How To Quit Telling People What To Do

Social Media's Authority Problem

I finally quit Instagram last month. There were many contributing factors—its incompatibility with long form writing, the passive-aggressive engagement norms, a constantly fluctuating algorithm—but the nail in the coffin was that I no longer wanted to tell people what to do.

Back when I was experimenting with various types of text posts on Instagram, there was one that was far-and-away the most popular: advice. Directives. How to’s. All the better if it sounded psychological, and could mimic the experience of receiving guidance from a friend. People would save, send and share these posts like nothing else.

I never knew whether such posts were favoured by the algorithm, or whether it was the individuals using the app who yearned to be told what to do, or both, but the result was the same: declaring myself an authority was clearly the way to build an empire on Instagram.

The only problem was that I didn’t like telling people what to do. Online psycho-babble has always struck me as an impossible genre: how do you offer advice that applies to everyone who reads it? In order to avoid giving some people really bad advice by accident, most influencers stick to meaningless platitudes. This allows them to take advantage of the Barnum Effect, which is a psychological phenomenon relied upon by psychics, astrologers and personality test writers, wherein people interpret statements broad enough to apply to almost anyone as highly personal. This doesn’t just make social media advice popular: it also turns those who give it into authority figures in the eyes of their audience.

The therapist-influencer also takes advantage of this effect, with one key difference: there is no illusion that their posts contain personalized advice. And yet, that can still be the emotional experience of the follower. The para-social bond that forms as a result can feel a lot like friendship on the receiving end, even when the influencer will never (and can never) know every follower. For people feeling lonely, alienated or misunderstood, this can be a comforting salve. A temporary and unreliable salve, perhaps, but a salve nonetheless.

I should know, due to my brief career as an astrologer. Over the course of my adult life, many friends had encouraged me to go into the helping professions, convinced I would make a great therapist or social worker. This idea repelled me, because getting overly involved in the emotional problems of my friends was a compulsion of mine that was often detrimental to myself and others. Astrology felt like a medium for encouraging people through emphasizing strengths and possibilities, without getting too serious or intimate. I was pretty good at it, too, but the moment I realized I didn’t actually believe that the cosmos affected personalities and world events, it felt dishonest to continue, and I closed up shop.

So I’d done my fair share of doling out pseudo-therapeutic advice, and was aware of how meaningful this could be for people. However, the risks of claiming such a role were starting to make themselves known. My posts had followers messaging me with their personal problems, asking for advice. One person wanted to write me an entire document outlining the conflict they’d had with someone who followed me (I’d never met, followed, or corresponded with either of them). I even had someone ask me for nutrition tips, a topic I’d never claimed to know anything about. It was clear that I was becoming an authority figure in the minds of a certain followers, which led them to think I was uniquely positioned to help them with their problems. This worried me.

I have favourite writers, just like everyone else, and I imagine them to be smart, thoughtful and insightful to a degree that can probably only be sustained from afar. Reading their work makes me feel close to them, a sensation which cannot possibly be mutual, and there are moments where I feel that they have something important figured out that I do not. This causes me to imagine that, if I were them, certain problems in my life would be easy to solve, or wouldn’t exist in the first place.

And yet: time and time again, meeting my heroes has shown me that they are just as flawed and uncertain as I am. We are all truly just bumbling through life, trying not to knock too many things over. If a reader has held a writer in impossibly high esteem, this discovery can feel like a disappointment—or worse, a betrayal. So these open-hearted appeals perturbed me, not due to anything pathological on the part of the sender, but because I knew I could never live up to the imaginary version of myself that they had formed through reading my work.

Even more disturbing to me was how easy—not to mention lucrative—it would be to step onto the pedestal these followers were offering me, by declaring myself an expert in the lives of strangers. I could fashion my online persona into a mirror, encouraging readers to project onto me, feel close to me, helped by me, which could develop into a powerful urge to support me.

On Instagram, the path of least resistance is to become a guru.

It’s baked right into the app: one does not have friends, but followers. It is much more laborious to counter this tendency, to continually knock myself off the pedestal, and to resist the incentives to step back onto it. Some find my refusal off-putting: they do not want their projections—whether positive or negative—to be interrupted with a vulgar reminder that I am a real person.

Over time, I watched other writers start charging for private conversations, hosting retreats, and promoting private support communities. These were all ways to create alternative income streams to complement what they made from their writing. In other words: they were monetizing their online personas, their attention and their wisdom. It wasn’t quite consulting, or therapy, or spiritual healing; it was a new hybrid, somewhere in between friendship-for-pay and sage-for-hire. It was not clear to me whether these writers had always wanted to be gurus or whether they were simply responding to economic pressures and incentives, but either way, it seemed they were no longer looking for readers so much as acolytes.

