It is a cruel irony that I’ve finally decided to start blogging again when the “cultural reign of the blog” has recently been declared dead.
This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve started writing online, including all the way back in the 90s when blogging meant stringing HTML together by hand and my posts were sodden with edgy black and white photos scrounged from the early Internet. If I had continued writing from 2006, when I started my master’s program, or from 2015 when I returned back from China, by now I would have more than fifteen years of practice.
For more than a year I’ve been preparing to write again. I bought yellow legal pads and 4×6 index cards. Every night I sit down with books, important books, old books, new books. Books I want to say something about. Books others readers could find value in.
In the light of the morning that energy always becomes, “What’s the point”?
If there is something dying about blogging, it is the idea of the personal web log. Half of my anxiety about writing is defining some kind of niche. In my most recent job the majority of my clients were financial services companies. Here is a chance, I thought, to own a positioning, define an audience, build some thought leadership expertise.
Instead I spent the summer reading all six volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle cover to cover.
Everyone we encounter in our feeds seems polished, but that’s understandable. We don’t get to see early pieces or artistic attempts, because the algorithm only reveals to us after a creator has developed far enough along to grow their audience. The more pernicious lie is that everyone seems packaged with a perfect little bow. Gurus build funnels to drive traffic to lead generating content, barrelling towards an online course, which leads to the promised land of a private coaching offer.
There seems to be a time lost with an older generation—Knausgaard’s generation, who didn’t grow up with the Internet—where being something wasn’t a matter of packaging. Part of the privilege of that generation was the possibility of making a living just doing the thing that you loved doing. Being a writer meant writing, not creating a Udemy course. Cultivating a writer’s persona, if you fell prey to the masculine fantasy of it, meant drinking too much and smoking too much and not giving a damn what people said of you (while caring within your writer’s heart).
For that generation after mine, this is right and natural. First you pretend to be the thing, then learn to become the thing. Or maybe you don’t maybe you just pretend and that is sufficient. Being stuck in the middle, neither option presents itself as viable.
The only goal I have at this point is to show up here every day. Part getting around this block is avoiding any thought of grand design before I build the habit of writing back up. “Grand design” a novel or even a topic for a newsletter. If you are reading this on Substack, the title of the corresponding newsletter is Garbage File in order to deliberately downplay the value of these individual posts. In that sense the work there is a kind of writer’s notebook inspired by Henrik Karlsson of Escaping Flatland, with the only goal to press publish every day.
Writing this post is like dealing with arthritis in my hands. I imagine a retired violinist struggling to hold the bow again. And at the same time, I’m watching the word count like a high school student.
The conclusion here is there is no conclusion. Just hitting publish, closing the notebook, and looking for the next topic.