Has Writing Made Me Selfish?
Or Have I Always Been This Way! Social Media, Self-Publishing, and Internet Vanity
“Religion, science, art, commerce, industry are in a state of motion,” Edward Bernays writes in the opening paragraph of “Manufacturing Public Opinion: The Why and The How” (1928). “The inertia of society and institutions is constantly combated by the activity of individuals with strong convictions and desires.”
I wasn’t drawn to writing because of its capacity to shift inertia - personal, institutional, or otherwise. I wrote my first stories with crayons on 8x11 printer paper, illustrations taking up the larger half of the page, misspelled words taking up the other half. I selfishly cast myself as the lead in my fictional tales, taking myself on my own Hero’s Journey, not yet knowing I was likely primed to write that archetype by the stories I’d read and watched before that. I drew my dad with a cane and top hat, not because he wore those things but because I somehow thought that would make him a man to readers. I colored skirts on my mom and sisters.
Pattern recognition is an important part of childhood development, particularly as it relates to developing mathematical and musical skills. I didn’t find myself naturally excelling at math or music production, but I could identify the patterns found in a compelling story. I enjoyed leaning into these patterns and learning more about myself and the world at large through the words I selected, and the order I chose to arrange them. I sharpened my skills as a writer by sharpening my skills as an imitator. I drilled the five-paragraph rhetorical essay format into my head in high school. Churning those papers out was like brushing my teeth - annoying at times but a bit necessary. As I began reading more intellectually stimulating works for pleasure, I began learning which ideas and voices I more closely connected with. Further attempting imitation, further developing a sense of discernment and writing style that felt like “me” somehow.
In 2022, I was driven to self-publish my writing online due to an intense bottling of feelings and thoughts that I felt like I needed to unload somewhere. I had filled up diary after diary and engaged in copious conversations with friends about the state of the world and the internet but was left unsatiated. Somewhere in this dissatisfaction, I was stirred to put cursor to Google Doc in hopes of releasing some kind of pressure valve. Once the words were published, I toiled with regret, swiping my thumb downwards on my phone, waiting for any sign of life. What was the point of sharing my thoughts if nobody considered them? I cynically thought to myself. After what felt like days, a comment spawned - some stranger said they enjoyed what I had written. Some kind of switch flipped. Somehow I wasn’t just some girl with a diary anymore, I was a person - a writer? An artist? - who was playing a larger part in the collaborative human search for meaning. A person who concurrently seeks out and creates their own truth. I was a person with a - drumroll please - blog!
Writing and self-publishing have granted me the invaluable gift of keeping up a deliciously cathartic and consistent creative practice, continuously refining my brain and tongue. Writing encourages me to think closely about myself and the phenomena co-occurring around and through me, compelling me to read and observe more closely than I may otherwise do. It’s enabled me to make new friends and engage in thought-provoking conversations on culture and media with people I may never speak to in person. And it’s allowed me to bypass an opaque publishing world, in which convincing others to platform your work can be a lengthy and disheartening process, at times. Nonetheless, the outlet through which I self-publish - the internet, and more specifically, the platform Substack - allows for matters of vanity and power to come into sharper relief more often than I care to admit.
The internet is simultaneously vast and pint-sized in that it’s a neverending warehouse of information delivered in helpings that range from gargantuan to minuscule. Since there’s so much to get through - the warehouse is neverending after all - the teaspoon bites of information have proven to reign supreme. People’s attention spans favor low effort and high reward, a reality we’ve known for over a century, as people put down books and turned up the volume on their radios and televisions. In such a landscape, it feels as though the inertia Bernays writes about becomes a bit more flexible.
The method through which people can shift public opinion is necessarily reliant on spectacle. Bernays knew this, writing “Ideas and situations must be made impressive and dramatic in order to overcome the inertia of established traditions and prejudices.” Drama online manifests in a variety of ways, whether it’s coming up with the most witty quote-tweet in a widespread back-and-forth about a person or generational behavioral trend, or cultivating a glamorous or tragic esoteric online persona, bolstering your internet ethos, your follower count, and often your rhetorical power. Online people - as with offline people - benefit greatly from having saturated personal identities, as a means to sell products and disseminate ideas.
In an environment in which you must shout to be heard over so much noise, it’s not hard to imagine how intention can become muddled, specifically in terms of one’s intention to write and share their work. As I mentioned, I began sharing my writing out of a kind of desperation, in need of a place to put all these things I was thinking about and feel some kind of connection. As we transition into new life stages, we’re met with thoughts that we think are utterly unique to us, which can feel quite isolating - realizing you’re not alone in these thoughts brings about a healthy dose of clarity. I sent out a flare signal and was met with a response. A response that’s brought forth a reminder that I’m not alone and an opportunity to develop my thoughts and writing abilities further. And a response that also feeds the narcissistic tendencies that have sprouted out of cultivating an online personality for nearly half my life.
