A Response to Erin Loechner

I Was Supposed to Organize My Closet Today But I Got Sidetracked By Something Interesting on the Internet: A Claire Story

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Yesterday I was catching up on my Substack feed when I stumbled upon this essay by former blogger Erin Loechner (originally shared by Haley, whose link wind-ups are always intriguing).

Approximately one billion years ago, I followed Erin online. To be blunt, I’d forgotten about her—I hadn’t realized she’d completely disappeared from social media platforms three years ago. I remembered she had a book with a cute cover and some kind of message about being more intentional. She was also an HGTV designer, possibly? Also some kind of homeschooling program thing? the back of my mind whispered.

Erin’s article was titled What I Saw When I Came Back to the Internet, 3 Years Later. I was expecting some kind of on-brand piece about the importance of putting down your phone in favor of your real life. For the most part, that seems to be the underlying current, although written beautifully and pulling in a bit of research.

However, the piece was also causing a bit of a stir, and some of that stir had to do with tired stereotypes about women’s writing and the way we communicate on the internet—two of my favorite topics.

The TLDR (although it’s not that long, so you should probably just…R):

• Erin expressed frustration that “everyone is on Substack now”. She claimed that most of us were essentially being duped, since Substack is “simply  another Silicon Valley idea fueled by over $86 million of private funding, perfectly poised to build a foundation on ideals that appeal to the masses but cannot sustain them.”

• She complained that “everything is monitzed”, and that too many people are making “a living from living our lives”. She says that whenever possible, you should choose not to monitze your writing.

• She says that most influencers are painting themselves in the best possible light, only to rapidly change their brand and opinions. She seems to say that you should follow whoever you want to, only to then claim that you’ll likely have “ followed someone you don’t know into a pit of despair and are left to crawl out of it alone.”

• She says that Stanley cups are a bizarre trend, and also that she has one. I nodded along at that paragraph as I sipped out of my own. It was a gift! And it keeps me hydrated!

• She touches on the idea that everyone needs to “Say Something™” on the internet these days, and that not every aspect of your life needs to become a narrative. She also expresses deep suspicion about the entanglement of feminism with beauty trends.

• In what I read as the strongest part of the essay, Erin talks about how influencing online is leading to “emotional whiplash”, which is in turn leading to major mental health problems for Very Online People. She writes: “[Influencers] are being dragged by the audience’s desires, through threads of expectations, dizzied and directionless. They are weary and tired and worn, and they are crumbling under the pressure, and yet: they are still wearing the mantle. They are still holding on. What else is there to do? It’s a job, they tell themselves, flicking on the ring light. Just smile and do the job.”

Erin finishes with a paragraph that begins, “if these words sound harsh, perhaps it’s because they are” and concludes with “it’s not too late to become free.”

Well, they do sound harsh, and a little mean. But as someone who often sounds harsh and a little mean on the internet, I wanted to respond to her points with the generosity that I wish she would extend to others.

I think I understand what Erin was trying to say.

She was trying to pinpoint the oddity of our online culture, and the way people on social media have branded and monetized themselves into something less human than they were created to be. But what she communicated instead was a bitter take on the way women are engaging with the internet that “called out” without much pastoral care.

I can sympathize with Erin’s frustrations. It’s undeniably true that social media platforms have wreaked havoc on the mental health of girls and women. If you’ve found a deep sense of peace offline, it makes complete sense that you would want to spread that message far and wide. People are on the internet too much: full stop. Few would deny this.

I also know firsthand the pressures of feeling like you need Something To Say when living out your very ordinary life. A huge part of my job as an author is selling my books, and any salesperson worth half a grain of salt knows that sales is best through storytelling. I, like most of us rowdy sinners, struggle with pride, and can absolutely get to navel-gazing. Not every cup of coffee needs to be a revelation I share with the world. Erin’s desire to point that out is a good one.

But this essay is profoundly lacking in self-awareness, and therefore I have a really hard time taking it seriously.

Here’s why:

Women have historically been asked to suppress their emotions.

Whether it’s the classic “women are too emotional” or accusations of hysteria, women are no stranger to being accused of having too many #feels. Have I, too, opened Instagram and winced at a video of a sobbing influencer in a car, recording what clearly should have been a private moment? Yes.

