It’s been said that blogging is dead. I’d argue that Substack proves this quite thoroughly wrong. Blogging is different but it’s not dead yet. And I think, in the year of our gourd 2026, there is nothing quite so needed as long-form content.

Short form content is fun and snappy. It’s geared towards humor, hot takes, high engagement, and people who are witty and a little mean. But it also turns out that’s not really good for your brain? It drags you in for clicks, and isn’t actually there to explore or contemplate, just to create friction enough that you keep scrolling.

Short form content has been weaponized into a tool to capture your attention and hold it hostage.

Which just is bad for all of us on a ton of levels. You can read all about that in any number of places, but for now suffice to say that between the algorithm and the hot takes and the dopamine hits, not really a lot of good going on in most of social media right now.

But… I’m seeing myself – and others – return to reading long-form content again. Often on sites like WP and Substack, hosted platforms for people to put their thoughts together into coherent paragraphs and then share them. And I think this is one of the best things that can happen to us right now.

One, because that combined with some basic media literacy gives me hope for people not just getting totally snowed under by the propaganda machine, but two because “tell story” is an innately human function that we have been participating in for longer than we have been Homo Sapiens, best we can tell, and those stories help us ground ourselves in who we are and how we fit in the world.

Organizing your thoughts into sentences and paragraphs is, at the root, good for you. But it’s also fun, and makes you think. Reading longer posts gives us more context, and writing responses and our own stories helps us learn to contextualize the world for ourselves. Training our brains to think more deeply than a hot take twitter reaction is just good on all kinds of levels.

I’ve been blogging a long time. My first blog was built on Blogspot in 1998, and I’ve only had a few years in the intervening almost 30 where I didn’t have a blog that I was keeping up with, even if just idly. Blogging was how I made my living for awhile, before and during the 2008 recession.

But here’s the thing. Having a place to put your thoughts, to sort through them, to have ideas and explore them out loud, to tell your stories in a way that makes you think about how they will be read? Doesn’t have to be a gig. I’m not getting paid for it anymore. I am an irregular poster at best, and I’m not blogging for anyone else’s schedule. Post what you want, when you want. Write about video games or bad movies or Halloween traditions or whatever you enjoy. Dig into your special interests and then share them with the world.

You don’t have to follow anyone’s instructions.

The very act of putting your thoughts in an order that helps someone else read your writing and make sense of it is good for your brain, increases your attention span, and helps fight back against the doomscroll brain rot that seems to have captured us all.

So yeah. This is me, telling you, that you should blog if you want.

Push back on the world that says that nothing but the soundbite matters, that the headline is all you need to read. Push back on doomscrolling and endless numbness.

Write something.