A blog is like a gillnet

The other night, I was watching Alone, that reality show where people try to survive in the remote wilderness, alone, for as long as possible. Contestants are dropped into the silence of nature, surrounded by cold lakes, tall trees, and the pressing need to eat. Beyond ample camera gear and memory cards, each player is given a satellite radio they can use to “tap out.” The last person to give up wins.

One thing that stood out to me: the gillnets. Folks spend countless hours crafting these handmade nets, tying them to long poles, and setting them out into still water, desperately hoping for a fish. A diamond-web of hope. They check back later and celebrate if something’s caught. These small wins are intensely radiant; you can feel it through the screen. As I sip my beer from the comfort of my couch, I cheer with them: fish dinner tonight!

I’ve kept thinking about those gillnets, how they’re designed: the size of the openings tuned for different fish, for different waters, built from experience and instinct. Moving with that idea, it hit me: writing a blog is kind of like setting a gillnet.

You tie your thoughts together: raw strings of feeling, insight, curiosity and cast them into this vast lake we call the internet. You don’t know who or what might come across them. A stranger might stumble on your page at 4am and find something they didn’t know they needed. A friend might glimpse a side of you they’ve never seen. A bot finds your article and bakes it into the training data for some LLM. Maybe nothing happens at all.

If we don’t write, and if we don’t share, it’s like sitting on the bank, watching the water, hoping for fish dinner… but with no net, no pole, no line. We can’t expect anything to come back if we don’t send something out.

So let’s write. Imperfectly. Write something for yourself to read. Don’t expect to catch a ton of fish at first. Instead, see what you pull up from the depths of your world. Some posts are empty nets. Others surprise us.

Let’s believe in the net. Let’s believe in the simple act of casting.