The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.
The push and pull of the internet in my present life is getting harder to ignore or deny. It's not that I'm not online, it's just that I'm not engaging with the internet and its machinations in quite the same way as I did a decade ago. There's a distance there. A desire to be on, to be a part of it, that clashes with my current internal need for distance and quiet. I want to be connected, yet I also want to chuck my computer into the ocean.
And this dichotomy is clearly evident when considering this blog. This absolute nothingburger that was cultivated around some misplaced need to pretend to be part of some community after all of the online communities I took part in ceased to exist. But I am no more or less alone now than I was a few months ago because nothing has changed in my tangible reality and I haven't figured out how to go about making that change.
This, in essence, is simply a long way of me considering how it's been over a month since I've posted anything. A cynical audience would surmise I was aura farming, but that would require some kind of audience to begin with, and since I'm largely shouting into the void here, well, I have nothing to point to other than the vague goings on of life. The clock moves along its steady pace, I awake and go to sleep, only to start the day over again.
Someone I cherish deeply, who stole my heart eighteen years ago, recently graduated high school and made her way across state lines to stay with us for a bit, so above all else, that would account for two of the weeks that started this month. I'm no psychologist, but one might suggest the remaining time could be chalked up to me mourning her absence once it was time to go home and resume life. It's never been easy to separate, but it only gets harder as the years pass.
My reading this past month was unfortunately minimal due to a spike in my insomnia. I did manage to read Fleishman Is In Trouble around the middle of the month and finished off a re-read of Giovanni's Room yesterday afternoon, but most of the month was spent in a bit of a reading slump; picking up random books, reading a page or two, and promptly putting them down because I couldn't focus.
Hopefully July will be a bit healthier for me, mental health wise. I'd love to see some change, whatever that may look like, but I've long learned not to hold my breath. After all, how could I expect change when I'm not actively taking steps to facilitate said change? What a drag.
How could you be this far along in life and still be so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all? Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn't life. Maybe that was just middle age.
-- Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is In Trouble, pg. 372
Something occurred to me the other day, a thought that's probably been lingering in the back of my head for a while now but only recently decided to jump to the forefront: there isn't really social media anymore. By that I mean, there isn't social media in the way the idea of "social media" was presented to my generation in the 2000s.
At the turn of the century, the internet was seen as a vast world of possibilities, one that allowed you to maintain connection with your friends, family, and acquaintances, even if you were no longer in physical contact with them. There were a series of websites that came about over the course of the next decade, each building on what came before it, offering something new in the process and making their site feel like the place.
MySpace was obviously the first juggernaut in this space, but then you had Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Each providing different experiences that catered to different groups of people. Instagram was for budding artists, Twitter was often cited as the "town square," and Facebook was for the college crowed and aging Gen Xers. Tumblr was a bit of an outlier in that it kind of served everyone, but even then it felt wholly unique.
None of that really exists now. All of these sites as we once knew them are long gone, replaced by corpses of their former selves, which has resulted in the online social structure becoming deeply fragmented in a way that, at one point in time, felt almost unthinkable.
And it's hard to honestly diagnose the inception point. On one hand, it's easy to point to the political shift that occurred in the mid-2010s that made everyone inherently more divided. On the other hand, one could point to the monetization of all of these platforms. On another hand, one could suggest that each platform's desperate attempts to mimic the identifying features of every other platform left users with a sense that none of this really matters anymore.
There's only one social media account I frequent nowadays (Twitter), but even then, despite the work I put in to avoid the issues a lot of other users have with the site, I'm not immune to the knowledge that the Twitter that exists in 2026 is vastly different from the one I signed up to in 2009. Obviously, it was going to change to some degree, but it's the way it changed that's the problem. Because it wasn't just a functionality change, it was a change in community, and this is an issue that plagues all of these legacy platforms.
Whenever I decide to shake the dust off my Facebook account to have a look around, I'm shocked at how dead it feels. Like Instagram (its de facto sister brand), the website is overrun with Reels (thanks, TikTok) and the algorithm would rather force-feed you "content" slop than the goings on of the people you're friends with or the pages you went out of your way to follow. So if the main goal of Facebook was to keep up with old acquaintances and you don't actually get a timeline of their posts anymore, what need is their for the site, right?
