The Circus Comes for Everything

There’s no room to create quietly anymore. To write just for the sake of it. Everything has to sell itself, and if it doesn’t, it fades into obscurity.

Substack once felt like a refuge. Quiet. Direct. A place for words to stretch out without being forced into spectacle. No algorithms to game, no endless scrolling, no pressure to perform. Just the page and the people willing to read it.

But the circus always comes. First, it’s a whisper—recommendations, engagement metrics, a nudge toward “growth.” Then it’s threads, debates, and the relentless pull to turn writing into content, into something clickable, shareable, marketable. What once felt sacred becomes another stage, another performance. I sure can live without Notes where people market how they make a living on substack or the shouting becomes cool again.

Maybe I am just turning into an old nag but I find it exhausting, this cycle. Every corner of the internet bends toward visibility, toward noise. Substack, Twitter, even Instagram—they all start with promise and end the same way: flooded by the algorithm, chasing the crowd, trading authenticity for reach.

There’s no room to create quietly anymore. To write just for the sake of it. Everything has to sell itself, and if it doesn’t, it fades into obscurity. They call it connection, community, progress. But it’s just a prettier word for control.

So maybe it’s time to go back to the spaces they can’t touch—yet. A personal blog, a private letter, the kind of writing that doesn’t care if it’s seen or celebrated. Writing that exists for its own sake, because it has to.

Let the platforms burn themselves out. Let the circus roar until it collapses under its own weight. The page will always be here, waiting, quiet and still. A place where the noise can’t reach. A place to write like it matters, even if no one’s watching.