It sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? It seems like the ultimate answer. We’ve stamped it on Instagram sunsets, packaged it into expensive wellness retreats, and made it the holy grail of the modern age.

We are starved for meaning, so we bought the slogan. I know I did. In fact, when I first started this Substack, “finding your purpose” was exactly what I told creators to do.

I was wrong. After years of writing, observing, and searching, I came to a bitter realization.

It is complete bullshit.

If that slightly offended you... good. We might just be onto something.

The New Religion

To understand where all the emptiness is coming from, we need to take a look at how we are misusing psychology.

For most of human history, we lived inside collective frameworks that gave life meaning. Religion, cultural traditions, and shared myths offered a sense of significance and belonging. They gave us answers to the big questions: Why am I here? What am I meant to do?

During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, everything started to crumble. The institutions lost their authority, the individual became empowered, and church and state were separated.

Until then, purpose was largely defined by religion. Religion and life were so inseparable that the question of your purpose was never asked. We have outgrown the dogmas from the past. We can’t return to blind faith in institutions we no longer believe in.

At the same time, the purely scientific and rationalistic worldview that replaced them is insufficient. By explaining the psyche as a mere byproduct of brain chemistry or reducing human motivation to biological drives, it leaves no room for the soul. It denies the autonomous, spiritual part of ourselves that craves a deeper purpose.

As a response, the human potential movement started to emerge in the 60s. It introduced Abraham Maslow‘s “hierarchy of needs,“ which placed self-actualization at the very top.1 This meant the ultimate goal of human life shifted toward becoming completely self-directed and discovering one‘s own inner motivations.

As we moved away from traditional spiritual beliefs and the supernatural, we adopted a rational framework to explain our existence and give our lives meaning. This led to collective ideologies that take all kinds of forms in sports, politics and even in science.

When we use psychology to explain all of human behavior, it overreaches its scientific limits. By claiming absolute, universal truths that apply to all people regardless of time and place, psychology reaches beyond scientific reasoning into the realm of dogmatic certainty and thus easily becomes a substitute for religious belief.2

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There is a particular danger in using psychology to find your purpose. It provides a litany of methods to help you, which means the search starts to feel like work.

The Purpose Industry

Once people began searching for their unique purpose, capitalism quickly stepped in to help them find it (and profit from it).

The journey to “find your purpose“ is heavily commercialized, driving massive industries of self-help books, wellness retreats, life coaching, and targeted lifestyle products.3

The whole self-help industry is obsessed with analyzing yourself and finding who you truly are.

We have come to believe that if we analyze ourselves deeply enough, we will reach a point of enlightenment where our problems vanish and our purpose magically reveals itself. You can then finally be yourself and live your purpose.4

Looking at the overwhelming amount of information, courses and tools, it’s funny that only a handful of people seem to have found their purpose. And most of them never consumed the ideas of the self-help industry.

Reality paints a more sobering picture. The obsession with finding your purpose has led to endless introspection. We take personality tests, dig up childhood traumas, and journal endlessly, waiting for an “aha!” moment of purpose that never comes.

The creator economy thrives on this because it happily provides you with more courses, books and frameworks that keep you analyzing and consuming. It keeps thousands of creators in a loop of trying to find their purpose… and then makes them feel bad because they haven’t found it yet.

But people who supposedly found their purpose are not much better off…

The Intellectualized Purpose

Let’s say your purpose is to help people. To do that you build a company that makes a lot of money so you can help a lot of people.

It sounds like a noble mission. I can’t argue if this is your purpose or not. Nobody can argue with that. I mean how could helping people be a bad thing?

Well, our ego is a sneaky bitch…

Humans constantly use intellectual ideologies to justify their behavior and make it socially acceptable. When you say, “I am building a company to make money so I can help people,“ you are using a rational ideology to mask a deeper, perhaps more selfish or irrational drive.

Primitive and ancient man used religion to participate in the irrational forces of nature and the cosmos. We are terrified of these uncontrollable forces, so we use psychology to rationally explain them away. In order to appear scientific and rational, psychology had to deny its religious origin (the soul) and attempt to rationalize our desire for immortality. It acts as a desperate internal attempt to achieve the security that religion once provided externally.

People use these rationalizations because they need them in order to live irrationally while appearing logical and good to society. The ego‘s job is to act as a PR agent. It presents our raw instincts in a socially acceptable form.

We are heavily influenced by our environment. Naturally, we pick up a model of what we ought to do and what’s expected of us. When we operate entirely from a place of what we should do, we are usually submitting to an external ideology rather than acting from our true, autonomous core.

Every ideology comes with a morality. What is good and what is bad, according to this worldview. Morality, in this sense, becomes a tool for conformity that alienates us from our own nature.

If we are judged (or judge ourselves) against a predefined standard, we eventually fall short. You can see this in various forms: a religious doctrine, a social expectation, or an unattainable ideal.

The Intellectualized Purpose falls exactly in this category. It comes with its own set of what’s good and what’s bad. Because humans cannot perfectly live up to these unrealistic ideals, they inevitably fall short, internalizing this failure as feelings of sin, guilt, or inferiority.

In this light “finding your purpose“ acts in the exact opposite way from what it promises, leaving us feeling like we never quite arrived. Like we need more discipline, need to change ourselves or need to find an elusive purpose to be a good person.

The moral conflict isn’t really that big of a problem, because in the end does it matter if you just want to make money for your own gain if at the same time you help people?5

The real problem is that an Intellectualized Purpose still leaves you empty.

The Fear of Death

If we go to such great lengths to find our purpose we should ask where this need to find our purpose comes from in the first place.

Consciousness comes at a very high price. We are the only animals who know they are going to die. It seems like such an obvious fact that we rarely think about the deeper consequences.

Intellectually we perfectly know that we are going to die. But emotionally it scares the shit out of us. Just because we understand it intellectually doesn’t make it any less powerful.

Thinkers like Ernest Becker even argue that the fear of death is central to our being. 6 Everything comes down to it. I agree.

Almost everything we do is an attempt to deny our mortality, so we don’t have to confront our terrifying reality. This creates a deep need to feel significant. We want to stand out, we want to be special, we want to matter. We basically want to control this thing death, so it stops being so scary.

We pretend that we can conquer death, thus our deepest desire is to become immortal. Most of the accomplishments of human history stem from this fact: pyramids, culture, and basically every business.

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We want to leave our mark on this world and have an impact that survives beyond our biological self. Ultimately we are looking for “cosmic significance.“

We are all somewhat narcissistic in that sense. It comes as a fundamental part of our psychological makeup. Our natural selfishness feeds on abstract ideas of self-worth, allowing us to expand our sense of self endlessly without regard for the laws of physical reality.

This gives humans a symbolic identity and a mind that can contemplate infinity. Simultaneously, we are housed in a physical body that is destined to decay and die.

Humans are irrational beings more than anything: half animal, half symbolic.

It’s a fact we don’t like much about ourselves, because it makes us helpless against nature. So instead of accepting it we use our intellect to put ourselves at the pinnacle of evolution.

This creates a natural level of self-deception. We hide our selfish and irrational behavior. In other words, we are chronic liars. From an evolutionary perspective it has been beneficial to be a bit delusional about reality.

Our rational mind is the perfect instrument to make this lying so sophisticated that we all agree not to get too close to death.7

All Problems Are Emotional

There is no doubt that science is one of the most amazing accomplishments of human history. But we are really just very smart apes. Science gives us a language to rationalize our irrational nature.8

We use our intellect to control our terrifying biological reality. If we can understand how life works, it gives us a sense of power over nature. So we convince ourselves that we have somehow transcended the reality of life and death. In that process we replaced God with Truth.9

Your purpose then is simply the individual ideology you construct to assure yourself that your life has a neat, logical meaning beyond the grave.

Here is where it gets tricky.

On the other hand, we also have a need to belong and be part of a group. If we stand out we fear that we might get rejected. So instead of saying I want to build a business to stand out, leave a mark on the world and make myself immortal, our intellect invents a socially acceptable, noble narrative to camouflage our true motives.

But unfortunately it leaves us feeling empty. We are trying to solve an emotional problem with a tool of the mind.

Two Ways Creators Hide From The Void

Because we no longer have collective religions to absorb this emptiness and handle our immortality for us, the burden falls entirely on the individual. The crushing weight of trying to justify our own existence leaves us desperate for an elusive purpose.

I see two dominant ways creators are dealing with that:

1. The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist is trying to find the “right” purpose. This sets off an endless search that usually results in a loop of self-improvement. They think they just need to learn more about themselves until they suddenly become enlightened and everything makes sense. Because they will never get to this point they are stuck. They hoard their potential out of fear of making the “wrong“ choice.

Making the wrong choice would mean they stand out and could get rejected by the group (or audience). Instead of asserting their own individuality they want to be saved by an external ideology. But their ego is too strong to submit to one. So, they end up paralyzed.

The search for their purpose is a way of trying to immortalize themselves. They rejected the collective solutions, so they are left all to themselves. Since they can’t find their purpose, they are haunted by an immense fear of an unlived life.

2. The Workaholic

The Workaholic acts much like the Perfectionist but instead of letting fear paralyze them, they use an Intellectualized Purpose to justify their (ego’s) mission. They are not alone, because society already approved it.

They are on an endless quest of trying to be enough by achieving more. This is particularly dangerous because our society rewards this behavior. By exhausting themselves with working, they are essentially trying to fill their void. It allows them to say, “Look how hard I worked today!”

But their purpose is not really coming from their soul, so the Workaholic desperately needs the approval of others. So besides a toll on their bodies, they feel a profound sense of emptiness.

You’re Asking the Wrong Question

You will never find your “purpose.“

It’s like playing chess and asking what the best move in the world is. It’s the wrong question to ask. When I started my Substack, I had identified a lack of purpose as the root problem. So I tried to help creators find their purpose. It implied that once you have found it, the problem is solved. My mistake was that I had been looking only at the symptoms: fear and emptiness.

Most creators already know what they want to do.

They want to create, but they don’t. That’s why they want to find their purpose. It gives them a place to hide because they think it will get easier once they have found their purpose. It won’t. And it’s exactly why calling this feeling emptiness or fear doesn’t help. It’s really guilt and it gets worse the longer they don‘t create. Guilt is much more precise than emptiness or fear. It is directed toward someone.

Think of your life as a loan you have been given, and guilt is the debt you carry just by existing.10

Because you know you will die, you feel the crushing weight of having to do something meaningful with this life. But stepping out of the crowd strips away your safety net. Standing alone exposes your smallness and vulnerability against the fact of your own mortality. You feel guilty for daring to defy death by becoming an individual.

This brings us straight to the core of the actual problem. You can’t get rid of guilt. Even if you refuse to separate to become your unique self, you will feel the guilt of an unused life.

That’s why religion works so well. It provides a purpose big enough to absorb that guilt. But most of us can’t go back to simply obeying a higher calling. You are probably too self-conscious for that. You see through these illusions and can no longer genuinely believe in the grand justifications, leaving you crushed by the guilt you were trying to escape.

The same happens when you are trying to find your purpose inside yourself. You simply can’t bear the amount of guilt all by yourself.

Finding your purpose then is just another illusion that’s destined to fail. Because even if you supposedly find it, you are still terrorized by guilt. And now you‘ve got nothing left to blame.

And this brings us to the most crucial question: how do you pay it off?

Purpose Has to Be Created

First of all you should relax. Life is not meant to be figured out. There is nothing wrong with you.

You are drowning in unused potential. It’s now time to create something with it. I won’t tell you what to create. You already know that.

What I mean by creation is wider than you might think. It can be raising a family, building a business, cultivating a personal philosophy, or mastering an art form. Anything where you turn what‘s inside you into something real. What matters is that it comes from you and not from what you think you should be doing.

The distinction is important, because the Workaholic is creating too. The Perfectionist hides in the search and never uses the loan. The Workaholic hides in the work and believes that if they just build something big enough, the account will finally be settled and they can rest.

In both cases it is a desperate escape from themselves and the inherent guilt of life.

What gets us into trouble is trying to find relief. It’s an illusion. You are really aiming for a state where you stop hesitating. Where what you do lines up so closely with what you actually believe that the doubt has nowhere left to sit. You stop arguing with yourself about whether you are allowed to be a unique individual.

You are not waiting to be “called.“ You are an artist who appoints themself. “I choose to be a writer,“ “I choose to build this business.“

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You take the raw, chaotic, irrational material of life and use your creative force to put it into a meaningful shape.

Your business, Substack, or art are just byproducts of that process.

They give you a container, so you can offer your work to the world. The guilt came from separating, so the payment has to travel back to other people. What comes back justifies you to yourself.

When you create, you are using the loan. You are released from the guilt. But only temporarily. Because creation is the ultimate assertion of your individuality, it instantly separates you from the crowd and you are left with guilt again.

The cycle doesn‘t end, but the nature of the guilt changes from paralyzing you to creating you.

This is crucial because death is the only repayment of the loan. So the real question is not about paying it off but what you do with it.

The meaning is not hiding in the work, waiting for you to uncover it. You put it there. You decide this matters, then you act as if it does, and the acting is what makes it so.

This is hard work because there is nobody telling you what is right or wrong, nobody motivating you, nobody who is taking the lead. It carries only your own signature.

It’s not a one-time act. It doesn’t get easier, but it gets more meaningful the longer you do it. You cannot force this realization, nor can you logic your way into it. You simply have to keep building your meaning, piece by piece, until the work itself carries you to the very edge of what you can control.

And if you are the one making the meaning, then the thing being built is not the essay or the project. It is whoever is doing the making. You are never finished because you never stop becoming someone.

That’s much more fulfilling than trying to find your purpose. But it is also much harder because for a writer it means accepting the fact that writing will never get easier. You just have to sit down and write. You are not building a business. You are becoming a writer.

Close the tab and start the most important piece of art you will ever create.

P.S. Your business should be a vessel for your life‘s work, not a prison of your own making. But you can‘t build the vessel while the only language you have for yourself is the performance you give for the audience.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I built The Archetype Navigator to give you the words to describe your signature. It shows you how you naturally create, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.

It‘s free, takes five minutes, and it won‘t tell you what to create. You already know that.

I never had a job. After studying I went straight into entrepreneurship. It felt like the path I was meant for but nobody told me about. After being utterly lost, I built an e-commerce business.

Long story short, several years ago, I sold my e-commerce business and turned my side-hustle branding studio into my full-time work. It felt like the best life I could have.

I usually woke up fully excited. After my morning routine (which took 2h), I dived into a state of flow, doing creative projects I loved. I was working between 2 and 4 hours and enjoyed my life. I had the freedom to work from anywhere, so I started to travel more.

The money was good and my life was comfortable. That’s the dream the creator economy is trying to sell. I was living the life people write glowing threads about.

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But in those quiet moments of fulfillment I realized something that nobody is talking about: passion is crap. By that I don’t mean that you should do work that you hate, but passion alone is just not enough.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was so I summarized it under a feeling of unfulfilled potential.

I was making brands look good. I was helping businesses become more successful. It was good work, creative work, even fulfilling work. But was it the impact I was meant to make? Was I really fulfilling my potential?

The answer was a clear (and uncomfortable) no.

I had built a great life and business. I enjoyed the freedom that many creators would die for. But continuing to live this dream felt like I was living a story that has become too small for me. It led me straight into a search for a deeper meaning.

Being Lost is Part of the Process

My search started with brainstorming. Fueled by endless specialty coffee and dopamine, every new idea seemed brilliant. This was my own experience of what I call “Exploration Phase” (although "WTF-Am-I-Doing-With-My-Life" Phase would be more fitting).

First, I tried to play the logical game: scaling my studio. I drew up plans to go international. Working against my own advice, I told myself to “position horizontally.” The truth was that I didn’t have a clear target audience. My goal was to help founders build a purpose-driven brand and business.

I went to business meetups trying to pitch new clients… and felt like an imposter. Who am I to talk about purpose-driven branding? My background was e-commerce and my portfolio reflected that. I told myself it was a mindset issue.

But thinking about the idea made me realize another issue: scaling would mean a bigger team, more management and distracting me from the work I love to do.

That sounded like a new cage in the making.

So I pivoted to the next “great idea.” I became obsessed with the intersection of exponential technologies and purpose. I went to the meetups again. This time I got a lot of positive feedback. People were interested, they gathered around, they asked for my contact info. This was a clear sign of validation.

But the voice in my head knocked again. The idea was aligned with my passion and intellectual cause, but not my lived story. It felt like starting from zero, without my most valuable asset. I had no lived experience, no hard-won wisdom to share.

A passion is not the same as a calling. I realized I couldn’t build a sustainable body of work on intellectual curiosity alone.

I was trying to teach a transformation I never experienced myself.

This led me back to my area of expertise. I decided to create an online course for e-commerce sellers on how to build a brand rooted in strategy and purpose. It was the logical next step in the creator playbook. Productize your knowledge.

The creative part was a joy. I spent weeks designing the sales page, lost in flow state. Then it was time to optimize the copy. I knew the audience wanted tactics and fast money. I knew the “7-Figure” claims worked.

So, I wrote them.

An inner battle began. The voice in my head went nuts. I was going against my own values. But then my rational mind kicked in with a genius idea:

“I’ll sell them what they want (money), and deliver what they need (purpose).”

I told myself I would just do this now and slowly shift later. This is called self-deception (or lying to yourself if you want). The truth was I was becoming one of the gurus I despised.

That’s when something dawned on me: it feels like a battle because I’m serving the wrong people.

The right path doesn’t require you to convince anyone. It’s an invitation. And I had been trying to invite an audience that craved quick fixes to a deep, transformative journey.

I was going in circles because I was busy and productive, doing the wrong thing. I was playing it safe and hiding from the real work.

The Wakeup Call

If I wanted to tell a great story I would tell you that there was a sudden moment of breakthrough where I became enlightened and my whole life changed. But we all know that real life doesn’t work like this. There were a lot of small moments, but one stands out in particular. It was a confrontation with mortality.

