It's only my first week writing on Substack and I have definite rituals set up for this very reason because I know burn out is real. I've lived through it both creatively and later as a journalist. Creativity suggests freedom but I agree once you start chasing performance and chasing an audience. It can eat away at you. I find your advice really useful and have already considered in 1 week being here turning the notifications off. Their like little mainlines of dopamine that can eat at your ability to stay present and in the flow...
I would recommend everyone to turn them off...it might mean that you miss comments and don't reply to people but that is a compromise worth taking...it feels exciting at first to get the notifications but very quickly it looses its appeal and starts to drain your energy and thereby creativity as well
It seems like your work and the beginning of my work on here seem to align in that we need to be good stewards both of the community but also protect and nourish our creative paths. My approach is maybe less grounded and developed but both inform the same goal. I look forward to digging into your posts more!! And thanks notifications are off. I needed that already!! haha.
This is powerful. It’s exactly what many artists are saying on IG. Chasing the metrics by spending so many hours making videos for people who just scroll by. When I stopped looking at metrics my art began to sell. Now I upload a photo of art and never check likes. Never. I might now even look at that post ever again. It was ruining my life. I even had to block certain people who were watching my metrics and I felt an awful competition from “friends”. Now I feel calm. My creativity has returned but I still feel the pull once in a while and I fight it.
Hi Claudine, thanks for sharing. We are all susceptible to it, it's kind of human nature but so glad you found a way around it. Are you active very active on other social media platforms?
Good morning Benjamin, I am on FB and use YouTube for occasional art inspiration. I have no interest in Tik Tok Snap Chat or others.
Funny thing is, removing people from social media sites that pop into your mind with the immediate thought of “I wonder what (__insert persons name_) is going to post today that might get more likes than me Or, “ I bet so and so is going to see this and get jealous, or look at all those likes I’m on roll! Are all poisonous feelings, so I had to pull away to regain my sanity, my peace. Now I sleep soundly8 hours straight and wake up ready to make more art.
WOW. Spot on!! This is almost exactly what I was speaking about in my last writing. Although, I speak from the view point of an artist. This is so great and I am glad others are awake and aware! Love this piece! 👏
This has hit home for me … yeah I’ve been exploring this exact tension in my own writing … kind of exhaustion that comes from chasing productivity and visibility as if they define our worth. But if really this is an invisible system that we’re trapped in, aren’t we also complicit in maintaining it? Sometimes I think we lean too heavily on blaming external forces like “the system” or “the algorithm” without fully owning how much we participate in the performance ourselves.
Powerful read Benjamin. I love that dialogue on realignment and the awareness of how we are perceived on the outside while we can quietly drift from what is happening internally. Similar to your point, in one of my first posts on my publication, I discussed invisible rules and the assumptions that cause us to commoditise our efforts in the eyes of others. Thank you for aptly covering this, and I'm sure it will help a lot of fellow writers.
I really appreciate how you unpack these observations on the hustle culture. I am a survivor of it, now building my own personal writing brand based on my own specific interests. Thanks for these valuable nuggets.
You know the Trump organization is really down here messing with me hard because i keep saying he's not my elect and I stand with all of you, im the real Jesus Christ, that he pretended to be, he knows i won't shut up and I wont stop pressuing him for what he's done to me and those men women and children, he also used what I said about protecting children to get more votes. I got tired of people standing up in my place when all they've done is lie
Permit me, from my dusty cloister of books and symbols, to respond to your compelling diagnosis of what you name the performance economy. You have correctly identified a malaise—though I wonder if it is not so much a sickness as it is a modern liturgy: an elaborate rite we enact, unwitting celebrants in a cathedral of metrics.
You see, cultures do not merely have rituals—they are made of them. In medieval Christendom, for example, the cathedral was not merely a place of worship, but a diagram of the cosmos: height symbolized divine aspiration, stained glass filtered light into lessons, and every gesture was encoded with meaning. Today, we have traded the cathedral for the dashboard.
Our sacred icons are no longer the Madonna and Child, but the graph and the click-through rate. Our confessions are public, timestamped, optimized. The sinner no longer kneels in shadow but refreshes their analytics in the glow of a device. “Have I been seen?” has replaced “Am I saved?”
You mention presentation replacing presence. A fine and tragic formula. But it is not new. The Scholastics once debated the substance of the Eucharist—whether the host was the real presence of Christ or merely a symbol. We now apply the same theological agonies to ourselves: am I a person, or only the performance of one?
