Subscribe

I created this site as a personal record to myself. I was in the midst of a year of creation and my original intent was to create structure for the year as well as have a tool through which to remember and reflect. It was made for me.

A question I quickly received about it is why I wasn’t writing on Substack. Making a site made no sense - it was a lot of unnecessary work, and it would give me none of the distribution capabilities that Substack had out of the box. My reasoning was two-fold.

First, intent. To begin with a concept of distribution and to enable the reward pathways of subscribers and engagement would undermine my intent to create for myself. I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t feel reinforced, or alternatively punished, by signals of external validation or their lack thereof. Even if I consciously told myself I wasn’t doing it for others, knowing myself, the mere possibility of feedback would be deleterious. Better to not turn on that pathway to begin with.

Second, control. This site is mine. It’s for me. It’s my corner of the internet. It’s a simple street stall that I tend with care, as I am able. The fact that my stall is in a back alley which sees little to no foot traffic is fine by me. Here I’m able to rearrange and present it as I want it. It’s what I want.

Of course, although acknowledgement is not my primary intent, I will not pretend that I do not desire acknowledgement. I think that feeling seen is the base motivator underlying most human intention. I started testing the waters by sharing select posts on social channels. Twitter and LinkedIn felt weird, and although sharing writing on Instagram felt awkward I enjoyed doing it and I enjoyed getting comments and feedback in return.

I happily noted the encouragement from friends to make a way for visitors to stay up to date with my writing, although I delayed and resisted pulling the trigger until I felt ready.

That time is now.

Why now

Honestly, I’m not exactly sure. It’s been on my mind for a while, and it required a block of time to upgrade this website and set up infrastructure to collect subscribers and share updates.

As I look past my year of creation, I’ve decided that it’s important to me to keep this site alive and growing. The terms of my relationship with it will change, and I look forward to that evolution.

I’ve also started writing more and more fully formed essays. These are my Thoughts. Where my writing began with casual roughly-hewn Dailies, crafting complete, fleshed out ideas taken to a conclusion began coming more naturally. Thoughts are refined and edited and intended to be revisited by myself and by others. I intended these Thoughts to be consumed by others.

This first version of subscriber infrastructure bundles all the updates on my site - the rough Dailies, the refined Thoughts, and also the cataloged projects that will eventually make up Stuff. Depending how things play out, I may create the ability to subscribe to only certain categories of content. Learning to tolerate imperfection in my craft has been part of my development on this journey.

Purpose

As I move to enable the public to subscribe to updates from my little back alley stall, a strange thought has crept its way into my brain.

I really enjoy writing. There are certainly downsides: it’s not easy, it takes a lot of time, and keeping my practice regular requires investing less in other domains. Writing seriously - as measured in volume - requires writing regularly. Writing begets more writing and the return on time spent writing scales exponentially the more often I write, which means writing seriously means crowding out the space for other activities much more than writing casually. But writing is a practice I find fulfilling and it’s fully in my control.

I also like the inputs to writing. Specifically reading, thinking, engaging in discourse. Having meaty conversations with others and with myself. Processing that raw jumble of material into a coherent idea, thereby discovering the limits of its substance, and being forced to push past that limit to the next frontier of my reasoning. Overcoming rumination. Completing a thought.

What if I became a writer, I thought. Or a blogger, a creator, I guess we’d call it in today’s social media and content landscape.

The idea held allure. I could spend months, maybe even years, focusing on writing merely as a craft for myself. Refining that craft and writing for myself and sharing it with the world. If I could give myself the room to do so for an extended time I might build myself an audience. Some people might like it, and I might find building myself a niche. If I could orient the goal at expressing and sharing myself - as opposed to climbing the rankings of “top global [whatever-X-type] content creator” - I might find satisfaction and fulfillment in that. It could be a life that brought me happiness.

I was talking about this with a friend of mine, someone with a social presence of his own, and he poured some cold truth on that fantasy. I appreciated that.

My main medium of TV nowadays is YouTube. Watching videos essays and geopolitics content and whatever little niches amuse me at the time is my alone time wind down in the evening. As a consumer of creator-led content I feel I’ve developed something of an appreciation for the independent creator economy. And the reality which I know to be true but wasn’t connecting to the fantastic idea that I’d serendipitously build my own audience is this: it’s not really serendipitous.

Creating Content as a craft - which I distinguish from my Year of Creation, I acknowledge that here I’ve walked into a confusing distinction - but creating Content in the sense of the Creator Economy, like YouTube videos or blog posts or podcasts, isn’t about putting oneself out there and see what happens. Maybe it begins that way, but seriously creating content means stumbling into a niche and finding it resonate with a small audience and developing and refining and format and gradually exploiting that niche and growing the audience and somehow making it all sustainable.

I’ve seen established creators try to deviate from their niche. Video game streamers trying to shift to a new game. Geopolitics commentators moving to military history. Political podcasters trying to shift their view, express nuance.

It sort of doesn’t work. It’s really, really hard, at least.

Setting the intention of becoming a content creator in a serious way, with two capital C’s, would certainly be possible, and it might even be fulfilling, but I should not kid myself. The things that make maintaining and nurturing this website feel fulfilling to me today cannot be projected forward should the intent be result.

Once again I find myself torn by an inescapable tension between the outcomes which I desire from intentionality and direction and the daily practice and the inputs to creation and craft and the daily practice of routine which I have learned are how I am able to sustain my work. It feels like a juvenile thing to be wrestling with at this mid stage of my adult life. But here I am.

In the meanwhile, I have decided that I will not pursue the path of a creator. I will continue to write and I will continue to build this site and I will continue to express and to share. I hope I will refine my craft.

But writing will not be my mainline thing. I will not write for the sake of writing and telling myself that practicing the craft of writing will actualize a fantasy I’ll stumble into a scale-worthy audience and a sustainable financial and creative life will materialize just because, shucks, the world is so gosh dang excited to crowd into this back alley and admire the random assortment of knickknacks I’ve collected and arranged.

I’ll continue as I have. I will continue to explore and interrogate and seek my mainline elsewhere out in the wild.

In the meanwhile, I’ll write and create and explore and share on this site, according to as I can and I wish and I am able to. I’m grateful that some folks have already subscribed and that they and others will read and reflect. I’ll be really happy whenever the occasional passerby smiles and nods and remarks before moving on. That is enough.

And to you: thank you for subscribing and reading. I know that it’s not a lot, but it really means a lot to me.