Tuesday night it hit 14 degrees, which is not unheard of here, but is also not what most days are like, thank God. I didn’t have any meetings planned until lunchtime, so I decided this would be an excellent day in which to sleep in.
When I rolled out of bed at 10 minutes to 7 (I am, my wife tells me, bad at sleeping in, but to be fair, that is almost an hour and a half later than I normally get up) I padded into the kitchen and started the coffee. I noticed the sunshine coming in the kitchen window, the hoarfrost on the grass in the backyard, the cats under my feet. I feel peace and calm.
Then I realize I had left my phone in the bedroom.
As soon as I picked up my phone and scrolled though the social media feeds, I find myself getting angry about things the current President is doing. I find myself reading articles - almost all opinion pieces – about how bad it is. I feel the urge to respond, to chime in “me too!
Then it hits me – I’m doing it again. It’s me. The problem is me.
I do not have to live this way. I had a “before the phone” experience and an “after the phone” experience that morning, and trust me, the before experience was better.
The problem isn’t my phone – it’s a tool, like the hammer someone uses to hit a mugging victim is not the problem. The hammer is agnostic, and so is the phone. In both cases, the user is at fault.
I’m not so willing to give the platforms a similar break, though. Unlike the hammer, or the phone, they are operating exactly as their creator intended: manufacturing stimulation, generating outrage, pulling me deeper and deeper into engagement. If it’s designed to be addictive, and you are addicted, it’s hard to blame the addict for falling into a trap someone set for you.
The only way to avoid the trap is to stay out of the woods.
I’m not giving up my phone – given my work and the environment I live in, that’s untenable. But, I can change how I interact with it.
I deleted social media apps from my phone.
I still have Instagram on my phone, but I don’t get “lost” on Instagram the way I do on other apps. If it becomes a problem, it will have to go too, but I like taking occasional “in the moment” pictures and sharing them, and seeing yours.
My desire to stay informed is at odds with my desire to remain sane.
Unlike a lot of folks, apparently, I don’t doom scroll in the evenings. Instead, for me, it’s morning that is the problem. I’ve used my morning cup of coffee to scroll social media to see what has happened while I was asleep. But honestly, that’s a very innefficent use of time, and algorhythims are not a great filter for deciding what I should be reading.
I need three kinds of news: Global, national, and local. Of the three, arguably, the local has the most impact on my day to day life. The crime wave in my neighborhood or the selection of a garbage collection contractor has far greater impact on my daily quality of life than does the potential tarrif on goods made in Mexico.
I changed my news stack
Starting local, and moving outwards:
We subscribe to our local paper – the Clarion Ledger. It’s not a great paper – like many legacy media, it’s been gutted, but it’s at least as deep as what I would glean from social media, and it doesn’t have an algorithm. I read the weekend edition local coverage to get an overview of what’s rising to the surface.
I also read Mississippi Today, our state’s nonprofit news organization. (Find your local nonprofit newsroom here, and then donate money to them). They are the best at telling me what’s happening at the state level. Again, state level news is far more important than national in terms of my daily life. A 10% sales tax on groceries impacts my life much more than whatever happens to the national income tax, and is far more in my control to influence as well. They have an app, so I can read it in an algorithm-free environment as well.
This week, I added a subscription to The Guardian’s weekly news magazine to the mix, and installed the Guardian’s app to my phone. They are a UK based news org, and so, in an age where US media is in a flurry to bend the knee to this current administration, having a trustworthy outside perspective is valuable. This gives me both (US) national and international coverage, is well written, and I like paper-based media – the act of sitting down with a cup of coffee to “read the news”.
It’s worth noting that all of these sources cost me money. But paying to actually read news means I take it seriously, and if you are not paying for a product, you ARE the product.
I still have social media accounts, but I have to be at my desk to use them – I can’t doomscroll while sitting on my couch, watching a movie, or at the table while eating Cheerios, or, God help me, at a stoplight. No, just like we did in 1995, I have to go into a separate room in my house and turn on a machine to see that part of the Internet.
I’ll report back next month on how it’s working for me.
It’s getting cold as hell tonight, and so for supper I made my platonic ideal of chili, which means it tasted like the chili my mom made when I was young. We served it with Fritos, as God intended, and with good sharp cheddar and sour cream.
