I’ve had some good discussions with friends, recently, about what we make and how we spend our time.

There was a period in which you could make one thing, and just one thing, and that thing would stand a decent chance of reaching a large enough audience (or a small but suitably spendy one) so that you could make a nice little living from whatever it is you’re best at and most passionate about.

The world has changed, though, and the reasons for this change are many and not universally negative.

Some of this evolution stems from the disempowerment of traditional gatekeepers, for instance, which is arguably a wonderful thing. But it’s also the result of our communication channels fracturing and forking, which has jolted us from a world in which there were relatively few and mostly regional distribution mechanisms, to one in which there are globe-spanning mega-platforms owned by companies that mint their fortunes by convincing us to fill their metaphorical pages and airwaves with work we previously would have been compensated for.

In this new reality, such efforts often become unpaid toil that primarily benefits the platforms through which it’s disseminated, and if we want to garner enough attention and credibility to maybe sustain the work we would prefer to be doing—the stuff that actually matters to us, and in many cases, which actually matters to the folks engaging with it—we’re told we need to post more, pivot to video, becoming influencers, and generally add this additional portfolio of (again, usually uncompensated) responsibilities to our pile of other compulsory labors.

(It speaks volumes about the value of such content, I think, that AI-based tools can so casually churn out convincing replicas of human-made social shareables.)

Most of the people with whom I’ve spoken about this dynamic and its implications for the work they do have decided to refocus more of their time and effort on the stuff they actually care about.

They’ll make more books, they’ll make more music, they’ll do a lot more of the stuff that fuels them and a lot less of what drains them and pulls them away from that former category.

This is roughly where I’ve landed, too.

I decided to finally write a new book after years of exploring other mediums and delivery mechanisms, in part because that’s the sort of conversation I like to have with folks on the other end of my work; big projects, longer duration relationships, more opportunity to really explore that which warrants exploration.

Shorter and more temporal methods of communication also have their place, and in some cases these methods are ideal for making connections and following up on larger bodies of work (after reading a book, attending an event, etc).

I love social media for its capacity to help people cross-pollinate in this way, as it grants us the means and permission to reach out into the void and see who’s on the same wavelength, wherever those resonant souls happen to be geographically located.

Thus, I’m reworking my life to ensure I have plenty of room for heftier, more intensive projects, so that I can experiment with how I get said projects in front of people who may be interested in the same, and so I can determine what role those bite-sized bits of communication and creation might play in my body of work, moving forward.

I don’t want posts and promos to be a dominant, or even medium-sized focus in my life—I’m not interested in working as a serf in a social media company’s fields—but I do still think these can be valuable tools if deftly and purposefully wielded: I just don’t know what it means to use them in that way, yet, in part because they’re not currently optimized for that sort of utility.

This is a liminal moment for me, then—and for many other people, I suspect—during which I’m shrugging off some outmoded personal definitions of value and usefulness, adopting some potentially Quixotic variations of the same, and scanning the horizon for workable models that might be a better fit than what’s become the norm in many making-focused spaces.