On Coming Home

There’s so much richness in Mandy Brown’s piece on writing, work, context, and creating a space for oneself.

Brown focuses on the shift from using social platforms for publishing—rigid systems that haven't evolved with users' needs—to building spaces where intentional connections between ideas can form and grow over time. Instead of being focused on content ownership, she’s more interested in context, in placing her thinking "within [their] own body of work."

One of the things that struck me most was Brown’s intention to shape her reading, writing, and other online efforts around a single topic—books:

"I made a decision many years ago to shape my work around the books I read. … It’s allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given. Not every seed I’ve planted has thrived, of course. But after all these years, some are quite hardy, while others have made some very rich compost. And I find myself often amazed by what emerges: not only the seeds I planted but a great many I never anticipated, connections and stories I didn’t see until I was right on top of them, until they were tangled at my feet."

That kind of foresight and deliberate action to sustain a process over time is something I envy. I've had many ideas on how to focus my creative energy online, but I haven’t stuck with any one thing long enough to turn it into a lasting practice.¹ Maybe Brown's words are a push in that direction. 🤷‍♂️

Another key point is Brown’s reflection on labour and the role of friction in meaningful work:

"And more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being."

As much as I value efficiency, I find I’m most efficient with the work I care about least. I try to streamline tasks I don't enjoy so I can make space for things I want to labour over. With work I’m passionate about, the time and mental effort I invest in thinking and creating is often what I enjoy most—the process is more fulfilling than the result.

On the subject of AI doing work for us, Brown adds:

"But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is gone. What is the experience of asking for something to appear and then instantly receiving it? What changes between the thought and the manifestation? I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves."

What happens when the work is gone? Does more work appear, or do we fill that time with things worth labouring over? I see the value in AI taking care of less meaningful tasks—as long as we use that time for what really matters.

Lastly, Brown touches on the nostalgia many of us, myself included, feel for an earlier time in the social media landscape. For me, that’s Twitter circa 2007:

"…a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it."

I've been longing for a return to some version of the past I remember for some time. I’ve even gone as far as drafting a manifesto to revive something from that era, hoping to reconnect with people from my past. But maybe nostalgia is holding me back from letting something new emerge.

Ultimately, coming home isn’t about a place for content at all. It’s about finding what home is in the first place—labouring through a process that builds the context and connections to carry us forward.