On providing value (or, wrestling my brain into submission)

I am trying to get out of the mindset that everything I produce needs to have “value.”

In fairness to myself, I come by this notion pretty honestly: for one thing, I’m a Millennial, and came of age in the era of hustle culture/girl boss/side hustle toxicity. Some aspects of this have mercifully died back—I will write about the Death of the Girl Boss at some point, and will try to not be too vindictive about it—but the productivity train keeps on rollin’ and, unfortunately, it drags us along with it.

There are of course macroeconomic, societal, and psychological reasons why our generation has such a predilection to be pulled into the hustle mentality. We entered the workforce during a historic recession, saddled with enormous student debt, with a degree that for most of us, meant nothing. Most of us started out broke and are still broke today, working for corporations and companies that don’t care about us in a time of astronomical costs of living. And these factors, once combined, instilled in us the mentality that freedom meant money meant power meant authority.

So what did we do? We clawed our way up the corporate ladder, trading burnout for a liveable wage. Turned our passions and hobbies into side hustles to make ends meet. Gave platforms to scammers promising that you too! can be rich if only you got your shit together and bought their course/book/retreat.

Anyways. This is an attempt to explain why I’m so dogshit at writing for public consumption.

In my everyday life, I work in marketing at a fast-paced tech company. I have been working in marketing in one way or another for more than a decade. I have specifically worked in content marketing for most of that, which means that my profession is to write things that appeal to a wide audience and drive high page views. That’s been my job, and I’m good at it.

It is entirely antithetical to what I want this space to be.

It’s not that I don’t have ambitions for Hello Toad—I very much do (another article on the to-do list: how productivity and slow living can coexist). But what those ambitions do not include is appeal to broad masses. I’m not trying to create the fucking Buzzfeed of slow living. This is probably obvious to anyone reading this, but try telling my brain. My brain, who insists on constantly questioning if this is relatable-enough content. If this is optimised for search. If it’s providing anything useful or actionable, damn it! Because in marketing, it has to—at least, it has to if it’s going to be successful at contributing to someone’s bottom line. 

I am trying to shake the weight of “providing value” off my shoulders. Or at least, rethink it in tangible ways. “Value” doesn’t have to connote all the success metrics that hustle culture has instilled in us: money and notoriety and power. Value means (obviously! Obviously!) so much more. It is connection and honesty and reaching a hand into the ether of the internet and saying, “Hey, you’re not alone in that feeling!” or “Hey, there are more of us here than you think.”

But back to being dogshit at writing consistently. For an A-type, overachieving, slightly neurotic (if this article is anything to go by) human like me, letting go of the idea of (traditional, quantifiable, numerical) value has been so unbelievably challenging. Every time I’ve tried to plan out content for this space, I’ve found myself falling back on predictable listicles and how-tos that I’m sure a thousand people have already written better than I could. It’s felt disingenuous and inauthentic and all the things I don’t want to bring here. They’re the safe choice. There’s nothing vulnerable about them.

So then, in disgust, I’ve done what I’ve done countless times before when trying to write for my own sake: I’ve given up. I’ve stopped posting. I’ve gone dark.

And those ambitions that I mentioned a minute ago? They are forced down and their voices drowned out to a whisper, until—inevitably!—the urge to create becomes once again too goddamn loud.

So here we are. I’m seizing that urge to create by the horns, pouring thoughts onto a page, ignoring the oh-so-loud voice that keeps telling me how cringe it is to put this all out there, and getting back to our regularly scheduled programming (which, let’s be honest, I haven’t quite figured out yet—but I’m going to trudge through that uncertainty anyway).

Welcome back.