The Internet I grew up with has been dead for a while.

It wasn’t perfect, and I’m sure I’m seeing things through rose-colored glasses, but it used to be a place where people just… made stuff. That was the whole goal: to make something. Maybe because you were passionate about it, or because you thought it would be funny—or maybe just to see if it was possible.

Most websites back then were the result of someone spending a couple hours learning how to write HTML and then cobbling together a homepage with color combinations and font choice that would give modern graphic designers a full month of recurring nightmares. You’d slap an “under construction” gif on the bottom of the page (never to actually be removed) along with a view counter (never to tick past 23 views a month), and voila, Tom’s Official Guide to the Migration Patterns of the Western Sandpiper™® was ready to share with the world.

Things are different now.

You don’t make something for the sake of making something; you make something for the sake of wringing every last penny out whoever’s coming through. Everyone’s trying to maximize traffic and view counts and clicks and retention so they can collect your data and sell it to brokers who will follow you around trying to shove the last thing you searched for on Amazon down your throat.

It’s exhausting.

Sabbath Thoughts was built in the world of the old Internet. The making-things-for the-sake-of-making-things Internet. I don’t sell data, I don’t run ads, I don’t paywall content. But as the Internet has bloated and morphed into whatever it is today, the requirements for being on the Internet have bloated and morphed with it.

You don’t just write something and post it. You write it, make an image for it (because who’s going to share something on Facebook without an image?), make sure the plugin for cross-posting to social media is working, write the text for the social media post, notice the weekly update isn’t sending correctly anymore, look into and realize the free plan you were using for emails has been discontinued, spend a few months looking for a low-cost alternative, run into a thousand dead-ends, find one that works, hook everything up only to discover that it doesn’t want to play nice with your existing plugin that sends your latest post as an email, spend some more time digging to discover a separate plugin that makes sure your post plugin can talk to your email sender only to discover that it creates an agonizingly slow bottleneck in sending speeds, so the 1,200 emails you start sending Friday afternoon won’t actually finish sending until sometime Saturday morning, but that’s a moot point anyway because pretty soon you’re going to hit the subscriber limit for your free plugin and you know you can’t afford the paid tier.

All that for a blog post.

I’m tired, folks.

When I started Sabbath Thoughts as an email to friends (nearly 20 years ago!), it was just a way of sharing reflections about God’s Word. Now the whole operation has bloated into something more than I can handle, and I need to scale back to something more reasonable.

Here’s what’s changing:

Posting frequency

Even during my most productive years, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to consistently post one new Sabbath Thought a week. I’ve always been a slow writer, and I’m probably slower now than I was when I started. (It’s a lot easier to write to a few dozen people you know than a few hundred people you don’t.)

So, in an attempt to be more realistic about the bandwidth I actually have, here’s the new goal: one new Sabbath Thought on the first Sabbath of every month. (That’s tomorrow night!)

Twelve per year feels more realistic than fifty-two. I wish I could promise that means they’ll be really really good ones, but I think all I can promise is that I’m going to try really really hard to make them exist.

Weekly emails

In concert with that, I’m changing how the weekly emails work. I want to make sure I’m sending something worth opening on the off-weeks, so instead of just recycling an old post, I’ve been trying out a new format.

James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) sends what he calls a 3-2-1 email every week, with three quotes from him, two quote from others, and one question to reflect on. I’ve started doing something similar—three quotes from old Sabbath Thoughts, two scriptures, and one question.

(Here’s what they look like.)

Actually, I’d love to know what you think of it. Is the new format worth it?

If you’d like something specific in the emails, you can leave a comment below and let me know what’s missing!

Extra bits (Read and Reflect, Scripture Pictures)

Part of the bloat I’m dealing with is something I brought on myself. As extra elements became part of Sabbath Thoughts, they usually came with metrics, and it’s easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking like a caveman. “Number too small! Need make number bigger!”

Why? Well… because it’s small!

