I’m a busy guy. Between working forty five hours a week and a jumbo college course load I pretty much leave my apartment before 9 every morning and don’t get back until after 9 at night every day (plus weekends, where I seize the bulk of my work hours). Then there’s the homework, reading, and writing to be done on top of it all. A lot of you know what that’s like, unless you’re one of the privileged college students floated by parental cash infusions who pretend they don’t have time to get everything done just to participate in the culture of exhaustion.

Then there’s Odyssey, that extra commitment I slopped onto my own already heaping plate like a lot of other young writers I know. Even now it’s past midnight when I’ve just pulled an 11 hour shift immediately following a 2 hour Biology course and I’m writing this with one bloodshot eye open. My beer blog has fallen a little behind, the kitchen floor needs Swiffer-ed, my dishwasher seems to be interested in doing anything other than getting my dishes clean, and right about now I’m starting to question if farting out an article for a website that doesn’t pay me is really worth the time I eke out for it.

Writing for Odyssey initially appealed to me because it seemed like a great way to get my name out there and gain readership that could potentially cross over onto other platforms where I might one day pay my bills with my writing, which as an English and Literature major would certainly beat the hell out of teaching. Writing weekly articles would at least instill in me the practice of keeping to a schedule, meeting deadlines, and staying sharp. That, and I was told it “looks great on a resume.” All of these things seemed at first to be ample compensation for a writing “job” that is totally unpaid save the $20 pat on the back a writer (sorry, “content creator”) with the most shares in each Odyssey “community” receives every week.

Weeks in, I’m starting to change my tune. It isn’t the slough of coming up with new content with mechanical consistency or taking the time to structure it into a thoughtful article or even the painfully boring process of whoring that article across social media (a practice that I am embarrassingly out of touch with and detrimentally uninterested in). It is decidedly that the diminishing returns of overcoming these obstacles over the course of just a few weeks with what spare time (ha) and energy (pfff) that remains after seeing to my other duties has occasioned a colder and more sober look at Odyssey as a company.

Solemn reflection has left me feeling like I’ve been had. Business Insider reported that as of April of this year, Odyssey had only 70 full-time employees on its payroll and had received $32 million in funding. Let’s compare that to the $20 Odyssey pays out to each whole writing community every week. Spread nationwide across every single chapter of writers, Odyssey is paying out less than a million dollars a year to the throngs of promising young writers who account for 10,000-plus articles generated per week and the 30 million unique monthly page views they garner (figures also reported by Business Insider, also all the way back in April, so these numbers have likely significantly grown since then). Can you imagine the kind of money they’re raking in from the ad revenue generated by tens of millions of clicks every month? You’d think the least they could do is spring for publishing software that doesn’t piss itself and die on every operating system or device I’ve tried using it on.

So what am I doing here? Is it quality, mutually beneficial work or am I devoting my precious time and energy to floating someone else’s ingenious pyramid scheme? Part of me wants to believe it’s worth it, but then I think of how much better my blog could be doing. Is Odyssey helping me reach an audience? Perhaps marginally, but the lion’s share of exposure is wrought by my own hands via rubbing it in the faces of various friends and followers. Is it generating thought-provoking, informative, or otherwise entertaining content? Surely not. I’ve had many ideas gutted or diminished by the meager time I have to develop and execute them within the confines of a weekly deadline with everything else going on in my life. This is not to say that a weekly cycle is unrealistic in any context, but rather to emphasize that I could justify spending the time to craft something researched and polished enough to warrant publishing if I was being compensated by Odyssey in any way.

I’m not alone. Scrolling through Odyssey’s website it’s obvious that writers en masse are heaving out whatever they’ve managed to spew onto a word processor just to make it to the next week: “10 Things I Found in My Butthole This Weekend.” “An Open Letter to Bank Candy.” “500 Words on Why I Don’t Like Raisins.” None of those are actual articles, but they’d be better reads than many I’ve dragged my eyes across. Odyssey doesn’t seem bothered by the quality of its content, though. Clicks and ad revenue don’t discriminate. The cash will continue to flow seemingly regardless of what they let escape from their editors, but it could end up being damaging to the writers.

Intangibly, offering up whatever they can muster just to meet a deadline does not help a writer develop vocational skills. Week in and week out they won’t be growing as a thinker or finding their voice or any of the other requisite abilities they must master. We tend to think of creativity as a lightning bolt but it’s more like a muscle, and so doing 30 crunches (or whatever healthy people do) in 30 seconds at the end of each week just to get them in isn’t going to impact one’s health or physique over any length of time much like churning out 500 words just to get it done isn’t going to advance one’s literary prowess. The tangible damage is troubling as well. Potential employers are going to judge your abilities based on how they perceive the work you’ve done in the past, and some of that judgment is going to be aimed at the company you keep (if only I could learn to Tweet like I understood these principles). Am I really to believe that someone is going to look at my resume down the line, see Odyssey, and pay me to write for their website after seeing my name come up on the same page as the author of “The 7 Things I Want to Tell My Neighbor’s Leopard Gecko?”

Now, granted, not everyone writing for Odyssey is looking for that kind of work in the future and not everything has to have Serious Integrity or Gravity for it to be worth reading. Fluff has a rightful place in the spectrum of creativity. But even for those who are only in it for a platform to elevate their thoughts and opinions, I have to ask: are you satisfied? Are you reaching people and creating discussion or even just taking them outside of themselves for a quick laugh? Or are you shouting into the chasm of the internet while someone else bags bucks off your echoes.