Creativity, attention, & competition

On jockeying for eyes in the colosseum of social media, and figuring out how to opt out of the competing while still engaging wholeheartedly in the creating

Apr 20, 2023

I don’t want to fight for attention. I have done that for most of my life, seeking the ways I can stand out and catch the eye of someone important, of everybody important, of anybody at all, navigating bizarre social ranks to find a spot where I feel adequately seen.

I played the games and competed in the ways that we all do: in our childhood homes, in school, in relationships, in business, in appearances, in material goods. My hobby and passion from age 24 to 33 was the literal competition of fitness: every day in the gym I would compete, against the clock, against other people, against myself. I wouldn’t always win, though sometimes I did, but it didn’t matter. I was competing daily. For years. Until an injury forced me to stop.

I have also been a creator my whole life, from photography to writing to programs and coaching, to videos, public speaking and podcasting, and even some dabbling in music. The last decade in particular, these two forces have collided, and I have jockeyed for attention in the colosseum of social media and digital content. Posting, promoting, prompting, engaging, marketing, teaching, scrolling. Following the formulas, the scripts, the steps, fighting for a perpetual place at the top of your feed, fighting for eyeballs.

And this effort worked. By committing to the climb, my business grew from a scrappy side hustle to a six figure one-woman show, where I actually got to do what I am both good at enjoy: coach women, work with them intimately, help them place their feet on the ground and breathe a deep, overdue peace into their lives.

But then, I stopped — this time, by choice. I left the app that I had built everything on, the app that required I compete harder with every asinine algorithmic update, the app that flattened critical topics like mental health or complex cultural issues into one-liner viral infographics, the app that distanced us from ourselves and from each other under the guise of “community”, the app that calcified identities, the app that made sure we all competed and compared our rankings at least a little bit, every day. The costs of staying actively engaged in this race in which we were — are — all, clearly, collectively and individually losing, became too obvious to ignore, and I opted out. I left the competition.

*This* is where I want my attention to rest.

I still wrestle with the consequences of this choice, and sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to walk away from it all at the peak of my success. By choosing to leave the arena, I lost the eyeballs that paid my bills and fulfilled a piece of my life’s purpose, my valuable “relevancy” dissolving into the shadows as my microphones all fell silent. Do I even exist anymore when I’m no longer competing for attention?

Holly Whitaker

’s recent piece (as always) struck a chord with me on this note:

In other words, because I’m not capitalizing on my earlier successes or my privilege in a maximal way, turning everything I do into a profitable venture, I’m not doing it right. Foregoing what ‘everyone else’ is doing, and what we all know to be the winning formula in terms of building a brand or building an audience or getting your work out into the hands of your market and thus amassing wealth, or at least trying to, has felt like I’m losing some kind of opportunity, leaving money on the table, allowing myself to fade into obscurity, and in general just totally fucking myself over.

I’ve been wondering a lot about the line between expression and competition, especially in the digital domain in which we all now live. Expression is the act of creating and sharing. But the moment we press publish, we are pushing our precious creations out onto the global table where everyone else’s equally precious creations have also been pushed, and we hope secretly that somewhere in this colossal pile of content someone will pluck our tiny piece of work out from under the cacophony of voices and have their interest piqued just enough at first glance that they pause and give it an earnest look.

That is the hope anyway. And if we want our chances of this to be greater, we need to play the game. We need to be on all the apps, using all their newest features, following the crowds, publishing and posting at dizzying rates, promoting ourselves, staying “engaged”. And this is where what was once clear and simple has become murky and muddled for me.

I once had a stranger online tell me that I owed a debt of gratitude to the man who left a rude comment on a video I had created about my own life. I owed him, she said, because he watched my video. I should be thanking him, taking his “feedback”, and be extremely appreciative that anyone watched my free video at all, since after all, he didn’t have to. And in this she was right: he didn’t have to choose my video from the infinite pile of free videos. But he did, and even though he didn’t like it and he was sure to let me know — as if he had paid for a service that I was supposed to provide to him that I somehow failed to deliver on — my viewership went up by a count of one that day. And I therefore owe him for this unparalleled act of generosity.

I think about this bizarre interaction regularly (in fact it partly inspired this essay), as it seems it illustrates the confusing relationship between creator and consumer, the upside-down markers of value and success within the modern act of artistic creation, and the undercurrents of competition for attention that seem to sustain the entire content ecosystem.

The truth is I am deeply grateful for every view, every subscriber, every human who tunes in to my work. Even though my follower count has dropped by tens of thousands since the height of my Instagram career, there still somehow remains a group of people who listen to my podcast, watch my videos, read my words, and choose to give me their valuable attention. Some even (actual generous souls) who choose to pay the $5 a month to read and support this very publication. I do not take this for granted. It honestly baffles me sometimes. I am humbled and astounded by it, to say the least.

But I also am not sure I’m interested in fighting to optimize this, or even keep it this way, if it means I have to bow to the gods of algorithms and exert my life’s energy trying to claw my way to the top of some digital pile of content so I can claim enough attention to feel adequately seen or by extension, successful.