I had a moment where I was forced to look at the finite nature of my own life. It’s hard to put the experience in words, because it was a very emotional experience. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but I was suddenly stripped of every psychological protection. I could see reality sober and clear: I was going to die.

In this very moment it wasn’t a distant reality. Everything felt like as if I were doing it for the last time.

It wasn’t particularly pleasurable, but extremely sobering. And in that raw, clarifying space, a new kind of urgency was born. The vague feeling that “something was missing” transformed into the answer I needed:

That really changed something for me. Not all at once, but a slow unfolding. My first act was to stop searching for a “better” business model. I needed a new way of being. The exploration was over. The path was right in front of me. In fact, it was there all the time. It doesn’t help to see your path. You need the courage to walk it. I realized that I would run out of time in whatever direction I chose.

And almost immediately, the universe sent a test.

A new client came along. He wanted high-end product photography as many clients do. I was hesitant but he assured me he was interested in developing a strategy and brand later. So I took the project. My team and I poured our hearts into it, creating an A+ strategic and visual concept. Work a client usually pays 10x the price.

We were proud of the work. His reaction: “The colors don’t seem to fit.”

In creative work it’s not uncommon that the client is not (immediately) thrilled with your ideas. So I dug deeper, but he couldn’t articulate what he wanted. I was a philosopher trying to sell art to a day-trader. After two Zoom calls trying to understand his vague feedback, he delivered me the line I needed to hear:

This hit me hard, because it stripped down the illusion I was still holding on to. In that moment I finally got the lesson. He was basically telling me: “I’m not the right audience for what you are trying to do.”

Following your path demands courage to make hard decisions. My path required me to be willing to let go of anyone who didn’t want to go deep. I realized that no amount of money was worth the psychic cost of trying to force my purpose into a container that couldn’t hold it. That unrewarding project brought me immense clarity. I was ready to make some radical changes.

How I Ended Up on Substack

During my exploration phase another project was born: Serapex. Back then it was lacking the clarity that I now gained. It was focused on my story but not my real calling.

My idea was to help people build an online business where your interests, passion and purpose overlap aka. what Dan Koe does but different. The articles are still online (please don’t read them).

First I tried to build my brand on Instagram, reviving an old Instagram account. I remember opening the app to post and thinking: “What the fuck are you doing here?”

A mentor told me that IG is now all about Reels. Just the thought of dancing for the algorithm, of creating 30-second videos about deep psychological concepts, felt absurd. I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to sustain such an inauthentic practice.

Next, I focused on X. The vibe seemed better, more intellectual. But my feed quickly pissed me off. It felt like a global convention of imposters. Eighteen-year-olds selling life advice, “gurus” with bios bragging about the millions they supposedly made for clients. Everyone was trying to sell a transformation they never experienced. It was a sea of superficial platitudes and trolls.

How could I build an authentic brand on platforms I didn’t even want to use?

It was at that point I found Substack. I heard about it before but never gave it a real thought. I took a closer look and it felt like a great match. The only problem was that I’m not a naturally gifted writer. I thought fuck it, it seems like a skill that’s worth acquiring.

I decided to fully embrace Substack. No other platforms. No bullshit. Just a commitment to exploring my own story. And it felt amazing.

Authenticity is less about what you do and more about what you refuse to do.

Authenticity sounds great in theory but is much harder in practice. And while authenticity is important it makes for a shitty standard. How do you determine if you are authentic or not?

Passion, authenticity, happiness… all these things are byproducts of building a body of work. The act of creation is the main event.

Beyond Authenticity

Instead of creating a separate work of art, many creators make their own life and internal conflicts the product. This leads to a tormenting, hyper-aware self-consciousness. As a result they drift into burnout.

The most recent trend in the creator economy is authenticity and so far it has resulted in anything but authenticity. Everyone is shouting the same empty platitude: “Just be yourself.” It’s well meant but completely useless. Who else would you be?

But the biggest problem is that it keeps you stuck.
"Be yourself" is not the destination.

I have been circling in this stage for years. I read more psychology than my therapist. I could name every pattern I was caught in. I refused social media, the gurus and the funnels. That a sneaky trap because I felt like I already figured out what I meant to do.

I started to call this state Sophisticated Procrastination. You are productive doing the wrong thing, because your work has no criterion. “Be yourself” gives you no way to know whether today’s work was right. Without a criterion there is nothing to finish against, so you prepare instead.

Be yourself cannot be wrong, and that is the problem with it. It asks nothing. You already are yourself. You were yourself the entire time you were stuck.

Refusal got me off Instagram and X. It also got me out of my comfortable niche. But refusal only tells you what you are not.

The answer is not more authenticity. It is self-construction against a self-made standard. Determination from oneself, not expression of oneself. You choose and build your own ideal that you then follow.

It takes a tremendous amount of self-awareness and honesty to build an ideal that actually fits your nature, rather than one you just think looks good on paper. That kind of honesty has nothing to do with posting your feelings online. It means admitting I wrote those 7-figure claims and meant to send them.

Yes, I built my Substack and business, but they are just a byproduct of creating my life’s work. I’m building a reality of my own that makes me independent, yet still allows me to live in the real world without constantly clashing with it. It's a working relationship between my creative force, my resistance, and my overarching goals.

That’s why I keep repeating that the business is not the point. What if everything works out according to the dream of the creator economy? Money doesn’t cut it. Passion doesn’t cut it. Authenticity neither. You end up stuck because you don’t know where to move. You supposedly arrived, but you feel empty.

There is nothing waiting under there to be uncovered. You make it.

Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to give you the right vocabulary. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

At least according to the score that Pangram gave me. I signed up months ago, back when it was supposedly the best detection tool for AI writing.

The scores seemed credible… until I ran some experiments. I entered a mixed text. Some written by AI, some written by me. Pangram correctly identified it as mixed. But now the weird part. It flagged the section I had written myself as AI-generated. WTF?

But it got worse… I entered a text that was 100% generated by AI. The result, according to Pangram? 0% AI.

This is palmistry disguised as math.

“Look, it says 40% AI-generated.” I filed it under “Classic AI B.S.” and forgot about it. Then Substack launched a new feature called “Scan for AI.” You can scan any post and get a score from 0 to 100 estimating how much of it was written by AI.

The response to the new feature was overwhelmingly negative. At least from what I saw. I was a bit surprised because at first glance it seemed like a good idea. Substack is trying to protect itself from the flood of AI-generated slop.

So far, so good. The problem lies in how they tried to approach it. They partnered with Pangram to provide the scores. The same Pangram.

But do we really need a detector to tell whether it is AI-written? I mean, does it even matter? I think it‘s pretty obvious when writers use AI. Sometimes you can even tell which model they are using.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s “bad” to use AI as a tool for writing. But if your whole essay smells of AI writing, I’m gone. What really gets me are the tics.

“It’s not… it’s…”
“The problem is structural.”
”In today’s fast-paced digital landscape...”

This drives me crazy. I just can‘t read that kind of writing anymore. The content might be good, but it has zero taste.

AI detectors scan the output. But the real loss already happened in the process.

Writing Is Supposed to Suck

I have a love-hate relationship with writing. Maybe it’s because I haven’t developed my skills to the point where it is all flow. Most days when I sit down to write, I would literally do anything but write.

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I would even go so far as to say that writing is supposed to suck. By that I don’t mean that all writers are masochists… well, maybe a bit. My point is that sometimes your writing just flows, but most of the time it doesn’t. There is always an urge to procrastinate. Most people give in to it. Serious writers have learned to deal with it.

Most of writing is actually thinking. And thinking deeply is what makes writing so hard. We try to avoid anything that is hard. So we still write, but we skip the thinking.

It’s very easy to use AI every time the friction of thinking deeply arises. Even though there is a “Thinking Mode”, AI can’t replace your thinking. You have to sit with that discomfort. That’s why I decided to mostly remove AI from my writing process. I use it to do some light refinements and final editing. I only allow myself to use it when I feel I have gone through enough pain to reach the core of my idea. (Hence the masochist part.)

How To Screw Up Your Writing

There were many times when I wrote a crappy first draft. Things more or less flowed. Then the friction arose, and I switched to AI. I turned it into an outline and refined the draft. It seems innocent, but at least for me, it destroys the creative process necessary to come up with something original.

After hitting publish, I realized that I wanted to focus on something else, and that my core argument had been lost along the way. That’s because I used the first thought I had and put it into AI. The output looked good, so I published it. Nothing was wrong with it. But what I actually wanted to talk about got buried in just one section. I hadn't done the part that comes before. Sometimes hours of staring at the screen or days of not writing more than a crappy sentence.

It seems like wasting time, but that’s what the creative process looks like.

And that’s the ironic part. We call ourselves creators, but we try to skip the creative process. Yes, it is uncomfortable, but there is another reason so many creators reach for AI. This one is external. The platforms put pressure on you to be “consistent.“ The creative act knows nothing of time, nor does it care.

If you are constantly working against a deadline that doesn’t give you the space to think, you are robbing yourself and others of the greatest gift you have: the thing only you can create. That’s how you end up being a content creator. Or, put differently: you are an employee for the algorithm.

The Best of Average

The internet is overflowing with content. Almost all of it is mediocre. AI will raise the bar because suddenly everyone can produce good content. But all we get is better mediocrity.

If you are playing the content game, you are constantly under pressure to create more and better content. The case for using AI becomes even stronger. Everyone is doing it, so you have to use it too, just to keep up.

You might be a prompting genius, but AI by its nature produces average output. Running the same prompt twice produces a different outcome. Do it a hundred times and you will see a pattern emerge. AI predicts the most likely continuations, so it gets pulled toward an average. You are producing average crap, just a bit better average crap than the other guy.

AI models are trained on huge amounts of data. That data is a reflection of the past. If everyone is using it and it is trained on the past, you are in fact running behind by relying on AI.

It’s tempting to play that game. It feels safe. Creating something original, something from your unique experience, feels much more risky. There is no guarantee that people will like it.

Conformity feels safe because it is. Creating something unique means being alone with it.

You Can’t Measure Depth

Before there was AI, people would use templates or copy the style of popular writers. The underlying pattern hasn’t changed much with the arrival of AI. Just more people doing it.

So it isn’t really about AI.

I remember I had swipe files for copywriting. I collected what I liked and what counted as best practices. Best practices are the result of what was measured.

“What gets measured gets managed.”1

But how do you measure depth? I have no idea and neither does Substack. So the metrics show what’s easy to measure. With the new Pangram feature, it was supposed to be easy to tell whether you use AI. Even if the detection worked perfectly, it wouldn‘t matter. It only distracts from the actual problem.

We use proxies for depth and end up optimizing for something else (likes, views, restacks, etc.). Since those are the only metrics you see, it‘s perfectly rational to focus on the ones Substack shows you.

It leads to conformity. And that is really the problem we should be focusing on. There is no score that can determine whether your work is original.

Be Personal, Not Different

If you are playing to conform, you play the same game as everyone else. It’s the default mode. It’s easy. And it’s a race to the bottom. You are playing the game of the content creator. Since AI has lowered the barrier to entry dramatically, you are now competing against everyone who has access to it.

We tend to confuse productivity with creativity.

The creator economy currently punishes creativity. We have been trained to be productive. That’s why many creators have to re-learn to be creative.

If you want to stand out from the sea of sameness, you have to risk doing something different. Actually personal is the better term here. Personal is not just inherently different, but also unique. Nobody has your lived experiences. Nobody can think like you. Nobody can write like you.

That’s why I don’t want to read obvious AI writing. Anyone can write like this. Taste is personal. It’s what turns content into art.

Creativity is about expressing who you are first. Standing out and getting attention are only consequences.

What Substack should be doing is fostering a culture where artists can be creative. Focusing on arbitrary AI scores, likes or open rates doesn‘t help. If Substack itself doesn’t have the courage to stand out and do something different, we end up with a place that is just like every other social media platform. A community for creative people should be creative.

Creativity is a way of being. We are always creating.

The question is: are you creating content or are you creating art?

P.S. Your business should be a reflection of your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. You have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you truly are.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your creative patterns, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you writing the wrong article.

At the front sat our guru. He had recently grown a thick beard, rebranded himself as some sort of spiritual sage, and now sat in total silence while his team worked the room, pitching us dubious backend services.

Everyone was taking notes.

I wasn’t. I had a blank page in front of me and after a while I started to feel weird about it. But there was nothing to write down. I had already sold my company months earlier. I didn’t care about e-commerce. I never really had.

So why was I even here?

Because I desperately needed the whole thing to be real. Otherwise I would have had to ask what I was actually doing with my life. And I would have to explain what I did the last four years.

Back then I couldn’t see it. It turns out procrastination can get so sophisticated that you actually build something.

You might even build a business.

The Expensive Stepping Stone

Well, this is what happened to me when I built my e-commerce business. I knew from the beginning that it was only going to be a stepping stone. My idea was to scale it to a couple of million in two years, make an exit and then do the thing I actually wanted to do… Yeah, I can see the delusional thinking now.

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I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do, so I tricked myself into building an e-commerce business with perfectly rational arguments. Even though I knew it was just a stepping stone, the moment I thought about the success my brain was flooded with dopamine. I got high on my own potential.

Add to that the fact that building my business involved risk and novelty and you have a powerful emotional cocktail on a regular basis. I was hooked. And suddenly I had a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock, which makes changing direction look pretty stupid.

But was it really true that I didn’t know what I wanted to do?

Procrastination is really just a form of avoidance.
And what we are trying to avoid is fear.

I remember that I had some sort of clue what I really wanted to do back then but I was afraid to dig deeper.

And I don’t think my case is very unique.

What could be so frightening that we go to such lengths to avoid it? The answer is so dark that we try everything to not talk or think about it: death.

Why We Create Anything at All

The fear of death sends chills down our spine. Which is why the drawer stays closed and the lid gets sealed with biohazard signs.

Ernest Becker opened the drawer in his book The Denial of Death. I’m not exaggerating when I say it literally changed my whole life.

Art, society, politics, economy… everything is an attempt to make us immortal and deny death. Becker calls this the immortality project. The fear of death gives us an immense drive to build something that leaves a footprint of us.

It led me to a pretty uncomfortable conclusion: building my business was my immortality project. I was trying to give my life significance on a cosmic scale.

It feels weird to say that. In my head I didn’t need the approval of everyone. I was doing it for myself. That‘s what I told myself, anyway. What I was actually afraid of was what it would mean if I never built anything at all.

Some people manage to keep the drawer closed seemingly forever. After reading Becker I couldn’t. My drawer didn’t close again and thus it became obvious what I was trying to do.

The fear of death explains why I built my business, but it doesn’t explain why I used the e-commerce business as a stepping stone. I wanted to be significant, yes. The question is significant to whom?

Nobody Survives Alone

Humans are highly dependent on other humans. Just look at a newborn baby. Without support it won’t survive. This dependency is deeply ingrained into us. It is part of the human condition. Naturally it creates a second kind of primal fear: the fear of separation.

It’s for that reason that loneliness feels so painful.

While the fear of death seems abstract and distant, the fear of separation is something much more immediate. There was probably at least one day in the last couple of weeks when you have felt it.

Or think about a heartbreak. Some people say it’s like an ice pick that’s slowly pushed through their heart. I don’t know about you, but I would rather work eight hours a day for a boss than having to go through that experience.

Being alone makes you vulnerable to death. That’s where the two primal fears connect. One puts you to work. The other one decides what you work on.

Why I Built the Wrong Thing

I already had a hunch that the e-commerce thing wasn’t really my ultimate destination. There was something lingering in the background, but I couldn’t explain it or put words to it back then. So I went for it anyways.

The arguments for building an e-commerce business were… perfectly rational. Looking back at it now, it’s clear to me what happened.

Building an e-commerce business was a pre-approved script. I followed the guru because he already “made it.” He was legitimized to teach how he did it because it led to a definition of success that gets rewarded by society (money and fame).

You look at how other people did it and of course you see only those who survived. That’s how I stumbled onto the guru and bought his blueprint for $8k. I was looking for reassurance that this is a viable path.

By following the script you get the safety of the crowd. You follow the script, just slightly different. So it even seems like you are doing your own thing.

Looked at it from this angle, though, it’s not much different from a 9 to 5. You are running a script of what you are supposed to be.

Building a business, accumulating wealth, or climbing a corporate ladder are all ready-made, pre-approved paths provided by society. Society has already agreed that if you succeed at this, you will get recognition.

That gives us the significance that we are seeking.

For years I was immersed in the fictional games and success metrics set up by society. It took me a long time to see it, because by those metrics my business was doing “good.” Supposedly I was doing everything right.

It was during corona that I realized that I was just running a script. And the reason I entered entrepreneurship in the first place was because I wanted to run my own script.

It took me another two years before I could really see my own path.

Smart People Are Not Afraid

Really doing your own thing feels risky… because well it is. Most of you reading this are driven to do your own thing. And you know there comes a certain fear with it. But it doesn’t feel exactly like fear. At least not the way it feels when your bank account shows zero.

That’s the sneaky part. The fear is lingering somewhere in the background.

Smart people hate fear. So they try to use their rational mind to overcome it. That’s where the procrastination gets really sophisticated.

“I better build a strategy before I start.” → Makes sense.

“I better use an advanced stochastic model to cluster my audience into socio-economic segments to improve the resonance of my messaging.” → Also makes sense (kind of).

“I want to help poor people in Africa… but how am I going to make money?”

That’s a rational question to ask. But it’s probably the wrong one. Because now you started a sequence of “But first I have to…“

“I want to help poor people in Africa, but first I have to make a lot of money.”

“I want to launch my product, but first I have to build a strategy.”

“I want to write that article, but first I have to go to the toilet.”

You are smart, of course you are not afraid. You are just making a rational choice. The smarter you are, the better your excuses can get.

