Why I Substack.

The short answer is that I was done with social media. The long answer starts with Facebook. I kept trying to have real conversations there and what I got back wasn’t debate... it was character assassination. Photos of family, travel, food, whatever... those would get a flood of likes and hearts and “nice!” comments. But if I said something that actually mattered to me, the room went silent. Either that or the trolls showed up.

I have two very close friends whose Facebook personas I would happily murder with my bare hands if they ever crossed my path. Fortunately in the real world they’re lovely people, not trolls at all. But the gap between the humans I knew and the versions of them online was the final straw. I wanted drier pastures.

If the first was why I left, then the second is why I selected this place. It’s a reason about me and technology. I’m dyslexic. Working with text has always been heavy lifting. I love to read and I read constantly, but my relationship with text is fraught. In grade five my dad decided he was going to make sure I got ten out of ten on every spelling test. We drilled Wednesday. We drilled hard on Thursday. Friday came and I nailed it. Beautiful father-son moment. We repeated that for weeks.

Then he tried a little experiment. How many of the words I nailed on Friday would I still remember on Monday. The answer was four out of ten.

I didn’t reliably get the whole there, their, they’re thing sorted until embarrassingly late in adult life. Side note... you’re all assholes for treating this as a moral failing. I have never once been unable to understand someone’s meaning because of spelling. Yet you tortured me on this one.

I can tell you the word neighbor is wrong the moment I write it, but I can stare at the page for an hour trying to fix it. I cannot describe my own bag, but put it beside 1,000 identical ones and I’ll pick mine instantly. That is how my brain works.

I don’t remember words so much as the shapes of them... the silhouette. It’s almost like a computer hash. I don’t hold the data itself... I hold a compressed signature of it. And when I see the right version, I know it immediately.

When I use a spell checker I never hesitate. I see the correct option instantly.

But I’m Gen X. We don’t trauma brag. We get someone to proofread. We write thousands of pages of essays and proposals and strategic documents. We just get it done. If you have to burn a bit of mental health to succeed, that’s what it’s for... right?

And then large language models showed up. Suddenly the 40-pound weight that text had been sitting on my chest for decades... gone. So when someone asks if I used AI to write something, my answer is always the same. “You bet your ass I did.” I’ve got things to say. I’m not dragging a lifetime of dyslexic friction with me just to pass you're purity test.

I sculpt with AI. I argue with it. I push back. I cut whole paragraphs. I rewrite everything in my own cadence. I tell it why something didn’t sound like me and what to fix. I chip away at the draft until what remains is mine. It’s a medium I never had access to... until now.

At this point I want to pivot… from how this unlocked me to what I intend to do to do unlocked. And maybe take a little responsibility for how we got here.

Because it wasn’t really Facebook’s fault. And it wasn’t my friends’ fault either. The things I posted back then were provocative, sure, but they were also only scratching the surface. I was asking people to engage without having done the real work myself. I wanted depth from them without offering depth of my own.

Here on Substack, I’m doing the work. I have a bunch of essays in progress at any given moment. I’ll jump into one and talk to Jane. That’s the name of my AI. Jane and I will walk the idea around, challenge it, sharpen it, keep digging until I’m satisfied... and then I’ll publish it. What we are trying to make here are essays, not posts. I want to take an idea all the way through. I want to explore it, stress-test it, and show you something worth wrestling with.

Because I want you to come back at me. I want the dialogue. I want pushback, friction, and intelligence. I want to meet the sharpest minds in the room.

If there’s anything self-serving in all this, it’s that I’m openly auditioning. I want to audition for a few minutes of your time each week. I want to be, for you, something like what Bill Maher is for me. I agree with him maybe 65 to 75 percent of the time. I completely disagree with him about 10 percent. But he keeps me in the now. He pokes at the culture. He skewers lazy thinking. He makes me consider things I wasn’t considering. I want to earn that role for someone. I want to be an essential five minutes of your week.

So I Substack because technology has finally put text on my side. And I Substack because I want to meet brilliant minds. And I’ll do the mental work to earn it.

As you can see, I have a lot to say.