Project 2004: I Don't Want to Play Anymore

When I announced I created my own curriculum for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I promised I would keep you up to date on how it was for me (in case you want to give it a try yourself). The honest version is... most of it was boring.

I don't mean that in the "my attention span is shot" way (even though it is). I mean boring in the specific, tedious sense of covering ground I've already covered. I majored in English Literature as an undergrad and I've been editing fiction professionally for years. Not to mention publishing my own. So when the Burroway textbook walked me through showing versus telling and the fundamentals of scene construction, I was basically sitting through a lecture I could've taught myself.

But I did the work anyway, which is the whole premise of a structured program. You don't get to skip the parts that feel beneath you, or make you pine for TikTok slop. Discipline is the only thing that separates people who talk about improving their craft from people who actually do it. So I read the damn chapters and did the writing exercises.

I apologize if that's an underwhelming update but what's true for me may not be true for you, especially if you didn't major in English.

The thing is, even the boring parts keep revealing truths I'd forgotten, plus fun literary references that remind me of what it felt like to be erudite and well-read. The experience also made me more excited for Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners in the second semester. O'Connor's thinking on the relationship between belief and fiction connects directly to the kind of moral criticism I'm doing on this site and on the YouTube channel. So I doubt that will bore me.

Of course Project 2004 has always been about more than the MFA. The original idea was that the older version of things was frequently better than what replaced it, and that hypothesis keeps getting proven everywhere I look. Including places I wasn't expecting.

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Everything Sucks on Purpose

I've been watching a lot of Zac Rios on YouTube lately. If you haven't found him, he compiles TikToks by theme, and two themes keep coming back because his audience can't get enough of them: the abysmal build quality of new vehicles and the equally abysmal build quality of new homes.

The car content is staggering. Zac shows us poor people lamenting that they'd just bought their dream car (or bought something more practical for their family) only for it to (sometimes literally) blow up in their faces. We see brand new trucks with body panels that don't align. Transmissions failing before the first oil change. Infotainment systems that make you take your eyes off the road to find the right button on your screen. These aren't beaters from a buy-here-pay-here lot, though Zac has videos about those too. These are $50,000 and $60,000 vehicles (which is somehow considered entry level now) and they're built by companies that have previously given us the best cars in the world.

The housing content is worse. Video after video of people who have bought new construction homes where the plumbing backs up on move-in day or foundations crack within the first year. Builders using the cheapest materials that'll technically pass code inspection, and sometimes cheating even that. A home inspector on one of these clips found a brand new house that was missing shingles on the roof. Missing them. On a house someone was about to close on. Not to mention they'll hire whoever works cheapest and fastest, quality (or citizenship) be damned. I have my own experience with new construction, and it was not positive.

My husband and I have been watching all of this, and I'm glad we watched it together because he is a man of taste. He likes fancy, is what I mean to say. And like a normal person, he equates newer with better. And thanks to these fine internet folks, he understands now that is no longer true.

Our current house is too small. We know it's too small. We bought it several years ago as a short-term house just for me and Gemma. We knew he had a year or two left living in another city for work, and the layout of this 2004 townhouse had a perfect layout for my sweet Gemma and her mobility impairments. But Gemma is gone now and the hubs is back home. Ideally, we would get something more like our previous abode.

Unfortunately, the house we sold in 2020 is now priced at double what we sold it for and we can't afford it. And any bigger house would mean financing at roughly double the interest rate we locked in on our current mortgage, on a property that was probably built with the same cut-rate materials and shortcuts we've been watching fail on camera.

Instead, we're working with what we have. We're adding a shower to the basement half bath, which is where my office is. I spend most of my waking hours down there, and this is one improvement that changes the daily livability of the space. We're also swapping out some of the furniture on the main floor for pieces we already have in storage. Kind of like upcycling.

Likewise my SUV is fine mechanically but deeply boring. Black on black, which also means that from May through September in Kansas City it doubles as a mobile sauna. A new SUV would mean buying into a market where the sticker price keeps climbing and the build quality keeps sliding. So I'm keeping mine and making it feel a little more like me with pretty seat covers and a steering wheel cover plus, if I feel sassy enough, maybe some exterior badges. We'll see.

When There's No Such Thing as an Investment Anymore

The sad part is none of these changes are about frugality. We technically could afford a new house and a new car, even if overpriced. With our money continuing to lose its value, budget is a real limiting factor these days. But more people would stretch to make that down payment if the product they were buying was worth it. In our current landscape, no matter what the product or who made it, we can all be almost certain that the price isn't worth it. Instead, we will simply be asked for MORE money for repairs, subscriptions, and other assorted nonsense.

There's simply no point to any of it anymore.

The entire consumer economy runs on the assumption that you'll keep buying the next thing, and the next thing keeps getting worse. This is by design. You know this. You've heard the word enshittification just as much as I have, and there's no better word to describe the current state of things. It started as a tech term, but it applies to damn near everything now. Cars, homes, appliances, furniture, clothing. The incentive structure rewards companies for building things that fail, because failure generates the next purchase.

Your grandparents' refrigerator lasted thirty years. Yours will last eight, maybe ten, and it'll cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars. And also it will make you download an app, connect to wifi, and steal your data.

The floor has dropped and "you get what you pay for" hasn't been true in an alarmingly long time. A lot of people have opted out, and it has nothing to do with hearing me talk about Project 2004. They have eyes and ears just like I do, and we've all come to the inescapable conclusion that companies are intentionally taking our money and giving us garbage, so we're keeping what we have, or seeking out something "vintage." Something that was actually made well, which is what America used to be known for.

What's Coming

As a reminder, the YouTube channel relaunches in September as Kristin McTiernan: Internet Moralist, with weekly film and TV commentary focused on properties from the late 1990s through the early 2000s. The entertainment from that era connects to the same thesis running through everything else in Project 2004: the stories were better, the craft was sharper, and looking at why is the whole point of what I do here.

And if you're following along with the self-paced MFA, you can view and download the semester 2 curriculum below.

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