it was that I’m going to have to jump into the popularity races myself.

We live in an age of popularity surveillance now. Simon & Schuster, the publisher of one of my books just started following me. Until the Twitter fad crashes and burns (my friend Jeff tells me on IM, “I am waiting for Twitter to collapse into a giant meta-black hole with everyone retweeting everyone else”), I predict book advances will be determined in part by an author’s follower count. Penelope told me she felt the same way after last year’s SxSW. Must. Get. On. Twitter. And. Attract. Thousands. Of. Strangers.

Here’s where my worrying brain starts to spiral. If SxSW represents the future, does that mean that we’ll all become aspiring micro-celebrities in our own industries? Will obsessive self-promotion becomes the new normal?

After a few days at home, I started to worry less and see this crowd for who they were: entrepreneurs who had paid upwards of $2,000 to attend a conference and needed to get their money’s worth. Most of us are not trying to build Internet companies. We probably won’t approach life with the same self-promotional fervor.

Immediately after SxSW, I couldn’t have been more relieved to return to San Francisco.

It’s ironic, because I normally think of San Francisco as being a haven of weirdos. But after five days in the Austin Convention Center, my non-Internet friends, writers, artists, and unmarried, people I usually lovingly consider odd compared to most Americans, seemed so refreshingly normal. They are capable of carrying on an “epic” conversation without bragging that they are having an “epic” conversation.

Changing planes in Dallas, I tapped out a Facebook status update: “on my way back to SF after sxsw, eager to be around normal people, ie, non-aspiring micro-celebrities.” The first comment in response was from an old work friend. Her response reassured me and made me smile. I was returning to the real world. “What’s sxsw?” she asked.

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