I'm sitting here working on short-form videos. The traction is thin. And the thought arrives, the way it always does, quiet and reasonable-sounding: maybe you should optimize. Maybe meet the algorithm where it is. Change the content. Give people what they seem to want.
I even watched a few videos about how to make videos go viral. The techniques were so far from anything I am or want to be that the research lasted about ten minutes before I closed the tab.
I recognize the urge immediately. I've had this thought a million times. It's an old con.
So I let it pass. And then I sit with the discomfort of letting it pass.
Nobody tells you to conform. In high school you just watch what happens to the kid who doesn't. You watch what gets rewarded and what gets ignored. You adjust. Most people adjust without ever consciously deciding to. The decision happens below the level of decision.
And then you grow up and the pressure just changes clothes. Social in adolescence. Professional in your twenties. Algorithmic now.
I understand why people do it. I want to be clear about that. The pull is real. It works, at least in the short term. There are days I can see exactly why someone would make that trade. I've made it myself. Some fears are easier to ignore on a Tuesday. I know because I've ignored them. I'm not standing apart from any of this.
I've bent to it plenty of times. The pressure has worked on me. I've made the easier trade, chased the legible thing, shaped something to fit a container that wasn't mine. I'm not telling a story about immunity.
But looking back across the whole length of it, I can see a pattern. I always corrected back. Maybe not immediately. Maybe after some time in the wrong direction. But the needle always found its way home.
That's what I mean by continuity. Not a perfect record of refusal. A lifelong correction toward the same thing.
Sometimes I feel held to a higher standard than other people. I know how that sounds. But it isn't arrogance. It's the weight of having a self that won't let you off the hook. I know what it costs to ease up. Not in a dramatic way. Just the quiet drift away from the thing that works. I've been there. I correct back.
At least it's a real assignment.
That's what I keep coming back to. It's scary, yes. There are days I can see the other life clearly, the one where I'm not always having to be on my game, the one where I made the easier trade. It looks restful from here.
But I set my life up for challenge. For adventure. For the thing that keeps costing me something, because that's how I know it's real.
The people who refuse the pressure at each stage, in high school, in their careers, in their creative work, they don't look consistent from the outside. They look reckless. Naive. Uncommercial. Until they don't.
What they actually are is continuous. The same person who corrected back in high school is the same person correcting back now, sitting here with the videos. The pressure changed costumes. The correction didn't. That's the whole thing. That's the only thing.