The Gen X Problem With the Creator Economy

I was trained to remove imperfections. Now they're what makes people believe you.

I can spend an afternoon editing a 45-second video that would have been better if I'd posted the first decent take.

I told a friend about it the other night. We're both Gen X, and we both have kids who record a video, share an opinion, and move on with their day. For them there's almost no gap between having a thought and publishing it.

For us there's a big gap. I used to think mine was camera shyness. It goes deeper than that.

Why I don't want to add to the pile

Most of what I see on social media is hard to respect. Videos thrown together in minutes. Recycled opinions. Manufactured outrage. AI content built to hold your attention for three seconds.

Some of it is just bad. Some of it does damage. Most of us have watched a family member take something false they saw online and treat it as fact. A conspiracy theory, or an AI video good enough to fool someone who never learned to doubt what's on a screen. It's hard to watch someone you love lose track of what's real.

After that, you don't want to feed the machine. The internet is drowning in content. Why would I add more?

People trust people

Because I'm building a company, and people don't trust companies. They trust people.

Customers want to know who is behind the product, what that person believes, and whether they can be trusted. The product alone often isn't enough.

I've heard that someone needs seven or eight hours of your content before they'll seriously consider buying from you. I have no idea if that number holds up. The idea behind it does. Trust comes from familiarity, and familiarity takes repetition.

So making content is part of the job now. I can accept that. What I can't get past is the quality bar.

Red ink in the margins

Early in my career I was a designer responsible for many of Apple's web properties. We learned through constant critique.

I had a creative director who would hand my work back with the margins full of tiny red annotations. A few pixels off here. An alignment problem there. Something in the composition that didn't feel right. Nothing was too small to mark.

It wasn't perfectionism for its own sake. Do that enough times and you develop judgment. You learn to see quality before you can explain it. It was an apprenticeship: you worked next to people with exceptional taste, absorbed their standards, and slowly built your own.

That training shaped how I make everything. I want to review my work, refine it, get feedback, and improve it before anyone sees it.

All of that takes time, and time is the one thing social content doesn't give you.

Rough is the new credible

My friend and I kept coming back to one observation. A lot of the content that performs best is unpolished. Awkward cuts. Bad lighting. Rambling delivery. Someone talking into a phone while walking down the street.

I used to wonder why any of it worked. I was judging it by the wrong standard.

The feed is full of produced ads, optimized messaging, and AI video that gets more convincing every month. Next to all that, something rough feels human. The rough edges tell you a person made it.

That's the reverse of what I learned as a designer. I was trained to remove imperfections because they hurt credibility. Now they're what makes people believe you.

Of course, people fake this too. Skilled creators make their videos look spontaneous on purpose. They leave in the awkward pauses, shoot on a phone, and skip the polish they could easily add. Authenticity has become a production style, and a production style can be manufactured like any other.

So the same medium that taught us to distrust what we see also taught us to trust whatever looks least produced.

The video isn't the artifact

I don't think craftsmanship stopped mattering. I had it pointed at the wrong thing.

When I designed websites, the artifact was the experience, and every pixel was part of it. When I record a video about something I learned building a company, the artifact is the thought. The video just carries it.

So the quality questions are different. Is the observation useful? Do I believe it? Will someone learn something? Lighting, editing, and composition still count. They just count less than those three.

I still care about quality. I don't want to add noise, and I won't trade substance for engagement. But I've been treating polish and quality as the same thing, and they aren't.

Getting the reps in

The part I resisted longest is this: you can't learn a new creative skill without being bad at it in public for a while.

Our kids already know this. They make something, post it, see what happens, and do it again. Their learning happens in the open. Mine happened behind closed doors, with a creative director's red pen between me and the audience.

So I've started treating social content like learning an instrument. You don't get better at guitar by polishing the first song you learned. You get better by playing.

The apprenticeship hasn't gone away. The critic changed. Now I publish, watch what lands, and build a different kind of judgment from that.

For a recovering perfectionist, this is hard. But I'm getting the reps in. If my next few videos are rough around the edges, that's probably a good sign.