It's weird how things are cyclical. In the past few years, I've just opted not to do a lot of internet writing. In the days of blogging, it's what really helped me get my ideas out and helped me refine them too. Perhaps the signal v noise ratio is too tilted in the noise direction to make it viable, perhaps I've just gotten more comfortable in the past few years.
But what is old is new again. In many ways, the concentration of online media towards behemoths like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Medium and now Substack, it's both easier and harder to get your words out. The stakes feel higher now than they used to, so I'm less inclined to riff publicly on something that might get judge before I've had a chance to refine and edit.
Still, there's something incredibly value about journaling in a public form. For years, mostly overlapping with the pandemic, I kept a daily journal that was mostly highlights of the day. I did it in bulleted form so I'd have incentive to do it. It was a 5-year diary, so the theory was that you'd be able to see what you were doing the year before on that day. At first, it was cool. Then it became a bit weird when I'd be flooded with memories about breakups on a particular day or I'd have flashbacks to a particular period of time and I'd know what I was doing, but i'd not document it in the diary because of this or that reason.
The self-editing is what made me stop. Well and laziness.
Now, I'm less interested in writing for other people. But I do feel the need to clarify my own ideas and flesh out thoughts. I think years of using Twitter as I have means that my ideas feel a bit captive, even if you can share a tweet link it's not the same as having better articulated thoughts on a page somewhere.
We'll see if it happens, but I'm more motivated to try to connect those ideas in a coherent place than I ever did. Newsletters hold less appeal, because they feel too intrusive. I'd rather just have a place to collect ideas. Not so much a "here is what I did today and what i learned" thought maybe there's an element of that. I'd love to tie ideas back to much of my professional work, and there's also an opportunity to share parts of my obscure interests with people who will tell me they find this stuff fascinating. (like skeeball or Finnish baseball, lol.)
We'll see how it evolves, though.
But what is old is new again. In many ways, the concentration of online media towards behemoths like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Medium and now Substack, it's both easier and harder to get your words out. The stakes feel higher now than they used to, so I'm less inclined to riff publicly on something that might get judge before I've had a chance to refine and edit.
Still, there's something incredibly value about journaling in a public form. For years, mostly overlapping with the pandemic, I kept a daily journal that was mostly highlights of the day. I did it in bulleted form so I'd have incentive to do it. It was a 5-year diary, so the theory was that you'd be able to see what you were doing the year before on that day. At first, it was cool. Then it became a bit weird when I'd be flooded with memories about breakups on a particular day or I'd have flashbacks to a particular period of time and I'd know what I was doing, but i'd not document it in the diary because of this or that reason.
The self-editing is what made me stop. Well and laziness.
Now, I'm less interested in writing for other people. But I do feel the need to clarify my own ideas and flesh out thoughts. I think years of using Twitter as I have means that my ideas feel a bit captive, even if you can share a tweet link it's not the same as having better articulated thoughts on a page somewhere.
We'll see if it happens, but I'm more motivated to try to connect those ideas in a coherent place than I ever did. Newsletters hold less appeal, because they feel too intrusive. I'd rather just have a place to collect ideas. Not so much a "here is what I did today and what i learned" thought maybe there's an element of that. I'd love to tie ideas back to much of my professional work, and there's also an opportunity to share parts of my obscure interests with people who will tell me they find this stuff fascinating. (like skeeball or Finnish baseball, lol.)
We'll see how it evolves, though.
The self-editing is what made me stop.
Not clear here and curious. Do you mean you'd self-edit because you didn't want to cause future trips down emotional memory lanes?
Impressive that you have five years worth of journals. I only have about a year and if I knew how valuable that one year would've been I would've began keeping a journal since I hit puberty.