It's okay to suck at math

The moment I decided to become an English major: I was sitting in my high school Statistics class, staring at an exam that might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian. As I sat there, pen trembling in my hand, I had what I now recognize as an epiphany wrapped in an anxiety attack: I would never, ever understand math.

The beauty of that moment, looking back, wasn't in the failure – though I did almost fail that class. I got some clarity. I wanted to spend my career reading and thinking and writing. Of course, I also had unrealistic expectations that I could be a part-time columnist and live in a 2-bedroom in the West Village while, for some reason, having a borderline fanatical devotion to Manolo Blahnik shoes (I watched too much “Sex and the City” so that explains that). Life would go on to humble me, quickly.

Today, as a copywriter navigating the silicon forest of tech, that moment feels like foreshadowing. "Learn to code" has become the pragmatic refrain guiding creative souls who made the mistake of wanting to be “writers” or “artists” in an increasingly expensive and data-driven world. Prevailing wisdom suggests that if you can't speak in algorithms, you might as well be speaking in tongues.

But the world desperately needs its poets, even (especially) in its most technical spaces. While engineers build the scaffolding of our digital future, writers are the ones who make that future feel like home. A good writer can translate complexity into clarity and bring the marketer’s mandate - “storytelling” - to life.

Justice for the bookworms

There was a brief moment in time when the world of print and digital media started crumbling. Job prospects for writers were grim. The days of getting paid a living wage to write one article for three months became firmly a thing of the past.

But I don’t think it was too long before tech companies realized that copy and “content” are needed. When everything sounds like the same blanket AI voice, being funny or sweet or rebellious is one way to get a leg up in a crowded space.

Most brilliant innovation is worthless if no one understands why it matters. The most elegant code is just elegant noise if it can't be explained to the people who need it. This is where we come in – the ones who spent college analyzing Yeats instead of analyzing data.

In a landscape obsessed with optimization, sometimes the most disruptive thing you can do is remind people what they're optimizing for in the first place: human connection and purpose. Or maybe just a solid chuckle.

So if you’re trying to carve out space in an industry that often seems to value logic over soul, know that it's not just okay to suck at math; sometimes it's the very thing that makes you invaluable. Not everything worthwhile can be quantified, but where would we be without a little soul in our systems?