The Skojec File Remastered: Evolving for 2026 and Beyond

Cleaning Things Up and Getting More Focused

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I have thousands of published essays. Millions of words in print. But last September, I wrote the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write.

The unwanted end to my marriage sent me spinning. I asked for help from my readers, and they stepped up in a big way. Between direct contributions and new subscribers, I was able to bring in enough revenue to get through the darkest part of this. I cannot overemphasize enough that I wouldn’t have made it this far without all of you.

In return, I promised a travel series as I took my grief on the road and tried to pull myself together. It helped me to process what I was going through and find a sense of purpose buried within the pain. Many of you have told me it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and although I can’t see it that so clearly, I hope it’s true. It was very raw, and I can’t even bring myself to revisit those pieces just yet. Still, it’s nice to believe that maybe something good came from this awful thing.

And I’d like to keep that momentum going.

I’m back in Raleigh, and the road trip is over. So I’m focusing on making the most of my newfound abundance of solo time, and I’m putting my energy into improving my work. I’m not done with travel writing, but for now, I have to focus my efforts on rebuilding my life. This Substack will continue to play a central role.

I’ll never stop writing personal essays and reflections, but I also want to pivot back to the broader current of writing I’ve always done: social and cultural commentary, neo-futurism, the unexplained and ontologically challenging weirdness of our world, and even religious deconstruction (where appropriate).

State of the Substack

TSF grew to ~3,300 free and 290 paid subscribers over the course of last year — about a 20% increase. We’ve got a great open rate, and good retention, but I give away almost all of my best content for free, and growth has been plateaued for months now.

Part of that is on me. For most of the month of January I was borderline non-functional. I was mostly just sitting in my apartment, shell-shocked, missing my kids, and feeling the weight of being alone all day every day, when I normally thrive on regular human contact. A couple weeks ago, I started a new health protocol that is helping me to break mental blocks and find the energy to do long stretches of creative work. And because there are none of the interruptions of busy family life, sad as that is, it’s also a big boost to my ability to focus on and complete tasks. There’s still a lot of grieving and healing to do, but progress is being made.

This Substack is currently my only source of income, it’s only bringing in a little over $20K annually — about half what I really need for subsistence and basic contribution to the welfare of my kids. Subscription renewals come in sporadically, based on when folks first signed up, and revenue is therefore inconsistent month-to-month.

That means every new subscription, every bit of one-time support from readers, these are the things that make it possible for me to keep going. I don’t currently have any full-time job prospects, and outside work it takes away from time and energy spent both here and on the new podcast I’m doing with Kale Zelden. I have enough work between the two to keep me busy full time. Between research, writing, filming, editing, designing, tagging, describing, uploading, promoting…it’s easy to completely fill a week.

And my goal is to make that financially sustainable, rather than dividing my time.

With all of this in mind, I want to increase the value proposition here and grow the paid subscriber base, so I’m buckling down and focusing on a functional revamp.

My topic mix is eclectic, but that’s just how my brain works. I chase patterns. I write about epiphanies in real time. It’s a bit of a jumble, but to me, it all ties together in a central theme: I’m looking to make sense of human life in a chaotic world.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to get rid of the “sections” that had segregated content into rigid buckets. Although I haven’t yet had time to re-tag my whole archive, my basic topic lanes are as follows:

• Cultural Commentary - Discussions about cultural shifts & current events

• Personal Reflections - Personal essays on various topics, drawing from direct experience and typically written from a first person POV

• Religion - I don’t still practice it in any organized way, but I still think and write about it a lot

• Personal Growth - Different than personal reflections; stuff I’ve learned about navigating trauma, neurodivergence, and life in general that might be helpful to others

• Travel - My writings from and about various places that I’ve gone, and the things I discovered while I was there

• UAPs & Unexplained - Anything particularly weird or woo or involving news about our visitors from somewhere else

• AI & Tech - We are in the most rapid acceleration of technological advancement in human history, and it affects all of us

• Podcasts & Media - This is where I link to any podcast appearances, including those on Monitoring the Situation, of which I am the co-host.

These tags are for some unfathomable reason not searchable, nor are they visible on the posts themselves, so I’ve put this list permanently into a “Start Here” post that will be pinned to the top navigation bar.

I’ve also unlocked all of the top 20 or so of our most popular posts in the archives.

Boosting Value for Paid Subscribers

I want to increase the value of the paid tier to make it genuinely worth it to those who have already invested in this work, and to grow the paid subscriber base to make this work sustainable.

Free subscribers will still get most of the core content on TSF, but some paid features I’m planning to add will hopefully make that level of investment feel worthwhile:

• Exclusives that go deeper or add bonus content to existing free essays

• Monthly live Q&A Chats or AMA posts

• Periodic roundups (at least monthly) of curated links and quick takes on the biggest topics and stories I’m tracking. These will be kind of like the old “Friday Roundup” series I used to do, but with reduced frequency and higher focus.

To sweeten the deal, I’ve set up a limited-time 20%-off promotion for anyone who signs up by midnight Eastern on Sunday, February 22nd.

And of course, as always, you can leave a tip to keep this project going by clicking the link of your choice: (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe).

New Series Inbound

Back in January, I teased a piece I wanted to do on the “Coming Global Storm.” I’ve been wrestling with this topic every day since, trying to figure out the key components and best angles of approach. The situation is evolving so rapidly I’ve struggled to keep up with new developments as I’m writing about the ones that I already know about.

So instead of trying to nail down a single thought piece, I’ve decided to break this up into a series. It’ll be at least six parts — an introductory piece and five separate essays looking into each of the Five Forces I see that are rapidly re-shaping our world.

The main installments will be available to all readers; other additional bonus content/deeper dives will be for paid subscribers only.

This will be the first experiment on this new value-added approach, so we’ll see how it goes and tweak from there.

The first piece in the series is titled The Global Storm is Here: The 5 Forces Reshaping Our World in 2026.

It drops on Thursday.

New Brand Identity

I haven’t updated the logo for TSF since the first post came out in 2020. It’s feeling a bit dated. I’ve been playing around with concepts, but I haven’t finished the process. Here are a few fun ideas I came up with. So far the wheatpaste logo on the black brick wall is in the lead in my internal, one-person polling, but it’s anyone’s game at this point:

Concluding Thoughts

I’m not going to pretend I’m out of the blast radius. I’m still going through hell, but I’m walking a little more and limping a little less.

One thing I do have in abundance right now is quiet time. Too much, in fact. So I’m hoping to put it to good use, or it’s going to sink my battleship.

I can’t thank you all enough for being here. Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting this work (and me personally), and I look forward to making this a very productive year at TSF!

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