Stop Selling Me Your Way To Go Viral

Lately I keep noticing a strange disconnect between what we say we want and what we are being taught to pursue. Most people I know don’t wake up hoping to be seen by thousands of strangers for a few seconds. They want their words to matter. They want to feel that something they share reaches another person in a way that actually does something, even if that something is small and hard to measure.

And yet so much of what fills our feeds now is focused on reach rather than impact, on visibility rather than meaning, on how far something travels instead of what it changes once it arrives.

It’s hard not to absorb that over time. You start to wonder whether impact is supposed to feel louder than it actually does, whether making a difference should be more obvious, more immediate, more provable. You start to question whether the quiet ways things move people still count.

I think this is where a lot of the exhaustion comes from.

There is a constant hum of advice about how to grow, how to scale, how to accelerate, how to optimize what you say so it lands faster and wider, and even when you’re not actively trying to follow it, it has a way of seeping in. It starts shaping how you think before you realize it’s happening. You notice yourself shortening thoughts that want room. You feel pressure to resolve ideas before they’ve finished unfolding. You start measuring your work by response instead of resonance.

What gets lost there is impact.

Impact is not loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t spike and disappear. Impact is what happens when something stays with a person after they’ve closed the app. When a sentence comes back to them later in the day. When a thought rearranges how they see themselves or a situation they’re in. When something opens instead of excites.

That kind of impact is hard to track and impossible to manufacture.

It requires presence. It requires honesty. It requires being willing to let your work move at the pace of your own understanding instead of the pace of the internet. And it often asks you to tolerate not knowing how something will land, or how many people it will reach, or whether it will be immediately rewarded.

There’s a subtle but important difference between wanting your work to matter and wanting it to spread. Spread can happen without contact. Creating something that matters requires relationship.

When all we are doing is going viral, we are mostly creating motion. We’re not necessarily creating change. We’re not necessarily offering something that can be integrated into someone’s actual life, into their body, into the way they make decisions or hold themselves through something difficult.

Impact changes someone.

Impact shifts how they relate to themselves.

Impact gives language, or permission, or space.

And that kind of impact almost always comes from someone being themselves fully enough to let their voice sound like their life, not like a formula.

This is why being yourself isn’t a branding idea, it’s an internal orientation. It’s about staying close to what feels true even when it’s slower, less tidy, less immediately impressive. It’s about trusting that depth does its own kind of work, even when it doesn’t look dramatic from the outside.

The more time passes, the clearer this becomes. Reach can be exciting, but it doesn’t necessarily nourish. Impact is quieter, but it’s sustaining. Reach leaves you chasing the next moment. Impact builds something that lasts.

Depth replacing reach isn’t a rejection of growth. It’s a preference for growth that actually feels like something. Impact replacing noise isn’t about opting out. It’s about choosing to contribute in a way that feels honest and alive.

And maybe that’s the shift many of us are living through right now, not as a declaration, but as a felt sense that what we want to offer, and what we want to receive, needs more room than the hacks allow.

Not bigger.

Not faster.

Just more real.