A cartoon depiction of the author, wearing a hoodie and smiling motd.co

Eternal December

Hahaha hello oh no #

This is in fact "my XOXO 2024 blog post", but it turned into a lot more than that as I was thinking about it on the bus to my allergy shots this month, and then even more less than a week later. So bear with me, I guess. Because I feel surrounded by endings right now.

Two weeks ago I attended the final XOXO here in Portland, the place I moved to in 2016, just short of 3 years after first visiting it because of XOXO. Between the lack of yearly meet-ups and the fragmentation of social media platforms, I'm not used to the feeling of isolation that comes from leaving an event like that!

It used to be you'd follow everyone you met on Twitter and excitedly chat with them in the days that follow. I have been checking platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon a little more often after kind of backing away from a lot of social media, but I don't feel that rush quite the same way. The platform I've been posting on most regularly is probably Cohost, and after I drafted this post, and tried to decide over a long weekend with houseguests visiting if the post was too long, too self-involved, too vulnerable... Cohost announced on Monday they'd be shifting to read-only mode in October, and shutting down entirely sometime before the end of the year. So before I talk about XOXO, a quick diversion.

Mourning Cohost #

I signed up for Cohost in its private beta period. I started with a pseudonymous page name but I think I may have had my first name attached to it for a good while. I found that useful for bootstrapping a bit, making it clear to people who might not have picked up immediately who I was that we knew each other. Before things went public, though, I did something I haven't really done before-- I set up a named page and for the first time in a long time made that not my primary presence. I posted to it for some things-- music posts that I thought might eventually serve as a jumping off point for a music blog I was planning on making under my real name (which has probably been discouraged for even longer due to the launch of Record Club, which I will admit I am enjoying quite a bit-- that's one bright light that's been in my life the last couple weeks); sharing creative projects that had my name on it or that I knew I would promote elsewhere like Mastodon or my personal website. That sort of thing. But the majority of the socializing and the "shitposting" (I still hate labeling things that–I feel like it removes a lot of the power of the posts) I did under my pseudonym.

I didn't do a lot of work to "disguise" the account. I've used that name elsewhere, people would refer to me as Casey, and so many other little things here and there. I'm sure that for some people who know who I am it was totally obvious... though I'll admit it occasionally made me feel weird or sad or bad to think that someone else might not know. But if you know me well enough to care, you probably figured it out, and if not, oh well, right?

All that goes to say that it made me feel weird sometimes, and especially today, when I talked up Cohost in a big way, and anyone who went to look at the Cohost page with "my username" had like... 3 posts in the last month or whatever, and if they were on Cohost themselves, they wouldn't have seen me repost most of the good posts, like or comment on almost any of their posts, etc.

I'm still feeling weird about this strategy. I've known people who have done similar things and never felt weird about them doing it, but it has felt strange. Was it a deception? Is it a natural coping strategy to years of social media churn and burnout? I honestly tried not to think about it, and the impending shutdown and trying to reconcile this double-life-but-really-that's-melodramatic has been a little bit weird.

Struggling with XOXO #

I struggled with a lot of the messaging at XOXO this year. Everyone's in a different place; 50% of the audience was brand new to the community, so maybe it was good for people to be on stage telling us to make things and share them. I found myself flinching, though. I do make things. I do share them. For what?

None of those helped stop so many of us, myself included, from poisoning our brains and lining the pockets of terrible people, for so much of the last 20 years. Where are the things I'm "just making" going, who will remember them, why do I let these obsessions stick in my brain and bother me for not completing them, not iterating on them, not polishing them to a shine? Is my "lottery" having a decent job, because someone with hiring power saw a... toy I made linked in a newsletter, on a blog, in a Slack channel I advertised it in? What does that say about who I am?

Witnessing the end of the "ZIRP" era #

If you work in tech or know people who do, you may also be familiar with the state of the industry, where money isn't quite as free as it used to be, large investors are chasing dangerous trends that I have no desire to go near, and even the most profitable companies in the world are laying off workers because blah blah blah who cares. I'm not Matt Levine. The result is this: many people I know feel less motivated by their work. It's not just that we've gotten better at turning a keen eye to the impact of our work (though many of us have), the actual conditions under which we're being told to work are worse.

Obviously I have to couch all of this in the grandest of acknowledgments. People like me have lived privilege lives, had privileged jobs. I've become accustomed to a relatively large amount of influence and recognition and wealth compared to many of my friends who work in other fields. Still, what are given is somehow not as much as our labor affords the people who sit at the top, but I recognize that we have opportunities and conditions many are rightfully jealous of.

