TL;DR: I spent years rewriting other people’s words for a living. This Substack is me finding out whether I have any of my own.
I spent years as a translator. The job, stripped of its dignity: take someone else’s words, rebuild them in another language, invoice, repeat.
A linguistic copy machine – one with opinions it never printed.
That’s the part that got to me. I had the opinions. I’d finish translating some executive’s press release and think: I could have written a better argument than this. Then I’d file it, quote the next job, and go back to reading other people’s newsletters – the consumption side of the same machine. Words in, words out, none of them mine.
And the machines are coming for the copy machines. Every year DeepL gets a little better at my job, and my job was already an echo. When the tool that replaces you is an improvement in fidelity, you were never the source of anything.
The voice in my head had its objections. I’m not creative enough. Who cares what I have to say? Reasonable voice. My first articles are clunky – you can scroll down and check, they’re right there, all seven of them. But they exist, which is more than I can say for the perfect ones I never wrote. Perfection is just procrastination in a tuxedo.
There’s a version of this I can’t fully argue away. All those years of reading – the lurking – were the apprenticeship. Taste is built in the audience, not on the stage; the echo years might be the only reason the source has anything worth saying now. Maybe some people should keep lurking a while longer. I don’t know how long that debt properly runs. I only know mine felt paid.
So: this Substack. I didn’t want to be the echo anymore; I wanted to be the source. No niche, a name that’s an inside joke with myself. I am carving out my own little corner of the internet before the event horizon swallows us all.
Fuck becoming famous. I just don’t want to die in translation.
I think I just read the origin story of "Julian Content Creator"...