Several months back, someone posted a comment that went something like, “You don’t monetize your blog.” Why not? was the implied question, quite in tune with the prevailing neoliberal ideology of the day.

I thought about it. I’ll admit, I was tempted. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, nawwww!

For starters, I don’t know how to do it and can’t be bothered to learn.

Second, if I knew how to do it, or could be bothered to learn, this blog does not get enough traffic to make the effort worth my time.

I’m an outsider. It’s my natural habitat. In our present celebrity-saturated, soundbite-filled world, could an independent philosophy blog, by an outsider-philosopher who lacks Harvard or Chicago or other lucrative connections, conceivably drive enough traffic to a fundamentally ideas-driven site to make the effort worth it?

I doubt it.

Of course, I could write, Kim Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, over and over again. Maybe even, Kim Kardashian has a big butt! 

That might drive traffic here.

But I doubt that traffic would stay very long. (No pictures of Kimmy, for one thing.)

The third and final reason I don’t monetize this site: in this neoliberal, materialist age which structurally encourages the commodification of everyone and everything, I would like there to be just one thing in my life as a professional writer that has not succumbed to such pressures. That one thing would be this blog, Lost Generation Philosopher.