You Are Interesting Enough for the Archive
From a historian who spends her life reading other people’s “unremarkable” thoughts
Somewhere there is a historian in an archive, hunched over a diary of a woman who died many years ago.1
This woman never held office, never wrote a book, and the only time she was ever in the paper was for the time she came in second place in a pie competition at the Fourth of July picnic in her town. We know this, because on July 5th, she wrote:
“Sharon’s husband paid off the judge, we all know it. That pie was a travesty.”2
She ran a household, raised some kids, had a longstanding rivalry with her neighbor (Sharon, presumably), and lived in a small town that no one would be able to find on a map.
What she did do, religiously, was keep a diary.
Most of her entries are tiny, no more than two or three lines. Things like:
“Rained all day, John’s knees are aching.”
“Had to darn a hole in Henry’s sock, how the boy destroys them so fast I cannot figure.”
“Coal bill higher this month than last November.”
“Tried a new recipe. Burnt it.”
If you’d ask her about it, she would probably have said, “Oh it’s nothing. Just my silly little notes to myself.”
She would have been wrong.
Because from those scraps a historian can see the shape of the bigger picture. Gender roles, health, climate, inflation, church politics, social class. Her “uninteresting” life offers truths about the world that a hundred speeches by Very Important Men™ could never touch.
And that’s why the discourse that “not all of you are interesting enough for Substack personal essays” makes me want to scream into the nearest archival box.
As a historian, I’m here to tell: my entire field is obsessed with exactly the minutiae of day to day life that some people keep trying to convince you is pointless.
Your little essays? Diary entries? Notes? Your posts about work, rent, kids, love, faith, queerness, burnout, politics, fandom, or your cat’s last visit to the vet?
That’s the good stuff.
Who Decides What’s “Interesting,” Anyway?
Let’s start with that take above.
“Not all of you are interesting enough for Substack personal essays.”
On the surface, it’s framed like tough love: most people are boring, not everyone deserves and audience, the market is saturated, no one will pay you for your thoughts, blah blah fucking blah.
But under that, there’s an older, nastier story: only some lives are worth documenting. Only some perspectives are worth writing down. Everyone else? Be quiet, consume, leave the narrative to the “special” people.
Historically, we know who those “special” people have been:
wealthy
white
cis
male
literate
influential
If you don’t fit into that stack of adjectives, your story has usually been treated as background noise, relevant only when it bumps into the biography of a Great Man™.
So when I see people saying “none of you are interesting enough to write about your life,” I hear: please maintain the existing inequality in whose stories survive.
I call bullshit.
What Historians Actually Use
Here’s the secret: professional historians don’t sit around all day reading only presidential memoirs and the personal diaries of the Robber Barons.
Well…not all historians anyway.
We absolutely do use those, sure. But they rarely tell us the real details that we want to know.
If I want to understand, say, the emotional fallout of Roe v. Wade being overturned, I don’t just read Supreme Court documents. I’m looking at:
Tweets and Instagram posts from the day the decision dropped
Personal essays about miscarriages, IVF, and abortion
Church newsletters telling congregants how to feel
Text message leaks and group chats
Protest signs, zines, Substack rants, TikToks
If I want to understand the 1950s, I read Ladies’ Home Journal and Tupperware party manuals and bored housewives’ diaries and church cookbooks, not just Eisenhower speeches.
If I want to understand the AIDS crisis, I’m reading ACT UP flyers, underground newsletters, personal letters, and memoirs from people who were told they were “too niche” and “too political” to be mainstream.
“Primary sources” are not just big, glamorous documents. They are grocery lists. Marginal doodles. Fanfic. Bad poetry. Group emails. Blog posts. Tumblr threads. That rambling Substack essay you’re positive no one will ever want to read again.
Historians are basically raccoons. We are out here, elbow-deep in the trash can of the past, shrieking with joy because someone in 1912 wrote three cranky sentences about the price of bread.
The Archive is Already Biased. Don’t Help It Stay That Way.
Here’s the other thing: the archive isn’t neutral.
What gets saved is political and social and wildly unequal.
Historically, powerful people had the money and infrastructure to preserve their letters and books and objects. Entire institutions exist to make sure their legacies stay shiny forever.
Meanwhile, poor people’s letters were tossed when they moved. Enslaved people’s words were recorded only when white people felt like writing them down. Queer people burned their diaries in fear of police, family, or employers finding out. Women’s writing was dismissed as frivolous. Zines and newsletters and community newspapers disintegrated in basements and boxes.
So when someone says, “no one wants your little personal essays,” who do you think is most likely to believe them?
Not the guy who already assumes the world is waiting for his every thought.
It’s the people who have already been told, implicitly and explicitly, that their lives are not central to the story: women, queer and trans folks, people of color, disabled people, working-class people, migrants, chronically ill people, neurodivergent people.
The exact people historians in 2125 will be desperate to hear from.
Imagine trying to write about the 2020s and having only official press releases, corporate marketing campaigns, and the autobiographies of tech bros. That’s not a history; that’s a biography of the 2020s with Stockholm Syndrome.
We need the messy, contradictory, ordinary accounts from everyone else.
“But My Life is Boring”
I can hear it already:
“Okay, fine, but my life isn’t interesting enough. It’s literally just work, sleep, reheated pasta, netflix, and more sleep. No one will care.”
First: same.
Second: that’s the point.
The drama of history is built on painfully normal days. Wars and revolutions are made out of commutes and paychecks and small acts of kindness and cruelty. Policy decisions land on the ground in monthly budgets and doctor’s appointments and classroom lectures and awkward holiday dinners.