There is a lot I do not like about the world right now, but on a day where many bad things happened, I managed to make good food and feed my family, and that is not nothing.
There is a lot that will need to be done over the next four years. I have zero guilt about taking time to rest from it today.
I’m preaching tonight at Safe Harbor Church in Clinton, MS - a church with a large LGBT contingent in their congregation.
Tomorrow is the inauguration, and many of us, not just those in that community, are nervous.
God of love, God of hope
God of our understanding and longing
On the eve of the inauguration,
We are gathered tonight in this place to seek your will
And to learn how to try to do it.
We recognize that our desire to follow your will does not mean we always do
But we trust that our desire to please you does, in fact, please you.
It is a rough time right now, and many of us are fearful.
We do not always know where we are going, or what the future holds.
Our future is uncertain, shadowy, unknowable.
But we trust you, and seek the comfort of your presence.
We know you will not leave us, or forsake us,
And in the presence of our enemies, you prepare a feast.
Protect us, oh Lord. Watch over us
As we labor, and as we rest.
Give us strength to resist, hope to sustain others,
And make of us a testimony to your glory.
Some days the words just show up. You are practically vibrating as you sit down at the keyboard, coffee cup in hand. As your hands fly across the keyboard, your coffee grows cold, forgotten, as the words crawl across the page. Often when this happens, you have been carrying these words around with you in your head, playing with them as you put them first this way, and then another. Like pieces in a tile puzzle, you decide how they should go, how you make the picture printed on the tiles make sense.
By the time the words are on the page, they are old friends that have played in dozens of ways, having begun as thoughts you wrestled with, played with, gotten to know. Writing in those cases is merely transcribing. When I have days like that, writing is sheer joy.
It is a truism that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a week, and underestimate what we can account in a year.
I think we also discount what we have already done. I can, at any given time, feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing over the last year, despite that obviously not being true.
So I have recently begun the practice of what are called in tech circles, weeknotes. They take various forms, depending on who is doing them, but at a minimum, they are notes about your week. (Duh, as we said when we were kids).
What it looks like for me is an Evernote window I keep open all week, where I jot things I want to remember that happened that week - business, personal - it all goes into the same document. All week it looks like a long list of bullets.
Then Saturday, I clean it up, maybe drag in some photos, and save it, and open another one for next week.
If i just did this, it would be valuable. Like a low-key, low commitment diary.
But because I believe in the value of working in public, I pull out the items fit for public consumption and that I think my readers would be interested in, and share them on my website. They go out every Sunday morning.
I find them to be a pretty useful record of changes I made (When did I change domain providers? Where is hughlh.com hosted?) or vacations I took (what hotel did we stay in when we went to DC?) or even as a way of learning how long it’s been since I went home and saw my mother (the answer is always, according to her, “too long”).
Because people often have logistics questions: In Evernote, I have a notebook stack called Logbooks, then an individual Notebook called 2025 and each week is a note, titled by the date of the last day of the week. For example, this week’s note is 25-1-18. I use this title format so it sorts automatically in numerical order in the notebook.
My wife loves the videos on YouTube by Emmymade. They are a bit hard to describe, but a recurring routine is that Emmy will do taste-reacts, where she eats a food - usually something out of the ordinary, like Hard Boiled Egg Chocolate Pudding. She likes lots of these things, and says so. But she goes to long lengths to not say she hates something. A sure sign she was unimpressed is she will say, “That’s not my favorite.”
In a similar vein, I hate to talk bad about a book I did not enjoy. Not all books are for everyone, and some books are just not written with me in mind. That isn’t the author’s fault, and it doesn’t mean it isn’t the ideal book for someone else. So, when I just cannot finish a book, or when I sometimes finish when I should have quit, my default descriptor is, “That just wasn’t for me.”
In a first meeting with someone yesterday, I mentioned that I was a sixth-generation Mississippian.
That lead to questions.
I briefly told how Jonathan Hollowell and his family had moved from Wayne County, NC to Marshall County, MS in the 1820’s, to take up land left when the Chickasaw were forced to move to Oklahoma.
Her: It’s remarkable you know all that. Was that passed down in your family?
Me: No - I had to research it.
Her: It was important to you that you knew?
