Insider/Outsider: Can You Stay True in a Game You Have to Play?

You can be an insider—fully bought into the game, chasing the algorithm, selling the dream. Or you can be an outsider—rejecting it all, staying pure, probably staying broke. But what if the only real path is finding the razor-thin middle ground?

Patrick hit a wall in his garage—the kind where you sit completely still and feel the silence pushing in from all sides. After six straight hours of sending cold messages on LinkedIn, hoping someone would need photos, he asked himself something he'd never asked before: "What if I can't do this anymore?" Not because he doesn't love photography. Not because he's burned out, though he's been there. But because something in the air feels different. The calls don't come. The budgets are thinner. The expectations are bigger. Everyone wants more for less, faster. And somewhere in all that, he's realized something: I'm either going to change, the market is going to change, or something breaks. That moment in the garage felt like a reckoning.

The Confession: You're Part of the Machine You Critique

Patrick's honest about his own hypocrisy. He's building Terrible Photographer while running funnels, tracking open rates like a day trader, planning to sell a book and eventually a course or workshop. He's part of the machine he often questions. He doesn't get to pretend he's innocent. But that doesn't mean he's comfortable with it. He spends mornings writing newsletters about authentic creativity, then afternoons strategizing how to turn that newsletter into Instagram carousel posts, then repurposing those into LinkedIn think-pieces about the death of authentic creativity. The irony tastes like stale coffee and desperation. There's seemingly manufactured authenticity everywhere. And he knows what it looks like from the outside: another photographer with a platform, building an audience, monetizing their experience. He knows exactly what he doesn't want to become.

Insider vs. Outsider: Neither Road is Clean

Patrick is neither. Or maybe he's both. He's an insider because he has to survive. He has a family in one of the most expensive cities in America. He has to pay rent with pictures, which means he has to play the game at least enough to stay in it. But he's also an outsider because he refuses to participate in so much of what this industry has become. He won't turn every portrait session into content for his feed. He won't objectify people for engagement. He won't pretend that buying new gear will fix uninspired work. He won't sell you a formula for creativity because creativity doesn't work that way. You can be trusted and still feel disposable. Respected and still feel empty. Valued—and still have no idea who the hell you are. The workload multiplied. New campaigns. New deadlines. But somewhere in the process, he stopped asking why he was making these images and started focusing only on how fast he could make them.

Why Terrible Photographer Exists: Resistance as Act of Creation

He's not building this because he's figured it all out. He's building it because he needs it. This is a space where creatives can talk about the real stuff—the 2 AM existential spirals, the client who wants you to shoot like someone else, the slow erosion of confidence from comparing yourself to highlight reels. But every now and then, there's magic. The client who trusts you. The project that pulls something out of you that you forgot was there. Flow is a mental state where you're fully immersed, so focused, so locked in, that time disappears and the work almost does itself. And you can't reach that state if you're just chasing likes, scrambling for rent, or scrolling Instagram at midnight wondering why your work doesn't look like someone else's. Terrible Photographer exists as an act of resistance. Resistance to the commodification of creativity. Resistance to the idea that what we do is just disposable content. Resistance to the shallow hustle of brand-building that leaves no room for soul.

Key Takeaways

• There's no perfectly clean way to be a photographer in 2025; you have to walk an impossible tightrope between art and commerce
• Being inside the machine doesn't mean you have to give up your values, but it does mean accepting some uncomfortable contradictions
• The real resistance isn't in rejecting the game entirely; it's in playing without losing sight of what made you pick up a camera
• Flow—that state where skill meets surrender—is only possible when you're not grinding to survive every day
• Photography is worth the struggle because it's one of the few ways to stay human in an increasingly algorithmic world

The Terrible Take

You don't have to figure it out perfectly. But you have to be honest about what you're willing to compromise and what's non-negotiable. Because that's where the real creative work lives—not in the hustle, but in the resistance.