I frequently call myself stupid because this takes a painfully long time. I can spend a week agonizing over a problem before getting somewhere. This just feels so counterproductive and empty while others "deliver value" or whatever that bullshit is called within a much tighter time limit

Like, there isn't any way to speed up this process. I'm just waiting for my subconsciousness to wander in the right direction. My brain works in overdrive and I quickly get tired, but sometimes it produces the exact result I'm looking for and I can finally move on

I do need to rest, and optimization is relaxing, but I can't help but wonder if I reach for it only because that's basically the only self-soothing behavior that works for me

I keep repeating buzzwords like "faster" or "better", and they are at least somewhat valid, but I think at this point I'm just addicted

If I had a nickel for every time I saw a worst-case quadratic SSA-adjacent algorithm described as "fast", I'd be able to afford therapy

It's got a little better for me recently: some people are subscribed to my RSS feed and repost the content to Reddit and HN a few hours after publication. But that works just because I cheated earlier. I still don't understand how I was supposed to get the initial audience "fairly".

Mind you, *I'm not trying to sell bad content*. A couple of my posts are controversial, others niche, but about half of my posts had >100 rating on HN, and some were daily top 1. It's something people like, but platforms cannot successfully promote.

I like writing and I don't dislike the audience on the platforms, but the absurdity of what I have to do to reach it is apparent. I've asked friends to submit my posts for me. I've initiated discussions to attract attention. It's manipulation. I shouldn't have had to do this.

I can set aside time to write useful stuff, and I do like discussing things from time to time. But I don't want to, nor can I waste time reacting to meaningless posts on LLMs, news articles, tech bro predictions, and other aspects of late stage capitalism that form the core of tech platform content.

But all those platforms condemn submitting your posts exclusively in the name of preventing self-promotion. They want you to participate in the community in a different way, i.e. by interacting with others' posts.

Writing good posts is hard work. You need to research a topic, design software, find the right angle, create illustrations and examples. Writing and polishing text can easily take days. Beyond that, I often have to update my blog software to improve post quality (tikz *shudders*) or accessibility.

is this a sex joke or am i obtuse

If it makes you feel any better, I have the imposter syndrome as well :) Thought I'd be dunked on when I wrote this. The syndrome is a universal experience, not something to do with skill.

Surely you made a backup?