The truth is that I want to contribute, I think we all do. I want to connect, I want to alleviate someone else’s suffering or loneliness, I want share, I want to my work to be helpful, and this requires, of course, that it be seen. The truth is that not getting the response you expected after the terrifying and wholly exposing act of pressing publish is devastating, and having work be received to crickets (or trolls) has brought me tears and strife more times than I can count. The truth is that these instances can be mitigated by promoting more, promoting better, being on more social apps, or having a larger audience. But the truth also is I don’t want to build a fucking brand, I don’t want to draft perfect headlines and taglines and thumbnails, and I absolutely do not want to spend my days elbowing my way to the top of the news feed for two seconds of someone’s half assed attention. I just want to make things, and I want to share them.

I am figuring out how I can opt out of the competing while still engaging wholeheartedly in the creating.

We are vying for something in a thousand ways every day, toggling and ranking ourselves and others in countless social hierarchies from our bodies and appearances to the products we buy and the roles we play, expending our life’s energy in desperate pursuit of someone’s attention, of everyone’s attention, of anyone’s attention, for a moment of some cheap semblance of approval and appreciation. My professional career informs me just how many of us feel like we’re failing spectacularly at every single one of these races that we feel we have no choice but to remain in and run, even when we can feel the life being sucked out of us by every reluctant effort to move up a barely perceptible notch on the social ladder. But oh do we fear opting out — but maybe because it so viscerally feels like losing. But is it, really?

What I could no longer ignore about these (very human) races for status, for significance, for attention, for belonging, for “success”, is that the chasing of someone else’s attention requires all of our own.

The good news, however, is that we can leave most of these races, at least in part, if we want — of this I am certain. In recent years and to varying degrees, as I faced a neuromuscular injury, quit Instagram, sold my home and nearly everything I own to sail around the world and live more simply and sustainably, I have opted out of many of the traditional Western attention- and soul-sucking competitions that hold us captive. As a creator, Substack has been a haven since wandering the deserts of no-social-media-land. And though I first felt a flurry of excitement with their new Notes feature, after only a few moments on it, I can sense the urge to compete start to crawl itself back from the dead. I should post more, write more, write better, engage with other writers and readers more, ask my readers to consider become paid subscribers more often, promote myself more, host more chats, do more. If I just played the game, if I just once again dedicated my own life’s attention to the pursuit of everyone else’s.

I think of how many brilliant creators have felt this pressure to reach everyone online all the time, and how many have been immediately crushed and defeated by this endless sense of competition and comparison, and given up entirely. And the biggest shame of it all is not that they kept their work from the world (though this is a true loss), but that they kept it from themselves.

This letter by Kurt Vonnegut (recently shared by a fellow sailor and Substacker

Ashley Gremel

), where he responded to a letter from a classroom, offers a meaningful reminder:

I will not attempt to speak for everyone — our relationship to our work varies as much as the work itself. But I have realized that for me, the real gold to be found here isn’t from winning. It’s not in impressions or views or follower counts. It’s not even in hourly rates or paid subscribers or annual income. And though it’s close, the truest reward might not even be in impact or helping to change someone else’s life for the better or help them feel less alone — though to be clear, this is certainly one of the most powerful and significant returns on any type of creative work, be it poetry or coaching programs or music or writing. But it’s not the real gold. It’s not the real reward, for me these days, anyway.

The real reward from creating is learning more about what *gestures at everything* This Whole Thing even is. It’s in, as Vonnegut says, the becoming. It’s transmuting the impossibly tangled mess of being a tiny flawed human in this infinite universe into a tangible something, and holding it out in the palm of our hands to examine and contemplate and communicate with. It’s the internal clarifying of our inherent confusion, the articulating of our awe and enchantment, the distillation of big questions and difficult problems. It’s the looking right into the devastating reality of our perpetual uncertainty and place in this vast cosmos, shaping the nebulous mystery of it all in to words or form or sound, and then investigating it from this side, and then from that. The real gold is in the reclamation of our attention, in focusing ourselves back to the living, the making, the unfolding, the mystery, the process of turning our existence into a thing beyond ourselves.

And yet in some ways, in most ways perhaps, we collectively need this from each other. We need to see each other’s art.

Art can’t nourish us physically, can’t change the history of what has already happened. But art can help us build the emotional scaffolding that supports our processing, it can lay the cultural groundwork for change, it can cultivate the connections that we need for deeper empathy, and it can help to create a new story, a new future. Art can be a place that we find solace, and find community.
-
Anna Brones
, Tend the Light

Social media democratized talent, but this in turn has incentivized competition, requiring us to stay tap-dancing in the talent show, chained to the stage of our phones, posting and promoting and comparing ceaselessly as we struggle and strive for a sliver of whatever they have or whatever else success means today, while the raw and real earth under our feet goes unnoticed, while the actual relationships in our lives go untended, and while our precious attention gets syphoned into a tiny little screen.

And here is the line that I am trying to walk. I used to need the follower count and the likes and the attention on every piece I shared. But these days, it feels more and more like I can create and tell no one, rip it all up and distribute the pieces in a thousand trash bins, and I would be still better for it. I am still pressing publish (hi), still playing the game a little, but no longer at the expense of my life’s attention. I don’t need the views in order to feel adequately seen. I’m not here to win. I’m here to discover what’s inside this body and mind.

These days, I want to create for nothing more than my own self actualization, and then I want to step outside and swim in the sea and breathe in the evening air and look at the sky.

xo, Taylor

Creativity, attention, & competition

On jockeying for eyes in the colosseum of social media, and figuring out how to opt out of the competing while still engaging wholeheartedly in the creating

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