Does anyone really blog anymore?

I would require multiple appendages to count the total number of blogs I’ve had in my lifetime. LiveJournal confessionals, scenster-era Xanga pages that were more form than substance, BlogSpot-based chronicles of my high school fashion choices — I even had a short-lived Tumblr dedicated to ranking the quality of my Tinder dates.

Perhaps the personal blog was bystander casualty in the 2010’s War Against the Personal Essay. “We don’t want writing about your lived experience, we want unreadable experimental writing that thinly veils your lived experience!” and so forth. But as I write this, the number of places to publish (and, you know, read) any kind of non-AI-generated writing is shrinking by the hour. This morning, it was announced that Jezebel would be shutting down after 16 years.

It make sense that models like Substack are on the rise. Where else do writers have but whatever corner of the internet allows them to carve out a space for themselves? Even better if, like Substack, they promise a profitable, growth-oriented model. Medium did the same thing a few years ago, and after cultivating 2,200 readers and hundreds of thousands of views on my posts there, I earn approximately $0.02 each month. So here I am, keeping my intellectual property to myself and bringing it all back to where it started: the blog.

There is peace and joy in complete uselessness. I’m pretty sure Thich Nhat Hanh said that. To write without a “growth-oriented” mindset and without the constraints of whatever terrible business decision will land in the publishing industry’s lap next. To do something and remember what it was like to care about it before it fed you.

The other day on Twitter, writer Jamie Hood declared “the age of irony poisoning is over … earnest girlies rise up!” And I have personally never been more excited for such a cultural shift. I will see you on the blog.