Congratulations! If you are reading this, you are a real person.

Overnight, my subscriber count went from 497 to 47.

Before anyone starts sending sympathy cards or casseroles, let me explain.

I’ve had this blog for several years, and oddly enough, I accumulated most of my subscribers during a long absence. When I recently started looking through the list, I noticed something strange: a lot of them didn’t seem to exist anymore. Not just inactive… but completely gone.

So I started doing a little subscriber housekeeping.

Many of the blogs were started years ago and then abandoned, like a treadmill purchased in January. After ten to fifteen years of no activity, I figured it was safe to assume the owners had moved on to other things—like real life, or possibly competitive napping.

A surprising number were also diet sites, clearly hoping I would suddenly become their next customer. A few were connected to a rather suspicious-looking Russian site, which made me wonder if I had accidentally become part of an international carb-smuggling ring.

So… out they went.

While going through the list, I stumbled across a blog I used to follow when I first started writing. It belonged to a young woman who was documenting her weight-loss journey. She and I had a lot in common.

Her system was simple. Every time she lost a pound, she added a gym clip to a long chain of clips. If she gained a pound, she removed one.

It was a clever idea.

I tried the same thing myself for a while… but I didn’t get very far before I realized I was removing clips faster than I was adding them, which felt less like motivation and more like a depressing arts-and-crafts project.

When I looked up her blog again, I saw she hadn’t posted anything since 2017. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe she reached her goal and moved on, or maybe she just got tired of counting clips.

Either way, her page was one of many that had gone quiet.

There were several others I used to follow that had either stopped posting altogether or disappeared completely. I’ll admit, I felt a little guilty removing them from my list.

But at the end of the day, I decided it was time for a reset.

So here we are: 47 subscribers strong.

If you’re reading this, congratulations—you made the cut. You are officially a real, live, red-blooded human being (or at least a much more convincing robot).

My hope is to slowly build the list back up again with people who enjoy reading and sharing stories—not just trying to sell me miracle diets, suspicious investments, or something that ships from a warehouse somewhere outside Moscow.

So thanks for sticking around.

It’s good to know there are still a few humans out there.