The Numbers Versus the Point

But, I’ve already heard, you’re abandoning—and even worse, not “growing” your audience!! You’re giving up such great opportunities to get subscribers—to be exposed! Forsooth! Maybe so; maybe I’m missing out on a lot of LinkedIn “impressions,” but I’m not even entirely sure what that variety of “eyeball” would mean. Certainly not that your post has been read, much less appreciated. Maybe you won’t be clapped at by someone on Medium, and maybe you’ll miss the twenty cents that’ll earn you. But ditching all this writing-while-striving also means you won’t have to spend your time attending to bad-faith commentary, or doing all the extraneous and stressful things—all wrapped up under the umbrella of what I’ll generally call marketing—involved in trying to gain paid followers, “stick to brand,” get noticed by as many people as possible, and all that jazz. If you just want to write and explore, and maybe write along with and for a few people who appreciate it, hell, that’s great.

And here’s the thing with exposure: I get the sense that people who tell you to be everywhere as much as possible, “putting yourself out there,” etc., forget there are some pretty negative, or at least questionable, meanings of the term. The most obvious, of course, is sort of the creepy logical end of self-promotion: exposing far too much of yourself, with offense and disgust and maybe even harm piling up all around. But then there’s also the variant that cautions you about spending too much time in the elements, lest you permanently damage your soft tissue—or just freeze to death—in the cold. Those elements are usually weather-related—but I like to think, too, that too much time exposed to weird social media environments and populations that play for notice at all cost only results in the deadening of (I’ll go ahead and say it) the soul’s soft tissue.

It reminds me of the arguments I always somehow walked in on in grad school, where many of my classmates were either Christian clerics or practical theologians, always fretting about the decline of churchgoing in the US. No one’s interested in church, or what we say or do! How do we bring people in? How do we get them interested? We have to meet people where they’re at! The handwringing and the hip solutions always sounded to me like a combination of giving in to the very “world” whose humanity-denying practices the church liked to criticize, and getting people in the doors only to pull a bait and switch. Wait! We thought we were here for a pizza party—now we’re sitting through a sermon? Instead of concentrating on living out their truth and letting that be enough—and attractive enough an example to those for whom joining in or participation or whatever would be meaningful—this crowd seemed to be watering itself and its own messages down in order to be the most popular gathering place in town, or at least popular enough not to feel like middle school outcasts.

What I’m trying to say with that bad example is, in other words, what are we all doing with so much connection? What does it all result in? If you can make a living taking photos of yourself, and can handle the constant performance, then great, do your thing! But as for me and my virtual house, I think I’d just like the time to explore, quietly and simply, without invading anyone’s privacy or flashing ads or unwittingly training some AI tool thanks to my own work putting words together. I’ll give it a shot, then; here goes!