Am I Back?
The beginning of substack
Not so long ago I said I would step back from Substack. I said this for a number of reasons.
First, I was overwhelming myself posting every day. It was cool for a week or two, but eventually, I became burnt out. I felt like I was talking about and writing about the same things over and over again.
Second, Substack is a great source of income and disinformation generation for prominent anti-vaxxers.
Third, my own mental health. I am not going to lie, graduate school has pushed my buttons as far as stress and anxiety. My depression started to act up again even after taking my anti-depressants. For this reason, I had to step back as far as online content creation.
Finally, I wasn’t making much money on substack, to begin with. This newsletter was made in part to build a community and to help me a bit financially since I put a lot of work into this with little financial incentive.
Perhaps all of this came from making the difficult choice of changing niches. I went from nutrition to general science communication/COVID-19. That isn’t easy whatsoever considering all of the information out there related to the pandemic and my general introduction to public health via graduate school.
So why come back?
I came back to Substack for a number of reasons. Mostly because it’s easy to create content and manage my email list on here than on most other platforms.
There are also plenty of amazing pro-science accounts on Substack that forced me to change how I see the platform. I am going to list some of the accounts:
While I will do my best to talk about covid, my main goal is to advocate for critical thinking and scientific literacy as debunking myths seems like a fool’s errand.
Nevertheless, I will try my best to summarize the best research on the topic and explain some of the nuances. This is in addition to talking about science denial, conspiracies, understanding science, and more.
The type of science denial I will be targeting will of course be anti-vaxxers.
I am doing this to help save lives from the clutches of anti-vax rhetoric, help people become more logical, and lessen the grip of anti-intellectualism in our society.
The Future
I ultimately want this newsletter to be informative, help people make better decisions, and give you a good taste of Jae’s perspective. My love is writing and I need to work more on that.
Hopefully, you’ll stick along for the journey.