Am I Doing It Right?

How to write in the age of ChatGPT

By the time I was 45, I had achieved all kinds of things to prove I was exceptional. I stood atop a mountain of accomplishments, posed heroically, a plastic grin stretched across my face. But underneath that hollow, brittle smile was a question that underscored everything I did:

Am I doing it right?

No matter how big the achievement, I carried around a constant sense of doubt that colored everything. There was no authenticity to any of it, because I wasn't doing it for myself.

I was doing it for everyone else.

Because that was the only way I knew how to live.

When Performance Replaces Instinct

I grew up on the water. At the age of two, I was probably better at swimming than walking. When I began the selection process to join a special little corner of the Marine Corps, I was a little concerned about my physical stamina in terms of carrying heavy gear for many miles, or my ability to stay awake for days. But one thing I wasn’t at all concerned about was my ability to perform in the water. I was always comfortable in water.

So when I got to the swim phase of training and began to struggle, I was really surprised.

The instructors insisted on us doing strokes a certain way. The strokes were slightly different than I had learned them, but in an effort to comply and meet the instructors’ expectations—which is sort of what you need to do to be permitted into this special club—I tried to swim the way they wanted me to swim.

Except I couldn’t.

Their techniques made me slow and clunky, and left me out of breath and exhausted. Imagine trying to consciously think about how you take each step as you walk instead of just focusing on where you are going. Swimming with their techniques was sort of like that for me.

Thankfully one instructor noticed my struggles and pulled up beside me one day in the training pool. He asked if I had swam much before I arrived for this screening. I told him my childhood heritage on the water and expressed my frustration.

Then swim the way you want to swim, he said as we treaded water.

Huh… just like that? I asked, tentatively.

I don’t care how you do it. Just get it done.

His comment made me realize that my swimming problems were coming from trying to conform to a way of doing things I already knew how to do. And with that realization, and permission to swim with my preferred techniques, my struggles ceased and I breezed through the rest of swim phase without issue.

I look back on that breakthrough and ache just a little.

If only I had realized back then that most of my suffering came from performing my way through life.

If only I had realized I didn’t need permission to just be myself.

Now We Let Machines Tell Our Stories

I have read a lot of concern about AI taking over writing, especially in my beloved little corner of the internet here on Substack. I recently read a piece by one of my favorite writers, Linda Carol. She was referencing another favorite author of mine who did some clever analysis of some of the most popular essays on Substack and found eerie similarities to most of them. The implication from both of these essays is that AI is doing most of the writing for the top-performing posts on Substack these days.

Here’s a quick excerpt from Linda’s article:

So [Will Storr] did a little experiment of his own. He reviewed a bunch of those “bestselling” pieces and came up with a ChatGPT prompt that churned out articles so similar to the “bestsellers,” you’d be hard pressed to know which are AI and which are human.

He’s talking posts with 12K hearts.

He compares actual “bestselling Substack” posts to ChatGPT posts and it’s chilling.

Something about that almost makes me want to weep. Throw in the towel. Because why the hell are writers spending hours to maybe get 50 or 100 likes or subscribers when someone types in a ChatGPT prompt and gets freaking ten thousand hearts?

I can certainly relate to Linda’s existential concerns, but what she focuses on—the popularity metrics—misses the mark for me.

There are days when I read other people’s writing and I think that everything I want to write has already been written—and done better than I could have done it. Those days really bum me out because I begin to question the point of my writing. I mean, why write if everyone is already telling the same story better than me?

Then I read articles about strategies for growing an audience, or strategies for how to make a living writing. Pretty quickly, I am pulled into all sorts of anxiety. According to the ‘experts,’ in addition to writing what I am already writing, I have to conjure up pithy things to say and publish notes 5-6 times a day, minimum, and I have to read and comment on dozens of articles to strategically to get noticed by writers with bigger audiences.

And pretty quickly, I am right back where I started, in performance mode, writing what I think will get me attention and validation rather than what is on my heart.

I feel like a Bird of Paradise, doing some elaborate mating dance, desperately hoping to get your attention. And when I allow myself to get swept up in these kinds of motivations—the existential concerns that equate your hitting a button as evidence of my value as a writer—I feel doubt rather than clarity when I publish what I write.

I am left wandering around with that same plastic smile, asking that same pesky question:

Am I doing it right?

The Power of Storytelling

So while I appreciate Linda’s concern that people are cornering the market using AI-generated slop, I don’t get all that concerned because I am not writing with the goal of getting thousands of likes. Worrying about how many people press a button feels like a popularity contest to me.

