Growing the Void
On the fear of writing after going viral
The piece went viral.
Thirty-three thousand souls pressed the subscribe button to this strange newsletter. And I, wretch that I am, sat watching the numbers climb with a sick, crawling sensation in my chest.
For nine months after, I have not written a word.
Not because I had nothing to say, oh no, the ideas came, they always came, chattering like demons in the small hours. But each time I approached the page, the same accusation rose up before me: You hypocrite. You charlatan. You wrote about putting down the phone, and now you refresh the page to count your admirers.
Let me confess something terrible: I wrote against the machine—raged against it, even, and the machine rewarded me. I preached disconnection, and thousands connected with me. I advocated for silence, and my words kept multiplying, replicating, feeding that very beast I claimed to oppose.
Do you see the trap?
The algorithm, that patient, invisible curator of human weakness, has learned to metabolize even our disgust with it. Every act of resistance becomes content. Every moment of self-awareness becomes performance. I could not escape it. I cannot escape it, even now, even as I write these words condemning the very act of writing them.
And so I fled into silence, telling myself it was noble, that it was necessary, that it was authentic. But what is silence except another form of cowardice?
Here’s what actually paralyzed me, the thing I dare not name: Before that essay, I wrote into the void. Happily into the void! No one was waiting. No one cared if I published or didn’t, if the words were good or garbage. Failure was private, and therefore bearable.
Then you pressed that button. Thirty-three thousand of you. You said, in effect: “Perhaps this person will continue to say interesting things.”
Suddenly there were real people. Real expectations. The void had filled with faces, and I could not bear. God help me, I could not bear the thought of disappointing you. Of proving that the last essay was a lucky fluke, an accident, a moment of borrowed insight I could not replicate.
This is the trap of success: it teaches you to doubt the very voice that earned it.
I tried to write. For nine months I opened the laptop, summoned the courage, positioned my fingers over the keys, and felt the weight of your expectations press down upon me like a physical thing. Every blank page became a referendum on my worth. Every idea died in the space between thought and page, murdered by the question: What if this disappoints them? What if they leave?
Before, I wrote because I wanted to. Now I couldn’t write because you were watching.
The phone still sits on my desk as I write this, face-down but not off, never off, its small weight like a stone in my peripheral vision. I have not solved the problem.
I check it compulsively. I refresh pages for nothing, for everything, for proof that I exist, that I matter, that someone, somewhere, is thinking of me.
What right do I have to speak? What right does a man have to offer wisdom about a problem he has not solved?
None, obviously. But when has that ever stopped anyone on the internet?
Moral authority is not a prerequisite for speech. If it were, the entire digital ecosystem would collapse overnight. We would all fall silent at once, suddenly aware of our own hypocrisy, and the great engine of content would sputter to a halt.
But we do not fall silent. We cannot.
So why return now?
Not because I have learned anything. Not because I have overcome the fear or solved the contradiction. I return because I have finally understood that overcoming it was never the point. The fear will never go away. And waiting for courage, waiting for readiness, waiting for the perfect moment of moral clarity—that is just another way of never beginning.
I am writing this badly rather than not at all. I am failing publicly rather than succeeding in never trying.
Here’s what I can promise: I will write again. Not every week, not on a schedule, not with any guarantee of profundeur. But I will write when I have something to say, even if that something is ordinary, even if it disappoints you, even if some of you leave.
Because the alternative: the endless postponement, the gradual erasure of the self—that is no life at all.
If that’s enough for you, then stay.
I will write again tomorrow.
Or I won’t.