Your silence isn't helping anyone, but your voice might

The pain of staying quiet while the world screams

I've been having the same conversation on repeat for months now and it’s starting to do my head in.

It goes like this: someone brilliant — usually running a business that’s actually helping people, usually with something genuinely important to say — tells me they can’t bring themselves to post about their work right now. Because the world is too heavy and it feels wrong to talk about their thing when people are suffering. They don’t want to be that person adding to the noise.

And I want to shake them (lovingly, but still).

I understand the impulse. I do. The world feels like it’s coming apart most days (and has been consistently for a while) and talking about your coaching program or your art or your whatever can feel obscene in the face of that.

But when you stay quiet, you’re not making space for more important voices. You’re making space for the loud, empty ones. The ones selling courses on how to get rich quick whilst people lose everything and people building empires on other people’s desperation.

You think you’re being respectful by staying small. But small isn’t noble when the alternative is letting arseholes dominate the conversation.

We’ve convinced ourselves that the equation works like:

the louder the world’s pain = the quieter we should become.

But silence doesn’t redistribute itself to the deserving. It just creates a vacuum that gets filled by whoever refuses to question whether they deserve to speak.

The comfort of staying irrelevant

If you genuinely believe your work doesn’t matter enough to discuss in the face of crisis, then you’ve answered the most important question about your business: you don’t think it’s important enough.

And maybe it isn’t. Maybe your work really is just elaborate navel-gazing dressed up as entrepreneurship. Maybe, for you, it really isn’t “that deep”, in which case, my question is, so why do you do it?

The people I work with are actually doing work that matters. In whatever small and big ways. They make a big difference to their communities and their industries. They’re funding scholarships for kids who would otherwise never see university. They’re creating platforms for stories that mainstream media won’t touch. They’re building businesses that prove you don’t have to extract value to create it.

When they [*points aggressively over there*] stay quiet, when they convince themselves their work is frivolous, they’re not being humble. They're abandoning the field to people who think profit margins matter more than human ones and robbing the world of important conversations.

As far as I’m concerned, that is pretty fucking deep.

The strange comfort of staying irrelevant is that it requires nothing of you. No risk, no vulnerability, no chance of being misunderstood or criticised. You get to maintain the moral high ground of “knowing better” and “caring less” without ever having to prove what better looks like or showing us what you really fucking care about.

But the people who are most afraid of speaking up are usually the ones whose voices we need most. Because they understand the weight of words. They’ve grappled with the responsibility that comes with being heard.

They’ve just mistaken that responsibility for a reason to stay silent.

The myth of readiness

There are, believe it or not, actually no swiftly-punishable laws around who gets to speak when. There is no cosmic board of directors issuing permits for public discourse. You do not need to complete your trauma healing, be the modern equivalent of Xena the Warrior Princess, achieve perfect political clarity and “balance”, or solve your own life entirely before you can contribute to anyone else’s.

Every movement that ever mattered was led by ordinary people who understood something we’ve forgotten: you don’t have to be healed to be healing. You don’t have to speak about politics to be political. You don’t have to abandon humour, lightness, beauty, love simply because other people are hurting.

The prerequisite for speaking isn’t perfection. It’s caring enough about something bigger than your own comfort to risk being wrong, misunderstood or judged. It’s being willing to stand in the arena where your ideas can be challenged and discourse gets unpleasant and messy, where you might discover that what you thought was true was only partially so.

It’s choosing the discomfort of being seen over the safety of being invisible. Because what we mistake for humility is often just fear that’s learned to dress itself up in virtue.

Your best ideas will probably push buttons. They might make people uncomfortable — they might make you uncomfortable. But discomfort is the price of admission to conversations that actually matter.

So, if you find yourself thinking “I don’t have anything to add to this conversation” my guess is you’re hiding from something you are afraid to say.

If you can’t identify what that something is, then maybe it is, in fact, time to dig a lil deeper. Not because the world is too broken for your voice, but because your voice hasn’t yet found what it stands for.

We’re bloody squandering this

For pretty much the first generation in human history, you don’t need institutional permission to build a sustainable creative career. You don’t need a publishing house to decide your book is worth reading or a record label to determine if your music deserves distribution.

You need 1,000 people who believe in what you’re making. Maybe fewer.

For centuries, whoever controlled distribution controlled the narrative. They decided which stories got told, which perspectives mattered, which futures were worth imagining. That monopoly is cracking open like a fucking fragile, mouldy egg.

What we’re experiencing is narrative freedom made manifest. The ability to tell stories that don’t serve existing power structures and build businesses that prove different values are possible. We actually have a chance to model the future instead of just critiquing the present whilst someone else profits from that very critique.

And we’re bloody squandering it, mate. Because we’ve been trained to believe that speaking requires a permission we’ll never receive. And, isn’t it just easier to let someone else give a shit instead?

What creativity actually demands

Real creativity has never been a simple case for making pretty things in pretty times for pretty people. Real creativity is problem solving. It is the refusal to accept that suffering is permanent, problems are inevitable, everything happens for a reason and that “this is just how things are”.

Real creativity is political.

Every song that carried people toward freedom, every poem written in the darkest places, every mural painted on walls meant to divide — none of these were born from safety. They were born from the understanding that creativity is not separate from the work of justice. It is the work of justice.