When I teach or write about the past, students don’t light up because I say, “In 1954, the Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education.”
Sure, that’s what happened.
But what makes it interesting is the Op-Eds in local newspapers, the diary entries of students, the real life worries of the men and women and teenagers impacted by desegregation.
That’s the story.
Those are all “boring,” private, small-scale pieces of writing.
They are also the only way we know what that era actually felt like for the people living through it.
Why would the 2020s be any different?
The Internet as a Messy, Beautiful Archive
The internet, sad to say is not a utopian digital archive run by benevolent librarians.
Substack, in particular, is a company. It’s want growth, profit, engagement. It has moderation problems, discovery problems, and all the usual platform headaches.
Like WHY is the mobile app so annoying to use? GET ON THAT!
But Substack and the internet in general is doing something almost radical. It’s giving thousands of people permission to send their thoughts straight into other people’s inboxes without needed anyone’s approval.
Some of those newsletters are important news, polished cultural criticism, amateur investigative reporting, or just trauma dumps. Some are cooking blogs, some are fan letters. Some are “just” personal diaries: women writing their way through a tough divorce, someone struggling with chronic illness, people who are losing their faith, gaining it, coming out of the closet or trying to find the courage to do so, surviving grad school (and doing a middling job of it), raising kids, not raising kids.
Is every single one of those going to get famous? Get a million subscribers and a book deal? No, of course not.
But here’s what will happen.
Some will get printed, saved, and tucked into boxes.
Some will be exported and stored by families.
Some will be screenshot and shared across platforms, preserved in unexpected ways.
Some will be used as sources in future academic work.
If we’re very lucky, the servers will stay alive and the words will remain right there on your page.
And even if none of that happens to yours, it still matters.
Because writing it shapes you and your community right now. It documents, at minimum, for your own future self, that you were here, thinking about these things, at this particular moment in history.3
There’s a reason so many people in the 19th and early 20th centuries kept diaries, even when no one else read them. It helped them make sense of the world. It helped them locate themselves inside events they couldn’t control.
We are living through a time of overlapping crises: climate, pandemic, democracy, fascism, economic instability, the steady erosion of bodily autonomy and human rights. You are allowed, more than allowed, to leave a record of how that felt in your body.
How to Write for Future Historians (Without Turning Your Newsletter Into Homework)
If you’re still with me and thinking, “Okay, but how do I write something that would actually be useful to Future History Nerds™?” here’s the good news: you probably already are.
But if you want a little nudge, here are some questions I wish more people would answer publicly:
What does money feel like where you live? Are you scraping by? Comfortable? Terrified? What are the numbers?
How does politics show up in your day? School board meetings, immigration offices, hospital policies, workplace dress codes?
How is climate change creeping into the background - heat waves, floods, weirdly warm winters, allergy seasons from hell?
What did you grow up being told about gender, race, sexuality, bodies, success? What are you unlearning?
What are the tiny indignities and tiny joys that never make it into “official” accounts?
You do not need to be profound. You need to be specific.
“Today I stood in line for twenty minutes to buy overpriced oat milk while listening to a podcast about the fall of democracy and trying not to cry” tells me more about this era than any white paper.
Before you hit publish and cringe, ask yourself: Would this help someone 100 years from now understand what it felt like to live in 2025 in my body, in my town, with my politics and my problems?
If the answer is even a soft “maybe,” congratulations: you’ve just created a primary source.
A Historian’s Blessing for Your “Silly Little Essays”
I know all the reasons not to write.
You’re tired. You’re busy. You’re not sure you have anything new to say. You’re worried that your story is small, your voice is shaky, your audience is…your mom and that one friend from college.
But here’s what I know from the stacks and the databases and the dusty boxes:
The voices that feel small now are often the ones that matter most later.
The housewife who scribbled in the margins of her cookbook never knew she’d help historians understand 1950s gender roles.
The queer kid writing photocopied zines in the 80s never knew their rage would become crucial evidence for how communities survived the AIDS crisis.
The factory worker who kept a diary of strikes and wages never knew their words would anchor a whole chapter in a labor history monograph.
You don’t have to be “exceptional” to be historically valuable. You just have to be honest.
So from one exhausted, over-caffeinated historian to all of you:
Please keep writing your “uninteresting” Substack essays. Keep sending newsletters no algorithm can silently bury. Chronicle your life in all its petty, glorious, conflicted detail.
You are archiving your existence in real time.
And someday, some future grad student may crack open a file, digital or physical, read your words, and finally understand something about this strange, messy decade that no official report ever captured.
If that isn’t interesting, I don’t know what is.
If you’re a writer who’s been told you’re “not interesting enough,” I’d love to hear from you: what’s one tiny, ordinary detail of your life you wish more people understood? Hit reply, or drop it in the comments. Future historians are taking notes.
This is a hypothetical diary, but not that unlikely.
Sharon is completely fictional and I hate her. She stole that first prize from my fictional housewife and my grudge against her will never fade. Is this related at all to the time I came in second at a pie contest, when the first prize winner was the cousin of the guy in charge and her pie was clearly subpar to mine?
No…of course not. It would be unhinged to still be mad about that nearly a decade later and I am perfectly hinged.
My memory is so bad that I dearly wish I’d been a diary keeper and posted my every dull thought on my Xanga back in the day. Instead I have a memory like swiss cheese.
I totally love this. I really want to tell people currently living to record their genuine lives because history is so interesting in the most boring ways. And it’s so easy for glitzy media or propaganda to paint unrealistic scenarios that everyone believes. Like the 1950s for instance
I absolutely love this. It's inspired me to try to keep a better diary.