give yourself permission not to care (what people think about you)

thoughts on harnessing hate and ridicule for creative output

There's a thought experiment I keep returning to, one that feels too simple to be useful but somehow isn't. I try to think of a single person—any person—who has created something of lasting value and been universally beloved for it. Not just tolerated, not just eventually appreciated after they were safely dead, but genuinely loved by everyone who encountered their work while they were alive to feel it.

I can't come up with anyone.

Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. Beethoven's late quartets were dismissed as the confused ramblings of a deaf man. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems before her death, and those anonymously. Even figures we now consider uncontroversial—Fred Rogers, for instance—had critics who thought his gentleness was making children soft, unprepared for the world's inevitable cruelties.

The more I think about it, the more absurd our expectation of universal approval becomes. We live in a world where people can't agree on the color of a dress in a photograph, yet somehow, when we create something—when we pour our inner landscape into external form—we expect consensus. We expect strangers with entirely different histories, values, mental models, and aesthetic sensibilities to not just understand our work but to love it.

It's like expecting everyone to have the same favorite song. Or the same favorite memory. Or the same relationship with their mother.

I think there's something almost violent about this demand for universal approval, something that asks us to sand down every rough edge, to eliminate every aspect of ourselves that might make someone else uncomfortable. It's a kind of creative suicide by committee, where the final product bears so little resemblance to the original impulse that it satisfies no one—not even its creator.

the paradox of visibility —

Last month, one of my Substack essays took off in ways I never expected. The gratitude was real—still is. But alongside the readers who resonated with my words came another crowd: the purists, the gatekeepers, the people who took personal offense at my choice to embrace AI tools in my creative processes. They weren't just disagreeing with my methods; they were denying the validity of the work itself.

What struck me wasn't just the criticism—I've been thinking and writing about ideas my entire adult life, interrogating my own beliefs, reassessing my values, turning my worldview inside out to see if it holds up to scrutiny. This is who I am. It's the work I do on myself, constantly, the way other people might go to the gym or tend a garden. So when strangers decided that my use of certain tools invalidated everything I am, everything I think, everything I've spent decades cultivating about how I see the world... well, it felt less like legitimate critique and more like having someone tell you they know your inner world better than you do.

The notification count kept climbing. Views, shares, comments—all the metrics that supposedly spell success. I thought I understood what virality felt like, having navigated the chaotic waters of social media for years. But this was different. This wasn't the throwaway irreverence of a platform built for hot takes and shitposts. This was Substack—the place where I'd been turning my thoughts inside out, sharing the tender machinery of my mind with strangers who'd chosen to sit with my ideas long enough to actually read them.

Admittedly, when the hate started rolling in, it didn't bounce off like it usually does. These weren't random drive-by comments on disposable content. These were people rejecting not just what I'd made, but seemingly the very core of how I think, how I create, how I've chosen to exist as a person who makes things in the world.

These strangers began psychoanalyzing me based on a single post. Which, when you step back and look at it, is quite wild. People who had never read my work before, never witnessed the years of wrestling with ideas, never seen the care I take in examining my own motivations—they felt qualified to diagnose my creative process, my character, my worthiness as a thinker. All from one essay.

Some of them even started offering unsolicited advice on how to fix me. "Your work would be stronger if you did X," they'd say, as if I'd asked for their consultation. "More people would like you if you just..." as if popularity were the point of thinking out loud. A few even dangled the promise of their paid subscriptions like carrots—"I was going to subscribe until I saw you said this thing I didn't like." The implication being that I could buy their approval, their money, their validation, if only I'd reshape myself into something more palatable.

I keep returning to this moment, this offer to trade pieces of myself for acceptance. Because the person I am—the one who thinks these thoughts, who asks these questions, who chooses these tools—is someone I've grown to like, even cherish. Not because I'm perfect, but because I'm mine. And no amount of money, no number of subscribers, no chorus of approval will ever be worth surrendering that. Ever.

the weight of judgement —

I've been sitting with this feeling for weeks now, trying to understand why it landed so differently than I expected. There's something about having your deepest thoughts dissected by strangers that creates a particular kind of vertigo. It's not just criticism—I've weathered plenty of that, like I said. It's the way criticism of your work becomes criticism of your mind, and then, somehow, criticism of your right to think at all.

Last week I wrote about imposter syndrome being the price of showing up. At the time, I thought I was exploring some abstract concept about creative courage. Now I realize I was actually grappling with this exact moment—this strange aftermath of visibility where other people's voices start to drown out your own. The piece was my way of working through something I didn't yet fully understand I was experiencing.

There's a strange intimacy to having strangers rifle through your thoughts like they're sorting through your sock drawer. These weren't just people disagreeing with my conclusions; they were people who seemed personally offended by the way my mind works. As if the very architecture of my thinking was somehow an affront to their sensibilities.

