I wrote 4,000 words about air fryers and lost the will to write

I was a content lead at a content agency, writing and managing SEO articles for clients who sold everything from air fryers to accounting software to, memorably, a brand of adult diapers that insisted on being called "premium absorbent wear" in every single article, no exceptions, per the client's very firm brand guidelines.

I used to actually like writing. That's the part that's hard to explain to people who never did this specific job — I studied literature, I used to write short stories in my twenties that a small handful of people actually enjoyed, and somehow that turned into a career where I once spent four working days on a 4,000-word article ranked "Best Air Fryers Under 2 Million VND: A Complete Buyer's Guide," optimized around a keyword a client's SEO tool told us to target, containing zero opinions I actually held about air fryers, because I do not, in fact, have opinions about air fryers.

The slow realization crept in over about two years, not from any one bad article but from a specific ritual: every piece went through a "content scorecard" before publishing, a tool that graded writing on keyword density, sentence length, and something called "readability score," and graded down anything too clever, too specific, too much like an actual human wrote it with actual thoughts. I started writing worse on purpose, because writing better scored lower, and the client paid for the score, not the writing.

I told a coworker once, half joking, that I'd become fluent in a language designed to be read by a search algorithm and skimmed by nobody, and she laughed and said "yeah, that's the job," in a tone that told me she'd made peace with it in a way I clearly hadn't.

There wasn't a single dramatic exit. I just started dreading Mondays specifically because of the content calendar, then dreading Sundays in anticipation of dreading Mondays, and one day I opened a half-finished draft titled "17 Signs Your Accounting Software Needs an Upgrade" and could not make myself write sign number nine. Not wouldn't. Genuinely could not produce the sentence.

I gave notice a month later. I'm doing something unrelated now, honestly still figuring out what "unrelated" means long-term, but I started writing a short story again last month, badly, slowly, for absolutely no client and no scorecard, and it felt like using a muscle I'd forgotten I had.