Why Substack is the antidote to toxic social media

Investing in the future of conscious content

Despite my deeply entrenched, unhealthy addiction to social media, I am making an effort to slowly, slowly divest my energy from the Meta-verse and redirect it into healthier, more human-centered containers. Thanks to my friend Francie, I was introduced to Substack as the up-and-coming platform for writers.

Writing is something that comes naturally and effortlessly to me. I have been writing almost daily since I was 12-years old. I never thought about referring to my writing ritual as a “practice” — it’s just something that’s part of me. Writing is my therapy. Writing is my art. Writing is my contribution to society. 

It’s a lifelong dream of mine to be able to fully support myself as a full-time writer. This is something that most people consider an impossible dream. It seems unlikely without prostituting my writing for commercial purposes, doing copywriting for ads and that sort of thing. 

More than four years after publication, with more than a thousand copies in circulation, sales of my book Regenerative Purpose still have yet to pay back the thousands of dollars I put into publishing the paperback and producing the audiobook as an independent author.

“No one values writing for the sake of writing.” Or at least, this is what my pessimistic inner narrative has been telling me for as long as I can remember.

I am ready for this to change. 

I have been told by many people that my ideas are groundbreaking, that my book was life-changing, or that a social media post was inspiring or illuminating. I know that the way I string sentences together touches people, triggers insights, and provokes new ways of thinking. 

My writing is definitely not for everyone, but I know that for the people who deeply resonate with my offering, it can move really big things.

So why is it so hard to get paid for this work? I’ve been reflecting a lot on this lately.

In Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, he explains how one core wound of the modern economy is extraction. Extraction happens when the elite assume ownership of things that were once plentiful for free, make them into private property and then sell them back to the masses. Bottled water is an example.

Extraction is about taking resources (and energy) from the many, for the benefit of a few. The original sin of extraction was most likely applied to natural resources. The fruits of the Earth-ship that are humanity’s collective inheritance were harvested, divided, and sold, piece by piece. Now with the proliferation of social media, I see the same thing happening with our creative bounty.

We are now conditioned to the extraction of the fruits of human creativity — various forms of wisdom, pleasure, and beauty. The creative labor of “we the people” is now mercilessly yoked to major platforms of mass extraction; Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon, to name a few.

We pay our attention mindlessly, in the throes of addiction. In doing so, we pay the salaries of gatekeepers. Meanwhile the creators — writers, musicians, artists — are getting paid pennies for every dollar that the corporations are making. 

We have unconsciously consented to economic slavery and we automatically feed the extraction machine with our creative energy.  The result is that our human essence is savagely depleted, and our souls are silently crying.

One way that we can reverse this is to share more wisdom, pleasure and beauty with each other, locally, for free. When we circulate creative energy in our communities, the nourishment received is immediate, emotional, and visceral. We can forge and deepen connections by exchanging without money.

The other thing we can do — when we are participating as consumers in the vast global media-sphere — is build relationships with the creators we read, watch and listen to, and make the effort to pay them directly.

Money itself is not the problem. Paying for things is not the problem. But when there’s a vast gap in time and/or space between parties in an exchange, there’s more potential for extraction, and it reinforces separation between human beings.

We are so conditioned in modern life to buy things without having any relationship with the creator or provider. We pay extraction taxes to massive media aggregators and platforms, just because of the speed and convenience they give us. But this unconscious consumption distances us from the reality we are buying into with our attention currency. What are we paying for? Who is actually receiving?

People are often shocked to learn that when I sell a copy of my book on Amazon, the platform takes about 70% of the revenue, and I get around 30%. But to buy my book from my website is slightly less convenient and requires a few more clicks.

I am just as guilty as anyone else of giving tons of energy to extraction platforms over the years without realizing. If I conservatively estimate an average of an hour per day spent on social media over the last 16 years (it’s likely much more in recent years), that totals 5,840 hours or 243 days. That is eight months of my life. Eight months! I could easily have written another book in that amount of time.

After more than 16 years on Facebook, thousands of photos posted, millions of words written, I have built a shrine to my public image. My profile is full of artifacts for the museum of my life. But my friends list is full of strangers who wouldn’t recognize me in the street. And because of a mysterious algorithm, the majority probably haven’t seen a post of mine in years. Yet I often find myself leaking energy there, without meaning to, almost as if in a trance. It’s a well-designed machine.

By contrast, I have been on Substack less than a year, and already have a friendly, engaged circle of supporters who dig what I am putting out. (Thank you to my 1,393 active readers, including 21 paying subscribers!) This environment is nourishing. Readers here invest their presence and financial resources, intentionally, and this motivates me to show up consistently and give my best.

I have summarized some of the major differences between Substack and Facebook in the chart below. They are like night and day.

Here I am, on my birthday, asking you to pay for the gift of my writing. If you appreciate what you read here, please vote with your money for me to keep going! 

Let’s do our best to consciously create a new economy. It’s not easy to break free from digital addictions. I have been trying for years, so I know how sticky they are, trust me! But every moment of intentional energy counts. Moment by moment, dollar by dollar, we can divest from feeding extraction platforms that distance us from our humanity. Instead let’s invest in growing connection and creativity.