Shit You Should Care About: Inside the rise of millennial and Gen Z NZ media phenomenon
Make It Make Sense is the first book by global media sensation Shit You Should Care About. Photo / supplied
On a winter’s day in 2018, Lucy Blakiston sat in a university class trying to make sense of an article about Japanese pacifism and something from the BBC that her lecturer was lecturing about. She knew she should care about this stuff and that after three years, it should be making sense, but it wasn’t.
“Here I was, spending my youth (and an obscene amount of money) fighting tooth and nail to try to keep up with not just my coursework but also the world around me, and it seemed as though no one had tried to make it even the least bit enjoyable.”
So, she texted her friends Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer, who’d helped her understand the hardest world of them all – high school – and made them an offer: why didn’t the three of them come up with a better way to explain shit you should care about?
It started with a blog. Today, Shit You Should Care About is a fully fledged media brand that millennials and Gen-Zers (and their parents) flock to: two podcasts, 3.5 million Instagram followers, a daily newsletter, and a weekend advice column.
Now, SYSCA founder Blakiston and regular contributor Bel Hawkins, a poet and writer, have released the book Make It Make Sense. Instead of asking the questions, here Blakiston and Hawkins answer a few about how they’ve grown a media business when many big players are struggling, the differences between Gen X and Gen Z, their famous followers, and their hopes for the new book.
You started SYSCA in the back of a political science lecture. Have you ever had to use what you learnt in political science – or any of your university courses?
LB: I can’t even remember what the lecture was about, which is telling, but what I can say is that everything I learnt about how the world (and the media) wasn’t working, helped me figure out a way to build a business that did.
BH: I studied journalism just before social media really took over – so it was quite a buzzy experience entering the workforce as everything was disrupted. I can’t say I’m using the inverted pyramid [it’s a writing technique] or rallying against hegemonic discourse every day, but I do think it taught me to be curious and cynical, and I don’t think you can write (for online especially) if you don’t have those two things.
Does it ever give you panic attacks about how big it has grown? And how do you fit in other writing/life stuff you might like to do?
LH: I still find the size of this thing incredibly hard to fathom, which I think is the best thing ever. When I’m mentally in a good place, it doesn’t give me any type of anxiety, because, strangely, it just feels like I’m talking/writing/posting to my friends.