Resisting the Substackification of my Writing
I've been writing on my main Substack account for a while now. For most of that time, I published a new newsletter/article every two weeks. Up until a few months ago, publishing frequently just for the sake of publishing felt exactly right. Like so many others, I was heavily influenced by the idea of "The Gap" as popularized by Ira Glass:
"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, itâs just not that good. Itâs trying to be good, it has potential, but itâs not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game [...] is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesnât have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. [...] Itâs gonna take awhile. Itâs normal to take awhile. Youâve just gotta fight your way through."1
This sounds very plausible, even unavoidable, when starting out with any creative endaveour. So, the first 50 issues of my Substack newsletter were published weekly; then, I switched to putting out a new piece every two weeks. More often than I want to admit, that meant cobbling together something half-plausible the evening, sometimes even minutes before the deadline. Not beeing incoherent or self-contradictory as the only quality stardard for my writing â unsurprisingly â left my increasingly frustrated and unsatisfied.
So now, another 80 or so issues later, my taste and expectations have reached a point where the only way I manage to write something I myself find interesting and worthwile is to spend a good portion of those two weeks on that single piece of writing â which basically never happens. Consequently, most of my writing leaves me deeply unsatisfied. Up until that point, I wanted to be someone who carries a pocket notebook around at all times (which I do) and writes about his ideas and questions on a regular basis (which I also do).
Now, I want to become the kind of person who writes well. I want to spend a lot of my free time reading and thinking about topics that are interesting at least for me. And I want to dive into the art and craft of essay writing.
In order to get me started on that journey, I announced to my readers that from now on, I will publish a new newsletter every four weeks and that I will shift my focus on writing longer blog articles here (and on my German main blog). Also, I started reading and analyzing essays. A lot of essays.
During that phase, my Substack feed (which is actually helpful, sometimes) presented me with a Substack Note2 by a user named Clara Adler. Although I had never seen or interacted with her before, what she wrote in that Note and a few comments attached to it deeply resonated with me â not only because of the points she made, but also because of how beautifully she made them. Besides a few conversations with trusted readers3 and two of my essay-writing heroes, it was Claras well crafted rant that pushed me over the edge and made me start that very blog that you are reading right now.
She might do the same for you. So here are a few extensive quotes:
"Substack has become the worldâs largest repository of unbothered mediocrity. The dominant register is confessional mush. [...] The ideas are recycled at industrial scale: the same epiphanies about burnout, authenticity, wellness, and âdoing the workâ, dressed in the language of vulnerability as though emotional disclosure were a substitute for an actual argument. Diary entries cosplay as essays. Anecdotes mistake themselves for evidence. Lists replace thinking. And the tacit contract between writer and reader, that the writer has wrestled with something, risked something, discovered something worth the readerâs irreplaceable time, is broken on arrival, cheerfully, and often daily.
There are exceptions, of course, a handful of writers using the platform the way a blade uses a whetstone, producing work that is strange, rigorous, original, and alive. But they are precisely that â exceptions! The rest is content pretending to be literature."
"Weâve created a culture where being emotionally legible is mistaken for being intellectually substantial. A diary entry with line breaks gets treated like philosophy because it bleeds publicly. But difficulty, compression, structure, the ruthless act of refining thought until it can actually carry weight now appear almost suspiciously âelitistâ. The remarkable thing about truly great writing is that it survives rereading. Most online content barely survives the scroll that found it."
"Some of the most moving writing carries the visible fingerprints of someone still becoming. You can feel the mind reaching beyond its current vocabulary, and that effort has its own dignity.
The problem begins when culture stops treating becoming as a stage and starts canonizing it as an endpoint. Imperfection is human. Anti-refinement is fashionable. Those are different things entirely. A rough but honest attempt can be beautiful because it points toward growth. What exhausts people is the industrialization of unfinished thought presented with the confidence of revelation."
"People should write more privately, read more seriously, revise more brutally, and publish more selectively. The problem is not beginners trying to think in public. Every serious writer begins by imitating, circling clichĂŠs, discovering their own mind through language that initially belongs to other people. That is normal. Necessary, even.
It becomes toxic when platforms collapse the distance between drafting and publishing. A diary entry receives the same structure of reward as an essay shaped through years of revision and intellectual pressure. The system flattens distinction, teaching writers to optimize for immediacy instead of depth, recognizability instead of discovery.
[...] Real writing does require exposure. But exposure alone is not art. The question is whether [...] the reader leaves with language for something they could not previously articulate.
[...] The best writing rarely emerges from urgency to be seen. It emerges from someone sitting with an idea enough that it stops being performance and starts becoming thought."
"The drama isnât that everyone suddenly started writing but that many stopped reading deeply enough to develop taste before demanding an audience. Weâve confused expression with thought, visibility with substance. A culture that rewards constant output inevitably produces industrialized mediocrity. People publishing every passing emotion before it has had the dignity of becoming an idea."
"[T]he tragedy is that the essay used to be a form of intellectual risk, and now it is often treated as a content container. [...]
What made the essay alive was uncertainty. A mind discovering something as it moved. Most online writing now arrives with the conclusion prepackaged and emotionally ready for agreement. Nothing is explored. Everything is affirmed.
[...] The rare pieces still worth reading are the ones that leave the reader slightly reorganized afterward, not reassured that their existing worldview has tasteful prose wrapped around it. And there are writers like that here. Fewer and fewer though."
I might be decades of practice away from being one of those writers.
But I am determined to become one.
