Dear subscribers, today’s history is my own. This is why Past Passport exists.
Nobody wins a political argument online.
Ask me how I know, friends. Tried for 10 years, 11 months, and 4 days.
I’m 0-47,904, at last count.
I opened my X account in 2021 with one topic: politics. An angry headline, a controversial take, then a pointless argument with strangers. And an insult or three.
Time for a confession.
I was a loser doomscroller. 100%.
I walked my faithful yellow Lab, Butterbean, every sunny Texas morning. Enjoying my pup and the day? Nah.
Thinking up the banger reply to that Crazy Guy online. “Now I’ve got him!”
Then I walked home, sat back down in my black mesh computer chair, cracked my knuckles, and typed with fury.
Another banger for the Crazy Guy with 27 followers ranting about COVID-19 or abortion. Really?
Dumb and dumber.
I played the loser doom scroll game for 2.5 presidential administrations.
Let’s add up the scorecard as of January 17, 2026, friends and neighbors:
X followers: 1,525
Substack subscribers: 0
Minds changed: 0
Mental energy left: 0
Anxiety: 11 out of 10
Books and articles finished: 0
Money made from creative writing: Big fat $0.00
Something needed to change.
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The day I ran the numbers
January 17, I was in this very chair, posting politics. Addicted to the dopamine hit from confrontation and argument. But it somehow depressed me too.
Sound familiar?
Stopped. Reviewed the bold numbers under my X name.
It hit me.
“The hell am I doing?”
Tough love moment. Nothing.
Doomscrolling like any online schmuck with 24 followers in his mom’s basement eating cherry Pop-Tarts from the Piggly Wiggly.
My mental energy showed it. Cratered. Anxiety soared about tomorrow and the years ahead. Every new headline angered me. Made me think the worst was to come.
And here is what sucked the most:
I couldn’t think of one thing worth writing about.
Felt like my brain had been sucked of every drop of creativity by a septic tank truck from Social Media, Inc., driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s mom.
If you’re a writer, this is the worst in life. Rock bottom. Trapped in a circular cluster F of anger, uncertainty, and creative cul-de-sac.
“If I’m not a writer, what the hell am I?”
But a change was afoot.
How I rebuilt my X account and started my Substack
I nuked my old X account the next morning.
Nothing dramatic.
No band played. No announcer made the heroic call. The sun didn’t break through storm clouds.
Just sat in my creaking black mesh chair, Coke Zero 10 inches from my left hand at the PC. Like any day.
Then I clicked Edit Profile in the top right on X.
I deleted my anonymous political handle. Then I typed:
Joseph Pickett @Pastpassport.
Why history?
Always been interested. Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1996. Blew my gourd. Still got the dog-eared yellow copy in the downstairs book cabinet.
Also have a pile of books on the Civil War, the Roman Republic and Empire, ancient Greece, the Renaissance. World War I.
A new X brand was going to end my transformation out of online politics.
Then I remembered: Substack.
Writing short posts on X is one thing, but full history articles felt right to me.
Opened Past Passport on Substack. Done and done.
What I noticed after 4 days
I banged out history posts and started writing 4 Substack essays that week.
One about the day I stood in Olympia, Greece, and ran the original stadium. Not naked and oiled like the Greeks, though.
One about the gouges in the Pantheon doors. Weren’t very good, honestly. I review them now, and I cringe.
But funny thing.
I noticed it lying in bed in the morning, as sunlight filtered through the southern oak branches and through my shades...
My mind was popping with ideas.
What was this here?
It was a creative firehose turned up to 11.
Literally ran to the computer. Banged out 7 or 8 story ideas. And a very rough draft of new chapters to my book.
The heck was going on?
Simple.
I’d quit consuming and started creating. Psychologists in New Zealand had 658 people keep a diary for 13 days. The day after they created something, their energy and enthusiasm climbed.
And the ideas in bed, with faithful Butterbean snoring to my right?
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara found something fascinating... creative ideas show up when the mind is free to wander.
Mine hadn’t wandered in years. My mind was occupied with drafting the banger for Crazy Guy. Reacting, not acting.
Bottom line after a few days: My creativity soared. Three or four essays weekly. Daily X posts.
