I’ve been writing on Substack for a few months now.
I like it, and intend to continue with my Newsletters, regardless of subscribers and followers or lack thereof. Actually I’ve done OK in this area, so the following words are offered with a little tongue-in-cheek, and just a soupçon of wry humor.
Substack arrived like a messiah of marginalized voices, promising liberation from the algorithmic prison of social media – a digital promised land where writers could build direct relationships with readers, unmediated by corporate gatekeepers.
We called it democratization. We whispered revolution. What we got was another landscape of performative authenticity, where personal narratives are packaged like artisanal products and vulnerability becomes a brand strategy.
Writers now cultivate audiences like delicate greenhouse plants, each newsletter a carefully pruned ecosystem of confession and constraint. We've transformed intimacy into a subscription model, where deeply personal revelations come with a monthly price tag and unsubscribe button. The emotional economy has found its currency: raw human experience, monetized and delivered directly to inboxes, digestible between work emails and grocery lists.
These digital missives are modern confessionals, where writers absolve themselves through meticulously crafted paragraphs, and readers consume trauma like exotic delicacies. We pretend this is connection – this transactional intimacy where personal stories are both sanctuary and product. Every deeply felt essay is simultaneously a cry for understanding and a carefully calculated content strategy, each painful revelation another brick in a personal brand's architecture.
The platform promised freedom but delivered a new form of performance art.
Writers learn to bleed on command, to transform personal pain into shareable content, to turn vulnerability into a renewable resource. Algorithms don't care about authenticity; they hunger for engagement. So we slice ourselves open, curate our wounds, present them with just enough dramatic lighting to ensure someone will click, someone will read, someone will care.
Substack became the place where millennial and Gen Z writers externalize their internal landscapes, mapping psychological territories with the precision of colonial cartographers. Mental health becomes content, trauma becomes narrative, personal struggle becomes a potential revenue stream.
We are all entrepreneurs of the soul now, trading in emotional real estate, constructing digital monuments to our most fragile selves.
The irony is exquisite: platforms designed to liberate individual voices have created new systems of constraint.
Writers now perform for their subscribers, calibrating honesty against potential backlash, measuring vulnerability against potential unsubscribes. Each newsletter becomes a delicate negotiation between authentic expression and market demands, between genuine revelation and algorithmic palatability.
Corporate wellness has nothing on this new emotional marketplace. Here, burnout is not just a condition – it's content. Anxiety is not a struggle, but a potential trending topic. Depression becomes a narrative arc, mental health a genre. We consume these stories like sophisticated cannibals, hungry for proximity to others' pain while maintaining a comfortable distance.
Substack promised democratization but delivered a new hierarchy.
Not of traditional publishing gatekeepers, but of marketable suffering. Who can craft the most compelling narrative? Who can transform personal anguish into compelling prose? Who can make their internal collapse look aesthetically pleasing, intellectually rigorous, just vulnerable enough to be relatable but not so raw as to be uncomfortable?
We are writing ourselves into existence, pixel by pixel, subscription by subscription. Each newsletter a small rebellion, each personal essay a potential lifeline, each story both a wound and a weapon.
We are not just writers any more. We are curators of our own digital souls, architects of performative intimacy, trading in the most valuable currency of our fractured age:
the appearance of genuine human connection.