The wild thing about being born in that small window between 1997 and 2001 is that I’ve asked, and been asked, on multiple occasions whether I more identify with Millennial or Gen Z. By most demographic analysis, I should be more in line with Gen Z. Despite that fact, I often don’t really feel as if I fit in there, even though most of the other people I’ve met do. I have my suspicions of why that is: the primary being my odd relationship with technology. Growing up, my parents were one of the few American families, or so it seemed, who insisted on not paying for cable television. I remember when we finally convinced our parents that it was important to get our own internet connection (we consensually leeched access off of our neighbour across a cul-de-sac): in my last year of middle school. Many of the things that hallmark Gen Z culture were things I was unable to have access to. And yet, we had computers in the house. Of course we did. My father had a desktop to do the family’s taxes (ahh, the memories of TurboTax disc cases strewn about), and my mother had a laptop to play solitaire and check email. And I shared an old tan box with my siblings where I remember storing powerpoints on 3.25″ floppy disks made in Windows 98. There was a single room in our house for most of my early childhood where it was even possible to access the internet, and so most of the computer time I got at that stage was at school or our local library.
On the Outside
This state of being around the internet but not on it has left me at a strange crossroads. I remember reading blogs, and seeing people’s personal websites, but never made it onto places like GeoCities. I knew what MySpace was, but wasn’t social enough to use Facebook for much other than the silly little pay-to-win games that defined early Facebook. Being diagnosed but overall untreated for both Autism and ADHD meant that I had trouble making friends in the real world, but my lack of reliable access meant that making a retreat into the digital space as so many of my contemporaries did wasn’t really an option until I was in high school. When I would venture into the more “public” spaces on the internet (what would now be exclusively social media platforms, but then could have been simple chat rooms), I was a perpetual lurker. In fact, I was so deathly afraid of making myself known at all that the thought of building connections never even really occurred to me. I’ve heard so many stories of people using the anonymity of the internet to be emboldened to be their true selves without fear of reproach or ridicule, and finding their spaces to thrive. “Well”, I thought, “If that’s what the internet does, then my truest self is a sad coward who doesn’t believe himself to be worth the 2kB of text data it takes to say ‘Hello’.” Even today, I struggle to have interactions with strangers online. I have a nagging feeling every time I try that tells me, “You don’t have anything valuable to contribute to any discussions. There are always people who’ve come before you that have said it all, and you’re wasting your breath.” I’m not sure if that’s just normal social anxiety or something else, but it’s probably the hardest thing I have had to deal with.
Incorporate or Die
Even the idea of writing a blog was somehow insurmountable, and that’s another quirk of the time I came online. Just a few short years before I would come of age on the internet, everything on it was pretty much created for, as a sports metaphor might put it, love of the game. In the early 2010’s, when “Draw My Life” videos were the trend of the week, I remember everyone I followed and looked up to at the time all basically saying the same thing; they had gotten into making their art for fun and never expected to be offered a career from it. Shortly after that, I started seeing more and more children and young adults attempting to use these platforms from the onset with the goal of making it big. From video one, these creators would be trying to coin their catchphrase, build a brand or, pretty obviously, just bite whoever was the current fad with the hopes of getting some of the spillover from a generation newly online and hungry for content. I also fell into this trap, trying to cash in on a gaming channel on YouTube that was obviously never going to go anywhere. News has gone this way too, and blogs and personal sites no longer feel like hobby projects; instead, everything is portfolios designed to attract sponsorship deals or job opportunities. There’s nothing really wrong with that per se; in the current social landscape, especially in the United States, most have no choice. Despite that, as I’ve watched the monoliths get built and people get fabulously wealthy off of regular folks who are scrounging at the bottom for even a dew-drop of a living, it’s caused a lot of disillusion for me as an individual. As a result, I’ve turned inwards and decided fuck it: I’m blogging.
Finding Inspiration
The piece of the puzzle I was lacking wasn’t missing. Maybe as you’ve been reading this you’ve been saying to yourself the solution as well already: “Write for yourself.” Of course, I know that. The best art is created by people who have something to say, and say it no matter what circumstances. I’m not entirely sure I could point to a single thing in my experience that has stopped me in my tracks, but I’ve never felt like I was in touch with myself enough to write. I would fret about the details: should I focus on a single field, how many words is worth posting, etc. Well, I’m tired of that. If you’ve found this blog and somehow made it this far in, congratulations and welcome! I’m so glad to have you here. If you stick around, I’m going to be doing my best to make this my own little corner of the internet, of which I have full control, and make it how I believe it should be. I want to feel like people who come here are here because they connect with the words they read. I want to have discussions about all sorts of things, and not feel like I’m being forced into a specific niche to optimize for an algorithm. This is my place to write my thoughts, and they may be redundant but they’re mine.
Finding Community
I don’t think this is the post to introduce myself, but I’m uploading this with a sister post that will include more about what to expect on this corner of the internet. Consider this post my mission statement, more than an introduction: a sort of way to say “I am here.” If you feel so inclined, I would love to build stronger relationships with others who have similar ideas and if you’ve got a blog, new or old, I’d love to read it! Other than this blog, the other best place to find me would be on Mastodon. Thank you for sticking around this long if you have, and have a great day!