This website began as an experiment in 2017. At that point in time I was 25 years old, I had just left a job, I had free time, and that youthful retardation that only truly exists in your 20s. Although I had published a novel at that point and had posted on various websites over the years for free (using stuff like Blogspot, etc) I never had my own website. I thought it would be cool to have my own website and wanted to see what would happen if I did. So I decided to start Meaningless Magazine, and the rest is history.
It has now been 8 years since then, and this website is still here. I said I would give it a shot just to see what would happen, and I believe 8 years has been a significant amount of time to enjoy the experiment. I have enjoyed interacting with various new people over the years, and some of you are pretty cool. At first it was fun to actually hear from people and I was pleasantly surprised people would read stuff and reach out to me. All of that being said though, as you can probably tell with the title of this post: this website will not be here forever. I have made the decision to stop renewing it, and the website will be going away forever on July 3 of next year (2026).
To those of you that have been following and reading for awhile now, I sincerely appreciate the readership and support. Unfortunately, I just don’t think it is worth it anymore for me to keep doing this. I wanted to post this now as a sort of mini-warning ahead of time just in case anyone wanted to save anything I’ve ever written over the course of the website’s history. I am assuming there will probably still be a way to find stuff using websites like Wayback Machine, but if you want to save certain things yourself by simply copying and pasting stuff you can feel free to do so now. Some other good news: I may publish a book with some of the better pieces I’ve posted on this site over the years as a final farewell (as well as new stuff, so you don’t feel ripped off and aren’t buying shit you already read and can currently get for free on the site).
Below I will outline a couple of reasons why I’m taking the website down, and on the opposite end of the spectrum I’ll leave some caveats regarding what would allow me to keep the website up.
The Reasons:
Money
This is the most obvious one. It costs money to keep this website up each year, and it feels like it’s getting more expensive each year. In 2017 when I started the website it was a fairly low-stakes experiment, but 8 years later I feel like the costs have gone up a bit. Squarespace isn’t really that cool to me anymore. I’m sure I could find some cheaper way of doing it, but part of me just wants to do the tabula rasa thing and say fuck it all. I simply cannot afford to waste the money on this website much longer when it doesn’t really pay off in the long run. I have to feed my cat, I have to fill up my gas tank, I gotta buy meat at the butcher, etc. Life is just getting more expensive.
Media Literacy
People are just too fucking dumb these days to read. It’s that simple. Of course, this has always been the case for writers working in any period of time. But it feels like reading comprehension and media literacy is at an all time low. Especially when it comes to stuff like AI, people are getting significantly dumber and more retarded than they ever have been before in human history. Let’s face it, when most people pick up their phone they aren’t doing it to check out the latest article by their favourite writer. It’s to look at whores on Instagram, memes on Twitter, and so on. I am fighting a losing battle here as people give in more and more to overstimulation.
I feel like most people don’t really pick up on nuance or understand what it is I am trying to write sometimes. What ends up happening is people read stuff, interpret things incorrectly, and then I just feel bad that I have left things available to read on a free website for morons to read and interpret incorrectly. To give you an example of what I’m referring to: recently I heard from someone I hadn’t heard from in awhile. They mentioned they read one of my articles, and from the way they were describing it they sounded like they hadn’t actually read the piece. In fact, I could tell they hadn’t. I would bet the money I don’t have to keep this website running that they didn’t read it. And the problem is that person is not the only one like this; I suspect most people are like this in 2025. This is not something getting better, I can only imagine it will get worse over time.
Now obviously, I have never really cared about what people think or say. I am a writer and most writers don’t. One cannot be a serious artist and really work for other people and think about what others want. But the difference here is when it begins to affect my personal life a bit. The thing is, with a free website pretty much anyone can access stuff I’ve said and they can make judgments and assumptions about me without even reading what it is I’ve said properly, paying me to read it, and then go on to spread falsehoods about my reputation to other retards who don’t read and will agree with them that I have said something I didn’t say. I would rather just take my free work down and channel it into a novel or something people have to pay to read instead; I figure this way the people who actually want to read it will read it and the people who have malicious intents will most likely not.
