Why blog?

I've been asking myself this for quite a while now. I used to have a blog (at this domain - the silly pun is what I got it for) around 15 years ago, but just stopped. I used Twitter for a while, but stopped. I also tried Mastodon and LinkedIn for a while, but stopped. So I obviously tried it, and also obviously didn't stick to it.

I do get the itch to share my thoughts occasionally. I talk to people and get to share with them in conversation, but that's ephemeral. A blog is more public and more permanent. Which are, funny enough, probably the main two reasons why I never kept it up.

What if the stuff I write is silly - if not now, perhaps a year from now? What if somebody else already wrote about this, did more research, is more knowledgeable, smarter or both, and I'm just adding noise that detracts from these superior posts I could just read and share instead of writing my own?

I suppose it took me almost reaching 40 to realise that both of these things are true, and that's fine. A lot of what seems wise to me today will seem silly in the future. And there is definitely people out there who are better than me at everything I can do.

For some reason, I'm entirely cool with that, now. What's there to lose? Who's even going to read this? Doesn't seem to matter very much. Social media of any shape or form just feels overwhelming to me. I don't have any evidence to back this up, but I could swear the average LinkedIn user spends more time writing posts and comments than reading what others write. Feels weird to write anything there, like joining a large group of people all shouting into a void. And that's even without considering that a good chunk of that "content" these days is probably machine generated.

As anachronistic as blogs may be today, they seem like the optimal medium for me. There's no noise. I have no need to produce content to satisfy some algorithm that's going to make me famous. I can just share my thoughts, almost as in a personal journal, and if nobody except for me ever reads them, that's completely fine.

So I'm going to try this again. Let's see if I keep it up.