Anonymous User asked: i struggle a lot with maintaining the effort i put into something when i feel like i'm not getting back what i deserve from it. sometimes success takes a long time and you have to keep doing the damn thing to get there -- do you have any advice for when doing the damn thing feels hopeless?
I have been very lucky to have seen some returns on my efforts in a bunch of places -- academia, written criticism, podcasting. I did not see a return, or any kind of money for anything, for maybe three or four years at the beginning of my "blogging career," which started in 2010ish (although I did have a readership, some really wonderful people encouraging me, and a very different arena of discussion than what we have today).
I am a believer in the Darius Kazemi method of winning the lottery. For many years, I made stuff because I thought it was fun to make things and to write little essays of cultural commentary. Most of those things showed no return, but I did get better -- I received criticism (which sometimes stung and was sometimes affirming), and I listened to it all, and I was the beneficiary of a lot of editorial time and effort after I started publishing in various places. I am my own most brutal critic, and I am always trying to get better and more efficient, and I am basically never happy with how I've spoken to something or described it or addressed it.
So I take your point that doing the thing can feel hopeless, and I think part of that is that I have almost zero expectations of what I "deserve" back from the thing. [This is also why I stopped pursuing independent commercial game development -- the time to outcome lag is just a living nightmare.] Instead, I try to consider and center on what I am going to learn when writing or reading something. I think the reason that Lutz and I enjoy doing the shows we do is that we're always getting to learn things, and thankfully other people enjoy learning along with us.
[This is, by the way, one of the reasons I have such a huge respect for video essayists like Jacob Geller and Chris Franklin -- they make these massive undertakings, rarely with the wide-eyed easiness of loving fandom -- and they make it without any kind of guarantee that anyone is going to care about it. There is an abyss underneath some of the hardest, most time-consuming work on the planet, and the capability really good video essayists have to go for the hard work without the safety of pitch->editorial is impressive. Deeply brave.]
Maybe this is helpful. I am deeply appreciative every day that people want to hear me and my various cohosts talk about things and try to understand the world around us. There's no guarantee of it, and I had to work for more than a decade to feel like I was any good at it. And hopefully I will keep getting better!