killing substack

Over the last fortnight I was scammed so well that it took a friend and fellow writer to point it out to me. When I mentioned to Tom the heartfelt, articulate and lengthy emails I’d been receiving, outlining the main themes of my writing with more rigour than I myself can muster, including an offer to help extend the reach of my ideas at little to no cost, Tom’s response was blunt.

‘It’s a scam’, he said. ‘I’ve had them too. They go for independent writers with websites. Block it straight away.’

Of course it was a scam, I told myself as I walked home, disappointed. In that moment I felt crestfallen that no other human had the goodwill and mental wherewithal to summarise the themes that I explore in my writing as consummately as the AI-penned emails I’d been receiving. Just as I’d feared, the emails from ‘Frank Sutcliffe’ were too good to be true. A knight in shining armour was not about to deliver my writing ‘into the right hands’. Shit, I thought, how could I be so vulnerable to nearly fall for such an offer? Then again, how could I write as I do and not be vulnerable?

Perhaps it was in reaction to this experience of being scammed that I came to the decision that my endless scrolling on Substack had become an addiction. Nothing in particular marked my change of heart. It was more a slow realisation that the gains I’d made in leaving social media, in terms of increased mental space and gaps in my day, were being squeezed out as I sat cocooned in my car after teaching a class, or before getting out of my car in the driveway, reading just one more Substack note, just one more post. I wasn’t wasting my time, surely. The posts I read were well written and enlightening, a window into what other people were thinking across time and oceans.

It took a couple of weeks for me to notice that my reading on Substack had become compulsive, that whatever I read there was never enough, and then another week for me to do something about it. The solution was obvious but it wasn’t welcome. I was sick of having to give things up. Still, I did do it. Three days ago, I uninstalled the Substack app on my phone, wiggling the orange square until it dissolved and disappeared, keeping my access to it on my computer so that I could come to it in an intentional way, rather than as a means of self-erasure.

On the surface, deleting the Substack app on my phone sounds a bit self-denying and needlessly harsh (as well as fantastically trivial compared with the current state of world events). But actually the question that tipped me into deleting the app took me in the opposite direction, towards freedom. The question, it seemed to me, was simple. Was reading Substack in my car and halfway up the stairs and on the back steps and in waiting rooms making me bigger or smaller?

Once I accepted that it was the second, the bluff was off. No more idle scrolling. Which in turn means that, these days, all I have access to, as a source of doom-scrolling on my phone, is the NYT’s news app which the situation in the Middle East rules out as a source of escapism.

Perhaps one day, not so far off, I’ll finish the manuscript that has so far been on my computer desktop for ten years. I daresay I won’t, with the time that I reap from not doom-scrolling, realise my every dream, much less eradicate the rampant weed in my garden that for sixteen years has got the better of me. However, I feel hopeful that I might be more present, my eyes open to the minutes between my fingers and the ground beneath my feet.