I catch myself doing this all the time. I come up with some complex theories. They totally make sense. The funny thing is that right in the moment other people start agreeing with me, I realize I just made up an excellent excuse to hide from my fear. Most of the time my intellectual excuses help others hide from their fears too. So they happily agree with me.

So we end up looking for a safe path calling it a rational choice. It makes sense logically, but not psycho-logically.

That’s exactly why I ended up ignoring my voice. The reason I couldn‘t explain what I actually wanted to do isn‘t that it was irrational. The thing didn’t exist yet, so there were no arguments for it. Nobody could agree on it. Its justification can only be built afterward, out of the finished work.

Giving Birth Is Painful

Just because you found a path yourself doesn’t mean it is your path.

The fear you feel for walking your own path is your compass. You might not (yet) be able to explain to others what you are doing. Good. It means the path has not been approved by society.

Sophisticated procrastination really means running away from your own path. You are using your potential as a way to hide. It feels comfortable because it gives you a womb-like feeling of oneness. It protects you from messy and harsh reality of nature.

You are refusing to be born.

And by refusing to be born you deprive yourself and the world of the gift that is inside of you. For you to be born your old identity first has to die. Letting one version of you die is painful. And it’s painful exactly because so much has to die.

For me, the definition of success I imported from society had to die. After letting it die, I couldn’t help but do my work. I didn’t need motivation, discipline, or an elusive purpose. I was just doing what I was born to do.

You have to create yourself, not your business.

P.S. You can’t create yourself out of nothing. You start with the material you already have. Archetypes are one way to see what that material actually is.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

I built the Archetype Navigator as a free tool to uncover your natural psychological patterns. It won't tell you what to build. That’s your part.

There are notes, there is a feed, there are engagement metrics, there are algorithms. And it’s not an accident.

We shouldn’t be surprised. But we often are, because we’re clouded by nostalgia for a past that’s gone, or delusional about a future that Substack simply wasn’t built to deliver. We want the quiet purity of a direct email connection, but we also want the viral growth of a billion-people network.

We want to believe that if we complain loud enough, we can change things for the better. But getting angry at Substack is like getting angry at the rain.

The weather isn’t trying to do anything to you. It simply is. It doesn’t matter what you want it to do. To see what’s happening to Substack, we have to look at the system.

A Few Words About Systems

When a company takes hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital firms, it enters a system.

Over the last fifty years, venture capital has perfected a very specific system trap: fund an innovation, acquire the early adopters, provide the scaffolding for a habit change, and then aggressively subsidize it until you achieve a network effect.

That venture capital system doesn’t want a quiet sanctuary that helps a few thousand writers make a moderate living.

Substack has to play by the rules of the system it’s part of. If you want to scale, you have to build an arena for people to play a game. You create a feedback loop. You reward the people who bring you more attention with more status. And once that feedback loop begins, it turns insatiable.

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The early adopters loved Substack because it offered an escape from the noisy feeds of Twitter and Facebook. But as Substack grew, it hit a wall. The logical thing became to play it safe and do what has worked before. So they built the very tools of distraction and short-term dopamine that power every other big social network, because that is what the masses have been trained to click on.

None of this is evil. The system wants what the system wants.

Substack is Not Your Best Friend

The mistake we make is believing that a tech platform is our partner, caring about our success and sharing our goals. This leads to the first myth about systems: believing we have unlimited power. We believe we can endlessly outsmart the system. We become the manic growth-hacker, convinced that if we just post enough Notes, optimize enough headlines, and hack the algorithm, we will be successful.

When you spend four hours a day building your presence on Substack, posting Notes for the algorithm, hoping to capture a fraction of the “free” traffic it creates, you are feeding the system. You are generating the content that keeps users scrolling, hoping you will get paid for it (or go viral).

Substack will gladly take your generous work and use it to increase its valuation. That leads straight to the second myth: we have no power at all.

Cynicism Is a Comfortable Chair

Say you don't care about growth often enough, in a comment section full of people saying the identical thing, and you can almost believe it. Almost… But nobody who has stopped wanting something needs to announce it this many times.

It’s tempting to cross our arms, declare that Substack is succumbing to the same race to the bottom as every other social network, and paint the picture of the defeated idealist.

Cynicism is incredibly comforting.

When we decide the game is rigged, it lets us off the hook. The algorithm decides if our work gets seen. It’s not our fault. We can blame the venture capitalists, the platform updates, the attention economy, politics, the weather…

We play the cynic, but we still check the dashboard. We still quietly hope that maybe, our authentic post will accidentally trigger the algorithm and go viral. We resent the hustle, but we leave the door cracked open secretly hoping we win the lottery by being a good person.

Resenting the system while hoping to be picked by it is exhausting. It leads to burnout. And worse, it deprives us of our agency.

Culture Creates Change

It is easy to conclude you don’t have any agency because you are not one of Substack’s shareholders.

When looking at how systems work, it’s hard to see that there is a hidden driver underneath it. Systems are driven by culture. And culture is the results of interactions between people. Which is to say:

Culture is the defining mechanism of any community. The system only amplifies what the nodes inside the system choose to feed it. When we reward the growth hackers with our attention, we teach the system that growth hacking is our culture. When we complain about the noise but refuse to do the emotional labor of building deep relationships, we hand the power to the loudest shouters.

Our job as creators is to create the culture for change.

If we want to preserve the core ethos of this space we cannot wait for the executives in San Francisco to do it for us. We have to take responsibility for it.

What Are You Going To Build?

Complaining surrenders the very power we need to make things better.

We have the agency to decide how we want to shape the future we want to live in. We can choose resonance over reach. We can replace performing with creating art. We can choose to be the person who writes something real instead of optimizing it for the algorithm.

You don’t have to build a funnel. Instead of waiting for the platform to remain a sanctuary, it’s on us to act like we belong in one. The system will respond to the culture. What kind of culture are we going to build today?

Use Your Agency

The future of Substack is predictable. It will continue to look more like the rest of the internet, because the system of the internet demands it. The noise will increase. The temptation to sprint for short-term engagement will grow. The pressure to conform will feel overwhelming.

You have a choice. You can surrender your agency to the system and complain when the rules change. Or you can start creating the future you want to live in.

People accuse me of complaining too much. Listen, I have German roots. Complaining is part of German culture. But what these people usually miss is the deeper core of what I’m actually saying. Because it’s not what they want to hear. It’s neither complaining nor delusional optimism.

Life sucks. But it’s our responsibility to make the best out of it. Taking responsibility is hard. Making a change is hard. But creating something meaningful is never easy.

Use the system, but don’t let the system use you. Are you feeding the algorithm? Or are you feeding the culture?

P.S. Changing the culture starts with you. To create something real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and person underneath it.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. Take it or don't, but build from who you are, not from what the algorithm rewards.

It’s a closed system where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators. It’s loud, it lacks nuance, and the algorithm loves it.

But you came here to escape that.

You read deep philosophy. You take advanced cohorts. You understand the complex market dynamics that the 20-year-old course-sellers couldn’t even begin to grasp.

Watching the circus makes you sick. Why?

Because the “clown creators” are shipping garbage and pulling in $50k a month. Meanwhile, you are agonizing over the perfect sentence that no one will ever read.

You are not lazy. You are disciplined, curious, and probably more self-aware than anyone else in your circle. And that’s exactly the problem.

The Dopamine Hell of the Intelligent Creator

I see this pattern all the time. You take the courses, read the books and fill Moleskine notebooks with game-changing strategies. It feels like you are making progress.

But your brain is tricking you. It has convinced you that learning about building your business is the same as actually building the business. Welcome to the dopamine hell of the intelligent creator.

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Every time you think about your future success your brain releases dopamine. This is where it gets sneaky. Because it uses the same biochemical mechanism as actually achieving your goal. In neuroscience, this is called premature reward activation.

Your brain rewards anticipation almost the same way it rewards achievement. So planning can feel like progress, even when nothing moves.

You’re literally getting high on your own potential.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Over time, you have built an identity around being a learner. It’s doubly rewarding because you have become “the guy who knows everything.“

Your ego loves getting rewarded with that kind of attention. All this creates a powerful emotional cocktail. You crave new knowledge like Dan Janssen a slice of pizza.

It’s tragic, because you have conditioned yourself for the feeling of progress rather than actually making progress. That’s really a very sophisticated form of procrastination. Let’s call it Sophisticated Procrastination.1 And it is an epidemic haunting the creator economy.

The Curse of Being Average

You are ambitious and there is one thing that you hate more than anything: being average. You call it high standards. You might even take pride in being a perfectionist.

If you look closer, you’ll see it is actually Sophisticated Procrastination underneath it.

It keeps you safe in the world of ideas (where you are perfect) and stops you from entering the world of execution (where you might look average).

Your ego is protecting you from the risk of judgment by more studying, planning, and analyzing. If you don’t ship you can’t be average. If you stay in your head, you remain perfect. You never have to confront the gap between who you are and who you think you are. And so, you fill your graveyard of good intentions with another course.

Why Discipline Fails

The standard advice is simple: just take action. Write one sentence. Start small. But what happens if you take action and the only thing you hear are crickets?

This is where it gets tricky because if your audience is small there is little to no feedback. You get stuck because you think the problem is discipline. You beat yourself up that you don’t get the desired results.

This makes you vulnerable for blueprints, formulas and productivity advice.

To really understand what’s going on, we have to go somewhere the gurus can’t go. Beneath the bad habits and the dopamine loops. We are dealing with something existential. The gurus hate that because it is the kind of problem that you don’t solve with a course, dopamine detox or AI app.

The God Complex of the Procrastinator

As long as you are planning, learning, or strategizing, your potential remains infinite. In your mind, the book you plan to write is perfect. The business you intend to build is revolutionary. The version of yourself you’re becoming is exactly who you always knew you could be.

When you keep your ideas in your head, you are a god. You control the outcome. You imagine the success and it almost feels real. This keeps your ego protected and safe.

But the moment you take action by posting the article or launching the product, you crash into reality. Action kills your divine fantasy. Every time you create something, you’re choosing not to make every other version of that thing you could have made. You’re killing infinite possibility and replacing it with one specific piece of work that gets judged or worse gets ignored.

You procrastinate because you cannot bear the grief of seeing your god-like potential reduced to a mediocre reality. You would rather dream about being a great writer than actually be a writer who got 12 views on their last post.

You Have a Preparation Fetish

Humans cannot stand the overwhelming chaos of reality. It is too big, too unpredictable, too terrifying. So, we narrow the world down to survive. We find a small area we can control and treat it as if it were the whole world. This is where Sophisticated Procrastination becomes a fetish. It sounds dirty because it is.

You reorganize your Notion workspace for the third time this month, color-coding the tags and aligning the columns until everything clicks into place. For a moment, the chaos vanishes. You are doing something and you feel like are in control.

The problem is that you start chasing that feeling. The fetish becomes more important than the writing. So you avoid doing the actual work because it feels too uncomfortable and you can’t control the outcome.

Inside the closed system of the course, everything makes sense. Step A leads to Step B. It creates a seductive illusion of certainty. That gives you hope and protects you from the fact you are ultimately powerless against reality.

It is a superstition. You are like a primitive man performing a rain dance to control the weather. You study frameworks and highlight books to control your destiny. The longer it didn’t rain, the more desperate the tribe became with their superstitions.

The more you feel like you nobody is reading your Substack, the deeper you retreat into the safety of Sophisticated Procrastination. Because at least there, you’re still making progress.

Overloading of the Immortality Project

Every human needs to feel that their life matters, that they will leave a mark that outlasts death. Ernest Becker called this the Immortality Project. Usually, society provides pre-packaged projects: “Be a good Christian,” “Climb the corporate ladder,” or “Raise a family.“

The problem is that you have rejected those defaults. You stepped off the ladder. You may have stepped away from traditional religion. You decided to build something of your own.

But this creates a dangerous vacuum. Without the structure of a company or a church, the entire weight of justifying your existence falls on your creative work.

If you hear crickets after the launch, it doesn’t mean the offer was bad. It means you do not matter. Imagine the stress that creates. No one can move freely under that kind of crushing spiritual pressure.

When every sentence is a referendum on your right to exist, of course you can’t type. You are paralyzed by the stakes. You are treating a blog post like a tombstone. You want it to be heavy and permanent. But to get moving, you need to treat it like what it actually is: Just another brick.

The Bricklayer Mindset

The way out starts with creation. The cure is to take the chaos of your life and turn it into a body of work.

If you’re not creating you’re drowning in your own potential. You keep it inside where it is safe and infinite. But if you keep it inside, you are turning your potential against you. That will make you go crazy. The trick is to turn the internal energy into external value.

The whole process is almost like a form of exorcism. You have to get it out before it poisons you. Give it a concrete shape in the form of an article, podcast or product.

The act of creation is hard work. To make it bearable is to change what the work means to you. Adopt a bricklayer mindset. Currently you are paralyzed because you treat every post like a cathedral (a statement of your soul).

Treat your posts like bricks. A brick is small, imperfect, and replaceable. But if you lay one brick every day, you have a wall. Eventually the bricks turn into a cathedral.

Shift from Self-Expansion to Self-Surrender

You are currently driven by a desire to stand out, to be special, to be “successful.” This puts a lot of pressure on you. You act like a god trying to control the world. Spoiler alert: You can’t.

This is the Atlas complex. You are paralyzed because you are trying to hold up the sky. It is too heavy for one pair of shoulders.

When you create to prove yourself, the audience is a judge (terrifying). When you create to help the audience, the audience is a partner (reassuring). If you are trying to impress “The Internet” it triggers grandiosity and fear. You cannot impress a billion people. But you can help one person.

When you’re writing to help someone, you think about the person reading this who is stuck in the exact place you were last year. The question becomes simpler: Does this actually help them or not?

It bypasses your ego because it’s not about you. It allows you to merge with something larger by losing yourself in the work for others.

You Are Not the Source

Your ideas do not originate inside your head. They come from what you read, the conversations you have, the patterns you notice in the market, the problems you see others struggling with. You are synthesizing inputs from the world and giving them a new form through your particular lens.

You are the filter, not the source. Your value is in your particular way of noticing, your ability to connect ideas that others missed, the clarity you bring to problems people are struggling with but cannot name.

Your role is to pay attention, to synthesize what you notice, to give it clear expression, and then release it. What happens after that is not yours to control. The views, the growth, the feedback is in not in your hands. Realizing you are a participant in an ongoing conversation grants you the psychological safety to act.

The Courage to be Human

You want to be sovereign, autonomous, and perfect. That is a destructive fantasy. We are all humans and humans are fragmented, dependent, and imperfect. The ability to see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible is the root of creativity, but it requires accepting your own limitations

Embrace being a human. You are small. You are afraid. You need money. You want validation. And eventually you will die (sorry for being a downer).

The business you’re building will not save you from any of this. It won’t protect you from rejection. It will not eliminate your need for others. It will not prove you are special enough to transcend ordinary human experience.

And that is okay. Flaws are human, and they attract other humans. If we were machinelike, our work wouldn’t resonate. It would be soulless.

By admitting your weakness, you gain the only power you really have: the power of reality. People will trust you not because you are above them (which they know is a lie), but because you are with them, struggling with the same problems they are.

You can’t transcend your insecurities. And you shouldn’t. It is part of what makes the work worth reading.

You create pieces reflective of who you are. You are building a body of work that reflects an actual human trying to figure things out. That is enough.

Truth is more useful than perfection, and a hell of a lot easier to maintain

Just lay one brick. Then another.

P.S. The only thing remembered is the people who create something real. To create something real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Usually, it happens in a Zoom call. My team brings in a strong, creative concept. It’s beautiful. But then the clients get their hands on it. They start questioning if the colors are right for the audience. Is this even increasing the conversion rate? The logo has to be bigger. And then they want to cram in the legal disclaimer and those three irrelevant product features.

By the time it gets to the public, the beautiful idea is dead, buried under a gazillion pounds of corporate logistics.

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I bring this up because right now, I see the same thing happening to the creator economy. Here the murder happens

If you spend any time online today, you are completely surrounded by grifters and hustle-bros practically screaming at you through your screen to monetize your passion.

You post a picture of a delicious, crusty loaf of sourdough you baked. Maybe you knit a scarf… or you show your mother-in-law a rosary bracelet they made from broken jewelry.

It doesn’t take long until someone says: “You should monetize this.”

The gurus of the internet (aka. the 23 year old in matching t-shirts showing up in your YouTube ads) have convinced an entire generation that you are leaving money on the table, if you don’t monetizing everything you are remotely talented at. Otherwise you must be a fool or a failure who doesn’t possess the mindset necessary to win.

It is officially time to tell these people to go to hell.

The Only Grinding I Care About

I have a slight obsession with specialty coffee. It’s my favorite morning ritual. I love the sound of the grinder and the moment the water touches the grounds. Even before the freshly brewed coffee hit my tongue, I feel alive.

But I am also an entrepreneur with a terminal case of builder’s brain. At some point the thought of turning it into a business came to my mind. I started coming up with all kinds of ideas. I created packaging designs and logos, researched the sourcing, and imagined even having a small café.

After a few days, I had an epiphany. A coffee business would completely bury my love for coffee under logistics and overhead issues. Most of the time I wouldn’t spend on the parts I actually love. Instead I would be managing inventory and desperately trying to game the Instagram algorithm so people would buy 12-ounce bags of dark roast.

I decided right then to keep it as my unproductive guilty pleasure that keeps consuming time and money.

It exists simply because doing it makes you feel alive. When you slap a $5/month subscription fee on your hobby, you introduce commerce. And where commerce goes, clients follow. Suddenly you have a boss. You are dealing with “The Algorithm.”

The Algorithm is the worst, most sociopathic client in history. It doesn’t have a worldview. Or empathy. Or taste really.

Making something beautiful gets replaced by open rates and click-through performance (not to mention dropping emojis in comments). Everything has to be optimized to get the metrics growing. The presence and joy that once filled you with passion are gone.

