The promise of the creator economy was, and still is, seductive. It offers a decentralized path: the freedom to pursue silly creative writing, to build a direct line to an audience, and to fund a life based on what makes me happy. As Substack essayist Henrik Karlsson put it, it’s “thinking on the page.”
But for many creatives like myself, that promise has curdled and even gone bad. The reality of today’s creator economy is a system that feels less like an open field and more like a series of inescapable, high-walled gardens. Gaining traction on platforms like Medium seem a lost cause, and launching on Substack is super hard to get going without a significant social media presence or an existing email list, neither of which I have at this point. The very structures that made content creation possible are now overtaxed, buckling under the weight of AI-generated saturation and a culture that’s chronically online.
The core problem, however, is philosophical more than technological. The creator economy, as currently constructed, is a trap. It has become a system that doesn’t reward creativity, but rather the performance of your creative output. This algorithm-driven machine rewards faux professionalism over purpose, and complacency over the raw, haphazard, and inefficient work that real growth requires. In my eyes, there are three traps, one of faux professionalism, the platforms themselves, and the subscription models that reward running in place and niching down into potential oblivion.
The Trap of “Professionalism”
The first trap of the creator economy is the bad habit of aspiring to be a professional. In this new economy, “professional” is a synonym for “marketer.” We’re told that simply creating content we like to make isn’t enough; it must be “franchise” or some sort of lore-building material. Our short stories and essays must be leveraged for brand building. It’s not to say that the content today is all bad, but it becomes very much similar and builds on what worked previously. Creators are taking fewer risks than ever in favor of maintaining a brand just like a company does.
This is the tyranny of preconceived ideas. We’re told that we must follow models that, in reality, simply don’t work sustainably. This “professional” mindset forces us as creators to spend the majority of our time on everything but the act of creation. It demands marketing, optimization, and relentless self-promotion. The cost of this pursuit is enormous. I’ve personally wasted so much time and resources to the point of bankrupting myself emotionally and financially just to put out content I’m proud of, but simply isn’t commercially viable. I became forced to abandon the simple, joyful act of “thinking on the page” in favor of a full-time, unpaid marketing internship. This is why I quit the creator economy a few years ago in favor of writing as a true creative outlet, with no monetary value any longer attached to it.
The Trap of the Content Platforms
The second trap is the platforms themselves. The promise of discoverability is largely a myth. Platforms like Substack or Medium don’t exist to help new voices find an audience; they exist to help established voices monetize the audience they already have. Yes, occasionally an essay will get picked up by some curation service or influencer and a creator can build a substantial audience overnight. But this is very much an exception, and with how hypercompetitive content creation is today, it’s an exception that’s getting even rarer.
These platforms create a vicious circle. To get going, you’re told to build a following on social media, but those platforms demand a relentless, algorithm-driven performance that is itself a full-time job. You are forced to pour your energy into the default solutions of marketing simply to earn the right to be seen on the platform that was supposed to liberate you. The platform, therefore, doesn’t solve the problem; it merely becomes a tollbooth on a road you had to build yourself.
The Trap of the Subscription Model
The final, and most insidious, trap is the economic model. The dominant subscription model, epitomized by Patreon, seems like a stabilizing force but is, in fact, a machine for generating stasis. It rewards complacency. Everyone ends up falling into the same monetization pattern – a Discord server, tiered Patreon rewards, a YouTube membership, branded print-on-demand merch – and it gets to a point where you must cultivate your niche as a full-time job in addition to actually doing what you want to do with your content.
When a creator’s livelihood is tied to monthly subscriptions, the incentive shifts from innovation to retention. Creators are no longer artists but service providers, obligated to deliver the exact same product, or something very similar to it, month after month, to minimize cancellations. This model punishes risk. It discourages the very trial and error that acquiring and developing real knowledge requires. It incentivizes creators to each find a comfortable niche and never, ever leave it. This never worked for me. I’m by my very nature niche-resistant and whenever I did start making headway in a niche, there were a few people who saw me as a threat and essentially gatekept me out of that community. So, I never got any sort of momentum, and after switching niches many times, I finally gave up and turned to finding alternative sources of income to pay the bills.
