Genre Conventions of Substack Confessionals

Most concretely, these essays take a personal insight of the writer (almost exclusively a 20-something working in tech) and use it to reflect on the psychology of humans or on human nature writ large. Texts are usually in first person, although they can slip into second person in occasional personal narratives. They are straightforward, with little artifice, aside from the kind of summary Didionisms that are endemic to Internet writing, like “consider this,” “here’s what I am trying to say,” or “this is the point:”. Extended metaphor isn’t rewarded, and flourishes or similes are typically confined to the sentence level. And they’re comfortably internet-native, which means their register is loose, flitting from serious to memey in the same paragraph.