Some Quick Updates After A Long Hiatus

I'm still alive. Just needed to rethink some things.

This is just how I meditate. Nothing to see here.

I May Have Bitten Off More Than I Could Chew.

I started this blog as I do with most new endeavors I undertake: with enthusiasm, naivete and haste.

For better or for worse.

I’m the type of person that likes to learn things the hard way, through trial and error and just getting in there and breaking things.

I don’t really believe in taking the advice of others—generally speaking—because an individual’s learned wisdom is a result of their lived experience. It’s transient in nature and isn’t tailored to the masses. At least not at every stratum.

That’s not to say that base-layer wisdom can’t be derived from other people. Obviously, the greatest religious and philosophical texts in human history teach us timeless truths from thousands of years of people figuring out optimal modes of “being”.

But I find that as the advice becomes more niche and boiled down, the less useful it becomes. Basically, what works for you doesn’t usually work for others (at least not in the same way) since we all carry unique predispositions toward the world around us.

First principles and laws of nature are my preferred reference points to jump off from. Adding to that my lived experience up until now, and my worldview is basically complete.

I still always listen to the advice people offer because it’s useful in indirect ways. There are usually tidbits of wisdom that can be extracted from the body of what they’re saying, even if their thesis is totally unrelated.

I could talk on these ideas for a while, but that’s not the focus of this post. I’ll save it for another day.

Getting back to the point;

It turns out that trying to produce a blog post once per week doesn’t work well for me.

I have perfectionist tendencies when undertaking creative projects.

This can be very counter-productive (“great is the enemy of good” and so forth) and it’s something I have to try and keep in check. But I also know that there are a lot of poor-quality blogs out there and I don’t want mine to be one of them (regardless of readership).

As a result, this past Summer I started to get hung up on a few big posts that are still only half-written.

I would get part way through and realize the topic is too big, or requires too much research/prep to be able to tackle in one week’s time while still feeling satisfied with the finished product.

It’s what Robert M. Pirsig calls a “gumption trap”. A roadblock that saps your enthusiasm for the project at hand.

Because of the pressure I put on myself to produce a blog post once per week, I lost a lot of gumption after failing to do so for a few weeks in a row. I felt like a failure. Those weeks turned into months, and now here I am at the end of the year with not much to show.

Well I refuse to let this blog die young like all my other blogs that have come before it in past years.

For the past 6 months, I’ve been reimagining a new approach that is more sustainable and more fulfilling. I’ve been brainstorming about what kind of parameters I want to put on myself for things such as scheduling, content, target audience and general branding.

A new approach.

Firstly, I’m going to avoid writing about things that are too zeitgeisty, or time-sensitive.

Back in June, I made the affirmative case for spirited debate in this post. I talked about a brief moment happening in the cultural zeitgeist at the time, and used that story as a vehicle for the broader topic of debate.

While I still stand by essentially everything I said in that post, in the future I’m going to try and utilize more broadly-appealing reference points that have more lasting relevance.

The fast-paced news cycle across all media is such that even now—six months later—most people will have forgotten the details surrounding what I wrote about in that blog post. It’s relevance has been lost on most people.

Additionally, by employing this strategy I won’t feel as much pressure to publish a post while it’s still relevant. This isn’t South Park for Pete’s sake.

That said, I’ll most likely still post about these sort of zeitgeisty things every now and then, because realistically, sometimes I can’t help myself.

And that’s really key, and brings me to the next change;

I’m going to find a better balance between things I really want to write about and things I think people want to hear about.

This is probably the biggest challenge I’ve faced when deciding what topic to cover in any given post.

I have a decent idea of what people care to read about, but I also only want to write about things I’m interested in.

But it can’t be one or the other, it has to be a bit of a balancing act between the two. I’m still working on finding that balance, but in the meantime, I’m going to try and care less about what ya’ll think (sorry, not sorry) and rely more on my own enthusiasm for the topic to carry me.

Lastly, the new schedule is going to be a lot more loose. As I mentioned already, the once-per-week schedule proved to be sub-optimal for my desired outcome. Moving forward I will try and reduce post-frequency to one or two posts per month and if I’m ever feeling especially inspired, I can always decide to post more.

I hope this is agreeable to you, my subscribers (few, though there may be).

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you in the next post!

-Dr. Worm