This blog is 14 years old this month, and I know this because the bill is due. Every year in August, I have to pay to keep davideverettfisher.com as the name and to host it. Every year I have an existential dilemma of whether I want to keep this up or not.
Most of the time it’s just the lack of engagement, and not that I write to get engagement, but sometimes when I am yelling into the abyss and don’t even hear an echo, it becomes hard to believe that I am putting anything good out there. I started a Substack newsletter to increase engagement, and I do get more engagement there, but I’m not sure what I’m doing with this site.
This year, though, has been the biggest drop in readership ever. While I have grown my audience by leaps and bounds, the number of people that actually read to the bottom of the blog is just dismal. We are talking 4 on a really good day. This doesn’t count my Substack about my cancer coming back, which blew up to multiple hundreds of readers, but none of my more creative endeavors garnered much.
I don’t really want to be the guy writing about the lack of readers, or people don’t read anymore, or people’s attention is shot, or any number of other reasons people aren’t wanting to read what I have to say.
When I am facing a problem, the first thing I do is look at what I can change. I can’t make people read or want to read. If I could, I would, because I think reading is one of the most important things a person can do for their intellect, wisdom, mental health, and to keep curiosity alive. What can I do? I can change my content. There may be something else people want to read instead. I know what might work, but it isn’t what I want to write, and I’d rather die than make art for consumption instead of to create.
So that is the rub. Every year I even ask what people would like to hear more of or what they think I can do, and no one says anything, and when I do get comments, I get a couple of nice ones, and then I get hundreds that I delete that tell me that I suck and I should kill myself. Sorry, anonymous guy, not gonna kill myself today.
My most popular blogs are the cancer ones where my life sucks, the time I was almost a school shooter, again, a time when my life sucks, and then my sobriety horoscopes, which I am proud of. Most everything else doesn’t get much traffic. I’ll see random blogs from a long time ago that somehow got on someone’s Google search and wonder what that strange person thought, but sometimes they tell me by telling me I suck and I should kill myself. I had a few tell me I’m going to burn in hell, but I don’t get any ‘you rule, and you should keep living’, or ‘you should go to heaven’.
Art is weird. While I don’t do it for other people, I have to put it out somewhere since it seems weird to write something that has a message and then erase it. I can’t imagine painting something and just never showing it to anyone. Putting all this effort into a project that scratches an itch and not having it be appreciated.
Making things is hard. Most people don’t do it; instead, they critique it. Some of us have this itch that can only be scratched when we create things. Then we have to find the time, since most of our time is “earning” a living and supporting that, and then we have other responsibilities like family. Then there is getting the rest to make sure we can have energy to pick up the pen or brush, and then there is getting over our fears of making something dumb and finishing it. I know I have trashed thousands of things because I hated it. I try and not let Fear get in my way, but I am in bondage with Fear.
Then we post the blog, hang the picture, play the song, and we wonder if anyone likes it. Friends and family will say nice things, but the stranger who compliments is heroin. Most people won’t say anything, and then there are a few that really think it’s cool to criticize. Thank you, I will keep that in mind, but no, I won’t kill myself.
On top of people not reading and hate comments, we have the wonderful world of AI. I originally thought that AI wasn’t really anything to be taken seriously because it was really cheesy and not very good. While it is still cheesy and not very good, the bad news is that people are just gravitating to it. They use it to write emails, make party posters, or to replace books, libraries, and even the search engine. I know that I hate social media, but without it, no one will know about the blog they aren’t going to read. Still, AI is pure evil; it’s an economic bubble that will burst and cause catastrophic damage to the economy. Environmentally, it is a huge step backward, like we once changed laws on straws. Still, we won’t change laws on conserving the energy the data centers suck, the drinking water it destroys, and the heat that is put into the atmosphere; it is ludicrous, and people shrug their shoulders and have Copilot or ChatGPT write a letter.
Is it mortality that makes people so short-sighted? Or even worse, is it that they believe that they are immortal after they die, so they treat here like shit? Whatever it is, people won’t think very far outside themselves until it is too late, and even then, they won’t admit their shortcomings.
And the kids are using it in school so that our future generations will just be fucking idiots and unable to think or comprehend anything complex critically. This isn’t like calculators where math teachers were concerned that we wouldn’t get it if we used calculators; this is the fundamental ability to absorb information and not only grasp it, but understand it. We already have enough trouble with people believing false information based on their preconceived ideas; we don’t need people having less ability to parse information.
What scares me is that people will just read AI instead of writers. I don’t care if the writer you read isn’t me; just read human writers who work hard at the craft. Someone wrote an article about how most of what is happening with AI was foretold by science fiction writers for the last 100 years, except the part where it replaces them, the writers. Part of it is why would people get rid of such a perfect way to learn, escape, and participate with the subject? Sadly, people are always looking for a shortcut, even at the detriment of their communities or even themselves.
I didn’t mean for this blog to go off on AI, but at the end of the day, when I get my invoice for my blog, I have to think about the future. I don’t charge money for any of my content. Even my Substack is mostly free. But if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, but the tree has to pay to make the noise, is it wise to keep paying money?
People will say, I need to put myself out there more, put up short videos of being goofy. Gotta make content that goes viral and gets people’s attention. And they’re probably right, but what if I want to make the art I want to make, and I don’t have the energy, the temperament to be making reels and TikToks. I’m not making slop.
Anyway, I will think about the blog, and maybe I’ll keep it and keep writing shit that I hope sticks and get bummed when it doesn’t. I will create things that I think are cool,l and if someone else does, cool, but if no one does, that is fine. I know this isn’t trendy or viral. I am about to turn 50, so I am an out-of-touch old guy anyway, yelling at the clouds that no one wants to read and trying not to take any of the anonymous commenters that tell me to kill myself seriously.