the new notes

I hate how the new Substack makes me feel and I hate not being on it

Summer is entirely gone by now, and so is the focus and determination I promised myself. I lie still, looking at the overheated, crisp, gold-painted air; I think of everything I was meaning to do. 

My days are, sometimes, filled with so little movement that the only thing I can do is pick up my phone, scroll or look through the old stuff I wrote. The air seems very fragile, and so I can’t be too radical in the changes I make; otherwise my carefully achieved balance will get thrown off. 

I look through the new Substack, seeing excerpts from people’s essays, carefully chosen and shared to be their at their most appealing, most consumable. I realize the exact same thing can be done with these words. I tell myself this is marginally better than other platforms, simply because here there still remains some air of careful and nuanced self-expression. I look through the sea of words, view new trends pushing through them like waves, affecting the entire platform and then disappearing at once.

I read my old things, and see the ways I have become better, which is comforting; I think of the ways I could improve those words, only to then realize I will keep them unread either way, which makes those improvements ultimately meaningless. I think of new things to write, and then everything comes to my mind; so I close the computer, of course.

Very often, writing by hand is so much easier, simply because the words don’t fall down all at once. They appear slowly, naturally, as the only thing on an otherwise blank page. No distractions, no new tabs to be opened and looked through, full of words, ideas, quotes, opinions; a whole ocean, rendering your own voice completely meaningless. 

I pick up books and texts, read into them carefully, try to fully comprehend the entire way the author’s heart and soul was poured into this. I think that this is what it should be; a slow meditation, cherishing and working on things until they are fully ready to be put out into the world, with their artistic value the only measure guiding you (even though this book was also sold to me for money). I think good literature, good writing should seep into your mind slowly, open up your soul in the most intimate and personal way. I don’t think it should be consumed in this quick, detached way, with the numbers below appearing as its only value measurement. 

It’s difficult to grasp this, both in my mind and on the page. More people reading excellent and thoughtful pieces that can be found here is a wonderful thing, truly. What won’t leave my mind, though, is the feeling I had scrolling through the new Substack for the first time; the absolute overwhelm of seeing so many different fragments of voices all at once, all of them in some way detached from what they were originally, chosen to be their most clean and consumable and appealing in order to lure you in for the rest. All so different and abundant to choose from that your own voice seems to go a little quiet. This is, of course, a pointless lament in times so irreversibly influenced by social media. Usually, I don’t have this desire to fight windmills; it’s just sometimes that I wish things were a little bit different. 

What evokes a fake nostalgia in me is the thought of writers that came before now, before times when every single thing has to become a marketable commodity in its own right. I think of Kafka and Dickinson, dedicating their whole lives to writing words that the world didn’t care to read at the time; I think of anonymous poets before them, telling authorless tales meant to be shared through word of mouth only, die the same night they were born. Of course, the irony is that if we do have contemporary geniuses who stack their pages in a dusty drawer, pouring their whole heart out in the process, we probably haven’t heard about them yet.

In a landscape where attention matters more than anything else, withdrawing in silence in order to produce a carefully thought out piece seems as good as being dead to the public eye. The constant churn of projects being put out is what matters– to the media, to the public, to the algorithms governing all platforms, including the one you and I are on right now. The way we value slow, quiet genius is, of course, only retroactively, best after the artist in question has long been dead. 

I recently came across news of a mucisian announcing the end of their career, which has consisted of very few, yet critically acclaimed projects. People in the comments (admittedly, the worst possible entity to base your opinions or doubts on) were sarcastically arguing that the artist never really had the right to call himself a musician in the first place, because how can a serious person work on so few projects for so long. The label of successful or accomplished stays reserved only to people who fit the general understanding of how creatives should work and release their output into the world. 

On here, sometimes it feels like amazing pieces of writing are locked inside boundaries made of their most buzzwordy, catchable quote, of the number of whatever that quote manages to gather. Again, what is deemed good is what fits the expectations of what things released on this platform should look like; expectations fostered by the algorithm and new ways of organizing content, prioritizing what is most likely to elicit views and engagement, even if it gets thrown aside after a quick moment. And, personally, I have found that system to be the farthest possible from inspiring. I pick up the pen whenever I find something too beautiful, too painful, too interesting, too infuriating to just be left alone in my mind. I don’t pick it up at a regular hour, subject to a strict posting schedule or a minimal amount of hot words and topics covered. It feels a bit disheartening to see writing here be turned into something regular, quantitative, measurable; what good literature is fundamentally not. 

There is also the fatigue with overrepeated ideas. I get fatigued with the fatigue. With the fact that on the day of my twentieth birthday, I read more than a few snarky notes about the girlhood essays, whose bad press on Substack has probably, by now, overshadowed the actual number of these pieces, as well as their (relatively limited) potential of being annoying. Authors who look down on other authors, criticizing not the repeatedness of the curated feed but the imagined lack of creativity of others’ pieces. Snarky descriptions of young writers fighting for their lives at networking publishing parties, written from the perspective of the cool uninterested outsider, present at the exact same event. 

Like all rat races, this, too, can be dismissed as being in your head only. The fact that there’s always the next hot thing to write about, and then the next hot criticism of that thing, and these voices will be pretty much the only ones recommended. That any advice helping you write, channel your true creativity, is drowning out in the mass of tips on getting published, marketing your book, monetizing your Substack (which is something I have received at least a dozen personalized notifications and emails about). This can be dismissed as not very important, but I think it says a great deal about what we value most in the writing communities formed on here. 

It gets to the back of my head more and more, despite my best efforts; the preoccupation with labels, with all the packaging around the writing. The measurable outcomes it can achieve, not the actual process itself. Finding your audience, finding your marketing plan, finding your voice… The last one is what I earnestly yearn to do; yet in this pervasive feeling of cynical oversaturation, even this feels like another call to find an extremely specific audience, and make yourself most palatable to them. It’s not about the writing process, it’s about what numbers it can achieve. Useful numbers, presumably (i.e. measurable engagement or financial gain). 

To me, this is all quite a bitter feeling. “I have made this all up”; “I have to do more, go faster”. Interchangeably. At the book store, I pick up authors that got published at a very young age. It’s a bit humiliating to admit how bitter I am, losing the race that’s constantly playing out in my head. There’s this growing feeling that every day I’m not yet putting myself out there is a lost opportunity. Somehow, despite my best efforts, visibility and validation have crept inside my head and took the place of values appreciated the most.