This didn’t sit right with me. At first I wondered if I was simply behind the times—early career writers are, now more than ever before, encouraged a.k.a. pressured to continuously engage with their readers—or if I was jealous that I didn’t have the influence to pull off such a move. But when I pictured myself at a quiet retreat centre deep in the woods, surrounded by people eager for my help with their issues, I didn’t feel peace or satisfaction—I felt sick. Something would have to go very wrong for me to find myself there.

Earning respect through my work as a writer and theorist is one thing; claiming to hold the answers to the personal and existential problems of those who read my work, quite another.

The latter sounds a bit too much like worship.

Building a writing career wasn’t always like this. Not that doing so was ever a walk in the park, but between the disappearance of stable writing jobs, the declining freelance rates, the shrinking book advances, and the endless supply of free writing on the internet, which has resulted in people perceiving writing as less valuable and therefore expecting free content, it’s become nearly impossible for new writers today to avoid social media altogether, barring wealth or fame (in truth, I only felt I could leave Instagram once Substack Notes started gaining momentum).

Back in the mid 2000’s when such platforms first became popular, it was a common belief that they would have a democratizing effect, empowering citizen journalism by allowing ordinary people to publish work that challenged the carefully crafted narratives of the powerful. Whether reporters, poets or novelists, writers no longer needed to win over a gatekeeper to get their work in front of people: they could appeal directly to readers. Everyone would have their opportunity.

Such hope wasn’t entirely fanciful: many writers, in varying stages of their careers, gained massive traction as early adopters of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In fact, many of today’s top earning Substack writers got their big break during what I consider to be the golden age of social media, between the mid 2000s and the mid 2010s. It was not a Sisyphean task to grow a large, dedicated readership for a blog that you hosted on your own personal website, large enough to launch a career. Literary agents and magazine editors (remember magazines?) would regularly browse social media sites and the blogosphere, looking for new writers to sign or publish.

Such stories, however, have become increasingly rare, and the techno-optimism of this earlier time now sounds tragically naïve (unless you are Elon Musk). It’s become clear that governments, security agencies, tech giants and companies trying to sell you stuff are the real beneficiaries of these platforms, not Scrappy Little Nobodies.

But why does tweeting your way to a book deal sound delusional now? Well, the social media of ten years ago is not the social media of today: text-based content has been replaced by visual content, long form has been replaced by short form, organic reach has been destroyed by prioritizing ad sales, and external links have been suppressed into oblivion by platforms who never want us to leave.

In the golden age, a user’s feed was simply and solely populated with content from the people they’d chosen to follow, listed in reverse chronological order. You had full control over your feed, and would see everything from everyone you followed, including links to their blog, their website, or the latest article they’d written for a digital publication. This led to high-quality engagement: pieces spread organically through online word-of-mouth, meaning people would discover new work through their friends. Organic virality was a real thing that happened to unknown writers publishing in long form on their own websites (young people will just have to trust me on this).

The factor most responsible for the death of social media’s ability to launch writing careers was the introduction of the algorithmic feed. There is now a mysterious, invisible calculator deciding what you see. You will not be shown the vast majority of posts by the people you’ve followed. Instead, your feed will mostly contain advertisements and “suggested posts”. Every person you follow is competing with every other person you follow to make it into your feed, but the rules of the games can only be guessed at. You do not have control over your feed: the way you interact with content is only one of many factors determining what you see in the app.

This makes it nearly impossible to grow a readership the old-fashioned way, by slowly and steadily publishing high-quality work for readers who share it when so moved. Building an audience has become much more confusing, random and unpredictable. We suddenly need social media experts to guide us through the process, and even they are forced to infer algorithmic changes by scrying their own fluctuating analytics.

And then there’s that minor issue where a platform can permanently shutter your account, at any time, without explanation, an avenue for appeal, nor any ability to reach your following ever again.

This may be a rare, if devastating, event, but algorithmic paranoia affects us all. If my post flops, is it because my readers didn’t like it, or because the algorithm didn't even show it to them? Why would the algorithm hide it? How can I adjust my next post to avoid this? Will anybody see my next post if I publish it too quickly after the suppressed one? Or maybe it wasn’t suppressed at all—what if I just posted it when everyone was watching the hockey game?

There is no end to the questions, and they are unanswerable, because the black box responds to no one. This means that we are always at risk of wildly under- or overestimating algorithmic power, with no ability to detect when this is happening.

Are you having fun? I’m having fun.

But why is every writer suddenly trying to lowkey build a cult?

• There’s the fact that publishers now anticipate that writers pitching their first book already have a large online readership.

