A number worth more than it looks I’m 18 followers away from 300. Press enter or click to view image in full size Photo by Matias North on Unsplash In the world of social media metrics, that’s nothing. Algorithms reward scale. Virality compounds. The conventional wisdom says you’re either growing fast or you’re irrelevant. I don’t believe that. There’s an idea — Kevin Kelly wrote about it back in 2008, and it’s aged better than most internet wisdom — that a creator doesn’t need millions of fans. They need a thousand true ones. People who actually read what you write. Who comes back? Who thinks about it afterwards, maybe. I think about that a lot. So when I look at 282, I don’t see a number that’s almost 300. I see 282 people who, at some point, read something I wrote — about the biology of how we age, the lessons that history keeps trying to hand us, or the shifts quietly reshaping the next few years — and thought: yes, I want more of that. That’s not nothing. That’s remarkable, actually.…