My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 376 👋

I have been radio-silent for a while, and I owe you an explanation for why. Day after day, week after week I kept running into the same wall: low energy, no motivation to sit in front of my Mac in order to write and prepare this newsletter. My work, applications, and the whole tech scene have been taking up so much space in my head that I have grabbed every chance to close the laptop and do something else entirely. Over the past weeks, that felt like a relief. I have a longer post lined up explaining why I needed the time off, but I am not ready to publish it yet.

Long story short, I have been overwhelmed with the whole field of tech, and honestly I still am. When the only thing that seems to matter is cramming in as much AI as possible, and your productivity gets measured by the amount of tokens you burn through every single day, it becomes genuinely hard to keep going, showing up, stay motivated, and believe you are still doing the same pioneering work as ten years ago.

Not even a full decade was enough before I started questioning what I do every day to pay my bills and fund my life. Suddenly I am in this strange spot: do I want to stay in tech, and if not, what else? Do I keep going and hope it gets better? All of this is occupying my mind so much, that I reached a point where I simply do not want to deal with it. However, writing this newsletter means that I somehow have to deal with it. Working at the intersection of tech, design, and everything around it, I can not avoid running straight into the very thing that is overwhelming me.

And here's the part I keep coming back to, the reason Creativerly exists in the first place. I started this in 2019 because I believe in indie blogs and online magazines, in genuine, original, human writing. As the internet gets flooded with AI slop, we need more of that, not less. That belief has not gone anywhere. If anything, the noise of the last year has made it feel more urgent.

So the question that is actually been keeping me up is not just "do I stay in tech." It is this: how do I keep writing about the things I love, tech, design, apps and tools, and everything around them, in a way that leaves you with a bit of hope, or at least a good idea to sit with, instead of leaving you fed up and annoyed because yet another tech company went rogue?

Because pardon my language, but I do not want to spend every issue writing about all the fucked up things happening in tech right now (and the world in general). And there is plenty of it: security breaches in the AI tools everyone is rushing to adopt, green areas paved over for yet another data center, energy demands so heavy that companies quietly slide back to oil and gas to meet them. That stuff is real, and I am not going to pretend it is not. But I refuse to let it become the whole story.

Because there is a whole other story too, the small, well-made app built by two people who actually care, the writer publishing something strange and personal on their own domain instead of a platform, the tools that still feel like they were made by humans, for humans. That is the stuff I want to point you toward.

So what does this mean for Creativerly going forward? Honestly, I am still figuring out the exact shape. I can feel a spark again, some motivation, some energy coming back, and my backlog is full of posts I actually want to write. I am not going to promise you a rigid schedule, because I do not want to break my own trust the moment I am getting my footing back. But I am not disappearing again either. I will be here, writing the kind of thing I would want to find in my own inbox: honest about the mess, but always looking for the good.

Thanks for still being here. Let's get back into it.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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