Substack has become an anthropological study in creative calcification. Writers publicly transforming into content strategists, thinkers becoming take-generators, artists evolving into audience builders. It’s fascinating to watch in real time—the slow fossilization of creative ambition.
Here’s how it happens: Someone starts a newsletter to share their work. Within months, they’re writing about writing newsletters. Within a year, they’re teaching others to do the same. The original creative impulse—the deep research project, the piece of scholarship, the novel, the screenplay, the collection of poems—becomes the thing they mention having “on the back burner.” The back burner becomes a graveyard.
It’s not tragic. It’s just… interesting. Like watching sediment form layers. Each weekly newsletter adds another thin stratum, until the original bedrock of artistic intention disappears. The math makes perfect sense. Why spend three years researching or writing a novel that might never find readers when you can spend three minutes writing a take that definitely will? Why struggle with character development when you can develop your personal brand?
The Watercolor Problem:
This calcification mirrors a historical pattern. After photography was invented, watercolor painting exploded among the middle class. Suddenly everyone could be an artist without the technical mastery oils demanded. The medium was forgiving, accessible, democratic. The result? Thousands upon thousands of forgettable weekend landscapes. Earnest amateur botanicals. Competent but unremarkable seascapes that hung in parlors and gathered dust.
Substack is the watercolor painting of literature.
Just as watercolors made “being an artist” accessible, Substack has made “being a writer” accessible to anyone with opinions and wifi. No editors, no publishers. Just you, your thoughts, and a subscribe button. The results are predictably similar: thousands of forgettable hot takes. Earnest but unremarkable personal essays. Competent but derivative commentary that fills inboxes and gathers digital dust.
Watercolors were forgiving. You could fix mistakes with water. The technique was simple enough to learn quickly, complex enough to feel sophisticated. Newsletters offer the same false accessibility. Anyone can write 1,200 words about productivity. The format feels substantial, even literary. But watercolors, for all their charm, rarely produced masterpieces. The medium encouraged adequacy. Pleasant. Inoffensive. Ultimately forgettable.
Victorian watercolorists weren’t wrong. They found joy, community, purpose. Their paintings decorated homes, recorded travels. But it was craft, not boundary-pushing art. The real painters—those pushing oils into new territories—largely ignored watercolors. The medium couldn’t handle what they needed to express.
Similarly, the newsletter economy rewards consistency over quality, frequency over depth, engagement over excellence. Writers adapt rationally. The truly insidious part isn’t that people choose newsletters over novels—it’s that they begin to believe newsletters are the equivalent of novels. That hot takes constitute literature. That building an audience is equivalent to building a lasting body of work.
The medium becomes the message, and the message becomes: “Look at me being a writer in public.” But the actual writing—the slow, private, unglamorous work of crafting something worth rereading—quietly disappears. Substack turns the creative process into performance art. Writers don’t disappear into their work; they document the experience of trying to work. The process becomes the product. It’s like watching someone practice piano scales in Carnegie Hall instead of preparing for a concert.
The Comfort of the Container & The Choice
Here’s the paradox: building an audience changes what you’re willing to create. You write for the people already reading, not for those who might discover something truly different. The audience becomes a constraint, not a catalyst. You optimize for expectations, not challenge. You give them what they subscribed for, not what they didn’t know they needed.
The newsletter format is seductive. Contained. Manageable. Forgiving. You can have an off week. Your audience, building their own content engines, understands. But novels don’t forgive. Screenplays don’t understand. Poems don’t give you credit for trying. They demand excellence or they fail completely.
Everyone’s free to choose their path: build businesses, communities, influence. But let’s not confuse that with building literature. Newsletters can be sharp, useful, generous. But they live in the now. Built for circulation, not permanence. They’re part of the vanity fair—performing insight, curating selves, reminding everyone we’re still here. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We all want to be seen. But let’s not confuse visibility with value.
Literature operates on a different timescale. It doesn’t arrive in your inbox. It doesn’t depend on metrics. It waits, sometimes for decades, to be found. And when it is, it doesn’t just inform—it stays. You’ll stumble across it—too late to tell the writer how much it mattered. And you’ll realize they weren’t writing for attention. They were writing for whoever was still paying attention.
The writers who’ll matter in fifty years? They’re probably not building newsletter audiences. The medium can’t contain what they’re trying to create. Novels (or their digital equivalents) demand sustained attention—both to write and to read. They require commitment, patience, the willingness to disappear into something larger than a tweet thread. They aren’t consumed during a commute.
The Deeper Malaise: Sophisticated Surrender
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: this entire phenomenon—the newsletters, the productivity systems—might just be elaborate forms of surrender. Those Victorian watercolorists weren’t merely amusing themselves. They were retreating. The world had become too industrial, too complex, too beyond control. So they painted flowers, creating the illusion of meaningful activity while history churned on.
We’re doing the same with different tools. Every Substack essay about the decline of literature, every “creator economy” strategy—it’s rearranging furniture in a house that might be on fire. We optimize personal systems while collective systems strain. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of certain entrenched systems. So we retreat into personal optimization. We build individual solutions to systemic problems. We paint watercolors while Rome burns.
The productivity obsession isn’t really about productivity—it’s about control. When big problems feel unsolvable, we focus on the small ones that feel manageable (inbox zero, content calendars). Substack provides perfect cover for this retreat. It feels important, engaged. But it’s really just a sophisticated parlor game. We’re not building a new literary culture or solving the problems we dissect. We’re creating elegant distractions.
The watercolors were beautiful. The newsletters are thoughtful. Neither stopped the machine. Maybe this is what giving up looks like in the 21st century: not despair, but infinite creativity channeled into ultimately inconsequential pursuits. Not surrender, but sophisticated busy work. We haven’t stopped trying to be artists; we’ve stopped believing art can change anything fundamental.
So we paint our watercolors and publish our newsletters, all while the real world operates by logics we can’t influence. The productivity isn’t productive. The creativity isn’t transformative. The revolution isn’t revolutionary. It’s just… pretty. And harmless. And ultimately forgettable. Which might be exactly what we need it to be.
And isn’t that the quiet horror? Every year does get shorter, devoured not by grand failures, but by the thousand tiny efficiencies of the content grind – the research rabbit holes that yield a tweet, the profound thoughts diluted into digestible bullet points, the novels reduced to “coming soon” teases in a footer. Plans don’t just come to naught; they metastasize into half a page of scribbled lines. Hanging on in quiet desperation isn’t merely the English way; it’s the Creator’s Creed – You curate your vanishing, monetize uour malaise. You didn’t run out of time; you auctioned it off, week by week, until nothing remained but the echo of what you meant to build and the hollow metrics of what you did instead.
This appeared in my newsletter because the irony was too perfect to resist.
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