I realize the irony of me putting the following into a blog post that I also plan to share on social media. In fact, I hesitated before writing this piece, which I originally shared on my newsletter. Wouldn’t I just be adding to the problem? But the response was overwhelming; clearly, I am not alone in these reflections. Which makes me think a new way of doing things is ready to emerge.
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I’ll begin with a short anecdote. Last week, a friend reached out to ask if I’d be interested in doing an IG Live with her to celebrate the launch of her new single. The record covers similar ground to Women Without Kids, and with Mothers’ Day around the corner, wouldn’t it be cool to collab?
It would, I agreed, but following a year of heavy, heavy promo for the book, I just didn’t have the capacity to be “on” in that way right now
And she got it. More than that, she managed to sum up exactly what I realized I’ve been feeling lately: “Being expected to go deep on life / writing books plus being present on socials must be so much.
Yes. It is SO MUCH. To the point that I am questioning if my desires for my creative life are in fact incompatible with what I have started to think of as a culture of “peak content.”
This could just be a bout of burnout. After all, I wrote a similar rant a year or so after Sober Curious came out. But this time, it feels existential.
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It all began a few months back, when I put myself on something of a “content diet.” When I was working as a journalist, I had always made it my business to know what was happening in the culture. This meant religiously scanning my go-to list of publications; staying up to date with the edgiest podcasts; subscribing to the requisite newsletters; and sensing into the social trends that swirled between the lines. A practice that that followed me as I transitioned to writing books in 2017.
But over the past year or so, this practice had begun to feel nauseating. As if I were becoming content intolerant.
And not just because of the anguishing nature of so much what is in the air. The all-pervasive sense of fear, loathing, and hopelessness in the culture at large. Almost as if the pundits need the worst of the worst to happen, to give them something to be outraged about (because in the content culture, outrage is what sells).
But because on some days, I literally felt like I was gagging on the sheer volume of headlines, hot-takes, and opinions that my consciousness was attempting to digest. Like I was stuffed so full of “content,” there was no more space inside me for my own, original thoughts to form.
My own, original thoughts being the raw material of my author career.
If I have learned anything from my work with Sober Curious, it’s that if you want a different result, you have to take a different action. And so, one Saturday, I decided not to spend the morning gorging myself stupid on the latest from the Guardian, the Atlantic, The Cut, and the New York and UK editions of the Times. Over the coming weeks, I quietly unsubscribed from the Substacks I had somehow wound up following. On walks, I would fire up a favorite playlist over the latest podcast from my library. I haven’t looked back.
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Not least, because I am currently being called to a new book project; one that is requiring a deeper level of focus, and a deeper immersion into my imagination, than I have experienced before. The other side of the coin being that in order to have a career as an author, I am also supposed to be producing a constant stream of content, in order to build an audience, grow my name recognition, and “test out my ideas.” But the math is simple: the more content I am producing, the less time, energy, focus, imagination, and literal words I have left in me for the work itself.
Readers of Women Without Kids will know how easy it is for me to feel “less than” for never having been able to countenance juggling the sort of career I want with having kids. And I can also quite reliably shame myself into a hole for not having it in me to be highly visible in the content space while also writing books (let alone showing up fully for the client work that actually pays my bills). Plenty of other (undoubtedly smarter, more committed) authors seem to manage it just fine.
A younger, hungrier me, would have got on the Substack train right as it was pulling out of the station (Substack being the platform that authors are supposed to be populating with our content). But when I contemplate opening up my laptop and creating an account, my heart sinks and my body fills with lead. Because I just (in the words of famous Substacker and scribe on millennial burnout, Anne Helen Petersen): “can’t even.”
And not only because I just don’t have the time, energy, focus, imagination, and literal words to spare. But also because I am increasingly questioning whether a culture of “peak content” is in fact in direct conflict with the business of selling books.
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Selling books being the ultimate goal of my author career.
At this point I have five books to my name (if we count the deck and the workbook) which, despite me producing a ton of content and doing my best to remain very visible, have sold a fairly mediocre number of copies. And sure, everybody knows you can’t make a living writing books. But it would be nice if a higher percentage of my income came from the thing that feels like my vocation. The thing I do which people regularly inform me is changing minds, changing lives, changing the world.
I find myself grappling with a complex mix of emotions about not being able to “make it” as a full time author: disappointment; frustration; self-flagellation; confusion; and a thick lick of shame. What kind of an entitled, privileged little prick am I? I should be grateful to be published at all.
And I am. On both a personal and a professional level, my author career to-date has also been deeply fulfilling. It represents the realization of a lifelong dream and has opened doors I didn’t even know that I was ready to walk through.
But the thing is … with so much free content in the world, who even has the time to read books?!
For as long as I’ve been publishing books, the common wisdom when it comes to promotion has been: you can’t give too much of the work away for free. The thinking being: the more you share about your book, the more people will want to read it.
I can’t help but ask myself if all the content I’ve created to promote my books might actually have had the inverse effect. If my potential readers can check off the key takeaways by listening to me on a podcast, and get the juiciest tidbits from an IG Live, then why fork out upwards of $10 to buy a copy?
And sure, there is money to be made from subscriber-only newsletters and podcasts, and from exploiting the algorithms of what another friend describes as the “IG mall.” But “success” in this realm (if success = earning enough from your efforts for it to be worth it) requires creating a constant churn of … content.
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The upshot of all this being that I find myself increasingly compelled to resist a culture where the precious substance of our human creativity is reduced to content—literal FILLER—for Meta et al to sandwich between the ads that form the basis of their billion-dollar business models.
Content that usually has its own sneaky sales hook embedded in it somewhere. One reason I love reading books? Hours of “content” with no damn ads!
I’ve been buying and reading a lot more books since I put myself on my content diet. And I’ve discovered them the “old fashioned” way: by recommendation, by researching specific topics and themes that interest me, and by browsing the shelves of my local independent bookstores.
The other thing the content culture does, is train us to constantly be scanning for the shiniest, tastiest, and fastest to digest bites of digital intel.
In contrast, reading a book-length manuscript (let alone writing one) makes us work for our wisdom. It requires us to put down our phones, override our cravings for cheap, easy, cultural calories, and make space in our minds for questions, reflections, buried emotions, and new perspectives to surface.
Questions, reflections, buried emotions, and new perspectives, that I believe are what is really needed in the world right now.
I began my content diet as part of what felt like a necessary pause; a moment to catch my breath and reassess as I surveyed the path ahead. What I’m beginning to believe is that the content culture itself is directly at odds with my desires for my career, my wellbeing, and my life.
The longer I spend being “very offline,” the more I find myself grappling with the belief/fear that my ongoing relevance as an author requires my ongoing visibility.
But I am choosing to breathe into this manufactured sense of scarcity and go with my gut on this for now; which means that for as long as it feels like the healthiest option for me, I will be choosing my creativity over my visibility. I’ll just have to trust that my work will find its audience the next time I have something to say.
