Once upon a time, writers wrote books, artists created art, and broadcasters broadcast.
Simple.
Clear.
Noble, even. Now?
We all just ‘produce content’.
Yes, congratulations are in order-whether you’ve just spent a decade slaving over a novel, or you’ve uploaded a blurry video of your cat sneezing, you are officially now a ‘content creator’.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Content.
Shakespeare’s complete works?
Content.
This morning’s Instagram reel of someone making a sandwich while dancing to Taylor Swift?
Also content.
It’s a word that has swallowed everything. And in doing so, it has managed the impressive feat of making the grand, the beautiful, the bizarre, and the banal sound exactly the same.
The thing about ‘content’ is that it’s safe.
It’s beige.
It’s unthreatening.
It doesn’t demand much of you.
‘Content’ doesn’t care if you’ve just poured your heart and soul into a 120,000-word novel.
It shrugs, pats you on the head, and says: Nice long-form content, mate. Now could you chop it into twenty-three bite-sized infographics so people can swipe through it on the bus?
Your carefully produced radio documentary, complete with field interviews, painstaking edits, and atmospheric soundscapes?
Nope. Just ‘audio content’.
Grandma’s handwritten memoir of her childhood, brimming with wit, wisdom, and love?
‘User-generated content’.
Everything is levelled into one bland, all-purpose soup. Ladle it out, serve it up, hope someone clicks.
And once you reduce everything to ‘content’, it stops being about what you create and becomes about how much you churn out.
The modern creative life resembles a hamster wheel.
You write something.
Upload it.
Post it.
Share it.
Then immediately start panicking about what you’ll do next week, or tomorrow, or later this afternoon. The beast must be fed.
Relentlessly. Consistently.
Preferably with a ‘content calendar’ that ensures you’ll never accidentally have a single original thought that doesn’t fit your brand. And heaven forbid you stop. Because the moment you pause, the algorithms will quietly move you aside to make room for a man in Brighton live-streaming his pet iguana’s breakfast.
It’s exhausting. Worse, it’s flattening. Instead of striving to make something lasting, we’re pressured to make something regular, engaging, and shareable. After all, who needs War and Peace when you could have twenty TikTok’s about a talking avocado?
Here’s the real danger.
Creativity, at its best, has always been about connection.
It’s about a writer telling a story that makes you laugh or cry or see yourself differently.
It’s about a broadcaster creating a moment that cuts through the noise and makes you stop, listen, and think.
‘Content’ doesn’t care about any of that.
‘Content’ doesn’t want to connect. It wants to perform. To trend. To fill space. To push metrics upwards.
No one ever wept at a piece of content. They might have clicked it. They might have scrolled past it. They might even have ‘liked’ it.
But that’s not the same thing. And the more we buy into this cult of content, the more we risk losing sight of why we picked up a pen, a microphone, or a camera in the first place.
Maybe it’s time for a rebellion.
Time to stop bowing to the content gods, with their hashtags, their metrics, their ‘optimal posting times’. Maybe we should dare to be a bit less consistent and a bit more-well, interesting. To say what we actually want to say, rather than what the calendar says we should. To write something with depth instead of reach, the sort of piece I mentioned in my blog about ‘the long read’ last week.
To make something with meaning rather than mere ‘engagement’.
So let’s stop making content.
Let’s start making things again.
Because content is replaceable, forgettable, disposable.
But a story that makes you laugh, a broadcast that makes you pause, a book that stays with you long after you’ve put it down—those aren’t content. Those are connections.
And in the end, connection beats content every time.
