The Content Deluge

How to write when everything worth writing has already been written

Jul 06, 2025

Have you ever let yourself go out into the waves, far enough from the beach for the water to sweep you off your feet? Being a bad swimmer and terrified of the open sea, I haven’t. I imagine it to be very unpleasant.

I experience the same sensation every Sunday morning, however, when I open my inbox and find it inundated with a flood of Substack posts from my favourite writers. These essays, when I get around to reading them, are incredible. However, when faced with a dozen arresting titles at once, I freeze. I open them one after another, copy the URL, paste it into a document titled ‘To Read’, and close the tab.

Substack posts are only the tip of the iceberg. There are short stories, magazine articles, podcast episodes, TV shows, Youtube videos—all recommended by well-meaning friends. The list of great movies I haven’t seen includes (and you may want to swallow anything that is in your mouth right now) Sholay, The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Schindler’s List, and Gangs of Wasseypur. My list of must-read books is long enough to be a book of its own.

Art created by author. What do you think this is supposed to look like? Please let me know—my marriage might depend on it.

How does one deal with this deluge of content? Having lists in which to dump recommendations helps to some extent—you can hope that your future self will have the decency to stop being addicted to your phone and consume at least some of it.

Adding a drop to the wave

Unfortunately, I have an even bigger problem. Each time I want to write something, I have to first convince myself that it’s OK to add to the mountain of material on the internet, despite not being able to keep up with my own to-read list.

Here’s how I do it.

I am the only person in the history of humanity, I tell myself, who has lived my life. No one else can write from my perspective. All human experiences, including mine, are worth writing about. If we all decided to put down our pens because everything worth writing has already been written, then nobody would write about the present moment. We need good writing to make sense of the things happening around us.

That doesn’t mean, though, that one is only justified in writing about one’s own life or current events. Anything that comes out of a brain—fiction, poetry, opinions—is a function of that brain’s personality and circumstances—by definition, unique. We should put our thoughts out there, even if no one wants to read them.

Which means, I tell myself, that I should write because I enjoy it. It doesn’t matter who reads it. This philosophy is, of course, easier to preach than to practice. Two years on Substack and I still cannot resist the urge, when I publish a piece, to check how it is being received. I feel bad when the reception is lukewarm. The only writing I truly do for myself happens in my journal. Still, when my inner demons whisper “Who are you to write an essay on the Internet?”, I yell back “GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN” and it works.

The quality of my Substack posts is much better than that of my journal entries. The possibility of someone reading the words, even if no one actually does, tricks the brain into working harder, editing more ruthlessly. Some of the writing I am happiest with happens in the hour before I hit publish, because the audience suddenly becomes real.

These answers are messy. Write because your life experience is unique, but write about anything you want, not just your life experience. Write for yourself, but put it out in the world so that there are stakes. But don’t worry if no one reads it or likes it.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if such existential questions keep you up at night, as long as you can get yourself to do the thing—whatever you have chosen to do—with some regularity. It doesn’t matter if you feel like a hypocrite while doing it, guilty about the stack of beautiful unread articles sitting in your inbox.

Only the doing matters.