Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly disengaged from social media. It started with Trump’s election, which prompted me to delete Facebook from my phone. I found I didn’t miss it. Instagram stuck for longer. In the early days of the pandemic, when my wife and I were new mothers sheltering in our cramped Brooklyn apartment, it was a vital window and escape hatch.

But after parenthood, my free time became sharply constrained. To be alone with my thoughts, to stare at nothing and think while waiting in line at the grocery store or riding the subway, became a rare treat. I wanted to be bored. I wanted to watch my own thoughts percolate and recapture the creativity that boredom had engendered – to draft stories in my head, to conceptualize a jellyfish ship, a genetically modified police state, a detective in a post-scarcity world.

I still haven’t deleted my Instagram account, but I have the application settings arranged so that it can only connect via WiFi rather than cell data, which means I can’t scroll when out and about. Instead, I log in for about 20-30 minutes once every few months or so to respond to messages and catch up on photos. I find myself less anxious. I feel like my brain has more space to slosh around. I am drawn to check it less and less.

I’m not a complete luddite. I have group texts. I call people on the phone. I Facetime for hours at a time to talk about books and cooking. And, I’ve returned to carrying a book with me wherever I go.

I’m not going to lie – I miss things. I miss the life changes and milestones from family and friends that I care about, but with whom for whatever reason I never translated into a texting relationship. I went to the west coast last summer for a wedding of my dear friends K. and Z., and had moments of complete emotional dislocation when I realized how much of other people’s lives I had missed. But, it was also glorious to hear everyone’s stories, to meet new people with no prior knowledge of their lives, to learn in the moment where they were and where they had been and what they cared about.

And I do miss the internet, the version of it that existed when I was growing up – highly personal Geocities sites that forced me to learn HTML to create them for myself, niche forums, chatrooms, blogs. Blogs! I’m convinced that the whole Substack newsletter revival is just the result of a primal collective yearning for blogs. Places to visit and return from, rather than an endless, mediated scroll of throwaway content and ads.

So, I decided to revive this space, which was, originally, a blog. 

While cleaning up this website, I was struck by the number of dead links. Not just to things I thought were interesting at the time (I preserved the old “Hey, Internet” series from my early twenties), but to pieces of my actual work. A creative nonfiction piece I wrote for The Billfold, a series of author interviews I conducted with the now defunct literary journal Unstuck – these are gone and essentially irretrievable. If I’d put those things here, on the website that I own, I’d still have these bits and pieces of my very real labor. Instead, they’re lost to the mercies of changing online ecosystems and shuttered journals.

I’ve become painfully aware that platforms come and go. My most active remaining social media presence, on Goodreads, could disappear at any time according to the whims of Amazon. And why am I creating content for these corporations, for free? Why don’t I instead go back to a space I own, and make it my own?

So here I am, preparing to once again post like I used to during those halcyon days of Blogger dot com. I anticipate this will be a highly unoptimized series of personal posts about things I’m reading, watching, and thinking as I attempt to return to a regular practice of low stakes writing. If you’d like to be updated when that happens, you can subscribe below.