I have been on Hive from the start, and my 9th Hive Birthday is around the corner. For almost 10 years, I have been using Hive almost on a daily basis. It shaped my days; from planning writing sessions to doing photoshoots, to driving to strange places to drink a beer.
But in the last three months, or actually from the start of 2026, my life has been turned upside down by uncertainty; to such a degree that I have stopped using Hive, that I stopped doing photoshoots, and that I stopped thinking and being creative. It has become so bad that my wife has been worrying herself for the last three or so months.
Hive played a fundamental role in my life. And since the uncertainty of my life, and the uncertainty of my future in my work, I have not been able to think creatively, and I have not entered the mind space to create.
Linked with the rise of AI, in especially the way it has affected my own writing, the creative impulses that drove me to create slowly atrophied and died off in a very real sense.
This has been impacting my own writing as well. Where I once felt joy in writing, putting my ideas on paper, now I feel almost haunted by the words that once brought joy.
But in an attempt to restart this joy, to rekindle the yearning to write, I am going to POWER DOWN. This is a very odd statement to make.
And I feel like letting down myself, and the Hive Community, to power down.
But there is a very real reason why I am doing this, and I cannot, at this stage avoid it. It has come to this stage that I need to power down, probably at the worst time. It does not make sense, and it will not make sense. And it will probably harm the very real and hard work I have put into this part of my life.
I have worked for over 9 years to cultivate this space, to carve out the small corner of the internet that has been transformed in the last 5 years.
And I will probably regret this decision. For I have worked so hard in trying to create, to stake, to work on something bigger. And in a very real sense, it has been achieved.
But now, for reasons, I need to (for only a while) go into the opposite direction.
It feels like I am betraying the very community I have relied on for so long. But this seems at this stage to be the only way I can again begin to create.
What this change will bring about is, I hope, the impetus to write and create again.
I will, for now, change, where I will for a while only write on my blog, using it as my blog to create, to fight the fear of not creating. And if you feel the need to vote on these posts, I will appreciate it. If you feel that I have forsaken what the community has stood for, and I understand this in a very real sense, I do not blame you for thinking in this way.
I hope that I might again, return, as a better version, one that took me 9 years to build but only 6 months to break down.
