Bringing Back the Art of Storytelling

Before Facebook and Instagram made sharing updates as simple as a few taps, staying connected with friends and family took real effort. If you missed the 90s, 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—capture the old-school commitment to crafting and sharing life’s adventures.

Social media has made it effortless to share even the most mundane updates, but this convenience often comes at the cost of depth and quality.

Early Days of Digital

In the pre-social media era, I was the guy filling inboxes with lengthy emails and quarterly newsletters. Long flight delays during my consulting gigs gave me the perfect excuse to fine-tune my updates. Back then, I relied on listservs and even built a GeoCities site with HTML and RSS feeds—years ahead of Friendster or MySpace!

When I landed a consulting project in London, I bought an early digital camera that stored photos on floppy disks. Suddenly, my stories came to life with images. I shared detailed posts about my travels, like a Napa trip that even got reprinted in The Sacramento Bee. But the process of formatting photos and content was painstaking—what used to take hours stretched into days.

As life got busier, my time to write and post dwindled. I eventually joined the social media revolution. Facebook made publishing quicker, but less personal. Over time, my posts shrank: long, detailed stories became brief updates, then photos with captions. The depth of the experiences often disappeared in the shift to brevity.

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

— Mark Twain

Rediscovering Storytelling

Social media is great for capturing fleeting moments, but it lacks the richness of true storytelling. I was reminded of this recently while reading a friend’s detailed account of a safari trip to Kruger National Park. Despite the countless photos and Facebook memories we’d shared, they paled in comparison to the vivid narrative.

So, I’ve decided to return to storytelling. Instead of just posting snapshots on Instagram or Facebook, I’ll share the full stories behind them—moments that deserve more than a fleeting scroll.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey to rediscover the joy of storytelling, one memory at a time.

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