Scripture Pictures were an attempt to boost social media visibility and engagement, and they worked! But I never stopped to ask if I have an actual need for boosting social media visibility and engagement. Why? For what purpose?

I dunno. It was just a number I could watch getting bigger on a dashboard.

If I had infinite time, I’d keep on making those—but it’s just one more thing to remember and keep up with, so I’m dropping it for now.

Read & Reflect was an attempt to build a community around scheduled Bible reading and discussion, but I think the execution was a little clunky and, again, I found it to be something I couldn’t keep up with in terms of scheduling and participation. I love the idea and maybe we’ll revisit it someday, but I’m officially shelving it for now, too. (It’s been effectively shelved for a while now, but I think saying something is better than letting it languish in uncertainty.)

Books (physical, digital, and audio)

I had a lot of great feedback after launching Letters From Babylon this year, including some requests for an ebook and audiobook version. I’d love to make those happen, and I’m looking into it, but I don’t have a timeline quite yet. Anything audio related especially is going to take a lot of time to record and edit and package, but I want to make things as accessible as possible. So those are on my radar.

I’ve also discovered in the past few years that I really enjoy making longer form content. Trying (and failing) to keep up with the one-a-week pace makes it harder to focus on things that take more time (like books!), so I’m hoping this will clear some space to work on bigger projects.

The ever-changing digital landscape

I can’t think of a clever way to transition into this, so I’ll just get right into it:

AI bums me out, man.

It’s been talked to death, and I’m sure it’ll continue to be talked to death, but I’ve been absolutely devastated to see how many people are blindly incorporating as much of it as possible into every aspect of their lives.

(I know—AI is complicated and it’s a confusing label—I think there are a lot of amazing uses for LLM architecture and it’s not so simple as saying that all instances of AI are worthless or harmful. And to clarify, what follows is about generative AI specifically—the kind where you can ask a chatbot to be creative on your behalf.)

It’s kind of taken the wind out of my sails to see so many people outsource their thoughts and creative endeavors to a soulless, mindless machine. I’m disheartened to see how many people think “more” and “faster” are synonyms for “worthwhile” and “better,” or who have convinced themselves that an algorithm’s creations are actually their creations.

I don’t mind using LLMs as glorified search engines, but I’m determined to keep them as far removed from my creative process as possible. I saw someone online ask this about AI-created content: “Why should I bother to read what you couldn’t be bothered to write?” And I think that’s true for most creative endeavors.

It makes it hard to write, because I know that for every paragraph I wrestle with—all the edits and backspaces and first drafts that never see the light of day—ChatGPT and its ilk have buried the Internet under literal mountains of text. What’s the point? Who’s going to bother reading my stuff in that sea of content? Who’s even going to notice it?

Even before AI, I think blogs were on their way out the door. They had their day in the sun, but most people have moved on to videos and podcasts. The fact that it’s so easy to prompt ten million posts on ten million subjects with just a few keystrokes just feels like the final nail in the coffin when it comes to visibility.

But that’s okay. This isn’t about visibility or traffic. At the end of the day, what I post here is just the end result of me trying to grapple my way to a better understanding of God’s word. And if posting those grapplings are worthwhile to even a small handful of people—and I’ve heard from enough of you over the years to know that they have been worthwhile—then I’m fine with Sabbath Thoughts existing as a relic of the Internet that was. It might be a dinosaur, but it’s our little dinosaur, and I’m happy to let it keep roaming as long as it can.

Until next time

I want to end this by saying thank you. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started writing these things, and to be honest I’m still not quite sure what I’ve gotten into, but having this blog become (a wildly inconsistent) part of my identity for 19 years has been something special. More than that, getting to hear from so many of you who have found value or encouragement or comfort in Sabbath Thoughts (for nearly two decades!) has been an absolute privilege I’ll never feel like I deserve.

Things are different now—the entire Internet is so different now—but I hope this blog will continue to be a place they can come and find something useful from God’s word to think about. Thanks for being part of it, even as it changes.