I had a moment last week that felt like a distillation of everything wrong with the internet in 2026. I opened LinkedIn to read something interesting. Instead I found forty-seven people I know posting their own content, and not a single one of them engaging with anyone else's. Forty-seven monologues. Zero conversations. Everyone broadcasting. Nobody listening.

The content treadmill is real, and we're all on it. The question is whether anyone is watching us run.

The creator-to-audience ratio is broken

There was a time when the internet had a clear division of labour. A small number of people made things. A large number of people consumed them. Blogs had readers. YouTube had viewers. Twitter had lurkers. The ratio wasn't perfect, but it worked. Content found audiences because audiences existed.

That ratio has collapsed. Every platform now tells every user the same story: you should be a creator. LinkedIn wants you posting thought leadership. Instagram wants you making Reels. TikTok wants you performing. Substack wants you writing a newsletter. Even Spotify wants you to start a podcast. The message is relentless and unanimous: consuming is passive, creating is active, and passive is bad.

We turned the entire internet into a room where everyone is on stage and nobody is in the audience. The applause is just other performers clapping between their own sets.

The result is a strange new ecosystem where the primary audience for any piece of content is other content creators. Writers read other writers. Podcasters listen to other podcasters. LinkedIn posters engage with other LinkedIn posters. Not because they're genuinely interested, but because engagement is the currency that feeds the algorithm, and the algorithm is the only thing standing between them and invisibility.

The exhaustion is the feature

I spent fifteen years in advertising. I know what a content calendar looks like. I know the rhythm of ideation, creation, distribution, measurement, repeat. It's a factory process, and it works for brands because brands have teams. They have copywriters and designers and social media managers and strategists. The machine has many parts.

Now we're asking individuals to run that same machine alone. Post three times a week minimum. Vary your formats. Write long-form and short-form. Record video. Repurpose across platforms. Engage with comments. Track your analytics. Build your personal brand. Every day. Forever.

It's a treadmill. And like all treadmills, the speed keeps increasing while you stay in the same place.

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The content paradox: The more content that exists, the less any individual piece matters. The more you post, the more you need to post to maintain the same level of visibility. The treadmill speeds up precisely because everyone is running on it.

The exhaustion isn't a bug. It's baked into the business model. Platforms need content volume. They need fresh material every second of every day to keep users scrolling. The easiest way to get that volume is to convince every user they should be contributing. Your fatigue is their inventory.

The lost art of consumption

Here's what nobody talks about: being a great consumer is a skill. A rare and valuable one.

I think about the people who shaped my taste. The friend in my twenties who always knew the right restaurant. The colleague who sent me one article a month, and it was always the right article. The person on Twitter circa 2012 who never posted original thoughts but had the best retweet game on the platform. These people weren't creators. They were filters. Editors. Curators. They consumed more than anyone else, and their consumption was the gift.

That role has been devalued almost to extinction. We don't celebrate great readers anymore. We don't admire the person who watches everything and recommends the one thing worth watching. We celebrate the person who posts, regardless of whether what they post is worth reading.

I've learned more from great consumers than I have from most creators. The person who reads fifty books a year and tells you which three to start with is more valuable than the person who writes one mediocre book. The friend who tries every restaurant and sends you to the right one is worth more than a hundred food influencers. Consumption, done well, is a creative act. It requires taste, discernment, and the confidence to filter.

The case for strategic silence

I'm not saying don't create. I write this blog. I build products. I post on LinkedIn occasionally. I'm very much on the treadmill, and I know it.

But I've started to think differently about the ratio. For every piece I create, I try to consume ten times as much. Not scroll through ten times as much -- actually consume it. Read the whole article, not just the headline. Watch the whole video, not just the first thirty seconds. Sit with an idea before responding to it. Let things percolate before I have a take.

The most interesting people I know are the ones who consume voraciously and create sparingly. Every piece of output is dense with input. You can feel the reading behind the writing.

There's a word for what happens when you consume deeply before creating: taste. Taste isn't innate. It's accumulated. It's the residue of everything you've read, watched, listened to, visited, and sat with long enough to form a real opinion. You can't develop taste on the content treadmill because the treadmill doesn't give you time to digest. You consume just enough to create your next piece, and your next piece is thin because your consumption was thin.

What if we just stopped?

I keep imagining a world where half the internet's creators took a month off and just consumed. Read the books on their shelf. Watched the films in their queue. Visited the exhibitions they bookmarked. Listened properly to the albums they saved. What would happen?

I think the remaining content would get better. The conversations would get deeper. The recommendations would get sharper. And when those people came back to creating, having actually absorbed something, their work would be richer for it.

The content treadmill tells you that silence is death. That if you stop posting, you disappear. And algorithmically, that's true. But in terms of the quality of what you eventually make, silence isn't death. It's composting. Everything you consume in the quiet periods breaks down and becomes the soil that something better grows from.

I'd rather write one thing worth reading than ten things worth scrolling past. And I'd rather be known as someone with great taste -- someone who always knows the right thing to recommend -- than as someone who posts every day but says nothing worth remembering.

The treadmill is right there. You can always get back on. But the view from the side is so much better.