The most liberating number on the internet is zero. Zero views, zero comments, zero subscribers. From the outside it looks like failure. From the inside, it is a soundproof room.
When this blog started, nobody read it. I do not mean that poetically. I mean the analytics showed a flat line, and the one spike in the first month was a bot in a datacenter somewhere, crawling everything with a pulse. (thank you for your service, bot)
that zero is not the absence of an audience. It is the absence of consequences. You can be bad, in public, for free.
Go read my early posts. Actually, do not. But if you do, you will find a young man in Ethiopia trying on borrowed voices like jackets at Hadid. In one post I am doing a famous philosopher’s routine with the serial numbers filed off. In another I am a LinkedIn prophet explaining Stoicism to an audience of nobody. There is a post where I call something “problematic” three times in four paragraphs, because I had read the word online and thought it was seasoning. It is not seasoning. It is salt, and I used it like sugar.
Those posts are bad. They are also load-bearing, but that is a different essay. The point here is simpler: I got to be bad without paying for it. Nobody screenshotted my worst paragraph. Nobody quote-posted my hot take about algorithms, which was, in hindsight, a lukewarm take stolen from someone smarter. The zero absorbed everything.
A blog with no readers is a gym with no mirrors. You show up, you lift badly, nobody laughs, and one day the bar moves like it means it.
People ask how to build an audience, and the honest answer is unfashionable: you do not find one. You grow one, slowly, by writing the thing one specific person needs. Not a demographic. A person. And that person is usually you, three years ago.
I write for the version of me who was nineteen, broke, googling “how to think better” on a phone with a cracked screen, getting answers from men in blazers selling courses. (teaching men’s fashion and alpha men were the go to dawg) He needed someone to say: here is a book, here is what it did to me, and there is no funnel at the bottom. He needed an essay written by someone whose context looked like his, and he could not find it, so now I write it.
Somewhere out there is another kid on another cracked phone, in Bahir Dar or Nairobi or Paramaribo, typing the same query. The search engine will connect us eventually, or it will not. Either way, the post exists, like a lighthouse that never checks for ships.
The math, then. Zero readers means infinite attempts. Every post is a rep, and every rep is effectively private even though it is public, because privacy on the internet was never about locks. It is about indifference. Use the indifference. It is the most generous thing the internet offers a beginner, and it does not last forever.
Write like nobody is reading, because for a while, nobody is. That is not the punishment.
That is a gift from the gods.