Every year, I receive a bill: pay $200 or disappear from the web. Disappearing is too hard to contemplate. So I pay.
This year, I received a kind email from a reader who found my blog in this infinite sea of content and took the time to tell me how much they had enjoyed reading me. Flattered, I renewed with more eagerness than usual.
Still, I find it difficult to reinhabit this space.
It’s not so much that I lack the desire. But I’m struggling. Struggling with the life of a very average forty-something, with a job that is far more demanding than it was in 2008, and more broadly with the general “bleakness” of our times.
All the more so because social media has been weighing on me lately; I try to limit myself to 20 to 40 minutes a day. And in that difficulty, I realize at the same time that more truthful, more ordinary content would do us good. It likely still exists, but it no longer reaches us. The algorithms push us toward spectacle, luxury, and perfection. And when humans are no longer dazzling enough, we are served influencers generated by artificial intelligence.
So there it is.
A one-year reprieve for this little corner of the web.
It will remain fallow.
Or not.
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