Why am I blogging?

Why am I blogging? I ask myself this sometimes as a way to distract myself from blogging. Slipping into meta thoughts is a very easy way to avoid action and doing things.

That said, I think there are actually some interesting reasons to examine why I’m doing this - to at least give me an idea of when to stop when I feel those needs are no longer being served.

Compost

I want to generate a vast corpus of work that I can use to build the next layer of intellectual tools to help me figure out what I want to do. For every scifi story I write, I complete 3 others to about 60% and 5 others to about 25% and 10 others to 2%. This is how the trophic levels in agriculture work too - there’s a massive amount of grass required to produce a pound of beef. The more content there is on this blog, the better a high-level refined product I can make later.

Bigger, Slower than Twitter

Twitter is fun, but the structure of it brings you into current events, without the chance to zoom out too much. The platform wins with the rage-engage. It’s not a game I want to play very often. I enjoy the idea of putting multiple ideas together and seeing if there’s something seaworthy there.

Fun

Honestly, writing for private consumption gets boring after some time. I have a goal to hit 5k/words a day in my journal. That would be insane. Even at my top writing speed, we’re talking about writing for nearly 2 hours nonstop. There is definitely a benefit to being able to produce that much output privately, but I want to show the world some of it and it’s fun to have friends and family read it and go ooh ahh!

I miss the early ’10s

Those were the good days of the internet man, before it started fucking up democracy and stoking hatred and all of that. Back then 4chan was a place where horrible people hung out to make memes. Now it’s a place horrible people hang out to plan mass murder. Blogging takes me back to those halcyon days a bit.

Rhythm

I like the idea of putting out a post every day. I find interacting with people in person to be hard for me sometimes because my mind is overflowing with thoughts and pushing those aside to do justice to the moment is difficult. I am hoping to get into a rhythm with my mind that says “Don’t worry thoughts…you’ll all get a chance in the limelight but for now can we just hand the cashier our card instead of thinking about spaceships?” Giving myself a guaranteed public channel of expression will hopefully soothe a lot of the anxiety and racing thoughts that show up when I’m having a bad time.

If you build it, they will come

My late 20s were characterized by a lot of overwork, isolation, introspection. I had tons of friends but I didn’t keep in touch with them and I regret that very much. No matter where I am in my life, I want to stay in touch with a few people and I want them to know that I’m thinking of them. I wanted to build this blog up so there’s always somewhere for people to show up when they think “Huh, what’s Saurya up to?”.