Posting is a distraction
Spend less time where your work doesn't last
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I haven’t posted to Substack Notes in a week.
Instead of a quick post, I’d write it out and put it on my blog, or send the link to a friend.
Rather than post a nice photo, I’d text it to someone I haven’t talked to in awhile.
Instead of posting, I’ll spend time writing emails, or getting taxes in order.
Instead of posting, I make some more coffee and read my Star Wars trilogy book.
Like Noah Kalina said in a recent Hotline Show video:
I was out taking pictures and I made a picture that I really like. I was working on it and I was like, “This is so good.” And I was like, “What am I going to do with this?”
My natural inclination is to want to post it on the internet, but why? I almost feel like it’s embarrassing to post things on the internet now.
Think of all those heart-felt posts to David Lynch we saw on Substack since he passed away. What happens to all of them 10 years from now if Substack doesn’t exist? What happens to them 10 days from now?
Imagine if they lived on your website, or in a zine you made with friends. A compilation cassette, with photocopied J-cards and limited to just 50 copies.
A silk-screened poster. A hand drawn bumper sticker. A phone call with an old friend talking about Twin Peaks, or starting a David Lynch night at your library.
We need to stop living a post-first existence.
We’re writing our messages on the beach, knowing the ocean will come in and wash it away. We post to keep the algorithms from getting mad, to remind our audience that we have things to say multiple times per day, throughout the week, month after month.
Our main artistic output should be enough, but instead we build an entire ecosystem of add-ons with automated email reminders from assorted platforms.
It’s not enough for our work to be inspired by our heroes. We nepost to remind the algorithms of relevant keywords to make it easier for the programs to pick who sees our 35 word tribute.
An hour long video interview isn’t enough. It must be broken up into bite-sized clips. Convert those clips to audio for podcast or audio embeds. Then we post all this work on the beach while the ocean has pulled back for a moment, hoping that our fans walk by at the right moment and see all our hard work.
We might have 100 subscribers that we email once a week.
Yet we’ll post throughout the week to hopefully reach 5% of our “followers,” a concept we scoffed at here on Substack, yet we keep playing the game.
But I’m hearing more people believe those 100 subscribers are enough. Make the work, hit publish, then go about our day.
Maybe sharing with 100 people could be enough.
Like I said in ‘The best work is boring work’ a week ago:
Maybe it’s not even called “marketing,” but it’s a return to the truest form of your work and practice that makes it easier for the work to speak for itself, which in turn frees you to get closer to the heart of who you are, which is probably the best marketing work any of us can hope for.
What if our practice became so deep and rich that the 100 people lucky enough to be on our email list started telling more people?
What if the magic isn’t about hitting an arbitrary subscriber count, but reaching the tipping point in our work where the magic can longer be contained, and it begins to spread without us needing to write messages on beaches?
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I've come to realize that the transient nature of most "social" platforms bothers me a great deal (and yes, I have to include Substack and Bluesky in that category; they're great now, but so were Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, etc. once upon a time).
All the time I spent on Twitter, all gone when I decided to run screaming from the impending toxic radioactive dumpster fire. I don't care about the actual content, but the time spent on it? Ugh. Instagram is likely going to follow. Fortunately I never got much traction there, guess the algorithm punished me for the sin of not engaging and posting all the time. But still the time spent making those posts...it wasn't zero. I could have done something meaningful with that time, and I did not.
So, if I'm sinking my often limited free time into anything, it should be something I know will stick around and that I care deeply about.
I used to blog, and since those posts all exist as files under my direct control that can be hosted just about anywhere, using a domain I've owned since the 1990s, they're still up online, all the way back to the first one in 2009 (the site prior to then is gone, but that was my choice).
Goals for this year include tangible output, like a zine or two maybe, but also making sure my online presence is more robust than a corner of someone else's platform.
There are no guarantees that a great platform that's not under your own control will remain great, or even continue to exist at all, in the future.
I love the idea of our creativity and sense of self being so big it expands beyond the realm we thought was possible. I think about the greatest songs and how they weren't written for an audience, they were written because the artist couldn't contain them anymore. And they answer questions the listener didn't know they even had but are so glad they found the answer. I know when I hear or see something great I can't contain it. I put it on a playlist, send it to a friend, or play it so loud in the car the car next to me asks, "Hey, what song is that?"