Why you should write blog posts and not be a blogger

The other problem with Substacking is that no one will click on posts without a photo so you have to illustrate everything with barely related stock photos. It’s just undignified. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.

I am doing Inkhaven this month, which means that (if all goes well) you’ll get to hear from me every day for the next 30 days. My posts will also be less edited than usual, especially early on in the month. In a triumph of optimism, I’m assuming I will be able to develop a backlog and then edit my posts more thoroughly later in the month.

As Inkhaven begins, I thought it would be a good time to talk about whether you should blog regularly.

No.

...okay, this is really not an ideal take to have in front of the surprisingly large number of people who have paid an eyewatering amount of money for me to tell them their blog posts are bad.¹ So I will elaborate.

“When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.” Perhaps people who work any job think this, but I think “Substacker” is a job you’d have to be unusually crazy to want to do.

I have to come up with something novel to say three times a week (or ideally more—I’d be a more popular Substacker if I wrote more), or else give in and write a million variations on “abortion should be legal” until my brain dribbles out my ears.² So everything I do—every conversation I have, every book I read, every emotion I experience—is raw material for my Substack. Sometimes people ask me how many hours I work and I have no answer. Sometimes I take my child to Lilo & Stitch (2025) and write a blog post about it. Is that work?

I have no deadlines, no accountability if I sit on my ass, except the slow loss of paid subscribers. I also don’t get days off: I’m writing this post in a hotel room while on vacation. I have to make specific efforts to ever have a face-to-face conversation with people who don’t live in my house. And what is my reward for all this? People yell at me constantly.

People who don’t write online think that online writers hear a constant chorus of agreement. But in my experience, when people agree with my post, they never tell me! They nod along, maybe send a link to a friend, and go on with their lives. I only hear from people if they think my post is a pile of shit and I have the dumbest takes since Marc Andreessen. Half the time they don’t even read the post and instead dunk on whatever imaginary post they’ve extrapolated from the title or from quotes on social media.

All of your coworkers are also in the three-to-five-posts-a-week content mines, and nobody reads a post that’s like “Ozy Is Smart And I Agree With Them About Everything.” So most of the time when you engage with other bloggers, either they’re dunking on you or you’re dunking on them. And then you have to figure out if they’re the kind of person who gets bitter and vindictive, or the kind of person who sees it all as kayfabe and is happy to write a thousand-word post calling you an evil moron and then DM you to go “I’m in town, want to get coffee?”

And then there’s the parasocial aspect. Regular readers of any Substack feel like they have a close relationship with you, even if you have no idea who they are. So if you have a Substack with a wide readership, people will devise takes about your marriage, your sex life, your friendships, your traumas, your hobbies, your relationship to your children, and whether you cry yourself to sleep at night and if so about what. These takes have absolutely nothing to do with you as a person, and are instead mostly a projection of their own insecurities, conflicts, and deep-seated personal issues. If you try to correct them, you look defensive and whiny and just cement their views. It is extremely maddening.

So why do I do it?

You haven’t heard from me much in the past few weeks, because I’ve been at Viable Paradise science fiction and fantasy writers’ workshop.³ At Viable Paradise, Scott Lynch gave us a talk in which he said something like “remember, you don’t HAVE TO write. You put a lot of effort into becoming a professional writer, because you like writing. Don’t say that you HAVE TO write. Say that you WANT TO write.”

With all due respect to the great Scott Lynch, I’m pretty sure I don’t have to write or want to write. Instead, I have a compulsion to write. I have written an average of something like 500 words a day every day since I was twelve years old, except when I was very severely depressed. (Moderate depression isn’t enough to stop me.) Writing is an activity that simply happens for me, the same way that eating naturally happens, and with somewhat more regularity than brushing my teeth. I have no volitional control over it.

Since I’m going to be writing regardless, I figured I might as well try to make a living at it, and now I make somewhat more than I would as a barista for much more interesting work.

But if you don’t have the compulsive writing itch, I don’t think you’re the right kind of crazy to become a Substacker. Maybe you’ve never had a chance to try to be a compulsive writer, and writing thirty blog posts in a month will addict you to writing like the free samples of heroin DARE classes claim that drug dealers give out. Or maybe you’re the right kind of crazy to be a conventional journalist, or a screenwriter, or a novelist! Maybe writing is just not for you! All of these are okay.

Before Ben Pace fires me from Inkhaven, I will say that, while very few people should become bloggers, many people should write blog posts. For most people, writing blog posts is a greyed-out option. That’s a shame, because most people have many interesting observations to make about the world.

If you find yourself explaining something four or five times, consider writing it up. Here are some kinds of things you might consider writing about:

• How to do a particular task (programming, data analysis, knitting, cooking, running a meetup...) that people keep asking you for help with.

• A historical event you find interesting.

• A flaw in a particular study that everyone keeps citing.

• A common misunderstanding that you keep having to correct.

• A review of a book (fiction or nonfiction) you always find yourself recommending.

• A useful piece of life advice you give over and over again.

• The weirdest story that ever happened to you.

• Something that everyone else is doing WRONG and you want them to STOP but no matter how many times you rehearse in your head your BRILLIANT ARGUMENT that they should STOP they continue to not be telepathic.

Your essay doesn’t have to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (although putting your commas in the right places helps). You can put it on your website, or a rarely updated Substack, or on Less Wrong or the Effective Altruism Forum if you’re that kind of person. At a minimum, you will have a link to send people, which will save time next time you have to explain it. But it’s very likely that if you have to explain something over and over again, then:

1. You have genuine expertise in the topic.
2. Other people are ignorant of the topic.
3. Other people find it interesting and helpful.

You can only have a face-to-face conversation with, like, ten people at once, and that’s only if you are one of those obnoxious people who holds court at Bay Area rationalist parties. If you write a blog post, you can explain something to hundreds or thousands of people, which is a significant contribution to the progress of human knowledge.

It bugs me that so much knowledge is locked up in the heads of people who don’t write. We have an endless number of essays about books, publishing, cancel culture, writers’ block, comma positioning, and other topics of great interest to writers. But as for deep insight into the human condition derived from being a cable guy, we’ve got like one essay. I can’t help but feel like we’re missing out. So I think you all should go out there, ungrey some options, and learn to write an interesting blog post if you have something to say, whether or not you have decided to pay an obscene amount of money to live for a month at Lighthaven and have me tell you your blog posts suck.

1. Presumably they are actually interested in Scott Alexander and dynomight telling them their blog posts are bad.

2. No shame to people who do that. It’s an honorable course-- abortion should be legal!-- and probably convinces more people than whatever shit I have to say about Maoism in Nepal.

3. Thoughts on the experience to come.