Since COVID happened until this year I would have told you "we can't find people" too, but this year the applications have flooded in. So at least they'll come crawling back eventually.

The listener is only a consumer. It cannot define the words. It is not responsible for their use. It interprets, and to be sure misinterprets, the words, but that, while similar, is subtly different.

Of course, at this point we're ultimately getting stuck in that nerd thing I spoke of in another comment: "I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully."

So, while hilarious, I will break the cycle and ask you to clarify what you mean by "define" so that I can shift to using your definition. I'd have used it from the start but I haven't quite figured out how to read your mind yet, so I as the speaker, unfortunately, was beholden to defining it as I understand it.

That is always the case. It may turn out that others opt to also become the audience after something is written, but that can only be determined in hindsight. Even when someone says "Oh yeah, I'll totally read what you have to write if you write it for me. Promise!", there is no guarantee they will actually follow through. More often than not they don't.

While the work is being written, the author is the only known audience. In practice, if an author cannot find enough motivation to write something for himself, it simply won't get written. Anyone else who happens to become the audience is gravy, but the work cannot be written for them as they only become known as an audience later.