--- title: "The internet is full of experts. What the world needs is ordinary people who write honestly about their trade and their lives." date: 2026-03-25 description: "And the world read him. Millions of people read him. Not because he was an expert in anything. But because they recognised in his pages something from their own lives that they hadn\'t known how to name." author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "Online promotion" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/online-promotion.md" --- # The internet is full of experts. What the world needs is ordinary people who write honestly about their trade and their lives. The first sentence you write doesn't have to be good. It has to be true. *'Today I fixed something and I wasn't sure I could.'* Or: *'The client I saw today made me think of my father.'* Or even: *'I don't know why I'm writing this.'* [![The internet is full of experts. What the world needs is ordinary people who write honestly about their trade and their lives.](https://cojocarupetru.info/images/marketing/oameni-simpli-scriu-sincer.jpg "The internet is full of experts. What the world needs is ordinary people who write honestly about their trade and their lives.")](https://cojocarupetru.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=350:write-honestly-about-their&catid=27:online-promotion&lang=en-GB&Itemid=504) > And the world read him. Millions of people read him. Not because he was an expert in anything. But because they recognised in his pages something from their own lives that they hadn't known how to name. Yesterday morning I stood for about ten minutes in front of the bathroom basin and stared at the tap. Not because anything was wrong with it. But because I had just read an article about 'how to optimise your digital presence as a professional in the plumbing sector' and that phrase — *optimise your digital presence* — had lodged itself in my head like a bone in the throat. **Listen to the audio dialogue summary** The tap was a tap. Its chrome lightly marked with limescale, the screw at the base tightened by hand by someone who knew what they were doing, the washer replaced probably a few years back, visible from the newer colour of the rubber. Someone had fitted it. Someone knew why that screw and not another, why that type of washer for the water hardness in this city. And that person, whoever they were, had most likely never had a blog. I sometimes wonder what the internet looks like from where they stand. --- ## The expert and the person There are two types of content on the internet and I can now tell them apart within the first three lines, with a precision I don't know whether to call experience or exhaustion. The first type is written by experts. Or by people who want to appear to be experts, which amounts to the same thing from the algorithm's point of view. Their articles begin with an impressive statistic, continue with numbered subheadings, contain phrases like *best practices*, *key takeaways*, *actionable insights*, and end with an invitation to subscribe to their free newsletter that costs ninety-seven dollars a month after the trial period. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's empty. The second type is written by people who have something to say and aren't quite sure it's worth saying, but say it anyway. It's written by the barber who describes how a woman of seventy sat in his chair and told him, whilst he was cutting her thin, white hair, that her husband had died in spring and that she'd had no one to talk to since. It's written by the mechanic who tells how a 2003 Golf, which he has kept alive six times over with parts sourced from breakers' yards, belongs to an old man who can't afford anything else and who waits for him outside the workshop with a bag of apples from his garden every autumn. It's written by the plumber who admits that the first job he did alone, without his father beside him, burst a pipe and flooded a flat, and that the shame of it lasted years, until he understood that the shame had in fact been the beginning of his real trade. That kind of content isn't optimised. It's written. --- ## What happened to the ordinary voice My son came home once and told me he wanted to make YouTube videos. I asked him what about. He said: *I don't know, that's what everyone does.* I sat with that sentence for a few days. *That's what everyone does.* As though content were a social norm rather than an expression. As though appearing on a screen were an end in itself, independent of what you have to say. I told him then about his grandfather — my father — who was a mechanic and who never wrote anything, but who knew how to explain any fault in such a way that you understood not only what had broken, but why it had broken, and what that said about how you'd been driving, and what you might do differently. He spoke rarely and concretely. Each word carried the weight of something personally verified, not read. That man would have been an extraordinary blogger. He didn't get the chance. Or it never crossed his mind. Or, more likely, he lived in a time when you didn't need to build a brand from what you were, because what you were was visible in your work. Things have changed and I don't think