I am conducting a survey

its not a Normal Survey its going to be so fun I promise

a couple nights ago, when i couldn’t sleep, i was struck in the early hours of the morning by a sudden desire to know a lot more about the people that read this blog. there are about 200-300 of you who regularly comment/email/otherwise engage verbally with the posts, but the rest of you are largely unknown to me — which, to me, is a really interesting dynamic (while of course also being completely obvious and basically non-notable). the people that read this blog are a huge part of my life, actually far bigger than i can even reckon with or comprehend at any given moment, and i know almost nothing about most of you outside of what substack’s analytics tells me. that’s crazy!

i’ve always been perversely interested in reading stats and reader info about my favourite blogs, and i also realized that i just have a huge demographic sample here — about 125,000 readers across, unbelievably, almost every country in the world.¹ it’s very rare that you get the opportunity to ask that many people a question. so, i thought — i should write a questionnaire full of actual things i (and maybe other people) want to know about this mysterious community that defines my entire life! i can make it sort of invasive and difficult to understand and no-one can stop me!

so, the survey is here. it’s anonymous, and i would be so grateful if you took 10 minutes and filled it out <3

some of the questions are pretty normal and demographic in nature. most of them are things i would ask you if we were hanging out (many of them are taken directly from real conversations i’ve had with my friends over the last few months). all of them are things i have genuinely wondered at one time or another about the people who so generously engage with this blog. there’s not really any through-line to the questions, or any narrative i’m looking for; they’re honestly pretty random. still, i hope that all of them together will help me understand this vast, undefinable readership a little better, in some way.

there are no wrong answers to any of these questions — in fact, i literally did not include any options that i thought i could be judgmental towards. they’re all optional, so don’t answer anything you’re not comfortable with and don’t let it take up too much of your time or anything. i plan to post any interesting findings, as well as my own responses. I know its annoying to fill out a survey but I think it will be really FUN and also wouldn’t it be cool to have actually like a really big study of how many people have sort-of cheated on their partners???

ok that’s it! more stuff coming out soon! <3

1. interesting discovery: according to my stats, i have exactly one subscriber in Greenland, Togo, and the Republic of Congo respectively.