You guys know this pain better than anyone. Many of you left corporate meat-grinders, burned-out agency jobs, and restrictive niches because you felt like a parasite. You came to the creator space seeking authenticity. But if you drag the very metrics and pressure you were trying to escape into the spaces you use to heal, you are slowly dying another death.

Leave the Money on the Table

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of making money from creativity. Branding has been very good to me, and getting paid to sit in a room with your feet on a desk coming up with ideas is arguably the best job on the planet. But there is a radioactive strain of hustle-culture BS going around today that tells us that every single creative act we perform must be thrown onto the great conveyor belt of capitalism.

We’ve swallowed this cultural lie that if a hobby isn’t making you money, or building your personal brand, or expanding your content ecosystem, then it is somehow a waste of your time.

There will always be people out there who look at you with genuine pity when they find out you aren’t cashing in on your talents. To the hyper-transactional minds of the internet, you are just a weirdo leaving money on the table.

I’ve sat at that table. It is crowded, the coffee is mediocre, and the people sitting there are only speaking in marketing hieroglyphics about MRR and churn rates. The whole gig sucks down infinite reserves of brain juice without giving one real satisfying moment holding any gravity or substance.

If walking away from that table makes you a weirdo, then I highly suggest you buy a weirdo hat, put it on your weirdo head, and happily walk out the door. Let them have the table. You get to keep your soul.

Let Your Job Pay the Damn Bills

Most people in the creator space will tell you to hate your 9-to-5. They will tell you to escape the matrix and be your own boss. I want to offer you a different view on this.

Your day job is your patron.
It’s the Medici family of your own private Renaissance.

Because your job carries the burden of paying the mortgage and buying the groceries, your creativity is fully free. It doesn’t have to appease an algorithm. No pressure to use fake timers to trick strangers into buying your ebook just to keep the lights on. You don’t have to water down your voice or put a click-bait title on it.

Dopamine fades, but that kind of depth compounds.

By removing the financial pressure from your art, you create a space where you can actually be authentic.

You're Allowed to Just Do Things

Every good story runs on conflict, and the bad guy in this story is the belief that every minute of your existence must have a return on investment.

We live in a system where human attention is mined, processed, and sold to the highest bidder. In that kind of world, holding onto a piece of your heart simply because you enjoy it beats is a rebellion. Maybe it’t a form of beautiful vandalism that we most need right now.

Great work, whether in business or in art, never comes from conforming to the perfectly curated status quo. You have to step outside the madness. Greatness requires the sudden cessation of stupidity. And trying to monetize every moment of your life is incredibly stupid.

So here's your creative brief, since they are still haunting me.

Shut the laptop. Turn off the phone. Forget your personal brand for five fucking minutes. Go outside, or into your kitchen, or down into your basement, and do something so unproductive that the internet wouldn’t know what to do with you.

P.S. We are drowning in content creators. We need more artists who are beautifully alive. To be real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save your sanity.

You’re thirsty. You have three dollars. You say, “I would like some lemonade.”

The kid behind the counter looks at you, pushes up his glasses, and says, “We don’t actually sell lemonade. We sell a $49 course on how to synergize neighborhood thirst dynamics, leverage unused lumber to build a stand, and scale your lemonade enterprise to 10k MRR.”

You look behind you. There is a line of 5,000 people desperately waiting to buy the kid’s course so they, too, can build stands that sell courses about stands. Meanwhile, everybody is still dying of thirst.

Welcome to the status quo of the creator economy.

If you spend enough time scrolling these days, you realize the “How to Get Rich” virus has officially jumped from Twitter and LinkedIn over to Substack. The symptoms are always the same. The humble-brag (“How I made $10k while sleeping”). The empty platitude (“Clarity is key”). The engagement bait (“Drop your link below”).

It is a closed system where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators who want to be creators. It is a feedback loop that feels like there is a community of people, but it is actually just noise. It’s a Hall of Mirrors.

The algorithm loves it. Content about “growth” gets obsessively clicked by people who are anxious about growth. The platforms amplify the signal, implying that this is what success looks like.

But a Hall of Mirrors has no exit. Everyone is agreeing with each other about how to write, but nobody is actually writing about anything.

Substack used to feel like a quiet cathedral for writers. Now, it starts to feels just like any other social media. And that sucks.

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It’s time to throw a rock through the glass.

We don’t need another post about how to get 1,000 subscribers. We don’t need another breakdown of a viral note.

We need you.

We need the you that existed before you started worrying about your open rates. We need the you that has a craft, a struggle, and a life in the real world.

You won’t build a resilient strategy by studying the platform. You have to leave it.

Go do something interesting in the real world.

Learn to bake sourdough. Train for a marathon. Fail at a garden. Struggle with a philosophy that creates tension. Have an adventure that cannot be summarized in a six-second video.

Then, and only then, come back and write about that.

We are drowning in advice and starving actual for wisdom.

Advice is cheap. “Post at 9 AM.” “Use this subject line.” That is a commodity.
Wisdom is expensive. Wisdom comes from doing something hard and failing at it, and then figuring out why.

When you bring your wisdom into the Hall of Mirrors, you break the glass. You stop being a reflection of a reflection. You become a source.

This is scary. It is scary because “How to Get Rich” is a proven commodity. It feels safe to sell shovels to gold diggers.

Writing about your specific, idiosyncratic, real-world journey feels risky. It is terrifying to write a nuanced essay knowing it might only get six likes, while the grifter next door gets five thousand for a listicle. The algorithm might not recognize you immediately.

Good.

If the algorithm doesn’t know what to do with you, it means you aren’t a commodity. You have crossed the line from content into art.

You are the immune system of this platform.

We have a sickness right now where we believe the ultimate goal is a million dollars and a massive personal brand. It's a trap. The actual dream? Make a decent living, do work you are proud of, 1,000 readers who truly care, and shut your laptop at 5:00 PM to go eat dinner with your family.

The people who built this platform didn’t start writing to get famous. They started writing because they had a gift. They didn’t set out to create content. Their gift was a perspective on a life actually lived.

Don’t trade your unique perspective for a listicle that ChatGPT could have written.

If you are a writers quietly showing up, sharing your art, and building slowly: Please don’t stop. You are the immune system of this platform. And we need you more than ever.

P.S. The only thing remembered is the people who made this platform real. To be real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

But then you are sitting in front of a blank page.

So you do what any highly intelligent creator does when faced with the task of writing. Staring out the window, checking emails, brewing that fourth cup of coffee, cleaning a desk that is already spotless… and yes, even taking phantom trips to the bathroom just to avoid staring at a blank screen.

But if you are like the creators I work with, there is a darker pattern that repeats itself over and over. You dabble in a sinister little addiction called sophisticated procrastination. You spend hours reading articles on Substack, falling down research rabbit holes, optimizing your systems, or building the "perfect strategy" for your business.

You can spend weeks procrastinating in this sophisticated manner. It feels like you are making progress. But at the end of the day, the page is as empty as a politician’s promise. Your actual work hasn’t moved an inch.

In the meantime, something tragic happens. You have had so many new ideas while actively avoiding the old ones that the original concepts lost their spark. They feel stale or "not good enough" now. So you abandon them, leaving behind a graveyard of half-baked projects. And then the cycle starts all over again.

The Paradox of the Blocked Artist

This is a classic picture I see all the time. Not just in the creators I work with, but in myself as well. Because this sophisticated procrastination looks so much like work, it is very difficult to see it for what it truly is: a defense mechanism distracting you from the actual act of creation.

Why do we do this? It’s not just a matter of poor time management or a lack of discipline. We distract ourselves because the act of creation is terrifying.

Humans possess a deep desire to create. We want to leave our mark on the world. We want to have an impact, or just feel that our lives matter in some permanent way. This drive to immortalize ourselves is how the pyramids were built, and it’s at the root of all human art.

But to actually put your ideas into the world you have to embrace your unique path. This means you have to stand apart from the crowd. Psychologically, that is a highly vulnerable and terrifying leap. So, we hesitate. We brew more coffee. Or refine our strategy… for the third time this month.

When you don’t get your ideas out of your head and make them real, they turn on you. They end up blocking you. And that is what happens to artists all the time.

We say we are "creatively blocked," which implies an emptiness, a lack of inspiration or skill. But you are not empty. You are dangerously full. What you are feeling is actually your own will to create. It is easy to confuse this for being blocked, because your fear turns that energy in the opposite direction. Instead of putting it into a creation, you direct it inward against yourself.

This is the paradox of the blocked artist. Because you are blocked, you feel like you can’t create. But the only way to release the block is to create.

Art is Exorcism

I like to think of art as a form of exorcism. Keeping your ideas all to yourself, hoarding them within your own mind, is literally making you sick. It can cause all kinds of mental problems like self-sabotage, imposter syndrome, or depressive crashes. I believe that if you are holding this unexpressed creative tension for too long, it will eventually manifest as physical symptoms.

Burnout is a great example of this phenomenon. It seems like a contradiction, but burnout is not caused by working too much (although that certainly happens). Most of what we call burnout is actually a creative sickness. It is caused by not creating what wants to be created through you.

Instead, you build what you think others want you to build. In the old days, artists sacrificed their true inner voice to please the church, the state, or a wealthy patron. Today, we do it to please the audience, the market, or the algorithm.

In doing so, you submit your unique creative energy to a collective ideology. When you betray your own inner voice to please the algorithm, you get so blocked up with your own ideas, to the point that they begin to haunt you, attack your nervous system, and make you sick. I have seen many creators being cured of physical and mental exhaustion simply by finally letting their own ideas out.

When you are blocked, you are trapped in a cycle of only taking things in (reading, researching, consuming) and giving nothing out. This happens because giving a piece of yourself away feels like a profound loss to the ego. To the deeply creative mind, this act of creation is perceived not only as a birth, but also as a kind of dying.

We want to put our entire being, our absolute perfection, into a single project. Achieving perfection is impossible. But more importantly if you are trying to pour your entire being into one piece of work, it will feel as final and terrifying as death. So it’s no wonder you freeze. Faced with this “All or Nothing” mentality you instinctively choose the “nothing” of the blank page to avoid the pain.

You have to accept that your creation will only ever be a piece of you. It can’t represent your whole being. At best it’s an expression of your whole being at a given moment of time. Let it be imperfect. Your only job is to get it out.

The Price of Standing Out

An exorcism is painful. It requires a tremendous expenditure of emotional and intellectual energy. It forces you to look at your own imperfections in the uncomfortable light of reality. But that is the whole point.

By taking your abstract ideas and forcing them into a concrete medium, you separate them from your ego. You look at the work and say, “This idea is no longer me. It is now part of the world out there.” You have placed the “demon” outside of the self.

When you are finally done, you will feel a profound sense of satisfaction. Note that it arrives when your work is finished, not when you get likes, sales, or praise for it. Creativity is independent of external validation. You may not feel this relief right away, as the exhaustion of the process might cloud it. You must force yourself to keep getting your ideas out, over and over, until you reach a psychic equilibrium.

But alongside that satisfaction, you might feel a strange heaviness. By putting your mark on the world, you are separating yourself from the herd. You are asserting your individuality, and the human mind always feels a sense of guilt for having the audacity to stand apart and say, “Look at what I have made.” Embrace this feeling. It is simply the emotional tax you pay for being fully realized and alive. It means the exorcism worked.

Get the demon out so that you can finally breathe. You owe it to yourself.

P. S. If you are trying to figure out which idea to pull out first, you need to know what kind of art you were actually built to make. To align your ideas with your natural patterns, I created The Archetype Navigator. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save your sanity.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

You’ll find a dozen of posts on how to go viral, blueprints on how to make your first 10k online, and AI created slop. The creator economy has become a sea of sameness.

But we both know the truth. The blueprint is a lie.

If business was a science, everyone would be rich. But business isn’t a science. Business is an art. Interestingly not many creators talk about art.

We call it the creator economy. This strikes me as funny because most people are anything but creative. In art there are no strict rules and you have to be willing to do something different. You have to take a risk.

Today, I’m launching a new podcast to explore what creativity and art really means. It’s called The Becoming of Art.

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After months of thinking about the idea, I finally recorded the first episode. I am not very comfortable being on camera. I am not a native speaker, so if you hear a weird accent, think of it as part of my branding.

I haven’t cut any of it. I’m doing it this way because if I’m going to ask you to embrace the vulnerability of becoming an artist, I need to go first. I want this show to be a proof-of-concept.

If you are looking for step-by-step plan on how to make money online, you better skip this one.

This podcast is for people who want to become an artist and express their authentic self instead of just building a business.

P.S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to start with the most important piece of art you will ever create: yourself.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually an expression of who you really are.

You wake up. You commute. You rent out your mind to a corporation for a fraction of its true value.

You were born with infinite potential, a multidimensional being forced to play a one-dimensional game. You trade your rapidly fleeting time to build someone else’s dream, hoping that one day, a broken system will finally reward you.

It won’t. The traditional path is a slow, quiet death of the soul.

But there is an escape route. The greatest wealth transfer in human history is happening right now, quietly, behind the screens of your devices.

You don’t need a groundbreaking product. You don’t need venture capital. You already have a million dollars locked in your head. When you synthesize your curiosities and monetize your mind, you don’t have any competition. Writing online is the ultimate meta-skill. By packaging your authentic self into a digital product and building an audience, you decouple your income from your time.

It is the most reliable vehicle for financial freedom and the highest form of human self-actualization. Just document your journey online. Speak your truth, hit publish, and create with absolute autonomy.

Before you bet your family's future on your ability to combine quantum physics and amateur pottery into a booming personal brand, we need to talk.

The Creator Economy’s Dirty Secret

Behind this intoxicating, pseudo-philosophical pitch lies a small detail that the gurus love to ignore. Their advice only works because they have a structural advantage. Their target audience is literally everyone else on Substack. This is a rare situation you only get when you are selling shovels during a gold rush.

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The gurus tell you to avoid picking a niche by simply combining your random interests (e.g., philosophy, coding, fitness). They promise that “you are the niche.“ But if you actually do this, your potential audience is so small that the business model collapses.

The danger is how sophisticated these gurus have become. Their gospels liberate you from having to pick a niche. And they appear to be practicing what they preach. But look closely at their business model. They really just niched down on the “how to make money online” niche. That is probably one of the most lucrative niches on the internet. They just rebranded it with minimalist aesthetics and philosophy.

Most creators will never operate in a market sustained by constant influx of hopeful newcomers. As a beginner it’s hard to see what’s really going on. The gurus tell you exactly what you would like to believe. They do it in an almost seductive way. You might subconsciously sense there is something wrong but their vision sounds too appealing.

You look at their audience size and rationalize to yourself that there is proof that what they are talking about is true. Logically it makes perfect sense. The creator economy loves a post-rationalized case study.

The guru looks back down the mountain and describes the clear, logical path they took to the top. They talk about business, but forget to highlight the role of lucky accidents, random experimentation, and trial and error.

It’s like saying “I drove drunk with no seatbelt for 30 years and I’m fine!”

We see their success, but we don’t see the hundreds of creators who failed trying to do the exact same thing. Their formulas are full of hindsight bias that only work if you decide to pivot into teaching other creators how to be a creator.

The result is a graveyard.

People are failing and throwing in the towel, not because they are incapable, but because the advice of the gurus is misleading.

The Hope-Despair Cycle

There is a psychological mechanism that makes this machine run beautifully. Many creators get stuck in what I call The Hope-Despair Cycle. It works like this:

1. A guru creates a profound sense of hope.

2. Fueled by hope, you consume more of their content.

3. You look for the blueprint and end up buying the course.

4. The course makes you feel like an insider with secret knowledge creating even more hope.

5. The promised results fail to manifest.

6. Your self-trust erodes.

7. You give up OR you search for a new infusion of hope and the cycle begins again.

At this point you see the problem either as personal (I’m not good enough) or as systemic (The system is rigged). It’s easy to overlook that no matter how good their blueprint is, it was never made to be replicated.

Business Is Not Rocket Science

There is no universally applicable formula. Anyone who is trying to convince you that there is a step-by-step plan to success is either delusional or just wants to get into your wallet.

That doesn’t mean all business advice is wrong. There are some principles that actually work. But they are boring and haven’t changed in a hundred years. They don’t make for a sexy course you can sell for $997.

Most of the creator economy depends on the illusion that business is highly complicated and you simply lack the right information.

Science seeks to uncover universal, repeatable truths. If you follow the formula, you get the same result. Every time. Water boils at 100°C at sea level. This is a scientific fact. In business there is no equivalent for that.

The “7 Steps to a Million Followers” tries to pretend it’s a repeatable formula. But it’s not. It’s a weather report from last Tuesday. Interesting, perhaps, but not a reliable guide for today’s journey.

The creator economy is desperate for a safe path to financial success and there is no shortage of people who desperately trying to provide it.

Creators follow the gurus because they are looking for an insurance policy. A strictly logical, metric-driven approach to problem-solving gives the reassuring impression that you are making an objective choice.

That’s how we end up with a whole industry of palmistry disguised as business advice, pretending business is a predictable science rather than an art.

The Great Paradox of the Creator Economy

Why do so many smart, ambitious people fall for the illusion of the blueprint? Putting yourself out in the internet to build a business is terrifying. It leads to a profound psychological conflict.

We are driven by two fundamental energies. The Greeks called them Eros and Agape. Eros is the drive to individuate. It is the need to be special, to stand out, and to leave a legacy. Eros is the spark that makes you want to become a creator in the first place. It is the voice telling you to step out of the comfort of the herd and build something of your own.

And stepping out of the herd triggers our deepest evolutionary fear: isolation. Standing out puts you in direct conflict with Agape. Agape is the desire to be part of a group and to merge with something bigger. It is the survival instinct that warns you not to wander into the dark woods alone.