there's any use in lamenting that. The change happened. The question is what you do with it. --- ## Knausgård and the plumber Karl Ove Knausgård wrote six volumes about his life. Not about his life as a celebrated author — but about his life as a man who washed dishes and argued with his wife and couldn't get himself to write and remembered things about his dead father that he hadn't known he was holding. He wrote with an almost unbearable precision about the mundane. About what it's like to drink coffee in the morning when the children won't let you wake up properly. About how the attic smelled in the house where he grew up. About the shame of being an ordinary person in a world that demands excellence. And the world read him. Millions of people read him. Not because he was an expert in anything. But because they recognised in his pages something from their own lives that they hadn't known how to name. That is the only secret of writing that truly matters: **to name what others feel but cannot articulate.** A mechanic who writes that he is sometimes afraid to open an engine he's never seen before, that there are a few seconds of genuine uncertainty before everything he knows comes back to him — that person names something universal. The fear before an unfamiliar thing. The distrust of one's own competence even after years of experience. The moment when expertise and doubt coexist in the same body, in the same workshop, on the same morning. The reader who finds that sentence isn't looking for an expert. They're looking for a witness. --- ## Why Ritika Rai's authenticity is not a marketing trick I've seen authenticity mentioned as a strategy many times. *Be authentic on social media. Authenticity sells. Consumers want authenticity.* That phrase irritates me in a very specific way, because it turns a fundamental human quality into a technique. As though you could decide to be authentic in the same way you decide to use a particular typeface on your website. What Ritika Rai does — and what works in her communication — is not an authenticity technique. It is a decision not to separate the person from her work. To show up as a whole, with the uncertainties, with the partial failures, with the moments when she didn't know what she was doing. She doesn't perform vulnerability. She uses it as a tool for connection because she understands that the only communication which endures over time is that in which you recognise a real human being. That can't be learnt from a personal branding course. It's learnt through the decision to write one honest line instead of ten impressive ones. The plumber who writes *'I made a mistake on a job and came back the next day to fix it at my own cost, without telling the client in advance'* is not doing marketing. He is doing something far harder: publicly holding himself to the standard by which he lives. And that is irreplaceable. No advertising campaign can buy that line. --- ## What is lost when we don't write James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, spent decades studying the effects of expressive writing on ordinary people. His conclusions are unsettlingly clear: people who write regularly about their experiences — including difficult ones, including mundane ones — have greater mental clarity, process stress more effectively, and understand their own decisions more fully. I'm not writing this as an argument for writing as therapy, though it is that too. I'm writing it because there is a concrete loss when people with real experience never document their thoughts. My father knew things about engines that he never wrote down. He passed them on partly — through short conversations, through gestures, through *this is how you do it, not any other way*. But part of what he knew died with him. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way things that were never put down anywhere are lost. A blog is not immortality. But it is a way of saying: *I was here, I did this, I thought this way.* And sometimes that is enough. --- ## How to begin when you think you have nothing to say I understand that objection. I had it myself. The problem is that *having nothing to say* and *believing what you have to say isn't worth it* are two entirely different things, and we confuse them constantly. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking *today I have had no experience worth recording.* They wake up thinking *who wants to read about my ordinary life.* And the answer to that question is: more people than you'd think, for reasons you can't anticipate. **Start with the smallest possible thing:** Write a single sentence about something you did today in your trade. Not a beautiful sentence. A true one. *'Today I saw an electrical installation done by someone who didn't know what they were doing, and it could have killed anyone who touched the light switch in the bathroom.'* Or: *'Today I cut the hair of a man who didn't say a single word in forty minutes, and when he left he thanked me twice.'* Or: *'Today I changed a washer on a twenty-year-old car and thought that this car has seen more of life than I ever will.'