Popularity
When we publish a newsletter, a blog post, a tweet, or this very Substack post, we look for numbers: traction, open rate, clicks, shares of attention. We want our content, ideas, and eventually, us to be popular.
But what is the value of this popularity? Who is the other side of that stat? Can we redefine our impact? By deanonymizing our world, we start moving from transacting with faceless avatars to dealing with people, adding multiple dimensions to the personas in our content plan, and more importantly, keeping our activities in the world in sync with our creative practice.
This week's prompt is:
What is the value of popularity?
Simply put, I start from within, receive feedback from without, and dance between the two. I have been writing a lot lately about my teenage years, where popularity was my main goal as a way to know I belong and an understood. People and what they thought of me were the source of my life. It was dangerous. But from my own center, being better friends with myself, I have learned to interact with the world around me in more interdependent ways. The definition of popularity is "the state or condition of being liked, admired, or supported by many people." This almost killed me and I am not kidding. The value of popularity with this definition could be relationship. Everything is relationship. When oriented around taking care of life or vitality, popularity could serve the whole well, I think.