How to write online without sacrificing your creativity or inner joy

The dopamine trap secretly draining your motivation to write

You’re about to hit “Send to everyone now” on your most recent Substack article. There’s the usual faint fluttering of butterflies in your stomach as you think of this piece landing in the inbox of your hard-won list of subscribers. You poured your heart into this one — its current flows beneath the carefully formatted pages (broken only by a ‘Subscribe’ button or two).

Would they like it? Would they even read it? Would they even click on it?

The questions devolve as the butterflies multiply and you quickly press the button that will send your heart out into the world for judgement.

Hours pass. Nothing.

Oh! A loyal subscriber ‘liked’ the article. You feel wonderful for a moment. Then the fraught wondering returns.

The book that transported you to another world yesterday is reduced to black curlicues on a white background today, unable to weave its usual magic without your focus, which keeps getting pulled to the published article.

As the likes grow, you find yourself confusingly unsatisfied. Should they be growing faster? Is this article doing better than previous ones?

Then the comparisons creep in… that other writer published an article at the same time and they have triple the likes! And with the comparisons comes the self-doubt: Was there something wrong with your article? Were you too vulnerable?

Then a new notification comes in: someone just unsubscribed from your newsletter.¹

Your heart drops. The idea of ever pouring it out into writing again suddenly seems absurd. Instead, you find yourself wanting to hide away, to erect a fortress around it and protect it from the world.

If you’re a writer on Substack, you may recognise some of yourself in this story. This rollercoaster of publishing may seem like an unavoidable and inevitable rite of passage (err… write of passage) but these oscillating feelings suggest something very sinister is going on beneath the surface. Something that is not only affecting your writing abilities, but your entire identity as a writer.

Your inner comparison maker

Just behind your forehead and right above your eye sockets sits a region of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Fittingly situated, wherever you look, the OFC compares, running continuous moment-to-moment value calculations to help you decide (or rather, feel) whether a given action is worth doing (or not). It is where your expectation of, well, anything, is set.² Then your dopamine system comes in with its spikes and dips to let you know whether reality exceeds that expectation.

Say you’re at a dinner party and recognise a chance to tell a rather hilarious joke. You lay down context, build the tension and then hit everyone with the punchline, expecting (hoping) for a few chuckles. And to your surprise, your expectations are exceeded as the table dissolves into laughter around you. Your OFC calculates that moment as much greater in value than expected, and your dopamine system supplies a nice spike that feels like “do more of whatever led to that!”³

Now let’s say Joe sitting across from you takes your joke and builds on it. (You never really liked that Joe.) The table explodes with laughter. People are slapping it while wiping away tears. And you find yourself sitting there feeling… a little miffed. Like you had brought a bit of thunder to this dinner party and it was just stolen from you.

Your OFC grabs Joe’s bigger laugh as the new yardstick, and against it your own moment suddenly measures short. This drop of reality relative to expectations manifests as a dip in dopamine. The dip is the miff — it makes you want to do less of whatever led to it.

The moment before Joe and his thunder-stealing, you felt energised, keen to bring the table to laughter again. After Joe, you feel… a little less inclined to do so.

But the feeling passes and by the end of the night, you barely remember it.

The OFC works as part of a beautiful feedback system designed to help calibrate our motivations to do more or less of anything. And it has been completely warped by one pervasive aspect of modern life: our propensity to assign a literal numerical value to absolutely everything — and keep it permanently in view.

The most dangerous invention of all: the ‘like.’

The most dangerous thing on the internet

A world of scores

Take a step back, and forget for a moment that many of us have never known a world without that tiny little heart icon. Can you see how utterly dystopian it is to reduce the idea of a compliment — something that should be warm and genuine and nuanced — down to a discrete and binary unit?

It’s as crazy as if a little ‘laugh meter’ was hovering above each head at the aforementioned dinner table, quantifying your joke’s impact into one tidy numeric score, and then directly comparing that value against Joe. For all to see.

