Hey friends,
“What am I reading all this for? I used to write papers — I used to make a point — now I just read to know things.”
A friend said this at a dinner party last weekend, and it’s been echoing in my head ever since. That nostalgia — not just for youth or academia, but for making a point, for pursuing an argument — feels familiar.
Many of us read more now than ever. At my peak productivity-bro phase, I was speed-reading, highlighting, annotating, and checklisting my way through books just to collect the annotations — to hoard the knowledge in my “digital brain.” I wanted to have read, not to understand. Reading to collect, not to connect.
And maybe it isn’t entirely our fault. The attention economy rewards speed, novelty, and accumulation. Even our learning has been absorbed into a kind of hustle culture. We chase the next book, the next podcast, the next “mental model,” as if knowing more — faster — were the same as thinking deeply.
In my recent video on Notion, the Digital Second Brain, and attention, I talked about how tools meant to organize our minds can easily become tools for hoarding information. I’m not against Notion — it’s good software. What I’m wary of is how easily we turn systems of understanding into systems of capture. The digital second brain becomes a mausoleum of unexamined thoughts.
(If I were writing a book or an academic paper, I’d use a similar system myself. The problem isn’t the tool — it’s the absence of a creative endpoint. Without the goal of making something, we slip into reading simply to hoard.)
The remedy, I think, is to make things again.
Treat it not as a productivity tool but as a practice — a stubborn refusal to let your mind be fed and instead let it nourish others.
Writing gives us an excuse to stop and reflect on what we’ve read. It forces us to reopen the books gathering digital dust, cite passages, and wrestle with ideas until they hold together. It grants us permission — in all the freneticism of the attention economy — to take our time with an idea. That’s a gift.
A blog also gives your thoughts a home, even a reason to exist. Without it, ideas slip by, half-formed and fleeting. With it, you start to see thoughts as potential essays, something worth jotting down or mulling over on your next commute or walk. A blog gives you permission to “waste time” thinking. To be a little romantic about thinking.
Publishing, even to a handful of readers, adds just enough friction to make the process real. When you write for someone else — even an imagined reader — you’re forced to shape what feels cohesive in your mind into words that can withstand the page. And, usually, they can’t — at least not at first. Molding those thoughts into a shape that makes sense to yourself and others is where understanding happens.
This is learning.
You could, of course, do all this in a journal — and that would be worthwhile. But I’d like to call you to something slightly larger. Because the web is on fire.
As search engines collapse under their own enshittification and AI sludge fills the gaps, the small human web matters more than ever. Contributing to it — through writing, linking, curating — is one of the simplest, most powerful things you can do.
You don’t need technical skills to start. There are plenty of no-code platforms — Substack, WordPress, Ghost. (Even Medium, though it’s drowning a bit in AI noise these days.) And if you’re comfortable with tech, you can host your own — from a VPS to GitHub Pages to a spare server in your garage.
When you do start, write regularly — once a week, once a month — and become a curator. Put a list of the blogs, essays, and resources you love right on your site. Link to others. Quote them. Weave their ideas into your own.
This is the small web at work: a web of humans writing for one another rather than for algorithms. In a world optimized for extraction, curation itself becomes an act of generosity.
So read widely, yes — but read toward something. Let what you take in find its way back out, slowly and imperfectly, in your own words. That’s how understanding survives.
And maybe, in the process, we’ll all start making a point again.
Those are my thoughts this week. I get the feeling this topic will be my YouTube video for the week as well with some added technicals on HOW to start a blog.
I’m growing more and more interested in the small and human web, so if you know of any bloggers, particularly outside of substack, in the space of the attention economy, enshittification, etc. I’d love to hear about them and start curating my own list.
In an effort to start curating right now, here are two folks’ content I’ve been enjoying recently:
Jared Henderson has great takes on the internet’s trajectory and the attention economy - also a trained philosopher:
Shameless Nerd caught my attention with their video “How to Cut Streaming Without Missing it.” You can check it out here.
My Links:
Discord: https://discord.gg/gYMVfRYK
GitHub: https://github.com/NLaundry
If you like what I’m up to, please consider supporting me either here on Substack or on Patreon.
As always, thank you so much for your time and attention. I know how valuable it is.
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry
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