Content with Anti-Content

Mantra
I do not need to be foregrounded as an expert over the trouble to be present with it.

Centering Thought

I am not a content creator.

And let me be clear—this is not a slight to those who identify with or operate under that title. People mean different things when they say content creator, and I honor that. I know better than to construct a single, rigid definition just to tear it down for my own rhetorical benefit. That’s not my aim.

What I am resisting is a particular formation of content creation—the kind that rewards constant output, prizes visibility over depth, and disciplines us into branding ourselves as the voice of this or that struggle, this or that discourse. As a professor and scholar, it would be easy for me to participate in this: to wield my credentials, amplify my “hot takes,” and position myself as a specialist whose platform depends on performing mastery.

As a professor and scholar, it would be easy for me to play that game. I have the credentials. I could fashion myself as thevoice of ____, optimizing every post to perform mastery. But something in me refuses. Not out of arrogance. Not out of indifference. But out of fidelity—to where I come from, and who raised me.

I was raised in Texas by men and women who practiced what I’ve come to understand as a blackened stillness. They tended to flowers. They watched the sky. They knew the ways wind bent through ash trees in spring. Their minds stayed on Jesus, on bluebonnets, on music. They did not rush to prove what they knew—they simply lived it.

It is from this place that I speak.
Not a platform, but a patch of earth.
Not a brand, but a rootedness.

Anti-content is not a withdrawal from the world, but a way of becoming in the world that disturbs the demand to be constantly legible, performative, or monetizable. It is not apathy. It is not detachment. And it is certainly not an appeal to privilege or the fictive comfort of silence in the face of disaster.

Because many of us live in the region and shadow of death.
We are witnessing mass suffering.
We are watching the planet buckle under ecological plunder.
We are not witnessing something new, but rather the intensification and exposure of what has long been true: that the concept of the Human was always frail, always contingent—and that Human Rights, far from being an infallible creed, emerged as the ornamental language of an insidious world-ordering. What once passed as sacred ground now reveals itself as a cruel architecture dressed in the garments of moral clarity.

So no—this is not a choose-your-own-adventure spirituality.
This is not a call to turn inward while the world burns.

This is a gentle invitation to those who may feel forced into performances that are not true to them.
To those who feel their public presence being turned into something to be poked, prodded, shared, consumed—and then discarded until the next post.
To those who feel trapped in the obligation to perform relevance.
This is for you.

Because not all of us are reporters. Some of us are cooks.
Some are poets. Some are called to be sermonic voices crying out in a wilderness paved by calloused indifference.

Some are teachers who thrive not on timelines owned by technocrats, but in independent bookstores, storefront sanctuaries, classrooms, and kitchen tables—places the technocrats have not yet commodified.

Anti-content is my appeal to you, to us.

Because social media is not a timeless institution.
We are still living in the aftershock of its arrival.
We are still learning how it is shaping our children, our desires, our grief, our sense of personhood and obligation.
And too few are asking what it means to share not just posts—but spirit, untested spirit—under the gaze of something that never sleeps.

Mindful of our various struggles, seen and unseen, published and unpublished, my hope is this:
That we each, in our own way, might remember that we are a Body made of many members.
And very few of us are called to become darlings of the algorithm.
But some are.

And for all of us, the task is the same:
To interrogate the disciplinary formations that shape our performance.
To name the regimes of recognition that seduce us away from ourselves.
To discern the internal storm raging within us that threatens the anchor of our sincerity, the anchor of our integrity—
an anchor moored, even in its fragility, to our truest possibilities.

Because not every word must be optimized.
Some truths grow low to the ground.
Some truths must be whispered in the dark.
Some truths arrive not in trending sounds, but in silence, in slowness, in stillness.
And they are no less true for having come quietly.

In the past, I tried to “create content.” But feeding the algorithm left me empty. Each attempt felt like I was impersonating a newsroom, not living a life. My thoughts don’t arrive in hot takes. They arrive in layers, in slowness, in silence. I’m not wired to produce on cue.

And yet I do want to share. I want to share in the old sense of the word: to offer something to the commons. I want to share as an act of care, not a claim to authority. I want to be in community, not competition. I want to build circles, not brands.

But in my profession, especially in the world of the academy, I’ve noticed how often people feel they must signal their power in every post—another credential, another thread proving their status. Many are trained, even those who consider themselves “progressive”, to perform mastery over the trouble: “Let me show you how I have theorized, diagnosed, and interpreted this.”

But do we need experts over the trouble who must always remind us they are experts over the trouble?
Is that the best way to tend to the wounds of the world?
What disciplinary formation produces that mode of performance, and what, ultimately, can it offer?

What does it mean for me to share what I know, what I feel, what I’ve lived—without paying tribute to the disciplinary gods of mastery and recognition?

What happens when we stop curating ourselves as content and begin showing up in ways that are true to the texture of our own journeys?

What if your words didn’t need to always be optimized? What if they only needed to be true?

🌱 Closing Affirmation
I am not a brand. I am not an algorithm. I am not only an expert over the trouble.

I share because I care—not because I must be seen and known.

My steps are not ordered by the regimes of recognition that prize visibility, credentialed authority, and algorithmic appeal over truth, integrity, and interiority.

They are ordered by a deep stillness, by a quiet knowing, by the rooted wisdom of those who came before me—those who listened more than they performed.