To give you a very clear example of what I mean by this that is not something involving my website in any way, take a look at this YouTube video description. The user uploaded a video in which they took a song, remixed it themselves, and then wrote: vinyl rip of the 1977 German 12" Aka “Long Bread.” I encountered this video on Twitter recently, and people were commenting and reacting to it as if it were a real recording. No one seemed to understand that it was a fan edit, a song edited and remixed by a user. It was not a recording Brian Wilson ever made himself, and yet people were acting like it was. I get that it’s all fun and games, but you can still appreciate my point: people can easily share and spread misinformation, and they do it all the time. If it’s that easy to do, you can probably imagine what I’m getting at and how easy it is to do with full on articles that people don’t read: I personally don’t want to be involved in that any further than I already have. People are too fucking stupid and I just don’t trust them anymore. The climate of 2017 is not the same as 2025, and the climate of 2033 won’t be the same as now, if you catch my drift.
Distraction
Sometimes I feel like this website is more of a distraction to me than anything else. There are times I would like to work on other things and yet I feel the call of the website instead, and then I end up ignoring the other things and writing something for this website. Right now I feel like my calling is to do other things artistically speaking. YouTube videos, for example. I see a couple people I like doing longform essays on YouTube and it’s basically a version of what I do here. That feels way more useful than what I do: no one reads anymore, so I should probably be doing something worthwhile like that if I choose to write essays and so forth again. This website feels like I’m just being stubborn for the sake of having my own website. Other stuff I’m interested in would be writing another novel, and working on more screenplays. I’d like to focus more on that.
Retreating Into The Wilderness
These days I feel like I am becoming more of a Buddhist in the sense that I am done with “stuff.” And “things.” I don’t really know how to put it other than that really, but I don’t really have a desire to own much, leave things out there on a website, participate in life beyond what I have to in order to survive. I am referring to the material world in general. It’s all so meaningless to me. Spending money on stuff I don’t need and doing stuff I don’t need to do all feels sort of whack to me and not cool. It’s out of line with who I now see myself as. These days I kinda feel like just disappearing completely and dropping off the face of the earth. I may renege on this, but this is how I feel lately. I know I’ve said stuff like this before, but I am pretty sure I mean it this time. It’s no big surprise, after all; I am the same guy who literally titled the website after the fact that life is meaningless. But the feeling is growing more with age in me I guess, I don’t know. I just want to simplify my life.
The Caveats / Reasons I Would Keep The Site Running
If People Donate (and the total is at least $300)
At the moment the website costs like $320 or so to keep running yearly. If I were to receive around that amount in donations, I would probably keep the website running. It would be a Darwinian sort of thing: if the people out there like it enough to pay for it, I will actually keep it going for them to honour them. But as it stands, no one is donating anything. I don’t expect anyone to either, but if I were to receive that amount I’d probably keep things running.
I don’t mean to be a Jew about this, because 300 bucks is not a huge life changing sum of money or anything, but it’s just the fact of the situation: I can’t really justify spending the money to keep this website running anymore when it could be going to other things in my life that are more useful and serve me better (like my cat’s litter box or going to the movies from time to time). If I got help, sure, but I doubt anyone will and don’t expect anyone to. I am just throwing this out there in the same way a guy talks about a hot girl and says something like, “I’d fuck Sydney Sweeney.” It doesn’t mean anything, but the thought is nice.
If My Books Make At Least $300
This one is similar to the above. If my books were to make over $300 one year, I would probably keep the website going. But as it currently stands, it’s only beer money. Not enough to use to invest in myself properly or a whole ass website.
If I Find A Job
I am currently unemployed, so every dollar counts. As I said, I can’t justify shitting $300 away on a website barely anyone reads every single year anymore. However, if I find myself in the situation where I have some sort of decently paying job in the near future, I will eat my words and keep this website running for a bit further.
There you have it. I hope this doesn’t come across as me complaining. That’s not how I feel at all, I am just intending to give you a realistic picture of where the website is headed these days. Sometimes the way I look at this place is like it’s a show and every year I have to make the decision if I am going to renew it for another season or not. In terms of that analogy I have made the decision to renew for one final season. 2025-2026 is going to be the final season of Meaningless Magazine. It’s kinda sad, but all empires must come to an end.
