Dear Sublime,

I have to confess that you have been a little bit my equivalent of a nicotine patch for quitting the infinite scrolling of Instagram—it was getting bad this year. Like phone falling on my face while falling asleep kind of bad. I don't know why I got so into doomscrolling and couldn't stop—my personal hunch is that its algorithm is very good at creating a sense of being alone, together (also the title of a great book by Sherri Turkle) and showing you the lives of strangers while strangers you don't know can also be looking at you. It's quite like looking at things that are positioned as aspirational, from people you don't see often enough online to really care about, and about things that you don't really care about—it is easy to feel lost, and as if you are at a party holding a red solo cup of mystery liquor where you don't really want to be there because you can't really hear anybody and it's all sort of the same mess anyway, but it seems less sad than being alone with just your own thoughts. Sublime is like going to a dinner party with some friends you hold near and dear, and some famous-only-to-you people you've quietly respected and journaled about from afar, being fed the most nutritious and delectable of foods, and the most nourishing of conversations.

I have some hunches about why Sublime is different, and I think it mainly comes down to community curation, and the categorization mechanism. On the note of community, I appreciate seeing people that I'm starting to understand as probably acquaintances in real life because of their past work, and realize that we probably subscribe to the same set of newsletters and conference circuit—but there's just enough of a spread that I always learn something new. On the note of the categorization mechanism, it's lovely to have the inability to make a binary choice—it's not "do I like/find useful/am tickled/want to save for later" or not, but rather "what does this connect to? how is this relevant to my existing interests? does this spark a new part of my mental map that I should start paying more attention to?" Sublime in this way is less like categorizing all of the things in the world into a polarizing good or bad, but rather makes me think about the connections between all of the things living rent free in my attentional capacity -- and then offloading some of that.

As far as actually using the app itself, I find it very easy to make new connections and sort things into my existing collections, but I wish that it were smarter sometimes in collecting things fresh from around the web—the browser extension is something I used fairly often in Chrome, but haven't gotten a chance to update into Arc (this is a good reminder to do so) and I haven't gotten it on mobile yet (partially because my phone is very very old and might not survive an update). This desktop only approach that I have to using Sublime means that I have less volume, but perhaps this is not a bad thing—it is of better informational quality, in part because I feel like it should be respectable curation when other Sublimers might be looking at it.

I mostly have gratitude about this platform—most things elicit an "oooOOOOooOOH" and I hesitate to burn out on consuming too much at once to be able to digest properly. It is not cheap information or material, and I would put it into the category of a very well hewn, expertly pattern made jacket. One can do WORK in it, and it'll pick up scuffs and a patina that ages well with time, but one does need to have good posture while wearing it.

Cheers to the new year, always happy to answer more questions about Sublime! Something alive for me this week is the thought of the difference between a tool and a template. Tools make you stronger at your craft. Templates make you stronger at content. I feel Sublime is more in the tool category in the same way Tumblr and Myspace inadvertently taught us all how to code, but I'm not sure why yet.

Things I'm thinking about