Every year, between Christmas and New Year’s, I write a series of posts reflecting on the previous year. To do this, I typically scan through my blog to jog my memory. What I found this year is that… I kind of abandoned my blog.

One reason I quit writing so many blog posts is because I ran out of things to say. When I started blogging — we’re going all the way back to the late 90s, early 00s here — anything and everything qualified as a blog post. Funny exchange at the McDonald’s drive-thru? Blog post! Saw a traffic accident? Blog post! As time went on, I decided that I wanted to have something to say in my posts. I didn’t want them to be dry recordings of events like some sort of court ledger; I wanted to tell stories and be creative and even when writing about, say, Thanksgiving, I wanted to write something that had a little deeper meaning. After a couple of decades, I ran out of interesting things to say. This year for Thanksgiving, everyone who was invited showed up, the food was delicious, we all had a great time, and everybody went home. The end.

Unfortunately and perhaps sadly, it’s often easier to share those things through social media. I saw a killer sunset last night. I took a great picture of it and literally had nothing to say about it and so I posted it on Facebook. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to drop pictures and those disposable events that happen at McDonald’s drive-thrus. It’s a great place to say something when you have nothing to say.

Over the past several years people have moved away from blogs — both writing them and reading them. Writing 1,000 words about a trip to the zoo or a particularly delicious slice of pizza is one thing; getting someone to read those words is a different challenge. There are many reasons for this. One is because of the amount of content available to us today. We have news apps that take all the news from all the other news sites and summarize them because there’s so much news. Believe it or not, finding interesting and free things to read on the internet was once a challenge. Today, if I click on a web article and it takes more than two seconds to load, I close it and move to the next one. There’s no value to any one article because there are millions more waiting in the chute. All of this stuff is being pushed down our throats, and unless I’m screaming about my blog a hundred times a day, it all gets lost. In a world where Beyonce has a blog, it’s tough to get people to read about why I like ice cream.

The shift in how and where content is consumed has been pretty obvious if you’re a writer. The future is here. I would say I can listen to any album imaginable with the touch of a button, but I no longer need to touch a button to do so. There are so many great podcasts available today that if I only listened to the first minute of each one, I still wouldn’t have enough time in a single day to hear them all. We live in a world where I can stream nearly any movie or television show imaginable to my phone while riding i the car. That’s tough for a blog to compete with. People want bite-sized chunks of entertainment. People don’t want to spend an hour reading; they want to watch celebrities getting interviewed while eating increasingly spicy hot wings.

Google recent articles about blogging and you’ll find two types. Half of them have doomsday, clickbait headlines like “Is Blogging Dead?” and “Why Are People Still Blogging?” The rest of the articles (the majority, in fact) are about how to monetize your blog — how to “brand your content” and how to write blog posts that lead to sales. The type of blogging I do isn’t even on the radar anymore. It’s not even considered quaint. It just seems old.

If this sounds increasingly sour or spicy (the post, not the hot wings), I don’t mean it to. There are changes I could make and things I could do differently that, if all of this were a business, I would do immediately. What do you do when nobody wants the stuff you like to make? They say you can either change with the times or get rolled over. I’m having a tough time choosing between the two options.

This morning, as I log into WordPress, I see a bunch of errors at the top of my screen. Some obscure plug-in has failed. Again. I’ve said this before, but the more I am required to work with computers, the less I enjoy working on them. There was a time when nothing sounded more fun than tearing apart a computer and adding some RAM or upgrading a video card, and today that sounds awful. I come here to write, not to troubleshoot plug-ins and do upgrades and check for security patches and all the other nonsense that comes with maintaining a website. Maybe it’s me this morning.

Where does that leave me in 2025? I’m not sure. I’m having a good time dabbling on YouTube and I will always write because I love words. This blog post was starting to sound like the end of something but maybe it’s the beginning of something else. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, here are the rolls we had for Thanksgiving. They were tasty.