Don't Envy the Wicked (or Anyone Else) Writing Online

On the temptation to envy and covet others' gifts, opportunities, or platforms

Photo by James Jeremy Beckers on Unsplash

One of the challenges to being Online is being hyper-aware of what everyone else is doing and then comparing yourself to others. For teenagers, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok can be dangerous in this regard. For parents, Facebook and Instagram. For writers, Substack and Twitter. No matter how gifted you are, no matter how hard you work on your writing, no matter how worthy your writing is of an audience, someone how there is getting more readers with absolute slop. Worse than slop, there are writers out there with a bigger readership who are toxic to their readers, who are actively harming their souls! And yet no one will read your edifying work! Or perhaps they aren’t writing slop or toxic work, but they are just midwits, spewing half-formed thoughts out into the wild and yet getting inordinately positive traction for some reason (I often feel I fall into this category myself). Meanwhile, your work is intelligent and carefully constructed and largely ignored. There is no justice in it! Substack likes to remind me of where I stand in the Faith and Religion (or something like that) rankings, and everytime I see it, I’m reminded that I’m behind writers that practice horoscopes and other such occult nonsense. It’s humbling and frustrating. As a writer, particularly in a hyper-visible online world, you will be tempted to be envious of other writers and their platforms, their opportunities, and their gifts. The challenge is to learn to do your work to God’s glory without turning your head to the right or the left to compare yourself, to stop worrying about where other people are in relation to you or how other people are more or less successful than you and to put your hand to the pen and write. Unless you can do that, you will become so consumed with envy and bitterness and inadequacy that your work will suffer immensely. Instead of pursuing what you know to be good, you will pursue attention and praise, and you will lose the love of writing.