To be honest, I didn’t take to the commerical web particularly well.

I grew up in the late 90s/early 2000s hacking on personal websites and blogs with a goal that was more akin to life field notes about personal exploration in technology and making friends with people through sharing those field notes.

Making money with what you shared? Pffffft.

Why would you do that?

The point is personal expression. The point is personal connection. Money just muddies up the whole works. Makes things about business, not about people.

I ended up going into web development professionally, not because I had any particular affinity for the discipline, but because, at the time… I was relatively good at it, and it felt like a more honest, more authentic living…. even if that did lead me to working for the corporate and VC world for a time.

But as I went pro with code… my writing, my art, and my overall precense online just simply suffered.

There were other, more personal reasons for that as well…. but by the late 2000s, the personal website was dead, centeralized social media was on the rise, blogging was practically synonmous with marketing plan to sell goods and services, and there was this sudden expectation that everything needed to be best accessible via mobile because that’s where most people would be looking at it.

For me, blogging and journaling ceased to be fun when I was told my lived field notes weren’t enough, and suddenly people who’d been blogging far less time than I had were experts on the medium just because they said they were, and their shill was to teach me the secrets of sucesss, and that I’d never be successful because my interets were way too all over the map.

So, eventually…. I just gave up.

Bloggers then started closing up shop or prioritizing other social media platforms, and others dropped off the map entirely.

On occasion, I’d try to experiment with sharing my passions… I tried the YouTuber thing once, but found that speaking out loud was hard for me, and the editing process felt cumbersome.

But mostly, I just laid dormant on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and later TikTok, watching other people post and feeling just a little sad and jealous that the world I came from was gone.

As things started feeling less like a conversation, and more like a hustle for money…. I dunno… I just started losing interest.

I don’t want to be a personality, I just want to be a person doing a thing and if people like the thing, they can throw some dollars in my jar…. and if they like what I’m doing regualrly, they can throw dollars in my jar monthly…. but in the current ecosystem, I still feel like the entertainer/hustler aspect of it is required, and I just can’t do that.

And so I feel like I don’t even deserve to ask.

But also, I deserve to eat.

SO, I go back and forth about it.