9 Years of Work—and the Algorithm Still Doesn’t Know I Exist

I’ve spent the last nine years building something that matters—at least, it matters to me.

It’s called the Reciprocity Project. It’s a platform I started to help researchers and writers get better feedback, improve their work, and deal with the quiet, brutal struggle of doing hard things in isolation.

I’ve posted nearly every day. I’ve shared thousands of thoughts, built tools, recorded videos, written blog posts, tried to show up in all the ways we’re told matter. And still—nearly a decade in—I get people asking:

“Wait, what is that again?”

And every time I hear that, it hurts. Like… really hurts.

Because if you’ve ever tried to build something meaningful from scratch, you know how demoralizing it is when no one sees it. Not because it’s bad. But because the algorithm never let it through.

And here’s the thing:

Most people still have no idea how much of their life is controlled by algorithms.

You think you’re seeing the world. You’re not.

You’re seeing what a machine thinks you should see.

What you hear. Who you talk to. Whether your spouse even gets your message on time. What your kids learn in school. What research gets funded. What books get published. Who gets famous.

All of it is filtered, sorted, and ranked by invisible systems you don’t control.

I’ll post something that takes me days—sometimes weeks—to write. Thoughtful. Vulnerable. Built from experience.

And it disappears.

Even my own wife doesn’t see it in her feed. Because the algorithm decided it wasn’t relevant to her life as a mom who loves golden retrievers.

And it’s not just social media.

Regulations? Algorithms.

Healthcare approvals? Algorithms.

Your bank account? Algorithms.

The traffic light you’re stuck at every morning?

Yep—algorithms.

And still, we walk around thinking, “If I just work hard enough, someone will notice.”

But the truth is more brutal:

You can do everything right and still be invisible.

Because algorithms don’t reward meaning. They reward metrics.

And unless your work fits the formula—unless it’s popular enough, short enough, shareable enough—you don’t exist.

So before you give up…

Before you assume your project isn’t good enough, your writing isn’t clear enough, your voice isn’t valuable enough—

Ask yourself: Did it actually reach anyone?

Or did it just get filtered out by a machine that decided, in 0.2 seconds, that you weren’t interesting today?

I’m not saying this to make you feel worse. I’m saying it because I need to remind myself too.

I’m nine years in. Most days, I feel like the only person who knows how hard I’ve worked is my mom. And I’ve almost quit more times than I can count.

But I haven’t.

Because once you understand the game, you stop taking it so personally.

You stop assuming that silence means failure.

You stop chasing perfection for an audience that may never even see you.

And you start building anyway.

Because that’s the only power we’ve got left—

To keep creating, even when the algorithm doesn’t care.