Because the premise itself quietly shifts the goalposts — it’s not “evaluate the article,” it’s “speculate about an unseen draft.” It’s not “address the criticism,” it’s “pre-invalidate criticism by inventing an alternate reality.” That move — subtle but significant — doesn’t clarify anything, it obscures everything. It’s not engagement, it’s reframing — and reframing is not the same thing as resolving.
You suggest that a raw dump of thoughts might have existed — that a chaotic precursor might have been transformed into something structured — but that observation, even if true, doesn’t actually address the core issue. It’s not about whether a messy draft once existed, it’s about whether the finished product stands on its own. It’s not about process, it’s about outcome. The existence of an earlier version — real or imagined — doesn’t immunize the final version from critique. Creation isn’t evaluation — and effort isn’t excellence.
And the guarantee you offer — that criticism would persist regardless — isn’t really a guarantee, it’s a projection. It’s not certainty, it’s conjecture. It’s not insight into others’ motives, it’s an assumption about others’ reactions. Predicting bad faith — without demonstrating it — isn’t analysis, it’s speculation wearing the costume of inevitability.
There’s also a quiet conflation happening — it’s not “people disliking something,” it’s “people being impossible to please.” Those are not the same claim. Disagreement isn’t hostility — and criticism isn’t persecution. Treating them as equivalent — collapsing evaluation into antagonism — transforms a conversation into a caricature. It’s not “no way to win,” it’s “no way to avoid disagreement,” which is a completely different and far less dramatic proposition.
The notion of “human washing,” too, carries an embedded assumption — that human intervention inherently degrades coherence. But that framing — again — is not a neutral observation, it’s a value judgment disguised as a technical claim. It’s not “less coherent,” it’s “differently structured.” It’s not “less clean,” it’s “less mechanically uniform.” Coherence isn’t synonymous with polish — and polish isn’t synonymous with quality. A text can be pristine yet hollow — and it can be uneven yet meaningful.
More importantly, the entire dilemma you outline rests on a binary that may not actually exist. It’s not “please critics or don’t bother,” it’s “accept that reception varies.” It’s not “win or lose,” it’s “communicate and be interpreted.” Framing discourse as a game with only defeat conditions transforms ordinary disagreement into existential futility — and that’s not realism, it’s dramatization.
Because audiences aren’t a monolith — and reactions aren’t predetermined. It’s not “people like you,” it’s “people with different criteria.” It’s not “shitting on,” it’s “responding negatively.” It’s not “impossible to win,” it’s “impossible to guarantee universal approval,” which has always been true of any expressive act in any medium at any time.
Underlying your comment is a deeper assumption — that criticism invalidates effort, that negative reception negates value, that disagreement implies malice. But those equivalences don’t hold. It’s not rejection, it’s evaluation. It’s not hostility, it’s interpretation. It’s not sabotage, it’s variance in judgment.
And variance — inconvenient, unavoidable, sometimes frustrating — is not a flaw in discourse, it’s the defining feature of it.
So the question “why bother trying” rests on a premise that may itself be misframed. It’s not about pleasing everyone, it’s about expressing something honestly. It’s not about eliminating criticism, it’s about tolerating its existence. It’s not about winning approval, it’s about accepting plurality.
Because communication — like writing, like reading, like interpretation itself — isn’t a system designed to produce unanimous outcomes. It’s not consensus manufacturing, it’s meaning negotiation — messy, imperfect, sometimes contentious, always subjective.
And that condition — not failure, not injustice, not impossibility — is simply the normal state of human exchange.