Modern man is not merely alienated, as Marx once warned; he is gamified. Where the factory once demanded the rhythm of the machine, now the platform demands the rhythm of the feed. The factory’s whistle has become the ping of a notification.
Yet you offer something of a monastic response. A Rule, not unlike that of Saint Benedict. Your architecture of escape—awareness, realignment, integration—resonates with ancient echoes. The Desert Fathers withdrew into the wilderness not to abandon the world, but to confront its temptations in their purest form. You suggest, wisely, that we too must map our demons: not serpents or satyrs, but “growth charts,” “algorithms,” “engagement scores.”
Still, I caution against mistaking the interior for the incorruptible. Even within your proposed alignment architecture lurks a quiet contradiction: to define one’s values is to construct another performance, albeit a private one. The danger is not escape, but that escape itself becomes another brand.
May I suggest a fourth step? Irony. Not the corrosive cynicism of the postmodern void, but the classical irony that knows its place in the theater. Like Pirandello’s characters, we must know we are characters. We must speak our lines with full knowledge that the stage is real and unreal. The performance economy only devours those who forget they are performing.
In closing, allow me to borrow from Tertullian, with slight heresy: Credo quia absurdum est—I believe in meaning because it resists quantification. I write not to be read, but to remember that I am more than my readability.
Ugh! Thanks for the gentle reminders - as I sit reading other people’s Substacks for over an hour while sipping my coffee and sitting in my pjs. This has become my morning ritual since the election, and while I have positively increased my ratio of uplifting and helpful blogs to political ones that make my blood boil, it’s still not helping me in creating before consuming. And I suspect writing in the mornings, whether it’s my blog in here or my fiction writing, would be best for me since my schedule as an entrepreneur isn’t consistent. But I do know none of my clients want me in their homes before 9am, and the dog and I are before 6. So clearly I have some good chunks of time to commit to creating 🙂. This is also a good reminder for me that I purchased your 2 Hour Starting Point last week and have not dug in to it yet!
It's only my first week writing on Substack and I have definite rituals set up for this very reason because I know burn out is real. I've lived through it both creatively and later as a journalist. Creativity suggests freedom but I agree once you start chasing performance and chasing an audience. It can eat away at you. I find your advice really useful and have already considered in 1 week being here turning the notifications off. Their like little mainlines of dopamine that can eat at your ability to stay present and in the flow...
I would recommend everyone to turn them off...it might mean that you miss comments and don't reply to people but that is a compromise worth taking...it feels exciting at first to get the notifications but very quickly it looses its appeal and starts to drain your energy and thereby creativity as well
It seems like your work and the beginning of my work on here seem to align in that we need to be good stewards both of the community but also protect and nourish our creative paths. My approach is maybe less grounded and developed but both inform the same goal. I look forward to digging into your posts more!! And thanks notifications are off. I needed that already!! haha.
It leads to fatigue for sure. Good write.
This is powerful. It’s exactly what many artists are saying on IG. Chasing the metrics by spending so many hours making videos for people who just scroll by. When I stopped looking at metrics my art began to sell. Now I upload a photo of art and never check likes. Never. I might now even look at that post ever again. It was ruining my life. I even had to block certain people who were watching my metrics and I felt an awful competition from “friends”. Now I feel calm. My creativity has returned but I still feel the pull once in a while and I fight it.
Thank you for the great post.
Hi Claudine, thanks for sharing. We are all susceptible to it, it's kind of human nature but so glad you found a way around it. Are you active very active on other social media platforms?
Good morning Benjamin, I am on FB and use YouTube for occasional art inspiration. I have no interest in Tik Tok Snap Chat or others.
Funny thing is, removing people from social media sites that pop into your mind with the immediate thought of “I wonder what (__insert persons name_) is going to post today that might get more likes than me Or, “ I bet so and so is going to see this and get jealous, or look at all those likes I’m on roll! Are all poisonous feelings, so I had to pull away to regain my sanity, my peace. Now I sleep soundly8 hours straight and wake up ready to make more art.
It's in the zone. Thanks for the read.
