The Silver Lining of Algorithms

When something no longer defines you, it no longer confines you either..

Reveries Journal #24 | 23 November 2025

This morning, I was walking with my borrowed dog (long story). And now that I’ve said “long story,” I feel like I should end this newsletter right here, because the whole week—everything lately—feels like it could be summed up under that heading. A long story. Something better lived than explained.

But reflection is how we understand, and writing is how we interpret and express what happens to us.

So yes, I was walking with my borrowed dog. With my mind elsewhere, we wandered off the bitumen and, from habit, onto our usual route—a long stock route dirt track. A few minutes later, I was snapped back into the world by the sensation of mud building under my shoe. What had been dry yesterday had turned to cluggy black soil overnight. The storm must have hit harder here.

I turned Hogan around—that black mud sticks like glue—and we made our way back to the dry dirt, then to the bitumen. As I walked, I remembered the storm updates from the night before: trees down in town, thousands without power. At home, we’d caught only the edge—a little wind, a little rain—and miraculously avoided the damage the supercell delivered elsewhere.

How fortunate.

But what struck me more in that moment was how fortunate we are in almost every way—and how rarely we notice. We’re constantly missing storms we don’t even know are happening. Things might be going wrong, yes, but how often does it occur that what is happening is far less severe than what could have happened?

I think of this often. I hear about freak accidents, sudden illnesses, lives overturned in a single day. And whenever I lift my head from my own concerns and look outward, I’m reminded—again—how much there is to feel grateful for.

What else?

Something else.

On my blog, athousandbitsofpaper, I discovered that I have nearly 2,000 email subscribers. Not the subscribers that show up on the home page - which is the public view number - but email subscribers - whose data and open rates are buried under a different screen that only I can access, but rarely do. In fact, the last time I looked, it was about 250, and that was a few years ago. It’s a separate set of statistics from the one that I can see easily at a glance. Through the glance view, I’d noticed the page view stats were down over the past year—fair enough, since I hadn’t been posting as often. Real life bulldozes my inner life more than I’d like, and my writing (and the book I keep promising to finish) is usually the first to suffer.

I was searching for something else entirely when I found not only this quiet list of readers but their open rates. People had been receiving and reading my posts all along. My audience hadn’t vanished—they had simply shifted delivery systems.

A few things clicked into place. Someone had commented earlier this year on a post that they now subscribe to my blog by email, so they “wouldn’t miss out” on my posts.
Algorithms, of course. No matter the platform, our work sits at the mercy of unpredictable currents.

Which means the only accurate measure we can control is our internal reward system.

Creation has to be for our own pleasure first. Which it is, I mean, I can’t not write - it is as natural and necessary to me as oxygen these days. But I have to admit, like anyone creating anything, it’s nice when other people read it too.

So the great lesson this year—writing “in the dark,” to what I assumed was a dwindling audience, has been unexpectedly profound. I learned how to move the reward from something outside my control to something infinitely available within myself. That shift in dopamine—from external validation to internal creation—has been a deep and lasting recalibration.

So maybe there is a silver lining to social media and its algorithmic whims.

When something no longer defines you, it no longer confines you. The freedom to be yourself—and to create in line with your internal outcomes—is profoundly moving. It resets a lifetime of conditioning. And the remarkable thing is that when this shift happens at the creative level, it happens everywhere.

In the past, I only felt good when someone said, “Oh, this is great.”
Now the reward arrives the moment I feel that.

“There is no external validation that can match the feeling of being creatively aligned with yourself.”

Rick Rubin

And it’s all just practice :)

*Header Photo taken during a drone flight earlier in the week. I cannot believe the clarity and quality of modern drone photography.