WRITING | PHILOSOPHY | GROWTH
Why I’m Losing the Desire to Publish Every Day
I want my posts to feel like glimpses into my soul, not digital commodities.
Before I begin, allow me to say that aspiring writers should write every day, at which point they can ditch the descriptor “aspiring” and instead refer to themselves confidently as a writer — without or without the vanity metrics to “prove it.”
Like any other skill, we improve best with committed daily practice, even if we can only squeeze in thirty minutes or so here and there.
Writing is a craft that requires us to laser-hone our thinking as well as develop our own personal, artistic self-expression. It’s impossible to achieve these feats if we only take to the keyboard every once in a blue moon.
But choosing to write every day doesn’t mean we have to publish every day.
I’m trying to contemplate this perspective more as time goes on, if only to rescue myself from the inevitable trappings of hustle culture, which is always seeking to turn art into a commodity fit for market exchange and nothing else.
Choosing not to publish every day goes against the grain of a lot of popular advice pertaining to “success” here on Medium, which is that the more we publish, the better our chances are of succeeding.
To be sure, I’m not contesting this wisdom. In fact, I don’t even know if I’ll be able to not publish every day. I’ve worked hard to internalize the habit that I ought to, and it’s hard to question things we have made into habits.
I’m caught in a tug-of-war where it feels like if don’t publish something every day, I’m doing something wrong, and yet at the same time, if I do conjure up a post out of thin air every day, I’m also doing something wrong.
This is because there is undoubtedly truth to the idea that in order to succeed, we have to keep showing up to do the work.
Each time we hit publish, we’re pulling the lever on a slot machine and hoping the magic will happen — that we’ll get more reads, gain new followers, and perhaps earn more than we’ve ever earned from a story before.
If we only pull the lever once a week, it’s going to take longer to be discovered than if we had pulled the lever every day.
That’s just a fact.
Success, then, is simply a matter of time and commitment, a deliberate choice we make to continue showing up to pull the lever until something works — or doesn’t, at which point we hopefully learn from our failures and move on.
At the same time, however, I find myself continuously in confrontation with a society running rampant with noise — with endless digital content all voicing different opinions, like the schizophrenic mind of a God lost in its own stormy seas.
It feels like I’m caught in a hyper-competitive zone where each person is trying to have their noise drown out all the rest, and this, in turn, makes me feel like I have to engage in a similar kind of arms race to find the success I seek, or get left behind to accept my lot among the irrelevant.
In this environment, I crave silence.
I long for writing — and other forms of content — that seem to come from a place of deep thinking and nuanced self-reflection. I long for the piece that, underneath, reads as if the author took a time-out from the world and its noise long enough to truly pull something out of the silence that they willingly embraced.
And I’ve noticed that the more I try and hustle myself into publishing every day, the more my blog posts begin to feel like commodities as opposed to glimpses into my soul.
On the flip side, when I allow myself a break from publishing every day, I end up feeling much better about the next thing I write.
This is because I want my words to be a real glimpse — however problematic — into the nature of whoever and whatever I am, not a hastily strewn together collection of words that I hope will evoke the proper reactions (engagement) out of people so as to increase my odds of going viral.
When I slip into the hustle culture trap of writing just to write so that I can have a better chance of eventually making money from my writing, the more my words begin to feel empty and hollow, even to myself.
This is when I begin to feel like I’m losing my grip on this writing endeavor a little bit.
For me, writing is as much about learning how I think as it is about sharing my worldview with others.
Because, strangely enough, it’s like I don’t really know what I think until I set out to actually find out via the texts I produce.
In this way, writing really has come to be — at least for me — the most rigorous exercise in discovering — and challenging — my own worldview.
But this feeling gets lost when the thought that I must publish something creeps in, and the post that follows is born from that thought, rather than any spontaneous, inspired muse that stirs within me.
And so, I find myself questioning whether or not I really need to publish a post every day, and if that’s what I ever wanted to do in the first place.
As a writer still laboring in obscurity, I still have access to that outsider’s view of the whole game — and that view from the outside is extremely valuable.
For as much as Medium’s most successful authors have inspired me to take my writing journey seriously, at the same time, I can’t help but notice how much they seem to say the same things over and over again in each new post — but in slightly different ways.
I often wonder if that’s what I want to become, or if it’s even avoidable.
Publishing every day does eventually lead to quality writing, but at the same time, it leads to a lot of redundancy in one’s message. It also leads to the commodification of the writer — or the artist — rather than the pursuit of authenticity and truth in one’s thinking.
Once in the trap, it’s hard to feel like you can get out. After all, you have a hungry audience that wants something from you every day, and you have to feed it, right?
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a crime.
Good advice bears repeating, and there’s an argument to be made that self-improvement is really just choosing which beliefs we mentally brainwash ourselves with.
So it comes as no surprise that even those who have found success have to keep on repeating how they managed to do it, even if it starts to seem like each post is deja vu past a certain point.
And should I find myself with such a hungry audience, I would want to feed it as often as I could, because it would be a privilege to do so.
But I’m constantly pushing myself to avoid the trap of redundancy, to avoid the cycle of words-for-the-sake-of-words, and to avoid seeing my creations purely as commodities whose worth is determined by the vanity metrics we desperately chase, hoping they will finally validate us.
I know on a fundamental that I have to validate myself, and the only way I can do that is if I feel proud of what I write.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to feel proud about a post that I crank out purely because I’m terrified of not publishing that day.
So the takeaway, I suppose, is this.
There are more important reasons to write than to publish something every day, and if it comes to a point where it feels like the trap of social media is causing you to violate your own authenticity, then it’s okay to take a step back, remember why you’re doing this in the first place, and take it from there. A few days off, here and there, is nothing in the grand scheme of the years — indeed even lifetime — that we will be laboring away, hoping that, eventually, our labors bear some fruit.