Becoming Members-First

As of summer 2025, the content on my site is becoming member-first. Meaning that almost all of my newly-produced publications will be exclusively for supporting members.

Why?

There are a couple of reasons, but I want to start with the one that feels more relevant at this moment in time…

I was around 5th grade. With the little money I had, I bought a pack of Cheetos. While I didn’t particularly want to, I went to treat the kids from the block.

Rado – not his real name, but definitely his real attitude – one of the bullies in our district, snatched the pack out of my hands and started running away while shoveling fistfuls of chips into his mouth like a man possessed by acid.

I feel very similarly right now. I produce writing – and my hope is that it’s quality writing – and big corporations siphon it off to fatten their algorithms and AI chatbots. Meaning that even when people are actually searching for thoughtful writing – not just fast-food answers – it’s becoming damn near impossible to be found.

Solo writers like me are left gnawing on the bones of what used to be an audience.

And what do we do?

We enter into a productive frenzy. We try to do more. We try to do everything. We pump out more content. We scatter our presence across every platform like parasites, hoping to suck the life out of the people inside. We collaborate with more people. We chase more partnerships. We slowly trade our originality for engagement metrics and call it growth.

In the process, we lose our uniqueness. We lose focus. We forget why we started. We let our initially sound voice turn into algorithm-approved soup. All for a few more eyeballs and a few more bucks.

But instead of becoming more valuable for our readers, we become less.

And in the age where people don’t care about their work, I think it’s only natural to reward the ones that do.

You Get What You Paid For

Most websites online treat their blog as an afterthought.

It’s sad.

They churn out content the same way a manufacturing plant cranks out plastic toys – cheap, hollow, and designed to be forgotten.

They don’t aim for quality, they aim for volume. The focus is this: the more content you blast into the void, the more chances you have to fool people, put them into a sales funnel, and run endless A/B tests until they’re guilt-tricked into buying something from you.

I consider myself an exception.

What I publish as articles, book summaries, and courses is not a clever way to hook you in some overengineered sales funnel where you get dripped through “value” emails in the hope of turning you into a paying subscriber. No, the writing is the end of itself. The writing is the product I offer.

I don’t spend my time plotting up conversion hacks. I spend it turning thoughts into words – and if people become customers, that’s their decision, not the result of some psychological squeeze play.

I don’t try to persuade. People persuade themselves.

My craft is not upsells and email automation. It’s a new perspective that forces your brain to work. A new way to think differently about a problem. An ideology that challenges your convictions and makes you question your current way of doing.

And that’s hard.

It’s extremely difficult to convince someone to do something different. To have different thoughts. To escape the socially accepted norm and act against the conventional practices. To step off the conveyor belt of “normalcy” and do something that doesn’t come pre-approved by LinkedIn thought leaders and YouTube sensationalists.

But that’s what I’m trying to do.

Through personal stories, rigorous research, and drawing ideas from the likes of Immanuel Kant, Erich Fromm, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ayn Rand, and others – people who have lasting appeal, no modern gurus that expire in algorithmic irrelevance. I focus on creating writing that acts as an intellectual slap in the face, jolting you out of your autopilot mode.

All of this takes a lot of time.

Ironically, with the numerous new tools that promise to speed up your writing, it now takes me more time to create an article, not less.

Why?

Because I care about the end result. I’m not here to feed a content calendar. I don’t have a Notion board packed with ideas I’ll never use. I don’t have a second brain. I have one brain, and I’m trying to use it properly. I don’t aim to produce 4 articles for a month – or some other arbitrary number labeled as the key to success. In fact, I don’t produce anything on schedule.

I find a topic I want to explore – which usually happens spontaneously. And I take as much time as I need to wrap it up in gorgeous writing. Sometimes it takes a week, other times it takes a full month.

Attention over Income

It’s not about the money. It’s about the attention.

It’s normal to think that it’s about the money. That I’m locking my content behind a paywall in the hopes of increasing revenue.

And while getting paid for what you do is a basic act of self-respect, the real reason I’m making most of my content members-only is because attention is the real currency.

There’s a massive difference between how people treat free articles versus the ones they’ve paid for. The first skim while half-watching a YouTube video, forget it instantly, and maybe bookmark it for a future that never comes. The second sit down, immerse themselves completely in the writing, take notes, and strategize about how they can use the content to better their lives.

Same material, entirely different agendas.

You probably don’t remember much of the free content you’ve consumed. But you probably do remember the thing you paid for, sat with, and wrestled through when you were desperate for change.

There is a huge gap between what the writing can do for you, and what you do with the writing.

My writing is to be read and reread. It’s not here to be skimmed on the toilet and ghosted two swipes later.

I know that all of this is hard in the era where distractions scream at you from every goddamn corner of the internet. But that’s what’s needed to move the needle in the right direction.

I want to attract the people who are willing to sacrifice fun for progress. Cheap hits over lasting change. Comfort over clarity.

Because real progress is hard and there is no hack around that.

Some problems can’t be solved by consuming more content, downloading another productivity app, or following a new self-help messiah who discovered meditation last Tuesday. At some point, you need to stop scrolling and start doing.

My Way Since 2018

I’m particularly proud of the writing I do on my website – a site I started back in 2018. I’ve managed to resist the urge to offer clickbait titles and magic formulas that promise seven-figure financial transformation.

The more I write, the less I want to write about what everyone else is writing about.

Writing is a craft, the craft I want to excel at. But writing starts with thinking. Your thinking shapes your writing.

While many productivity hustlers obsess over writing tricks to “hook the reader in the first sentence,” my focus is on the harder part: the thinking. The actual substance. The thing before the thing.

Not so much about what are the key takeaways from books – in my book summaries. But how to think about the ideas inside.

Not so much about what techniques you should try to apply to alter your habits – in my articles about habits. But how to think about habits in a new way.

Not so much at all about unrealistic and “revolutionary” formulas for success. But sharing personal, intellectually challenging ideas that offer a different way of seeing things. A new way to look at what’s possible.

How you write matters, but the fundamental thing is what new you can bring to the table.

While many people offer “proven” systems to unlock your potential. I’m exclusively interested in giving you different ways to think about your problems.

Because best practices might get you to the next milestone. But only a shift in perspective can change your trajectory.

I’m glad I’ve managed to avoid the attention-death-trap of short-form social media. I’ve never offered “revolutionary strategies” for people too lazy to read a second paragraph. I haven’t SEO’d my site into an inhuman swamp of keywords. I haven’t crowded my site with sponsor banners. And I didn’t make a Substack just because everyone else did.

In the sea of sameness and AI-generated garbage, I built something different.

And honestly, I’d rather have a handful of sharp minds actually read my work than a flood of attention-deficit scrollers half-skimming it while nodding along to some new guru in a rented Airbnb mumbling about manifestation techniques.

In a world addicted to instant everything, I offer something slower, sharper, and intentionally inconvenient – a perspective that doesn’t comfort, but challenges.

If all the above sounds like the kind of writing you’d actually want to sit with – not just scroll past – becoming a member might be worth your time.