Get Ready for the Rise of ‘Humble Porn’
My prediction for a modern-day alternative to ‘success porn’
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“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 — success porn, it is giving rise to an idea I’d like us to consider:
Humble porn.
This idea of acute humbleness sits high for me right now. Perhaps it’s because of where I am in the arc of repeat world disasters — or the fact that my personal theme for 2022 is slow down — but whatever the reason, the notion of normalizing simple, basic behaviors sounds pretty darn good.
Max Klein distilled it better than I’m doing right now, acknowledging that “We often let distractions blind us to the small beauties in life … Maybe we look at our phones on a walk instead of looking at the sky, clouds, and trees.”
And beyond doing these very normal things, I’d love to see more people shouting about them from the top of mountains.
I’m not impressed by the fact you churned an 80-hour work week — in fact, that’s pretty appalling. I don’t care that you made six figures online doing…
