So, I’ve been wondering whether or not it’s even worth it.
I took a little hiatus from blogging back in June, as I had a lot of life stuff going on, but it also gave me a little chance to pause and try and figure out what my place is in this great churning, gurning algorithmic content machine most of us are caught inside these days.
To tell the truth, I’ve gotten a little discouraged in the last 12 months or so. As someone who makes a living writing words for fun and profit, the rise of generative AI, the ongoing social media-fuelled breakdown in polite society, the daily doomscrolling and the hourly outrage alerts have started to make it all feel quite futile. There’s too much of everything and not enough of something, and it kind of feels like we’ve all developed a case of Ren and Stimpy’s space madness, doesn’t it? Do my little words even matter?
There’s a lot of nostalgia for the pre-collapse internet era out there these days. Like a lot of people, I got mesmerised by the shiny town squares of MySpace and Facebook and Twitter back in the day, sharing all kinds of random babble and life moments that I’d be truly embarrassed to do now. Again, like a lot of people, I’m a lot more cautious now about my online life, what I say and what I share. I begrudgingly still use Facebook (honestly, when you live on the other side of the world from a lot of your friends and family, it still has its uses), I abandoned Twitter years ago when the Nazis took over and find most other sites incredibly irritating (the various Twitter replacements) or full of stupidity (hello, Reddit).
These days, many of the spaces I used to go to online just make me feel sad, mad, or bad.
I started this website all the way back in 2018 when I was at a bit of a creative slump in life, mired in journalism jobs that weren’t really fulfilling and needing a bit more of an outlet. I could write about anything and everything I wanted here, and it spurred me to stretch my brain a little more.
It’s been a good impetus – I’ve ended up migrating in my work to doing far more writing and reporting than I’ve done in years for what I humbly think is New Zealand’s best news web site, and restarted my long-dormant comics hobby with Amoeba Adventures in 2020. Writing for this website has turned into my “pressure valve” for writing about things that don’t quite fit into my paid writing niches, a chance to babble on about cool music and comics and movies and sometimes whatever’s going on in my life.
But yeah, sometimes I get a bit discouraged, when I start to think about how many “readers” to this website may now just be AI bots scraping my actual words for their soulless slop, about how hard it is to make actual human connections online now. Sometimes it feels pointless. Sometimes you want to toss your phone in the ditch and walk away.
The quandary is if you want to be a writer in 2026, you have to use the internet, at least a little bit. So I’m not going anywhere on this space, just yet.
I took a break for a few months to mull it all over, feeling so very tired of the “enshittification” of online spaces and ideas. I took a little holiday in the real world to remember what it’s like out there and to remind myself that, ultimately, as much as I appreciate every single person who reads my words out there, I write the words for me, because I have to get them out, because being a writer is the only serious job I’ve ever considered in my life since I was about 12 years old and because, I hope, in the end real words by real people are always going to feel more real than all the endless garbage being churned out by opportunists and grifters out there.
It ain’t a big site, this one, and yet I’ve had a blast writing my little essays here for the past 8 years, despite moments of doubt.
“I’m looking to something more than endless scrolling for that dopamine hit,” I wrote back in my first post on this site in 2018. “I’ll focus on what keeps me going in this tattered world.“
Why bother? Well, it beats the alternative, doesn’t it? In a world gone mad, we find the joy where we can, when we can. Onwards!
The purpose of the blog, which you will learn when you get old (you young whipperspapper) is to remind you of the things you thought you’d never forget but you did. Also, to say, I stand with X, but no way in hell do I buy into Y. But I’ve only blogged for 21 years, so I could be wrong.