My Substack Problem

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

My name is Alice, and I have what you might call an addiction to Substack.

It started innocently enough at the beginning of COVID. "I can quit anytime," I told myself when I discovered an easy way to share stories I was writing.

So I created a Substack newsletter and subscribed a few family members and a couple of close friends. Every time I wrote something, I pressed publish, and they automatically received it as an email. The rush shot straight through me.

Small-time dealing to family members and close friends soon expanded as I began chasing the high of validation from more and more readers.

But like any good addict, I wasn't just dealing—I was using too. My gateway drug came in the form of Letters from An American by Heather Cox Richardson. She'd started writing daily in September 2019 to chronicle what was happening during the first Trump presidency and put it into a broader historical context. Initially she shared her writing on Facebook before migrating to Substack. I subscribed the day she launched on Substack and got my fix delivered directly to my inbox every morning around 3 a.m.

I would wake up in the middle of the night and check if Heather had sent her email—like a junkie checking for their dealer's text. When I saw the email, I could go back to sleep because I knew that in the morning, I would be able to read it, and she would help me get through the day and deal with the insanity of the first Trump presidency.

Sometimes there was nothing from Heather. By now I had created an entire persona for her in my head. I knew she was a Harvard-educated history professor who taught at Boston College. She dropped hints about her lobster fisherman husband. I imagined she lived in a small coastal village in Maine. The house would be one of those practical Maine places—wide pine floors, windows that rattled in the wind, a wood stove. After she made dinner for her family and put her kids to bed, she settled down to write late into the night—that's why her posts arrived at 3 a.m. Just as she was going to bed, the lobster fisherman I'd come to know as Buddy was starting his day in his skiff. Two people whose schedules never aligned.

I worried in those pre-dawn hours when there wasn’t an email, and sometimes I couldn’t fall back asleep. Sure enough, other addicts were worried too. People were frantically asking on Facebook, "What happened to Heather?" We were like concerned children when an elderly parent missed their daily check-in call. Later, we'd get her post with an explanation: the power had gone out and she'd lost internet access. The collective sigh of relief was palpable—our dealer was okay, and our supply line was secure.

One Substack subscription led to another. And another. I found distraction and kindred spirits, baking tutorials, and menopause advice—not that I needed that, but you never know when a younger friend might. My inbox became a buffet of political opinions, quirky ideas, confessional stories, life advice, stories of life in Tasmania, and recipes for things I would never actually cook.

Soon I was getting newsletters about newsletters. Meta-addiction had set in. My inbox count of Substack newsletters went from manageable double digits to an embarrassing three-digit number. What was once a peaceful few minutes with the Globe & Mail spread out on the kitchen table while enjoying my morning coffee became something entirely different. Now it was a frantic scroll through political analysis, lifestyle advice, and at least three different hot takes on whatever happened yesterday—all consumed before 9 a.m. My quick-fix habit was also systematically killing the fiction reading that I had once loved.

The consumption was spiralling, but so was the production. Like any dealer looking to expand their territory, I started a second Substack to publish the first messy draft of a book I was writing. Then a third with a couple of friends—why not hook somebody else in?—when Trump got elected a second time and began making threatening noises about Canada becoming the 51st state. It’s a modest resistance project to explain to Americans why we will never, ever join the USA. We're so much better than Americans, and obviously we needed to tell them.

I helped a reader start his Substack. He helped another friend. The addiction spread—readers becoming writers, writers recruiting more readers. I couldn't stop enabling others to join my newsletter-fueled cycle.

And I couldn't stop clicking "Subscribe." Each newsletter promised to be the last one, but there was always just one more writer whose thoughts I absolutely needed in my inbox...

But you know what? Maybe I don't want to get clean. Sure, my inbox is chaos, but buried in that digital mess are voices I actually trust—people who aren't worried about advertisers or shareholders or going viral.

My 'dealer' Heather is still writing every morning, her 3 a.m. dispatches now reaching millions who, like me, need her steady voice to make sense of a second presidency that somehow makes the first one look quaint by comparison. She’s a brilliant historian helping us understand our moment in time, keeping it documented for the future, even if some of the details of her domestic life were products of my imagination.

So I write. So I subscribe.