Paywalls, Pain, and Balance
Veronique wrote about paywalls in her latest email take yesterday, and I wrote this to her on Mastodon:
Paywalls are a hard thing to navigate. What's right for one person won't work for another; some people take years developing their audience and reputation before they start putting things behind a paywall. Some people do mixes of both. In some cases putting the real "meaty" stuff behind the paywall and the light stuff free; or the bulk of everything is free, but include enticing bonus content. It's all over the map.
We both agreed nobody knows what they're doing. I definitely don't! I wrote to myself yesterday saying that I'm resigned to the fact that I'm not going to make "serious" money online. On one hand, it sucks to think that I have all these big plans for myself and realize that no, I'm not going to make a living out of this. On the other hand, it's freeing: I can write anything I want without worrying about the quality, or feel like I need to be a "content creator".
Let me step back a sec - it feels like I'm saying "content creator" in a perjorative manner. I suppose I am, and I'm looking down on that kind of work. I don't mean to diminish what other people are able to create, especially if they are able to do so on a consistent basis. What I am specifically looking down upon is the "content mill" stuff - the blog posts that are SEO keyword junk that is churned out. But also the feeling of pressure of having to create something to keep going, and commodifying the creative process and taking the fun out of things.
Again - some people are able to do this (create quality content, consistently) and I applaud them. I have discovered that I cannot; I have tried many times, and it all crumbles. So being able to look at my abilities, the time available to me, and being realistic - I now don't feel any kind of guilt or pressure about writing whatever I want to. If I get the chance to create something of higher quality I can, and I have avenues to share it.
Maybe, some day, I will reach another level. But right now I'm not there.
Pain is a weird thing. When you first notice it, depending on severity, it can be debilitating or at the very least, make usual activities uncomfortable. And then sometimes you learn to live with it and make acommodations and you sort of notice it's there, but since you've adjusted you don't notice it as much.
And then when it goes away, it takes you a while to realize - oh hey, I don't feel any pain anymore!
That's what it's felt like with my left foot. A while back it felt like it was broken, but x-rays revealed that wasn't the case (thank goodness!). I went a little lighter on walking for a few weeks and wore looser shoes, hoping to return it to normal. I only realized yesterday that it wasn't hurting or bothering me anymore. It's probably been like that for a few weeks now.
There are often days at work where I really crave to be busy. I have a list of things to do, but they are tasks that take very little time. So I'm left with a day to fill and there's not really much I can do. We have mandatory learning courses every year but those only take so much time, and they're also not always very interesting (especially when it's the same courses each year to remind you of the various policies we have to follow). This often results in me quickly running through my options:
- Write (usually a blog post - like this one!)
- Read my RSS feeds
- Scroll through Mastodon
- Scroll through reddit (and try to refrain from commenting on things)
When I've done all that...there's not a lot left to keep me occupied so I get restless.
The irony is that when I am busy with work, it can get overwhelming. I wish there was a better balance.
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