After eight months, the scorecard, my friends:
X followers: 18,297
Substack subscribers: 580
Paid subscribers: 32
Am I there yet? Hell no. Not by a long chalk.
Just starting the Ironman journey to a successful Substack and X account.
But now I’m on a mission.
A mission I developed while studying and writing about history and leaving the doom scroll as dead as Julius Caesar (may he rest in peace).
Every problem we have has been here before
I was gobsmacked as I researched and wrote Past Passport in the early days. January and February, seems like 100 years ago.
Something I knew intuitively before, but now I saw the overwhelming evidence in the big-ass books piled on my desk. Herodotus. Thucydides. Caesar’s Gallic War.
Almost every problem we have today, in politics, the economy, and the world, has happened before.
100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,700 years ago.
Consider….
Around 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that he wished he’d been born in any age but his own. He called it the age of iron, nothing but labor and sorrow.
The Persians burned Athens to the ground in 480 BC, temples and all. Thirty-three years later, the Athenians started building the Parthenon on the same rock.
Rome thought it was wiped out after Cannae in 216 BC. It had nearly 700 more years.
The plague killed about half of Florence in 1348. Within a century, the survivors’ grandchildren were raising Brunelleschi’s dome.
In 1992, in the library in Ironton, Ohio, I was researching the 1937 flood and found a Depression-era editorial pining for the good old days.
Every generation was sure it was the last one. Convinced it was the worst, and everything was finished. Nope.
Has the world changed? Sure.
Technology, medicine, science. Human beings haven’t, though. We face the same emotions and the same limits our ancestors did. The same possibilities too.
The future is brighter than your phone lies
Then, one afternoon in March, a ray of sun hit me, literally, through the oak branches out front.
The future is brighter than a lot of us think.
Our brains get consumed by the negative doom-scroll porn in our hands every morning.
Social media is rigged that way. Get you addicted to the dopamine hit. Come back again and again. Argue pointlessly. Buy shit. Feel depressed and worthless.
Rinse. Repeat.
I see it online all day: the mind-numbing doom-and-gloom cycle.
In a survey of 10,000 young people in ten countries, 56% said humanity is doomed because of climate change. Three out of four said the future is frightening.
I blame the phone. That’s social media taking an iron wrecking ball to people’s minds with negative doom porn. In the most advanced, most blessed time in human history.
Meanwhile, look at where we are next to where we were 100 or 2,000 years ago. Our ancestors dealt with things vastly worse than what we deal with today.
We just need to put on our big boy pants, set down the phone, stop consuming, and start creating.
My mission today
My friends, the mission:
Reassure people about the future with history and art. Dive into the history, beauty, and culture our ancestors left us.
Dread the news less, learn what the legend omitted, get old answers to new problems. Screw the doom scroll, Social Media, Inc. and the horse it rode in on.
Rome thought it was hosed after Cannae. It lived almost 700 more years. That’s the history I write.
It’s all there in the massive history books. Somebody already had your problem in spades. Somebody already solved it. And they wrote it down. Maybe on papyrus that had to be recopied every 24 years, but it’s there if you read it.
Are you ready?
Sure, life still sucks sometimes. I’m not that far gone.
I still complain about my son getting T-boned, and I bitch about the property taxes in Texas. But I do it Stoic style, like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius would.
Marcus wrote a note to himself about 1,850 years ago:
“Look down from above on the countless herds of men.”
You gotta zoom out and see the big, beautiful picture, guys.
We can handle this. Our ancestors did it, and we can too.
Subscribe if you want more peace about the future, to avoid doom-scroll depression, and to discover old answers to your problems.
Join me.
I put down the black rectangle that was selling me negative nonsense. You can too.
Life is good. Amazing, really.
And the future? Bright. And the past proves it. We got this.
Follow me for three essays a week against the doom scroll. Subscribe at pastpassport.com. I’ll even toss you a 7-day free trial:
God bless.
Joseph@pastpassport.com
Follow me on X: @pastpassport
Excellent, well done!
I did the same late last year, but I took the nuclear option: Deleted my entire account. When I went back six months later I started with zero followers. Up to 1100 now and I try to curate my feed and be careful about what I comment on and how.
Knowing my replies show up in my follower's feeds is a good way to help keep me honest. :)