Stepping Off the Treadmill

On a year of chasing reach, and the decision to stop.

I’m SJF, living in Kyoto and sharing the sounds and small details of this city — from rivers and temple gardens to local festivals. These letters follow my life here and the Sound Walks I guide in the city, all with the hope of noticing what might otherwise be missed.

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Hello from a very warm Kyoto. The cherry blossoms have been and gone for weeks now (I missed the peak this year, somehow!) and the city has settled into that lovely short window of time before the cicadas turn the volume and the pressure up; summer’s arrival.

There’s a few ideas swirling around my mind that I’ve been working through for a little while now. I want to walk you through my thought process. This might get a bit messy. Buckle in?

A pattern I keep seeing

You’ll probably be familiar with this pattern too: people who get popular talking about productivity online tend, over time, to stop being productive at anything except making content about productivity.

In that example I’m pretty much singling out the productivity bros, but you can fill in the blank with whatever you like really. The marketers become marketing YouTubers and drift further from any actual marketing work. The accountant YouTubers spend less time on actual accounts and more time selling their course on how to make six figures as a freelance accountant. Chefs make fewer meals and more reels of meals. A subset of writers on Substack spend more and more time writing about writing on Substack.

It’s a similar shape every time.

Someone is good at a real thing so they start sharing it online. The sharing rewards them, in money, attention, validation, more than the original work does/ever did and then the audience grows. So they make more content about the thing than they make of the thing. Yet the day still has the same number of hours, so something has eventually gotta give.

What gives is almost always the original practice.

The algorithm ends up acting like a treadmill pulling you forward. And once you get on, it’s real hard to get off.

I’ve felt it pulling on me too

I’ll be honest. Over the past year I’ve spent more and more of my week on social media. I’ve spent a lot of time writing letters, and making videos, sure. But also a lot of time obsessing over the metrics. Watching the numbers slowly tick upwards. Hours on Substack Notes. Studying other creators for clues. I became concerned about REACH above everything else. I made sure the first ten seconds of a video grabbed the viewer’s attention. I polished those thumbnails, dammit.

And when something I posted did well, I’d notice myself wanting to make more like it. When a Substack Note got a lot of replies, I’d think about why and try to write the next one in a similar shape.

I didn’t decide to become someone who chased engagement. I just responded to the feedback, and the feedback taught me what the algo wants to see. After a while I started trying to think in hooks. I caught myself looking at a real-life moment and wondering if it would do well on social media, before even wondering if it was beautiful.

And I started to feel a bit gross about that.

That’s not who I want to be.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to make a call like this. I gave up alcohol at the end of 2025 because I had a look at myself and realised the drink really wasn’t doing me any good. Some people can drink and be totally fine. I’m not one of those people. So I stopped.

It’s the same shape here. This is not to say that social media is bad for everyone. Some creators clearly thrive on these platforms (Austin Kleon as a great example). I just know it isn’t working for me.

The crux of it

Here’s a thought that I keep coming back to. I began posting consistently here on Substack a year ago and the weekly cadence I set for myself was what I’d read was necessary for growth. But it ended up pushing me to rush things. To ship before things were ready. To prioritise the posting schedule over making something I’m proud of.

I convinced myself I had to keep the schedule to keep the growth going (and because I had paying subscribers!), and somewhere along the way the schedule, or the treadmill, began dictating the work instead of me.

And then, about a week ago, a friend introduced me to the concept that we’re currently living in an achievement society. The short version goes something like this:

There was a time when our bosses and our institutions were the ones who told us what to do. They cracked the whip. We resisted, or we didn’t, but at least we knew where the whip was coming from. It was external to us.

But now? Well, we crack the whip on ourselves. No boss needed. Everything we do is in the name of growth at all costs, in the name of becoming, in being seen.

The sneaky part is that this works very well because it feels like freedom. You’re the one deciding to post on Instagram. You’re the one filming yourself for YouTube. You’re “building your brand.” You’re being entrepreneurial. But the pressure is just as real as a boss leaning over your shoulder, only this time the boss is you, and you can’t quit.

