The rise of the Sovereign Creator

Own your platform. Monetise your mind. Serve from alignment.

I never set out to become a full-time creator. This work that I do online has always lived on the edge of the day, in the quiet hours after work or early on a Sunday morning, when the rest of the world feels a little slower. It’s something I’ve returned to over and over again, not because I had a clear plan, but because something in me kept asking for more.

Like many people, I was drawn to the promises of the creator economy. The idea that you could build something independent and flexible, that you could escape the rigid structures of traditional employment and work in a way that felt freer and more aligned. I watched others do it and wondered if I could too, if there was a way to carve out a version of this that worked for me.

Over time, I tried a handful of things: kindle publishing, affiliate marketing, coaching, crypto, YouTube. Some of it worked. Most of it didn’t. But what I began to notice, through all of it, was that something felt increasingly off. Not just in my own experience, but in the culture surrounding it. What once felt full of possibility had started to feel constricted. The language of freedom was still there, but beneath it was a kind of pressure that didn’t feel creative at all.

There’s a strange tension that arises when you try to create something meaningful within a system that constantly pulls you toward performance. You begin chasing metrics you don’t believe in. You shape your work around trends you don’t care about. And slowly, the reasons you started begin to slip out of reach.

But over the past year, something in me has shifted and that’s what this letter is about. It’s an attempt to name what many of us have been feeling, that the rules are changing and the old paths no longer fit.

While that might sound unsettling, I find it deeply encouraging because it means we’re no longer bound to systems that were never built for us, and we finally have the chance to build something better, on our own terms.

To understand this shift more clearly, we’ll explore the core ideas behind it, what it means to become a Sovereign Creator, why so much of today’s advice leads to burnout and disconnection, and how concepts like creative immunity, and the discipline spiral can help explain the deeper patterns behind fatigue. At its heart, this is about building something that lasts. Something quieter, stronger, and more aligned with who you are.

The Performance Economy is a trap

Somewhere along the way, the promise of freedom turned into the grind of performance. What began as creative expression slowly calcified into content strategy. We started chasing reach instead of resonance, and the real work, the work that once felt alive, became a hollow loop of publishing just to stay relevant.

We tell ourselves it’s discipline. But it’s really addiction. Every platform is designed to hijack your dopamine system. The feedback loop is real and it’s chemical. Each like, each new subscriber, each tiny metric hit delivers a spike of reward. And so you keep feeding the machine, not because you’re aligned, but because you’re neurologically wired to.

As Dr. Anna Lembke explains in Dopamine Nation, pleasure and pain are processed in the same parts of the brain, and they operate in a kind of balance. When we overstimulate the pleasure side — with novelty, with reward and the constant hit of feedback — the brain automatically compensates by tilting us back toward discomfort. The more we chase that high, the more intensely the crash follows.

The result is a nervous system stuck in survival mode. Constantly checking, tweaking, refreshing, trying to read signals that were never designed for your wellbeing in the first place. This is what I call performance poisoning. The slow erosion of your creative instincts by metrics that were never meant to guide anything real. It’s not your fault. These platforms spend billions engineering compulsive behavior. But we do have a choice in where we place our attention.

The sovereign creator is the one who steps back. Because they’ve started to build something else: a foundation that doesn’t require feedback to move forward. A nervous system that can sit with silence. A model of creation that runs on rhythm, not reaction. This is the first sign of creative immunity and the only real way out of the trap. We are going to go into this in more detail in the next letter which will be about early stage growth but for mow lets look at what is really driving this.

What’s Really Driving This: Fear, Identity, and the Discipline Spiral

The surface story is always the same: hustle harder, post more, stay visible, never stop. If the numbers aren’t growing, it must be your fault. You’re not disciplined enough, not consistent enough, not serious enough.

But beneath that story lies something more fragile. It’s not a question of effort or even strategy. What really drives the performance economy is fear. Fear that if you stop, even for a day, everything you’ve built will simply disappear.

This fear seeps into everything. It convinces you that your value is tied to visibility, that your worth is measured in views, followers, and engagement. And once that belief takes root, you start mistaking urgency for alignment. You double down on routines, frameworks, and “content plans” as if the next 30-day sprint will finally unlock the magic formula.

It feels like traction, but it’s really just tension and if left unchecked it automatically leads into the discipline spiral: a loop where misalignment gets mistaken for laziness, and the solution is always more force, more hustle, more grind. The result isn’t growth, it’s exhaustion, the quiet erosion of your creative voice, and the creeping belief that you’ll never quite catch up.

At the root of this spiral is an identity crisis. You stop creating from who you are, and instead you start performing for who you think the audience wants you to be. Psychologist Charles Cooley called this the looking-glass self: “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.”

The truth is, you don’t need another productivity system or another shortcut. What you need is sovereignty. This is the ability to create from identity instead of anxiety. The ability to step back from the noise, to find your rhythm again, and to create in a way that feels true.