Me: Vital. It makes it easier to be here - in Mississippi, with all it’s issues - now, if I know how I got here.
In light of waves hands everything going on, some folks are considering deleting their Meta accounts.
I’m not ther eyet, but that is largely becaise of the 19 years and 11 months of work I have put into that site. There is writing of mine on there that exists nowhere else int he world, there are pictures I posted there that don’t exist elsewhere, and messages on there with people who have died.
The good news is you can export all of that. Facebook makes it surprisingly easy.
Granted, it’s wintertime in Mississippi, which means it might be 75 degrees and 90% humidity, or it might be 17 degrees. Every day is an adventure!
But it’s winter, and the days are short, and the nights are long. For my European ancestors, it would have been a total game changer. Food could run out, you might freeze. But here in Central MS in 2025, it’s just inconvenient.
But my body knows, somehow. Knows that this is a time for slowing down. Knows this is a time to stockpile calories. Knows this is a time to rest, to crave sleep more.
I’m going to try to live more seasonally in 2025. I don’t really know what that means, exactly. But it’s obvious to me that there is something baked into my genes that wants to act differently in the spring than it does in the summer, that treats winter different than fall.
I think I want to explore what that would look like this year.
Last night, our neighborhood did one of its annual traditions - the burning of Christmas trees on New Year’s day.
It was a magnificent affair, as it always is. Flames that leapt 20 feet in the air. The passing of the trophy for the Fantasy Football league winner. The naming of those who died last year, those who have had job transitions, welcoming of the new neighbors. After the trees had all been cremated, we moseyed inside, where there was hot chocolate and champagne and chili and finger food.
We met new neighbors, deepened ties with folks I have only waved at on my walks, and caught up with folks I have been missing. And then we walked home in the crisp night, just five houses up the street, while talking about how much we love our neighborhood, and our city, and how grateful we are to live here.
I knew a guy once who seldom drank, but when he did, it was single malt scotch. His motto was, “Drink less, drink better.”
Going into the new year, that is my guiding phrase: Less, but better.
Fewer, better projects. Fewer, but better, articles published. Fewer, but better, income streams.
Less, but better, work.
On this first day of 2025, here is what I’m thinking about: What do I want to do more of? What do I want to do less of? How do I want to show up in the world? What are things that, if I did them, I would be glad that I did?
Here is an incomplete list of intentions I have for 2025 (That’s the first time I’ve typed that - how wild is it that we are a quarter of the way through this century?)
I want more of my life to revolve around writing and publishing.
I will shift most of my writing away from social media and toward my blog, newsletter, and membership site.
I will prioritize generating income this year - preferably via my membership team and direct sales of products I create, such as books.
My writing currently generates the income of a good part-time job. This is in-spite of, not because of, my business missteps. This year I will treat my writing like a business.
Last year we had our first real vacation in 16 years. I intend to make doing that a priority again this year.
I’m going to bring my full self into spaces - less codeswitching, less posing, less specialization. Expect this space to have content about wildlife, writing, meals, the US South, cats, being an independent businessperson, social justice, depression and neurodiversity, and more. Oh yeah, and probably even more cats than you previously thought.
I’ve never been very good at resting - I want to learn how. Less, but better, work.
I spent the morning redirecting my domains and so on with micro.blog. I guess I am doing this thing.
I’ve spent some time working on my site notes page, in an effort to describe what I’m trying to do here. The TLDR of it all is I want to like blogging as much as I did back in 2004. Simplify, simplify.
I have been complaining about social media for at least 7 years, maybe more. I don’t like the way it captures my attention, the way it sucks me in, the way it kills my mood and makes me distrustful of people.
Yesterday I saw a positive post about a thing currently in the zeitgeist, and whose viewpoint I agreed with. My response was not to share it or comment on it, but instead I went to the comments because I wanted to see what the horrible people would say about it. I was looking to be outraged, to find people to whom I felt myself to be morally superior.
I do not like this version of myself. I don’t like me on social media.
I like Facebook (for example) best as a place to put thoughts like the 3 paragraphs above. It’s important to me that people read these thoughts - I get no value from putting them in a private journal. I have been blogging since 2003 - I am used to writing in public. I like the accountability that comes from being a public person.
