Three people said they read my Substack. I nearly apologized.

This weekend, I did something increasingly unusual in the post-AI economy: I went to several events in real life. These weren’t the usual Zoom webinars or conference calls in which everyone looks faintly alarmed by their own face in the corner of the screen.

Actual events. With actual people.

Huzzah!

And three different people, in three different conversations, said some version of the same thing:

“I’ve been reading your Substack.”

Three times, and all three times, I did the same thing: I deflected, made a joke, changed the subject, and felt my face do something involuntary. Because I was embarrassed!

They did not say, “I receive your Substack and delete it.” They didn’t say, “I subscribed accidentally while trying to close a pop-up.” They did not quietly pull me aside to explain that my use of improper punctuation had recently become a matter of their concern…

So what, exactly, was I apologizing for? Because this is, objectively, a nice thing to hear. Having people read your work is the entire point of writing in public. The evidence, if I’m willing to look at it, says people like it. They open the emails. And very few people have unsubscribed in protest…. the paid tier keeps not shrinking.

Please Read This. But Never Mention It.

Here’s my working theory, and it starts with a sociologist.

The Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman had this idea that we all perform on two stages in our daily lives: the front stage is where you present the curated self (the polished version). Backstage is where you drop the act, have your rehearsals, and recover…. the whole system works because the audiences stay separate.

A newsletter is the ultimate front stage. By the time an essay reaches your inbox, it’s been through more rounds of edits than most board decks I’ve written.

Then someone at a weekend event says “I read your piece,” and the stages collapse into one. The person standing in front of them (unedited, holding a warm seltzer, mid-bite) is suddenly expected to be the person who wrote the thing. And the standing-there version hasn’t been through six drafts. He’s running on first-take dialogue and whatever he remembered to eat that morning for breakfast.

The embarrassment is, I think, about the gap between the written self and the standing-in-a-room self. What’s even stranger is that I publish this thing on purpose.

Nobody hacked into my laptop, stole my private notes, added a subscribe button, and began distributing it every Sunday evening. I write these essays, edit them, choose a title, sometimes create a chart, and then press a large button that says, in effect:

“Send these thoughts to thousands of people.”

This is an unambiguous act.

And yet there is apparently a vast psychological distance between knowing that someone opened an email and having a real person stand in front of you and say:

“Yes, I saw what you were thinking.”

The Inner Voice, Transcribed

If I slow the moment down, my inner monologue says something like this:

Who do you think you are? You put your thoughts on the internet, with your name on them, and asked strangers for their attention, and now an actual human is confirming they gave it to you. In public. Where other people can hear!

Notice the logic. The voice isn’t saying the work is bad. It’s somehow saying that claiming attention at all is an offense. And I think this is the central psychological problem of writing on the internet for anyone who isn’t a narcissist.

The narcissist has no gap to fall into: publishing feels like the world finally catching up to their self-image. “I read your Substack” lands as overdue tribute. No embarrassment, because there was never any doubt that their thoughts deserved an audience….

For the rest of us, publishing is a claim we’re not sure we’ve earned at first. Every essay says, implicitly: this is worth eleven minutes of your finite life. And when someone confirms, especially to your face, that they read it, the claim suddenly has a creditor!

The voice objects to the act of being visible at all.

It is less of an “impostor syndrome” than a kind of exposure alarm. The fear is not necessarily that people will discover you’re a hack. It is that they will discover you really meant what you said.

That you really do think about careers, institutions, AI, work, macroeconomics, and why the floor beneath so many white-collar professions appears to be shrinking day by day, prompt by prompt.

That you cared enough to sit down and turn those thoughts into a couple of sentences.

(How embarrassing.)

Writing online requires a peculiar form of doublethink: you’ve got to believe that what you have to say is worth publishing, while maintaining enough distanced self-awareness to know how absurd that belief actually sounds.

The Data Says One Thing: The Gut Says Another.

I’ve written before that I use data to inform decisions but make the final call on my gut instinct. Usually, I’ll defend that. This is the case where the gut is simply wrong and needs to be overruled.

