Things that Stop Us in Our Tracks: Are you your worst enemy?
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#Today 17

Good day!

At the bottom of the gulch.

This was just the beginning. Like an Olympic event, the skill required to negotiate each fallen tree kept increasing.

I lost track after ten, not counting the ones I could slip beneath.

Did I make it? Of course.

Be everwell.

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The Quiet Readers

By Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 17, 2026

Most days, writing for the public feels a bit like working the late shift in a warehouse.

You show up. You clock in. You do the work.

Boxes go out the door, but you rarely see where they end up.

Independent publishing often feels the same way. Articles are written, edited, posted, and archived. The process repeats the next day, and the day after that. Over time the work becomes routine. You learn to focus on the craft itself rather than the response, because response is unpredictable and often invisible.

But every once in a while there are small reminders.

A quiet statistic. A returning visitor. A familiar pattern in the logs that says someone came back again to read another piece. Not loudly. Not publicly. Just another person spending a few minutes with the work.

That kind of readership is easy to overlook in a world that rewards noise.

Modern media tends to measure value in reactions—shares, arguments, bursts of attention. Independent work rarely moves that way. Instead, it accumulates slowly. One article read here, another bookmarked somewhere else. A thought carried forward into a conversation that the writer will never hear.

It is easy, after years of doing this, to assume the work disappears into the void.

But it doesn’t.

Someone is reading.

Someone is sitting with the ideas long enough to think about them. Someone returns weeks or months later to see what else has been written. Those readers rarely announce themselves, and that’s fine. The quiet readers have always been part of how writing travels through the world.

In fact, they may be the most important audience a writer can have.

A quiet reader isn’t chasing spectacle. They’re looking for something to consider. Something to file away. Something that might help make sense of the moment they’re living in.

For a writer, that is enough.

So if you are one of those readers—someone who stops by now and then, reads an article, and moves on with your day—know that your presence matters more than you might think.

The work may feel solitary from this side of the screen, but the act of reading completes the circuit.

And somewhere in the middle of a long workday, it is good to remember that the circuit is still there.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References

Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682.