Sjoerd Blom

Since redesigning my website, I made myself a solemn promise: publish more often. At least twice a week. Rhythm. Structure. Discipline. It seemed only logical. If you want to stay visible, you have to remain visible.

A fine resolution, but reality tends to push back.

During the week, my job absorbs a great deal of energy. Not so much the work itself, but mainly the hours. They carve up the day. When I get home, I want absolutely nothing for a moment. No keyboard. No ideas. No SEO checks or sentences that could be tightened just a little more.

Let me be honest right away: I have absolutely nothing with Valentine’s Day. In fact, I think it’s a terrible day. There. It’s out. But yes… I’m married. And my wife expects me to do something. So there you are, mid-February, stuck in an internal struggle between principle and pragmatism.

A gift. With a poem. I hear myself say it and instantly feel 83 years old.

Sometimes it does not take a major incident to realise how dependent you are. I only really noticed it when WhatsApp stopped working the way it normally does. Nothing dramatic. No sirens, no power outage. Just a sudden silence on the channel you unconsciously rely on for everything from “are you on your way” to “can you call me for a moment”.

I wrote briefly about it in Temporarily Without WhatsApp: How Fragile Our Digital Reachability Is. It was only half a day, but it felt as if something self-evident had disappeared. And that is exactly the point. Digital dependency only becomes visible when it falters.

As long as I can remember, I have been interested in my ancestry. Who were the people before me? Where did they come from? And how did their lives influence my own? Those questions became even more intriguing because my family ties extend far beyond the borders of the Netherlands. Not only within our own country, but also towards Hungary and Slovakia.

I have been meaning to write something on my personal website again for quite a while. And, as usual, I keep promising myself that this time I will really pick it up properly. Only to publish nothing for months on end. By now, I know that pattern all too well. Still, this moment feels different. Not because I suddenly developed better discipline, but because the foundation of my site has changed. And that foundation brings a sense of calm.

This morning I decided to do some housekeeping in WhatsApp. Old videos, endlessly forwarded GIFs, voice notes I don’t even remember the context of anymore. All in all, about five gigabytes of data. Nice and tidy, I thought.

Until later that morning.

Out of nowhere, my WhatsApp account was blocked. No notifications, no chats, no way to send or read messages. Nothing at all. As if someone had silently pulled the plug.