Stop Creating Content

Why the numbers will never tell you if you are a writer.

I despise the term “content creator.”

Ironically, I spent a surprising amount of my life creating A+ Content. Almost eight years, to be precise. I’m not saying this to brag. A+ Content is simply what Amazon calls the section where a brand tells its story. At least that’s the intention.

My studio produces the branding, product photography and everything you need for an e-commerce brand. So for a long time I made content for a living in the most literal sense of the word.

It was also a constant battle. My clients wanted images that increased their conversion rate. As a former seller myself I totally understood the economic side of their business. But I also wanted to make something beautiful. So almost every project turned into a fight between conversion rate and my taste. I didn’t always win.

When I started writing on Substack, it felt like I had finally left that world behind me. Nobody could ask me to make the logo bigger anymore. In January I published an essay called “Stop Creating Content,” which argued that content is filler and art is an offering. Hundreds of you liked it. Maybe you were one of them. We all patted ourselves on the back for being so deeply artistic.

Since then I have realized something uncomfortable. My clients were not entirely wrong. A product with beautiful images that nobody buys has failed. The same is true for writing. We love to tell ourselves that everything that has to do with money and attention is not pure art. It feels noble.

That’s what my essay from January got wrong. It told you to forget the numbers, make art and keep clapping for yourself until the world catches up.

I meant well, but I really just gave you a more sophisticated way of hiding from judgment.

Where Content Comes From

Let’s look at the word content itself. Content is what fills a container. The container is what comes first. When the internet exploded, every website, feed and platform suddenly had empty space to fill. Content became the name for whatever we poured into it.¹ Nobody asked what it was for, as long as it fit.

That alone would not be a big deal, because writers have always worked inside formats somebody else built. The bigger shift happened somewhere else.

For most of history, the question of whether your work mattered was answered by someone else. A painter worked for the church or a patron. A writer had a publisher, an editor, or a circle of peers who decided whether the work was any good. You could disagree with their verdict, but at least there was one. Somebody else carried the burden of saying “yes, this is worth making.”²

Today most of those authorities are gone. That is a good thing for sure. Anyone can publish, nobody needs permission. But the burden did not disappear. Now every one of us has to carry it alone. And honestly, most of us are not built for that.

So we looked for a new authority and found one right there in the app.

The dashboard became our new patron. Likes, restacks and subscriber counts give us what the church once gave the painter, which is a verdict on whether the work is worth something.

The problem is that the dashboard is a terrible patron. It does not give a shit about your work. It cannot tell a truth from a trick and it changes its mind every week.

You know how this plays out. You spend three days on an essay. You rewrite the opening five times. You hit publish.

Four likes.

Two of them are from people who know you in real life. One is a bot.

The Debt We Are Trying to Pay

To understand why this hurts so much, we need to go one level deeper.

We are the only animals who know we are going to die. Most of the time we treat that as a fact we understood long ago, but emotionally it never stops haunting us. Because our time is limited, we want it to count. We want to make something that matters and leave our legacy (whatever that is).

Most people handle this by following the crowd. Go to work, do what is expected of you and borrow you sense of meaning from what everybody around you believes. It is a safe choice.

A creator does something riskier. The moment you say “I am going to make my own thing,” you step out of the crowd. You become visible. Now you are alone with the question the crowd used to answer for you: who said you get to do this?

That question produces a very specific feeling. Most writers would describe it as being behind, as wasting their potential, or as the nagging sense that they should have more to show for themselves by now.

I think the more precise word is guilt. It feels as if we owe the world an explanation for daring to be different. As if the time we were given is a loan we are not using properly.

Content is what we make when we are trying to pay off that debt. We give our writing the job of proving that we have the right to be here. We then check the dashboard to see whether the payment went through.

This is also where my essay went wrong a second time. I wrote that there is no “late” in art, only “ripe.” Readers loved that line, and so did I. But there is a late. Your time is limited and you know it, which is exactly why the debt feels so heavy.

Two Ways Creators Worship the Dashboard

I see two ways creators try to settle that debt. They show up over and over again in my comments and DMs. I know both of them all too well.