I found myself doing something I haven't done in years: second-guessing not just what I'd written, but how I'd arrived at writing it. Was I really thinking clearly? Was my process actually valid? Had I been fooling myself about the quality of my own thoughts? It's a peculiar form of gaslighting, this external chorus that makes you question your internal compass.

The irony wasn't lost on me that in an essay about creative tools and artistic authenticity, I was now questioning the authenticity of my own creative process. The critics had managed to make me doubt not just my work, but my worthiness to do the work at all. Which is, I suppose, exactly what they intended.

connecting the dots —

This isn't the first time I've found myself circling these questions—there's something compulsive about examining the places where creativity meets resistance, where the act of making something collides with the world's opinion of what you've made.

Last month, I wrote about letting your ideas touch reality, about how thoughts need room to breathe outside the safety of your own mind. I was thinking then about the necessity of risk, the way ideas remain half-formed until they meet the friction of other people's attention. What I didn't anticipate was how that friction could feel less like productive resistance and more like sandpaper against my skin.

Henri Rousseau (my patron saint of creative audacity) has been on my mind a lot lately—that stubborn, magnificent fool who kept painting while critics said he must have worked "with his feet while blindfolded." There's something absurd about his persistence, the way he showed up to exhibit after exhibit while the art world laughed. But here's what gets me now: Rousseau wasn't trying to prove the critics wrong. He wasn't painting at them or despite them. He was painting because that's what painters do.

That distinction feels important, though I'm still working out why. Maybe it's because when you're creating despite criticism, you're still letting the critics set the terms. You're still playing their game, just from the opposite side of the board. But when you're creating because that's simply what you do—because it's as natural as breathing, as necessary as eating—then the criticism becomes... what? Background noise? Weather you can't control but don't need to let ruin your day?

After the initial round of hate flooded in on the viral essay, I wrote a sorta-follow-up piece about embracing AI tools without apology—"It's My Party and I'll Use AI If I Want To." The title was deliberately flippant, unapologetically direct. I was drawing a line in the sand, claiming my right to choose my own creative tools. And I meant every word. There's something in me that refuses to soften edges for the comfort of strangers, that won't dilute conviction for the sake of universal approval.

But looking back, I wonder if I was still playing that game of creation despite criticism, still letting other people's discomfort dictate the terms of my defense. What I'm grappling with now is whether there's a third way—not creating despite the noise, not even creating because you want to prove something, but creating from a place so centered in your own knowing that external judgment loses its power to disturb your peace at all.

the reframe bc f*ck being a victim —

There's a moment—I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, somewhere between the third week of notifications and the eighteenth cup of coffee spent brooding over comments—when something shifted. Not dramatically, not with any fanfare or sudden clarity, but the way a tide changes: gradually, then all at once.

I started to notice something telling about the criticism. The people who hated my piece about taste being the new intelligence weren't actually responding to what I'd written. They were responding to what they assumed I'd written, to some phantom essay that existed only in their projections. My actual argument about discernment, about the question of what should be created in a world where anyone can create anything, seemed almost beside the point to them. They didn’t care what I wrote. They only cared how I’d written it.

And suddenly, I started to view the criticism in an entirely different way. Not as judgment I needed to defend against, but as evidence of how loaded the cultural conversation around creativity has become. These weren't personal attacks on my specific ideas—they were reflexive responses to keywords, to perceived allegiances, to categories they'd already decided I belonged to before they'd finished reading.

The irony wasn't lost on me that in an essay about the importance of taste and discernment, many of the critics had demonstrated neither. They'd seen what they expected to see, heard what they were primed to hear, dismissed what challenged their preconceptions. Which, in a strange way, proved the very point I'd been trying to make about the necessity of careful attention in an age of infinite content.

I found myself thinking about my viral essay differently. Yes, thousands of people had read it. Yes, some had loved it and others had hated it. But maybe the more interesting question wasn't whether everyone approved, but whether it had done what I'd actually set out to do: to think through the relationship between abundance and discernment, to explore what it means to develop taste in a democratized creative landscape.

The people who resonated with the piece—who sent thoughtful emails about their own struggles with creative overwhelm, who shared stories about learning to trust their own aesthetic judgment—those people weren't looking for universal truth. They were looking for someone willing to think out loud about questions they were grappling with too. They weren't seeking consensus; they were seeking company.

Which made me realize something that feels almost embarrassingly obvious now: I wasn't writing for everyone. I never had been. I was writing for the people who needed to hear those particular thoughts, expressed in that particular way, at that particular moment. The critics weren't my audience any more than vegetarians are the audience for a barbecue restaurant. Their disapproval wasn't a failure of my work—it was evidence that I'd written something with a point of view.