Right at your moment of maximum self-doubt, the gurus appear with a “guaranteed blueprint” and a “community of like-minded creators.” They offer you a borrowed ideology so you don’t have to carry the terrifying burden of your own greatness. They tell you that you can have the rewards of standing out without the risk of standing alone.

And it works. Driven by fear, we buy the course. You get to feel like a rebel while acting like a sheep. Because of this, the creator economy doesn’t build Artists. It mass-produces Artisans. An Artisan just learns a technical skill to produce what is popular. An Artist asserts their inner drive onto the world.

The Courage to be an Artist

In art there is no right way. The only thing that ever works is your path.

The artist naturally challenges the status quo. And this involves the risk of failure and rejection. This means the artist is in a constant battle with self-doubt. Most creators can’t deal with that, so they seek safety in a blueprint. They retreat to the certainty sold by the creator economy. But complete certainty is dangerous and often masks a dogmatic closed-mindedness.

Your capacity to tolerate self-doubt is the greatest predictor of your success.

The artist creates not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To fully believe in one’s work while simultaneously harboring doubts shows a profound respect for the ever-evolving nature of your own truth.

The moment your own path becomes clear it doesn’t feel like confidence. It feels scary because everything seems to click. It’s almost spooky. And that’s a sign that you hit on something deeply meaningful. Carl Jung called this is an encounter with the Self. That’s who you truly are. Awe is the only proper response to such an encounter.

Ironically, we spend most of our lives running from these encounters. Standing face-to-face with your own potential is a deeply personal experience. We are standing there all by ourselves. That is terrifying so we shrink from our own greatness. We fear our highest possibilities just as much as our lowest ones.

Eros drives us to individuate and realize our unique potential. If we only follow Eros without Agape, it triggers fear and isolation. The magic happens when we surrender to the encounter of the Self. By leaning fully into your potential (Eros), you paradoxically tap into a universally shared human experience (Agape).

It sounds simple, but it requires a lot of courage. The gurus don’t talk about it because you can’t teach courage.

However you can find courage by walking your own path.

To do that you have to be able to hear your inner voice clearly. You must step away from the noise of the world and actively direct your focus. Artists must maintain the peace of mind necessary for listening to their deeper selves.

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In our highly distracted society, it’s up to us to make constructive use of solitude. You must be able to be quiet and let solitude work within you so that unconscious insights have the space to break through.

You can’t simply will yourself to have a creative breakthrough. However, you can choose to show up for the work.

The artist builds momentum by devoting themselves to the creative encounter with intense dedication and commitment.

Every time you face the page you re-enter the tension between Eros and Agape. You are not writing to publish on Substack. You are writing to become an artist. This practice strengthens your willingness to keep doing it. Overt time you build a habit of resilience rather than just a fleeting sense of clarity.

Don’t wait for clarity to arrive before you create. You have to create in spite of your fears, and the act of doing so becomes your foundation.

Take Money Off the Table

I know many of you plan to make money with your Substack. There is nothing wrong with that. But we have romanticized the idea of starting a business. Just because it has never been easier to start a business doesn’t change the fact that entrepreneurship is incredibly risky.

If you start a business with the intention to monetize in the next 6 months, please don’t. Most people will be crushed by the financial pressure of having to make money. It squeezes the art out of the business and you are left with soulless shell.

As long as survival/money is on the line, you will default to conformity. The pressure to make money turns people into people (or algorithm) pleasers. By taking monetization off the table initially, you remove the fear of survival. You make it purely an act of self-creation.

Dare to Write a Terrible Sentence

Writing is the cheapest, purest way to extract your internal thoughts and create something permanent in the real world. Writing forces you to sit in an empty room with nothing but your own inner drive.

The blank page is paralyzing precisely because it represents unlimited possibilities. But without limits, there is no creativity. Write a terrible sentence you know you will delete.

Embrace the fact that your first draft is supposed to suck.

Through the act of self-creation and a daily practice you build a personal philosophy instead of a hollow personal brand. Think of it as a lens through which you see the world that is shaped by your passions, interests, and lived experiences. I call it personal because it’s not a framework you study, it’s a reality you actually live.

Clarity comes from acting, not thinking. As you write what you really care about, your Personal Philosophy becomes a form of self-expression. At some point you will want to turn this into a business. That's a legitimate ambition. But the path begins with you, not the market.

Write a terrible first sentence. And then do it again tomorrow.

Go make art.

P.S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison built from someone else's blueprint. To do that, you have need the courage to build what only you can build.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It’s a mirror to help you trust your own path.

On May 15th, exactly 12 months after I went all in on Substack, I woke up to 10,000 subscribers. You might be wondering how I did this. In today’s article, I’m giving away my exact blueprint for free.

If I were playing the same game as everyone else, that is exactly how I would open this essay. We have all seen these posts. They clog our feeds and dominate the trending tabs.

They all look the same. And if you click on the profiles of the people writing them, you notice something fascinating. They are teaching you how to build a massive audience, yet their own posts struggle to get 25 likes. The math doesn’t add up.

Inflating numbers is easy. You can import a dead email list from a failed crypto project, run paid ads to cheap giveaways… or simply lie.

But their scammy practices aren’t the biggest problem here. The tragedy is that honest creators believe that this crap actually works.

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You sit there, trying to write beautiful essays about philosophy, or art, or human resilience, and you see the “10k in 12 months” post. You look at your dashboard sitting at 49 subscribers. You conclude your writing sucks and start doubting yourself.

You aren’t doing anything wrong. You’re just not a grifter.

Selling Shovels in a Gold Rush

The problem is when you see this type of content and start to read it, it logically seems to make sense. Since it worked for them, you would assume it must be true.

The people shouting the loudest right now are selling shovels in a gold rush. Their aggressive, hyper-optimized frameworks only “work” because they are selling an anxiety-driven product: status, fast money, and vanity metrics.

People will practically throw their wallets at the screen if you poke at their financial insecurities hard enough.

Yes, their advice works… assuming you lack any moral compass and your goal is to build the same “business” as them.

If you write a thoughtful publication about Roman history, modern poetry, or navigating motherhood, and you apply their high-pressure sales tactics... you will look like a lunatic.

It’s not just wrong, but horribly wrong.

The growth hacker playbook prioritizes immediate extraction over long-term trust. It is at best a short-term strategy, because they need a constant influx of new hopeless victims they can burn through.

The most depressing part of the grifter advice is to turn every aspect of a profile, bio, and about page into a highly optimized sales funnel. If every writer on Substack follows this advice, the platform will overflow with aggressive sales pitches.

By optimizing all the friction out of your profile, you destroy the very magic that made your audience fall in love with your writing in the first place.

When you optimize away all your friction, you remove all the reasons someone might actually care about you. If your work is frictionless, it’s a commodity. And commodities only compete on one thing: who is cheapest and who is loudest. That’s a race to the bottom you cannot win.

The result is what we are seeing across the entire creator economy right now: an ocean of identical, soulless copycats. Everyone sounds the same, and nobody trusts anyone. Worst of all, the promised success is nothing but an illusion.

Everyone Is Authentic Now

We are in the midst of a crisis.

I talk to talented creators every week. They have a profound philosophy and unique worldview. But when it comes to promoting their work they panic. They retreat to the standard marketing practices they themselves despise, and as a result, nobody reads their work. Not because their ideas aren’t good, but because their packaging sounds exactly like everyone else.

They despise the crappy marketing tactics for a good reason. Most of it is deeply inauthentic.

It’s not a brand strategy you can slap onto a Substack post. Authenticity is something you are. It is really a byproduct of doing the actual work. Nobody who is actually authentic has to convince others that they are authentic.

Jesus didn’t wander around the desert wearing a backwards trucker hat saying, “Guys, welcome to my channel. Today I’m just showing up, unscripted, trying to be super authentic with my loaves and fishes.”

No. He just lived his philosophy. And that’s what made him such a magnetic person… I mean, he has more followers than every creator on social media. Combined.

The Starving Artist Lie

I know why you still use the marketing tactics you despise. You are doing it because you are terrified. The system has handed you a paralyzing, false choice: Either become a shameless marketer, or accept your fate as a starving artist.

So, pure survival instinct tells you to hold your nose, swallow your pride, and hit publish on content that makes your skin crawl. You think to yourself: “If I just play the game a little longer, maybe I’ll make enough money to finally do my real work.”

It is a lie. The grifters need you to believe this lie so you keep buying their templates. They tell you that ignoring the algorithm is career suicide. Good.

Commit career suicide on their terms, so you can build a business on yours.

Break their rules.

Embrace the Vandalism

We have become a society of skeptics and eye-rollers. We know when we are being sold to, and we know when someone is trying to manipulate us.1

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If you want to build a sustainable body of work that pays you for your depth, you cannot rely on logic. Trust is the foundation of any sustainable business. And to build trust, you need to be authentic.

You can’t get there with logic. It’s something people have to feel.

Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years, and it won't change in the next million. We are emotional beings. Nature cares a great deal about feelings, and feelings drive what we do. And right now, what people feel when they encounter the creator economy is — nothing. Or worse, suspicion.

To create a business that resonates with people we must:

1. Tell a story that honestly reflects the truth of who we are.

2. Express this truth in a way that doesn’t come across as bullshit to the audience.

It sounds simple. But 90% of creators fail because they let fear dictate their strategy. They want to stand out, but they are too terrified to do something different. They retreat to the safety of templates and best practices, serving up a lukewarm sandwich of average ideas.

We need more creators who possess the courage to commit Beautiful Vandalism.

By that, I do not mean you should break things. On the contrary. You should fix the broken thing by making it more beautiful. You take the walls covered in corporate graffiti and you paint a mural.

You are a writer trying to make another human being feel something. If you do that consistently, generously, and unapologetically, you will not need to trick them into paying you. People will trust you, and as a natural consequence, they will happily pay you to help them get where they are going.

Go build something beautiful.

P. S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s free and uncovers your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

It won't give you 10,000 subscribers overnight. But it might just save you a decade of climbing the wrong ladder.

You spend hours staring at a blinking cursor, doing the hard work of dragging an idea out of your head. You edit, you polish, and finally, you hit publish.

Exactly 1.4 seconds later, you get a notification. A comment! Already?! It’s from someone named ThoughtfulCreator_88 and it reads:

That comment was written by a piece of code operating out of a damp server farm in New Jersey. It has all the emotional authenticity of a guy hiring a raccoon wearing a trench coat to go on a first date for him. (”Hello human woman, I am enjoying this spaghetti. Do you have any garbage I could rifle through later?”)

It’s exhausting. We came to Substack because it represents the last great neighborhood on the internet. It’s a sanctuary from traditional social media optimized for constant dopamine hits. The promise here was real community.

And that community still exists. I have followed since I started out. Last year he posted a picture of a coffee. Turns out we both go to the same coffee shop. I reached out, and we met up.

Substack is not very big in Germany, so the chances of this happening were incredibly small. Meeting people in real life through an online community reminded me that Substack is really a special place. But right now Substack is under attack.

Last week we went for a nice walk through a park and exchanged some ideas. We realized we were both dealing with the exact same frustrating experience: our comment sections and feeds are getting hijacked by bots and engagement farmers. Funnily enough, the exact same guys spamming my section were spamming his.

If you look at your feed you might conclude that this is normal. But if you talk to other creators you realize that everyone is just annoyed by it.

There’s a word for this now: Subslop.

The saddest part is that this slop is destroying the culture of Substack. It makes it hard to see who is actually real. I don’t want to interact with a bot. If I need 10 minutes just sifting through the comment section to find out who is real, I might stop replying altogether.

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We are slowly being conditioned to accept this epidemic of fake engagement as the cost of doing business online. But that’s just the visible part. The same logic is quietly working its way into your drafts. Because suddenly we are writing paragraphs we didn’t think… or believe in.

The Multi-Billion-Dollar Lie

I talked to several Substack creators in the last couple of weeks. There is a weird pattern I recognized: as AI supposedly becomes better, I see more and more creators using AI less.

Contrast that with the most popular narrative on the internet right now. It seems like AI can do anything. Just think your thoughts and AI will create it for you.

Look at the most valuable companies in the world. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta committed $650 billion to AI this year. Yes, billions with a B. OpenAI is still far from being profitable, so it would be an understatement to say they have a massive financial interest in making you believe you need AI. They also have the marketing budget to pull it off. So it’s no surprise that you feel like you are falling behind if you aren’t using the latest model.

Big Tech is pushing for AI adoption. But as more people use AI it actually puts you at a disadvantage.

Objectively AI is not as smart as it seems. It’s just very good at pretending. At the core, an LLM learns patterns from huge data sets and estimates what the most probable next word should be given the context.

But here is the danger of “probable.” In writing, the most probable next word is also the most predictable next word. It is a cliché.

AI is non-deterministic which means you can run the same prompt several times and always get a different result. But look closely. After doing this for a dozen or so times you will see pattern emerge. The model will revolve around a certain idea. That means anyone using a similar prompt will get a similar result.1

The models tend to reproduce the most common patterns rather than invent an original, unusual point of view. Many users ask for the same things: “make this better,” “write a post,” “give me 10 ideas,” which pushes outputs toward the average of the internet.2

But it gets worse…

It’s not a… It’s a… Sea of Sameness

We are consuming so much AI-generated text that we are subconsciously adopting its empty, corporate style in our own writing, muddying the waters even further.

It’s not that AI sounds like humans. It’s humans sounding like AI.

Damn it. The use of the ”It’s not… it’s…” is so pervasive that I started using it myself. I can feel how I adopted some of the AI patterns… and it’s really hard to become aware of that.

That’s why we are drowning in a sea of sameness. As more people use AI, content becomes uniform in structure, tone, and visuals. Research suggests that while AI can raise collective diversity in some settings, it does not increase individual creativity.3

The ease of creating content with one click further intensifies competition and the struggle for visibility. Standing out becomes incredibly difficult. This will create a premium for human judgement and creativity.

The Death of the Creator

We call ourselves creators. This strikes me as funny. Most people in the creator economy are anything but creative. The word “Creator” used to imply divinity. Now it’s a job title on LinkedIn.

The creator economy is not devoid of creativity. The incentives are just set wrong. So, instead of creating something meaningful, most creators end up spamming the ecosystem just to inflate our subscriber counts.

And here is the uncomfortable part. I have done this. You have probably done this. It's not a moral failing. The temptation to produce something that performs rather than something that matters is a rational response to a system that rewards performance over truth.

The truth is, creativity is hard. It means you have to sit down and you might stare out of the window for an hour. Thinking deeply looks like doing nothing, but it requires intense mental effort. Because humans are naturally lazy, we retreat to using AI. You throw some half-baked ideas into a prompt, and boom, a couple of seconds later you have a flawless article.

Don’t get me wrong. AI is not the problem. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t use AI4.

The real problem is that we have become so obsessed with “providing value” and optimizing for the algorithm that we forgot what it actually means to be creative. We trade our unique perspectives for bulleted lists and actionable takeaways because they perform better. We use AI as a crutch.

“Providing value” is transactional. It’s giving someone 5 steps to fix their morning routine or 10 templates for better emails. And if your only goal is to provide transactional value, you will eventually be replaced by AI, because AI can regurgitate value all day long.

The whole process for original thinking is gone. The work loses its soul.

The Alchemy of Lived Experience

AI can create but it can’t do the noticing. It can’t walk through the park, smell some flowers or jump into a cold lake on a sunny day. Going through a regular day, you feel hundreds of emotions. AI can’t feel any of it. It has no lived experience. And the lived experience is what makes us unique. It’s the foundation of creating art.

AI doesn’t get that.

Every time I use AI to edit an article, it wants to throw out my personal stories or the parts that make the article different (especially the weird phrasing that comes from me not being a native speaker).

When we do the hard work of creativity and sit down to stare at a blank page for an hour you apply pressure. It takes your ideas, emotions and lived experiences and transmutes them into a unique point of view. That’s alchemy.

It takes the mundane lead of everyday life and puts it under enough internal pressure to turn it into gold.

Don’t confuse this internal pressure with the external pressure to create more and be more productive. This hurts the creative process because it doesn’t allow you to look deeply enough. That’s what philosophers and artists of the past did. They spent hours just thinking. Imagine that for a moment. Hours of undistracted thinking.

Do the Hard Work

We have a romantic idea that creativity strikes like lightning. That the right idea will arrive fully formed and we just have to capture it.

It doesn't work like that. Ask anyone who has actually made something.

The Renaissance painters didn't wait for inspiration. Michelangelo spent four years on his back painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Da Vinci spent three years on the Mona Lisa. He stepped away from the canvas to live, to observe, and to let his experiences refine his technique. That is devotion. They committed to the work regardless of how they felt.

The difference between a hobby and a life’s work is what you do when you feel absolutely nothing.

If you want to build a creative business, devotion is essential. When the page is blank and you have nothing to say, you sit down anyway, because the work is really about who you are becoming.

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So, just start. Don’t lean back waiting for the muse (or ChatGPT) to save you. Lean into the page. Write as many ideas as fast and aggressively as you can. Just get a really crappy draft out of your head.

Commit to writing for three hours. You know you’re gonna blow the first 20 minutes (or more) staring at the wall or thinking about the series you saw on Netflix. But those remaining hours are where the magic happens.

You will hit a wall. You will feel the overwhelming, modern temptation to open a new tab, take a half-baked idea and throw it into an AI, and let a machine finish your thought.

Don’t do it.

That friction is where your creativity lies. Wrestling with the right word, pacing the room, and deleting a paragraph three times because it doesn't sound quite like you. Every time you choose to push through that block instead of outsourcing it to a LLM or template, you are finding out what you actually think.

Last week Benjamin and I walked through a park for two hours with no agenda. That conversation became this article. I didn't plan to write this article. It just wanted to be created through me.