But my heart goes out to these women, who are perhaps not capturing their grief because they’re self-absorbed narcissists but because they have nowhere else to put it. Our culture is in a literal social crisis, where few people have the type of relationships in which they can break down sobbing. The answer to this isn’t to dive further and further into the internet; that will likely have the opposite effect of what we’re going for. But it’s understandable that lonely, sad women and girls are getting emotional online. We’ve been fed a crock of lies about what success should look like, and how to have it all, and many of us are exhausted and overworked, with no foundation and no ability to move from dysregulation to regulation. The sobbing and attention-seeking¹ aren’t the problem—the inability to contextualize our pain and the lack of IRL community around us are.

It’s easy to poke fun at or complain about Very Online Women; it’s a lot harder to talk about how we got to this place and what we can do to work our way out of it.

Some of us are “written processors”.

My husband is a verbal processor. When something difficult happens to him, he has an almost compulsive need to talk about it. He wants to go over every detail, every up and down, every possible answer to the problem.

I’m not like that. At all.

But I’m also not an “internal processor”. Instead, I think of myself as a “written processor”. Writing things—like this very letter!—help me understand how I make sense of the world. The process helps me express myself, stepping further into the fullness of who I am. Not everyone processes things this way, but for me, it’s a healthy way of reflecting and ruminating.

At times, I like to share what comes out of those writing experiences. While there’s plenty I write that I never share, I enjoy being able to show pieces of myself to others and feeling a form of connection, even if it isn’t as authentic or pure as in real life relationships. It’s a form of artistic expression that lights my soul on fire—especially my fiction. I feel called to it, as corny as it sounds. A deep, true calling. While some of my letters may come off as “over sharing”, rest assured that there is much in my personal life that I would never, ever put on Al Gore’s internet. Anything I do choose to share has been thoughtfully cultivated and is hopefully pointing towards a larger Truth besides self-absorbed mirror-gazing.

There are plenty of private moments that people have exploited for internet fame. It’s distasteful and we shouldn’t partake in it. (I’m thinking mainly of family vloggers who share inappropriately intimate moments about their kids.) But again, Erin doesn’t suss out the nuisance of those particular cases—she prefers to make sweeping judgements about those of us who, in her eyes, “[express] our views on the only thing we can be sure we are absolutely and unfailingly experts in: ourselves.” Is writing about myself navel-gazing? Probably sometimes. But it’s also how I explore myself and express myself, and as long as I’m constantly discerning how to do that in a way that isn’t sinful/prideful, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Moreover, women’s writing is frequently belittled as unimportant, and we can’t ignore that fact when discussing the nature of writing on the internet. I believe it was former blogger Natalie Holbrook (anyone else obsessively read Nat the Fat Rat in college? Anyone? Bueller?) who said that if men wrote mommy blogs, there would be a mommy blogging Pulitzer, and I have to agree.

The idea that you should provide writing for free “whenever possible” is unfair.

Within the essay itself, Erin links to her books’ Amazon pages. She is not giving them away for free. She wants just payment for them, as she should. For many writers, myself included, our Stupid Little Substacks² are our work. I’ve also written books, but my writing here is just as worthy of wages. It’s not less meaningful or worthwhile than hers just because hers takes place within the pages of a traditionally published book. (It might be less meaningful or worthwhile than hers for other reasons, but what I’m saying is that the format isn’t one of them.)

She gives a line of what feels like lip service—”nor is it wrong to be paid for your passions”—before directly saying that whenever possible, you should give your gifts away for free. I’m not sure where exactly she draws the line; she doesn’t specify.

Is every single thing I write for monetary compensation? Of course not! Not only do I provide some free content on Substack—like this very letter—but I also keep a prayer journal, write letters to my children in notebooks, and compose rambling poetry for my eyes only. If Erin’s encouragement was to make sure you have some hobbies that aren’t monetized, I would stand and applaud. I have plenty, and think the current trend to monetize every aspect of our lives is a bad one. But to literally say that you should provide your writing for zero compensation whenever possible while linking to her own books strikes me as tone-deaf at best and hypocritical at worst.