• There’s the expectation that writers engage continuously with their readers, lest they be seen as arrogant, neglectful or out-of-touch (I saw this sentiment in a Substack Note just the other day).

• There’s the cost-of-living crisis, which increases the pressure on early career writers to get more money flowing sooner.

• And let’s be honest: while being a member of a cult seems cruddy, being the leader has some obvious perks, no?

But if there is one ingredient even more crucial to social media—and by extension writing career—success than authority, it is authenticity. Some influencers even subvert the expectation of authority by instead leaning into authenticity and curating a raw, vulnerable relatability, which of course becomes its own type of authority, reminiscent of how Joe Rogan’s lack of recognition in mainstream media makes him more credible to his audience, but more feminine and progressive-coded.

Digital profiles live and die by authenticity: people defend their speech and behaviour by appealing to authenticity, and those seeking to demolish someone invariably accuse them of being inauthentic.

Nothing captures this quite like the apology video genre. Our tragic hero will appear dishevelled, with unkempt hair and a bare face. The video often begins with a forced sigh, and may contain crying. They will choose a plain, homey background and hide symbols of wealth. Natural light is strongly preferred.

These stylistic choices are an attempt to make the video seem spontaneous and the influencer appear honest and relatable. Vulnerability is key, as an apology’s reception weighs largely on whether it is deemed to be authentic, which the viewership wants to gauge for themselves. It is not uncommon for there to be a second apology after the first one is declared by the public to be insincere.

Most posts, of course, are not apology videos, but these videos help us understand what today’s online audience demands from their public figures: honesty, relatability, and vulnerability. These qualities incentivize influencers to build an intimacy with their audience, to lead their audience to believe that they have access to the actual human being. This encourages writers to create consultant-coach-healer-friend offers, and primes audiences to buy them.

But this raises an important question: can authenticity be consciously created? Everyone who’s ever filmed themselves crying has had to pause and set up a camera in order to capture their spontaneous release of emotion. A digital profile and a living, breathing, eating, shitting, snoring human being can never fully align.

We live under the knife. We must constantly perform authenticity, which means we will constantly fail to provide authenticity, which will result in constant accusations of being inauthentic, which cause us to act differently, in an attempt to get authenticity right next time.

These platforms, and the attention they offer, demand from us the impossible, and in trying to square that circle, some of us make strange choices. Maybe the real question is: why aren’t you building a cult?

This essay is not sponsored by Substack, and this site is not immune from the forces that have enshittified so many other platforms. But it’s getting a couple of crucial things right: writers own their subscriber list, and can take it with them if they leave. Substack gets paid when its writers get paid, which has led to significant and ongoing improvements over the four years I’ve been publishing here.

From what I’ve seen lately, Notes prioritizes relevance over immediacy, so that well-received articles circulate for a long time, readers actually see the writers they subscribe to in their feed, and writers feel less pressure to be note-writing automatons. The overall vibe of conversations on Notes is less reactive and more reflective than other places.

And for the first time, I saw a Note soliciting pitches for a print magazine, which struck me as a harbinger of exciting things to come.

Perhaps Substack is having a golden moment, and my compliments will not age well. But I can genuinely say I am happy to be here, and I selfishly hope we can stretch this moment into an era of our very own.

I’ve crafted an odd project for myself: I want to encourage people to think for themselves. I want to show through example that taking intellectual risks can be worth it. I want to make it possible for people to imagine who they are outside of the culture wars, and to re-discover their curiosity for the world around them.

And yet—perhaps it’s a lingering speck of anarchist within me—I don’t want to tell people what to do.

Is this contradictory? Am I deluding myself? Is what I’m doing even worse, because at least other people are being transparent about their desire for authority while I remain steeped in denial?

Honestly, I don’t know. I end the essay there and lean into a humble anti-expert brand, or I could list some unattractive things about myself and aim for relatable. I could, through negation, convey that I’m incredibly brave for breaking the fourth wall in this essay, and go all in on derring-do!

What I do know is that staying silent on the para-social merely allows me to implement it to my own advantage while feigning naïveté, and I’d rather leave that shtick to others. I want to earn your readership through my essays, not through creating an illusion. I lay no claim to purity or superiority here: I’m just as entangled in this strange new world as you are. But I do want to make this much clear: I intend to write (not consult, not coach, not heal) for a living.

My hope is that, if writers continue to experiment within this digital realm, some will eventually blaze a trail for writers who don’t want to spend their career telling readers what to do, nor toadying to them: writers who want to write for a living, not because they are stubborn or conceited or rude, but because their deepest calling takes form in the words they write in solitude, and their truest gift to the world is surrendering to nothing but their pen.