It’s been about a month since The Catalog went live, and I’ve been sitting with what it means to keep something alive without feeding it to the pace of the machine that birthed it.
I built the initial Catalog in bright, unsustainable bursts: 10-hour days, 5 posts at a time, all pulled from a year's worth of notes and photographs.
This was both to prepare a landscape readers could enter, but also to "catch up" so that moving forward I could focus on the current place I'm in instead of past places I've been.
Now the rhythm is slower: 2 to 4 hours at a desk, and the rest in the world, letting experience metabolize into language.
The problem that arrives with this shift is public: how does slow work meet its readers without being translated into what the algorithm understands as “lively”?
What follows in this dispatch are some half-formed reflections on resisting the industrialization of expression, amidst seemingly many other “successful” travel creators selling all they can on "how to grow your blog with SEO."
Why broad search intent fails the fringe
1) Aggregation is not attention. Most high-volume queries flatten inquiry into consensus demand. They privilege the average case, the predictable utility, and the already-explained. High-volume intent rewards what is answerable fast, not what is thinkable long.
2) The interface produces the question. Search is not neutral retrieval; it is a pedagogy. People learn which questions are “askable” by what the interface suggests. Autocomplete narrows horizons. Suggested queries discipline wonder into categories the index can parse. Broad intent becomes a feedback loop: we search what is searchable.
3) Optimization exerts downward pressure on voice. To be visible under broad intent, one writes toward a keyword spine. The sentence begins to serve the scaffold, cadence serves headings, and nuance is shaved for scannability. The text may remain factual, even helpful, but its epistemic dignity thins. The artifact becomes a vehicle for capture rather than a site of meaning.
4) Temporal bias. The ranking systems privilege recency and update cadence. Slow texts accrue over time; they rarely “refresh.” Under speed-logic, the slow is misread as stale, though it may be more alive.
5) The missing reader. Broad intent assumes a generalized seeker. My work is addressed to a specific kind of attention: the reader who asks better questions than the interface can propose. That reader exists, but their path is not the default funnel.
Why the fringe holds value
1) Periphery as laboratory. At the edges, language and form are less policed by convention. Friction is permitted, hybrid forms flourish, and citation lines are visible. The fringe incubates frames that later become common sense.
2) Minority questions, majority consequence. Many high-stakes inquiries start as “low-volume,” e.g. mutualistic mobility, post-productivity, and sovereign interdependence, among others. Their traffic is small; their effect on living is not.
3) Trust density over reach. A small circle of the right readers generates correspondence, not metrics. This is the economy I want to work inside: one where a paragraph can alter a practice.
The present tension
The Catalog is new, having only gone live at the end of last month (September 2025). The numbers are very small, and most probably all family and friends.
I want to learn how to invite the right readership without bending my writing into forms that are more "discoverable" but bereft of depth.
What I read
I read publications like and including The Baffler, The New Inquiry, Logic(s) Magazine, Triple Canopy, and n+1, among others.
Some of the most consequential pieces in my life reached me sideways, almost always through a friend or adjacent community.
For example, this (very niche) essay is a favorite of mine, and I believe I came across it shared in the Slack channel of Tech Workers Coalition.
Suitpossum
But how/where do people find this stuff? Do people even find it at all?
And is there anything wrong with something only being sparsely found, lightly read, and seldom circulated? (If you're not reliant on that thing to make a living, that is.)
On visibility
To wish for readership is to wish for recognition within the right frequency. Visibility itself is not inherently virtuous; its morality depends on what one must do to attain it. If a work’s essence must be distorted to be seen, the cost of visibility becomes too high.
On obscurity
There is a kind of grace in being partially unseen. Obscurity protects incubation; it allows ideas to mature before they are metabolized by the collective. The danger of instant visibility is instant interpretation, which forecloses depth. To remain slightly out of frame can sometimes be the only way to stay whole. For slow projects, obscurity is not failure—it’s part of what makes something special.
Reader as co-author
The kind of reader I imagine does not merely consume. They read in slow circuits, bringing their own context and contradictions. Each act of reading becomes an act of continuation. To write for this kind of reader is to leave intentional gaps, and to construct meaning collaboratively. The web, in its earliest imagination, was built for such dialogic presence; it’s only later that it became a feed.
