Of course, for a content creator, what they’re creating is the important thing in the world. The problems begin when they begin to falsely believe that the world will fall apart if they don’t have something to say or post something.
Sometime last year, I read a piece about the real-life pressures faced by content creators.
While many of them are facing and have faced issues, a few of them serious enough to require medical attention, I believe it calls for a paradigm shift in the way we create and consume content.
So let’s break up this up into the two sides of content — consuming and creating.
Consuming content has no guard rails
Remember back in the day when newspapers used to have the television show listings? That’s how we used to plan our television time. If our favorite movie or show came on at a particular time, we cleared our schedules and sat down to watch. Music was listened to mostly on tapes and CDs. Essentially, there was no endless parade of things to see and listen to. We worked around entertainment. Today, entertainment, or content works for us in the form of being on-demand.
The word content encapsulates everything — social media feeds, shows, music, memes, almost everything. This endless parade of content has, in many ways, turned us into zombies. It means we are constantly on any one of our devices, trying to catch up with something we possibly can’t catch up with.
Everyone is a content creator
Because content is such a loosely used word, everything falls under its ambit. A tweet, a post, a video, a forward, anything and everything is considered content. While this makes all of us content creators of some sort if we are reasonably active on social media, it also gives rise to a pressure that is largely self-created. This pressure also means creating stuff for the sake of it.
At the same time, there also exists a better way to create quality content.
Here are a few daily blogs I follow religiously:
- https://seths.blog/ — Marketer Seth Godin’s blog, probably the most popular blog in the world
- https://alearningaday.blog/ — Rohan Rajiv’s blog, a delightful one with many lessons gleaned from personal experiences
- https://gabethebassplayer.tumblr.com/ — From what I can gather, this Gabe is some sort of musician. But his pithy blog posts are simply amazing and are sure to make you think.
The best thing I like about all these blogs is this — they are well-thought of and the posting happens just once a day, giving the reader enough time to assimilate what has been written. There is no endless barrage of nonsense that essentially serves no other purpose but to tick the ‘number of pieces of content’ box.
While it was Seth Godin who initially inspired me to write every day, it was only recently that I realized why I write — to make sense of the world and put my observations in perspective. The writing every day (almost) is only a way of enforcing discipline, not to make my million non-existent fans happy, non-existent being the operative word. Of course, it feels good to have something you have created acknowledged but in today’s ‘hyper-contentitive’ world, thinking that someone will run out of things to read if I don’t post something just makes me delusional.
Of course, for a content creator, what they’re creating is the important thing in the world. The problems begin when they begin to falsely believe that the world will fall apart if they don’t have something to say or post something. The moment one begins to play to an imaginary gallery, it’s a downward spiral that only gets worse.
The essential thing to understand is this — there are no barriers to creating or consuming content these days. This means exerting pressure on oneself to catch up with or create content relentlessly is actually a very stupid thing. In an actual race, there is a finish line. In content, there is no finish line, making getting anxious and depressed about creating and consuming it quite meaningless. Losing your mind about something you can control is one thing. Losing your mind about something you can’t possibly control is something that, in many ways, is avoidable.
When the boundaries of consumption and creation dissolve, it’s on us to make our own.
