Remembering Why I Write

Why I'm returning to substack and my plans for this blog.

Once again I return to substack for the first post in over a year, just as my post last year was the first since 2023. When I returned, I was disappointed to find how Substack had become severed from the X/Twitter ecosystem by a series of very stupid decisions on X’s part. Since using twitter was so much more habitual for me, and especially since a large part of my writing flow lies in reading others’ content and thinking through how to incorporate or refute it, it just shook out that after I returned to writing under the Heliotroph name my work remained mostly focused on Twitter.

I did enjoy that X expanded its character limits so that medium-form writing became possible natively. For a while I was satisfied to use Twitter for off the cuff medium-form writing, while saving my long-form efforts for work on the next book, which I currently estimate is between 1/3rd and 1/2 finished. However after getting used to the new algorithms, I have come to the conclusion that medium form content simply does not result in growth on twitter. Every effortpoast is met with support from the same ~30 solid mutuals but never breaks out of that circle to be seen by new eyes. Meanwhile I return to substack to see that my old posts are still getting new engagement and my subscriber count is growing despite being completely inactive.

It has become clear that Twitter is essentially a “solved game” now. The formula for engagement is:

• Post something relatively open-ended that invites knee-jerk responses of support or denial.

• Include a stimulating image OR quote tweet an already successful and provocative post — ideally one that also includes a stimulating image.

• Make it just over 240 characters so that readers must press “show more.”

And the only thing you can do with that engagement is to eventually qualify for elonbucks so you can continue farming the same format for the straightforward payout. Twitter has intentionally destroyed its valuable service of being funnel to deeper content, maybe as a response to onlyfans spam but also probably as part of Elon’s dream of becoming the American WeChat.

Not only do I feel constrained in what’s worth writing by the very rigid growth formula, but I have also seen that the algorithm very aggressively preserves narrow niches and you will get zero reach on any content that deviates from the niche that your top ~100 most engaged followers determine for you. To be fair, I don’t yet know if the same is true of substack, and I can see how such constraints are useful to the overall site itself. But my hope is that by its less algorithmic nature Substack could allow me to write about a broader range of my varied interests without sacrificing too much readership.

Of course, part of me would be happy to remain effortposting into the void on X simply because my biggest motivation to write is simple enjoyment for the act itself. But as I get older, I am forced by the demands of life to remember that enjoyment is only a part of what I first set out to accomplish when writing under this name, and that the accomplishment of this mission will require taking it more seriously, which means being more serious about reach and about ensuring that this project can eventually become financially self-sustaining instead of ebbing and flowing in response to fluctuations in whatever time and energy I have left over from other employment.

So that this post can be of some actual use to the reader and not just a personal journal entry, I will leave you with the insight that has been by far the most useful to me and that I believe could be enormously helpful to any individual engaged in any creative endeavor (and by “creative” I do not simply mean art, but any work that aims to bring something new into existence):

That you DO have time. Time is not scarce, time is not the limiting factor. Time is subjective and subordinate to energy, and what we perceive as the lack of time is actually just how we physiologically parse a shortage of energy. Therefore by increasing the throughput of energy in your body, you can dilate the perception of time such that you are able to “fill the unforgiving minute/with sixty seconds worth of distance run.”

And ironically, nothing constricts your perception, nothing traps you in an unproductive torpor, more than the anxiety that there is not enough time. Truly, the state of anxiety is a self-reinforcing physiological feedback loop. The most functional people are those who either know how to break that loop themselves or are blessed to have relationships with individuals who can do it for them. These are in fact basic psychological technologies that many modern people are deprived of. This is partly because of the breakdown of socialization, but it’s also because we are in such worse physiological shape than our ancestors. The effort needed to break a chronically ill or high-calorie malnourished body out of a catabolic anxiety loop is monumentally greater than breaking a healthy body out of such a loop.

This is ultimately why I am of the opinion that despite the great variety of my interests, everything worth saying, everything that can help us recover our quality of life and establish a lifestyle worth living, eventually circles back to the question of “how can we promote the constructive feedback loop of increasing energy and structure.” For me, the act of writing itself is one of the most natural way for me to pour my energy into something that transforms it into a crystallized structure that allows this energy to be preserved in the form of ideas, and hopefully ultimately replicate itself by stimulating readers into their own state of inspiration.

I view my ideas on health and fitness and my ideas on philosophy and religion as mutually reinforcing and united in this goal, and I aim to devote this blog to exploring the specifics of that unity. Currently, some ideas for posts in the pipeline include a piece discussing the fertility crisis and a series of biographical posts about individuals who I believe could be considered something like “pagan Saints.”

I may also post some excerpts from the currently in-progress book on religious history, and place these behind a paywall with the caveat that I may offer paid subscribers a free copy of the finished product as I would not want to charge twice for the same content. I have enabled paid subscriptions, but I would encourage nobody to subscribe until I have settled into a good pace for posting and decided on how to offer content that is worth paywalling. As a corollary to all this I will also be aiming to be more active in reading and engaging with other authors here with the hope that, by making substack a part of my daily routine, I will be more encouraged to write here.