Creating as an Incubator of Meaning

Every time I mention that I run a blog, someone eventually asks the same question: “Do you get anything out of it?” And I get the impulse.

In a world where rent is real, food is real, bills are real, and hobbies increasingly feel like a luxury product for people with better margins, asking whether something pays is not stupid. Pretending that money does not matter in the world we live in is basically a children’s story.

But the question still misses something.

In many of my recent posts, I have been thinking about writing, blogging, and publishing in the late internet from the perspective of someone who actually runs a blog. I wrote about the atmosphere around AI, about the false purity around independent writing, and even touched on more technical questions, like whether blogging is still worth it in the age of AI.

But there is one point I have not really developed yet, because it did not quite fit into the looser essayistic reflections, and it did not quite fit into the more technical posts either.

The point is blogging, writing, or creating more broadly as a kind of incubator of meaning and agency. Something worth doing even when the simple answer to “does it pay?” is not very impressive.

These thoughts came mostly from conversations with people around my age, and from observing difficult transitional periods in people’s lives.

A break from work. Months of looking for work. Losing rhythm. Losing structure. Drifting into substances, numbness, or a general sense of pointlessness. Lying in bed too long. Moving through the day without much direction.

Experiences like this seem very common among people in their twenties and thirties. Almost every young person I know has some version of this story behind them, or at least knows someone who does.

I have had difficult periods like these too. But the second part rarely stayed for very long, if at all. I have never really experienced the deep loss of agency, the feeling of total hopelessness, the long lying in bed without purpose, or the slide into substances as a way of filling the emptiness.

Looking back, I increasingly think this was not accidental.

Of course, the philosophical and spiritual journey mattered. For years, that was the atmosphere I lived in most deeply. It gave me questions, language, orientation, and eventually a powerful sense of inner ground. But inner work alone can remain too private, too circular, too sealed inside the head.

Writing changed that. Publishing changed that even more.

It gave the inward process a form outside myself. A blog, or even a small external platform like Twitter back then, created a thin but real contact with the world. The thoughts were no longer only moving around inside me. They had to become sentences. They had to meet a page, an audience, a response, silence, misunderstanding, or recognition.

That difference mattered.

The philosophical and spiritual search gave me material. Writing gave that material a structure. And publishing, however small the platform, gave that structure a relationship with the world.

That is probably the part I understand better now, after leaving survival mode, than I understood while I was still inside it.

So when someone asks whether I get anything out of writing, the honest answer is strange. Financially, it depends.

There are mechanisms. Memberships, affiliate links, even the recently added ads. They helped cover part of the cost of running this blog. Sometimes they covered all of it. Sometimes they even turned a profit. Most of the time, the whole thing probably produced a loss.

But setting up those structures was also an automatic impulse from my old SEO/SEM brain. If something existed, it had to have some mechanism. Some funnel. Some button. Some small theoretical way for the work to connect with the material world.

On a daily basis, though, I barely think about it. I often forget that these mechanisms even exist.

So when someone asks whether I get anything out of it, I usually smile inside.

Because yes, there is something crucial I get from it.

It just does not have much to do with money.

This is where the usual question becomes too narrow. A project can be financially unimpressive and still psychologically necessary. It can make no sense on a spreadsheet and still make sense inside a human life.

Because basic meaning and agency seem even more fundamental than we usually admit. Without them, money is not the only problem. A person begins to lose the ability to move through life. And that, to me, feels like the difference between someone slowly sinking into pointlessness and someone who still somehow does something.

Maybe someone writes an essay on a random topic with no real monetization system behind it. Maybe there is not even a serious business model, only some almost-illusory structure around the work, like a free Substack, a Medium account earning symbolic pennies, a small YouTube channel that does not meet the monetization requirements yet, or a personal blog with a few buttons that suggest a business more than they actually create one.

Financially, much of this is close to absurd in late capitalism. Spending long hours on an essay that barely anyone reads, even when there is no clear reward. Who has time for that? But psychologically, it is not nothing.

Because there might be some community, even if small. Someone might respond. Some recommendation mechanism might exist. Some boost might happen. A post can be shared. A video can travel. A piece of work can reach a person you did not expect it to reach.

We live in a strange time where, at least in theory, someone can build a career from one social media post, one TikTok, one essay, one video, one moment of circulation. It almost certainly will not happen. But the fact that the door exists at all seems important for the human psyche.

It means that the work is not fully sealed off from the world.

That possibility matters.

Not because everyone secretly believes they are one viral moment away from salvation. That would be another kind of delusion. But because a completely closed room does something to the mind. A person needs at least some sense that action can travel beyond the borders of the day.

And this is where small creative platforms become more meaningful than their financial results suggest.

Especially when the alternative often looks like another platform with online tasks, a long registration process, long screeners, qualifications, and then an empty feed when it comes to actual work. Or the twentieth CV sent without even a confirmation that it was received. Or interviews followed by ghosting.

Compared with that, a blog, a channel, a newsletter, or a tiny public archive can become a structure around the self. It gives experience somewhere to go. It gives thinking a form. It turns confusion into a draft, a draft into a post, a post into a small object in the world.

This may sound minor from the outside, but it is not minor when the rest of life becomes unstable.

In my case, writing and building this website played that role for years, especially during the harder periods when, to put it a little poetically, the vibration of life was lower.

Having the site, trying a new format, publishing something, adding some almost-illusory monetization around new content, fixing code, improving optimization, changing a layout — all of that gave me something to do that was connected to a larger personal structure.

If the hourly rate for all of this were calculated, the result would be ridiculous.

But from the perspective of time, it is clear that this small structure helped me move through situations and pressures that would have been much harder to move through without it. It was an incubator of meaning, and maybe more importantly, an incubator of agency.

That is why the question of profitability is not the most important question.

That is why I smile internally when I hear it.

Because does it pay?

Not in the way people usually mean.

Not reliably, not cleanly, and not in a way that would impress anyone calculating the hours. But it paid by giving structure when structure was missing. It paid by keeping agency alive. It paid by giving the mind somewhere to go when life itself became too vague, too tight, or too stalled.

And maybe that is the part people miss when they ask the question too quickly.

Before a person can build a career, a business, a stable routine, or even a better life, there has to be someone left inside who still feels capable of acting.

For me, writing helped protect that part.

That is what I got out of it.