The Highway Dog
Every project you love eventually becomes a dog on the highway. You’ve outgrown it, or it’s outgrown what you wanted from it, and you have to decide: sell it, delete it, or just stop touching it. That last option is its own cruelty—the thing is technically still out there, still breathing, but you’ve driven away. Made me think about that whenever I tried to figure out what to do with something I’d spent roughly 2,300 days building.
For most of that time, this journal was the center of my life. I fed it. First alone, then with friends, then with people who were genuinely gifted at it and generous enough to show up. It dragged me around the world. I became obsessed with filling it, on the sincere logic that output scales with input—and for years, that held.
Then it became a job. Whether "job" is the right word for sitting in front of a computer all day generating content, hunting the web for material, republishing photo series by artists who hopefully preferred the exposure to a lawsuit—debatable. But money came in. An audience came in. A reputation came in, and the reputation turned out to be the first serious problem.
I’d built this on provocation—sharp writing, unfiltered images, a genuine willingness to go places polished media wouldn’t. That earned a kind of hall pass for doing things that seemed borderline insane. But the same image that gave me room to move also built a ceiling. Whenever I tried to write something with actual weight—surveillance policy, digital rights, anything that mattered beyond the weekend—the reaction was essentially a shrug followed by: great, but where are the tits? Someone described this journal as the tabloid of the hip. I fought that characterization for years. I got very tired of fighting it.
The last year before I finally broke was split between keeping the engine running and trying to figure out how to lift it out of the ditch simultaneously. The moment I found myself genuinely strategizing about how to compete with BuzzFeed as a fast-content aggregator, something went quiet in me. How many lists of fat squirrels attacking men in the groin can you absorb before your mind softens permanently? I tested this empirically. The answer is four. Four is the number where the damage stops being reversible.
There I was. Twenty-nine years old, profitable, with ad partners who were perfectly happy, and a machine that could have run indefinitely—and I was miserable about all of it. The problem was that this journal had become so intertwined with my actual life across 2,300 days that it was practically a synonym for me, and the version of it I’d allowed to calcify no longer resembled anything I wanted associated with my name. Selling felt like a betrayal. Deleting felt wasteful. The answer, economically indefensible and personally unavoidable, was to rebuild.
First thing I noticed when I tried: I’d lost the ability to write. Years of ingesting rapid-fire blog syntax—apostrophe errors, false urgency, the deliberate stupidity of content designed to be skimmed rather than read—had left my internal monologue murky. Real sentences felt foreign. So I bought books, newspapers, magazines, and read them everywhere I could manage: on the balcony, on the floor, on trains, in bed at two in the morning with the lamp too bright. Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back knocked something loose. I started going to a gym in Prenzlauer Berg, moved to a new workspace in Neukölln, started eating less meat—not from principle but because I’ve always preferred fish and fried tofu anyway. It says something about how far a performed identity can drift from what you actually want.
The new thing has to be built on that clarity. Less volume, more precision. Depth over velocity. Not fewer extreme positions—I haven’t mellowed that much—but better-aimed ones, with more weight behind them. The same edge, pointed at something that deserves it. Not scorched earth, not a clean break. A natural next chapter from something that genuinely mattered, built by someone who wants to feel proud of it rather than complicated by it.
That’s a low bar, maybe. But after years of looking at something I’d made and feeling the specific mixture of pride and shame and exhaustion that comes from loving a thing you’ve also been steadily ruining, low feels correct. The highway dog finds its way home. Or at least off the highway.