A Year Later, How Does It Feel Like?

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July 12, 2024, I clicked the send button on my Substack, and even though I ended the post with a promise to write to you soon, I knew that it wouldn’t be possible. Does that count as a lie? I don’t think so, but perhaps it does. In the space of the past 369 days, I have fiddled with the idea of writing the last letter, changing the trajectory of my writing, or just going off the radar. But as I woke up this morning, I had a strong nudge to write to you. Not that it is divinely orchestrated, it was more of familiarity. I needed to write to you because I wanted you to know that I still think of you. I still think of when I do this weekly, of when I do this monthly, of when I do this bi-weekly, and most importantly, that the 89 of you matter to me.

I take comfort in having to write to a few people, and you all have been a solace of some sort. For some, I am a really great guy, for some I am just an asshole, for some they don’t even know how I sound, and for some they are yet to decide–yet, a year and some days after I am here again.

Life fucks us up than we can keep up on some days, but I cannot deny that life has been good to me and I do not take it with levity. I have picked a series of fun things, taken some risky decisions, fought some battles (and still fighting Armageddon), but I think when I take one step back and reflect, life has offered me a sense of relief.

I have referred back to the countless times I started this newsletter after a friend told me to send the first one. This will be the 56th and which means if you have to read one per week, you have enough to help you cover for a full year. That is no small feat. While I have resumed back to writing to you weekly now, I am coming to terms of a bit of restructuring. You will notice them as time goes on. But first, the name. I do not have lists of topics to discuss with you but as always each week is going to take snippets from the books I read, my failed relationships, the bird pictures I took, my dating app discoveries, my absolute love for pizza and ranch dip, surviving my undiagnosed ADHD, my unpaid therapies with friend, and finding the loves of my life.

My Instagram bio has been one digital summary about me that has changed a lot, and currently, I seem to take pride in what I have:

FT Historian | Quasi Designer

Occasional Essayist | Semi-Successful Poet

Surviving Dostoevsky & Camus | Woke Hedonist

This will probably give you an insight into what I stand for, the entirety of my career trajectory, and a bit of my personality.

Photo by Jeff Jastrow on Unsplash

But before I go, in retrospect, I wrote on the throes of dating apps, especially in the United States, and how my friends and I are navigating it, and here is my chain of thought:

Parable of Dating Apps

There was once a hunter widely known for his feats of hefty catches. Among his peers, he has various laurels to his name; in other words, he was known far and wide as a great hunter in the neighborhood.

After spending some years in the forest, hunting with his peers, he decided to explore the possibility of fruitions in other forests. One day, he picked up his tools and left for the new forest to hunt. He picked his tools every night and hunted till dawn, but to no result. Then there comes the most important question: how does a hunter known for his hunting feats far and wide suddenly become one who goes hunting without coming home with anything? Is he a fraud? The truth is, dear finder, the hunter was never a fraud; the game of hunting is rather just different in this new place.

What is unknown to the hunter, therefore, is that unlike his former neighborhood, where hunting is done based on per head for a day, everyone hunts every day altogether at the same time in this new place, and rather than the old tools he's familiar with, the hunters here use newer tools he wasn't exposed to. His curiosity brought him to the truth, and he is left with two options: should he continue hunting alone? Join a pack and lose the possibility of having laurels to his name? Or stop hunting?

I will leave this open-ended, looking forward to writing to you next week.

Sign,

Olu