But I do not like the spambots and the trolls, the debt I feel when I get lots of comments, or god almighty, the notifications. And it pisses me off that people who I find deplorable and whose worldview I do not share use my words to make money.
Fine, people say. You have a blog - use it.
Fair, fair. But while I have been using WordPress for almost 16 years now, the last 6 or so of those has been a struggle. It does so much now, to try to be so much to so many people, that it does nothing particularly well, and it brings with it so much friction and is so busy that it overwhelms my ADHD brain. Writing a blog post used to be quick and easy. Now it’s such a production.
And somewhere along the way, we began to write for algorithms, instead of writing for readers. So many words per paragraph, images, keywords, tags, and categories. Along the way, we abandoned things like point of view and voice.
So, I’m trying a new thing - a new, from scratch, blog. I’m not going to import my back catalog - although it will remain on the internet at blog.hughhollowell.org. I’m using micro.blog as the platform to make things easy and clean, albeit a bit expensive for what you get.
When I’m done in a week or so setting it up, it will import automatically to Mastodon and Threads and BlueSky for folks who want to follow that way, and there will be an RSS feed. I will be hosting it at my oldest URL I currently own, hughlh.com.
It’s an experiment. Let’s give it a month or so and see if I still like it. But so far, I like it a lot.
I’m not really into technology, but I follow and read a lot of technology folks.
H’mmm, that’s not quite right. I obviously use tech - like I am right now! - but I don’t really care how it works. I’m sort of like the guy who drives a hi-performance car, but has no desire to actually understand how fuel injectors actually work. I can change the oil and know to rotate the tires, but have no desire to actually build my own car.
So, anyway, I read and follow Ben Werdmuller, who leads technology at ProPublica. And I loved his recent post on what the tech-bros love to call “Lifestyle Design”.
In it, he talks about what he wants out of life, and by extension, what he thinks should be made available to everyone. It’s not just the sort of life he wants, but the sort of world he wants to live in. It sounds like a great place.
But he hit on something that has given me fits for the two decades I have been working for social change.
My values are simply that everyone should be able to live this sort of life, regardless of who they are or where in the world they live. Everyone deserves autonomy, connection, support, safety, and the freedom to be themselves and express themselves openly. It’s not just that I want this for me, although clearly I do: I want to work towards this being an open, shared set of living principles that are available to all.
I’ve thought a lot about helping the world get there — remember, I want to work on projects with the potential to make the world more informed and equal. But the path to helping me get there is a little different. It involves carefully choosing the projects I work on, the team cultures I take part in, how I make money, how I present myself to the world, and the people and communities I associate with.
That part in the second paragraph about the difference between helping the world get there, and you getting there. That part right there.
I spent years sacrificing my housing arrangements so that others could have adequate housing. Years sacrificing my health so others could have adequate healthcare. Years turning down things that would benefit my family so that I could work to make other people’s families safer.
I’m no longer willing to do that.
I’m deeply committed to a better world for everyone. And it still occupies my thoughts, my work, and my plans. But I no longer believe that it requires I set myself on fire to keep others warm.
I like learning new things. It’s sort of my toxic trait - I would rather learn something new than master the existing thing I know. It’s probably ADHD-related - God knows everything else in my chaos-Muppet existence is.
Like, last night I came across a video of someone silver-soldering a ring, and ended up in a rabbit hole on YouTube watching folks make jewlery, and now maybe I want to learn how to do that?
So anyway, one cool thing about shifting to micro.blog is that I have to learn new skills - like writing in Markdown.
Over the holidays, I saw several examples of people over 50 not knowing how to do something that involved technology (like, how to change contact info on a phone) and them asking a younger person to do it for them. NOT to teach them how, but to do it for them.
I never want to be that person. I love learning things. I hope I always will. My biggest fear is to be the person that refuses to learn.
I have been on social media since the early days. I have been blogging since 2003.
I have friends from all around the world because of social media. I have raised several million dollars for good causes because of social media. My livelihood, my relationships, and so much enjoyment I get from my life is because of social media.
But I’m tired of social media. Or, rather, I’m tired of the ways the social media companies manipulate us. I want to meet cool people - I have no desire to participate in what Tobias Rose-Stockwell calls an outrage machine.