The data: readers open the emails. They restack the essays. They tell me they’ve read my words at events, unprompted, while smiling. Thirty-four of them pay actual money. My husband Gregg, who has been the involuntary first audience for every one of these essays, usually does not object to their content…

But the gut says: flee!

I spent a decade advising leaders to trust the evidence over the anecdote, and here I am unable to accept three compliments without staging an internal tribunal. If a client did this, that is, dismissed every positive signal and treated the absence of complaints as suspicious silence, I’d call them out on it.

So let me name it in my own instance: the embarrassment isn’t information about the work. It’s information about the era in which I was trained.

Ladder Etiquette in a Portfolio Economy..

Here’s the structural part, because there’s always a structural part. If you read this regularly you’ve probably been waiting for it.

Most of us were formed professionally in the employee era, when visibility had a specific shape: you were visible inside the org chart, to your boss, in the approved channels. And any visibility outside the building was immediately suspect.

Personal brand? — How unseemly!

Writing in public? — Who has the time, and who even do you think you are?

The old ladder rewarded the quiet sustained performer, or at least it claimed to…

That etiquette made sense when the institution held your career for you. It’s the same instinct that once made “self-promotion” taboo: because your promotion was your employer’s job, and doing it yourself implied you didn’t trust them.

Well. We’ve all seen how that trust worked out….

In a portfolio career, the byline is the storefront. The newsletter isn’t a vanity project bolted onto the real work, it’s part of the infrastructure, in the same way the LLC and the bookkeeping are infrastructure. (Update: I’ve recently moved to Quickbooks on the advice of a paid professional). This is how some of my consulting clients find me, get to know me, validate my thinking, and how three people at the weekend knew what I’ve been thinking about lately before I even said a word. The embarrassment is a tax the writer pays on an asset that’s been noticeably appreciating.

The voice in my head is enforcing the rules of an economy that no longer exists. It’s ladder etiquette, still going strong, in a portfolio economy world.

What I’m Going to Try Instead

I’d like to tell you that I’ve resolved this. But it’s clear that I haven’t yet. At the next event I attend, someone might mention the newsletter and my face will very likely do the involuntary thing again.

But I’m working on a smaller fix: a two-word response protocol for when the front stage and back stage collapse into each other: “Thank you.”

Not “oh, that old thing.”

Not “I mostly write it for myself.”

Not a joke, a deflection, or a subject change, simply: thank you.

Because the honest transaction is that someone spent their scarcest resource, their attention, on something I made, and told me so. The only non-absurd response is gratitude.

If you write in public, or post, or podcast, or put anything with your name on it into the world, I suspect you know this voice… I’d love to know what it says to you, and what you say back to it.

To the three people who told me they read ARK Strategy this weekend: thank you. I am sorry I reacted as if you had discovered me doing something private in a public park. The correct response was not embarrassment. It is gratitude.

The voice in my head will probably continue to ask who I think I am…

For now, I have this for an answer: someone who writes a moderately successful Substack newsletter about careers in the post-AI economy.

And unfortunately, some people read it…

-Alex

If someone quoted this essay back to you at an event, please be gentle. And if you’re building a career where the byline is the storefront, that’s what this newsletter is for — subscribe and join 2,100+ readers.

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Alex Randall Kittredge writes the Substack ARK Strategy and is the founder and Managing Director of APR Strategic Consulting. He has advised 9+ CEOs, integrated workforces, and redesigned organizations across hedge funds, startups, and industrial companies. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Cambridge, and mentors entrepreneurs & startup founders through Oxford Entrepreneurs Network, CamEntrepreneurs, and Plug and Play Tech Center. He is a Director of The Oxbridge Method Ltd, and is the author of the forthcoming book, How Your Side Hustles Will Save You: Creating a Durable Career that Transcends the Corporate Ladder.

Compliance Statement: All views and opinions expressed are solely my own and do not reflect those of any current or former employer, client, or organization with which I am or have been affiliated.