In fact, when women are able to use their natural skills and desires to help provide an income for their family, why shouldn’t we celebrate that?³ If it means getting more women out of shitty 9-5s where they have to request basic aspects of dignity like a room to pump in and bereavement leave, allowing them to work on schedules that work better for their family and help their home flourish, isn’t that the best case scenario (if that’s what the Holy Spirit has placed on their heart)?⁴

Think of a world where women were able to make sustainable income from their homes without falling prey to multi-level marketing scams. Where women could volunteer for the class party and do what they loved, earning fair compensation for it? Sounds good to me.

Substack is not just another platform.

Substack is vastly better than Instagram in almost every single way. Its devotion to long-form writing makes it much less addicting (I never just open my phone to “scroll Substack”) and it gives creators a much higher earning potential that doesn’t involve taking endless photos of themselves. Substack is more devoted to free speech than nearly any other platform, and has produced some of the best journalism in the world. It’s different than nuance-lacking TikTok, anger-prioritizing X, boomer-addicted Facebook, or envy-inducing Instagram in almost every single way. It’s really not a social media platform so much as it is a self-publishing tool.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly: the only reason any of us were even reading her piece is because Erin Loechner made a name for herself on the internet.

If I’m being brutally honest, this piece largely reads like the TradWives who travel to speak on large stages about why women shouldn’t work, or like ultra-rich business owners claiming socialist values. You are literally doing the thing you are insisting is so wrong for everyone else.⁵

Erin Loechner is a wonderful writer; she has a gift for language and I have friends who really enjoyed her books. (She almost certainly wrote this piece because she has a new book to promote). But let’s not pretend that her career was not assisted by an Instagram following. That’s nothing to be ashamed of or apologize for. You can be wary of algorithms, distrusting of big tech, concerned about teenage girls’ mental health, and aware of that fact. Erin writes that: “This is the precise moment we, as humans, hide under the blanket umbrella of ‘Two things can be true at once!’ instead of digging deep to ask ourselves if they are true, or if we merely want them to be true.” But it strikes me that what Erin wants to be true is that she is so far above the internet, when what actually is true is that her polished internet presence was the fan that turned a real flame of design/writing talent into a blazing fire of a career.

At the end of her essay, Erin gives us an important reminder: it’s not too late to untangle ourselves. I believe we should all be constantly evaluating our relationship with the internet and social media. But I also believe we can do that with less eye-rolling and a bit more accompaniment.

Hit me in the comments. Did you love Erin’s piece? Do you think we all need to log off? Do you think I was a little harsh? Do you think Substack is just another tech bro platform?

On My Nightstand 

• The Last Grand Duchess by Bryn Turnbull: I wish I had a reason I was so obsessed with the Romanovs, but in actuality, I’m just an oddball. Absolutely loving this historical fiction novel on Grand Duchess Olga!

• The Prodigal Son by Georges Chevrot: I was assigned this short book by my spiritual director and it’s the kind of book you simultaneously love (because it’s true) and hate (because it makes you cry.)

• Gen Z’s Search for Fulfillment: A heartbreaking read on Gen Z’s pornography rates, with an uplifting encouragement.

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In case you missed these Letters:

• What You Have In Common With The Most Obnoxious Person You Know - for subscribers

• Reimagining Pro-Life Activism - for subscribers

• The Denial and the Dissonance - for everyone

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I have a book coming out!

It’s a novel called The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County, and it’s about grit, grace, and grandmas on a mission. Learn more here.

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1. We always use this as a negative, but human beings were made to require attention in order to live.

2. Okay, she didn’t say this! I’m getting in my triggered feelings!

3. The Awakening of Miss Prim vibes!

4. Not always. Every single income-generating discernment should be accompanied by prayerful discernment, and if you’re charging for something vague like “healing”, you should be properly trained for it. I’ve written extensively about my wariness of the Catholic-influencer-life-coach bubble before.

5. Erin might argue that she’s not doing that anymore, but nowhere in her piece did she share any feelings of regret or remorse. And at bare minimum, she never even acknowledged this blatantly obvious fact!