* That sentence is the beginning. Everything else — the structure, the frequency, the platform — comes after. --- ## A conclusion that is not a conclusion I don't know if the tap in my bathroom was fitted by someone who writes somewhere about his trade. Probably not. Probably that person considers that his life is not material for the internet. But I sometimes think about what it would be like if he did write. What he would say about the water in this city and how it affects his work. About the client who rang him at seven in the morning because a pipe had frozen and who offered him a hundred lei extra *'for the trouble'*, which he refused because *'it's part of the job'*. About the first job he did alone and about his hands trembling slightly when he tightened the first joint. It would be a blog I'd read with more attention than any *best practices* guide written by someone who has never held a spanner in their hands. The internet needs fewer experts who explain life. And more ordinary people who live it and write about it. --- *Knausgård began writing 'My Struggle' because he couldn't write anything else. Not out of strategy. Out of necessity. Perhaps that is the only valid reason for anything.* --- ## 10 questions the article answers — and a thought after each answer --- Last evening I re-read the article, after my son had fallen asleep and the house was finally quiet, and I thought about how there are questions a reader asks before reaching the end of the first page — questions nobody formulates aloud, but which are there, behind the eyes, whilst reading. I tried to write them all down. I arrived at ten. There may be more. There probably are. --- ### 1. Why would an ordinary person write on the internet if they have nothing special to say? The article answers this through an inversion I felt more than consciously formulated when I was writing it: the assumption that you must have something special to say in order to deserve to write is itself a form of internal censorship that we apply selectively and incorrectly. We don't ask a person to have something special to live through in order to justify their existence. But we ask them to have something special to say in order to justify their writing. That logic limps. Knausgård wrote six volumes about coffee, shame, unwashed dishes, and his dead father. He wrote with an almost unbearable precision about the mundane, and the world read him because it recognised in his pages something from its own life that it didn't know how to name. That's all. Not excellence. Recognition. The ordinary person who writes honestly about their ordinary life does something the optimised expert cannot: they name what others feel but cannot articulate. *Source for the effects of expressive writing:* James W. Pennebaker — [Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9280.00058) *(Psychological Science, 1997)* --- ### 2. What does a mechanic or a plumber have to do with literature and with Knausgård? No direct connection. And that precisely is the point. Knausgård is not invoked in the article as an aesthetic model to follow. He is invoked as proof that the raw material of writing that matters is not the excellence of the biography, but the honesty of the gaze. He wrote about an alcoholic father and an attic and the shame of being mediocre. A mechanic can write about a 2003 Golf kept alive with parts from breakers' yards and about the old man who brings apples every autumn. The mechanism is identical. The material is different. What connects a Norwegian prose writer and a plumber from Botoşani [a town in north-eastern Romania] is not literary culture. It is the gesture of looking at one's own life with sufficient attention to describe it in such a way that someone else recognises themselves in it. My father was a mechanic. He never wrote anything. But he could describe a fault in such a way that you understood not only what had broken, but what that said about you as a driver, as a person, as someone who does or does not take care of their things. He was a Knausgård without a blank page. I don't know whether that's a loss or simply a fact. I think about it more often than I should. *On Knausgård and the 'My Struggle' project:* The Guardian — [Karl Ove Knausgård: 'Writing is a way of getting rid of shame'](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/28/karl-ove-knausgard-interview) --- ### 3. Is authenticity on the internet real, or is it just another form of performance? This is the question that troubles me most in the whole article, because I don't have a complete answer and I don't think one exists. There is a difference between being authentic and performing authenticity, and the boundary between them is thinner than it appears and shifts depending on how conscious you are of your audience at the moment of writing. If you write whilst thinking about how you'll be perceived, you're performing. If you write whilst thinking about what you want to understand, there's a chance you're being authentic. But that chance isn't guaranteed and isn't permanent, and it can transform itself in the course of the same text. What Ritika Rai does — and what works in her communication at a level you recognise immediately even if you can't name it — is that she doesn't separate the person from her work. She shows up as a whole, uncertainties included, not as an edited version of herself. That's not a technique. It's a decision repeated every day not to construct a protective distance between what you are and what you show. Perhaps authenticity is not a state. It is a practice. And like any practice, sometimes you do it well and sometimes you do it badly. *On authenticity in digital communication:* Brené Brown — [The Gifts of Imperfection](https://brenebrown.com/book/the-gifts-of-imperfection/) *(background reference for the entire theme of considered vulnerability)* --- ### 4. Why is something lost when people with practical experience don't write? Because undocumented practical experience dies with the person who carries it. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way all things that were never put down anywhere are lost. My father knew things about engines that he never wrote down, and which he passed on partly — through short conversations, through gestures, through *this is how it's done and no other way* — and part of what he knew no longer exists anywhere now except in my incomplete memory and in my hands, which learnt a few gestures from him without my always having understood why. Sometimes I do something mechanical and I realise I don't know where I learned to do it. It's his. It stayed. But how much did not stay. Pennebaker documented that regular writing about personal experiences — including professional ones, including things that seem trivial — produces cognitive clarity and consolidates procedural memory. Not as an academic argument. As a description of something the human mechanism does anyway, better when you help it. *Pennebaker research on writing and memory:* [Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-04080-004) *(Handbook of Health Psychology, 1999)* --- ### 5. Is there a real difference between an expert who writes and an ordinary person who writes? Yes. And the difference is not in the quality of the information. It's in the type of truth each one can transmit. The expert knows more about a narrow subject and can explain mechanisms with a precision the ordinary person doesn't have. That has value. I don't deny it. But the ordinary person who writes from their own lived experience — with their doubts, with their mistakes, with the moments when they didn't know what they were doing and did it anyway — transmits a kind of truth that the expert cannot access from their position of authority. They transmit that they are human. That uncertainty and competence coexist in the same body. That you can know how to do something well and still be afraid before you do it. That can't be learnt. It can be recognised. And the internet, saturated as it is with expertise, is acutely hungry for recognition. *On the attention economy and authenticity:* Michael Goldhaber — [The Attention Economy](https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440) *(First Monday, 1997 — one of the first texts to describe correctly what was coming)* --- ### 6. How does the past — a father, an inherited trade — shape the way we write about the present? I can't answer that without becoming personal, so I won't try to be otherwise. When I write about the plumber who doesn't write, or about the mechanic and the apples, I'm not writing about generic characters. I'm writing about people who resemble my father and the people who surrounded him — people who knew how to do things with their hands and who never asked themselves whether their experience was worth documenting, because that question simply didn't exist in the world they lived in. I write about them and I write about him and I don't always know where one ends and the other begins. That isn't a problem to be solved. It is a condition of personal writing. The past doesn't influence the way we write about the present. The past *is* the present, in layers, and writing is one of the few tools with which you can do stratigraphy without destroying what you find. *On memory and the narrative of identity:* Paul Ricoeur — [Oneself as Another](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3684974.html) *(University of Chicago Press — philosophical reference for the theme of memory and narrative identity)* --- ### 7. Can honest writing about one's trade appear unprofessional? It can appear so. And that is precisely why it works. There is a legitimate fear: if you admit you made mistakes, if you write that you were afraid before a difficult job, if you say you don't know everything — you lose authority. That logic is intuitive and wrong at the same time. Authority built on infallibility is fragile. It shatters at the first sign of humanity. Authority built on honesty is resilient precisely because it doesn't claim perfection. The mechanic who writes *'I opened an engine I'd never seen before and there were a few seconds when I wasn't quite sure what I was doing'* doesn't lose credibility. He gains something more valuable: human credibility. The reader understands that this person knows how to assess their own limits accurately, that they aren't reckless, that they are self-aware. That is rarer than any professional qualification. *On vulnerability and authentic leadership:* Brené Brown — [Daring Greatly](https://brenebrown.com/book/daring-greatly/) --- ### 8. What role does the relationship with a son or daughter play in the motivation to write? My son told me he wanted to make YouTube videos. I asked him what about. He said: *I don't know, that's what everyone does.