Critical discoverability
The question, then, is how to make work legible to those who might already care, but not yet know the work exists. Critical discoverability resists algorithmic capture by treating dissemination itself as a form of authorship.
If I am to invite readership without compromising form, perhaps the approach is not to grow outward but to grow inward: to deepen the root system so the few who arrive can stay, engage, and carry fragments elsewhere.
Over time, a small web of mutual discernment may form: readers who do not require algorithmic proof of value to recognize it when they see it.
Work and belief
I want to write "things that matter."
The dominant advice ecosystems for independent writers speak in the grammar of revenue streams: affiliate links, ad networks, and optimization funnels. Their promises are efficient, measurable, and spiritually vacant.
There is, of course, the tension of livelihood—the quiet, persistent need to sustain a project in the real world. But I’m learning to distinguish sustenance from scale. And I’m trying to unlearn the reflex that confuses visibility with worth, and to remember that what “works” financially often fails existentially.
The challenge is to make peace with the possibility that belief itself might be enough of a compass. That to do the work I believe in—to write slowly, attentively, and without disguise—is already a form of success.
Still, I want to be honest about the compromises already in place. I use Travelpayouts, an affiliate program that currently I earn nothing from (on account of having no audience), but hope will eventually help cover some basic costs of running this site without fracturing the ethos of the work or relying on reader contributions. I feel some tension even about this, but it's hard for me to define an alternative at this stage. Beyond Travelpayouts, I feel a strong resistance to joining ad networks (not that The Catalog would qualify at this stage) or even installing Google Analytics. Both feel antithetical to the principles this project was built on: reader trust, privacy, and independence from the surveillance economy that underwrites so much of the modern web.
I think often of Erik Gauger, whose Notes from the Road has quietly persisted without selling itself into fragmentation. I don’t actually read other travel publications. Most feel indistinguishable from their sponsors. But his work has a rare kind of integrity and an almost devotional attention to place, craft, and the interior life of travel.
Travel writing, freed from relationships with the travel industry, can be funny, powerful, and personal. It can be skeptical. It can be uncomfortable. At its best, it doesn’t sell anything. It just observes.
This site is, and always has been, independent and unsponsored. It’s a travelogue in the truest sense: one person’s account of wandering through the world, asking questions, and trying to understand a complex world.
Excerpt from Notes from the Road's About page.
Independence, after all, isn’t just a logistical stance; it’s an epistemological one. It’s a wager that truth, craft, and attention can still outlast the metrics built to quantify them.
An admission of personal confusion
Sometimes I’m not even sure I want to be a travel writer at all, and especially not a digital nomad travel writer (although this is the lens through which I happen to have experienced most of my travels). While there are certainly exceptions (Erik Gauger), much of this domain feels weighed down by a culture of "lifestyle" inspiration blended with performative freedom. I find myself increasingly distant from that orbit, uninterested in its economies of self-promotion and its glossy narratives.
Most of what passes as travel writing today feels extractive, promotional, and/or preoccupied with convenience. I don’t want to replicate that. I’m far more drawn to the undercurrents that make movement meaningful, or fraught: politics, labor, environment, memory, and belief. Those are the terrains that actually shape how we move through the world and how the world, in turn, moves through us.
Maybe where I began isn’t where I’ll end up. The Catalog might evolve from documenting places to examining the systems and stories that make them legible, the infrastructures of power and culture that determine experience. I want to write about what draws me intellectually and creatively, not what is merely photogenic and definitely not what is widely searchable.
If The Catalog is to last, it has to remain porous to change. "Digital nomad travel" may have been the doorway, but what lies beyond it is where the deeper work lives.
And if I want to write beyond this, it means I also need to live and experience beyond this too. Expect some upcoming reflections on what I think that means, and what I plan to do differently with The Catalog and, in turn, my life.
I share these reflections to signal that it’s okay to feel yourself shifting in relation to your work, the world, or the thing you are building.
A business / creation / work of art is a living system.
The desire to do something different than you did a few months ago is not inconsistency—it’s evolution, the natural consequence of reflecting and listening closely to yourself.
