I have been blogging for a loooooooong time. Not consistently — there are gaps you could park a car in — but my blog has been up in one form or another since 2002. Maybe 2001. The exact date is lost to the sands of GeoCities and whatever server Harper was running in his closet at the time.

Speaking of Harper, he’s the reason I started. He told me I should blog. He also told me I should start a vlog, and well… that didn’t happen. I had just moved to California to go to commercial diving school and figured why not. I was 21, I was lonely, and I had internet access. The holy trinity of early blogging.

Twenty-three years later my writing style has evolved, my vocabulary has gotten more better (hehe), and I have used this weird little corner of the internet to write about clowning, surgery, cat behavior, hyperbaric chambers, ukuleles, and whatever else my ADHD brain fixates on for a given week.

Here’s the thing about blogging long term: you have to figure out how you want to do it. Not how the SEO guides tell you to do it. Not how the content strategists with their editorial calendars and engagement metrics want you to do it. Your blog. Your rules. I know that if I wanted more readers I should be more planned and focused with my posts. I should pick a niche. I should have a consistent posting schedule.

But who cares about engagement?

As someone who is chronically online I am remarkably bad at being online. I am bad at social media. I am catastrophically bad at email (I have written about this). And I think I finally figured out why.

It’s all so impersonal.

I don’t need to know everything that goes on in everyone’s life. I am just as nosy and curious as the next person, but there are things you don’t need to share. (I say this as I continue to share my life online. Don’t @ me.) At first social media was interesting. You connected with friends. You could keep up with them without having to actually call anyone, which for someone with ADHD was a miracle. But then money got involved. And as we all know, money ruins everything.

(On that note, click here to sign up for my to-do list that lies to you.)

As soon as people figured out they could make money by just sharing their lives, lives became curated. Nothing was honest anymore. Paid reviews of products. Chasing a viral moment to get more followers to get a brand deal. All of it is exhausting. And just like TV commercials, it is all there to sell you stuff.

It always makes me think about the legendary snake oil salesmen. Traveling around in a wagon, selling “medicine,” and then leaving before consequences happened. That is the perfect business plan. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, but you got paid. This is what so many social media accounts have become. And since half the internet is bots at this point, you aren’t even helping real people. You’re performing for an audience of scripts and scrapers.

I don’t think this is where I meant to go when I started writing this.

BACK ON TRACK DYLAN.

What I was trying to say about blogging is that it shouldn’t be done to make money (looking at you, Substackers). It should be done to share your thoughts, feelings, and knowledge with other actual humans. It should be about connecting with people who share similar views, or having real discussions with people you disagree with. Remember when that was possible? I barely do.

Here’s the wild part though. I wrote that post about how much I hate what email has become, and shortly after, I received two different emails from actual people about my blog. Real emails. From real humans. With thoughts and opinions and follow-up questions. I emailed them back. They emailed me back. We have been going back and forth and it has been wonderful. The waiting for an email that I actually care about. That anticipation. It felt like 2003 again.

Off track again. Sorry.

I think what I am trying to say — and I acknowledge that I have been circling this point like a dog trying to find the right spot on a blanket — is that what we have lost through the explosion of technology is connection. Real connection. The kind that happens between actual people. Communication is the key to being human. To lose that connection is to lose a bit of yourself.

I say this as someone who loves people but hates leaving his house. Since the pandemic and my nervous breakdown I have worked exclusively from home. I have made amazing connections with people I have never met in person — like Steve — and those connections are real and wonderful and I wouldn’t trade them. But since my ankle surgery I have become even more of a homebody. The combination of pandemic, being immunocompromised, and not yet being able to drive places has turned me into a digital hermit.

It has gotten to the point where I am actively trying to figure out how to break the cycle. Once I am able to drive consistently (I actually drove to the grocery store the other day with Sarah, but my ankle was sore by the time we got there so it’s a one-way kind of thing right now) I can start going to play war-dollies again. I am also trying to find a D&D game I can go to in person. Real dice. Real table. Real people who smell like Doritos and poor decisions.

As a person who is usually described as a people person, it has been strange to experience this drift away from my usual connections. It isn’t that I don’t miss them. It’s that in dealing with everything going on — the ankle, the health stuff, the general state of the world — I just haven’t thought about them. Which is worse, honestly.

When I worked with seniors, one of the big worries was self-isolation, and I can see now how easily it happens. I am young-ish. I have friends. I have hobbies (too many hobbies). But if I didn’t have Sarah there is a very real chance I would be in a much worse state. When you are dealing with any sort of chronic illness it is hard to look outside of yourself. To not just curl up into a metaphorical ball and protect what you can. We need connection with other people to prevent that.

I guess what the point of this entire rambling post is — and I promise I had a point when I started, even if I took every possible detour to get here — stay connected with real people. Check on your loved ones. Reach out to people you haven’t heard from in a while. And don’t be afraid to ask for help.

The void is listening. Sometimes it even emails you back.