Two questions on my mind, let’s start with the blog. It’s always been on my mind, sometimes at the forefront and sometimes on the backburner. But it’s always there: what is a blog for?
The original way I phrased it was- why bother blogging if others are going to do it better than you? And that applies to any craft or pursuit, there will always be others who are better than you, because deep skillfulness takes a long time to develop and you don’t want to fall into the horrible trap of dedicating your life to something, and then realizing at the end that it was never ‘meant’ for you, that you never made a significant difference, that all of it was for nothing. How do you avoid that trap?
It takes more than just time to get good at something, it takes deliberate practice. That means giving it your all, which in turn seems to necessitate some degree of faith. Not necessarily in the religious sense, but you’ll have to believe that the Castle you’re building does not stand on pillars of salt and sand. You can try your best to ‘test’ this… but there’s always a possibility of failure and failure is painful and devastating.
I know, the age-old solution to that is to realize that not trying, not doing, not living… that’s the bigger failure. To live so safely that you never fail at anything, never leave your comfort zone, that’s failure by default. JK Rowling spoke about this. Well whoop-de-do, we’re surrounded by failure and life is all about surviving failure with undiminished enthusiasm (Churchill). Not about how hard you hit but how hard you get hit and keep moving forward (Rocky 4). Okay. So?
I think what works for me is… to figure out what’s “meant” for you (and this is an answer to the second question more than the first), you’ll need access to data about yourself over an extended period of time. You can’t trust yourself and you can’t trust your friends, because people are susceptible to narrative fallacies and we’ll create a story that fits, that feels right, and then we’ll rationalize whatever we come up with after-the-fact. This isn’t very helpful because it doesn’t correspond very closely with reality- only our vision of reality, our maps, not the territory.
This is where I think records come in really handy. Old journals, old blogs, old history on Facebook and Twitter. See, we reconstruct our memories and our identities at every given instance to suit the narrative that we create for ourselves. Journals and records don’t do that, and so they give us, on hindsight, a powerful insight into our changing nature. They reveal to us how much we have changed, despite us alwaya feeling like we’re more or less the same as we’ve always been.
I’ll be direct and talk about what I know instead of making big statements like these (I can only speak for myself). I have a Livejournal from about 2004, and I have written journals from my National Service days between 2010 and 2012. I was tempted to get rid of my journals because it’ll feel like a fresh start- there’s a whole bunch of to-do lists and bucket lists and stuff in there and it can be tiresome to live in the past.
At the same time, the past can be invigorating. You start to see patterns that hint at bits of your identity. Identity that isn’t typically at the front of your mind. You start to see what inspires you, what troubles you, what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, what your persistent desires and fears are.
At the simplest, I’ll put it as thus: several years of journaling will reveal to you how much you’ve changed in some aspects, and in others, how much you’ve stayed the same. The former is humbling, and it reminds you that the futurw is likely to look very different from whatever plans you might make, whetever ideas you might have.
The latter is perhaps more interesting- it allows you to make some reasonable assumptions and projections about yourself. That’s the water question. The rocks change- your friends, your job, your home, your marital status- but the water doesn’t. I still have the same questions. I still ponder the same things. I still daydream about the same things. I still get excited by the same things (once you adjust for the lower-bound of mediocre day-to-day stuff and pay attention to the out-of-ballpark hits).
So failure en route to getting good, and making a meaningful difference: you don’t want to be selfish, but you have to find something you enjoy doing so much that you’d do it even if you’re never going to be amazing at it. Your own inner state counts. You have to really find what you love, and you find that out by looking back at what wrenched your heart.
Writing is a joy for me even though I suck at it. And so I will keep writing even if my readership never increases, even if nobody ever cares to respond (or if responses are negative!). I write because it is cathartic to me.
So I never answered what a blog is for. Lol. It’s amusing to observe the meandering nature of my thoughts- I’m not doing this with any ulterior motive, this is just how my mind seems to work. A blog is a ‘superstructure’ of the mind. It is a tool of exploration and inquiry that is embedded in the broader ecosystem of the internet. A blog is for thinking and learning. You might not necessarily use yours as such, but I’m talking to the self-selected audience that’s still reading this for some odd reason.
A blog is for reaching out to a self-selected audience. Rather than searching for connection, you allow other travellers to find you. And they will find you when they are ready, when they are interested, curious. You draw the conversations to yourself, and you’re guaranteed (unless you become super-famous) of sincerity.
The analogy I’d draw is the relationship between a musician and her fans in a smoky bar, or on the street- there are no pretenses, you’re here for the music, not for some proxy-social-utility like at a jazz performance at some esteemed cultural centre. I’m not knocking the latter (I used to, because I was more insecure then than I am now, and I couldn’t define myself without first lashing out at the road not travelled). Actually even tiny local music scenes have silly politics and social complexities to navigate. .. so the ‘it’s all about the music, folks’ statement crumbles a little bit under scrutiny. I think people will always be people in that regard. But hey, whatever- as long as you’re doing what you love.
All of this is rationalization after the fact. My way of saying that I love thinking, I love writing, I love blogging, I’m happy about doing what I’m doing. I started out writing this in a state of anxiety and frustration but I feel bettee now, and maybe that’s a big part of why I write. Fair enough.
Acknowledging that, I still think that there are vast benefits to expressing yourself through the medium of a blog- it allows you to think and learn and refine your thoughts in circumstances that are really quite remarkable. Anybody can share your thoughts and ideas with anybody else in the world at any time, even after you’re dead! It’s a truly sick way of taking advantage of technology to connect with a vast human network and it still kind of confuses me that so few people do this, and stick with it.
Your body of work is your real legacy in the world (apart fron your relationships, and children if you have them). The internet is searchable. That means you no longer have to guess what people want. You can just put it all out there and let them find what they want. You can pay attention to the statistics of what gets shared, and you develop an insight into what they want, and you can build on that. Facebook discussions are limited by your social network and the mechanisms of the Facebook platform- people don’t share Facebook discussions on Twitter. (If they do, they screenshot it or copy and paste it into some site and then share it. Might as well it be on a blog so people can explore and navigate.)
I think my most fundamental impulse was a desire to create a space that was mine, yet could be shared with and explored by others.
I manage the ReferralCandy blog at work and I’ve been using it as a tool of exploration. I really like the idea of how you might create a blog for a specific purpose, then find that it sort of takes on a life of its own… I imagine that in the process of articulating thoughts you refine them, and refined thoughts that correspond with reality are, I think, very very valuable. And even if they aren’t, you know what, it’s fun. I’m having fun. Not gonna stop. There ain’t no gettin’ offa this train!
I think this post made less sense than usual but I had to get it out. Just reached work.