I've had a love-hate relationship with social media since COVID. After years of being active on X, LinkedIn, and Substack, I've decided I no longer want to play the game.
The feeds have been optimized for growth and engagement. Most users are vying for attention and optimizing for reach. When I'm active on social media and opening the apps daily, I become the worst version of myself. My attention becomes fragmented and I'm pulled in a dozen directions throughout the day. That's not how I want to live.
And here's the strange part: I have been winning at this game. I've amassed 100,000 followers across X and LinkedIn. But once posting became performative, it stopped being fun, and the community I loved withered as the algorithm rewarded the loudest players. The scoreboard said one thing, but I no longer felt like I was winning.
In this season, my work is shifting from transactional to relational, and publishing my daily thoughts into a reach-maximizing machine would put me at war with this philosophy. I don't want to stop publishing or lose connection with my readers, but I'm ready to leave the old game behind.
Substack is a different story. Where the Road Bends (WTRB) has been an outlet for creative expression and inner exploration for nearly four years, and I've poured hundreds of hours into essays that take weeks to craft alongside my editor. But my life is fuller than it's ever been, and when every creative seed has to clear that high a bar, most thoughts never get written at all.
So the Buddhist in me is taking a middle path: a public notebook. Short, rough notes published a few times a week. A return to when the internet felt like a small neighborhood. I'm not using an editor, following a long process, or applying a filter.
The raw material for these notes is simply my life right now: a new venture I'll announce in the fall, my coaching practice, my family, my health, and my spiritual practice. I'll share what I'm noticing, questions I'm living, learnings from my practice, and experiments that produce results and ones that don't.
Some posts will be half-formed and a few will be flat-out wrong. Some will be a few sentences, some will have just images, and others will be hundreds of words. That's the format. Field Notes is an experiment I'm running in public that will no doubt change over time.
I'm writing these as much for my future self and my kids as for you: a record of what I was learning, what I paid attention to, and what mattered, rather than what I thought would perform. I'll continue to publish on WTRB, just less often, maybe a handful a year. Some of these notes may even grow into longer essays, but most won't, and that's the point.
Why am I calling it Field Notes? Partly because that's what these are: notes from the field, written where my work and exploration is happening. But there's a more exciting reason, which I'll share after the summer. Stay tuned.
If you want to follow along, feel free to subscribe. This is my own tiny corner of the internet, and I plan to keep it that way. I'm glad to be here with you.