Online Shopping Never Asks If I’m in the Mood. Neither Should Good Writing.

Remember mall shopping? You had to WANT to be there. Real pants, a drive, dodging eye contact with the Auntie Anne’s guy, actually caring enough to go get the thing. The mood was a prerequisite. No mood, no purchase. That was just the deal.

I do not have that problem anymore and neither do you. Online shopping doesn’t ask if I’m in the mood, it just assumes I am, and it’s right every single time. Groceries, a gift for someone’s kid’s birthday I forgot about, bedding I didn’t know I needed until 11:47pm, clothes for my actual children who will not stop growing, clothes for me I’ll wear exactly twice, cat stuff because they gave me a look. There’s always something. The mood isn’t required anymore, it’s manufactured on the spot by whatever app I happen to be doomscrolling.

Online shopping might be the single smartest thing capitalism ever cooked up, and I say that as someone who has tried, genuinely tried, to be above it for the sake of my marriage. It’s not going anywhere because it solved a problem nobody even knew they had: it took “wanting something” completely out of the equation. You don’t need to want it. You just need to be near your phone. That’s the entire bar now.

Okay, so, weird pivot, but stay with me.

Good writing does the exact same thing online shopping does.

Think about the mall version of documentation, the stuff that just sits there collecting dust until someone’s mid-crisis. A 40 page PDF nobody opens unless something’s already on fire. That’s the mall. You have to be “in the mood,” which is really just a nicer way of saying you have to be desperate, before you’ll ever go looking for it.

The good stuff doesn’t work like that. The best internal docs, the best onboarding guide, the best anything, meets you exactly where you are with zero motivation required. You don’t have to want to learn the process. You don’t have to be curious about it. You just have to be near it, and it should be frictionless enough that you barely notice you learned something. Click, answer, done, back to your actual day.

That’s the real job, once you strip away the fancy title. Writing things down was never really the point. The actual work is removing the mood requirement entirely. Making sure nobody has to dig up willpower just to find the truth about how something works. The truth should already be sitting there, one click away, looking put together, like it knew exactly what you were going to ask before you asked it.

I used to think my job was turning complicated things into simple things. Turns out it’s smaller and a little weirder than that. My job is making sure nobody ever has to be “in the mood” to get an answer. It should just show up, the same way a hoodie I thought about for four seconds mysteriously appears on my porch two days later.

Online shopping never goes out of style because it stopped waiting around for your motivation. Good writing should be doing the exact same thing.

Also my cats need a new bed. I checked. They do.