For The Guardian, Julian Baggini writes that “There is an inherent vanity in writing: believing you have something special to offer the world is built-in to the very act of putting your work out into the world.” This echoes the motives that Bernays cites for why people are compelled to try to shift public opinion: social motives and motives of personal ambition. “Personal ambition to succeed, to convince others, to win recognition are basic motives that have activated most of the leaders of the world,” he writes. Having your writing validated by a large group of people certainly wavers along Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, probably landing somewhere between “esteem” and “love and belonging.”
Beyond that, social media has found ways to quantify, bottle, and sell this recognition by rewarding those with high engagement and high follower counts through Creator Funds and “official” verifications of status. “Non-social media” platforms like Substack, with their beholdenness to investors and the inevitable goal of making some kind of profit, end up adopting similar clout markers to boost activity.
In her brilliant essay, “The elite capture of Substack,”
writes that Substack has injected its platform with “game-like interactions” that “reward the user with vanity metrics like views, likes and comments on [users’] posts, subscribers…and eventually one of several checkmark badges that essentially denote who is a part of the elite.” Substack’s latest “follower” feature also serves as a rather empty, Twitter-esque attribute, stripped of any relationship to writing or relative differentiation from “subscriber.” As Hayes writes, all of these incentives motivate writers to focus on bolstering their audience through various engagement strategies, like posting on a schedule, restacking article quotes, and sharing others’ works. These are all fairly low-effort tactics that I have admittedly adopted, but the question I’m increasingly asking myself is why?Starting as early as eleven when I made my first social media profile, I have actively and quietly considered myself a commodity that I ought to market and sell to the best of my ability through social media. This is, in part, a reaction to the melding of patriarchy and capitalism. I’ve earnestly welded an attention-deserving girl/woman identity and attempted to cement myself as more of an exceptional individual than a part of a homogenous collective. It’s also a reaction to the way social media platforms are designed, in which your “self” is meant to be encapsulated in a series of images, and if that self is excellent enough, it can garner a following and perhaps money. Perhaps this format is the only way I know how to exist online. Perhaps it’s the only way I know how to write online.
There are many talented writers I look up to on Substack - many of whom became active on the platform quite early - who appear to make a good chunk of their living off self-publishing. The possibility of this - of making a living off my own published work amid a time when working in media is increasingly precarious - is intoxicating. I can’t help it - each “New free subscriber…” email I get ignites my dopamine receptors, the same way an Instagram “like” did when I was in high school. I often have to remove myself from my subscriber graph and activity page. My rejected pitches, my long corporate-owned hours, the dicey media job market, and my learned propensity to reap validation from an online following - all of it has made me feel a bit selfish, or at least self-obsessed. And I fear, at times, that the promise of validation could cause my writing quality to rot. That it could make me lose focus of why I loved writing to begin with - to create, to connect, and to learn more about myself and the world around me.
I like Baggini’s answer to this, which begins with the idea that any personal pursuit involves some degree of vanity, which at its root, means “daring to believe that there might be some significance in what we insignificant creatures do.” To believe that you have something worth saying is to be a bit self-involved, but if the polar opposite is believing that your voice is of little value, it makes more sense to lean towards a more checked version of the former.
As I continue reaching new people online with my writing, I think it’s important to look at my motives closely. Am I writing about a buzzy topic because I have an opinion I fervently want to share, or because I subconsciously want to improve my blog’s SEO, parroting perspectives into an agreeable echo chamber? Am I driven by clicks or connection? Am I writing a story I want to tell or am I just trying to meet my arbitrary publishing goal?
“The ultimate vanity is to believe you have none,” Baggini finishes his article. So long as we’re aware of the self-congratulatory spiral that social media - Substack included - can send us down, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to resist it - to the extent we can - while also following through on our personal and professional ambitions. I think both can co-occur. To be aware of your vanity is to be able to curb it, ideally. However, turning off our email notifications and, ultimately, getting offline more often is one of the most surefire ways to free ourselves. I intend to keep writing on here, but with long-form apps inching more short-from, I also intend to turn to my diary.
It's so cathartic to see this problem captured so eloquently. On one hand, I feel like short-form content platforms have disincentivized having Something to Say, so I really appreciate the thoughtful interactions Substack has been able to foster. At the same time, many of the notes feed conversations around being a writer are frustrating and slightly eye roll-inducing – sometimes it all feels more like LinkedIn than anything else.
God you put so well into words the way I feel about this website and publishing as a whole and it’s nice to see I’m not alone. The statistics are addicting and I’ve never thought of considering posting as something gamified but you’re totally right.