everyone should start a blog (yes, including you)
why sharing your thoughts online is a secret life-expanding technology
Ever since starting mine, I’ve become that obnoxious friend who says everyone should start a Substack.
Partly, it’s selfish: I want to see more of the inner worlds of the people I love. I want to read the way you think. I want your digressions and your particular way of describing a certain kind of afternoon light.
But it’s also because starting this Substack has changed me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until it happened. It’s been one of the most unexpectedly beautiful experiences of the year, one that’s felt both existentially transformative and emotionally intimate. Below I try to articulate this shift and make my case for why you might consider starting your own. I note this is all happening while I’m far from being a ‘known’ Substacker, with my humble, wonderful 60 subscribers.
1. Writing has made me feel seen in a way I didn’t know I craved
I don’t think I’ve ever felt this deeply seen before by already close friends, but also by interesting strangers on the internet. There’s an intimacy to it: people reading your work and gifting it their attention, resonance and time.
When I first launched this blog, I hoped for this not so subtly. In my first post, I quoted one of my favourite Substackers, Henrik Karlsson, who described a blog as “an extremely long search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting things to your inbox” (read this if you need more convincing to start a blog), a a signal flung into the void, hoping to summon kindred minds. This is already happening for me, slowly, and it’s magical.
It reminds me of when my artist friend V had a documentary screening, and afterward we all flooded her with specific, thoughtful, warm responses about the film and also about her. Or when she opened an exhibit and we all came, lingered, took it in slowly, and shared what it made us feel.
I remember thinking, I want to create things that allow for that kind of seeing. I’ve felt seen before in life, but never quite like this. This feels like my interior, the pace and pulse of how I think, is being noticed, which makes me feel profoundly loved. I feel myself expanding in the presence of being witnessed. The love begets more love, which is energetic, restorative and magical. It makes me feel larger than life, alive with boundless energy.
Even my parents subscribed and like my posts sometimes (hello mum and dad!). Unexpectedly, this has created a new kind of closeness between us. They’ve told me they love having this deeper insight into my inner world. The blogpost becomes both catalyst and context, a doorway into more intimate conversations we’d never had before.
Last week, I read one of my essays aloud at the Petersham Bowling Club open mic night with J. The average age in the audience was around 75. Afterward, a few people came up to share how they received my words. I nearly cried. Art makes that kind of communion possible, and writing, this small and inconsistent practice, is my way in.
2. It’s deepening old friendships, and attracting new ones
Writing helps me reconnect with old friends and draw in new, wildly aligned people. It’s been a soft but steady beacon for serendipity.
One of my friends, E, is moving to San Francisco, and I found myself gently urging her to start a Substack too as a way to stay close (E, please do!). This blog has helped me stay in touch with long-distance friends, and even people I once knew vaguely have become more emotionally present in my life through reading these posts.
It’s restarted conversations with people I hadn’t spoken to in years. It’s expanded the surface area of luck, magic, and human connection in my life tenfold.
I think what we often lack when it comes to maintaining friendships is context or a reason to reach out. Sometimes a name just doesn’t float to the top of your mind in the busy hum of life. But a newsletter or post, even a small one, brings you back into someone’s field of awareness. It’s like an AI prompt for your social graph: remember me? I’m still here, thinking about things.
3. Sharing makes you more discoverable to the right people
As I’ve become more legible to myself through writing, I’ve also become more legible to the world. And as that legibility increases, the universe seems to guide me toward the people and places I’m meant to find.
Sometimes the discovery feels designed, I’ve tried sharing on Twitter, my personal instagram, through the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and through small marketing experiments (my boldest so far: open mic night at the Petersham Bowling Club).
But often it’s serendipitous and unpredictable. Sharing online is like pulling the lever on a serendipity slot machine. Once you shout something into the void, it takes on a life of its own. You have no idea whose inbox it might land in - a new collaborator? A mentor? A lover?
Because I’m expressing something that feels deeply authentic, the people who find it often feel aligned in values, frequency, creative energy. It’s an insane life hack: people who were once lost to the noise can now find you, because you’ve made yourself findable. It feels like co-creation, like life is collaborating with me.
4. Writing regularly is rewiring my brain
Another shift is less visible externally, but through the act of writing itself, regardless of how my words are received, my mind is changing.
I remember sitting in Sappho Books with my friend M, telling her I wanted to start a blog to connect the floating fragments of thought in my head- to make meaning out of them, to figure out what I actually believe. She told me starting her Substack had changed how she thinks, and now I feel it too.
Since writing more regularly, I’ve noticed a shift in how I process, absorb, and orient to the world. Everything now seems to carry a hum of potential meaning. I observe more and connect dots faster. I’ve started noticing more of the invisible beams of experience that hold it all up.
Writing has trained my brain to tag moments as significant. A passing comment could now becomes a metaphor, a walk becomes a meditation and a bus ride could be a small essay on transience. The cynical take is that everything becomes ‘content’, ready to be transformed for performance, rather than simply appreciated, but it feels more like I’m learning how to actually see.
I get the same feeling when sharing random photos of moments I found beautiful on Instagram stories, a shadow on a table, the texture of a windowpane. My photographer friend A is especially good at this. Her stories feel like a rotating gallery. She’s taught me, just by doing, how enchanted the world can become when you’re paying attention. This helps me notice more and differently. It’s a way of living as if everything could be art.
5. This is backed by neuroscience (because of course I googled it)
I figured this shfit in cognitive processing couldn’t just be vibes (though vibes are real), so I looked it up. Apparently here’s what’s happening under the hood:
Neuroplasticity & Attention: Writing strengthens neural pathways related to memory and attention. You begin scanning your life for metaphor, story, insight. Attention becomes active, even hungry.
Working Memory & Meaning-Making: Writing offloads thoughts onto the page, which frees up cognitive bandwidth. You think more clearly and connect more abstract ideas, because writing is a thinking tool.
Encoding & Retrieval: You begin to encode and retrieve information more meaningfully. Your brain starts tagging more of life as ‘potentially important’, so you may become a pattern-seeking creature in the best way.
6. Writers have always known this
Science is just catching up to something writers have long intuited:
Joan Didion: “I don’t know what I think until I write it down. - Writing actively generates thought.
Susan Sontag: “A writer is someone who pays attention to the world.”- Writing infuses attention with gravity.
Virginia Woolf, in her diaries, described writing as tuning her “inner ear”, a deeper listening to life.
Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote obsessively about how writing altered what he noticed. The act of describing life made it more intentional.
7. Writing makes you more alive
Lately, I feel like I’m living in the realm of mundus imaginalis (a fun concept I learned last week), which refers to the imaginal world, where meaning is neither wholly objective nor purely subjective, but something in between. It’s a world made luminous by perception, choice, and language.
Writing creates a feedback loop between attention and meaning. You start living as if your life is worth writing about, which is another way of saying: you start living more fully.
So that’s my short case for why you should consider starting your own blog. I would love to live in a world where everyone had a Substack, not to go viral or for personal branding, but to practice noticing and trace the outline of your outline. A blog can be a place to build a small, tender space where you can witness yourself witnessing.
Maybe you’ll write your way into clearer thought, sharper perception, and maybe even a little magic. Please share your first post with me!
(Note: I promise this is not a sponsored ad for Substack)
I feel this! Multiple times a day I read something or have an idea, and I think "I should write a blog post about this!" Being a writer gives new significance to things, and it makes it more exciting to be a collector of ideas.
Aw, love how I’m anonymised in the text but not in the photo headline GAHHAHA