'So how are things *actually*, Alex?'

It's 6.30pm on a Saturday evening in October and I'm flicking back through my blog posts for the year, reflecting on how I've totally failed to carry out my plan of returning to an old-school pattern of blogging. Not necessarily little and often, but a return to posts that feel less weighty and consequential. Everything we post on blogs now – if we post on them at all – has to be an Article now, doesn't it? 3,000 words and 30 pictures.

I'm more guilty of this than most. I moan about social media, promise to everyone that I'm going to revitalise the blog, post nothing for two months, then return with some massive and very earnest read that takes me an entire weekend to write.

But I'm tired of everything on the internet being a) Something That Must Be Taken Very Seriously, b) evidence of our present cyberpunk dystopia, c) outright commercialism, d) fishing for dopamine hits on human attention and behaviour modification farms Instagram/Facebook/X/TikTok, or e) just utter brain-rotting drivel. (I'm being facetious; there's still a lot of good stuff and good people on the web. But, by golly, doesn't it all feel a lot more serious than it used to? And everything that isn't serious seems to be thoroughly compromised by ulterior motives.)

So this post won't be like that. I'm just posting a good old-fashioned blog post because I can – the sort of post I used to stick up more than 20 years ago when I first started blogging. Because increasingly I think that blogging is the last unspoiled thing left on the web. That and Wikipedia, maybe.

It's been a funny old year. Somewhere in my head it's still about late July. The last few months have been busy, and although having enough work to put food on the table is good, I don't like being busy. I like feeling fully occupied and putting my skills to good use, but also having enough space to dream up ideas. Busy leaves no time or space for daydreaming, and daydreaming is absolutely essential for someone who makes a living as a writer and editor. Busy means that I have failed, yet again, to honestly assess the gap between my workload and my capacity – that I've said yes to one too many things. I'm very glad that I've yes to some of the things I've said yes to recently... less glad of others.

Too long in the no-time of my inbox, not long enough in real time, thinking on paper or on foot with no particular economic goal.

A few people have asked me how I'm doing lately. I'll reply by saying I'm fine, then probably apologise for having failed to answer some email they sent me a month or two ago. I'll joke about needing an assistant. We'll exchange knowing smiles, say something like 'Freelancing, eh?'

Honestly, I am fine! I've learnt so much about myself since 2018/19, when things genuinely did spiral towards burnout and I had to make some drastic life changes to turn the ship around... such as stepping away, quite quickly, from a role that I felt I needed, from a career and financial point of view. A role that required me logging into Twitter every single day.

I've managed to gradually fashion a career for myself where I don't need to do that any more. Everything's a lot steadier now. However, every now and again I do need to make minor course corrections.

I'm not going to go into detail into all this here, because this is a rambling freeflowing type of blog post and I don't want to bore you. But I guess I want to say that it's important to take stock sometimes and really think about what you actually want and can achieve. The web tells us that we have to be crushing productivity or something at all times, ticking off X number of goals before we hit some arbitrary career milestone, and I'm profoundly bored of internet hustle culture. It's so exhausting.

I spoke to a friend yesterday who told me that his dream job is basically just lying in a field looking at trees. I related with that in a big way. But it's so hard to do that, isn't it?

Honestly? I feel lucky that there are people in my network of friends and colleagues who know me well enough to notice when those first burnouty signs start to show, and to ask me how I'm doing. Thank you.

I went for a long bike ride without my phone today. I've been experimenting with retro digital cameras lately (you didn't think I was going to get through an entire post without mentioning photography, did you?) and I took a few harmless little snaps on this 6MP little shooter from 2006. You know, the kind of pictures we all took before everything started to become about mining your 'content' for money or social approval or dopamine hits. Little pictures, not-very-good pictures, we used to make just to capture a memory.

I have an idea that there's something fiercely pure and noble about pictures like that. No ulterior motive! A picture of such low quality that it can never be sold or published, and if I stick it up on Instagram nobody will click the Like button. Taking pictures on a camera like that is a countercultural act these days, when everyone's phone camera is capable of producing eyeball-searing clarity and enough saturation to make reality look bland. When everyone has an amazing AI-powered supercamera, perhaps using a rubbish and incredibly dumb camera from the noughties counts as art. Perhaps it counts as resistance. Perhaps I'm just going through a more obtuse than usual phase.

Anyway, going for a bike ride without the doomslab iPhone in my pocket was just what I needed. We should all do it more often.

Thanks for reading. I'm going through a phase of staying the hell away from Instagram at the moment, and I don't know how long it will last, but I do hope to be posting a bit more on here. I'll try to keep at least some of it casual, personal, and real. One of the good things about Instagram is that it discourages being too earnest all the time, and being too earnest all the time is a trait of mine I'm trying to knock on the head.

Oh, look at that – 1,100 words. I really don't know how to be concise, do I?