The 3/4 Joke

This article was originally published on my Substack.

What exactly does it take to be heard? I used to think it was effort and quality. I’m rethinking that now, over a temperature map of Europe glowing the color of a stovetop left on too long.

Here’s what happened. I posted a small joke on LinkedIn. Two sentences, really. I’d always wondered why Germany, Holland, northern Italy, Switzerland and Austria bolt solar panels to every available roof, when Spain sits there, doing nothing, absorbing sun like it’s getting paid for it. They must have known something, I wrote, and left it at that. No smiley. No “satire” tag. I assumed the joke would carry itself, the way a decent joke usually does.

It didn’t carry itself. It got carried somewhere else entirely.

People showed up to correct me. Solar panels, several strangers explained with real patience, actually perform worse in extreme heat. Others pointed me toward grid loss over long transmission distances, as if I’d submitted a thesis to a review board instead of cracking a joke at a barbecue. Of course nobody laughed. The post didn’t require laughter to spread, it turns out, only a sentence ambiguous enough for people to argue with.

My usual numbers run between 500 and 1,000 readers. Respectable, modest, mine. This one hit 40,000. I watched the count climb the way you’d watch a fever rise on a child, half proud the body’s doing something, half worried about what exactly it’s doing.

So what traveled? Not the joke. The joke stayed home. What traveled was the friction, the tiny itch of being almost-but-not-quite understood, multiplied by several thousand people who each felt compelled to resolve it personally. A clean joke gets a laugh and dies a peaceful death in the scroll. A muddy one gets a comment section, and a comment section is just an algorithm’s favorite kind of campfire.

Here’s the part that actually makes me think, longer than the joke did. I write something most days. Sometimes I name actual problems, occasionally I attach an actual fix, and I pitch these pieces the way you’d nudge a heavy box up a ramp, with effort, with care for where it lands. These get read by the dozens, the honest ones. Then three-quarters of a joke, fired off in under two minutes, outran every careful thing I’d built that month combined.

Should that surprise me? Maybe the real question isn’t why the joke worked. Maybe it’s what “working” even means here, if reach and resonance turn out to be two completely different currencies, and you can get rich in one while staying broke in the other.

I won’t pretend I felt nothing. There’s a small, stupid satisfaction in knowing the reach exists, that the wiring still works, that somewhere out there 40,000 people stopped scrolling for one second because of something I made. But satisfaction isn’t the same as being glad. I’d have traded every one of those views for a fraction of that audience landing on the piece I actually built something into. I won’t tell you which one. Go look, if you’re curious. You might find it. You might not. Either way, it’s still sitting there, patient, under the radar, waiting for the right explorer to be seen.

So here’s what I keep circling back to, and maybe you’ve circled it too: when has the wrong thing of yours traveled further than the right one? And once it does, what do you do with that information? Keep making the loud, easy thing because it pays in attention? Or keep building the quiet, hard thing and trust that attention was never really the currency you were collecting?

I genuinely don’t know.