Other people’s words fall like so much water on the back of a mallard.1 I drift away. It surprises me sometimes how much I don’t pay attention. Someone else, I tell myself, is paying attention on my behalf.
I’m bad at talking. A coworker asked me recently what I do outside of work and I felt all knowledge of self leave me. I shrugged. “Well, you read,” he offered, “so what are you reading?” And that I could’ve answered,2 but I shrugged again, worried he would ask me to explain what the book was about - which, of course, would be an insurmountable task.
I have a real inability to express my thoughts succinctly. I started keeping a diary the summer after I turned ten. In a diary, you get to be gluttonously boring. Lazily flooding page after page just because you can, meandering through such minutia as what happened on that night’s episode of Masterchef and the pros and cons of walking to school.3
My distaste for short-form content is partly why I never came around to social media (and the awkwardness of small talk and pleasantries why I’ve never been big on texting). But I do like social media in theory, i.e. being able to keep in touch with people virtually, sharing content, etc. Blogs are my surrogate-Twitter. I read quite a few of them, mostly tech ones.4 Its different from reading, like, a publication in the Times. You are in someone’s den, someone’s home page.
The internet has empowered a lot of people who know nothing to presume they know something. Is it self-important to write a blog? I guess so. Sometimes, I think about the post I wrote on Chris McCandless in which I stated, “A meaningful life requires us to give of ourselves.” Do I really believe in the sanctity of hard work and/or self-sacrifice? Or was I just dumbly repackaging Protestant work ethic in flowery terms? I don’t know. Sometimes I think about going back and adding a qualifier: “I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about!”
So to answer the title questions, I think reading/writing blogs is like social media but better. None of my friends write blogs,5 but the idea of going around and visiting their blogs for the day sounds just lovely to me. Both because I like medium-form content6 and because I am disillusioned by social media (advertisements, privacy concerns, echo chambers perpetuated by recommendation algorithms, etc.).
But, as always, I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. You folks do you.
Footnotes
A phrase I’m borrowing from The Martian Chronicles. I read it many months ago, but the phrase has stuck with me: “The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”↩︎
Douglas R. Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop↩︎
My ten-year old self determined that “there aren’t too many pros.”↩︎
There are lots of great blogs out there, but I’ll just note Andrew Kelley’s for now.↩︎
…yet! :D↩︎
Made up term. But notice that all my posts have an under-ten minute reading time…↩︎