"Have you thought about TikTok?"

If you're a creative person, you've heard some variation of this question approximately seventeen thousand times. Maybe it's "You should really be on Instagram more."

Or my personal favorite:

"Your work is great, but it's just not very... accessible."

There's always a pause before that last word. Accessible. It hangs in the air like they've just told you your baby is ugly but they're trying to be nice about it. I know what they are saying.

"You're not playing the game, Nye."

You're not building your brand. You're not turning yourself into content. And right now, every author is expected to moonlight as a marketing manager, every musician as a social media strategist, every artist as a full-time huckster. This is apparently a problem.

They're not wrong. I agree, but that doesn't make you an artist.

Don't be too busy performing the idea of being an artist, so you don't have time to actually be one. Everyone has to pose that "I am a serious creative person," while the actual creative work happens in whatever time is left after the content calendar is filled.

I get it. The economy is brutal. Publishing is consolidated. Streaming pays pennies. If you want to publish a book, labels want to see your follower count. The system is designed to make you into your own PR firm.

But what if we just didn't? What if we just made things and published them?

Paul Cézanne couldn't get into art school.

The Salon de Paris rejected his paintings every year for nearly two decades. By middle age, he was so discouraged he stopped showing his work publicly for ten years. His best friend wrote a novel about him. A novel, by the way, about a failed painter who commits suicide. (ha!)

He didn't have his first solo show until he was 56. Today, he's regarded to be one of the founders of modern art. Both Picasso and Matisse apparently said, "Cézanne is the father of us all."

There's a great video essay by Adam Westbrook titled "Why Leonardo DaVinci was a Loser." Not because DaVinci failed, but because he took forever. He was slow. He left projects unfinished. He wandered from subject to subject. Over the course of his life he studied anatomy, engineering, botany, mathematics. His life is filled with failed flying machines, years sketching dead guys in the morgue, and running from city to city all over Italy. By the standards of our "30 Under 30" culture, he would have been considered unfocused, undisciplined, not serious about his career. The true "A Grade" F--- Up!

But that wandering? That slowness? That refusal to specialize early and market himself efficiently? That's exactly what made him Leonardo. There's no one else like him.

Now imagine either of these masters with a TikTok account. Picture Cézanne spending three hours a day posting "day in the life of a struggling artist" content, responding to comments, trying to figure out the algorithm, riding trends, asking his followers...

"What's up Gang! Did I just paint the painting of the #summer?!"

Would he have become Cézanne? Would Leonardo have become Leonardo? Or would they have become interesting artists who were really good at Instagram?

Deep and transformative work that actually matters requires something our current system actively discourages: time to be bad at things. Time to experiment. Time to fail privately. Time to develop a voice that's genuinely yours rather than optimized for engagement. Man, I can't go back and read old stuff without cringing, and likely, a year from now, I will probably hate reading these words now.

The video game company Valve has a philosophy: "Quality is a means to higher productivity." They don't spend their time marketing Half-Life or Portal to death. They spend their time making Half-Life and Portal so good that people can't shut up about them. The product does the marketing. The work builds the reputation. But Valve is ALWAYS late on delivery, they don't dominate the social media feeds, and they could care less about what is said about them in every game forum in the world.

Nobel Prize winners make their crucial discoveries at an average age of 44. Tech founders are twice as likely to start winning companies at 50 than at 30. Deep expertise takes time, failure, struggle. Real innovation comes from bringing together disparate ideas in new ways, which means you need time to wander, to explore, to accumulate knowledge that might not seem useful right now. Every failure from a lifetime of failure.

But you can't do that if you're also running an AI content mill. You can't develop genuine expertise if half your brain is always thinking about posting schedules and engagement metrics while you monitor AI models generating click worthy feeds.

I have regular readers who read my scribbles. Thank you readers.

When you're writing for 100s of people who actually care rather than chasing 100,000 people who might click if the algorithm feels generous, you're free.

Free to be weird. Free to be specific. Free to think about robots and distributed economics. Free to be difficult when it's easy not to be. Free to develop your voice without sanding off the edges to make it "accessible." Accessible. Yeah, sorry... that's not me.

But I still have to show up for those who buy in.

Woody Allen famously said "80% of success is just showing up." (Some say it's 90%, others 99%, the exact number doesn't matter as much as the principle.) The digital artist Beeple made a piece of art every single day over 5,000 days straight. Not because each piece was a masterwork, but because showing up builds trust. That's why he's worth 65 million in crypto. Consistency builds trust. Presence builds trust.

This is different from the performative showing-up of social media, where you're expected to be "on" all the time, engaging, responding, feeding the algorithm. This is the showing up of work. Of craft. Of saying: I'm here. I'm doing the thing. Week after week. Year after year.

That's why I published here every week for the past year. Not because I'm trying to go viral or game an algorithm, but I've learned...

showing up regularly for the people who actually care is worth more than occasionally showing up for people who don't.

This doesn't mean being deliberately pretentious. (Though, maybe I'm guilty of that?) But I hope that each week I'll find another person who reads deeply, and who engages with my struggles. They're worth more than a million drive-by likes. And it means showing up for them in return, consistently, with work that matters.

When every piece of content could be fake and will likely increasingly be, I have to make this space count.

These words need to matter.

We're drowning in generated content and it will get worse. AI can pump out endless blog posts, articles, images, music, an infinite stream of competent mediocrity optimized for algorithms. Authenticity from an individual who speaks honestly, becomes the only currency that actually matters.

And like any real value, it's hard to find.

What if we trusted that quality compounds over time, the same way knowledge compounds? The more you know about your craft, the faster you learn. The better you get, the more you have to offer.

The artists who are still working at 60, 70, 80 aren't the ones who had the biggest platforms in their 20s. They're the ones who put in their hours, stayed curious, kept learning, and built something real instead of something viral.

Being creative is a life long struggle.

So yes, I've been told I should be on TikTok. I've been told my essays are too long. Maybe they are. Maybe I'm leaving money on the table. Maybe I should pack this endeavor up and just fire up Netflix.

But I'd rather write for people who want to think than people who want to scroll. I'd rather take the slow path to figure this out and make something that lasts than the fast path and make content that disappears. That means I publish here, and then open up my writing program, struggle with Claude's nonsense, and start working on the next one.

That's it.

And if you're a young artist feeling the pressure to become your own marketing department, to turn your practice into content, to make yourself accessible and brandable and algorithmically friendly, I want you to know ... you have another option.

You can just make your work. You can get better slowly. You can find your people one at a time and build deep engagement with each one. You can build something small and real instead of something big and hollow.

It will take longer. You will not go viral. You might never have a huge platform.

But get this, you might actually become an artist.

And soon, when everyone's a sellout, where everything's generated, where authenticity is the rarest commodity? Yeah, I think that's how you stand out.

Seriously, now is the time to get good at something.

Go be an artist.

That's it for this time. I do this every week. If you vibe to the ideas I express, be sure to subscribe or share with friends. We'll see you next time.

Nye Warburton is a tortured artist who lives a happy life in Savannah, Georgia. This essay was an improvised recording done with Otter.ai, refined using Claude Sonnet 4.0, and edited with old-fashioned human labor.

For more information visit: https://nyewarburton.com

Adam Westbrook's Video Essay:

The Long Game Part 1: Why Leonardo DaVinci was a Loser.

• The Search for Authentic Personal Value, September 7, 2025

• On Drawing More, July 20, 2025

• Analogous Connections of the Mind, June 15, 2025

The Art of Not Making It

Great work is valuable for a reason