A few of you have written lately wondering why Field Notes doesn't have comments. It's a fair question. Comments are baked into nearly every corner of the web, especially on blogs and social media.
I shared in When Nobody's Watching that I designed this site to have no likes, reposts, or comments. This was driven, in part, by not wanting a scoreboard that would fuel self-validation loops and status games.
A former client asked whether sharing his reactions would just feed the validation cycle I'm trying to escape. A long-time reader wondered if I was shutting myself off to other perspectives, and another asked why I don't at least turn on private comments.
I gave a half-baked answer last week: when there's a scoreboard, I have a strong pattern of performing and playing to win the game. But there's another reason I turned commenting off. Somewhere in the past five years, starting in the depths of COVID, comments stopped being about conversation and genuine connection.
On the big platforms, like X and LinkedIn, commenting has become a growth tactic. People and AI bots drop comments to farm attention and build their own reach, not necessarily to engage with the author. The comment section has become transactional, and I can feel it when scrolling through the feeds.
So instead of a comment box, I’m choosing to encourage correspondence by email.
Correspondence is relational and intimate. When you reply to one of these notes, it lands in my inbox. It’s just you and me, and every exchange is a seed for a relationship to grow.
Private comments didn’t feel right either. They’d require you to create an account, and they don’t land where I actually read and reply.
I'm already seeing the difference. The emails I've received range from a few sentences to long letters about where people are in their lives. They're sharing what resonated, what they're working through, what they've been avoiding, and what they want more of. One exchange is even turning into an afternoon hike upstate in August.
That’s all to say: I want to hear from you. Tell me what landed, what you’d push back on, or what it opened up in you. A sentence or two is plenty. Hit reply to any note, or use the button at the bottom of every post, and I’ll write back.