It's Time I Write A Post Instead Of A Note

Turning things up a notch

Photo by Jose Morales on Unsplash

I took a six week break from writing as I was on the road without a laptop.

I made a few scant grunts and mumbles via the mobile app both on Medium and Substack, but mainly stayed away.

The damage? One less paid subscriber, ten less likes on my latest Notes, ten more passive-aggressive barbs on my home feed, and the great big silence of the social media void.

But now I am back. Posting Notes. Little fried fast food thoughts. Half-baked reflections better left in the oven. I’m the comeback kid staging a late run in the bottom of the 9th inning. Only all of the fans already left the stadium to beat the traffic home.

Worse, my home feed seems to be trolling me with advice about ‘being consistent’ as a writer, as if taking a holiday is the official death knell to dreams and ambitions.

Who the fuck is consistent? Not me. Not life. Not the weather.

AI is consistent. Death is consistent. Long, slow, imperceptible organ failure is consistent. The yawning gap between the haves and have-nots is consistent.

Now I’m going to try to coax myself into writing something longer than a two-sentence Note. Why? To further aggravate my pattern of inconsistency.

The result of this stubborn effort will be a handful of views, zero paid subscribers, and possibly a single comment.

The home feed will further troll me about having to consistently engage with my readers and fans, to bend over and show constant gratitude, to detail the next 50 installments of my irrational and inconsistent ramblings, to show some kind of road map full of tourist destinations and landmarks my readers can see and touch.

Instead I’ll waffle between Medium and Substack, one foot in both camps, talking about one platform on the other platform and vice versa. What’s my strategy? There isn’t one.

My home feed will insist I need a strategy. A ten point plan. Whisper sweetly in the ear of my ‘superfans’. Perhaps become a sociopath.

Number one: I don’t envision a world of ‘superfans.’ I instead imagine a world of ambitious writers and uneasy readers. Lost souls, like me, in a dog-eat-dog, AI-eat-human, Tech Bro-eat-gig worker world.

I’m sure my home feed will now send me a success guru telling me to assassinate all of my voices of doubt, to murder them one by one with steroid-infused affirmations about being the center of my own universe, like the navel smack in the middle of my own body, the hero of my own drama, and that I should BELIEVE in myself and my capacity to grow paid subscribers on Substack, and finally to silence and squash once and for all any last shred of self-skepticism, and to ignore my bills and my starved Stripe account.

Who does that? Must I be high on coke? See double? Hallucinate? Believe in Santa?

Or do I just need to pretend I believe in Santa, pretend I’m on an upwardly mobile trajectory towards success, pretend I am one of Substack’s contagiously fortunate winners, pretend I’m growing subscribers by the hundreds?

Maybe one day I will be able to hear a pretend stadium of roaring applause.

So many superfans!! / Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

© Carlo Zeno 2025