Pointless
One random Saturday morning I popped in a convenience store and bought my favourite paper to read with my energy drink. I had been getting that very paper for years. The guy at the store must’ve thought I was alien. What kind of demented girl buys the paper every week in this day and age? Well, little did I know that that specific Saturday would change my life. I flipped to the last page and there it was, a journalist position at Politis. I’m no journalist. I might become one in 10 years. But I'm here to prove a point.
“Journalism is literature in a hurry”. That’s a line from the 90s rom-com ‘The Runaway Bride’. There was a time, evidently in the 90s, when being a journalist was romanticised in movies and written about in novels. Being a hopeless romantic may be the reason I’m here. Journalists are paid to ask questions for you - to think and write. I’m supposed to give you insights, make you sound cool and eloquent at parties, keep you informed, liven the spark within you, help you navigate this world. I plan to treat this site like a good book, but written fast and for your own good.
Joan Didion, wrote a brilliant essay for the New York Times called 'Why I Write'. She stole the title from George Orwell, as she admitted during her talk at the University of California at Berkeley. In it she graced us with this beautiful line: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Maybe that’s why a demented girl like me would wander into journalism in the first place, not out of some cinematic ideal of chasing headlines in a trench coat, but because it’s one of the few professions that gives you permission to keep asking “why?” long after childhood. Journalism today isn’t just pounding the pavement with a notepad; it’s filtering noise, connecting dots, holding a flashlight over the corners no one bothers to sweep. It’s less about telling people what to think and more about giving them a clear enough picture so they can think for themselves.
What I might aim to achieve is exactly that: to make sense of the static. To take the chaos, the press releases, the rumours, the viral clips, the too-long reports and distill them into something you can hold in your head without it burning a hole there. If I do it well, maybe I can give you what Didion gave me: a way to see the world and your place in it a little more sharply, even if only for the length of a coffee break.
I left my corporate girlie job in search of purpose. And I think that purpose is here. Maybe the point is that not everything needs to have one. Maybe we write, ask, explore - not to solve the world, but to feel less alone in it. Maybe “pointless” is just another word for free.
And if along the way I figure out what I think, maybe you’ll figure out what you think too, which might just be the whole point.