not everyone is a content creator

and not everyone should have to be

my instagram bio reads “not an influencer,” not because i’m trying to be ironic, but because i’m trying to make a point. i tell people that i’m a writer, i’m a director, i produce, i act, and i consult, and i watch the specifics get scrambled in their heads before falling out the other era as ‘creator.’ it’s a zeitgeist marker that i hate because it’s reductive.

i don’t make content; i write essays. if someone else wants to make content, that’s their business, but i want to live in a world where words have meaning.

is it laziness?

is it the byproduct of being addicted to our phones, that everything we consume turns into slop because we’re swallowing everything down without chewing it first?

meta emailed me the other day asking if i wanted to be part of their creator program. substack is launching a creator fund (even though their platform is, or was, writer first). everyone who does anything is a creator, but i need us to be so real because it’s easier to be a creator than it is to be creative.

books, movies, essays, songs—all thoughtful art takes time to be birthed. but content can just be churned out. by the time you’re done reading this, another round of content is already on your feed.

a youtuber broke down exactly how long it takes her to film her vlogs. i was engrossed because there was a specificity to what she does, much like there is a specificity in what writers do. you would never know the years it took us both to grow in our craft because every platform wants us all to be the same.

tons of influencers have started substacks as another arm to their business (which is what i define as influencing, by the way, when you make yourself the product). i think it’s great—long live the art of blogging. but let’s not conflate one mastery with another.

you might be reading this and asking yourself, why does this even matter?

it may not. maybe i’m an old man yelling at the clouds. or maybe i just miss the individuality of craft and hate being addressed as anything other than the thing that i am. a writer, in case you missed that.

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