1. The Workaholic

The Workaholic pays in volume. When an essay gets four likes, their conclusion is that they did not do enough. So they do more: a Note every morning, a post every Tuesday, a thread about their morning routine because it seemed to work for someone else, and a content calendar that is color-coded three months ahead.

From the outside this looks like ambition, and our culture rewards it. Consistency is the one virtue every growth guru agrees on.

But listen to how they talk about their week. It is almost always about output: how many posts, how many Notes, how much growth. The writing has turned into evidence. At the end of the week they want to point at the pile and say, “Look how hard I worked.” For a moment the debt feels smaller. Then Monday comes, and since the debt never actually shrinks, they can never stop.

I spent years on that path, with the seminars, the courses, the books and the biohacking, all built on the belief that enough discipline and the right system would get me anywhere. It got me a lot of things, but I never once felt allowed to rest.

The tricky part is that the Workaholic often writes well. Some of their essays are actually great. But each essay was written to prove something. Readers can feel that, even when they cannot say why.

2. The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist pays with beauty, which in practice means they hardly pay at all. When an essay gets four likes, they conclude it was not good enough. So they go back to their drafts, study hooks, rewrite their About page for the third time this month and buy a course on writing. The next piece will go out when it is ready.

It is never ready...

An essay that stays in the drafts folder can never be judged. The Perfectionist believes they are protecting their standards, but mostly they are protecting themselves from judgment.

Both of them are asking their writing to answer a question no writing can answer: am I allowed to be here?

The Lie of Not Caring

The obvious solution would be to stop caring what anyone thinks. That’s what I told you in my essay from January. It sounded brave. Today I think it is one of the most common lies in the creator economy.

Nobody can justify their existence completely on their own. We are social animals. The debt we take on by stepping out of the crowd can only really be paid back to other people. A writer who claims they do not care whether anyone reads them is usually lying… or has stopped publishing. So wanting readers is perfectly fine.

What makes the difference is the role you give them. The Workaholic and the Perfectionist need readers as judges, so every number turns into a verdict on their worth. The Artist needs readers for a different reason.

To make your own thing, you have to separate from the crowd. The work is how you find your way back. When you write, you put something into it that is bigger than yourself. A reader who really takes it in finds that same thing there.

For a moment neither of you is standing alone anymore, because both of you are part of something larger than yourselves.³

The separation that caused the guilt is lifted. That moment doesn’t last though. The next morning you are on your own again and the debt is back, which is exactly why the Artist sits down and writes the next thing. But it can happen with four readers just as fully as with four thousand.

Artists Appoint Themselves

Being judged sucks. That feeling won’t go away. The Artist still checks the stats. They still feel the pull to write something easier and louder, or to go back and fix the old piece instead of starting a new one. The pressure stays the same. What changes is where it goes. The Workaholic turns it into more output, and the Perfectionist turns it against themselves. The Artist puts it into the work, because that is the only place where it can become something.

From the outside, the Artist does not look any different. The difference is internal.

At some point the Artist made a decision.
They decided they are a writer. Nobody handed them that title.

Because nobody gave it to them, four likes cannot take it away either. But it’s not a one time thing. It is a decision that has to be renewed everyday. That means you have to sit down and write the next thing.

So here is what I am asking you to do. Stop waiting for the numbers to tell you if you’re a writer. You’ll be waiting forever.

Write the next article and hit publish.

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P.S. If you want words for the way you naturally create, I built The Archetype Navigator. It shows you your creative nature, so the work you build looks like you and not like the last thing that went viral. It is free, it takes five minutes, and it will not tell you what to write.

P.P.S. Yes, I published this on a Tuesday. And yes, I’ve already checked the stats. Twice.

1. The word “content” in this sense only became common with the rise of the web. Before that, people talked about articles, stories, records and films. Those words describe what a thing is. “Content” describes what it fills.

2. I’m not romanticizing the old system. Plenty of artists spent their lives flattering dukes and bishops. But at least the verdict lived outside the artist.

3. Otto Rank describes this moment in Art and Artist. In the work, artist and reader experience “the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole.” They give up their mortal ego for a moment, only “to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.”