a couple words on "content generation" and substack and social media in general
why i don't reliably post every week/month
I don’t think we should be “consuming” “content” every day.
I don’t think we should be ingesting other people’s thoughts in random snippets like sticking our tiny mouths under a waterfall composed of pixilated packages of mind chatter.
I don’t think that incoherent streams of disconnected opinions, hot takes, deep insights, and outrageous news hydrate the thirsts we are longing to quench.
I don’t think that regularly “generating” “content” for the public on a schedule serves anyone but the machine.
This serves not the “consumers,” nor the “creators.”
In a world of regular “content generation,” the “consumers” will never know when your “content” is good enough to spend their wild and precious life energy attention force on the goings on in your head.
Have you ever been on a mushroom trip and had someone else interrupt your flow of experience with their personal thoughts? And these thoughts were not conducive to your flow, but took you in a different, less interesting (to you) direction that took you off course with dialoguing with the song of the universe? If you haven’t, I can share with you my experience: it can feel like a request requiring great sacrifice at best, and an almost violently selfish impulse at worst.
I think we may be so desensitized to interruptions of our flow that internally, on a deep level, we are having the experience we have on psychedelics when someone interrupts us. But on the surface, we are lured in, hooked to the scroll.
In this world of regular content generation, viewers have to read/view/consume everything you “generate” in order to parse through what is something your creator soul really needed to speak out and transmit vs. something that your chattermind needed to generate in order to stay relevant.
This is a waste of time, energy, and attention for the soul who is viewing your work. This adds to the hypnotic clutter harnessed by the corporate ruling class for dark magic — a type of spell work that uses disembodied mesmerization to transform us from souls who long for connection to mindless consumers of content who exist to buy products and live in complacent distraction. In this way, we grow a hazy film over our own primal understanding of the nature of reality and forget our quests for depth in earth school, forever hovering on the surface.
On the part of the “content creator,” I think regular creation of good and bad art (not content) is a beautiful and necessary practice to express oneself and create a pathway for the body to be a conduit of expression of whatever Godspark lives inside you. Indescribably wisdom pathways live inside all of us. I think we clear the mindchatter and lubricate our creation pathways through regularity.
However, when we decide that everything we create is destined for a world wide web of public audience, I think we risk many things.
We risk mistaking Conversations With Self with Content for Others. We risk knee-capping our strange, beautiful, sloppy, incoherent Conversations With Self with the awareness that this “content generation” is for the public eye, and therefore must look and feel a certain way. We risk creating when we don’t want to create, and feeling the lack of authenticity that comes with the sculpting of fluff.
I don’t think we should be consuming content every day.
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I do think we are longing to go deeper while we are only going vaster.
I think we need more fullness in our searches for entertainment and meaning. Books, movies, well thought-out podcasts, visual art… these are works that humans have often spent years or months coaxing, and sometimes wrenching, from their soul to offer you in your present moment. The journey and coherence of these stories can often be works of art.
Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, writes to a young poet:
“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create.
Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from the outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”
I think we are longing for connection and assistance on our quests to understand the texture of this world and our places in it.
I think we are longing for assistance discerning our gifts, and looking for people who long to receive them.
I think we are longing for relief in the massive, connected, interwoven beingness of all life and the great suffering that lives here.
I suspect we find this, in part, through great, winding pathways of coherent exploration by patching together the puzzle pieces of the beautiful minds and soul around us into a picture that gives us meaning, and by tapping into our own individual consciousnesses.
I suspect one way we listen to our own individual consciousnesses is by going out in Nature, getting very quiet, and drinking some of the wisdom that flows on the great cosmic river of presence. Here lives the awake soul.
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my substack life
I haven’t kept up with writing once a month, and I don’t feel sorry for it. My followership hasn’t grown so much, and perhaps would more if I dedicated myself to creating hot takes on Notes and writing on a regular schedule.
But I don’t ever want to add to the clutter of social media before you; I want you to trust that when you see something from me in your inbox, it’s because I chose to write and share something because I felt the necessity of it, and that I am doing my best to look into myself and see how deep the place is from which my life flows.
Substack is clearly going the way of instagram, ticktock, and others. They have invested in Notes and their app and an algorithm that seeks to highjack your attention and to pressure writers to generate ever more content to keep up with the hamster wheel of modernity.
At this moment, there is no fully getting away from these machines we have created other than personal choice and discipline, which is unjust and too much personal responsibility. But this is the reality of the realm of disciples. Here we are, with the mountain that feels too tall to climb, and the floor that feels to vast to wash. But up we climb, and the mop gets dipped again.
I promise to not “generate content” if you promise not to “consume” it.
Part 3 of the trolls who grew too big for the earth is coming this week, and I would love to hear from you after it arrives.
I hope you find a book, a movie, a song, a well done podcast, a visual art, or some long, deep conversation to dive into for hours and hours this week.
This is my prayer for you. With love.
