Hmmmm. Why do I blog? It’s probably the same reason that you blog but I doubt it. Actually, I make a point to never speak for others including myself because, day to day, my opinions change. I change and embrace that. Quoting me on something I said a year ago was only accurate at the time of writing. That’s just my personality. I embrace change. I don’t hold on to my thoughts, identify myself by it and let it define who I am.
All around Internet Dood, Jacob Lodwick announced he’s deleting his blog. The full post is here. In it, he wrote this bit that resonated with me:
I’m not certain that this is why I’m shutting down my blog, but I think there’s a connection. To have a blog is to have some portion of your brain assigned to monitoring your audience. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to hole up and think not of humans, but of work. I want quieter days with less stimulation from this increasingly buzzy world of external opinions and missions. I want big chunks where I don’t even think of myself. When work becomes truly ecstatic, everything else vaporizes… there are no thoughts of ‘how will it be received’ or ‘how would I turn this into something profitable’ or ‘could a company one day grow around this’ … I just want to quietly make shit for a while.
Jacob touched on two points. The first is your brain being assigned to an audience. It’s pretty incredible how much that made sense to me. I’ve been the guy that from 1999-2005, wore a shirt that said, “I’m Blogging This.” Then from 2004-2006, I almost exclusively wore a shirt that said, “find me on Livejournal.” and now my shirt said, “I’m tweeting this.” Prior to my extended Twitter break in January, twitter was so ingrained in my life that it was scary for anyone to get to know me on a personal level.
This is because most of my life was dictated by my following. The people who may or may not read what I did today were essentially dictating what I did. My goal each day was to find a way to get a reply that said, “you’re awesome.” I didn’t realize this was happening but it was. The positive to this was that it got me out of bed and got me out doing awesome things so i could share them. The downside is that my life ceased to be my own. Celebrity took over and each action in life was controlled by, “tasks that my audience would approve of.”
The obvious solution was to keep doing those things but stop sharing things that you all wouldn’t approve of. Let’s say I tried marijuana for the first time. The reason I didn’t (aside from legalities and health) is that I knew if I did try it, the young people that look up to me on Twitter would disapprove or my employer may punish me. Why it never occurred to me that I could still do it and just not talk about it is a good example of what happens when you share your entire life and become addicted to comments.
After my break from Twitter, things changed. No, I didn’t start smoking weed. I just did things differently and for those 2 months signed off from Twitter, I didn’t do any radical changes but I just tried new things and it took a solid 2 weeks to finally be able to go out and do something I’m interested in and not something that people will approve of or comment on with a “good job!”
Peter writes:
I spent the last few years deciding what I would do, then doing it, often with catastrophic results. I’m an obsessive, creative person, and all these self imposed “hey guys, now I’m working on this” phases were probably the worst possible structures I could build for myself. Clearly-labeled boxes quickly feel like jail cells to me. Feeling in-control and well-marketed are not my priorities at this point.
Yep. Streaming the creative decision making process on Twitter is dangerous. When I was working with Dom on 140 Characters, he taught me the value of shutting the hell of and just working. That discipline helps me in this job at my current employer where I just “get shit done” and don’t spend all day talking about it.
One thing Jacob didn’t write about is how easy it is to fail when you don’t fail publicly. the failures I’ve had since the first of the year when I decided to shut the hell up are failures you will never know about or, if they are, they’ll be revealed 5 or 10 years from now when it’s no longer important or no one cares. I fail every day. I just don’t fail in public anymore. There’s a big difference. Daily failures aren’t unique to me. You have them too. Being more quiet online will help you keep those failures to yourself as learning experiences and not proof that you’re an inexperienced 20 year old who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing in life because he’s too busy posting photos of his food than focusing on what really matters.
to that argument, I say that we’re all “posting pictures of our food.” Everyone has their time sink. You might watch sports or lay out in the sun or compulsively stay in the gym for hours at a time or go get your nails done once a week or doodle on a notepad in meetings. Those are all private indulgences. I just choose to have my “time sinks” as public knowledge. I do that less now but I still do it.
The unfortunate nature of blogging and sharing is that it starts as a way for people to know the real you (if you’re blogging transparently) and it’s a way for people to enjoy your journey and it gives you a way to archive life to reflection down the road. The downside is that people care what other people are doing so exposing your life will open you up to a complex where you aim to serve your followers with “announcements” and “what I’m working on” or “what I’m eating” and the readers get served by feeling better about themselves when you screw up or forming opinions on the way you live because you gave them enough info to make their opinions.
It’s great to see Jacob taking this step back. Of course, this last statement just ruined the whole post for me:
I’m not going to disappear from the Internet, though. I will maintain a customized, evolvy online presence at jakelodwick.com. I’m also considering turning the Odwick mailing list into a general “Jake Lodwick’s Monthly Update” list, so go to odwick.com and join the mailing list if you want to stay in touch.
Dude. You just retired from blogging by starting a mailing list and creating an easy way for people to find you on other online sites like Flickr and Twitter. The whole blog post was full of fascinating observations on the blogger / follower relation and now you say this.
do what I did. STEP AWAY! Delete your foursquare account and stop checking in. Ignore your twitter followers and stop posting to your blog. Call your mom every other day and ignore emails as soon as they come in. Truly unplug. Sigh.
that’s alright. We all deal with evolution in our own way. Life is meant to be a journey and my last statement showed what happens when people share “what they’re doing.” By announcing the deletion of the blog, I tell him how he’s going about it the wrong way. It’s his life. I should shutup about it.
Thanks Jacob for some inspiring lines. good luck in your next endeavour.