follow me on substack here:
I've been spending a lot of time on Substack notes. This is mostly because I have twitter and instagram blocked off my phone until 6PM, and I have nothing else to look at when I'm bored. It's telling that I don't feel a need to block Substack as well, because it's a lot less engaging.
Substack notes feels weirdly earnest in an offputting way, like a different flavor of LinkedIn cringe where you're being sold navel gazing existentialism instead of careerist striving. It also feels like parts of Substack have a weird hierarchical structure, where at the bottom there are people writing empty existential platitudes about how to live, above them there are people criticizing them for that, then above that a group of people engaging in meta criticism about how too much Substack writing is people criticizing Substack writing. I'm aware I'm doing that right now, and I promise to avoid ever writing about Substack again if I can avoid it. It also seems true that these criticisms probably apply to basically any literary scene and maybe these problems are just unavoidable.
The thing I actually like about Substack is mostly just following newsletters from people I know in some capacity, either IRL friends or twitter mutuals. It feels great getting a dispatch from someone you kind of know. I imagine it feels something like getting a letter from a friend by carrier pigeon in the early 1900s. I only pay for one Substack, have basically 0 interest in paying for any others and harbor no ambitions of ever getting paid to write here, but I really really really really like getting emails in my inbox with essays written by my friends.
I have long distance friendships that are sustained almost entirely by exchanging tweets or instagram reels over DMs. I think this is a habit my generation has developed since the days of tagging friends in the comments of memes on Facebook meme pages. On some level this seems really dumb, but it's also helped me stay in touch with some of my closest friends who live across the continent. Substack seems like another avenue to do this, and that seems pretty nice.