Procrastilearning: Why Your Substack Isn't Growing

The Obsession With Self-Improvement

You are addicted to the feeling of progress.

You read another book, take another course, queue up another three hours of podcasts. You’re trying to fill every minute being productive.

You track your sleep, optimize your nutrition. You supplement stack reads like a pharmacy: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, Urolithin-A,Magnesium Threonate.

You take cold showers and breathe like a Navy SEAL before you even check email.

On paper, you are the perfect high-performer.

And yet, you feel like you are running at full speed on a treadmill. You are “doing the work,” but you never actually arrive anywhere.

This isn’t a symptom of laziness. It’s the opposite. It stems from a deep, noble desire to do the right thing, to create something meaningful, to realize your potential.

But it’s a trap. A sophisticated form of self-sabotage that goes by the name procrastilearning.

And it’s an epidemic running through the creator economy.

The Crisis of the Modern Creator

Look around. The creator economy is an echo chamber. Gurus sell courses on how to sell courses. Everyone is building a personal brand by recycling advice on how to build a personal brand.

It’s a hamster wheel of tactical advice, productivity hacks, and growth strategies that promise a shortcut to a life of freedom.

But for most, it leads to burnout and disillusionment.

It’s an exhausting game of chasing metrics, optimizing funnels, and performing a persona you think people want to see. You feel like you’re shouting into the void unless you’re constantly playing the algorithm game.

So you retreat.

You come to the unfortunate conclusion that your the problem in this equation. You aren’t smart enough. You don’t know enough. You’re not disciplined enough.

You fall back into consumption. Just one more book. One more course. Then you’ll be ready.

You Are Not Broken, You Are Obsessed

So why do we do this? Intellectually, we know that consuming more information is just a sophisticated way of avoiding the work.

I have written about Mental Obesity before. But I came to realize that for some people this is just a symptom. Even if they start to create they can’t stop consuming knowledge.

It’s so seductive because not only does it feel productive but it also seems like you’re growing. This is where it gets tricky, because in a way you’re growing. And that’s exactly the problem. You become obsessed with growing.

It seems like a noble path. You’re disciplined, you’re not mindlessly scrolling TikTok. You probably consume valuable, high-quality content. That makes it incredibly difficult to recognize it as destructive.

Every time you consume knowledge you get high on dopamine, reinforcing the loop. You become smarter, better.

This is the trap of self-actualization.

The funniest part is that it’s motivated by an urge to transcend yourself. It could be said that all our behavior is ultimately motivated by the urge to self-transcendet. It’s a human need like breathing, eating, shelter.

This brings us to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Many see it as a pyramid to be climbed, believing you must secure the lower levels before you can concern yourself with the peak. This is only partially true. The need for self-transcendence can be so potent that we will jeopardize our basic needs for it.

Think of the artist who forgets to eat, lost in their work. Think of the entrepreneur who sacrifices their health for the sake of their vision, or the extreme athlete who literally risks their life for a single moment of peak experience.

For creators, we often seek this transcendence through our work, and the obsession can produce a powerful high.

From Obsession to Possession

It’s not just you. The pattern is running through our whole society. Everyone’s reading, meditating, optimizing, upgrading.

This is the central paradox of our time. We pursue self-improvement with religious fervor, believing that the next insight, the next biohack, the next productivity system will finally grant us the feeling of wholeness we crave. Yet, the finish line keeps moving. The frantic activity of “getting better” becomes a substitute for the quiet, often uncomfortable work of simply being.

This dynamic creates the very symptoms that haunts the creator economy. Our culture values ambition, independence, and the endless climb up the ladder of success. We are told this is what leads to freedom.

We are more connected than ever, yet we feel isolated. We are more “productive” than any generation in history, yet we feel a profound lack of meaning in our work. We are more “optimized” than ever, yet depression rates are skyrocketing.

We are living in a culture possessed that is possessed by a shadow. There is nothing new about this. It timeless human story, an archetypal energy that has been documented in myths and legends for millennia.

To understand how we arrived here, we need a deeper lens. We need to look at the psychological operating system running in the background of our collective life.

The Archetypal Lens

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know my passion for archetypes. Archetypes were originally introduced by Carl Jung. He identified them as universal, recurring patterns and stories that shape human experience.

Carol S. Pearson later developed a powerful model of twelve primary archetypes that map the journey of human development. By understanding which archetype is currently active within us, we can gain incredible clarity on our motivations, our behaviors, and our path forward (You can learn more about it here).

Every archetype has a light side and a dark side (the Shadow). And right now, the Shadow side of one specific archetype is running the show for you: The Seeker.

