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Searls of Wisdom for March 2026

I've decided to go on a content hiatus. This will be my last dispatch for a while. I don't know how long I'll be gone.

Why? Because I've been posting to an anonymous audience on the Internet almost every day since I was eleven years old. I posted through Bill Clinton's impeachment, 9/11, the Iraq War, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the version of Siri that would tell you where to hide a body, binders full of women, and a pandemic that changed everything and then nothing at all.

Very few of my friends live like I do. They aren't pundits. They don't post takes. They lead normal-looking lives, maintain healthy-seeming relationships, and have better hair than I do. These people are a mystery to me. Where do their excess opinions go? What do they do with all their creative ideas? Do any of them actually rinse and repeat, and does it even make a difference? How do they beat back the encroaching loneliness of existence?

You probably already know the answers to the above questions, because odds are you're among the vast majority of people who don't post.

Unfortunately for the present author, my adolescence was inextricably tangled up in the hunt for page views. I grew up mistaking attention for validation and validation for meaningful human connection. This did my adult psyche no favors. Like a bad Speed spinoff, it's as if a crude bomb was wired to a Geocities hit counter and planted deep inside my brain—rigged to explode if I should ever fall below 3 shitposts per week. I have no way to know if it's safe to log off until I give up and stop posting.

On a less dramatic note, the idea of "being just a little bit more chill" strikes the exasperated attention whore in me as exotic and titillating. Who knows, maybe this change will make room for a new hobby, like pickleball or methamphetamines.

I'm already starting to see the appeal. I've managed to avoid firing off so much as a pithy one-liner since my most recent episode of Breaking Change on March 20th. I'm honestly loving it so far: actually listening to people when they talk, making substantive progress on my higher-priority projects, and sitting silently with my thoughts instead of workshopping them all into tweets.

Normally, this is the part of the newsletter where I'd list off bullet points to highlight everything I created in the last month, but now that I've entered my post-content era, I simply cannot be fussed. You're smart, you can figure out how to visit a website and scroll down.

This is me pivoting. I'm no longer optimizing for "reach," but rather "happiness." I've been speed-running life in pursuit of financial independence and overall self-reliance, but… for what? So I could waste hours every other week editing a podcast? At some point or another, I should probably make good on all the things I promised myself back when I was mortgaging my health and hairline on the life of freedom I now enjoy.

We only have so many days in this world, which is why I routinely pause and ponder, "what does my perfect day look like?" Fortunately, I'm already doing a lot of the things I love doing. But when I close my eyes and imagine my ideal morning, noon, and night, I don't see myself manically tweaking a blog post or slavishly editing a video.

I mean, look at me. These are not the crow's feet of a man who has endless time to fuck around with that shit:

Signing off for now. If you ever miss me, you can always drop a line.

– Justin