But we’ve been convinced that creativity is luxury. That in times of crisis, artists should step aside and let the “real” activists handle things. This is the logic of people who’ve never understood that movements need more than protests and one person’s ripple effect can be extraordinary.

You don't need to be a revolutionary. You just need to stop pretending that staying quiet or “staying in your lane” is somehow more noble than having something to say. You need to find the part of yourself that’s willing to say “I see this differently” and then be willing to actually have a conversation. Right now, we often simply just need evidence that goodness exists. That hope exists. That we will fucking get to the other side. Can you do at least that? My bet is yes.

We need new stories. We need different ways of seeing. We need proof that the future we’re fighting for is not just necessary, but possible. We need to laugh, sometimes (shocking, right). We need to connect. We need to feel seen. Sometimes activism is protests and donations and hard conversations and sometimes it’s just showing someone that another way of living is possible. Sometimes it’s creating art that reminds people what beauty feels like when they’ve forgotten. Sometimes it’s building something so aligned with your values that it becomes proof of concept for a different kind of world. Sometimes, even, it’s making someone laugh so hard a little bit of wee comes out.

We need people brave enough to imagine what comes next and skilled enough to make others see it, too. Can you do that? My bet is yes.

The weight of “platforms”

Those of us with “platforms” (I hate this language), communities and economic freedom (no matter how “small” we might deem them) need to understand that our silence carries just as much weight BUT that doesn’t mean we need a public opinion on every single political occurrence all at once. But you do need to fucking care, mate. I’m sorry, you do. Every time we choose quiet because we’re afraid of being “too much”, we’re deciding which voices get to lead the cultural conversation.

The voices currently leading it never learned to question whether they deserve to speak. They’re loud, persistent, shameless in their certainty that their perspective should dominate. They never had to earn their place in the conversation or justify why their experience matters. They never spent years wondering if their existence was up for debate.

Meanwhile, the people whose voices we actually need — those who’ve had to fight for every inch of space they occupy — are the ones questioning whether they have the right to speak at all.

Marketing isn’t just “how to sell” — it’s how we shape culture. It’s community building. Every story we choose to amplify, every idea we decide to normalise, every future we invest in with our attention and resources.

Freedom unused is freedom lost. Silence is the fastest way to cede territory you can’t reclaim.

Look, this doesn’t mean we lose all discernment or join every conversation just to hear ourselves speak. Of course you get to choose where your voice adds value, where your perspective matters and where you can actually contribute something meaningful rather than just adding to the noise.

But that IS precisely the point of this message. If you don’t feel like you have something important to add to any conversation right now, then the work isn’t to stay quiet. The work is to dig deeper. To find where your voice creates support, difference, connection. To identify what you actually stand for beyond your own comfort.

And then to keep fucking moving.

The courage to matter

So if you’ve got something meaningful to say, say it. With your whole chest. Let them feel the weight of your conviction and the specificity of your vision.

Not because you’re perfect, but because perfection was never the point. Not because you have all the answers, but because your questions might help someone else find theirs. Not because the world is ready or clamouring or begging for your voice, but because the world is never ready for the voices it needs most and maybe just one person will be moved enough by something you say that it’ll all be worth it somehow anyway.

Your silence isn’t protecting anyone. But your voice — thoughtful, grounded, connected to something bigger than your own success or just making as much money as quickly as possible — might be exactly what reminds someone that change is possible, problems aren’t permanent and that there are still people willing to believe in futures worth building.

The conversation is happening with or without you.

If you care even a little bit, please choose with.

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Your writing practice

Finish this sentence and write for fifteen minutes without stopping: “The thing I'm afraid to say out loud is...”

Don’t edit. Don’t censor. Don’t worry about being eloquent or having it all figured out. Just practice giving voice to what wants to be said.

Now ask yourself: Who benefits when you stay quiet? Really think about this. Because someone always benefits from your silence, and it’s rarely the people you think you’re protecting.

Finally, imagine you’re 80 years old, looking back at this moment. What would that version of you want to tell you about the cost of staying safe versus the risk of being heard?

Write until something surprises you.

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Hi, I'm Lois — writer, strategist, storyteller, creative living advocate, and full-time heretic when it comes to how we've been told to sell online.

I live in the Costa Rican jungle with my kids, a keyboard and about 76 half-finished Google Docs. I've spent the last decade helping creatives and founders write the kind of words that change the room, build movements and feel like home. This is my Substack, The Smoking Area, where we say the things we’re not supposed to say out loud — and then figure out how to turn them into art, revenue or both.

You’ll always find a writing prompt throughout the article or at the very least, at the end. Because reading is great, but expression is the real medicine. I host writing retreats in the Costa Rican mountains a couple of times a year, these are not your average “retreat”. I bring you to a small, local mountain town who benefits from your presence. I hire the best local guides, chef and we stay in a breathtaking mountain cabin hosted by local entrepreneurs.

We spend 5 days writing, laughing, writing, rafting, hiking, writing, connecting with other writers, writing some more and pondering what it really means to be a creative in our world. You find a version of your voice you always knew existed but have been sitting on for some time. Right now there are just 3 spaces left for the January experience (!!!) you can read more about it and apply for a space right here.

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