Our wretched, inescapable fate

Our wretched, inescapable fate

My Dostoyevskian analysis of SEO

“Reader of Dostoevsky” by Emil Filla, 1906

Ah, SEO. Just saying it out loud feels like muttering a curse under my breath. It looms over us all like some indifferent deity - an omniscient, coldly calculating force that decides, without so much as a glance in our direction, whose words shall be seen and whose shall be cast into the bottomless pit of page two. Who among us hasn’t felt the existential horror of writing something meaningful, something honest, only to watch it drown beneath an ocean of keyword-stuffed nonsense written for no one and everyone at once?

It’s an absurd game, really…this constant chase for visibility, this desperate plea to appease the great and mighty Algorithm, which cares nothing for artistry, nothing for sincerity, nothing for the soul of what is written. It demands structure. It demands optimization. It demands that we contort our thoughts into digestible, Google-approved bites, feeding them into an abyss where they might, if we are very lucky, return to us as clicks.

And yet - what can we do? Ignore it? Ha! That’s like walking into the woods at night and expecting to be found. No, no. To exist in this world, and to be seen within it, we must engage with it, wrestle with it, manipulate it even as it manipulates us. We must learn the dark arts of metadata and backlinks, learn to whisper our truths in the language of search intent and keyword density.

Of course, in doing so, we lose a piece of ourselves. The more we conform to the machine, the less we sound like ourselves. It’s a quiet kind of tragedy, really, to spend hours shaping our words into something genuine only to break them apart and rearrange them until they are palatable to an algorithm that does not, cannot, feel.

And yet! SEO is both a curse and a necessity. It is the weight on our backs and the ladder we must climb. It is the chain and the key. We may hate it, but we need it. Without it, we are shouting into the void. With it, we are speaking - but in a voice not entirely our own.

So what’s left for us, the stubborn, the ones who still want to write with fire, with conviction, with something real? Perhaps, in the end, it’s about finding a balance, learning to play the game without losing ourselves in it. Learning to write for the machine, yes, but also for the people on the other side of it. Because while Google may decide who gets seen, it’s still people who decide what’s worth reading.

And that, my friends, is the only solace we have in this wretched, ridiculous, inescapable fate of SEO.