Substack has become the world’s largest repository of unbothered mediocrity. The dominant register is confessional mush. Sentences that begin with “I’ve been thinking a lot about…” and end, several hundred words later, having thought very little. The prose is undisciplined, clause piled on clause, the rhythm of someone who has never read their work aloud and wouldn’t survive the experience if they did. The ideas are recycled at industrial scale: the same epiphanies about burnout, authenticity, wellness, and “doing the work”, dressed in the language of vulnerability as though emotional disclosure were a substitute for an actual argument. Diary entries cosplay as essays. Anecdotes mistake themselves for evidence. Lists replace thinking. And the tacit contract between writer and reader, that the writer has wrestled with something, risked something, discovered something worth the reader’s irreplaceable time, is broken on arrival, cheerfully, and often daily.

There are exceptions, of course, a handful of writers using the platform the way a blade uses a whetstone, producing work that is strange, rigorous, original, and alive. But they are precisely that — exceptions! The rest is content pretending to be literature.