I try not to be too precious about writing. When I’m working, play and abandon are as crucial as discipline and consistency. Maintaining this balance is not easy; it requires a kind of psychological gimbal that takes time and effort to develop. But, if you’re reading this, you probably know that already.
So, yeah, I don’t take myself too seriously. But the work itself? I take that very seriously. Creating is a sacred act. It requires patience, perseverance, and a startlingly difficult combination of strong ego and profound humility. It’s almost as exhausting as it is invigorating, almost as crushing as it is inspiring. It’s emotionally expensive work. As creators, we have to cough up our soul onto our chosen medium as purely as we can, then criticize it brutally until it’s the best we can make it. Simply by dint of the sacrifice required, what we create has value, and that value exists whether people like it or not.
This is one way in which social media is corrosive to artists. We share pieces of our work, and the system tells us that the value of what we share is determined by how many likes it gets. The truth is even darker. Social media is a twisted market built on an attention economy driven by perverse incentives. Attention is the ultimate currency, whether it is generated by joy or outrage, hope or desperation. The attention economy is at its core anti-creative.
And yet, here we are, working in an environment where most of us must maintain an online presence. We’re stuck here. But why should we be at the mercy of someone else’s system? Wasn’t the internet supposed to put the power back in the hands of the creators? To liberate us from the stranglehold of the gatekeepers? It was, and I think it still is.
Without creators, social media platforms are an empty canvas. A gaping silence. A blank page. We have to stop accepting the frame given to us by the profiteers who run them.
Step one: Stop calling what you make “content.”
It is a bland, flaccid word that conveys the image of a shapeless, lifeless substance that exists only to fill whatever container it’s put in. It is an arid, inorganic designation for something whose only purpose is to be consumed, or worse yet, to take up space.
The word “content” is corrosive to creativity. If we’re just creating “content”, we’re slaves to the system, obediently filling up their warehouse with our hard work. To hell with that. The system is nothing without us.
The word content has no place in the lives of creative people.
It says nothing about what you do, what you create, or why.
What you make is art. It’s entertainment. It’s inspiration It’s education. It’s what you say it is.
It’s not content.
I invite you — no, I implore you — to stop using a word that devalues creativity and homogenizes the brilliant array of what we creators make.
We must seek more powerful ways to describe what we make. We’re here to stir things up. To provoke a response. To change the conversation.
Not to fill someone else’s empty jar.
Please, Stop Calling It “Content”