I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this post. A few weeks ago I was inspired by this quote from Why the Lucky Stiff:
> When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.
I won't bore you with the blog post I wrote in response, but the gist is that writing (and equally importantly, publishing) is a way of getting outside of your own head to think of a audience. We do it all the time as children but somehow as adults we seem to think we need permission to create something for the public. This has never been true and is doubly not true on the internet.
So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it. That is not the point. That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
> So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it.
It's demotivating to have created a huge body of work that you know nobody will ever read/hear/experience. It saps the desire to create any more. I've been creating things for decades and approximately 0 people (other than myself) have benefitted from any of it. Everything is always just under the line of "good enough" to publish/publicize, and publishing/publicizing are completely different skills than creating in the first place, and just feel awful to do.
> That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
I'm tired of sharpening my own brain. Oh yay, after several decades of challenging myself and creating lots of cool things just for myself, I have a super-sharp brain (let's be charitable for sake of argument). So what? I'm doing literally nothing useful with all my sharp intellect.
Creation has begun to feel pointless without sharing those creations, and the amount of effort and skill it takes to go from Tier 2 (not quite worth sharing) to Tier 1 (worth sharing) is enormous. We belong to a race of 8.2 billion people, most of whom are directly connected all the time. Human attention is limited, and everyone can choose to pay attention to the best 0.001% of any form of content or media -- and why wouldn't they? -- which already gives them way more content to read/watch/listen to than they could possibly experience in a lifetime.
That means you have to be absolutely world-class to create anything of value that anyone else would ever even bother to look at. You get to pick one thing that you're world-class at, if you're very lucky. And to do that, you can't do anything else. You want to share your paintings with anyone? You better fucking only paint, and do nothing else with your life, to have even a chance of anyone ever giving a shit about anything you paint. Good luck paying for your mortgage and your kids' educations.
Besides, in many endeavors AI will soon be (if not already is) churning out content that makes even world-class human efforts look like garbage. Very expensive garbage. Why would anyone bother to look at your worthless human shit when they can look at pristine AI-generated content instead?
So you can't create anything worth anyone's time, so you can't share anything, so you're stuck only ever sequestering your creations inside a dark basement forever where nobody will ever experience them. Eventually you just run out of desire to do that.
I think it is a good example of what the parent link is advocating - a short(ish) post on a single topic. We all enjoy long and informative articles but there is a place for things longer than a tweet but shorter than a essay.
> When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.
I won't bore you with the blog post I wrote in response, but the gist is that writing (and equally importantly, publishing) is a way of getting outside of your own head to think of a audience. We do it all the time as children but somehow as adults we seem to think we need permission to create something for the public. This has never been true and is doubly not true on the internet.
So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it. That is not the point. That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.