Why I can't just pick a niche

All the rules say I should, so what is wrong with me?

There was a time when I believed. “Believed what?” you may ask (I often ask myself that) and yet the best answer I can give is to simply look around. I believed all of it. Much like that oft-quoted and poorly analyzed David Foster Wallace line, I was too immersed to even ask, “What the hell is water?” 

I believed in the world, in the rules that governed it, in the games and the people and way things were. I hated it (really I despised it), but I believed it. Like one of those Mr. Punch marionettes, the best I could offer by ways of resistance was a smart ass wise-crack. Even my subversion, my desperate drowning cry for justice, was flat.

As an aside, belief is a common malady, one which we all fall prey to, and in far too many cases we even applaud. There used to be a great tradition of looking at our world with doubtful ideas, which sprung up variously in the Greek world, the Jewish world, and the Indus valley. Mr. Punch & Judy is only one example of the great marionette shows that used to mock our belief, punch through our veil of surety and remind us that everything doesn’t need to be as it seems. But in America, we’ve lost that tradition.

*

Anyways, returning to our thoughts. The story of seeing anew isn’t original. I’ve written about it elsewhere, my own addition to a long line of much better thinkers than I am who have detailed the process of waking up. They’ve written of sensing and smelling the bullshit that surrounds us, slowly at first, with a whiff or an air that becomes an onslaught of reality until they could no longer see the world they understood and understand the world they saw. My own tale is a decidedly modern affair, a sin I’m actively atoning for, and one which you can read here if you’re interested. But again, look to the masters, to Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, David Foster Wallace, Saint Augustine, even Tolstoy. They will enrich your soul and pull you out of your own drowning better than I will.

I started here not to simply say that you shouldn’t believe what’s around you (you shouldn’t), but I endeavor to return to the practical. Because when I believed — and I did believe when I started this newsletter — I also sought the best advice out there. The best advice about growing this newsletter, about monetizing it, about running it like a business. I was bold enough to think it could be a purpose-driven business, one which could do good in the world while making money, but my first assumption was that it was a business. And the gold-star advice on everyone’s “how to grow a newsletter” sticker chart was to pick a niche. It was to decide what value I offered and deliver on that value, day in, and day out. 

A little over a year into this newsletter, it’s apparent (to me anyways) that this is not a business. Or if it is a business, it’s a very poorly run one. Maybe that means I should be fired and someone more dedicated to the business should be brought in. I will be happy to accept resumes if you have recommendations. What this Substack actually is, at least right now, is a playground. It’s a place for art: to practice art, to explore my art, to bring my whole self into the art as I grow and develop and experiment — day in and day out. 

And it’s about time I accept that, starting with the ever present and always ominous niche.

Speaking of time (a transition that I hope you’ll forgive me for leaving in), choosing a niche is a decision of time. To quote one half of a Hippocrates quote: “life is short.” And if life is short, if we only get so many days, then every day we’re not advancing, we’re falling behind. In finance, we call it the time value of money. Money today is more valuable than money tomorrow. In forecasting, our confidence interval increases the further away we are from the event we’re predicting. We simply can’t know what will happen in the future with the same confidence as we know what will happen today. If that’s true, then the rational way to run this business is to try and grow as quickly as possible, to get as much money and as many subscribers today as I can.

But again, there’s that pesky assumption: a business.

Rather than a business, this newsletter has become my art. Say what you will about the quality of that art (but maybe say it kindly, or behind closed doors, I’m a sensitive soul)¹; this is my place to represent the significance of the world to my inward self. And to quote Hippocrates in full: “life is short, the art long.” I’m interested in the second half of that quote. Because if we’re playing a long game, a ten or even a hundred year game, then our models change. I’m no longer maximizing what I can get today, but how I can continue to do this work for as long as possible. How can I continue to love the growth, the challenge, the learning that it takes to approach the essence of greatness in this art? And that’s the point of this space: to spend my life (as a writer, as a spiritual seeker, as a human) approaching greatness. 

There is another, less discussed, aspect to this decision about choosing a niche. To be frank, I wish this aspect wasn’t required; I’m decidedly uncomfortable even introducing it into the discussion. Years of academic training have left a residue of distrust that is hard to scrub away. This mysterious factor?

Me.

I cannot separate myself from the question of whether to niche. I have history, assumptions, beliefs, and desires. I also have neurotic tendencies, existential anxieties, and spiritual angst. All of those are part of the work. As my friend

Joshua Doležal

says, “the projects that feel the most successful are the ones that most authentically express who I am.” One of the greatest gifts of this newsletter has been learning to trust myself again (a decidedly subversive ritual in the modern world), and that’s a theme I intend to explore more, rather than less, as we go on.

Choosing a niche would be to close off myself from my art. It would be prioritizing success over my continued mental health. But I’ve learned that any time I start to ignore parts of my experience, they find ways to emerge and demand recognition: in wrong thoughts, wrong actions, false assumptions. I cut myself and I bleed out my joy until the world is grey my every desire is to recede from it. I risk becoming a one dimensional character who even I don’t want to read. I can imagine nothing less desirable.

To decide what to make of this art, we could do worse than to look to the artists we admire. So I look to Goethe, who once said, partly to poke at critics but also to affront the many cultural condemnations of his work, something along the lines of, “all great art is personality, to feel and respect a great personality you must be something of one yourself.” The great artists, those painters and poets, authors and aural maestros, that define the times, all move the world through their personality. They somehow defy the limits we impose on them, as they make the white space around words, the silence before and after a composition, and the air around a canvas into as much a work of art as what we think we came to see. They make their bodies larger than the world. They’re almost non-dualist in their absorption of everything as a tool to show us how the world really is. To show us water.

