I’ve been publishing essays on Substack for two years now, and I’ve noticed some consistent themes and patterns emerge in my writing. More and more, I find myself wanting to revisit past work—to refine ideas, build on them, and let them inform future writing and action.
Substack, it turns out, is terrible for this. Newsletters are ephemeral by design; it’s all about what’s new. Once a post goes out, it disappears into the archives, buried under whatever comes next. So while Substack is an incredible platform for distribution, it’s awful for curation.
So that’s the goal for this site: curation rather than distribution. I plan use this space to cultivate a living archive of information (a digital garden, if you will), mostly for myself, but also for anyone else who’s curious. Substack will remain my public diary; this will be my public notebook.
On that note…
Why make it public?
There are a few of reasons:
First, taking notes in public forces me to organize and edit my thoughts. I’ve done shedloads of private journaling over the last decade, on paper and in Obsdian, but very little of it has lead to any into durable insights when compared with the writing I’ve done “out loud” more recently. Writing is great for figuring out what I think, but it seems like editing is where those thoughts get transformed into reusable frameworks. So in short: I wanted a place to write out loud that’s more flexible than a weekly newsletter.
The second reason is that I unironically love information architecture, and building a public site gave me an excuse to experiment with modern static-site generators.1 In time I hope to settle on a structure that makes it easier for me to access and recall ideas and frameworks that I think are important, so I can make more things, more quickly, more better.
The third reason is hopeless vanity.
Footnotes
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Huge thanks to Jacky Zhao for creating this one. ↩