The sharp, acidic sting of old balsamic vinegar hit the back of my throat before I even opened the jar. I spent the better part of this morning hunched over the bottom shelf of my pantry, pulling out glass containers that had long since surrendered their contents to the slow, invisible march of oxidation.
There is a specific kind of melancholy in realizing you’ve been hoarding things that have quietly died. I found a bottle of mustard that expired when I was still apprenticing under a man who used a loupe more often than he used his own eyes. I threw it all away-the dried-out pastes, the separated oils-and for a moment, the kitchen felt lighter, stripped of its pretenses.
It reminded me of the workshop, and more importantly, it reminded me of the way we lie to ourselves about numbers.
Movement Isn’t Always Progress
In my trade, restoring grandfather clocks, you learn that movement isn’t always progress. A pendulum can swing with perfect, mesmerizing regularity while the hands on the face remain frozen in a permanent midnight. The energy is there, the motion is there, but the outcome is a lie.
This is the exact sensation I get when I watch someone like Bruno, a young man I know who spends his nights in the glow of a different kind of machinery. Bruno creates things-video essays on architecture, mostly-and last Tuesday, I sat with him as he launched a premiere.
He was vibrating with a frantic, nervous energy. Every thirty seconds, his hand would jerk across the desk, and he would hit the refresh button on his dashboard. I watched the live view counter. 34. 37. 42. With every digit that clicked upward, Bruno’s posture changed.
He straightened his spine; he smiled; he spoke about “the crowd” that was finally showing up to see his work. But I was watching more than the screen. I saw that he had three separate browser tabs open on his own machine. I knew his sister was in the next room, likely doing the same. I suspected a few of his closest friends were hitting the same key in a rhythmic, unintentional conspiracy.
The counter was climbing, yes, but it wasn’t a crowd. It was a loop. It was the same twelve people, perhaps fewer, refreshing the page in a desperate attempt to manifest a momentum that hadn’t actually arrived. The animation of the numbers performed a growth that was entirely hollow. It was a clock swinging its pendulum while the gears were disconnected from the world.
The Indifferent Witness
We have become obsessed with the representation of the thing rather than the thing itself. Let us consider the nature of the digital counter, that little ticking heart of the modern internet. It is designed to elicit a physiological response.
When we see a number increase, our brains interpret it as a signal of social proof, of belonging, of victory. But the counter is an indifferent witness. It doesn’t distinguish between a new soul discovering your work for the first time and your own thumb, twitching on a trackpad because you can’t bear to look at a static zero.
I once made a significant mistake in a restoration of a longcase clock. I had convinced myself that the escapement was failing because the beat was uneven. I spent three days filed down the pallets, adjusting the weights, and growing increasingly frustrated as the rhythm refused to settle.
I was so focused on the sound that I failed to notice the floor beneath the clock was slightly warped. The clock wasn’t broken; the foundation was uneven. I had been trying to fix a mechanical error that was actually a structural one.
I admitted this to my client, a woman who prized honesty above all else, and the embarrassment of that admission has stayed with me for .
It is the same with these counters. We try to “fix” our visibility by refreshing, by begging friends to click, by engaging in these tiny, self-deceiving loops. The “floor,” in this case, is the cold-start problem of the digital world.
No matter how good the content is, it is difficult to attract the first hundred real strangers when the counter says zero. People are inherently cautious; they follow the path that has already been trodden. If they see a video with no views, they assume it has no value. It is a cruel paradox: you need people to get people.
This is where the distinction between “refreshing yourself into an illusion” and “investing in actual visibility” becomes paramount. When you refresh the page yourself, you are only lying to your own ego. You aren’t actually putting your work in front of a new pair of eyes. You are just wearing out your F5 key.
The Catalyst Over the Lie
To bridge the gap between the creator and the actual audience, one sometimes needs a strategic lever-not a lie, but a catalyst. For those who are tired of the circular motion of self-refreshing, there is a path that involves building actual social proof.
This is why services that provide an initial boost are so effective. Instead of Bruno sitting in his dark room clicking a button, he could have used a service to
which would have provided that initial layer of credibility that invites the organic world to actually take a look.
It isn’t about faking the work; it’s about ensuring the work isn’t ignored because of a number that started at zero.
The air in my workshop is often thick with the smell of linseed oil; the sound of sixteen different clocks creates a chaotic, overlapping symphony; the dust on the worktable is a constant reminder of what happens when things are left to settle; it is in this environment that I’ve learned to value the truth of a mechanism.
If a clock is going to work, every gear must eventually catch. If a video is going to find its audience, it eventually has to move past the circle of the creator’s own friends.
The counter is a siren song. It tells us we are doing well when we are merely busy. It tells us we are being seen when we are only being refreshed. There is a profound loneliness in a rising number that you know, deep down, is just your own reflection.
The Heartbeat of a Crowd
When Bruno finally stopped clicking, the counter stalled at 117. He looked at it, and the light went out of his eyes. He felt like a failure, not because his work was bad-it was actually quite brilliant-but because he had built his emotional state on a number he had manufactured himself.
He had mistaken his own pulse for the heartbeat of a crowd. We must be careful about what we measure. If we measure our success by the frequency of our own refreshes, we will always be successful, and we will always be alone.
The goal is to reach the point where you don’t need to look at the counter at all. You want the work to exist in the world, independent of your surveillance. In the workshop, I know a clock is truly restored when I can walk out the door, lock the deadbolt, and know that it will keep ticking in the dark, whether I am there to hear it or not.
There is a certain dignity in the cold-start, if you handle it with a plan. You cannot expect a heavy pendulum to start swinging on its own; it requires a physical push. In the digital space, that “push” is visibility.
Once the motion is established, the physics of the thing-the quality of the video, the resonance of the message-will take over. But staying in the loop of self-refreshing is like trying to start the pendulum by blowing on it. You’ll just run out of breath.
I think back to those expired condiments I tossed today. I kept them because I liked the idea of a full pantry. I liked the representation of being a person who could cook a complex meal at a moment’s notice. But the reality was just a collection of vinegar-scented ghosts. I feel better now with the empty shelves. It’s honest. It’s a starting point.
The Real Work Begins
If you find yourself watching your own counter, waiting for it to tick up so you can feel a momentary rush of relevance, stop. Close the tab. Understand that the illusion of growth is the greatest enemy of actual progress.
Either find a way to get your work in front of genuine strangers-through strategic visibility or raw, grinding outreach-or accept the silence of the zero until the first real viewer arrives. Anything else is just playing with the hands of the clock and pretending you’ve traveled through time.
The gears don’t care how you feel. They only care if they fit. And the world doesn’t care how many times you refresh your own page. It only cares if you have something worth seeing once the counter finally starts moving for real.
Bruno is learning this now, I hope. I told him about the clock with the warped floor. He didn’t quite get the metaphor at first, but as he sat there looking at his 117 “views,” I saw him finally lean back and let go of the mouse. That was the first honest moment of his career. It’s the moment where the real work begins.