* I sat with that sentence for days. Not because it was wrong — it was perfectly honest and perfectly his, at his age — but because it showed me something about how values are transmitted, or are not. We don't tell our children *write because you have something to say.* We show them that appearing publicly is an end in itself, independent of content. And then we wonder why the internet is full of noise. The motivation to write changes when you have a child. It doesn't become nobler or more important in any absolute sense. But it becomes more conscious of what it leaves behind. You write and you think: if he reads this in twenty years, what will he find? A person who thought, or a person who performed thinking? That question keeps me honest better than any editorial principle. *On the transmission of values through narrative:* Jonathan Gottschall — [The Storytelling Animal](https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Storytelling-Animal/9780544002340) *(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)* --- ### 9. Does the internet really need more content? Isn't there already far too much? There is too much content. And there is an acute hunger for writing. That is not a contradiction. It is a precise description of what has happened: volume has grown exponentially whilst density — how many words out of a million say something worth retaining — has fallen. We are drowning in content and starving for writing. A HubSpot study from 2023 shows that 82% of marketers actively use blog content, but engagement rates with long-form and personal articles have risen simultaneously with the saturation of the short-form, optimised content market. People are fleeing noise in search of substance, even though substance is harder to find. Ordinary, honest, unoptimised writing — the plumber's writing about the frozen pipe, the barber's about the seventy-year-old woman — doesn't add to the noise. It cuts through it. *Data on online reader behaviour:* HubSpot — [The State of Marketing Report 2024](https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing) --- ### 10. How do you start writing honestly when you've believed your whole life that you're not a writer? You don't start as a writer. You start as someone who has something to record. There is a difference that looks small and is enormous: the writer thinks about how it sounds. The person who records thinks about what happened, what they felt, what they still don't understand. The first produces sentences. The second produces truth, which subsequently becomes sentences if you're lucky and if you return to it with attention. The first sentence you write doesn't have to be good. It has to be true. *'Today I fixed something and I wasn't sure I could.'* Or: *'The client I saw today made me think of my father.'* Or even: *'I don't know why I'm writing this.'* From there, anything can be built. From intended perfection, nothing that lasts can be built. Pennebaker demonstrated that the quality of the writing doesn't matter for producing the beneficial effects of expressive writing. What matters is honesty and regularity. Two things you can do even if you've never read a creative writing manual. *The fundamental resource:* James W. Pennebaker — [Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions](https://www.guilford.com/books/Opening-Up-by-Writing-It-Down/Pennebaker-Smyth/9781462524440) *(Guilford Press)* --- ### Short bibliography All sources used in the article and in the responses above, collected together: - **James W. Pennebaker** — [Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9280.00058) *(Psychological Science, 1997)* - **James W. Pennebaker** — [Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions](https://www.guilford.com/books/Opening-Up-by-Writing-It-Down/Pennebaker-Smyth/9781462524440) *(Guilford Press)* - **Karl Ove Knausgård** — [Interview, The Guardian: Writing is a way of getting rid of shame](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/28/karl-ove-knausgard-interview) - **Brené Brown** — [The Gifts of Imperfection](https://brenebrown.com/book/the-gifts-of-imperfection/) *(Hazelden Publishing)* - **Brené Brown** — [Daring Greatly](https://brenebrown.com/book/daring-greatly/) *(Avery)* - **Michael Goldhaber** — [The Attention Economy](https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440) *(First Monday, 1997)* - **Paul Ricoeur** — [Oneself as Another](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3684974.html) *(University of Chicago Press)* - **Jonathan Gottschall** — [The Storytelling Animal](https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Storytelling-Animal/9780544002340) *(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)* - **HubSpot** — [The State of Marketing Report 2024](https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing) - **Ahrefs** — [How Much of the Web Is Invisible to Google](https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/) --- *The full article that these questions accompany appears above. If you've read this far, one of the questions was probably yours.* ---