Writing the Same Topic for Five Years Does Something to You
Not burnout, something else
In 2021 I started writing about Medium. How it pays. How to grow. What to do and what not to do. I had just discovered the platform and I was pretty excited.
It’s 2026 now.
I still write about it. Sometomes. And something is different now.
The Advice You Stop Believing
I didn’t get bored. Sometimes it happens, of course. You expect that. But I can write about what I like all the time.
But eventually you don’t follow your own advice anymore.
“Post consistently.” I don’t, and really haven’t for two or three years.
“Engage with your readers.” Mostly I don’t. I read the comments. Sometimes I respond. I don’t have time for more.
“Build your email list above everything.” I believe this in theory. But I actually prefer the blogging route over the newsletter route.
I write the advice anyway. Because it’s still true for other people. Because I know much of it works.
But somewhere in there, the writing starts to feel like performance, sometimes.
Rereading Old Articles Is Uncomfortable
I went back recently. Read a few pieces from 2021 and 2022.
The excitement is embarrassing, in a way. I wasn’t wrong all the time. Much of it still holds up. But the confidence. The certainty. The way I wrote as if I had figured something out permanently. Yikes.
I hadn’t. Nobody does. The platform changed. My income changed. My relationship to writing changed. The 2021 version of me didn’t know any of that.
That’s just time. But it does something to you when you read 900 articles written by a slightly different person each time.
The Niche
When you write about one topic long enough, you start to see the edges of it.
Medium. Substack. Creator income. Platforms rise and fall. The same arguments circle back every 18 months with different voices attached. I have written about Medium probably 300 times. I will write about it again.
Still…
There’s a kind of fatigue that comes not from the writing itself but from the repetition of the territory. You’ve covered this ground. You know where everything is. The map is complete and you’re still drawing it again, anyway.
New writers discover these topics every day. For them it’s fresh. You’re writing for them, mostly. That helps. But it doesn’t fully solve the feeling.
What I Did About It
Nothing dramatic.
I didn’t pivot to travel writing or start a podcast or rebrand myself.
I just started writing things that interested me more right now, even when they didn’t fit neatly into my “usual“ niche. EU tech policy. App development. The occasional piece that goes somewhere I haven’t been before.
Some of those performed badly. A few did really good, surprisingly. So good, they might become a new niche.
The Bottom Line
Five years of writing about one thing doesn’t mean you’ve mastered it. It means you’ve lived with it long enough to see what you got wrong, what changed, and what you’ve been saying on autopilot.
That’s not a reason to stop. It’s just something I realized.