Stop Creating Content

Make art, not Content

There is a specific kind of loneliness that every creator knows, but few talk about.

It is the silence that follows the publication of your best work.

You spent three days writing it. You bled into the keyboard. You navigated the doubt, the fear, and the resistance. You hit publish with a trembling finger, certain that this was the piece that would change everything.

And then… four likes. Two are from people you know in real life. One is a bot.

In that silence, it is easy for a dangerous narrative to take root. We tell ourselves the work failed. We tell ourselves we missed the timing. We tell ourselves we need to be louder, faster, and more aggressive to be heard. We start looking at the "growth gurus" who seem to print money by posting Notes about their morning routines.

But this reaction is a misunderstanding of what the work is for.

We are training ourselves to believe that the value of what we make is determined by the immediacy of the reaction to it. But art operates on a different timeline than the algorithm.

The Factory and the Garden

The dominant strategy of the creator economy comes from the industrial age. It values high volume, standardized parts, and predictable outputs. It treats creativity as a resource to be extracted. If you feed the machine, the machine feeds you.

But your Substack is not a content machine. It is a garden.

A garden requires periods of fallow. It requires rain, which looks like a gloomy day but is actually nourishment. It requires the courage to trust that something is happening underground even when you cannot see a sprout.

If you try to force a garden to behave like a factory, you exhaust the soil. You might get a quick harvest, but nothing will grow there next season.

The creator who apologize for posting “late,” has mistaken their natural rhythm for a production schedule. Late for who? The algorithm?

There is no “late” in art. There is only “ripe.”

Devotion Over Consistency

The gurus tell you that “consistency is king.” But consistency is a metric for machines.

The alternative is devotion.

Consistency is posting because it’s Tuesday. Devotion is posting because you have captured something that must be shared.

If you miss a day, you haven’t failed. You just took a breath. You come back to the work because you love it, not because you fear losing your streak.

You think your competition is the loud guys with the rented Lamborghinis. You think your competition is the other writers in your niche.

It’s not.

Your real competition is the version of you that is still trying to be liked. The version of you that wants to be safe. The version of you that is tempted to turn your life’s struggle into a sales funnel before you have even healed.

Win that internal battle, and the external metrics stop feeling like a judgment.

Don’t Create Content

There is a distinction to be made between being a “content creator” and being an artist.

Content is filler. It is the styrofoam packing peanuts that go inside the box. It is designed to fit a container that someone else built. Content is a commodity. Everyone can be a content creator and soon bots will replace them.

Art is different. Art is an offering.

Art tries to capture a truth. It is made because it had to be made.

When you make content, you are competing with everyone else who is making content. You are racing to be slightly more interesting than the next distraction.

When you make art, you have no competition. You are simply sharing the way you see the world. And since no one sees the world exactly the way you do, what you make becomes irreplaceable.

Be a Neighbor, not an Influencer

We are witnessing a market that rewards dopamine over depth. A “how to get rich” Note will always get more clicks than a nuanced essay on the human condition.

I used to take that personally. Now I see it for what it is: a filter.

If you feed your audience dopamine hits, they will become addicts. You will be forgotten as soon as the high wears off.

You don’t want junkies. You want to build a connection. That means asking them to sit down, slow down, and think. And what you get as a result is something rare: a tribe.

You might build a smaller audience. You might not hit 10,000 subscribers in 30 days. But you will build a village of people who actually care.

You don’t need a million views. You need 100 people who get so much value from your work that they feel a moral obligation to tell everyone they know. That is a movement. The rest is just a mailing list.

The Integrity of the Work

So, to the creator who spent three days on a post that got four likes:

I see you.

And more importantly, your future self sees you.

In the silence, you are building the muscle of integrity. You are proving to yourself that you care about the craft more than the crowd. You are proving that your taste is yours, not something you borrowed from a trending tab.

This is the hardest part of the work. Not the writing. Not the tech. It is the emotional labor of believing in your own value when the world hasn’t clapped yet.

The work is to keep clapping for yourself until they catch up.

If you are devoted, if you are honest, and if you treat your readers like humans, the applause will come.

The beautiful irony is that by the time it does, you won’t need it.

You will have something better. You will have a body of work that is an expression of who you are.

Fulfillment comes from the act of creation itself.

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P.S. If you are trying to figure out what kind of work you should be devoting to, I built The Archetype Navigator to help. It’s free, it’s fast, and it helps you align your strategy with your natural pattern, so you don’t have to pretend to be someone else to succeed.