Blogging Paralysis
It starts casual, something you do because, well, why the hell not. Some thought enters your mind and, yeah, the Internet is huge, and you're not that interesting to begin with, but -- well, maybe you're more interesting than you think? Or maybe less, what difference does it make, this is something you can DO, you can type, you can hit publish, and sure, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference in the sense that nothing on the Internet really makes a difference, but it's something you can do, goddammit.
And maybe that little bit of structure helps, encourages you to keep writing, you're not just starting yet another journal in some notebook that's going to wind up buried under a pile of other books with only the first six or seven pages scrawled upon, and you find it two years later and think, "wow, that was a surprisingly expensive notebook, and look at all those blank pages ..."
Then this blog thing, it doesn't blow up, but you get one or two people who somehow find something you wrote, maybe even comment, they seem to even follow it, and then there's a couple more, and then there's like a handful of people who seem interested in some random topic that nobody else seems to write much about, and your casual little posts grow, and the basic little structure turns into a fucking series of essays -- like literal series, like "hey, this is the first post in a series about X" ---
and THEN YOU ADD a fucking email subscription box, and you add a plugin to your WordPress blog, and then maybe you move to Ghost or Substack or some bullshit, maybe open a Buttondown account, and suddenly you're not blogging, you're fucking "publishing," and THEN you're not even doing that either, because WHAT do you have to say that could possibly be of interest to your AUDIENCE -- that's right, you think you have a fucking AUDIENCE, like that's what you are, somebody with an AUDIENCE.
And the months drag by, and maybe instead of writing, because writing doesn't even seem like an option anymore, you tweak tweak tweak tweak, you change platforms and redesign sites, you experiment with self-hosting, you say maybe what I need is a microblog, you carefully preserve SEO as if it were important, you say maybe what I need is a custom fucking program that you spend months building with AI, or rather months watching AI build, and then, THEN, it's a year since you posted anything --
and then, what the hell, all of a sudden it's eighteen months, and like -- what the fuck, man, what is the point of any of this, it's a blog, it's a goddamned journal, it's a diary, some place for me to write some shit that might spark an actually useful thought for me in some other aspect of my life, maybe even improve my life as I read and take notes and think ... and maybe, and maybe, and maybe -- and this is what happened before, with the handful of people who actually liked your stuff, they weren't looking for fucking ESSAYS, because the world is full of fucking ESSAYS, and every dipshit with a phone has a Substack, and is on the Substack subreddit right now talking about, "how do I get more subscribers" and "is Substack dead" -- no, what I mean is, this stuff that might be useful for you, or might instead be just a waste of time -- well, it might also be useful or a waste of time for SOMEBODY ELSE as well as yourself.
And even if, as seems most likely, nobody else reads it, that's FINE, the same is true of notebooks beneath the pile of books next to your bed, but at least you don't have to pretend that you're publishing a fucking newsletter for an "audience" that actually noticed you stopped doing it.