Imposter syndrome hates when you post: In defense of bad work

How hating (or loving) things on the internet can help you finally hit “publish.”

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If I publish a book and it ends up with a one‑star rating, at least it won’t be lonely.

There is already so much bad work in the world. Bad music on Spotify. Bad YouTube channels. Bad books on Kindle. Medium posts that read like someone’s Notes app escaped captivity. And yet, people hit publish anyway. They are not waiting for permission, perfection, or for their craft to catch up to their taste. They are just… in the game.

Let’s be clear: When I say “bad” here, I don’t mean objectively worthless or universally terrible. I mean “not for me,” “rough around the edges,” or “nowhere near the creator’s own standards” — the kind of “bad” that lives in arguments and personal taste, not in stone.

The game is overrated (so rewrite the rules)

A game is just a set of rules with a win criteria that two people agree on. For creative work, the default rules are brutal: you only deserve to be seen if you’re excellent, original, polished, correct. Five‑star or nothing. If you feel like an imposter under those rules, that doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means the game isn’t always worth playing.

So opt out. Disagree with the rubric. Come play a different game with me: we measure success by whether the work exists, not whether everyone loves it. We count attempts, not applause. We celebrate the bad version because it’s the only way to get a better one.

While there’s certianly merit to doing your best and striving for greatness, we also value the notion that not everything has to be done well to be worth exploring or sharing. The tiny, human struggle of chasing a new passion is something AI can never take from us. Perfection can be mimicked. Evidence of our curiosity in motion can’t.

Bad media as a tool, not a curse

If you want to battle imposter syndrome, try this: consume bad media on purpose.

Scroll until you find something truly, gloriously terrible — and notice that the world did not end. Notice that they still have an audience, even if it’s just you, right now. Notice that the platform still gave them a “publish” button. If there is room for that, there is room for your work, too.

There’s tons of bad music on Spotify, and it’s still counting streams. Tons of bad YouTube content and it’s still there. Do you know how many bad books are on Kindle? I read over 50 books last year and hate‑read a bunch of them. They’re out there, living their best mediocre lives.

Then, find an artist you love and look for their early work. Scroll far enough down their feed. Dig up their old blog posts, Bandcamp demos, student films. See the awkwardness, the clichés, the weird experimental phases. Remember: if they hadn’t made those, you wouldn’t have the version of them you love now.

What publishing won’t fix and why you should do it anyway

Here’s the part the motivational speakers skip: publishing doesn’t magically heal you, even if you’re great.

I tagged one of my favorite musicians in my year‑end hype on Instagram. They’re my favorite for a reason: the work is raw and specific and deeply felt. They’ve done the thing so many of us fantasize about — they put their work into the world. And when I got the chance to have a weeks-long 1:1 conversation with them following my story post, I discovered they are deeply unfulfilled, unsatisfied, and generally unhappy.

But it’s my favorite music. I listen to a dozen of their songs every day. I bought the merch. And it didn’t bring them lasting happiness; being someone’s favorite artist didn’t save them from anything.

That’s not a failure of the work. It’s a reality check for the fantasy that if we just make one perfect thing — one flawless book, one viral post, one immaculate album — we’ll finally feel legitimate, safe, or whole. We probably won’t.

You have good taste and it reveals the gaps

You worry your work is bad because you have good taste. People with bad taste often don’t notice. That doesn’t mean you should lower your expectations for yourself. It might just mean you’re judging your Day One against someone else’s Year Ten, using your finely tuned taste as a weapon instead of a compass. Taste is there to pull you forward, not to pin you to the floor. Let the gap between what you like and what you can make be a trailhead instead of a verdict.

It can literally only get better from the moment you create the first Bad Thing. Until then, you have nothing to outgrow. No baseline. No bar. You’re standing in a mirror, critiquing a version of yourself that doesn’t even exist yet.

I self-published a book, and I’m dyslexic. It probably has typos and grammar errors everywhere. Okay? Despite what I had to overcome, I made something that now exists, in my own broken‑spined little way. It now sits out there on a digital shelf, somewhere between the bestsellers and the forgotten titles — not remarkable to the world, maybe, but real all the same. And in at least one place, it has weight. A physical copy rests quietly among the rows in my mother’s living room, tucked between other stories and non-fictions I’ve also never read, a thin sliver of proof that I stayed with something long enough, it couldn’t help but become real. The bar has been set, and it is encouragingly, comfortingly low.

Let it be bad on purpose

So here’s my invitation: make something bad this week and publish it. On Medium, on TikTok, in an email newsletter to three people — doesn’t matter. Post a filter-free photo from a moemnt you loved but you don’t look Instagram-perfect. Make up a word that gives it a typo marker. Let the metaphor run too long. Let it be obviously “not your best work.” Let it be a little cringe, a little self‑indulgent, a little uneven. Hit publish anyway.

Someone might tell you they don’t like it. Okay. Thank them for sticking around long enough to decide that. It’s published anyway. Someone might openly hate it. Let them. Your job is not to pre‑reject yourself on behalf of strangers.

And what if it does take off? What if the messy thing, the half‑finished idea, the “bad” work is the one that finds people? Then you get proof of something even better than perfection: there are humans out there who like you as you are now, not as the imaginary future version you’re waiting to become. You’ll still have problems. You’ll still have new gaps to close. But you’ll be solving them in motion, not in hiding.

When the one‑star review comes — and it will, eventually — take a breath. That little star is proof of something: you showed up. You entered the room. You played a different game. You didn’t expect fame or success anyway. Your work is welcomed by the plethora of “bad” work that already exists, and maybe loved by someone, somewhere, even if it’s just a younger version of yourself. That’s enough reason to hit publish again.