This Blog is Haunted
Not metaphorically.
I mean this literally: this blog contains the preserved thoughts of previous versions of myself. They are still here, speaking, frozen in timestamps, unable to update their opinions or correct their mistakes.
Every post on this blog is a ghost.
Not the spooky kind but the sad kind, the kind that doesn’t know it’s dead. They were written by someone who believed what they were saying at the time someone who was certain enough to publish, confident enough to hit enter, naive enough to think that the words would remain true.
But the words don’t remain true. The world changes and I change, but the posts don’t.
I wrote something here in 2022 about change, how everything is supposed to change and how people do change. I read it again last week and it felt like reading a letter from a friend I’ve lost touch with. The sentiments are familiar but the voice is distant.
The 2022 version of me believed in self-improvement with an earnestness that makes the 2026 version uncomfortable, not because it was wrong but because it was certain. And certainty is a luxury I can no longer afford.
This blog is a haunted house and I am both the ghost and the visitor.
I walk through my own posts like rooms in a building I designed but no longer recognize. Here’s a post about reading habits, here’s one about OpenBSD, here’s one about Camus and Frenchie from The Boys (god, I was so proud of that one), and here’s one about Why Greek statues have small penises (who even cares).
Each room contains a version of me, and each version thinks it’s the current one, but none of them know they’ve been superseded.
The worst part of a haunting is not the presence of the dead. It’s their persistence. They can’t leave or update or say “actually, I’ve reconsidered.” They just repeat the same message, over and over, in the same words, at the same volume, forever.
That’s what this blog is. A collection of messages that I can no longer amend.
I could edit them, go back and update the old posts. But that would be worse than the haunting that would be forgery. It would be replacing the ghost with a living person wearing the ghost’s clothes. The timestamp would be wrong but the text would be new. A lie with the appearance of truth.
Some of these posts are wrong. Not factually wrong, though some of those too, but philosophically wrong, written from a place of conviction that I no longer hold, with arguments I would no longer make and opinions I would no longer defend.
But they stay.
They stay because deleting them would be deleting part of my history. And keeping them is keeping part of my history that I’ve outgrown.
Either way, I lose.
I visit this blog the way you visit a graveyard, not to mourn but to remember that everything you think and write and believe will eventually become someone else’s artifact.
You are not your current thoughts. You are the accumulation of all your thoughts, including the ones you’ve abandoned.
And this blog is the accumulation, the sediment, the ghost layer.
If you’re reading this, you’re walking through a haunted house. Tread carefully, because the previous tenants are still here and they don’t know they’ve been evicted.