If you can write clearly and with an engaging prose, people will tell you that you should ‘become a writer’. Meaning that they think you should pursue writing as your full-time profession and earn money from doing so.
Obviously, getting paid to ‘do what you love’ seems great, but is it really? Having your writing suddenly become strictly regimented and maybe even sanitized sounds terrible. It sounds like relinquishing control of your own talent to be a workhorse for someone else.
I think that working as a full-time ‘writer’ seems especially terrible on internet blog sites like Medium, because the site and its pay model weren’t designed to financially sustain your life. When I see Medium users who are obviously churning out content to meet their quotas, I just feel bad for them. It seems stressful. I’m a member of Medium’s partner program because I think that $5 a month is a reasonable price to pay to access the content on here, but I would never dream of trying to “make it big” here.
Writing is fun, and I wish that it was a skill more people took time to develop. It’s therapeutic to have to sort through your own thoughts in order to write/type them down. Most social media sites heavily limit your number of characters, so it’s also fun to break that mold and go really ‘in-depth’ on a particular thought or topic you have.
I feel a similar way about making videos, whether that be on YouTube or TikTok. It can be a fulfilling experience to record a video of yourself rambling about whatever you want and having other people engage with it. But once you have to make those videos, you suddenly have a ton of external forces and pressures affecting the process.
I always see YouTubers talk about ‘burnout’ and it’s like, yeah… you’re making 10 min — 2 hr long videos, which includes hours and hours of recording, editing, and speaking. It seems like burning out as a content creator is almost inevitable. This an annoying phrase, but we really aren’t robots. Even if we’re doing ‘what we love’. Just because someone likes to write or create videos, I really don’t think they should immediately start trying to monetize that interest.
It’s just sad seeing content creators (of any sort) talk about burnout, because they probably once really enjoyed doing whatever it was they’re now burned out from. That’s why it seems terrible to me.
I write on Medium whenever I want to. I don’t have a “post goal” or even specific topics that I stick to. These websites should serve us, not vice versa. If you ever feel that an app or site is sucking away too much of your time, you can step away. If you view these sites as legitimate career opportunities, you will not be afforded that same privilege.
Monetizing your interests and talents can be lucrative, but I don’t think it’s something we should encourage everyone to do. Contemporary social media sites make it far too easy for anyone to create hordes of content and cultivate their own ‘audience’. But that’s all that these websites provide — they are not legitimate replacements for employment. Creating consumable digital content for a living just isn’t something we should encourage people to do. Content creation as a job is inevitably toxic, and I feel bad for those who are constantly stretched to their limit and worried about what they should ‘put out next’.
Our thoughts, ideas, and opinions as human beings are so valuable. As such, we should strive to share them of our own accord, in whatever manner we desire. Creating content online for a living is the antithesis to this principle, because at that point you are inherently no longer creating the content of your own accord, but someone else’s.
