Hello my dear readers! Look at that, another blog post! Can you believe it!? Perhaps it’s even more shocking that this’ll be a pretty short post compared to my usual standards!
Anyway, I hope your 2025 is off to a decent start and that many good things come your way this year. Of course the best of those things is the realisation that I might actually blog with some frequency this year!
I said in my last post that firstly, it’s incredible that I used to blog weekly! It was a habit and somewhere along the way that habit just stopped. It’s not even necessarily about the time, it’s about wanting to make the time and I just didn’t have that writing mojo behind me.
The other thing I said in my last post is that I was much less present online in 2024. It wasn’t just a WordPress thing but just generally, I didn’t really have much of an online presence anywhere on the same scale that I have in previous years. I’ve been perpetually online for the best part of 25 years but I just find this internet age loathsome.
This has been a lingering feeling of mine for a while and I’ve only recently discovered there’s somewhat of a conspiracy theory dedicated to it known as the “dead internet theory” which partially explains it. I’m not some conspiracy theorist but I’d argue in this case it’s not even a theory, it’s undeniable that the internet has lost that bit of magic about it. That human connection that much of the internet seems to lack now.
The counter-argument might be that I’m just becoming some grumpy, old man. That might be fair but my wings have spread across many a corner of the internet over the years and there’s just a real lack of authenticity and realness to this internet age.
I’ve met some incredible people online over the years but 99% of the internet now is just an advert, advert, bot, bot, spam, advert, actual human spewing hate, bot, bot, advert. Occasionally an actual human being filters through and it’s usually only communication served in self-interest.
“Sign up to my pyramid scheme.”
“I love your blog so much, your painfully average photos are so amazing! Can you subscribe to mine and we’ll never speak again?”
Where are the real people in this internet era? Is it a decreasing minority? I think the greatest thing about the internet is the ability to connect with someone anywhere in the world and it’s something that with more internet users than ever, has somehow become a bigger struggle to find.
Maybe I am just getting old and grumpy but I seem to spend half my time online not even looking at content I want to be looking at before giving up and doing something better with my time. Ultimately it is what it is and I don’t see that changing with the rise of AI and that’s even transcending into blog-writing and content-creating but for me, there’s no substitution for that genuine human connection.
That’s partially a topic for a blog-post on another day but I think somewhere along the way it has been lost that what makes the internet an incredible place is people and what AI will never be able to substitute is that people are imperfect.
Anyway.. this was just kind of a long-winded way of saying that my hopeful solution to my current disdain for the internet is that maybe WordPress is where I should be spending more of my time online.
I was feeling this way already and I’d actually written a large chunk of this post beforehand but the response to my previous blog-post kind of reaffirmed that there is a community here on WordPress and it’s one that I’ve missed. I have much less control on other platforms but here I can write what I like and filter out the spam or mundane interactions that don’t bring me any joy.
Time will tell but hopefully the best of the internet can still be found in this little corner of the web.
Thanks for following, until next time!
Jason
P.S – pictured is me and your modern day, faceless AI travel-blogger (Sydney, February 2013)
Jason likes to travel 