why i'm thinking of ending things (my newsletter)

might be time to dip

Hello friends—

Just as a heads up, this newsletter might disappear over the coming months. I do not mean a temporary hiatus. I mean that I might delete it. The reasons are not very complex or very interesting. They contain no lessons or news about the “state” of media, social and otherwise, and have everything to do with a very personal feeling I am having. But because there are people who read this newsletter (amazing to me, frankly), I figure I should say a little (hopefully, very little) about why I am thinking about deleting my Substack.

It's the phones, as they say—specifically, it’s Notes. I don’t like the platform. Every time I open the Substack app, I am presented with a string of posts that inspire hostility in my heart. I know that people reported this feeling on Twitter and Instagram and Tik Tok. But those platforms never truly inspired the kind of active peevishness I feel every time I open Notes. What’s more is that I find it inescapable. I’ve taken to calling Substack, this platform I like, the bitter fields of acrimony. This partly describes the dominant theme, mode, and idea of the writers who have come to call this place home. But also, it describes my interior state every time I so much as glance at my timeline here. The bitter fields are in my heart.

It is not a place that makes me aspire to higher consciousness. It does not make me feel playful and spry, as I used to when I just logged in to send my little newsletters and go about my day. There is something about the social media aspect of this platform—its operating procedures and modes—that uniquely annoys me to a degree I have never experienced in my life. And I am not a nice person when I am annoyed. Because I can’t opt-out of Notes, I am thinking of just nuking this letter and going away into the wilds and minding my business. I’ll come to some sort of answer by early next year. But do not expect very many letters from me until I can figure this out. As it is, I find Substack Notes unbearable.

I normally deal with annoying things by ignoring them because I do not want to encourage their persistence. This goes for people as well as for conversations, trends, art, people, and bits of discourse. That’s none of my business, I reply to friends who try to lure me into perceiving things I know to be annoying or, I’m not onboarding that. It’s a peaceful way of life, one that has kept my blood pressure low and my temper even.

This strategy works well on Twitter and Instagram, and it even works well in life. But it does not work on Substack, where annoying is not only the dominant idiom but seems to be the very point of its social media aspirations. If RageBait is Twitter’s most productive Engagement Plantation, then PeeveBait runs the meta on Substack. Or maybe I just have a bad personality and find people annoying. As an annoying person, I’m allowed that privilege.

But because I can’t really opt-out of notes at a systemic level—since it is such an integral part of the Substack App, for example—I think the only way to avoid on-boarding it is to simply leave the platform.

I do not wish this platform to be different. This is the nature of the platform. All of the debate club kids and irritating pedantry and extremely annoying anti-institutional stances are, well, a feature, not a bug, for the user base. And I understand that. What I have come to understand over the last couple of weeks in particular is that it’s a space that I actually do not enjoy very much. As my parents used to say, “If you don’t like it, leave,” etc.

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