The Sovereign Creator

Most creators are still playing by the old rules. They chase attention, build on platforms they don’t own, and outsource their self-worth to an audience they can’t control. They optimise for growth, not grounding. They post to stay visible, not to stay true. But a quiet shift is happening.

Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack, was one of the first to name it clearly: creators need to own their audience, not rent it. Yes, it’s convenient for him to say that but it doesn’t make it any less true. You cannot build a lasting body of work on borrowed ground.

Others have been circling this shift for years. André Chaperon has long written about resonance over reach and slow-building over scale. Paul Millerd walked away from the corporate script to build a smaller, saner model for creative work.

There’s a through-line in all of it: a return to sovereignty. Because real sovereignty doesn’t just mean freedom. It means structure, stability, and self-ownership. It means choosing values over vanity metrics. Owning your platform, your product, and your pace.

A Sovereign Creator builds from the inside out. They architect systems that support their energy instead of draining it. They design offers that reflect their experience instead of chasing trends. And they stop tying their creative life to the ups and downs of an algorithm they don’t control.

To live as a Sovereign Creator is to build inside your own rhythm. To create work that reflects who you are, not who you’re expected to be or who you think you should be.

And to do so in a way that is resilient, repeatable, and yours. But there’s another layer to this. One that goes deeper than platforms and products. Because the real shift is not external. It’s neurological.

It’s the slow rebuilding of creative immunity, the ability to keep creating without applause.

Creative Immunity

Most creators don’t realise how dependent they’ve become on feedback. They tell themselves they’re consistent, disciplined, serious. But underneath that story lies a quieter truth: they don’t know how to create without applause.

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s neurological conditioning. Social media platforms are engineered to reward us at irregular intervals, a design principle known as variable ratio reinforcement, the same mechanism that keeps people glued to slot machines. You don’t get the reward every time. You get it just often enough to keep coming back. And over time, your nervous system becomes trained to expect it.

The result is a form of creative dependency that’s hard to spot because it hides behind ambition. You tell yourself you’re chasing growth. But what you’re really chasing is reassurance that your work matters and that you’re still relevant.

Creative immunity is the opposite of that state. It’s the capacity to create without constant validation. It’s the ability to write when no one replies and to publish when the numbers are flat. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you build slowly through structure and systems that protect your attention instead of scattering it.

Most importantly you get there through reconnecting with the reason you started creating in the first place, before metrics got involved.

Creative immunity doesn’t mean you stop caring about your audience. It means you stop relying on them to tell you who you are. And in a world where AI can churn out decent content on command, this may be the single greatest competitive advantage a creator can have: To be immune to noise and to keep creating anyway.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Sovereignty sounds good in theory. But what does it look like in a normal week, for a real person, with real constraints?

1. You stop creating only for the feed.

Instead, you build something permanent such as a newsletter, a library or vault of work that doesn’t disappear after 24 hours. This means committing to a platform you own, usually email, and making it the centre of your creative ecosystem. If you don’t own the platform, you’re always one algorithm shift away from irrelevance.

2. You build one product — something simple, useful, and yours.

Just a simple offer that reflects your lived experience and helps someone take the next step. It could be a PDF, a paid resource, a workshop, a toolkit, a 1:1 call, the format doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you own it. That it’s yours. You can pursue other sources of income but your sovereignty shouldn’t be wholly dependent on brand deals, freelance clients, or someone else’s business model. Sovereign creators don’t sell themselves. They sell solutions they’ve lived through.

3. You set your own pace (and protect it).

The internet will always ask you for more. More posts. More angles. More consistency. But sustainability isn’t about speed. It’s about rhythm. You decide how often you publish. You choose your seasons of growth and your seasons of rest.

And then you build a system to make that sustainable, so your nervous system doesn’t have to bear the weight of constant urgency.

Pace is not a productivity hack. It’s the boundary that protects everything else.

4. You structure your time like a business, not a hobby.

That means working in blocks, not just when you feel inspired. It means batching content, building reusable assets, and creating workflows that reduce friction.

You still create with heart but you support it with a strong backbone. Structure is what gives your creativity room to breathe. This is the quiet work of sovereignty. It’s not just about posting, but building something that resonates.

Start with what’s yours. Protect your attention. And build from the inside out.

Why This Matters Now

The Sovereign Creator isn’t just an idea, it’s the antidote.

In a landscape built on urgency, performance, and noise, it offers a way to slow down, build with intention, and create work that reflects who you are, not who the algorithm wants you to be. You can still grow an audience and make money.

But you do it by building something grounded, honest, and truly yours.

That’s what I’ve started doing. And if you’re ready to do the same,

The 2-Hour Starting Point is where I’d begin.

If you found this helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Thank you,

Ben