I recently checked my credit card bill, and I saw an invoice from WordPress.com for this blog. Upon seeing that, I winced because I haven’t written a piece in forever so I’m basically paying for no reason. 

I keep telling myself that I should pick up the pen again, but to be frank, I have no idea what to write about. Call it an extended writer’s block, or maybe I’ve just been out of the game for too long. I genuinely enjoy writing, but I don’t enjoy having to contrive an article to meet a deadline because I don’t think it’d be my best quality work. I enjoy writing in a spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness way because it means that every piece of mine has its own unique signature. 

I’m not pumping articles out on a consistent schedule, but if the vision isn’t there, it isn’t there. I don’t want to force up a contested shot. I mean hell, Frank Ocean got two studio albums. Tarantino got nine movies (ten if you include both Kill Bills). 

I’ve often thought about canceling my WordPress account, but I don’t want to give up on my website. That being said, there do exist free website hosting services for my blog. Maybe I’ve internalized the idea that paying for something makes me value it more, but I’m a little scared that I’m going to completely forget about my blog if I can maintain it for free. Maybe subconsciously, I was using the recurrent payments as a way to hold myself accountable. It’s almost like canceling a gym membership – probably the smart decision to do if you rarely lift, but you still feel ashamed doing it.

I do think that writing for the sake of writing is acceptable. There’s potentially a slight pretentiousness, similar to someone rambling about something because they love the sound of their own voice. But I’ve written articles that I didn’t particularly like in real time, but had grown fond of over the years. 

In my sophomore year of college, I would journal daily, oftentimes without much of an agenda, but in the hopes that one of the journal entries would turn into something coherent or interesting. It was a numbers game for me. I’d usually write about my day because it was the easiest subject matter to write about. There was also an element of wanting to preserve my memories. It felt like a month would go by, and I wouldn’t have been better or worse for it, almost like time was slipping away. 

So my journaling transformed into a means of bookkeeping. I had this idea in my head that 30 years down the line, I’d find these entries tucked away in a forgotten shelf, and I’d blow the dust off the cover and transport myself back into my formative college years. I maintained this diary for almost two months. But then one day, I thought I’d read over a few of the entries, and I had this moment of reckoning. It was the most monotonous thing I had read, each day blurred into the next. Is my life this boring? So I stopped writing. 

Looking back, sure, my life felt boring to me then. Even now, reading my old diary entries feels like opening up a can of worms. But who knows? Maybe they wouldn’t have been boring to read thirty years later. Society could’ve changed so much by then that even the most basic details in those entries would feel bizarre.

For instance, I could’ve been describing sitting at a physical lunch table, and thirty years later we might have virtual reality AI tables, or maybe we’ve scrapped the very concept of a lunch table altogether because we figured out wireless nutrient transport into our bodies. You get the idea.

That got me thinking. Maybe I had been judging my journal entries by the wrong standard. I wanted them to be interesting now, when they were really being written for someone thirty years from now. Maybe writing isn’t about capturing extraordinary moments. Maybe it’s about preserving ordinary ones before they stop being ordinary.

Imagine explaining foraging to a kid in suburban America, and then explaining grocery stores to a caveman. Or down the line, having to explain the concept of food to an alien who doesn’t get hungry. You don’t realize the paradigm that you’re in until it’s fully shifted. There’s a literal ball of fire in the sky, and no one’s questioning anything. Or for instance, how are we searching for aliens when we have the animal kingdom? 

Alright, so based on everything I’ve written so far, the logical conclusion is that I should continue to write my diary entries, regardless of how boring they might feel in real time. But it’s hard. For one thing, it’s incredibly boring. But also, I also don’t think that excessive book keeping is that productive. 

For instance, I downloaded Letterboxd a few years ago to keep track of my movies. It started off great – I could watch something, and I’d post a review for that movie and I’d get a few likes from my friends and a slight dopamine hit. But it got to a point where I’d be watching a movie just so I could post a review on Letterboxd. I’d sometimes even watch 3-4 movies a night so I could pad my Letterboxd stats and see the list grow. I might watch a movie and in the midst of watching the movie, try and formulate a review to post later. I’d become so obsessed with bookkeeping that I lost the basic premise of watching a movie, which is to be entertained for a few hours. 

Letterboxd for me is a personal example, but a more general example could be taking pictures on a trip. Pictures can definitely serve as souvenirs that can last for a lifetime, but looking through a lens could potentially distract you from living in the present. There’s a balance with preserving memories and just living life, and for me it’s often difficult to find. 

But I’m hoping that these occasional blog posts can be that for me. It might not be an uber-detailed day-in-the-life, but I’d like to think that these articles offer a small window into the way I think. Maybe the things I thought weren’t worth writing about were exactly the things worth preserving.