Shifting shadows: a rumblewrites update

My plans for the future

Hi all, and welcome back to rumblewrites. This week’s post will be outlining my plans for the future of this blog. I want to say right up front that I am not quitting, I’m just making my online presence more manageable.

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You may have noticed a slight downtick in my prescence on Substack over the past 6 months. And there’s a good reason why.

I started this newsletter as a means of continuing the academic-style research I was carrying out at university. But I didn’t just want to do it, else I’d have stuck to a writing everything down in a locked Word document. I wanted to share it. To engage with a community of like-minded people. People who enjoyed history, literature, and language as much as I do. I wanted to share knowledge, spark conversations, and make friends with other writers. And I’d heard Substack was the place to do it. At least, it used to be.

For a while now, things have been changing. Influencers and celebrities have been flooding the platform, bringing their existing audiences with them. The likes of Stephen Fry and Alex O’Connor are pay-walling their content and making more money through a single article than you or I will likely make across our whole publication. And this isn’t even their primary creative outlet. Substack is no longer a place to discover writers and their newsletters, it’s a place to follow your favourite big creators and to financially support them. It’s another means of engaging with the content you already know.

Andi discusses this phenomenon in her article: The Great Substack Shift. She talks about how this is changing the face of the platform altogether:

They’re bringing existing audiences, polished visual content, and a completely different approach to what “Substack content” looks like

The Great Substack Shift: 2026 Predictions

To stay ahead of the curve, or rather, to not be swept under it, we must adapt to these changes as they come. Produce more visual content, promote it across more platforms, and engage, engage, engage. When I first joined, Notes was being heralded by some as the end of Substack as they knew it, and I’m finally understanding why. Because now Notes is the primary source of engagement, subscriptions, and payments. And Substack itself has begun marketing this “community as a growth strategy” model as the single best way to grow on their platform.

In fact, as M. E. Rothwell found, Notes where you share your articles - you know, Substack’s main function - actually perform the worst out of all types of content.

And I understand his frustration. Both my visibility, and that of the content I actually want to read, has diminished greatly over the past few months. Instead, the same familiar faces are shoved down my throat, and Notes has become satured with click-baity engagement farming posts which frankly bore me. I quit Notes about a year ago now after a string of nasty comments and DMs left me feeling pretty fragile. I don’t have any desire to go back. Nor do I have the time or mental capacity to craft 20 bites a day which may or may not reward my actual writing with a morsel of engagement. I’d go back to Twitter/X if I wanted that.

To sum up: I joined Substack back when the writing used to speak for itself. But now it has become another form of social media. Its algorithm favours those who have the time and resources to study it. Or who import their large followings from elsewhere. And that’s not the platform I signed up for.

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Social media as a whole has been draining me for a long time now. And I was naïve to think that disengaging from Notes would make Substack any exception.

Now, this is going to be a weird link, but stick with me. One of my favourite YouTubers, JSchlatt, recently put out a video on his personal account explaining why he will no longer be posting to his main channel:

He recounts a recent near-death experience, after which he was still more concerned about the performance of his latest video than, oh I don’t know, almost dying?! While I can’t say I’ve almost died recently, the core message of his video still resonated with me. Because I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve woken up in a cold sweat, heart beating, panic-striken, worrying about my next article. Whether or not I’ll have time to write it. What to title it. How to advertise it. Whether any of you will like it. And with this recent drop in engagement, I’ve become even harder on myself. All because I set myself the goal of writing on here once per week. And because I’m a perfectionist. And because this (frequency + quality) is what I promised you.

Obviously, this is not a normal response. And it’s not Substack’s fault. Over the past few months, a combination of factors has led to my mental health declining. I’ve been entertaining more negative self-talk, neglecting self-care, and I even developed temporary insomnia. I’m tense all the time, and I just can’t turn my brain off. From my day job to some tough situations in my personal life, Substack and the online world are just a drop in the ocean of a larger problem, but a drop they are nonetheless.

So why not change? Why not adapt along with the platform? Others seem to be doing it, and I’d be lying if I said the thought to optimise, to jump back on Notes, push my Instagram, pay even, hadn’t been scratching away at the back of my mind… It couldn’t hurt, anyway. Not when I’ve been losing more subscribers than I’ve gained for more than 6 months now.

But the simple answer is: because I can’t.

When I first started this newsletter, I had a lot of goals in life. I wanted to progress my career. To make more friends. To have a meaningful relationship. I wanted to return to my old hobbies: painting, crafts, drawing, etc. To exercise more. And to become a writer. Through a portfolio of published works, through a full-length book, and through a newsletter. Plus a successful social media prescence. I placed an immense (admittedly, self-imposed) pressure on myself when I set myself these goals and I’ve only just started to realise the impact it’s had.

While I can’t claim to be (anywhere near) as successful as Schlatt, our reasons for stepping back are the same: I don’t need to focus on more anymore. I’ve actually achieved most, if not all, of these goals already! But the problem is: I keep changing the goalposts for success. I’ve been stretching myself too thin and trying to accomplish too much for too long now. I can’t keep going. Unforuntately, it took a near mental break and a comedy YouTuber to convince me of this.

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So what now?

I’m going to relax. Actually. Properly. And then I’m going to re-evaluate my goals.

I’m not entirely sure what this will look like yet, but what I do know is that I want to keep creating. Because that’s what makes me happy. I just need to do it in a way which prioritises my wellbeing. And as much as I’ve slagged Substack off, it’s more effort than it’s worth to find another platform which will inevitably be turned into something I don’t like in a few months’ time anyway. So, for now, I’ll be staying put.

I’m just no longer committed to publishing a new article every week. I’ll write when I have something to say, whether that be weekly, monthly, quarterly… And I won’t be afraid to take an unannounced break, or to prioritise other things.

I realise this is quite a minor update for such a lengthy post, but I felt like a full explanation was worthwhile, if only for my own satisfaction. Thank you to those of you who have stuck around, who read and comment on my posts, and who support little writers like me. You’re the reason I’m still here, sharing what I love :)

And with that, I’ll be signing off the year. I hope you all have a wonderul holiday season, and a happy and healthy 2026. I’ll see you in the New Year. Valete.

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