I Built Everything the Gurus Told Me To. Then I Burned It Down.

Chuck it in the fuck it bucket and win life.

Not long ago I was sitting in front of my computer at 2 AM.

I was staring at a half-finished blog post about “5 Systems Every Creator Needs to Scale,” in a daze of self-contemplation, and I realized something:

I fucking hated what I was doing.

Not the writing itself. I’ve loved writing since I was a kid stealing my mom’s typewriter to bang out terrible science fiction stories.

But somewhere between “follow your passion” and “build your personal brand,” I’d turned writing into a job I despised.

Here’s what happened.

Growing up, I was the weird “artistic” kid in the land of rednecks, hunters, and wannabe cowboys.

Small town Tennessee is the kind of place you really don’t try to stand out. It’s part of the Bible Belt. It’s very old fashioned. And yes, there are racists and cousin fuckers, but they’re not the majority by a long shot.

Still, as a boy growing up in the 80s/90s, wanting to do art and be creative was considered being a pussy. That was girl stuff. You were supposed to work on cars, ride in rodeos, play sports, hunt animals, and when you came of age, fuck every girl you could.

That’s never really been my bag, though.

I’ve always thought for myself. I much preferred to sit inside and read the old encyclopedia set we had or draw or write something.

Now, I learned all that other stuff because that was what was expected of me, but once I hit my teenage years, I got infected by what I can only call the “90s Indie Virus.”

I was 100% fuck the system, dye my hair blue, get shoved into ISS, do some drugs/sell some drugs, make zines, read comics, and have a very FTW (fuck the world) attitude. I was a punk without a clue.

I won’t go into a huge amount of detail on my time right after high-school

I joined the military ( more about that in a minute, and I’m sure you’ll hear enough stories about that from me over time.) Before that, I worked a few dead end local jobs at factories and industrial plants, retail stores, and similar. Got myself involved with a woman I never should have, got married, and got her pregnant.

With no real future, off I went into the wild blue yonder with the USAF in early 2001. Then, September 11th happened, and off I went to war for the next 12 years.

I came out of the military with stories nobody wanted to hear and a brain that wouldn’t stop making weird connections between disparate things.

I’d spent 8.5 years in Japan, 12 years in the military, survived classified work and institutional betrayal and PTSD and enough cultural displacement to make me permanently strange.

Divorce came shortly after leaving the service. A vindictive ex-wife kept me out of the lives of my children for almost a decade. I spiraled into depression and constant anxiety, even while barely maintaining some pretty good jobs.

Drugs, drugs, drugs dominated a good portion of that period of my life, along with sex clubs and chaos magic. Self-destruction was the game. And I was going out laughing like a madman riding a nuke, screaming, “Top o’ the world, Ma!”

My brain became of jumble of all the information I was ingesting, sometimes causing an overload. Combat psychology and quantum mechanics. Japanese philosophy and chaos magic. Gnostic theology and platform economics.

I started writing about all of it because not writing about it felt worse.

Then I made the mistake every creator makes: I listened to the experts.

“Niche down or die,” they said. “Pick one lane. Build an audience. Create a funnel. Scale your offer. Optimize for conversion.”

So I did.

I picked “creator business” because I understood systems thinking from the military and operational frameworks from building things in chaos. I sanitized my voice because profanity doesn’t convert. I removed the weird philosophical tangents because they confused the message. I stopped writing about consciousness exploration and institutional critique and liminal spaces because those topics didn’t fit the niche.

I built everything correctly. Newsletter. Lead magnets. Sales funnels. Content calendar. Email sequences. The entire apparatus of creator business done exactly how the gurus said to do it.

And it worked pretty well. People subscribed. They bought products. I made a decent amount of money from it. The metrics went up and to the right.

But I was dying inside.

Every week I’d sit down to write another post about productivity systems or content calendars or building online courses, and I’d feel this gray weight settling over everything.

The encyclopedia brain that made me interesting started feeling like a liability. The weird connections between domains—the thing that made my perspective unique—got filed away as “off-brand.”

I was creating content about creation instead of actually creating. Teaching frameworks I’d learned from other teachers who’d learned from other teachers.

A copy of a copy of a copy, each iteration a little blurrier than the last.

The breaking point came on a Tuesday, in the depth of the night, a 2am epiphany.

I was outlining a course about “building your creator business” and I realized I didn’t even believe what I was writing. Not because it was wrong—the tactical advice was solid.

But because it was solving the wrong problem. It was teaching people how to build businesses that would make them as miserable as I was.

I could see the trajectory: scale to six figures while hating every minute. Hire a team to produce content I didn’t care about. Build systems to automate the hollowness. Become one more voice in the echo chamber, teaching people to build echo chambers of their own.

So I stopped.

Not the writing. Never the writing. But I stopped trying to be marketable. Stopped sanitizing the weird edges. Stopped pretending I was only interested in one domain when my brain naturally connects twenty domains before breakfast.

I took all that bullshit and I chucked it in the fuck it bucket.

I started writing about whatever captured my attention: chaos magic and military systems thinking and Japanese aesthetics and fringe science and institutional betrayal and consciousness exploration and the patterns beneath surface diversity.

I brought back the profanity and the dark humor and the gonzo digressions.

I wrote to one weirdo reader instead of at an audience demographic.

All those gurus won’t tell you this, because it’s bad for their business, but letting go of scale is fucking liberating.

My audience is smaller. My revenue is smaller. By every guru metric, I’m doing it wrong.

But I wake up wanting to write instead of dreading it. The people who subscribe actually read what I send instead of just opening it for the freebie. The conversations in the comments are real instead of performative.

I’m might not ever “scale to six figures.”

I’m probably never going to build a team or sell a course to thousands of people or become a recognized name in creator business.

And I’m completely at peace with that because the alternative—creating content I don’t care about for people who don’t really want it—is worse than not creating at all.

This whole thing you’re reading right now? Niche of One? It’s the result of that pivot. It’s what happens when you stop trying to be marketable and start being real. When you write about what actually interests you instead of what the market demands. When you accept that your audience might be smaller but at least they’re actually yours.

I could be wrong about all of this.

Maybe I’m just rationalizing failure. Maybe in five years I’ll look back and think “should’ve stuck with the proven path.”

Actually, no, I fucking won’t. Because the proven path was proving one thing very clearly: it was killing the reason I started creating in the first place.

So here we are. Smaller scale. Weirder content. More honest. Less optimized.

Writing about consciousness and combat and chaos magic and whatever else seems worth exploring.

Making connections nobody asked for between domains that aren’t supposed to touch.

If you’re here because you’re tired of sanitizing your voice to fit someone else’s template, tired of niching down until you hate your niche, tired of building the “right” thing while dying inside—you’re not alone. I’ve been there. I burned it down and built something different. Something smaller and weirder and more honest.

You can too.

Or you can decide I’m full of shit and the gurus are right and scale is the only metric that matters.

That’s fine too. The thumbs-down button works great.

But if you’re one of the weirdos who’d rather be genuinely small than performatively large, who’d rather create something real than something optimized—stick around.

Let’s see what happens when we stop trying to appeal to everyone and start trying to interest the right someones.

I’m glad I didn’t quit creating. I’m glad I quit creating the way everyone said I should.

Welcome to the aftermath.

~ J.D.