Before Facebook and Instagram made sharing updates as easy as a few taps, staying in touch with friends and family required real effort. If you missed the 90s, check out these classic New York Times pieces: A Eulogy for the Long, Intimate Email and How to Write a Family Newsletter Your Friends Will Actually Read. They’ll give you a taste of the old-school commitment to crafting and sharing life’s adventures.

Today, social media makes it effortless to stream updates, no matter how mundane. But this speed comes at the cost of depth and quality.

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”

— Mark Twain

Early Days of Digital

In my world, I was the guy filling inboxes with lengthy emails and quarterly newsletters. Flight delays during my consulting gigs gave me time to perfect my updates. I used a listserv, then a GeoCities site with HTML and RSS—way ahead of Friendster and MySpace!

When I landed a consulting project in London, an early digital camera–it used floppy disks–brought my stories to life. Photos and detailed posts about my travels, like a Napa trip reprinted in The Sacramento Bee, drew a sizeable audience. But the time it took to format those photos around the content was intense. What used to take hours turned into days.

As life got busier, time to write and post became scarce. I eventually joined the social media revolution and moved to Facebook, which made publishing easier but less personal. Over time, as Facebook’s layout evolved, my detailed posts became short updates, then just photos with captions—the depth of the experiences lost to text limits.

Rediscovering Storytelling

While social media captures fleeting moments, it lacks the depth of true storytelling. Recently, I read a detailed account of a safari trip to The Kruger with a friend and was amazed at how much I’d forgotten. Despite photos and Facebook memories, they pale compared to the richness of a well-told story.

So, I’m bringing back the stories. Instead of just posting on Instagram and Facebook, I’ll be diving into the tales behind the pictures. I hope you’ll join me on this journey down memory lane.

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