I am 46 years old and I have never been popular; at least not ‘football jock’ popular. I seldom find real life people who immediately relate to my experiences. I don’t know why I would expect thousands of people to cheer me on, especially in this flooded market of writers focused on self-discovery and healing. If the same ratio of internet readers relate to me as people do in real life, I should feel lucky to have a few people read and relate to what I write.

And most days, that is precisely what I get from published essays.

I get a few people who like an essay. Maybe one or two who leave a comment. Sometimes I get a personal note, which feels to me like a gift of warm, fuzzy socks on Christmas morning—delightfully thoughtful, and immediately beneficial.

I don’t know about other writers, but when I write essays, I am mostly just trying to have a conversation. I am trying to connect.

When I write about recovery or healing, I’m not trying to tell you how to do something or what to do. I’m telling you this is where I am in the hopes that you might relate to it.

I guess I figure you might be reading this right now, feeling a certain way, and maybe you’ll resonate with what I say and maybe it’ll make you feel a bit better. Or, I dunno, maybe you’ll hear something from my experiences and it’ll make you say ‘huh… maybe I can handle things that way too?’

That’s what I did when I first started my journey of recovery.

I read people’s experiences that were similar to mine and to which I could relate. I considered what they said about how they handled those struggles. I experimented with their approaches. I noted what worked. And, as a result, I grew.

That’s the power of storytelling. And the amazing thing about storytelling is that both the storyteller and the audience member benefit from this process.

The storyteller feels better because the telling of that story is the natural completion of their experience. The audience member hearing the story picks up nuggets of truth and wisdom and stores them away for later, or maybe decides to jump up and make a change in the way they have been living or thinking.

My anthropologist friends tell me that’s pretty much how humans have been learning, growing, and healing since we have recorded history. Storytelling is so universal that we see the same patterns again and again—painted in ochre on cave walls, carved into tablets, sung in songs. Entire continents apart, people who had no idea the others existed still told stories with the same arcs, the same lessons, the same longing to understand and to be understood.

Here’s the point I am trying to make: While I find the topic of AI’s effect on writing interesting from an academic perspective, using AI to write essays would do nothing for me, because I am not writing for you.

I am writing for me.

Well, hold on. That’s not entirely true. Don’t leave just yet! :)

Because you’re here too, aren’t you?

What I mean is that, as the storyteller, I am not writing to get likes or other external signs of validation. I am not performing for you.

I am trying to tell my story—my lived experience as it is unfolding—in the most authentic way I can. The process of doing so is what helps me understand myself and grow. Understanding traumatic experiences is often complex and confusing. My traumatic experiences and how they affect me today are like several skeins of yarn tangled up in a deep bag. The only way to tell one thread from another—the only way to make a story out of it—is to pull out the knotted mess and begin the process of untangling it all.

Writing is how I do that.

And if reading it helps you, perhaps by inspiring some idea or pointing you in a certain direction, then we have helped each other, haven’t we?

Don’t get me wrong. It would it be easy to offload much of this writing to AI! This essay has already stretched over two days of determined writing, and I have thought about scrapping it more than once.

Because writing authentically is hard.

I have a lot of energy and ideas, and I try to get them out as much as I can. But life happens. Sometimes I run out of steam. Ideas fizzle. I lose my train of thought. I get interrupted by kids wanting to spend time with me. I have to feed myself.

It would be super easy to simply tell AI “finish my essay for me while I get some grub.” What AI would produce would certainly sound good. It would flow and have nice structure.

Of course it would. It was trained on the best of us.

But what it would produce would have the appearance of beauty, but with no soul. It would be like the band Nickleback—a corporate version of emotion—predictable, polished, and utterly hollow.

More importantly, using AI to write would only put me right back where I was when all these problems started—in performance mode. I’d be writing for empty metrics, rather than participating in the ageless cycle of growth that is storytelling.

I’d be trying to swim the way you wanted, rather than what works for me.

For me, healing and recovering means returning home to myself—a person I always waited around for permission to be, and as a result was never allowed to develop. A person who was rushed into life, who learned how to perform and appease to get and keep love, but never felt safe enough to be himself.

Authenticity is what I am striving for today. If that means an essay that takes 7+ hours to write and only gets a few likes, so be it.

Because writing it—including the distractions, the doubts, the struggles—is the process through which I unravel the yarn, one thread at a time.

This is how I do it right.

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About The Author

Hi. I am Eric. I spent 20 years in the US Navy doing exceptional things—special operations, flying airplanes, conducting research as a military scientist. Now I’m a full-time dad, part-time writer, and recovering overachiever. I write about healing, identity, and what happens when you stop performing and start telling the truth. I’m not here to go viral. I’m here to connect, untangle, and maybe make you feel a little less alone (and if you laugh once or twice along the way, even better).