Jeremy Friesen wrote about his ten year blog anniversary.
I loved two points in particular. The first one is about scheduling. I used to see many people deciding to write a blog and trying to commit to regular posts.
“When I first started blogging, one of the concerns I heard and internalized was that I should write to a schedule. I found that to be a path of misery. I don’t keep a schedule, nor publish at peak hours. Instead, I release what I write when I’m done with it.” – Jeremy Friesen
If you’re a writer and you want to change your habits, if you’re not a writer and you want to work on being a writer, then this seems like a good idea. Do a little of something every day until it becomes second nature. That’s how I started to run. Go for small runs on a regular basis, no matter how small. Just go. And one day you’ll be sitting inside and the weather is lousy and you’ll feel the urge to go for a run. You’ve successfully changed yourself! Congratulations. I know it isn’t easy. It’s work.
The second of Jeremy’s points I liked is about trying to be successful. It’s hard and there is a lot of luck involved. Not work. Luck. And Lady Luck is fickle. It’s hard to repeat a thing that depends on luck.
“To grow my readership, I thought I needed metrics. What I found was that I was prone to chasing that questing beast. I looked at posts that did well, and would wrack my brain to write something more about that; Or like that. Again, misery. I had ceded my muse to an algorithm.”
It’s so easy to fall into this. It happens wherever those small “like” buttons are, wherever those “comment” forms are. It happens on blogs, and on the fediverse! It’s why many people switch them off. Gopher people say the don’t miss comments. Mastodon offers a setting to hide notifications about likes and boosts. You just get the replies.
I’m not immune to this myself. I am happy when I see people liking and sharing pictures I took, for example. And I spend a little extra time on my prose, crafting it, spinning it. Does it work? Words have rhythm, sentences want to be read. I read these words in my head, writing and rewriting them until I’m happy. It’s the effect of the invisible audience. All acts of speech on social media are partly oratory, I think.
I want to come back to the question of blogging, of the motivation to write. To me, motivation is a big riddle. Why can I code hours on end at home but not at the office? What brings joy and what does not? Why is it that if I do a thing for money – for any extrinsic reward, probably! – I feel less intrinsically motivated? I heard that this effect can be shown in children. I still wonder about the reason, though. In the work place, I think part of it is that in capitalism, the things you enjoy so much you’ll do for free, so paid work is often joyless.
But the demotivation effect of extrinsic rewards is more than just a memory of work; I feel like it has to do with freedom in a personal, private way: the autonomy to decide if I want to do a thing now, or later, or not at all. If at any time I do a think now even though I don’t feel it, that’s joy wilting away. And thus I will happily accept a gift freely given but I don’t want to get paid. I don’t want to promise help in exchange for money even if I’m very likely to help for free.
I still remember the most fantastic gift I ever received for software I had written: some chocolate and a cook book, from Belgium, from net artist / sculptor / 3d artist / videogame designer Auriea (@auriea). I still think about that a lot.
Her site still uses my software, a version from 2004–2006. Amazing. ❤️
Links:
Happy 10th Birthday Take on Rules
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
#Life #Philosophy #Blogs