The Problem with the Content Treadmill

I've been thinking about what happens to writing when it has to happen on a schedule. Not on a deadline — deadlines are fine, deadlines are a wall you can push against, they give shape to formlessness. I mean a schedule. The expectation that something will arrive in the inbox every Tuesday at 9 AM, whether or not you have anything worth saying.

I run this newsletter. I like running it. But sometimes Tuesday comes around and I sit at the desk and the honest thing would be to write: nothing happened this week that I have a real thought about. I don't have an angle. I don't have a take. I have some half-formed observations and a vague sense that I should revisit something I read last month. That's not an essay. That's a note to myself.

Instead, what most people do — what I've done — is manufacture urgency. Find the peg. The news hook. The discourse. Something someone said on a podcast that I can react to. And that works, technically. You get the thing out the door. But you know it's thinner than what you're capable of when you actually have something to say.

The consistency trap

Every guide to building a newsletter audience says the same thing. Be consistent. Post on a regular schedule. Train your readers to expect you. And I understand the logic — there's research about habit formation and brand recall and all of it. The advice isn't wrong, exactly. It's incomplete.

Consistency without substance trains your readers to expect something, and then trains them to skim it. I subscribe to maybe 15 newsletters. The ones I actually read, the ones I stop what I'm doing and read — they're the ones where I know the writer only publishes when they've got something. There's a trust built into that irregularity. When the email arrives, it means something.

The ones that hit my inbox every single week without fail? I've stopped opening most of them. Not because they're bad. Because I've internalized that they'll always be there, and "always there" feels like wallpaper.

The economics push the other way

I get why writers resist this. If you're running a paid newsletter, your subscribers are paying monthly. Silence feels like theft. You took their money and gave them nothing this week. So you write the thing, even if the thing is filler.

But I wonder if we're wrong about that. I wonder if the subscribers who stay longest, who actually value what you do, are the ones who'd rather get two great essays a month than four mediocre ones. Nobody cancels a subscription because a writer took a week off. People cancel because they stopped finding value, and filler erodes value faster than silence does.

The goal isn't to be in someone's inbox. The goal is to be worth opening.

I'm going to try something. I'm going to publish when the thing is ready, not when the calendar says so. If that means two posts in a week sometimes and nothing for ten days other times, fine. I'd rather be uneven than polished-but-empty.

We'll see if it works. Maybe I'll lose subscribers. Maybe the algorithm will punish me. I've been thinking about it for months, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the writing I'm proudest of was never the stuff I wrote because it was Tuesday.