People tell me I am mysterious with some regularity and they mean it kindly, and every time I have the same small internal reaction, which is that I am not being anything. I am just not talking. Those two states look identical from the outside and they are nothing alike from the inside, and the gap between them has turned out to be one of the more interesting things about doing this work in public.
The internet has one setting and it is loud
Every platform I use is built to reward immediate, high-volume, high-confidence output. Post constantly. React fast. Have an opinion within the hour. The mechanism does not distinguish between people who are like that naturally and people who are performing it, and it certainly does not offer a lane for whatever the opposite is. The result is that everybody's public version is a somewhat louder edit of them, and we have all silently agreed to treat that edit as the real thing.
I am bad at that setting. Not principled about it, just bad. My first reaction to anything is usually nothing, and the useful thought arrives two days later when it is no longer relevant to anybody. For a long time I treated that as a professional deficiency and tried to correct it, which produced a version of me online that I found genuinely embarrassing to read back and which, notably, did not perform any better.
What people are actually reading
Silence is unusually open to interpretation, so people fill it with whatever they arrived carrying. The same absence of a reply reads as aloof, as mysterious, as rude, as sad, or as deeply cool, depending entirely on the reader. None of those are coming from me. They cannot be — there is nothing there to come from.
That is mostly harmless and occasionally genuinely useful. The mysterious reading is flattering and I have never once corrected it, which I suppose makes me complicit in it. But it does cause one real problem, which is that people assume a quiet person is judging them. I am not. I promise. I am thinking about a lamp, or about whether I left something on, or about nothing whatsoever, which is the most common answer and the one nobody believes.
What I do instead
I write things down. Everything I want to say properly ends up somewhere like this, in long form, hours or days after the moment, where I can take three passes at it and cut the two paragraphs that were showing off. That is not a workaround, it turns out — it is just the format that matches how the thinking actually happens. It only felt like a workaround while I was measuring it against people who are quick.
And in conversation I have stopped filling gaps. Not as a tactic; I tried the tactic version and it is exhausting and everyone can tell. Just genuinely allowing the pause, answering the question that was asked rather than the nearest easier one, and being willing to say I do not know. The number of people who find that unnerving is much smaller than I assumed, and the ones who do not find it unnerving are, without exception, the better conversations.
The one thing I would tell anyone else like this
Do not build the loud version. It does not work anyway, which is the part I wish somebody had told me three years earlier — the audience it attracts is looking for the loud thing, and you cannot sustain being the loud thing, so they leave and take the numbers with them and you are left having spent a year being somebody you do not like.
Build the slow thing properly instead. Fewer, longer, better, and let it accumulate. It grows more gradually and it grows on people who actually want what you are making, which means it does not evaporate the first month you are tired. That is not a moral position. It is the only strategy I have found that survives contact with an ordinary bad week, and there are always ordinary bad weeks.
So: not mysterious, not aloof, not judging you. Just slow, and increasingly relaxed about being slow. If you have sent me something and it took two days, that is what happened, and the answer you got was almost certainly better for having waited.
The longer version of all of this.
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