The world is a scary place, especially as an adult. It seems like nothing gets better. For every step forward we’ve taken over the past fifty years, it feels like we’ve taken three steps back over the past ten. For people in my age-group, we feel especially burdened by unfortunate timing, what with having our transitions into adulthood bordered by both tries of the Trump administration, or having college unceremoniously cut short by an unprecedented global pandemic made worse by the man at the top. It feels like everyone is falling to pieces, more divided than ever, more separated, angrier.
It becomes so easy to fall into despondence and despair. When the world feels like it’s falling apart around us, how could you not? The people on top keep winning, the ones who most deserve to lose are incapable of it, and the ones who need help the most are the ones cheering for it all the same.
I myself have fallen into this mentality on occasion. To think of how bleak things seem. Ive thought about suicide. Never serious thoughts; I am too afraid of what comes after to take that road. In some aspect, my fear of death is what keeps me optimistic. If I think about what I think comes after for too long, I fall into a panic, and when I come out the other side of that panic, I can see the beauty of what life really is all the more vividly.
No one wants to have to fight for anything. But we have to fight for it all the same.
The world around us is a raging tempest, blocking out the horizon and masking the way forward. The social platforms we feel forced to use want us to be blinded by it. If you can’t see any way forward or solution, why bother doing anything at all? It’s up to us to find out own way out, and use that to guide those who are unable by holding firm and becoming that guiding light. We have to be a lighthouse.
We can’t give up. To be defeatist is to lose the battle without a fight. We cannot surrender. To give in and accept the dreary future the people on top want for us is to surrender. We have to stand tall and be a lighthouse.
I wrote this after being inspired by a mastodon post by Paul Cantrell, in response to the changes Google made to their search. It was just about how he was blocking the Google crawler from indexing his pages, but it stuck with me. I saw this specific reply from @DeltaWye which says “Be a lighthouse in the tempest.” The idea of holding fast in your own ideals, in fighting for what you want the internet, or the world for that matter, to be, of being the lighthouse, inspired me.
The crux of modern social media is to make you angry and depressed. It’s not to keep you connected or informed; if you are angry or depressed, you’ll engage more with the content and stay on the platform longer. That has to change. We have to build the internet we want to explore. The fun internet. The version of the internet filled with exciting niche micro-communities and independent websites and cool people doing cool shit. That’s what I want this website to be, and what I want my internet to be. That’s why we have to be a lighthouse.
At the time of posting, it is 12:25:03 AM on Friday, May 22, 2026. I am not proof-reading this. I want this up on the Internet raw and unfiltered. If you are seeing this, I want to personally and graciously thank you for giving my site a visit. It means the absolute world to me that you would go out of your way to support the indie web.