Just Write
42 comments
·February 22, 2025AndrewStephens
feoren
> So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it.
It's demotivating to have created a huge body of work that you know nobody will ever read/hear/experience. It saps the desire to create any more. I've been creating things for decades and approximately 0 people (other than myself) have benefitted from any of it. Everything is always just under the line of "good enough" to publish/publicize, and publishing/publicizing are completely different skills than creating in the first place, and just feel awful to do.
> That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.
I'm tired of sharpening my own brain. Oh yay, after several decades of challenging myself and creating lots of cool things just for myself, I have a super-sharp brain (let's be charitable for sake of argument). So what? I'm doing literally nothing useful with all my sharp intellect.
Creation has begun to feel pointless without sharing those creations, and the amount of effort and skill it takes to go from Tier 2 (not quite worth sharing) to Tier 1 (worth sharing) is enormous. We belong to a race of 8.2 billion people, most of whom are directly connected all the time. Human attention is limited, and everyone can choose to pay attention to the best 0.001% of any form of content or media -- and why wouldn't they? -- which already gives them way more content to read/watch/listen to than they could possibly experience in a lifetime.
That means you have to be absolutely world-class to create anything of value that anyone else would ever even bother to look at. You get to pick one thing that you're world-class at, if you're very lucky. And to do that, you can't do anything else. You want to share your paintings with anyone? You better fucking only paint, and do nothing else with your life, to have even a chance of anyone ever giving a shit about anything you paint. Good luck paying for your mortgage and your kids' educations.
Besides, in many endeavors AI will soon be (if not already is) churning out content that makes even world-class human efforts look like garbage. Very expensive garbage. Why would anyone bother to look at your worthless human shit when they can look at pristine AI-generated content instead?
So you can't create anything worth anyone's time, so you can't share anything, so you're stuck only ever sequestering your creations inside a dark basement forever where nobody will ever experience them. Eventually you just run out of desire to do that.
Gravityloss
This post was worth reading and I think it's something very important to think about.
It's a bit similar to the succesful artist syaing follow your dreams and then analyzing the odds. That it's not a meaningful strategy on its own.
tejonutella
That’s a lot of words to say you’re not great at marketing yourself
tgdude
I think you gotta keep it fun. I make things I think are cool that I think others might think are cool too.
That's it. Literally "I just think they're neat."
Sometimes I just get a quiet "That's nice dear" from friends and my partner, sometimes I get "Oh wait that's kind of cool actually".
It's all still fun.
blackhaj7
Share the post! Would love to read it
AndrewStephens
Well, if you insist: https://sheep.horse/2025/1/the_act_of_creation.html
I think it is a good example of what the parent link is advocating - a short(ish) post on a single topic. We all enjoy long and informative articles but there is a place for things longer than a tweet but shorter than a essay.
blackhaj7
Great post and very motivating! Thanks
adityaathalye
Writing != Publishing. It's wise to not conflate these two acts.
Let Writing be personal; reflective. Occasionally one might feel like sharing with another self. Then, publish with kindness to self. Publishing is an open set of choices, including writing a rambling email to a friend or two. If writing publicly is stressful, email someone.
ozim
I think writing publicly is much less stressful than writing and not publishing.
After you get past initial fright of course. Because later you don’t fret about what-ifs.
I think I started posting comments on HN 5 years ago and I had account since 15 years ago.
iamwil
If your goal is to write, the worst thing you can do as an engineer is to try and write your own blog engine, or fiddle around with some custom settings.
Fight that urge. The thing to tackle is to figure out the habit of writing first. And you can only do that by writing consistently. If you have nothing insightful to write, write about something you took a couple hours to figure out in a TIL.
hombre_fatal
I stopped blogging because of this. I migrated my blog to my own stack in my mid-20s and every time I wanted to write, I would have to fix something or implement some feature. I ended up not writing.
I wish I just used Wordpress or something that let me click and drag images into it and move on.
kstrauser
Preach it. I had a pretty comfortable Markdown-to-Hugo-to-rsync pipeline set up. Know what’s even easier? Paying for a micro.blog account to glue all that stuff together for me, and using their perfectly fine app to publish and edit on the go.
8200_unit
Doesn't seem the author is taking their own advice. Posted a single blog post on January 8th and hasn't posted since
danielspace23
"Quality over quantity" is a thing, especially for individuals as opposed to large publishing groups. Personally, I find that the people who post less on their blog, BlueSky account or YouTube produce the best content over their peers. I enjoy a Folding Ideas video infinitely more times more than the garbage Linus Tech Tips pumps out every day.
bobbiechen
I'm sympathetic - knowing something is different from putting it into practice, and sometimes other life things happen too.
I've been writing online for a few years now and for me, it comes in bursts. I recently started a new blog and publish it every two weeks - something that helped me was to write a lot when I was in the write mood, which gave me material to edit during off-weeks.
Over3Chars
[flagged]
timdellinger
an eternal truth, but like all eternal truths, there are many people seeing it for the first time
I would perhaps perhaps articulate it as:
you find your tribe by hoisting a flag and seeing who rallies around.
choose action over perfection - you'll be happier in the long run.
so: write on the internet.
sirodoht
Reminds me of mataroa's (personal project) philosophy: https://mataroa.blog/#philosophy
And of Jorge Luis Borges:
“What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.”
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rodolphoarruda
I totally agree with the post. Now, regarding: "Don’t over-engineer your site", I'd say sometimes it's good to add some engineering to it. To put an effort. If you had zero effort to put your website (or public notepad) online, it won't cause much regret to shut it down. So a decent effort would at least cause a second thinking before shutting it down, as you would remember the time you had dedicated to it for the infrastructure and content itself.
1970-01-01
Hre's and example of not doing anything but jsut writing something and smaking the OK GO button. Yes I know its terrible. I'm oding it on purpose to show how bad the idea this is.
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At the very least, take some time to compile your main thought or argument and hold yourself to a minimum standard; If you're shooting straight from your keyboard and into the public domain, it won't take long before you regret all of your publishing.
roflmaostc
The internet is overflowing with low quality content and information.
I feel like, rather push the extra mile for a nice blog entry and more people will appreciate it.
deivid
I struggle a lot with this, I keep a blog and every time I start a new post, I get the feeling that it should be "good" (for some definition of good), which makes the writing of most entries to drag for a week or so.
On top of that, I reject a substantial amount of the ideas that I get, because they are not good/deep enough.
6stringmerc
“If it helps, get drunk, choose a pseudonym, and post anonymously.”
Bad writing advice Hall of Fame contender right there.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this post. A few weeks ago I was inspired by this quote from Why the Lucky Stiff:
> When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.
I won't bore you with the blog post I wrote in response, but the gist is that writing (and equally importantly, publishing) is a way of getting outside of your own head to think of a audience. We do it all the time as children but somehow as adults we seem to think we need permission to create something for the public. This has never been true and is doubly not true on the internet.
So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it. That is not the point. That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.