How I Write So Much as an Overthinker
15,000 words per week is not sane, except if you're already sick
GENTLE REMINDER: SIX DAYS LEFT
The current Three-Year Birthday Offer gets you a yearly subscription at 20% off forever, and runs from May 30th to July 1st. Lock in your annual subscription now for $80/year. Starting July 1st, The Algorithmic Bridge will move to $120/year. Existing paid subs, including those of you who redeem this offer, will retain their rates indefinitely.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now is the time.
I thought: Should I write this post or should I fix my mental health instead? Anyway.
I used to be an overthinker. Any piece of writing with my name in it—be it a 10,000-word-long essay on the forgotten history of artificial intelligence or a two-word Substack Note—had to be Perfect, with capital P, Perfect. The fear of judgment and criticism was so great that I would write badly on purpose to preempt the inevitable complaints from my then tiny audience, which, had they caught me off guard, would’ve left me in bed for a week questioning my entire life.
Today, I can say I am cured. Today I am so cured that I’m actually sick with the opposite problem: obnoxious verbosity.
But, does writing this much really need fixing? Some people go without typing a single non-mandatory word their whole lives, and no one raises hell about that. But I am insane: I’m currently, on average, at seven thousand words a week. No. That’s a lie. I’m publishing seven thousand. I’m writing twice that. And edit out just as many. That amounts to five posts a week for you and another ten for the garbage can.
I didn’t always publish this much. I had a three-per-week cadence for two and a half years. I started with that frequency because the professional advisers tell you to start at a pace you can handle for a year. I obliged. Two months ago, I went tryhard mode: one article per business day. So this is my explanation for how I’m doing it and why. (I could handle one per calendar day if I wanted to, but I’m annoying enough. I’m now publishing one article per calendar day as part of a challenge lol, I’m sorry.)
I’ll divide this post into nine sections. They’re a glimpse into my work process that you might be able to replicate (some parts of this can’t be replicated; if you have kids, you can’t un-have them). This post itself is a great example of how I apply these ideas, which makes it meta-non-fiction, which is perfect to appease the weird needs of an overthinker.
Here’s the outline:
I don’t have kids
I do it full-time
I stick to a niche
I follow my body
I write more than I read
I'm obsessively ordered
I have a good memory
I’m a quick drafter
I don't reject technology
1. I don’t have kids
I am 31 32 (it’s been a while since I started writing this, I guess my overthinking self hasn’t died fully yet). I don’t have kids. I want to have them. Sometime in the future. I’ve been thinking the same thing for 10 years (wait, I just realized…). That future doesn’t seem to be coming. Why? Because I have so many options to choose from at any given moment—among them writing too much—that I don’t seem to find a good day to start having them.
I think this is happening to everyone everywhere (who is an overthinker): we have more options to be, to do, to go, to love, to experience than any other time in history, and that’s pushing us away from choosing the default option. We think choice is a good thing—and it is—but often fail to see that it is actually a sneaky trade-off we unwittingly accept.
I know people who manage to do great work—writing or otherwise—while caretaking 3 younglings. They are my true heroes. Not the Substack purple-badge bestsellers, nor the famous journalists and politicians who, surprise, have carved out a place for themselves on Substack, nor the fourth-generation authors who top the New York Times bestselling list year after year. Parents with small audiences who passionately and consistently show up in the rare moments all three kids are asleep—those are my true heroes.
They’re the counterexamples Seneca surely had in mind when he wrote that “it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a father yet, but I have other handicaps: I burn the coffee and have to do it again, for instance. Thankfully, I can make as many batches as I want, for I have no other professional obligations, which leads me to the second point.
2. I do it full-time
Annie Dillard writes in The Writing Life that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
I choose to spend them writing and reading. But of course, no kids and no real job make it easy to devote my life to my hobby (why so many people generously pay for it is still a mystery to me, though). This blog is like a universal basic income policy disguised as research and investigative analysis. Most jobs nowadays are like that.
Jokes aside, how do you even write five posts a week while working a 9-5 job? Again, I don’t look up to people who publish 4 posts a day (ChatGPT, ahem), but to those who write one per week, starting every day at 6 pm. If, on top of that, you add those three toddlers we were talking about who, for some reason, need feeding every day, then it’s clear Thomas Carlyle was wrong: History is but the biography of great parents.
But, is writing full-time really that big an advantage? Resounding yes from me, sorry to those of you who can’t do it.
It sounds super cool to have a biography like that of Miguel de Cervantes: he lived a life full of adventures, including but not limited to having his left hand crippled by a musket shot in the battle of Lepanto, being kidnapped by Ottoman pirates and held captive for five years, and being jailed several time for “financial irregularities”—all of that before starting to write what’s considered the greatest novel of all time, Don Quixote. But your odds of achieving literary recognition are higher—though still as dim as moonlight on a summer midday—if you live a life like Jorge Luis Borges’s: a voluntary prisoner of his father’s vast library, with no desire to live the adventures he so precisely and magically imagined. Read all day. Write all day. That’s it.
But there’s a better empirical reason why you must write as much as you can.
The tragedy of the ancient writer was having no audience. No one within 500 miles knew how to read or write. Cervantes found popularity, but, like his contemporary, William Shakespeare, he was one of a kind. The rest are all catching dust like their books. The tragedy of the modern writer is having no distribution.
Let me put it in perspective just how lucky we are compared to our elders, yet how hard it is to make it in today’s cutthroat environment: I get more monthly views on this sorry-ass blog than Cervantes got reads to his Don Quixote while he was alive. Read that again. The difference is that he was, at the time, among the most famous writers in Europe, and I’m just the 30-something most popular technology newsletter on this little-known website called Substack. I get virtually zero distribution compared to what I could be getting given today’s technology.
Almost everyone is literate, so the readers-per-square-meter stat today is much higher. That also means that everyone writes. So—because the amount we can read has remained constant—the competition is unfathomable. Cervantes was, after all, better off.
Full-timing this hobby is how I output twice or thrice as much as you, which statistically gives me a bigger share of the pie. Or I could travel to the coasts of Somalia and see if some African corsairs are up to making my biography a little bit more flashy.