Shutting Down

This is now a private page and I will reduce activities on it

Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash

I have always been good at giving advice. Many people have lifted themselves up by the help of what I could tell them about life and what matters, what doesn’t.

And now, to the cliché, you are waiting for: I am miserable at advising myself.

Of course, this is what people always say. Maybe I should have advised myself to not say it, but this is, genuinely, what I feel right now.

If you have read any of my posts about social media, then you should know that I am not overly excited about that concept, as it has unfolded over the years. Substack falls into that category, so why am I here?

I have no good answer to that question, but I can see that one of the good, old pieces of advice I have always given to others now applies to myself too: that they should ensure to balance things so that they do as much that gives them energy as what takes energy – at the end of the day, they should end up being enriched by the things they did that day, all-in-all.

The sum of plusses and minuses should end up in a plus.

Currently, Substack, along with all other media – not just social media – drains me for energy.

I attempt in several ways to talk to people about important things, and even though there are some who respond now and then, I feel the burden of the many who don’t.

Too many minuses.

As my life isn’t offering me many (or any) plusses currently, despite my serious hunt for those, I am now out of energy and initiative and have to take my own advice and stop some of the drains, including Substack.

While I can live with disagreement, I can’t live with getting no response at all from the world on things that matter to me.

Maybe it would have been better, if there had been another source of thought-exchange that I could bid into, like friends I could meet now and then and with whom I could talk about the world. Or, at least some kind of balanced treatment of the big questions of today in the existing media.

Or, as a last resort, just the knowledge of there being at least some people in the world who still behave rationally and are able to balance all that happens into sound considerations and actions.

But there isn’t any of all that, and looking for it but not finding it takes all my energy.

I see only a big minus at the end of each day.

So, it is not about writing, it is about trying to get into a dialog with the world about the writing. And that simply doesn’t happen to a large extent.

My solution, for now, is to pull the plug – and keep writing, but for myself.

As I hate seeing each day how nobody read anything I published, and as I’m not successful with just not checking, I will close down my activities on Substack, like this:

1. Each site will, for a start, be made private. This means that new subscribers can ask, I’ll get an email, and then I can decide if they can subscribe. Existing subscribers will not be affected.

2. Chats will be closed

3. I’ll stop both writing to and reading from Notes

4. I’ll not publish anything to any of the sites

5. I’ll after a while stop checking for comments, and ultimately stop answering them – and then switch off comments altogether

6. I may, after some considerations, remove all the stuff from here. Then, perhaps I can publish some of it somewhere else, if I can start believing that people will read it there instead.

As I have paid for the domain names, I don’t want to close the sites completely, in case I should later want them back, therefore they’ll stay, but without activity.

I have made no decision for the future further ahead – maybe I’ll come back, maybe with a new name and a new style, being a fake person, such as it is liked by most. I may even start teaching you how to grow your substack! But just now I haven’t decided on anything.

Since there are literally millions of other sites and just as many other publishers here on Substack, there shouldn’t be any reason for anyone feeling that they are losing anything. And I’ll have peace of mind when writing just for myself, not needing to even think about who might want to read it or not.

So, starting with this site, circling around to the others over a few days.

So long, and thanks for all the great talks we’ve had – and thanks for reading.

And, just for the record, I do know that a few people here actually did support me, perhaps reading more of my stuff than they wanted to, just to make me happy, and I am forever thankful for that.