This model is also fundamentally unstable. As more creators enter the field, and as the cost of living rises, the price must go up. But audiences are finite and their own entertainment budgets are increasingly overtaxed. The result is a system that will inevitably under its own weight, where creators are forced into a constant state of fundraising, like many creators having to turn to streaming on YouTube and/or Twitch constantly to save their livelihood.
My Own Purpose-Driven Exit from the Creator Economy
If the platforms are a trap, the “professional” mindset is a trap, and the economic model is a trap, what is the alternative? The answer cannot be a “better” platform or a “new” monetization scheme. Those are just default solutions that re-frame the same problems. The only durable exit is a philosophical one. I decided to reject monetization as the primary goal, even refusing to charge people for what I produce. The value I seek is seeking out an audience who wants to pursue the same ideas and concepts with me on a deeper level, not simply seeking vanity metrics and worrying about if I’m going to make content “worth my time” to produce.
So, my own content creation is no longer reliant on a business model at all; instead, it serves as a declaration of purpose. My alternative was to refuse to post a damn thing I write unless it can serve a long term purpose. This is my way of reclaiming the act of creation from the marketplace. It returns to the idea of writing as an actual communicative tool. In another of his Substack essays, Henrik Karlsson called a blog post “a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting things to your inbox.” This is a fascinating mindset for writing in the current creator economy, one in which the very unconventional Henrik and his wife are able to make a living.
This path is not professional, per se, nor does it seem efficient. But it is very human in an algorithm-happy economy. What Karlsson is suggesting seems the only way to remain an artist in this world that is consistently rewarding complacency and piledriving nostalgia into our faces. Such an approach reframes the idea of seeking an audience through writing online into a sort of open letter writing. This may be the only way to protect the inward forces that make us, as John Stuart Mill once wrote, “a living thing” instead of a machine “set to do exactly the work prescribed for it.”
What Search Query Do I Intend for This Reflection?
While I have not yet exacted this search query approach in my own writing, it’s a mindset that I feel is necessary for all content creators to adopt. This is especially true for those like myself who have eschewed social media entirely and aren’t crazy about having to charge people money to access what I have to say. This isn’t a judgment on those who must. After all, we all have bills to pay. But it’s a necessary personal boundary to protect my own work from the choice paralysis and undue stress that comes with it.
What I need to do is to stop simply reflecting on a problem like an armchair philosopher and actively seek out co-conspirators. The query for which this reflection must serve can’t be simple like, “What is the creator economy?” It needs to be one that’s specific, vulnerable, and clear about my own philosophical stance; it’s like sending up a “bat-signal.” The only people who will resonate with this essay are the exact people I want to find. They could be other disillusioned idealists, other “niche-resistant” thinkers, or other folks who value purpose over performance.
This is an open letter, but it’s also a chance to create an open set of questions. Where are the other niche-resistant thinkers? How can we better protect the raw, inefficient, human work of creation? What does a purpose-driven, non-transactional, and sustainable creative practice look like for you?
So, consider this my first query: “Find me people who also see the creator economy as a philosophical trap, who feel it rewards performative professionalism over purpose, and who are actively seeking a more human, sustainable, non-transactional way to ‘think on the page’ and connect.”
Seeking others who can answer these questions and ones similar is the value I want my content to provide. It’s my way of reframing writing online as an act of hopeful connection, a way to find the others who are trying to protect the inward forces that “living thing” within, as John Stuart Mill once wrote, from the machine “set to do exactly the work prescribed for it.” Henrik Karlsson offered those of us who have watched our blog posts live in obscurity for years a way to bring our ideas back into the light and into the arena of discussion. As for whether, I need social media or a major presence on a platform to succeed at getting any work done on this venture, I will leave it up to my words to speak for themselves.