P. S. Everything in this article comes back to the same problem. We have forgotten who we actually are in the pursuit of performing for an algorithm. Before you can write in your own voice, you have to know what your voice actually is.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so your business becomes a vessel for your life’s work. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

You could spend an hour in the feed and come away with three ideas you hadn’t considered before. Writers writing about things they actually cared about. Readers who actually read. A quiet corner of the internet that hadn’t been colonized yet.

Now it feels increasingly like LinkedIn. Substack is becoming a place where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators who want to be creators. It’s an endless loop of productivity hacks, growth tactics, and audience building.

At some point, we moved from creating things to teaching people how to create things. Most of the wealth comes from recruiting other people and teaching them how to sell the dream to even more people.

Some would call this a pyramid scheme. In the creator economy, we call it personal branding.

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Don’t get me wrong. Substack is still the best platform I have found. But the air is getting thinner. The noise is drowning out the signal. And if you’re a creator actually trying to build something meaningful, this shift isn’t just annoying. It changes how you think.

How I Became a Substack Bestseller

Maybe you have experienced it yourself. You are about to write a new article. There are hundreds of great ideas in your head. You know what you want to say.

But before you start, you take a quick look at what’s getting attention. You see that your favorite creator posted something a couple of days ago that went viral. The topic is great and there is validation that people like it.

Maybe you could write about that? You pause. This could be your breakthrough. So instead of writing what you actually wanted to write, you write something you think people will read.

After spending some time on Substack you start to notice other creators. People who arrived on the platform five minutes ago are suddenly growing faster than you and showing up everywhere. It’s frustrating, even if you tell yourself it shouldn’t matter.

So you take a look at their profile. Research purposes, obviously. Lucky for you, they have a post pinned at the top titled “How I Became a Substack Bestseller.“

You read it. And just like every other growth article you “accidentally“ read, they all seem to point to the same obvious best practices. You must post one to two long-form pieces per week and supplement this by posting on Notes four times a day. Your titles have to be “click-worthy.“

None of it is particularly surprising. In fact, it makes perfect sense once you see it. And that’s exactly why it’s dangerous.

Because you don’t make a dramatic decision to change what you’re doing. You don’t abandon your work or suddenly decide to chase attention. You just adjust. Slightly.

But over time those small adjustments start to compound. And bit by bit your art turns into content.

The $100 Million Sanctuary

Let’s not forget that Substack is a business after all. Last year they raised $100 million in funding. It may have started as a sanctuary for writing, but once you raise that kind of money, you don’t get to stay a sanctuary forever.

The obvious move is to copy what already works. The more time people spend on the platform, the more valuable it becomes. So it starts behaving like every other social platform: Keep people on the platform and give them reasons to come back.

This has an impact on the creators as well. Once attention becomes the currency, the whole game changes. It increases the pressure to create more content.

Since Substack hasn’t introduced ads yet, the quality of content is critically important to them. More creators competing for reader attention is good for their business because it means higher quality content.

Except that’s not what’s happening.

The Placebo Dashboard

By introducing new metrics, Substack supposedly helps you make better decisions. You are told to analyze the numbers to write a piece that’s more likely to capture attention. Because these numbers are plastered across your dashboard and dominate your feed, you’re actively encouraged to analyze data before you even think about your next idea.

The problem is that the numbers you see are misleading.

Let’s take A/B testing your title as an example. Unless you are in the top 1% of creators, your audience size is simply too small to yield statistically significant data.

Substack has essentially given you a placebo button. It’s like the “close door“ button in many elevators. It is there simply to make impatient people feel better by giving them something to do. The only function is to soothe the mammalian brain’s preference for control and certainty. And this function keeps you engaged on their platform.

This data gives us false confidence, functioning as a feedback loop of confirmation bias. You end up changing your writing style or your headlines based on what is effectively the same as flipping a coin.

The biggest problem I see with metrics is that they destroy diversity because they force everybody to pursue the same narrow goal, often in the same narrow way, or to make choices using the exact same criteria.

By gamifying writing with leaderboards, “rising” tags, and subscriber counts, Substack shifts the creator’s focus from a “wide context” problem (how do I write something meaningful and interesting?) to a “narrow context” problem (how do I get this number to go up?). When every creator optimizes for the same narrow metrics, we end up in a sea of sameness.

The funny thing is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. If you study the trending tabs and optimize your work based purely on Substack’s dashboard, you will inevitably end up sounding exactly like everyone else who is trying to game the algorithm.

The real magic of independent writing comes from instinct, imagination, and sometimes just daring to be different or weird.

And here is where it gets sneaky. Through these metric-driven nudges, your behavior starts to change. Do this long enough and you’re slowly becoming someone you didn’t intend to be.

When metrics define who you are, you get stuck. Because metrics are inconsistent. And so your identity becomes inconsistent too.

That’s the part most people miss. They think they’re optimizing their strategy. But what they’re actually doing is destabilizing their identity.

Identity Drift

I call this identity drift. Here is how it works:

1. You start writing what matters

2. You notice what performs

3. You adjust slightly

4. You repeat

5. You drift

None of these are big decisions. They are just small compromises. But over time you go from expressing something to producing something.

The real problem is that you’re trying to build something without knowing who you are as a creator. Before you ask how to grow, you need to decide who you are.

If you don’t define your identity, the platform will define it for you. And as we have seen that’s not necessarily in your best interest.

Most people never really define who they are as a creator. Not clearly, at least. So when the environment changes, they don’t have anything stable to anchor to. They try to be a writer, but also a teacher. They want to express something real, but they also want to grow. They experiment with different formats, different tones, different strategies, hoping something will click.

In isolation, none of that is wrong. But taken together, it creates a kind of internal fragmentation. You’re no longer operating from a clear center. You’re reacting, adjusting, adapting, trying to reconcile different roles that don’t fully align.

The specific loss here is not just voice or quality. It’s the relationship with the work itself. The artist makes something because it demands to exist. The content creator makes something because the calendar demands it. Those are completely different orientations, and the distance between them is measured in identity not just output.

The Horror of Success

Identity drift doesn’t just change what you create. It changes how creating feels.

Sitting down and writing feels heavier. I mean, not that it ever was easy, but now you feel exhausted even before sitting down to write. You second-guess ideas and start to procrastinate by reading another how to grow article.

The writing is not really the problem. The problem is hitting publish. For all the changes Substack made, the editor makes it really easy to hit publish. So why does it feel so hard?

It’s the pain of shouting into the void. You pour your heart into an article and nobody reads it. You start to take it personally and think it’s the content. So you think you can escape the pain by writing about something that’s supposed to get attention.

I know it sucks. But you know what sucks even more? Actually getting a lot of likes on an article you didn’t create because you wanted it to exist but because you thought people will read it.

One day you wake up to 30,000 subscribers. It seems like you made it. But then you have to write about stuff you are not passionate about for an audience you don’t care about. The audience came for a performance, not for who you really are.

This is where things get slightly masochistic. You spent so much time building your audience that you can’t just walk away. Maybe even your mortgage payment depends on it.

This is no longer identity drift. It’s an identity prison.

You Are the Work

If this feels uncomfortable, it should. Because at some point, you handed over authorship.

Before you can create art, you have to appoint yourself an artist. You don’t wait for the feedback of the creator economy. You decide (internally) that you are one. Your first step is simply giving yourself permission to occupy that identity. It seems trivial but it means you take the responsibility to shape your own life.

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You cannot create compelling content if you spend your entire life locked in a room staring at analytics and editing software. You must have the courage to go out, experience the world, suffer, love, fail, and live vigorously. That messy life experience is the raw fuel for your creative engine.

Don’t overthink your content strategy. Focus on pursuing your own curiosities, developing your own skills, and figuring out your own life.

The writing, videos, podcast or whatever you create are really just a byproduct of becoming who you really are.

If you just follow the metrics, you are handing the chisel over to the algorithm. You are letting a piece of code determine who you get to be. And let me tell you, the algorithm has terrible taste.

The Quiet Rebellion

Awareness is the first step. The second step is harder. It requires courage. Because it means you will have to go against the default path of the creator economy.

Some people accuse me of being a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian. I get where it is coming from, but I disagree. Obviously. Being a contrarian is part of my DNA (I was born C-section, btw).

I’m throwing rocks at the creator economy because the machine is broken, and we have to smash some windows to let the fresh air in. We have to make some beautiful vandalism called art.

It takes a lot of bravery to ignore the dashboard and accept that the numbers don’t define your value. That is a quiet rebellion for creative freedom.

You must have the courage to declare yourself a creator, to stand out, to disappoint your audience when it’s time to evolve, and the courage to live a life worth writing about.

The shift toward the attention economy is also an opportunity to find out who you really are and to take responsibility for shaping Substack in what it was intended to be.

The identity drift is already happening. The question is who will you be?

P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of building for the wrong audience.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

(Names have been changed to protect the not so innocent)

Todd is staring straight through your screen. He looks profound. Or deeply serious. Or maybe he just hasn’t slept because he’s on day 42 of monk mode. He presses his hands together under his chin, fingertips resting gently on the neckline of a $300 unbranded beige t-shirt. On the minimalist oak desk beside him, purposefully placed just out of focus, sits a ceramic mug of ceremonial-grade matcha.

Todd leans into the microphone, drops his voice into a calm, authoritative, low-BPM rhythm, and begins to speak.

It sounds intoxicating.

You watch this while eating a lukewarm sandwich at your desk, and you are hooked. Because Todd isn’t screaming at you to trade crypto. He’s looking directly into your soul and telling you that your ability to focus is a superpower. He’s telling you that your random obsession with stoicism, analog photography, and gut health is the foundation of a media empire.

Todd claims that thanks to his philosophy, he now works exactly two hours a day. (We will temporarily ignore the fact that feeding his newsletter funnels, managing his Discord, and filming high-contrast reels actually takes him 11 hours a day and a minor caffeine addiction.)

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There is nothing really special about Todd. He is just very articulate. The promise is that everyone can do this. He makes you believe the only thing you have to do is be yourself on the internet. And if you buy his $997 course, you too can exit the matrix, transcend the 9-to-5, and build a successful creator business.

Todd is the hero of the modern creator economy. He is also a symptom of why the creator economy is currently broken.

The Creator Economy is Run by Delusional Optimists

Here is the thing about Todd. Todd isn’t lying to you.

He actually believes in his course. You aren’t buying a scam. He gives you an impeccably designed blueprint. It’s the equivalent of a NASA-grade, titanium water-purification filter. It works perfectly. Todd uses it every day to turn his thoughts into pure, liquid gold.

But what Todd forgets to mention is that a water filter only works if you have water. He already had a half-million Twitter followers when he used his blueprint in 2019.

He sold you the water filter. But you live in the desert.

You hook Todd’s system up to your Substack of 42 subscribers, turn the crank, and absolutely nothing comes out.

This is where the psychological violence of the creator economy begins. Because when you buy a high-end system from a very smart guy and it fails... you don’t blame the system. You blame yourself.

You think you didn’t synthesize your curiosities well enough or you haven’t used the correct writing framework.

You never stop to look at the unromantic math:

Todd doesn’t like the math because it would mean he has to admit that it was more luck than his pure genius. So Todd calls these people low-agency.

Nobody is in charge of this whole thing. That’s what makes it so hard to see. The creator economy is not a pyramid scheme run by malicious elite. It’s a virus. A self-replicating idea that feeds on our need for status, freedom, and meaning, and rewards the people at the top for keeping the dream alive.

The system is designed to flow the water directly to the top. And Todd is working to keep the water flowing.

The whole industry only works if there are enough delusional optimists buying water filters and don't realize they are standing in a dessert.

By now there is a natural urge to call everyone a grifter and decide that building a Substack doesn’t make sense. It feels like defending oil cartels in a class-action lawsuit. Or dealing fentanyl.

Before you start deleting your Substack, let’s look at the alternative.

The Myth of the Million Dollars

The reason we fall for the Todds of the creator economy is simpler than we'd like to admit. Todd didn't invent a dream. He just packaged one we already had.

That sounds great. But who says I want to become a millionaire? When we think about having a million, we are really fantasizing about the freedom from problems and autonomy. What we don’t see is that there is no life without problems. No matter how many zeros your bank statement shows.

I guarantee you that 99% of people do not actually want to be millionaires. They just like the idea of the money, but not what it requires to get there.

What you actually want is the ability to stop working at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, close your laptop, and go for a walk in the sun. Or to meet with your friends… or just to enjoy your life.

You don’t need a million dollars for that kind of life.

With a hundred thousand a year you can eat well, travel, drink the fancy coffee, invest the rest, and leave your desk when the weather is good without asking anyone's permission. Most people who've actually made a million dollars are still at their desks at nine in the evening trying to figure out how to make two million. The number grows. The Tuesday afternoon walk keeps getting postponed.

You want to become a Sovereign Creator. Most people hear “sovereign” and think of yachts and financial freedom. But psychological sovereignty is infinitely more important. You have to define what success looks like for you. How much is enough?

If you don’t define it, you will accidentally adopt the definition set by people who do not care if you are happy.

The Strategy of Art

There is another point that stinks for Todd. The sobering statistics mean you are better off keeping your day job or freelance work. Savings would do the trick as well. Keep whatever is paying your rent. At least for now. The biggest mistake you can make is putting the pressure of survival on the thing you love.

Even shooting for $100k requires uncomfortable work and patience. So how do we ensure that even if you miss the financial target, you haven’t wasted two years of your life?

If you are reading this, you probably want to help people with your work. But you don’t help people by producing content. Nobody ever woke up saying “Man, I could really use some content right now.” Instead of creating content and becoming a slave to the algorithm, we are going to make art.

When I say art I don't mean you have to become DaVinci and paint the next Mona Lisa. Art is simply a way of being in the world.

The act of creation forces you to get to the core of who you are, because you cannot make great art while pretending to be someone else. Art is an expression of who you are. You are constantly confronted with the question of why you are here.

That’s why art is really an existential response, a deep longing to transcends yourself. You don't just make the work. The work makes you. I like to think of art as way of sharing your gift with the world and in the process become a better person.

This can have a therapeutic effect where both the creator and the audience have an opportunity to heal. You share what you see in a way that makes someone else feel less alone. That leaves something real behind.

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In the process of creating art you lose yourself and participate in a communion with the work. Instead of submitting to consistency you submit to devotion. You are answering something that comes from inside you and needs to exist regardless of whether anyone reads it.

With this mindset you can’t lose. Even if you don’t make single dollar you have developed a point of view that cannot be copied, a voice that is yours, and a relationship with your own creative capacity that no algorithm can take away.

Content decays. Art accumulates.

How To Actually Make a Living

Philosophy is beautiful. But philosophy does not pay the rent.

Forget the traditional metrics that Todd obsesses over. For the first six to twelve months your only job is to find ten people who genuinely care about what you’re making.

Not ten thousand. Ten.

Find ten people who trust you, respect you, and need what you have to say. Ten people who read everything you write. Who send it to one person because it changed their life. Who would genuinely miss you if you disappeared

Ten people who trust you are worth more than ten thousand who follow you for the dopamine.

From those ten, you will eventually learn what problem you actually solve, how your voice sounds, and what you have to offer that nobody else does. But you can only learn that from people who care, and you can only find people who care by shipping the work.

Right now, a familiar voice in your head is probably asking: Okay, but what is the exact acquisition strategy for the ten? How do I actually get them? What’s my niche?

Let me stop you right there.

You are looking for another blueprint. You are trying to overcomplicate the mechanics so you have an excuse to avoid doing the actual work. Asking “how” is the best friend of the sophisticated procrastinator.

You want the step-by-step plan to get your ten? Here it is:

Open a blank document (or one of the thirty in your drafts folder) and write something so uncomfortably honest that it makes your stomach hurt. Hit publish. And then you do it again next week.

Do that consistently for six months, and you will be ahead of 99% of the people on this platform. If you really did this for six months straight and you still feel completely lost, hit reply. I will personally refund you every single penny you paid to read this free email.

Somewhere in this process, whether or not the business works, you become someone who has done the hardest thing a creative person can do: You stopped planning and started becoming.

You didn't build a personal brand. You built a person.

Now, stop procrastinating and close this tab. Your blank page is waiting.

P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of trying to find your niche.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

Deliver your value quickly. Cut out the pauses. Edit out the dead space. Distill your complex humanity into a six-minute, highly optimized YouTube video so the algorithm knows exactly which consumer demographic to feed it to.

We completely ignored the rule.

A couple of weeks ago, and I went live on Substack. We spent a lot of time coming up with an agenda. And then, we threw the outline out the window. We just wanted to have an honest conversation about the underlying rot of the “personal branding” and why 97% of creators are miserable.

We didn’t hit stop.

We kept talking. We talked until my contact lenses dried out and Taylin’s local time hit 2:00 AM. We stripped away the safe, practiced answers we give on regular podcasts, and eventually hit the bedrock of actual, existential fear.

Seven hours later, we logged off.

I did not edit this video. I didn’t cut out the silence, the glitches, or the moments we lost our train of thought. To edit it down into “bite-sized takeaways” would have been an act of vandalism against the very philosophy we were discussing.

Art requires devotion. And sometimes, devotion is deeply inefficient.

In this unpolished tape, you will find:

• Why “Monetize Your Passions” is a psychological trap disguised as a business plan.

• What a VR rollercoaster in a rural Mexican village taught me about privilege, pain, and the refusal to scale a business.

• The terrifying freedom of admitting you are never going to be the next Steve Jobs.

• The difference between a creator fighting for a $1 million exit, and an artist who just wants a Tuesday afternoon.

I do not expect you to watch the whole thing. It is seven hours long. You have a life, and I respect your time.

But I also respect your intelligence. If you are exhausted by the tightly choreographed, heavily manicured guru content on your timeline, you can pull up a chair in here. Pick a random timestamp. Drop in anywhere you want. Listen for twenty minutes while you wash your dishes.

The door is open, the tape is raw, and there isn’t a pitch waiting for you at the end.

See you inside.