And all of this is happening whilst we’re smack bang in the middle of what people are calling the attention economy. The platforms make their money by selling your attention to advertisers. Every minute you scroll, every notification you tap, every video you finish, that’s the product. Your looking is what they’re selling. Which means the apps in your pocket are engineered, very precisely and incredibly well, to keep you looking. The dopamine, the variable rewards, the way a single good post can light up your whole week. None of that is by accident of course. Likes and social validation keep us coming back for more. Whether we’re creators or regular users of these platforms. And we’re told again and again by everyone that all we need to do to “make it” is just post regularly. Keep feeding the machine until the day that we hit the jackpot.

So we’ve ended up with a culture that’s pushing us to drive ourselves harder, whilst plugged directly into platforms designed to keep us looking for as long as possible.

Burnout, it seems, is exactly what the system produces when it’s working as designed!

The work that actually matters

I make my living by taking people out on guided sound walks in Kyoto. Real ones, in person. People come, I take them out for a few hours with good recording equipment, and we listen to the city together. They leave with a recording of that morning, in that place, with the sounds we found together.

That’s the work. And it’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. That’s what I’m trying to build here.

Improving the walks, making them better, doesn’t happen on Instagram or Substack. It happens by walking around Kyoto early in the morning trying to find a side street where I can hear the sound of a craftsman working. It happens by understanding how a particular shrine sounds at nine am versus at three pm. By becoming known by businesses and hotels here in Kyoto. By getting better at the moment I put the headphones on a guest for the first time, so their next two hours is way more interesting than the two before it.

None of that is helped by pleasing some mysterious algorithm or posting about it constantly in the name of “SUBSCRIBER GROWTH”. The hours I spend on social media are hours not spent on the thing those walks are made of.

There’s a Japanese word that I think works well here: shokunin. It’s the craftsperson who deliberately doesn’t scale, because scaling would destroy the very thing they’re making. The sushi restaurant with only six seats. The coffee shop owner who’s poured the same coffee, the same way, for forty years. The work and the scale of it are inseparable. If you industrialise the scale, you lose the work.

My wife works in a shop here in Kyoto that sells beautiful goods made by Japanese craftsmen and women. One of their makers takes a whole year to fulfil a single order (and it’s not even a very big one!). It doesn’t matter how many times she’s asked to rush. She simply will not.

Maybe this craftswoman is too busy posting on Instagram to make bowls, eh? What do you think? Or perhaps she’s just so concerned with quality that she has to do it the way she’s always done it. And that’s gonna take the time it takes.

Kyoto, in Sound is a small thing by design. The whole proposition rests on slowing down enough to listen well. If I try to grow it through consistent weekly posting on Substack, Instagram Reels or YouTube in an attempt for audience optimisation and more bookings per week, I’d be violating the thesis of my own work. My business is about asking people to pause.

I can’t sell what I’m doing through channels that punish pausing. And all modern day platforms certainly punish pausing.

What I’m changing

Right. So here’s what I’m changing.

I’m pausing paid subscriptions. The Substack stays free for everyone. If you’re currently a paying subscriber, your card won’t be charged again. Your support has mattered to me far more than the money ever did, and I want to be plain about that.

I’m also stepping way back from Substack Notes, Instagram, and from social media as a daily habit. The weekly-posting treadmill, the dopamine of watching numbers move, the conditioning to make more of whatever just performed well: that’s what I’m coming off. All of it.

What stays

This Substack is not going anywhere. I’m just not going to give into the pressure of posting every week to keep the algorithm satiated anymore. I will send emails when I have great stuff to share with you about what I’m doing here in Kyoto.

What you’ll get instead is fewer letters, fewer videos, longer thinking time, but things I’m actually proud of rather than things I rushed to keep the algorithm happy. This little blog of mine has already done what I needed it to do. People have found me through it in the past year and come on a sound walk because of something they read here. That’s a real outcome. It’s the kind of slow, depth-first growth that I actually want.

The recovered time will go back into the work I should have been doing more of all along. Walking new neighbourhoods. Getting to know the hotels and shops and concierges across this city. Finding the places only locals know. Sharpening the walks themselves. The slow, less visible work that doesn’t show up on a feed but adds up over time.

If you’re coming to Kyoto (or know anyone who is) and want to go on a sound walk with me, the Kyoto, in Sound website has all the information.

If you’ve been reading these letters for a while now, thank you for being here.

And thank you for noticing with me.

SJF