I think Substack is great overall for nurturing more long form writing and making it accessible and fun and a regularly rewarding habit. But it’s also important for new writers to be aware of how performative it is to write in public, even if you don’t have a large following, there’s a strong incentive that works on a psychological level that a) acts like a little brain parasite motivating you to snap-to-grid all truths into pithy, narratively legible little platitudes or arcs and b) removes you from the slower and unrewarding work that allows you to form a more interesting and complex understanding of things. The more I privately journal the better my public stuff gets. The private stuff is important because it’s the only place you can contend with the truth.

And I think there’s a very simple instruction for journaling that could be helpful for people, which is to simply focus on writing down as many true things as they can (whether emotionally true on the level of experience, or observationally true in the world, or propositionally true as a way of generalising the world).

I’m not a big fan of journaling as a way of self improvement (e.g. explicitly journaling for gratitude or unpacking trauma or whatever) because it similarly incentivises performance and dishonesty. If you just make writing an endeavour to say as many true things as possible (and surgically remove all the other stuff that reveals itself as fake rot over time), improvement happens automatically.