🔋 Optimizing for Profit

When you create, when you introduce parts of your weird and unique self into the world, can you avoid the temptation to immediately optimize your content for profit?

An important thing to state at the outset: there is nothing inherently wrong about making money through a creative pursuit. Much of the world benefits by it! We need artists and craftsmen and driven amateurs who are incentivized to toil over their creations and then be rewarded with sufficient resources to continue going!

But boy oh boy have we tipped the incentive scales towards profit.

Into the Belly of Optimization

A couple weeks ago I wrote about why I write, and I made a corresponding reel on why I create more broadly. There, I talked about making things without obsession over engagement, and my commitment to doing so as a method of self discovery and with the hopeful benefit of modest assistance to others.

I also opined about the the probable value of exploring search engine optimization, which thrust me deep into a rabbit hole I'm still digging into. SEO is all about, well, optimizing. It asks questions like:

• What steps can you take to rank higher on Google?
• Have you latched onto the perfect keyword?
• Have you trimmed exactly right to maximize readability?
• Have you landed on the most eye-catching title and image?
• Have you used {insert yet another AI tool} to make this thing more engaging?

It's remarkable how quickly it shifted my view of what I write here. I'm decidedly not interested in flattened content, the sort of thing that looks like everything else out there. I'm biased towards originality, which seems, in a sense, at odds with the very idea of optimizing for the largest possible audience and consumption.

And yet I can't help now but wonder what adjustments I should make to increase the likelihood of harvesting search results. And I'm so intrigued by Google Zero, the theory that search results as we know them are outdated and that we need to be prepared for any entirely new way to find an audience on the web. To be sure, I'm onboard with making sensible adjustments like adding headers and tweaking the order of things. I'm just not down with approaching everything through the lens of maximum engagement.

To explore further, I decided to take another go at Reddit. I've been an on-again-off-again Redditor for 15 years, so it's not exactly a new experience. I pulled back last year because of Reddit's shady dealings with third parties and their own single-minded drive towards growth and profit, but it remains a singularly useful place for niche discussion. I created a new account (I bet you'll never be able to guess my username) and joined subreddits specifically aligned with the areas of interest I explore here and in my professional life: veterans, education, productivity, writing, blogging, YouTubing, etc.

It's perhaps a consequence of these particular subject materials, but do you want to guess the most enduring throughline I've seen so far? Money. The questions all seem to be a version of:

• How quickly can I build a blog that qualifies for ad revenue?
• How do I juice engagement on a new YouTube channel so that I cross the threshold to earn money for my videos?
• I created an Instagram account with X impressions and received an offer to sell it for Y dollars — should I take the offer?
• How do I get more stuff done so that I can make more money quickly?
• How do I take every possible step to squeeze every possible dollar out of every benefit that I qualify for?
• How do I optimize for profit?

The money is first, and the content just a narrowly tailored vehicle to get as much of it as possible.

A Counter Proposal

Again, none of this inherently wrong. The above are valid questions, and it's emphatically okay to want to maximize earnings in any given pursuit. I also acknowledge that I create from a privileged position where I don't need to rely on a side hustle for income, and I'm not thinking about this through the lens of a day job.

But man, are the incentive structures telling. We live in the age of AI, complete with endless promise of efficiency and success, where we spend precious little time appreciating the struggle of creating something in the first place.

The struggle to create matters! The struggle is often the point!

Surely there is value beyond optimized profit! A quick, non AI-generated list to consider:

• Creation forces personal reflection and growth
• Creation provides a point in time to look back on — a snapshot of emotions and thoughts in a particular moment of life
• Creation shares with others the lens through which you view the world
• Creation inspires and helps others, often in invisible ways
• Creation in one area of life begets creative thinking in other parts
• Creation feels good, even when it doesn't

Value. So much value beyond the money. And yet to strive for this value, you have to swim against the swift and compelling current of hyper optimization.

Swim with me, won't you?

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