The Yearning for a Better Life

The Seeker’s journey always begins with a yearning. It’s a feeling of disconnection, dissatisfaction, alienation, or emptiness. It’s the quiet but persistent whisper that there must be more to life than this.

The Seeker archetype is also the part of us that refuses to settle for the status quo. The goal is the search for a better, more authentic life. It is the engine of all growth, the heroic impulse that pushes us to leave the safety of the known and venture into the unknown.

The settling of the New World was a Seeker’s quest on a massive scale. People left behind established lives, driven by the search for freedom of opportunity and the chance to realize a Utopian vision. This cultural DNA created the idea that through ambition and striving, one can always ascend. This is why the Seeker energy feels so natural, so right, especially in our culture. It is the story we have been told since birth.

But here is the critical truth that gets lost in the noise: The Seeker’s journey, at its deepest level, is not an outward path but an inward one.

The yearning the perfect business, the flawless article, the ultimate body of knowledge are just projections. Because we feel partial, disconnected, and fragmented inside, we project our desire for wholeness onto an external goal. We believe that if we can just achieve that thing, we will finally feel complete.

But as you’ve likely discovered, no external achievement can ever fully satisfy this deep, primal yearning. The Seeker’s true call is an invitation to expand our own consciousness. It is the call to embark on the journey to find our true selves.

This is the very energy that fuels the Creator’s Journey. But when we don’t understand its true nature, we become trapped by its shadow. We mistake the journey for the destination, and the search for the answer. We become intellectually obese, forever consuming maps instead of courageously walking our own path.

The Creator’s Journey Through the Seeker Archetype

This archetypal journey of the Seeker is a developmental process that unfolds in stages. Understanding which stage you’re in allows you to see why you’re stuck or what the journey requires of you. Let’s explore how the journey unfolds:

The Call: The Search for a Better Life

The Seeker archetype begins with a feeling of emptiness. A subtle sense that something’s missing. You may not even know what it is. You just feel restless, confined, alienated, disconnected. You want more.

This is for example the moment you looked at the conventional 9-to-5 path and knew, “This is not for me.” For many of us, this call was answered by the promise of the creator economy. It’s a promise of autonomy, meaning, and a life built on our own terms.

This is a heroic impulse. You started consuming content not out of boredom, but to find a path. You began your quest.

Stage 1: Exploration and Experimenting

The first stage of any Seeker’s journey is exploration. You travel, you experiment, you study. It allows you to break the gravitational pull of conformity.

This is the first year as a creator. It is a period of consuming voraciously across a wide range of topics, following dozens of thinkers, trying on different ideas and writing styles. It’s exciting, expansive, and necessary. You are mapping the new territory.

But this is also where the seeds of Mental Obesity are sown. Your brain begins to equate the dopamine hit of a new idea with the satisfaction of actual progress. And while this is a vital part of personal growth, a danger emerges if you are not cautious: you start to believe that accumulating knowledge is the same as building wisdom. Without realizing it, you are training yourself to find comfort in consumption, building the foundational habit of learning as your primary, most rewarding mode of operation.

You see this in creators who constantly pivot, start new accounts, launch new projects, reinvent themselves weekly. It feels like freedom, but it’s actually avoidance.

This phase is essential. It builds psychological flexibility, imagination, and exposure to the world. But it lacks direction. It’s movement without a destination.

Stage 2: When Seeking Becomes Self-Sabotage

At some point, your journey shifts. Exploration turns into a craving for identity and autonomy. You want to become someone with depth, skill, and direction.

This is the birth of ambition.

You choose a craft. You set goals. You chase mastery. You enter the marketplace and begin to measure yourself against the world. This stage is powerful. It generates competence, confidence, and tangible achievement. It gives structure to the previously wandering psyche.

But this is also where the Shadow Seeker takes over. The longing for transcendence gets hijacked by the ego. Here is how it keeps you stuck:

The Terror of Conformity

The Seeker’s core fear is conformity and being unoriginal.

You’re studying the “gurus” for strategy. You obsess over growth tactics, monetization models, and brand positioning.

You look at the polished work of established creators and compare it to your own messy ideas. The gap feels impossibly wide.

You become terrified of being just another copycat, another noise-maker in the echo chamber.

• Ambition demands you create something great.

• Fear tells you you aren’t ready yet.

This conflict creates paralysis. You return to the warm, safe land of consumption because learning about how others became original feels safer than attempting to be original yourself.

