Don't Be Authentic. Be Productive.

addictions, algorithms, asbestosis

It’s been a quiet week in most areas. A little nausea, tight chest now and again, the usual stuff that comes with Asbestosis. My head’s been good too, apart from some new-old type behaviour that I’ll come to later. Maybe I’m getting bedded into the final approach to life’s final station.

I’ve been writing on Substack for ten months. I’m a writer and Substack looked like a good outlet for my work. Much of what I write these days focuses on my terminal illness and how to make good use of the limited time I have left. I’ve found Substack to be great for getting my thoughts down and in a straight line. I like the community, the people I interact with. Like everything, it isn’t perfect.

My addictive personality kicked in this week. The new-old behaviour, seeing the drug and thinking that’s what I need. So it plugged itself into Substack and set to work. The need to be needed grew .

We went to see ‘I Swear’ at the Curzon. I like the cinema because they have love seats where Alison and I can sit together and cuddle as and when. And few people go on a mid-week daytime which is a big bonus. We had the whole cinema to ourselves right up to the few minutes before the film rolled. A group of old people bustled in, talking, faffing around with coats, jabbing at mobile phones, utterly oblivious of a world outside their own. They sat in front of us, the whole cinema to choose from, but they sat in front of us. Unbelievable. What are the odds?

The film is good, not fantastic, but it had Alison crying most the way through. It’s about a young lad who develops Tourette’s Syndrome. The trials he endures at the hands of people, society, authority. A few people saw past the illness and he had the chance to build a life and pass his knowledge of how to live with what society would call a socially unacceptable attitude.

I took away his triumph, he got to see the queen who gave him a medal for his work educating people about the disease. And, how utterly cruel the human being can be when it senses someone at odds.

I’ve been seeing posts on Substack recently about the way the platform is heading. Invariably, they are from someone who has or thinks they have the inside track on how the platform is changing. It centers around the section called ‘Notes’ and there are lots and lots of posts about ‘Notes’, how to use them to build a following and subscribers paying thousands to read content.

There’s stuff about video content too and large numbers of people selling courses in growing a Substack following. The posts are long, seem well researched and laid out, though lacking any real evidence I would expect to see. The posts are broken into manageable sections taking the writer to the sunlit uplands of thousands, nay, tens of thousands, of subscribers and a deluge of money flowing into the darkened bedrooms of content creators.

This was what I needed. Big numbers. I signed up and stepped onto the production line, posting, re-posting, building anxiety and tension, checking several times an hour to see how many had commented, liked, followed, subscribed. But the numbers were going the wrong way so I knew I had to try harder.

Don’t be authentic, be productive.

I noticed old patterns and new ones. Those posts, telling me how great I would feel by working hard to build my following, they all looked the same. The structure, the section headings in bold, the iambic pentameter of process, the certainty without evidence that the author was right. And I noticed my level of tension, my neediness, the stress building up. More importantly the time I was devoting to this, that I had taken away from the things I used to enjoy (there’s a word to cogitate) the time I would have spent with Alison and the dogs, the books I hadn’t had time to read.

Consider this; If you’re not paying for the thing you are using, then you are the product.

Social media of any type is designed to keep me using it, for what reasons I have little knowledge but it feels like financial gain for the people that own the code. And the product isn’t a community of like minded people, it is whatever they take from us and we freely give. It’s capitalism cloaked as social-ism.

Stuff like this isn’t good for addicts. It’s like the alcoholic drinking low alcohol wines. It re-establishes the connections in the brain that promote dependence on something for a sense of well-being. And it’s built on sand.

I speak only for myself, others may have a different view and that’s fine. I’m glad I spotted it and I’m glad I’m pulling back from the daily grind of creating for someone else. I set out on Substack to find people who had a life, thoughts, ethos that I liked or could aspire to, and that still applies. I follow people and people follow me. I subscribe and people subscribe to me (I don’t have a fee and that’s my choice) and the number that read and comment and share I’m grateful for. But this is for me and I’m staying and not changing.

We have some friends coming for brunch in a minute. The last visitors we will have, as I enter my own self-induced shutdown, Battening-Down-The-Hatches, I call it. I will physically isolate now until at least the beginning of April 2026, the planets willing. It is to protect me from infection of mainly airborne diseases, the numbers are already beginning to rise. I will attend the Boardman Tasker award ceremony, but I will also give them a video of my acceptance speech should I be honoured.

I like this quiet period of my year. Staying home, fires, reading, hearty meals, reading, writing, resting. Think of the Dormouse settling down in its warm nest.

Take care and good luck

Paul