Conversation

Just realized something. The younger readers of my writing over the last 15 years haven’t generally grown up to be like the older readers of my writing. Where younger = 5-15y younger than me and older = 5-15y older. The two groups seem to have gotten different things out of it.
4
30
I was 33 in 2007, so a 40-year-old reader would have been older and and a 25y old younger reader then then (now 40 and still “younger”), is a different kind of 40-year-old. Not just a generational thing. Different personality. If they found me now, they likely wouldn’t read me.
1
11
Equally an older reader wouldn’t have read me if they’d been younger I think. Theory: younger readers used my writing to make sense of the world, and their *possible* future place in it. Older readers used it to make sense of their *actual* past.
1
23
Now of course the world makes no sense to anyone so nobody’s really reading anything contemporary (just vibing with headlines and ledes at best), and the earnest-beards are retvrning to classics and pretending furiously to have found answers there 🤔
3
23
Replying to
Another thing: the lack of content in early 2010s too. Finding your stuff was just proof that cool stuff could exist. Probably motivated a lot of people to explore internet stuff
1
Replying to
Well there was a lot of blogging about blogging, blogging about making money blogging, travel blogging, mommy blogging, gadget reviews, and Tim Ferris type stuff. But yeah, general interest writing was still mostly in magazines. Blogs were colonizing niches mostly.