Four years in, still not making a living: an honest account of the numbers and the mistakes

Four years of this and I do not make a living from it.

I want to write that down plainly, because the retrospectives that get shared are written by the people it worked out for, and that produces a badly distorted picture of what this work usually looks like. Survivorship bias is not a statistical curiosity here. It is the entire reason anyone believes the odds are better than they are.

So: no big number, no inflection point, no thread about how I cracked it.

Where things actually stand

Growth is real but slow. The written work outperforms the video work by a wide margin, which took me embarrassingly long to accept because I had decided in advance that video was the priority. Income is inconsistent and does not cover living costs. Most of the audience arrived through search, not through anything I did on social platforms, and search rewards patience in a way that made almost all of my urgency pointless.

The work that gets the most response is consistently the most specific and the most personal. The work I spent the most time optimising performed worst.

Five things I got wrong

1. I optimised for the algorithm instead of for one reader. Years of keyword-shaped, thumbnail-shaped, format-shaped output. The pieces that actually landed were the ones written for a single person who had written to me. Writing for everyone produces something nobody recognises themselves in.

2. I treated volume as progress. It is much easier to make another video than to ask whether the last twenty were any good. Volume feels like work and is measurable, which makes it the perfect place to hide.

3. I built on rented ground. I put years into platforms that could age-restrict, demonetise or delete me without explanation, and then acted surprised when they did. I have written separately about how that mechanism works. It was foreseeable and I did not want to see it.

4. I mistook being busy for being effective. This is the one I find hardest to write. Editing is absorbing, has visible output, and cannot reject you. Emailing a potential collaborator can. Publishing something personal can. Asking to be paid can. I spent four years choosing the task that could not reject me and called it productivity. That is not a work-rate problem. It is avoidance with a spreadsheet attached.

5. I isolated myself and called it focus. Working alone on a stigmatised topic in a language that is not the majority language of my audience, without peers, without anyone to tell me an idea was bad before I spent a month on it. I thought that was dedication. It was mostly just alone.

The mental health part, and why I am including it

I hesitated over this section because it can read as self-pity, and then I decided that leaving it out is exactly the dishonesty I am complaining about.

There is decent research on this from an adjacent world. Studies of graduate researchers have found rates of depression and anxiety several times higher than in comparable populations — some work putting it around six times — with only around a third seeking help. A Berkeley survey reported over 40% of graduate students in some fields showing depressive symptoms. An Arizona study found around half reporting high stress.

I am not a graduate student. But the structural conditions are close enough to be instructive: long solo projects, no external validation for months, self-worth fused to output, no clear finish line, and a peer group you rarely see. Those conditions do reliable damage regardless of the subject matter, and knowing that they are structural rather than personal has helped me more than any amount of self-improvement content.

If you are doing this kind of work alone: the flatness is not a character defect. It is a predictable response to the setup.

What I am changing

Writing first. Text outperforms video for me, survives moderation, and gets found through search years later. I inverted this for four years.

Depth over frequency. Fewer, longer, more specific pieces on the questions I actually get asked.

Own the destination. The site and the email list are the assets. Everything else is a doorway.

Do the task that can reject me. One uncomfortable, potentially-rejecting action a week. That is the whole rule, and it is the only one I expect to actually change anything.

Stop calling it a business while acting like a hobby. Either the goal is income — in which case things like sponsorship, rates and pitches are the work — or the goal is advocacy and I should stop measuring myself against people whose goal is income. Pretending both simultaneously produced the worst of each.

Why publish this

Partly because it is true, and this site's only real asset is that I do not tidy things up.

Mostly because four years ago I would have found this useful. I read a great many creator retrospectives written by people for whom it worked, and I concluded that the gap between their results and mine was a gap in effort or talent. Some of it probably was. A lot of it was that I was reading a filtered sample and calling it a benchmark.

If you are two years into something that has not paid off yet, and you are wondering whether everyone else has cracked something you have not: they have not. Most of them just do not write this post.

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If any of the mental health section landed close to home, please talk to someone properly qualified rather than a stranger on the internet with a naturism blog.