Best,
Philipp

This is an absolute marathon of a conversation! Here is a comprehensive timeline to help your listeners navigate through nearly seven hours of deep dives into philosophy, the creative process, and the creator economy:

Podcast Timeline

00:00:00 - 00:31:00 | Writing Styles, Strange Loops, and The Concept of a Calling

• 00:00:00: Introduction to Philipp’s writing style, which Taylin describes as having “moral elevation”. Philipp explains his best ideas often come from brain dumps when he feels annoyed or edgy.

• 00:06:00: Taylin discusses his ADHD tendencies, his fascination with strange loops, and how exploring these concepts eases his existential curiosity and death anxiety.

• 00:13:00: A discussion on existential questions and finding one’s purpose. Philipp shares a story about witnessing kids in a rural Mexican village marveling at a VR headset, which deeply shaped his sense of privilege and his calling.

• 00:24:00: Differentiating between a genuine “calling” from life and an intellectualized, ego-driven ambition.

00:31:00 - 01:00:00 | Psychedelics, Surrender, and The Denial of Death

• 00:31:00: Taylin shares how his first Ayahuasca experience instantly shifted him from a strict rationalist mindset to a spiritual one.

• 00:38:00: The pain of peeling back layers of inherited social conditioning to find out what you truly believe.

• 00:46:00: Confronting human limitations and death. Philipp talks about his struggles with chronic fatigue, how it forced him to give up control, and the impact of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

• 00:56:00: The difference between simply surrendering to life and acting as an active “vessel” for a higher purpose.

01:00:00 - 01:40:00 | The Meaning Crisis, Redefining Art, and The Ambition Loop

• 01:00:00: How the decline of religion and the rise of a statistics-driven, rationalist society has led to a modern meaning crisis.

• 01:12:00: Redefining art. They discuss Naval Ravikant’s definition of art as “anything done for its own sake” and Philipp proposes that art is fundamentally a “way of being in the world” rather than just a final product.

• 01:23:00: The tension between being a starving artist and a soulless entrepreneur, and using personal philosophy to bridge the gap.

• 01:34:00: Getting trapped in the “ambition loop” and the psychological drive to build “immortality projects” (like trying to become the next Steve Jobs) to justify existence.

01:40:00 - 02:36:00 | Niching, Multi-Passionate Creators, and Market Reality

• 01:40:00: Finding meaning through chosen suffering and the immense satisfaction that comes from saying “no” to cut off infinite options.

• 02:03:00: Why traditional “niching” often fails multi-passionate creators. They discuss how building a unified personal worldview is a superior approach to forcing yourself into a box.

• 02:18:00: The slow reality of monetization and building a business. Why keeping a day job is often a much saner approach to protect your art from financial pressure.

02:36:00 - 03:44:00 | Audience Q&A: Substack Growth, Trolls, and Therapy

• 02:36:00: Transitioning to audience questions. They discuss the strategic use of Substack Notes for experimenting with ideas and driving growth without spamming.

• 03:10:00: Handling trolls and the inherent difficulty of writing with nuanced perspectives in short-form content.

• 03:37:00: Deep dive into personal therapy experiences, touching on CBT, parts therapy, internal family systems, and Carl Jung’s approach to dream analysis.

• 03:42:00: Exploring the benefits and practical limitations of Wim Hof breathwork.

03:44:00 - 04:28:00 | Biohacking, Obsession, and Faith vs. Creed

• 03:44:00: Thoughts on the biohacking space, cutting down on supplements, and microdosing LSD and Ketamine for writing and rest.

• 03:59:00: The destructive vs. productive sides of obsession, and pondering the difference between being obsessed and being “possessed”.

• 04:10:00: Why looking up to extreme outliers (like Elon Musk) is often a terrible model for a fulfilling life.

• 04:16:00: A philosophical look at Jesus as a role model for living authentically, and the critical difference between having direct spiritual faith versus merely following a religious creed.

04:28:00 - 05:21:00 | AI in the Creative Process and The Value of Deep Reading

• 04:28:00: Critiquing current Substack features and discussing the desire for community tools and on-platform product sales.

• 04:56:00: A polarizing debate on AI in writing. They agree that prompting AI to generate drafts is “crap,” but utilizing it as a brainstorming partner, an editor, or a tool to have interactive conversations with books is highly valuable.

• 05:34:00: The danger of mindlessly consuming social media to harvest ideas versus diving deep into structured books, courses, or one’s own subconscious.

05:21:00 - 06:04:00 | Taylin’s Value Framework and The Messy Creative Process

• 05:21:00: Taylin breaks down his “Hierarchy of Value Creation”—moving from commoditized information up to identity-shifting intellectual property.

• 05:52:00: Exploring the fundamental difference between an “idea” (which changes the contents of the mind) and a “big idea” (which changes the structure of the mind).

• 05:55:00: Balancing structure and intuition. They compare their opposing approaches to the messy creative process.

06:04:00 - 06:53:26 | Art as Exorcism, Otto Rank, and Trusting the Spooky Calling

• 06:04:00: Viewing the creation of art as a form of therapy and an “exorcism” of ideas that demand to be let out.

• 06:07:00: Philipp details the profound influence of psychoanalyst Otto Rank (Art and Artist), discussing the trauma of birth and the human struggle between the fear of life and the fear of death.

• 06:20:00: The “spooky” nature of finally accepting your purpose. Philipp shares a wild, synchronistic dream about the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan that confirmed his path.

• 06:38:00: Wrapping up an incredible, unscripted, nearly 7-hour marathon of devotion to conversation.

Read more

1. Step one: Buy my $997 course on how to become a six-figure creator.

2. Step two: Create your own course teaching other people how to become six-figure creators.

3. Step three: Sell it to the people who couldn’t afford my course.

If anyone from the FTC asks, we are a “multi-tiered dimensional personal branding ecosystem.” (That’s code for running a literal Ponzi scheme out of a rented Boca Raton strip mall.)

But assuming you have a fragile conscience and don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit, you are forced to do it the hard way. You have to build a “personal brand.”

And currently, trying to build a personal brand feels like receiving an official decree from the Ministry of Internet Money:

MEMO TO ALL CREATORS
SUBJECT: Algorithm Optimization & You

To better serve the platform, we ask that you immediately select just ONE of your hobbies to talk about until the end of time. Please neatly amputate all other passions, personality traits, and spontaneous thoughts, and place them in the provided bio-hazard bins.

Failure to comply will result in us hiding your posts behind a viral video of a golden retriever eating a head of cabbage.

Thank you,
Management.

Naturally, you don’t want to do that. It is spiritual amputation. So you look for a loophole. And waiting for you with open arms is the creator economy’s favorite piece of modern advice:

“Bro. Stop overthinking. YOU are the niche. Just talk about your life, combine your unique interests, and the market will reward you!”

Oh, thank God. Finally. I can just be my authentic self. I’ll launch a personal brand at the unique intersection of "Jungian shadow work," "artisanal sourdough," and "passive income through Notion templates."

Where the hell do I park my Lamborghini?

I’ll tell you where: right next to the tooth fairy’s minivan, because "You are the niche" is the biggest fairy tale on the internet.

You look at the creators with massive audiences. Sure, today they can post a single quote about the cosmos, attach a picture of their espresso, and get ten thousand likes. But if you scroll back through the internet archives to 2019, you know what you’ll find?

They were the single-topic Facebook Ads specialist grinding out 4,000-word technical tutorials just to get five people to notice them.

Taking audience-building advice from a growth guru with 500,000 followers is exactly like taking financial advice from a guy who just successfully robbed a casino. “Just walk in and take the money, bro. It's so liberating!” Sure, it sounds fantastic when he says it. But if you try it with zero leverage and zero experience, you’re just going to end up alone in a very small, very sad room.

It’s survivorship bias wrapped in a Stripe check-out.

Telling people to “just be themselves” is easy when you already have half a million people hanging on your every word. But how about when you are starting out at absolute zero?

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You cannot monetize “being you” when nobody knows who you are. The market does not care about your passions. It cares about problems. And when your audience is currently small enough to fit inside a 2008 Honda Civic, you cannot simply declare yourself a personal-brand guru.

You lack the gravity. And more importantly, you lack the data.

If you have a small audience, trying to find your niche is a trap. You don't even know what you're good at yet. When you're just starting out, you don't need a niche. You need a laboratory. You need to throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks.

So let’s do ourselves a favor. Print the word “niche” on a piece of paper. Hold a small private ceremony. Say a few words if you need to. Then set it on fire and open a window.

The Niche Is Dead

I know we are all here to make a living with our art. Good luck with that. But money is not the point. Neither is the niche the problem.

There is something nobody in the creator economy wants to say out loud.

Most of the content promising to help you build a meaningful business is not built on generosity. It is built on the discovery that meaning sells better than money. That wrapping a business course in philosophy and identity work and the language of purpose makes it feel different from the obvious get-rich-quick scams.

But it’s not really different. It’s just better dressed.

Greed dressed up as purpose is still greed. It’s just harder to see coming. And considerably harder to walk away from because it speaks directly to the part of you that wants your life to matter.

The people producing this content are not lying. Most of them believe what they’re teaching. That’s what makes it so sneaky.

Here is the part that actually drives me crazy.

I have written about this before and I keep coming back to it because it drives me genuinely crazy that “how to find your niche” articles go viral every week while actively failing 99% of the people reading them. Not because the advice is stupid. Because it is structurally built for someone who is not you, packaged as universal truth, and consumed by people who then blame themselves when it doesn’t work.

The growth gurus built their audiences in completely different circumstances than yours with a completely different timing. Almost always they already had a reputation that helped them to take off. They look back at what worked and package it into a framework. But a lot of it was circumstance dressed up as insight after the fact.

When you follow that advice and fail, and you will fail because the map was drawn for someone else’s territory, you don’t question the map. You question yourself. Because realizing, that you spent months following structurally flawed advice, is too painful to admit.

Bankrupting Your Self-Trust

You have probably felt it. You read something that finally makes sense of everything, take notes, feel the momentum building, and go to bed thinking tomorrow is the day.

But in the morning you open their newsletter instead of writing. Again.

It’s not laziness. You are running a sophisticated operation to protect yourself from something that frightens you more than failure. The content gives you the buzz of forward motion without the exposure of actual creation. Every new framework feels like the missing piece, every course like the last thing you need before you’re ready. Your brain cannot tell the difference between thinking about your potential and using it, so it keeps choosing the option that feels like progress without the risk of finding out what you’re actually made of.

And the loop is costing you something nobody in this space talks about. Not time or money. Every morning you choose the content over the work, you make one withdrawal from the only account that actually matters, which is your trust in yourself.

You know this. That’s the worst part. You know exactly what you’re doing when you consume instead of create. And that knowing without acting is more severe than any external failure could be, because external failure you can blame on timing or the algorithm or advice that turned out to be wrong. But this is harder to explain away.

Here is what the content you’re consuming will never tell you, because it would immediately undercut the sale.

It sells you an identity. Think about it: Your unique combination of interests is your competitive advantage and the market will reward you for simply being yourself.

It tells you that you are already enough and you desperately want to hear that. That’s exactly why it doesn’t work.

You cannot think your way into a new identity. You can only act your way into one. Repeatedly. Over a long time. With real feedback from real people.

So you try. You post something, finally doing the dang thing.

You don’t have thousands of subscribers yet. That’s why you were consuming the “how to grow” content in the first place. So when you finally get the courage to post something, nobody cares.

That really hurts. If a marketing tactic fails, you can blame the tactic. But when the strategy was "just be yourself" and nobody buys it? That feels like a direct judgment on who you are.

Addiction with a Podcast Microphone

Here’s where it completely gets fucked up: You go back to their content. The thing that caused the damage becomes the treatment.

That's an addiction with a philosophy degree.

What you don’t see is that this is how the system works. In the beginning you will get ignored and the only way through is by stubbornly showing up. If your only drive is money or recognition you won’t survive this phase. You need to make peace with the fact that your work is going to suck for a while.

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The gap you feel between the creator you know you could be and the drafts folder full of things that never got published is not a problem to solve. It is the most reliable sign that you are already a creator.

It’s means that you have a highly refined sense of taste. That’s a competitive advantage because it cannot be bought, taught, or shortcutted.

Every serious creator lives permanently in that gap. It doesn’t close with more skill. It widens, because your taste develops faster than your ability. Ira Glass said this better than anyone.

The Blueprint is the Problem

There is an old parable about three bricklayers. Here is my version of it:

You ask the first what he is doing. He says: “I’m laying bricks.” Then you ask the second. He says “I’m building a wall.”

You go on to ask the third. He looks up and says “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m co-creating a sacred temple.”

The first guy is waiting for a foreman to tell him what to do. The second is following a blueprint. The third is different. He is doing the work because the work itself is an act of devotion

Every brick is part of something people he will never meet will walk into centuries from now and feel something they cannot name.

The cathedral is a metaphor for work that serves something larger than the individual making it. A cathedral is built for a community. It outlasts the builder and creates value for people who will never know the name of the person who laid a specific brick.

That’s the business model done right. Not monetizing your passion. Building something that serves people so generously that compensation becomes the natural consequence rather than the desperate goal.

Now look at your situation honestly.

Right now, somewhere on your computer, there is a folder called something like “brand strategy” that you have opened maybe twice. That is the first bricklayer doing the work of the third. And some part of you has known it the whole time.

You know the difference between laying bricks and building something sacred. You cannot bring yourself to do the former when you came here to do the latter.

Embrace this refusal. It is your most honest impulse. You just have to answer the call instead of running from it.

The cathedral does not build itself on honest impulses alone.

Show up to the page at the exact same time every day. Not to "grow your audience." But because sitting in that chair and making something out of nothing is the price of admission to a creative life. Embrace the suck. Make the promise to yourself, and then keep it.

That is how you buy back your self-trust.

Once you stop desperately searching for a niche, and just commit to the daily devotion of your craft without giving a damn about who’s watching, guess what?

Your voice will finally show up. And once your voice shows up, you’ll realize the niche didn’t need to be found. It was right there the whole time.

P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of trying to find your niche.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

It started back in 2016. I was supposedly doing my Master’s thesis in computer science at a software company. In reality I was slowly dying of boredom while writing a highly technical academic paper that absolutely no one on earth was ever going to read.

Right around that time a friend sent me an article about digital nomads. I took one look and fell straight down the rabbit hole. It was my introduction to entrepreneurship and it instantly clicked. It felt like the thing I was born for, but nobody ever told me that this is viable career path (thanks social conditioning).

Then came the moment my whole life changed. Really.

It was Saturday morning, ridging an elevator to a completely empty office. Because who works on Saturdays? Well me apparently.

My reasoning was simple. The faster I get done with this thesis, the faster I can figure out what to do next and build my business.

As I walked through the empty office I had sort of an epiphany. I don’t even know the CEO of this company. He definitely does not know me. In fact, nobody here actually knows what the fck I’m doing. The only guy who knew what I was doing was my overworked advisor who dumbed me off to co-worker who didn’t gave a shit.

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My decision was made. I just had to figure out how. After buying a one-way ticket to Thailand and trying to find enlightenment in a monastery (spoiler: I didn’t), I eventually ended up on a beach in LA.

LA had always been a dream of mine. I thought it would be a great place to find some real inspiration.

Instead I found an Instagram ad.

Why You Need To Break Things

I was scrolling through my feed, when it suddenly appeared. I don’t remember the exact phrasing but it said something along the lines of: “How to build a seven-figure online fitness coaching business in 12 weeks.” The guy in the video was named Sterling. At that moment, it sounded like God himself talking to me: My son, this one is for you.

I didn’t even have the money to pay for the course. But conveniently, it was payable in three monthly installments. I figured by the time the second payment rolled around I would have made all the money back anyway. Sterling projected absolute success. A million followers and financial freedom while traveling the world. It was a masterfully presented image. He was a textbook guru perfectly engineered to exploit my deepest psychological needs.

A month and a half later the dream didn’t materialize and I ended up broke in the basement of my parents house.

I bring this up because if you spend any time on Substack or Twitter these days, you are completely surrounded by the digital descendants of Sterling. They are everywhere: “How I gained 10k subscribers in 30 days,” and “Drop your link below so we can support each other!”

After almost 10 years of running my own business and getting burned by a dozens of gurus, I can tell you that the people doing this aren't necessarily bad people. They’re just responding rationally to the incentives of a broken system. The algorithm rewards noise and engagement bait.

But as someone whose lifelong strategy has always been when everybody goes left, I go right, I can tell you that great work doesn’t come from conforming.

You have to smash a little mud on the perfectly curated status quo.

If you want to survive the current creator economy without losing your soul, you have to be an outlaw. You have to reject the rules of the broken system and start writing your own. Literally.

Learn to Love the Crickets

Let’s get one thing straight. This is a tough gig. Writing something truly great that changes how a stranger feels, is incredibly difficult.

Most people in the growth cult will tell you to just post consistently. “Consistency is King!” But consistency is a metric for factories. An apple tree that tried to produce fruit every single day of the year would die.

What you really need is devotion.

When you sit down to write a piece and you hit publish with a trembling finger... and you get exactly four likes. Two from friends. One from a bot. And one from your mom.

That hurts. It feels like you’re shouting into the void. But it’s the part of the creative process where your muse is sleeping off a bad hangover behind a dumpster, the crickets are chirping, and tumbleweeds are rolling through the vast, empty space between your ears.

You think the market has rejected you. It hasn’t. The market is just busy. You are speaking to what I call the “Ghost Economy.” They are silent introverts and deep thinkers who actually read your stuff, nod quietly, and never leave a comment. The deepest waters are often still. You aren’t building a massive audience. You are building a small village. Outlast the crickets. Write for three years to absolutely no one. Sucking is the first step to being great. Make friends with sucking.

Don’t Set Out to be Famous

If you want to know what your Substack is about, don’t look at your analytics. Find the conflict.

