There is too much content in the world.
It's a scary thought to have, for someone who is trying to get into content marketing and is dabbling in personal content creation (hey, that's actually what I'm doing right now!).
And yet I do have the urge to create, to write, to share my thoughts, ideas, arguments, and feelings. But "there is too much content in the world" haunts me, turning into "what's the point of adding mine?" and, worst of all, "every thought I share needs to be original, profound, and watertight, otherwise it's not worth sharing at all".
Let's interrogate that.
I'll start with "every thought I share needs to be original". That's easily debunked: even if the words I've strung together have never existed in that order before, the chance that they express something that has never been expressed before is little to none.
True originality is unattainable. Even if something looks original, it's a bunch of other unoriginal ideas cobbled together.
And anyway, relatable content performs really well, however you want to measure that - in likes, clicks, shares, book sales, foot traffic through an art exhibition, or making someone feel less alone.
With so much content out there, it's impossible for any one person to consume it all anyway. So even if your content isn't original in the grand scheme of things, it very well could be new to whoever stumbles across it.
So my content can't really be original, and it doesn't have to be.
And now: "every thought I share needs to be profound". Um, no it doesn't. A thought can be just that: a thought. I will not elaborate.
Finally, "every thought I have needs to be watertight". By this, I mean that I need to cover all my bases. Take every piece of information on the topic into account.
This is the thing I struggle with the most and is what most often leads to pages of unfinished thoughts and arguments that turn into disclaimer after disclaimer without actually getting to the point. (You have no idea how many disclaimers and caveats I wanted to add to this blog post.)
I recently left academia with a Master's degree, and one of the toughest things about writing my thesis was letting go of the idea that I could mention every little bit of relevant information and cite every remotely relevant paper.
Which would have been near impossible, since I was writing about the senses, language, emotion, and embodied cognition (look it up - it's a pretty big topic that whole books are unable to cover). I couldn't include every single piece of research done on these topics in my entire lifetime, let alone a two-year MA.
And I cannot include everything everyone has ever said about content in this blog post.
It makes sense that there is so much content in the world. There are billions of people, all with giant brains filled with thoughts and ideas, and with a bunch of platforms on which to share them.
It's arrogant, actually, to think that sharing my thoughts is going to somehow tip the scales and cause the world to explode because there's too much information out there. There's already too much information out there; adding mine won't make a significant difference.
So I might as well just do it.