WOW. Spot on!! This is almost exactly what I was speaking about in my last writing. Although, I speak from the view point of an artist. This is so great and I am glad others are awake and aware! Love this piece! 👏
Yes. Let's try to spread this message as much as we can. :) Thanks for reading
This has hit home for me … yeah I’ve been exploring this exact tension in my own writing … kind of exhaustion that comes from chasing productivity and visibility as if they define our worth. But if really this is an invisible system that we’re trapped in, aren’t we also complicit in maintaining it? Sometimes I think we lean too heavily on blaming external forces like “the system” or “the algorithm” without fully owning how much we participate in the performance ourselves.
Powerful read Benjamin. I love that dialogue on realignment and the awareness of how we are perceived on the outside while we can quietly drift from what is happening internally. Similar to your point, in one of my first posts on my publication, I discussed invisible rules and the assumptions that cause us to commoditise our efforts in the eyes of others. Thank you for aptly covering this, and I'm sure it will help a lot of fellow writers.
Brilliant, thank you
I really appreciate how you unpack these observations on the hustle culture. I am a survivor of it, now building my own personal writing brand based on my own specific interests. Thanks for these valuable nuggets.
Great article! Thank you so much
You know the Trump organization is really down here messing with me hard because i keep saying he's not my elect and I stand with all of you, im the real Jesus Christ, that he pretended to be, he knows i won't shut up and I wont stop pressuing him for what he's done to me and those men women and children, he also used what I said about protecting children to get more votes. I got tired of people standing up in my place when all they've done is lie
Dear Fellow Traveler and Editor, Ben,
Permit me, from my dusty cloister of books and symbols, to respond to your compelling diagnosis of what you name the performance economy. You have correctly identified a malaise—though I wonder if it is not so much a sickness as it is a modern liturgy: an elaborate rite we enact, unwitting celebrants in a cathedral of metrics.
You see, cultures do not merely have rituals—they are made of them. In medieval Christendom, for example, the cathedral was not merely a place of worship, but a diagram of the cosmos: height symbolized divine aspiration, stained glass filtered light into lessons, and every gesture was encoded with meaning. Today, we have traded the cathedral for the dashboard.
Our sacred icons are no longer the Madonna and Child, but the graph and the click-through rate. Our confessions are public, timestamped, optimized. The sinner no longer kneels in shadow but refreshes their analytics in the glow of a device. “Have I been seen?” has replaced “Am I saved?”
You mention presentation replacing presence. A fine and tragic formula. But it is not new. The Scholastics once debated the substance of the Eucharist—whether the host was the real presence of Christ or merely a symbol. We now apply the same theological agonies to ourselves: am I a person, or only the performance of one?
Modern man is not merely alienated, as Marx once warned; he is gamified. Where the factory once demanded the rhythm of the machine, now the platform demands the rhythm of the feed. The factory’s whistle has become the ping of a notification.
Yet you offer something of a monastic response. A Rule, not unlike that of Saint Benedict. Your architecture of escape—awareness, realignment, integration—resonates with ancient echoes. The Desert Fathers withdrew into the wilderness not to abandon the world, but to confront its temptations in their purest form. You suggest, wisely, that we too must map our demons: not serpents or satyrs, but “growth charts,” “algorithms,” “engagement scores.”
Still, I caution against mistaking the interior for the incorruptible. Even within your proposed alignment architecture lurks a quiet contradiction: to define one’s values is to construct another performance, albeit a private one. The danger is not escape, but that escape itself becomes another brand.
May I suggest a fourth step? Irony. Not the corrosive cynicism of the postmodern void, but the classical irony that knows its place in the theater. Like Pirandello’s characters, we must know we are characters. We must speak our lines with full knowledge that the stage is real and unreal. The performance economy only devours those who forget they are performing.
In closing, allow me to borrow from Tertullian, with slight heresy: Credo quia absurdum est—I believe in meaning because it resists quantification. I write not to be read, but to remember that I am more than my readability.
Yours in semiotic fellowship,
A relic from the 20th-century
Ugh! Thanks for the gentle reminders - as I sit reading other people’s Substacks for over an hour while sipping my coffee and sitting in my pjs. This has become my morning ritual since the election, and while I have positively increased my ratio of uplifting and helpful blogs to political ones that make my blood boil, it’s still not helping me in creating before consuming. And I suspect writing in the mornings, whether it’s my blog in here or my fiction writing, would be best for me since my schedule as an entrepreneur isn’t consistent. But I do know none of my clients want me in their homes before 9am, and the dog and I are before 6. So clearly I have some good chunks of time to commit to creating 🙂. This is also a good reminder for me that I purchased your 2 Hour Starting Point last week and have not dug in to it yet!