The Quiet Joy of Making Things Nobody Will Ever See

My friend Priya has a newsletter with eleven subscribers. Eight of them are family. She writes it every Sunday anyway — long, weird essays about birds and her father's hardware store in Ohio — and it is, without exaggeration, some of the best writing I've read this year.

She's not doing it wrong. She might be the only person doing it right.

We Turned Play Into Performance

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: the internet used to be where you went to be bad at stuff. The early-2010s internet was full of blogs with no readers, SoundCloud accounts with three plays, Etsy shops that sold one bookmark to your aunt. It was charming. It was practice.

Then the metrics moved in. Now every platform shows you exactly how many people saw your work, exactly how that compares to your last post, and exactly which of your friends' posts are outperforming yours. We built a machine that converts hobbies into anxiety, and then we acted surprised when everyone stopped having hobbies.

The result is a culture where people don't start things unless they can be great at them publicly. You can't just take up painting — you have to become a painting content creator or quit. The sketchbook became a portfolio. The journal became a personal brand. Play died of exposure.

Twelve Followers Is a Feature, Not a Bug

There's a specific freedom in knowing nobody's watching. When the stakes are zero, you experiment. You write the strange essay. You attempt the song in the wrong key. You post the photo of your sourdough that came out looking like a meteorite, unfiltered, caption optional.

Psychologists have a version of this idea — evaluation kills creativity. The moment you imagine an audience judging you, your work gets safer. Smaller. More average. The algorithm doesn't just measure taste; it flattens it, because the safest way to get reach is to make what already reached.

So the twelve-follower account isn't a failed influencer. It's a person who still gets to be a beginner. That's rare and precious in 2025, and honestly, kind of radical.

The Hobby Renaissance Is Already Happening

Look closely and you'll see it: the return of the knitting circle, the community garden, the zine fair, the adult rec league. Part of this is burnout with the attention economy. Part of it is that people are quietly rediscovering what our grandparents never forgot — that making things with your hands, for no one, is one of the last genuinely free activities left.

Some of it is even happening online, in the corners the algorithm forgot. Group chats that share recipes. Discord servers where fifty people post half-finished novels. Accounts with handles like @sarahdrawsbadly that are, frankly, drawing wonderfully.

Make Something This Week. Tell No One.

If any of this lands, here's my challenge: make something this week and don't optimize it. Don't pick the platform, don't study the trends, don't check the numbers. Write the thing, bake the thing, record the thing. Post it if you want, or don't.

Priya's newsletter goes out to eleven people every Sunday. She's been at it for two years. Last month she told me she finally thinks of herself as a writer.

She was a writer the whole time. The follower count just never got a vote.