Meta Blog

This is a blog post about blog posts.

Dear Participants of Social Media,

How often do you pause before publishing little slices of your life to the internet to ask yourself: why am I doing this? At this point we all know about the dopamine rushes and the various other puppet strings the ever-optimising designers of Big Tech might loop around our pliable egos. But without diving too far down the Identity & Attention Economy Supercomplex rabbit hole, do you ever wonder about the immediate, instinctual Why?

I’ve recently hopped on the Quit Social Media bandwagon. I take shit photos and was always slightly creeped out by Likes, so going silent was easy. And after a week or so of uninstalling the apps, I lost the itch to browse too. But the itch to write blogs remains. Why?

Who am I writing for? Perhaps I am one of Milan Kundera’s “dreamers”:

“We all need someone to look at us. Some long for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, for the look of the public. Others have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties… Still others need to be before the eyes of the person they love. And finally there are those who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.” (paraphrased)

Or perhaps I am Goffman’s living theater actor, developing my own identity through the act of constant performances.

Or maybe I really am a pawn of the Attention Economy Supercomplex, and this desire to publish my thoughts are not my own, but implanted in me by a cabal of tech profit mongers who wring ad dollars out of any and all personal information I donate to their data scraping, personality coding, behaviour predicting platforms.

Or maybe I am simply another self-important millennial, imbibed with the notion that my unique and special thoughts are worthy of pronouncing to the world.

But I can invert the question, and ask myself why not post? The question is not whether or not to write — I am always writing. The question is whether or not to publish any of that writing for others to read. My primary hesitation is that some day someone who I respect and who once respected me may discover this blog and thereby realise that I do not spend the majority of my mental energy thinking about how to combat climate change or the impact of artificial intelligence on employment rates — but on my own tiny life and the various inconsequential musings that pass through my head.

For that, I apologise to my future self if this collection off-the-cuff commentary comes back to bite me in the ass someday. But in the spirit of Winnie the Pooh’s Say What You See game, I intend to keep at it for now, for no reason whatsoever.