The novelist Brandon Taylor, who writes a lot of interesting things in his newsletter, suggested a few weeks ago that he might abandon Substack just to get away from its Twitter-esque “Notes” feature. Later he changed his mind, having been shown how to avoid it.
I’ve been toying with the idea of testing a newsletter using Substack in 2025 (could that clause be any more noncommittal?), but I agree that Notes is rather terrible even though I haven’t quite written it completely off yet, the way I have other social media. I still get that occasional email with a Notes link roundup, and often click on something there just to read a completed thought from someone I follow, then find myself sucked into a bit of time-wasting.
Like this morning, when sifting through Notes, I somehow stumbled on a link to something called “Analog Social.” Apparently this is something that one can read on one’s phone while also feeling like one is above the sorts of people who read things on their phones.
The creator of Analog Social hosts what they like to call “salons” — one can “apply” for an “invitation” to attend (and pay for) a dinner at an expensive DC restaurant. The program follows a rather regimented schedule of “guided conversation” (turn off your devices, please) hosted by “a PhD candidate” who boasts of experience running “dinner parties across the world.”
I really am sorry to be so churlish, but this sounds like an uninteresting person’s idea of an interesting evening. I mean, it sounds like someone once heard someone else describe something someone else said they had read about 1920s-era Paris, or those 1950s-era Georgetown dinners with whatshername, the Roosevelt niece or daughter or whatever she was, and thought, “There must be a business model here somewhere!”
Still, I wish the creator’s potential audience all the best, whether that means one hour of stimulating conversation (exactly one hour, according to the online schedule), or the possibility of meeting someone with whom they can eye-rollingly recount that conversation later.
Look, social awkwardness abounds, but it always has; not everything can be blamed on our phones. If you want to connect with people with whom you can have a good conversation — and it’s the connection that matters, not random conversations (perhaps we can blame phones for causing so many people to get the two confused) — then you could sign up for something contrived like this (and perhaps you will have a wonderful time, what do I know), or you could do something like the following:
- Do meaningful work. (Meaning is what you bring to it, not what it brings to you.)
- Read old books. Secondarily, watch old movies. (The former required, the latter optional.)
- Pursue interesting, solitary hobbies that will give you something to talk about other than your work and books.
- Be kind, in general.
- Sit at the bar (yes, turn those devices off) and introduce yourself to strangers.
- Volunteer.
- Go to church, or your faith’s in-person equivalent.
- If you don’t have any particular faith, then get one. The faithless (unless they are extraordinarily and generously open-minded) tend to be tediously solipsistic. Plus, they don’t have a church to go to.
If your response to the above advice is to ask if I follow all of it myself: Well, good God, no. Jesus Christ was the only human whose example mattered as much, or more, than the words he said, but then, he wasn’t only human. If you only took advice from those who followed their own, you’d never take advice at all. (Perhaps, in some cases at least, that might be for the best.)