That’s how one reader described what you’ll find here.
Another said it gave them “an excuse for feeling depressed.”
Third: “Obnoxiously on point.”
A lost feeling
I created this space for people who miss meaning without the “next step” pitch.
The ones who remember the feeling of discovery and stumbling through the old internet, when blogs wandered and people wrote simply because they couldn’t help themselves.
Who enjoy places like bookstores, browsing unhurriedly, not looking for anything in particular, yet savoring the pleasure of finding something unexpected.
If that’s you, then hello there, I’m Stephanie.
And I miss that feeling.
Our deepest tension: signal versus self
We spend our entire lives absorbing signals.
From the internet, from culture, from the world around us, from the people who raised us. And somewhere in the middle of all that, there’s us — the self — trying to make sense of it all. Trying to figure out which parts to hold onto, which to let go of.
That’s the big ol’ nut signal versus self keeps trying to crack (and progress so far has been… mixed).
Sometimes that means an essay about productivity (but not), identity death, insomnia & mortality, fitness transformations, or a man just trying to iron his pants. The subject changes, but the hidden thread beneath remains remarkably consistent:
What did the world teach us to want, and what is still ours underneath?
There are no step-by-step solutions here, no takeaways nor frameworks.
There may be more questions than answers.
If you’re fine with that, consider this a kind of homecoming.
For the people who still wander
signal versus self lives in two places: here and on YouTube.
They’re where I ask stubborn, often weird questions — in whatever length and format the ideas demand. Some ideas become essays, others become videos. But every one of them unfolds how it needs to — often slow, sometimes maniacal, but always intentional — and it takes as long as it takes.
Think of it as permission to follow a train of thought longer than necessary. To get pleasantly lost every now and then and trust that something interesting might just be waiting around the bend.
My work tends to behave this way because I’ve been publishing online since 2001, and I’ve already spent enough time letting platform algorithms shrink the shape of my thinking or decide what counts as valuable. (This fantastically unhinged essay explains it best.)
If you found me through YouTube, subscribing to this newsletter is the best place to stay connected to my work. If you found me some other way, dope.
Glad the internet still works sometimes.
