For years now, people have been saying that blogging is dead, but now, in 2026, I think they might finally be right.

It's taken me a while to accept this. I didn't want it to be true. I did everything in my power to avoid making videos on social media, but now I have to accept that it's the only way to have an audience. It's the only way to get people to your website. It's the only way to make a living, or at least the only way for me to make a living. Someone who doesn't really have any skills outside of building websites and being terminally online.

One good thing for those of us who prefer writing to putting our face on camera is that Substack exists. Even though it's a newsletter, it's a lot like old-school blogging, and I like it for that reason.

The problem is I spend way too much time on it, trying to get it perfect, trying to find the right angle, thinking about what my audience might want to hear, what they won't like, whether they'll be critical, whether my writing has deteriorated over the years when I haven't been writing much, or whether I'm stuck writing in a commercial way rather than a storytelling way.

My audience over on Substack is also my old travel blogging audience, and I've pivoted to sustainability writing, which just feels off and unnatural. In between, I went from travel blogging to academic writing and now to sustainability writing, which is supposed to be approachable. It's not working for me right now. I think I just have to stop overthinking it and write whatever the hell I want.

That's what's got me resurrecting my old personal blog. I gave it a refresh, and now I feel like I can write whatever I want here. Any topic, no thinking about keywords, no specific storytelling, just a brain dump of whatever is on my mind. I'm actually really excited about the idea of writing anything and knowing that no one's going to read it. No followers, no audience. No one's finding me through Google, that's for sure.

Then there's social media. I've just started doing short-form videos, and boy, is that hard work. I do not want to hear about how content creation isn't a real job. It's time-consuming, and it's difficult to do well. It's difficult to find an audience. It's difficult to be natural in front of the camera. It's difficult to make something that stops people from scrolling, and it's especially difficult to monetise it.

But that's what I have to do now, because if I want to keep working online and have enough money to feed myself, I have to get back on social media. I have to be omnipresent (wtf). I have to make videos, and interesting ones, and I have to get in front of the camera. That's the reality of it.