Nobody’s Reading Anyway (Thank The Baby Jesus)
The one day you can fail without witnesses
You know that invisible thing pressing on your chest every time you write for an audience?
That low-grade hum of will they like this mixed with is this on brand mixed with what if they unsubscribe?
Gone.
Evaporated sometime around 7am when your readers chose cinnamon rolls over content. (A choice I respect deeply. Cinnamon rolls are objectively correct.)
The algorithm is sleeping off its third helping of cranberry sauce tinged stuffing. That one person who always comments first? Currently losing a game of Monopoly to a nine-year-old.
For precisely twenty-four hours, nobody is watching.
So what are you going to do about it?
The Weight We Pretend Doesn’t Exist
Every creator carries it. Most won’t admit it.
That constant low-level awareness that everything you publish is being evaluated. Ranked. Compared to your last hit. Filed away in some cosmic spreadsheet of your worth as a human being. (Okay, that last part might just be me. Therapy is expensive and I’ve made my choices.)
This pressure does something insidious. It doesn’t make your content bad—bad would be obvious, you’d catch it and fix it. It makes your content safe.
A little more optimized. A little less weird. A little closer to what worked last time.
You file down the edges that might alienate someone. You soften the take that might get pushback. You reach for the proven structure instead of the experimental one because what if it flops and everyone sees.
And slowly, post by post, your voice starts sounding like the thing you’re afraid of. Smooth. Competent. Instantly forgettable.
This is convergence. The gravitational pull toward the mean. And constant visibility is the engine.
The Gift Nobody Recognizes
Most creators see Christmas traffic and think: Why bother publishing? Nobody’s reading.
Which is exactly like refusing to practice piano because no one’s in the concert hall.
(Terrible metaphor. Pianos don’t have analytics dashboards that mock you with their flatlines. But you get it.)
The empty feed isn’t a problem. The empty feed is the point.
When nobody’s watching, you can finally hear yourself think. You can finally write the thing that’s been sitting in your drafts for three months because it feels “too risky.” You can try that voice that lives somewhere in your chest but never makes it to the page because what would they think.
The silence gives you room to discover what you actually want to say. Not what you think will perform. Not what the algorithm rewards.
Just... you. Unoptimized. Unpolished. Possibly unhinged.
Which brings me to my confession.
What I’ve Been Too Chicken to Publish
I’ve got a draft about failure. Real failure. Not the LinkedIn kind where everything becomes a “lesson” and you “wouldn’t change a thing.” (If you wouldn’t change anything, you didn’t actually fail. You just had an inconvenient success. Different thing.)
I mean the kind where you made a bad call. Hurt someone. Still haven’t fully processed it because processing would mean admitting it happened.
Every time I open that doc, I hear the same voice: This isn’t on brand. This doesn’t fit the content strategy. What will the AI writing guy’s audience think when they find out he’s kind of a mess sometimes?
So it sits there. Getting stale. While I publish safer stuff that sounds approximately like me but isn’t actually me.
Today I might publish it.
Not because I got brave. Because the stakes finally match my courage level. (Which is to say: I’m brave enough to fail quietly, in front of maybe forty people who are distracted anyway. A real profile in courage, I know.)
What’s yours?
The format you’ve been too scared to try. The take that might alienate half your audience. The level of honesty that makes your stomach hurt when you imagine hitting send.
Today’s the day.
Update: I published mine. The Disappearing Act — about going dark for five years, the lockdown that broke something in me, and why I'm writing this alone on Christmas with a judgmental chihuahua. Fair warning: it's not a recovery story.
The Permission Slip
Fine. You want it official? Here:
I, the empty Christmas feed, hereby grant you permission to:
☑️ Write something that helps absolutely no one. Not every post needs to teach. Some posts need to excavate.
☑️ Say something you’re not sure about. Uncertainty is interesting. Certainty is usually just a person who stopped asking questions.
☑️ Try a voice that feels too much. Too intense. Too vulnerable. Too weird. Whatever your “too much” is—today it’s just enough. (Maybe too little. Push harder.)
☑️ Publish without the SEO dance. No optimized slug. No strategic CTA. Just the thing you want to say, said the way you actually talk.
☑️ Fail where no one’s looking. The small audience is a feature. Training wheels for your real voice.
The Dark Truth About Distinctive Voices
They’re not built in the spotlight.
Every creator with a voice you’d recognize? They didn’t develop it during their viral hits. They developed it in obscurity. In the weird experiments nobody saw. In the three-hundred-subscriber era when they could try anything because nobody was paying attention anyway.
(This is the part where I’m supposed to say “and you can too!” but I find mandatory optimism suspicious. You might not develop a distinctive voice. Most people don’t. But you definitely won’t if you never give yourself room to fail. So. There’s that.)
The pressure to perform kills the space you need to discover what you actually sound like.
Today, that pressure evaporated.
Most creators will treat this like a problem—traffic is down, why bother—and wait for January when the eyeballs return.
You could use it differently.
You could write the thing you’ve been avoiding. Try the voice that scares you.
You could publish something genuinely goofy and see if maybe, possibly, against all odds, that’s been your voice the whole time.
One Last Thing
You don’t have to publish anything today.
This isn’t productivity content wearing a Santa hat. I’m not here to squeeze value out of your holiday. Take the day off. Eat something obscene. Lose to a nine-year-old at Monopoly. (They’re ruthless. Respect the hustle.)
But if you’ve been carrying something—a draft, an idea, a voice you’re afraid to try—today is when it gets room to breathe.
Not because you have to.
Because you finally can.
The weight comes back tomorrow. The algorithm wakes up. The pressure resumes its regularly scheduled programming.
But right now?
Nobody’s reading anyway.
The silence isn’t a problem to wait out. It’s the laboratory you’ve been waiting for.
What are you going to publish while no one’s watching? (Hit reply—I’m genuinely curious. Also slightly lonely. The algorithm abandoned me too.)
Crafted with love (and AI),
Nick “Failing Quietly” Quick
PS…Subscribe if you want more of... this. I publish daily now. Unclear if that’s momentum or mania. We’ll find out together.
I saw your other article but haven't read it yet. It'll try tomorrow when my eyes aren't so decimated.
I'm not keen on first-person stuff, but knowing the holiday lull was coming, I sprinkled a few of those, including one coming tomorrow, in this time period. They weren't experimental, just different, a couple spontaneous on an afternoon. We'll see how they play compared to the usual fare, but I'm not tossing away the mold.