Still: teams are smaller, deadlines are tighter, layoffs are always lurking around the corner. People hold onto jobs they don't like longer because they don't know what else there is to do. We read and re-read articles about burnout and impostor syndrome and the overlap between the two and wonder: are we whiners, or are we falling apart?

And somehow despite the end of this era, there are people who are still at the top, who are the ones shuffling the money on to the next thing, or the ones who are "taking responsibility" for layoffs despite the fact that their jobs are intact, and they will still be there to announce the next layoffs, and the ones after that.

The vibes are bad. I'm left wondering how much of that is turbulence and how much of it is... an adjustment. I've been lucky so far. I like my team a lot. I want to do good work on the problem in front of me, despite the odds. A lot of my friends and my peers can't say the same, and I hate that.

Over the hill #

I turned 40 this summer. I'm not really afraid of my 40s? But I still feel like the loose ends of what I started in my 30s, in terms of figuring myself out and what I want, are like a kind of make-up work that I still have sitting in front of me. People I know have disconnected from toxic behaviors. They've picked up peaceful offline hobbies full of plants and hand tools. Some of them transitioned, some of them got diagnoses, and sometimes it feels like everyone else found a way to enter a new understanding of themselves, one that comes with peace.

I don't feel that way. I know I grew a lot in my 30s but I still feel in an awkward phase. I know that who I was when I was 35 is not who I am now, but I don't really know who I am now. I know I'm more confident in my career and my politics than I ever have been, but I don't know how to harness that in a way that isn't annoying, abrasive, or even hurtful. My 30s are over but also they're still sitting in my todo list with all the other crap I need to do.

Moving #

We also moved homes this summer. We wanted to shorten Gretchen's commute; we wanted a second bathroom. This "ending" is maybe the silliest on its face, but as happy as I am with our move, I am coming to realize that I am grieving the home we left and the neighborhood it's in. We lived in one house for 7 years. That's a longer time for me living in one place than I've experienced since we moved houses in 1996. I built habits, we welcomed a new pet and said goodbye to our first, we got to know the neighbors and the neighborhood, and we didn't leave it because we no longer liked it–it just wasn't the right place for us any more. It was easier to say that of places that didn't have quite so many memories.

You can't stay here~ #

Semisonic's Closing Time came out in 1998, just a couple months before I graduated from 8th grade and entered high school. If you were tapped into pop culture at that time and the years following it you can maybe understand that this song haunted me, a teenager who would go on to hear it at every end-of-school-year, end-of-camp, end-of-anything event that needed a soundtrack, on top of the countless references, both sincere and ironic, for basically all of my teenage years. I don't really like this song and there's a certain effect to which I want to deny any profundity to lyrics that have been forced upon me so many times. The song, as you may know, contains the line "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end". ugh. duh. Yes, we know that. But I could not help thinking of these stupid words while trying to decide what all these endings I'm feeling really mean for what lies ahead.

Some of the beginnings that come from these ends are clear:

But the first few: my career, how I'll spend time online, and what it means to make things any more... I don't have as clear an answer on those. Will people I know find more job security? Will I get to keep my current job? Will there ever be exciting new places to work, or even places that aren't chasing trends, furthering surveillance, enclosing the commons, obscuring abusive labor practices? In the case of watching some dear coworkers depart over the course of this year (both voluntarily and involuntarily) they're the ones with the new beginnings, and I'm excited and hopeful for them, but to be blunt I'm in a place and time where jobs don't get backfilled and there aren't new coworkers coming in with fresh ideas. The "new" here at work is new responsibilities without new hours in the day to accomplish them. New tasks piling up while I try to find the motivation to finish old ones. A feeling not unlike the 30s/40s transition that I'm falling behind.

Back into the dark forest #

...so what about Cohost. Now that I've admitted a bit more, in my own name, about what it meant to me, how do I honor the time spent on the platform, the affordances and the hosting that its staff provided to me? How do I carry forward the relationships from it, both old and new, that are important to me? To whom do I need to reach out and grab a hand and make sure they know that I don't want to lose them wherever we each go next, and whom can I trust to just... have the same values, the same wants, the same sense of what's cool and fun and good?

And then there's XOXO. What's new with my unfortunate desire to have too many ideas and realize a fraction of them to an unsatisfying degree with the decreasing energy I have to actually accomplish them? What's new with conferences, now that basically every conference I've ever felt like I belonged at (XOXO, !!con, Deconstruct, Eyeo, even Strange Loop–which I never made it to in-person, but always meant to) has ended? I have no idea. I think I realized about halfway through the festival talks that I was hoping that one of the speakers would give me the answer to these questions, and maybe more of the ones above, at the same time that I realized that none of them were going to. It's not their fault–it was never their job. But I guess it means that I'm stuck figuring it out.