If you clicked on this post thinking it will make you the next millionaire-from-home I would stop right here. It has nothing to do with that and yet, it has everything to do with it.
Be honest with me for a moment. I am aware I am not exactly a Substack authority, sitting here with my 100 subscribers and 7 posts. But I imagine every single one of you reading this article has seen at least one article this month “How I made 10k $ on Substack in one month?”, “How I grew to 100000 paid subscribers in 3 months?”, etc. - a screenshot of a dashboard, a strategy, financial plan and at the end of the page a small button with a course link, priced as if they are doing you a favor.
yours truly
How does this make you feel? Genuinely. I can tell you how it made me feel and I can only assume that I am not the only one, even if maybe we don’t say it out loud as much.
It made me feel I am not good enough.
What am I doing with my 100 subscribers and my 7 posts, while Susan is out there buying a house from selling-courses money? Substack is supposed to be this next big thing, no? Yet here I am, doing the thing I always did with internet, with crypto, with Tiktok, watching from the outside window into the store, arriving exactly at the closing hour, feeling the fomo (fear of missing out) but not reaching for the treasure. What am I doing so wrong? Teach me, master of all trades who writes posts like this for a living and sell the recipe for those who are hungry.
The recipe is always right there, isn’t it? We all know it:
4-5 note a day
1-2 articles per week
build a community you talk to everyday
private articles for paying subscriber
get VIP subscriber
etc.
It is all so achievable, so close you don’t even need talent or passion anymore, you just need ChatGPT or Claude. Feed it a prompt, get that essay, cash the check.
What I didn’t expect though is that it makes me feel both superior and inferior at the same time. I don’t want this article to shit talk those who actually sell these kind of courses but I feel we need to face the emotional facts.
I click on those articles because truth be told, yeah, I do want to know how much Susan made last month. I see it and then I immediately feel inferior. Why? She’s making money while I am doing it for free, while still doing it half-anonymously because I don’t even have the guts to face the music. So yes, she is way ahead of me.
But after I see the numbers and reading the content, I get it. I is vague. It is something in the shape of an essay but not quite there. No sentence is making me question something or feel something. The only thing is making me feel is envy, and it is a feeling I don’t want to embrace here or in my life anymore. That is the moment superiority kicks back in (hehe, at least I write my own words, at least I spend some time thinking what I am writing about my struggles at the moment and how can I help other feel less alone). I may not be able to help you be the next millionaire based on my courses but maybe that is not the point for me. I am better than Susan, right?
Isn’t it strange though? How I can feel two things at the same time, on top of each other, feeding of each other and leaving me with an empty feeling inside. This can only happen, I assume, when you’re standing at the exact intersection of wanting to be seen and refusing to perform to be seen. Yeah, maybe Susan optimized for reach and audience. At the same time I am optimizing for honesty and since that can’t be sold in a course, we are on different paths here.
But underneath all of this, a bigger and uglier question keep popping up in my head:
Are we (the ones writing think-opinion-pieces about Substack monetization at 11pm, feeling smug about our authenticity) any better than those battling in comment on Facebook with people they don’t know?
From a distance, it might look the same. Two camps, human writers versus AI-assisted one, each convinced they hold the moral standard, each a little right. I fear we’re entering an era where this has no end, it just moves platforms. Tiktok yesterday. Substack today. Something else tomorrow.
I don’t have a clear answer. But what I do know is that I have some posts, I have some subscribers, I even talk to 2 people from Substack, so in the end at least 2 people read and related to something I wrote. No formula, to VIP subscribers, no courses. And maybe this is something you can’t fake or buy.
So if you came here looking for the recipe, I am sorry you lost 5 minutes of your life. If you came here because maybe at least once in your life you felt it to, than I think you already know that it is not just you and maybe slower is better.
Love,
A.
There have been scams and 'get rich quick' schemes since forever. For some reason they seem to have become more acceptable in the oast years again 🤔 For writing and creating content, I think you're right that the amount of (AI) slop will increase. But at the same time the tolerance towards it might decrease. At least mine has.
I'm all for producing the content you would like to consume 🫶🏼