On trying to sell honestly in an economy that prefers surveillance to trust
Recently, in a conversation about sales and marketing I had been quietly dreading, my mentor suggested something disarmingly simple: use your pen. Not to polish the edges of a pitch or refine a conversion path, but to say, plainly, what I have been wrestling with. To stop trying to resolve the tension between the parts of me that don’t quite agree, and instead let them speak to each other in public.
So this is that attempt.
There is a version of the modern business owner I am supposed to become. She is efficient. She understands funnels. She studies behavior at scale and speaks to it in ways that feel almost psychic. She knows how long you hovered over a product, what you clicked last week, what you might want next Tuesday. She does not ask if you need something. She predicts it, then places it in your path, gently but repeatedly, until it becomes difficult to tell where your desire ends and her strategy begins.
I understand how she works. I just don’t know if I can be her.
Because there is another part of me that feels just as real, and far less negotiable. The part that writes. The part that believes language should clarify, not persuade. The part that has spent years trying to say something useful about the world as it is—and as it could be, if we were a little more honest with each other.
For me, that has never been abstract. It means caring, specifically, about equality and justice—not as slogans, but as conditions that shape people’s daily lives. It means paying attention to mental health and well-being, especially in a culture that rewards exhaustion. It means advocating for research and care that center women, and particularly Black women, whose experiences with pain and illness are still too often dismissed, underfunded, or misunderstood. It means asking why certain conditions receive attention and resources while others are left to be managed quietly, indefinitely, by the people living with them.
That is the voice I trust.
And it does not always sit easily beside the one that needs to sell something.
I built Simply Edyn & Co. because I care about objects that feel considered. Materials that hold up. Language that doesn’t talk down to people. A quieter way of moving through the world, even in something as ordinary as a T-shirt or a notebook. The site reflects that. It is restrained, almost to a fault. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t rush you. It assumes you are a person with a mind, not a metric to be optimized.
This is, depending on who you ask, either a strength or a liability.
The advice I’m given—sometimes gently, sometimes with urgency—is almost always the same: you have to be more aggressive. More visible. More strategic. Which is to say, more willing to treat attention as something to capture and hold, rather than something to be respected. The language shifts quickly from “customer” to “user,” from “reader” to “traffic,” from “person” to “data.”
I find myself resisting that shift, even as I understand why it exists.
The last decade didn’t just change how we shop; it changed how we are seen. The platforms we use every day are built on a simple premise: the more precisely you can model a person, the more effectively you can move them. This is not a secret. It is the business model. And it works. It works so well that it has become difficult to imagine an alternative that is not, in comparison, inefficient.
But efficiency is not a neutral value. It has a direction.
It doesn’t stop at data.
There is also the language we’ve come to accept without really examining it. “Clickbait” sounds almost harmless, like a small trick everyone agrees to participate in. But what it actually trains us to do is more subtle. It rewards exaggeration. It blurs the line between interest and urgency. It teaches us to capture attention, not earn it.
When everything is written to provoke a reaction, we lose some of our ability to sit with something that doesn’t announce itself immediately. We become quicker to click, quicker to move on, and, in a quieter way, less patient with one another. The expectation shifts. Conversations flatten. Nuance becomes inefficient.
In business, this has consequences that extend beyond marketing. If the primary goal is to secure the click, then the relationship that follows is already shaped by a kind of misdirection. You are not meeting someone where they are; you are guiding them somewhere else. And when that becomes the norm, trust becomes harder to build and easier to lose.
A healthy economy depends on more than movement and scale. It depends on a baseline of trust between people—between those who make things and those who choose to buy them. When that trust erodes, the system doesn’t collapse all at once. It thins out. People become more skeptical, more guarded, more likely to disengage or to move through transactions without any real sense of connection.
Clickbait is not the only cause of that shift, but it is one of the more visible symptoms. It reflects a broader willingness to trade clarity for speed, and relationship for reach.
I’m not outside of that pressure. I feel it every time I sit down to write for my own business.
I keep coming back to the same question: what would it look like to build something that doesn’t rely on that first moment of distortion?