The hate, I began to see, wasn't the opposite of love. It was the opposite of indifference. And indifference, not criticism, is the true enemy of creative work.

the cost of caring too much —

I keep thinking about all the things that never got made because someone was too afraid of what people might think.

Not just the obvious ones—the paintings left unfinished, the songs unwritten, the books that died in the drafts folder. But the subtler losses, the quieter tragedies. The essay that got watered down until it said nothing at all. The poem that had its heart edited out by committee. The idea that got shelved because it felt too personal, too risky, too likely to offend someone somewhere.

There's a particular kind of creative cowardice that masquerades as wisdom, that tells us the smart thing is to sand off our rough edges, to make ourselves more palatable, more marketable, more broadly appealing. It whispers that the goal is to be liked by as many people as possible, to never make anyone uncomfortable, to never stake out territory that someone else might want to contest.

But what if the goal isn't to be liked? What if the goal is to be useful? To say something that needs saying, in a voice that only you possess, at a moment when someone out there needs to hear it exactly the way you can say it?

I think about the person who might have needed to read my essay about taste and discernment but never got the chance because I talked myself out of publishing it. Or the version of myself from five years ago, struggling with questions about creative authenticity in a rapidly changing landscape, who might have felt less alone if someone had been willing to think through these problems in public.

When we let other people's discomfort dictate our creative choices, we're not just silencing ourselves. We're silencing the future conversations that might have grown from our work, the connections that might have formed, the understanding that might have emerged. We're robbing the world of whatever strange, specific, irreplaceable perspective we brought to the table.

The people who hate what you make were never going to love what you make. But the people who need what you make might never find it if you're too busy trying to please the people who were never your audience to begin with.

I now think it’s actually selfish to withhold your work out of fear. Not just selfish toward yourself—though it is that—but selfish toward the people who are out there somewhere, wrestling with the same questions you've wrestled with, feeling alone in thoughts you've thought too. When you decide not to share your perspective because it might make some strangers uncomfortable, you're also deciding that those other strangers—the ones who might find solace or insight or company in your words—don't matter as much as your own comfort.

Which is fine, I suppose. We all get to choose how we spend our creative energy, how much risk we're willing to take, how much of ourselves we're willing to offer up for public consumption. But we should be honest about what we're choosing, and what we're giving up in the process.

permission granted —

To be completely honest with you, I’ve had this essay in my drafts for over a week now, trying to figure out how to end this thing. Which feels fitting, somehow—this whole essay has been about the space between what we want to say and what we think we're allowed to say, between the voice in our heads and the voice we think the world wants to hear.

With that, there's something almost ceremonial about giving yourself permission not to care. Like you need to make it official, write it down somewhere, sign your name to it. But maybe that's exactly what this essay is—a kind of contract, a document we can return to the next time someone tries to convince us that our thoughts aren't worth thinking, our work isn't worth making, our voices aren't worth hearing.

Permission not to care what strangers think about the way your mind works. Permission to write for the people who need these particular thoughts, expressed in your particular way, without worrying about the people who don't. Permission to let your ideas touch reality, messy and imperfect as they are, because the alternative—keeping them locked away in the safety of your own head—serves no one.

Permission to be human in public. To think out loud. To change your mind. To be wrong about things and right about others and uncertain about most everything in between. Permission to value the connection you feel with readers who understand over the approval of those who don't.

Think about Henri Rousseau again, painting away in his studio while the critics sharpened their pens. I wonder if he ever gave himself formal permission to ignore them, or if he was just so absorbed in the work itself that their opinions became irrelevant. Maybe that's what we're working toward—not the effortful act of not caring, but the natural result of caring so much about the right things that the wrong things lose their power to wound.

Maybe you're sitting in your own quiet space right now, holding back something you want to create because you're afraid of what people might think. Maybe you've edited your voice until it sounds like everyone else's, smoothed your rough edges until there's nothing left that's recognizably you. Maybe you've been waiting for permission that no one else can give.

Here's what I want you to know: your work exists for the people who need it, not for the people who don't. Creating something worthwhile has never, in the history of human creativity, required unanimous approval. The people who are going to hate what you make were never going to love what you make. But the people who need what you make might never find it if you're too busy trying to please the people who were never your audience to begin with.

The critics will always be there, of course. That's their job. But it's not yours to please them. Your job is simpler, and harder, and infinitely more interesting: to pay attention to what matters, to think clearly about what you see, and to share it with the people who need to hear it.

So here's your permission slip, if you need one. Permission to create from the center of who you are rather than the edges of what's acceptable. Permission to trust that your perspective matters, your voice is necessary, your thoughts are worth sharing. Permission to let other people's discomfort remain their problem to solve.

Permission granted.

XO, STEPF

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