I’m Not Trying to Sell Anything... I’m Just Emptying My Brain

(By the way, that looks like an Apple lappy…urgh…not my thing lol)

Every so often, I stumble across a piece of “content” that opens with that exact line, usually delivered by someone standing in a kitchen that costs more than my entire off-grid existence, filming themselves against a backdrop of throw cushions arranged with the precision of a hostage negotiation. “I’m not trying to sell anything, I’m just sharing my journey.” And then, seventeen seconds later, a discount code appears at the bottom of the screen like a rash.

I want to be clear before I go any further: I understand the impulse. I’ve had it myself. There’s a particular seduction in the idea that you can just... talk. Unburden yourself. Let the thoughts fall out of your head and onto a page, or a screen, or whatever surface happens to be in front of you, and call it generosity rather than commerce. It feels honest. It feels like the opposite of the endless grubby hustle that the internet has become. And for about ten seconds, before the algorithm gets involved, it even is that.

Then something happens. Something always happens.

I live in a cave in rural Spain, which I mention not because it’s relevant to the point I’m making but because it is, structurally, the least “sell-y” location a person could possibly write from. There’s no ring light. There’s no branded mug of oat milk latte just out of shot. There’s a solar panel that occasionally decides it’s had enough of photosynthesis for the day, and there’s me, sat with a laptop that’s older than some of the opinions I’m about to challenge. And even here, even in this deliberately unmarketable life, I catch myself doing it. Framing a thought. Wondering how it’ll land. Asking, somewhere in the quieter, more mercenary part of my brain, whether this particular emptying of my skull is going to perform.

That’s the bit nobody says out loud. The moment “just sharing” becomes “strategising while pretending not to.”

Here’s the thing about genuinely emptying your brain, the actual unfiltered version, not the aesthetic of it: it’s usually incoherent, occasionally embarrassing, and almost never good marketing. Real thoughts, dragged straight from the source, tend to contradict themselves within a paragraph. They loop back. They admit things. They don’t resolve neatly into a call to action or a “link in bio.”

What gets sold to us as authenticity, that soft-focus, “I’m just being real with you” register, is actually one of the most curated performances going. It’s authenticity with the edges sanded off. It’s vulnerability that’s been through several drafts and a legal team. Somewhere along the way, we decided that the performance of not trying was more persuasive than actually not trying, and so an entire economy sprang up around people pretending to have no economic motive whatsoever.

I’ve watched this happen in real time on platforms I use myself. Someone posts something raw, something that actually costs them something to say, and it does well. Genuinely well, because people can smell the real thing even through a screen. And within a fortnight, the same person has identified “raw honesty” as their niche, and what was once a genuine crack in the facade becomes a recurring feature. A brand pillar. The vulnerability gets scheduled. It goes out on Tuesdays.

I’m not accusing anyone of villainy here. I think most people who do this aren’t cynical operators twirling a moustache; I think they’re just responding, sensibly, to incentives that reward a certain kind of openness while quietly punishing the messier, less shareable kind. The market has learned to like confession. It just prefers confession with good lighting.

Fair question, and I’ll try to answer it without immediately undermining myself, which, if you’ve read this far, you’ll know is not guaranteed.

I write because thinking out loud, on a page, in front of strangers, is the only method I’ve found that reliably makes me finish a thought. Left to my own devices, in my own head, an idea gets about sixty per cent formed and then wanders off to do something else, the way a dog does when it hears a noise three gardens over. Putting it in front of an audience, even an audience of people I’ll never meet, forces the thought to go the distance. That’s not altruism. That’s just how my particular brain is wired, and I’d be lying if I dressed it up as a public service.

Am I hoping someone reads it? Obviously. I’m not a monk with a typewriter shouting into a void for the health benefits. I’d like this to reach people. I’d quite like, if we’re being honest, for enough people to read it that I don’t have to go back to a career that involved wearing a lanyard with a straight face. That’s a motive. It’s not a shameful one, but it’s a motive, and anyone who tells you their newsletter exists entirely outside the economy of attention is either lying to you or, more charitably, lying to themselves first.

Where I think I differ from the “I’m not selling anything” brigade isn’t in the absence of a motive. It’s in not pretending the motive doesn’t exist. I’d rather say, plainly: I want you to read this, I’d quite like you to come back next week, and if that eventually pays for the diesel that runs my generator, marvellous. What I won’t do is dress that up as pure altruistic brain-emptying while quietly counting the open rate in another tab.

Here’s where I’ll probably lose some of you, because this is the bit where I turn the cynicism back on myself rather than on the ring-light brigade, which is always the less satisfying direction for an essay to go.

The actual dishonesty isn’t wanting an audience. Wanting to be heard is about as old and as human as it gets; you’d have to go a long way back, past every campfire and every confession box, to find the point where humans didn’t want someone to witness their thinking. The dishonesty is in the disguise. It’s the insistence that this is purely for you, dear reader, purely a gift, when really it’s a gift with a small, unspoken hope stitched into the lining.

I think the healthiest version of what I do, and what anyone does when they sit down to write something and put it out into the world, involves holding both things at once without flinching. Yes, I want to say something true, something that’s been rattling around unresolved in my head for a week and needs somewhere to go. And yes, I’d like you to stick around for the next one. Both are real. Neither cancels the other out. The only sin, as far as I can tell, is claiming it’s only ever the first one.

So no, I’m not “just emptying my brain,” not in the way that phrase gets used to mean don’t worry, nothing commercial is happening here. Something is always happening here. I just think you deserve to know what it is, rather than being told, with a straight face and a discount code waiting in the wings, that it isn’t happening at all.

Thoughts stitched together off-grid, where the only algorithm that matters is whether the solar panel feels like cooperating today.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham