Scrolling Facebook, I saw a post in a writer’s group that made me pause. The author, who had published novels and was working on a memoir, shared that she had written almost nothing in the last year. Writing had been part of her identity for decades, but now she questioned whether it was worth it anymore. She no longer felt excited by the prospect of generating ideas and writing about them; the whole process felt futile. A chorus of comments echoed her sentiments. I found myself chiming in.
“In day-to-day life, I will have flashes of ideas and I’ll start building out a piece in my head, but it never materializes somehow,” I wrote. “It feels like there is so much I *should* be accomplishing, and it’s overwhelming to know where to start, so I stay stuck.”
Other writers shared feeling burned out and guilty for not hustling to get more work, especially when comparing their bylines to those of colleagues on social media (I feel this!). One person worried she’d forget how to write altogether.
Many of the people submitting comments were accomplished, prolific writers. Several had published books and earned enviable bylines in national outlets. And yet here we were, feeling like none of that mattered.
There are plenty of reasons for our collective paralysis. Generation X writers, like me, could be caught in the squeeze of raising kids and beginning to care for aging parents. And good Lord, raising teenagers makes caring for a newborn baby seem like a gentle stroll in the park. (Truly, teenagers are awesome. They’re witty, opinionated, passionate, and so much cooler than me. In 60 seconds flat, they can fix my WiFi, teach me slang, and destroy me in an online game. But also, parenting them is like getting blasted out of a canon each day, then scrabbling on the dusty ground for the pieces of your sanity that remain, hoping you can put some version of yourself back together.)
Or maybe we’re all a little (or a lot) distracted by the state of the world, which makes me feel like we’re living in a dystopian novel. Did we really just invade Venezuela? Is ICE still snatching people off the streets of Chicago? Just another typical day for the U.S. government, it seems.
And for writers, artists, and other creative professionals, the rise of AI-generated content has been a brutal gut punch. Months ago, a friend sent me a blog post by author Mark Lawrence. As an experiment, he had compiled a selection of short stories written either by humans or bots and offered readers a challenge: Could we tell which pieces were human vs. AI-generated? In most cases, I could not. Worse, I ranked some of the AI stories higher than the human-written ones — and so did a lot of other readers.
I published far fewer articles in 2025 than I had hoped. Outlets I once worked with on a regular basis have either shuttered or drastically reduced their freelance budgets. And I’m still working on finding an agent for my manuscript, a young adult cli-fi novel that I began querying in 2024.
All of this leads me to the inevitable question: Is it worthwhile to even try to write anything anymore? Will anyone read it? Or will it get lost in the roiling sea of meaningless content that’s churned out every millisecond?
Then I think about why I write. Why I started this blog in the first place. It wasn’t to collect bylines, nor was it to build a massive platform and receive accolades from readers near and far. It was just for me. I wanted a place to catalog the emotions and experiences of motherhood, a little slice of the Internet that would be mine to mold and shape.
I started writing my dystopian novel for similar reasons: I had an idea swirling around my brain, and I needed to translate it into something tangible. To keep it somewhere safe, even if it never makes its way to a coveted spot on a shelf at a cozy bookstore.
Maybe the things we write, create, or otherwise send out into the world won’t matter to most people. Maybe I’ll never sell another article and my story will live forever on the abyss of my hard drive, as different versions of slightly tweaked drafts.
Even if all of the above turns out to be true, I think I would still keep writing. Because the words aren’t, in fact, meaningless; they still matter to me. I’ve finally realized that is enough.
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