One Year of "Still Human"

Don't wait. Be a mess. Take a position.

Dec 29, 2023

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As I’ve gotten closer to my one year anniversary of writing this newsletter, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what a “one year” post might look like for me.

I didn’t want it to be overwrought, or overlong, or overly sentimental — the same goals I try (and often fail) to achieve in my regular essays. I also didn’t want this to be a “growth post,” where Substack writers write guides for other Substack writers outlining what worked for them, what didn’t, and what they would do better in order to grow bigger, faster.

I’m a writer, and I love writers, but this newsletter is for everyone. So I’m not going to talk metrics or subscriber growth strategies here.

But considering the growing role this newsletter has begun to play in my life and career, it feels wrong not to address its first anniversary at all. When I posted my first essay on January 3rd of this year, I was a new resident of Australia, a marketing copywriter, and a father of one. Today, I’ve written over 80 essays in this newsletter, I teach at a university, and I’m a father of two. It feels like I should say something.

So let’s skip the pontificating, and get right to my thoughts on this sort-of-significant-but-really-not-all-that-significant milestone.

More than anything else, I feel gratitude.

I’m so incredibly grateful for the people who have read these essays, week in and week out. The people who have commented on them, shared them, told me via email or notes or in-person that they’ve meant something to them over the year that Still Human has been around.

Actually, that’s not even entirely accurate, because it wasn’t Still Human a year ago. It started out as Think & Move, and then became Natural Intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence — so clever, I know), before finally settling in as Still Human around July, where it will hopefully stay for a while.

The fact that this newsletter has had three different names in its first year is a testament to the perspective shift that it’s represented for me. Substack markets itself as a “new publishing model for writers,” but for me it also meant a new growing model.

I’ve always preferred doing my growing and learning behind the scenes, rather than out in the open. Growing is messy, and when you do it publicly, that mess is on full display. Scroll through the archives of Still Human and you’ll see me flail off in different directions beyond just the banner at the top of each essay.

From the outset, I committed to myself that I would let this thing be a bit of a mess. If I was going to write about being human, I was going to let the writing itself be human — letting it make its mistakes and stumble around before learning to stand on its own, letting it discover itself and bump up against others and learn from them before bumbling off on its own path. And allowing it to do all that with people watching — at first just a few people, and then a few hundred, and now a thousand and growing.

It’s also significant that I first signed up for Substack and registered the name Think & Move back at the beginning of 2021. But I let fear and self-doubt kill my initial excitement, and my account sat for 24 long months before I wrote my very first essay. It wasn’t until the geographical “fresh start” of moving to a new country inspired me to pursue other fresh starts that I finally took action.

I don’t tend to believe in regret, but it is hard not to consider how much farther along I would be if I were currently celebrating three years of writing this newsletter, instead of just one.

The lesson there is pretty obvious, but worth making explicit: don’t wait. Just start. I tell my students at the university that the only job of a first draft, first performance, or first song is to get over with. I wish I had followed my own advice back then, rather than waiting until I had the perfect concept, or perfect wide-open schedule, or perfect ready-made audience for this newsletter. (Surprise — none of those things came anyway.)

One more lesson: your tiny little audience isn’t as tiny as you think.

When I first hit 500 free subscribers, the goal I had set for myself for 2023, I remember having the deflating thought: “Man, that’s really not that many people, is it?”

But then I thought about how I would feel if those 500 people gathered in a room to hear me speak. I thought about 500 seats in an auditorium. I used to be a performing artist. I know what 500 people feels like. It feels like a lot. Performers who “make it” always say that the jump to 5,000 people doesn’t feel all that significant compared to the jump from 5 to 500.

Imagine even 50 people listening to what you had to say, contributing their own thoughts, all of you enriching each other.

Hell, consider how good it feels when you’re at dinner with just five friends, talking about things that are meaningful to you.

As trite as it sounds, it turns out there really are no small audiences.

Finally, one more piece of advice: believe in things, and let yourself believe in them publicly.

I’m an agreeable guy by nature, and I’m also terrified of being seen as arrogant or overconfident. I was initially so scared of taking any sort of position on anything in this newsletter, because who was I to say what was right or wrong? I’m just a doofus with a laptop and an internet connection.

But then I realized that in this artificial era, our perspectives are what give our human lives meaning. Some of the opinions I’ve expressed in essays this year, I already disagree with now. I’m sure I’ll disagree with even more of them a year from now. That makes my heart rate rise a little even to think about.

But there’s value in letting your opinions out in the open, as long as they’re reasonable, and not harmful, and both you and your audience understand that opinions are all they are. It’s okay to take a stand on something you feel strongly about, even if you walk it back later. I initially wanted to simply write about how beautiful it is to be a human being living in this world. But you can’t really do that without acknowledging the beauty of people seeing things differently from each other. If anything, I hope to get even better at this in the future.

Really, that’s what this post should be about. The future.

Here’s to staying human in 2024, and hopefully improving on this little newsletter that it’s my genuine privilege to write.

Once again, thank you for reading along.

One Year of "Still Human"

Don't wait. Be a mess. Take a position.

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