Perfectionism as a Defense

The Shadow Seeker is the perfectionist within. It’s the voice that whispers you can’t start writing until you’ve found the one perfect idea. It’s the part of you that fears being seen as a novice, that wants to emerge fully-formed as a “thought leader” without ever having to endure the messy, public apprenticeship of being a beginner.

You are waiting to feel “ready.” But the Seeker’s journey is infinite. There is always more to know.

The Inability to Commit

The primary symptom of the Shadow Seeker is a chronic inability to commit.

You cannot commit to a niche, a project, or even a single article, because commitment feels like you’re getting trapped.

Commitment means choosing one “imperfect” path and closing the door to all the other “perfect” possibilities that you believe are waiting in the next book, the next podcast, the next course.

The Shadow Seeker is addicted to the potential of the journey, not the messy reality of the destination. They try to outrun that fear through growth.

That’s why they can’t stop. Ambition becomes a protective shell.

Externally they look disciplined, impressive, high-performing. Internally they feel like a house of cards.

Stage 3: From Seeker to Sovereign

This is the stage the Shadow Seeker prevents you from reaching. It is the promised land you can see but feel you can never enter.

The identity the Seeker built starts to crack. It may not be a dramatic event. It might be a quiet breakdown, a slow disillusionment, a moment of profound clarity after finishing yet another book that promised everything and delivered nothing.

Suddenly, productivity no longer feels meaningful. Achievement no longer feels satisfying. Optimization no longer feels liberating.

This is the beginning of spiritual seeking—not necessarily religious, but profoundly psychological. Here, the Seeker discovers that the original longing was never for success, freedom, travel, knowledge, or growth.

It was a longing for authenticity. For wholeness. For connection with yourself or a higher power.

This is the pivot point. The search turns from outward ambition to inward alignment. The goal shifts from “success” to “transformation.”

You realize that the work is not a means to an end (money, status, freedom). The work becomes s a vehicle for self-understanding. It is a way to bring your calling to life.

Creation now flows from a sense of purpose, not a sense of lack.

It’s the psychological equivalent of initiation. The core of initiation is death and rebirth. The ambitious, ego-driven persona you built has to die so it can give birth to the deeper, Sovereign Self that was waiting behind all that striving.

This is where the Seeker becomes whole.

And ironically, once you reach this point, your work becomes better, your creativity becomes clearer, and your life becomes easier. Not because you’re trying harder, but because you finally stopped trying to escape yourself.

Our whole journey basically comes down to authenticity. To experience our own life to the fullest. It’s a sacred experience. You might feel it when you’re creative or when your work has an impact greater than yourself.

You don’t have to believe in a higher power, but you do have to decide what you value, what you hold sacred, and what makes you feel alive.

It doesn’t matter how successful you are, the Seeker will not be satisfied until you find a higher meaning in your life. Ultimately it’s a search for our true selves, which in turn allows us to share our gift with the world.

The Rise of the Sovereign Creator

The antidote to the Shadow Seeker is creation.

Creation is the act of metabolizing information. Information that sits in your head becomes toxic (intellectual obesity). Information that flows through you and is transformed into work becomes wisdom.

The Seeker is not eliminated. It is transformed to serve another archetype: The Creator. This then gives birth of the Sovereign Creator.

The Sovereign Creator does not stop learning. They learn through creating.
Consumption no longer leads. It serves.

You stop trying to become a creator. You literally are a creator.

The inner work we have explored is the “hard part” of the creator journey. It is the uncomfortable, ambiguous, and deeply personal work that the gurus and their growth hacks will never mention. It is the path less traveled.

But it is also the only path that leads to the self-sovereignty we all have been craving all along.

Your burnout, your disillusionment, your feeling of being a fraud are not signs to quit. They are signals that your story has become too small

It is time to write the next chapter.

Finding Your Compass

Archetypes help you to guide your journey. They uncover your greatest strengths and your most stubborn patterns of self-sabotage. We have gone deep into the Seeker archetype today, but the Seeker is just one part of your psychological makeup. To become a Sovereign Creator, you need to understand the full picture of who you are.

For those of you who are ready to do that work, I’ve created a powerful, free resource to serve as your starting point.

I call it The Creator Compass.

It’s based comprehensive diagnostic tool that gives you profound clarity on your Creator’s Journey.

The assessment consists of 72-question and will take you about 10-15 minutes to complete thoughtfully. It requires a moment of quiet reflection, a small investment of your time. The return on that investment is a level of self-knowledge that most people never access.

After you complete it, you will receive a personalized, 13 page PDF report detailing your full archetypal constellation and your current stage in the creator’s journey.

It is the most powerful tool I know for building a creator business that is an expression of who you truly are.