Member-only story

Get Ready for the Rise of ‘Humble Porn’

My prediction for a modern-day alternative to ‘success porn’

Evan Wildstein
3 min readJan 19, 2022
Image: Ruel Madelo/Pexels

“Normalize tweeting when you like oranges more than lemons.”

Not exactly a groundbreaking statement, is it? At the same time, I would argue it is quite revolutionary.

That line comes from Smillew Rahcuef’s fabulous Twitter account. Smillew appears to be on a crusade (of sorts) to tweet about the most benign things possible. “Normalize tweeting when you’ve questions,” he wrote recently. In another, he suggests you “Normalize tweeting when your car ran out of gas.”

These are painfully… normal things, real things. For most of us, these are everyday things. They feature nothing about the growing hasty pace of life or burnout-inducing levels of hustle.

More than being simply “normal,” they include none of the things Jayla Sun references when she says, “Influencers are packaging basic shit like ‘be nice’ ‘be honest’ ‘be kind’ as life HACKS. How’d we get here???”

These tweets are not prescriptive bouts of simplicity. It is one human being acknowledging something many of us have been intrinsically feeling for some time but have not quite been able to codify. In a sea of grossly over-saturated — and hugely overrated —…

--

--

Evan Wildstein
Evan Wildstein

Written by Evan Wildstein

Words on work, organizational culture, and humor. More at https://evanwildstein.com.

Responses (27)