Every good movie, every good novel, every good ad campaign runs on conflict. What is the bad guy in your story? Is it the hustle culture? Is it superficial marketing? Is it the loneliness of modern life? If you don’t have a bad guy, you’re just writing a brochure, and nobody voluntarily reads a brochure.

Once you have your bad guy, you need to embrace being contrarian. When building strategies for my clients, I always look for what the industry standard is. And then perfectly do the opposite.

If all the growth gurus are telling you to speed up, hack the system, and read 100 books a year at 2x speed, go 180 degrees the other way. Tell your readers to read one great book. To put it down and think about a single sentence for three days. Let it alter them.

Be beautifully unproductive. Share your worst post. Make something so honest and dripping with human imperfection that it stops the scroll. If you treat Substack like Twitter 2.0, you are fighting over table scraps in the dopamine economy. Dopamine fades. Depth compounds. Don’t build your business on a fading asset.

Starve Your Monkey Brain

I’ve met so many writers who are stuck. Their pages are blank, so they open a new tab and read an article about “How to overcome writer’s block,” which leads them to a Twitter thread by some 22-year-old guru about “The 7 habits of highly effective typists.”

You’ve got a bad case of what Buddhists call “Monkey Mind.” It’s your forebrain chattering away, swinging from branch to branch, terrified of doing the actual, unglamorous work of staring at the blank page.

If you want to write about building a creative business, do not read other people writing about building a creative business. You’re just drinking downstream water. Go to an entirely different galaxy.

Read biology. Read the history of the transcontinental railroad. Read a book from 1950. Go outside, build a damn wooden table with your bare hands. Have a difficult, uncomfortable conversation in the real world. Expose yourself to some grit and friction that hasn’t been optimized by a Silicon Valley product manager. Then come back to your desk and bring those weird, unrelated dots together.

That is how you develop an original voice.

Make Art Not Content

In my branding and design studio, I saw brilliant ideas happily murdered over and over again because clients demanded they fit the crappy bullshit marketing everyone else was doing on Amazon. They actively choose the safe and mediocre garbage over the risky and brilliant idea.

You don’t have a client to please. And you do not have to fit a template (really). This gives you ultimate freedom.

Don’t voluntarily cage yourself by trying to appease a mathematical formula or an imaginary audience. You are not a content creator trying to trick an algorithm into making you famous. You are a writer trying to make another human being feel something.

The people playing the Guru Game might rack up higher subscriber counts in the short term. They might wave their screenshots in your face. Let them. Their audience is built on the flimsy foundation of quick dopamine, and dopamine fades.

The future of the creator economy is not written by the loudest voices. It’s going to be won by the most resonant ones. The people who refuse to manufacture generic advice. The ones who treat their work as an offering rather than a funnel.

Greatness requires the sudden cessation of stupidity. Look at the sea of people screaming for attention, step back, and decide to just quietly build a fire in the dark.

Just sit down, stare at the glowing rectangle, pull an idea out of the dark, and make some art that has a positive impact.

Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

You pour your soul into a post, hit publish, and… nothing. Or worse, you miss a few days because you have the flu, or you wanted to see your friends, or you simply needed to sleep, and the numbers crash.

It feels like the system is staging a conspiracy against you.

It’s not.

The algorithm doesn’t like you. But it doesn’t hate you, either.

The algorithm is simply indifferent.

It is a system designed with a single objective: to show the right person the right thing so they don’t close the app. It doesn’t know your name, it doesn’t care about your bank account, and it certainly doesn’t care about your mental health.

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As much as we might hate it, we need the algorithm if we want to grow. It’s the only way to find the people who need to hear us. I haven't found a way around this reality.

Faced with this, creators usually fall into one of two traps:

1. The Neurotic: You become a slave to the algorithm. You post five times a day. You optimize for clicks. You put on a mask so thick you forget who you are. Or, more likely, you burn out before that happens.

2. The Cynic: You decide the game is rigged. You refuse to engage. You post once every three months and tell yourself that quality always wins. But because you are invisible, you don’t grow, and you become bitter that “grifters” are winning.

There has to be a third path. A strategic one.

It begins by looking at the false expectations the creator economy is selling you.

You see the bestseller lists, the Instagram lifestyles, the 7-figure revenue screenshots. Status is a sneaky force. The system uses your core psychological needs (status, affiliation, the fear of missing out) to manipulate you. They trick you into believing that if you aren’t a millionaire yet, you’re a loser. If you don’t buy their course right now, the window of opportunity is closing.

They tell you that you are falling behind.

But ask yourself: Behind who?

That’s the question they don’t want you to ask. Because if you ask it, you realize the game they are playing is “Capture the Flag,” and the flag is your wallet.

Do you actually want to run a 7-figure business? Most people wouldn't, when they realized the true opportunity cost: pulling regular all-nighters, neglecting relationships, and becoming a neurotic slave to a piece of code

Most people (if they are honest) just want to do good work, be fairly paid, and close their laptop at 5:00 PM.

It is okay if you are not posting today.

In fact, I wrote this very piece because of my own fear that the algorithm would punish me. I would love to post every week. Realistically, it’s every two weeks. But recently I got sick. “I missed my schedule.”

But that is short-term thinking.

What if you skip a week because you were sick, or because it was your mother’s birthday, or because you just didn’t have anything true, and people leave? Great. Because they are not your audience. They are traffic.

Traffic needs to be bought every day with new content. A real audience misses you when you are gone. They send you a DM: “Dude is everything okay?”

The “consistency gurus” will tell you that you are leaving money on the table. They might be right. You will grow slower. You won’t hit the viral lottery.

Let them be optimizing for a metric. You are optimizing for your life.

Choose the middle path. You might grow a little slower, but you will arrive at your destination with your sanity intact.

And you might actually love the life you build.

Your business should be a vessel for your life's work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

It’s a closed system where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators. It’s loud, it lacks nuance, and the algorithm loves it.

You came here to escape that.

You read deep philosophy. You take advanced cohorts. You understand the complex market dynamics that the 20-year-old course-sellers couldn’t even begin to grasp.

But watching the circus makes you physically sick. Why?

Because the “clown creators” are shipping garbage and pulling in $50k a month. Meanwhile, you are agonizing over the perfect sentence that no one will ever read.

You are over-educated and under-executed.

You are not lazy. You are disciplined, curious, and probably more self-aware than anyone else in your circle. And that’s exactly the problem.

The Dopamine Hell of the Intelligent Creator

I see this pattern all the time.

You take the courses and fill Moleskine notebooks with game-changing strategies. It feels like you are making progress.

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But your brain is tricking you. It has convinced you that learning about building your business is the same as actually building the business. Welcome to the dopamine hell of the intelligent creator.

Every time you think about your future success your brain releases dopamine. This is where it gets sneaky. Because it uses the same biochemical mechanism as actually achieving your goal. In neuroscience, this is called premature reward activation.

Your brain rewards anticipation almost the same way it rewards achievement. So planning can feel like progress, even when nothing moves.

You’re literally getting high on your own potential.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Over time, you have built an identity around being a learner. It’s doubly rewarding because you have become “the guy who knows everything.“

Your ego loves getting rewarded with that kind of attention. All this creates a powerful emotional cocktail. You crave new knowledge like Dan Janssen a slice of pizza.

It’s tragic, because you have conditioned yourself for the feeling of progress rather than actually making progress.

Psychologists would call this behavior learned helplessness. I consider myself an optimist so let’s call it procrastilearning. And it is an epidemic haunting the creator economy.

The Curse of Being Average

You are ambitious and there is one thing that you hate more than anything: being average.

You call it high standards. You might even take pride in being a perfectionist. Look closer, and you’ll see it is actually just fear underneath it.

Procrastilearning has a hidden function. It keeps you safe in the world of ideas (where you are perfect) and stops you from entering the world of execution (where you might look average).

Your ego is protecting you from the risk of judgment by more studying, planning, and analyzing. If you don’t ship you can’t be average. If you stay in your head, you remain perfect. You never have to confront the gap between who you are and who you think you are.

And so, you fill your graveyard of good intentions with another course.

Why Discipline Fails

The standard advice is simple: just take action. Write one sentence. Start small.

But what happens if you take action and it still doesn’t lead to the desired results?

You ship something, it lands in silence. The engagement the gurus promised doesn’t materialize. And instead of questioning the advice, you doubt yourself.

So you relapse into another round of the procrastilearning loop.

The longer you’ve been in this loop, the more self-doubt it creates. As a result, you either return to more sophisticated gurus, or you grow cynical and disengage entirely.

The gurus are right about one thing: you have to take action. Action creates clarity. Clarity creates more action. Making tasks small to build a positive feedback loop is sound advice.

But this is where most of the advice stops. You get stuck because you think the problem is motivation. It’s not. The lack of motivation is just a symptom. The root of the problem runs deeper.

To really understand what’s going on, we have to go somewhere most productivity advice refuses to go. Beneath the bad habits and the dopamine loops. We are dealing with something existential. The gurus hate that because it is the kind of problem that you don’t solve with a dopamine detox or AI app.

There are four layers to this. And none of them have a weekend solution.

1. The God Complex of the Procrastinator

As long as you are planning, learning, or strategizing, your potential remains infinite.

In your mind, the book you plan to write is perfect. The business you intend to build is revolutionary. The version of yourself you’re becoming is exactly who you always knew you could be.

In the realm of procrastilearning, you are a god. You control the outcome. You imagine the success and it doesn’t just seem possible. It feels real. This warm, womb-like state keeps you protected and safe.

The moment you take action by posting the article or launching the product, you crash into reality.

Action kills your divine fantasy. Every time you create something, you’re not just making one thing. You’re choosing not to make every other version of that thing you could have made. You’re killing infinite possibility and replacing it with one specific piece of work that gets judged or worse gets ignored.

You procrastinate because you cannot bear the grief of seeing your god-like potential reduced to a mediocre reality. You would rather dream about being a great writer than actually be a writer who got 12 views on their last post.

2. You Have a Preparation Fetish

Humans cannot stand the overwhelming chaos of reality. It is too big, too unpredictable, too terrifying. So, we narrow the world down to survive. We find a small area we can control and treat it as if it were the whole world.

This is where procrastilearning becomes a fetish. It sounds dirty because it is.

You reorganize your Notion workspace for the third time this month, color-coding the tags and aligning the columns until everything clicks into place. For a moment, the chaos vanishes. You are doing something. You are in control.

The problem is that you start chasing that feeling. The template becomes more important than the writing. The framework becomes more important than the business.

But you are confusing anxiety management with actual work.

Inside the closed system of the course, everything makes sense. Step A leads to Step B. It creates a seductive illusion of certainty. That gives you hope and protects you from the fact you are ultimately powerless against reality.

It is a superstition.

You are like a primitive man performing a rain dance to control the weather. You study frameworks and highlight books to control your destiny.

The longer it didn’t rain, the more desperate the tribe became with their superstitions.

The more you feel like you nobody is reading your Substack, the deeper you retreat into the safety of procrastilearning. Because at least there, you’re still making progress.

3. Overloading of the Immortality Project

Every human needs to feel that their life matters, that they will leave a mark that outlasts death. Ernest Becker called this the Immortality Project.

Usually, society provides pre-packaged projects: “Be a good Christian,” “Climb the corporate ladder,” or “Raise a family.“

The problem is that you have rejected those defaults.

You stepped off the ladder. You may have stepped away from traditional religion. You decided to build something of your own.

But this creates a dangerous vacuum.

Without the structure of a company or a church, the entire weight of justifying your existence falls on your creative work.

If you hear crickets after the launch, it doesn’t mean the offer was bad. It means you do not matter.

Imagine the stress that creates.

No one can move freely under that kind of crushing spiritual pressure. When every sentence is a referendum on your right to exist, of course you can’t type. You are paralyzed by the stakes.

You are treating a blog post like a tombstone. You want it to be heavy and permanent. But to get moving, you need to treat it like what it actually is: Just another brick.

4. The Familiar Hurt

This is the most subtle psychological trick.

When you procrastinate, you feel guilt. You beat yourself up. You call yourself lazy.

You might ask: Why would you choose to feel guilty?

Because guilt is safer than anxiety.

Guilt implies agency. It tells a comforting story: “I am failing because I am lazy.” This logic keeps you in control. It implies that if only you worked harder, you would succeed. You can “fix“ yourself. It keeps the dream alive.

Anxiety is external. It is the realization that I could do everything right and still fail. It is the realization that the world does not care about me.

You unconsciously choose the slow burn of self-loathing (procrastination) because it protects you from the sheer panic of stepping into a world that you can’t control.

It hurts, but it is a familiar hurt. It is better to feel like a lazy genius than to find out you are just an average writer shouting into the void.

The Art of Surrender

Now that we understand the root cause, you’re ready for my five-step framework and a free PDF. I’m sorry to disappoint you. There is no such thing. You can’t hack your way out of an existential problem. But you can start living differently inside it.

Here is the shift you need to make.

The Bricklayer Mindset

The way out starts with creation. The cure is to take the chaos of your life and turn it into a body of work.

You don’t create because you have figured out who you are. You create in order to find out.

If you’re not creating you’re drowning in your own potential. You keep it inside where it is safe and infinite. The trick is to turn the internal energy into external value.

The whole process is really a form of exorcism. You have to get it out before it poisons you. Give it a concrete shape in the form of an article, podcast or product.

The way to make creation bearable is to change what the work means to you.

Adopt a bricklayer mindset. Currently you are paralyzed because you treat every post like a cathedral (a statement of your soul).

Treat your posts like bricks. A brick is small, imperfect, and replaceable. But if you lay one every day, eventually, you have a wall. You don’t cry over a brick; you just lay it.

Shift from Self-Expansion to Self-Surrender

You are currently driven by a desire to stand out, to be special, to be „sovereign.” This puts a lot of pressure on you. You act like a god trying to control the world. Spoiler alert: You can’t.

This is the Atlas complex. You are paralyzed because you are trying to hold up the sky. It is too heavy for one pair of shoulders.

The solution is counterintuitive. Instead of trying to control (which fails), you surrender. Don’t confuse it with sitting on your couch all day doing nothing. That’s called apathy

Surrendering is the desire to merge, to serve, to belong to something larger.

You must stop creating to prove your worth and start creating to give a gift.

When you create to prove yourself, the audience is a judge (terrifying). When you create to help the audience, the audience is a partner (reassuring).

If you are trying to impress “The Internet” it triggers grandiosity and fear. You cannot impress a billion people. But you can help one person.

When you’re writing to help someone, you think about the person reading this who is stuck in the exact place you were last year. The question becomes simpler: Does this actually help them or not?

It bypasses your ego because it’s not about you. It allows you to merge with something larger by losing yourself in the work for others.

You Are Not the Source

The gurus have failed you as gods. But the void they left behind is dangerous.

When you reject the cultural gods (money, fame, the corporate ladder), the ego tries to fill the vacuum. You try to make yourself a god.

The term „creator economy“ is misleading because it implies you are the creator.

This is a recipe for madness or neurosis.

You cannot be the worshipper and the worshipped. When you draw only from yourself, you eventually run dry. When creators talk about burnout, they are mostly talking about an existential failing. Their ego is collapsing under the weight of trying to be self-created.

You cannot be the source of your own meaning. It’s outside of you and you can’t control it.

Your ideas do not originate inside your head. They come from what you read, the conversations you have, the patterns you notice in the market, the problems you see others struggling with. You are synthesizing inputs from the world and giving them a new form through your particular lens.

You are the filter, not the source. Your value is in your particular way of noticing, your ability to connect ideas that others missed, the clarity you bring to problems people are struggling with but cannot name.

Your role is to pay attention, to synthesize what you notice, to give it clear expression, and then release it.

What happens after that is not yours to control. The views, the growth, the feedback is in not in your hands. Realizing you are a participant in an ongoing conversation grants you the psychological safety to act.

You are not a god trying to invent a new reality. You are a servant trying to transport something valuable to the people who need it.

The Courage to be Human

You want to be self-sufficient, autonomous, and perfect. That is a destructive fantasy. We are all fragmented, dependent, and incomplete. The ability to see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible is the root of creativity, but it requires accepting your own limitations

Embrace being a human.

You are small. You are afraid. You need money. You want validation. And eventually you will die (sorry for being a downer).

The business you’re building will not save you from any of this. It will not make you invulnerable to rejection. It will not eliminate your need for others. It will not prove you are special enough to transcend ordinary human limitation.

And that is okay.

Flaws are human, and they attract other humans. If we were machinelike, our work wouldn’t resonate. It would be soulless. The imperfections are what make each of us and our work interesting

By admitting your weakness, you gain the only power you really have: the power of reality. People will trust you not because you are above them (which they know is a lie), but because you are with them, struggling with the same problems they are.

Your insecurity is not something to transcend before you can create. It is part of what makes the work worth reading.

You create pieces reflective of who you are. You are building a body of work that reflects an actual human trying to figure things out. That is enough.

Truth is more useful than perfection, and a hell of a lot easier to maintain

The First Work of the Artist

None of this will make the existential pressure disappear. But they will make it meaningful enough to create anyway.

Here is the key part:

It cost me decades of pain and suffering to realize. I confused self-transcendence with self-actualization. They seem like similar concepts, but they are fundamentally different. This piece is one of many attempts to make that difference clear.

Self-actualization is you trying to become your ideal self through effort and control. Self-transcendence is surrendering to the fantasy of control and accepting your role as part of something larger.

Willpower has become the superstition of the modern world. The fact is, we are not in control. We never were.

You cannot muscle your way to a masterpiece. You cannot hack your way to a legacy. The more you tighten your grip, the less flows through you.

Unless you allow your life to call on you, you will keep on searching for the promised land in the next course or framework. And you will never find it. Because the promised land is the work itself.

Just lay one brick. Then another.

The first work of the artist is the artist themself.

P.S. You cannot transcend yourself until you know the difference between the identity your ego is trying to protect and who you truly are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.

It might just save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype