Why I stopped churning out content

I had always been drawn to creating content, well before I ever thought about trying to make a career out of it.

To be clear, I still believe deeply in content. I still make a living thinking about it, shaping it, and helping it work harder. What I stopped believing in was churning out content for the sake of churn especially when the why, the model, and the person behind it were all getting blurry.

I was always filming things. At first, it was mostly to study my surfing. Then it was Jackass-inspired tomfoolery. Eventually, it became fitness content and a way to tell the story of my relationship with training.

Early on, it was just fun. Then, around the time of my first corporate job, I started envisioning a new media property around health and fitness. In my mind, this was going to be my ticket to becoming my own boss and building something of my own outside the traditional corporate path.

I worked tireless hours trying to recruit writers and creators, assign and edit content, manage social media accounts, and keep the whole thing moving. It was exhausting. And I don’t even know if I was good at it. I just had this grand vision and kept chasing it.

Eventually, it did lead me down a new career path as an editor, and at an interesting time. Traditional media was changing rapidly. The internet was really starting to take off. Social media was becoming a bigger deal. More and more attention was shifting from print to web, then from web to social.

For a while, I had a decent run inside that shift. But then web and social kept getting more intense. More platforms came out. More creators emerged. More formats appeared. And the pressure to always be on, and always be churning things out, became mentally exhausting.

Somewhere along the way, I got completely sucked into it. Sometimes on camera, and many times behind the scenes, but the churn never stopped. Visitors, views, likes, comments, saves, shares. It started to feel like running on an unstoppable treadmill while also trying to solve a complex problem. You could jump off, but then you risked being forgotten. If you stayed on, unless you had a strong business model and a team to execute with you or for you, that path almost always led somewhere unhealthy.

And I’m not sure people fully understand how real that can get.

You can push through burnout when it’s mild or moderate. But eventually, stronger versions of burnout become serious. I think I had been on the edge of it for years, or recovering from milder cases only to repeat the cycle again. It took a much more serious version: one that left me sick and in chronic pain to force me to stop and ask what I had been doing all these years, and for what.

An unclear “why” and muddied business models

At first, creating was fun. Creating content around fitness was fun. For several years, I got to wake up and make things that I hoped would inspire people to live healthier, fitter lives.

But as the media landscape kept changing, building a business around sponsorships and ad dollars became harder. That forced a pivot. Content was no longer the thing. Content became the thing used to sell other things.

And that can be fulfilling for a while. But it is not the same.

The objective changes. It becomes less about inspiring, entertaining, educating, or exploring an idea, and more about persuading people to buy. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Businesses need to sell. But the relationship to the work changes when the content is always in service of another conversion.

At the same time, when it came to my own content, I didn’t have a clear product to sell. I wasn’t selling personal training packages. I didn’t want to sell gym memberships or build a studio. I didn’t have a fitness app. I didn’t have some clear new service I was excited to build.

And I was becoming increasingly aware that I didn’t want to be typecast as a meathead or gym rat. Fitness has been a major part of my life, and it has brought a lot of good into my life. But it is not all that I am.

So what was I doing? Posting my workouts, my meals, my vacations? For what? To get followers, for what? To build my brand, for what? What is my “brand” even?

Anyone can get ripped and post their workouts and meals. Anyone can go on vacation and flex it.

And maybe that sounds dismissive, but I don’t mean it that way. I respect people who build real businesses around that. I know how hard it is. I just started to realize I didn’t know if that was the business I wanted to be in, or the person I wanted to become.

A loss of interest in playing the game

Questions of who I am, who I want to be, and what I’m trying to sell aside, the game of content creation has changed dramatically.

There are more creators in market. More platforms. More formats. More features. More sophisticated algorithms. Trends that constantly come and go. And increasingly, it feels like we’re not just creating for people anymore. We’re creating for the algorithms.

That is exhausting.

I don’t want to “have to” post five times per day. I don’t want to set up my tripod everywhere and shoot everything while missing the actual lived experience. I don’t want to A/B test every post. I don’t want to walk up to strangers on the street and ask them a million questions while they’re just trying to go about their day.

I don’t want to turn every thought into a carousel. I don’t want to package every failure into a hook. I don’t want to pretend every walk is a lesson. And I definitely don’t want to scare people into paying attention.

And I’m not saying none of that works. Clearly, it does. I just don’t know if I want to live that way, where everything I do, think, or experience starts becoming potential content.

An evolved relationship with my initial subject matter

This goes back to the bigger question of who I am, what I’m selling, and what I’m trying to leave behind.

Fitness, exercise, working out… whatever you want to call it was and always will be a major part of my life. But I’m not a gym owner. I don’t train people, outside of helping some people in special instances. I tried digital coaching for about two months, but that was really more of an experiment to see if I could create a new business model.

I don’t have a fitness app. I don’t want to build a studio. And quite frankly, I don’t want any of those things right now.

That doesn’t mean I stopped caring about fitness. I think it means fitness became too small of a container for what I was actually interested in.

At the moment, I’m much more interested in the future of healthcare, human psychology, our food system, and where things are headed at the intersection of human beings and artificial intelligence.

So maybe I didn’t lose my passion for fitness, but I think I did lose my interest in performing fitness as an identity.

An exhaustion from losses

It’s interesting to think about the advice to “never give up.”

Generally, I think that’s good advice. But I also think there comes a time when it’s completely justified to stop, pause, reassess, and decide whether you actually need to double down again or hard pivot.

Because if you’ve repeatedly doubled down and failed over and over, that wears on you.

In my case, I think my body eventually forced me to stop because I kept getting back up. And every time I got back up and failed again, I found a way to thrash myself for it.

Now, I’m not saying I’m done creating content. And I’m definitely not telling people to give up if they fail a bunch of times.

But I do think there’s a time to stop and ask: What the hell am I doing? Why am I doing it? What am I actually trying to accomplish? Why has this failed in the past? What would need to be different next time? Do I have what I need to be successful? Do I even know how I’m measuring success? And can I see myself doing this for a good chunk of time?

I don’t think I stopped because I had nothing left to say, but I do think I stopped because I finally realized that more output was not going to solve an unclear why, a weak business model, or a version of myself I no longer wanted to perform.

I still very much believe in creating. Just not churning without a reason, without a model, and at the cost of your actual life.