Before the Wanting, There Was the Making
The Doing Is the Only Proof That Matters
Sometimes I feel something I can’t quite put into words.
I finish a piece of work I’m genuinely proud of. Post it. The numbers go nowhere. Then I scroll for thirty seconds and land on a video with no nutritional value whatsoever — hundreds of thousands of likes.
I know that comparison is immature. I know likes aren’t value.
But the feeling is real.
At first, I repackaged that feeling into a more presentable question:
Why does serious, substantive content have so little reach on the internet?
That question sounds like cultural critique. Like concern for the content ecosystem. Like thinking seriously about human nature and platform design.
But honestly, part of it was just avoiding something more personal:
The things I make haven’t found their audience yet.
Admitting that is much harder than diagnosing the era. Because one is the era’s problem, and the other is mine.
But here’s what’s interesting:
That anxiety — the one I didn’t want to look at — pushed me toward a question I actually find worth sitting with.
Is the platform training people toward short and shallow? Or is human nature already like this, and the platform just followed?
I’ve thought about this for a long time, and I’ve come to think the answer might not matter. Both are probably true, and they reinforce each other — there’s a part of human nature that’s drawn toward stimulation and instant reward, platforms identified that, amplified it, and now that part of human nature becomes harder to resist inside the amplification. The loop doesn’t stop just because you’ve figured out which came first.
So why should serious content have reach at all?
My first instinct was that the question itself was wrong — why does serious content need reach? Make it well, and the audience will come.
But I immediately argued back against myself: why shouldn’t it?
In a world where only fast, frictionless content circulates — do the things that require you to slow down in order to feel them actually disappear? Or are they just pressed down somewhere, waiting for a crack to open?
I don’t have an answer.
But I have a feeling, faint but persistent:
Serious content — the kind that’s deep, the kind that asks you to stay — corresponds to something equally deep in people. That part doesn’t make noise. It doesn’t surface on its own. It’s easy to drown out.
But it’s there.
I know it’s there because I’ve felt it myself — reading a sentence and feeling something loosen. Finishing a video and carrying it around in my head for days. Those things didn’t come from short and fast.
So I keep making this kind of work.
Not because I’ve resolved the question of reach. Not because I’ve found a way to fight human nature and the algorithm.
Because that feeling of “I can’t fully explain why this is worth doing, but it is” — that feeling is itself the engine.
The things you can explain very clearly tend to be the things that are finished once you’ve done them.
The things you can’t explain — the ones you do anyway, without being able to say exactly why —
that inability to explain might be precisely where their weight lives.
The difficult feeling is still there. I haven’t resolved it.
But I’m at least willing to admit it now.