I miss blogs, which is a slightly ridiculous thing to write on a blog.

But I don’t mean blogs exactly. I mean the old internet—the one where you’d click a link, then another link, then another, and 45 minutes later you’d be reading a stranger’s extremely detailed ranking of every R.E.M. B-side. There was no content strategy, and nobody was building a personal brand. The guy just had opinions about R.E.M. Somehow, I miss that.

Remember when we used to surf the internet? We didn’t scroll it, consume it, or have an algorithm serve it to us after it had already decided what would keep us there the longest. You went looking for one thing and found six others along the way. Fan sites were dedicated to one television show, message boards were full of people arguing about things that would never matter, and blogs covered obscure music, bad movies, good books, knitting, politics, parenting, or whatever somebody happened to be obsessed with that week. Some of it was terrible, a lot of it was ugly, and the fonts were horrific, but it felt like there were actual people behind it. More importantly, you never quite knew what you were going to find.

At some point, we stopped randomly putting things on the internet and started creating content. Even that phrase makes me a little tired. Content is such a joyless word for something another human being made. A story is content. A photograph is content. A song is content. Even a 700-word LinkedIn post about the leadership lessons someone learned while assembling IKEA furniture is content. Everything goes into the same machine.

And once you’re creating content, apparently you need a strategy. You need a cadence, hooks, and SEO. You need to repurpose, optimize, and ask yourself whether the thing you’re about to say provides enough value. Sometimes I just want to tell you about a song I like.

This is especially true in the professional corners of the internet, where everybody seems to be teaching something: five things I learned, three mistakes you’re making, and here’s what nobody tells you about X. I do this, too, of course. I’ve written plenty of articles about writing, creativity, and careers, and I genuinely like sharing what I’ve learned. But lately I’ve been wondering when we decided everything we put into the world had to earn its place there. When did having an interest become having a niche? When did making something become building a platform? When did sharing something you love become thought leadership? Maybe I don’t have a thought to lead today. Maybe I just found a really good song.

Recently I wrote about how the best creative people I know are interested in everything, and the response surprised me. People didn’t seem hungry for another piece of career advice. They responded to the idea of simply being interested—reading something that had nothing to do with their jobs, following the weird link, or knowing way too much about a subject nobody is ever going to pay them to know about.

Maybe that’s part of what I miss about the old internet. It was built on rabbit holes. You didn’t always know where you were going, and that was the fun part. Discovery required a little wandering. Now Spotify knows what song I want to hear next, Netflix knows what show I might watch, and Instagram knows what video will keep me from putting my phone down for another seven minutes. The algorithms have gotten remarkably good at giving us more of what we already like.

To be fair, that’s incredibly convenient, but also a little boring. Because finding exactly what you’re looking for isn’t the same thing as discovering something you didn’t know existed, and I’m starting to wonder whether that difference matters more than we think, especially for people who make things.

Creative work depends on unexpected collisions. Something you read bumps into something you heard five years ago. A photograph reminds you of a conversation. A song sends you looking for another artist, which sends you somewhere else entirely. Two things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other suddenly do.

You can’t really schedule that, and you certainly can’t optimize it. And I’m not sure we can trust an algorithm to do all of our wandering for us. The more our feeds learn our tastes, the easier it becomes to stay inside them. More music like the music we already love. More writers who think like we do. More opinions we already agree with. More ideas adjacent to ideas we’ve already encountered. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—I like it when Spotify finds me a song I love.

But I also want someone to hand me something and say, “This is weird, but trust me.” I want to pick up a book because I like the cover, read an article about something I know absolutely nothing about, or watch a movie because someone whose taste I trust won’t stop talking about it. I want to have a conversation that sends me home to look something up and, somewhere along the way, stumble across something I wasn’t looking for at all.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking differently about my own website lately. Obviously, it’s here to show my work and tell you what I do, but it also gives me a place to follow some of those rabbit holes—to write about creativity, make playlists, share something I’ve discovered, or explore an idea simply because I can’t stop thinking about it. Not everything has to ladder up to a content pillar. Maybe that’s terribly inefficient, but I’m okay with that.

And maybe, if creative work needs those unexpected collisions as much as I think it does, we should all get a little more intentional about being inefficient. Take the wrong turn or click the weird link. Pick up the book you weren’t looking for, listen to something the algorithm would never choose for you, and give yourself permission to get a little lost along the way.

And if you happen to stumble across a stranger’s definitive ranking of every R.E.M. B-side, send it my way.