Growing Yourself on Substack

Rather than numbers

Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

‘Just as a plant growing in the garden needs to be looked after, fed and watered, protected from animals eating it or other plants overgrowing it and cutting out its light, so we humans have our own human needs, some similar, some different. When were you last under threat of being eaten?! But somebody overshadowing you and cutting out the light – that happens quite often.’

So begins Hungry for Love, the first chapter of the book I have written as a manual for young people just starting out on their adult life. The first chapter is all about getting your fundamental human needs met as this is the basis of emotional health and the soil that nourishes your growth. I look over the range of different needs on physical, social, mental and heart levels. I was wondering how these might apply to life on Substack. We get these posts about how you can grow your numbers on Substack. What about growing yourself?

Attention

The need that is most obviously at play on any social media platform is attention. This is what I have to say about it in my book:

Everyone needs to be noticed, to get attention from other people. Attention is emotional food. It affirms our existence. Attention makes people grow. People will go out of their way to get attention, rather than be ignored. Some people are so hungry for attention they talk incessantly or act out to grab any attention they can. Usually they cannot help themselves and need someone else to take control of the situation and teach them boundaries. Attention needs to be shared, like food, without being greedy and bingeing everything on the table. You make sure no one is left out.

Attention is so appealing that many people make it their life's goal to get attention from as many people as possible. This is one of the primary functions of social media. Everyone is saying, 'Look at me', just as a young child does. You can even make getting attention a profession and earn money for it. This is called being a celebrity. But attention, like food, is just a means to an end. It should not be an end in itself.

How you give attention and what you give attention to is equally important. You could be giving your attention to getting your real needs met. You could be giving your attention to gaining competence and confidence in applying life's lessons. You could be giving your attention to developing deeper relationships. Or you could be giving your attention to your phone. Some of the things you do on your phone are a good use of time: many are just a way of wasting it. It is for you to decide which is which.

Privacy is as important as attention. Privacy is like wearing clothes. Without it you are exposed to the influence and judgements of others. You cannot be your own person if you lay yourself open to the whim of others. Some things you should keep to yourself or only share with genuine friends.

This sets out the beginnings of a way to think about attention, which is as fundamental to life as food, but, being unseen, is often driving behaviour unconsciously. We haven’t got an industry like cookery books and shows telling us how to create and consume the best attention. Yet attention is a currency valued as much as material wealth in our world. Fame and fortune go hand in hand and what is fame but a glut of attention. We even have leaderboards on Substack telling us who has managed to garner the most attention, the implication being, these are the people you’ll want to give your attention to, because everyone else is, so they must be the best. Maybe, maybe not.

Adults are notoriously bad at teaching children how to give and receive attention because they had no useful education in the subject themselves. The school system is an organised way of conditioning, interrupting and disrupting attention.

I spent much of the winter rereading the works of the modern interpreter of Sufism, Idries Shah, in which he details over and over again the way the pursuit of the development of human consciousness is confused by people mixing up their spiritual goals with their need for attention and for emotional stimulus. He pointed out, before the age of social media, how difficult people in modern society find it to withdraw their attention from what they’re attending to.

Entertainment

The whole entertainment industry is built on gaining and keeping your attention and rewarding you with emotional stimulus. This is the life people work to live. It’s really no different from the bread and circuses of the Roman era except that the craving for emotional stimulus through watching violence is now satisfied by virtual rather than actual violence. That is how far civilisation has come in 2000 years. Sex is of course the other great emotional stimulus that grabs people’s attention. Fortunately Substack is relatively free of these primitive stimuli. We can watch attention at work and play with it in calmer waters. Calming everything down is essential to being able to see clearly and find the best space in which to grow.

How are you getting on with giving and receiving attention on Substack? I wrote one note asking if anyone follows the modern teachings of Jesus Christ and got zero attention. I wrote another note about rules I’d made up for myself about giving and receiving attention on Substack and I got 800 likes and most of you, my subscribers. What does that tell you?

Idries Shah pointed out how teachings about life are required to be entertaining (i.e. provide an emotional stimulus) in order to be accepted. Much Sufi wisdom is hidden in the traditional joke stories of Mulla Nasrudin. My book is uncompromisingly a serious instruction manual without the aid of diverting stories though I do try to say things in such a way as to hold the attention. Whether it will be palatable for the publishing industry remains to be seen.

So how are you getting on with navigating Substack’s attention economy? Do let us know.