And I guess that's my main question in all of this: What purpose do any of these platforms serve anymore? IG and Facebook are essentially worthless, partially because it's all advertisements and regurgitated memes, and partially because people have become obsessed with presenting an idealized version of their actual lives. Twitter is still the "town square" in a sense, but it too sits in the shadow of its former glory, as people copy years-old tweets or constantly rage bait, all in a pathetic attempt at engagement farming to make pennies off their posts.
Tumblr, to its credit, seems least affected, though some of the UI changes and the attempts at monetization that've been implemented in the decade since I was last on the platform do lend themselves to the general feeling I have of this place being a bit of a wasteland, run by a company desperate to keep itself afloat.
I don't know. In one respect, this fracturing of the social media experience has allowed singular-minded communities to get a second-life through the likes of RateYourMusic, AlbumOfTheYear, Letterboxd, and their ilk. However, I do think dismantling the means in which people at large congregated around one another online can only be seen as a negative. Maybe this was intentional, maybe it was simply a biproduct of the tech companies and their intrinsic race to the bottom, maybe it was something else entirely. I don't know the reason, I just know something's been lost.
Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
You never knew in advance if a decision was the right one. All you could do was try to imagine the future and use that to help you make up your mind in a difficult situation, and if you couldn't imagine the future, well, you had to make up your mind anyway.
Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, published by Faber and Faber in May 1989
I just noticed I completely vanished on here for the month of April, to the dismay of no one in particular. Nothing happened, I have no reason, I've just been kind of... drifting, I suppose. Doing nothing of note, accomplishing nothing of what I desire. My aching, insomniac body made it difficult to find my usual solace in the things I often turn to for refuge, but other things slipped in to keep my head above water.
I randomly started reading comics again after kind of falling off the wagon during COVID lockdowns. Ended up building a Komga server and loaded it up with a bunch of series I'd been putting off forever. My goal is to simply read an issue a day; this way there are no stakes and I don't feel obligated, as I so often did in college, to plow through a miniseries or a story arc in a single sitting, which usually left me feeling a little hollow.
It's been going well so far, I think. Started off re-reading Spider-Man: Reign before finally reading Watchmen, which led to re-reading Spider-Man: Blue, and I'm currently working my way through Tom King's The Vision miniseries from 2015. It's a fun companion to the traditional books I read week-to-week, so I really hope I can stick with it.
For however one may come in later years to reassess one's achievements, it is always a consolation to know that one's life has contained a moment or two of real satisfaction such as I experienced that day up on that high mountain path.
-- Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, pg. 204
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.
-- James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, pg. 62
Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem
There's something I've been mulling over in my brain over the course of this week, something that's been bugging me a bit since I had the sudden urge to return to this site. Have I entered some kind of regression state? Emotionally, mentally, or spiritually? Like, why am I here? And why do I think about this place still? I know there's still an active community, but it feels like a graveyard to me.
My old account was made in the summer of 2011, a moment in time between the end of high school and the start of college. It wasn't great--hell, it was pretty awful--but I find myself yearning for it. If not for the moment itself, then maybe for what it represented? The ocean of possibilities before me. The chance to make something of my life, to form relationships, to build an existence that was more than just scraping by day after day.
Instead, I'm physically very much in the same spot I was nearly fifteen years ago. I have a job, sure, and two degrees, but do I have a life? Do I have a sense of community? Do I have love? Have I yet to experience what it means to feel loved? In all honesty, no. I have hobbies, sure, interests that bring me joy. I have a career, I make okay money, but still not enough to support myself, and I still have no idea how to go about finding a partner.
And so I'm here, but for what? What is being gained in entering this space again? When taking into consideration everything I was feeling and holding onto in 2011, is it even a healthy exercise to come back to this space, one that feels even more vacant and empty than the physical world I inhabit? The internet as I knew it a decade and a half ago has been hollowed out, and due to the refuge I so often sought in its escape, that absence of life and community has in turn made me feel worse than I already did.
I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing here. Haven't been active on Tumblr in almost a decade. All of my old mutuals have disappeared from the site or their accounts were deleted; I suppose that's essentially the same thing. Where are they, I wonder? Is there even room for someone in their mid-30s on this site anymore? I'm not sure...
Being here feels as if I stepped right out of a time machine. Given the state of social media in 2026, I needed a space that could act as a brain dump, and my Wordpress blog wasn't appropriate--neither was my old, abandoned Tumblr blog, honestly. This will probably just be me screaming into the void occasionally. We'll see.
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