I say I want to write for an audience, but then I don’t do it –– the type of sign I’ve learned to interpret as “I don’t really wanna do it”, for if I did, I’d have done it already.
Writing for myself, in these journal, feels enough. That’s when i realize that my struggle is personal.
I don’t want to talk about marketing, or the way you can make an online business with no budget –– the kind of topics I was chasing last year. Though I’m able to follow such threads for a while, they quickly begin to feel stale. Even fake.
Most of what I want to write about naturally is the day to day topics that envelop my mind. The ups and downs of Life –– what I’ve been writing about since my early years.
Maybe that’s why a journal feels like the perfect medium for such personal musings. Are they worth sharing? There’s only one way to know, and perhaps I’ll never will, but that might be the wrong question to be asking in the first place.
I’ve become so used to sharing openly in the past, throughout the different eras of my life, that I’ve also become dubious of the motives for doing it. Not that sharing one’s inner world is bad, but the mechanisms that have been placed in line to exploit such natural human inclinations.
After all, some of the most rewarding interactions and conversations I’ve ever had have spawned from someone’s reaction to whatever I wrote.
There’s so much emphasis placed on providing “value” to your audience whenever you publish something –– a kind of kool-aid I, myself, have drank –– that I seem to have forgotten that value can be as simple as showing something beautiful, or making someone feel seen.
Not everything has to be a 12-step framework, or a how-to listicle. It can be as mundane as “I feel this way, and you might feel so too”.
If blogs are dead, it isn’t merely because Google or AI or whatever other boogeyman we blame this upon. Blogs were dead the moment we began chasing metrics rather than the pure pleasure of simply pressing the “publish” button.
As the Internet matured, so we matured with it, and what was one a place for discovery and self-expression turned into a boring source of corporate slop.
I’m trying hard not to sound like an old man yelling at the clouds. If anything, I’m trying to find out where did I go wrong on this, figure out how did it happen, in the hope of finding that original source that once led me.
Maybe I’ve become jaded with time. Maybe now I know too much. Being part of the same industry I complain about is nothing short of weird.
Then again, I might not be the only one, and me sharing about this –– the way I feel –– might spark a little light in someone, somewhere.
That’s valuable.
And so, I press publish, and my words traverse the world wide web, are picked by bots and crawlers and your computer’s cache, until they finally settle inside your head.
Tell me, Dear Reader, how do you feel today?