That’s the online world we live in.

And the OFC — our helpful value comparator — loves numbers. With all nuance stripped away, the value comparison becomes a straight numerical comparison, something a child could do.

Without a better-calibrated reference point, the raw and cheap ‘like’ count always wins.

The publishing rollercoaster

Let’s say you publish an essay at 9am and receive 5 ‘likes’ in two hours. You may have expected a little more — “Didn’t my last article have more than this by now?” — but since the memory (and therefore expectation) is fuzzy, there is barely a ripple in dopamine. Just a flicker of disappointment.

But it’s human nature to go hunting for more information. Even when it is to our own detriment.

So you find yourself clicking away from your essay and scrolling through other recently published pieces. And you can’t help but look at their ‘like’ count. Your OFC immediately latches onto this as a concrete reference from which to calculate the value of your essay. And suddenly you have an influx of mental comparisons bombarding your dopamine system as it churns out dip after dip, in perfect lockstep with your eyes flicking from number to number.

Then you see someone who has 80 likes and your eyes can’t help but dart to the time that essay was published: the same time as yours. Your OFC greedily absorbs this new information and makes the devastatingly easy comparison between 80 and 5, concluding that your essay is worth far less. Your dopamine system responds with a cavernous dip and you feel dejected and demoralised, the physiological readout of a worse-than-expected outcome.

An inadequate reference point

The cruelty lies in all the nuance that this raw comparison of ‘likes’ omits. All your OFC can calculate with two crude numbers is a deficit. What it can’t see — because this information isn’t in your mental model — is that the other writer has ten times the audience, that both numbers are on par for their different stages of growth and that visible examples are survivorship-selected.

Your OFC faithfully computed the value of your own actions using a statistically meaningless reference point, yet you experienced a very real chemical drop in response.

We live in a world full of crude numerical reference points — ‘likes,’ restacks, number of subscribers, followers — and no way to calibrate them into a rich model that would actually yield useful comparisons. This constant onslaught of social comparison is eroding the value of our actions, one heart icon at a time.

It is making us want to do less of whatever led to that.

And what actions led to your essay being judged as inferior? Publishing. Creating. Writing.

Impacts of bad calibration

When your OFC made the comparison between your joke and Joe’s joke, it had a richly calibrated model to work with. The reference was matched on nearly every variable that matters — same audience, same moment, same conditions. The comparison — that Joe really did get a bigger laugh — is, for the most part, entirely fair. But because all that nuance is implicitly taken into account, the dip is small and the sting is fleeting.

Publishing online hides all that nuance. The other writer’s audience size, their head start, the months of growth behind that number — all still true, and all still real, but buried behind dozens of links. At the dinner table, the context was front and center but online, the context is hidden behind a single, discrete unit of affirmation.

The shining light of the ‘like’ completely overshadows any nuance.

If you’re a writer — or anyone who has a presence in social media — this fact should terrify you. It means that every comparison your OFC faithfully computes about your work is missing all its calibrating information, causing needless and frequent dips in dopamine.

These dips are supposed to update the calibration model and the behaviour that led to the dip. But there is no model to update because the model is simply a crude number. All that your OFC has to work with is “action: published essay → outcome: worse than expected,” so it instead decrements the value of the act of publishing.

This means each dip essentially revises your sense of your own essay’s worth downwards, wiring in the feeling, “do less of whatever led to that.”

Do less writing.

Or worse, corrupt it. Forgo creativity in pursuit of ‘likes.’ Sacrifice your joy on the altar of engagement.

In the very extreme case, where your identity is intricately tied to being a ‘successful writer,’ these dips can directly update your self-worth. Downwards.

At first, you may just feel like you’re coincidentally in a bit of a creative slump on the days you publish. Over time, as you publish more essays and your OFC runs the crude numeric comparisons, you may find the sight of your work desk — which once brought excitement — starts to feel more like… well, work. You may find yourself procrastinating more and more, deferring your writing instead of looking forward to it. The well of creativity that once flowed so plentifully is slowly drying up.