I may not be naive enough to believe I am one of those defining artists, but nonetheless this is my art. And so I bring my whole personality into what I write. Which is to say, if I’m going to bring my personality into this art for ten, twenty, fifty more years, then I do not intend to limit myself now. I refuse to cut off parts of myself that I have only just discovered, that I am only learning to work with, and that I can hope may connect with you, my dear readers, when they are fully embraced. The obsessions, joy, and love I feel today are not the same as they were in my 20s, and will undoubtedly change in my 50s or 60s. My skills are not what they were even a year ago. Why should I be in a rush to define what this is and what tools I use? Why limit myself? 

Again, were this a business, that limit would be the correct decision. But again, not a business, merely a man creating art.

I can almost hear some of you screaming at me through the screen. Yes, art can be a business, and yes, we should be valued for our art. Maybe this Substack doesn’t have to be my only art, maybe it should support growing an audience so that I can live off my art. Maybe it’s the thing I have to do in order to get to the thing I want to do. Isn’t that the Faustian bargain many artists made with social media? To put it another way, maybe this newsletter becomes a great thing to have built, even if it isn’t much fun to build. 

To that argument I offer my own experience. There’s a saying that the Naval Academy is a shitty place to be at and a great place to be from. I’d say the same about Navy Test Pilot School, my MBA program, all of which I’ve achieved. I’ve given enough of my life trying to join an elite club of pretentious assholes (and yes, I too am a pretentious asshole much of the time) who all fondly look back and remember hating the cost of entry. I refuse to play that game anymore. Right now I want a place I come to do the work I love, the work that I’m blessed to do. And that work decidedly does not fit into a niche.

They somehow defy the limits of their objects, as they make the white space around words, the silence before and after a composition, and the air around a canvas into as much a work of art as what we think we came to see. They’re almost non-dualist in their absorption of everything as a tool to show us how the world really is.

But let’s run the thought experiment anyways; we may at the least learn something. Maybe it turns out I’m full of shit and a niche should emerge (although seeing as how you’re reading this, you should rightfully be suspicious of that possibility).

What would my niche be, the niche that allows me to bring my personality to the page and continue doing this work well into the future? What am I supremely interested in right now? Business? Not really. Not at all in fact. I am bored with and disillusioned by the business world, and the idea of making business more human is both too much and too little. Philosophy and/or spirituality? Those may be closer (after all those are the two genres Substack has allowed for me to fit into), but neither quite feel right. Both are traditionally centered in the academe, which I am decidedly not. I would never be allowed in. And both come from their own sets of assumptions, which I do not share. Maybe my niche could be self-transformation, of life hacks, a subject I’ve fallen victim to in my younger days. But the idea of hacking anything makes me want to throw up, and I suspect, makes you all race for the unsubscribe button as quickly as possible.

The closest thing to an answer I have found comes from Jennifer Michael Hecht’s brilliant book, Doubt. Quoting Gabriel Marcel, she explores the rupture in our lives between problems and mysteries. Problems must be solved, whereas mysteries are to be enjoyed unsolved. Our daily decisions are problems to be solved, but the universe and existence are mysteries that will never be solved. When we grasp that rupture, we finally understand what it means to be human. And isn’t that what makes great art, the courage to understand our own humanness? So maybe that would be my niche, the courage to understand our humanity. Doesn’t exactly ring out and land in a pithy bio. 

Imagining, though, that we just defined the niche subject, the natural progression insists I define what my product is. Do I write essays, cultural criticism, fiction, poetry? Hell if I know. I find joy in all of them. I find different joys in different writings, both my own and others. And here’s where it starts to get really hard for that niche: the experience I get from different writing isn’t consistent. One poem may move me one way, whereas another won’t, even when they’re on the same subject. One essay may move me today, and a week from now the same poem doesn’t have the same effect. The art I love reveals different layers, but that’s because of what I bring to it, not because of what the art itself shows. It’s not repeatable, and the worst thing for a business is randomness. 

But if we could ignore that and continue our thought experiment to its natural conclusion, and we choose a pithy subject and a high potential product, so that you know exactly what you’ll receive when you sign up for this Substack, what will be left of me? Having given up the freedom of exploration, having denied joy and love and flow in my work, having made a business, I know where this path leads. Because when I am my business (a trap I fell hard into as an aspiring entrepreneur) my identity and my experience is directly tied to its success. When the number of subscribers (dare I imagine paid subscribers) goes up, I feel on top of the world. When it goes down, or engagement rates are low, or a piece doesn’t get as many comments, I feel like a failure. A shell of a man. When I only have one dimension to love myself by, then I will chase that love however I can get it. I’ve been down that path, and the numbers rarely love me back. No thank you.

All that to say, our thought experiment seems to have failed.

I started out with the assumption that I didn’t want to choose a niche, and I’m aware that I merely reaffirmed my prior desires. The rationalist in me is decidedly uncomfortable with the outcome, especially when most of my arguments were emotional rather than logical. However, in moments like this, I often look to the past to see what might rhyme. In this case, I’d like to end by quoting the Bhagavad Gita.

“Work hard in the world, Arjuna.
You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only.
You have no right to the fruits of work.
Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender.
Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma.
They who work selfishly for results are miserable.”

If all that comes is that this is work for work’s sake, then good. I don’t want a business, not right now. This whole discussion has me wondering what other rules I’ve been following without understanding why. Work (even art) is only one aspect of our lives. Where else can I reject what I believed and choose me? Where else will you?

---

A question for you: what is the work that you do for it’s own sake? What is spiritual for you that most people wouldn’t realize?

1. unless you want to praise it, in which case, sing it from the rooftops, and send a recording of it to me so I may enjoy it even more.