Not slower for the sake of being slow, but clearer. Not quieter for the sake of restraint, but more precise about what is being offered, and why.
Because if we want a system that works for more than the few at the top, it has to be built on something more durable than attention alone. It has to be built on people being able to recognize themselves, honestly, in the things they choose to engage with—and in the people offering them.
I am not naïve about the stakes. Rent is not philosophical. Inventory is not abstract. The lights do not stay on because you held your values intact. There are days where the tension between my writing voice—the part of me that wants to tell the truth cleanly—and the reality of running a business feels almost impossible to resolve. One asks for clarity. The other demands movement.
And yet, I keep circling the same question: what does it mean to build something sustainable, not just environmentally, but relationally?
On my site, sustainability shows up in materials—organic cotton, slower production, fewer toxins—but also in tone. There is an attempt, however imperfect, to not overstate, not overpromise, not manipulate urgency where none exists. It is a small refusal. It is also, I’m beginning to understand, a risk.
Because the market rewards what is loud, fast, and repeatable. It rewards the ability to turn attention into action with minimal friction. It does not always reward restraint.
And still, there is a quiet countercurrent. You can feel it in the fatigue people carry after years of being marketed to as if they are always on the verge of needing something. You can see it in the way language has started to flatten—everything is a “must-have,” everything is “essential,” everything is urgent. When everything is urgent, nothing is meaningful.
I don’t think people are as easily persuaded as the systems built around them assume. I think they are often tired. I think they are paying attention in ways that aren’t captured by click-through rates. I think they notice when something feels off, even if they can’t name why.
So I am trying, in the middle of all this, to build a business that does not rely on that feeling of “off.”
This is slower. It is less predictable. It means writing product descriptions that read more like notes than pitches. It means allowing space on a page where nothing is asking you to do anything. It means, sometimes, not knowing if the work will meet the moment in a way that sustains it.
It also means saying things plainly when they need to be said. About cost. About health. About why certain pieces exist at all.
Recently, I wrote about living with chronic illness—the kind that doesn’t always show up in ways the world recognizes as urgent. Fibromyalgia is part of it. So are other conditions that are still being sorted through, slowly, unevenly, at the pace of a system that is not built for complexity. There is no clean narrative for that. No single solution you can point to and say, “This is the answer.” There is only management. Access. Time.
And time, like everything else, has a cost.
In a more conventional business model, this would be a story to leverage. There would be a cleaner arc, a more defined emotional hook, a clearer path from vulnerability to purchase. I understand how that would work. I also understand why it unsettles me.
There is a difference between sharing something because it is true and shaping it because it converts.
I am still learning where that line is for me. Not in theory, but in practice, where decisions are less abstract. Do you place the support link above the collection or below it? Do you lead with the product or the story? Do you let someone arrive at the need on their own, or do you guide them there?
These are not just design questions. They are ethical ones.
We do not talk enough about what it looks like to run a business that refuses, even partially, to treat people as extractable. There is plenty of conversation about growth, scale, and strategy. There is less about restraint, about trust, about what you are willing not to do.
If we want a different kind of market—less manipulative, less exhausting—it will not appear fully formed. It will be built, piece by piece, by people making smaller, sometimes inconvenient choices. Choosing not to track something you could track. Choosing not to say something you could say to push a sale through. Choosing language that leaves a person intact.
This is not purity. It is an attempt.
I am not outside the system. I rely on it. I participate in it. I benefit from it in ways that are uneven and, at times, uncomfortable. But I am also allowed to question it, to adjust my place within it, to decide what I am willing to trade for stability.
The tension has not resolved. I don’t expect it to. What has changed is my willingness to stay with it, to let it shape how I build rather than rush past it in the name of growth.
Simply Edyn & Co. is still in progress. So am I.
If there is a strategy here, it is this: tell the truth as clearly as you can, make things that hold up, and trust that people are more than the systems designed to predict them.
It is not the fastest way to build a business.
But it might be the only way I know how to live with one.
Tasha Monroe
Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.