If any of this sounds familiar, try to take a moment next time you feel a lack of motivation to write. Did you recently view your metrics? Get an unsubscribe? Glance at another writer’s subscriber count, or their restack numbers, or the comments piling up on someone else’s post? These little dips might be whittling away at your joy without you explicitly realising it.

A better model

So how do we fix this? How does a writer publish online without sacrificing their creativity, motivation and inner joy?

We need a better model, one that sits upstream of the ‘like.’

Don’t just ask, “How many likes is good for this essay?” or “How many subscribers should I be getting per week?” Instead, add the following preface:

“For a writer with my audience size, at a similar stage of growth…”

Then everything becomes so much more clear. Likes are calibrated against a smart reference point, not a ‘dumb’ one.

How I protect my joy

In an effort to preserve my own joy as a writer, I set out to gather the data that would allow me to add such a preface — to calculate the nuance behind the naked number.

You can’t turn off the comparison machinery above your eyes. But you can give it a reference that’s actually true rather than leaving your OFC to grab the nearest stranger’s vanity metric.

Over many months, I built a tool to gather data on as many notes and essays as I could, collecting ‘like’ counts and subscriber data across many writers. Then I bucketed it by audience size, and turned it into distributions — what’s normal for someone at a similar stage of growth, shown as a range rather than a single number.

Before I ever even take a glimpse at metrics, I make sure my OFC is loaded with this calibrated reference point. I know what the realistic range of likes is for a writer of my size. And I know the average number of new subscribers a writer at a similar stage of growth sees per week. Any dips I experience are shallow and only help me refine the upstream model. Updates do not touch my self-worth. And my inner joy remains intact.

And to preserve the collective joy of Substack writers, I’m making this tool available here.

Imagine you hit “Send to everyone now” with a proper reference in mind. You still feel the familiar fluttering in your stomach. But this time, your expectations are realistic and calibrated against the right data. The other writer with triple the likes? Both their numbers and yours are right where they should be.

So you close the tab and pick your book back up. This time, it works its magic while your article goes out into the world and works yours.

It is possible to pour your heart out into your writing without feeling like the world is passing judgement on you. Your heart — your joy — doesn’t need a fortress. It just needs the right scaffolding.

“A phone full of hearts” by A.R.

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In an upcoming essay, I’ll share the exact protocol I use to ensure my creativity, motivation and self-worth remain protected whilst maintaining a public presence on social media and Substack.

In the meantime, please feel free to calibrate your OFC with the Substack Growth Calibrator:

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A note on where this is headed…

In a world that’s reduced almost everything we do to a number, our motivation, creativity and joy are silently under attack. These are precious human artefacts, and it’s my mission to build the tools that protect them.

Writers are where I’m starting, because it’s where I live, but these tools will grow to protect anyone who ventures online — anyone whose dopamine system is vulnerable. If that’s a project you want to follow, subscribe.

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References for this essay, and for the wider series, are available as a collection in the Research Library, specifically:

• Dopamine, Reward Prediction, and Learning

• Variable Reward Schedules and Intermittent Reinforcement

• Incentive Salience, Wanting vs Liking

• Habit Formation and Dopamine

• Value Coding and Reference Dependence in the Orbitofrontal Cortex

• Social Comparison and Relative Reward

1. On my second day publishing on Substack, I turned off “unsubscribe” notifications. I highly recommend you do this as well, for reasons I’ll explain in the upcoming protocol essay.

2. The OFC is one of the brain's primary regions for representing and comparing the subjective value of competing options. (Valuation is distributed across several regions such as the amygdala, striatum and vmPFC, but I'm using the OFC as the cleanest representative of the brain’s value-comparison network.)

3. It is well-established that dopamine is all about the “more.” It is a motivational system that is actually separate from the pleasure (opioid) system.