3. I'm back, everything's changed

Hola hola,

It's been more than 650 days since my last newsletter. Bet you didn't see this coming. Holster your shock, awe and/or reverence for a moment while I take you on a little stroll through what on earth is going on here. To start things off, you should know that this was always one of my favourite projects. And I've constantly felt a yearning to return to it in the year-and-a-half-plus since I last popped into your inbox. It's only after I finally pulled the trigger and sat down to squeeze another issue of out my brain that I realised why it had taken so long:

This is a really, really boring newsletter.

Sharing my thoughts and insights on my foray into seniorhood?! (Seniordom? 🤔) Cookie-cutter trash. Let's rip that band-aid off quick – that's gone, and this newsletter is changing completely. But in this past year-and-a-half-plus, I regularly spent time thinking about ideas for issues and even went so far as to bullet point out, or partially draft out, some of those issues. But I ended up running out of steam on every single one of them, because it's just such a boring premise. It's like undressed salad – as long as the right ingredients are there, it's theoretically good for you to eat. But who on earth enjoys eating undressed salad?! And I can tell you one thing for sure – I certainly don't enjoy making it.

But I'm back. Somewhat. Who really knows. I'm committing to nothing. But the reason for my return is two-fold:

1. I always have an underlying desire to write (and I mean write for me, not write for work which I do every day)

2. I've been inspired

Let's start with point two.

I read some newsletters, and I liked it

I won't bury the lead, those newsletters are:

• Ten Things – An occasional list of 10 things Luke Leighfield finds cool

• Supergranular – Occasional essays by Thom Wong

• Not out, but through! – Personal stories from Dan Bartlett as he navigates a personal meaning crisis

• Blackbird Spyplane – A style and culture "sletter" (their words) that I don't think I'm cool enough to fully understand

Collectively, these newsletters kinda reinvigorated my passion for writing. It didn't come all at once – I discovered these newsletters at different times (although chronologically in the order I listed above). And they don't all contribute the exact same special sauce to the aforementioned reinvigoration. But when I took pause to think about these newsletters as I wrote the very thing you're reading right now, I picked out some of the ingredients of said special sauce:

• Writing that satisfies the author, not The Algorithm™

• Perspectives that are unique and personal

• Optimised for purpose, not consumption

• They aren't about work

Not that newsletters can't get big followings, but in my view if a writer wants to write just to build a huge audience they can "monetise" (a word I find increasingly nauseating), they'll probably get there faster with a faster-moving platform like Twitter, LinkedIn, or even TikTok (sure, not a traditional "writing" medium, but you can still do it). And so when a writer chooses newsletter as a medium, they're making a deliberate choice not to optimise for audience gainz, but to satisfy their creative desire. (There's also the school of thought around "owning your audience" via an email database, which is a benefit social media platforms don't offer, but I don't believe it applies to the first 3 of 4 creators, as they don't appear to actively sell anything. Luke has affiliate links for a few things, but they're not in relation to the content of his newsletter.)

The comparison with social media platforms is also helpful to examine uniqueness and personality. If you've spent any appreciable amount of time on LinkedIn, you'll see patterns emerge amongst the content that's shared. A common one is junior-to-mid-level people sharing their learnings in their field – perhaps framed as "X things I wish I knew when I started", or similar – which are entirely un-unique, often not particularly helpful to others in the profession, and which a cursory Google search would turn up millions of articles that also note them. It's possible some of these folks are genuinely naive to how common this knowledge is and they're just excited about sharing it, but I find it more likely that most of them are simply looking for something with which to net "engagement", and that this was either the easiest thing for them to write or they believed from past experience on LinkedIn that a post that follows this template does the trick. When you've spent a LOT of time on LinkedIn (which I tragically have), coming into these newsletters I mention above is like a breath of fresh air. In fact, it's almost like leaving a smog-ridden city for the clean air of the countryside for the first time – it dawns on you in radiant brilliance that this is how it's supposed to be, until we built the very structures that polluted it all.

Luke's newsletter, for example, is a list of 10 recent things he liked. On the surface it looks simple and decidedly un-unique (as well as worryingly similar to the format of a LinkedIn post). However what you're getting isn't just something he's slapped together to keep engagement numbers up – he's meticulously curating things that are meaningful to him among the sea of digital garbage we're all afloat in, and sharing them in the hopes they bring meaning to others. And for me, they often have brought meaning. In his latest issue – Ten Things #242 – he shared an article from The Bitter Southerner (a publication I'd likely have never come across otherwise) which moved me to the point of a few tears. Can you guess how many times a LinkedIn post has done that?

Dan, on the other hand, with Not out, but through! dives deep into very personal, vulnerable storytelling in his three-part series Three years, in which he vividly chronicles painful struggles with mental health, relationship breakdown, and finding purpose. It's startlingly but refreshingly honest (perhaps doubly so for me as he's a former co-worker, and I knew none of this prior), and takes the title of some of the best writing I've read all year – both on a technical front with his choice of present-tense narration of past events, and on a content front with the relevance to my own personal struggles with mental health, relationship breakdown, and finding purpose.

The other two newsletters, in very different ways, reminded me of both the value and the fun of being yourself in your writing. It's clear from the way Thom writes Supergranular – which comprise anecdotes from his life and thoughts from his mind – that he has an artistic mind, and thus treats writing as an artform even when it's not written art in the traditional sense we might think (i.e. as fiction). You could imagine this same content in the form of tweets or even YouTube videos, but as a writer through and through he gives himself to that medium. And the end result is all the greater for it. With Blackbird Spyplane, a newsletter I'm completely new to and not yet a huge reader of, I was immediately struck by how much fun the writer is having with it, purely through their choice of language (it's littered with slang). And it was that discovery, perhaps more than anything else, that prompted my return to writing. Perhaps we could think of it as the straw that broke the camel's back. Or whatever the positive version of that is. (The spark that lit the fire? Although a cool, intentional fire – not wanton destruction)

So what does this all mean now?

At the end of the day, I just want to get back to writing again. Sure, I write for work every day, but that doesn't scratch the itch. That's writing for someone else. And I think that's the same reason why the original angle of this newsletter failed – I was writing for someone else there too. Maybe it was a version of me I thought I was, but wasn't. Or maybe it was because I was writing for an audience I didn't have yet, with the vague, semi-conscious desire to leverage or monetise them down the line. Maybe there's even a way that could've worked for me, and in that universe maybe I'd even be happy with it.

But that ain't where we live, pals. So I'm getting back to writing for me. If you originally subscribed to this newsletter just to see what I'm writing – you're grand. If you subscribed to learn how to do mid-to-seniorweight content marketing / copywriting "right", I'm afraid to say you're bang out of luck. Sorry about that. You'll be better off unsubscribed. (Thanks for coming, though!)

I can't tell you what will come next. Nor how often it'll come. I simply don't know. It'll still have dashes of "work", but I don't want it to be a "work newsletter". I mean if we really want to nail the premise of my horribly lazy pun of a title Content Righting, getting it "right" is just as much about the non-work parts of life, if not more so. Because we work to live, not the other way around. So maybe you'll hear a little about my corner in the tech world. Maybe a bit about figuring out how to live life better. Perhaps a few findings around London. Definitely design.

Let's see where it all lands, shall we?

Your pal,
Brad