Everyone suffers from scope creep, especially good artists finding their footing. A good visualization of this is with YouTubers, specifically video essayists. They'll start with simple production and whichever B-roll is affordable in order to present their points. And from the experience of producing a video essay, their next is better-researched and with a higher production value with a longer runtime. The next after is even more elaborate, taking months now instead of weeks.

Sometimes, these YouTubers will make second channels that have shorter, off-the-cuff videos that are reminiscent of their original work. But if they're really good, even these secondary YouTube channels will fall victim to scope creep. Again, the production value will go up, the time between videos as well.

Natalie Wynn, known as ContraPoints, is a good example. When she started making videos in 2016, she was in front of a camera talking about politics and philosophy. Over time, her production evolved into theatrical productions with dramatic lighting, costumes, and set designs. Videos that journalists have called "the mold of Oscar Wilde by way of Weird Twitter." What began as accessible video essays became hour-long films taking months to produce, each one more ambitious than the last.

Harris Brewis (HBomberguy) followed a similar trajectory. His channel started with straightforward video responses and gaming critiques. Now he produces heavily-researched, multi-hour documentaries. His 2023 plagiarism investigation ran four hours. I can't imagine how much fact-checking and consultation with experts went into it. Production timelines keep stretching out endlessly. And what for, exactly?

Even Big Joel, whose main channel features analysis of media and culture, created Little Joel as a secondary outlet for looser, more casual content. Joel himself has mentioned losing "the bone in my body that tweets" after making Little Joel videos. His attempt at a more relaxed format began demanding his creative energy. It's so antithetical.

The Weight of Neoliberal Expansion

I believe all of this is symptomatic of being part of a Neoliberal world. To feel compelled to always expand, always do more. The entire world's media digest has become more radical and hyperbolic. And it feels as though we need to follow suite.

I sympathize. There is just so much to consume, after all. And most of it can be consumed for free or on a subscription service people are already paying for.

"Being creative today means seeing the world around you as a resource to fuel your inner entrepreneur. Creativity is a distinctly neoliberal trait because it feeds the notion that the world and everything in it can be monetised."

The constant pressure toward entrepreneurialism and productivity has mutated creativity itself in the pressure cooker of advanced capitalism. We are trapped in the pressure cooker to be ever more creative and original; such demands are an inescapable part of the capitalist structures we occupy.

Research on neoliberal work culture shows how management's enforcement of targets and the expectancy to overwork generates psychological distress, instability, pressure and a negative working environment. We believe we must constantly optimize, improve, produce more with better quality has become the "commonsense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world."

My Own Treadmill

I confess I am not immune to the artist's treadmill. I have been writing non-stop the past few months. It's been fun, I think I had a backlog of ideas that was brimming because I was in university for fall, winter, spring, and summer semesters four years straight. I had no free time to work on my own writing.

Those years blur together now. The turning of seasons marked only by course schedules. Spring and summer semesters meant two classes each, not only to finish school on time but frankly because it allowed me to continue getting student loans. Four years of writing papers for professors instead of for myself. Four years of watching leaves turn gold outside library windows while I highlighted passages about other people's ideas. Four years of storing up my own thoughts. Water behind a dam.

But I need to actively, intentionally remind myself that the entire reason I created https://brennan.day was to have a joyful IndieWeb personal site that I could do whatever the hell I wanted on. It is not supposed to be parity with my Medium account where I now make a full-time living writing near-daily.

The Paradox of Good Intentions

I think a lot of the scope creep comes from a place of well-intention. We feel obligated to our already-existing audience to give them more, to provide value and utility. Not out of wanting validation, but because we want to benefit people; we want to do good for the world.

I've actually been posting more on brennan.day than Medium, mostly it has been coding tutorials after adding features to my website, because I want to share that with others, I want to make the act of creating your own IndieWeb personal site easier. The gates always need to be lowered.

But it all feels so serious, so white-knuckled and with my shoulders-tense. As though there is a part of me that is pathologically unable to just output whatever, to shitpost or to get loose-goosey with it.

I've been trying to deliberately resist these inclinations. I guess that's partly why I started a personal journal on my tilde.town account. And I guess that's also why I wrote my first satire a few days ago. But it's still all so neat and tidy.

The Absurdity of Self-Imposed Standards

Nobody is asking me for what I do. I think my audience are nomadic by nature because of how I just write whatever the hell I want. And also because I'm inexperienced and not nearly as skillful as writers who have amassed loyal fans. All of that is fine, it just makes the idea that I am so stringent with my standards all the more absurd.

I end up coming across as this deeply serious, pretentious person when I'm the furthest thing from. I think so lightly of myself and take so few things seriously. It is a bizarre persona born from years of masking that it hard to shake off.

Ways Forward

So how do I—how do we—break out of this cycle? What could I be doing on brennan.day that would open things up for me?

Embrace the quick and dirty. Set a timer for 15 minutes and publish whatever comes out. No editing. No second-guessing. The spirit of early blogging was exactly this. Raw thoughts, unpolished edges, the authentic voice.

Create deliberate constraints. Instead of always adding more, try adding less. A 200-word post. A single photograph with a caption. A poem written on your phone. Your website should be a place where you "can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you."

Establish "shitpost Saturdays" or "draft Thursdays." Give myself permission to publish the unfinished, the half-baked, the weird thoughts. Make it a recurring thing.

Experiment with different formats. Voice notes transcribed directly to text. Screenshots of your Notes app. A running list of things that made you laugh this week. A photo dump with zero context.

Remember why you began. Before the analytics, before the audience, before the pressure to perform. What was the joy? What was the play? What made you want to create in the first place? Go back to that.

Lower the stakes. Not everything needs to be a polished thinkpiece that "provides value." Sometimes a website can just be a website. A place where you exist, where you think out loud, where you make something because making things is fundamentally human.

Good work comes from imperfect, messy, shitty margins. From not trying so hard. Creativity is supposed to be joyful. The scope creep happens when we forget that. When we turn play into work, spontaneity into strategy, self-expression into self-optimization.

Lower the gates for ourselves as much as for everyone else.